Stay Free - Russel Brand - July 15, 2024


The Battle of Good and Evil: Bishop Barron EXCLUSIVE Interview - SF 406


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 20 minutes

Words per Minute

165.68164

Word Count

13,307

Sentence Count

813

Misogynist Sentences

7

Hate Speech Sentences

23


Summary

In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, host Russell Brand sits down with Bishop Robert Barron to discuss his new book, 'The Right Thing' and why he doesn't take the presidential oath. He also talks about why he thinks it's time to get rid of the monarchy, and why the idea of a monarchy should be eradicated. Stay Free with Russell Brand is on all of the social medias, if you search for it, you'll find us. This episode is available on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, iDEY, and Stitcher. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/StayFreeWithRussellBrand and use the promo code: stayfree at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you place an order of $10 or more. You'll also get access to all of our exclusive member-only VIP tickets to our upcoming events, including our live webcast on Rumble, which will be streamed exclusively on Rumble. If you like what you hear here, please consider pledging a pledge of $5 or more by clicking the link below. We'll be running the offer on the App Store or Google Play, and we'll be giving you a 20% discount when you sign up to our newsletter! in the coming weeks! We're working on transcribing your comments and posting them on the blog and podcast! You can also write in to us at awakingwonderings@whati.co.uk and get 10% discount code: stayfreewithrusscrane@rampart@r/r/remindme/tftr/tweebee at awakenwonder to receive $10,000 and receive $5,000 in the offer will be gratefully received! Thank you for listening to stay free with me! I'll be listening to your comments, too! Tweet me to let me know what you thought of the show! and/or your thoughts on the show? if you have a question or thoughts on a particular piece of advice you'd like to be featured in the next episode? Timestamps/tweet me on Insta: or any other podcast you're looking for a shoutout? or your thoughts/theday? I'm looking forward to hearing back!


