Episode 86 - Christian (Part Fohr)

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meditation has by far been the most important discipline in my life any spiritual discipline prayer worship all the things i grew up with none of them have been as directly life-changing as meditation has been for me and it has allowed me to experience my life more fully more presently the colors shine brighter the music sounds better it's just been life-changing and i've been so excited to see all of the meditation apps and the mindfulness sort of ideas sweeping the world the western world through our technology and you know in the workplace even there's time my daughter's school they have times for mindfulness i love that [Music] but there's an aspect a spiritual aspect to meditation that is missing from a lot of the cultural mindfulness movement as wonderful as mindfulness is there's more we started as the liturgists with meditations before we even did the podcasts we did meditations and music that would go along with it and we still do that we still we put out weekly meditations that are not just mindfulness things which mindfulness honestly you can get in a million places right now but you can't in a million places get science mike giving you a lectio divina or or an ignatian spiritual visualization you can't get a oneness meditation for me or a new spiritual song that i'm working on for a mantra for you or there's al or hillary giving you an empowering unique self meditation there's all sorts of stuff that we put out on our patreon feed it's not just a an auxiliary to what we do it's at the heart of what we do is trying to provide and engage in work together that can help us deepen our spirituality deepen our presence to this life to the beauty and the glory that is all around us and within us if that kind of thing sounds interesting to you we encourage you to just check out our patreon page you can go to the liturgists.com and just click on the join us button it's only a dollar a month to get started at the first tier level at that level you get the weekly podcast that mike and i do called the alien and the robot which is where we discuss the ideas that sometimes end up making it their way to this a lot of the similar topics that we might address on the main podcast here a little bit more raw a little bit more how they're being formed in real time what's happening behind the scenes of the liturgists all kinds of fun stuff so there's that you hear about events first and there's a new app that we're trying out together with discussing and trying to find other patrons and liturgists through the world to connect with and uh it's just a whole thing happening and if you're just listening to this podcast you're missing out on on taking these ideas further than just hearing them by yourself so go to the liturgists.com if you're interested and click the join us button and i'll take you to patreon and not only will you get meditations and and all this stuff that patrons get but you'll help make this podcast happen obviously it's a pre free podcast and we don't have ads on it because we just take this space really seriously and have never wanted to be beholden to corporate strings we've never wanted to have to sell something we're not super passionate about ourselves and so it's just never we never have taken that path we've kind of just relied on the support of people that listen and download for free and that makes it work so thank you those of you who are patrons and those of you who like listening to this show or just appreciate what we do maybe your maybe your kid likes this show and they made you listen to this because it has richer roar on this one they knew this would be a gateway drug for you uh anything helps so again the liturgists.com just click that join us button and we can keep doing this because we really really enjoy it love you all hope you enjoy today's fourth part of our christian series with the esteemed and incomparable father richard rohr welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody did you take your name from the the greek words liturgists where'd you how come you took that name that's a good question um yeah so i mean i don't know what the greek words are but the idea of the work of the people was sort of the that's what it means yeah the work of the work of the people yeah very good okay and our thought our thought in it when we started the liturgists mike and i had both kind of lost our faith um we both grew up evangelical christians and had come to a point where we deconstructed all of that and had a lot of experience with christianity and with our beliefs that um we let go of all of it but we had also both had mystical experiences that we couldn't let slide away so easily as to just dismiss spirituality as wonderful useless wonderful that makes total sense yes so in that conversation we're like how do we talk about we would love to talk more about what was that what is this what is all of this [Music] but with without being afraid of any other stories so how can can we have science in the room with faith in the room with art yeah and all of it together and and looking for some sort of spiritual work of the people that is a little less constricted than what we were used to and that's how the whole liturgist thing started that's how it started well thank you so you're kind of the perfect the perfect person for us to have involved tonight it's the thing i like to talk about good thank you hey father rohr this is william here um i met you several years ago at a rob bell event in laguna niguel oh you were at that yes and we uh we were in a hotel lobby you walked in with your adjacent and you bought us all moscow mules and talked to us for about an hour it was one of my favorite experiences i remember that you're right i didn't remember there were moscow mules oh i remember we were sitting there with the fireplace right on the ocean