Hello everyone, this is Father Paul and I hope you're having a good day. You're listening to Cops in Conversation. And welcome to this episode of Cops in Conversation. And today I have the pleasure of talking with Peter Abdelmalek. Someone you've probably never heard of before and has a very interesting story. I'm excited to get into it. To begin with, let me just say a few things about Peter. Peter is a physician by trade. He is, in his own words, boringly average. Yes.
And in terms of what he likes to read, what he likes to learn about, that's what we're going to get to talk about today. So welcome, Peter. Thank you, Abuna. It's good to be with you. Same here. It's great to have you. I just want to ask you to begin with. You're a physician and you studied medicine here in Canada, Queens? Yes. And how was that? How was your experience as Coptic Orthodox on campus? Did you get to meet other Coptic Orthodox students? Was there
a Coptic club? What was that like? I think in university, what most people learn is there's time for things that you care about, time for things that you want to do. The thing that's said to you in your first year is, you know, they go, look, you're used to doing well in school. You're used to learning lots of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is going to be like drinking out of a fire hydrant. I'd done a degree in sciences.
And so I was more prepared for some of the elements, let's say, than somebody who had a richer background, say, in literature. So they brought some other pieces. But when we were doing anatomy, I'd already done it. So there was a lot to learn and a lot to do, but at the same time, it's like, you know, what are your priorities? So I actually tended to come back on the weekends. I was engaged at the time, and then my wife and I got married right at the end of my fourth year, so I was
about to start residency. So I came back to see her, but also for service. We had service Friday nights, so I would leave promptly at noon on Friday and make it back to Guelph. where my family is and where I would come back to. And there'd be service in the evening and then I'd be around for church. Kingston is a lovely community, but it's small. It's about the size of Guelph, but a lot of people transition to and from Kingston. You go there because it's good to career climb.
Queen's is a great university. career climb a little bit there for a while or whatever but you're usually few people although there were some are stationed there to live there and to have their family there and their next generation will grow up in kingston that kind of thing so the church community was was small but they were doing as well as they could and they had they had a rented property and priests would come and visit and serve and abu was from the monastery
he came and served with us for a while um i think kingston yeah yeah it was hoped that he would stay and be the permanent priest in fact and then one day he he sort of let us know there was a monastery thing happening and he was integral to it so um it was it was cool being at queens i like i didn't have the same sort of community that people in this area would and i think that that is sorely missed and people in kingston have a difficult time of it i had no other cops
in my year The year below me had two, and an Armenian guy with an Egyptian dad. The year below me had three Copts, essentially, if you will. And then I had a few very devout Catholic people who I was close with as well, and that kind of
thing. But it was isolated, for sure. Forgive my boldness in this, but also some of the Copts who went to Queens were trying to get away from... their whatever their scene or they they just didn't want to deal with other coptic people or whatever and so doing a coptic club which we did eventually have thanks to to actually some of the guys underneath me in the year below me um it was an interesting thing it was beautiful though because you saw people who came to kingston
to get away from i don't know being around so many copts if they were in mississauga brempton guelph gta area that kind of stuff who sort of started to come back because there were only five or six people and they could actually get close to all of them uh or somebody like one of the homies god bless him you know he would check up on everybody because obviously he could and he has a great heart and you know him and i know him and he's amazing and so um it was
kind of cool we did have a coptic club eventually um For the disenfranchised, probably. But thank God it did take off. And I believe it's still going. I actually haven't checked up on it in a while. And they have a permanent priest now. They do. And the church is growing, thank God. And the people there, the servants who are dedicated there that are living in Kingston that will continue to, they're all wonderful. They're beautiful people. They do as best as they can to make sure
everybody feels like they're at home. So there's a couple, for example, that would routinely host the students. And they didn't have to. They just said, you're coming to my house this coming weekend
and we're going to have food. campus events when we'd have priests come and things like that whether from the eastern diocese or from here yeah and then go don't worry don't worry tanji she's gonna do all the cooking and just gonna have tons of food for your event so they were awesome that's good to hear and um obviously experience on campus differs from one person to the next but just a lot of stuff that that happens on campus it ends up being the place where you Really experience
the work of God. You know, you have all these plans. You're going there for your own purposes. And you have your own, you know, schemes. And you're going to, you know, reinvent yourself and all that. Only to go there and really discover and encounter Christ. And He does stuff. You know, He changes you. He shows you who you really are. What you began as a service here in Mississauga
was something very interesting. when i heard of it um this wasn't something that was common something that i hear about happening in many churches so you know piqued my interest and i really wanted to know more about it and i heard really good things about it and and i started to ask about you know who's leading this this meeting who's kind of in charge of this meeting who's behind this meeting and the reason being i wanted to know like you know this this meeting
must have someone who has spent a lot of years, you know, studying theology and studying, you know, church history and patristics and really well versed in patristics and must have, you know, gone to seminaries and degrees and all sorts of things. And then, you know, to my surprise, like that wasn't the case. It was just boringly average Peter. It was boringly average Peter. And again, that theme of boring the average keeps coming through. And it's so important. It's so