Transcript

00:00:00.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.
00:00:03.000 You must have a dream to be higher.
00:00:07.000 The organics are working in. We've got a live shot there.
00:00:09.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonders members.
00:00:14.000 Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:17.000 What an incredible show we've got for you.
00:00:19.000 Theologian and Bishop, Bishop Robert Barron.
00:00:23.000 You'll notice that I call him the right thing, Your Excellency.
00:00:26.000 That's what you call people when they're a bishop, and I'm pretty proud of myself for doing that.
00:00:31.000 I like using names like that.
00:00:32.000 Let me know in the comments and the chat If you yourself conform to titles.
00:00:36.000 I once spoke to someone.
00:00:37.000 His name is Matt Stoler.
00:00:38.000 He was a political advisor.
00:00:40.000 He told me that getting rid of all titles would be a brilliant way to level the playing field, like not calling people doctor.
00:00:47.000 It's interesting, isn't it?
00:00:48.000 Because how do you equate it to ideas around, for example, gender, Mr., Mrs., and, you know, preferred pronouns and that kind of stuff.
00:00:56.000 Imagine if you just wouldn't call doctors, doctors.
00:00:58.000 I don't know.
00:00:58.000 Let me know what you think about that.
00:00:59.000 Anyway, I'll be talking to Bishop Robert Barham.
00:01:02.000 One of the things that continually plays upon my mind and let me know how you feel
00:01:06.000 about this you awakened wonders you because I'm very interested to learn
00:01:10.000 your perspectives on it. How do you feel about the general pervasive idea that
00:01:16.000 people are stupid, that we're spoken down to, that we don't understand reality,
00:01:21.000 that we're simpletons that we should be shepherded and herded into paddocks of
00:01:27.000 conformity.
00:01:27.000 Sometimes you'll see something from a protester that absolutely exposes that ridiculousness.
00:01:32.000 We'll be with you on YouTube for about 10-15 minutes, then we'll be exclusively streaming on Rumble.
00:01:38.000 And you are not going to want to miss my conversation with a theologian.
00:01:41.000 Robert Barron.
00:01:42.000 He tells me how to interpret this book.
00:01:44.000 He tells me how to see it as a library rather than as a single book.
00:01:49.000 Although it does have a single narrative.
00:01:51.000 We talk about a lot of good stuff.
00:01:53.000 You're going to love this conversation.
00:01:54.000 Here is a protester in the UK.
00:01:58.000 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.
00:02:25.000 Here, she shows that she completely understands the gig.
00:02:30.000 Why do you feel so passionately about this?
00:02:33.000 Because I know there's an agenda.
00:02:34.000 What's the agenda?
00:02:35.000 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.
00:02:45.000 It's for surveillance.
00:02:46.000 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.
00:02:57.000 Do you see how people have actually understood the way the wind is blowing and what bureaucratic, democratic tyranny looks like?
00:03:06.000 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.
00:03:26.000 When you see something like that you realize people understand, people know what's what, people know what's going on.
00:03:32.000 Here's a member of parliament in the UK Uh, taking the oath, like all of them have to take.
00:03:38.000 I don't know if they take an oath in your country, do they?
00:03:39.000 When they become a congressperson or whatever.
00:03:42.000 But he refuses to pledge allegiance to the king.
00:03:44.000 It's gone viral in our country, but in a way, does it make a difference?
00:03:47.000 A king?
00:03:48.000 A president?
00:03:49.000 A box of chocolates?
00:03:50.000 A road cone?
00:03:51.000 Who cares, really, what it is that is the symbol of hierarchical power that sits astride your nation?
00:03:59.000 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?
00:04:08.000 How can you celebrate royalty in any way if you are against ideas of hierarchy as those movements evidently, plainly, and explicitly were?
00:04:17.000 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
00:04:41.000 Won't make no difference.
00:04:42.000 Won't make no difference, mate.
00:04:43.000 Won't make a blind bit of difference.
00:04:45.000 This is fantastic.
00:04:46.000 Ed Miliband has just got a job in the new government as kind of an environmental minister or some such description.
00:04:54.000 Now, I met him before and interviewed him when he himself was running for prime minister as the leader of the Labour Party.
00:04:59.000 They've just been elected in my country.
00:05:02.000 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?
00:05:27.000 Why are our cars not electric?
00:05:31.000 Government needs to step up.
00:05:33.000 I presume you've got one.
00:05:34.000 I haven't yet.
00:05:35.000 It's a work in progress.
00:05:36.000 Practice what you preach!
00:05:39.000 It's a work in progress.
00:05:41.000 We've actually got our way to buying one before lockdown.
00:05:44.000 It is going to happen, I promise you.
00:05:47.000 I have bought an electric bike, but it's on its way.
00:05:49.000 An electric bike?
00:05:50.000 That's unnecessary!
00:05:51.000 A bike, that's more electricity!
00:05:53.000 You should be able to ride a bike.
00:05:54.000 I've got an electric toothbrush.
00:05:55.000 They don't need to be electric!
00:05:56.000 I've got an electric bike!
00:05:57.000 I've got an electric dildo!
00:05:59.000 Ah!
00:06:00.000 Oh, please, please, tell me what to say!
00:06:02.000 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.
00:06:16.000 The game of being an environmental minister.
00:06:18.000 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.
00:06:27.000 Sorry, we've got to cancel Christmas.
00:06:29.000 Sorry, you're going to be doing funerals on YouTube.
00:06:31.000 Yet they had parties.
00:06:32.000 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.
00:06:41.000 It was a work event.
00:06:43.000 Yeah, that's what they all say, mate.
00:06:45.000 And what we can glean from that is what?
00:06:47.000 Hypocrisy.
00:06:48.000 Just the way that the institutions function.
00:06:50.000 The way that they are run.
00:06:51.000 They run on hypocrisy.
00:06:53.000 The way that Ed Miliband's bike runs on elections.
00:06:57.000 Electricity!
00:06:57.000 Unnecessarily, because you can run a bicycle using your tootsies.
00:07:01.000 Hey, so hang on, so you're you're pushing for everyone to have an electric car and you don't
00:07:07.000 have one yourself? I'm pushing to make it accessible. Look, I'm pushing to make it accessible.
00:07:11.000 So you want to lock everyone in their homes but you're having parties? Yeah,
00:07:15.000 well when we say that everyone should have an electric car we're...
00:07:18.000 We mean people that have currently got vehicles that aren't electric so we can further impecuniate you in the way that we do.
00:07:25.000 In countless, immeasurable, tiny and sometimes grand ways, invisibly baked into our system.
00:07:31.000 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.
00:07:39.000 Or we'll have some tax system that's Why are you not saying thank you?
00:07:42.000 you of your resources, one way or another we will enslave you and we will ask you to
00:07:48.000 thank us for that while we're doing it. Why are you not saying thank you? Are you not
00:07:52.000 enjoying the change?
00:07:53.000 It's even accessible to you.
00:07:54.000 But you haven't even experienced one yourself. I mean, you'd like to think if you're going
00:07:58.000 to tell us all to get an electric car and encourage the nation to embrace electric cars...
00:08:02.000 Look at the smile. Look at the smile because they know it's a game. And who are the people
00:08:06.000 that write the rules of the game?
00:08:08.000 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.
00:08:35.000 And Tony Blair See the finger!
00:08:38.000 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.
00:08:47.000 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.
00:09:02.000 Although no one's proven that those rumours are true, of course.
00:09:06.000 What I'm interested in really is how power functions.
00:09:09.000 What roles these people play.
00:09:11.000 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.
00:09:25.000 There is no objectivity.
00:09:27.000 There is no honor.
00:09:28.000 There is no valor.
00:09:29.000 There is naught but some invisible system, some vital urge towards more power and more wealth.
00:09:36.000 Mick Jagger has just found out the hard way that a lot of people in Canada haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.
00:09:42.000 Don't see Justin Trudeau as a heel-clicking Friendly, lovable scamp with a full head of hair just doing his best.
00:09:50.000 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.
