Journey to Reality–Sacramental Life in a Secular Age

Episode Transcript
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(00:23):
And welcome to another edition of thehandgun Plugged Podcast, a podcast that is
committed to bringing the most interesting,informative and inspirational people directly to your earbuds.
And today, as usual no exception, we have an incredibly interesting guest
who's written a profound book that I'lltalk about in just a few moments.

(00:44):
But this book is titled Journey toReality, and it's about the secular or
the sacramental life. And it's interestingthat I made that error at the very
beginning of this podcast because it's abook about a contract. I've often said
that contrast is the conduit to clarity, and here in the book you have

(01:06):
a contrast, as the subtitle makesplain, between the sacramental life and the
secular life. The subtitle is actuallySacramental Life in a Secular Age, and
the author is Zachary Perc and inthis book he's talking about essentially two revolutions.

(01:34):
The first revolution took place at Pentecostwith the birth of the New Testament
Church. This was the birth inessence of liturgical, sacramental Christianity. It
was a birth that is replete withthe notion that you cannot dichotomize between the
physical and the spiritual. Physical thingsas spiritual qualities and spiritual things relate to

(02:00):
physical qualities, so you can't falselydichotomize between the two. The Second Revolution
was the Protestant Revolution, a revolutionwhich began an ongoing revision of the core
principles of the historic Christian faith.And ultimately, this revolution divorced scripture from

(02:23):
tradition. It loosed scripture from therestraining fetters of Apostolic tradition, from the
creeds, from the councils. I'veoften said, and I wrote about this
in my book Truth Matters, LifeMatters More, that Swiss reformer Uldrich Swingley

(02:45):
reimagined both the Eucharist and baptism.The Eucharist he reimagined as a mere memorial
and baptism, well, baptism issentially is a mere welcoming ceremony, and
the ramifications have been spectacular, andthat's precisely what we're going to talk about

(03:08):
on today's edition of the Hank Unpluggedpodcast. My guest again is Zachary Porcou.
He is a professor of history andtheology at the University of Saint Catharine's
in Saint Marcos California and he holdsdegrees in philosophy, classics, interdisciplinary humanities.

(03:30):
He's an author and the book thatwe're focusing in on today is his
book, as just mentioned, Journeyto Reality, Sacramental Life in a Secular
Age. And Zachary, I amabsolutely delighted to have you on the Hank
Unplugged Podcast. Thanks Hank, I'mdelighted to be on. Well, let's

(03:52):
have some fun as we get intothe process of distinguishing between the secular and
the sacram mental. Let's start withthe question that you start within the book,
and that is an answer to thequestion what is Christianity? Well,
I mean, how controversy do youwant to get right away? Well,

(04:14):
you know, controversy for the sakeof controversy as sin, but controversy for
the sake of the truth is adivine command, So I'm not opposed to
controversy. Yeah. So, Imean that question ends up being kind of
at the heart of the first chapterof the book because you have you enter
into this cultural landscape where in aUnited States and the Western world where you

(04:35):
say Christianity and you know, youget ten people and they'll give you eleven
answers. Kind of thing, right, So we end up having to define
terms right at the very beginning.And there's two ways you could go about
this. I think I think youcould be generous and give what I call
a Wikipedia answer, which is justany group that has some connection or inspiration

(04:58):
from historical christian which would range allover the board, from Jehovah's witnesses to
Mormons, to Catholics, whatever.But then I think if you want to
do something more than that, morethan sociological, you have to say something
that is rooted in a historical patternof being from the first century, what

(05:19):
comes directly from Jesus through the legon of hands, and just from history.
It's very clear to that you canmake that case that there are some
things that have continuity all the wayback to the first century and other things
that don't. And that's why Igive this example of the family life in
the first chapter, that Christianity ismore like this living body of people that's

(05:43):
passed down from generation to generation.And we see that, of course in
the Orthodox Church today. So alot of people think that Christianity started with
a book, and you're saying,no, Christianity started with a person.
Yeah, And you see that languagetoo in a lot of different kind of
circles. I grew up around alot of evangelical language, and so many

(06:05):
times people say the Word of God, the Word of God, and what
do they mean? They mean abook, But that's not how it's used.
Even in the New Testament. Youknow, obviously the word is Christ,
the logos. He's a man,and so he enters into the world
as a person, as a human, he passes on his life to other
humans, and that's going on wellbefore almost any of the New Testament is

(06:28):
written. Yeah, that's an importantpoint to make at the outset. So
people were not captured by the essenceof the Christian faith as a result of
merely a text or only a text, but because they participated in a life.
And I think that participation, andyou alluded to this earlier, is

(06:48):
like the participation of a family.You make that point very eloquently in your
book. There's so much about myfamily and I have a huge family,
have thirteen children and lots of grandchildren, and there's a lot of inside knowledge
that goes on within the family thatpeople on the outside wouldn't get. There

(07:08):
are jokes, there are metaphors,there are experiences that we have as a
nucleus of people that people on theoutside would have to come into the inside,
come into the family to actually understandthat ethos, that particular dynamic.
That's right, and the life ofthe church is the same way, I

(07:30):
mean, And that's why we talkabout the mysteries in Christianity what are called
sacraments in Latin, and what wemean by that is not something that cannot
be known. Right if you geta bad catechism and you're eight years old
and you say, what do wemean by the Trinity? And you get
handwaved and somebody says it's a mystery, don't worry about it, just believe
it. You know, that's notwhat we mean by mystery. What we

(07:51):
mean is something that can only beknown by entering into it, by participation.
So a family is a mystery.A marriage, especially very intimate,
is a mystery. It's known completelyby the two people in the marriage,
but not completely by anyone else.Yeah, that's a really good point.
And I think that you also inthe book talk about the etymology of the

(08:15):
word mystery, and there's a connectionbetween that word then and the word you
alluded to earlier. And that issacramental. Yeah, sacramentos is just the
Latin translation of the Greek word mystery. On why is that connection so important
Because I think in the West weuse the word sacramento, especially because of
Catholicism. This word gets thrown arounda lot, the sacraments, the Seven

(08:39):
Sacraments, This is a sacramental thisor that, And I think it's important
to understand what that means, notjust a technical term, although it is
that it's connected to this concept ofmystery. And this concept of mystery is
connected to this idea of participation thatyou have to enter into it, not
as something that we say, don'tworry about it and you can't comprehend the

(09:01):
things of God, so stop askingquestions. You know, that's not what
we mean. We mean what theapostle said, taste and see, that's
what we mean. Is that whatyou're driving at in the book when you
say that Christianity requires more than theintellect, It requires the imagination. That's
right. And the imagination also notas something that you do in solitary in

(09:24):
your head. Right, it meansyou have to be able to imagine and
visualize things, but you do thatalso Ian and through participation. You know.
It's it's very interesting that in theGospel accounts when Andrew goes to when
they go to Nathaniel and they tellhim we've found the Christ, and he's

(09:46):
very skeptical, right famously, Yeah, yeah, you know, nothing good
comes out of out of Nazareth.They don't argue with him, and they
don't say, well, you know, you do you and we're gonna go
do our thing. They tell himtaste and come and see you, come
and see for yourself. And thenwhen he does, of course, then
he gets it, but they don't. In other words, they understand that

(10:07):
he has to participate in order toget who Christ is. Your second chapter
actually starts out with another question,which is what is religion? And you
said that's tantamount asking the question whatis the nature of reality? Yeah,
that's right. So I think thatespecially again, this book was written for
a modern, twenty first century kindof post Christian audience, for whom so

(10:31):
many religious terms and religious discussions areoverdrawn, over, tread, exhausted.
Right, We've talked as a cultureabout these different things and argued about what
these terms mean for hundreds of years, and part of the fatigue from that
centuries old conversation, and as partof the effects of the Reformation that I'm
sure we'll talk about later, isthat people have gone to say, well,

(10:54):
religion is just a matter of personalopinion. It's your personal take on
what works for you, what mattersin your life, what you like and
what you don't like, et cetera. But I wanted to draw the reader
back to this ancient idea that whenancient people Pagan, Jewish, Christian,
when they ask the question what isyour religion, they were asking a profound,

(11:16):
high level question, the highest levelquestion, what do you think is
going on with the cosmos, withhuman nature, with goodness, with morality,
with purpose? And so that's reallywhat religion addresses, and that a
lot of that context has been lostto modern people who have become disenfranchised with

(11:37):
religion. And I want us toget back to realizing that the question of
religion is the ultimate question, andin doing so, you have to kind
of loosen your definition a little bit, because atheism is a religion, Sovietism
is a religion, whatever, like, these are all religions, And what
I mean by religion is worldview.That's what I want to get back to.
Everyone has a worldview. How doyou view the world? You can't

(12:00):
not have a worldview, and youcan't have a neutral worldview, right,
because any way of viewing the worldis a worldview. It's not neutral.
So that's how I wanted to framethis because then people understand and appreciate the
magnitude and the importance of the questionsthat we're asking. Yeah, you know,
reading through this book, you findthat there's an epicenter, and that

(12:22):
epicenter is a word. That wordis arka, And I want you to
expand on that a bit, becauseas we go through this podcast, that
word no doubt will come up againand again, and I think you want
to have this branded on the canvasof people's consciousness so that they don't have
a false view of what we're talkingabout when we use the word God or

(12:46):
even the plural gods. Yeah,so this is again I was trying to
kind of go back to the basicsfundamentally with this text, because again,
people say God, and we haveall sorts of preconceptions of out who or
what that might mean or might notmean, And so I wanted to use
a completely foreign, unfamiliar word forpeople, which is this Greek word arkae,

(13:09):
and I want to briefly address,if I may, some readers of
the text have objected to this useof the word actually because it's so foreign
and it's not people don't recognize thisword from any of the kind of Christian
conversations of the last several centuries.And I want to emphasize it is in
the Gospels. It's in John.He says in the RK was the logos,
that's the first verse of John.So it's there in the Greek.

