This Lesson from the Bible will Make You Unstoppable | Franciscan University | EP 252

Then you ask yourself, "Well, what's the limit of that?" Because that's the religious question fundamentally: is, well, if you took on all the responsibility you could take on and you faced everything that you needed to face, what would you be like? Who would you be? And how would the world transform around you? And well, if the partial answer is, "Well, if I do that a little bit, things get a fair bit better," then the next question might be, "Well, what if you did that completely?"

And I don't think that's possible in some sense, right? It's like, you know, perfection is a horizon that always recedes. But it isn't obvious to me what the upper limit of that is. And certainly we do see people—I mean, saints, see it's a—it’s a Francis of Assisi who kind of pushed the limit, and miraculous things happen around them, maybe in the literal sense, and if not in the literal sense, close enough, you know, for all intents and purposes. And so that's heartening.

I now welcome to our stage our own president, Father Dave Pavanka, TOR. [Applause] [Applause] Father Dave became president of Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2019, the first Franciscan alumnus to lead the university. Father Dave also earned a Master of Divinity, an M.A. in Theology, a Doctorate in Education, and an Executive Juris Doctorate. He is a member of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Province of the Franciscan Third Order Regular. He was ordained a priest in 1996. A well-known Catholic speaker and author, Father David has written seven books and produced several evangelistic films and video series, including Sign of Contradiction, Metanoia, and Letters to Myself from the End of the World through the ministry of the Wild Goose. Please welcome Father Dave and our speaker, Dr. Peterson. [Applause]

"Well, thank you so much, and again, I'm just very pleased with the turnout and everybody being able to join us this evening. As Dr. Peterson and I were talking this morning, one of the things that he was mentioning was that he often doesn't come to universities anymore for many reasons, and we asked him, well then why did you accept our invitation? And his response was, because you seem different. I hope that was a compliment." [Applause]

"And it's been a blessing to have Dr. Peterson with us. He's been so generous with his time all morning, spending time joining us, and seeing our campus, joining us for liturgy, so it's been a great blessing and honor to have you with us. So thank you so much."

"Thanks very much for the invitation. So I appreciated Dr. Peterson's discussion on the corpus of the Scripture, of the Bible, in the book. And one of the things that he and I had talked about was to discuss a book, not the book. Fair enough, definitely. So when I was praying and discerning about which chapter I wanted to talk about, what I thought was most appropriate, there were a few things that were going through my mind. On Monday, we're starting the holiest week of the year for us. We're entering in a holy week, which is a time that invites the Church and the people of God to look at the cross that is ultimately going to lead us to the cross, and how suffering is so central to the Christian experience. Christian redemption comes about through suffering. So there was that, that I was continuing to think about. But I was also pleased, Lord, reflecting on the fact that we're near the end of the pandemic. And one of the things that I've been praying about over the last many weeks and months is how the pandemic has placed in forefront of our culture suffering and death and pain. And it seems to me that we have not dealt with that very well. We've got to the place where so many people are riddled in fear as if suffering is to be run away from at every cost, at every opportunity, the idea that there actually could be something beautiful and holy and salvific about suffering. So when I was reading through your book and I saw in the last chapter you speak about suffering and being able to do that with a sense of gratitude, I just felt that that was the place that maybe we could talk about this evening."

"And what does that look like? At the very beginning of the chapter, you say a much of your life you have been searching for certainty, and then you pivot very quickly to speak about suffering. So maybe two questions: your search for certainty, how has that brought you to what you spoke about earlier this evening, and why did you make such a quick pivot to talk about suffering?"

"Well, I think it's because, if you're looking for certainty, the reality of suffering is certain. I mean, what do you accept as evidence above all else? That's a good question. That's a hard question. But I would say pain is up there. It's very difficult not to believe in the reality of your own pain. It's somewhat easier not to believe in the reality of other people's pain. That's not so easy either, you know? But it's your pain seems to be undeniably real. And so it does beg a question, which is, you know, if pain is undeniably real, is that which overcomes pain even more real? And that I think that's in some sense that's the idea that lurks behind the idea of the resurrection."

"I mean, I was going to tell a story during this lecture today, although there wasn't really a place for it, but maybe this is a good place for it. I'll tell you something else I've been thinking about, which really knocked me for a loop, let's say, which I probably still haven't really recovered from. So a long while back, I had planned to do a series on Exodus. I did a biblical series on Genesis, which people seemed to appreciate, which I found extremely useful. It was quite a privilege to have the time and the space to walk through those books and try to understand them first psychologically, and I like to speak about things psychologically before I would ever dare to speak about them religiously. I think you leave that for last resort in some sense. I was thinking about some of the ideas that I talked about today. You know about the Bible being the foundation of the lens through which we look at the world. We have this idea that the Bible is a living text, and you know if we embody it, then it's a living text that's actually accurate. And I think to the degree that we're avatars of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that we do embody it for better or for worse, and we're stuck with that or blessed by it or both. The reason I didn't tell you the story was because I didn't know how to weave it into the theme that I was developing tonight, but it's relevant to the theme of suffering and what might the reality of suffering and perhaps what might be more real than suffering."

