405 - Fr. Josiah Trenham - Marriage: The Bedrock of Civilization - The Symbolic World

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
People think, oh, are you can you moralize people's people's
adult treat It's like it's not even moralizing. It's actually
this is if you did it, went into any deal
with anyone and you break, that's illegal.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Like that's you're breaking the law now.

Speaker 3 (00:11):
People I like, especially in southern California, a lot of
people have swimming pools. Most of the people who have
swimming pool have contracts with a pool cleaner. He comes
once a week, he cleans your pool. He puts some
chemicals on. You never see him. But if you break
your contract with him, he's gonna sue you. In California
where we did this, we're the ones who created no

(00:33):
fault divorce nineteen sixty nine. Actually once again, Ronald Drake
Ye Ronald Wow, governor of California, who did it. If
you break your pool contract, you're gonna go to court.
But you can break your sacred vowels that you made
usually in front of a minister of God and a congregation.

(00:55):
Nobody watched you sign your contract with your pool cleaner.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
This is Jonathan Pejel. Welcome to the symbolic world.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Hello everyone, It is a joy to be here with
Father Josiah Trenham. Everyone watching this knows about Father Josiah.
He's been such a great voice for Orthodoxy and just
general reason and common sense online but also in his
wonderful parish in California. He is organizing a conference that
I am very excited to be able to participate in.

(01:49):
It is a conference on marriage. It is not going
to be limited to the Orthodox Church. It's really going
to be like a wide conference on the importance of
marriage civilizationally, you know, obviously as Christians as well.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Well. It is October tenth.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Eleventh, finishing on the twelfth, and it is where is it, father,
It's at.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
The historic Fox Theater in downtown Riverside here in southern California.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
And so and the website is Themarriage Conference dot com.
You can go there, check it out and look it out.
And today Father Josiah and I are going to talk
about exactly that, which is the important of marriage as
a civilizational institution that is universal and also its specific

(02:34):
culmination in Christianity. Father Josiah, thank you for coming and
also tell us why you want to talk about marriage
so much all of a sudden.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Well, it's great to be with you, Jonathan. Want I
get to talk with you, and I'll talk to you
about anything. Whatever you want to talk about, I'll talk
to you. I do love the subject of marriage, and
it's not recently that I've been interested in talking about it.
It has been kind of, well, kind of a personal

(03:09):
obsession since I was fifteen years old. I'm pushing sixty,
so it's been actually pretty long time I've been thinking
about marriage. But the longer I have served as a pastor,
the longer I have served as a priest, the more
deeply convicted I've become that the decline of valuation of

(03:33):
marriage and its significance in the West is intimately associated
with misery of all sorts, and that if there's going
to be any recovery of sanity and healthy human functioning
in the West, it's going to involve a reclamation of marriage,

(03:56):
for sure. I feel that more strongly now than I
ever did before.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
One of the narratives we've heard in the past few decades,
I mean, probably you know, since World War Two, is
in some ways this idea that the nuclear family is
an artifice, right, the idea that marriage is actually a
very superficial thing. It's an artificial you know, we've heard
different attacks on marriage. This notion, how can I say

(04:26):
that that it's not a universal institution, right, that it
is in some ways an institution of patriarchy and somewhat
hostile to.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Women, all of that.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
And so you know when you hear that and that
that's been going on for decades. Now now we kind
of see the results of that. We see the demographic collapse,
we see the misery of people, the loneliness of people.
You know, So what is your take on those those
attacks on marriage that have been going on.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
There's a lot to that. Let me begin by responding
to what you were initially saying about the universality of marriage.
Marriage has always been at the very core of living
the Christian life. However, traditionally in traditional Christianity it has

(05:14):
a different place than I would say it's had, let's say,
in twentieth century American Christianity. So in the history of
the church, marriage has always been in front and center,
for sure, but not exclusively. I remember I was raised
as a Presbyterian. When I was a young man in college,
I had a dear friend who clearly had a calling

(05:37):
to the monastic life, clearly had a calling to the
single life, and He pulled me aside on several occasions
over the course of our studying together to share his
angst because there was no place for him in his
Protestant world. He didn't want to get married. And if
you weren't married, somehow in that period of time, it

(05:59):
was revealed viewed somehow unnaturally. As a matter of fact,
today I'm giving you this interview on the feast day
of Saint John the Baptist. The twenty fourth of June
happens to be his birthday. His birthday is the third
most celebrated birthday in the history of the human race.
The Lord's birthday, of course, Christmas is the most celebrated,

(06:20):
The Virgin Mary's birthday September the eighth is the second
most celebrated. But John the Baptists is the third most
celebrated birthday, and his life is the third most cherished life.
I mean, in our tradition, in the Orthodox tradition, there
is no such thing as a church without iconcept Saint
John the Baptist like everything on the Iconist Dowson and
everywhere else, and he functions kind of as a as

(06:45):
a witness as a standard for monastics, especially people who
have a calling like he did to complete consecration, and
so he forewent marriage. He never got married. He gave
himself one hundred percent constantly to Christ, and so our
monks and nuns follow him. And yet today I was

(07:06):
celebrating the liturgy before I came on with you. In
my sermon today, I was pointing out that the archangel Gabriel,
when he came to Zacharias to tell Zacharias about the
upcoming birth of John and what he was going to do.
He summarized John's in public ministry under three phrases, all
beginning with the word turn. He's going to turn three groups.

(07:31):
He's going to turn people to the Lord in general.
That's going to be number one. That's a beautiful calling.
He's going to turn the hearts of fathers to their children.
And don't miss that. I mean, here's a guy who
doesn't have a family. I mean, his ministry is going
to be to families. He's gonna even though he himself

(07:53):
had no biological children and lived in the desert and
eight bugs, he he minished to the married, He ministered
to those who had families, and he taught fathers to
consider a great a great honor to invest themselves in
their sons and their daughters. He turned the hearts of
men to the children, and then he's going to turn

(08:13):
the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous. He's going
to bring people in general to start considering ways that
our time tested. So I just want to say that initial, uh,
that that initial volley for us. Marriage is fundamental, it's
foundational for Christianity. It together with monastic life are the

(08:35):
two kind of foundational bedterocks for building your life in
this life. And they're not always that separated. They kind
of interweave, they have a symbiosis. They both help each
other all the time and in many ways. But so
marriage has always been the natural for those who aren't
called to the monastic life. This is the natural context

