Speaker 1: If I was asked what is the number one most
difficult Christian behavior that must be assimilated to by catechumens,
I would say it's learning to endure yourself, being patient
with failure and not freaking out, recognizing that you're not
a saint, that the Lord is going to make you one,
and you may make a lot of progress in their
life towards that destination, you may make less and everything
in between, depending upon how much you're engaged, but you're
not going to make any until you learn to put
up with yourself. There's only one virtue that Jesus ascribes
by itself salvation to It's called epomone in Greek, and
it means patient endurance, and for that one alone, he says,
the one who has epomoni, the one who endures to
the end, will be saved. You might be a wreck,
but if you can endure yourself, keep yourself in the church,
keep yourself repenting, and keep getting up, you're going to
be saved.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pehel Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello everyone,
I am overjoyed to be here with Father Josiah Trenham.
Many of you who are watching this will have already
seen him. Father Josiah is the priest and the pastor
of Saint Andrew's Orthodox Church in Riverside, California. He's also
the head of Patristic Nectar publication that published books, they
have podcasts, they have videos, and you have probably seen
him talking about Orthodoxy and also other subjects all on
the social media's.
Speaker 3: And so Father Josie, thank you for talking to me.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jonathan, very happy to be with you.
Speaker 2: And so Father d just I and I've seen each
other a few times. I've been to his amazing parish.
It's it's astounding what it is that they're able to do.
They have a school now, and they're looking towards all
kinds of taking over some of the social services that
we think of helping people, doing all kinds of wonderful things,
full of families. And there's even like a brewery associated
with the church. It's quite it's quite. It's quite an
astounding thing. Like I have to say, I was, I
feel very inspired by the parish. Another thing that inspires
me quite a bit is also to see the effort
that Father Josiah and his parish are doing to get
through the ethnic problem of Orthodoxy. You know that they're joining.
They're making these beautiful way in with their joining. The
music of the different jurisdictions, some some Byzantine chants, some
Russian chant and you know, chance from different traditions kind
of join together. And so Father Josiah has been on
the forefront of something that seems to be happening in America,
a kind of reawakening of people towards Christianity and in
our case more specifically towards Orthodoxy. And so Father Josiah,
maybe you can tell us a little bit about when
it is that you started seeing this happening in your parish.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you, Jonathan. I've been a priest for thirty
one years. I was ordained in nineteen ninety three. So
I've been trying to fulfill the priest calling, a portion
of which is evangelization. Any decent pastor has to both
lead his people towards God and take care of his flock,
but also study the culture. This is the tradition of
the church, is that priests have to be students both
of the scriptures and that which is unchanging, and also
of the culture to form a bridge and to be
able to preach the gospel to people. So I had
been watching, and I would say that I have seen
a number of movements and cycles in these three plus decades,
but the most exciting has been really the last four years.
The last four years so there has been. When I
first was converting, this is the late nineteen eighties, the
early nineteen nineties, there was had been a large movement
towards Orthodox Christianity that had been going on for about
twenty years. Remember at this time, from about nineteen fifty
five on the great ascendancy of Roman Catholicism, which was
just exploding from the turn of the century, from eighteen
ninety really until about nineteen fifty five. People like the
great Archbishop Fultonsen who dominated the television. I mean he
was the most watched person in nineteen fifty five. Really, yeah,
can you believe that? And all he was doing, all
he was doing was he had his little baretta. He
was quite educated man. He had a PhD from the
Levon and he would write, you know, theological like lessons
on a chalkboard. And he was the number one watch show.
And Hollywood used to send their movies to Archbishop Spelman,
Cardinal Spellman in New York City, and if he didn't
give the thumbs up, you know, the producers would reconsider
or make changes. You know, I mean, you can't even
imagine that world, but that's what it was they had.
In the fifties. They had the Catholics had six million
kids in their schools in this Today they have one
point five million. Wow, a seventy five percent reduction. So
something was really going for them in the In the
first half of the twentieth century, mainline Protestantism was strong,
but really from the from the middle of the fifties on,
there was a massive kind of over assimilation to American life.
Just imagine President Kennedy, you know, the first Catholic president,
when he was being grilled by a mostly Protestant Congress
and public, he made very clear that he would not
allow his you know, religious faith to influence him in
his governance. You know what a bizarre thing to say.
I mean, you're not going to allow your religious but
that's what he had to say to get elected as
a Catholic. But he did it, and that was a
major accomplishment for the Latins. But they have been you know,
the multiple scandals they've been suffering terribly. The Latins have
just been tanking the last half century, and the same
thing happened with the mainline Protestant churches. So most of
the second half of the twentieth century, the mainline Protestant
churches became very secularized and many people came into the
Orthodox Faith. For instance, the man who catechized me had
been a very influential episcopal priest in Los Angeles. In
nineteen seventy seven, when the American Episcopal Church began to
ordain women, that was it. He left and he became
Orthodox under the late Metropolitan Phillips Saliba, who was a
tremendous evangelist for Orthodo in America. During his archbishopric, which
was from nineteen sixty six until twenty fourteen, almost fifty years,
he received so many Protestants. When I became Orthodox in
ninety three, I met priest after priests. The vast majority
of our priests were converts from They had been Catholic priests,
they had been Lutheran pastors, they had been Episcopal priests,
and now they were Orthodox. And so that was just
the milieu into which I came after about ten years
around two thousand and four. That really the incursion into
the Orthodox Church from non Orthodox clergy really stopped, and
the great sense of Orthodoxy coadulating groups together and with
the hope of becoming an American Orthodox Church really collapsed
around two thousand and four. And since that time, up
until COVID, I would say, we were in a period
of very serious decline, very seriously. All jurisdictions were shrinking,
some shrinking more quickly than others. And then out of
the blue comes the COVID catastrophe and death shows its face,
and the next thing we know, we went from shutting
our churches down by order of the state, and here
in California it was really bad, really bad. Our Governor
k Newsom past orders forbidding us even to sing, like
literally regulating singing. Such a catastrophe, such a catastrophe he
actually was. His orders were refuted five times. He lost
five cases before the Supreme Court before he even acknowledged
losing one and loosened things up. Thankfully, in the county
where I live, we didn't obey him at all. Our
sheriff went before our county supervisors after the first unconstitutional
order and said to them, if you think I'm going
to support the shutting down of churches and enforce your
unconstitutional laws. You have another thing coming. So nothing happens here.
We just kinnot went on as usual. But since that time,
really since death showed its face, I have seen an massive,
massive movement towards the church. I'll give you some numbers.
Over the course of my pastor until COVID, I would
have maybe twenty or twenty five cateicumens. And I considered
that pretty good. We worked hard.
Speaker 3: That was amazing at the time.
Speaker 1: At the time, we were feeling really good about it.
But you know, everything's perspective, and we were feeling pretty good,
and we were working constantly, praying for more and trying
to fulfill our duty to make a bridge to our
brethren in our community. And then COVID hit and it
just spiked so and it's continuing. It has shown no
sign of stopping. And as of last Pasca, we received
our converts into the Orthodox Faith always on Great and
Holy Saturday, in the e of Easter, we had one
hundred and ten catechumens. Wow, sixty two of them we
received into the church. Others needed a little bit more time.