"So I'll tell you the story hopefully I can do this reasonably briefly. When Moses is leading the Israelites through the desert, I'm very compelled by that story. You know, so for example, one of the things that's really interesting about it is that the story begins with a tyrannical state and then it's the Spirit of God that leads the Hebrews. Maybe it's the Spirit of God that characterizes the Hebrew longing for freedom, and that's kind of an interesting idea. You know psychologically you think that what's the Spirit of God? The Spirit of God is that which manifests itself within you in opposition to tyranny. Could be. You know, that's a bad idea, it's quite an idea, it's a remarkable idea, and maybe it's true. It's certainly the case that that's how God is presented in that story and in many other ways. But that being paramount above all—and you know there's a corollary to that—well, we shouldn't be subjects of tyranny if we're children of God. For Israel—and Israel means we who struggle with God—it's not appropriate for us to be subject to tyranny. That's interesting too because I think we sort of accept that idea at face value in the West: that yeah, slavery is wrong, obviously. It's like it's not so bloody obvious these things, you know? One of the things that I'm really curious about in relationship to the most modern types who make group membership the science of existence is why is slavery wrong exactly? It's like it's just one for all groups, and one group lords it over another. It's like that's not wrong, it's just tough luck for the oppressed group. There's no wrong there because it's only wrong if we're sovereign individuals, right, with some intrinsic worth who are not to be subject to arbitrary tyranny. That's when it's wrong. And you have to accept all those other axioms before you get to say anything about slavery being wrong at all, otherwise it's just, hey, like Marx pointed out, it's just brute economics. And so you can make a moral judgment about that if you want, but what's your criteria for saying that it's wrong? You know, and of course that would upset people on the radical left who want to presume that it's intrinsically wrong without having to presume all the things that you have to presume to make it intrinsically wrong, and without even noticing that that's just a sleight of hand. In any case, so that's part of that biblical narrative too. We're not the sorts of creatures who should be subjected to tyranny. And then the tyranny might be, well is it the tyranny of a state or is it the tyranny we impose on ourselves? And I would say probably both. Why not both? The story could be referring to both. We tyrannize ourselves with our own presuppositions all the time. And then you might ask yourself, why don't we just give up our tyrannical presuppositions? You know, because they're not worthy and they're oppressive. But we don't give them up, and we often celebrate them. And I think the story has an answer for that too, because it's out of the tyranny into the desert. It's like, is that better or worse? How about worse? And so what if it's the case that even to escape from the tyranny of your own presuppositions that you don't go from the tyranny to the promised land, you go from the tyranny to the desert? And who the hell, excuse me, wants to do that? And the answer is no one with any sense. It's like, hey, I'll just keep the tyranny, thank you very much. At least I know where everything belongs there. And fair enough, I mean this is a very serious question, and it's an open question in the Exodus narrative whether the desert is worse or better than the tyranny. And so—and you know, you see this in the real world, lots of people in the Soviet Union pined for the days of Stalin. So I read a book once that was reminiscences of an extermination camp written by the guards, the good old days. You know, so I don't think there's a tyranny that's so brute that we can't long for it if it's been shattered, and so that's quite something, all that packed up in that story.

Anyways, so the Israelites are out in the desert, and they're there for 40 years. And you might think, well, what kind of leadership do they have? It's not that big a desert. And the answer is, yeah, but you know the desert after a tyranny? That's no bloody joke. And maybe it takes three generations to get through it, and that's possible. And so there's all that. And then the Israelites are wandering around in the desert. What happens? Well, the same thing happened to them as it's happening to us. They're worshipping false idols, and they're tempted, and it's no wonder they're tempted because while they're in the desert, it's like it's not going so well. It's no wonder they're having a crisis of confidence, you know? And maybe they're pining for the old days, and they're not so sure that the God who informed them that being the subjects of tyranny was wrong because now here we are in the desert, and so they lack faith. And it's understandable. But despite it being understandable—and this is one of the harsh things about the story—what does God do when he hears their complaints? He sends poisonous snakes in there to bite them. I think that's pretty brutal. You know, and that's the sort of thing that makes the technical atheist type sort of recoil about the conceptions of God in the Old Testament. Like, it's not exactly what you'd expect in some sense from an all-merciful being. It's like you've got these poor Israelites, first of all they were in the tyranny. Then they had that part go across the Red Sea, now they’re mean wandering around in the desert and that's not good. And so your best solution is to send a bunch of snakes in to bite them. But you think, well, you know, even if you're in the desert after a tyranny and you lose faith, then the snakes are going to bite you, right? Because that's what happens. Because if you're in, you know a little analog of hell and you lose your faith, is that going to make it worse or better? And the answer is, well I have reason to lose my faith. It's like, fair enough. That isn't the question. The question is, what happens if you lose it or you start looking for faith in the wrong directions? And the answer is hell gets a little deeper. That's one of the things that really frightened me—I spent a lot of time studying atrocity—and one of I realized on a metaphorical level that the reason hell is a bottomless pit is because no matter how bad it is there is some bloody stupid thing you can do that will make it worse. And that's right, you know? And that's a terrifying realization to really understand that.