(08:58):
in which all the beauty of life develops. And to
see that abandoned as though somehow it was something that
was man made, or even worse, maybe made by politicians
and therefore can be altered and adjusted and you can
take these parts and dump those parts. That's nuts. Yeah,
that's just absolutely nuts.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
It's interesting what you said about the relationship between monasticism
and marriage. I've been thinking about that quite a bit,
because one of the things that is confusing for people
outside the church is they look at the literature of asceticism,
you know, and they have this sense and in some ways,
maybe Christianity is a kind of.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Anti life thing.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
You saw that in Enlightenment thinkers that may be one
of the causes of the Roman Empire, where all these
people going to join monasteries. But our experience actually shows us,
strange enough, the opposite, which is, in some ways, those
that give themselves to the monastic life and in some
ways offer their bodies and themselves to cry alone, they

(10:01):
end up becoming the anchor for the communities who then
just populate the world. They end up being like moral
hooks that people can look to and kind of see
as examples. But the funny thing about the example is
that the asceticism of the monk, who's completely you know,
who completely denies that, say, marrying a woman or being

(10:24):
part of a marriage, gets reflected in life as the
asceticism of marriage, which is then the people look to
the monk, and though they are married with one person,
they see thatceticism reflected in their married life, which people
don't tend to think of marriage as a form of asceticism.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
No, they don't, because much of our opinion about marriage
has been you know, biosmosis, absorbed by our falling culture
and very secular culture that doesn't have a vision for marriage. Obviously,
obviously marriage is tanking. I mean, it is absolutely taking.
It's a minority status today, like forty one percent Americans
are actually married at forty one percent of households. That's

(11:02):
nuts compared to when I was born, even, I mean,
I know I'm old, but not that old. I was
born in the sixties and seventy five percent of homes
were occupied by a husband, a wife and children when
I was born in California. That's nuts. You know, it's
been my experience that this symbiosis is very intense. The
Church even teaches in her canonical tradition that if there's

(11:23):
any monk or none who criticizes marriage at all as
a reason for becoming a monk or none, they have
fallen into heresy, and any offering that their offering in
their is gone. Saint John Crisostom dedicated a whole book
that he wrote called on Virginity. In this text, he

(11:44):
labored to argue that those who are choosing the monastic life.
If they do it with criticism at all of the
married life, that they have just stolen the value of
monastic offering. Because some monasticism is so precious is because
you don't have to do it. It's a free love
gift you're offering. You're offering to say no to the

(12:10):
great happiness of marriage in order to give all of
your energies as a free gift of your love to
Jesus and to the church. If all of a sudden,
marriage is evil, there's no gift at all. It's the
only option. If marriage is evil or in any way
tainted with sin by definition, then you have to true
Christians have to become monks and none, which just guts

(12:32):
the value of monasticism itself. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah, But one of the things that I've seen seems
to be like one of the causes of the fact
that marriage has fallen apart and marriage has become so
difficult is because we've we have this sense in which
marriage is the place where I will get everything that
I want right, and so I have needs. I have
all these these needs, these sexual needs, these emotional.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Needs, these these.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Needs of accomplishing myself, and I see marriage as the
culmination of that, the place where I can get you know,
make myself get what I need for myself. Uh where
in fact, you know, as I mentioned before, it seems
it seems like marriage in the in the traditional in
Christianity is in some ways a form of offering.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
It's it is a form of sacrifice which has great
joy in it.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
It's not that you sacrifice yourself and it's just this,
you know, it's actually that in the in the offering,
there's this great there's a great joy that comes out.
But we I mean and I and I say that
for myself as well. Like when I went into marriage,
I had completely had that, I had completely absorbed this
idea that marriage was for me to get everything that
I wanted.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
And you know, and uh and and and.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
For for several years, I suffered quite a bit from that,
you know, in my own marriage.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Yes, well you're not the only one, Jonathan. We uh,
I share that too. When I when I was young
and I was thinking about getting married, I I wanted
a beautiful wife. I wanted to be have a woman
who loved me. And you know, I'm very sympathetic with that.
That's there is a you know, a lower form of

(14:08):
love and ambition. Arrows, for instance, that is very important.
It's very important. It's not as though the Church is
saying that that that marriage it doesn't have that aspect
of being able to be loved and to be possessed
by someone and to possess them joyfully with with with love.
The Church is just saying, look, that's the entry door.

(14:31):
That's the entry door. But the house is much larger
than that and much more beautiful than that. And even
the entry door, as legitimate as it is, becomes much
less relevant the older that we get and the more
mature I should say, in our in our relations that
we get. I love that image that Csus Lewis uses
in his book The Four Loves. He's describing arros and

(14:54):
he says arrows is very important. He reminds us that
it is very dangerous, right, I mean, cube, it has
a bow and arrow. It's not to give you chocolate.
You know you're gonna get shot and you're gonna bleed out. Yeah,
But he says, arrows is the is the powerful shot

(15:16):
that gets the train of marriage and family life moving
down the track. He says, but it can't sustain it
now for that you need really more mature loves. You
need story ghee, you need feelia, you need a GOPI.
If you're going to keep your marriage going and it's
going to mature, you know, you can have a place
for arrows. But really, these other loves have to become

(15:38):
larger and more important in order for marriage to become
what it it can be. And once it's growing, Wow,
what what can't it do? Really? I look at my
thirty seven years of marriage and I think it's tamed me.
I still have a lot of work to do, but
it has tamed me a lot. It has taught me patience.

(16:00):
It has expanded my heart from the little tiny stone
that it was to now just a little bit bigger stone.
It's done a lot of things to me that I
never dreamed it could have done.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think we can see in
some ways we're in an amazing situation. You know, it's
sad to rejoice of the situation. What I mean is
that there are some warnings that you can see in
the fathers or in just holy people all through the
centuries about the dangers of letting this, you know, letting

(16:34):
our vision of marriage go and in the past few
centuries we have so we went down that path, we
had that experiment, and now we know what it looks like.
And so in some ways it is a great time
to talk about this because we actually have We've run
the experiment, folks, We have the results, and we know
what it looks like.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
And you know, the the image.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
I mean, there are so many dark is that populate
our world right now, Like you know, the the image
of the the the single or divorced person in the
in their late forties swiping on Tinder, you know, trying
to like find to get dates.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
It's just this sad it's just like this sad, sad thing.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
And there are just a lot of these images like
that's just one, but there are a lot of these
images that have populated popular culture now for several decades
that show us to what extent, to what extent, putting
effort and living a family life and marriage is the
way to go to actually to be to live a satisfied,

(17:42):
joyful life.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
You know, I agree with you. We have abandoned not
just living marriage, but we've abandoned champion. We don't have
champions really of marriage, at least not in the public square.
We have a lot of interesting people, we do, and
some are even raising the alarm about declining birth rates,

(18:04):
which is a great concern and which is one of
the concrete fruits of abandoning marriage, is that we just
aren't having children. We're not only not in love with
marriage anymore, we're not in love with parenting anymore. And
we're trying to find alternatives, which which are not working well.
But even those who are discovering the importance of child