00:10:07.000 The Canadian people, like the British woman you saw at the beginning of this piece, are not idiots.
00:10:14.000 People are not idiots.
00:10:16.000 They are awakened.
00:10:17.000 They don't need a managerial class of bureaucrats with slick hair and slick words governing them.
00:10:23.000 They need the state to get out of the way.
00:10:25.000 They need these bureaucracies to get out of the way.
00:10:28.000 They need, indeed, to have control over their own lives and their own communities.
00:10:32.000 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.
00:10:45.000 And God, are they working hard to oppress that and prevent that.
00:10:49.000 It seems that we can't get no.
00:10:52.000 Can we get any?
00:10:53.000 Even a little bit of satis- Oh, you do it in your mind.
00:10:57.000 I mean, we love your Mr. Trudeau.
00:10:59.000 That's a true goal, I mean his family has always been such big fans of that man.
00:11:06.000 Of course, cos Mick Jagger was once a figure that understood the culture, that exemplified
00:11:13.000 the culture, that demonstrated and catharsised shamanically somehow the culture.
00:11:18.000 He was it's sexy, anti-establishment, writhe and lithe and wriggling and leaping and snarling and singing and chanting manifestation.
00:11:27.000 He was the rejection of the decades prior.
00:11:30.000 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
00:11:40.000 out no more and presumably Mick Jagger from the kind of life that he lives
00:11:44.000 in this is no condemnation and Mick by God he's earned it is an
00:11:47.000 incredible man he don't know that the people of Canada almost without exception don't
00:11:52.000 like Justin Trudeau the same way the people of Britain don't like Kirstarma
00:11:56.000 The same way the real people of America don't like Joe Biden.
00:11:59.000 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!
00:12:11.000 By the way, congratulations on the Canadian soccer team.
00:12:15.000 They've changed the subject.
00:12:17.000 What about the Canadian soccer team?
00:12:19.000 We don't care about that either.
00:12:21.000 Ice hockey, fuck you.
00:12:22.000 If you're watching this on YouTube, sorry about the swearing, we'll be on there for a couple
00:12:26.000 more minutes and then we will be exclusively streaming on that sweet,
00:12:30.000 sweet, sweet stream of freedom that we call Rumble.
00:12:33.000 And I'll be talking to Bishop Robert Barron.
00:12:35.000 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.
00:12:45.000 If you're an Awakened Wonder, it's been available on the platform for over a week now.
00:12:50.000 And of course, now, my conversation with Candice Owens is up for Awakened Wonders.
00:12:55.000 She don't pull no punches.
00:12:57.000 It's all in now.
00:12:58.000 I mean, I don't even want to say it.
00:13:00.000 I'm not as confident as Candice Allington.
00:13:02.000 Also, I don't share all of her positions, but it is a good chat about Christianity.
00:13:06.000 But let me tell you some of the subjects that come up.
00:13:09.000 Holocausts, abortion, I mean, it's all in there!
00:13:12.000 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.
00:13:19.000 I respect her a lot and I like her a great deal and it's a pretty brilliant conversation.
00:13:23.000 As you know, next week we will be live at the RNC.
00:13:27.000 We got some fantastic interviews coming up.
00:13:30.000 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.
00:13:40.000 Marjorie Taylor Greene, even if they see me mispronounce their name, I'm sure they'll be pretty excited to get on.
00:13:46.000 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.
00:14:01.000 I'm doing a show on the Monday and on the Wednesday.
00:14:03.000 I don't know the dates, but there's a link in the description now.
00:14:05.000 Come and see me do stand-up comedy.
00:14:08.000 I've got a really good show cooking.
00:14:10.000 It's been a really weird year for me, and I've got a lot of things to say about it, baby.
00:14:15.000 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.
00:14:25.000 Because I'm aware of why people think it.
00:14:27.000 Because people recognise what Justin Trudeau is.
00:14:30.000 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.
00:14:40.000 The idea that Trudeau's parroting here is one you'll be familiar with.
00:14:44.000 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.
00:14:58.000 I mean, do a lot of old people have a bit too much house?
00:15:01.000 More house than they could handle?
00:15:03.000 I'd say so, Justin.
00:15:04.000 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.
00:15:26.000 They want to still live in their community's quality of life.
00:15:30.000 And there is no housing that they can afford even to downsize other than staying in their big house.
00:15:39.000 So where you're actually working to increase the amount of apartments or senior assisted living centers in...
00:15:51.000 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.
00:16:04.000 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.
00:16:13.000 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.
00:16:30.000 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.
00:16:42.000 We wouldn't put a dog through the Difficult, debilitating final years of decay, would we?
00:16:48.000 And so why would we put an old person through it?
00:16:50.000 Well, they're expanding that.
00:16:52.000 Canada prepares to expand its euthanasia law to include people with mental illness.
00:16:56.000 They're the last people... I don't know why I say they.
00:16:58.000 We are the last people you can ask whether or not you want to be dead.
00:17:01.000 Yes!
00:17:02.000 Of course I do!
00:17:03.000 Of course I do!
00:17:04.000 But hopefully that feeling might pass.
00:17:07.000 Some Canadians, including many of the country's doctors, question whether the country's assisted death program has moved too far, too fast.
00:17:13.000 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.
00:17:28.000 And the peculiar thing is I'm not convinced anymore that it's an entirely rationalist project.
00:17:32.000 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.
00:17:37.000 It's a pretty expansive program.
00:17:38.000 People with anorexia have been given the green light for suicide.
00:17:41.000 Oh my god, it's a very, very serious disease, anorexia, and in itself an indication that The whole society has gone off track.
00:17:51.000 The messaging.
00:17:53.000 Do you get anorexia in countries that have not been subject to our cultural models and messages?
00:18:02.000 Open question.
00:18:03.000 And a growing number of young Canadians think that poverty should also be included as eligible criteria.
00:18:09.000 Are you too poor?
00:18:10.000 Yes, I am poor.
00:18:13.000 Good.
00:18:13.000 Would you be better off dead?
00:18:15.000 We'd prefer it if you were a bit deader.
00:18:17.000 Hearing loss has also been included.
00:18:20.000 You've become eligible for euthanasia.
00:18:20.000 Good news!
00:18:23.000 Would I like a trip to Europe and Asia?
00:18:25.000 Yes, that's right.
00:18:26.000 If you'd like to come this way, he's agreed to it.
00:18:29.000 I can't wait to go!
00:18:31.000 Oh, well, it's free will.
00:18:33.000 The individual is the most sacred thing available.
00:18:35.000 Nighty-nighty!
00:18:37.000 There you go, Canada.
00:18:38.000 That's what progress and liberalism look like.
00:18:40.000 Can you get no satisfaction?
00:18:42.000 That's a double negative, baby.
00:18:44.000 And Canada is so negative, it deserves a double.
00:18:48.000 Hearing loss has been included.
00:18:49.000 Medical bureaucracies have been accused of pushing patients to agree to kill themselves.
00:18:53.000 Have you ever needed God more?
00:18:54.000 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.
00:19:00.000 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.
00:19:15.000 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.
00:19:24.000 Click the link in the description.
00:19:25.000 Become an Awakened Wonder.
00:19:27.000 We've got some fantastic items and join us next week at the RNC.
00:19:30.000 Come see me in Milwaukee.
00:19:31.000 There's a link for that in there as well.
00:19:33.000 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.
00:19:44.000 This dirty little thing's not gonna let us get in contact with Christ.
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00:19:50.000 I'll be back after this with Bishop Robert Barron.
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00:21:14.000 Today I'm joined by his excellency Bishop Robert Barron, the Bishop of the Diocese of Winona,
00:21:26.000 Rochester, Minnesota and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
00:21:31.000 He's the host of Catholicism, a groundbreaking, award-winning documentary about the Catholic faith, which aired on PBS.
00:21:36.000 The Pivotal Players won an Emmy Award.
