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July 12, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:20:19
The Battle of Good and Evil: Bishop Barron EXCLUSIVE Interview - SF 406
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In this video, you're going to see the future.
You must have a dream to be higher.
The organics are working in. We've got a live shot there.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders members.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
What an incredible show we've got for you.
Theologian and Bishop, Bishop Robert Barron.
You'll notice that I call him the right thing, Your Excellency.
That's what you call people when they're a bishop, and I'm pretty proud of myself for doing that.
I like using names like that.
Let me know in the comments and the chat If you yourself conform to titles.
I once spoke to someone.
His name is Matt Stoler.
He was a political advisor.
He told me that getting rid of all titles would be a brilliant way to level the playing field, like not calling people doctor.
It's interesting, isn't it?
Because how do you equate it to ideas around, for example, gender, Mr., Mrs., and, you know, preferred pronouns and that kind of stuff.
Imagine if you just wouldn't call doctors, doctors.
I don't know.
Let me know what you think about that.
Anyway, I'll be talking to Bishop Robert Barham.
One of the things that continually plays upon my mind and let me know how you feel
about this you awakened wonders you because I'm very interested to learn
your perspectives on it. How do you feel about the general pervasive idea that
people are stupid, that we're spoken down to, that we don't understand reality,
that we're simpletons that we should be shepherded and herded into paddocks of
conformity.
Sometimes you'll see something from a protester that absolutely exposes that ridiculousness.
We'll be with you on YouTube for about 10-15 minutes, then we'll be exclusively streaming on Rumble.
And you are not going to want to miss my conversation with a theologian.
Robert Barron.
He tells me how to interpret this book.
He tells me how to see it as a library rather than as a single book.
Although it does have a single narrative.
We talk about a lot of good stuff.
You're going to love this conversation.
Here is a protester in the UK.
Sticking it to the proverbial man and understanding that our ULEZ cameras, which are ostensibly about environmental measures and protecting the environment, which of course ought be done on the basis of our love and connection for the planet, but needn't necessarily be managed by centralized forces that always seem to uncover as their solution to the problems of the environment, imposing control on ordinary people.
Here, she shows that she completely understands the gig.
Why do you feel so passionately about this?
Because I know there's an agenda.
What's the agenda?
The agenda is pay per mile next, then it's electric, then it's car sharing, then it's reduced private ownership of vehicles, then all these cameras are what are always going to be for the police.
It's for surveillance.
You think it's going to be used to prevent crime, but it's actually going to be linked to when we go to digital ID, with our digital currency all linked to our carbon footprint, essentially a credit scoring system.
Do you see how people have actually understood the way the wind is blowing and what bureaucratic, democratic tyranny looks like?
Do you remember we spoke a little while ago about Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis on this, that democracy has always had The inclination towards tyranny in so much as it can become a set of institutions that are centrally governed and controlled while still allowing most people to feel like they're participating in democracy because they get to vote once every four years.
When you see something like that you realize people understand, people know what's what, people know what's going on.
Here's a member of parliament in the UK Uh, taking the oath, like all of them have to take.
I don't know if they take an oath in your country, do they?
When they become a congressperson or whatever.
But he refuses to pledge allegiance to the king.
It's gone viral in our country, but in a way, does it make a difference?
A king?
A president?
A box of chocolates?
A road cone?
Who cares, really, what it is that is the symbol of hierarchical power that sits astride your nation?
In a way, I thought when the statues were being pulled down across the country, well, how can you have a royal family in the end?
How can you celebrate royalty in any way if you are against ideas of hierarchy as those movements evidently, plainly, and explicitly were?
Here is an MP refusing to take the sort of oath but sort of in a way participate in in systems that with or without a monarch appear to be tyrannical because that's the way they're organized i take this oath under protest and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic until that time i do solemnly sincerely
Won't make no difference.
Won't make no difference, mate.
Won't make a blind bit of difference.
This is fantastic.
Ed Miliband has just got a job in the new government as kind of an environmental minister or some such description.
Now, I met him before and interviewed him when he himself was running for prime minister as the leader of the Labour Party.
They've just been elected in my country.
Have a look at this wonderful piece of propaganda, Easy Soft propaganda on Easy Soft TV of a morning and note that Ed Miliband His expression, his face and his demeanour belie the obvious evident fact that we all know and we all understand that politicians are playing a kind of game when he talks about electric cars and how everyone should have an electric car and electric cars are the solution and why don't you have an electric car?
Why are our cars not electric?
Government needs to step up.
I presume you've got one.
I haven't yet.
It's a work in progress.
Practice what you preach!
It's a work in progress.
We've actually got our way to buying one before lockdown.
It is going to happen, I promise you.
I have bought an electric bike, but it's on its way.
An electric bike?
That's unnecessary!
A bike, that's more electricity!
You should be able to ride a bike.
I've got an electric toothbrush.
They don't need to be electric!
I've got an electric bike!
I've got an electric dildo!
Ah!
Oh, please, please, tell me what to say!
Now, as well as the ridiculousness of the claim and the obvious hypocrisy, casual hypocrisy though it may be, just watch his demeanour and watch the fact that Ed Miliband knows that what he's only doing is participating in a game.
The game of being an environmental minister.
Remember, in our country, throughout the lockdown, the politicians that were in power held parties during the period when everyone else was forbidden to have Christmas.
Sorry, we've got to cancel Christmas.
Sorry, you're going to be doing funerals on YouTube.
Yet they had parties.
People have forgotten that Keir Starmer, the current Prime Minister, was also involved in parties, or at least an event in which he had his sleeves rolled up and he was drinking a beer.
It was a work event.
Yeah, that's what they all say, mate.
And what we can glean from that is what?
Hypocrisy.
Just the way that the institutions function.
The way that they are run.
They run on hypocrisy.
The way that Ed Miliband's bike runs on elections.
Electricity!
Unnecessarily, because you can run a bicycle using your tootsies.
Hey, so hang on, so you're you're pushing for everyone to have an electric car and you don't
have one yourself? I'm pushing to make it accessible. Look, I'm pushing to make it accessible.
So you want to lock everyone in their homes but you're having parties? Yeah,
well when we say that everyone should have an electric car we're...
We mean people that have currently got vehicles that aren't electric so we can further impecuniate you in the way that we do.
In countless, immeasurable, tiny and sometimes grand ways, invisibly baked into our system.
Like if you get to the end of your life and you still own your home, we'll make sure that you need to go into care and that that exhausts you financially.
Or we'll have some tax system that's Why are you not saying thank you?
you of your resources, one way or another we will enslave you and we will ask you to
thank us for that while we're doing it. Why are you not saying thank you? Are you not
enjoying the change?
It's even accessible to you.
But you haven't even experienced one yourself. I mean, you'd like to think if you're going
to tell us all to get an electric car and encourage the nation to embrace electric cars...
Look at the smile. Look at the smile because they know it's a game. And who are the people
that write the rules of the game?
They are the elders of the system as well as the current leaders who are of course ultimately linked in myriad ways and it may not be shadowy and they may not wear hoods and they may not even worship Moloch around a fire but What's corroboratable, observable, evident and plain is that there are financial and bureaucratic interests that transcend democracy that ultimately govern and control these figures and the economic systems that they endorse.
