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The Lord of Spirits
Apocalypse Now and Then
The word "Apocalypse" stirs up forebodings of the end of the world—natural disasters, wars, massive destruction, giant comets, etc. But is that how the Bible uses the term? What if there were apocalypse throughout the Scriptures? And even now? Join Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young for this sequel to the "Nous" episode to see what apocalypse has to do with your life as a Christian.
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- [00:01]
Narrator
He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the lord of spirits. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence? Orthodox Christian priests Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show focused on enchantment in creation, the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits.
- [01:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Welcome back to the Lord of Spirits podcast. My co Host, Father Stephen DeYoung is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana and I am Father Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. If you're listening to us live, you can call in at 855 AF radio. That's 855-237-2346 and Matuska Trudy will be taking your calls tonight and we'll get to your calls in the second part of today's show. So Lord of Spirits is brought to you by our listeners with help from St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology. St. Athanasius is an online academy for kindergarten through 12th grade, offering live classrooms in core subjects, foreign languages, various electives and orthodox studies. To learn more about St. Athanasius Academy, please visit www.saaot.edu.
- [01:57]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And let me add, I want to assure everyone, I talked to Deacon Adam over at the Saint Athanasius Academy and he assured me that when you go and you take courses from them, he is not going to use your tuition money to launch himself into space. Hey, so you don't have to worry about that.
- [02:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Big bonus. Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm looking for in online education for my children.
- [02:23]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, you don't want people just using that money to go to space.
- [02:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, right, right. So we know that when we titled this episode Apocalypse now, and then a lot of people got excited that we were going to talk about the end of the world. We know it and you know, it's great, starts with an earthquake, birds, snakes, airplanes. But that's not actually what this episode is about. Apocalypse isn't actually just a word that means the end of the world turns out to be a biblical genre. But before we get to that, and you know, we always take a while to get where we're going, we want to back up to our previous episode on the Noose, because this episode is its sequel. Now, we got a lot of questions about thoughts from our last episode, and the one that kept coming up was this one. Does the idea that all of our thoughts coming from outside mean that every single thing we think is being whispered to us by God, an angel or a demon? So, Father Stephen, is that what we meant?
- [03:23]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No.
- [03:24]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No. Yes. And I mean, no. No. Yes. Right.
- [03:28]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No, not yet. Yeah, you're confusing everyone. Okay.
- [03:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No, comma, celebratory. Yes. Okay, there we go.
- [03:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, for the transcript. Yeah.
- [03:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Clarify. Right, yes.
- [03:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And everyone, hopefully you've marked on your bingo cards. We're about to back up to something we talked about last time to clarify it here at the beginning of this episode.
- [03:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Indeed.
- [03:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So that's a free spot for everybody.
- [03:53]
Yeah. So the stuff we were talking about last time was.
- [03:58]
A little bit complicated, maybe a little bit.
- [04:02]
In depth. So now we're going to just throw everyone in the deep end at the beginning of this episode as we sort of clarify where we ended up last time.
- [04:13]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You know, when you said complicated, I started forming an Avril Lavigne related joke in my head, but just didn't quite get there. So.
- [04:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Like that the original Avril Lavigne or the before she was crisis actor Avril Lavigne, who has taken her place.
- [04:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah, we should have a doppelganger episode.
- [04:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
There we go.
- [04:37]
So.
- [04:39]
To start with, and believe it or not, this is hopefully going to help clarify what, what we were talking about last time with the news. We're going to start by talking about pre reflective consciousness.
- [04:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
When I woke up this morning, I said to myself, today I want to talk about pre reflective consciousness.
- [04:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But then you had already reflected and so it was. It was all over, self defeating.
- [05:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [05:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, so.
- [05:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So, okay, so what, what does that mean for those of us who are not, you know, reading the latest in, in psychological. I don't even know the right noun.
- [05:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
For this, but yes, existential psychology and phenomenology. Yeah, correct.
- [05:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [05:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So, right. So this is, this is another way of talking about.
- [05:27]
What we were talking about last time with the noose in terms of a point of attention. Right. And the news is a sensory organ in a point of attention or a point of focus.
- [05:41]
But the, the term pre reflective consciousness is Talking about it's pre reflective because it's sort of this, this level of consciousness before you get to thoughts. That's the pre reflective. Right, right. Before you get to the actual thoughts, before you get to the stream of consciousness.
- [06:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. This sort of, kind of direct apprehension, you know, where you don't have to think about something in order to, to, to get it, you just sort of receive it.
- [06:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, all of a sudden I was about to use the term fundamental apperception that I realized that would not help. So. But too late. I already.
- [06:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Come on, I'm barely getting this stuff.
- [06:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. So this is going back to that stream of consciousness is not you. Right. And so when we talk about pre reflective consciousness, we mean that this point of attention is back before that, which the important part of that is that that means you can focus it on or your mind can look at or your mind can consider whatever language you want to use for this. Right.
- [06:47]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Contemplate maybe yourself.
- [06:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, you can contemplate yourself. And so that means the news. This, this kind of consciousness we're talking about has to be sort of before yourself so that you can look at and think about yourself as an object and come to know yourself.
- [07:09]
Right. So it's possible to live in an unreflective way and not know yourself or not know yourself very well. Right, right, right. And this is something that's sort of a constant in both ancient philosophical literature and ancient Christian literature is the idea of coming to know oneself.
- [07:33]
That, that's the beginning of knowledge. Right. Is to come to know your own soul and your own self. And so the noose has again, has to be. Prior to that. It can't, it can't be. When we say I am thinking, right. The I is ourself. So that means we're starting with ourself. We're not thinking about ourself. Right. And then we're talking about, you know, something then related to ourselves. And so when we talk about the noose, this is back behind our sense of ourself.
- [08:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. So like for instance, you know, I've had a lot of pastoral conversations in which I might say something like, listen to your own thoughts. So if you're listening to your thoughts, you're observing your thoughts, whatever you are, you know, your thoughts aren't thinking. Aren't thinking your thoughts. You're thinking your thoughts. There's a you that can, that can observe the thoughts, you know, that can actually kind of. It's not dissociative exactly. But, but you realize that they are not you.
- [08:41]
I think that's my understanding of what we're talking about now.
- [08:45]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And so then you can also think about you. You can think about yourself.
- [08:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right.
- [08:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And to use an analogy, if you have a weird feeling in your gut. Right. You can sit there and think about what is going on in my gut and try to ponder what's happening. This is the same kind of thing, but in your mind or in your soul. Yeah, right. That you could say, what is going on in my mind? Right, right. What is going on in my soul? Because there's. There's this. There's this pre. Reflective level consciousness. The noose is separate. And this is. This is also what's being talked about. We had a call last time where we got into a little bit whether the spirit and the soul are different things. And we talked about how some of the fathers, they're sort of used as being the same thing, just referring to the immaterial part of a person.
- [09:46]
And then other fathers. There seems to be a distinction. And so when there's a distinction, the spirit is referring to this. This to the noose, to the noetic part of a human person. Right.
- [10:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Because sometimes spirit and soul are used as basically synonyms.
- [10:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right?
- [10:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Right.
- [10:08]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It's just all lumped together.
- [10:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Right. Because. Yeah, some of the fathers talk about body and soul. Some talk about body, soul and spirit as three separate things. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's. Well, number one, it's important to realize that even though we're talking about this stuff in this way, obviously we're not necessarily using strictly biblical terminology because the Bible doesn't talk in this way, but it does speak in a way that is evincing.
- [10:40]
The same things we're discussing. So, for instance, in the Psalms, where.
- [10:46]
The writer addresses his own soul. Right. Oh, my soul, my soul. You know, and I mean, we have, you know, we have lots of church hymns like that. You know, the big one from the great canon of Saint Andrew of Crete, the Kentuckian, My soul, my soul arise. You know, or, you know, in the Psalms, bless the Lord, O my soul. Right. And, you know, so much of what we talk about in the show is about kind of saying, okay, what if what's in the scripture is not always a metaphor? Like we seem to so often take it as being, you know, what if you actually can talk to your soul? What if you can observe your soul? You know, what if it's not quite the same thing as the you. Right. And of course, that means that, you know, Descartes famous dictum, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am is actually wrong because you're not your thoughts. You're not your thoughts and thinking is not what makes you you.
- [11:44]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But by the way, do you, do you know how he died?
- [11:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I do not remember how he died.
- [11:50]
Father Stephen DeYoung
He was trampled by a horse.
- [11:53]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wow.
- [11:53]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It is true. And that is the origin of the saying, never put Descartes before.
- [11:58]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh God, I felt like I was walking into something.
- [12:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You were. It was a trap.
- [12:04]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
But that's okay. I'm gonna look up on Wikipedia to find out. He really did die.
- [12:08]
Father Stephen DeYoung
He did really die. He was really dying.
- [12:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh man. Wow. Okay, so at least it is a well founded joke then.
- [12:14]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, so yeah, just a certain irony.
- [12:19]
But, but right, and yeah, as, as you said.
- [12:23]
You know, and this is something that the Church Fathers said very quickly. Right. They said, you know, in order to, in our Greek language describe what's going on in the scriptures, we sometimes have to use terms that are not themselves in the scriptures.
- [12:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right, right.
- [12:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And that doesn't mean you're importing theology or you're importing philosophy that's foreign to Christianity just because those terms are used.
- [12:52]
Right. In, in philosophy per se. This is one of the common misconceptions about the Church Fathers by a lot of our friends. Friends, mostly our non Orthodox friends, but even some of our Orthodox friends that they just brought in all of this Greek philosophy rather than just, you know, they're using the Greek language.
- [13:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, there's, I mean for those who have that, for those who are receiving that thought, there is a wonderful book called Christianity and Classical Culture by Yaroslav Pelikan which addresses this very directly. And actually he shows how the Church Fathers take Greek terminology but then put different meanings into it. They're not just simply importing philosophical concepts, they're just using the Greek language and giving new meanings to the words that they're, that they're making use of. So there is, you know, it's a, it's a wonderful book. And of course Pelikan is an unparalleled historian of Christianity, so I do recommend it.
- [13:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes, it is a good book.
- [14:02]
The.
- [14:04]
Key importance, not just for understanding the hymns that you mentioned, for which this understanding is helpful, but also this is important.
- [14:14]
That the nous in some sense is before the self is critically important to our understanding of how humanity has free will. The way Father Dumitru Staniloy, whose name I always mispronounce.
- [14:34]
Describes this is that humanity is in some sense absolute.
- [14:40]
Meaning, not determined by his physical and material circumstances that we're able to. Because we're able to.
- [14:54]
Look at our thoughts from behind our thoughts, look at ourselves from behind ourself. That gives us the freedom to comport ourselves. Right. We can't change reality with our will.
- [15:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [15:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. We can't sort of reach out and bend. There's the brute facticity of reality. But we can choose how we are going to comport ourselves to reality.
- [15:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [15:16]
Father Stephen DeYoung
How we're going to receive what comes into our life and our mind. Right. We have freedom in that because of this distinction. Because of this separation.
- [15:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Because if you are your thoughts, then that means you are at their mercy. You know, you're simply at their mercy and. And attempting, like. Attempting to.
- [15:41]
You know, like I. There's been many times I've had pastoral conversations with people where. Where it's like I keep having this thought and I just can't make it go away. And, you know, I feel like something is wrong with me. You know.
- [15:53]
If. If you are your thoughts, then the answer to that is yes, there's something wrong with you. Right. That's. I mean, what other possible conclusion could you come to? And then people find themselves helpless to just make a thought go away. You can't just will a thought to go away unless you, you know, if you realize that you are not your thoughts, then you can actually begin to develop the discipline to do things to your thoughts. But you're still going to have thoughts that come unbidden. But that doesn't mean that there's something fundamentally flawed.
- [16:26]
I mean, I can't peer into the mind of Christ, but Christ himself was tempted.
- [16:33]
But he is not his temptations, obviously, because he did not sin. So hopefully I'm not getting across any Christological lines. I should not by saying that, but I think that seems pretty clear from the Gospels that that's what happened.
- [16:50]
So, yeah, free, you know, free will is kind of based. Not kind of free will is based in this. That you're not your thoughts. You know, you can observe your own thoughts. You can do things with your thoughts. You can reject the thoughts. You can accept some thoughts. It's. This is a thing and it's very freeing thing. I think. I think we mentioned that last time. It just. The experience of freedom comes, I think, from realizing that.
- [17:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, right. And if you look at the other side, Right. If your brain is just sort of a chemical machine that generates your thoughts, right. And then those generated thoughts in your stream of consciousness are you. Then, you know, Sam Harris is right. And free will disappears.
- [17:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [17:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And the person who has the thought that he should kill someone or rob someone or. Right.
- [17:40]
There's no free will involved. It's just purely mechanical.
- [17:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. And how can you, how can you ultimately blame someone then who just simply obeys their thoughts?
- [17:50]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right.
- [17:50]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You know? Yeah, yeah.
- [17:53]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So.
- [17:53]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, so. So, okay, so we have talked about where thoughts come from, that they come from outside. So let's unpack that a little bit more. I mean, we talked last time about the various ways of knowing other than the news. Right. Like there's, you know, techne, which is the know how. There's episteme, which is, you know, sort of observational.
- [18:16]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Mathematical, scientific knowledge.
- [18:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Mathematical, scientific knowledge. Yeah, there's. There's that kind of stuff. Right.