00:21:37.000 Bishop Barron is a number one Amazon best-selling author and has published numerous books, essays, and articles on theology and the spiritual life.
00:21:43.000 His most recent book, This Is My Body, has sold over 1 million printed copies.
00:21:49.000 Bishop Barron, thank you very much Thank you for joining us today.
00:21:52.000 Russell, it's my pleasure.
00:21:53.000 Thanks for having me on.
00:21:55.000 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?
00:22:41.000 Ought a Christian be trying to fit in, or ought a Christian be challenging?
00:22:46.000 Well, it depends on what you mean, I suppose.
00:22:47.000 You know, we love God, and therefore we love whatever God loves.
00:22:51.000 And God loves the material world, because he made it.
00:22:53.000 So, you know, God so loved the world, he sent his only Son.
00:22:57.000 In that sense, sure, we should love the world around us.
00:23:01.000 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.
00:23:13.000 And in that measure, we're meant to cause trouble.
00:23:17.000 The famous saying about when Paul preached, there were riots.
00:23:20.000 Well, that's natural, because Paul was preaching a pretty radical message and was declaring, at least implicitly, a new king.
00:23:27.000 So in that sense, yeah, we're meant to be permanently subversive.
00:23:30.000 But at the same time, we love what God loves, so we're not in sort of antagonism against the world.
00:23:37.000 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?
00:23:44.000 If you're just in a stance of constant, you know, pugnacious opposition to the culture, you can't evangelize it.
00:23:49.000 But we're meant to be deeply challenging to it at the same time.
00:23:53.000 That's the peculiar space a Christian ought to live in.
00:23:57.000 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
00:24:34.000 There's a general election in our country, the UK, in the next couple of days.
00:24:39.000 There is obviously an election in your country in November.
00:24:43.000 And I have the sense that we are tacitly invited to sublimate our religious faith to the goals of our culture.
00:24:53.000 Or worse yet, Utilize our spiritual faith to make us more effective in the culture.
00:25:00.000 I've noticed this in a variety of spiritual spaces.
00:25:04.000 Practice this and you will become a better accountant or actor or lover or whatever.
00:25:10.000 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.
00:25:29.000 And I wonder what your view is in this position of significant leadership you find yourself?
00:25:36.000 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
00:26:08.000 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.
00:26:16.000 So, that's a beautiful path, you know.
00:26:18.000 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.
00:26:30.000 It's meant to liberate you for The making of the kingdom of God, you know?
00:26:35.000 So Jesus sends his disciples out.
00:26:38.000 Someone like Paul is a prime example.
00:26:40.000 I mean, Paul had his own kind of addictions.
00:26:42.000 You know, Paul was caught up in his own tradition, but in a kind of violent, aggressive way.
00:26:49.000 And when he was pulled out of that by the risen Christ, it then freed him to do his work in the world.
00:26:56.000 So, it's the both-and, you know.
00:26:59.000 But the path through moral and spiritual crisis, that's a great one in many ways, and walked by lots of the saints.
00:27:07.000 Look at Augustine.
00:27:08.000 You know, Augustine, a spiritual searcher for all those years.
00:27:11.000 He's a maniche for nine years.
00:27:13.000 I mean, he's kind of a fierce opponent of Catholicism for nine years.
00:27:17.000 And then has a crisis.
00:27:19.000 When you look in the confessions, and that scene where he's literally pulling at his hair, you know, he's in such crisis.
00:27:26.000 But then he's liberated.
00:27:28.000 Once he falls in love with God, he realizes, now I love God, and then love everything else for the sake of God.
00:27:35.000 Now you're ready.
00:27:36.000 See, now you're ready to be really engaged in the world properly.
00:27:39.000 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.
00:27:52.000 I feel greatly relieved, not only by that offering, but by the fact that from that perspective I am indiscriminate.
00:28:02.000 Just one of the mass of human beings saved by the cross and by the blood of Christ.
00:28:11.000 And for me it seems so powerful as well as humbling.
00:28:16.000 I recognize the necessity of humility before honor and as you have described, Your Excellency, any honor belongs to Him.
00:28:23.000 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.
00:28:35.000 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.
00:28:53.000 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.
00:29:02.000 I feel that there's been an incredible attempt to reframe religion as a sort of hocus-pocus superstition.
00:29:08.000 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
00:29:38.000 Well, I think the basic dynamics remain the same.
00:29:40.000 They've always been the same.
00:29:41.000 or if it's business as usual for men of faith and institutions of faith?
00:29:46.000 Well, I think the basic dynamics remain the same.
00:29:50.000 They've always been the same of, we're all sinners.
00:29:53.000 And so, you know, some might express it in a very dramatic way,
00:29:57.000 and then they go through a real crisis.
00:30:00.000 But all of us are sinners, which means our desire gets misguided.
00:30:04.000 And once the desire for God is misguided onto anything other than God, it becomes ipso facto addictive.
00:30:11.000 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.
00:30:20.000 It can't satisfy that desire.
00:30:22.000 So I go back.
00:30:23.000 I go back again and again and again.
00:30:25.000 That's the woman at the well, right?
00:30:27.000 She goes back every day to that well, and the well is sex, pleasure, power, money, whatever it is.
00:30:33.000 And Jesus says, and you get thirsty again, don't you?
00:30:36.000 I want to give you a different kind of water, welling up to eternal life.
00:30:40.000 So, that's the redirecting of desire onto its proper object.
00:30:44.000 I think that's the permanent crisis of humanity.
00:30:47.000 That's where we've all been from the beginning.
00:30:49.000 We're all to different degrees caught in that problem.
00:30:52.000 Religion is meant to redirect that deepest desire for God onto its proper object.
00:30:59.000 Look at Jesus crucified now, because you mentioned saved by the cross.
00:31:03.000 It's got so many dimensions, but one of them is he's stripped on the cross of all possible addiction.
00:31:09.000 You know, if wealth, pleasure, power, honor are the big things, well, he has none of that on the cross.
00:31:15.000 He's stripped of all of it.
00:31:16.000 There's no wealth at all.
00:31:17.000 He's having no pleasure, the opposite of it.
00:31:19.000 He has no power.
00:31:20.000 He's nailed to a cross.
00:31:22.000 He has no honor.
00:31:22.000 They're spitting at him as they kill him.
00:31:25.000 So, it's the stripping away of all possible addictive desire.
00:31:30.000 But what does he desire?
00:31:31.000 The will of his father.
00:31:33.000 And so, that's why Aquinas can say, looking at that cross, you're looking at a happy man.
00:31:39.000 You're looking at a liberated man.
00:31:41.000 You're looking at someone that's the path.
00:31:46.000 Through identification with Christ crucified, we find that same place of liberation.
00:31:50.000 You know, that's Paul saying, you know, it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
00:31:57.000 I've been crucified with Christ.
00:32:00.000 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.
00:32:10.000 That's at least one way to think about how the cross of Jesus saves us.
00:32:14.000 That dynamic, as far as I'm concerned, is a permanent dynamic of human life, sin, grace, addiction, and redemption.
00:32:22.000 That dynamic applies to all of us.
00:32:25.000 Yes, and I feel that that message, the opponent, the enemy, as C.S.
00:32:32.000 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
00:33:03.000 can offer. That too, being post chemical dependency and addiction, I feel like I,
00:33:10.000 personally at least, know something of attachment. I know something of this exploration.
00:33:18.000 And it's yet still difficult not to respond to the signifiers of pleasure.
00:33:27.000 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.
00:33:42.000 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.
00:34:01.000 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.
00:34:17.000 But even under this, I'm noticing a kind of aspiritual, amoral, nihilistic tendency that Nature is not absolute.
00:34:28.000 God is not absolute.
00:34:30.000 All taxonomies melt in a way.
00:34:32.000 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?
00:34:55.000 Or are there indeed external powers that magnetise us towards negativity?