And Tony Blair See the finger!
See Tony Blair turning into a satire of himself before your very eyes, warms that Labour, the current governing party, embrace AI or force to raise taxes.
That's what we're going to have to do, he says, chiding, chastising and educating you with a digit so long that Rupert Murdoch's former wife must be astonished at the value that can be packed into one hand.
Although no one's proven that those rumours are true, of course.
What I'm interested in really is how power functions.
What roles these people play.
How these people that end up as literally lords and seem, in the case of Tony Blair, to have vested interest in data companies that will likely benefit when the National Health Service, that's our Medicare long established, Are able to access all of our health data.
There is no objectivity.
There is no honor.
There is no valor.
There is naught but some invisible system, some vital urge towards more power and more wealth.
Mick Jagger has just found out the hard way that a lot of people in Canada haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.
Don't see Justin Trudeau as a heel-clicking Friendly, lovable scamp with a full head of hair just doing his best.
Many people that live in Canada remember the way that he tried to evoke the Emergency Act, remember the way that people's bank accounts were frozen because they donated to a trucker protest, remember the way that those truckers were vilified simply because they were protesting about the way they earned a living and the kind of restrictions they faced during the pandemic era.
The Canadian people, like the British woman you saw at the beginning of this piece, are not idiots.
People are not idiots.
They are awakened.
They don't need a managerial class of bureaucrats with slick hair and slick words governing them.
They need the state to get out of the way.
They need these bureaucracies to get out of the way.
They need, indeed, to have control over their own lives and their own communities.
And as we are experiencing, that is the inert tendency ...afforded to us by the great miracle of technology and the platforms such as this one that allow free communication and new consensus to emerge.
And God, are they working hard to oppress that and prevent that.
It seems that we can't get no.
Can we get any?
Even a little bit of satis- Oh, you do it in your mind.
I mean, we love your Mr. Trudeau.
That's a true goal, I mean his family has always been such big fans of that man.
Of course, cos Mick Jagger was once a figure that understood the culture, that exemplified
the culture, that demonstrated and catharsised shamanically somehow the culture.
He was it's sexy, anti-establishment, writhe and lithe and wriggling and leaping and snarling and singing and chanting manifestation.
He was the rejection of the decades prior.
But now, of course, and I've experienced this in sort of a minuscule, pipsqueak way, what happens is the establishment, it hoovers you up, it sucks you in, it lacquers and shellacks you with his bullshit and claptrap and then you can't see
out no more and presumably Mick Jagger from the kind of life that he lives
in this is no condemnation and Mick by God he's earned it is an
incredible man he don't know that the people of Canada almost without exception don't
like Justin Trudeau the same way the people of Britain don't like Kirstarma
The same way the real people of America don't like Joe Biden.
Not because of the individuals or the people, they're all children of God, but because they are the representatives and exemplifiers of a bullshit system that frankly we're over!
By the way, congratulations on the Canadian soccer team.
They've changed the subject.
What about the Canadian soccer team?
We don't care about that either.
Ice hockey, fuck you.
If you're watching this on YouTube, sorry about the swearing, we'll be on there for a couple
more minutes and then we will be exclusively streaming on that sweet,
sweet, sweet stream of freedom that we call Rumble.
And I'll be talking to Bishop Robert Barron.
If you haven't listened to Robert Barron explain his relationship with Christ and the significance of Christ in a world that appears to be falling apart, then this is an experience that you are gonna love.
If you're an Awakened Wonder, it's been available on the platform for over a week now.
And of course, now, my conversation with Candice Owens is up for Awakened Wonders.
She don't pull no punches.
It's all in now.
I mean, I don't even want to say it.
I'm not as confident as Candice Allington.
Also, I don't share all of her positions, but it is a good chat about Christianity.
But let me tell you some of the subjects that come up.
Holocausts, abortion, I mean, it's all in there!
She didn't, you know, that woman, she don't leave nothing in the gym, as they say in pugilism of the more physical variety.
I respect her a lot and I like her a great deal and it's a pretty brilliant conversation.
As you know, next week we will be live at the RNC.
We got some fantastic interviews coming up.
Yes, we're still working to secure, you know, the big T himself, but Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gats, Matt Gaetz, I mean they're all coming on.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, even if they see me mispronounce their name, I'm sure they'll be pretty excited to get on.
Thomas Massey, you let me know who you want to see us talk to and you'll get inside the Republican National Convention by joining us And there are still a few tickets left to see me in an intimate venue in Milwaukee.
I'm doing a show on the Monday and on the Wednesday.
I don't know the dates, but there's a link in the description now.
Come and see me do stand-up comedy.
I've got a really good show cooking.
It's been a really weird year for me, and I've got a lot of things to say about it, baby.
Maybe, and I pray that they are not as out of touch with reality as Mick Jagger's appraisal of what the people of Canada might think of Justin Trudeau.
Because I'm aware of why people think it.
Because people recognise what Justin Trudeau is.
A neo-liberalist who has been co-opted and captured by a set of globalist interests that require willing stooges like Trudeau to stand up front like boy band members and parrot their ideas.
The idea that Trudeau's parroting here is one you'll be familiar with.
It's like the kind of peculiar notion that at the end of their lives, our elderly, instead of being revered and cherished, learned from and looked after, the crotchety old bastards, they should be hijacked and mugged and stood up for their property.
I mean, do a lot of old people have a bit too much house?
More house than they could handle?
I'd say so, Justin.
One of the things that always comes up for me is the idea that, you know, on housing you have a whole bunch of older folks who are living in houses that are too much house for them right now, but their connection to neighborhood, to community, means that, no, they don't want to move out to the suburbs or to some different city to be closer to their grandkids.
They want to still live in their community's quality of life.
And there is no housing that they can afford even to downsize other than staying in their big house.
So where you're actually working to increase the amount of apartments or senior assisted living centers in...
To the weary boredom of the Gen Z audience there, sort of beleaguered and baffled and beaten back by this kind of bureaucratic claptrap that Justin Trudeau himself probably doesn't believe in or even understand.
It's the sort of thing that I suppose gets handed to him on a piece of paper and he very politely reads it out and there's some globalist agenda around the acquisition of property is therefore met.
You'd be aware, won't you, of black Rock recently investing significantly in residential properties as the acquisition of land, whether it's agricultural or developmental land, seems to be accumulating and centralizing in the way that most things seem to be centralizing.
And if you're not sure about what Justin Trudeau's attitude is to the gift of life itself, then remember, Canada is the country that will kill you, not only if you're on the edge of death and it's the kindest thing to do.
We wouldn't put a dog through the Difficult, debilitating final years of decay, would we?
And so why would we put an old person through it?
Well, they're expanding that.
Canada prepares to expand its euthanasia law to include people with mental illness.
They're the last people... I don't know why I say they.
We are the last people you can ask whether or not you want to be dead.
Yes!
Of course I do!
Of course I do!
But hopefully that feeling might pass.
Some Canadians, including many of the country's doctors, question whether the country's assisted death program has moved too far, too fast.