and we just sat and talked to the spot yeah i think we took a picture together too i think i have it somewhere but uh just wanted to say it was one of my favorite uh moments and just a lot of things you shared were really crucial for my spiritual development at that time so they make me happy thank you thank you well father here's what we're doing i know you're limited on time so let's jump in if we can listen you can call me richard okay richard is fine yeah richard um so we have been doing a series for the last few weeks called christian and we have an interesting audience that we have people all over the theological map from we we have about as many atheists that listen as evangelical christians we have a whole lot of uh like i think 52 according to mike who's he's sorry he can't be here for today he's in transit uh on tour and he couldn't he couldn't make it work sure um but according to him 52 of our audience does not consider themselves christian but most of those um were christians so there's a lot of kind of the duns and the nuns and the duns so we have a a wide swath of people but all most of whom like coming to the conversation with an open mind and an open heart and so we've been digging in on this christian series what is christianity um do we identify as christians why um or why not and just kind of digging into what does that mean in this day and age what are the the impacts of that on our lives and on the society and just talking about the concept of christians so you were one of the first names that came up with as a as a dream person to talk to um i assume that you would still identify as a christian yes i would yeah so maybe we could just start by unpacking that what what does that mean to you and why would you identify as a christian well let me start by being honest and probably unimpressive but the first reason is because i was born a catholic you know so i was able to receive the message at a childish level for sure but uh it was still a message at that level that started me off with great comfort great beauty great security it was a world view that held me and it helped me well through the uh you know rebellions of the 60s the the intellectual explosions that continued through the 70s and 80s but then the second answer and of course i mean i've been a franciscan for almost no for over 50 years so i've had plenty of time to process this to to work with it to study it to to pray through it so i'd have to say what comes to me at least this morning or today is um that i find the christianity that i've been given that's all i can say is able to appeal to the head and the heart simultaneously and equally and uh that's just very satisfying uh it uh it but again i know most people weren't given that and i've always said our our great central belief is merely the belief in incarnation embodiment and fleshment i don't think christianity has unpackaged that very well at all but when you do try to un-package it i find it hard to believe that most human beings wouldn't find that tremendously attractive you know but the trouble is and you know what i'm going to say probably we projected that exclusively onto jesus instead of letting jesus carry the message for the whole of humanity yeah and human beings we're just egocentric enough that we aren't interested in things if we're not in on the deal and when we were told to believe all these miraculous things about jesus in most cases without any verifiability it just became an abstract artificial belief system because frankly it didn't include the human psyche the human body the human mind uh and for me any religion that includes all that is is worth calling a religion so i don't have any trouble being a christian but i don't i've given a special time to put that all together um i'd love to hear what you were saying about the head and heart i'd love to hear a little bit more about that that's been a really special just the even the phrase talking about the head and the heart it calls up um i had i had an experience with ramdas i went on a retreat with ron ross a couple years ago um and in that he was he kept talking about that and he he gave me a name actually while i was there like a spiritual name he called me vishnu das and he was saying that he had seen me as as he got to know me a little bit that i had spent a lot of my life in my head but he saw me now trying to live in my heart and he said when you when you can be in both of those places at once there is there's vishnu good for you and uh so that's a really special thing to me and as a lot of my a lot of my meditation practice since then has been heart centric and and remaining in my heart and so i'd love to hear i'd love to hear how you uh to delve more into that you kind of touched on it briefly but what do you what did you mean by being in both the head and the heart well uh first of all i think it's something that is achieved only over time i don't think you you you fall in the beginning of your journey into both you fall into one or the other at best usually into neither one because you're still reacting and rebelling so you're afraid to use good intelligence and you're afraid to trust the heart that feels too sentimental perhaps so it's a it's always a work in progress uh the the letting the head inform the heart and the mind and form the body the body and form the mind and that very realization is what helps me trust it that it doesn't fall into your lap it's it's an integrating process and it's mostly and i mean this sincerely it's mostly done to you yeah you don't consciously set out to say oh i'm going to put head and heart together we're not even smart enough to know how to do that no it's just as you learn to love other people love creation as you learn to get educated and see all the good things your mind does bring you and therefore learn to trust it again they inform and educate one another head heart hardhead usually in