- [18:24]
And you know, this of course, is the idea, of course, the noose as a sensory organization receiving thoughts and images from outside. That's contrary to solipsism. We're not just brains in a vat. You know, there is actual contact with the outside going on in your, in your mind. But I think a lot of our problem is that we tend to reduce.
- [18:50]
Knowledge to language. Right. And then this is what we think of as thoughts is a kind of internal monologue, like the things that are being said in my head. But actually, you know, an interesting thing about that is.
- [19:05]
I occasionally see people like posting on social media. They're surprised that people experience an internal monologue because they'll say things like, I don't have an internal monologue. That's not the way that I think. You know, I don't think in words like that. And that's interesting to me. That seems to be an indication that that person has somehow just is approaching it from a different angle. I don't know what that's like. I do have an internal monologue. There are words that roll through my head all the time. I'm a very word oriented person. But you know, can we reduce thoughts to just words? Clearly not.
- [19:43]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So you're more like the theatrical cut of Blade Runner rather than the director's cut of Blade Runner.
- [19:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [19:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
With the monologue coming in, in the background.
- [19:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [19:54]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Well, yeah. And, and you know, we spent most of the effort because of course the episode was about the news. So we spent most of the episode not talking about the news.
- [20:06]
Just like we're spending most of this episode not talking about apocalyptic. But the.
- [20:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
We'll get there.
- [20:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I think some folks, you know, we got to the deuce and, and, and settled there. Right. The other four ways of knowing that we talked about are also ways that thoughts come into your.
- [20:25]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [20:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Your mind. Right, right. They're just not always turned into language. Right. So when you're. If you're out wrenching on your car and you know what you're doing, right. And there's, there's techni involved, but there is a knowledge of. This is. Oh, here's the problem. This is what I need to do. Right, right. That's not an 8. The angel of Car repair.
- [20:52]
Right. Or the ghosts. The ghosts of click and clack coming to help you, unfortunately.
- [20:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So you're saying that as I'm looking at my bookcase right now, there's not an angel there sending pictures of my bookcase into my brain.
- [21:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No, that's your eyeball.
- [21:08]
Right. So these, these things come in. We just, we, we don't always reduce them to language. But.
- [21:17]
When we call something a thought, when we talk about thought, like you were saying, we're thinking about that internal monologue. Right? But so.
- [21:26]
To give an example, right. When you look with your eyes and I look at the tree out the window, right. The, the image of the tree is coming into my mind through my eyeballs. Right.
- [21:44]
But I can also then turn that into language. Right? The word tree. Right, Right. But when I do that, the experience of me standing in front of a tree, touching a tree, looking at a tree, smelling a tree is very different than having the word tree in my brain.
- [22:05]
This is what we mean when we say reducing it to language.
- [22:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, Right.
- [22:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
This reduction has happened. It's been boiled down and most of the content has been lost in favor of this word. And so the same thing happens, the same thing happens with the noose, Right. That you can have things come in through the noose. Not at the level of sort of discursive language. Right. That's feelings, emotions, impressions. Right. You feel sad.
- [22:41]
You could put that into words. I am sad. But the words I am sad do not really convey the fullness of what you experience when you are sad.
- [22:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. At best, it can function as a kind of shorthand. You know, you can invoke the idea of sadness in someone else by saying it. But, but even then there's kind of different kind, you know, and of course, language tries to deal with the complications. You can see a tree. You can say, okay, it's an oak tree, or it's a maple tree, or it's a Japanese, you know, maple, you know, or something like that. These are all different looking trees. But the Japanese maple that's in my neighbor's backyard does not look like the one in my front yard. And it is an objectively different experience to see those two trees. You know, the one I have is much younger and smaller, and theirs is big and lovely, you know, so even though language can work on those complications and try to become more precise, it's still. It's still. You know, I could. I could qualify it. Oh, it's a small Japanese. Oh, okay. It's a small one, but. But still, the specific one in my yard, you can't. You cannot. You could never describe it with language in such a way that someone would get the exact experience of being there.
- [23:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. At best. At best, you can invoke a memory.
- [24:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right.
- [24:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Of a similar experience. Right. You can make it.
- [24:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Do you remember when. Yeah. Do you remember when you were there? You know, even the memory of the same tree, like, if someone saw the tree before I pruned it, that would not be the same. The same thing as it is today, you know, And.
- [24:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And that's that we consider someone to be a great writer when they are able to evoke those actual experiences in us in the form of memory through the use of language. But we more commonly are doing it the other way.
- [24:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [24:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We're taking the experience of boiling it down. And. And the same is true. Right. I was just talking about a tree. But the same is true when we're talking about the news or with, for example, the word God.
- [24:45]
Or even the name. Right. Jesus Christ. It's a very different thing, the word. And we can use it very discursively. Right. The sort of bad kind of theology, which is like putting together tinker toys. Right?
- [25:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [25:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You just get the pieces and put the pieces together to construct something.
- [25:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [25:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
As opposed to coming to know Jesus Christ.
- [25:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right.
- [25:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Very different thing.
- [25:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. Like, you can see. I mean, I see this all the time on the Internet, people arguing Christology. And the way that they argue makes me really wonder whether they know the person they're talking about. You know, it's just. Yeah, yeah. Even if what they're saying is correct factually, you know, it's still not the same thing as the one that they're talking about. About.
- [25:36]
Yeah. So, I mean.
- [25:39]
It kind of raises the question, right, If. If there's this knowledge that's beyond language.
- [25:47]
And for instance, an example might be that, you know, sort of a noetic example is sometimes people. You might go somewhere and you have a feeling like something is. Is just wrong. Like it feels sort of spiritually wrong or. Or spiritually. Right. You know, that there's that sense. But it's not. It's not something that's just pure. That you can get by observation alone. Right. So this would be an example of the noose apprehending spiritual reality. But then that kind of leads you to the question, you know, like, well, do my atheist friends have spiritual experiences? Right. Because they would probably say that they don't. Because they would. Especially if they're really a materialist, a real materialist. They would say that spiritual experiences, there's no such thing as that. There's only the material senses. So, you know, but if. If such experiences are just reduced, are reducible to language. I had a feeling that something was wrong. Right. Well, then you can kind of, much more easily kind of explain it away. And the classic example of that is in A Christmas Carol where when Ebenezer Scrooge, we've all read it, or at least you've watched some film version of it, probably everybody or a sitcom episode riffing on it. Right? Yeah. I mean, this is one of the most reused stories of our time, where he encounters Jacob Marley. I was about to say Bob Marley, but then I remembered it's not.
- [27:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That would be a much more interesting story in some ways.
- [27:24]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I'm just pushing aside all the jokes that just came to Jacob Marley, his former. His former partner, and, you know, he identifies himself as Jacob Marley, and then Ebenezer Scrooge basically tries to explain him away as being. Based on whatever he ate last night. Right. So undigested beef, a blot of mustard. You know, essentially he's. He's saying that this unmistakably spiritual experience he's having is just, you know, an indigestion problem. Right. But he's having the experience. And of course, you know, as the story goes, he eventually reconciles himself to that fact, you know, and is able to change as a result of that. But, yeah, he's a disbeliever, and he's explaining it away because for him, it's reducible to some kind of physical process. You know, I just ate the wrong thing last night.
- [28:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And we. We definitely need to get this Christmas visit from Bob Marley's ghost meme going.
- [28:34]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [28:35]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Because this can be amazing.
- [28:36]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes, absolutely.
- [28:38]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Get to work, people.
- [28:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So, but yeah, and we've. We've talked about previously on previous episodes about, you know, sort of the. The. The classical four. Four ways of interacting with reality that humans have. Language, our music and ritual.
- [28:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, right.
- [28:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And we're going to come back to this later in the episode.
- [29:01]
But this is. This is important because. To mention here, because we as modern Western people tend to try to reduce all of these just to language. It's not just our thoughts and experiences that we reduce to language, but it's all of these things. Things, Right. So we go and we look at a beautiful icon, but then we're like, okay, well, this. This represents this, and that represents that, and we try to break it all down into language. But even. Even if you write it up really thoroughly and really well. Right. And you have all your. Your citations from art history. Right. And you have this whole thing, reading that is a very different experience than standing in front of the icon.
- [29:45]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. And, you know, people sometimes do the same thing with liturgy. Right. They're like, well, this part means this or it represents this. And I mean, like, while that's not entirely wrong. Right.
- [30:02]
It can be problematic when people like, oh, now I get that. This is the thing that that means, you know, and so it becomes a meaning that you received observationally rather than an experience that you participated in through ritual. You know, it becomes a spectator sport, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. Or again, again, again, like, there's. There's a whole history of interpreting the. The Divine Liturgy and other services with these kinds of ways, but they. They're. They're not reducible to that. Like that. That's not the only. It's not like, for instance, when. When, you know, the great entrance happens in the Divine Liturgy, it's not. You're not supposed to get a meaning from that, you know, you're supposed to participate in it, you know. Yeah. Because you could get a meaning from that by watching it on a YouTube video.
- [30:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And that's also why we shouldn't have our noses buried in BR books during liturgical services.
- [31:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [31:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I know it's very comfortable for us as modern Western people to try to, again, process everything as language. I want to follow along and read what is being sung or read what is being said and try to just process that mentally in the form of language. Right. But when you do that, you're not participating in ritual. You're participating in a linguistic exercise. Right, Right. And you can sit at home and read the text of the Divine Liturgy. But I think we would all agree that is a very different experience than actually being in and participating in the Divine Liturgy.
- [31:42]
And even though we may feel comfortable doing that. Right. It's good to be uncomfortable.
- [31:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [31:50]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And the same thing's true with music. Obviously, we talked about ritual and iconography or art, but obviously the same is true with Music, Right. There's a big difference between reading a lyric sheet and listening to music. Right. Like, these are not the same.
- [32:05]
The same thing.
- [32:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [32:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Unless you're like everybody in the movie Amadeus and you can just like, look at sheet music and hear it in your head. In this case.
- [32:16]
Go ahead. But I'm not that person, so. Right.
- [32:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay. So, you know, we have this problem where we kind of divide this stuff out into, you know, the physical, the material, the immaterial, the material. You know, it's. I don't know. As modern Western people, we like to have things categorized. And the problem when we do that is we tend to. When we divide it up into pieces, then we just pick the one piece that we prefer and kind of leave the rest aside. And I think one of the projects that we're trying to pursue on this podcast is to show that everything really is one. You know, there's not.
- [33:02]
Natural and supernatural. Right. That's not like we, like. There's a deliberate reason why we use the phrase the seen and the unseen when we're describing what we're doing on this show, because there's a distinction there. There's things you can see and observe with your senses, and there's things that you cannot see with your sense senses. But. But natural and supernatural is a different kind of distinction. You know, there's the. The Cartesian notion of the soul, which is basically that you're this. You are this immaterial soul that's kind of trapped inside a body, you know, or. Or to use the name of a very famous anime film, Ghost in the Machine. You know, Ghost in the Shell.
- [33:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Noob.
- [33:43]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Ghost in the Shell. Oh, that's right. It is Ghost in the Shell. I have seen that. But. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, man. I'm just ashamed of myself now suddenly. I did like that movie, but it's been a long time since I saw it now.
- [33:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You liked the anime one? Just.
- [33:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes, I have not seen the super.
- [33:59]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Problematic live action one.
- [34:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I have not seen that one. No, I have not seen that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I appreciate. I appreciate the anime film for its aesthetics largely. I mean, obviously I was not on board with its philosophy. It was interesting to watch them sort of struggle with a philosophical problem of, you know, if a person is enough of a machine, can that. Can it still hold their soul? Right. Obviously it's based on this Cartesian idea of the soul. Right. You know? Yeah, right.
- [34:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. So, yeah. So in. In the ancient world, right. There's just creation, there's just the world the cosmos.
- [34:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [34:37]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And that includes both material and spiritual realities.
- [34:44]
Everyone just accepted that there are gods, there are spirits, there are. Etc. Etc. They are also in the creation. Right. We don't see them with our eyes, but there are things that we hear with our ears and don't see with our eyes. So the idea that there are certain things that we only apprehend with our minds rather than the other senses kind of made sense to ancient people. Right. Just like there's things you smell but can't see or hear but can't see or hear but can't smell. And so these are all just different aspects of the one reality. And then modernity happens and everything gets lame.
- [35:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I feel like 19th century German.
- [35:30]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We're getting there.
- [35:31]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Theologians are about to be mentioned.
- [35:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We're going to get there. We're not even there yet though. We're still in like the 16th, 16th, 17th century.
- [35:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [35:41]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So we're, we're, we're building up to them. Right. And that's, that is where you get, as you mentioned, the Cartesian idea, right. From Descartes, what's called Cartesian dualism. The idea that, that the material realm and the spiritual realm are separate realms. Just that realm, language. Right. That they begin to be spoken of as if. Now no one's saying these are actually separate quote unquote places, but they're being spoken of in that way. Right. That, that there is, you know, the human body is the body and we have access to that in a certain way. And then the soul is the ghost in the machine. The soul is geist. Is there somewhere connected to it in some way?
- [36:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [36:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It's not entirely clear. And we don't have access to it really in the same way. So you get there, the beginning of this division and the vision between natural and supernatural. Right, right, right. Supernatural doesn't just mean this is a happening that is outside the things that usually happen. Right.