Anti-life, anti-divinity, anti-beauty, anti-everything, except for a kind of pragmatic, secular, citizen-management program that gently and carefully migrates power away from you and towards them.
And the peculiar thing is I'm not convinced anymore that it's an entirely rationalist project.
I do believe that there could be an occultist dimension, but why don't you let me know what you think about that in the chat.
It's a pretty expansive program.
People with anorexia have been given the green light for suicide.
Oh my god, it's a very, very serious disease, anorexia, and in itself an indication that The whole society has gone off track.
The messaging.
Do you get anorexia in countries that have not been subject to our cultural models and messages?
Open question.
And a growing number of young Canadians think that poverty should also be included as eligible criteria.
Are you too poor?
Yes, I am poor.
Good.
Would you be better off dead?
We'd prefer it if you were a bit deader.
Hearing loss has also been included.
Good news!
You've become eligible for euthanasia.
Would I like a trip to Europe and Asia?
Yes, that's right.
If you'd like to come this way, he's agreed to it.
I can't wait to go!
Oh, well, it's free will.
The individual is the most sacred thing available.
Nighty-nighty!
There you go, Canada.
That's what progress and liberalism look like.
Can you get no satisfaction?
That's a double negative, baby.
And Canada is so negative, it deserves a double.
Hearing loss has been included.
Medical bureaucracies have been accused of pushing patients to agree to kill themselves.
Have you ever needed God more?
If you're watching us on YouTube right now, I want to tell you that you are going to love this conversation with Bishop Barron.
So click the link in the description and join us over there as we talk about meaning and purpose and salvation and change and the possibility that there might be something more to this world than what waiting to be poor enough or deaf enough To die in Canada.
Lord alone I pray there's something more worthy than what we're being offered by this bureaucratic managerial class of stooges that seemingly want us dead.
Click the link in the description.
Become an Awakened Wonder.
We've got some fantastic items and join us next week at the RNC.
Come see me in Milwaukee.
There's a link for that in there as well.
Okay guys, Bishop Robert Barron is a pretty fascinating man and we'll be joining him for a conversation after we've made sure the vibes and the air is clear.
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Today I'm joined by his excellency Bishop Robert Barron, the Bishop of the Diocese of Winona,
Rochester, Minnesota and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
He's the host of Catholicism, a groundbreaking, award-winning documentary about the Catholic faith, which aired on PBS.
The Pivotal Players won an Emmy Award.
Bishop Barron is a number one Amazon best-selling author and has published numerous books, essays, and articles on theology and the spiritual life.
His most recent book, This Is My Body, has sold over 1 million printed copies.
Bishop Barron, thank you very much Thank you for joining us today.
Russell, it's my pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
Sometimes when I am in church, which is only a recently acquired habit, I feel a timidity about, which for me seems pivotal, is it the role of people of faith, of Christians in particular, and perhaps, of course, I recognize the denomination of which you are a representative, To find ways to fit in with the material world, or is there something inherently challenging, not only for the practitioner of Christianity, but does it present a challenge in terms of our relationship with the material world, both personally, but through our conduct?
Ought a Christian be trying to fit in, or ought a Christian be challenging?
Well, it depends on what you mean, I suppose.
You know, we love God, and therefore we love whatever God loves.
And God loves the material world, because he made it.
So, you know, God so loved the world, he sent his only Son.
In that sense, sure, we should love the world around us.
At the same time, we're followers of Jesus, who was massively challenging to the power structure of his time, massively challenging to the Rennian consciousness of his time, challenging to the sinfulness of his time.
And in that measure, we're meant to cause trouble.
The famous saying about when Paul preached, there were riots.
Well, that's natural, because Paul was preaching a pretty radical message and was declaring, at least implicitly, a new king.
So in that sense, yeah, we're meant to be permanently subversive.
But at the same time, we love what God loves, so we're not in sort of antagonism against the world.
Cardinal George of Chicago, who is kind of a hero to me, used to say, you can only evangelize a culture that you love, right?
If you're just in a stance of constant, you know, pugnacious opposition to the culture, you can't evangelize it.
But we're meant to be deeply challenging to it at the same time.
That's the peculiar space a Christian ought to live in.
Yes, I'm reading Acts and today what I was reading was about Paul causing a riot and then being chained and then using his Roman citizenship as a kind of cultural get out of jail card and like reading about Paul in particular It excites me, it makes Christianity very exciting to me and frightening and I suppose it's that zeal in particular that I find appealing and I suppose the reason I've started this conversation with that question is
There's a general election in our country, the UK, in the next couple of days.
There is obviously an election in your country in November.
And I have the sense that we are tacitly invited to sublimate our religious faith to the goals of our culture.
Or worse yet, Utilize our spiritual faith to make us more effective in the culture.
I've noticed this in a variety of spiritual spaces.
Practice this and you will become a better accountant or actor or lover or whatever.
And I suppose that I've come to faith through addiction, through despair, through suffering, through loss, through isolation, through disappointment, through heartbreak, heartache, and personal ruin, and I don't feel like I'm being made fit for anything other than God.
And I wonder what your view is in this position of significant leadership you find yourself?
I love the fact that you came to it through addiction, spiritual moral crisis and that's a classical path to God, you know when something falls apart in this world and then a Deeper higher world opens up in that process or when you hit the bottom of an addiction and you realize this is taking me nowhere It can open you up then to what's beyond all addictive desire which is the desire for God and what's disguised in all addictive desire is ultimately a desire for God and
So, that's a powerful thing, and you're standing in a great tradition there, going back to the New Testament itself, coming up through all kinds of the lives of the saints.
So, that's a beautiful path, you know.
Now, having gone through that and having fallen in love with God, then you are better suited to be an active presence and a transformative presence in the world.
It's meant to liberate you for The making of the kingdom of God, you know?
So Jesus sends his disciples out.
Someone like Paul is a prime example.
I mean, Paul had his own kind of addictions.
You know, Paul was caught up in his own tradition, but in a kind of violent, aggressive way.
And when he was pulled out of that by the risen Christ, it then freed him to do his work in the world.
So, it's the both-and, you know.
But the path through moral and spiritual crisis, that's a great one in many ways, and walked by lots of the saints.
Look at Augustine.
You know, Augustine, a spiritual searcher for all those years.
He's a maniche for nine years.
I mean, he's kind of a fierce opponent of Catholicism for nine years.
And then has a crisis.
When you look in the confessions, and that scene where he's literally pulling at his hair, you know, he's in such crisis.
But then he's liberated.
Once he falls in love with God, he realizes, now I love God, and then love everything else for the sake of God.
Now you're ready.
See, now you're ready to be really engaged in the world properly.
It was recently explained to me that I am redeemed and I am forgiven, not through any action or my own, not through the pursuit or attainment of merit, but because of His sacrifice on our behalf.
I feel greatly relieved, not only by that offering, but by the fact that from that perspective I am indiscriminate.
Just one of the mass of human beings saved by the cross and by the blood of Christ.
And for me it seems so powerful as well as humbling.
I recognize the necessity of humility before honor and as you have described, Your Excellency, any honor belongs to Him.