But since then we're back up now to about ninety five,
almost one hundred, and I suspect we'll be at one
twenty or one thirty by the time that Easter comes.
Those numbers just are continuing to increase. And I usually
do about ten or twelve trips every year around the
United States to give retreats at different parishes or universities,
and everywhere I go, Jonathan, everywhere I go, the numbers
are massive. I was just I was just in ben
Lomond two days ago. I was in Walla, Walla, a
couple of Washington a couple of days before that. I
was in Raleigh, North Carolina before that, and I was
in North Royalton, Ohio before that, all like in the
last two months. And in every one of those places,
one had eighty eighty catechumens, one had fifty four catechumens.
I mean, just shocking, absolutely shocking.
Speaker 3: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: I mean some churches I'm seeing it's like they're doubling trip.
They don't know, they just something. Some parents have just
finished building. There they're building and they're already.
Speaker 3: Have outgrown it. You know, what a great problem, What
a great, great problem? Exactly?
Speaker 2: And so what is your what is your vision? I
mean what do you think Do you think it's it's
just COVID? Do you think there's something else afoot? Do
you think there's you know, I before we started recording,
I mentioned how everybody now and their brother is writing
a book on re enchantment. You know, some people were
kind of ahead of the curve. I know Roderer, for example,
he's been kind of harping on on this subject for
several years. But now even Ross Doubtitt is publishing a
book on re enchantment.
Speaker 3: So you know, what do you do? You think there's
something spiritually.
Speaker 2: Happening at a even at a bigger scale than then
just let's say, what's happening in orthodoxy?
Speaker 3: What do you see going that's going on?
Speaker 2: Father?
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, I should say, all of those
people published in the books, that's a compliment to you,
Jonathan may them. I've been listening to you, and you've
been helping us think about these things for a long time.
So it's good that more books are being written and
your message is being received. I think a lot of
things are going on larger issues, both culturally and spiritually.
So when I say the rise of COVID, it wasn't
just the bug right. It wasn't just the disease. The
disease is serious, and especially in a very wealthy, pleasure loving,
self centered culture, which forgive me, I'm speaking about the
United States. No offense to Canadians, but probably it applies
directly to you also. You know, the one thing we
can't stand thinking about is death. We just can't. We
have no way to process it in our secular culture.
Secularism has no answer for death, and so we've hidden it.
We've worked for decades to hide death. All of the
traditional rituals associated with death, not just for Christians, but
even for people of other religions, have all been squelched.
People are mostly dying alone, mostly dying in hospitals, and
then they disappear. They get within an hour. Usually they're
in the hospital basement in the morgue. Someone calls the mortician.
He comes and picks them up and puts them in
his basement, charging you two hundred and fifty dollars a night,
more than a nice hotel room. Really, really, the scandal
of the mortuary movement, which is a very recent, phenomenal
and eighty five billion dollar industry, it is a scandal
of immense proportions we've hidden. And then even our funerals.
For a lot of Christian people, funerals don't even involve
a body anymore. There are celebrations of life. The person's
already been cremated or buried somewhere, more often than not
cremated because of the cost involved these days to bury
it's like buying a new car. For all of these reasons,
we've just kept death away. And there's nothing about COVID
that in which you could do that. It was it
was too shocking, It was too shocking. On top of that,
you had just prior to COVID, this whole rise of
the new atheism, this hokey kind of reassertion of a
classical atheism, but very poorly done, very thin. But a
lot of people bought it because they were so dissatisfied
with the declining religious leadership in the West. As I
just mentioned what was happening in the Catholic Church, the
girl tests, scandals of immense proportions, and I'm not talking about,
you know, small scandals. The largest Roman Catholic arts that
I see in America is here in Los Angeles, four
point four million members. Archbishop Gomez just signed an agreement
eight hundred and eighty million dollars settlement, the largest settlement
ever for sexual abuse by clergy and his predecessor, Cardinal Mahoney,
was just an absolute scandal and catastrophe for decades. So
I think that the incredible lack of leadership among in
the Christian community in America made it easy to think
that Christianity was cheap and not very serious, and the
new atheists came along, a lot of people bought this.
One of the new things about catechumens today in the church.
As they come and I have them described their previous
religious commitment, if any, almost all of them have at
least a small stint in atheism.
Speaker 2: Asunding, it's really astounding to see that. It's like it's
atheists coming back to church, is what we're seeing.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yes, so I think I think the combination of
really us being so bad, we just we had a
really terrible second half of the twentieth century as far
as christ leadership in our country if you look at
the statistics, for instance, for evangelicals. One of my areas
of interest and expertise is marriage. I wrote my doctoral
dissertation on marriage and the Church Fathers and so I'm
particularly interested in that the stats on divorce for Evangelical Christians.
The divorce rate amongst Evangelical Christians is higher than the
national average. I mean, what can you do with that?
You expect your churches are going to grow when the
witness is that poor. It's that poor. So you know,
our Lord says, the great apologetic for the growth of
the church is Christian love, faithful love. By this all
men will know that you are my disciples. You want
to convince them the ultimate apologetic, have christ Like love,
selfless love. And of course if you're throwing your spouse
out or cheating on your spouse, the witness disappears very stain, exactly,
it's completely gone. So I think that the decline in
Christian leadership, the appearance of really grotesque secularism, the breaking
forth of COVID, plus all the machinations, all the sudden
arising of non American standards with regards to cultural life,
the compromise of free speech, the incredible manipulation by the
three letter agencies. I mean, this is all for an American.
My forefathers came on on the Mayflower literally fit Francis
Eaton sixteen to twenty. My family has been here for
a bloody long time. To see this appearance, very recently
of such non American forms of being, it's just outrageous.
I think all of those things have created this incredible
ball that has been rolling down and smashing obstacles that
have kept people unwilling to make radical changes in their life.
And I think right now, since all of those those
phony foundations have been knocked out, people are asking bigger questions,
much much bigger questions.
Speaker 2: One of the things we're seeing, at least the things
I'm noticing, is that it's a preponderance of young men
that are converting. I don't know if you if you've
seen the same thing, and what do you think about that?
Speaker 3: What do you think is going on there?
Speaker 1: In my own parish, it's it is. I'm still a majority,
but it's only a small majority. But I think you're right.
If you look across the West, the majority, the greater majority,
are men. But I'm very happy with that right now, Actually,
I'm very happy with that. That doesn't mean that this
is going to turn out well, that's a different subject,
which I hope we'll talk about. But so far, I mean,
we're at the very beginnings of this, I'm hoping but
to see men confronted with a serious, time tested Christian faith.
And I'm speaking now just about my own experience as
an Orthodox Christian. One of the things that really drew
me to Orthodoxy was the sense of solidness, the fact
that I wasn't very important in a sense, like my
opinions mattered almost nothing. I was told a funny joke
when I was first exploring Orthodoxy. The person meant it
just as something trite, but it really impacted me. The
person said, look, to understand us, you have to understand
this joke. He said, how many Orthodox bishops does it
take to change a light bulb? And I'm like, what
the person's talking about? And then he smiled and he
said change. Now. That can be read two ways, right,
One is that in general we don't change. But also
sometimes it's just a light bulb. Yeah, yeah, it needs
to be changed. It needs to be changed. So sometimes
we were not on the cutting edge of good things
because we have that mentality. I was really impressed with that.