the course of our life the pendulum swings to one direction or the other and when you when you ignore one what normally happens is the other becomes cancerous let me give you i won't pick on any denomination but i think we've all been exposed to a lot of what i'd call saccharine sentimental emotionally based christianity and you usually see that there's been no appeal to the head and so the the heart misplays its game you know and it's uh it's usually poorly stated christianity poorly experienced christianity [Music] there's a meditation teacher named judith blackstone that i really like and she talked about the head and she's she has these embodiment meditations and um one of the things one of the examples she she gave in one of her meditations that i thought was really interesting was she had somebody that was meditating um with her a lot and this person was a real heart person and they were meditating so much felt like the heart was opening opening opening so much that life actually became kind of unbearable she could hardly go go out anymore uh it was like she couldn't read the news everything just like hurt too much and so she really focused she really focused with that particular woman on helping her to meditate in her head like get get the head thing a little stronger and in that process she actually found that uh it's not the heart shut down but it was able to bring a balance that she was able to function more in life and i think i think that that balance of how we tend to live in one place in our bodies over the rest is an interesting thing to pay attention to do you think that the dichotomy between head and heart could be expanded to the other you know gut and other shocker points or anything like that or is yes uh i'm glad you bring that up because even head and heart are a unfair dualism yeah there's loads of degrees in between as they gradually learn to work together and you know i do think many of the eastern religions show that they've observed this and they named this with probably much greater subtlety than western christianity did we were a little too transactional not a little just in a major way we were transaction and when you think of religion as a set of magical transactions uh you don't tend to really transform people very well richard i'm curious i'm really curious you keep using language like i was given i was given this tradition i was i was born into it and then you use language that said this was done it kind of is done to us and the language sounds um sounds like it is we are allowing and unfolding perhaps consenting perhaps at times not but i'm curious about where there is room or where you think personal responsibility or active participation fits into this story of a faith tradition of of this thing that is done to us or given to us you know that question in various forms continues to recur it's um you see my quick glib response and you can help me unpackage it would be to consent is actually a deep act of freedom oh yeah in a mature person you can't say yes to something unless you're operating as a free agent but but freedom was so little encouraged in most of our western christianity we catholics and the orthodox it was all about obedience to authority the protestant traditions it was about obedience to a text it didn't encourage inner freedom and so i'm glad you're centering in on that but you wouldn't want to understand this as total passivity in fact almost the contrary yeah i can see you get it uh it it looks like a letting go now of course we catholics always used mary as the archetype of this that somehow we always said her let it be which is the symbolic let it be of all of creation came from an utterly free woman and i think that's much of the work of the first half of life god creating that freedom in you freedom from yourself freedom from your natural egocentricity freedom from your wounds and uh because we didn't spend a lot of time on that we find out the people's freedom even people who've been christian for 30 40 years is very minimal in other words you know their christianity tends to look usually more like their culture than jesus and you know how applicable this is in the united states right now that it's clear to more and more people that the american culture won out not jesus and this is probably a good effect of what we're going through but again the point i'm bringing up here is we're partially responsible for that because we didn't encourage freedom despite paul in galatians 5 saying for freedom christ has made us free but i don't think we idealized freedom very much at all it was only in our second vatican council in the 1960s in the catholic church that we wrote one of the major documents of the council on religious freedom and that we have no right to impose our catholic christianity on anybody but boy look it took us until the 1960s to get to that degree of appreciation of inner freedom there is no love without freedom it's only coercion shame guilt fear and we seem to be content with that is freedom something that we take responsibility for or is freedom something that is also then given to us and done to us let me try it this way freedom makes it possible for us to be responsible yeah you know just mandating commandments doesn't really encourage responsibility it doesn't make you you know the word responsible means able to respond and you've got to clear out a lot of gunk in all of us before you're able to respond from your deepest self your truest self your best self and you don't just do that by obeying a commandment or following a scripture it might be a starting point but it isn't the ending point did i answer your question there i'm not sure that i did you know you did and it's beautiful um to hear you respond in that way it makes me think a lot about the work of the existentialists um yelam and frankel and this tension that we have between freedom and responsibility and and this um the