And I feel too that it's significant that Saul was zealous in his persecution of Christians as he was zealous in his ministry and mission.
In a sense it's just a redirecting of a current that was there before and it's commonly understood in addictive circles that the same drive, pang and yearning that drives the longing or craving For whatever is the object of our addiction remains in recovery.
But I feel too that there is, recently I thought about, I think it's from Ephesians, you know, the battle against dark powers in high places.
I feel that there's been an incredible attempt to reframe religion as a sort of hocus-pocus superstition.
Your denomination and in faith in particular has been, it feels to me, been quite deliberately I know that there have been significant problems within institutions of the church, but for me, and I don't know if this is generational narcissism or not, please tell me, but it does seem that we're at a pivotal point of incredible crisis that only a kind of rapture or second coming could alleviate, and I wonder whether or not there is any
Well, I think the basic dynamics remain the same.
They've always been the same.
or if it's business as usual for men of faith and institutions of faith?
Well, I think the basic dynamics remain the same.
They've always been the same of, we're all sinners.
And so, you know, some might express it in a very dramatic way,
and then they go through a real crisis.
But all of us are sinners, which means our desire gets misguided.
And once the desire for God is misguided onto anything other than God, it becomes ipso facto addictive.
It has to, because I desire, whether it's wealth or pleasure, power, honor, whatever it is, and it can't possibly satisfy what I really want.
It can't satisfy that desire.
So I go back.
I go back again and again and again.
That's the woman at the well, right?
She goes back every day to that well, and the well is sex, pleasure, power, money, whatever it is.
And Jesus says, and you get thirsty again, don't you?
I want to give you a different kind of water, welling up to eternal life.
So, that's the redirecting of desire onto its proper object.
I think that's the permanent crisis of humanity.
That's where we've all been from the beginning.
We're all to different degrees caught in that problem.
Religion is meant to redirect that deepest desire for God onto its proper object.
Look at Jesus crucified now, because you mentioned saved by the cross.
It's got so many dimensions, but one of them is he's stripped on the cross of all possible addiction.
You know, if wealth, pleasure, power, honor are the big things, well, he has none of that on the cross.
He's stripped of all of it.
There's no wealth at all.
He's having no pleasure, the opposite of it.
He has no power.
He's nailed to a cross.
He has no honor.
They're spitting at him as they kill him.
So, it's the stripping away of all possible addictive desire.
But what does he desire?
The will of his father.
And so, that's why Aquinas can say, looking at that cross, you're looking at a happy man.
You're looking at a liberated man.
You're looking at someone that's the path.
Through identification with Christ crucified, we find that same place of liberation.
You know, that's Paul saying, you know, it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
I've been crucified with Christ.
I've been liberated from my addictions and my concupiscence and my sin, and now I'm freed for the proper direction of my desire.
That's at least one way to think about how the cross of Jesus saves us.
That dynamic, as far as I'm concerned, is a permanent dynamic of human life, sin, grace, addiction, and redemption.
That dynamic applies to all of us.
Yes, and I feel that that message, the opponent, the enemy, as C.S.
Lewis would have it in the screw tapes in particular, is forever amplifying the message of attachment Of the pursuits of pleasure and distraction and I suppose I have the personal advantage of having lived a life of an initially deprivation in the sense of you know ordinary banal poverty and then to be afforded the incredible abundance that celebrity and fame
can offer. That too, being post chemical dependency and addiction, I feel like I,
personally at least, know something of attachment. I know something of this exploration.
And it's yet still difficult not to respond to the signifiers of pleasure.
It's still difficult to sort of unpick synaptically the tendrils of a culture that works very hard, it seems, to ensure that the institutions of the church remain condemned and smeared.
The ideology And in particular ideas such as salvation, redemption, forgiveness, service, kindness, all these ideas appear to be relegated and replaced with individualistic, phatic facsimiles of those ideas.
That everything centering around the individual, even things that might nominally seem good, like a kind of egalitarianism, a kind of surrendering to personal autonomy, a deep tolerance for any way of life.
But even under this, I'm noticing a kind of aspiritual, amoral, nihilistic tendency that Nature is not absolute.
God is not absolute.
All taxonomies melt in a way.
And this kind of affords some sort of antithetical power that's difficult not to regard as demonic, where if these dark powers aren't playing out through our culture, are we, Your Excellency, to accept that they are just taking place within our own psyche, within our own soul, within our own spirit?
Or are there indeed external powers that magnetise us towards negativity?
Yeah, there are.
I mean, I would say as a Catholic speaking out of the great tradition, going back to the Bible, there's an invisible dimension of God's creation that has persons in it.
So we call them angels.
And the trouble is, the word angel, you know, in English has that sense of little cherubic babies and all that.
An angel is a kind of fearsome reality.
You know, Aquinas would say each individual angel is its own species.
It's his way of saying, like, if you were to gather every single human being that's ever existed, That currently exists, that ever will exist, into one great being, that would give you a sense of what an angel is.
So, my point is, they're very powerful realities.
Now, some angels, some of us have fallen, some angels have fallen, and therefore they pose a real danger, a spiritual danger.
Now, are they operative through secondary causes?
Of course.
They're operative in human hearts and human minds.
They're operative in human institutions.
They're operative in certain movements and trends within culture and all of that.
So, no, the Church has always been very attentive to the presence of the dark powers.
And what are they trying to do is exactly what we were talking about.
They're always trying to get our desire away from its proper object onto improper objects and thereby create chaos and havoc.
I always think of the two names of the devil in the New Testament.
Diabolos has the sense of the scatterer, right?
Diabolos means to scatter, to cast apart.
There's the mark of the devil, the demonic.
It's always a scattering power, what divides us.
But the second name of the devil is Hosatanas.
Satan, right?
Which means the accuser.
The accuser.
And that's deep.
Go back to the book of Job and you'll find it, you know.
And then in the book of Revelation, the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who night and day accuse them before God.
So, the accusing power, there's the sign of the demonic too.
The Church has got to be hyper-aware of these realities, and our job is to fight them.
I mean, there is a spiritual warfare.
Paul talks about that.
You know, we do battle not with flesh and blood, but powers and principalities.
So, that's part of the game.
Now, the powers, again, reveal themselves through flesh and blood, for sure.
And the Church is there to be a counter sign and to enter into the struggle, the battle.
If we just see ourselves as kind of attending harmlessly to people's interiority, we're missing the game.
I mean, it's a great cosmic struggle that we're part of.
I wonder how we navigate what would appear to be a complex terrain where there's a requirement, due to the demands of academia and the culture more widely, to limit ourselves to a lexicon of rationalism, even when discussing angels and cosmic and metaphysical, if indeed metaphysical is the correct term if they are actual, battles.
While acknowledging that that's truly what's happening.
Of the things you just said and those two terms, I was struck by, you know, you said Diablos and I feel that etymologically the idea of duality and doubling and splitting is often associated with darkness or malady or evil.
Doubt coming too from the same point of origin.
And this idea of accusation and tension, I've found it harder to understand that except for what you were saying about it sort of occurs early in Job.