The idea. You know, when I was a Presbyterian. I
I was born and raised a Presbyterian. When I was
a Presbyterian seminarian. I was being licensed by my local
body of pastors. It's called the presbytery, and you get tested.
You have to defend you know your faith, and get
the acceptance of the other pastors in order for you
to get a license to preach. And so when I
went before them and I was confessing my faith, I
brought the standard, which was the Westminster Confession of Faith,
and they asked me do you have any do you
want to make any exceptions to this? I said, well,
actually I do, and they said, well, tell us what
they are. So I told them all fifteen all fifteen
exceptions things I disagreed with, mostly because of Orthodoxy. I
had been studying Orthodoxy. I wasn't yet ready to become Orthodox.
One of them was not giving communion to infants, so
Presbyterians don't do that in general, And so I took
an exception and they ended up approving me and licensed
me nonetheless, even though one of my theology professors the
seminary had been sick and he came to see me
that the monday after I got licensed, on the weekend,
and he told me, if I was there, you never
would have got.
Speaker 3: Licensed, he said, I know what you really think.
Speaker 1: I never would have happened. But I thought to myself,
you know, that's it, that's just it right that they
want to uphold the standard, but they approve fifteen changes,
fifteen alterations. And you know, the sixteenth the end of
the sixteenth, seventeenth, and the early part of the eighteenth
century were periods of lots of detailed confessions were written,
both by the Catholics and by the Protestants. And the
problem with writing all of these detailed confessions is that
you say too much. Yeah, you know, you say too much,
and then you have to revise them. And then where
do you stop? What can you throw out? What do
you have to keep? I went to a Protestant Evangelical
Protestant liberal arts college in Santa Barbara called Westmont. Really
loved my time there, and they had kind of the
standard at the time Protestant confession of Faith. Some years after,
maybe twenty years after I graduated, I got an email,
as everyone did, from the school, from the president informing
us that they were changing their statement of faith. And
it went from this very long, detailed statement to it
like very short, like four paragraphs, but not the four
paragraphs of the Nicene creed right their own four paragraphs.
And I thought to myself, if you were a founder,
like people put their life savings into starting this university,
and if they thought that in forty years fifty years,
the leadership was going to gut what they considered to
be basic Protestantism and invent something very kind of new
and simplistic, what would they have said, Are they going
to give their money to that? That kind of phenomena
in the Western Protestant world is so thin that I
think people, young men especially are seeing Orthodoxy and its
unwillingness to budge matters of the faith. I remember I
told people when I first got ordaned as an Orthodox priests,
I was so happy because if I stood up and
preached and I said something that was untraditional, something that
was not Creedle, the ladies, the old ladies in my
church literally would have caught. They would have grabbed me
by the ear and they would have just walked me
out of the door. That would have been the last
time I preached. They didn't need the bishop, did they would?
I mean, they would have called them, for sure, but
they would have take care of me. They would have
taken care of me themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are canons and some of the Russian later
Russian synods that say exactly that. They say, if a
priest come in your parents says something which is not traditional,
kick them out, like.
Speaker 3: You don't, don't wait for the bishop. That's pretty funny.
Speaker 1: To throw them in the boss for us.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 2: And so one of the like one of the things
too that how can I say this. One of the
things that your parents has done well is also paid
very much attention to beauty, both in terms of the music,
but also in terms of the icons. You know, for
those who don't know, there's a little chapel at Father
Josias Church that just has some of the most splendid
painted icons I've seen in North America. To be honest,
beauty's expensive. Father, Like, it's difficult and it's expensive.
Speaker 3: Why are you putting.
Speaker 2: So much effort into that aspect in your parish?
Speaker 1: This is our way, this is the way of the church.
Just think of the widow's might. Think of Mary when
she broke that you know what, ten thousand dollars base
of sacred ointment on our Savior and the apostle were scandalized.
Why'd you do that? Why such an extravagant act of
devotion when that money could have been better used elsewhere.
I think our commitment historically to building the most splendid
buildings and always making them better than anything else is
a measurement of a love for God. You know, the
church is for God and it's for the people. And
if we're going to spend we look at all these
people who are are rich and they have fancy houses.
That doesn't scandalize us. But Christians meet in gymnasiums. I mean,
what's the message there. You need beauty for yourself, but
the church can just be ugly. No, I don't think so.
I think it's a measure of devotion, which is why
for two thousand years, as soon as we could, you know,
for the first three centuries, in most parts of the
Roman Empire, if there was a military garrison near, you
could not build because you would be arrested and punished.
The only archaeological remains that we have of churches before
the Edict of Milan in three twelve are on the outskirts,
you know, near Armenia, in places like that where there
weren't soldiers to kill us. And even then we met
in the best houses, and we did our best to
make them beautiful. We had beautiful vessels in the first
three months. We had beautiful tapestries, we had beautiful painted
gospel books, we had beautiful crosses, but we just didn't
have any churches because it was impossible. But it was
like a compressed spring. And as soon as we were
legalized as pseudos, Emperor Constantine began to give our properties
back and allowed us to actually have assets. It was
like the spring just exploded, and we commandeered great Roman
buildings and we made them explicitly Christian. We took these
great basilicas and we made them gorgeous. And then in
the sixth century we invented the expanse dome and that
changed everything. And we've always had this commitment to the
sacred arts, architecture, sacred music, iicnography, wood carving, all of
those for the glory of God. And this is just
the Church's way. When I was becoming Orthodox, one of
the things that really drew me was the sacred arts
of the church. I remember when I was in seminary,
as I was mentioning earlier as a Presbyterian, there was
a new Orthodox church just down the road that was built,
and I used to drive by it all the time
and watch, just watch the architecture going up, and they
had put in new icons. And I was too timid
actually to go in, but they left the doors open often,
so I would just go out and like look through
the doors. I had some sense that if I went in,
it was over for me. It was over for me,
And sure enough, as soon as I did start going in,
I went in for Great Vespers eventually, and that was it.
I would always go on Saturday nights and still go
to my Protestant church, but very quickly I looked at
my wife, I said, sweetheart, why am I so motivated
to go to Great Vespers every Saturday night? Way more
than I want to go to church on Sunday morning?
And the beauty just.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, I mean, of course, you know, I
agree with you.
Speaker 2: I asked that question, but you know, I totally agree
with you that, or else I wouldn't have done what
I did for so many years. But there is I
think also there's that contrast, you know, the contrast that's
related to the situation with COVID. You know, this extreme loneliness,
this facing of death, and also facing of tyranny at
the same time, like this, this contrast of what true organic,
organized liturgical community looks like. I think it's the same
with beauty. You know, we our neighborhoods are mostly ugly.
