Hello everyone, this is Father Paul, and I hope you're having a good day. You're listening to Cops in Conversation. 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? You know, 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. Absolutely. And speaking of lenses, I mean, it's very rare today that we see people take a step back and think about the lens through which we... observe the world interact with the world and that happens sometimes too when we read the fathers that yes we use the same lens that we're largely unaware of let's say you know we've been formed by this consumerist lens so we approach the fathers as you know modern consumers and we're you know looking for a specific opinion
something that supports what we're trying to say the way we live our lives rather than looking to the fathers and reading with the fathers and seeing what the fathers are are saying and experiencing and inviting us to experience right we're just looking to the fathers to kind of support what we've already decided that we're gonna do or how we're gonna live whereas being patient readers allows us to just take a breath take a moment and examine like how is it that i'm living my
life today how is it that they lived their lives and do we have any common grounds are there any issues that they're trying to warn me about and are there any um kind of challenges that they've already addressed that I'm experiencing today and how is their experience helpful in helping me navigate these challenges that I'm facing today. For me today, I look at all the things that are available to me and I say, you know
what, why not? If I have access to all of these wonderful things, why not just... partake of all the good stuff and just consume as much as possible and i can consume information i can consume products i can consume things and then when i with the same mindset turn to the fathers and say you know what i'm just i have access to all of this uh stuff and i'm just gonna consume as much of it as i can and just by consuming it this is somehow going to change my life this
is somehow going to alter my the way i experience church and my attendance in church where as i see in the fathers they're trying to warn me i guess as i say like don't turn this into kind of this whole thing about who you are and affirming who you are and where you're coming from this is something else this is something that's transformative you come to christ he's going to transform you into what you were created to be you're going to become a person by coming to christ not you
are coming to christ for him to pat you on the shoulder on the back and say good job you know uh you're doing great you're perfect you don't need to change even like you know this kind of self -affirming uh approach but with the fathers it's different like with the fathers they they challenge things they they really not just challenge quote -unquote facts but they challenge um visions and view of things and how we view things and how we approach things and this is what's very
rare today because it's very dangerous for someone uh to really present an honest opinion online it's almost like they only present what's safe and what's agreed upon why you know the online mob and to be real to be uh honest is something that's very rare otherwise they lose you know followers they lose influence they lose you know or they get canceled or they get canceled but with the fathers i'm like They have their eye on the prize. The prize is Christ and nothing
else to them matters. So they're giving us this truthful vision of life, how it is, how it ought to be, how we as Christians walking in their footsteps, in their tradition, along with them, ought to see Christ, ought to see our lives in this world, our time in this world. So you've really said something that I want to piggyback off of. Anybody who knows me know I have a few recycled things I like to say and that's it because
I find them so interesting. But there's this sense, there's something I talk about with people that I think could best be called iconic vision or viewing things as icons in a sense. What we have... is we think we look at the world objectively because it is what it is. And that's a concept that's given to us by materialist, rationalist thought, right? The world is what you can measure and break it down to its various million, billion
pieces. And what the Church Fathers do that's so interesting is to go, look, what you're viewing the world through is actually the impassioned thoughts that you have, pathos being those sinful thoughts that come to us from outside, if you will. your world is shaped by something that you don't even know you're wearing, right? You don't even know you have those glasses on. And so when I want to make this example for people, I'll say like, look, the beauty of being Orthodox
is you have no farther to look than icons. I cite the example of the fact that most of the earliest depictions, as Sotak knows, of the crucifixion have the Lord completely alive. So particularly we still have some great depictions in Ravenna where you have the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. He's not slouched. He's not bloodied. His eyes are wide open. You know, there's still actually like real color to his flesh. He's not paled
or anything. And he's looking out at the individual viewing the icon or sometimes at those at the foot of the cross. And it's so funny because art historians and other scholars have taken that as a sign that Christians were, quote unquote, offended by the cross. And so they didn't want to depict Jesus being bloodied. I think that's so funny because St. Paul already from the very beginning has talked about the fact that he's not offended whatsoever, but he glories in the
cross of Christ. And so it would be a real step back if only, you know, 50 years later, people are going, oh, let's not depict him, you know, crucified. But what you actually have, is a vision of reality that we can't see physically. And I think that's something that people really struggle with. The icons, and the Church Fathers teach us to do the same, but the icons, to go with this example, show us reality as it is, not as we see it. And as we see it, reality is not always
as it seems. And we know this from our experience. We know that people can look on the exact same thing and interpret it in two completely different
ways. If you're a devout, christian you look at the poor man as christ if you're a billionaire techie you may you may look at him as somebody who needs help but you may also just look at him as a guy who couldn't make in the world he wasn't cut out for it and that's what the greco -roman pagans did right they they thought that that was just the work of fate and the poor guy sucks to suck and you know he's poor that's why there was no point really for the hospital for
exactly until the fourth century so but what the icons do is is i and i tell people this i'm like look If you were at the foot of the cross and you're looking at Jesus, you're looking at a dead guy, you know, for all intents and purposes. May God forgive me for speaking like this. But if you're really physically there, you know, if you're going to take a snapshot, it's a dead
guy. if you can see with the eyes of faith, if you can see reality as it actually is, you actually have the icon, which is the Lord of glory who is fully alive, enters into death, that he might destroy death by death, as we've been singing these 50 days and will continue to. And so the icon of Christ crucified fully alive is actually showing you reality. The snapshot... If you took a Polaroid in the year 33 AD, whatever date it's debated to be, if you took a snapshot of Jesus
crucified, you're not seeing that. You're just seeing a quote -unquote dead guy. Where the eyes of faith, the eyes of virtue, allow us to see reality as it actually is, not just as it appears physically. And so there's this distinction that...