00:35:02.000 Yeah, there are.
00:35:03.000 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.
00:35:12.000 So we call them angels.
00:35:14.000 And the trouble is, the word angel, you know, in English has that sense of little cherubic babies and all that.
00:35:19.000 An angel is a kind of fearsome reality.
00:35:23.000 You know, Aquinas would say each individual angel is its own species.
00:35:28.000 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.
00:35:39.000 So, my point is, they're very powerful realities.
00:35:43.000 Now, some angels, some of us have fallen, some angels have fallen, and therefore they pose a real danger, a spiritual danger.
00:35:52.000 Now, are they operative through secondary causes?
00:35:56.000 Of course.
00:35:57.000 They're operative in human hearts and human minds.
00:35:59.000 They're operative in human institutions.
00:36:01.000 They're operative in certain movements and trends within culture and all of that.
00:36:06.000 So, no, the Church has always been very attentive to the presence of the dark powers.
00:36:11.000 And what are they trying to do is exactly what we were talking about.
00:36:13.000 They're always trying to get our desire away from its proper object onto improper objects and thereby create chaos and havoc.
00:36:23.000 I always think of the two names of the devil in the New Testament.
00:36:27.000 Diabolos has the sense of the scatterer, right?
00:36:30.000 Diabolos means to scatter, to cast apart.
00:36:33.000 There's the mark of the devil, the demonic.
00:36:35.000 It's always a scattering power, what divides us.
00:36:37.000 But the second name of the devil is Hosatanas.
00:36:41.000 Satan, right?
00:36:41.000 Which means the accuser.
00:36:43.000 The accuser.
00:36:44.000 And that's deep.
00:36:45.000 Go back to the book of Job and you'll find it, you know.
00:36:48.000 And then in the book of Revelation, the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who night and day accuse them before God.
00:36:53.000 So, the accusing power, there's the sign of the demonic too.
00:36:59.000 The Church has got to be hyper-aware of these realities, and our job is to fight them.
00:37:04.000 I mean, there is a spiritual warfare.
00:37:06.000 Paul talks about that.
00:37:08.000 You know, we do battle not with flesh and blood, but powers and principalities.
00:37:12.000 So, that's part of the game.
00:37:13.000 Now, the powers, again, reveal themselves through flesh and blood, for sure.
00:37:18.000 And the Church is there to be a counter sign and to enter into the struggle, the battle.
00:37:24.000 If we just see ourselves as kind of attending harmlessly to people's interiority, we're missing the game.
00:37:30.000 I mean, it's a great cosmic struggle that we're part of.
00:37:34.000 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.
00:38:00.000 While acknowledging that that's truly what's happening.
00:38:03.000 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.
00:38:21.000 Doubt coming too from the same point of origin.
00:38:26.000 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.
00:38:35.000 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.
00:38:54.000 And yet, if we don't acknowledge the theological truths that are compounded within that, we end up just offering, you know, wellness advice.
00:39:06.000 Right.
00:39:07.000 Well, you know, that's a strategic question or a prudence question.
00:39:10.000 When you're an evangelist, you start off from where people are.
00:39:13.000 So, where are you?
00:39:14.000 And how can I enter into that space now with religious truth?
00:39:17.000 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.
00:39:26.000 I might start with some of the classical arguments and so on.
00:39:30.000 So, it depends on the person.
00:39:31.000 You've got to be very Adept and sort of canny when you're doing evangelization.
00:39:36.000 And that's both personally and then at the cultural level.
00:39:39.000 So you have different audiences, different needs.
00:39:42.000 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.
00:39:56.000 And religion really offers the water welling up to eternal life.
00:40:00.000 It offers salvation from that.
00:40:02.000 I mean, salvation just means health, Let me offer you health because you're in a very unhealthy situation.
00:40:09.000 So that's a good way to start with people who are, you know, wrestling with that.
00:40:14.000 So it depends on your audience, I suppose.
00:40:16.000 You don't immediately go to the maybe strangest corners of the religion.
00:40:22.000 Even though, you know, it really isn't that strange when you think about it.
00:40:26.000 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?
00:40:36.000 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?
00:40:46.000 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.
00:40:53.000 To me that's a very reasonable claim to make.
00:40:56.000 You know, look, mathematics is invisible.
00:41:00.000 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.
00:41:08.000 You're dealing with realities mathematical abstractions, but aren't part of the ordinary world that the sensorium takes in.
00:41:16.000 They're part of a higher invisible world.
00:41:18.000 So we deal with the invisible world all the time, actually.
00:41:21.000 The church talks about it, you know, in a somewhat denser way.
00:41:25.000 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.
00:41:34.000 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.
00:41:47.000 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.
00:42:18.000 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?
00:42:48.000 It's not the right of any external or individual, particularly not a male or an institution to make that choice.
00:42:55.000 Or when it comes to sexuality, that these are kind of forms of homogeneity and forms of tyranny.
00:43:02.000 How do we navigate those choices when the culture appears to have won those arguments?
00:43:09.000 Well, it comes down to the intuition of value.
00:43:12.000 I go back here to Dietrich von Hildebrand, who was a great Catholic philosopher of the 20th century.
00:43:17.000 There are epistemic values, so truths that the mind takes in.
00:43:21.000 There are aesthetic values.
00:43:22.000 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.
00:43:29.000 I mean, it It imposes itself on you.
00:43:33.000 There's an objectivity to value.
00:43:36.000 Or if you're shown a mathematical formula, you don't say, well, you know, in my opinion, that doesn't really make sense.
00:43:40.000 No, it imposes itself on you.
00:43:43.000 Well, the same is true of moral values.
00:43:46.000 Think of like Immanuel Levinas, the great Jewish philosopher, 20th century, post-Holocaust.
00:43:51.000 A lot of his family died in the Shoah.
00:43:53.000 And, you know, to look at the Holocaust and say, you know, in my opinion, that just wasn't the right thing to do.
00:44:00.000 I mean, how absurd that sounds, right?
00:44:02.000 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.
00:44:14.000 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.
00:44:21.000 Epistemically, aesthetically, morally, there are values that assert themselves.
00:44:27.000 And in fact, life takes on meaning in relation to those values.
00:44:33.000 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.
00:44:45.000 It's all a matter of my little shifting private opinion.
00:44:48.000 No, the best things in life are when an objective value presents itself to you and you surrender to it.
00:44:56.000 So, I put moral values in that framework.
00:44:59.000 So, not the legalistic, you know, finger-wagging church and hung up on sex.
00:45:04.000 It's the church recognizing certain values as Objective and absolute and not a matter of my private opinion.
00:45:13.000 So the taking of the life of an innocent child in the womb, I would look at it in terms of loving us.
00:45:20.000 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.
00:45:31.000 So that's what the church is recognizing.
00:45:33.000 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
00:45:41.000 to the values, the values, they're objective. And it's what makes life wonderful when
00:45:48.000 you can accept those values in their objectivity.
00:45:51.000 Do you feel that the part of what rationalism has inhered is a sense through relativism
00:46:01.000 that everything is kind of tepid and difficult to understand, that there are no moral absolutes?
00:46:09.000 There is nothing upon which we can hold with certainty.
00:46:13.000 There is nowhere where you can throw yourself and receive grace.
00:46:17.000 And do you feel that that is somehow deliberate?
00:46:20.000 And if indeed there are dark powers in, you know, the principality, how would that not be one of the results?
00:46:28.000 Yes.
00:46:29.000 Let me put it in terms of the ultimate question of God's existence.
00:46:33.000 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.