I wonder what challenges you have calibrating the various arguments and discourses that you must conduct Knowing that, in a sense, if it sounds too Baroque and grand, people will surely accuse you of a kind of hysteria and unrootedness.
And yet, if we don't acknowledge the theological truths that are compounded within that, we end up just offering, you know, wellness advice.
Right.
Well, you know, that's a strategic question or a prudence question.
When you're an evangelist, you start off from where people are.
So, where are you?
And how can I enter into that space now with religious truth?
And so, if I'm starting with, let's say, a fierce atheist or a very rationalistic, materialistic atheist, I'm not going to start with the cosmic struggle of the angels, you know.
I might start with some of the classical arguments and so on.
So, it depends on the person.
You've got to be very Adept and sort of canny when you're doing evangelization.
And that's both personally and then at the cultural level.
So you have different audiences, different needs.
I think Russell, actually a lot of people are like you, meaning that they're struggling with or they have struggled with the way their desire has been directed, and it's caused them all kinds of pain.
And religion really offers the water welling up to eternal life.
It offers salvation from that.
I mean, salvation just means health, Let me offer you health because you're in a very unhealthy situation.
So that's a good way to start with people who are, you know, wrestling with that.
So it depends on your audience, I suppose.
You don't immediately go to the maybe strangest corners of the religion.
Even though, you know, it really isn't that strange when you think about it.
Why would we assume that between our little world that we can take in with our little sensorium, between that world and God, there yawns simply this infinite abyss?
I mean, wouldn't it make sense that in between the realm that we can see and experiment on and so on, and God, there'd be another, there'd be a realm that we can't see?
So in the creed, you know, very early on we say we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.
To me that's a very reasonable claim to make.
You know, look, mathematics is invisible.
Any scientist in the measure that she's using mathematics, and any scientist today in physics has to do that, you're dealing with invisibilities.
You're dealing with realities mathematical abstractions, but aren't part of the ordinary world that the sensorium takes in.
They're part of a higher invisible world.
So we deal with the invisible world all the time, actually.
The church talks about it, you know, in a somewhat denser way.
But to answer your question, I think it depends on the audience, and you have to be kind of, you have to be kind of deft when it comes to addressing different audiences.
Yes, it seems that it would be naive indeed to assume that the limitations of the sensory instruments are commensurate with the limitations of the potentialities.
That's an extraordinary assumption to make and often when contemplating that I consider the miracles within mathematics if by miracles one expression or understanding of them could be extremely complex patterns or the Or the seemingly unnecessary beauty of music and the sense that there is a burgeoning archetype pushing behind what is observable and that it is somehow present within me and yet be beyond me.
Do you find, is it difficult to take absolute positions around, as you must according to, well beyond your tradition, your doctrine, your faith, your religion, on issues that increasingly are offered up as matters of personal choice, whether that is sexuality, the issue of abortion, And how do you frame them so that they don't fall into the categories that the culture would assign to them in the case of abortion?
It's not the right of any external or individual, particularly not a male or an institution to make that choice.
Or when it comes to sexuality, that these are kind of forms of homogeneity and forms of tyranny.
How do we navigate those choices when the culture appears to have won those arguments?
Well, it comes down to the intuition of value.
I go back here to Dietrich von Hildebrand, who was a great Catholic philosopher of the 20th century.
There are epistemic values, so truths that the mind takes in.
There are aesthetic values.
I mean, when you listen to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, you don't say, it's my, you know, kind of quirky, private opinion, and that's a great work of art.
I mean, it It imposes itself on you.
There's an objectivity to value.
Or if you're shown a mathematical formula, you don't say, well, you know, in my opinion, that doesn't really make sense.
No, it imposes itself on you.
Well, the same is true of moral values.
Think of like Immanuel Levinas, the great Jewish philosopher, 20th century, post-Holocaust.
A lot of his family died in the Shoah.
And, you know, to look at the Holocaust and say, you know, in my opinion, that just wasn't the right thing to do.
I mean, how absurd that sounds, right?
There are certain values, and he would say, the face, when you look into the face of someone who's suffering, it has a claim on you that's absolute.
You can't say, well, it's my private opinion that I'm going to be kind to that person, but someone else's private opinion might be, no, I'm going to reject him.
Epistemically, aesthetically, morally, there are values that assert themselves.
And in fact, life takes on meaning in relation to those values.
If you relativize all of that, and that's what happens when you completely subjectivize the whole operation, is your life becomes so flat and tepid and uninteresting.
It's all a matter of my little shifting private opinion.
No, the best things in life are when an objective value presents itself to you and you surrender to it.
So, I put moral values in that framework.
So, not the legalistic, you know, finger-wagging church and hung up on sex.
It's the church recognizing certain values as Objective and absolute and not a matter of my private opinion.
So the taking of the life of an innocent child in the womb, I would look at it in terms of loving us.
I mean, that imposes itself upon me with an insistence and a radicality that does not permit me to say, well, my private opinion, I think it's okay to do that.
So that's what the church is recognizing.
You know, if you look at the moral life now in greater, like finer detail, matters of prudential judgment, all that. But when it comes
to the values, the values, they're objective. And it's what makes life wonderful when
you can accept those values in their objectivity.
Do you feel that the part of what rationalism has inhered is a sense through relativism
that everything is kind of tepid and difficult to understand, that there are no moral absolutes?
There is nothing upon which we can hold with certainty.
There is nowhere where you can throw yourself and receive grace.
And do you feel that that is somehow deliberate?
And if indeed there are dark powers in, you know, the principality, how would that not be one of the results?
Yes.
Let me put it in terms of the ultimate question of God's existence.
From Feuerbach on through Freud and many others, they always told the charge of religious people that, well, it's just wishful thinking, it's, you know, what you want it to be true, and so you invent God and so on.
They never turn it, though, back on themselves, that there can be a lot of wishful thinking involved in an atheist, because to say, oh, there's no God, there's no absolute norm, there's no absolute norm for epistemic, aesthetic, or moral values, well, then I can live any old way I want.
Well, that's enormously attractive to a compromised and fallen soul.
If the world of objective value turns you upside down, it claims you and it sends you and it redefines you, there's part of that process that it's exhilarating if you surrender to it.
But it's overwhelming if you, you know, hey, I don't want that.
That's making way too much of a demand on me.
So I'm going to pretend all of that stuff is just private opinion, culturally conditioned.
There's nothing objective to it.
It makes my life a lot easier and duller, duller.
And I think that's, we're looking at a lot of young people.
The boredom among young people.
That's what a purely materialistic and relativistic worldview will generate.
See, to me, religion, Russell, is an invitation to adventure.
And I know, look, I'm wearing this drab black suit and all that, and there's different reasons why we do that.
But in the common imagination, there's an association of religion with these poor nerdy people that, you know, they're living at this very low level.
On the contrary, religion is meant to open you to adventure.
It's materialism and relativism that is the door to banality and tepidity, you know, what makes life fun and adventurous.
St.
Irenaeus, you know, whose feast day we had a couple days ago, the glory of God as a human being fully alive.
That's the game.
That's what we want, is to have people fully alive.