- [36:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Miracle.
- [36:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
A very unusual occurrence. Right. But supernatural as meaning, not material.
- [36:56]
Caller George
Yeah.
- [36:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's all the woo woo stuff. Yeah. Right, right. Like angels are supernatural. Yeah. God is supernatural, you know. Yeah. Which is not true. Not true.
- [37:09]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. And then as that develops.
- [37:13]
We'Re not even into the 19th century yet, but you get the beginnings of German idealism and you, you get our friend Immanuel Kant and you get not only sort of the taxonomy of these two realms, but there's sort of an iron wall between them.
- [37:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [37:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Now where. So for Kant, sort of classically, you have the, the noumenal realm, that's what he calls It. Right. Related to the noose, related to the mind, where you have God the self, meaning the soul, the thing in itself, the essences of things. Right. These are all things that can only be known by the mind through what he basically calls a kind of intuition. In religious circles.
- [38:05]
Especially Protestant religious circles, that's how faith ends up getting kind of defined. Faith is that sort of intuitive knowledge of those things, of God and of the soul.
- [38:19]
And then you have the phenomenal realm, which is all the stuff we know through the senses, which is all the material stuff. Right, right. And these are these two separate boxes. And most conservative Western theology ends up evolving out of this kind of viewpoint. Right. So there's maintained that you. Yes, God exists.
- [38:43]
The soul exists, the essence. Things have essences, things have natures, things are what they are.
- [38:53]
But that's something, you know by faith or intuition or through the application of mental categories. That's not something you know through the senses or through science or through any of those things. Right, right. So you have these. These two realms. And so this is how we end up as.
- [39:16]
Conservative modern Christians, sort of having this box or this set of brackets where we put all that stuff, all that noumenal stuff, and then the rest of our life, everything outside the brackets, we basically interact with everything else the same way atheists do.
- [39:33]
Because that's all in this just phenomenal material realm.
- [39:36]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yep.
- [39:38]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And so then now we get to the. Our 19th century German friends.
- [39:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
All right, Friends, though, not really friends. Scare quotes.
- [39:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
They're not good. They're not good friends.
- [39:51]
So they'll like totally invite you to go see a movie and then flake out and not show up. Not text, nothing. That's the kind of friends there.
- [40:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
They just ghost you.
- [40:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, yeah. So thank you. They geist you even.
- [40:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, there you go.
- [40:09]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So. And we get. We get to Hagal. And so what Hagel does essentially is collapse that idea of a noumenal realm, of a spiritual realm. He collapses. Geist and spirit, he just collapses that into the material world.
- [40:28]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So what does that mean? Like, how does that play out?
- [40:30]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, what that means is that essentially then, right. All of these, everything from God to.
- [40:42]
Spirituality to the soul, all of these things sort of get reduced to a kind of spiritual metaphor.
- [40:52]
Related to material processes. Right. So you get out of this, and this is what then liberal Western theology evolves from. So you get like the social gospel and liberation theology. Right.
- [41:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's all very. This worldly focused.
- [41:14]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. So spiritual liberation, what spiritual liberation really means in this kind of view is the transforming of the material conditions of your life to give you freedom.
- [41:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, right.
- [41:28]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's now spiritual liberation. Right. And so sin gets replaced with tyranny and oppression. Right. Everything gets reduced. So you still have a concept. Right. So for Hegel, God is sort of in the creation, evolving and working things out right along with everybody else. Right. And God is just sort of this animating positive spirit within. Within the.
- [41:55]
The cosmos. Right. And so that you still use this language to talk about it, and you still see this spiritual dimension, but the spiritual dimension is now more about feeling and sentiment and solidarity, kinship, than an actual connection to an actually existing creator God.
- [42:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, right, right.
- [42:24]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And so, yeah, so that's. Then, you know, our conservative Western theology comes from sort of more of the.
- [42:31]
Kantian kind of view. And the liberal theology comes out of more the Hegelian kind of view. And from that comes process theology, all of that. All of our 19th century German friends.
- [42:44]
And so then, you know, the, the response.
- [42:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [42:50]
Father Stephen DeYoung
For people who then reject Christianity altogether. Right.
- [42:58]
Then this is how secularism comes about. Because then you just, rather than collapsing the spiritual into the physical and the material, you just sort of peel away that layer. You just rip the spiritual and material layer off the top and leave only the physical and material.
- [43:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, because if it's really just a metaphor, well, why not have some other metaphor? You know, if there's not actually a God that you can encounter, why not come up with some other, you know, way of. Of organizing your values around material flourishing? You know, and what's interesting about this to me is like, this seems to be the way that public discourse is just sort of expected to go now. Like, there's this polite thing that we don't do. Right. Or I should say there's this thing we politely don't do, which is, you know, you don't talk about.
- [43:57]
Spiritual things in public because, well, that should be either kept private or it's kind of sort of a joke, you know, that. Don't. Don't talk about that. And I mean, you know, when we were putting our notes together, you gave the example of, you know, Neil Degrasse Tyson, the. Is he an astronomer? Is that what he is? Yeah, I think so.
- [44:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
He's an astrophysicist.
- [44:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Astrophysicist. Okay. So I was pretty close.
- [44:20]
You know, he made some reference. He used the word Godspeed on Twitter and then had to, like, apologize for that because, of course, he doesn't actually believe in God, you know, so you shouldn't, you shouldn't say that.
- [44:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
His fellow atheists came after Him.
- [44:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right.
- [44:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Twitter dogpile for Godspeed to ask.
- [44:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
How dare you? Yeah, how dare you? Yeah. What does that mean? You know, aren't they on just on rockets? And I, you know, it's the thing that you're sort of not allowed to say, right, like this. We just politely don't do that in public. And I was thinking about this in contrast to an experience that I have once every week or so.
- [44:59]
So my family, we buy. We get raw milk from a Mennonite family about 30 minutes or so, 35, 40 minutes south of us. They have a greenhouse and a dairy farm. And, you know, they make lots of wonderful things. And when you go there, though, they will openly and easily talk to you about. About God and about the weather, usually in relation, one relation to the other, you know, and it just really strikes me at how. And it's not like they're not proselytizing or anything like that. It's just simply their experience of the world, and that's how they talk, that they just don't participate in that polite agreement that everybody else has. You know, they have no problem saying, you know, God was really good and gave us really good weather this week. You know, like, it's just something they just sort of openly do, you know, So I think about that when I drink my Mennonite milk.
- [45:59]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, right. And even.
- [46:02]
Again, we were talking about the brackets. Right. Even most.
- [46:08]
Modern Christians who.
- [46:11]
Thoroughly believe in God, thoroughly believes, wouldn't talk about it that way comfortably in, like, mixed company. Maybe when they're at church. Right.
- [46:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Or with their church. Yeah. Like you're to do it in church or.
- [46:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, yeah. But not like at the mall, like, not like, you know, talking to a store clerk, you know.
- [46:35]
Yeah. And so.
- [46:39]
Yeah, so that's sort of ways it all went wrong, right. In the, in the modern period. And so probably the. The question was, we've gotten. Most often since starting this show has been like some version of can we really go back to, like, can we, like, unmodern? Like, is it possible to demodern oneself?
- [47:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [47:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
How do you go back?
- [47:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Unmodern is a good old English construction, and I affirm that.
- [47:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay.
- [47:16]
So. And. And you know, you can't unlearn. There are some things that you can't unsee. Right. So, like, you can't sort of. Right. Reverse things and use the Wayback Machine that way.
- [47:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [47:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah.
- [47:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I can't just decide not to be modern.
- [47:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, yeah. Right. But then. So what is then sort of the way back into the ground, Right. In terms of.
- [47:45]
Trying to come back to something more like that. And it's not to. Again, to set the clock back, but it's to. We have to actively work, and that's what the rest of this episode is going to be about.
- [47:59]
You have to actively work to reintegrate what's been pulled apart.
- [48:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [48:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We can't just pretend it was never pulled apart.
- [48:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [48:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. But we can work to bring it back together. Right. And so that is the key to that, is understanding that for every spiritual reality, there's a concomitant material reality and vice versa.
- [48:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, Right. These always, always go together.
- [48:31]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And this is at the level of like we've talked about in past episodes, there being spirits or angelic beings assigned to the elements of the created world.
- [48:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There's no neutral ground who are participating in their government.
- [48:46]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That, that there are spiritual as connected to every physical reality and physical realities connected to spiritual realities. Right. And.
- [48:58]
The place where we. So, you know, the, the. This is the relationship between, you know, the mind and the brain or the mind and the heart. Right, that, that, you know, we all talk about our heart. You know, I left my heart in San Francisco last Christmas. I gave you my heart the very next day. Gave it away.
- [49:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, man.
- [49:22]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And. And, you know, even when we, like, use the heart emoji, it doesn't actually look like a biological human heart.
- [49:31]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [49:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Unless someone's doing that on purpose as a joke. Right. You don't see, like, the vena cava. Right.
- [49:40]
So, you know, we get that when we're talking about our heart, we're actually talking about a spiritual reality.
- [49:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [49:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But we're connecting it in, talking about it to this organ. Right. And the same thing with the mind and the brain, Right, that, that, you know. Yes. You've got this gray, mushy thing with electricity firing around in it. Right. And that's not completely unrelated to your mind and your thoughts. Right. It's not ghost in the machine. Right.
- [50:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So when someone vents his spleen, then.
- [50:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [50:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I knew it.
- [50:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
His blood is up. Yes. Yeah. The better one is in Greek, when you have compassion.
- [50:25]
You spleen at someone.
- [50:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's great.
- [50:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's literally what it means. So in the Gospels, Christ literally spleens at, like, sick people.
- [50:37]
Is what the Greek literally says.
- [50:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wow, I am standing here beside myself. Yes.
- [50:44]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So. Right. But. So these are. These aren't disassociated, right? Yeah, these are disassociated. And.
- [50:54]
One of the key. Probably the key place. The key place. And this is setting up what we're going to be talking about the rest of the episode. The key place where we do this and we do this ritually is in the idea of sacrament or the mysteries of the church.
- [51:08]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Exactly. Right.
- [51:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Where you have a material reality and a spiritual reality permeating each other.
- [51:18]
Right. Whether it's water or a male and a female human or.
- [51:26]
Bread and wine. Right. There is a divided spiritual reality that comes to permeate those material things.
- [51:34]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. Right. All right. Well, on that note, we're going to be back in just a moment and we're going to start talking about apocalypse as a genre within Scripture. But first we're going to take your calls. But before that, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back.
- [51:50]
Narrator
Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855 AF radio.
- [52:11]
Announcer
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- [52:43]
Caller George
And you didn't have to ask Raskova for help cleaning, polishing, carrying in or out any work in the church. The woman was a stalwart, a tovarish you could count on. No one knew her suffering. They never bothered to look into her eyes. It surprised me that most of the church folks at St. Alexander the Whirling Dervish Parish didn't even know her name. It wasn't anything they thought about.
- [53:11]
Announcer
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- [53:22]
Narrator
We'Re back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-23-7-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.
- [53:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Welcome back. This is the second half of the show where we start to take your calls. Thank you very much for that voice of Steve. So the first caller we have on on the line is someone with an excellent name, and that is Andrew from Indiana. Andrew, are you there?
- [53:56]
Caller Andrew
Yes, I am, Father. Thank you for having me on.
- [53:59]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Welcome to the Lord of Spirits. What's your question or your concern?
- [54:03]
Caller Andrew
Well, my question is what is accomplished in the worship of God by those who are outside of the people of God? And that's sort of the broad question. But I was thinking specifically with three, I guess you could say, circumstances.
- [54:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The.
- [54:26]
Caller Andrew
First being the people that are akin to the Israelites in the Old Testament, like the Edomites and Midianites. On the show you said that there was a point where they were worshiping God still.
- [54:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [54:40]
Caller Andrew
But.
- [54:42]
They didn't have the worship of the Torah. They didn't have the rituals that were a participation in Christ's saving work, like the rituals of the rituals of the Torah work.
- [55:01]
So that is one circumstance for those peoples in the Old Testament. That's Americans, because as Americans did have the Torah, or at least a version of the Torah, I guess you could say, and they held Passover and the various other feasts and festivals, but obviously they were. They separated off and they worked on the wrong in the wrong location. So this was accomplished in their worship as well. And then to bring it to the present for those who are liturgical Christians, who are side of the Orthodox Church, as I say, what is accomplished for them.
- [55:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. So. Okay, so I'm just going to restate your question, the way that I understand it. You can tell me if I've got it. You're essentially asking if someone's not actually sort of what we might think of as canonically part of the people of God, whether that's Israel in the Old Covenant or Israel in the New Covenant, which is the church, then.
- [56:07]
What exactly does their worship accomplish, if anything? Is that correct? Am I getting that right?
- [56:14]
Caller Andrew
Correct.
- [56:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [56:15]
Caller Andrew
That's what I'm talking about, their worship, what it accomplishes for them.
- [56:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Yeah. So I have some thoughts on this, which I'll say first, but I know that Father Stephen probably has a lot more to say, but I'll just say this, that.
- [56:29]
Whenever someone is being obedient to God, they're being obedient to God. Right.
- [56:35]
The idea that outside of the canonical boundaries of the people of God, there is nothing but unmitigated darkness.
- [56:44]
Is simply not true. Right. It's simply not true. And.