key. And I want to know, the meeting that we're going to be talking about is a meeting where church fathers are discussed, are key, are primary. And it surrounds their writings and their thought and their teachings and their method and all of that. And all of this, how did it... Did it come about from someone who was boring the average? Before we get into that, about you personally, how did you get the church fathers? And maybe how did you start reading them? How did you start
getting exposed to them? So I guess like for those listening, Petristics is just the writings or readings of the church fathers. And so coming from the word pater for father. I sort of grew up not entirely within the church. I was baptized and I went to church and I came to liturgies sometimes. But it wasn't really until I was a young man, say 15 or 16. One, I liked having debates and that was a bad thing. You know, the debate the atheist in your class thing was very
popular in my generation. I'm sure you know that scheme all too well, Abuna. And I'm a brash, bold, whatever kid at the age, and I sort of want to win these arguments. And then we had a couple of servants, where I was growing up at the time, who would ask these difficult questions about why it is we think we should read the Bible, what Jesus' death really means, why we celebrate multiple feast days. And some of these just... hilariously basic questions. You know, they think,
it's the Bible, man. What are you talking about? Or, Jesus, he died. This is a fact. This is the faith. What do you mean? Why are you asking me what that means? And one servant in particular was very good at then being like, you know, then picking apart all our answers, doing that sort of Socratic method where you'd suggest something and he'd go, that's stupid. Here's why. You know, or he'd say, if I was an atheist, that's baloney
or whatever. And so, Um, between that and, and starting to, to mature a little bit, I think I started to want to learn more and ask questions and to figure out what does this mean? What's the point of all of this? I didn't know any better at the time, other than to like go to chapters or Indigo or whatever it's called now, you know what I mean? And, uh, and to pick up the random
books, unlocking the Bible. the case for christ and so on um so i read a lot of what i later found out were protestant authors and and i had some family was protestant and all that stuff and that wasn't bad it wasn't good it was just what it was but it's all i had to hand you know um there were there were some other books of his holiness potion with it which i read um i struggled with some of the translations you know and things like that but i was also looking some
of the earlier translations were just not great right and so so the ones are much better are they yeah yes there are a few like a life of repentance and purity that one's much much better so um but i was i was looking for something more you know i would i would read things like case for christ and i'd go okay i can prove to you that the tomb was empty you know and here's these historical facts why but it struck me that nothing of what i was reading was something that I would
go to die for. Like I had learned, even in passing, the early Christians would, you know, from saint stories, from saint movies, from my grandmother, you know, from church, whatever, you would hear these stories of the martyrs and defending their faith. And for some reason, and I don't really know why, but God works in the ways that he does. And one day I'm sort of thinking like, I wouldn't
really go to die for anything that I read. The fact that, you know, the secret gospel of Mark was a forgery by a guy trying to make it big in the archaeology industry, didn't transform me. It was a fact, and facts aren't bad. They're just facts. But I didn't find anything in them that was life -giving or transformative or real in that sense, even though they were real facts. And so I really just wanted to figure out...
Why I was doing what I was doing, why it was, you know, I was 16 or 17 having debates with atheists in my class, but nothing of what I read changed anything about my life. And so it was then that through happenstance, it's not happenstance, by God's grace, I happened upon actually Father Peter Farrington's work, who I'm sure Otsak is aware of. And it really struck me. He was talking about the church fathers, but in a way that was now personal. In a way that was now like, here
is what Ignatius of Antioch said. Here's what Severus of Antioch, who he loves, talked about and so on. And I go, this is fascinating. I mean, this stuff is really cool. And then I learned that there was this St. Athanasius guy who they called apostolic in the church. And I was like... That guy sounds really important. And of course, the church here began with his chapel, which is still here with us, thank God. And there's a center now being built, I believe. So I was
like, this guy sounds important. I should really read the guy that they call apostolic. That seems like a pretty big title. And so I read on the Incarnation. I know you love the Book of Muna.
And I was... so i didn't understand most of it i think but i didn't know that at the time you know i i read the book and i was like this guy is fascinating he's asking all these difficult questions he's he's saying why does jesus become flesh why why would the logos do this okay so he does it for this reason here's also how he had to manifest how can you prove the resurrection and he'd give all these answers that didn't make sense to me And I think by God's grace at the
time, I was like, there's clearly something wrong with me, why this doesn't make sense to me. So for example, in that famous example that he gives, he'll go, look, the way that we know that the resurrection is true is that Christians go to their death. And that really spoke to me at the time because of my struggle. And I was like, cool, that's not what I expected. What do you mean we know the resurrection is true because people are willing to die? And that took time
and God's work to really get into my heart. But once I had discovered him, I was like, you know, these church father guys, like there's something here. There's a richness, there's a depth, there's a reality that I really want to tap into. And so then the next thing that I happened upon, I believe also still through Father Peter Farrington, but once you sort of get into the world, you're