That happens through a surrender to objective value.
As you thank God that the church, despite we're getting attacked all the time and I get it for all the different reasons, but that there's some voice in the culture that's calling for objective value.
Because if we surrender just this great sea of relativism, we're like a lot of people on You know, air mattresses floating around, no relation to each other, but no energy, no sense of purpose or direction.
The great river of directionality has turned into this big lazy lake, and all we're doing is lying on our air mattresses, bored, bored by our own relativism.
So, the church is, again, St.
Paul again, it's this grabbing-by-the-shoulders quality, like, wake up, look, open your eyes.
That's, you know, Chesterton had that observation about, you look at Christian statuary, like on Chartres Cathedral, he said the saints don't have their eyes closed, they've got them kind of wildly open, big open eyes, because they're looking out at this extraordinary World of value, you know.
That's how I read the church and its role in the culture.
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Okay, back to the content.
Yeah, I want to see the world like a saint.
I want to experience what they experience.
Maybe not the suffering, maybe not the enormous trials and challenges, but this process of desacralization and banalization, it seems to me, is a kind of preparatory step to ensure that false idols can be erected.
In a territory where nothing feels sacred, where nothing feels beautiful or holy, it's very exciting to receive a new gadget or artifact or a new stimulant that they can all be paraded out as golden calves and temporal deities and for me that's not inadvertent.
To your earlier point, you know, it's not an either-or where the church says, okay, eschew the world and just turn to God.
No, it's turn to God and now you'll appreciate the world appropriately.
Now, even wealth, pleasure, honor, power find their place.
So, again, Augustine, love God and then love everything else for the sake of God.
So, if you have wealth, great, now you know what to do with it.
You're experiencing pleasure?
Now you know how to integrate that into your life.
You've got power?
Terrific!
Use it!
I mean, look, I've got a certain power as an evangelist, and we've developed this ministry, and I can, all right, I've got power, I'll admit it.
I hope, please God, I'm not addicted to power, or I want to just keep clinging to it, but I hope Through prayer and everything else, I know how to use that power.
Even the same with honor.
You're an honored person.
Fine!
Aquinas says honor is the flag of virtue.
Terrific!
So now if you love God and you're a virtuous person and you're being flagged for that, great!
You know how to use it.
Again, Chesterton said, as long as he thought the world had to make him happy, he hated the world.
But once he knew the world isn't meant to make you happy, Then he loved the world.
And think of Chesterton, you know, life and laughter and joy and drinking and dancing.
But he became that Chesterton because he said, the world is not going to make me happy.
Once he realized that, then it made him happy.
That's the razor's edge that we're on in the spiritual life.
Having, over time, accrued the power to which you just referred, albeit as a conduit for higher power, are you still able, do you feel, to maintain an unencumbered and intimate relationship with Christ that does not feel somehow diluted By the duties and structures that are now outward representations of the flower of that intimacy.
Well, I think if you find intimacy with Christ and friendship with him, which is the goal of the Christian life, by the way, it's not, you know, to be a good person or it's not follow the laws.
The goal of the Christian life is to fall in love with Jesus, is to become his friend.
The more you cultivate friendship with the Lord, who is Divinity and humanity having met.
That's what Jesus means.
Not just another guru or a teacher, but in him divinity and humanity have met.
Well, that's what salvation looks like.
That's what healing looks like.
That's what freedom from addiction looks like, right?
So the more you become friends with him, the more you want to conform your life to his.
Conformity there's a form to it and so that means following certain laws, but you do it with joy You know, it's the way a married person Joyfully follows his wedding promises.
It doesn't experience them as a burden but welcomes them and Celebrates them and give it or the way I've used example before I I'm a golfer a bad golfer but the way golfers were obsessed with With the rules of golf, I don't mean the technical rules, I mean the rules of the swing.
How do you do it better?
Show me.
What am I doing wrong?
And I don't resent that.
I want it.
Tell me more so that I can make this crazy swing better.
So once you fall in love with the Lord, you feel that way about the spiritual life.
Give me more rules.
I want more rules, not even fewer rules.
I want more liberation.
And it's going to come if you keep giving me newer ways to conform to Christ.
And then again, Paul, it's all the paradox.
That's my liberty.
It's for freedom that Christ has set you free, Paul says, right?
At the same time, Paul says, I am the slave of Christ Jesus.
Now, on modern terms, that doesn't make a lick of sense.
You can't be anybody's slave and then be free.
Paul makes perfect sense.
I'm the slave of Christ Jesus, and it's for freedom.
Finally, I'm free from my addictions, and my sin, and my chains, and my all.
I'm free from that.
And it's conformity to Christ that has set me free.
That's the name of the game.
Yes, I understand that all energy requires polarity, and that the self will somehow glom onto some form of deity, or idol, or God.
Indeed, as has been said many times, it's not whether or not we worship, it's just what we worship.
I wonder, to your point about the humanity of Christ, where do you find Christ that is most human?
Is it the agony in the garden?
Is it in his relationships with other people, the apostles or Mary?
Where is it that you feel that Christ is at his most human?
How do you reconcile Christ's divineness with his real fear?
How are we to understand that, Bishop?
Well, you have to take a step back, I think, to our understanding of God.
God is not a being.
So, that's something Thomas Aquinas says very clearly.
Thomas says that God is not in the genus of being.
It's a very extraordinary thing to say.
So, you and I are in the genus of humanity.
We belong to this type of being, right?
The camera in front of me is another type of genus.
And you think, well, wouldn't the highest genus of all be the genus of being?
Whether it's the planet Jupiter, or you, or God, or a dog, wouldn't they all be under the heading of being?
And Aquinas says, no, God is not in the genus of being, which is a way of saying the creator of all things is not a thing in the universe.
God is not one reality among many.
Which means God is not competing with reality for space, right?
If I'm going to physically come where you are and I want to get you out of that chair, or I want to get in the chair, I've got to kick you out of it, right?
There's a competitiveness about finite things.
God is not a finite thing, not the biggest thing around, not the supreme being.
God is to be itself.
This is Thomas Aquinas.
Now, the upshot of that is God does not compete with us.
That God can be fully present to us, and in fact, his presence doesn't knock us out of the chair, it makes us more alive, right?
And there's the burning bush in the Old Testament, he's making that point.
That when God comes close, the bush is not consumed, right?
It's on fire, it's beautiful, it's radiant, but not consumed.
That's what you look like when God comes close to you, right?
Now, what we call the incarnation, that God becomes one of us, but mind you, if you look in the doctrinal tradition, without ceasing to be God, And without overwhelming the creature he becomes.
So the Council of Chalcedon says that we have two natures coming together without mixing, mingling, or confusion.
It's a very interesting point.
In classical mythology, right, when the gods come in, things are incinerated and things have to give way and there's always a conflict because the gods are coming in.
There's none of that, see, in the Incarnation.
God becomes a creature without destroying the creature.
And without destroying himself.
God doesn't turn into a creature and stop being God, if that makes sense.
But they come together non-competitively.
Well, see, that's the heart of the Christian spiritual life.
is the closer God gets to us, the more alive we are.