thing that we've often separated as being different from each other but is actually similar the the consent piece of allowing and participating in the work of god to unfold in us and and where in that there is this tension of freedom and responsibility or perhaps like a fluidity between them both that they are not as different as we think they are you know isn't it interesting in our metoo movement and our what i think is a maturing of our understanding of of sexuality and relationship that the word consent is now being written about from so many sources almost as if it's a new idea at least for males you know didn't you know and i i don't think a lot of them did know that consent is the only thing that could make this this way of relating meaningful beautiful enriching so it's funny we centered in on that word but i think it is an important word it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed 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betterhelp.com liturgists join over one million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists so i grew up in a black liturgical denomination a more holiness than pentecostal uh okay yeah for example my my parents when they were married uh jewelry was considered a sin and so they were get they exchanged wedding watches really yeah oh dear in a way i mean it's very actually very special and so sincere we moved and danced we we did the embodiment thing uh you know but we were still pretty orderly you know i almost think we took a bit of a pride in not being too pentecostal like some of the other black denominations like kojic yes yes so my question is what do you say to many of us who thought we were connecting the binary of head to heart like for instance we thought physical expression and worship coupled with evangelical apologetics made us holistic christians like defense of scripture traditional conservative values you know all of which you know truthfully were reinforcing white supremacy and heteronormative ideals when you kind of unravel that deconstruct that that feels like a betrayal how do we learn because i feel like a lot of people are in this situation how do we learn to trust again to trust modern christian wisdom or even modern science because i feel like a lot of us um because of feeling the certainty of like you said the head and heart binary feeling together because we believed it this way we read the josh mcdowell books you know like we had the defense of scripture and all those things um coupled with the the the familial joy and family and fellowship uh but then when you realize that that doesn't really work at least in the way that it was being framed it can feel hard to trust again what do you say to i guess a whole generation of people who are having a hard time trusting institutions having a hard time trusting whether the church some of them don't even trust science i think that's why we see this this wave of you know flat earth and all sorts of wild conspiracy theories because i think there's a whole generation of people who just feel betrayed um and don't know what it even looks like to do head and heart let alone like michael said all the other chakras that are in between like yeah what would you what advice would you give her well i like you centering in on that word trust i huh yeah i i bet that is true and it helps me understand the the level of emotion i meet in so many post-evangelicals it's just i i'm surprised that they are as angry disappointed hurt mistrustful as they appear to be i think catholics are now going through that with the pedophilia crisis feeling very very betrayed by their catholic church too yeah how do you regain how do you rebuild the ability to trust again wow i sure don't have a magic recipe i suppose it has to begin in one or two concrete relationships that tame the heart so the heart stops getting so self-protective because that's what a lack of trust is it says i don't want to be hurt again yeah that's very understandable and god must surely understand that i don't want to be hurt again but it is a defensive self-protective posture so you can't get real far if you stay there and you seem to be recognizing that that it's a stance that's understandable but it isn't really the life stance of faith faith has open arms uh it it is not always backing away from the other or from the moment or from the situation now knowing that the mind is seems to me the primary place that we self-protect through various rationalizations justifications i guess what i'd encourage people to do is find out what their mental defenses are to watch how they defend themselves from vulnerability from intimacy learn how you're doing it with your wife your husband your children yourself because how you do anything is how you do everything and when you can catch yourself oh this is my way of defending and protecting myself you can be pretty sure that that's the way you're defending and protecting yourself from christianity or anything else does that make sense yeah that makes sense even just correlating trust to faith i do think there is a bit of a resistance you know in our culture to faith because of betrayal and trauma and yes what we've experienced i i even think sometimes how it's connected me and some friends have a joke about how optimistic the 90s were as as an era it was kind of this american exceptionalism and everything you can just do it you can you know like it was and i think that's what a lot of us truthfully have been deconstructing from too is you know the the post-racial belief that we were given that was wrong the american exception that says america is always right and then how that ties into religion i think it's just caused the lack of trust and faith and yeah i do think we need i i love what you said about building concrete relationships a few uh rather than starting to trust a whole again maybe or a greater institution yeah but if you can't trust