And so, okay, poisonous snakes. And so now the Israelites are not only lost, but they're being bitten by venomous creatures. And you know, there's an echo of the snake in the Garden of Eden in that story. And so finally the Israelites, they get kind of tired of being bitten by the snakes and they go to Moses and say, you want to have a chat with God because you seem to be in there fairly tight with him. How about you get him to call off the snakes and maybe we'll behave a little better? How's that for a deal? And Moses says, okay, I'll see what I can do. And he goes and has a chat with God, which is no trivial matter. And God doesn't do what you'd expect because what you'd expect—like, and this would even work in terms of making it a comprehensible narrative—you'd think, okay, all right guys, you've been bit enough, no more snakes. But that isn't what happens. And I think the reason that it doesn't happen is because there's no getting rid of the snakes. I think that's also why there's a snake in the Garden of Eden, is there's just no getting rid of the snakes. You have to learn to contend with them. It's more like it's more that or maybe it's better to learn to contend with snakes than it is to inhabit a world where there's no danger. Maybe it's something like that. I don't know.

Anyways, God says something extremely surprising and very interesting from the perspective of a clinical psychologist. He tells Moses to cast a snake in bronze and to raise it up on a staff. And the staff seems to me to be a reference to the staff of Moses, and that staff of Moses is something like the thing you put in the ground to orient yourself with. It's the staff of God too, and it's sort of like an axiom and maybe it's like the Tree of Life. It's like, here I stand, it's a center point, it's all of that. In any case, you put the snake up on the staff. That's also the symbol of healing, right? The physician's symbol of healing, the staff with the snake. And so it is a symbol of transformation, and partly that's because snakes shed their skin and are reborn and so they're viewed as agents of transformation, and so that's all lurking in that symbol. And then God says get the Israelites to go look at the snake on the staff, and then the poison won't poison them anymore. And I read that as a clinician; I thought that's really interesting because one of the things that we learned, all schools of psychotherapy learned in the last 100 years, is that if you get people to voluntarily confront what makes them afraid and what makes them want to avoid, then they get better. It's curative. And so that's the message there. It's like, well if something is terrifying you, pay more attention to it. And that's actually what you teach people in psychotherapy. I mean there's a variety of psychotherapeutic techniques, but exposure is probably the cardinal technique. It's like if I can find out what you're avoiding and get you to confront it voluntarily, you'll get better. And the reason seems to be is that if you get people to confront what they're afraid of and sometimes what disgusts them, but what they'd like to avoid, let's say, if you get them to confront it voluntarily, that could be the future even, you know, the indeterminate future, they don't get less afraid, they get braver. And that's different.

It's not like they get accustomed to what they're looking at and they're no longer afraid—that kind of happens—but it isn't really what happens. What really happens is they discover there's a lot more to them than they thought, and so they're not as easily intimidated then. And so if you run a clinical client through a session of exposure therapy—maybe they're afraid of an elevator or something like that—you get them so they'll go in the elevator. And sometimes, they're often women because women have anxiety disorders more often than men. One of the unintended consequences of that often is they'll go home and have the fight with their husband that's been brewing for 30 years because they're now braver. They see themselves in a different light because they've confronted this thing that terrifies them. And so it's so interesting in that story that God's cure for this—for the venomous serpent—is voluntary exposure to the source of terror. It's so interesting that that's the case.

But that—and this is relevant to the issue of suffering, right? And confronting suffering dead on to actually focus your attention on that which you would like to avoid. One of the remarkable parts of that story is also that one of the scariest words ever is, if I was God, they wouldn't have been bitten in the first place, right? So they put the—they've got the serpent; the serpent's on the pole, but they're still going to get bit. And I think that that's what's essential about that is just because the serpent is there doesn't mean that everything is fixed. It now looks like they're still there, but the transformation that takes place is the focus of the suffering becomes a symbol of faith for them, and that's obviously on the cross.

"Well, and part of the faith is the faith that enables them to go look at the serpent to begin with."

"Absolutely. Okay, so that leads us to the next part, which is in John, because Christ says thousands of years later that he has to be lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness. It's like, okay, what in the world is going on there? Because that's a hell of a thing for anyone to say about anything ever. And it's right, because what does that mean? Why would the Son of God compare himself to a serpent? And why that particular serpent, and that serpent in the wilderness?"

"And I knew this old idea that lurks in all sorts of stories in this corpus of stories that I talked about. You know, there's an idea that the hero rescues his father from the belly of the beast. That's a very, very old idea. And what that seems to mean to some degree is that if you look into the abyss, then that reacquaints you with the wisdom and possibility of your tradition. It's something like that. It forces a maturation and a recognition of what's fundamentally important—that confrontation with what's terrifying."