And so, to your question, the humanity and divinity of Jesus are always both on display all the time.
So you say, well, he's most human on the cross.
No, he is, but he's also most divine on the cross.
Or he's most divine when he's performing a miracle.
Yeah, he's also most human when he's performing a miracle.
It's both and at the same time.
And to get that, see, incarnational intuition, is to get all of Christian spirituality.
But watch, across the board, people getting it wrong.
It's either, oh, it's really humanity, and then God is kind of off on the side, or boy, he's really divine, and his humanity is kind of a little addendum.
No, no, no.
No, no.
He's fully divine, fully human, all the time, without competition.
And now, next step, and we're meant to become Christified.
It's no longer I live, but Christ who lives in me.
So now, I don't become Jesus in the full sense, but by adoption, I become a son of God, too, right?
That's Christian spirituality.
It's not about just being a nice guy.
It's about being deified.
So I know it's a bit of a rambling answer to your very pointed question but I think it's at the heart of the matter.
It's clear.
At the beginning you said that it's not beingness but to be itself.
So it's paradigm busting and it's beyond ontology and I suppose is demonstrated numerous times this sort of Cohen-like bafflement that induces Yes.
be a necessary component because it's inviting you to transgress against the
limitations of your own consciousness and I feel that when we buttress against
numerous mysteries when wrestling with the physical universe we find down there
in the mysteries of quantum physics comparable, comparable paradoxes.
How can this be and not be at the same time?
Yes and both but neither.
Also through the slit, round the slit.
It's almost that in the same way that in semantics and linguistics one might find clues, in every area of the creation there are kind of almost archetypal imperatures to be discovered.
You indicated, sir, that you might help us to look at the Bible as a single narrative, like a library, how to ensure that the sort of the apex point of Christ is foretold and understood in the Old Testament, and I've been thinking about that since reading the Bible, which I began doing when I was baptized, you know, a few months ago.
I was thinking that there's some examples, well, you know, throughout Isaiah, obviously, and sometimes in the Psalms, it seems, but even in the pluralization of the presence in the garden in Genesis.
I wonder if you can help us to unpack and understand that.
Yeah, and there are two things about what you said, and they both have to be maintained at the same time.
Namely, on the one hand, the Bible is not a book, it's a library.
And this is a huge problem with a lot of the opponents of religion, when they say, oh, the Bible, you know, is all this nonsense, and it's pre-scientific, and it's Bronze Age mythology, and, you know.
You can't take it literally, etc.
And I always say, look, it's like walking to a library and saying, do you take the library literally?
Well, it just depends.
What section are you in?
Because the Bible, ta biblia is plural in Greek, it means the books.
So we say the scriptures.
That's more accurate, the scriptures.
It's a collection of texts written at different times by different authors to different audiences to different purposes and using wildly different genres.
Right?
So, sometimes you have things that are closer to our sense of history.
There's really nothing like our sense of history in the Bible.
It couldn't be.
It was long before our sense of history developed.
But there are things that are closer to it, you know, say parts of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, etc.
You've got things that are more like saga or legend or myth in the Bible, for sure.
You've got songs like the Psalms, you've got apocalyptic literature, you've got epistolary literature like Paul's letters, you've got the Gospels, which are their own literary form.
And so, the Catholic Church would teach, as you approach the Bible, you've got to be hyper-careful about genre.
What kind of text are you dealing with here, you know?
So, on the one hand, I want to insist upon that.
The Bible's not like just one book that can be univocally interpreted.
It's a collection of books, and you've got to be really adept at making adjustments as you read it.
But then, your second point is equally valid.
Namely, within this library of texts, yes, from different times and different authors and different purposes and all that, we can nevertheless discern its themes and trajectories and narrative thrust toward Christ.
I'll state it simply.
The Old Testament is all about God's great rescue operation.
So, God's good creation, but through sin, things have gotten messed up.
But God never leaves his creation.
He sends rescue operation after rescue operation, anticipated by, let's say, Noah's Ark would be a great story of God trying to rescue the human race.
But it looks like Torah, it looks like Temple, it looks like prophecy, it looks like the great patriarchs, it looks like all the Old Testament expressions of God trying to bring his people together with him, right?
And we also, if you read the Old Testament honestly, what do you find?
It by fits and starts, one step forward, two steps backward.
You know, the temple gets destroyed, and it's not honored properly, and the Torah is usually disobeyed, and the prophets, they stone them.
You know what I'm saying?
And so God's attempts are thwarted again and again.
But then, in the midst of that great narrative, what do you begin to hear?
You begin to hear this announcement, this hope, this anticipation that God will send a Davidic figure, he'll send a great king, but it'll also be God himself shepherding his people.
So, now go over to Ezekiel and people like that.
I mean, I myself will come and shepherd my people by means of this Davidic king.
What do you find in the New Testament?
Precisely that.
What was longed for in the midst of this great narrative, they claimed, came.
Jesus is the Davidic King, the Son of David, but who also, strangely, is the God of Israel himself, in person, shepherding his people.
This is why, now from a Christian standpoint, if you had Ben Shapiro on, I'm sure we'd argue about this, but from a Christian standpoint, how do you read the whole Bible?
From the standpoint of the culmination of the narrative, that it was all leading toward, look again, the Council of Chalcedon, divinity and humanity coming together without mixing, mingling, or confusion, and in this way that humanity is saved and rendered glorious.
There it is.
There it is.
That's the narrative high point of the biblical revelation.
And so we would read the whole Bible in light of that culmination.
Why is there so much emphasis upon the failings and flaws of the Pharisees and Sadducees?
Why are they more consistently condemned all the while Sinners embraced.
I recognize, of course, it's those that have sinned that most require redemption.
Why such continued critiques and even attacks on those that appear like the elder son to have Misunderstood the function and purpose of morality.
Why, if this is the appearance of Christ, the Davidic King, is the apex of the story, although of course there are subsequent chronicles yet to be told, culminating in revelations, and I wonder how that pertains to where we are now.
Why this focus on institutional power?
Well, and we shouldn't be too hard on the Pharisees and the scribes.
One of the things that we tend to miss, we automatically think, oh, Pharisee, bad guy, right?
But on the contrary, in the New Testament context, they would have seen, oh, no, the Pharisees are good guys.
The Pharisees are the ones who are trying to lead this life in a very noble and focused manner.
So, we shouldn't automatically see them as bad guys, but I think Jesus is indeed pointing out one of the typical abuses of religion, when religion itself, which is meant to get you off of your ego and onto objective value, to use our earlier language, it's meant to get you off the ego onto God.
Religion itself becomes a means of aggression, a means of increasing selfishness.
And so that's a classic problem, reading Paul in terms of law and grace and so on.
But I think that's what we're meant to see in those stories about the Pharisees, is don't let the best thing become the worst.
You know, the old Roman adage, corruptio optimia pessima, you know, when the best goes bad, that's the worst.
And I think we're meant to see that in the Pharisees.
That's meant to be the best, to live the Torah and to live the focused life of a good Israelite.
But when that becomes a means of aggression and selfishness, it really stinks.
The corruption of the best is the worst.