00:46:43.000 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.
00:46:58.000 Well, that's enormously attractive to a compromised and fallen soul.
00:47:03.000 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.
00:47:15.000 But it's overwhelming if you, you know, hey, I don't want that.
00:47:18.000 That's making way too much of a demand on me.
00:47:21.000 So I'm going to pretend all of that stuff is just private opinion, culturally conditioned.
00:47:27.000 There's nothing objective to it.
00:47:28.000 It makes my life a lot easier and duller, duller.
00:47:33.000 And I think that's, we're looking at a lot of young people.
00:47:36.000 The boredom among young people.
00:47:39.000 That's what a purely materialistic and relativistic worldview will generate.
00:47:45.000 See, to me, religion, Russell, is an invitation to adventure.
00:47:50.000 And I know, look, I'm wearing this drab black suit and all that, and there's different reasons why we do that.
00:47:54.000 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.
00:48:03.000 On the contrary, religion is meant to open you to adventure.
00:48:07.000 It's materialism and relativism that is the door to banality and tepidity, you know, what makes life fun and adventurous.
00:48:17.000 Irenaeus, you know, whose feast day we had a couple days ago, the glory of God as a human being fully alive.
00:48:17.000 St.
00:48:23.000 That's the game.
00:48:24.000 That's what we want, is to have people fully alive.
00:48:27.000 That happens through a surrender to objective value.
00:48:30.000 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.
00:48:42.000 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.
00:48:56.000 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.
00:49:06.000 So, the church is, again, St.
00:49:09.000 Paul again, it's this grabbing-by-the-shoulders quality, like, wake up, look, open your eyes.
00:49:15.000 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.
00:49:33.000 That's how I read the church and its role in the culture.
00:49:38.000 Hey, are you in Milwaukee?
00:49:39.000 No, I ain't in Milwaukee!
00:49:41.000 Come Milwaukee then on Monday the 15th of July, Julius Caesar.
00:49:45.000 And on Wednesday the 17th of July, Odin's day, the god Odin.
00:49:49.000 Monday, moon day.
00:49:50.000 I will be performing in your town, Milwaukee.
00:49:53.000 I'm there for the Republican Convention.
00:49:55.000 I'm doing stand-up comedy.
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00:51:17.000 Okay, back to the content.
00:51:20.000 Yeah, I want to see the world like a saint.
00:51:22.000 I want to experience what they experience.
00:51:24.000 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.
00:51:40.000 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.
00:52:02.000 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.
00:52:09.000 No, it's turn to God and now you'll appreciate the world appropriately.
00:52:15.000 Now, even wealth, pleasure, honor, power find their place.
00:52:20.000 So, again, Augustine, love God and then love everything else for the sake of God.
00:52:26.000 So, if you have wealth, great, now you know what to do with it.
00:52:30.000 You're experiencing pleasure?
00:52:31.000 Now you know how to integrate that into your life.
00:52:34.000 You've got power?
00:52:35.000 Terrific!
00:52:36.000 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.
00:52:36.000 Use it!
00:52:44.000 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.
00:52:55.000 Even the same with honor.
00:52:57.000 You're an honored person.
00:52:58.000 Fine!
00:52:58.000 Aquinas says honor is the flag of virtue.
00:53:01.000 Terrific!
00:53:02.000 So now if you love God and you're a virtuous person and you're being flagged for that, great!
00:53:07.000 You know how to use it.
00:53:08.000 Again, Chesterton said, as long as he thought the world had to make him happy, he hated the world.
00:53:16.000 But once he knew the world isn't meant to make you happy, Then he loved the world.
00:53:21.000 And think of Chesterton, you know, life and laughter and joy and drinking and dancing.
00:53:26.000 But he became that Chesterton because he said, the world is not going to make me happy.
00:53:32.000 Once he realized that, then it made him happy.
00:53:35.000 That's the razor's edge that we're on in the spiritual life.
00:53:38.000 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.
00:54:14.000 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.
00:54:24.000 The goal of the Christian life is to fall in love with Jesus, is to become his friend.
00:54:29.000 The more you cultivate friendship with the Lord, who is Divinity and humanity having met.
00:54:34.000 That's what Jesus means.
00:54:36.000 Not just another guru or a teacher, but in him divinity and humanity have met.
00:54:41.000 Well, that's what salvation looks like.
00:54:44.000 That's what healing looks like.
00:54:46.000 That's what freedom from addiction looks like, right?
00:54:48.000 So the more you become friends with him, the more you want to conform your life to his.
00:54:53.000 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.
00:55:05.000 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.
00:55:24.000 How do you do it better?
00:55:25.000 Show me.
00:55:26.000 What am I doing wrong?
00:55:27.000 And I don't resent that.
00:55:30.000 I want it.
00:55:31.000 Tell me more so that I can make this crazy swing better.
00:55:35.000 So once you fall in love with the Lord, you feel that way about the spiritual life.
00:55:39.000 Give me more rules.
00:55:41.000 I want more rules, not even fewer rules.
00:55:44.000 I want more liberation.
00:55:46.000 And it's going to come if you keep giving me newer ways to conform to Christ.
00:55:52.000 And then again, Paul, it's all the paradox.
00:55:54.000 That's my liberty.
00:55:55.000 It's for freedom that Christ has set you free, Paul says, right?
00:55:59.000 At the same time, Paul says, I am the slave of Christ Jesus.
00:56:04.000 Now, on modern terms, that doesn't make a lick of sense.
00:56:07.000 You can't be anybody's slave and then be free.
00:56:10.000 Paul makes perfect sense.
00:56:11.000 I'm the slave of Christ Jesus, and it's for freedom.
00:56:15.000 Finally, I'm free from my addictions, and my sin, and my chains, and my all.
00:56:19.000 I'm free from that.
00:56:20.000 And it's conformity to Christ that has set me free.
00:56:24.000 That's the name of the game.
00:56:26.000 Yes, I understand that all energy requires polarity, and that the self will somehow glom onto some form of deity, or idol, or God.
00:56:37.000 Indeed, as has been said many times, it's not whether or not we worship, it's just what we worship.
00:56:45.000 I wonder, to your point about the humanity of Christ, where do you find Christ that is most human?
00:56:51.000 Is it the agony in the garden?
00:56:54.000 Is it in his relationships with other people, the apostles or Mary?
00:57:01.000 Where is it that you feel that Christ is at his most human?
00:57:04.000 How do you reconcile Christ's divineness with his real fear?
00:57:10.000 How are we to understand that, Bishop?
00:57:15.000 Well, you have to take a step back, I think, to our understanding of God.
00:57:22.000 God is not a being.
00:57:23.000 So, that's something Thomas Aquinas says very clearly.
00:57:26.000 Thomas says that God is not in the genus of being.
00:57:28.000 It's a very extraordinary thing to say.
00:57:30.000 So, you and I are in the genus of humanity.
00:57:32.000 We belong to this type of being, right?
00:57:35.000 The camera in front of me is another type of genus.
00:57:38.000 And you think, well, wouldn't the highest genus of all be the genus of being?
00:57:43.000 Whether it's the planet Jupiter, or you, or God, or a dog, wouldn't they all be under the heading of being?
00:57:50.000 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.
00:57:59.000 God is not one reality among many.
00:58:03.000 Which means God is not competing with reality for space, right?
00:58:08.000 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?
00:58:16.000 There's a competitiveness about finite things.
00:58:19.000 God is not a finite thing, not the biggest thing around, not the supreme being.
00:58:26.000 God is to be itself.
00:58:28.000 This is Thomas Aquinas.
00:58:30.000 Now, the upshot of that is God does not compete with us.
00:58:35.000 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?
00:58:45.000 And there's the burning bush in the Old Testament, he's making that point.
00:58:48.000 That when God comes close, the bush is not consumed, right?
00:58:53.000 It's on fire, it's beautiful, it's radiant, but not consumed.
00:58:58.000 That's what you look like when God comes close to you, right?
00:59:02.000 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.
00:59:17.000 So the Council of Chalcedon says that we have two natures coming together without mixing, mingling, or confusion.
00:59:23.000 It's a very interesting point.