St. Gregory of Nyssa makes in the life of Moses where he goes why does Moses come and meet God at the top of the mountain and he goes you know what do I tell them you are who do I tell them what's your name and what not and the Lord says to him God says to him out of the burning bush literally well I am that I am is most of our translations but if you will he literally tells him I is right in the present tense existing is what I am and it's like You know, it's like,
well, that's the most disappointing answer. What do you mean? This guy just found a burning bush and now it's just Ayes? But in reality, Gregor of Nyssa goes, look, true reality is things that exist as they are, not... as they appear by deception. And God, therefore, is the only thing that truly exists and gives life to all things that are.
And then he takes that to the spiritual life and he goes, the problem in the spiritual life, and he says this in his homilies on the Beatitudes, he goes, is not that we need to be convinced to pursue good. The problem in the spiritual life is that we need to stop being deceived as to that which is really good by nature. And so that's iconic vision, where you're like, this looks like it's going to satisfy me. It's not, though, because I can now see with the eyes of
virtue. I can take off the passionate lens that I have. You were talking about consumerism, and there's the writings of a lesser -known desert ascetic, but who becomes the source of the whole desert tradition, is Evagris of Pontus. And he dies in 399. He's responsible for a list of eight generic or passionate thoughts that are the basis or the root. of all of the other thoughts that
we struggle with. It is the basis for where the Catholic Church gets the seven deadly sins, but he didn't mean it that way in any way, and that comes through. And the list is slightly different in the West. It is, exactly, right? Because the seven, he has eight. They combine two, and then they add one. So they combine sadness and acedia, and they also combine, rather, pride and vainglory. Sadness and acedia just becomes sloth, what the West calls sloth. Pride and vainglory just becomes
pride, and then they add envy. And so minus two, add one, you get seven. But in any case, in his system, he starts with gluttony. He goes, look, the very first of the passion thoughts is gluttony. And we think we know what gluttony is today, right? We think, okay, cool, that's Mandarin before Lent. You know, that's gluttony. And what I find fascinating about Evagrius is he's like, no, no, no, no. Gluttony is an attitude towards all of reality. It's not just what you put in
your mouth, although that's the basic root. Because gluttony is an attitude of saying, I need to consume what's in front of me. In fact, the whole world is made for me to consume. It's made for my entertainment. The world is a plaything that should be subject to my every whim. And then he says that leads to lust, because naturally lust is the belief then that the human being made in the image and likeness of God is also
made for my consumption. And so what he says is when we... tear away these veils as the veil from Moses' face was taken away in Christ, if you will, as St. Paul says. If you tear away all these veils, all these different lenses, all these different colorings or whatever we have to our vision, you can start to see reality as it is and not as the things that we've become subject to through our own slavery, our own wishes.
And I think that's something where reading the Church Fathers allows you to go, I didn't even realize I was struggling with this sin. And that's why I was so enslaved to this or to that bad relationship or to that desire for a car of a particular make or whatever. You know, it's not that other people are bad. It's not that cars are bad. It's not that music is bad. It's not that any of these things in and of themselves is bad. It's just that I've become enslaved to
them and put them above Christ. And now I've let them become an idol in my life. And so reading with the church fathers, I think allows us to go. I didn't even know that I was looking at the world this way. And that's why I think, and I keep citing the life of Moses, but it's just because it's on your desk here. But I think reading with the church fathers, and there are a number of works that do this, allow you to go, wow. I didn't even pay attention to that in my life.