- [56:51]
We have Orthodox saints, for instance, commenting on, you know, even within the past couple of centuries, commenting especially on the problem of, you know, what are often described as separated brethren. And one of the problems with that phrase, of course, is that people tend to emphasize one of those two words over the other. Like they'll really want to emphasize the word separated and forget about brethren, or they really want to emphasize brethren, forget about separated.
- [57:21]
But, you know, like Father George Florovsky said, you really need to emphasize both words. They're both important. But there are Orthodox saints, like, for instance, Saint Siloan the Athonite, and I'm kind of blanking on the name right now, but I think There were some 19th century Russian saints who commented especially on Catholics and Protestants in Russia. And they said, you know, when they do something that we agree with and recognize as our own, we should affirm that. And like they do well to do those things. Like, they never say, well, they're not Orthodox, so, you know, I mean, what are they really doing?
- [57:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right?
- [57:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So I'm going to go ahead and then punt over to Father Stephen for especially if he wants to comment on that. But especially, you know, the, the Old Testament piece, which I don't know. I mean, we talked about this, but I'm sure he has a lot more to say about that. So.
- [58:09]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Father yeah, right. So, I mean, what the Midianites and Ishmaelites and Edomites, and it's Ishmaelites and Edomites who make up the Midianites. What they're doing when we re encounter them is they're continuing the kind of worship and the patterns of worship that they got from Abraham and Ishmael or Abraham and Isaac and Esau, right? They're continuing those forms of worship. Right. As you mentioned, they hadn't actually received the Torah, you know, which gave the specific, the specific commands.
- [58:49]
But here's the thing.
- [58:52]
Those commandments are commandments given to humans. And, and that cuts in two ways. First, they're not restrictions God imposes upon himself. It's not God saying, I am telling you to worship me this way as my people. Therefore, I am now restricting myself to only work here in this place at all, right? And never, never do anything else.
- [59:26]
And then, secondly, right, liturgy is not the work of the people, right? So ritual isn't something, isn't a process that we do that then results in us having certain benefits, right? Ritual and liturgy is the means given to us by God through which God tells us he will work and do certain things when we are obedient and do the liturgy in that way. So the question whether we're talking about the Midianites or the Edomites or the Samaritans or Roman Catholics and Protestants or anybody else, the guy living on an island who's never seen an Abrahamic religion in his life.
- [60:14]
I mean, the question amounts to what is God doing there, right? And the ultimate answer to that is we don't know most of the time. This is the Saint Irenaeus of Leon's famous. We know where the Holy Spirit is. He's in the church, right? And we know what he's doing in the church because God made certain promises to us as to what he would do in the church. But we know he's outside the church, but we don't know what he's doing outside the church always. In fact, most of the time we don't. Sometimes we find out later. You know, some people group comes, comes to faith in Christ, right? And you could go back and look and you can see these sort of seeds like St. Justin Martyr talks about in their previous beliefs and culture that kind of helped lead them to Christ. And you could say, oh well, that was the Holy Spirit, Spirit's doing, right? But in real time we can't always see that.
- [61:13]
So you know, the Holy Spirit blows where he will and he's doing it. And God can choose to honor what he chooses to honor. He can show mercy on whom he will show mercy and compassion on whom he will show compassion. So the issue is we're accountable for the riches and the wealth that we have received.
- [61:37]
So those of us who are in the Orthodox Church are the ones who are going to be the most responsible on the Day of Judgment because we've received the whole thing, the whole tradition.
- [61:49]
Everything, all of Christianity, we have it and have access to it. And so that makes us more accountable for what we do or don't do with it and what we learn and what we don't learn and what we practice and what we don't practice.
- [62:04]
God is also, Christ is going to judge everybody. He's also going to judge those people outside the church. He's going to judge non Christians. He's going to judge ancient people outside of Israel. We know he's going to hold them accountable for what they did with what they received. And that in pretty much all cases is less.
- [62:23]
Right? Unless they, unless they, you know, were aware. Unless they're like an Israelite who's aware of the Torah and decides to move to Moab and become a Moabite, worship chemosh, right? Then he's going to be super accountable because he received the whole thing and rejected the truth. Right? But, but your person who's in ignorance, who's sort of doing the best they can, right? Your person who lived his whole life and died in 13th century France and never saw an Orthodox church, right? He went to the only Christian church in his village.
- [62:52]
Right? God's God's going to judge that person based on what he did with what he had, not on what he did and didn't have.
- [63:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Does that make sense, Andrew?
- [63:03]
Caller Andrew
Yeah, but it just raises a, I guess, a slight issue because I've heard this problem with the context of evangelism discussion where some people said, you know, if you. I heard this more my positive days, where if you go and you teach people about.
- [63:20]
Christ, then when they die, there's going to be a more severe judgment on them. And so.
- [63:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
On the one hand, that is true, but on the other hand, didn't God send that person to teach them the good news? Right. He's. He's sending someone to do that for them, you know, and they will be better off having received more. Correct? You know?
- [63:51]
Caller Andrew
Yeah.
- [63:52]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And St. Paul points out, right, St. Paul talks about in Romans 2 about these Gentiles who keep the law, right, because just because they're conscious, right. They live relatively moral lives. Right. There are some of them. Right. Some of them live more moral lives than Israelites. Right. But is it easier to follow Christ when you know who he is, or to just kind of figure out how to do it on your own when you don't know who he is?
- [64:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [64:20]
Caller Andrew
Yeah.
- [64:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So. All right. Well, thank you very much, Andrew, for your call. We are happy to have you on the show. Okay, so we've got another caller, and George is calling from Illinois. So, George, are you there?
- [64:35]
Caller George
I believe that I am here. Am I coming through?
- [64:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, we can hear you. So what's your question, George?
- [64:41]
Caller Christiana
Very good.
- [64:42]
Caller George
Okay. Most of my impression or my knowledge about what the noose is, I got from Clark Carlton, who used to have.
- [64:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
A.
- [64:54]
Oh, did we lose George?
- [64:59]
I think we lost George.
- [65:02]
All right. Father Stephen, are you still there?
- [65:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I'm still here.
- [65:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay, well, hopefully George can call back and we'll talk to him. So. Okay, well, we do have another caller waiting. So Christiana from Ohio. Christiana, are you there?
- [65:19]
Okay, well, we don't seem to have her connected either.
- [65:22]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Catastrophic phone system collapse.
- [65:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah. I don't know what happened here. All right, well, someone's cut the phone lines.
- [65:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Do you hear eerie music in the background?
- [65:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's coming from inside the studio.
- [65:37]
All right, well, hopefully we'll be able to get these folks back. So, George, are you there yet?
- [65:43]
Caller George
I am here.
- [65:45]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay, we lost touch with you for just a second and I heard you. Yeah, yeah. Welcome back. I heard you saying that you had learned about the noose from something from Clark Carlton. Is that right?
- [65:56]
Caller George
Yes. His ancient faith Podcast Faith and Philosophy, which is discontinued now.
- [66:03]
Okay. And he. The way he handled it, he contrasts the noose to. I think he's. The word is the o' Neill discursive reasoning.
- [66:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [66:15]
Caller George
That. Am I saying that Greek word correctly? Is the O N?
- [66:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Close enough, yeah.
- [66:22]
Caller George
Okay.
- [66:25]
And with that in mind, that the noose is not a reasoning.
- [66:32]
Not a discursive issue.
- [66:37]
Some years ago, I heard a science podcast in the end episode which raised the question, can a child think before he or she can talk? And they give a few. They give, I think, three stories. I know number two.
- [66:54]
An adult man who was taught to talk, and then he lost his ability to communicate with others like him who couldn't talk because now he could reason and use words. And he lost his ability that he had to communicate with some other guys. And there was another woman who was. She was college educated, and something happened to her brain. She wasn't able to talk or think. And then she regained it, and she was able to reflect on the period of time when she could not talk or think. And she heard she couldn't talk or speak in words, but she had.
- [67:32]
She started talking about some. Some method of thinking that she had during that time period. And it made me think, is maybe this an organic reflection of the noose.
- [67:45]
Like in a child's brain that can't talk yet is there.
- [67:50]
Were they would the noose. We're told to have faith like a child. Would that be what might be going on there? Am I making sense?
- [68:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, you're making sense. I think that. I mean, I have. I did not listen to what you listened to from Clark Carlton, so I can't comment on what he in particular said. I have heard this distinction between the nous and the. You know, I don't want to say Dianetic, because then that's L. Ron Hubbard.
- [68:20]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Dionia.
- [68:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, the Dionia. Yeah, yeah. The discursive reasoning faculty and. Right. That is true. Right. They're not the same thing. And I think that's an important place to start. Like, that's what we're talking about, that you are not your thoughts. And also that the nous is not the only way to receive knowledge. Right. And so when you talked about people, for instance, who are either, you know, physically immature or then. Then had an injury or something like that, and yet they still were able to perceive, and then even later could kind of comment on that, just show. That's just an illustration of what we're talking about, that there's lots of different ways to know, and there's Lots of different ways that thoughts come into, you know, into your mind. Right. So, Father, did you have anything you want to add to that or correct or whatever?
- [69:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, just a couple quick. Yeah, we. We've got to be careful.
- [69:15]
When we. When we use. When we distinguish between Greek words.
- [69:21]
Not that what he was saying was wrong, but I can give you examples where the word dionia is used in the Bible, for example, where it basically means the same thing as news.
- [69:34]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right?
- [69:34]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So exhibit A would be when. When Christ quotes Deuteronomy and says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. The word for mind there is dionia. And he doesn't mean discursive reasoning. He means your mind. Right?
- [69:50]
So. But I mean, it's helpful as a label. And any label you use, we just have to say this is a label we're using to make a distinction. It's not a technical term. Because if people start to look at it as a technical term, then, you know, for example, they start thinking different Greek words for love mean different things.
- [70:10]
Stir that pot again.
- [70:13]
But, yeah, it is definitely true that there is. There are ways of interacting with the world that do not involve language, Right. And if you, if you work with animals at all, you know this, right? Animals can learn to understand verbal commands and understand certain words and sounds, mean certain things.
- [70:33]
But you could. They also are able to process and strategize, right. And interact with their environment in a way that they're not. They don't have thoughts formed into language in their brains, right.
- [70:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
When they're.
- [70:48]
Father Stephen DeYoung
When they're doing it. Right?
- [70:52]
So, yeah, there. There are. There are multiple levels. And putting it into words, like we said earlier, is. Is reducing it in a certain sense, right? You might, if. If you're a craftsman and you're making a chair, right. You probably don't. If you're a professional craftsman, every time you make a chair, think in your head discursively. Like, okay, now I need to make this measurement and make sure the curve is right. Like, you just, you know how to do it and you just do it, right. You don't have to go to the language level, right?
- [71:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And. And, you know, and like, I have four children and I watched, I interacted with them before they could talk to me. You know, they were responding and. And not, you know, in. In a linguistic way. They didn't have words initially, and yet it was. They. They could still communicate. They could still interact. You know, they could still. They knew who was who. You know, like, you know, a baby that prefers mom over dad, which is what usually happened in my house. But we did have one baby that for a period of time, actually liked me better. Only one out of four, though. But you know, like, it's, it's definitely a thing, you know. You know, the idea that they can't think or can't know doesn't make any. Just because they don't have language doesn't. The evidence doesn't line up with that. So I hope that makes some sense, George.
- [72:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And watch a baby interact with an icon sometime.
- [72:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating.
- [72:27]
All right, well, thank you very much for that question, George. It's a useful distinction, clarification to make. Okay, we're going to take one more caller before we continue on. Start talking about Apocalypse. And that's Christiana from Ohio. So, Christiana, are you there? I'm here.
- [72:42]
Caller Christiana
Can you hear me?
- [72:43]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
We hear you.
- [72:45]
Caller Christiana
Yes, yes, I'm back.
- [72:47]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You made it.
- [72:49]
Caller Christiana
So I am the woman of many questions.
- [72:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, well, okay, you get one. And if it's good, we'll let you have a follow up.
- [73:02]
Caller Christiana
So I was driving the other day and there was a morning dove in the road. And the way that they walk, they sort of bob their head so they feel like they're going faster, but they're really not going any faster. And I nearly hit it. And I felt a sort of horror inside of me. I was like, no, I can't hit a dove. That's the image of the Holy Spirit. And I'm like, wait, is it, what is, what does that mean? Can we honor the Holy Spirit by honoring a dove? If we hurt a dove in a bad way, are we dishonoring the Holy Spirit? What sort of connection does the Holy Spirit have with the image of a dove?
- [73:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So, like, as opposed to, for instance, if you hit, I was going to say a pigeon, but pigeons are doves.
- [73:49]
If you hit a turkey buzzard with your car.
- [73:52]
Which is a little bit more likely, probably because they like to hang out on roads, you know, would that be sort of not the same thing?
- [74:02]
I mean, so in the scripture we do get the Holy Spirit alighting on the Lord Jesus at theophany, as it says in scripture, in the form or the shape of a dove. But he did not become a bird. Okay, so what's. Yeah, he did not become a bird.
- [74:19]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay.