(13:33):
And I pulled it out. Itwasn't arbitrary, and I wanted to use
it to emphasize a certain aspect ofthis conversation. What is that. It's
that when we're talking about God,we're not talking about an omnipotent Santa Claus,
right, which is I think howthe baby version of a lot of
this. You see, Okay,God's up there in heaven somewhere, he's
making his naughty nice list, He'sseeing who's good and who's bad. He's

(13:56):
spying on everybody, and on hisown preference or his sense of taste,
he's going to condemn some behaviors orothers. And you might that sounds a
little like Zeus or for or whatever. But that's not what the early Christians
meant, and that's not what Johnmeant when he was appropriating this Greek language.

(14:16):
When the ancients talked about the Arkain whatever form, they were really
talking about something like reality itself beingitself. And all these ancient cultures,
the most sophisticated of the ancient cultures, realized that even if there were a
bunch of gods Zeus and Thor andall these guys, that above them had

(14:39):
to be some higher power, somethingthat was uncreated. Aristotle calls it the
first Mover. There's lots of namesacross all sorts of traditions, Eastern,
Western, Asian, Greek, everything, because thinking people realized there had to
be an unmoved mover. There hadto be an uncaused cause. There had
to be some thing that is thesource of everything, even above the And

(15:01):
this got confusing because we use Godwith the upper case G to mean this
supreme power, because if you comefrom a Jewish or Christian or Muslim tradition,
but we also use the lower caseG to mean people like Zeus and
Odin and all these guys. SoI said, let's get away from all
this language, let's just say,Okay, that's what we're talking about when

(15:22):
we're talking about God, the Father, the source of everything, the uncaused
thing, which is being itself.But who is also a person. That's
the Christian edition. You might say, yeah, also a person. And
I'm just doing a research project ona cult in China that at least started
out in China, and one ofthe things they denigrate is the whole idea

(15:46):
of the Trinity, that there's oneGod, that the Father Son and Holy
Spirit are God, and that theFather Son and Holy Spirit are distinct and
they're personal, they're personal beings.And within the context of the Christian God,
you preserve this idea of the One, therefore and the many. And

(16:07):
I've often said it's really important tohave a Trinitarian God because if you only
have a Unitarian God, that unitarianGod lacks the moral perfection of love because
absent the universe prior to creation,there's no one to love if you just
have a Unitarian God. So it'sso important for people to understand that the

(16:30):
Trinity is not some arbitrary idea,but it is a correct personification of who
God is. Yeah, and Iyou know there's the Trinity. Conversation can
be as technical and convoluted as youwant, because it's very old and a
lot of the smartest people in theworld have weighed in on it. But

(16:52):
for the text, I said,look, let's answer the question that people
want to know, which is whocares? Why do we care about this?
And the answer I gave is becauseGod is love and that means something
very important. We want love,We want to be involved in loving relationships.
But in order to understand what lovingrelationships are, we need to get
to this idea of the one andthe many. How are you both one

(17:15):
and many? How are you yourselfbut also unified to other people in a
family, in a marriage, etcetera. And the root of all that
is, as you point out,in the very being and nature of God.
And you talk about how this ideaof God being the ultimate reality,

(17:36):
the archae being reality itself, howthat intersects with the notion that all of
us are concerned about and that isour fall and then our redemption. Yeah.
So the image I use in thetext is a plug or a power
outlet. So if God is beingitself, he's something like all the energy

(17:56):
and power of electricity, and youif you're in your not being itself right,
you're created. I'm created. Sowe are like cell phones or laptops
that are plugged into the source.We're not sources ourselves. We're plugged into
the source. And so the fallis something like Adam and Eve saying,
you know, we're going to beour own power source. That's what the

(18:18):
devil says to Eve. He says, you shall be as gods. And
you know, there's a lot ofcommentary on that, but one way you
can take that is you're going tobe your own archae if you have the
tree of knowledge. So it's likeunplugging a power strip from the wall and
plugging it into itself, and thenof course all the power turns off,
and that I think that's an importantway to start thinking about the fall.

(18:41):
Obviously it's not exhaustive, but it'san important I think anodyne to so much
of the Western fixation on sin ascrime and all the courtroom language that has
sort of become a neurotic fixation ofso much of Western theology that I wanted

(19:02):
to get back to what more withthe language of the Fathers is, which
is we are dying sin and leadsto and is part of death and sickness
and corruption. And that's what we'retrying to do. We're trying to get
connected back to the archa, becausethen we will be part of life itself.
Yeah, I'm thinking about something youwrote in your book where you note

(19:22):
that a lot of people think thatthe most important thing about Jesus is his
moral teaching or his loving disposition.But really the most important thing, as
you've put in your book about JesusChrist, is that he is theanthropist,
that he is the god Man.Why is that the most important thing?
How does that relate to the solutionthat we all have in terms of our

(19:45):
fallen condition. Well, if there'sno theanthropos, the god Man, then
there's no medium for us to connectwith God. Right, We're always going
to kind of be separate from him. And this problem recurs in different kinds
of like you say, Unitarian religions, where there's God up here when we're

(20:06):
down here and it's not clear whatthe connection is. I mean, he
can sit up there and make thingshappen, he can command things, he
can ask for things, he canwe can obey him. You know,
there's all kinds of relationships you canhave. All of those exist in Islam
or Rabbinic Judaism, but only inChristianity is there an intimacy. Back to

(20:26):
the mystery of participation in God's beingitself, and the only way that we
can really participate in God's being sincehe's the uncreated archae and who has Who's
bodyless, timeless, ageless, spaceless, immaterial. I mean, there's no
way for creative things to interact withhim at an intimate kind of level,

(20:47):
and so we can't do anything aboutit. So God has to do something
about it. And what does hedo. He has the Son take on
human nature fully while preserving his divinenature. And therefore, in Christ person,
the two natures are united in totalintimacy in sacramental union, and that's

(21:10):
how we can participate within God theFather in an intimate way through the sacraments.
Yeah, I want to get backto that in a little while,
but ultimately something needs to be saidin terms of setting the foundation to our
conversation. I alluded to it inthe introduction, and that is the distinction
between a sacramental and a secular wayof thinking. The sacramental being the way

(21:36):
the early Christian Church viewed, whatthe emphasis of Christianity and the Church was
to begin with, and how themodern Church has actually, under the auspices
of Christianity, embraced a secular ora modern way of thinking. Mm hmm,
Yeah, what part of that doyou want to talk about? Well,

(21:57):
the distinction between the two to setsort of the foundation for the rest
of our conversation, because that seemsto be axiomatic to everything that we're going
to talk about today as the podcastcontinues. There's the sacramental way of thinking.
The sacramental way of thinking means thatultimately, within the context of the

(22:18):
Church, your sacraments, those sacramentstransform you. You're able to receive through
the liturgical sacramental dimension of the churchzoetic energy that transforms you from one glory
to another. Or the secular wayof thinking that really was introduced during the
Protestant Reformation or revolt or revolution atwhatever you want to call it. Yeah,

(22:42):
And I was faced with trying toexplain exactly what you just said when
I was writing this book for myundergraduates, when I taught on the East
Coast and I had been assigned toteach introduction to theology at a Catholic university,
and they really just wanted me tokind of, as far as I
could tell, rattle off the what'sright, You must be triple immersed in

(23:03):
baptism, you have to take communion. Why because communions Jesus moving on,
you know there. And you wouldsay this to nineteen year olds and they
just stare at you. They'd belike, why, so what? Yeah,
yeah, so what? Okay?I get what you're saying, but
I'm completely unmoved by it because whocares. And what I ended up having

(23:23):
to do is go to the bottomof what we're talking about. What we're
talking about I found was a fundamentaldistinction between a sacramental and a secular way
of looking at the world. Whatis that difference. The difference is that
on a sacramental way of viewing theworld, the physical and the spiritual cannot
be disconnected and the secular motion historically. Obviously, seculism is a broad and

(23:47):
complex topic, but one of themain things it means is that is actually
the for the very first time inhistory at a large scale, people really
started thinking about the physical and spiritualworlds as not only being separable but separate,
and maybe the spiritual one doesn't exist. You know, we at least
can bank on the physical but whetheror not it has any spiritual content,

(24:11):
and we're going to table that slashnot talk about it, slash deny it.
And that shift to separating the twomakes sense of people's reactions when you
try to explain something like baptism orthe eucharst to them. They just don't
get it. Why on earth doeswhat does the water have to do with
my soul? Even if they buyinto the concept of the soul, because

(24:32):
there are many, many undergraduates thatI teach who are spiritual and not religious,
as they say they they're down withkarma and good and evil and the
soul and all these kind of things, maybe even heaven. But even so,
they don't really see how that's connectedto what they do with their bodies.
And that's why we have to pointout that in the ancient world,

(24:55):
everybody in every culture realize that thephysical and the spiritual or weren't separable at
all. Every physical thing has spiritualcontent, and pretty much every spiritual thing,
with one exception, has a physicalcomponent, the exception being the archae
You can't leave us with that.You've got to expand on that, because

(25:15):
I think that this is such animportant thing for people to recognize that you
can't dichotomize between the physical and thespiritual. You mentioned water just a few
moments ago. Water has a spiritualquality to it. Certainly within the sacrament
of baptism, it has a transcendentlyimportant spiritual quality to it. Yeah,

(25:38):
And I guess if you want meto go deeper on this, I can
add something that's not in the bookthat I sort of touch on a little
bit, but it'd be worth goingto a little bit more, which is
when you say that the physical andthe spiritual are not related, are they're
separable and separad What you're actually sayingis that the universe is meaningless. That's

(26:00):
a jump that a lot of peopledon't see. But when we read the
Early Enlightenment kind of thinkers and they'retrying to talk about models for the universe
to do science and empiricism with,they want to keep saying that the universe
doesn't have inherent intrinsic meaning in it. It's like a clock. That's what
Johannes Kepler says. He says everyoneneeds to stop talking about the universe in

(26:22):
terms of persons and minds and spirits. He said, I want people to
start thinking about the universe in termsof a giant mechanical clock. And of
course nothing's changed. Modern people stillwant to talk about oh oh, well,
we're all in a computer program simulationtheory. It's the same thing that
they had in the seventeenth century,you know, the same model. What's
the similarity. The similarity is thingsare mechanistic, meaning ultimately they're meaningless.