in a sea of it once you realize, right? I figured out that there were apostolic fathers, which are just fathers who are disciples of, the disciples themselves of Jesus. So when I found that out, I was like, this is cool. This is nothing short of miraculous that we have writings from guys who sat with the apostles. And so then I found that John the beloved, of course, St. John, because he lived the longest, he had the most disciples. And so I learned about St. Ignatius of Antioch
and St. Polycarp of Smyrna. And I was like, I can't believe we have writings from guys who died. within a lifetime or two of the Lord himself. And who learned from the guy who we consider the theologian, the first one properly called theologian, John the Gospel writer. And so I was like, this is mind blowing. So I read the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch. And in it, I saw things like reference to bishops, deacons, priests. And he'd say things like, without these,
there's no church. I'd read him talk about the Eucharist, which I had struggled with. Is it symbolic, as some Western Christians might say? Is it literal? Is it whatever? This kind of stuff. And he goes, look, those who deny this incur death in the midst of their disputes because they deny this, which gives life. And in another letter, he calls it the medicine of immortality. And I'm like, okay. Okay, cool. I need to be more into church. I need to learn more, both
about my own faith. through the writings of the church fathers, but also by really actually getting into church for real this time. Because clearly this is the place that has housed the faith of somebody like Ignatius who learned from St. John. And then the icing on the cake at the end of that really was when I learned that Polycarp then had a disciple named St. Erneos of Lyon who died in about 202. And when I read his work against heresies, of which the first volume has
a bunch of gems, and then... The rest of volume one and volume two are mind -numbing because he's summarizing the arguments of Gnostics at the time, which we can get into later. But then books three, four, and five of this 300 -page text that is with us from 1 ,800 years ago is an exposition of the faith. And I went, where
has this treasure been? I can't believe that people have said, church fathers or things like that, people have mentioned these things before, but nobody ever told me this treasure existed. And from there, from about when I was 16 or 17, I was like, these are riches, man. And so I just kept reading as much as I could, really, because I fell in love with the church fathers. That's
amazing. And just curious, any of the atheists you debated with and, you know, showing them, you know, the facts of the case for Christ, case for the resurrection, where did these facts lead
them? As Ozak knows, like nowhere. you know often people and i think this is a really interesting thing about orthodox quote -unquote apologetics if you will because it's such a an overused term today i think it is you know apologia just being the word for defense um orthodox apologetics has never looked the way that we do it in the west necessarily right where saint justin the martyr writes in apologia and he's not going And St. Justin Lamar, to your story, for those
listening, is a second century church father. He's not going, here's a fact about science. Here's a physical law that proves God. Here's some sort of constant that must be God driven. He goes, this is the life of Christians. This is what it looks like. You have to taste it if you want to know what it actually is. And so in orthodoxy, you know, we've always had this teaching from the very first centuries of like.
here's here we can talk about why this makes sense and it's reasonable and it's philosophically coherent and all this good stuff but you're entering into a relationship a marriage union with the divine trinity not an intellectual debate with with a smart guy and if if you know if you walk into faith hoping to find somebody smarter you may be disappointed you may not be we have tons of smart amazing people but you're not going to get what you're actually looking for, which,
if you're looking for real faith, is in union with the living God. And that has to be experienced and lived. And it was only years later, after reading the Church Fathers, that I go, all those arguments I had were so wrongheaded. And I would get angry and impassioned and this kind of thing. And the other guy would just sort of go, you
people and your faith is stupid. And now I realize why that was the case, because I was giving him something that was... really not a life just a set of facts and nobody can fall in love with a set of facts like dead knowledge you know giving the the living experience of encountering christ and i think that's part of the issue is that uh people think that if only i have the right answer or the right combination of arguments presented in the right way Just people will be
convinced. And despite the best efforts of the smartest people who take that approach, it doesn't work. This is not how people are converted. This is not how people come to the faith. This may be the reason people and their curiosity might be piqued. But if it stays there, if it stays
in that sphere, it's stillborn. ever you know get to produce life you know they say that the best way to make an atheist mad is to give him a good answer because at the end like you give him a good answer and you know it makes perfect sense coherent logic everything and it just makes him mad because you know now he's going to go back to the drawing table and try to get something to throw back at you and then you know the cycle continues then maybe you go back to the drawing
table and figure something out so i i really love how you got into the church fathers because you know it it doesn't seem to fit the popular idea of you know, people who are into the richness of the tradition of the Orthodox Church, who
are, you know, the special group of you. Here's just some 16 -year -old kid who is, you know... talking about his faith and arguing with people and and and starting to read and bit by bit he's led into this deeper mystery this deeper encounter with the church with christ with tradition and that's beautiful and that's amazing um and that's really going to be the theme for this conversation is that boringly average is actually quite amazing because all of this is accessible to all of us.
It's not something that's reserved for the elite, for some sort of, you know, elite category of believers who are, you know, only if you're inclined philosophically and like you enjoy this kind of, you know, philosophical debates, then this is going to make sense to you. This is, you know, this is for the boring. If you find yourself, you know, saying, I'm just the average, you know, church goer. This is it. This is it for you.