(18:25):
bearing haven't quite been able to move to the next step,
which is that before you address parenting, you have the
issue of marriage as a universal institution, something that God
himself made for the human race. Until we take a
hard look at what we've done to marriage, and I

(18:45):
would say, you're right. I think it is several centuries
in the making. But I'll tell you the mid twentieth century,
from the fifties until where we are now, especially with
the outbreak of the sexual revolution in the sixties, we
have gone from not expecting marriage to full frontal assault
on him, full frontal assault, and now we can't even

(19:06):
talk about it's integrity. I mean, look, I don't mean
to be disrespectful in any way but when the champions.
The two great conservative political champions of America are Ronald
Reagan and Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan was the first Ronald
Reagan was the first twice married president the United States

(19:29):
has ever had, and Donald Trump is the first three
times married president that we've ever had. Something is wrong.
Something is wrong if we can't discuss the importance. I
can understand if they presented themselves as you know, thank
you for trusting me, even though I have failed in

(19:51):
the most important earthly arrangement. I committed myself to that
institution where your word means the most more than business arrangements.
He's in marriage. You make sacred oaths when you get married.
All cultures do. Yeah, it's the test about integrity. I
would be more sympathetic if we had political leaders who

(20:12):
were trouncing on marriage and they said, look, you know,
forgive me, I'll give you an example. I give you example.
I had the privilege of meeting a British politician recently
that I really like. I'm sure you know, Nigel Farage.
I like Nigel very much, and Nigel has a lot
of good things to say. I'm very interested in some
of the things that he says, and I was asked

(20:35):
to participate and speak at a conference, and I knew
he was going to go. I didn't really want to
go to the conference, but I told them, I said, look,
if you can give me ten or fifteen minutes with
Nigel by myself, i'll go. Well they did. They were
super kind, super wonderful people, very kind, and in my
conversation with him, I appreciated his humility, you know, he said,

(20:56):
and I've heard him say it elsewhere. A matter of fact,
he said it at Art last time we were there.
He said, I'm not an example. He goes, I believe
in this. I champion marriage. I know marriage and family
life are so important for culture. He goes, but please
don't look at me. Don't look at me. I have
failed in this area. I have, you know, some things
in my past that are really not great. And I'm

(21:18):
I'm humbled by that. I'm like, that's beautiful. Right. He's
holding up the example as any person in leadership should.
If you don't honor marriage, you're not helping your land.
But he's doing it with humility. But we have others
who you know, it's not it's just not talked about.
It just can't be talked about. And that's that's tragedy

(21:41):
because we have guns from all sides pointed at marriage,
guns and all sides. The legalization of adultery, which happened
in my lifetime. M I mean, that's Can you imagine
a culture where it used to be illegal to be adulter?

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:58):
That's the legalization of adult three the U.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
Because it's breaking contract.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
So funny, people don't don't realize that even like just
normal not even outside of morality, like just normal contract.
You have a contract with a person. This is a
promise you make, you sign a piece of paper. It
is illegal to it is illegal to if you go
outside of the contract, you're breaking the law.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
Like it it's shouldn't.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
People even even people think, oh you can you moralize
people's people's adult treat It's like it's not even moralizing.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
It's actually this is if you.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
Did it, went into any deal with anyone and you
break that's illegal, Like that's you breaking the law.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Now. People have like especially in southern California, a lot
of people have swimming pools. Most of the people who
have swiming pool have contracts with a pool cleaner. He
comes once a week, he cleans your pool. He puts
some chemicals on you never see him. But if you
break your contract with him, he's gonna sue you. In California,
where we did this, we're the ones who created no

(22:58):
fault divorce nineteen sixty. Actually once again, Ronald Draken, Ronald Wow,
governor of California, who did it. If you break your
pool contract, you're gonna go to court. But you can
break your sacred vowels that you made usually in front
of a minister of God and a congregation. Nobody watched

(23:20):
you sign your contract with your pool cleaner. Hundreds of people,
hundreds of people come to witness making sacred oaths to
get married, and the consequences aren't even close. So what
you violate your pool contract and they get another pool cleaner.
You violate your marriage and you have children. The consequences

(23:46):
are irrefutable. The outcomes for kids in divorce families in
every measurable category atrocious, atrocious. No, we really need to
have our hearts. All. We need to do exactly what
you said. Recognize the time is up. We've done the experiment.

(24:07):
Let's evaluate the results, and let's make the proper conclusions.
We don't need to beat anybody up. We just need
to make the conclusions and reorient our heart's disposition.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Yeah, and I think that that's an important point because
you're right. In some ways, we're all quite broken.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
You know.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
Everybody is affected by these these problems of the sexual revolution.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Everybody has been tainted by it.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
You know, we none of us can just stand up
and say we're glorious examples of everything. But I think that,
like you said, to be able to reorient and say
this is the ideal, you know, and and we will
pray for those and we'll weep with those that who
struggle to keep it and will continue to have mercy.
But we cannot compromise on what the ideal is because

(24:52):
to do so, like you said, we've seen the results.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
We know what it looks like.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
And on every front, in terms of people's mental health,
in terms of the existence of communities, in terms of
children's mental health, all of this is just breaking down.
Everybody is living with the consequences this now for a
few generations over and over.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
In Quebec.

Speaker 1 (25:13):
It's crazy like here where we are, you know, these
reconstituted families are it's just it's become it's become completely normal,
and you know, and and it's taboo to talk about it,
but you know, the abuse rate in a reconstituted family
is so much higher than with it. So we have
this mythology of you know, the abuse of families, and

(25:36):
how families are these little you know, these can I
say this.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Like these these nodes of abuse and power and all
of that.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
But man, reconstituted families, it's beyond it's beyond anything.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
So not only do we have to I think, make
the evaluation, conclude the experiment, and draw our conclusions from them,
so to speak, but also we we need people who
have experience and who are knowledgeable to lift their voices
and to say, you know, we need to address marriage

(26:11):
for what it is. It's a pre political, divinely created
institution and it can't be discarded anymore than you can
discard your own humanity. We're trying that now too, and
it's not going well. It's not going well at all.
But they're connected. The two are very commended. You know,

(26:31):
marriage is a paradisal institution. It wasn't exactly as it
is now. The fall had tremendous consequences on marriage. But
it's not something that God made up later. It's something
that when he made humanity without marriage, he did not
say his creation was good. His creation everything else was good.
He looked at everything else. But when he had Adam

(26:52):
and he brought all the animals to Adam, and Adam
showed his incredible intelligence, his prophetic insight, and his ability
to discern the purpose of God's creation for every animal,
and he gave a name, which is which is what
naming really means, Yeah, defining. When he did that and
he looked around, he could not find rest until God

(27:14):
looked at him and said, you know what, this is
not good, the only not good in creation. I'm not
good without sin. That's amazing. How could there be a
not good when there's no sin? Well, there's not. It's
not good because it's incomplete. And then he made Eve
and then Adam looked at her and it was very good.