You know, if at least if that, if some of
our neighborhood aren't so bad, then for sure go to
the go to the shopping districts, these strip malls and
you know, the highways and all this. There's that kind
of ugliness about our world that you when you go
to Europe and you go to the old towns in Europe,
you realize just how ugly we're used to, we've accepted
at how ugly the world is. And so the the
draw of something absolutely, you know, unapologetically beautiful, I think,
like you said, there's as a kind of powerful strength
in that.
Speaker 3: But it's not for our sake, you.
Speaker 2: Know, it's you could make a big, gilded something for whatever.
But when it's dedicated to God, there's a you know,
there's a sense in which it's like, well, who is this?
Speaker 3: Who did this to their own glory?
Speaker 2: It's like, well, no, it's not to anybody of glory
around here, you know, it's dedicated to Saint Andrew's dedicated
to God. You know, this is this there's and because
of that, it feels like we can almost it makes
not how can I say this, Like it makes certain
things that if you put them in your house, it
would actually be completely unacceptable, Like if you did so
much luxury in your own house, it would almost be
a scandal. But because it's dedicated to God, we can
just smile and enjoy.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't think there's anything selfish about it.
It's for the glory of God. It reveals Heaven, so
it's also a witness about what our future is. There's
a huge shot of encouragement into the hearts of everyone
who comes. This is why when we come into the church.
It's one of the reasons. There's many other reasons. We
literally are altered we come in. Our hearts are changed,
our minds are uplifted, even physically if we're sick. We
feel better when we're in the community. When we're in church.
It is of course a heavenly realm where heaven and
earth mixes. There are angels present, there are saints present,
but the beauty is overwhelming and sanctifying and healing, and
it's the revelation of Heaven. But it's also for us.
It's also so normalizing, and it makes all of the
divisions of society come into a sense of harmony. You know,
the rich and the poor are the same. In the church.
Everyone has the same access, everyone has the same experience.
Doesn't matter if you have a lot of resources or not.
You could be a general in the army and some
new recruit comes in and you kiss each other by
the mention and talk to each other by the by
your first name when you come to the chalice, and
when you greet each other in the midst of the church.
So it's so uplifting, it so absolutely magnificent. It has
nothing to do with self centeredness. I remember reading an
article recently. I mea was a couple of years ago
about an archaeological dig in Rome and they found, you know,
Emperor Nero the Insane. He used to have this big
ballroom and he had a rotating floor, a massive rotating floor,
and he had a massive statue of Apollo, carved statue,
and at the top Apollo's head was him.
Speaker 3: Of course.
Speaker 1: It was Nero, right, So they found that, and I
thought to myself, Okay, so that's his icon right, his
self glorification effort, self deification effort. And the Romans were
into that, right, they loved doing that for their emperors,
and they wanted us to go along with them. We're like, no, no, no,
we're not going to bow down to you. We're not
going to light the incense for these emperors. But that's
not because we were against it, against the idea. No,
we're we're against the it's the wrong person. Put Christ
face there, and we're there, absolutely, we're there. Makes perfect
sense to us, and that I think is what we're
expressing in the church, worship of the church. It's a
great love gift of him who is worthy.
Speaker 2: M Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I think I think
it's wonderful because the excesses of Nero right now, think
about like the excesses of Nero, of the emperor there
in the day. But now we have those types of excesses,
you know, but for private citizens, you know, or there
are people who have that type of excess in the
in the private world, people that have absolutely no responsibility
to the public. At least Nero had to pretend like
he was actually, you know, kind of responsible for the
people there, and so we are in this weird contradictory
world where luxury is actually abundantly available to people more
than ever, but the people don't have any responsibility, and
so the church, I think also once again becomes such
a bulwark to that in saying, Okay, you know, yes,
we actually in North America, we are the richest you know,
civilization in the history of the world. And so why
can't we make beautiful churches.
Speaker 3: It's so hard for us to I mean, some people
are doing it.
Speaker 2: Obviously you're doing it, there are other examples of it,
but so many people feel like this is impossible to
them despite the fact that luxury is so abundant to us.
Speaker 1: You know, yes, it's a representation I think of a
little bit of our worldliness in the church which we
need to correct, right. We need to repent the idea
that are any parishioner is going to live in a
house that's more expensive than our church building. That's just impossible.
That's just uh. And for us to call our people
also our whole view of of dispossession, this is very
hard for US Americans, you know. For us, the temptation
is if you think God loves you, that that you're
gonna have everything's going to go well, you're gonna be blessed,
You're gonna have you know, money flowing in. You give
him your tithe and he's going to open the windows
of heaven and put money in your pockets. Maybe it's
going to be so great. This is not This is
the mentality that's right and that's not the church teaching
of the church. For us to be wealthy means that
you have no expectations and wants. You can have very few,
very few dollars in the bank and you can be
exceedingly wealthy. If you don't want anything, and if you
have a lot of money but you always want more,
you're a pauper, you're a poor man. I call I
call it the golden handcuffs. There's so many people who
have a lot of money in our land, but they can't.
They just never have anything to give because they increase
what they think they need proportionally to their income, so
they're always strapped. They're always right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've seen that for sure.
Speaker 2: People It's like as soon as they can increase their
debt level, they just increase their debt and they live,
you know, like up to hear in debt constantly, and
they have nice things, but you know, just the worry
of that is so detrimental to your soul to have
to be basically a slave.
Speaker 3: To those debt, to that debt.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's true, that that's such a modern phenomena.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's it's epidemic in our culture, right.
I mean, I was shocked. It's amazing to me that
in America when I was young, the Republicans were all
about balancing the budget. I mean, that was one of
their absolute, non negotiable principles. And they, of course would
just tell everybody what we all knew. If you spend
more than you make, you're going to go into debt
and you're going to ruin your life. We all understand
what it means personally and individual level with credit cards,
but nationally, in the last what ten or fifteen years,
no one talks about it, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans.
No one has a plan for it. And the Democrats
and the Republicans are exactly the same. They're all going
to blow through our money. We started using the word
trillion like we used to use billion, like we used
to use million. Now we have a thirty five trillion
dollar deficit. I saw even President Trump recently interviewed before
the election about how he was going to balance the budget.
And I've heard him speak about this before, and so
I wasn't expecting much. And when he spoke, he didn't
give much. He said, well, you know, when you think
about thirty five trillion dollars and that interest on our
debt is now our third line item. We spend more
on the interest on our debt than we spend on
the military, which is saying something in Americas because we
spend so much money on the military. And his answer was, well,
you have to remember what our assets are, how much
oil we have under the earth. And I thought to myself,
oh terrible. I only received encouragement when Elon Musk came
along and said that he had convinced President Trump to
hire him as an efficiencies AAR and that he was
convinced that he could remove two trillion dollars from the
annual budget. When I heard that, I thought, Lord, thank you,
thank you, because that's exactly how much we're over budget.
Two trillion is how much every year, for like the
last four years, we have been over budget. If Elon
can actually do that and help us to recover basic
sense that you don't spend more than you make. I mean,
it's so basic a ten year old knows this.