It's perfect. How has your experience been? uh when speaking with others about church fathers so um i don't know if this needs to be said but but as your reverence was talking about we have this meeting where we read the church fathers together with the intent being like a lot of people struggle with the church fathers right or or they struggle even with the concept as you said um that's for somebody with a doctorate degree or is a member of clergy or whatever and
by god's grace we were able to start this meeting where we were like okay let's read the church fathers together not necessarily there at the time of the meeting but read the text alone during the week and we would pick up you know works that had divided homilies and things like that and then people would come and the goal was to be like let's go through the text together what what struggles did you have what questions did you have what didn't make sense whatever and
then there was the opportunity to add context you know where people would say I have no idea what he's referencing here. And it'd be because they had never heard of Apollinarianism, which is lesser known, but was important at a certain part of the church's life towards the end of the fourth century, right? And so we would fill in that context together so then people could go back and reflect on the text and go, oh, that's
what that really means. One of the interesting things, so I guess before that even maybe, one of the guiding... quotes that has always sort of been on my mind when I think about how to talk to other people about the church fathers is actually something from a modern Yaroslav Pelikan, who I know knows the name. He was a professor of church history at Yale, right, forever. And towards the end of his life, he converts
and becomes Orthodox. And so I've always found him really interesting because I guess it takes a lot of gusto, I think, to be teaching other people about the history of the church for 50 years and then to go, but you know what here's actually where home is um in his 1962 jefferson lectures before he even became orthodox he he he has this dictum that i think is really fitting he says look tradition is the living faith of the dead traditionalism is the dead faith of
the living and so if you're thinking about tradition as the living faith of the dead you know what we're what we're talking about with the church fathers is how do we inhabit and live in the faith that they're passing us down, that's witnessed by their lives, by their writings, by the stories
about them, by the hymns of the church. How do all of these things fit together so that we have the image of one passing a baton, not one saying, here's a set of texts, read them, enjoy, as though you're reading case law as a lawyer or something, to know the precedents or something like that. Sorry for lawyers. When I first encountered other people reading The Church Fathers or being curious or whatever, when the group started, there were a bunch of very keen people who came. So they
kind of knew what to expect. And then a bunch of people who sort of heard about it from somebody else started to come. They came in, I think, not knowingly and not nefariously, of course, but sort of believing that we were going to talk about that traditionalism thing, which is the dead faith of the living. Cool. A guy named Cyril of Alexandria who died in 444 said, so, okay,
that's nice. Awesome. Thanks. Great. Why would any average person care about that if they weren't a specialist or a member of clergy or whatever? And so I think... What I was so intrigued about was when we were able to make connections, when people could go, wow, this Basil the Great guy sounds like a great guy. And I'd be like, yeah, he started the world's first hospital and the world's first orphanage. And people would be like, no way. That's an important part of Western
society. But yeah, you have the church to thank for that because that's not an organic part of the ancient Roman society. Ancient Roman societies don't care. for people like that. They don't care for those who are not their own. You know, to illustrate this point, I even, I'll quote to people a letter from Julian the Apostate, who was one of the emperors that tried to bring the empire back to paganism in the later fourth century, who happened to be a school buddy of
Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian. And at one point, one of his letters to his priests, he goes, look. The Christians clearly are outdoing us because they're taking care of not just their own and not just the Jews, but our people too. And we don't even do a good job taking care of our own. So let's start to try to imitate them, which is so countercultural to paganism in the ancient world. And so when I share things like this with people, they go, no way. So these people
actually change things about the world. I go, yeah, the world you live in is shaped by the church fathers and by the life of the church and how Christianity... pervaded everything that we know and understand and think and so we started to come to that people go maybe this stuff is is really important and then you had the other group and this was really beautiful there was a whole other group of people that were very very devout went to tasbih multiple times a week
still do um and and have probably memorized all the liturgies we have and so on And it was like lights would turn on in their mind when we'd read something. They go, is that like the first host when we say this, this, this, this, this? I go, exactly. I think, well, no way it all connects. And watching those things was really phenomenal because you get people all of a sudden realize, okay, this stuff matters. This stuff is actually
real. It's not just dead guys talking. And I think those were the things that really got people past the hurdle because there were a lot of people who were like, I'm just not smart enough for this man. There's still people who tell me, Peter, I'm just not smart enough for you. And I look at them and I sort of laugh because I'm boringly average, as we've said. And I'm like, I'm not
that smart. I first read St. Athanasius on the Incarnation, and then when I reread it a year later, I was like, I didn't understand most of this text. It turns out I'm an idiot. And then when I reread it again, and every time I reread it still, I'm like... oh, it turns out I missed this whole section, you know, mentally. I just didn't even understand something was happening.
And I think that's the beauty of it, is the more and more we come to faith, the more and more we come to our devotion to Christ, the more we come to liturgy, partake of the Eucharist, we get closer with our spiritual fathers who guide us in the fight against sin and for virtue, the more we get into the church fathers and go, oh,
wow, look at the depth of this. And so I think... that that sort of real lived experience that real like this stuff matters and actually changes us has been what has helped some people at least go okay you know what i do like this stuff and i can read that and and maybe i can learn something from it even though i don't have an advanced degree or i'm not a i don't know philosophical person or whatever and the thing is like there are obstacles There are challenges, like you