(27:34):
It went from good to very good. This is all
foundational stuff. To ignore that, or to pretend that somehow
the political sphere or the state is the origin of
marriage or can control and irregulate marriage, this is ignorance. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
One of the things also that people say, they say
that the you know, the the nuclear family is a
modern invention that in fact, in the ancient world you
had extended families and that the extended family was really
the family and all of that. And what's fascinating about
because I hear people use that argument all the time,

(28:14):
even even in weird progressive circles. People will use that
argument to kind of defend an alternative vision of society.
But it doesn't hold up because the extended family, of course,
but always the nuclear family. It's like there's the merriage,
there's the family, and then the extended family is this

(28:35):
large blessing that comes in kind of.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
Supports Obviously you need that.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
But if you think that you can have the extended
family without the nuclear family, that's absolutely ridiculous. You can't
have the village without the nuclear family. You're not going
to have a bunch of children that nobody knows who
their parents are, running around being raised by a village.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
That's completely ridiculous.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
You know, this is a criticism from you know, the
nineteen fifties and kind of the of the American family
into this two kids. We have two kids. We really
don't have connections to other generations. That's not our way
in the East and in the West. In the formation
of marriages, we're very clear and we combine both the

(29:16):
reality that in the coming together of a men and woman,
a new family is constituted that is in a sense
independent and unique, just like the family from which they came,
but with an abiding relationship to their progenitors. That is
very expressed in our tradition and the Orthodox tradition in
what happens when people are crowned. The crowning has three

(29:40):
basic references. It has the obvious kind of Greek victory.
You know, you run the race and you've come. The
race in this case is the race to get to
marriage in an honorable way. When we take the crowns
off of a couple's head, the priest says that these
crowns were put on your head as a reward for continence.

(30:03):
This means the Church recognizes that when you found your beloved,
of course you've been as your hearts are growing closer
and your emotions are growing closer. It's natural for your
bodies to grow closer to God's institution for the propagation
of the race. But you honored him by respecting that.
That is a quality of married couples, and that took investment,

(30:25):
that took some measure of merital asceticism. And so you
get a crown for being dignified in your courtship. That's
one of the purposes of the crown. Another purpose of
the crown is to bear witness that you are entering
into a relationship of self sacrifice. That love, which is
at the basis of your union, will show itself in

(30:46):
you laying your life down for the other. You're choosing
your spouse to be your chief neighbor, and Christ teaches
us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and their spouse
is going to be that. And so you get crowns
like the forty Holy Martyrs did when the grounds and
came down from heaven. Because you're entering into a martyr relationship.
The husband's supposed to love the wife like Jesus loves

(31:06):
the Church and Lacey's life down for her. That's serious business.
And the wife has to respect the Church and that
respect her husband like the Church respects Christ. And that
also especially because we husbands, a lot of times we
make it very difficult. It's very hard for the wives
to respect us. But they have to write and they're
crowned with a blessing, a martyric blessing. But it's also

(31:28):
it also has a third reference, and that third reference
is to being crowned as a king and a queen
over their new realm, over their new kingdom, which is
their home. It might be two hundred square feet. When
I got married, I had a four hundred square foot apartment.
I had to like suck in to get into the kitchen.
It was very narrow, but I felt like I was

(31:48):
the most wealthy king. We had four hundred dollars in
the bank when we got married, like that's it. But
we had our health. We knew we're gonna get jobs.
We did right away. But we set all the rules. Brother,
we set all the rules, and we decided, you know,
when we were going to pray and when we weren't,
and how we were going to raise our kids, and
when dinner was going to be right. This is our kingdom.
That concept is so fundamental, it's actually in English common law.

(32:13):
I mean, this is what's behind the fact that a
police officer cannot enter your house unless he has a
warrant from a judge, because that a man's home is
his castle. He says he's in charge there. This is
a great mystery. So when you're crowned and in the

(32:33):
crowning prayers, the priest turns and he blesses your parents.
So your parents are there. They're assumed to be watching
and giving their consent. As a matter of fact, a
priest can't marry a couple unless he has the consent
of the girl's father. The cannon's forbid it. So yeah,
so they're involved. The parents are involved, and they're the

(32:53):
ones respecting it. And it's the joy of a parent
to see their children become their own family. But they
don't lose You don't lose your connection to your parents.
I mean, I have a bunch of my kids are
married and they have given me grandchildren. Our relationship changed,
but it's it's better, it's a deeper even.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah, I think I think a lot of the images
you brought up are beautiful. I've been telling people that's
why in fairy tales it's always princes and princesses.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
People think that it's an arbitrary think.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
No, it's because exactly of what you said, which is
that in some ways, when the man and the women
join together, they become principalities for the kingdom on which
they reign, which is their own family, no matter what
level it is. You know, this, this this union causes
a little kingdom to exist, and it's a and it's
important to kind of to understand. It's very beautiful and

(33:42):
there's a joy there's such a joyful element to realize,
you know, this image that that this idea that that
when Christ blesses marriage, like he says, you know, you
leave your father and your husband, you join together and ultimately,
when you've seen Christian imagery, you become even like a
little image of the of the Church, like you you know,

(34:03):
you become a little image of the relationship between Christ
and the Church in your you know, microcosm. So it's
a it's it's a cosmic thing. It's not a it's
not just a it's not just a question of practicality,
it's not just a question of emotion. Where although all
of those things are true, it really is a participation
in the in the cosmic order, you.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Know, in the in the West, in the marriage right
in the West too. It's there's an action that I
really respect and I like at the end of weddings
in the West and sometimes we orthodox use this too
in the West when the couple is now married, uh,
and they they're about to leave and they're going to
recess out of the church. In our tradition, we usually

(34:45):
are singing God grant you many years. It's very triumphant,
very beautiful. But they they step down and they go
to and they greet their parents. And I always tell
the couple of the couple's going to do that. I
always tell them, look, you go together. You're gonna go
greet the parents, the wife of the bride, but you're

(35:06):
going together. Don't separate. Your hands have been put together
in the service itself. The priest joins them and that
you keep them together, and he blesses your hands. Now
you go together as a new independent family and couple,
and you greet your parents for the first time as
an equal. It's marvelous. It's majestic. You know, typically we
would kiss our parents' hands, but we're doing it together,

(35:28):
you know, looking them eye to eye. And then you
go to the groom's parents, and then you come and
then you walk out as mister and missus. You walk out,
you know, as as this new couples. It's the same
idea that as an art tradition that you have just
become something that is extremely valuable. You may be going
home and moving into the apartment above your parents. Very

(35:51):
that's very common.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
Common. If you ask me, do I have an apartment
in my garage and is one of my daughters with
their husband living there right now, the answer would be yes, yes,
that would be yes, but independently right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
And I think there's so many things because one of
the problems that we've seen in I've seen that around
me is people they they say, what's the like?