"Well, so Christ says he has to be lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness. It's like, okay, what does that mean? I thought a lot about the relationship between the serpent and the Garden of Eden and the idea of Satan because there's an association there between those two ideas. And that's a very strange association too because there's nothing in the biblical story in Genesis that indicates that the serpent is Satan. Like, that's an idea that aggregates across hundreds of years or thousands of years that equation. And I tried to think that through. I thought, well, the snake is the thing that threatens us, and that's true biologically. We're wired to be afraid of serpents, especially poisonous ones. And they've been in an antagonistic relationship with mammals for like 60 million years—a very long time—but in some sense, the idea of Satan is he's the ultimate in serpents. And so that's why that equation is drawn across time. It's like, well, what threatens you? Well, snakes, yeah, they're pretty nasty. Well, there's snakes, and then there's, well, the origin of snakes. So maybe you conquer a snake, and that's one thing, and maybe the next thing is you go out and you find nests of snakes, and you root them out. But then there's the snakes that are in the hearts of your enemies; that's a harder snake to deal with. And then there's the snake that's in your heart, and that's the hardest snake to deal with, right? And that's where the equation between the serpent and Satan comes because the worst of all snakes is the serpent in your own heart. And so there's a psychologization of the idea of the predator, and it becomes something that's more spiritual. Is that you're most vulnerable to the worst impulses within you, right? That's the worst predator."

"Okay, so there's the idea of the concretization of the idea of the serpent becoming psychologized up into this figure of the adversary himself, and that abides within you. Analogously, perhaps, is this reference that Christ makes to himself in relationship to the snake. I thought, well, what's the passion? If the snake is what you're afraid of in this concretized sense, then the passion is the sum total of all possible fears. I think that's right, you know? Carl Jung, he thought about the story of the passion as an archetypal tragedy, and here's what he meant by that. So imagine that you took all these tragedies that were ever written, and you sort of distilled them so that you got the ultimate tragedy because the fact that you can identify a bunch of different stories as tragic means they have something in common, right? And so you could imagine you could pull out the central pattern of tragedy, and we could flesh out some of what that might be like. It's tragic when something bad happens to someone. Well, what if they deserve it? Okay, well, then it's not so tragic. It still might have an element of tragedy, but it's really tragic if something really terrible happens to someone who clearly doesn't deserve it. So what's the most tragic story? Well, it's the worst possible thing happening to the person who least deserves it. Well, that's core to the passion story, that's for sure, right? Because not only is Christ innocent; he's not merely innocent, he's also good. And not just good; he's as good as it gets. And yet his life is this—the tragedy of the passion is the worst of all possible punishments visited upon the least deserving person. But it's much way worse than that; that just barely begins to scrape the surface because it's torture, and a terrible torture because the Romans designed crucifixion to be a terrible torture, like consciously. And so it's tragedy at the hands of your fellow man and your fellow man motivated by the spirit of Cain in the most fundamental sense: how can I inflict the most misery possible in the shortest period of time, let’s say? Subject to that at a young age with foreknowledge as a consequence of betrayal by your best friend, at the hands of a mob of your own people who are simultaneously under the thumb of a tyranny that's part and parcel of what's persecuting you, who persecute you knowing you're innocent—not just innocent but also good—and who choose to punish you instead of punishing someone they know to be criminal. It's all of that. It's like the sum total of all possible fears, and I think that's right. And it's so interesting to me that psychologically, that—not speaking religiously, to the degree that that's possible when speaking about such things—is that our culture has put at its center an archetypal tragedy. It's as if we're attempting to inoculate ourselves against the catastrophe of life.

But what's also so fascinating about the story of the passion is that the crucifixion is not the end of the story. The end of the story is the resurrection. And so the implication there is the same as the implication of going into the abyss to rescue your father from the belly of the beast. It's like, the tragedy isn't the end of the story; the resurrection is the end of the story. And so then you wonder what that means psychologically, because what you see in the psychotherapeutic session—in the psychotherapeutic milieu—is that if you get people to expose themselves to what they're terrified of, being terrified isn't the end of the story; recovering is the end of the story. And so that begs the question: is like, well, to what degree are we capable of bearing suffering and prevailing? And the answer might be to the degree that we're capable of confronting it forthrightly, and that might actually just be true. And you know, you think, well how could it be otherwise in some sense? Like, what's going to call the best out of you if it isn't the most? What's most challenging? Because it's not that easy to get the best called out of you. It's not going to just happen because someone rings your doorbell, right? You have to be shook to the core before you're going to undertake what's necessary to make the sacrifices that are required to put you in alignment. That doesn't happen with no reason."

"So, well, so are you grateful for your suffering as a consequence of that? I don't know. That's a high standard, man. That's a high standard. And maybe it's unrealistic. But I think one of the things that faith brings us to is—and we were talking about it when we were in the chapel in the friary—is that when we look at the cross—and it's very Catholic—is that we always see Jesus there, that the corpus is there. And because you talk about in your chapter, but what does it look like to transcend suffering? And what does that individual look like? And in some ways our businesses are similar, right? People are bringing their brokenness to you, and they bring their brokenness to me. But I believe in a God that can transform that. So I was asking myself what does that look like? And I recall a priest that I met in Africa, and I believe what he had was Lou Gehrig’s disease, so by the time I met him, he was no longer able to really move his arms or legs very well. We were praying that the Lord would heal him in that. And then he began to share his story with me in what had taken place in he and his community in the midst of his sickness, in the midst of his suffering. He said people didn't use to go to church very much, but since I've been sick, people are coming. And that they wouldn't line up for confessions, but since I've been sick, there's a long line of people coming to confession. He said the church was half full and now it's packed. He said people begin to speak and they say that I'm more empathetic, that I'm more compassionate, that I'm more loving, that I'm more kind. And I'm embarrassed to admit that at that moment as he was sharing his story about the transformation that was taken both in he and in the community, I was praying, 'Lord, please don't heal him.' Because if we believe that this is what I want to be right, I want to be loving and I want to be kind, and I want to be generous and I want to be empathetic, but I don't want it to be through the cross. There's got to be another way that we can discover that."