said, there are hurdles to overcome, but the whole process is so worth it that it makes these
hurdles, you know, a small price to pay. And that's the thing that people don't usually realize that these... hurdles in comparison with hurdles that they've already gotten over in whether in whichever career they're in like if they're in medicine if they're in engineering no matter what career they're in they've already spent enough time reading and analyzing and learning and it takes you know a fraction of that effort to get into the world of the fathers to begin
to have a conversation with them right to read their stuff and with understanding of course that there will be technical jargon that's going to need explaining there will be guidance that we need to seek kind of you know someone holding your hand taking you step by step but it's very doable for like we started saying for the average person right this is not something for someone whose iq is you know in in the top 100 like 99th percentile no this is for for everyone right
and as you as you mentioned the different people coming from different places in their lives and different things appealing to them or attracting them and they begin to make these connections but In order for these connections to be made, what kind of requirements or prerequisites? I mean, do I need to know philosophy? Do I need
to know history? In order for me to begin to make connections and to begin to see what these fathers are saying is relevant, and not just relevant to what the church is saying, it's relevant
to life today, relevant to my faith today. What kind of... prerequisites are required to kind of begin to engage with the fathers i think in terms of like necessity your spiritual life has to be a focus because it's very easy to read the church fathers and to feel like i'm justified or i'm smart or i'm i'm better than whatever because i can now tell you that uh you know severus of antioch uh wrote these letters and That stuff
is cool and really important. But if it doesn't come back to the living relationship that I have with Christ, then these are just facts. The same way those facts that I first learned about were nothing to me. So I think that, to be very honest with you, Abuna, and you can correct me if you disagree, I think that's the only real requirement as like, you must do this. In terms of what would be helpful, I think... The beauty about reading the Church Fathers is that there's something
there for everybody. So my friends who like art, there's stuff there, writings about what would be called iconoclasm in the 8th century and disagreements about why we use or don't use icons or things like that. There's writings about that. You know, there's a book, for example, by a scholar on the concept of beauty in the writings of St. Gregory of Nyssa. If you are fascinated by the philosophy of beauty and these ethereal out there ideas that are really beautiful when you get
into them, there's a book for you. However, if you're the person that sort of goes, I don't really know. I just want to know how to repent. Like, I need to know why I keep struggling in my life. There's books for you, right? And when I got into the Church Fathers, I was... I was reading the old Nicene, post -Nicene Fathers collection, which I was like, I thought was a goldmine. You can access if you type in ccel .org into your browser, click enter. And then
there's a tab for Church Fathers. You now have 38 volumes of the Church Fathers at your fingertips, right? And I was like, this is amazing. but they're from the late 1800s. And so I got very used to that kind of writing, to be honest. I kind of love it now because the long -winded sentences with multiple subclasses now kind of attracts me. But for a lot of people, it was difficult. I was drowned in that. And so I sort of swam whether I liked it or not. But now there's easy
to read, right? Church Fathers translations. There's early Christian writings, which is a series of translations. There's popular patristic series, which a lot of people know about from St. Vlad's. It's another series. There's ancient Christian commentary, which a lot of people have heard about. And it's great if you want little selections about various verses and thoughts and things like that, maybe even places to go
further. But I would suggest that. Whatever your interest is, there's something in the Church Fathers for you. Ask somebody who may know where to start you off if you want. The big thing that I tell people, though, I'm like, learn to become a patient reader. Because especially if you're reading the older translations where there's a sentence with three different sub clauses, it takes five lines to get to the point. You have to read something and not go, what did I
get from the sentence? What's the fact? What do I need to know? What are the five bullet points that I'm going to regurgitate in Maharagan or Sunday school? You need to be like, okay, I'm going to bend the knee of my intellect, if you will, and bow to this text in terms of my intellect and say, what is it trying to teach me? If I don't understand, maybe there's a problem with
me. And what I find is when people do that and allow the text to begin to speak to them and sort of go, how he said that really doesn't fit how i think then they can allow it to challenge their presuppositions and that's the hardest thing right as a reader is to go oh how he's using this word is not in any way what i mean um i can illustrate if you think it'd be if you think it'd be good absolutely so something i i cite commonly and all my friends have heard
this a million times is i tell people like look when when the lord says to a bunch of people that are following him. He said, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. A lot of us take that as, okay, proof of the Eucharist, cool, point. That's the end of the sentence. And of course, our Western Christian friends in the Protestant
church go, no, that's figurative and so on. But if you really want to get into what's being said, what you really have to do is go back to Leviticus and Numbers, books that many of us never read. And realize that blood... Just gloss over and say, especially the book of Numbers, it's just a list, a bunch of lists. And then you go back to those texts and you're like, cool, blood in
those texts is the life of an animal. And of course, in there, in Moses' rights, as we have in the church, he's the author of the first five books. He says, you shall not eat the flesh of an animal with its blood for all... The life of all flesh is in its blood. I think about that as a phenomenon. If you're watching it as a first century Jew, when you kill an animal, when you slit its throat to sacrifice or to eat or whatever,
you watch it writhe about a little bit. And then when it loses enough blood, it sort of... gets down and stops moving very much. And then when it loses even more blood, it dies. And so what you see with your own eyes, what your experience actually tells you is blood is a life force or a life thing. It communicates life. And there's a bunch of other biblical images that can be
added to that. But when you take that to John 6 and you're like, oh, oh, so when the Lord says, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He's citing an example they understand. But all we read as 21st century moderns is either cannibalism or some really weird magical ritual, right? And so that's a biblical example of something that we have to get back to with the church fathers, where when they say something, they may not mean