Speaker 2 (36:14):
What really is it? Like? What is this like? We
have this this ceremony.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
You know, I love her, we live together, you know,
where we're faithful to each other.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
Isn't that enough?

Speaker 1 (36:24):
But I think what you've said and the way you've
described the marriage ceremony helps you understand. For those people
that watch the MY channel will understand that origins have
a different quality to them. You know that in order
to manifest the transition from one world to another. Right,
no matter how you think about it, whether it's you know,
America separating from England and becoming its own thing, whether

(36:47):
it's your own baptism where you leave the old life
and you enter into a new one. It has to
be marked in a certain way. It has to be
a moment that is marked in time, marked in place,
you know, let's say, stamped with a kind of vertical
relationship where we invoke God to bless this, this, this
this new reality.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
You know.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
It's it really becomes like a little image. I think
of Jacob when he he he discovers.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
The Bethel like the house of God.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
And there's these angels moving up and down and God says,
this is your this is going to be the beginning
of you, Like this is the house of God, but
it's also the place from which you will bless all
the nations and all of this sense. And so that's
what marriage does for a couple. It basically says like you,
like you said, it's it's basically marking the moment when
you are no longer two separate people, but now you

(37:38):
have there is a there's a being that is formed
that is the joining of the two together. And that
being is more than the individual parts, right, it is
something that is mystically one in a way that that
that that is real, Like it's not it's not an illusion,
it's not something it's something that that will then, like
you said, found a kingdom together.

Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yes, so yeah, it's a very it's a powerful it's
a powerful thing and very important.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
There's little aspects, I think, Jonathan, there's aspects of marriage
that are very attractive to people still, even in this
anti marriage culture, even though marriage has been you know,
being shot and legislated against for decades now, and then
that has to stop. Please Lord, let that stop, and
let's reverse course. People like little aspects, right. They love

(38:26):
the sex part, they love that, they love the being
together at least sometimes part. They like that, they like companionship.
Who doesn't like companionship? And even though if you're not married,
the potential for developing that companionship into really a friendship
that's worthy of that name is less. Marriage gives you

(38:49):
that opportunity to really develop friendship. But I think what
they're missing is is an appreciation. And I think we
can conclude from this experiment that this is true. What
I'm about to say. Marriage and sexuality is such a
big deal that if you don't get it right, it
will ruin your life. It will ruin your life. God
created marriage in his wisdom to be able to unify

(39:11):
a whole bunch of extremely important things together. Let me,
just in my mind tell you what I think those are.
It starts at the top with desire, So the desire
that exists in a man for a woman and a
woman for man. Saint John Chrisostom describes marriage from the
position of a father watching his daughter run to her husband.

(39:33):
He says, the way that a parent should view it,
it's two halves running to make a whole. It's a
sense of incompletion and a desire to be whole and
be complete in a one flesh union of life with
this other person. So that desire, it also has a
sexual component, which is extremely powerful, don't we know it?

(39:53):
I mean, look at our society. The desire is so
powerful that people can't contain it without the norms of
the church, without norms of basic morality that most societies
have had. Since we've abandoned those, sexuality has gone wild
and desire has spun out of control and reaked havoc.
Is reakd havoc with the epidemic of single moms who

(40:14):
are abandoned with their children, with children who have no fathers,
which is kind of like the most foundational cause of
disorder in their life. So if we start with desire,
we might go then to the concept of union and sex,
which is so powerful. Remember though, that those two are
joining union sexual union and desire is very important. Our

(40:35):
culture doesn't even get that anymore. Our culture today has
separated the the impulse, the sexual impulse, from union with
the explosion of auto eroticism. I mean, look what's happening
in some of the Asian countries, radical social dysfunction because
people have even broken that they have desire, but they've

(40:56):
turned it in on themselves through digital life, and they're
not even allowing that to push them towards another. So
that's the first union. I would say, you have this,
you have desire, you have union. God puts in their love. Right,
that's a different kind of desire and much more noble
than just the sexual desire, to desire someone for the

(41:18):
benefit of them. That's huge. So marriage has desire. It
combines desire with sex, It combines sex with an actual
union with a person, and that union with love as
the motive, and that love with some definition to it.
There's a lot of people say, well, I love my partner,

(41:39):
but we define the love. It's a love of substance
what we might call commitment. So love marriage keeps that
defined well for us. It's commitment. That commitment is a
particular kind of commitment we call marriage, which is a
whole life's commitment. Sometimes people don't fully embrace that, and
they get married and they keep little pieces of their

(42:02):
life to themselves and they don't let their spouse look
into it. You know, maybe I have my checkbook and
you have yours and we don't look at it. I mean,
it's not the end of the world, but it's pretty stupid.
Just as a pastor, it's a marker. It's a marker
of something unhealthy. If there's portions that you're keeping from
your spouse, that's not what marriage is. Marriage is a

(42:23):
full blown sharing of all aspects of life. You can
divvy up those aspects, but you can't on principle, say
stay out of that part of my life. Yeah, yeah, marriage.
All of these things are incredible. And if you tear
them apart, if you tear desire from union, union from love,
love from commitment, commit from from marriage, marriage from children,

(42:43):
that's a natural step. Children to parenting. Parenting is part
of the package, and all of that in permanence. All
of those things together are the is the miracle of marriage.
That is what God has done. If you take any
one of those things outside of the bonds of marriage,
you're going to have trouble.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, that's amazing because you can just play it out
in your mind and look at all the examples of
all of those is, all of the things you mentioned,
and how in our society they've all been broken apart
into their separate little thing and you can see the
misery that it that it brings.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
And it's interesting because the commitment part. I kept thinking
about that.