00:59:25.000 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.
00:59:35.000 There's none of that, see, in the Incarnation.
00:59:38.000 God becomes a creature without destroying the creature.
00:59:44.000 And without destroying himself.
00:59:46.000 God doesn't turn into a creature and stop being God, if that makes sense.
00:59:50.000 But they come together non-competitively.
00:59:54.000 Well, see, that's the heart of the Christian spiritual life.
00:59:58.000 is the closer God gets to us, the more alive we are.
01:00:02.000 And so, to your question, the humanity and divinity of Jesus are always both on display all the time.
01:00:11.000 So you say, well, he's most human on the cross.
01:00:13.000 No, he is, but he's also most divine on the cross.
01:00:17.000 Or he's most divine when he's performing a miracle.
01:00:21.000 Yeah, he's also most human when he's performing a miracle.
01:00:25.000 It's both and at the same time.
01:00:27.000 And to get that, see, incarnational intuition, is to get all of Christian spirituality.
01:00:34.000 But watch, across the board, people getting it wrong.
01:00:38.000 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.
01:00:46.000 No, no, no.
01:00:47.000 No, no.
01:00:48.000 He's fully divine, fully human, all the time, without competition.
01:00:52.000 And now, next step, and we're meant to become Christified.
01:00:57.000 It's no longer I live, but Christ who lives in me.
01:00:59.000 So now, I don't become Jesus in the full sense, but by adoption, I become a son of God, too, right?
01:01:07.000 That's Christian spirituality.
01:01:09.000 It's not about just being a nice guy.
01:01:11.000 It's about being deified.
01:01:13.000 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.
01:01:20.000 It's clear.
01:01:21.000 At the beginning you said that it's not beingness but to be itself.
01:01:24.000 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.
01:01:37.000 be a necessary component because it's inviting you to transgress against the
01:01:42.000 limitations of your own consciousness and I feel that when we buttress against
01:01:47.000 numerous mysteries when wrestling with the physical universe we find down there
01:01:53.000 in the mysteries of quantum physics comparable, comparable paradoxes.
01:02:00.000 How can this be and not be at the same time?
01:02:03.000 Yes and both but neither.
01:02:05.000 Also through the slit, round the slit.
01:02:10.000 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.
01:02:25.000 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.
01:02:53.000 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.
01:03:08.000 I wonder if you can help us to unpack and understand that.
01:03:14.000 Yeah, and there are two things about what you said, and they both have to be maintained at the same time.
01:03:18.000 Namely, on the one hand, the Bible is not a book, it's a library.
01:03:22.000 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.
01:03:34.000 You can't take it literally, etc.
01:03:36.000 And I always say, look, it's like walking to a library and saying, do you take the library literally?
01:03:41.000 Well, it just depends.
01:03:43.000 What section are you in?
01:03:44.000 Because the Bible, ta biblia is plural in Greek, it means the books.
01:03:48.000 So we say the scriptures.
01:03:50.000 That's more accurate, the scriptures.
01:03:52.000 It's a collection of texts written at different times by different authors to different audiences to different purposes and using wildly different genres.
01:04:01.000 Right?
01:04:02.000 So, sometimes you have things that are closer to our sense of history.
01:04:06.000 There's really nothing like our sense of history in the Bible.
01:04:09.000 It couldn't be.
01:04:09.000 It was long before our sense of history developed.
01:04:13.000 But there are things that are closer to it, you know, say parts of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, etc.
01:04:18.000 You've got things that are more like saga or legend or myth in the Bible, for sure.
01:04:23.000 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.
01:04:34.000 And so, the Catholic Church would teach, as you approach the Bible, you've got to be hyper-careful about genre.
01:04:42.000 What kind of text are you dealing with here, you know?
01:04:46.000 So, on the one hand, I want to insist upon that.
01:04:48.000 The Bible's not like just one book that can be univocally interpreted.
01:04:53.000 It's a collection of books, and you've got to be really adept at making adjustments as you read it.
01:04:59.000 But then, your second point is equally valid.
01:05:02.000 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.
01:05:21.000 I'll state it simply.
01:05:23.000 The Old Testament is all about God's great rescue operation.
01:05:27.000 So, God's good creation, but through sin, things have gotten messed up.
01:05:32.000 But God never leaves his creation.
01:05:35.000 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.
01:05:44.000 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?
01:05:56.000 And we also, if you read the Old Testament honestly, what do you find?
01:06:00.000 It by fits and starts, one step forward, two steps backward.
01:06:04.000 You know, the temple gets destroyed, and it's not honored properly, and the Torah is usually disobeyed, and the prophets, they stone them.
01:06:11.000 You know what I'm saying?
01:06:12.000 And so God's attempts are thwarted again and again.
01:06:16.000 But then, in the midst of that great narrative, what do you begin to hear?
01:06:20.000 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.
01:06:37.000 So, now go over to Ezekiel and people like that.
01:06:39.000 I mean, I myself will come and shepherd my people by means of this Davidic king.
01:06:45.000 What do you find in the New Testament?
01:06:48.000 Precisely that.
01:06:50.000 What was longed for in the midst of this great narrative, they claimed, came.
01:06:58.000 Jesus is the Davidic King, the Son of David, but who also, strangely, is the God of Israel himself, in person, shepherding his people.
01:07:08.000 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?
01:07:17.000 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.
01:07:35.000 There it is.
01:07:36.000 There it is.
01:07:36.000 That's the narrative high point of the biblical revelation.
01:07:40.000 And so we would read the whole Bible in light of that culmination.
01:07:46.000 Why is there so much emphasis upon the failings and flaws of the Pharisees and Sadducees?
01:07:57.000 Why are they more consistently condemned all the while Sinners embraced.
01:08:03.000 I recognize, of course, it's those that have sinned that most require redemption.
01:08:09.000 Why such continued critiques and even attacks on those that appear like the elder son to have Misunderstood the function and purpose of morality.
01:08:23.000 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.
01:08:38.000 Why this focus on institutional power?
01:08:43.000 Well, and we shouldn't be too hard on the Pharisees and the scribes.
01:08:46.000 One of the things that we tend to miss, we automatically think, oh, Pharisee, bad guy, right?
01:08:52.000 But on the contrary, in the New Testament context, they would have seen, oh, no, the Pharisees are good guys.
01:08:56.000 The Pharisees are the ones who are trying to lead this life in a very noble and focused manner.
01:09:04.000 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.
01:09:22.000 Religion itself becomes a means of aggression, a means of increasing selfishness.
01:09:28.000 And so that's a classic problem, reading Paul in terms of law and grace and so on.
01:09:34.000 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.
01:09:42.000 You know, the old Roman adage, corruptio optimia pessima, you know, when the best goes bad, that's the worst.
01:09:49.000 And I think we're meant to see that in the Pharisees.
01:09:51.000 That's meant to be the best, to live the Torah and to live the focused life of a good Israelite.
01:09:59.000 But when that becomes a means of aggression and selfishness, it really stinks.
01:10:03.000 The corruption of the best is the worst.
01:10:06.000 But I wouldn't want to be too tough on them and say that that's the worst kind of sin.
01:10:11.000 It's one of the many forms of dysfunction that's being addressed in the New Testament.
01:10:17.000 Is it John who Christ loved that wrote Revelations?
01:10:22.000 What, I forgive the scope of this question, how should we utilize what is being described there?
01:10:35.000 Yeah, your first question, it's a famous debate among Bible scholars.
01:10:39.000 I would say this, it's certainly someone associated with the Johannine community wrote it.
01:10:43.000 Was it the same person that wrote the Gospel, that wrote the letters of John?
01:10:47.000 Again, revisit the Bible scholars to get all kinds of answers to that.