There's another book. It's titled today by Popular Patristic Series. It's on social justice. It's a series of homilies by St. Basil the Great. He never gave a homily called On Social Justice, but that's what the compiler and translator called it. And he says something, again, very stark. He goes, look, if you look in your closet and you see that you have two coats, just understand that you stole one of them from the poor. And none of us would naturally look at our closets
and think that. We'd think, why do I only have two coats? But it's when you read something like that that you have to step back and be like, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa. What what's so different about me and the way I live that I'm suddenly, you know, I'm in such a different worldview I'm in such a different place than them that I view the poor or my own possessions or whatever So differently and then later in the same collection will be like if you take the rich man The real
trouble with him isn't that he's rich. It's that if you take away his riches, it would be better if you've taken away his arm for him, because the agony he suffers at the removal of his wealth is unbearable to him. He goes, that's an indication to you of what your problem is. And that's something we could all read and go, okay, my relationship with these things is the issue, my attachment, my slavery, my willingness to let them control
me. That's really where the problem is. And that, again, is something that you get from reading somebody who writes in a completely different time, thinks in a completely different way than us. But also it was clearly a man dedicated to social causes. Like he opened the world's first
hospital, you know? Right, right. And someone like that in his position and with access to all of these resources and then telling us moderns today that, you know, it's better if you take someone's arm than if you take, you know, the content of his bank account. You know, he's not wrong. Like a lot of people would rather... And in fact, it does happen more often than not. Unfortunately, people take their lives when they lose large sums of money because they say life
is unbearable. If I do not have these resources, I cannot live. If I don't have this standard of living, life is not worth living. What's the point? What's the point? And he's speaking to that. They're all speaking to that. They're saying that this is a problem with the way we view life. This is a problem with the way we approach life. And the problem is also, I think, if we read from within our own culture, whatever it is we're reading is tainted by the same lens that's blinding
us. And it's only from reading from outside of... our culture our time bubble then we begin to see like here's someone looking at our life today from the outside and he's helping us see how ridiculous it all is St. John Chrysostom Again, it's a bunch of homilies that they call on marriage and family life. I love that book. So one of the sermons is on marriage, and he writes about the wedding reception. Yes, that's the best.
Whenever I want to show people, I'll be like, you know the church fathers knew what we would be like? And they'll be like, what do you mean? He knew that there would be an open bar. He knew all the dancing and the music and the songs. He knew. And then he writes it in such vivid language, like you're basically inviting the devil. You invite Christ to the altar and say like, you know, I want to start my marriage at
the altar, sacramentally. And then a day later at the reception, I invite the devil and his pomp and his music and all this stuff. And then
I begin to wonder. you know why are things going wrong in my marriage well you know if i started off on the wrong foot and and he tells us like you know you can say to me that it's tradition just this is how people are doing things everybody does it he says the exact same thing we say to each other today exactly he's saying it and he's saying do you know how ridiculous you sound like if there's good tradition keep it but if there's bad tradition break it and by all means if there's
something that's good that's not traditional start it like how ridiculous how crazy would it be if you have a reception and invite poor people yeah how how insane would that be you know this is not traditional but hey you know it will be attributed to you as you are the person who started that tradition and it takes someone like that with such you know a crisp presentation of our reality to kind of uh make us take a double take almost something like when like why am i
doing what i'm doing like is it really the right approach the right way of doing things the right thing to do here am i just doing it just because everybody else is doing it yeah i never thought of it this way and it takes someone like that who was able to phrase it like that for me to start thinking that way and that's really the the you know i'm not going to say the but one of The most important aspects of reading the
Fathers, living with the Fathers. To tack on to that, you and I know that St. John Chrysostom suffered for doing that. I think that's the beautiful thing about reading real people. Sometimes our idea of the saint, as they said or did things, and then it was like... Yeah, then they went to heaven and died and whatever and everything was good. And instead you have St. John Chrysostom who got into arguments with the empress, particularly after she put up a statue of herself in front
of the church, right? And he goes, this is wrong. What you're doing is wrong because he wasn't ashamed to speak the truth. And he eventually
gets exiled and he dies in exile, right? And you're like... saint john chrysostom bishop of constantinople big deal right the the city of cities in the ancient world and um and he suffers and he's exiled and his life sucks as a result of speaking the truth and we have his letters to olympia the deaconess um that you can still read today from that journey right that's where that classic phrase glory to god for all things comes from while he's in chains in in exile and
um And you just have this fact that he's like, it doesn't matter. I knew when I said those things that were quote -unquote inflammatory that I was going to suffer for it. There's a real cost to it. This is real preaching, not empty preaching, you know, from the safety of, you know, distance. And I'm just saying stuff and it's really not going to cost me anything. No, this is going to cost me everything. And I'm still willing to say it. And we may think, well, he's the patriarch
of Constantinople. Like, I mean, that guy can say whatever he wants. It's like, no, even he wasn't safe. And he was actually less safe because he was a member, an important member of clergy. And so the impetus for the rest of us as Christians is to be like. Let's speak the truth in love and let's speak reality because that's how the world will be saved. If you and I are going to be like, okay, well, I'm just not the person
to do it. And it is a God -given vocation. And some of us are called to witness in a particular way at particular times. But if we all assume it's somebody else, it's never going to happen. And Chrysostom shows us that even though the church remembers him as John of golden mouth, which is just what Chrysostom means, He was going to suffer for that witness. Even though later memory would go, wow, everything came out of his mouth is golden. And it's like, yeah, he
was persecuted for it. At the time, it wasn't so golden. Yeah, right. Some people took very real offense with it, the empress. There's another text from Gregory the Theologian in some of his homilies on the love of the poor. And you people decorate your houses with stones that preserve temperature. Stones that preserve the warmth in winter and the cold in summer and comfort.
