Bishop Barron: Word on Fire

Bishop Robert Emmet Baron is a U.S.-based prelate of the Roman Catholic Church serving as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He was a professor of systematic theology at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake from 1992 until 2015, upgraded in 2008 to the inaugural Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture. He founded the Catholic ministry Word on Fire, which employs traditional and digital media to describe the doctrines of Catholicism to the general public. Word on Fire published the 10-part series Catholicism, which was broadcast on PBS in 2011, and which Bishop Baron hosted. He's published a number of books, including Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism, and very recently, Your Life is Worth Living with Fulton Sheen, published on March 5, 2019. He has a substantive YouTube presence with a total viewership of 30 million and is well-known on Facebook as well, with 1.5 million followers. Clearly, Bishop Baron is among the rare religious figures managing a substantial public impact in the present world.

"It's very nice to see you. I've been looking forward to our meeting for quite a long time."

"Yeah, me too. Thanks for having me on the show."

"Yeah, well, people keep writing and saying you have to talk to Bishop Baron, and then they come up to me and they say you have to talk to Bishop Baron."

"Well, I mean, the same thing from the other side: everyone telling me to talk to you. So it must be in God's providence, I suppose."

"Yeah, so why do people want us to talk, as far as you're concerned?"

"Yeah, you know, I'm not entirely sure. But I would say, I think you've opened a lot of doors for people to religion in an era when, you know, the new atheists are very influential among young people. And I think you've opened doors that legitimize at least reappraising these great issues and questions and texts. And so I'm doing it, I suppose, in a more explicit way. But you're, I think, paving the way for an awful lot of people at least to reconsider religion. So maybe they find that intriguing—probably the fact that we're both coming out of an academic background, but then trying to reach out, you know, more widely through social media. So there's that in common."

"But nice to speak for myself. That's what I see in you that's been so powerful because in the wake of the new atheist critique, I mean, I just find that such a desert opens up for young people. And I deal with young people all the time, and I hear the echoes of Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris all the time. But it's such a finally bleak view, you know? And religion speaks to these deepest longings of the heart. And I think you, for a lot of people, made that again possible—at least to think coherently and rationally about those things. So I found that very uplifting and helpful, and I think a lot of people have too. If maybe they see a point of contact there between the two of us."

"Maybe you know, it's funny because I've received letters from people of different faiths from all over the world. A surprising number of people—Catholics, and a lot of Orthodox Christians, a substantial number of Muslims, far more than I would have ever suspected, Protestants, and even Buddhists and Hindus—who are following the lecture series on Genesis back in 2017."

"Yeah, also, you know, a tremendous number of atheists, I would say. Yeah, they probably outnumber the religious people, surprisingly enough. And they've said that the tack that I've taken, which is I would say, kind of a balancing line between the religious and the psychological, yeah. But I guess it's had the same effect on the people that I've been targeting—that it's had on me, like these stories."

"Well, you know, I've talked about you actually to the American bishops because I'm on this—I'm the chair of the evangelization and catechesis committee. So the bishops are concerned about how we propagate the faith today, you know, and I've laid out for them a lot of the grim statistics, and they are grim, about especially young people leaving the Catholic Church. You know, we have the highest rate of people leaving. Anyway, I've gone through some of those stats, but then I have pointed signs of hope, and you're one of them. The fact that this gentleman who's speaking about, I'd say, spiritual things and certainly now about the Bible in a way that is smart and compelling, especially to young people, is hopeful. So many might be leaving, you know, official religion, but the religious questions have not left their minds, and I think you're addressing that in a way that's very provocative and compelling."

"And it's given me a sort of renewed courage to say, well, why can't we do the same thing? Why have we? It's our book. I mean, let's face it. The Bible is the book the Church has produced as it's the heart of the Church's life. But why isn't it that someone who's at least, in a formal sense, outside the Church doing a better job than we are at explicating?"

"And so I take it to be a state of whole-person mystery. Well, I feel that my position outside the Church is actually critical to the success of what I'm doing. You know, people who have tried to pin me down multiple times with regards to my belief in God. I actually did a two-hour lecture in—this was a 70-minute lecture in Australia about that question because I thought about it long and hard. I've always felt imposed upon, I would say, and boxed in when people ask me that question. But I finally figured out that I didn't really feel that I had the moral right—hmm—to make a claim about belief in God. Meaning that's not a trivial thing to, let's say, proclaim. Yeah, you know, because it's not merely a matter of stating in some verbal manner that I am willing to agree semantically with a set of doctrines. It means that you have to live. You have to commit to living a certain way, yeah. And the demand of that life is so stringent and so all-consuming; and you're so unlikely to live up to it that to make the claim that you believe, I think, is a—to me, it smacks of a kind of—I mean, I understand why people do it, and this isn't a criticism of people's statement of faith, but for me, the critical element of belief is action."