"So wouldn't it though? Right? But the fundamental key to the central Christian reality is it's through that cross that we are transformed. It's by—one of the things I was reflecting on—Jesus embraces his cross, his suffering, and says yes to that—a yes which I—I just can't remember. He says yes to it too."

"Yes, yes, he offers. That's the question that I want to talk about, is which is more difficult for who does?"

"Hey, good question. Thank you. I'd rather just a second—a good question, thank you very much. I think we're done. Thank you for coming, right?"

"But isn't that, isn't that in fact the case? Is that when Jesus embraced his suffering, he gives life to the world. He breaks the power of this evil one over the snake and gives life. Suffering is no longer meaningless, actually; it's salvific. But the same thing happened with this priest in this community in Nairobi, Africa, is that he embraced the suffering and it transformed him. Yes, but it also transformed the community around him because they saw the way in the manner with which he suffered and he embraced that, and he found that to be transformative—isn't that what it means when you talk about transcending this and you talk about how the impact that that can have on another person watching? That's what the invitation—what the Gospel is inviting us to."

"Yeah, that seems right to me."

"Okay, so how do you reconcile this?"

"Thank you. What another reconciliation! So, you tell the story, and you tell the story beautifully of the past and the resurrection, but how do you, how do you personally approach that? How do you reconcile this reality?"

"I think that's what you try to do in your life, you know? I mean, this is an idea that I derived, I would say in large part from reading you, Carl Jung. He talked about psychologically, again, about the two great ideas about Christ. You know there's the idea in John and that Christ is the Word that was there at the beginning of time and at the end of time. It's this temporally eternal divine Word, impersonal in some sense almost. Well, because it's something that extends from the beginning of time to the end of time, isn't so evidently human. You know, it's elevated beyond the confines of what's merely human. But it lacks something as a consequence of that too, right? It lacks time and place. And the way Christianity is—the nature of the incarnation, the God—yeah, exactly, exactly. It bridges that gap. I had a student once who asked me, 'Why don't we just tell the same archetypal story over and over? Why do we need all these variations?' and I thought that's a really good question. I'm not exactly sure about that, and then I thought, oh, it's related to this issue, is that there's the divine Word, but there's the incarnation, and the incarnation indicates that the specifics of time and place are just as important as the eternal that surrounds it. And so then I would say, well, that's probably true in each of our lives, is that, well, how do we reconcile this? Well, that's your ethical adventure, how you reconcile that. And we each do it in our own way and with tremendous difficulty, I would say. And we do it aided and abetted, if we're fortunate, by people that love and care for us. But that is the challenge, you know? A huge part of the challenge of life—and this is something I tried to concentrate on in this last chapter—is how do you bear the suffering that is at the crux of life without becoming tempted and embittered? That's really, really difficult."

"Now, you know someone might point out, go ahead and be bitter, see where that gets you. And if you have any sense—and generally people have at least some—they know that being sick and bitter is worse than just being sick. And that being right, it's worse. But it's very hard temptation to avoid; sometimes you want to be bitter just out of spite in some sense because things are so terrible. All you've got left is your willingness to shake your fist and say, well, you know, really, is this like this? Many poisonous snakes, really? That's like maybe I could have learned with just one or two, not a hundred. And so, but we're stuck, we're all stuck with that. And I think we're stuck with it at every level of our life in some sense is how do we maintain a high-order moral orientation in spite of suffering and malevolence?"