Speaker 2: But our astounding that we went from, you know, in
some ways the idea that barring or lending on credit
it was like a sin. It's like you have to
go to confess, you know, and now it's just it's
actually the way that it works. The whole system works
based on you know, it's basically a big usury system.
It's such a it's such that's such an example of
you know, moving away from Christianity and how rapidly some
of the consequences of that of that are not the
ones you would have thought at the outset, but you know,
end up in this situation, like you said, where you're
basically servicing your debt at.
Speaker 3: The highest level of your budget.
Speaker 2: What happens when you know, the servicing the debt of
the of the country you know becomes the number one item.
What happens when it's higher than your GDP? Like I
don't know what what limit there is you know for
this to go.
Speaker 1: You know, who knows A plus increase in medical costs
and aging population less taxpayers putting their money in because
people aren't having kids. I mean, it is a recipe
for disaster, it seems.
Speaker 3: It seems. It seems.
Speaker 2: So I want to ask you a question that one
of the things we've seen in the return to the
church is is the we call people call them orthobros.
I don't personally like the term, but there is definitely
something that I'm seeing is that a lot of the
people coming into the church are very they're very heady,
like they're very they have an intellectual and so for
the good, you could say, because it's pretty amazing to have,
you know, intellect. Usually in the past people who would
come to the church it was often you know, personal crises, right,
It's like you, you know, you lose someone, you you
go through a very difficult time and and then God
kind of reaches out to you.
Speaker 3: But now we have people that are.
Speaker 2: Coming in through a search for meaning, and therefore they
they they're also quite heady and sometimes amazingly but sometimes
also with great difficulty, Like they're they they come in
with all these ideas and so I'm wondering how how
how you see that and kind of.
Speaker 3: How you deal with that question.
Speaker 1: I share your perception of what's happening, and I thank God.
I thank God for the level of Orthodox books, excellent
pedagogical instruction about life in general. None of this existed
when I became Orthodox. When I became Orthodox, very few
Orthodox books. One of my oldest parishioners, who I just
buried two three years ago, she converted in nineteen sixty three.
There were three books that her priests could give her
in English, three books, and they were small. Today we
have tens of thousands of orthes, which they're not all
you know, quality, but certainly we have an abundance of
catechetical material, and it's important. The mind has to be engaged,
it's very important. But that's the beginning. That's just the beginning.
And I always tell my cateicumans it's not just the beginning.
That's the easy part. Yeah, it's the easy part. Now
you have to transfer that thought into your heart and
into your behavior. And this is why getting involved in
a serious catechetical program is very important. And a catechetical
program is not just an informational program. Of course, priests
are going to teach the faith. They're going to teach
who God is, what a human being is what sin is.
Who Jesus is is, what Jesus has done to save us,
Who the Holy Spirit is, and how he'll inspire your
life and connect you to God. What the Church is,
what repent is, what faith is. Who are the saints?
I mean, this is all constituent elements in a catechism.
That's basic. But just as important is coming to the services.
Learning how to stand in the presence of God, learning
how to fast, learning how to feast. Those both have
to be learned. Learning how to forgive. That's a huge issue,
very very important, and the course the church has whole
services designed to teach us how to do that. Learning
how to listen and follow. Obtaining a father confessor, that's
a big deal. Having an accountability it's of course a
great blessing to because you have an unbelievable support that
you never thought you would ever have. To have a
father confessor. Learning to relate to a bishop, learning to
relate to a priest, learning to have in your life.
This is also one of the gifts of the church.
When young men come, especially to the church, they get
a family. All the old ladies in the church and
all the old men. They become their aunts and uncles,
and in reality, I mean we actually believe in the
reality of spiritual relationships that are constituted in baptism and
by sharing a common childie, that are just as real
and sometimes more real than our biological and relations. All
of that takes time, which is why catechism absolutely cannot
be done quickly. Assimilation takes time and submersion and is
a lot more than just thoughts in the head. And
I'll tell you if I was asked what is the
number one most difficult Christian behavior that must be assimilated
to by catechumans, I would say it's learning to endure yourself.
This is being patient with failure and not freaking out,
recognizing that you're not a saint, that the Lord is
going to make you one. And you may make a
lot of progress in their life towards that destination, you
may make less and everything in between, depending upon how
much you're engaged, but you're not going to make any
until you learn to put up with yourself. There's only
one virtue that Jesus ascribes by itself, salvation to It's
an amazing reality. He of course him so many virtues
and teaches us so many virtues, not just by by
his behavior but by his own pedagogy. But there's one
that's unique, and that is it's called epomoni in Greek,
and it means patient endurance. And for that one alone,
he says, the one who has epomoni, the one who
endures to the end, will be saved. Yeah, you might
be a wreck, but if you can endure yourself, we'll
keep yourself in the church, keep yourself repenting, and keep
getting up, You're gonna be saved. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think found that.
Speaker 2: That's amazing, because I've said I obviously experienced that myself,
especially coming from the context where I came from, you know,
some strain of Protestantism that I came from. I remember
a pastor once saying in church, you know, Christians don't
sin anymore. It's like and he said, well, he said,
at least we don't practice sin. That was the thing
he said. He said, we sin occasionally, but we don't
practice sin. And I was sitting there, you know whatever,
I was like nineteen years old, and I was looking
at him like, well, I don't know what to say,
because obviously this is so. I guess I'm going to
go to altar call every week. It'll be like my
Protestant version of confession, because I definitely sin all the time.
And there's this sense in which, you know, the kind
of way we beat ourselves up sometimes morally is actually
because we think we're better than we are. You know.
It's like we think, like, how could I do that?
I should be espe I agree, yeah, And that's what
I've learned, I think through confession is because the thing
about confession people who haven't practiced it, especially if you
try to do it. You know, often I'll have you
honest with as I travel, I don't go to confession
as much as I should these days, but there are
moments in my life where I've gone to confession as
much as possible, and and you just keep saying the
same thing, and so you're like, you know, and say,
you realize I am nothing, Like I really can't do this.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: There's and then the surprise, at least sometimes is that
at some point something happens that you don't totally know
what it is. Through prayer, just through going to church,
through going to communion, you're like, oh, wait a minute,
this is actually this thing that used to I used
to confess every week, all of a sudden it's gone
or it's almost not there anymore.
Speaker 3: What happened?
Speaker 2: You know, it's and this is the sense in which
you see that God is working. It's working through us,
you know, without even we always have to make efforts.
But God is always working. You know, sometimes even in
the moments when you think that your loss and nothing
you're doing is working and you just keep falling and falling,
God is still working.
Speaker 1: Yes, I love that text that the Lord Jesus quotes
from the Old Testament and applies to us, where he
says that God resists the proud, but he gives grace
to the humble. Humility is so beautiful. It's so beautiful.
And the Church is by asking us to keep our
eyes on ourselves and not upon others, or in Saint
Paul's language, to esteem other people as more important than ourselves,
you know, Jesus model of course, putting a towel around
our waist and washing people's feet, esteeming them that highly.
That brings grace like a magnet into someone's life. And
the more that we can learn to endure ourselves and
not make up stories about who we are or how
much we've you know, we've progressed not looking down on people.