it the way we mean it. They may not use the phrase, the idea, the context in the exact same way that we do. But as modern sort of children of the Enlightenment, we tend to think that the way we view the world is just a fact. It's just a given. So I tell people all the time, I go, look, to give a quote -unquote TLDR to this long tangent, I go, look, just don't presume you know what the text is talking about right away when you read it. Bend any of your intellect and say,
okay, I'm going to learn from this. It knows something I don't, or this church father knows something I don't, and I'm just going to be patient and wait for the point to be made. I'm not going to read a sentence or two or three and say, I don't get it, this doesn't make sense, this is stupid, and close the book. I'm going to go, okay, I don't really understand what's happening,
but I'm going to keep reading. That I actually lived through because I didn't, and this isn't a good thing, but I didn't really have anybody at the time when I started to read The Church Fathers to tell me, what does this mean? Or what am I reading about? Or what's this random controversy that just got brought up? I just kind of got thrown in the deep end. And what I realized was
I'm a lot dumber than I think I am. And that was good because what it meant is I could learn to be patient and go, okay, I have no idea what happened for 20 pages. But if I just keep going and then I read more writings of this particular church father, I will get into his mind. Phronima is the word we use for this in the church, right? I will get into his mindset and start to understand how he is saying these things and what the categories
mean to him, not to me. And I think that's the really big thing with us as modern readers, because we're impatient, right? There's a spark notes for everything. There's a Wikipedia article for everything. The last time any of us went and got, you know, an Encyclopedia Britannica to get background about something we didn't know was never. My experience in university was I was the sort of second, maybe third generation of people who never picked up a physical journal,
right? To go, oh, you have a research paper to
write. go write it and we go okay cool google fact about blank and blank right and then they introduce the searches with the fancy advanced searches and you go blank and blank together you get a thousand electronic articles you don't have to read them if you read the abstract you pretended like you were an expert you quoted it you had a bibliography as long as you are your whole body and you sounded like a genius yeah and i think that has that has debilitated
us as readers in general but especially with people who lived at a time and thought in a way completely different to us because we take our suppositions go i know what he's saying about this but it turns out we're completely wrong most of the time right and that's very important to note that you have to be a patient reader you can't just assume that they're just because they're using similar words that say that you would use in a conversation in a sentence that
they mean what you would mean if you were saying these words and being a patient reader means that you're getting into not only their mind but their world they had an educational system that's different than our educational system so for us to just presume that they break things down and present their their understanding in ways that we would do is it's almost leading
us in the wrong conclusions, right? We need to be patient and get into their world and not just get into the world, but understand like where they're coming from, how they view the world. We don't look back to the fathers, but we look with the fathers to the future, meaning that we look with them. In their mindset, we get into their minds and we look with them at how they see the world, how they see themselves, how they see God, how they see all of these things interact
with one another. And with this, we begin to understand what it means to have a patristic faith, a tradition of the church that is alive.
It's not just a bunch of maxims or sayings or quotes that we can just... pick and choose and throw at you know our enemies or people we're having a debate with and then you know call it a day it's something that's living right so in order for it to be truly living you need that time you need that patience right The church fathers are for everyone and they're not just a matter of luxury that it's something that will
be nice to get into if I have time. And all that is required, as you said, and I completely agree, is that your spiritual life is in focus. That's my goal. That's my aim. And the fathers had the same goal and had the same aim, that pursuit of perfection, that journey towards virtue. It's very important for us to know that it's not just something that complicates an otherwise simple faith, beautiful faith. This is the simplicity of the faith. This is the beauty of the faith.
For the fathers, it wasn't about just introducing philosophical categories and big words and big technical terms into an otherwise simple faith and saying things that are needless. These are all things that make the faith as accessible and as experiential as possible. It's not just an additional layer that we have to peel off in order to get to the real faith. This is the real faith. And everything we see in church, everything we do, everything we experience in
church has their hands on it. you know they they touched everything they they spoke everything they experienced everything when we look back uh at the writings of the fathers and we see we see for example what they thought a church is we only find you know the four uh uh the one holy catholic and apostolic and we see like they describe their experience. And it is through reading their writings is that we get to live their experience and being in conversation with
them and pray with them as they're praying. I wanted to ask you another important question.
And this one... uh takes us beyond you know the the the meeting which i hope is you know by now everybody realizes that this is something quite doable and uh and at the same time quite necessary to have and it's something i hope that every church incorp like if not having a a specific meeting discussing the church fathers but at least incorporate it into some sort of you know bible study or spiritual meeting because This
is so important. They're not just kind of like footnotes that you use to kind of support something you're trying to say. You go and control F and look for something. It's almost like without the fathers, what you end up with is this shallow, flattened presentation of the faith that really
leads you nowhere. other than a reflection of your own ego a reflection of yourself right yeah you need the fathers in order to be able to see christ yes yes and the the analogy that saint irenaeus uses as opposed to to pelican he says the the faith is like a symphony you know and it's got multiple parts and and multiple instruments and vocals and so on He goes, what your role is as a Christian is to enter into the symphony.