"And the requirements of Christianity are so incredibly demanding that I don't see how you can proclaim yourself a believer without being terrified of immediately being struck down by lightning or cosmic judgment."

"Yeah, there's a lot to that. I mean, there's a lot to it. This story that I've always loved about Origen, the great Church Father, whom Jung loved, by the way—I mean, Jung saw the Church Fathers as some of the first great psychologists—and Origen's sermons on Genesis and Exodus are like yours, in many ways. I mean, have you been reading him explicitly?"

"But the of psychodynamic and spiritual reading of Origen is all over that. But the story is about this young guy in Gregory who comes to Origen to learn the doctrine of the Christians. And Origen said to him—the first you must come and live our life, and then you'll understand our doctrine. And that young kid, Gregory, became Saint Gregory. So he becomes the great saint of the Church. But he had to get into the life first. And there's a lot to that. I think the practices of Christianity get into your body before they get into your mind."

"It's also true, I think, that when you take away a lot of practices that surround certain doctrines, the doctrine fades from people's minds. When I was a kid, there was still the practice around the Blessed Sacrament. People, you know, with genuflections—and before you entered the pew in Church, you would genuflect. In fact, they say that Catholics of my parents' generation, when they came into a movie theater to see a movie in the rows of seats, would genuflect before the aisle."

"But see, that means this thing was so in their bodies, you know? But that practice was communicating to the mind the importance of what's in front of them. Well, the same is true really of all the doctrines. You know, God in some ways is a function of this manner of life, and so I've emphasized that actually a lot in my own work. The postmoderns who have influenced Christianity are very strong in that too—practices."

"I mean, I take Jordan Peterson's claim: there's a hundred ways into the question of God. There's all kinds of paths, you know? One of them being just that ritual of the body. The moral life is a way in; to look at the saints and try to be a saint is a great way in."

"Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet, who was a convert under John Henry Newman, so he himself went through this process of discovering faith. But someone came to him and said, you know, I'm really wrestling with belief in God, and he said, 'Give alms.' He didn't provide an argument or a proof. He said, 'Do something.' And, of course, if you play the whole thing out—I mean, if God is love, that's what God is, then performing an act of love gets you closer to God than almost anything else. And so, the giving of alms can lead you into that sacred space."

"Now the questioning mind, I mean, then wants to ask all kinds of questions about it and ground it. So, you know, Fides Quaerens Intellectum—faith seeking understanding—that's where theology and philosophy will come in, but I think practically about certain elements of, let's say, Judeo-Christian fundamental belief."

"From, you know, I spent I think two-and-a-half hours on the first biblical lecture I did on the first sentence of Genesis, and then tried to take the opening chapters apart in great detail. But it's very interesting propositions from a psychological and philosophical perspective in Genesis. I mean, I look at it sort of technically in some sense as a statement about the nature of being. I mean, what Genesis reveals to me is that there has to be a structure to encounter possibility, or that there is a structure that encounters possibility that's built into reality itself. And that structure is God the Father. And that structure uses a process, and the process is the logos. And the logos is something like courageous, truthful communication. It's the word, but it's much more than that. And it uses that to encounter this potential and to generate order."

"And it seems to me that that's psychologically akin to what human beings do with their own consciousness. You know, the new atheist types and the materialist scientists tend to consider human beings deterministic organisms, but my understanding of neuropsychology is that the only time that we are non-deterministic organisms is when circuits for specific tasks have been built up through lengthy practice and can be run automatically. You know, much of the time in our lives—and I talk to my audiences about this—what we do is we wake up in the morning, our consciousness reappears on the plane of being, let's say, and what we face in front of us is an unstructured and potential-filled chaos."

"Yes, and our consciousness determines the manner in which that potential transforms itself into the actuality of order—in the present and the past. And I think everyone understands that. We treat each other that way; we treat ourselves as if we are responsible for what we bring into existence. That's part of our moral responsibility. We treat each other as if that's part of what makes us worthwhile as creatures. That's part of our value. We treat ourselves as if the nature of what we bring into being is determined by our choices between good and evil. And we treat other people the same way, like you can't have a friendship with someone if you don't believe that they have that power of choice and that capacity for morality. You don't have—they don't respect you and they won't interact with you, and so you can't found a friendship on that, and you can't found a family, and you can't found a society or without the fundamental presupposition that individuals…"

"This is another element, of course. The presuppositions in Genesis, then, that the individual is somehow made in the image of God. If God is that which confronts potential and generates order—and, moreover, because God says to in Genesis that every time he constructs something that's new and orderly using the logos, he says, 'And it was good.' And that's so fascinating to me because it's repeated so many times because what it implies is that if you confront—if the potential of being is confronted with what's good and truthful and courageous, then what emerges as a consequence is good."