The more that we can avoid doing that, the more
that we can become more settled in the grace of God,
because he pours out his grace upon people who choose
to take the humble position, and that is the most
secure position of all. It's only when we raise ourselves
up that we get insecure. Is when we lift ourselves up,
then we can fall. If we can keep ourselves low,
there's no place to fall. Where like we're spiritually crawling
on the ground and we're looking up towards people. It's
so peaceful and it's so safe, and it keeps us
from falling into the horrible position of judgment. One of
the things I'm trying to convince converts of constantly is
that when you see something terrible, you see something that's
a lie or dark and how can you live one
day in our culture and not see those things all
the time. You have a choice, right then, what you're
going to do when you see it. How are you
going to respond to this? If you choose to point
at it and to criticize it, to judge it, what
you're doing right there is collaborating with the one that
we call in the scriptures that the abolos, the one
who points the finger. You're actually collaborating with Satan himself
or with a demon, in actually promoting a spirit of
darkness on the land. The scripture says that Jesus did
not come into the world to judge the world, but
that the world might be saved through him. And yet
he is the judge. If he wanted to exercise his judgment,
he could have done that, but he didn't. He wanted
to save us, not judge us. And so we have
the better choice. When we see something that's terrible every day,
I think we can do two beautiful things. One is
we can collaborate with Jesus in bringing grace and salvation
to someone's life. So when you see something terrible going on,
you can lift up your mind and you can say, Lord,
look on this person, open some spout in heaven and
cause grace to come down upon them because they're in
great need right now. Send your mercy to them right
now and save them from this catastrophe. Then you're actually collaborating.
And the second good thing to do is be convinced
that God only allows his children to see horror, So
that they can discern some portion of that horror in them.
Whatever we see some in some way, it's in us.
And if we turn from what we see and say, Lord,
I know that's in me too, please get it out,
get it out. Those are two very gracious grace summoning
actions that would collaborate with Jesus and bringing grace to
the whole world, which is what we're about. We want
every single person, Jonathan. I want every person on planet
Earth to be baptized, to have their sins watched, the
way to have God come and live in them, to
be established in peace forever so that they can live
a beautiful life. This is this is what I'm This is,
This is the Christian vision. This is We're interested in everyone.
We want everyone, and this is our task.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of change the subject here all over, because
there's a bunch of stuff that I was wanted to
get your opinion on. One of the things that we're seeing,
and you mentioned that a little bit is you know,
you mentioned how the people that come to church are
have some atheist aspect to them.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: The sense that I also have is that there are
also a lot of people going into all these weird
religious directions. You know, we have the spiritually not religious,
and everybody has their own little kind of New Age
version of spirituality or something. And I'm wondering if you're
seeing in your own parish people that have gone in
that direction kind of coming back, and how do you
account for that or what is it that you're seeing?
You know, what is it that's touching these people?
Speaker 1: Uh? I think I understand what you're the question you're raising,
and it does exist. The re enchantment, right isn't always
finally tuned theologically, No.
Speaker 3: That's for sure.
Speaker 1: So we have it. Might if you come to my parish,
you're going to see what shall I say, a collection
of tattoos.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I never thought about that.
Speaker 1: Norse gods, you know, witches, covens, people have tried these things,
you know, they've just you know, I look on it
and forgive me, but it was an improvement. It was
an improvement if you look at, uh, the the ancient
pagan world, forgive me. The ancient pagan world was a
lot better than our secular society, I'm sorry, so much
better in many measurable ways. How they treated the unborn,
even though they were terrible compared to Christian standards, way
better than what we do. How they treated marriage. I mean,
many Roman men had mistresses, but they also took care
of their wives. They also knew that they had to
support their children or else society would collapse. People weren't
giving up having kids. No one was that stupid. The
Pagans were a lot smarter than us. They had bad gods.
I mean, I'll give it to you, but at least
they believed in the divine and supernatural realm. They knew
that they owed something to that realm. They knew that
they were accountable to that realm. The idea that today
our people think that really, despite all the evidence that
every society and the history of the human race has
recognized as evidences of the divine, now all of a sudden,
it's not there. I mean, how stupid do you have
to be? So I've told people, I've told people, look,
you can't call people today pagans. That's that they don't deserve.
They don't deserve that compliment. It's not nice at all.
And I tell them, especially in I've had quite a
bit of what shall I say, a little wrestling, a
little interaction with the LGBT community, yeah, and this is
an area I think of particular evidence. So there is
no precedent for the sexual chaos and anarchy of our
current time. There is no president Historically, the best you
can do if you're if you're a gay man is
to look to the Greeks, look to the pagan Greeks.
But even there there's nothing that parallels what's going on today.
I mean the the the relationship of older men with
younger men, the sexual alliances in Greek pagan culture. Yeah,
they existed, but it was very clear that these did
not involve that putting aside of marriage. Many of these
men had their wives and they had their children. I'm
not saying that they were being good to them, but
they didn't think you can just dispose of marriage, you
can just dispose of family life and everything is going
to be okay. That is not true. And they also
were very The Greeks were one hundred percent opposed to
the unnatural reality. Forgive me for being so graphic of
anal sex that was ver bolton in Greek society. I
don't want to go into it too much because your
listeners might be scandalized. But they had other ways. If
you understand what I'm saying, but it didn't involve that.
That was considered the breaking of the vessel, the breaking
of you. You're hurting yourself, You're going to destroy yourself,
and that's that's the only precedent that really can be
appealed to. We are so off the rails in continuity
with previous human generations that what can I say? We've
lost our minds, We really lost our minds. So there
is some in some way if people get involved in
crazy religious experience, it's probably better than secular atheism.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: All right, So I have to ask the question that
follows this obviously, is you know, one of the things
that has been in my circles, you know, and it's
something that I didn't expect, and at first I didn't
even know.
Speaker 3: How to react because it was so far from my
own world.
Speaker 2: Was the whole psychedelics thing, right, And so you know,
my friend Joan Peterson talks about psychedelics, and then other
people that I meet i've met actually father.
Speaker 3: This is because I never thought about that ever before.
Speaker 2: And so all of a sudden, meeting people in my
own parish and that tell me they've converted because of psychedelics.
But then I also meet people that have had absolute
psychoses and have lost their mind because of psychedelics. And
so you live in California, and so I'm imagine that
you have to deal with this.
Speaker 4: As a priest, you probably have to deal with that,
And so I'm curious to hear what you think and
what your advice is to people that are asking themselves
this question about these substances.
Speaker 1: My experience is very similar to what you're describing. There are,
in fact, plenty of cases in which, under the influence
the Lord himself appears and can pull someone towards him.
But that doesn't mean that the event itself is wise
or justifiable, and just as often as not, the exact
opposite happens, which is a terrifying reality. That doesn't mean
that a terrifying reality can't catapult someone into sobriety. I
think that's what's happening. I've noticed recently. I watched that
clip from Tucker Carlson about him being attacked by a demon.