"When I was a young seminarian, one of the things that I started—I worked in a neonatal intensive care. In the summer, I baptized over 20 babies, and all the babies died. And it was very—I was a seminarian, and I was supposed to have all the answers, right? And they'd come to me and they'd say, you know, tell me real quick, why did this happen? You know, this guy, why did he allow this to happen? And I came to the place a couple of things. One is that I didn't have to defend God. Like, in my own mind, in my own heart, there was something very freeing in that. I don't know why. I mean, what kind of explanation? Let me explain to you why this happened. Oh, well, thank you so much. Yeah, that makes sense. I wish somebody would have told me that. Right, right? But what I did—but what I would continually come to is that—and this is a mystery of the faith—that Jesus is present in the midst of the suffering. And I tell the story, actually the first book I wrote was on freedom, and I spent a lot of time in that Exodus text because that's the invitation to look at Pharaoh and be freed. But that when we're children and we fall down and we scrape our knee, our mom comes and she kisses us, and she pats us on the head and says, 'It's gonna be okay.' And it is! I mean, really, what has she done? She's kissed me on the head, she's petting me, she said it's gonna be okay. But we grow up and we don't think that's enough anymore. But my experience tells me is that when Christ can do that for me in the midst of my brokenness, in the midst of my suffering, in the midst of my pain, and remind me that I'm loved, right? I remember sitting in the chapel, it was a Thursday evening as a seminarian, and trying to figure all this out and hearing the Lord breaking in the midst of that and say, 'Dave, I love you.' And I said, 'Well, I appreciate that, but that's not the issue. Let me explain the issue.' What am I supposed to tell these people? And He reminds me that I'm loved, and it's enough. It's enough. And that's the Christian mystery of suffering, that it ought not be something that we try to escape, but it's actually an invitation that we continually find Jesus. Because I suggest that when we find God in the presence of the suffering, we can find Him anywhere. It's easy to find Him in a sunset or in a baptism. Take a brand new baby, pour oil all over them and grease them up, and it smells the chrism; it's wonderful. It's easy to find Him in that. How about cancer? Yeah, and divorce? And infertility? That when we can find—and that it's the mystery of our faith that God enters the messiness rather than just fixing it from the outside—He enters this and takes this upon Himself and transforms it. When we find Him there, I suggest we find Him anywhere. It's my experience that our faith becomes more real, it becomes more authentic, it becomes more present when we can find Him in the midst of that."

"Yeah, well, what would I say about that? Well, I guess one of the things I would say about that is that perhaps it looks like, you know, we have something difficult to do as it turns out. You know, we might think—and why wouldn't we—that we would rather that things were easy. And pain-free—fair enough—but that isn't what our life is like. It's extremely difficult. It's difficult to maintain an ethical orientation in the midst of malevolence and suffering. And that means, in some sense—and I suppose this is part and parcel of the Christian story—that we have some divine calling. It's something like that. It's like—and that divine calling is to establish what's good in the midst of what isn't—to be Jesus in the midst of it. To be Christ."

"Yeah, well that's because that's the question, I guess. I don't know exactly what to make of that because I don't know to what degree we're called on to find Christ in the middle of that, let's say, or to be lifted up like that in the middle of that."

"I think he's both, and this is hard. If I can't find Christ in me, then I can't find Him in them. And if I don't see what He's done, how He's alive in me, then as a priest or as a believer, it's hard for me to invite somebody else to that. And it's hard for me to see Him in somebody else. So that's where after first, Paul says that, 'As Christ was alive in me.' When I experienced that, not just read it, it's not just a corpus that we look at, that we read the Bible, but it's a live; it's a living word. When that becomes alive in me, then it allows me to be able to see that in other people. Because they know me well, I can find Him in me because I know it goes in this head."

"Well, and you see, you know when you see people who are noble in spite of their suffering, it is ennobling. It is uplifting—like really it is. And it's been striking to me too. People want to be encouraged in that direction. I mean part of the reason that my lectures, I would say, have been successful to the degree that they have been is because people find them encouraging, and that actually seems to work like it seems to be positive because it isn't good news. Well, it seems to be. I mean it isn't necessarily the case that that would be the case, you know? Because it could have been that I would have said encouraging things to people. There's more to you than meets the eye, and you're capable of more than you're demanding of yourself. And you know, if you took on your responsibility and faced the things that you're trying to avoid, that your life would be richer and better, and for you and for everyone around you. And the result of that could have been that thousands of people would come to me and say, you know, I gave that a pretty good shot, and your advice is really awful, and everything's gone to hell around me, and like, thanks a lot buddy. And that, and that, it's not like that's a completely incomprehensible possibility, but that doesn't seem to be what happens. What generally happens is that young people in particular, but not only, come to me and say, look, I've been trying to take on more responsibility and to face the things I've been avoiding, and everything is way better. It's like, okay, well isn’t that something?

Well then you ask yourself, well what's the limit of that? Because that's the religious question fundamentally. Is, well, if you took on all the responsibility you could take on and you faced everything that you needed to face, what would you be like? Who would you be? And how would the world transform around you? And well, if the partial answer is, well if I do that a little bit, things get a fair bit better, then the next question might be, well, what if you did that completely? And I don't think that's possible in some sense, right? It's like, you know, perfection is a horizon that always recedes. But it isn’t obvious to me what the upper limit of that is. And certainly we do see people, I mean saints let’s say. You say it’s a—it’s a Francis, who kind of pushed the limit, and they miraculous things happen around them. Maybe in the literal sense, and if not in the literal sense, close enough, you know, for all intents and purposes. And so that's heartening.