(26:47):
There's no purpose necessarily behind them,there's no moral content. But if you
say that the universe is actually filledwith spiritual things, with spirits specific governing
the planets and nature and all thiskind of stuff, the gods or the
angels or whatever, then what you'resaying is that the universe is primarily filled

(27:08):
with other minds, with other persons, and therefore your relationship to the universe
is personal. It's it's a relationshipwith other persons, you know. Good
example, if there is a godof the sea, then we better pray
to him, or sacrifice to him, or hope that we're in good relationship

(27:30):
with him when we go out sailing. If there's no god to the sea,
if it's just currents and forces,then there really is no meaning in
it. There's no relationship. There'sno moral or spiritual content between you and
the sea, the way there ison paganism, and then of course on
Christianity, because Christianity affirms that theuniverse is full of spirits, it just
says some of them are an open, hostile rebellion to God and then our

(27:55):
aggressors to mankind. So my pointin saying this is when you say,
yeah, the physical and spiritual areconnected, what you're saying is that the
universe is full of inherent meaning.And when you say there is no connection
between the physical and spiritual, you'resaying there is no baseline meaning to the
universe. You can make up whatevermeaning you want and you can assign it

(28:17):
to stuff. Oh this means somethingto me, may not mean something to
you. That means there's no inherentmeaning to the universe. So the secularism,
we actually lose a lot more onsecularism than people I think realize.
Yeah, and I think that there'sa way of making this concrete in the
minds of people. At this junctureof the podcast, when we say this,

(28:41):
the apostle Paul warned, do younot know that your bodies are members
of Christ? And because of that, when you look at it from a
pragmatic standpoint, if you have sexwith a prostitute, you are now involved

(29:03):
in more than just a physical act. You're involved in an act that has
spiritual implications. So if you don'tdichotomize between the physical and the spiritual,
you recognize that there is a profoundramification to how your body is used.

(29:26):
Yeah, and this is another bitof ancient context that I think people don't
have when they read Saint Paul's saysomething like this. He says, do
you not know your bodies are temples? And what was going on in the
in the pagan world at this time, Well, they had this. They
had temples which they believe that thegods entered into, and they had idols.
Paul talks about idols a decent amount. And he doesn't mean this is

(29:49):
a little bit of a side,no, but it's it's very much related.
He doesn't mean fake things. Oh, the ancients were so dumb.
They carved a sculpture of Zoo andthey really thought it was Zeus. But
they were stupid and they didn't realizeit was just would no. So that's
not what the ancient context was.In the ancient Greco Roman world, there

(30:10):
had been for centuries a known art, the art of making gods, and
what they did was they built thephysical body, the physical body of the
deity, and then they summoned aspirit into it with magic rituals. And
once they trapped it in there,they were able to get it to do
stuff for them, prophesied, divination, healing, stuff like that, by

(30:30):
giving sacrifices to it. This iswhy you can catch a genie in a
bottle and then have it give wishes. That legend is a derivative of this
idea that you can catch a spiritand then make it perform for you once
you have it enslaved, and thatwas a very known and understood reality to
ancient people. Why am I bringingthis up because when Paul says your bodies

(30:53):
are temples of the Holy Spirit,what he's saying is that, just like
the Pagans built these statues and triedto summon the spirits of fallen angels into
them, your physical body is designedactually to be an idol in this technical
sense of what of the Holy Spirit, of the spirit of God of the

(31:18):
Ark, and so he's saying,this is a huge, huge deal.
Your physical body's purpose, one ofits main primary purposes, is to inhabit
the Ark, and so you needto treat your body in a pious way
as though it were a temple.The way Pagans treated the temple has acred.

(31:38):
The way the Jews treated the templeis sacred. That's what every individual
Christian's body is. And so that'swhy you wouldn't go into the liturgy and
have a big rave party. Thatwould be totally inappropriate because it's a sacred
space. That's a way of talkingabout what Saint Paul's saying when he says,
don't unite the members of your bodyprostitute, that's the same thing kind

(32:01):
of that he's talking about. Yeah, so the essence of the book is
that we as Christians need to enterinto a sacramental life. And I pointed
out earlier on that with the ProtestantReformation, you really got rid of sacramental
thinking. The Eucharist, the baptismno longer sacraments no longer something God does

(32:25):
in you, but something you're doingfor God in essence. And you're saying,
we have to get back to asacramental way of life. This is
the essence of the Christian faith.If you go to the Book of Acts,
you're looking at sacramental liturgical Christianity.So I want to ask you the
basic question for everyone listening in,what are the sacraments? Obviously there are

(32:52):
some that immediately would resonate with everyonelistening in. Baptism is a sacrament.
If you read about baptism from aNew Testament standpoint, if you're reading through
the Book of Action, realize thatbaptism really is sacramental. So talk about
the sacramental nature of baptism, ormaybe put another way, talk about the

(33:15):
significance of baptism as a sacrament.Yeah, so with baptism, I mean,
so, what are the sacraments?You know, we talk about a
sacramental life, a sacramental way ofviewing the world. That's what we've talked
about already. So the sacraments arethese kind of specific focal points in the
life of the Church where we're tryingto do particular ritual actions for particular ritual

(33:38):
results. And ritual I don't wantpeople to get freaked out by this word.
I mean ritual just means that we'reperforming a series of physical actions that
have spiritual consequences and significance and effects, and so consequences and effects. Yeah,
so there are real consequences, thereare real effects. So when you

(34:01):
the analogy I use so for baptismin particular, the analogy I use in
the text is that you know,you're if we're extending this power strip analogy,
right, it's like, okay,so mankind, what happened in the
fault? We unplugged from the wall. We plugged ourselves back into ourselves.
And then now we're trying to repent. We're trying to plug back into the
ark But you know, how dohow do we do that? Well,

(34:22):
centuries of corruption and neglect and vicesand slavery to the passions and the demons
and all these things have caused ourplugs, you know, the plug part
to kind of rust and it needsto be cleaned off before it can plug
back into the arkae. And anotherway of looking at it is that God
the ArKade. You know, it'sit's being itself. You can't just take

(34:45):
it upon you suddenly, right,if you want to on, my phone
is dead, I need it tocharge. You're not going to go stick
it into a bolt of lightning.It's going to blow up your phone,
right, you need a regulator ofsome kind of phone charger regulates that.
It brings it down to a degreethat you can't actually use to charge your
phone because raw electricity will just youknow, it destroys things. Lightning is

(35:07):
destructive. So we need to bringit down into a way that we can
actually interact with it. And that'skind of what the sacraments do, and
baptism's the first one because it purifiesyou. I'll get to that in a
minute. So that way you're preparedto receive community. You're plugging back into
the ark. And I'm mixing metaphorsa little bit, but you get the

(35:29):
idea. So a lot of studentsasked me, Okay, sure, I
love God, I want to bepart of the ark. What is washing
my body have to do with it? And this is another Enlightenment kind of
era thing, which is this whenwe separate the physical from the spiritual.
Of course, we separate the bodyfrom the soul. And ancient Christians did

(35:50):
not do this. No ancient peopledid this. They realize that you are
a soul, you are a body. You are a mind. You are
all three of these things, andthey're all interrelated, just like all your
organs are interrelated. Yeah, youhave a stomach and a kidneys and a
brain or whatever, but they're allyou. They're all you, you know.
So if you want to become partof the Archa, to interact with

(36:12):
it, to be a dwelling ofthe Holy Spirit, you have to be
cleaned. That involves your body.And that's a radical paradigm shift for so
many people because even if we're religious, even if we identify as Christians,
even if we identify as Sacramento Christians, so many modern people do not really
believe that they are their bodies justas much as they are their souls.

(36:35):
So when you're baptized, you're washed, you're cleansed, you're united with the
Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spiritand dwells your being. You're united to
the Church. So baptism is transcendentlyimportant. Would you go so far as
to say, and this is controversialin many modern Christian minds, would you

(36:59):
go so far as to say thatbaptism is necessary for salvation? Therefore that
may be above my pay grade.God saves. Yeah, See, this
is like a trick question, becausea lot of presents come to me and
they say, what's necessary for salvation? You know, there's this big emphasis
on necessity. Where's the checklist?What do I have to do? What
are the minimums? And you knowthe answer is sort of from different directions.