in even one relationship in your life one person that you let in uh that's who you are and that's that's how you're gonna relate to everything else i do think we would be smart to stop using the word faith for about 20 years and just use the word trust wow because faith carries this connotation of intellectual content believing in these ideas are believing these ideas are true and there's a lot of people who believe a lot of ideas are true and they can't trust the guy sitting next to them on the bus you know so it doesn't mean very much yeah yeah it it definitely you pointing that out kind of kind of brings up for me the feeling of how being embodied in those spaces when we were even in charismatic type churches being embodied carried a belief system that was actually toxic for us so then how do we in its force it shut down people in their bodies i feel like or i could say for myself oftentimes i feel shut down in my body because uh to express myself in certain ways just triggers a toxic belief system and so maybe it's i don't know hillary maybe i need to form new neural pathways to to connect embodiment into uh um more healthier into boundaries into healthier uh modes of being um but yeah i like what you said about trusting um the person but because we used our bodies by raising our hands or swaying in the to the christian music we catholics made our sign of the cross and genuflected in very tame ways but we didn't realize that even that muscle memory which became almost catatonic repetition was another way of really avoiding the head heart connection wow and i i hear you saying that and i totally agree totally agree yeah anything that becomes catatonic repetition or mere imitation of the group actually keeps us out of consciousness yeah it doesn't make you more conscious makes you less conscious well again consciousness demands at least some degree of freedom not coercion duress or pressure so how does the how does the form the liturgical form of whatever tradition you're in how does it relate to freedom does it necessitate at some point making a break on some level with the the tradition either internally or or externally or can it from within even though it's doing the same thing over and over um how can the relationship change to become free from from its childlike place you know you when you when we begin it's literally the guy in this in the clouds telling us to do these actions with our bodies how does it evolve into freedom well you know you have to start somewhere uh so you don't want to say that starting at the childish level is wrong how else can we start yeah but because we didn't understand the language of growth change change was not a good word in christian circles and part of that i blame on that horrible mistranslation of jesus in matthew and mark's gospel in most of our bibles i don't know about yours it's translated as repent and i'm no greek scholar but i studied enough greek to know that the word translated repent means change your mind metanoite so we weren't given a whole theology of change and so i think as a result we did stay at this childish level in our understanding of whatever our christianity revealed itself to be you know i had a wonderful uh protestant woman minister visit me just this morning we had a good talk and she she was explaining some of her life to me and sure enough before she became a minister as an adult she had a very successful business background and was successful in the business world and i told her something that i wasn't trying to flatter her on but i said so many of the more mature christians i met came to christianity a second time or at an adult level but had to leave the infantile level which she did for a number of years i remember years ago i was teaching in colorado springs and i said such a thing to the crowd there and the bishop of colorado springs was sitting right in the front row and i thought sure he'd come up to correct me but he said richard the best catholics i know all left the catholic church for 10 years and then came back and brought to it an adult intelligence made an adult act of faith it's what i call the second journey first journey christianity is far too often i'm going to overstate it but not much more than childhood conditioning and childhood conditioning that uh feels it has to now justify itself because it's wasted forgive me 20 years of its life here so i can't be wrong you know and that's almost why they don't want you to give them an adult version because i'd have to admit that what i've had up to now was a childish version so it's hard to grow christians up it really is if you don't set the pattern from the beginning [Music] [Laughter] [Music] i may have told you this the first time we met but after i felt like i had had a re-imagining of what christianity could be i'd kind of lost hope in my evangelical protestant structures of faith and i had this beautiful mystical life opening week in assisi oh yeah in those hills where saint francis used to preach it is spectacular it's beautiful a spiritual disneyland yeah it really it really was um and after that i i was so inspired by christianity and some of the history that we had either ignored or minimized as protestants uh and i tried to become catholic i was like no catholicism maybe that's a big enough open enough structure that i can that i can play within it without being constricted to the child like sure interpretations that i had grown up with um but it was interesting i i couldn't get in without acknowledging the cha like to say i believe in these doctrines and dogmas and like profess the faith um which i thought was an interesting like you can't come in with without and without going through the childish stuff yeah is that what you meant to say that's what i meant to say i didn't mean to be offensive to the tradition but that's what it felt like to me um oh i know it which which has left me in an interesting