comfortable mattresses and and linens from the far east where they were getting silk and things like that and you read it you're like man yeah that's how people build houses today you know and and he was like it is what it is truth is truth And I think that's something that when you read real living people, St. Gregory the Theologian is a funny example, too, because he didn't want to be a bishop. You remember, right, that he ran away when he was ordained a priest.
And then he had to come back and go, okay, sorry, guys, whatever. My bad. I'm here again. And then when he's made the bishop of Constantinople, he goes to a city that at the time was actually full of heresy. He wasn't even allowed to go to the patriarchy, if you will. And he had to go preach in a tiny little church. And he says, this sucks. wanted any of this. And he's so real. And that makes his witness to truth all the more
real. I think for a lot of people, one of the favorite weeks for some in our patristics meeting is when we do an intro to a church father, some of whom we know more facts than others. So sometimes we can introduce more detail. But like Gregor the Theologian has some autobiographical poetry that he's written where he documents the fact that he didn't want to believe. He didn't want to come to faith. And then he nearly got crashed on a boat heading to go to education. Essentially,
he was going off to uni, if you will. and he nearly dies, and he goes, look, if you allow me to survive this, my life is yours. I hope he survives, and now he's stuck. Now he has to
keep his word. Right, and then after that, he's like, he didn't want the priesthood, and they made him a priest, and his father did, actually, who was also Gregory, which makes church history a lot of fun, because everybody's, Basil has a Basil, Gregory has a Gregory, and so on, and then he doesn't want to be a bishop, and every single time, God's like, look, this is not your will, it's mine, and he goes, fine, this sucks, and I hate it, it but i'm gonna do it um and
when when when we do those weeks together where we introduce a church father a lot of people are like that was really cool i didn't know gregory was such a baby about you know being ordained a bishop and it's like yeah he hated it he hated every minute of it um he even left the council of constantinople that happened in 381 because he didn't want anything to do with it and so on so it's one of those really funny kind of situations where you have the opportunity to
read these real people be actually very real and to struggle, but still to pursue the life of virtue. We could cite other examples, but
I don't want to just keep rambling here. That's actually very interesting because these are not... uh ideal figures that are you know uh perfectly packaged story these are real lives people who put their lives where their mouth was and they and they spoke the truth and it cost them and it takes us back to the very disciples themselves who you know were preaching the crucified lord and the risen lord and uh it wasn't something that was you know without cost. It cost them
their very lives. And this was the witness. This is the witness that they left us. And only from within can their witness be seen as witness. From without, it's weakness. And St. Paul said it. To the world, for the Greeks, the cross is foolishness. But to us, it's the very power of God. And you mentioned a story before. There's a similar story. From Father John Bear wrote a commentary, sort of commentary on the Gospel of John. And in it, he talks about the story
of Blandina. Yes, I love that story. And that story is like it encompasses all of like this young slave girl who is being martyred and basically is hanging in the middle of the arena. And, you know, all the people sitting around like all those billionaires and saying, oh, you know, poor girl. Or perhaps they're thinking, oh, it's her fate. There's nothing really that could be done for her. Like it's her fate to be, you know,
food for the beast, for our entertainment. But as St. Irenaeus relates to us, he tells us like. The people who were hanging on the floor of the arena with her to be martyred, they saw something else. Something that no one else saw. They saw Christ. Yeah. And I think one of the best parts about the letter of Irenaeus about her is he also shares that although she's being beaten down, you know, by the whatever you call them, the guys that are doing the torture before she
gets eaten. He narrates that they were beaten. with sweat and physical exhaustion as they were beating her down. And that all those in the arena who could were seeing Christ suffering for their sake in the person of the weakest of the weak. Blandina is a slave girl. Not only is she a woman, which of course are not even second -rate citizens in the ancient Greco -Roman world. Contrary to most people's thought, it's Christianity that transforms the position of women. but she's a
woman and she's a slave girl. She's good for service or prostitution at best, you know, in that context. And it's her, the weakest of the weak, who can really show us who Christ is and that he comes and descends to that place to raise us up out of it. And those around her, not the pagans, are able to see reality as it is. It's like the anecdote about Polycarp, Saint Polycarp of Smyrna. He's being martyred. And the emperor of the time goes, repent, man, like just change
and deny Christ and we'll leave you alone. Because he was old at the time, right? Saint Polycarp was aged. And he looks at him and he goes, you know, 86 years I've served him and he's done me no evil. why would I deny him now? You may leave him now after all these years. Exactly. And then the emperor looks at him and goes, okay, well, at least curse the infidel and the atheist, which is what they called the Christians, right?