Speaker 1 (43:23):
People also don't realize this as well, because one of
the problems we've had is that love.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
Has been reduced to kind of emotion, like something that I.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
Feel, and it is that to some extent. Obviously, you
know you need the feeling, it's a it's an important
part of it. But when you have the commitment, what
happens is once that feeling is put to the test
and you you kind of anchor yourself in the commitment,
you have this refining And it's hard to describe to

(43:52):
someone who hasn't experienced it, but you know, once you've
gone through these refining processes, you discover whole aspects of
what a person is, of what it is possible with,
like what possibilities God has put in us when you
are able to work through those emotions and the taming
of those emotions even in your relationship, let's say with
your spouse or your desire, and all that has fruits

(44:15):
all through your life. Right, it's like the reining in
of your sexual desire, for example, it's not just about sex.
It ends up pervading all your capacity to rein your
passions in to control yourself, to aim, to focus right,
to aim towards towards proper things. And it's just something
that the ancients knew very well. Like you read, I

(44:35):
remember reading like.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
An old, an old salesman's book.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
It was really funny and there was it was saying like,
if you want to be a good salesman, one of
the things you should do is you should have sex
the day just before a big sale. And like for
a lot of kind of let's say early modern or
like twentieth century read of this. So that's ridiculous, that
the dumbest, craziest thing, But like ancient people had understood
this energy, like if it's sexual energy, if it's focused,

(44:59):
if it's sacrifice to something hiher, if it's put in
services something higher, actually yields in all through your life,
in all kinds of things and all kinds of and
you can see, like you said, when you talk about
let's say South Korea as a good example, where the
kind of auto eroticism out of control also leads to
a kind of just a basement of human intention in general,

(45:22):
where people have no motivation, have no desire, have no ambition,
I have no kind of drive towards anything, because they're
just drowning in their own pleasure. It's like all of
these things go together in ways that it's it's so
hard for modern people to kind of read to put
back together in the way that ancient people's understood just naturally.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yes, you know, I did a trick once on my parish.
It wasn't very nice, but it was a lot of fun.
It was about twenty years ago, and back when it
was before email or it was like a WordPress something
like that. I can't remember what the technology was, but
you could start writing messages on you know, and doing
these little blogs. And so I would always write some

(46:05):
patristic quotes to my parish, and I was. I was
in the middle of a study actually on Roman marriage
Pagan concepts of marriage, which, forgive me, is so far
superior to what we have in the West, so far superior.
Take just take the word monogamy. You know, if you
talk to Americans about what monogamy is, honestly, what they're

(46:26):
going to tell you is they might know that monogamos
means that you have one wife or one husband, but
they think that means at a time, right. I have
met numerous people who think they're monogamists and they've been
married five times. It's just that they weren't having these

(46:47):
multiple times at the exact time, Okay. And so I was.
I was reflecting on the Roman concept that Pagan they
knew what monogamy was. It was so serious. We have
many tombstones from the early centuries of the Roman Empire
in which a woman was just called she was the

(47:07):
wife of one husband. Paul uses that exact language quality
for ordination. It's one of his. But it was a
very common Greco Roman reference to the fact that you
got married once and you made it work, and if
you did, it was extremely significant and you might not
be super faithful. You might not have a lot of love,

(47:28):
you might have a mistress or worse, you know, maybe
you even have a boy, but you don't mess with
your marriage. Now, you know, from a Christian perspective, of course,
that's greatly debased. But in their minds, you still have
to take care of your wife. You know, you have
to provide for your wife. You need to get along
with your wife, you need to provide the household for

(47:49):
your wife. You need to take care of your children.
If you don't, the state will collapse. They knew that.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
Yeah, society will collapse, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
That's right. Absolutely, these are pagan's right. They're supposed to
be stupid. They're not stupid. They're not stupid. They knew
a lot better than us, the idea that we can
be doing what we're doing today and it's not going
to have terrible consequences. No, they knew traditional cultures know this.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Yeah, so what do you say to people, Because this
has been something that I've seen a lot in my
friends and you know, and in younger people as well,
is that they have this idea that people should people
want to get married. But they have this weird idea
that marriage has to be this big, huge thing that
they they cost a fortune, and therefore people just wait
and then they live together and they have kids, and

(48:34):
then they get married as a kind of culmination of
their relationship and you know, and that they can make
a big, a big big deal about it in a
big feast. And there's even in the Christian world. You
see that by the way, I grew up in not
my parents particularly, but in a world where people would say,
you know, finish your.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Studies, you know, don't get married.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
You know, made as if being married young will ruin
your life or something like wait, and so you put
wishing these young people that are just can you imagine
like you're you know, you're nineteen or twenty, you're just
exploding with desire, and you're telling these people wait until
you finish your PhD by the time you're twenty five,
twenty six. And so, I mean, I'd like to hear

(49:14):
you talk a little bit about that narrative in our society.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
You're trying to get me in trouble.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
Well, what I'm not trying.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
To get you in trouble. I think it's important. If
I cared about getting in trouble, then I would not
answer the question, Jonathan, because I have gotten in trouble
on this very subject my entire priesthood. I agree with
you before I answer that, though I never told you
how I tricked my people. Oh yeah, yeah, I meant
to tell you that. So I was sending out reflections,

(49:44):
and I usually I love Saint John Crososom, so I'm
always quoting him. So I sent out five reflections about
marriage and family life and that kind of thing, and
about God's providence and arranging things, and I put the
quote beautiful quote, and then I put Saint John Crososom.
I did it for a whole week, five times. The
next week I told them I'm really sorry. All of
those were quotes from Seneca. Every quote was from Seneca, right,

(50:10):
a contemporary of Saint Paul the Great Roman. And his
words were so beautiful no one could tell it wasn't
Saint John Chrysostom. That the points were the same, the
respect for of course, he didn't understand I'm not suggesting
that he understands providence exactly as I do, but this
there was a lot more in common that we have
today with Secondly.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
We have with today, yeah, exactly, or even a lot
of Christians today, even that's a.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
And knew how to get married. The Romans knew how
to get married. And the involvement of the way that
we do dating today, this radical individualistic approach to dating
and to marriage formation. It also is part of the
package that needs to be re evaluated and dumped. Frank
The best way to meet people are through friends and

(50:57):
family who know you and know them. This is the
best way. I have a good friend. He's Indian, he's
from India, and he tried so hard. He came to America.
He's working, he became a professional, and he's like and
his parents were like, well, you need to get married,
let us help you. He's like, no, no, I've got this.

(51:17):
I've got this. And he tried and he tried, and
he did the whole kind of dating thing and then
he just wore himself out. So finally he cried uncle.
He called his parents and he said, okay, I give
up arrangement, arrange me a marriage. But the only one
thing I ask is make sure that you consult my brother,
because he had Ah. He was very close to bother

(51:38):
than his brothers. He said, please make sure my brother agrees. Anyway,
so they did taken care of they made the beautiful arrangement,
and he's lived in the happiest marriage since. For me,
it was the great weakness of the two styles, right,
it's a competition between the two styles. He got worn
out and completely depressed by doing the American Western secular thing,

(52:02):
and he finally gave in and he let his parents
have an important part. Who knows you better than your folks,
and if they love you, and you have your brother
to help as well, that's the chances that are a
lot higher a lot.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah, well, at least take it.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
I mean, we don't necessarily need to have arrange marriage,
but at least take the advice of the people that
know you.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
That is for sure. Like you said, your parents grew
up with you.