- [74:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I don't know if I rescued myself by saying that Father Steve was about to. Yeah, no, he did not become a bird. Right. So he's not, he's not a dove. The Holy Spirit is Not a dove. Certainly iconographically, where you see a dove appear, usually that's what, you know, it's a symbol of the Holy Spirit because of that description that's given in the Gospels. But, I mean, I would. I don't know. I'm just shooting from the hip here. But I would not say that the mourning dove that you accidentally hit with your car, it would be an affront to the Holy Spirit any more than hitting some other bird or animal. Right? Now, if you were, like, gunning for it and you were trying to just run this thing down out of a sense of glee of killing things with your car, that's another problem entirely. But I don't think it has to do with the particular species that you're hitting. I don't know. I guess I'm just shooting from the hips.
- [75:17]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So unless you take it home and eat it, then it's okay. You're hunting at that point?
- [75:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Car hunting, yeah.
- [75:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I live in Louisiana.
- [75:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Not the best way to hunt, though.
- [75:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. No, right.
- [75:32]
Yeah. So, yeah, The. The. The key is that in that instance.
- [75:38]
Right, it's describing the way in which the Spirit descended. It's giving an image. This is why, technically, in orthodox iconography, you're not supposed to depict the Holy Spirit as a dove in any other icon.
- [75:58]
In order to not sort of give that impression that the Holy Spirit was incarnate as a dove or something.
- [76:05]
This may scandalize some people.
- [76:08]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You do see it that way in some places, in most.
- [76:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
In most of the scriptures, that in a lot of ancient Near Eastern literature, the dove is not an image of, like, peace and beauty the way it is today.
- [76:24]
People, people and things are usually compared to doves in the Old Testament. And this is not why the Holy Spirit. Let me be clear. This is not why the Holy Spirit is compared to that. Right. It's ascribing a white descent. Right.
- [76:39]
But in the Old Testament and in a lot of ancient eraser literature, doves are actually considered to be stupid birds.
- [76:48]
Jonah's name means dove.
- [76:53]
And that's at play in the book of Jonah that he doesn't have his head, right?
- [76:59]
It turns to figure out what God is doing. The reason why the dove returning with the branch at the end of the flood is so important, is that doves aren't very bright. So if it was able to go and find a branch and get back, that means, oh, the water must be mostly gone now, Right? Like, Mikey likes it. Right. So the dove could even go and find it. Right. And so what. What happened? What happened in Sort of the tradition. It wasn't actually the peace thing didn't come from the Holy Spirit, actually. It came from Noah's dove with the branch in its mouth. The olive branch was originally the symbol of peace or the token of peace. If you look at our Orthodox prayers, our older prayers, they talk about the branch, the olive branch, as the symbol and token of peace, but they would depict the dove with the olive branch in its mouth. And so that whole image became a symbol of peace. And then people sort of forgot about the olive branch, and it was just doves. And then people started letting them loose at weddings, and they went to the bathroom everywhere, and it was a nightmare.
- [78:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Or funerals. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [78:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's the worst. Sorry.
- [78:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
If you. If anyone out there has had it released doves at your funeral, I. It's. Yeah, yeah. Because. Because. Because the idea there that some people have is like, oh, that's the. That's the soul going up or whatever. It's like, please don't do that.
- [78:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No.
- [78:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's why we don't make these things up.
- [78:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So, in essence, if you do hit a dove with your car, it's because the dove was too dumb to get out of the way.
- [78:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Hopefully that's not scandalous there for you, Christiana.
- [78:33]
Caller Christiana
Oh, no. So, okay, good. Do we. So were you saying that.
- [78:42]
The Holy Spirit came down as the image of a dove just to describe its whiteness and how it sort of was, like, bright in the way it flew?
- [78:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, right. It's about the motion, like a dove. It's about the descent of the Holy Spirit.
- [78:58]
It's not describing the Holy Spirit. It's describing the descent of the Holy Spirit.
- [79:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Does that make sense?
- [79:07]
Caller Christiana
Yes, it does.
- [79:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay, great.
- [79:10]
Caller Christiana
Well, thank you so much.
- [79:11]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You're welcome. Nice to hear from you, Christiana. All right, so rolling on. Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse now or actually Apocalypse Then.
- [79:20]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Apocalypse then.
- [79:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Then. Yes. Yes. Then, then, and now. We had.
- [79:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We had to take a few calls because we were going to get to the actual topic of the episode far too early, too quickly if we did. That's right. Yes, that's right. So that's right. Now we're safe to actually start the actual topic.
- [79:37]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes. Okay. So Apocalypse is not about the end of the world or. Or about, you know, like, it's funny. Like, we have this genre of stories, you know, post apocalyptic, which doesn't actually mean the end of the world, although it usually means the end of a world, you know, a civilization.
- [79:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The end of the world as we know it.
- [79:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes, as we know it. Right, right. Hey, that's where we started this episode, you know? But yeah, it's not about mass destruction or giant comets or about giants.
- [80:11]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Zombies.
- [80:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Zombies, yeah. Zombie apocalypse. Although, as an interesting side note, I just have to share this with the world. There is a. There's a Facebook account that I like to follow called Confessions of a Funeral Director.
- [80:25]
Which the guy who writes it actually went to seminary with our mutual friend Mike Landsman. So that's kind of fun. And at one point he posted. This is like a couple of years ago, at one point he posted this sort of confession that when he's. Now, some people may not appreciate this humor. So I'm just warning you now, this.
- [80:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Is the scandal episode.
- [80:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
This is the scandal.
- [80:45]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah.
- [80:46]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. He. He says that when he's putting. When he's putting bodies in coffins, if they're wearing shoes, that he ties the shoelaces together. Because if there ever is a zombie apocalypse, then it would be hilarious. That's what he. That's what he said.
- [81:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It could save lives.
- [81:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It could save lives.
- [81:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's true.
- [81:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's right. Slow them down just a little bit. Yeah.
- [81:08]
Father Stephen DeYoung
There was some televangelist who said the COVID vaccine was going to start a zombie apocalypse.
- [81:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, nice.
- [81:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And he was serious. Well, as serious as those folks get.
- [81:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [81:21]
Still could. I mean, you don't know. Yeah. So that's not what apocalypse is, one.
- [81:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Of my favorite genres of. Of films. But no, this. This is a genre of ancient literature.
- [81:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [81:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It's a very different genre.
- [81:34]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [81:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So, yeah, it's not about mass destruction. It's not about nuclear war.
- [81:42]
And so the word. The word apokalypsis in Greek just means revelation.
- [81:50]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Or unveiling, literally.
- [81:52]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Or revelation. Yeah. Removing a cover. Unmercy. Seating something.
- [81:59]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There we go. Now we've been doing episodes long enough that we can have cool callbacks like.
- [82:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That to previous episodes in joke Inceptions. There we go. So, yeah, you're peeling back a layer and revealing something. Showing something.
- [82:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [82:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But that's why you will sometimes in your old timey Bibles, it will be the Apocalypse of St. John.
- [82:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [82:20]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And in your new timey Bibles, your lame ones, it'll be the revelation of St. John.
- [82:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Not just revelation ever. Revelations.
- [82:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. There is no plural.
- [82:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's not the book of Revelations.
- [82:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
There is no plural. There was one revelation to St. John and he recorded it.
- [82:41]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes. Right.
- [82:44]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So. So, right, but those are. Those are synonyms, basically. To reveal something, to uncover something.
- [82:50]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [82:50]
Father Stephen DeYoung
To show something. And so what it is uncovering is the spiritual reality. That is always, as we said at the end of Act 1, that is always connected to and right behind the physical and material reality.
- [83:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. But that we don't usually see.
- [83:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That most people don't see. Right, Most people don't see. And we're gonna get into this more in Act 3. Why a lot of people's. Their noose isn't all that active. But so because our noose isn't all that active, we don't see this. Right. But it is revealed to people whose nooses are like prophets and apostles. And then they.
- [83:40]
Are able to.
- [83:43]
Fill in those blanks. Right. They're able to then show, here's what's going on behind the material reality that you're seeing.
- [83:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. And far from this being something that's just relegated to that last book in the Bible, it's actually everywhere. So whenever a prophet receives revelation from God, it's an apocalypse. You know, something's being pulled away, and now he sees something, you know, that God has given him this vision. Which is why they're often called seers. Right. There's this notion of. Like Moses, for instance, in orthodox liturgical texts is referred to as the prophet Moses, the God seer. You know, God revealed himself to Moses. God Apocalyptus. I don't know that there's a. There's not a verb, is there? I don't know. But God pulled away the veil.
- [84:35]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Apocalypto.
- [84:36]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. No.
- [84:37]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Oh, man.
- [84:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's bad. That's. Is it really?
- [84:41]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah.
- [84:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, wow. Okay. Well, there we go. All right. Well, there. That's.
- [84:46]
Father Stephen DeYoung
First person.
- [84:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [84:48]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. Right.
- [84:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [84:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [84:50]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [84:50]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's. I am revealing.
- [84:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, Right. Yeah. Right. Right. So. So the. This happens all over the Scripture. So I mean, we do have this book called the apocalypse of St. John, but it's happening all the time. It's happening all the time. You know, whenever you've got a prophet or apostle receiving something or anybody receiving something from God, that's. It's an apocalypse.
- [85:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It's what the whole Bible is.
- [85:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [85:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
To varying degrees of obvious. Right. So there's places where it's more obvious, but it's what the whole Bible is when we understand the Scriptures correctly. That's why the Old Testament was written by prophets and the New Testament was written by apostles. And there's less than a hair's breadth between what a prophet is and what.
- [85:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
An apostle is, as we discussed in a previous episode.
- [85:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But the. The earliest. Yeah, you mentioned seer. The earliest Hebrew term for prophet is actually seer.
- [85:51]
That goes back earlier than.
- [85:55]
The word navi that gets translated as prophetis In Greek. In Greek.
- [86:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
What's the earlier word? What's the Hebrew for seer?
- [86:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It's a form of the verb ra to see.
- [86:11]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay.
- [86:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Which is also, and I think not coincidentally, part of the root that gets turned into bishop.
- [86:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes, Overseer.
- [86:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, yeah.
- [86:24]
Right. But so that's the idea. The idea, this is even the earlier level is the person who sees. Right. And then by the time you have sort of the navi, the prophet idea sort of firmly established.
- [86:38]
You still have that element because, for example, the book of Jeremiah, the definition of who is a true prophet is the true prophet is the one who has stood in the divine council. So the one who has seen God, the one who has been, you know, in. In the presence of God, stood in the divine council and seen him. Yeah, and the angelic hosts. And another good example of this sort of noetic site is the story of Elisha and his servant Gehazi.
- [87:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, right.
- [87:11]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And Gehazi underutilized biblical name, folks. We got like a thousand Georges and nicks in all of our churches. 0gehazis, folks.
- [87:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, but you do need a nick in an. In an Orthodox church for that church to be canonical. Like, literally, no matter what tradition or jurisdiction it is, there's always some guy named Nick. It's just the way that it is. So I don't know that there's. We can't set up a Gehazi race requirement.
- [87:38]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right? No, but just. Just a token gazi or two. Good.
- [87:45]
So, yeah, so for those who aren't super familiar with this story.
- [87:52]
The prophet Elisha had this. This servant Gehazi. And there was this point at which the authorities were closing in on Elisha. As many of the prophets in the Old Testament. He was not a popular D dude. And so they were persecuted. Right. As. As you know, Christ would later say in, in the Gospels, which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? Elisha was one of them. But so as. As they're sort of closing in, his servant Gehazi is sort of terrified that they're going to die. And Elisha is on the other hand, totally calm.
- [88:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [88:30]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And so then there's this episode where Gehazi doesn't understand why Elisha is totally calm. And so Elisha sort of prays and Gehazi's eyes are opened is the language that's used. His eyes are opened and he's able to see the angelic hosts. Right. The armies of Yahweh, the God of Israel, like surrounding them on all sides and protecting them.
- [88:57]
And the implication is this is what Elisha sees all the time.
- [89:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right.
- [89:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Elisha is just living in the full world, spiritual and material. And that's why he operates the way he does. That's why he has the contentment and the ability to face the suffering and persecution. And giving that to Gehazi then than helps Gehazi.
- [89:25]
And so when the writers of scripture, when we talk about the Holy Spirit inspiring scripture, this is mostly what we're talking about, what that inspiration is. Sometimes people think about that inspiration, like, oh, he went into a trance and then like he came to and he had written all this stuff and oh, what's this? Like reading it for the first time himself, you know.
- [89:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. It's that they. God reveals things to them.
- [89:52]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, right. This is where the Holy Spirit comes and allows them to see.
- [89:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Which if you think about it. Okay, so like we're going to talk about some places in scripture where this happens. But like, so Genesis, obviously a good place to start at the very beginning.
- [90:08]
Like, there's events that happen at the beginning of Genesis that literally there was no one around to write them down. You know, like there was no one there when God, you know, no human being there when God separated the waters from the, you know, and the firmament and the earth. And like no one was there. And then, you know, there's all kinds of stuff that happens.
- [90:31]
Long, long before any of this gets written down. And the only way that someone would know those things or that a prophet would have that, that knowledge, as if God had revealed it to him. Right. You know.
- [90:45]
And yet further than that. Right. Is what exactly is scripture doing when these stories are being told through the prophets? Right. And this is really interesting to me because like it's often said, for instance, and rightly so, that the Bible is not a science textbook, that people who attempt to turn it into one. Whether it's people who are trying to do that to debunk it, or those who are trying to do it say, no, no, it's sort of the greatest of all science textbooks. I'm looking at you. Ark experience.