So he points to the pagans of the audience and he's, I love St. John, St. Chrysostom, St. Polycarp, sorry, because he's, He's got cheek. He points to the pagans and goes, cursed be the infidelity. And it's like that example is left to us and people still read it. And they're like, look at the man of faith and bravery. And everybody around him in the Colosseum is like, that guy's an idiot. Look, he was just offered freedom. Why didn't he pursue it? And then it's only with
the eyes of faith. It's only in reading the church fathers and discipling our minds and our wills that we can see and be like, he's the one that's
really free. right the rest of us are enslaved to something a fear that somebody's going to come and take something from me a fear that this relationship is going to end and i won't find anyone a fear that this pleasure that i'm attached to might get removed or found out or or i might be embarrassed by it it's the rest of us who are slaves it's polycarp standing in the arena without fear it goes okay cool i've been with him my whole life i know nothing's changing today
You can't scare the person who believes in Christ. And that's what, at the very start of the conversation, I said, St. Athanasius, you know, he says this thing about proving the resurrection. And I was expecting a philosophical proof. And he goes, the real proof of the resurrection is that people who were aforetime, previously, afraid. now go to their death willingly. Even happily, they profess their faith in Christ. Not because they're
sadists, masochists, or whatever. It's because these people know that Christ is the reality of all things. And what they're doing is pursuing truth. And so I've always taken that text as a maxim in reverse to be like, so if I believe the resurrection to be true, if I think Christ is truly risen, then I shouldn't be bound by fear or by slavery. Because that's actually the proof, apparently. that the resurrection is true, is that the Christians are free of any of these
chains. And it's like when you take that in reverse, you're like, that just left the realm of theology and became super, what we would call today, a quote -unquote practical. You know, suddenly that's real. And all the church fathers and mothers, when you're reading even the most philosophical of texts, it's going to come back to something that is real, that says like, look, if you say this, you're saying something dramatically different about what it is to believe in Christ, who he
is, and how we live the life in him. That's something where I think when we teach church councils in Sunday school, a lot of people leave and they're like, there's a good guy, there's a bad guy, there's a date, there's an emperor, there's a place. Done. And what I try to impress on people is I'm like, no, guys. The what, where, when, just kind of a laundry list of facts. I'll be
like, guys, look, you didn't get... 300 bishops from all across the known world some of whom died on the way you know to get together in one place to be like guys we're all agreed right it's all cool consubstantial okay awesome let's go home you know it's because they thought this stuff mattered because they were like the christ you believe in dramatically changes the rest of your life and everything about it you know including how you're going to act tomorrow, including
the Eucharist, including what you're going to sing, so on and so forth. And I think it's that depth of reality that we're trying to communicate to people. We're talking like, hey, read the Church Fathers. This stuff is important because we want to see where all of that fits in this grand schema that is the life of the Church, of which the Church Fathers are beautiful witnesses, but they're not the whole life of the Church, right? I'll often cite to people just one stanza
from Tasbeha, and I'll be like... Just think of this one stanza. You and I just read pages of the Church Fathers. And this one stanza here has in this beautiful little short form summary all of these thoughts in it. If you can get that context. You know, and so there'll be some people who go to Tasbeha and got that. And then there'll be a bunch of people who are like, now my mind is opened. Now I really understand that that has so much depth. Right. You know, there is
a saying today. The hell you're willing to die on. Yes. And it's not that people aren't willing to die for what they believe. It's that what they're willing to die for is not worth dying for. And we mentioned already, you know, finances and money. A lot of people today tie the concept of freedom to money. Financial freedom. That's what freedom means. to a lot of people. Yeah. And then we meet with people, we encounter people who had, you know, much more money than we're
ever going to see. And they tell us like these church fathers, we have stories of saints who left enormous amounts of resources. And these fathers, they tell us, they explain why to us. It's not just a matter of, you know, having the right person in charge of the money. results in good outcome is that it changes you. If you, let's say you make $10 a month and you give to the poor $1, you think if I make a hundred or if I make a thousand, I would be giving more.