Did you see that? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I knew about that story actually for Wow,
but I didn't think you would talk about it in public.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I didn't know about it. But I presumed
it just by his awakening, I would say from yeah,
there's been so and I think it's it's broadly across
our culture, is that the darkness has appeared and that
has awakened people to the reality of the unseen world.
And yeah, as sad as it is, they're actually helping us.
You know. C. S. Lewis and his Screwtape Letters talks
a lot about how the demon's scheme to be unseen
because if they can keep people believing that there is
no supernatural world, they've got them exactly where they want
to be, so they don't want to do anything that's
too you know, shocking, that might waken them up to
the unseen world. And now that's very much the case today,
is that so many crazy things are happening spiritually speaking,
that fewer and fewer people are maintaining the fiction that
there is nothing unseen, whether they're going to come full
full circle to a Christian position, an orthodox position, which
is that the unseen world is the primary and most
important world, and that it itself gives meaning to the
visible world. You know, that bifurcation, which is right in
our creed. Right we say, I believe in one God,
the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of
all things visible and invisible. That bifurcation is very important
in Christian theology. And I always tell people, look, the
obsession with the physical which inspires our culture, especially our education.
You know, Stem, everything Stem. I always laugh. I am
always poking fun at my own parishioners who are at
so many of whom are academics. I'm always poking fun
because I'm like, you know, that's great in all. I mean,
I support medicine, I mean technology, engineering, it's all great,
it's all wonderful, But nobody dies for that stuff that
all the most important things, all the most important things
in life are unseen. All the most important things are invisible, God,
the Soul, love, Truth. I mean, these are the things
that you die for. These are things that give you
motivation to get up and go to your engineering job.
If you don't have the invisible, what do you care
about the physical? Yeah, I mean, nobody cares. But today
it's you know, it's just the opposite. You know, everybody's
acting like STEM. It's just this a great thing and
so important in society. No, no, no, no no. Read
philosophy Read books find out about your soul.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think you're right. I kind of see
it as there's a constellation.
Speaker 3: Of things.
Speaker 2: Peaking in, like there's a consolation of things. There's these
people going into all these new age kind of practices,
people who are doing psychedelics. There's also this obsession with
the UFOs and supernatural. People are also obsessed again with
like hauntings, and they're obsessed with a astrology, which like
I didn't expect that, you know, all of a sudden,
My daughters, she said, all her friends, all the teenagers,
they just all they love astrology.
Speaker 3: They just talk about yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Everybody's reading their horoscope, which is you know, which shows
you that that just in the popular culture, things are shaking,
like the materialism isn't enough, and so people are grasping
at all these sometimes ridiculous or at least incomplete, uh
you know, ways of doing it. Sometimes they're also kind
of materialistic. The UFO one is to me often seems
to be a desire to encapsulate any type of experience
into materialistic you know categories. Uh. But then all of
this is showing us that there's a kind of there
are fissures in the wall like things are kind of
cracking and that the future is going to be religious.
You know, it seems that that's the case. And so
the question is rather how what is that going to
look like? And you know, at least I know in
the long term what it's going to look like. I
know in the long term, christ wins like, there's no
doubt about that. But at least in the short term.
And even AI too, that whole idea of AI, of
how this desire to kind of build an intelligent.
Speaker 3: Machine that that will that will influence us. All of
that is is our symps.
Speaker 2: Of the same thing that's happening in our society.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I share your sentiment.
Speaker 3: Have you thought about the AI think?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm just asking you because it's it's just everybody, It's
it's happening everywhere.
Speaker 3: What is your perception of that? What do you think
of this of the AI thing?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 3: Asking I am I the only one who's ever asked
you that. Father just signed public.
Speaker 1: One of the one of my catechumens, is employed as
an as an ethicist for artificial intelligence big tech company.
And we had we we have we collaborated a bit,
uh matter of fact, we contemplated. There's a big conference
going on, actually I think it's going on this month
end of this month in Athens, and we submitted a proposal,
a joint proposal to talk a little bit about ethics
and artificial intelligence. I begged out of it, much to
my happiness. I just my traveling is driving me crazy,
absolutely crazy. Just can't do it. But this is whether
we want to think about it or not, it is
apparently upon us. How can we not think about it?
I have a spiritual son who's doing his PhD in
Byzantine studies at a big university I won't say where
here in America, and he's taing right now some graduate classes,
and he's been giving he gave a test risk recently
to his grad students on some aspect of Byzantine history,
very complex aspect, like between the twelfth and the fourteenth century,
very neglected portion of Christian history, which means that the
AI resources for that are very limited.
Speaker 3: Thin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're very thin. And so this is a way
that he discovered that even top level I mean this
is a very top level university in America graduate class,
he got a paper back that was just superb. It
was perfect, except it make no reference to any of
the Greek texts that he had these grad students read
that were not popularly in the English language, and he
asked in his requirements for the paper that they referenced
these texts. Well, when the paper was turned in, there
were no references to text, so he knew immediately this
was a fake paper. He went to the head of
the department of the department at the university to ask
what should he do. He said, this is a perfect paper,
but it's a complete fake and the professor said that,
who was head of the department, said I agree with you.
It's clear the case, and there's not a thing we
can do about it. They don't have the apparatus to
address it. And it would be he says, she says
thing and very hard to prove. But that is catastrophically horrific.
People are are now able to fake their intelligence by
a dependence on chat, GPT or something else. And what's that?
What is that going to mean when we need competence
in human beings and you don't, you don't have access
to your phone to you know, make a fake paper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a while, it's definitely a wild time it's
it's it's an amazing resource. Like I use CHGPT because
I mean, you can have act if you have very
actually sometimes very esutary question, very difficult questions, you know,
especially the new version, they just give it to you.
It's it's quite astounding. But at the same time it
is in some ways, you know, the problem that Plato
brought about in the Fedra, right, this problem of the
exterization of memory and the exterization of thought, and so,
like you said at some point that people, the only
thing skill that will be useful for humans is the
capacity to use the AI. Like that's the skill that
you have to develop. It won't be to likely learn anything.
It'll just be like are you good. It's kind of
like now it's like are you good at searching on Google?
That's what it was for a while, that's what made
you smart, And now it'll just be are you capable.
Speaker 3: Of using the GPT?
Speaker 2: But yeah, so I think one of the things that
might do interesting, love Father, is that it might bring
us back to old school stuff like you've be in
the class of the pencil and a piece of paper,
and then it'll be like, I'm sorry, but anything you
do right now is going to be from your own
memory or else it doesn't count.
Speaker 3: And then people will be.
Speaker 2: Forced to actually make efforts that they didn't have to
make even ten years ago to prove that they know
what they know so we might.
Speaker 1: Through the pain? Though, are we going to have to
go through the pain first and then recalibrate?
Speaker 5: I just wonder, you know, we ever do anything in
any other way? Father, like well said? Well said, I
have these two marvelous priests here who.
Speaker 1: Work with me. There's the three of us in the
parish who work full time, and they're younger priests, and
they're far more technologically savvy than I. And one particularly
is been working from a priest's perspective with chat GBT,
and he's been showing all sorts of things about I'm
giving this talk to this kind of group. I need
high level Byzantine graphics. I want to emphasize, especially these
church fathers. And you know, he's been walking us through
the creation of these incredible presentations that you're able to
make if you know how to ask the right questions
and to lead the intelligence the way that you want.