- [91:25]
That's a joke for my dad.
- [91:28]
Yeah, yeah. He and I feel you just wait.
- [91:31]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You just wait till global warming raises the sea levels and see who's laughing.
- [91:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There we go. Right, right. You know that that's not what its purpose is. And the fact that it's not doing that and we say that it's not doing that is not some kind of cop out. Right. So you Know, when, When. When the creation is described, it's not described in what we would think of as scientific terms. And it's not even trying to do that.
- [92:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right.
- [92:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's not talking about chemical processes. It's not talking about. I mean, it's. It's not talking about any of that stuff. Right. And so, I mean, that's why for me, like, I know this is just a personal opinion, but that's why for me, the whole kind of creationism versus evolution versus how old is the Earth, like, this stuff is just missing the point of what's going on there. Like, I mean, if someone wants to talk about that stuff and is interested in that, fine. But. But that's like not what Genesis is about. And Genesis is not even trying to supply that knowledge, you know? You know, it's not bad science because it's not science. And it's only in a world where we think that science equals knowledge and science is the only kind of knowledge that that's a problem. You know, like, well, if it's not science and how can we possibly trust it? Well, we just spent a whole episode and a half talking about why that's not all there is to it. Right, right.
- [92:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And it's. Yeah, it's. It's. The creation story is really, to us what God was doing.
- [93:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [93:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And what it means.
- [93:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [93:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And. And things about it that God wants to communicate to us. He's not telling us how he did it because we can't understand how he did it.
- [93:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, right.
- [93:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
He's not telling us the material level. Yeah. And it's well known, I think by now that I hate this how old is the earth stuff, and it bore you to tears.
- [93:22]
But yeah, I mean, if someone's arguing some position on that with an agenda. Right. Like if somebody, you know, I mean.
- [93:34]
Darwin was put to, like, horrific uses in 19th century colonialism and early 20th century, like fascism. Okay.
- [93:41]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Right.
- [93:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. I'm again, that. Okay. Like, if they have an agenda for today day based on that, then.
- [93:52]
I might need to get involved in the discussion. But if it's purely at an academic level of exactly how old the earth is, I don't care.
- [94:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Or the whole kind of. Again, I mentioned the arc experience, the whole answers in Genesis approach, which is the idea is if this doesn't line up according to these scientific categories, and that means the entire scripture is bunk. You know, that's like saying that the manual that came with my microwave, if it does not line up to Elizabethan forms of iambic pentameter then it's junk and we can't use it. Like it's not meant for that. That's not what, it's, what it's doing. Although I think it would pretty, pretty amazing if one of you people out there who writes, you know, manuals for appliances considered putting them in blank verse. Just an idea or a little alliterative Anglo Saxon verse, another idea, just throwing that out there.
- [94:52]
But no, that's not, that's, that's not what it's for. Right.
- [94:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And, and to, to paraphrase N.T. wright.
- [95:02]
There aren't any 19th century Germans around anymore, so we don't need to kowtow to them.
- [95:10]
Right. So yes, they wrote as if. Right. Their culture, civilization, form of religion was the denouement of history. Right? Yeah, we obviously don't believe that. Right. Things didn't go so well for Germany in the intervening years. There were some problems. Yeah, right.
- [95:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There's been some history since then.
- [95:31]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We have, we have just a similar mindset. Right, Right. So for example, we assume that if God explained the creation in scientific detail, that would be 21st century science.
- [95:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [95:46]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Not only would it have made no sense to Moses, Right. If he actually explained it, it would probably still make no sense to us. It'd probably be three or four thousand years if ever before it made any sense to anybody. Right. Because we just assumed that our science now is the science. And yeah, we look at science 100 years ago and we think a lot of it was dumb, but we're not going to think that 100 years from now because we're smart and have it all together.
- [96:14]
So the whole premise behind the idea that it would be science is flawed. Right. But the point is it isn't. It's apocalypse. It's revealing what God is doing. And so the same thing's true when you come to the flood. Right, Right.
- [96:28]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Which every, every ancient culture acknowledges happened on some level.
- [96:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. There is a material reality there. There is, there are events that happened. Right. The world and everything in it, the cosmos was created. That means it came into being at some point. Right. So there is a material reality that happened there. Right. But we're saying that the scriptures are that there to describe that material reality. They're there to describe the spiritual reality. Same thing with the Flood. Right. The material reality is probably almost everybody agrees on this is the material reality are the earth changes that happen at the end of the last ice age. Right. But the point is not of the story of the flood as recorded in Genesis, is not to say here is exactly what happened? Everybody knew what happened. Everybody knew there were these earth changes. Everybody knew there was a flood. Everybody knew that human civilization was nearly annihilated by it. Everyone knew all of this. Right. It was. What does this mean? Why did it happen? How did it happen? How did God preserve humanity through it?
- [97:37]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. What is God doing here?
- [97:39]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. That's what the scriptures are telling us. They're not just trying to tell us about the historical material event, though there was one, right. We're not going to the other extreme and denying that there was one and saying this is just a spiritual event or some spiritual truth. Right. But what's revealed to us in the scripture is the spiritual truth that is always there behind it alongside the material event, Right?
- [98:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yep, yep. Yeah. Same thing. Same thing with the Bible story. Like, you know, linguists and philologists will say, yes, we can look back and see that there's these divisions of link languages and civilization kind of splits up and, you know, all this kind of thing. But that's not what, like the Bible story is, you know, sorry, philologists, it's not. It's not a philological textbook, you know, that's not its point. It's about.
- [98:32]
The spiritual reality behind it. It's about human beings attempting to sort of control God and the. What. The fragmentation that happens as a result of that. And then worse still, that the various tribes and nations become subject to.
- [98:48]
Initially. Well, initially it's good. God puts them in the hands of angelic powers, but then it becomes bad when those angelic powers fall by accepting worship from those nations. It's about the rise of paganism and the rise of idolatry.
- [99:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right.
- [99:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Which.
- [99:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And we read. We quoted in a previous episode from anthropologists and sociologists talking about this. This is a thing that happened in human history, right. And what the Scriptures is revealing is what was going on there, the spiritual reality that laid behind those events. Same thing is true with the Exodus. We talked about the Exodus in the Pascha episode, right? There were these locks connected to the Red Sea that the Israelites had to cross to get out of Egypt.
- [99:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right?
- [99:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Physical water locks, Right. They also pass through the sea of reeds in the underworld, Right. That is the spiritual reality of what was happening there. And so the scriptures are about revealing to us the spiritual reality, not trying to give us a date for the Exodus, which is why that also bore sweet tears.
- [99:53]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah. And it's. And it's the same reason why, like, again, that that approach, you know, it's. It's like. Like when I was an Undergrad, One of my favorite poets was John Keats, and he's got this amazing poem called To Autumn, which I read every year at Autumn. You know, but a physics textbook cannot explain why. That's beautiful. That can only really be understood in spiritual terms. Like, it only makes sense that way. Right.
- [100:22]
So. So, yeah, I mean, you know, this. This problem gets repeated over and over again as people are trying to read scripture. We have to understand it's all apocalyptic. You know, another example is the conquest of Canaan. Right. Where you've got. There's a material thing happening, this migration of these Hebrew tribes, but there's also a spiritual side, which is the gigantomachy, the defeat of the giant clans. That's also happening. That's. And that's what the scripture is revealing to us. You know, it's passing on this apocalypse.
- [100:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, right. And. And then you get into the other historical books. You get into the books of kingdoms, or 1st and 2nd Samuel 1, 2nd kings, the parallel in 1st and 2nd chronicles. And 1st of all, it's sort of like it's chronicling the kings of. Of Israel and Judah. But then also it just zags for a whole bunch of chapters. It talks about Elijah and Elisha, who aren't kings. Yeah, they're. They're prophets. But on top of that, when you compare what's going on in scripture to what's going on in the archaeological record, it's. It's kind of fascinating because you have, you know, most of first and all of second Samuel, or first and second kingdoms about David, and there's barely mention of the existence of David in the archaeological record.
- [101:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, it does exist, but not barely.
- [101:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. And only recently has it been found. Whereas you look at Omri, the founder of the Omride dynasty, which Ahab was part of that dynasty. But Omri, he gets six verses in the Bible that basically just say like three times how wicked he was and that he bought the hill where they built Samaria later.
- [102:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [102:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's it. Right. But you go outside to the archaeological record, and all of Israel's neighbors referred to Israel as the house of Omri Beit Omri.
- [102:30]
Long after his dynasty was even gone. He was one of the most powerful and successful kings in the Northern kingdom's history, if not the most and influential in terms of Israel's neighbors at the global scale. Bible just set six verses. He's wicked. Right, that's it. And you see this refrain all the time in those books where it says, you know, as for everything else this wicked guy did, is it not recorded in the annals of the kings of Israel. Right. So yeah, you could go there and get the material history. Right. It's there in their official annals. All the battles they fought, the territory they, they took, the taxes they raised, the, the things, building projects. You can read all that there scriptures are here to reveal to you the spiritual reality behind that.
- [103:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [103:17]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And the spiritual reality of Omri is that he was wicked. He contributed to Israel's downfall and its spiral into destruction by the Assyrians.
- [103:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. So then, you know, perhaps in a more obvious section of the Old Testament in the prophets, that this is apocalyptic as well. Right. And you, so you, then you start getting prophets like Isaiah who sees God on his throne, Right. And, and reveals that kind of thing. Like this is, this is apocalypse in a way that makes, that's a little bit more obvious to us, I think. Right. So, so what are some more examples of, of that from those prophets?
- [103:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right? Well, there's, yeah, I mean there's obvious examples. So there's more subtle examples. I mean, what Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel are essentially doing is Isaiah, you know, before the fall of the northern kingdom or at the fall of the northern Kingdom, Jeremiah at the fall of Judah to the Babylonians and Ezekiel in exile is, you know, the people know either hey, the Assyrians are coming to kill everybody or the Babylonians are coming to kill everybody and enslave the rest, or we're in exile. They know that. Right. The prophet doesn't have to come and reveal that to them the dates where they were living. Right. The prophet comes to reveal to them, here's why, here's why the Assyrians are coming, here's why the Babylonians are coming, here's why you're in exile, and here's how God is going to bring you out of this. Here's how we ended up here. Here's what you need to do now in terms of repentance. And then here's how God is going to deliver us from this, from the consequences of our own, of our own sins and wickedness. And then you get the really obvious ones like Daniel and Zechariah, where they're actually apocalyptic texts, right?
- [105:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [105:08]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Like they're directly like recording visions, right?
- [105:11]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. These massive world history spanning kinds of things, you know. Right, yeah.
- [105:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And the Book of Revelation is that too, right, Exactly. And this is where that end of the world stuff comes in. Because in these more expansive apocalyptics. And the Book of Enoch is, is this too. Right. The Book of Enoch is actually several of these put together.
- [105:34]
And other Enoch literature is mostly apocalypses, but it has this vast sweep of history. It covers from the beginning all the way through the history of God's people all the way to the end.
- [105:48]
Right. And.
- [105:51]
As modern people, I guess we're more fascinated by trying to figure out what's ahead, what's in the future for us, which is the end, rather than trying to actually understand our past and our heritage and how we got here, which to me is backwards. Right, right.
- [106:09]
But yeah, so that it's. It's the whole sweep. Right. Not just. Not just here's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen in the future so that you can figure out when the end is coming. Exactly.
- [106:24]
And so when we say this is everywhere in the Bible, right. Probably the place where people would think this exists the least might be the Epistles of St. Paul. Because modern Western Christians, we've been taught that, you know, St. Paul's writing theology. Right. Which of course isn't true either. He's writing letters to churches and to people, but he's sitting there, right. He's writing theology. This is discursive reasoning. You know, we're going to go and analyze his grammar and his logical arguments. Right? Da, da, da, da, da, da, da. But if you read St. Paul closely and you look at the actual structure of his epistles, he will make a series of theological points. And these aren't just any theological points. These aren't sort of premise one. Right. Premise two. Right, Right. These are theological points like the first chapter of Ephesians.
- [107:22]
Right. We've been adopted as sons of God. We're already seated with Christ in the heavenly places. Right. This is. This is visionary type stuff. Right. This is revealing spiritual reality type stuff. This is. This is the spiritual reality. And then at some point in the epistle, it's almost always translated into English as therefore.
- [107:45]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right.
- [107:46]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Therefore. And the corny old chestnut is when you see that, you ask, what is it there for?
- [107:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I heard that so many times when.
- [107:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I was growing up.
- [107:59]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
What's the therefore? Therefore like? Oh, he's saying it again, Pastor, whatever your name is.
- [108:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, but what it is, is it's St. Paul doing this transition now to the very practical and the material level.
- [108:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right.
- [108:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
This is true. This is the spiritual reality. This is what's going on. Therefore, this is what you need to do. Therefore, you need to love your brother. Therefore, you need to put off sexual immorality.
- [108:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right?
- [108:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Therefore, you need to worship in this way and not that way.
- [108:31]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, Exactly.
- [108:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So even in St. Paul, this apocalyptic element is fundamental to what he's, to what he's doing. And that's what's behind. You'll sometimes hear that this eschatological tension between the already and the not yet. But what's really going on is actually more this apocalyptic transition. This is the reality. This is the truth right now and back then and in the future. Right. This is the truth. Therefore, this is what needs to happen now, which isn't just sit around hoping for stuff that's going to happen someday in the future. St. Paul always has stuff he wants you to do. Yes, sorry, some of our non orthodox Christians.