(37:22):
Right. One is that God isthe ultimate and final judge of salvation.
Christ is Lord of all, andso we can't say, you know
who is and who isn't going tobe saved. But here's an interesting point.
Obviously, famously, the thief onthe cross isn't baptized, and Christ
confirms his salvation, so technically no, like there's an example, there's a

(37:45):
counter example of somebody who wasn't baptized, but who will dwell with Christ in
paradise. But you don't therefore conclude, Oh, okay, I guess I
don't really need it. I guessit's optional. No, there's a normative
path to salvation that has been outlinedby Christ and the Apostles and our Holy
fathers, and you want to dothis now. Maybe maybe the thief on
the cross is later baptized in somefashion in the age to come that we

(38:08):
don't really understand. But Hopefully thosetwo facts help help to answer your question.
Yeah, well, what I'm reallygetting at and you quote Saint Cyprian
of Carthage saying that you cannot haveGod as your father without having the Church
as your mother. So what I'mdriving at actually was not a trick question

(38:30):
as much as an emphasis on thenecessity to be intimately involved in the Church
and the sacramental liturgical life of theChurch, because it's within the context of
the Church that you receive baptism.It is within the context of the Church
after being baptized, that you areprepared, as you rightly pointed out,

(38:51):
you're prepared for the sacrament of Sacraments, which is the Eucharist, and you
get the spiritual life. So youknow, in many mons, modern contact
secular thinking, really you have thisidea of Christianity and salvation being punctiliar.
I pray to prayer. I'm inas opposed to recognizing that Christianity is not

(39:15):
merely a point. It is aprocess where you grow in the grace and
knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ,where you through the sacramento liturgical life of
the Church, you receive the veryenergy that is necessary so that you can
go from one glory to another,not only in this life, but in

(39:37):
the life to come. So Iguess what I was driving at with that
question was more the necessity of beingintimately involved in the life of the church,
because without that, you're not pluggedin. Without that, you don't
receive spiritual energy. Yeah, it'sI mean, there are many analogies you

(39:59):
can give. It's like and again, I think this goes back to my
complaint before, is that so muchof salvation language in the West is warped
around kind of the Catholic versus Protestantfixation on guilt and atonement and I'm a
sinner. That means you're a cosmiccriminal, and I need to do something

(40:22):
so that I don't go to jail, cosmic jail which is hell? And
what is that exactly? Well,you have to do with these penances,
No, you don't have to doanything. Just believe you know that that
whole controversy is really foreign to Orthodoxybecause we don't view salvation primarily in those
terms, although that obviously that languageis in scripture, but it's not the
only language about salvation in scripture,and what we want to view it as

(40:45):
is more like sickness and health andbecoming more and more healthy. You know.
So if you want to be anathlete, you know, you want
to get in first, you wantto get in shape. Then you want
to practice and drill, and youdo all these things to become a deeper
and deeper athlete, a more skilledand push the limits on what it means
to be let's say, a basketballplayer or a martial artist or whatever.

(41:08):
You do that out of joy,because you love it, and that's what
drives you to do it. Andthat's what we're called to do in asceticism,
and fasting is not because we're bador food is bad, but because
we love Christ and we want towe want to go deeper into that relationship.
You know, same way a marriage. You don't just go like,
all right, we got married,here's the ring. We're done, you

(41:29):
know. Married. No, marriageobviously is something that you go deeper and
deeper into over decades and decades,because it's a relationship. And these relationships
are mysteries that we participate in.And so when you think about salvation in
those terms, you say, ofcourse I want to be I must be
baptized, I must take community,I must go and participate in the liturgy,

(41:52):
not because you have to or you'regoing to jail, but because,
of course you want to spend timewith your wife. Of course you want
to go to practice because you wantto become a better husband, a better
martial artist, a better athlete,whatever it is, out of love and
because there's we're talking about God.There's no end to those depths. Yeah,

(42:14):
and I think too. And ifI recall you actually use this analogy
in the book. I could bewrong about this. But let's say you
want to get in really peak physicalconditions, so you buy a gym membership.
The fact that you bought the gymmembership doesn't solve your problem. You
say, I paid for the gymmembership and now I'm in great physical condition.

(42:38):
That's absurd. Obviously you have touse that membership. You have to
participate in the life of the gymto become physically fit. So it is
a process as opposed to the punctiliaridea of well, I bought the membership
and now I'm going to be ingood shape. That's absurd. You have

(42:58):
to exercise size of Saint Paul,let's say, right, gymnastize yourself into
godliness. That's right. Yeah,that's in the book. That's exactly right.
And I think that when we lookat examples of talking about salvation in
especially in the New Testament, Pauldoes use athletic examples. You know,
we don't notice this very much,but when he says the crowns, you

(43:20):
know, I've rut the race,I've won the crown. In the ancient
world, they didn't give trophies.I don't know why we give cups today
like for athletes, and in theancient world they give crowns as trophies.
I think that's cooler. En Reese, Yeah, that's right. Yeah,
and yeah, so you deal withyou know, the sacrament of baptism transcendently
important. And I've already alluded tothe sacrament of the eucharists, but I

(43:43):
don't want to leave it there.Can you expand on the significance of the
Eucharist. Let me put it inmy own paltry terms, when I partake
of the Eucharist, on partaking ofzoetic energy. Zoetic energy is different than
biological energy, but it is justas real, just as poignant, just

(44:05):
as profound, and in a sensedangerous if misused. So for example,
Paul says that in First Corinthians,chapter eleven, speaking of the Eucharist,
some of you, as a resultof taking this in an unworthy manner,
some of you are sick, andsome of you have actually died. So
there's a power, a potent powerinherent in partaking of that spiritual energy.

(44:35):
Yeah, because it's not just akind of energy, it's energy itself,
life itself being itself. There's Ithink there's a reason that so much of
the scriptures and the hymnography and theimagery and the liturgy relates to God to
a fire. He's a consuming flame, and I think that symbol is the
symbol of Him being life itself.But of course fire is life giving,

(44:59):
it war, it's related to cookingfood, right, all life giving things.
But it can also burn you.And so there's the sense in which
fire results are very dangerous that wehave to interact with it in the proper
way. That's how life works,and God is the ultimate example of that.
Because you can't just again with thelightning analogy, you can't just shove

(45:21):
your phone into electrical storm and hopethat it gets charged. It's going to
explode, and so we have toapproach God in the right way. Now.
Prior to the incarnation, there wasn'ta way to do that. To
go back to our previous point aboutthis, That's why the theanthropost is so
important because the arka is not hasno body, but it has no medium

(45:42):
that it shares with us. Hehas no medium that he shares with us.
That's why the incarnation is so paramountbecause now he shares our nature,
so he can give us his bodyas food that we can eat. That's
a medium that we can interact with. And it's not a symbol that it's
something we eat, because that's partof our nature. Again, assume that

(46:07):
the physical and this always has spiritualcontent. Well, what you eat nourishes
you. That's not a biological sidenote, that's our nature as contingent beings.
And so when God gives himself tous to eat, you are what
you eat. Everyone knows that.So if you want to be calm,

(46:27):
filled with the energy and power oflife himself, you have to you're a
human being, you have to eathim. The angels don't do that.
Marriage also is a sacrament, andyou point out in your book that it
is a way of imitating the Trinity, the Triune God, and therefore when

(46:50):
you get married, you're not justentering into a contractual relationship. The implications
of this are very, very practical. So, for example, Florida,
many years ago, you had theinitiation of no fault divorce. You're saying
marriage is a sacrament. Divorce isactually, by way of analogy, cutting

(47:13):
a human being in two because thetwo have become one. So there's a
huge consequence to both the sacrament ofmarriage and the ending of that sacramental relationship
if it is done in a waythat violates all biblical precepts and principles as
well as the sacramental way of thinkinginitiated in the Book of Acts. Yeah,

(47:38):
and I think that this is oneof the reasons. I think one
of the many reasons secularism has becomeso powerful is because if you can separate
the physical and the spiritual, thenyou can sort of have all these You
can do whatever you want without anyconsequences, no spiritual consequences, because the
spiritual isn't connected to the physical.And so we think, oh, we'll
get married, we get divorced,we can break it, who cares.

(48:00):
But the reality is that it's anotherway of participating in this one and many
relationship. And I want to beclear because it's a heresy to say that,
well, the father and the son, that's like a marriage, and
the Holy Spirit is like the child. You know, that's an analogy that
gets used. That's an extra hereticalanalogy called double procession. So I'm not

(48:22):
saying that, but I am sayingit's an imitation. It's a shadow of
how the Trinity is one and many. We do the one and many things
in a certain way as a family. That's not a one to one to
the trinity, but it is anotherway of having this one and manyness because
you know, I have a fivemonth old daughter and when I pick her

(48:43):
up, you know, I lookat her and I see this is me
and my wife, and it's herher own person too. You know,
it's all three of those things.And when you have kids, it's really,
I think, quite concrete the waythat marriage is a single fleshed thing
because you're made of your mom's flesh. It's there, you know. Going

(49:04):
through the pregnancy was so crazy tome because I'm like, this is my
wife's body. I put my handon her belly. But there's another person
in there, and we can't.It's very hard to distinguish the two of
them at first, and eventually theyseparate, but that connection, it doesn't
go away. That's a beautiful analogy. Another aspect of the sacramental nature of

(49:24):
the Church is the priesthood. Notonly the priesthood of all believers, but
the priest himself has a very significantrole to play in that the priest is
a priest via the wonder or themystery of apostolic succession. Can you expand
on that a little bit, becauseI think this is a really important thing

(49:46):
for people to recognize. Yeah,so you know, well, gosh,
there's so many dudes and don'ts withthis one. But I think that you
know, we see it. It'sin the New Testament. It's in the
Gospels. What happens is Christ specificallychooses certain people and he gives them a
blessing he physically to go do thesethings. He sends the seventy out to

(50:09):
cure disease and cast out evil spirits. He sends them out in pairs.
We know that. And then allthroughout the New Testament there's all these references
to them laying on hands to passon that authority and that power, and
it's both of those things, right, It's the authority that comes from Christ
because again the sources the authority isa man, not a book. But

(50:31):
it's also the power of the spirit, and it's a certain vocation, and
it's a certain charism you might say, you know, like chrismation. It's
the ability to interact with the physicaland spiritual world in a certain way.
What is the priest do. Heconsecrates the eucharst he blesses water and makes

(50:51):
it holy, He applies chris maation, he marries people. And the analogy
I using the text is, well, you know we're using this electricity comparison.
You don't Most people don't install theirown electricity in their home because again,
electricity is dangerous. I do notdo my own electrical I do lots
of other house repairs. I didnot touch the electricity. I call an
expert and because it's dangerous and Idon't know what I'm doing, and I've