But I looked at him and I said, after he
you know, showed this to me. I said, never use that.
It's gonna stunt you. So you're gonna miss you know,
a priest speaks from his experience, and he wrestles with
the scriptures, and he wrestles with the saints that he reads,
and you develop relationships with them. I mean, you pray
when you're reading Saint John Crossostem's text, right, You're praying
to the saints. You're asking him to help you. You're
entering into his life, and it's satisfying. It's the same
with the scriptures. When you're interacting, you're asking for the
spirits for illumination. If we miss all of that, the
whole process of discovery, the whole process of learning, it's
so deeply human and so deeply satisfying, we're gonna be
so sad, so terrible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, father, So we're kind of coming up on
time very soon.
Speaker 3: I want to give you.
Speaker 2: I want to ask you, I guess one last question.
It's a two part question. You know, in someoney, I'd
like to get your your intuition about what's coming. You know,
let's say, yeah, I know it's I don't want you
to to feel pressured, but you know, I think that mind.
You know, I've seen you as a very intuitive person
as well, and so I'd like you to give us
a sense.
Speaker 3: You know, the election was.
Speaker 2: Rough for America and people's perception of themselves and people's
perception of what's actually.
Speaker 3: Happening in the world.
Speaker 2: There's a big divide in your country, but also here
in Canada we're seeing that divide a peer. There is
all this there's all this searching that people have, and
it's leading people into all kinds of directions. And so
I would like to ask you kind of at least
a little bit what you see, and also what's your
advice for the young people, especially the young people that
are watching.
Speaker 3: And that they want to know how to be in
the world and where to look.
Speaker 1: What a question you know there is there are two
important symbols that everyone should have in the forefront of
their mind, and they should have them in the proper order,
the cross and your nation's flag. In my mind, those
are two very very important symbols, and for Christian people
it's very important to have them in the proper order,
you know, to be a parishioner, to be a Christian,
and to belong to a church, become a parishioner. That
word comes from a beautiful Greek word parcos, which means sojourner.
There's an incredible letter, an epistle that's usually bound in
our books on the Apostolic Fathers. It's called the Epistle
to di Ignitis. It's an incredible text. It's anonymous. We
don't know who the author is, but sometime probably around
two hundred hundred and he describes the disposition of Christians.
And he says, Christians consider every foreign land to be
a home country, and every home country to be a
foreign land. And of course that's a biblical concept. And
when God called Abraham out of the polytheism from of
the called these right ancient Mesopotamia, a very developed culture,
he called them to walk out. And for the rest
of his life, following God, he was a sojourner, and
he built altars, and he erected an established worship as
this foundation of his life. He fulfilled civic duties. You know,
he had good relationships with his neighbors. Sometimes he even
went to war for good purposes. But he never was
acting like his earthly attachments was were the most important.
He was looking. Saint Paul says in his Epistle to
the Hebrews. He was looking for a city whose architect
and builder is God, an eternal city. I think that
we Orthodox Christians prosper when we keep those related distinct,
the cross supreme and the flag second. And we have duties,
of course to our nation. We love our nation, but
we never put the flag above the cross. When we do,
we die, we die. And that's been my experience in
Orthodoxy in America. When we emphasize our nationalism above the Gospel,
we trivialize ourselves, and we're disappearing and we shrink, and
we should shrink because we're not being good Christians. When
we exalt the cross above the flag, we have a
proper relationship to the flag. You have certain patriotic duties.
You love your country, of course, this is your ground
that God made you from. I'm not definitely denying any
of that. I'm patriotic myself very much. So I love
my country, but I love God more and I love
His kingdom more, and I evaluate my nation according to
his standards. I try to make a contribution according to
what is un changing. I feel very uncertain, very uncertain
about our earthly scenario right now. If you ask me
like I'm uncertain if President Trump is even going to
make it to inauguration. That's how uncertain I am. The
things that have are going down in our land are
so outrageous. They're so outrageous. These assassination attempts, the amount
of manipulation of deceit that is just in the heart
of our existence. Its completely sobered me. It's completely sobered
me such that I every day I don't know what
to expect. I'm hoping for the best. I'm hoping for
the best. I'm hoping that this will be the beginning
of a major reorientation. I think it's possible, a major
social reorientation in which there can be a return to
the importance of religion, the importance of morality. This is
one of the most grotesque expressions of contemporary life, you know.
In two thousand and three, the late Supreme Court Justice
here antonin Scalia, he issued a minority opinion in this
case called Lawrence versus Texas, which was an LGBT staged
case to strike down antisodomy laws which used to be
so normal in America and they still were on the
books in Texas when he wrote his minority opinion, going
against the majority of the Supremes who did strike down
these antisodomy laws. He said, this is the end of
morals legislation in America. And if you don't have morality
inspiring your legislation, what is It's the end of justice.
He could have written that just as easily. If morality
is not undergirding your law code, then you do not
have a just law code. And we have we that
is us. Now, that is us. So I think how
that doesn't take a great theologian to articulate. I mean,
that's so basic, it's so normal. You can't abandon morality.
It's inescapable. You either have an articulated true morality or
you have something made up. And who's making it up.
Whoever's making it up is the God of the nation.
M h. I mean, you go up up the moral
of off to the author, and then you have the
God of the nation. If it's not from God, it's
not Jesus, who is it? Exactly that kind of religious chaos,
and I look at it even religiously speaking. One of
the things that's fascinated me is on the Trump side,
you have this collection of Hindus. Mind blowing they're very
attractive to me. I mean J. D. Vance's wife is
a Hindu. Vivek Ramaswami is a Hindu. We have, of course,
Kamala Harris claims that you don't have this background as well.
We have all this the rise of Hindu Wism, which
is full blown polytheism, and are we are we? That
doesn't matter, that's not going to have an impact on
what we think about justice or what we think about
it by the dignity of a human person. Ultimately, I'm
hoping that part of this radical readjustment in our society
will lead us back to some basic, rock solid You
can't acknowledge God. You must acknowledge God, even if it's
in some way that's, you know, more generic compared to
an orthox. Fine, but to acknowledge God, to acknowledge the
Ten Commandments, to acknowledge the existence and morality. This seems
so basic to me, and I just can't imagine if
we continue down this path of pretending that none of
this exists, it's going to end. Well.
Speaker 2: Well, Father, thank you for your time, you know, and
thank you for everything you're doing for your witness, and
also for showing us, you know, what's possible, even at
a parish level for people who who at least try
to put you know, the right let's say, the right
order of priorities, the beauty and also the dedication. I mean,
when I was at your parish, I think one of
the things I could see on everybody's face was just
this like this is my home, you know, And you
can feel that in the way that people are with
their kids crawling around and the you know, it's just
it's really astounding. And so thank you for everything to do.
And I hope, you know, I hope we can also
also talk again very soon.
Speaker 1: Father. Please keep in chanting us, Jonathan, please keep chanting us.
Speaker 3: Thanks father, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to
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