"And I also believe that to be the case for individuals. If you confront the world—a matter that's Cain-like and bitter—incapable of making the proper sacrifices, enraged, jealous, outraged at the suffering of existence and its essential unfairness, then you become vengeful and bitter and murderous and genocidal. And, yeah, that seems like no positive way forward. That's no bargain."

"Yeah, they demolished the metaphysics without really thinking it through, I think, and they leave people with—nothing. Yeah, nothing presents so empty that it just produces—it really produces pain for people. I've talked to many, many, many people, including atheists who have been vastly relieved to find some deeper meaning in—everyday life. I deal with that, is people that they feel obligated intellectually to accept the new atheist conclusions. But then their whole soul is rebelling against it. And I would say for obvious reasons, you know."

"It's variously said: Jordan, I have a colleague, Chris Kaiser, who teaches at LMU? He's written on your stuff. And he said, 'What Peterson is doing is what the Church Fathers would have called the trope-illogical reading of the Scriptures.' You know, the four senses: you got the literal-historical interpretation, you've got the allegorical, which has to do with Jesus, you have the anagogical, having to do with the journey to heaven. But the trope-illogical, they would have seen as the moral sense. So what it has to do about our moral lives and I think in our categories, say maybe the psychological life, etc. And so I think what you just proposed there is a cool, you know, trope-illogical reading in those texts. I mean, I—without denying it, I—would press the more metaphysical stuff."

"Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, did a wonderful meditation on Genesis, saying that to say 'I believe in God' is to say 'I believe in the primacy of logos' that goes over and against mere matter; is over and against a merely materialist view that what's more metaphysically primordial is logos. And he would stress intelligibility—that the fact that God speaks the world into being means it's marked in every nook and cranny by something like intelligibility, which in turn would ground anything like the sciences. I mean, any scientist goes out to meet a world that at least he or she assumes is intelligible, you know. So the intelligibility of things, the rational structure within being, is coming from the logos."

"But the other thing that I think is really intriguing about Genesis—that opening move— is the dethroning of all the false claims to divinity. So all the things that come forth from God, you know, from sun and moon and the animals and so on and so forth, we're all things that were worshiped in various cultures in the ancient world. So the author's saying, 'No, no, no, these things are not themselves ultimate. They're not the logos from which all things come.' But then the cool twist to me is it's not just a 'no,' because I see Catholics get this: because the way that text is structured, it's liturgically structured. It's like a liturgical procession, everything coming forth in this ordered way."

"At the end of the procession, I come: human beings. Right? So at the end of a liturgical procession is the one who will lead the praise. And so the point there—this goes back to Augustine and people like that—the point is none of these things is God. But all these things belong in a chorus of praise of the true God led by us. So—and there's the human role is to give proper praise to God."

"Socrates believes that one of the sins of the Judeo-Christian perspective is that it gave human beings dominion over the world. And the philosopher, the German philosopher, if the narrow that window, yes. Phenomenologist Luther, all! No, his student Heidegger, part eager, you know, believed the Judeo-Christian texts had given us the right to treat the world as if it were produce, you know, there."

"But that's getting exactly backwards, isn't it? It's this deep respect for our fellow creatures as part of the chorus of praise. And the dominion is not domination. I think it's that kind of right ordering. And the thing there is there's been a lot of interesting studies recently of the temple, the ancient temple, and how it was covered inside now by symbols of the cosmos. You know, animals and plants and planets and stars and so on, the idea being when Israel gathered for right praise, it was the whole universe being gathered for right praise. Now look at that in the Gothic churches; you go to Notre Dame, it's not an anthropocentric thing; you've got the planets and stars and astrological signs and animals galore because the cathedral was a successor of the temple, the place of right praise, and it's drawing creation in."

"See, I think it's much more modernity that is rough on nature and rough on the animal kingdom. Thomas Aquinas is not, and we go back to the pre-modern Christian thinkers. They're not anti-nature. On the contrary, because the biblical vision is salvation as a cosmic reality. God is trying to save all of his creation. That's the Noah story. God—the ark is like a floating temple, right? So, it's a little microcosm of the right order of things led by—and what are they concerned about? The animals. They're concerned about life that God created. That's why the ark becomes a symbol of the Church."