- [109:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, right. And I mean, you know, also known as repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Except Paul puts it the other way. You know, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
- [109:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Therefore repent and proclaim the gospel and live in unity with your brothers and sisters in Christ and you know, come together in worship and don't divide into factions and fight over stupid things.
- [109:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
All of that, that doesn't align with the spiritual reality that is actually present. Right, right.
- [109:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That is false to the reality of who you are in Christ.
- [109:59]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes, yes. All right. Well, we've had a nice bv second half to the show, but it's the Lord of Spirits podcast and that means there's a third half coming. So we're going to take a break in just a second and when we come back, we will be talking about Apocalypse Now. So let's go to break.
- [110:18]
Narrator
Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-A- radio.
- [110:39]
Announcer
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- [111:29]
To find this book and others like it, you can go to store.ancientfaith.com again, that is store.ancient faith.com.
- [111:39]
Narrator
We'Re back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 8-55-AF-RADIO.
- [111:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Thanks, Voice of Steve. And you know what else you can buy at stored on ancientfaith.com and that's father Steven's book, the Religion of the Apostles. This is an unpaid advertisement, but I just had to mention that for everybody because it's selling very well, thank God. But there's a big new printing in the warehouse, so there's lots more to go.
- [112:17]
Father Stephen DeYoung
For now.
- [112:18]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
For now? Yeah. I mean, you know.
- [112:22]
We'Ve sold out in the past, so, you know, get your copy while you still can. All right, well, before we continue, we actually do have another caller, and Samuel is calling from Virginia. So, Samuel, are you there?
- [112:36]
Caller Andrew
Be you well, Fathers.
- [112:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Be well to you. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast. We're happy to hear from you. What's on your mind?
- [112:46]
Caller Andrew
Does the liturgy include some sort of apocalyptic unveiling?
- [112:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [112:58]
Right. So how does that. Yeah, you might be thinking, well, in what way or how does that work? And that would be a very rational thing to wonder.
- [113:09]
Right? I mean, we could do like whole episodes on this, and we actually do plan to do some episodes on stuff that specifically in the liturgy.
- [113:19]
There are a lot of things revealed in the liturgy, but I would say that among the foremost would be.
- [113:26]
The presence of God to his people. Like when we say Christ is in our midst, you know, remember that the liturgy is fundamentally a sacrificial meal that we share with our God.
- [113:38]
And He offers Himself for us to us. Right. And so we, we feed upon him and he is revealed to us. He becomes known to us, you know, just like happens in the breaking of the bread at Emmaus, he becomes known to us in the breaking of the bread. Right. So fundamentally, the Divine Liturgy reveals Christ. There's a lot of other things we could say about. About that revelation of Christ, but that's the most fundamental part of it. It is. It is an unveiling. It is a pulling back of the veil.
- [114:15]
And certainly there's liturgical bits that kind of indicate that, like, for instance, the opening of the. The holy doors and the kunastasis, you know, that's an indication of part of what's happening there. So, Father, you got anything to add?
- [114:31]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, yeah, there's the very literal, right, the opening and closing of the doors, the opening and closing of the curtain, the veiling and removal of the veils from the gifts.
- [114:43]
But, yeah, this idea of noetic revelation is deeply built into the words of the liturgy. And I think exhibit A of that is actually in the epiclesis of the liturgy of St. Basil the Great. The epiclesis of St. John Chrysostom. It's make this bread, right, to be the body. Make that which is in this cup to be the blood of Christ making the change by the Holy Spirit. The Epiclesis of St. Basil the Great, it is show this bread to be and show this cup to be. So the idea of showing, revealing, seeing the spiritual reality of Christ's body and blood.
- [115:35]
That permeates.
- [115:39]
The gifts is sort of right there in the language.
- [115:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. And also occurs to me. I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier, but, you know, after we receive Holy Communion, then we sing what we have seen the true light. We have received the heavenly spirit. Right. We're basically saying we've received this apocalypse. Right. That's what's happening right after you commune, you know, so, yeah, I mean, it's everywhere. It is an apocalypse. Yeah. Yeah. Does that make sense, Samuel?
- [116:13]
Caller Andrew
Yes, it does, Father.
- [116:15]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Awesome. Well, thank you very much for calling.
- [116:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I think. I think I'm gonna start advertising our Sunday service in the paper as a liturgical apocalypse. Yeah, let's see if it drums up some more visitors.
- [116:28]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Apocalypse 10a. 9am, St. Paul's in the Maze.
- [116:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I don't know.
- [116:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
When you do your service. Yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. That's a very fun idea. So. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Samuel, and we're happy to talk to you this evening.
- [116:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So.
- [116:43]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
All right. All right, well, we're going to roll on here with the third half of the show, and here is our therefore. Right, Right.
- [116:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Therefore.
- [116:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, exactly. Therefore. Therefore.
- [116:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. So again, like we said at the beginning of the last act, right. The question we get all the time is, how do we actually. I guess it's the end of Act 1. What's the way back into the ground of, you know, the ancient world? Right. In terms of their way of seeing the world. And so what we were talking about at the end of Act 1, in terms of language and music and art and ritual, talked about how we in the modern world, due to what modernity has done to us, tend to try to reduce everything to language. Part of the way back is to sort of follow that path back the other way. Right. Moving out of that kind of linguistic rationalism that has so come to cat. To to categorize and describe Western theology.
- [117:47]
But to try to move from reducing everything to language to going back to iconography. And we have the. We have the tools to do this in the Orthodox Church.
- [118:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [118:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You get. You can make yourself, even if you have to make yourself at first, right. Stand before or sit before an icon.
- [118:10]
You can make yourself put away the lyric sheet and just listen to the liturgical hymns. Right. And be in and listen to the liturgy. And you can come and participate in the sacraments and the mysteries in the liturgy. You can actually do this and fight that desire to try to boil it down to language and try to deal with it in that way. If you're not in an Orthodox church, this becomes much more difficult.
- [118:43]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Because of the heritage of four bare walls and discernment. Right. You know, the, like iconoclasm leads to this reduction to language. Because when you pull those things out, then what do you have left? You just have that.
- [119:05]
And now, mind you, we're not in any way knocking language. Right. But language is one. One of the ways that human beings interact with the world. I mean, how can I knock language?
- [119:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You know, I'm gonna go full Diogenes the cynic. And when people come and try to talk to me, I'm just gonna waggle my fingers at them in strange ways.
- [119:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the thing about the forebear. So this is something that hits home. Okay? So, you know, again, this is, I guess this is our scandal episode. But when that's your heritage, when that's the core of what church is.
- [119:48]
Even when you then do have, say, music, which is another way that human beings interact with reality. The way that music is ultimately evaluated within that context is in terms of the lyrics, you know, and that's why, for instance, then you can change the genre, can sound however you like, and there's no. Within that particular context, there is no argument against death metal in church if the lyrics are good. Right. Because.
- [120:22]
All that matters is the language. Now, almost every Christian.
- [120:28]
Would sort of viscerally understand that death metal doesn't work work in church. I'm sure there's some of you out there that probably don't agree with that. But, you know, and the reason why I would say that they viscerally understand this is because that's super rare in churches. Most would like, no, we will not put that in there. The problem is that there's no good argument against it. When four bare walls in a sermon is the core of what your religion does, there's no good argument against It.
- [120:59]
So, you know, that's the difficulty when you make church essentially a kind of lesson.
- [121:07]
I mean, I'm in favor of lessons and lectures and language and, you know, all that kind of stuff, but that's. When that's all that you've got, it's going to be much harder, much, much harder to get back to. I mean, if we could put it this way, why not this enchanted experience of the world, you know, the noetic apprehension of what's going on, the full panoply of human knowledge of who God is and what he's doing in the world. And I mean, not to do too much, you know, follow civilization kind of stuff of this, but I would say that, you know, that a religion that emphasizes language to the exclusion of this other stuff, or at least to the detriment of it, tends to help people become secular, frankly. You know, that's. That's what I think anyway, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [122:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Language. Language is. Is kind of, frankly, the lowest level of this, which is why we talked about reducing it to language.
- [122:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [122:14]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And we all kind of realize that. Right. Like, if the only way you ever communicated with your spouse was talking on the phone.
- [122:24]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [122:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That would greatly reduce your relationship.
- [122:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. And.
- [122:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And in a way that if you both lost the power of speech, but you were together.
- [122:36]
That would be less of a reduction.
- [122:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, right. And. And. And we all have this concept of. That's just talking about, like, we have this sense that there's something deeper and more authentic than language. Now, language becomes vivified when it's filled with authentic life. Right. When it has the whole. When it's within the context of all the rest of this, then it becomes what it should be. So, like, liturgy itself has a lot of language. Right. Has a lot of language, but it's only able to do what it does within the context of the ritual of the liturgy.
- [123:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. If you sit at home in your armchair and read the words of the liturgy, you will know it is not remotely the same experience even close. And people, I think, realize this. I've had a lot of people who, over the course of the lockdown, told me that at first they would, like, watch the liturgy on a stream, and then they stopped and started just doing typica or prayer services themselves or with their family.
- [123:41]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [123:41]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And they found actually doing those prayer services far more fulfilling than just watching the liturgy on a screen.
- [123:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [123:48]
Father Stephen DeYoung
As a spectator.
- [123:50]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yep, Yep.
- [123:53]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And so this is.
- [123:56]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
We.
- [123:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We talked last time about how.
- [124:00]
The noose is the capacity through which we as humans image God, that that imaging takes place. And we talked about how.
- [124:12]
What we choose to focus that point of focus on is going to be transformative for us. But there's also a liturgical shaping that happens to us and it happens again through the news in the same noetic way. But, but the ritual of the liturgy shapes us. And that's why in the Orthodox Church, we understand that the liturgy, worship, ritual has to be completely inflexible. Right? Because to mold something, the mold has to be completely firm. You can't mold Jello with Jell O.
- [124:55]
Right. If you try to mold something with Jello, the Jello will be shaped to the thing. The thing will not be shaped to the mold. And so if, if liturgy and worship and ritual aren't inflexible, then that is exactly what happens. We shape our worship to ourselves rather than the worship shaping us to it and the worship given by God shaping us to Christ, to God himself.
- [125:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, we can't state this strongly enough because there are a lot of kinds of worship out there.
- [125:35]
That.
- [125:37]
Within particular traditions that have this idea. The tradition has this idea that it needs to be constantly changed to sort of keep up with the times, for instance.
- [125:48]
But if worship is supposed to shape you, but you're constantly shaping it, then all you get is worship that's shaped like you. That's what you get. It's not then going to do the work of cleansing your noose so you can apprehend spiritual reality. And worship.
- [126:10]
Should not be altered to the times because then it doesn't do the work. And also, frankly, you know, it can't just be changed by issuing a decree. Let's just radically revamp it or, you know, cut this off or whatever it might be. That's not the way that. That's not the way that the worship that actually does this work works. Right. Because again, then it's. Then it's being. Then it's subject to a human will, right? Now, that's not to say, I mean, we could get this as a long rabbit trail potentially. But that's not to say that, like, for instance, I'm not claiming that the way that we worship in all its exact details on Sunday morning in our church here in Emmaus is the exact way that the Apostles worship. That's not what I'm saying. You know, the liturgics have changed over time, but not in any utterly radical or fundamental way. Right. The kinds of changes that have occurred are not the thing that we're talking about now. You know, when the Problem is when someone essentially says, we need to re envision what worship is, that's when you have the problem. Or we need to basically stop doing the tradition we've done for all these centuries and start something else now. That's the kind of problem that we're pointing out.
- [127:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The Zeitgeist is a spirit that exists, but it's not the Holy Spirit.
- [127:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. You don't want to be in the spirit of the times. I mean, I remember that another corny old saying from back in the day was, he who marries the spirit of the age will soon find himself a widower, you know, because.
- [127:48]
It'S constantly changing. You know, are you going to just keep getting married over and over again to new spirits of the age? Right. You know?
- [127:57]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, yeah.
- [127:58]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Doesn't work.
- [127:59]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And beyond this, we have in our head, this is another modern, Right, Western Christian thing. We have this idea of the two tables of the law, Right. We have this idea, right, that, you know, there's these first four commandments, that's like worship stuff. That's like God stuff. And then there's these other ones and they're like moral stuff. Yeah, right. And so there's. There's faith and morals. Right. Or the. And these are these sort of two different things.
- [128:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [128:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So first of all, I'm inclined to point out that there were not actually. It's not that, you know, God could only fit four commandments on the one tablet, and so he had to bleed over onto c attached sheets.
- [128:48]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wait, wait, are you Saying Cecil B. DeMille lied?
- [128:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [128:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, man.
- [128:55]
Charlton Heston is a collaborator even though.
- [128:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yul Brenner is Orthodox.
- [129:04]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wow.
- [129:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's true.
- [129:08]
It's not. It's not that, you know, he still is. It's not.
- [129:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Is he still alive?
- [129:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Actually, I haven't checked.
- [129:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, okay. Yeah.
- [129:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No, he's buried at a monastery in France.
- [129:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's right. That's right. He is.
- [129:20]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But he's still Orthodox. That's my.
- [129:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes, yes.
- [129:23]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So it's actually two copies, Right.