Speaker 1 (52:24):
They know your temperament in ways that you might even
not know about yourself, you know, and so they're definitely
that definitely is a huge part.

Speaker 3 (52:32):
Their suggestions are important, and it's better than scrolling social
media feeds and looking for pretty girls and then you know,
cold texting them and saying, hey, can we have a date.
I mean, that's not a great recipe. It's not it's
what people are doing everyway it's just not a great recipe.
You know, when my wife and I were dating, we
were very young. I met her when she was eighteen.

(52:55):
I was eighteen too. I was about to turn nineteen
and I want to get married.

Speaker 2 (52:59):
And.

Speaker 3 (53:01):
My parents didn't oppose it. Most of the parents of
my friends thought it was nuts. We were too young.
But I had already decided who I was. I had
my fundamental moral commitments made, and that's very important if
you're gonna I think it's good to date young. It's

(53:21):
good to form your relationships with your spousors. A thousand reasons.
Young marriages have benefits, but they shouldn't be engaged in
unless you really are out of the adolescence stage. We
have this strange you know, childhood and adulthood. This is
the traditional concept, you know, since eighteenth century and the
growth of wealth in the West, this concept of adolescents,

(53:45):
this nebulous period between being a child and adult has
gone from like a year or two to like fifteen years.
I mean, now you have adolescence in.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
Your twenty five year old adolescens.

Speaker 3 (53:57):
Yeah, we have thirty year olds playing video games, really
and not sure they if that should be a component
major component part of their life. They think it's legit.
I laugh at that. I'm like, you know, please, you're
never going to be able to get married in that
mentality because you really haven't decided who you are yet.
If you have decided that, if your commitment to God

(54:17):
has been made and there's nothing that's going to tear
that apart, you're ready to go. If you have a
work ethic, you're ready to go. Maybe you don't have
all your education done, but that doesn't mean you can't
do it. My wife and I we did our education.
We got married in college. She was ten days past
her twentieth birthday. I was twenty also, and she knew
what I was going to be and how I was

(54:37):
going to live, and she liked it, and I knew
who she was. And she's the same person today, except
more patient because she had to put up with me
for all these years. And it blessed us because now
we're able to go through so much of our lives
together and make decisions together. When you go and you
don't get married till you're thirty five years old, you've

(54:58):
already formed hard and fast opinions and about all sorts
of aspects in life. No, I like my kitchen raign
this way. This is how I do my refrigerator, and
this is how I do the closet, and this is
how I live in my house, and this is what
I do with the bathroom. All of those things become
major issues because you're so like formed, and now you
have to somehow merge with another thirty year old. It's tough.

(55:20):
It's very tough.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Yeah, And there's also you know, this is something that
I've seen there are these two competing images. One is
this idea that this nineteen forties fifties idea of the
woman in the home that's just at home, you know,
kind of basically cleaning the house and taking care of kids.
To me, that actually does it doesn't seem like a

(55:43):
particularly traditional image of what a woman is in a
traditional society. But then we've opposed that now with the
woman who goes out, does all their studies, has a career,
and once she's had a career, then she has children.
And now we have this problem, which is all of
these women in their thirties going to fertility clinics because
they've they've waited too long.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
It's like it really is a huge.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Issue, and so I've been trying to advocate in somebody,
into my daughters or to people around me, which is
that the women in the ancient world were involved, like
completely involved in the world, and having kids was part
of that. And they would have kids, but they would
still be involved in church and community. Like the idea
that they're at home, just at home with kids, Like
that's a ridiculous and we don't need to give in

(56:28):
to that. And women can have all kinds of activities
and also raise their kids and everything. But the idea
that you should wait to have children until older, that
is definitely an error, Like that is a huge mistake
that we've given into, even Christians like I again, like
I said, I grew up in a world where that
was totally ignor like the idea that you had to
wait until you.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Know, a woman finishes or like master's.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Degree and then and then had a children and it
like she's like already in mid twenties, like going toward
the end of the year twenties, Like ough, what a
weird way of thinking.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
Well, I agree with you having a child though, even
in the way that we're talking about it last right now.
I'm sorry, but children are the most amazing reality. These
are eternal beings made in the image of God and you.

(57:26):
God used you to be married and to have a
child is an incredible miracle of collaboration, co creation with God.
God doesn't do it without us. And forever that child
you've descended into one, and your love making with the
blessing of God, you've now become three. So there's the power.

(57:46):
Chris System says, the power of unity is expressed in
the child bearing. It explodes, you shrink to one, you
become three, and then that person is a perpetual bridge
between you three or ever witness to your union. So
every time you look at your children, you see a
little bit of her and a little bit of him. Right,
the husband and the wife are in that person, and

(58:08):
that child bears witness and will continue to bear witness
in unique ways for all eternity, to their oneness, to
their unity. So a single child, forgive me, is worth
more than any job. I just don't buy it. A
human being, a single human being, is more worth to

(58:29):
God than the entire cosmos. Saint Simon the New Theologian
says that that's how valuable we are. So to have
a child, to have two children. To have five children,
this is the greatest thing. And I'm sorry. It's not
just for the mom, it's also for the dad. I mean,
why do men work? Work is way over glorified. We

(58:50):
work so that we can have children and take care
of the children. We work so that we can provide
for our home and forgive me. Eighty ninety percent of men,
they don't work in glorious jobs. It's not like they
want to write books about how significant their jobs are.
I mean, I'm not downplaying work. Work itself. If you
do it for God and you do it for those

(59:11):
that you love, is very satisfying and very beautiful. All
I'm saying is that it's way over glorified in our
corp the public square is way over glorified. I'm sorry.
The domestic sphere is the beautiful realm, is the beautiful realm.
And that's where even husbands get their motivation. To come
home and have your kids sit on your lap, to

(59:33):
call it daddy. It's amazing, to pinch your face to
give you a kiss. I mean, then you feel alive
and you feel like getting up. If you don't have
any kids, it's hard unless you have a really meaningful job.
What gets you up? Why are you going to go
out and lay tar so that people can drive their

(59:54):
cars over it. I mean, that's great. If you're doing
it for your family and doing it because you want
to contribute to, you know, the functioning of your local community,
that's great. I'm not I'm not trying to discount that.
Alls I'm saying is that not only do we have
to make an argument for uh, you know, respecting the
domestic scene, we have to come to love kids. We

(01:00:16):
have to love human beings again, human beings are the
most incredible reality in the world. Young ones, middle ones,
and even old ones are elders. We're trashing the young
and we're abandoning the old.

Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
Yeah yeah, yeah, and that comes with it so.

Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
That we can work.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Yeah, we can work. And so father, what are you?

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
What are you hoping with this? This can maybe give
be our last question? What are you hoping with this conference?

Speaker 2 (01:00:45):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:00:45):
What is it that you you're trying to do? Tell
us a little bit about the people you're inviting and
what it is you hope to to what message you
want to bring forth?

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
Can we start with you? Since your comment, could you
tell us what you're coming for?

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
Oh, I'm really excited. I mean, I think this is great.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
You know, I think the fact that you're the person
organizing this gives me a lot of confidence about the
vision that will be proposed. I really want to help
people see the beauty, the kind of cosmic beauty of
the image of marriage, and how it's something that is
there from Genesis one until the end of the Book
of Revelation, this image of the union of heaven and Earth,

(01:01:23):
of the bride and the bridegroom.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
It's just it's the story.

Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
And so I think being able to see it as
this beautiful cosmic dance is definitely what I want to
bring to that to this conference where people can can
realize that it's not just although it is our life
and our emotions and our but it is this one
of the greatest ways to participate in the plan that
God has for the world.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
So that's the conference right there. That's hilarious, Sory. I
love that, you know, we Orthodox, we go to conferences.
You know, we go to a lot of conferences different
Orthodox speakers. It's wonderful. But remember the numbers that we've
got in this country. There's about seventy million Roman Catholics

(01:02:06):
about seventy million Protestants and about one million one million
Orthodox in the United States. I don't know how many
in Canada. Do you know how many Orthodox that are
in Chemidt. I don't have any idea anyway. So we're
tiny compared to the Catholic and the Protestant world, but
we share a lot of common virtues and important teachings.

(01:02:27):
And I can't think of one that was more important
to come together and to co labor on than to
address the experiment. I love the way that you put
that at the beginning of this talk. Address they failed
experiment of abandoning marriage. Identify the many evidences that we
have made a very bad mistake in abandoning marriage, and

(01:02:50):
not just abandoning it, attacking it, and then coming together
to lift up powerful champions who love marriage, who have
thought deeply about marriage as an institution for the human
race and as a bedrock of any successful society, come
together make our unique contributions. This is not about the

(01:03:11):
interior mystical life of the sacrament. This is about the
public place of marriage in any civilization that's going to
thrive and is going to honor God. In human beings,
marriage has a central place, which it doesn't happen to
have today. So I'm hoping people like yourself, like the
esteemed Archbishop Salvador Cordelion of San Francisco, the Roman Catholic

(01:03:34):
Archbishop of San Francisco. He is a real fighter for marriage.
He's a San Diego, he's a Californian, and he's been
involved in the front lines of defending marriage here. California
has kind of led the way in decimating marriage. We're
the ones who propagated no fault divorce, you know, We're
the ones who have been wanting to promote a whole

(01:03:56):
political redefinition of marriage what's called now same sex marriage.
Archbishop CORDELIONI was behind the Proposition eight here, which was
a huge controversy about ten years ago, actually more than
that now, I guess it's more like fourteen years ago,
in which we defined we just reaffirmed natural marriage as

(01:04:16):
between a man and a woman. No one thought we
could do it, and we did it as probably eight
the most crazy secular state in the Union, California passed
Prop eight and it was only undone by our Supreme Court.
Our state Supreme Court decided that they were going to
impose some new never before heard of right to same

(01:04:37):
sex marriage. But it was Archbishop Cordelioni who went really
leading that fight. And after that he came onto the
position of the defensive marriage chair for the USCCB, that
the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He's done a
lot of work. I interviewed him about this in twenty twelve.
Actually it was one of the first videos I did
on my channel. He's got a lot to offer. We're

(01:04:59):
also really real to have the leading sociologist of marriage
in America, doctor Brad Wilcox from the University of Virginia.
He has done so much work. His book is best
selling book. Last year, Get Married was well received, and
he makes an argument for human thriving in numerous aspects

(01:05:20):
of marriage. If how marriage is designed to really enrich
your life and make you more human, and he posits
and then destroys many of the myths, some of which
you've raised. Many of the myths that if you know,
the more sexual partners you have, the more satisfied you'll feel,
that if you get married, boredom is going to come
into your life, that you're going to go into poverty

(01:05:41):
if you get married. He confronts those myths and then
he shows you the real reality, which not true. It's
just not true, it's exactly the opposite in fact. So
he's going to come a very fine Protestant theologian, a
young and budding Protestant theologian and YouTuber, doctor Gavin Ortland,
who has a very strong formation in the Protestant world.

(01:06:04):
He's going to come and talk about the significance of
love and marriage. I think this is going to be
also very valuable. We're going to have some great live
music from the dirt. Poor Robbins from the Grades are
going to come in seeing you know this their thematic music.
You really turned me on to actually, and I'm so
thrilled that they're going to come. I think it's going

(01:06:25):
to be really edifying. A lot of visitors that are
going to come, a lot of VIPs from California are
going to come in. I'm hoping that lots of people
will come in order to rekindle or maybe for the
first time, maybe for the first time, have someone stand
up and say, you know what, it's time to set
the vision for marriage and to reaffirm the glory of
marriage and its centrality in any good culture, any normal culture.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
I'm really excited everyone, so sign up, come to the event.
I think that I think tickets are already on people
told me they already have their tickets, So tickets.

Speaker 2 (01:06:59):
Are on sale. They're are we going to go?

Speaker 1 (01:07:00):
So uh, I'd love to see you there, love to
meet you there. And they'll be you know, the half
dried for Robbins there, Father Josiah, all these these wonderful people.
It's going to be it's going to be a powder
keg of I think it's going to be great.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
I can't wait. I can't wait to go. So thank
you for doing this.

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
Marriage conference dot com Love Marriage Conference dot.

Speaker 2 (01:07:19):
Com, Love Marriage Conference dot com. Go there, get your
tickets everyone. Thank you for your attention.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Father just said thank you as usual for your your
wisdom and your thoughtfulness.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
And uh and I can't wait to see you in California.

Speaker 3 (01:07:31):
Yeah, wait to have you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
If you enjoyed these videos and podcasts, please go to
the Symbolic World dot com website and see how you
can support what we're doing.

Speaker 2 (01:07:40):
There are multiple subscriber tiers with perks.

Speaker 1 (01:07:43):
There are apparel in books to purchase, so go to
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405 - Fr. Josiah Trenham - Marriage: The Bedrock of Civilization

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}405 - Fr. Josiah Trenham - Marriage: The Bedrock of Civilization