(51:13):
been electrocuted before, and that thosepeople what do they have? They have
expertise, but they also have acertain authority. You know, there's permitting
involved in this kind of stuff.So I think it's an important analogy to
the spiritual life. The spiritual lifeis even more dangerous, you might say,
interacting with the Arka and being aconduit for this kind of energy.
Now you mentioned the priesthood of allbelievers. Of course that's also true because

(51:37):
the Holy Spirit comes down on Pentecost. We just you know, we're in
the week of Pentecost right now,and he comes into the church and flames
around people's heads, and so thatspirit is poured out on the whole church.
And so as a late person,you're not a priest. You're the
priest of your home, and youhave a home alter, and so your
home becomes this extension of it.So we always in Orthodox you understand that

(52:00):
the lay people are the fourth orderof ministry, right, Bishops, priests,
deacons, and then lay people.And and I think that it's dangerous
to talk about that a little bitin our post Protestant world, because it
is the right and duty of thelay people to do crazy things like take
a bishop and drive them out oftown for being a heretic. That has

(52:22):
happened in history. But I thinkif you say that to modern point of
post Protestant culture, they'll be like, great, we can do. We
have just as much say as abishop. We don't like the bishop,
We're going to tie them up andrun them out of town. Real that's
you know, you don't want todo that lightly. So there is a
dialogue up and down the hierarchy,but it's still a hierarchy, and God

(52:43):
has given us our pastors and shepherds, you know, with a special authority
that lay people don't have in thesame way. Yeah, and you're a
very comprehensive answer. You mentioned awords several times, and that is the
word chrismation. If you're Orthodox,you're very familiar with that word. But
I would say the average Christian,the average Evangelical, the average Protestant,

(53:06):
even Catholics are not often familiar withthat word chrismation and the Western form of
that word confirmation. Can you catchthat out a little bit for us?
Well, yeah, so chrismation isliterally an anointing with oil. That's what
the charism is. And this hasbeen historically understood to be how the spirit,

(53:28):
the Spirit is related to oil,and how we were anointed with the
oil of the Holy Spirit. Andthis gives you know, this is also
one of these mysteries, and youcould find all these weird examples throughout history
and the saints and things. Butit gives us, you might say,
broadly, a certain ineffable keroism thatallows you to start being a temple of

(53:52):
the Holy Spirit. Right, Baptismcleanses you, and then the Chrism,
the Chrism anoints you and prepares youto be a temple for the Holy Spirit.
And then you eat the Eucharist andyou get the ArKade in you.
And all of these things are partof, let's say, dressing the temple.
That is you to be able toreceive and to I'm sending to pay.

(54:16):
I'm gonna say you receive these powers. But actually they are powers.
You know, they are quite profound, because when we're doing all this dressing
of the human temple, what we'rereally saying is that God, it's back
to this business of who is man? Who is Adam? And Adam is
the priest of Creation, that's whatthe fathers call him, and it's his

(54:38):
job is to be an intermediary andan indwelling of the Trinity to creation,
to the earth, to the cosmos. And I want to just add this
little bit here. I heard this, and I keep asking everybody if they
know where this is from, becauseI cannot find the source. But I
believe I read somewhere one of thefathers saying when Christ walked on water,

(55:02):
he wasn't doing it in his capacityas God, but in his capacity as
Adam, as the priest of creation. And I don't want to repeat that
too much because I don't remember whatthe sources, But if you know,
or if anyone hears that, pleaselet me know. But because I thought
that was really cool. Yeah,One other thing that I wanted you to

(55:22):
touch on before we move away fromthe specific sacraments themselves, is sacramental objects.
You talk about sacramental objects in thebook, including let's say, relics.
You know, this was a foreignthought to me, quite frankly,
as an Evangelical Protestant, the ideathat relics actually have spiritual power. The

(55:49):
bones of a holy person, someonewho's really devoted their life to Christ and
the mission that Christ gave us impregnatedwith the power of the whole spirit,
obviously the relics of that person wouldhave residual effects even in the present.
This, again, as I said, was a foreign concept to me.

(56:10):
But again, this is part ofwhat you're talking about when you say that
spiritual and physical entities can't properly bedichotomized. That's right, And that is
a huge point of contention between alot of frankly secularized Christian denominations and traditional
ones because it just looks like completesuperstition on the outside. And I think

(56:37):
that it's important to redeem superstition briefly, which is that the ancient Pagans,
you know, they were what wewould call superstitious. They thought certain colors
and certain directions and certain you know, we're gonna put holly over here because
that protects against this, and we'regonna this is going to be this color
because that, you know, isgoing to be good luck and all these
kind of things. And we lookat that as post in life, and

(57:00):
people won't go, well, that'sall fake, and they were dumb for
believing that, But actually it's aprofoundly sophisticated way of viewing the world and
saying that all objects have spiritual andmoral content to them. Colors, numbers,
everything, and so you start tosee where these complicated zodiac and astronomy
and divination things come from. Theirpremised on a very real truth, which

(57:22):
is that the physical and spiritual arenot separable. Every physical thing has spiritual
content. Now, did the Pagansget misled by the fallen angels into thinking
all manner of things about this,Yes, but that doesn't mean that that
category is invalid. Right, Sowhen Christianity comes along, it redeems all

(57:45):
of these categories and says, yeah, objects have spiritual content. That's why
we put the alter facing east.That's why we wear crosses around our next.
You know, that's actually from thepagan amulet tradition, and that's a
redeemed tradition because it has real physicalcontent. So when you become spiritual,

(58:07):
when you start to draw close tothe Arka and he starts to dwell in
you fully, and you've purified yourselfof your stayings. In other words,
a holy person, physical stuff startshappening. You know, John of San
Francisco, Saint John of San Franciscowas often found to be serving the liturgy
two feet off the grounds. Whywhy does that matter? Well? Why

(58:29):
why? Like it seems incidental thatthat would happen. You know, people's
saints' faces glowed, That's that's partof where the nimbus and the icons comes
from. You know, Moses's faceglowed because he saw the backside of God.
So God is redeeming creation, feelingit with his energy, and therefore
the people who touch him, justlike I think. You know, Moses

(58:50):
had this glow when he came downfrom the mountain. That's that still happens.
It happens everywhere and so and evenan axe. You notice the people
with gather they're sick too, sothat Peter Shadow might fall on them and
heal them. And you could say, oh, well, they're just being
superstitious weirdos. But it's like,I don't know, people received. Even

(59:13):
in Christ's miracles, he often tellspeople get up and walk, but sometimes
he spits he and he makes clayand puts it on. Why does he
need to do that? You know, it's not need to it's because he's
working with the medium of the physicalworld. That these they're all inseparable.
Yeah, and they're inseparable because ofincarnation. So Christ comes into the world

(59:37):
in incarnation and as a result ofthat, this world is enchanted, a
word that you use again and againin the book. We're living in an
enchanted world. That idea is foreignto modern ears. Elaborate on that somewhat
now. I use that phrasing.A lot of people are have come to
the same conclusion to use this phrasing, people like Jonathan Peggio and people in

(01:00:00):
that circle. But I actually gotit from Charles Taylor, who wrote a
wonderful book on it's called The secularAge. It's very long, but he
basically explains all the conditions for howpeople used to think and then how they
become secularized in the modern era.And the terms he settles on are enchanted
and disenchanted, because enchanted gives agood sense of how all physical things have

(01:00:23):
this sort of spiritual content to them, regardless of what people believe in their
heads about them or not. AndI think it's worth pointing out that the
word enchanted is the same you know, in chant. I mean chant comes
from the same word, right.So there's like a musical harmony to creation.
That's part of what we're saying whenwe're saying enchanted. And that's why

(01:00:44):
the liturgy is sung. That's whythere's music in the liturgy, because we're
participating in the song of creation.The music of the spheres is what some
of the Renaissance people called it.And all of that is vital because that's
how the world actually starts. It'snot that way because of the incarnation.
That's how the cosmos is from creation. What the incarnation does is it takes

(01:01:06):
it a step further. It says, okay, we have this enchanted worlds
full of all this meaning a lotof it is screwed up though, because
the angels fell and then man fell, and now there's all these problems.
So in redeeming that old enchanted world, Christ takes it up a notch from
enchanted to incarnational. In other words, we can now actually commune with the

(01:01:28):
Arka himself. You know. Sopeople say, why did Jesus get baptized
if he was Jesus? And theFather's answer is to make water holy,
not because he needed it, butto actually take water at the moment of
his baptism. Now water became appropriatedto this holy element following his baptism.
Now everywhere it's a higher than enchanted, it's deified. That's what Christ is

(01:01:51):
drawing us all up into his deity. So that's what happened Pagan to Christian
and then the actual motion of historyis we go down from that into a
disenchanted world. Right, it's notthat what the secular person, what have
you think is that there's just matterand energy and then weirdos religious people they
add all this extra content to itthat's not really there. That's not how

(01:02:15):
it plays out in history. Pagan'sviewed the world as enchanted. Christian said,
yes, and deification is coming andwe can be drawn up into the
Trinity itself. And then it wasthe Reformation in the Enlightenment et cetera,
et cetera, that stripped all ofthat away to give us a bare bones
secular culture. Something else you talkabout in the book is liturgical. You've

(01:02:37):
mentioned that word a number of times. In the podcast. We talk about
the liturgical sacramental life of the Church, and in particular, an Orthodox Christian
will talk about the divine liturgy.I just went to the divine liturgy.
I'm going to the divine liturgy.But it is not just called the liturgy.