But the irony is, and what they teach us is that you actually can end up giving less. So it changes you and you wouldn't. you know instinctively know that you know that something needs to be looked at but what exactly and then when we when we read the fathers when we experience what they're experiencing and begin to kind of like you like you said earlier be patient readers with them we begin to see like why that change happens
and how that change happens. And in fact, you know, kind of like a veil that's been being put over our eyes just so we can think that the more the better when it comes to finances, when it comes to resources, right? When it comes to our ability to consume, the more, you know, the better.
and they go in a completely different direction and that's why it's so important and it's not just you know important on a philosophical level but very much practical it's not something that you can say to yourself because some people i i do encounter have convinced them i've written off church father and saying like this is all philosophical stuff it doesn't really impact me practically speaking like my day -to -day living my faith All I need is Christ and I believe
in Christ and my relationship is with Christ. The rest of it is just secondary to that. It doesn't, you know, impact that. Whereas these were people who were. approached him not as a sort of puzzle to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced, right? To be encountered. They knew that it's not just about getting the right bits and pieces of information oriented in the right way. And then we figure out what the Trinity is. And we just know it and we write it off and
move on with our lives. This is an experience, a mystery that you have to live with kind of the discomfort of not knowing. And they tell us what that's like. And they invite us. to share in that mystery, to share in that experience. And you have like St. John Chrysostom, one of his famous sayings, he goes, look, any God you can understand or comprehend is no God at all.
Yeah. You know, and it's like, wow. His point is just to be like, you're not out here doing an intellectual pursuit, trying to gain some sort of intellectual knowledge and say, ah, there's the Trinity. We had that. We had Gnosticism in the first and second century, where Gnosticism was an early body -denying heresy, if you will. They denied the goodness of the material reality. And they even really denied the incarnation,
therefore. But they also thought that one of the ways to real salvation was secret knowledge. That's where gnosis comes from, which is just the Greek word for knowledge. And so the church already experienced this sense of a faith that is just a heady material where you kind of know the right facts and then you're admitted to the pearly gates. You know, Peter has the pop quiz at the pearly gates, if you will, as the pop
image likes to go. And the church fathers and mothers were like, no, we already experienced that idea. We've already had this problem. And we've given many answers as to why this isn't the totality of the life in Christ. To cite another example, you were talking about our attachment to money. And what's really funny is when you read somebody like St. John Cassian, who in the 4th century goes to the desert. He's from the
West. He goes to the desert of Egypt to be like, we want to know what real monasticism looks like. Because, of course, it started in Egypt, and that's not an Egypt pride thing. It's just, you know, we had the Desert Fathers. It is what it
is. And we had a desert. yeah well a lot of it a lot of desert you know and and he goes out there and he interviews different church fathers right so we have the the interview with abba moses is the beginning and and many scholars take that to be our moses the strong right And in his institutes, which is part one of the work, he's got institutes, which is sort of how the monks live. And part two is the conferences where he's like, yo, what's what salvation look like?