- [129:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's why there's two tablets.
- [129:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, that's why there's two tablets. But aside from that, Right. There's also not this schism, Right. The way that the scriptures see what we call morality is not detached from it is the same essentially as the way that they see worship as we were just talking about it, especially in relationship to the noose.
- [129:54]
This is why you constantly see over and over again and especially emphasized in the New Testament, right. When Christ is asked, what is the first and greatest commandment? Right. He gives Two that sum up all of them. One of them from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength that we referred to earlier. And the second is, like it, love your neighbor as yourself. Those go together. And St. John in first John says, he who says he loves God and hates his brother is a liar.
- [130:25]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [130:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
These two go together, right? These two always go together. Well, why? Well, we've talked about worship. Worship is hospitality, right? And this showing of hospitality to God, especially in the form of food, especially in the form of sacrifice, the showing of hospitality to God, this worship we're talking about, this is part of what noetically shapes us in the image of God and allows us to image God. And because we understand that not just me, but every human person, every human person who's ever lived is the imager of God. Right. Then the hospitality that I show to that image is the hospitality I'm showing to God.
- [131:11]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.
- [131:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And those are all examples in the parable of the sheep and the goats of hospitality. Yeah, every single one of them. And so this is why you see over and over again in the Fathers, giving alms, giving money to a poor person to help them is an act of worship of God.
- [131:36]
And though it's too big of a rabbit hole to go into here, we'll do this in a future episode at some point. The Fathers are all very clear, and they're getting it from the New Testament. The giving of alms, giving aid to the poor, atones for sin. How about that? There's a bombshell to drop.
- [131:53]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right? Because it cleanses, you know, it cleanses that place, that person, and cleanses you, you know. Right, yeah. And the reason why all of these things are ultimately acts of worship, right? Like, I know one of the big conversations surrounding our podcast is like, what exactly counts as worship? You know, but the reason why all these things are acts of worship, as you said, it's this hospitality frame. But it's because everything that you do fundamentally is a ritual in the sense that you're in interacting with reality, right? So when you do the works of God, when you behave the way that God behaves when you do, you know, his works in creation, especially towards other people, that cleanses your noose. It allows you to have the apocalyptic experience, seeing God, seeing spiritual reality more clearly. Now, it's not gonna be like an instant thing like, well, I gave alms yesterday. How come I Can't see that heavenly hosts, you know, like, that's not the way that it works. Right? But, but, you know, because the people who have those kinds of experiences, it tends to be something that, that is formed in them over a lifetime or in some cases, God chooses certain people to work through. Right. In a way that we can't quite understand why, or whatever. But, but, but that's, that's what happens. And, and doing the opposite of that, like, you know, not loving your neighbor as yourself, that darkens your news because you're not behaving like God. You're not doing his works. And so then your ability to see spiritual reality is, is going to be more limited. You know, there's. There's some things that you can only understand after.
- [133:39]
You know, a life of all of these things. Worship, almsgiving, prayer, sacrificing your own time, yourself, your preferences. Like, all of these things, that kind of knowledge only comes through that kind of experience is not something you can get from simply hearing a lesson or reading a book. And that's why, frankly.
- [134:06]
If someone's going to be like a teacher of three theology and they don't have this experience of struggling in the Christian life, then while the words that they might use might be true, they're also transmitting a darkness alongside it because they're functioning with a darkened news, because they have not done the work.
- [134:34]
And that's something that everyone. I mean, this is a warning to me, right? I'm a teacher. Like, this is my task.
- [134:42]
So I need to be always struggling to do that. And I need to make sure I'm constantly being prepared, and I need to make sure that I have that blessing for my bishop. And I need to not check out of the spiritual life, not check out of doing good works and provoking other people to do good works, as St. Paul puts it.
- [134:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right? And make no mistake, the parable of the sheep and the great goats is apocalyptic.
- [135:04]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [135:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. This is not because it happens at the end, right. But what is, what is the Last Judgment? Right? That's. We read it on the Sunday, the Last Judgment. What is the Last Judgment? That's the day when everything is revealed.
- [135:20]
Right? That's the day. That's why you could call that day the Apocalypse. That's when everything is revealed. And what Christ reveals those people is when you met that man in the street and you told him he smelled bad and he should get a job and he was a drunk, and to get away from you, you were saying that to Christ.
- [135:40]
And when you met that man and you bought him some food to eat and you tried to help him and you were kind to him. You were being kind to Christ. And you can't tell Christ to get away from you and call him names and be disgusted by him in the street, then walk into a church and share a meal with him in The Eucharist.
- [136:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. St. John Chrysostom says essentially, almost exactly that, I think, like something like if you can't find Christ and the beggar at the door of the church, then you won't find him in the chalice. Right, I'm paraphrasing.
- [136:14]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And so the keeping of the commandments, all of them, both our worship and our lives. Right. This is what corporate cleanses the noose and allows us to see and understand spiritual reality. And in the same way, when we fall into sin, our noose is darkened and we become less able to see what is happening and understand the spiritual reality that underlies our life.
- [136:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah.
- [136:43]
Yeah. So to wrap up.
- [136:48]
You know, one of the things that this conversation has really helped to underline for me.
- [136:55]
Is how really everything is ritual.
- [137:00]
And I don't just mean that it's. Everything is like ritual. Right. It's not just a metaphor for. But it actually is. Like everything that you do, you're interacting with reality. You're interacting. And because all of the material interaction that you do has a spiritual aspect to it, that means everything that you do is interacting with spiritual reality. We talk about re. Enchantment, and sometimes people think of that just in terms of what you see. And certainly that's one of the elements. And we've been talking about that because episodes about Apocalypse. But there's also this sense of participation, the question of participation in the spiritual world. Right. And it can be tempting to want to.
- [137:48]
Have a greater awareness of the spiritual world or interaction with the spiritual world in. In a quick and easy way. Right. So we've talked, for instance, about people who get into the occult or into psychedelic drugs, this kind of thing. And it's true that takes you there very quickly. Right. But you're heading into it without having put on the whole armor of God.
- [138:12]
You know, you're leaping off the cliff without a parachute, without wings, or whatever metaphor you want to use.
- [138:21]
And there's a reason that the scripture does not ever provide a quick and easy way to.
- [138:30]
Open the eye of the soul, the noose. Right. To apprehend spirituality. There's no quick and easy way because it requires cleansing. Requires cleansing. So if you go with a darkened noose, you might receive Some kind of spiritual reality you might perceive or whatever, but it's going to do something very bad to you. And we talked last time about what that does, right? You know, just as scripture says, the, the eye is a lamp of the soul. If you're full of light, then you're going to be light. If you're full of darkness, then you can be darkness. But where this comes down for every person is that.
- [139:11]
This should lead us to understand that the Christian life is a holistic life. It's not a life that has some spiritual things in it.
- [139:19]
It's a holistic life that everything that you do, every single thing you do is a spiritual act. Everything that you do is a ritualistic act.
- [139:29]
A lot of our problem is that we don't understand that that's true. We think that there are sort of neutral acts or sort of non religious things that we do, but there is no such thing. And the question is not am I going to do spiritual things today? The question is how am I going to do the spiritual things that I'm going to do today? So you know, we're all going to eat a, eat food, right? Am I going to eat food that is blessed by God because I asked him to, or am I going to eat food that I did not ask for God's blessing? And so it is a different kind of spiritual act. It's a spiritual act, but it becomes a different kind of spiritual act. Right. Again, there's no neutral ground. No neutral ground. So the way that you wake up in the morning, the way that you clean yourself, the way that you talk to your family, the way that you go to work, the way that you do your work, the things that you look at, I mean on and on and on. It's not just a list of sort of moral things. Your moral or immoral, like you have plus or minus points on a moral scale. It's that you are interacting constantly with spiritual reality. And you can do it in a way that is going to make you more like God, or you can do it in a way that's going to make you more like this, demons. I mean this is, this is, these are one of our great themes. You know, everything is a, is everything is about everything. We've emphasized apocalypse particularly. And what I want people to walk away from this episode with is a sense of the apocalypse of the ordinary. What that actually does when we understand that every ordinary moment is an apocalyptic moment, is.
- [141:11]
The ordinary then becomes for us extraordinary. And by that I don't mean supernatural. I mean that we begin to understand and to interact with the whole of what reality is in a way that we can do it much more intentionally. Because like I said, you're always interacting spiritually. You cannot escape that because you are.
- [141:38]
A being that has a spiritual element and the world is creation that has spiritual elements. So everything that you do is spiritual. So the question is simply, am I doing it in a way that's like God or am I turning away from him and becoming like the evil one? So that's my encouragement for everyone is to seek the apocalypse of the ordinary Father.
- [142:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. So we gave earlier in the episode in Act 1, sort of a very brief and very oversimplified history of philosophy related to this. Yeah. And the reason for that.
- [142:22]
Wasn'T just to nerd out about it, but.
- [142:27]
It was because we need to understand how we got to where we are. Right.
- [142:36]
Sometimes I worry that the way I in particular talk about these things, including on this show, may come off, especially in our current climate, political and cultural climate, as trying to identify the bad guys, right? Like 19th century Germans, bad guys.
- [142:59]
Some people might even, hopefully they don't. But some people might even think, you know, non orthodox Christians somehow bad guys, Anybody, low church bad guy. I'm saying these are bad guys. It's got nothing to do with that, Right? It's about the actual history, right? We're in a place, how did we get here, right? Doesn't matter who's to blame. We're all to blame. Plenty of blame to go around. I'm to blame as much as anybody. But now we're here and we've lost something. To be honest, we had it. We had it taken from us historically, right? When the altars were stripped in Britain, that was top down. The English Reformation was not a move of the common people.
- [143:48]
It came top down. It was taken away. And what you see after that, in the whole and continuing in the whole Anglophone world.
- [143:58]
What you see is an awareness at some level of what's been lost.
- [144:06]
That we've been reduced to language, that. That some element of noetic side of the spiritual has been stripped away. And it comes out in all these weird ways. You have somebody like Sir Isaac Newton getting obsessed with alchemy and finding bizarre symbolism and structures. In the book of Revelation you have weird folk remedies and cures and what are essentially remnants of paganism and superstition cropping up in Puritan communities in the US who fled to have their totally pure English Calvinist religion. Right? Have all of these things going on.
- [144:43]
And relatively Accepted just because they're part of life. We are aware even when we want to deny it, no matter how fiercely we want to deny it, we're aware that the spiritual is there. We experience it all the time.
- [144:57]
And so it's going to come out in those unhealthy ways if we don't come up with a healthy approach. Right. And so Father Andrew just talked about.
- [145:12]
The idea that these things have spiritual resonance, all the things we do in our life. I'm going to come at it from the other angle. Right. We tend to try to pursue the spiritual as spiritual. That's what Sir Isaac Newton's alchemy is. We want visions, we want experiences. We go out and we. Because we've still got this bifurcation, we realize, I have all this. I'm a materialist, I have this mindset. I. I need to get this spiritual back. And so we start just pursuing purely spiritual experience in this sort of purely spiritual way. And there are folks out there who bounce around from mysticism to mysticism and from, you know, meditative practice to meditative practice. It's trying to. To chase after that experience. But since the reality is that the spiritual underlies the material.
- [146:09]
The only way to get to the spiritual is through the material. These always go together. This is why St. Paul says, you know, I can have all visions, I can speak in the tongues of men and angels, I can have all gifts and prophesy, I could do all these things, and if I don't have love, I'm nothing, I'm worthless, I'm garbage. It's pointless. Right? Love is the way we approach these things. So if you want to get the spiritual back in your life and you want to really get it, the real thing, not the counterfeit, you want to get the real deal, then the next time you see it, you won't have to wait long.
- [146:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
The.
- [146:53]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The next time you see someone who needs someone to smile at them, smile at them. The next time you see someone who needs someone to talk to them, or more importantly, listen to them, listen to them. The next time you see someone who needs help, help them.
- [147:08]
And you'll be amazed at how, as you start doing those things.
- [147:15]
The spiritual starts to come alive for you. You start to understand the world more. You're not going to go and find the spiritual on its own and add it to the material you already have.
- [147:30]
But through love, you're going to draw close to God.
- [147:35]
And your noose will begin to be cleansed. You'll get your mind right and you'll start to see what it is that that's been going on around you this whole time, and you'll start to understand.
- [147:49]
And that's also why St. Paul tells us in Hebrews that faith, which should be translated faithfulness, is the substance of things hoped for. When we're faithful, all of a sudden all of those hopes and dreams, all these things that we're just sort of believing by faith or intuition, suddenly have substance, suddenly become real to us.
- [148:10]
So that's my closing thought. There's a very practical way to try to get back to where ancient people were. And it's not through esotericism or even mysticism. It's through loving your neighbor in very real and very practical ways that every single one of us can start doing right now if we really want to.
- [148:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Amen. Well, that is all our show for tonight. Thank you everyone for listening. If you didn't get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we'd love to hear from you, either via email@lordofspiritsancientfaith.com or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We do read everything but cannot respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.
- [148:57]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific.
- [149:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And if you are on Facebook, like our page and join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.
- [149:16]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And if you're on Facebook, watch for what happens on my sister's birthday tomorrow. Yes, and finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com stroke support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasts stay on the air.
- [149:28]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Thank you very much and may God bless you.
- [149:44]
Narrator
You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung, a listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio. And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.