You're going to be a part that doesn't exist anywhere else, that God has made uniquely in your own way to participate. If you're out of tune with the symphony, though, you're not going to be part of it. And if you never jump in and actually do your part, you're also never part of it. So that kind of kills this modern, I call it heresy, maybe a blasphemy of individualism. But it also doesn't eliminate the person created in the image and likeness of God who's meant
to be part of this choir. And so if you can enter into the symphony in your own way, that's because you've lived the life or you are currently trying to live the life that has been passed down through the writings and faith of the church fathers and mothers so that you can actually now play your part to stand in the same place on the shoulders of giants, if you will. and now to preach and live the same faith, which is why we continue to celebrate the martyrs and the saints and this
kind of thing. Right. And when we go and look at their writings, it's almost like we have these specific questions and challenges that we're facing today, and we're looking to them as if it's some sort of list of Q &A, and we just want the answer to the question so we can just plug
it in. But it's not... an answer that we get but instead of we get a thought so when we were facing challenges like today one of the biggest challenges that we face is that everything has to be on the individual level everything has to be you know this individual pursuit of whatever it is you deem to be meaningful or significant the sense of community although um really felt and seem to be important is pushed aside for you know to give space to you know the individual
doing their own thing you know you're an autonomous center of consciousness doing your own thing pulling you know yourself up by your own bootstraps and you know there's no one else and nothing else and you're isolated into your own little world and when you look at the fathers and say like okay fathers tell me is it okay to do things on my own Can I be an individual or do I have to be part of a community? And sometimes we don't
find direct answers. But what we do find is the thought behind the answer, the understanding behind it. Because the questions, like nothing
new under the sun. The questions that keep coming up over and over throughout the centuries are little small modifications of heresies that have... been challenged and faced by the church and the fathers shed light on all of these things and like for example when um we see a lot of challenges or questions today about bioethics and questions of bioethics you know with modern medicine produce very unique challenges and situations that in ancient world these particular situations were
unthought of simply because the technology didn't make these situations possible. But it's not like that makes the church fathers useless, for lack of a better word, in answering or approaching these questions because it's the thought that they give us, the way of thinking, the way of approach is what they give us in order to be able to kind of even begin to formulate an answer. What is human life? Where does life begin? Is
life important? Is life significant? And questions about beginning of life issues, end of life issues, pain and suffering. And for the most part, pain and suffering today is frowned upon. The measure of a society is how little pain and suffering you have. And the less, the better. And then we see a different vision with the fathers. pain and suffering is just this thing that's central
in almost all of the writings. It's not something that you can kind of avoid and see maybe if they found a trick or two to kind of get around pain and suffering and the necessity and the place
for it in our lives. But you look at the questions or the challenges that we face today and it's all like, you know... um if my life is too painful to bear you know uh is it okay if i put an end to it put a limit to it is it okay if i you know avoid pain and suffering by any means that the reason i focus so much on pain and suffering is because it's it's one of those questions that kind of touches a lot of people and a lot of people when when they're faced with these questions
they want to know like What kind of opinions out there? And when you Google stuff like this, you get all sorts of answers coming from all over the map, right? And you see the vision that the fathers present, the tradition of the church presents. And you see that this is something that they saw it in a completely different light. It's not something to be avoided. It's part and
parcel of that spiritual journey. So my question is, in your experience with reading the fathers, with discussing the fathers, with having this meeting, in terms of mindset or methodology, how has that kind of manifested itself in the conversations? Are people looking for kind of distilling what the fathers are saying into methodology or basically looking for direct answers that
we can plug in? a kind of the the trend today just we want the quick 30 second hot take on this from this church father on this particular issue and just call it a day so i think people's inclination is to the latter right is to go okay cool since there is a wealth or a bank of information or whatever you want to call the writings of the fathers um maybe we'll have answers to questions and sort of like I think, unfortunately, sometimes we leave Sunday school thinking, like, you just
have to have the right answers to the right set of questions, and you're an okay Christian. You know, what I would consider a sort of pseudo -gnostic form of faith today, and we can talk about what that means later. But I think in having the meeting, what people have really come to is to understand that changing your mindset or your framework allows you not just to plug in answers to questions you think you had, but to really find out how to change the way you view
the world. And then suddenly you start to see the world as Christ has made it, as opposed to how we've been styled to by sin or by various ideologies or whatever. It's hard to look at God crucified in the flesh on a cross, on the most humiliating, despicable way. possible, you know, the Romans and the Eastern Persians and so on disagreed about who invented crucifixion because of how brutal it was, right? They would argue like, no, no, it was the other guy. Yeah,
it wasn't us, it was them. Yeah, you know, it's hard to look at God crucified in the flesh and to be like, you know, suffering must be avoided. When he then rises from the dead and goes, you must pick up your cross and follow me. And he doesn't just say, oh, some people have a cross, some people have it bad. You know, some people like Peter the Apostle are going to be crucified upside down. He says, all of us have this role.