How does that work? You know, they go sit down with various fathers and they'll be like, so how do I achieve purity of my eye? You know, because I've tried and it's not working. And in the institutes, they'll be like, what about the monk that says, I don't need to work because work isn't important. I just have to pursue God and live a life of simple faith and all this stuff. And he goes, no. In the Egyptian monasteries, they were very clear. Every monk had to do some
sort of work to be able to make ends meet. And one of the rules apparently at the time was the monk had to have a little bit extra. So he could donate to charity. And then in the text, they go into the access. He goes, look, some monks are now believing that they should actually dedicate less time to prayer and more time to doing more work so they can make more money because then
they'll give more to charity. And it's like all of these weird ways that we formulated excuses for how we want to live our lives, they've already had, even in the monastery in the fourth century. And so it's one of those things where you read and you're like, okay, as you said, Abuna. There is really nothing new under the sun. We encountered this idea. And I think the beautiful thing about inhabiting or living in a tradition, as opposed to, say, post -Reformation, where the individual
becomes the rule of the law, right? Here we mean the Protestant Reformation, where the hierarchy or the hierarchical status of the Catholic Church is called into question, and the impetus is put back to the individual believer as Martin Luther leaves the Catholic Church. Even Western secular scholars want to be like, look, maybe individualism took its rise from around that time or something like that. Because now suddenly you become the measure. We're in the early church or we're in
an Orthodox church. You're like, you're not the measure. Somebody else has asked that question. And it's not because they were smarter than you that they answered it. It's because they had the answer that was given by the tradition, which is the living faith of the church. is interesting. It feels slavish to people today, right? Because freedom has become the measure of reality. But in fact, what the Church Fathers tell us is like,
this is liberty. You're not out here, you know, struggling with a disease of your eyes in terms of lust, let's say, and going, I can't figure it out. What am I going to do? You know, is there a good... whatever 30 -step program some modernists come up with, they're like, no, we've been at this now for 2 ,000 years, and we have solutions for you. We have ways of freeing you. And I think that's the beauty of Orthodox tradition in the
end, right? We have all these beautiful theological writings and treatises and whatnot, and they are very rich and deep and amazing. But I think people often think that they stop there. where it's like, no, the bleed down, if you will, from those treatises is the everyday individual going, I just don't know how to stop swearing. I can't stop envying people that do well. And my vainglory suffers when I hear something good said about somebody else, and I just don't know how to cure
myself of this disease. And the church fathers are like, yeah, we know. We've been doing this for 2 ,000 years. Here are some solutions. Here's a way of being freed. And I think... when people really encounter that they suddenly start to go like this is great i can finally be free of my chains and i think that's the beauty of the faith right as christ says that he has come that we might we might be free that we might have
life right and He means that. An analogy, Abuna Athanasios in Kitchener, he likes to use this. He likes to go, you know, the church fathers and mothers and the desert, that's like the university ground, as universities used to be anyway, where people went out and they did experiments and they tried things and they went, you know, that doesn't work. We did that one, that was really bad. We did this, though, and it worked really
well. So that, if you will, out of that tradition, out of that lived experience, we can go, okay, there's a path. And some other people have trodden the path and gotten so far and fallen and gotten so much farther and fallen and some other people have gotten the whole way. And we have their example to be like, here's a way to track forward. Here's a way to be freed. Here's a way to be liberated. Here's a way to not let sin rule my
life. And it's like, well, we would be done if we knew there was a way to real freedom, to real true liberty in Christ, to be fully alive. And we said, That seems inconvenient. I'm going to leave all of that and figure out my own way. I'll joke with people. We're a community of a million pharmacists and other professions too, of course. Not to hate on pharmacists, but organic chemistry is one of the hardest things I ever
studied in my life. And I'll have people where I'm like, physical chemistry is even harder. Organic chemistry is one of the most difficult subjects that ever existed. For the engineers out there, sorry, Bona. You know, I'm like, physics is the hardest thing I ever tried to do. And I was terrible at it. And then I'll have people that come from these backgrounds like, no, no, no, I can't read. And I'm like, are you joking?