place because now at this point i wouldn't call myself anything i love all the traditions um but i don't belong to any of them and i think i wonder if that is a part of the nature of the kind of tradition i grew up with didn't have much of a structure for ah yes adult practice if you will of the faith um catholicism i see that it does you're in it there's lots of people that are in it that are that are open and and don't don't uh constrict everything to the literalism and all that but i just wondered if you had any thoughts about that you know it's a real pastoral problem for me how do you lead people into adult christianity when to get them started you almost have to go through what you've heard me call first half of life christianity uh i that's why i use ken wilbur's phrase so much uh transcend and include that are you familiar with that phrase he says as as you move to higher levels of consciousness what reveals them to be higher levels is you precisely have the ability to include and not reject or hate the previous stages that's the higher stage now you only see that according to spiral dynamics and integral theory you only see that ability in yourself at the second tier or the mystical level the example i always use is you know over the years i've counseled a number of army vets and marines and sailors who are so dutiful and and saluting and love their country and weep at the flag and just can't wait to fight the next american war and i could never go back to that and yet if i'd be totally honest i see an earnestness a dedication a willingness to die for something that i don't see in myself does that make any sense and i have to go back and retrieve include because as a little catholic boy you know i just of course i wanted to be a saint and a martyr and die for jesus and i was much more heroic then than i am now i'm a little bit ashamed to say that i'd like to believe if push came to shove i would die for another person for truth but i i sometimes doubt would i i think i'd find i'd find some excuse to get out of it that's why you who are married and have children are lucky because you can almost always say yeah for my kids i'd die uh oh yeah i got the biological means yeah but do you hear the point of making that yeah uh there really is something good about even the early traditional conservative pious uh patriotic use whatever word you want levels and there was a value there that when you proceed along the evolution of consciousness you tend to think well i've bypassed that you know and it's a warning it's a warning that that god is loving the soul at every level of its development and it isn't good for us to call any particular age or maturity wrong or bad i was a 14 year old once i was 24 year old once and i was still the same person i am now now i've been lucky enough to let it unfold but a lot of people don't get to live this long so we got to love them where they're at don't we of course i just i just was kind of bummed that there wasn't an on ramp [Laughter] well let me give you a real example of the truth of what you're saying vatican ii catholics the liberal catholics of my generation brought into the church right they have hardly ever passed on their catholic faith to their children i would say 10 to 15 percent liberalism progressive intelligent thinking isn't passionate enough to inspire young people now around maybe social justice issues yes but love of jesus our love of the scriptures or the sacraments uh that is boring to most young catholics i'm ashamed to say that liberalism doesn't know how to pass itself on do you hear what i'm trying to say i agree with you yeah uh stalwart black and white thinking passes itself on and i just i just hate that that that's true but it certainly is my my total life experience that you almost have to start as what i call in falling upward a loyal soldier and then you still remain loyal but not so much a soldier you're a loyal a loyal lover maybe the soldier energy we're starting our big men's conference here in alba in new mexico tomorrow and uh i realize this ever whenever i'm around the men the men just love soldier energy something to be absolutely certain about passionate about they don't like all this non-dual talk even though it's the only way they can survive now but it doesn't inspire joining it doesn't inspire signing on the dotted line and i i haven't resolved that pastoral problem really i have an interesting thought um so you used spiral dynamics and integral theory um just a moment ago to describe um kind of maybe the blue meme the meme of consciousness you know the green uh kind of the maybe to be dualistic use the liberal conservative divide now obviously beyond the green right uh you know there becomes theory into the second tier right yellow and turquoise and second-tier consciousness i've been deeply intrigued by this thought that you've put out there i know you're not the originator of it but you've done to me an amazing job of propagating this thought which to me can i think has the potential to move us from a green or from a first tier into a second tier and one of the things you've been talking about yeah one of the things you've been talking about lately has been um the notion of the separate self and the idea of connecting sin the definition of sin as being the idea of separateness and um i would love for you to maybe talk a little bit more about that because i think for instance a lot of people that have that you know the people you're mentioning the people that don't feel passionate uh that have maybe some of the progressive uh intelligence but aren't able to pass on you know maybe a belief system that feels concrete you know that isn't just lost in you know some sort of relativity um i think you're when you talk about the separate self it has somewhat of an ability to give a value system i think to those people so i would love for you maybe to expand on the notion of sin