But I wouldn't want to be too tough on them and say that that's the worst kind of sin.
It's one of the many forms of dysfunction that's being addressed in the New Testament.
Is it John who Christ loved that wrote Revelations?
What, I forgive the scope of this question, how should we utilize what is being described there?
Yeah, your first question, it's a famous debate among Bible scholars.
I would say this, it's certainly someone associated with the Johannine community wrote it.
Was it the same person that wrote the Gospel, that wrote the letters of John?
Again, revisit the Bible scholars to get all kinds of answers to that.
But I think there's a commonality within the Johannine literature, meaning the Gospel, the Johannine letters, and Revelation.
So I'll leave it there.
I think that's a fair enough thing to say.
But how do you read that book?
It's not really about the end of the space-time continuum.
I think what it's about is the ending of the old world of sin and the breakthrough of this new world.
What struck the first Christians, now we're getting to the death and resurrection of Jesus, If you bracket the resurrection, the entire thing falls apart.
If you say the resurrection is a nice old, you know, myth or it's a sign that Jesus' cause goes on or some nonsense like that, the whole thing falls apart.
They were so overwhelmed by the resurrection that they were convinced, and they were right, the old world is passing away.
In other words, the world that's been predicated upon sin and death Those have been conquered now, they saw in the rising of Jesus.
So that world, and it's exemplified for them by ancient Rome.
That's why all these references to Rome and the 666 which is Nero, etc., etc.
It's the Roman power structure predicated upon violence and hatred and domination.
That world is passing away.
Now, I know it looks like it's around massively, and it is, but its power has been broken by the cross and the resurrection.
So, that world is collapsing, and what's happening is a new world is being born.
Now the language of, at the culmination of Revelation, where the heavenly Jerusalem comes down.
What is that but the arrival of the new world?
The city of Jerusalem in that beautiful vision that has no temple in it.
You say, well, that's kind of weird, isn't it?
Because the temple was the reason everybody went to Jerusalem.
Why would in the final Jerusalem there be no temple?
And the answer is, because the whole city's become a temple.
See, the temple was meant to be the reminder that, hey, you should worship God in all things, in all things, at all times, in whatever you're doing.
So, at the culmination of the entire biblical revelation is The world that will emerge when God is in all aspects of life given right praise, right?
They saw the old world predicated upon bad praise.
Everything we've been talking about, right?
All the addictive forms of life and all that is being swept away and a new world's coming.
The heavenly Jerusalem, the end of time in God's good providence when that happens.
But in the meantime, that's why we still read that book, in the meantime, that's the life of the Church.
It's meant to be an in-your-face to the powers of the world.
It's meant to exemplify in its own life what the new world looks like.
It's meant to be a place where the Beatitudes are lived.
So, the book of Revelation is now, all right, here's your program.
You're the vehicle by which God wants to bring this new world into existence.
That's very beautiful.
A recent communion that I attended, it was from Corinthians, and when Father Dave said, did you not know that your body is a temple?
I was struck by his gentle rendering and the invitation to make our body a dwelling place for him.
And also that people, we People don't know.
We don't know.
We don't know that that's what we're supposed to be doing here.
It also feels like an invitation to revisit the cone-like quality of the to-be-ness of all creation.
I suppose if something is atemporal and aspatial it would be difficult for it to be contained within the limitations of our language in addition to our sensory experience.
I find it very difficult to continually maintain connection to what seems like the ...periphery of my own being.
I continually fall back into the familiar self.
I fall back into the forms of idolatry and clinging onto things that cannot withstand my yearning.
We all do.
Right.
We all do.
We all do.
And that's why the answer, and this is going to sound like a Hallmark card, but it's the central theme of the entire Bible, which is love.
Love is not a feeling, it's not an emotion, not a passing sentiment.
To love means to will the good of the other.
That's Thomas Aquinas, and the roots of that are right back in the Bible.
To love is to will the good of the other.
But love therefore breaks me out of the black hole tendency.
I want to draw all of reality into myself.
That's the addict, that's the sinner, that's what goes wrong.
I see the whole world in terms of its relation to me.
I suck everything into my own ego.
Love is the opposite energy.
I'm not willing my good, I'm willing your good.
And I'm not willing you're good so that you might be good to me.
That's more, that's the black hole just getting into the back door.
It's I'm willing you're good.
It's meant to break free of the pull of the black hole gravity.
That's the answer.
And that's why Jesus says, this is how they'll know you're my disciples, if you love one another.
Right.
That's what it's all about.
That's what the temple and right worship is all about.
See, worship means I love God.
I'm going to break free of my own ego, and I'm going to let the supreme objective value of God overwhelm me.
And then I fall in love with that value.
And then I love everything that God loves, right?
So there's the Christian life.
There's the whole Christian spiritual life is to love.
And thank God there are still voices calling for it.
That's why the church is needed.
And you're right, the powers, both visible and invisible, want that voice eliminated.
That's why the church has always been under attack.
And you know, yes, some of it deserved.
Church people have done terrible things.
Of course, of course, of course.
But spiritually speaking, the Church will always be attacked because it's speaking at its best for this truth, right?
That love is what's redemptive.
And that's our job.
That's the Church's job in season and hour.
Thank you, Your Excellency.
I wonder if we might conclude with a prayer, and if you would be so kind as to lead us in a prayer.
I'd be happy to.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Heavenly Father, we give you praise for all your gifts to us.
We thank you for the beautiful world we live in.
We thank you for this opportunity to be together.
May this conversation be spiritually fruitful for all those who hear it.
And Lord, we ask you to give us the strength and the courage to continue to do your work in the world.
And we pray through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Amen.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
In particular, the point about love and being able to recognize when that polarity has once again been reversed into solipsism is very helpful.
In Watchman Nee's book, I can't remember which one, I read that of course you won't find it in yourself.
You can't preempt an attack of temper.
It is in Christ.
It is in Christ.
And I was trying to understand what he was evoking.
It seemed like it was an invitation to somehow hold the image or actuality of a present Christ somehow external.
Certainly, you know, not within me.
Again, that paradox is repeated in Immanence and Transcendence.
And I felt like, how am I going to do it?
And throughout my days, I'm trying to, forgive the word, conjure the presence of Christ, because I recognize the problems of shamanism and any kind of separate little domain that I might try and establish, but trying to recognize and feel and relate to Christ in a present way, in a present way as I go about my day, for where else would I do it?
I think it's carrying an image of Christ on your person.
You know, so as a bishop, I wear this cross, the pectoral cross, you know, so I always have this around.
I usually carry a rosary in my pocket.
I think that's good to have something tangible that just reminds you of your connection to the Lord.
Thank you.
Yes, that's a rosary.
I've been doing it every day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
No, see, it involves the body.
I like that about the rosary, you know.
It's even like touching the beads can give you a... can sort of spur you to a higher awareness, you know.
So I like the physicality of it.
Yes, yes, I like that too.
Thank you.
Thank you for your time today, Your Excellency.
You're welcome.
I feel edified and gratified and elevated.
Thank you so much.
Well, thanks for having me, Russell.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
I hope we get to communicate again soon.
I'd love it.
Love it.
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