(01:03:00):
It's called the divine liturgy. Whybecause it is a direct process of
participating in the cosmic, heavenly liturgythat the angels are always doing around the
throne of God, which gives areally impotent answer to the question, well,

(01:03:20):
why should I go to church?You know my friends are there.
I'm gonna listen to a nice sermon, I'm gonna hear music I like.
If I'm evangelical, or if I'mOrthodox, I like these particular hymns.
Whatever. No, I mean yesto all of that, But that's not
the main reason. The main reasonis that we are actually participating in a
higher cosmic reality. And you mightthink, well, that sounds crazy,

(01:03:43):
but it's actually just in Exodus,because when God calls Moses up to sin,
I'm the subtext is that he showshim an image of the cosmic musical
structure of creation, and the angelsare participating in it. That's why when
you see the angels on the angeldoors on the Iconostas, they're often dressed

(01:04:06):
as deacons, because it's understood thatpart of the angelic function is the liturgical
at a cosmic level, and soGod shows Moses this, and that's why
I later. You know, ifyou've ever had to slog through all the
exact little bits about why the templeneeds to be this shape and this needs
to be this color, and needsto be this many tassels like why so

(01:04:29):
particular well, because this is playingon this ancient idea that all imitation is
participatories. If you imitate something,you participate in it. This is why
masks are used in role play inso many religious festivals around the world,
often in paganism, because you puton the mask of a deity, you
participate in that deity's energy in thesame way, that's what we're doing in

(01:04:51):
the whole the divine liturgy. We'rereally trying to imitate and therefore participate in
the cosmic liturgy. Significance of sayingthat in the liturgical life all time is
present, what is that significance?Why do we say Christ is risen as

(01:05:12):
opposed to let's say Christ was risenin a particular epic of time in the
first century. We don't say that, we say Christ is risen. So
the liturgical life is always a presentlife, isn't it. That's right,
because Christians are looking forward to theage to come, which yes, is

(01:05:34):
future, but it's also now.So the fancy word for this is proleptic,
which is it means something like alreadyand not yet. And that's what
Christ is. Christ has come andhe's coming again. He says the Kingdom
of Heaven is here, it's now, it's within you, and it's coming.
And so we are in participating inthe divine liturgy work, participating in

(01:05:58):
the cosmic liturgy around the Throne ofGod, and we're already sampling that age
to come in which all things arepresent. And the thing that kind of
blew my mind when I realized thisis there's this part in the epiclesis where
you know, they're calling the HolySpirit. The priests and the liturgy are
asking the Holy Spirit to come downand descend on the gifts. And there's
this line where they say, andwe remember, you know, the Cross,

(01:06:24):
the Grave, the Third Day Resurrection. They list all the events in
the life of Christ and they say, and your second and glorious coming,
but they say it as we rememberyour second and glorious coming. So in
the liturgy, because the liturgy isthis is this weird eternal present. We're
in the bizarre position of being ableto remember something that has passed as a

(01:06:45):
memorial event, something that's actually goingto happen in the future from our kind
of secular temporal perspective, because allof those events in the life of Christ,
including his second coming, are partof this eternal present. So when
you're part of the liturgical sacramental lifeof the Church, it's not just a
matter of going to divine liturgy Sundayby Sunday, but rather being involved in

(01:07:10):
an entire way of life, asacramental liturgical way of life. There's a
liturgical calendar, and through that youreally understand the essence of the Christian life,
and not just in an intellectual fashion, but you understand it through participation.

(01:07:31):
Yeah, because you are. That'swhy this question of reality is so
central to what I wanted to talkabout with this book, is because there's
the reality that you experience here.Now it's temporal, there's day to day,
et cetera. But then there's ahigher reality that contains the first one
and is lifting it up into sortof this cosmic level. And so that's

(01:07:55):
what the liturgical cycle is. It'ssort of part of the cosmic season of
this eternal present, and it's atthe highest level of reality. And we
can only participate in a very smalldegree to the extent that we are holy.
But we when we go to church, when we participate in the liturgical

(01:08:15):
calendar and we sing the festal hymns, over our dinner table at home.
We're actually being drawn up into somethingthat's much closer to reality as it really
is. So where does the Biblefit into all of this? I spent
most of my Christian life meditating onthe Word of God, memorizing the Word
of God. I still continue mostdays memorizing scripture. Where does the Bible

(01:08:36):
fit into the liturgical, sacramental lifeof the church. Yeah, so when
people convert to, or are aboutto, or don't want to convert to
Orthodoxy from Protestant groups or especially Evangelicclose, there's this huge question about what
do I do with scripture? Areyou saying the Bible's stupid and secondary and

(01:08:59):
it's all about liturgy and the sacramentsand priests and everything. I don't want
to let go of that. Andthat's also a bad way of thinking about
it, because the Bible really isa part of tradition. I mean,
that's the first answers what is theBible? Well, it's part of tradition.
Which books are in the Bible,who wrote them? And what the
canon scripture ultimately is. That isan artifact of it's an effect of the

(01:09:23):
early Church. I'm talking about theNew Testament. Primarily it's an effect of
the early churches coming to grips withthe person of Christ writing these things down,
etc. But therefore it's not separablefrom tradition. Actually, so everything
that we do in the liturgy,in the hymnography, in the sacraments,
it's all part of and uses theexplicit language of the Bible, because you

(01:09:47):
know, especially the Psalms are allover the services of the Church, in
baptism, you know, the creed, all of these prayers. The Great
Doxology is basically this pastiche of allthese really important Bible verses, especially the
Psalms. Right, So, oneof my friends always says that the whole
world of the liturgy can't really beunderstood apart from the imagery of scripture.

(01:10:12):
It's painted in the painting and thepaints and the colors of scripture. Because
the Bible, when you read itproperly, also lifts you up into this
kind of higher way of looking atreality. And you can't say me and
my Bible because you have to inevitably, as a Christian, a sacramento Christian,

(01:10:34):
realize that the Bible ultimately is inextricablywoven together with the concept of the
mind of the church. You haveto have the mind of the Church,
because otherwise you're not going to understandthe Bible in its proper context. You're
not going to understand the literal,the moral, the spiritual, or the

(01:10:56):
typological impact of the Word of Godone hundred percent. I mean, it's
the same family analogy. You know, if you read my the analogy give
is, if you read my grandmother'sdiary, you could get a lot out
of it, but you wouldn't understandall of it because you're not part of
my family. You know, youneed the family to interpret its own history.
And there's so many arguments that youcould get into about soloscriptor and all

(01:11:20):
this kind of stuff. And Ihad them, you know, as I
was converting from Protestism to Orthodoxy witha lot of my friends and a lot
of people. And I think thatfor those who are stressed out about that
question, I sort of settled ona very simple point, which is that
if returning to me and my Biblewas really the answer to the various corruptions

(01:11:45):
and doctrinal confusions of the Church,then what we would expect to see following
the Reformation and the Solar Scriptora movementis what we would expect to see is
a greater move towards unity among Christians, and in fact we see the exact
opposite. And so to me,that proof is in the putting with that.
It just it didn't work. Andso it's very difficult to say that

(01:12:06):
Sola scripture is sort of a cureother than what it really is is it's
a problem that has to be solvedby Protestantism for the rest of time.
Yeah, well said. One ofthe things you go into in the book
that I found very interesting and informativewas the aspect of icons. And you
make the point of the book thaticons are often said to be a way

(01:12:30):
of translating the faith for illiterate people, as you go back to the early
centuries and people are illiterate, butthey can get the message of the Gospel
by looking at icons. And yousay, no, that's really not what
icons are all about. It's notwhy the Christian faith is so visual.
You have imagery and scripture. You'resaying, Rather, the icons and the

(01:12:56):
visual nature of Christianity is directly relatedto this thing that you've been talking about
throughout this podcast, and that isthe participatory nature of the Christian faith.
Yeah, and I'm you know,obviously a lot of inch people were not
literally it depends on where you're talkingabout, and so icons are helpful blah
blah blah. But I think totry to explain away features of the early

(01:13:18):
Christian liturgical life from a merely utilitarianperspective, miss is the point, and
which is what you bring up,which is that icons are another one of
these sacramental objects, and we sayall kinds of weird stuff about them.
We say that an icon of asaint is a more accurate depiction than a
photograph of the saint, and thatreally gets at the point that the physical

(01:13:42):
and spiritual are interrelated, and notonly are they not separable, as we've
been talking about, but that thespiritual is really the truest content of reality
and the physical is can be distracting. We don't deny matter, We're not
gnostics or Buddhists or whatever, obviously, but we understand the hierarchy of these
things. So the icon depicts themore accurate true state of that person than

(01:14:08):
the photograph with all of its detailsdoes. And icon weird things happen with
icons, like icons have changed historicallylike another. What's depicted in them has
changed where oh gosh, I forgetthis story. There's there was this monastery
on Athos. I believe that wasgoing to be attacked by the Ottomans and

(01:14:29):
it was going to be destroyed becausethe monks were bad monks. They were
not, let's say, being goodmonks. And there was this famous icon
with Theotokos who in a vision,you know, told them they were going
to have one last chance. It'sa whole story is worth looking up.
And a feature of that icon changedbecause it's the Theototals holding Christ and he
tries to put his hand over hermouth to stop her from because he's saying,

(01:14:51):
no, these monks are going tobe judged, and she intercedes for
them, and she's grabbing his handso that he's not able to cover her
mouth, and she says, I'mgiving you one last chance to repent because
I'm interceding for you, and theicon actually moved and it stayed that way
ever since. So they are,in a weird way portals into the Age

(01:15:12):
to come. And that sounds totallycrazy if you come from a kind of
a secularized way of thinking, butit follows from everything we've been saying.
Yeah, it does follow from everythingthat we have been saying. And I
think one of the things that isso important you bring it out in the
book, but it's worth commenting onsome more, is that the Christian faith

(01:15:33):
ought to be if it's truly participatory, it ought to involve all of the
senses, the five classic senses thatwe talk about. Yeah, we taste
the euchars, we smell the incense, we hear the hymnography, we touch
the icons, we see everything inthe beautiful liturgy. Yeah, it's such