I mean, I tear myself apart about this in many ways because I think perhaps it's possible to take on too much responsibility and to crush yourself as a consequence. Maybe that's a sin of pride, who knows? It's certainly possible. But my experience so far has been that when you see people bear their suffering nobly, there's nothing in that but good. That's something. And then when you see people take on more responsibility and decide that they're going to aim up and confront their suffering honestly and forthrightly, that their lives get better, and the lives of people around them get better too. And so it's— that's very strange as well because it also means that the pathway to less suffering is through suffering, right? And that's kind of— that would be hopeful if the world was constituted that way. It's like, well, they're suffering, how do you make it worse? Run away. How do you make it better? Confront it. Yeah, but it's suffering. It's like, yeah, but it's there. There it is. It's a precondition for existence or something like that, and it's like you have something important to do as well. And you confront it, and that's the pathway to transcending it, probably. It’s rough. Maybe we wish it would be different, and maybe we don’t too."

"When I was reflecting on parts of your chapter, one of the things I was reflecting on in light of also the snake, right? Well I think a good suggestion is not to have a conversation with the serpent, all things being equal. But he ultimately—they believe the lie, right? And I think isn’t one of the greatest lies of the culture of the evil one, I would say? I find it really interesting you use the word the adversary in Satan, which from a psychologist and a scientist in this morning, you said, yeah, you meant that there is an evil. There is a personification of evil. If you read anything about Auschwitz, about the Nazi death camps, about what happened in the Soviet Union—if you read that sort of thing seriously, or if you read about people who've done like—I read a lot of books about the worst serial killers. And I mean, that’s quite the competition and to be the worst serial killer, which people do compete for, by the way. It's not like the high school shooters don't know about the reputations of all the other high school shooters. It's not like they don't try to outdo them because they certainly do, and they do it consciously. I mean, if you read those accounts and you don't walk away with the notion that evil exists and that the notion of an adversary is like as real as it gets, then you just haven't read very carefully."

"How do your peers deal with that when you say they don't? You know, I mean, psychologists generally don't—we mean some psychology, clinical psychologists talk about evil, but non-clinicians tend not to, and that's because they're just never—they just aren't confronted by it. You are, if you're a clinician. I mean, you see things in families that are so terrible that they're inexpressible and multi-generational often, you know? And the only language that you can really fit that sort of thing in is a religious language. That's the only language that's serious enough. And you know, I— I don't know, the idea of evil is a taboo idea scientifically; it's like, have it your way. You know, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn claimed was that the Nuremberg judgments were the most significant ethical event of the 20th century, or at least among them, because the Nuremberg judgment was that some things are wrong, right? You don't get the excuse, I was following orders. You don't get the excuse, that's how my culture looks at it. You don't get any excuses. That's what a crime against humanity is. It's like, do you believe in crimes against humanity? The answer is either yes or no because those are the two answers. And if it's no, then okay, you have the world where that's the belief, and see how that goes. And I'll have the world where I think that there are things that are evil, and we'll see how that goes, and because you're going to not condemn the imposition of pointless suffering on people for the sake of the suffering, that's not wrong in some fundamental and transcendental sense. I mean, you can say no; you know, say I don't believe in evil, it's okay. But that has its consequences, and one of the consequences is you can't condemn evil. That's a problem, you know? Or maybe not. But it's not like a world where you don't condemn evil; it isn't like there aren't consequences to that decision, you know? And I also think that there's no good where there's no evil, right? And so if you dispense with the idea of evil, don’t you simultaneously dispense with the idea of good? I mean because if something doesn't exist, how does its opposite exist? And if evil doesn't exist, then how does good exist? Because in some sense, those two things are—they're integrally linked in their reality. One of them only can't exist, right? That's not how things work. If there wasn't something that wasn't good, there couldn't be good. And maybe that's the reason there's evil, you know, metaphysically speaking. Because you might ask yourself, well why would God make a world that's characterized by evil? And the answer is, well maybe evil can exist as a possibility but not a reality. It could—if we did things right, evil could exist as a possibility and not a reality. Maybe to that end, Augustine says—I quote, that I wrote it—says, 'Preparing God would not allow any evil to exist unless out of it he could draw a greater good.' This is the part of the wisdom and the goodness of God. And as the believer, we see that ultimately in the crucifixion of Jesus, that we call Good Friday. There's this craziness that we call it Good Friday, and it's the darkest day of human history. But it's good, right? That that day is good because of the salvation that comes about from that. But to be able to make that step honestly, I think my suspicion is a lot of people that come and see you as a psychologist is because they're not able to reconcile that. They're not able to figure out that there is actually a good and an evil, and those two things ought to be recognized and seen."

"Yeah, well, it's a very difficult to reconcile, especially if you— you know, one of the things you do—that does happen to you as a clinician and no doubt as a priest is that you—you see people, often people who are shattered, not because their life is tragic, although that does happen, but because they've been touched by malevolence. Like, tragedy in and of itself isn't enough. You know, you can bear a fair bit of tragedy, but if if someone had it in for you, and you know you were betrayed and your life was blown into pieces because of the voluntary betrayal of someone who was aiming at your destruction. And you think, well that doesn't happen. It's like, yeah, well you better wake up because if you're asleep like that, it could easily happen to you, and I wouldn't recommend it because it happens to people all the time. And sometimes they do it to themselves, and that's brutal."