And so coming to the Church Fathers, you have this opportunity to go, okay, what's different in my thinking that doesn't allow me to access this wealth of knowledge and to learn about this faith in a real tangible way? To cite a couple of examples, stories you should help to illustrate. When you think about things where the church fathers have answered questions for us, but they're
not sort of the way we would formulate it. You have, for example, when I present this, I'll tell people like you've all, whether in Sunday school or to somebody else, taught this heresy, but you don't know it, is a guy like Marcion of Sinope from the second century. So Marcion of Sinope. was a shipbuilder and had some money and that kind of thing. And he donated to the
church, I believe it's the Church of Rome. And he wanted to be incorporated and also validated because what Marcion thought was the God of the Old Testament sounds like a very brutal God and Jesus is so lovely and dainty and all that stuff, sort of like we have today, right? Jesus would have never said anything mean to anybody. And you're like, yeah, watch what he says to the
Pharisees next chapter. And Marcion goes, well, the God of the Old Testament, and this, I mean, to be clear for anybody listening, is heresy and was condemned, right? The God of the Old Testament is an evil God, what he called the demiurge, who created the world. And therefore, the world and all matter, all creation is evil. And Jesus comes from the good God creator, or the good God, rather, to free us from the evil God. And so Marcion throws out most of the Old
Testament, basically all of it. And then he goes, the only person whose testimony he's willing to read in the New Testament is the Gospel of Luke, probably because Luke wasn't Jewish. And he would expunge from the rest of the New Testament that he accepted. He would take out every single mention of the Old Testament. Every time there was an allusion or reference, he'd go, that's baloney. That's from the previous unenlightened idiots, you know. And it's funny today because,
of course, we still struggle. A lot of people struggle. The first time they ever read an Old Testament text, they go, oh my goodness, God is so mean. I didn't know Jesus would do that. And it's because we don't have the right lens. We don't read as the church fathers do. So that to cite a text that you somewhat alluded to earlier, St. Gregory of Nyssa from the 4th century, he dies in 396. He writes a book called The Life of Moses towards the end of his life where he
goes, look. The details about Moses are not given to us just to be like, here's a nice guy. They clearly are telling us about the journey of the spiritual life. And I love when he opens the text, he begins with something that I hadn't really noticed. I'd always glossed over. He goes, you know, why is Moses described as a beautiful baby? And that was a moment for me where I went, hey, man, he wrote the book. What do you mean? He says he's a beautiful baby. And Gregor and
this is like, this isn't haphazard, right? This isn't Moses trying to, you know, like, you know, give himself some sort of beautiful baby, you know? Right. Yeah. Like, how would he know? Um, but, but Gregor, this is like. This is Moses trying to tell us that we can become the authors of our own birth, either into virtue or into sin. This is physical birth is given to us. We have no choice in that. But we can give birth
to ourselves. He says, in a sense, we're our own birth givers, our own parents in the spiritual life by choosing virtue or by choosing sin. And he then reads the rest of the life of Moses through this lens of being like, Moses' story is not just told to us for the sake of being a cool story. One, they didn't write biographies like this really in the ancient world. But two, the scripture has nothing haphazard or completely
extraneous just for like detail's sake. So then the thing that I think of too is he goes, look, when... when in Egypt, Israel is enslaved and they're making bricks. And Gregory of Nyssa is like, what is brick making other than to be attracted to the things of the earth? Because that's playing in the mud and using straw and mud and water, all those earthly elements. He says that is an example of the individual who's obsessed with the earthly life, who's obsessed with the material.
the physical, the tangible, lust, greed, envy, so on and so forth. And he says, what we're being freed from is the tyranny of Pharaoh, who is the devil, right? And so, I mean, it's funny always to say this as Copts, right? But if you sent Egypt to somebody from any time contemporaneous with the Lord, you immediately think slavery,
death, sin. the devil right because that's what the land of egypt was which which is why the lord's descent into that place is actually really important we celebrate as a feast day but that's a different matter um we tend to just do i think it's like a nice day to celebrate but uh and we're coming up to it soon thank god but um what gregory of nissa says is he's like look when we leave egypt that's when we depart from the land of sin and slavery and being stuck to brickmaking,
those habits, those addictions that we have that we're controlled by. There's interestingly multiple studies on the medical side of addicts, and what they find is that the more an addict uses a thing, the more they rate their need to use the thing, but the less they rate their pleasure obtained from taking the thing. That's basically the definition of addiction. And many of us have experienced this, right? There's a thing that we're hooked
to. There's a thing we're addicted to. There's a thing that has enthralled us and that we think, you know what? I am better than that. I can get away from it. Then something bad happens or we have a rough day or somebody says something mean to us at school or at the office or whatever, depending on our life situation. We go right back to it. And then we go right back to it, like a master, right? Like somebody holding a whip going, you know you're coming home. And
Gregory of Nyssa is like... That departure from Egypt is all of us, and we go through the Red Sea, having departed the land of sin and slavery and death, and that's drowned in the Red Sea, clearly a figure of baptism, but also a figure of our repentance. It does both things. And then to live baptismally for us after that is to die to those things of the world, to sin, to slavery,
to addiction, and to live to God. And so you read all of this in the life of Moses, and then those people who we were talking about earlier, who regularly went to Tazbah are like, wait, wait, wait. That's why we start Tazbah with the first host, where we read about Pharaoh and his hosts and his army being drowned in the Red Sea. I'm like, exactly. Because it's that journey that we have that ends with the fourth host, which is everything. Let everything that has
breath praise the name of the Lord. That's the climax, right? That's the journey of the spiritual life that we're experiencing in miniature when we do Tazbah, when we have every day. when we have every week, when we have every church liturgical calendar. And so when you come to something like that, you're like, wow, this scripture stuff really matters. And you suddenly go, the life of Moses is so much different than I thought
it was. I didn't realize that I was missing all of these elements in the book of Exodus that were actually educating me about what my life
today looks like. And I think it's in that sense that... to come back to the original question you asked many minutes ago now, it's in that sense that together we have come to learn in this meeting or with people who I know also read the Church Fathers and we talk and things like that, where we go, yeah, to obtain a mindset, to enter into a mystery is so much different than to say, well, where does it say what repentance
looks like? Apparently it looks like crossing the Red Sea, but you could never... use that as just a here's the fact kind of argument, right? You'd have to have all of this context go, wow, that's the image. And that's where I think reading the Church Fathers becomes an exercise in changing who you are rather than learning a few facts. And when people come to that, I think people have their own motivation to be like, yeah, this stuff is real. I want to keep with it. And I
think that's the beauty of doing it. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. For questions, comments, feedback, or if you'd like to make a suggestion on a topic for a future episode, please feel free to reach out to the email in the bio. And don't forget to subscribe to get a notification when new episodes drop. God bless you and have a great day.