(01:15:54):
a powerful thing because it's back tothis idea that you are a body,
you're not just the soul. Youknow, how many times have you heard
somebody say, you know, well, that's just when my body dies,
do whatever you want with it.I don't care. My soul is going
to heaven. And that's not aChristian idea. Actually, it's a pagan
idea that Christians were very much against, and it was very countercultural at the

(01:16:15):
time. Yeah, Christianity is veryphysical. I mean, when you think
about the physical resurrection of the dead, for example, there are a lot
of people that don't fully graphs that, but there's continuity between the body that
dies in the body that rises,immortal, imperishable, incorruptible. I want
to talk about something else that youbring up in the book. You sort
of turn the table. I lovethe way you do that. I love

(01:16:36):
turning the tables. But you say, the existence of evil is actually an
argument in favor of the existence ofGod, not an argument against the existence
of God. How is that?Yeah, So it's so easy for critics
of Christianity to get on a moralhigh horse and say, you know,

(01:16:57):
well, evil exists. You knowthis classic argument evil against God, problem
of evil. How can we reconcilea good, loving, all powerful God
with the existence of evil? Andyou can't let people kind of seize the
high ground from you here, becauseif you want to say something is evil,
that's actually quite a profound moral claim. Right. You're not saying I

(01:17:20):
don't like it. You're not sayingthis is contrary to our goals. You're
not saying it's inconvenient, you're notsaying anything like that. You're saying it's
evil. Therefore, there's this levelan ultimate cosmic moral order that it's violating.
Now. I was talking to mystudents last semester about this when we're
talking about morality and culture, andyou know, let them. They're very

(01:17:42):
secular, right, and they don'teven if they identify as religious. And
I said, okay, do youreally want to say that this guy who
loves raping and murdering people, Let'smake a hypothetical guy. He loves doing
these things, he's fulfilled by it. You know, that's just his preference,
right, what do you have againsthim? And we went through like,

(01:18:03):
well, you know those people don'twant to be harmed by him.
It's like, well, that's theirpreference and that and then he has his
preference how to immediate between these twothings? And I say, let's be
real. If this hypothetical person exists, you're saying, you will say without
hesitation, there's something wrong with him. It's not just that the things he

(01:18:24):
wants are wrong and evil, thatthere's something wrong with him like this is
he's messed up. In other words, he's violating the cosmic moral order in
some way that's higher than mere convenienceor utilitarianism or anything like that. So
actually, deep down everybody knows thatthere's evil because we say it's wrong.

(01:18:45):
Period. We don't say I don'tlike that we want to see something stronger
than that. The second you do, you're saying that there's an absolute,
an objective, moral order to thecosmos, and that it's knowable, and
that you ought to act on behalfof it or in accordance with it.
And so what are we saying.You're saying something profoundly religious in fact,

(01:19:06):
when you assert that evil exists,which much more leans to the idea that
there's an absolute moral lawgiver, notagainst the idea that there's an absolute moral
lawgiver. Where does free will fitin to all of this? I mean,
if you think about Christianity in amodern sense, and you think,

(01:19:26):
for example, the Protestant Revolution,you have the idea of the bondage of
the will, hard determinism and soforth. You are saying in your book
that free will is axiomatic to aproper understanding of the historic Christian faith.
It's axiomatic to a liturgical, sacramentalway of life. It has to be

(01:19:47):
otherwise the whole thing makes no sense, right, and so so many like
so much of Protestant is you know, presidences like sort of take one particular
element and then make that the center, because not making the sacraments the center,
and many of them have made thewell. God is supreme, he's
all powerful, he's all just thatmust be the center. And that's a

(01:20:08):
lot of Reformed theology. And soobviously if god will is something, it
has to be. And because thenature of God's supremacy, there's no other
factors that really matter. So peopledon't have free will is where that goes,
you know, in some but thenyou just turn God into this bizarre
moral tyrant. Then he really ismuch more like an omnipotent Santa Claus or

(01:20:31):
worse, you know, he's evilor he's a moral and either way you're
not talking about the Arka. Sofree will has to actually be part of
all of this because at a morebasic level, you can't love unless it's
free love. And the late greatmetropolitansu Zulis wrote about this in one of

(01:20:51):
his books where he said, evenwithin the Trinity, the Trinity is free.
They freely give and receive love withinthe Trinity. So it has to
be free and non compulsory, evenin the nature of God. And of
course that gets extended as a giftto humanity that we have this freedom,
freedom to love because otherwise it's notlove, and therefore evil does continue to

(01:21:15):
perpetuate because we are free. Godis not I sometimes using this phrase,
and people don't like it. He'snot a cosmic rapist. He doesn't force
us to love him. Love isultimately something by definition that has to be
a function of the freedom of thewill. Absolutely, and so that's I

(01:21:36):
mean. And then people want tosay, well, you know, they
want to kind of gyrate in thisspace between what you just said and the
existence of evil, and the answeris, listen, this is not that
complicated an argument. You're either freeor you're not. And if you're free
or free to do evil and Idon't really know. There's lots of sort
of weird hypothetical examples that skeptics havecome up with over the years to kind

(01:21:59):
of show that to be false,but they don't. They don't work,
and nobody's really accepted them. Iwant to move on to something else.
You raised the fascinating question about whyJesus, the god of the whole universe,
the walking incarnate arcade of being,did nothing whatsoever to stop his persecutors
and his tormentors. Why is that? Why did Jesus do nothing to spare

(01:22:27):
himself the carnage that was wreaked uponhim by his tormentors. There are a
lot of dimensions to that, andso the answer I'm going to give from
the book is not the only answer. I want to be clear about that,
but one in the context of thepoint I was making there. It's
because I didn't want people to thinkthat as many early early heresies and gnostic

(01:22:49):
cults who thought that the universe there'sthis good power in this evil power and
they fight and one of them isgoing to win, and that is such
a not that's not a Christian ideabecause it actually if there's a good power
and an evil power, we're nottalking about the arcade now either one is
the arkie. We're talking about thearkie. We're talking about being itself,
reality itself, goodness itself. Andso that thing, whatever that is Kant

(01:23:15):
doesn't need to do anything to provethat it is the most real or the
most good because it just is thosethings by nature. And so you know,
I don't know if you've seen.I think it's a Mormon image actually
of Jesus and the Devil arm wrestlingand their elbows are on the globe.
You know, they're like doing thisthing, and that's such an exciting and

(01:23:38):
dramatic image, but it's wrong.It's actually not a good Christian theology because
Christ didn't have to do anything.He was all these passive things. He
was scourged, he was killed,he was mocked, but he doesn't have
to do anything because if he destroysthe devil, you know, with a
blast. We're talking about might mixright in a certain sense. For who's

(01:24:00):
the most powerful. That's not theGod we worship. We're not worshiping the
most powerful entity. We're trying toalign ourselves to the archae the God,
who is being itself and being itselfdoesn't need to do anything. It just
is reality and evil. It's notlike this. It's like this. Evil
is a corruption, it's a privationof reality. It's vertical rather than horizontal.

(01:24:23):
Yeah, well said, you know, I want to augment that point
a little bit by reading something toyou, something that was said. I
quote this in a book that Iwrote, The Asinification of Christianity, and
that to play in a word theword being Ostine a man named Joel Osteine,
a word of faith teacher, avery popular person in the modern Christian

(01:24:45):
evangelical world. But he says this, and this is to your point,
Might makes right. He says,the Bible indicates that for three days Jesus
went into the very depth of Hell, right into the enemy's own territory,
and he did battle with Satan faceto face. You can imagine what a
showdown that was. It was goodversus evil, right versus wrong, holiness

(01:25:09):
versus filth. Here you have thetwo most powerful forces in the universe.
They've come together to do battle forthe first time in history, which is
kind of an interesting thing in itself. But then he goes on to say,
but thank god, the Bible says, Satan was no match for our
champion. This was no contest.Jesus crushed Satan's head with his foot,

(01:25:30):
He bruised his head, and heonce for all forever defeated and dethroned and
demoralized our enemy. One translation says, he paralyzed him and rendered him powerless.
But thank god, he didn't evenstop there. He went over and
ripped the keys of death and Hellout of Satan's hands. He grabbed Satan

(01:25:50):
by the nape of the neck,and he began to drag him slowly down
the corridors of Hell, all beatup and bruised, because he wanted to
make sure that every single demon sawvery clearly that Jesus was indeed the undisputed
champion of all time. So hereyou have this picture of two forces,

(01:26:14):
and the takeaway is the most powerfulthe forces is Jesus Christ in a battle
between good and evil? Right andwrong? Your comment, I mean,
I'd like to know how he knowssuch intimate details of this fight. But
it's funny because there's so much inthere that's true. Actually, which is
you know, in our hymnography wetalk about Christ Christ was victims, conquering

(01:26:38):
the devil, kicking down the doorsof Hades, all this kind of stuff
and the hymnography, But it isn'tbecause He's just another force. And that's
the most egregious part of that passageis that is good and evil, this
showdown between the two most powerful forcesin the universe. That's not true at

(01:26:59):
all. That's so Christian. That'sactually like Manichean or Gnostic right, that
there's a good God and an evilGod. Evil is not really the most
powerful force and one of the mostpowerful force in the universe. The Fathers
don't even talk about it really asa force in itself at all. They
talk about it as only having beingbecause it's a corruption of the good.
It has no essence, it hasno existence even in itself. This is

(01:27:23):
another challenge I give to my studentsin class. I say, all right,
there's nothing that's evil in itself.Prove me wrong. And they say,
well rape, And I say,well, rape is a corruption of
sex, which is a good thing. And they're like, well violence,
They say, well, violence isa corruption of physical force, which is
a good thing, from you know, chopping an onion to doing martial arts.
You know, there's everything good isgood. It just is. And