It took me hours to learn what a vector is. And you're out here doing, you know, crazy, complicated calculus. And you're telling me that you can't read the life of Antony? No, man, come on. If you knew what that holds, if you knew the treasure, the pearl of great price, you'd be looking for it. Absolutely. And I'm very glad that we had this conversation because it's often been presented as the Church Fathers is this kind of black box. We really don't know how to access it, how it
works. work somehow as long as there's one person in the church who knows what it is that's sufficient and we don't all need to to know or to read or to um get acquainted start getting familiar with the fathers because it's just at the end of the day you know it's really not that relevant or accessible and it may be uh also a little bit uh outdated and uh now we know so much more we're so much more enlightened and and all of that stuff and and the funny thing is this very thought
of now we know better yeah is uh is directly confronted by the father's like now we know better like you know you have christ who is um is alive on the altar and you come to him and you say like now we know better now we have all of these different ways of living or different ways of salvation or different you know path to to eternity and no this isn't it this is the path this is the way this is the way the truth and the life right so i wanted to emphasize that This isn't
something that's reserved for a special group in the church, either the professional, the ordained, either priest or servant or deacon. Or the PhD. Or the PhD, someone who's... you know interested in this kind of stuff so much so that they go and get a degree and study this is for everyone and it's not just for everyone this is what we do in the church it's not something separate from what we do this is what we do and here we have someone who's you know in his own words
Boringly average. Boringly average. Yes. In his own words, boringly average and found, you know, so much solace and so much depth and wealth in the fathers and went so far as to take that to his own community, to his own church, to have a meeting, to have a way of bringing more people
in conversation with the fathers. And all I want to say is this is... very doable why haven't we thought of it before why haven't we done it before and i pray my prayer is that every church does something like this you know this is not uh something that's copyright so you can all go ahead and copy and do exactly the same thing because it's wonderful it brings people into such wonderful conversation important conversations about real things things that really matter and
having conversations in a way that uh allows us to go uh behind or beyond any sort of modern veil that we have over our eyes and to experience things and to see things for what they really are so with that i want to just give peter uh opportunity for any final words any encouragement leave us with um i think i i think really like what you said abuna is is very true i um i happened on the church fathers as an accident of god's grace and I didn't think at any point when I
was reading them that I was going to talk to other people about them. I remember having a very strong feeling at certain points. I'd read things. I'd be like, I can't believe other people don't know this. And it wasn't because I thought they were stupid. I just thought it was so cool. This is so rich. I can't believe nobody else has taught other people this or said this. And I didn't read so that I could educate other people. But immediately what came to my mind was, wow,
really other people need to hear this. And by God's grace, through certain avenues, an opportunity came where it was like, okay, maybe there's room for a meeting. And it didn't work at first. And I'd show up to this meeting and it would just be me. And I'd sit alone for 45 minutes or an hour and go, okay, I'll go home. Or one or two people would show up and I'd go, okay, let's chat. Do you want to read the book together?
And that kind of thing. And for whatever reason, God in his own time allowed it to be such that more people were interested. And then people have come in where I'm like, this is amazing. I get to learn so much, A, from preparing the content, but B, from listening to other people reflect on the meaning of this text in their lives and how the person in the group who's an architect and who thinks about beauty and planning and layout can read a text and be like, look.
This spoke to me in my career in the way that I'm to live. It really reminds me of something C .S. Lewis said. He makes the point in his time, he goes, look, we have more than enough catechists and people talking religion out there. We have enough theological books. And of course, at his time, there were more than there are now. But, you know, in any case, I think his point is true. He goes, what we really need is more people who
are like geologists. who are Christians and devout, and are going to let that penetrate everything that they write, who are going to live true, authentic Christian lives, inspired maybe by the church fathers, he didn't say that part, but enlightened by their writings, that is going to penetrate every aspect of society. Because we have people out there who can write books and this kind of stuff, maybe. But even though...
There are common folk, if you will, lay folk like me, who don't have a degree or, you know, I'm not a member of clergy and things like this, where it's like, if we can live out our vocation in Christ properly, inspired perhaps by the writings of these church fathers and mothers, that's where society will change. God bless our priests, you, Abuna, all the other priests in our diocese.
You guys work laboriously and without end. But there's only so much that the priests can do if the rest of the body are going to go, okay, let's leave it to those guys. You know, good work, Abuna. And it's like, well, the rest of us are called to work with you, to follow your lead, to work wherever God has called us to say, like, what else can I add? Following the lead of the father in the church or in the diocese
and say, like, where's my two cents? it reminds me of a text everybody knows i i i love this text from the homilies of macarius i believe it's homily too or he'll be like look some people out there read some people pray and some people work and that was in his monastery right and he goes the one reading shouldn't look at the one working and be like, that guy's an idiot. He doesn't know anything. If only he read more.
But the guy working shouldn't look at the guy praying and be like, wait, why is that guy not
working and helping me out? And better yet, he even says of the guy praying, he shouldn't look to the other two and say, you know, the... the half wits over there who are not really doing the real spiritual stuff they're only working or praying he says the guy who's praying should look to the one studying and say whatever he reads will accrue to my benefit because what he reads will be added to me through my learning from him and the one who works should look at
the one praying and say That guy prays for me so that the work may be blessed, and so on. And he has this idea of a whole body coming together and saying, like, let's actually work together.
Let's actually be the body of Christ, be inspired by the saints, by the church fathers and mothers, to be filled with the Spirit, to be able to continue to pursue the life of virtue together with our various vocations, following our fathers, the priests, and the bishop, of course, and being able to add what God has given to us to add to the common work. Wow, that's beautiful. My prayer is that we all do that. Thank you all for tuning
in and being part of this conversation. And I want to thank Peter very much for your time. Thank you for hanging out with me for so long. My pleasure. Until next time. 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.