as separateness and even the notion of i've heard you talk before as sainthood as those that are able to be more aware and to include more uh versus you know the strict moralism that we were all that we all grew up with you know the beginnings of authentic conversion are when even in your psyche you begin and it's a process to move from i to we uh i live no longer not i as paul would put it where this thing that i've called richard and i've lived in this body all my life and i identify with it where i loosen my grasp on it i don't take its its virtues so seriously as if they're mine i don't take my faults as a reason to hate myself or condemn myself that's when you begin the melding into what paul would also call the body of christ or the collective or humanity if you just want a a secular word you don't need a a religious word for it but that's why i i use that language of first half of life second half of life you've unfortunately got to build that separate self isn't that ironic yeah the very thing you let go of is the thing you've got to create i think that's what makes the the leap of faith so difficult like i go off to a seminary and get an education i get a title and i wear a religious robe and okay identity identity identity but then somewhere along the road i began to see that it wasn't making me love humanity or jesus or anybody else it was just feeling good about being richard you know that's that's i think a necessary stage in authentic conversion where you move beyond as you well put it building up validating legitimating promoting this separate self uh and and again i don't think christianity has taught this very well christianity itself became a way of feeling i am more moral than you are i am more saved than you are all all this me to the point where it started to interrupt to the point where you where you extend the me into the infinity and that's like the goal yeah it's like just to maintain my separateness how can i all of you richard person saved for all eternity yeah it's it's it's about as well disguised narcissism as you can ask them it really is you can't disguise your narcissism better that you're doing it to go to heaven or to be like jesus or something like that yeah you know my next book on the christ i hope i in some part succeed in showing that holiness is a collective phenomenon salvation is a collective phenomenon we are the holiness of god in the collective you carry virtues that i don't carry i carry that you don't i don't have to compare i don't have to compete i just have to admire now if god gives me enough time there's still one more book i'd love to write i don't know if i'm going to get time for it but i'm convinced that paul is doing the same thing with sin and since you brought up the notion yeah uh i think for paul sin is a collective concept it's a collective entrapment uh uh human tragedy that we are all caught in an unsolvable human dilemma and we don't know how to overcome it and he says the greeks try to do it by intelligence read liberals the jews try to do it by religion read conservatives and he says fee on both of you the only way to live on out this mystery of of being collectively entrapped in absurdity and you know this isn't hard to convince people of right now look at our government yeah and we catholics look at our church after all of these centuries all this education it's still an absurd universe and i pray that i can i'm convinced you just go reread especially romans and galatians and i think this is what he means by the powers and the principalities so forgive my roundabout way but the separate self ends up not able to understand the glorious beautiful shared meaning of salvation and that's my christ book but i think it ends up being burdened by a sense of individual unworthiness or individual incapacity which just paralyzes most people when it's we're in this collectively you follow the point i'm trying to absolutely we're all stupid together and uh this weighing of well i'm holier than you and you're less holy than me and oh you just want to say stop it this has gotten us nowhere so if god gives me the ears pray that i can clarify what i believe is paul's collective notion of sin well let's let's partner with your beautiful question you know uh sin is maintaining the separate self and what i'm saying is the very separate self is the sin because sin can only be carried by this collective sadness and what humanity does to itself and does to one another it's the the the private individual is too fragile to carry that alone richard it sounds like you're talking about the second axial age is that something a term that you've uh yes carl jaspers i've used that for years uh does he say something like that refreshment well i think i've been reading and listening to reverend matthew matthew wright about his his language on it which is we don't wake up unless we do it together and hand in hand we don't wake up at all and there is a sense of collective salvation that none of us individually were meant to carry the responsibility for salvation or for the weight of sins where is he from [Music] oh gosh i think he lives in a monastic community in woodstock oh okay yeah but this idea that we have we have tried to transcend the body tried to transcend the self and to get outside of the self but in doing so have have accentuated selfness and there's a return to the collective and that we meet each other when you begin to move from i to we that your sadness is not just your sadness it's our sadness that's the beginnings of the movement out of sin do you thought because to try to carry that alone will just make you depressed self-hating or you'll project it on to other people which you can hate how does that relate to the freedom element that you were talking about as far as an experience uh you call it born again call it enlightenment whatever that separateness fades away you're not trapped by it anymore