(01:27:45):
that's what repeats this in Genesis.And it was good, and it was
good, and it was good.Good is evil is a corruption, it's
a privation. In the language ofthe fathers, it's a parasite. So
it's not really a force in itsown. It can't do battle with goodness.
But Christ does come and rings itall out. You know, he

(01:28:05):
does do that, but not becauseit's a force that can in any way
even onto logically, to use aten dollar word, come close to what
good is. That's a deprivation ofsomething else. Goodness doesn't need to use
force to prove its reality. Yousay, if it is reality, that

(01:28:26):
is. This is the same reasonJesus couldn't stay dead. He is life
itself, and life itself cannot die. Now that's profound. I think that's
worth cashing out a little bit.I don't know what else to say.
I mean it just that is whatit is, and I guess it.
Really it gets back to this pointabout what the archae is. You know,

(01:28:49):
I grew up around so much languagethat really was God. Is this
omnipotent Santa Claus. Don't make himmad? And that's not what we're t
talk What we're talking about He whois. That's what's in the halo.
By the way, if a lotof traditional icons of Christ have three letters
in the halo. If you knowthis and it's own in Greek, it

(01:29:12):
means it's hard to translate, butit's something like he who is. Sometimes
we translate it the existing one.It means he who is being itself.
That's what we mean by Christ.Yeah, beautiful. A word that you
cash out in this book of paramountSignificance is the word repentance. And you

(01:29:32):
point out that repentance is not anact, it is a life long activity.
So repentance is always an ongoing process. So we live as Christians active
lives of repentance. It's the sameas when we were talking about our getting

(01:29:55):
into peak health and buying a gymmembership. Analogy, right, Your repentance
is this constant, ongoing move ofcreation towards the Creator. And I was
actually just reading in them there's thisbeautiful book called The Ethics of Beauty by
an Orthodox philosopher and he summarizes thisbit from the Fathers in which I think

(01:30:17):
it's Maximus the Confessor who says thatcreation is from its first moments repenting,
and that's prior to sin actually,which is counterintuitive to an evangelical or much
of the Protestant mindset. What doeshe mean by this, Well, the

(01:30:38):
repentance just means a constant moving towardthe arca toward the ideal. And so
you were repenting as an athlete orsomeone who's trying to get in shape,
you could describe that as a continualmotion of repentance. Now, because you're
bad, maybe you won your latestgame, your sport or whatever, and

(01:30:59):
you still want to unquote repent towhy to go deeper, to become a
better athlete, to become more healthyall the time. That's what we mean
by repentance. Obviously the word youknow, etymologically we're turning away from something,
but theologically that's what it is,motion towards the thing we love.
Well said, you talk about secularismand Christianity. You're write about the birth

(01:31:21):
of the secular state, in which, shockingly, the government and the functioning
of society at large should be conductedwithout any involvement of religion or religious beliefs.
And you say, this is afallacy. It's a fallacy of neutrality.
You can't run a society without answeringthe question of ultimate reality. So

(01:31:43):
the fallacy is that you can separatethe idea of well, let's say question,
you can separate the question how shouldwe govern society from the question what
is a human being? Right?Because as soon as you ask the question,
okay, well, how should wegovern society? What are we talking
about a society of human beings?Okay, well, what's a human being?

(01:32:04):
Well? And then you get intothis question of human nature, and
now you're asking all the religious questions. So you really can't answer the one
question, how do we run societywithout answering religious question? So ancient people
didn't really divorce these ideas the waythat we do in the modern world.
We say, oh, separation ofchurch and state, and that sort of
an organization issue, I guess.But what it's ultimately led to is the

(01:32:28):
separation of these two questions, anotherway of separating the physical from the spiritual,
which is it can't be done,and if you do it, then
might make us right. I don'tthink that it's a coincidence that the twentieth
century was the bloodiest century in humanhistory by orders of magnitude. Yes,

(01:32:50):
the population was bigger, I guess, and we're dealing with the whole world.
Blah blah, you could nuance it. But really, what we're seeing
in the twentieth century and all itshorrors, is a world where secular nation
states are divorced from any moral authority, any spiritual accountability whatsoever, going to
war with each other over control ofthe world, and they show themselves willing

(01:33:15):
to do just about anything in away that would have been completely demonic and
horrifying to our ancestors. I think. So, what is the antidote to
secularism. Yeah, so I don'thave a program for world reform because we
also don't want to fall into thefallacy of thinking that we can achieve some

(01:33:38):
sort of utopian vision on earth.You know, empires and cultures rise and
fall. But what stays the same. What's stay the same for two thousand
years, the Church. And sowhat that begins with is our own personal
repentance. You know, the what'sthe famous quote, become holy in a
thousand at your right hand will besaved because it's our personal This is the

(01:34:00):
human participatory thing. It's persons whomake the difference, not systems, not
governments, not laws. It's personsstarting with the person with Christ, and
then for you and me becoming indwellings of the Holy Spirit. And as
you point out the book, youhave to make the Church the center of
your life, and then you havethe paradisical transformation of the cosmos. It's

(01:34:23):
not about escaping the cosmos. It'sabout transforming this world. And as you
say, you do that by livinga life being energized by the power of
the Holy Spirit, but the sacramentallife of the Church, so that you
can go out and make a difference, not by might nor by power,
by his spirit. Yeah, andso I'm not saying, oh, well,

(01:34:44):
just be a good person, right, be a good person, so
generic, so abused. Right,we want to be a specific kind of
person, because, as you pointout, we're not fleeing the world.
We're not gnostics, we're not Buddhists. We're not saying listen, matter is
bad, it's evil, it's corruptible, we need to become spiritual. We
need to get out of here,we need to leave. That's essentially what
Buddhism is. And we're saying no, we're here to redeem the cosmos because

(01:35:10):
part of the thing that we're tryingto get back is the original atom is
the priest of creation situation. Andso we're called to cultivate the garden of
the Earth. And that doesn't meana utopian project. That's one corruption of
it. And also doesn't mean fleeingthe earth. That's another. So these
are two extremes, right, We'renot fleeing the world, and we're not

(01:35:30):
trying to build the Kingdom of Heavenhere, but we're trying to become part
of the Kingdom of Heaven, whichwill sort of not retroactively, but it
will transform everything. It's totally transformative. Let's try to wrap this up by
talking about your last chapter. Ithink it's your last chapter, the Journey
to Reality, where you say thatthe ultimate goal is to become truly human.

(01:35:51):
How do you do that? Asyou've pointed out, you do that
by reconnecting with the Arka. Soour goal isn't to become anti secular,
it is to focus on a highervision of reality. Yeah. I think
it's very easy for lots of peopleto become aware of a lot of these
issues with the secular world and thesecular nation state, and then they become

(01:36:15):
fixated on Okay, well we've gotto be anti secular, you know,
And that's another kind of distraction,it's another invitation to worldliness actually, And
so I really wanted to end thetext with a vision of what we're aiming
at. What are we really tryingto do. And we're trying to do
something that's very freeing, actually,which is to become real and to participate

(01:36:36):
in he who is reality itself.And part I really want to emphasize a
huge part of what that means isnot really giving up on the world,
right, it's transforming the world butit's recognizing that every good thing, every
joy, every love, even everypleasure in its real, true form,

(01:36:57):
all of those things come from Hewho is the treasury of every good,
as we say in the Tripsycheon.And so you don't want to think like,
well, Christ is asking me togive up X y Z that I
like, but I guess I shoulddo it because you know, he's the
boss or something. No, theChurch wants us to distinguish between lesser goods
and the source of good itself.So one way I put this to my

(01:37:19):
students was everything you love is justthat you really love. It's just a
little kernel of a little scrum,if you will, of the source of
that thing. And Christ is callingyou into all joy and all reality.
And so we really it looks likewe're giving something up with all of our

(01:37:41):
fasting and are dying to ourselves andare taking up our cross. But paradoxically,
that's what Christianity is is you giveup to gain right, you sell
all you have and you buy theplot that has the treasure in it that
it's in so many of the parablesis the way to gain is to let
go. The way to live isto die. And then you get everything.

(01:38:02):
Yeah, and that is essentially thejourney to reality. The journey to
reality is participation in the life ofthe Holy Trinity. Yes, and it's
not I don't know. Like somany people, you hear that, and
if you're kind of secular, youthink, I don't know what that means.
It's kind of abstract, and Itry to clarify that at the end

(01:38:24):
of the chapter. It means itmeans obtaining every good. Actually things you
authentically like now, but their shadowsthrough a glass darkly. And so the
invitation is to see the world nowas good but not quite there yet.
You know. It's a shadow ofwhat the world will become and what you'll

(01:38:45):
become. Well, I love yourbook and I would love to be one
of your students, Doctor Zachary PourkuJourney to Reality, Sacramental Life in a
Secular Age. It's actually a fairlyshort book. It's a very very fascinating
quick read. You have the giftof communication. You'll be able to take
the complex make it simple and transferable. And I appreciate your writing style very

(01:39:10):
very much, and your articulation duringthe podcast has been brilliant. It's been
enlightening and I'm deeply grateful for thecontribution you've made to the lives of our
listeners. So thank you very verymuch. Thank God, thank you for
the kind words. It's been suchan honor to be on your show.
Well, thank you everyone for joiningus for another edition the hand Unplugged Podcast.

(01:39:32):
We promise to bring you interesting,informative, inspirational people, and we've
certainly cashed in on that promise inthis edition of the hand gun Plug Podcast.
Do remember that the resources that wemake available, like books like the
one just mentioned Journey to Reality,available through the ministry of the Christian Research
Institute. You can write me atbox eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North

(01:39:54):
Carolina, zip code two eight twoseven one. You can check it out
on the web at equipp dot org. And by the way, if you
enjoyed the podcast and we've been gettingsuch great reviews, please subscribe, rate
and review. It helps a lot. Again, thank you so much for
joining us for this edition of thehandcum Plug Podcast. Look forward to see
you next time with more

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