01:10:50.000 But I think there's a commonality within the Johannine literature, meaning the Gospel, the Johannine letters, and Revelation.
01:10:57.000 So I'll leave it there.
01:10:58.000 I think that's a fair enough thing to say.
01:11:01.000 But how do you read that book?
01:11:03.000 It's not really about the end of the space-time continuum.
01:11:07.000 I think what it's about is the ending of the old world of sin and the breakthrough of this new world.
01:11:16.000 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.
01:11:25.000 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.
01:11:33.000 They were so overwhelmed by the resurrection that they were convinced, and they were right, the old world is passing away.
01:11:42.000 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.
01:11:51.000 So that world, and it's exemplified for them by ancient Rome.
01:11:55.000 That's why all these references to Rome and the 666 which is Nero, etc., etc.
01:12:01.000 It's the Roman power structure predicated upon violence and hatred and domination.
01:12:06.000 That world is passing away.
01:12:11.000 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.
01:12:20.000 So, that world is collapsing, and what's happening is a new world is being born.
01:12:26.000 Now the language of, at the culmination of Revelation, where the heavenly Jerusalem comes down.
01:12:31.000 What is that but the arrival of the new world?
01:12:36.000 The city of Jerusalem in that beautiful vision that has no temple in it.
01:12:41.000 You say, well, that's kind of weird, isn't it?
01:12:42.000 Because the temple was the reason everybody went to Jerusalem.
01:12:45.000 Why would in the final Jerusalem there be no temple?
01:12:49.000 And the answer is, because the whole city's become a temple.
01:12:52.000 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.
01:13:02.000 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?
01:13:14.000 They saw the old world predicated upon bad praise.
01:13:18.000 Everything we've been talking about, right?
01:13:19.000 All the addictive forms of life and all that is being swept away and a new world's coming.
01:13:27.000 The heavenly Jerusalem, the end of time in God's good providence when that happens.
01:13:33.000 But in the meantime, that's why we still read that book, in the meantime, that's the life of the Church.
01:13:39.000 It's meant to be an in-your-face to the powers of the world.
01:13:42.000 It's meant to exemplify in its own life what the new world looks like.
01:13:46.000 It's meant to be a place where the Beatitudes are lived.
01:13:49.000 So, the book of Revelation is now, all right, here's your program.
01:13:53.000 You're the vehicle by which God wants to bring this new world into existence.
01:13:59.000 That's very beautiful.
01:14:02.000 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?
01:14:16.000 I was struck by his gentle rendering and the invitation to make our body a dwelling place for him.
01:14:25.000 And also that people, we People don't know.
01:14:29.000 We don't know.
01:14:30.000 We don't know that that's what we're supposed to be doing here.
01:14:34.000 It also feels like an invitation to revisit the cone-like quality of the to-be-ness of all creation.
01:14:45.000 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.
01:14:58.000 I find it very difficult to continually maintain connection to what seems like the ...periphery of my own being.
01:15:06.000 I continually fall back into the familiar self.
01:15:11.000 I fall back into the forms of idolatry and clinging onto things that cannot withstand my yearning.
01:15:19.000 We all do.
01:15:20.000 Right.
01:15:21.000 We all do.
01:15:21.000 We all do.
01:15:22.000 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.
01:15:32.000 Love is not a feeling, it's not an emotion, not a passing sentiment.
01:15:37.000 To love means to will the good of the other.
01:15:40.000 That's Thomas Aquinas, and the roots of that are right back in the Bible.
01:15:44.000 To love is to will the good of the other.
01:15:47.000 But love therefore breaks me out of the black hole tendency.
01:15:50.000 I want to draw all of reality into myself.
01:15:53.000 That's the addict, that's the sinner, that's what goes wrong.
01:15:59.000 I see the whole world in terms of its relation to me.
01:16:02.000 I suck everything into my own ego.
01:16:05.000 Love is the opposite energy.
01:16:08.000 I'm not willing my good, I'm willing your good.
01:16:12.000 And I'm not willing you're good so that you might be good to me.
01:16:15.000 That's more, that's the black hole just getting into the back door.
01:16:19.000 It's I'm willing you're good.
01:16:21.000 It's meant to break free of the pull of the black hole gravity.
01:16:27.000 That's the answer.
01:16:28.000 And that's why Jesus says, this is how they'll know you're my disciples, if you love one another.
01:16:34.000 Right.
01:16:34.000 That's what it's all about.
01:16:37.000 That's what the temple and right worship is all about.
01:16:39.000 See, worship means I love God.
01:16:42.000 I'm going to break free of my own ego, and I'm going to let the supreme objective value of God overwhelm me.
01:16:50.000 And then I fall in love with that value.
01:16:53.000 And then I love everything that God loves, right?
01:16:55.000 So there's the Christian life.
01:16:57.000 There's the whole Christian spiritual life is to love.
01:17:01.000 And thank God there are still voices calling for it.
01:17:04.000 That's why the church is needed.
01:17:07.000 And you're right, the powers, both visible and invisible, want that voice eliminated.
01:17:13.000 That's why the church has always been under attack.
01:17:15.000 And you know, yes, some of it deserved.
01:17:19.000 Church people have done terrible things.
01:17:21.000 Of course, of course, of course.
01:17:23.000 But spiritually speaking, the Church will always be attacked because it's speaking at its best for this truth, right?
01:17:31.000 That love is what's redemptive.
01:17:35.000 And that's our job.
01:17:36.000 That's the Church's job in season and hour.
01:17:39.000 Thank you, Your Excellency.
01:17:40.000 I wonder if we might conclude with a prayer, and if you would be so kind as to lead us in a prayer.
01:17:47.000 I'd be happy to.
01:17:49.000 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
01:17:52.000 Heavenly Father, we give you praise for all your gifts to us.
01:17:54.000 We thank you for the beautiful world we live in.
01:17:56.000 We thank you for this opportunity to be together.
01:17:59.000 May this conversation be spiritually fruitful for all those who hear it.
01:18:04.000 And Lord, we ask you to give us the strength and the courage to continue to do your work in the world.
01:18:09.000 And we pray through Christ our Lord.
01:18:11.000 Amen.
01:18:11.000 In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
01:18:15.000 Amen.
01:18:15.000 Amen.
01:18:16.000 Thank you.
01:18:17.000 Thank you very much.
01:18:18.000 In particular, the point about love and being able to recognize when that polarity has once again been reversed into solipsism is very helpful.
01:18:28.000 In Watchman Nee's book, I can't remember which one, I read that of course you won't find it in yourself.
01:18:34.000 You can't preempt an attack of temper.
01:18:37.000 It is in Christ.
01:18:38.000 It is in Christ.
01:18:39.000 And I was trying to understand what he was evoking.
01:18:42.000 It seemed like it was an invitation to somehow hold the image or actuality of a present Christ somehow external.
01:18:50.000 Certainly, you know, not within me.
01:18:53.000 Again, that paradox is repeated in Immanence and Transcendence.
01:18:58.000 And I felt like, how am I going to do it?
01:18:59.000 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?
01:19:21.000 I think it's carrying an image of Christ on your person.
01:19:25.000 You know, so as a bishop, I wear this cross, the pectoral cross, you know, so I always have this around.
01:19:31.000 I usually carry a rosary in my pocket.
01:19:33.000 I think that's good to have something tangible that just reminds you of your connection to the Lord.
01:19:39.000 Thank you.
01:19:41.000 Yes, that's a rosary.
01:19:42.000 I've been doing it every day.
01:19:45.000 Yeah.
01:19:45.000 Yeah.
01:19:46.000 Thank you.
01:19:47.000 No, see, it involves the body.
01:19:49.000 I like that about the rosary, you know.
01:19:50.000 It's even like touching the beads can give you a... can sort of spur you to a higher awareness, you know.
01:19:58.000 So I like the physicality of it.
01:20:00.000 Yes, yes, I like that too.
01:20:02.000 Thank you.
01:20:03.000 Thank you for your time today, Your Excellency.
01:20:06.000 You're welcome.
01:20:07.000 I feel edified and gratified and elevated.
01:20:11.000 Thank you so much.
01:20:12.000 Well, thanks for having me, Russell.
01:20:14.000 Appreciate it.
01:20:15.000 Thank you.
01:20:15.000 I hope we get to communicate again soon.
01:20:17.000 I'd love it.
01:20:19.000 Love it.