how does that relate to this how we experience that you're talking about because the you still have the subjective personal experience of the organism yes um what do you do in the end in the end the the universal sense of self the shared participatory sense of self and the individual sense of self have to learn to work together as good partners we don't want to obliterate the eye either and i think that's one of the glories of healthy christianity you know i think of the obvious story of jesus going after the one sheep he still is saying the individual believe it or not matters to god so perfect freedom would seem to me to be an ability to respect both to protect both the individual and the collective now as americans were such gross individualists we need to be stretched pretty far on the collective side i think and uh now did i answer your question what does that have to do with freedom ah well yeah unless there's a good degree of freedom from protecting my ego boundaries my ego superiority i don't think we'll allow that dying and that's what it is it is a dying to your own specialness your own uniqueness your own separateness but not entirely the paradox is you come back and reappreciate it but now as a part of the whole like a lot of our early saints said you know if you picture yourself in heaven apart from everybody else it's not heaven it's something else but it's not heaven a heaven of itself is a collective notion [Music] it's so interesting to hear you talk about that because richard i'm a therapist and i work closely with people who experience a variety of kinds of suffering and as you talk about the notion of individuality and how much we need to move towards the collective i have seen so many people in our individual society both love their individuality and individualism and feel extremely alone and disconnected even when not alone yes when you gotta advertise that you're special all the time you're usually very fragile which creates an immense loneliness oh we've got our work to do we really have our work so on my last question just to clarify it a little bit was have you heard of the um the ox herding zen cards or images like that the ten no i don't i don't think i have it's pretty great there's these images that the in zen um that they use to kind of describe the process of enlightenment and so i'll say them real quick the first one oh did you say the ox yes oh i used to have them all around the library okay yeah okay we had a library those got put away in a corner somewhere go ahead please i love those pictures they're great right yeah so there's the search for the bowl and then there's discovering the footprints and then there's perceiving perceiving the bowl catching the bowl taming the bull riding the bull home the bull transcended both bull and self transcended reaching the source but then it goes finally back into the world and so you have this idea of kind of this freedom um that happens and i've experienced this in my journey where it got to this point where the fight i didn't feel the need that i had to fight anymore it was it wasn't it was like yes the piece has nothing to fight there's nothing to fight the peace the past with all understanding um but then at some point if you follow the flow that is reality that brings you back into the world right i mean it's like love sends you back you don't just stay under the bodhi tree you you go back into the marketplace and that's that's kind of what i was wondering to get out with when you're talking about the eye versus wii that's perfect that's perfect thank you for bringing that up yeah in fact you're you find most religious questions about being saved or being born again or going to heaven you find them boring it's just oh are you still worried about that or trying to resolve that or fix that yeah it's you know i just talked to a bunch of college-age students here who visited us this morning from all countries and as much as i loved them they were so dear and so innocent i i could feel myself being pulled into those kinds of questions and i hope i answered them graciously but i got tired of answering them i i just didn't want to go back there [Music] yeah yeah and that's my limitation i'm not blaming them they're where they should be but uh you put it well you know re-entering the city writing the bull uh but just living life and you know thomas merton says much the same at the end of his life i just do what's in front of me it doesn't feel necessarily spiritual at all it doesn't need to it's just life [Music] i have never thought of asking a question like this of anyone so please bear with me i wanted to know what is it that you most like about being a christian [Music] assuming that you like being a christian if you in fact do what what is it about it that you like you know i think it's the expectation from other people i should be loving and the world should be loving the christian in many people's vocabulary they don't even know it but it's coterminous with being a loving person you know he's not being very christian i like living inside of that expectation because it allows me to go there it pushes me and invites me to go there that we've kept that much of our brand name intact is very exciting to me that even on the unconscious level most people assume that christianity is still about being a loving person so that's what makes me happy no one ever asked me it that way before thank you thank you well richard i i uh just i could talk forever to you because i love you're just such a such a fountain of wisdom but i know you have a place that you need to be so thank you so much for being on here to talk together in the new year right here yes we're gonna i think we're coming there that was the what i heard coming here right here in my office where i'm at right now great great so the listeners will get to hear more [Music] [Music] thanks for listening everybody [Music] [Music] you