"I recall the story of one of our graduates. She was a nurse, and she was just a bathing a patient, and her head nurse was kind of watching her, and she pulled her aside a couple of days later. And she said, 'I've watched the way you treat the patients. You treat them differently.' She said, 'There's a tenderness about you and an ability to see the person. There's just something different in your character. What do you attribute this?' And she said, 'I suppose two things. I've suffered greatly.' And this was a young woman that I'd walked with and has known horrible abuse within her family, which is just such a violation. But she said, 'I've suffered greatly.' And then she said, 'And I've been loved greatly.' And it was interesting that her colleague could see that there was something different about that, and she attributed it to ultimately suffering and ultimately to be like."

"Yeah, well that does—it does seem it can catalyze a kind of maturity that would be evidenced in that sort of interaction. We could probably go on for a while, but we're time— a parting thought. Oh, I guess perhaps I guess I'm hoping that perhaps that you Catholic types stop being so apologetic for your virtues."

"Amen. You know, one of the things that the radicals are really good at is weaponizing guilt, and good people have a proclivity for guilt. You know, because if someone accuses you of something, especially if multiple people accuse you, and you're a well-socialized person, a conscientious person, you're going to tear yourself into pieces pretty hard trying to figure out if they've got a point, and that's fine. You know, fair enough. But it makes you vulnerable to—another satanic synonym is the accuser, right? This question is, well how susceptible should you be to accusations? And that's a tough one because, like I said, if you're a good person, it's pretty easy to feel guilty. But the problem with that is your guilt can be weaponized, and that's definitely happening. So all of you people with your privilege, so you know, I guess I'd part with that thought. I think part of the reason that there's an injunction, a religious injunction to atone is to come to terms with your privilege so that it can't be weaponized. Maybe it's more complicated than that; it's a good start. It's like there are all sorts of advantages you have that other people don't have and no doubt disadvantages as well, right, that are unique to you. But let's stick with the advantages. It's like, well, what makes you deserving of those advantages? And it can't really be historical happenstance. You happen to be born American, you know, which is relatively good fortune because you can really not attribute that to you. You know, what, you don't deserve that in any sense.

So how do you justify it? And I think the answer is by leading an ethical life. That's actually the answer. It's not like you should lead an ethical life—you should, that's not the issue. The issue is that's how you atone for your unearned privilege. And the advantage to that is you can't—your guilt can't be weaponized under those conditions, not by other people, which is very important at the moment, but also by you. It's like you think, well I've got these advantages. Well, what am I doing about them? I'm doing the best I can with them, right? That's how I justify them, as I try to treat them as gifts and I try to make the most out of them in a way that's maximum beneficial for me and for everybody else simultaneously. I'm actually trying to do that. It's like, well, who could ask for more than that? And I think that's— well, that's one weapon in the culture war. It's like if you're living an ethical life, you know, if you're doing your best, well, maybe you can stop apologizing for your privilege and maybe that would take one weapon away from the people who want to burn everything down. Because they definitely want to burn everything down."

"So I invite the coral, if you guys want to come up and get set— we're going to have a closing hand. Just to that end though, one of the things that you and I talked about, and I think it's important about the university, is that the goal for our students is just that, you know? It's to be able to go out into a world and be holy and be a saint, and ultimately I think that that's what the world needs is men and women that are going to live courageously. I loved how in this chapter you spoke so often times about courage. Well, this is hard. It's hard to live this life. It's hard to be faithful. It's hard to be good; it's hard to be right. And yet it's the challenge that I think our student body has accepted the call that the Lord has on their life to be."

"Yeah, well, I think that's the basis of any real education is that, you know, it's a call to nobility. It's a call to virtue fundamentally because what good is education if it's not a call to virtue? So I also asked Dr. if he would mind if we prayed with him before we concluded the evening. His wife wasn't able to join us, but you're certainly welcome anytime. I offered him a job earlier, and he didn't say no—he didn't say no! But I must say in many of our conversations today, some of the things that we're doing here and some of the things that you're working on, I think there's a great synergy and a great way that we can collaborate. So I look forward to—oh, wouldn't that be good, this is a collaboration?"

"I suppose John Paul is going to come up, and I just invite you if you want to just—why don't you stand? And you stay—remain seated—and we're just going to invite the congregation to stand. We're just going to ask the Lord's blessing upon Dr. Peterson and also his wife and his son and daughter, that the Lord would continue to pour His blessings upon them. And John Paul is just going to lead us in a song, just a very simple song of blessing. So we ask the Lord to bless you, Dr. Peterson."

[Music] "And keep you. Please, face shine upon you and creatures too, Lord." [Music]

"Heavenly Father, I thank you for bringing our brother to us today. I ask your blessing to be upon he and his wife, his son and his daughter. Let them continue to know your love and your peace, your healing. Father, I pray your protection upon his work. Continue to inspire him, give him courage, give him strength. That, as Mother Teresa reminds us, we are but a pencil in the hand of God and that you would continue to plot your blessing; that he would write well. Fill him with your grace, your presence in the midst of his own suffering. May he discover and find you there. May Lord brought His blessings upon you, Dr. Peterson, God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen."

"Thank you very much for joining."

"Thank you very much! Thank you all! Thank you, everyone—much appreciated. Thank you. Thank you."