"So all the churches are meant to look like ships. You have a nave, right? The ship? The central aisle of a church? But they're meant to be a little floating temple where creation is honored and preserved. So, no, I would blame—there's a tremendous emphasis on the idea that, like Noah, who's someone who, like Adam before the fall, walked with God. He was capable because he could act nobly and courageously and truthfully and also put his family together. He's actually capable of shepherding the complex creation of being in its totality. Right? A period of absolute chaos."

"And, Brandon, I look at the environmental challenges, let's say, that we face today because of the complexity of the nine billion of us or the nine billion that there will be and the necessity of making sure that everyone has adequate security and shelter and food and freedom. Yeah. I see that the proper pathway forward to dealing with that is for people to put themselves together and to put their families together and their communities together, and that the consequence of that—the natural consequence of that adoption of ultimate responsibility—would be the extension of care beyond the immediate needs of a social—even. And so that everything does depend, I would say—and this is something I learned from Jung, from you—is that far more than we think depends on the orderly progression and care of the soul. All of it depends on it."

"And you know when I talk to my audiences, it's so interesting. And I think it might be something that the Church is missing, if I could be so negative. Well, you know, I've talked to about a hundred and fifty live audiences now about this sort of thing, independent of all my classroom lectures. And I'll tell you, I tell people, I suggest to people that the really the ancient idea is that life is suffering and that it's tainted by malevolence. That there's no more true ideas than that in some base sense and that that's something that everyone has to contend with. And if you don't contend with it properly, then you become embittered, and you work to make things worse. And everyone understands that. Everyone knows that's true."

"And then I suggest to them that the proper way out of that isn't the pursuit of material satisfaction or impulse of happiness or rights from the individual perspective. It's the adoption of responsibility. And I'll tell you, every single time I talk about that, you can hear a pin drop. And, yeah, I believe, and I think one of the things the Church has failed to communicate properly is that you need a noble goal in life to buttress yourself against its catastrophe. And I mean, evil is a good example of that in the Abel and Cain story because Abel devotes himself properly to God, and things work out for him more or less, in some sense, but then Cain is sometimes defeated by evil. I mean, obviously, he lives a proper, admirable life, and it needs to be communicated to young people."

"Right, what's the signal? The biblical key is always right praise. And I go right back to Genesis 1 as is when we give praise to God, drawing all creation together, then our soul becomes ordered properly, and then around us, a kingdom of right order is built up. In the Catholic Mass, we have that wonderful prayer: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace to people of goodwill.' And it's like a formula that if I get done the highest, then there will be peace around me. That's the condensation of the Sermon on the Mount."

"Yeah, that Sermon seems to see— that Sermon seems to me—and I also believe it to be psychologically true—is that it's necessary for you to aim at the highest value that you can conceive of, you know? And that has to have something to do with the amelioration of suffering and the constraint of malevolence."

"It expresses nothing away, naturally. Yeah, there's a negative, and then once you concentrate on that and focus on that and decide that that's your primary aim, then things do start to order themselves around you because, well, everything that you see and do directs itself towards that aim. But that's this—yes, this—you'd say strangely uniquely Christian thing is that we say, okay, the God that we're worshiping, the God revealed in the Old Testament but then finally revealed in Jesus Christ—as I'm looking over my computer screen right now, I'm looking at the crucifix of Jesus, right? So my praise is directed to a God who's entered radically into suffering—not just the physical suffering, but the whole brokenness of the world of stupidity and cruelty and injustice and hatred. That's where God has gone. So the God that I worship is the God who himself is dedicated to the amelioration of suffering or of healing the suffering of the world. But that's the way it's going to express itself in a fallen, conflictual world."

"Right praise will end up looking like love, looking like love for those who suffer. But see, I think that's the, to me, the master theme of the whole Bible. Israel always goes wrong without exception when its praise goes wrong. It starts praising the wrong things. So the modern in the same position we're in in the modern world, where we've escaped a tyranny of sorts, let's say, or we believe we have, and entered into this domain of untraveled freedom, and there's nothing but false idols calling to us from every direction. And that's that—that's the diversity idea as far as I'm concerned because unity is certainly as profound a moral necessity as diversity. There should be diversity within unity, and I fight it all the time, you know, in the Church too because we bought into that ideology."

"And I actually look at it as illness problem in philosophy, one of the many. But all we do today is we completely valorize the many; we never see its shadow side. We denigrate the one and never see its positive side. The one is extraordinarily important. God."

"Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's the death of that over our community. It's the same thing that drives constant, thoughtless criticisms of hierarchy even though all biological evidence suggests you can't even organize your perception without using an ethical hierarchy because you have to select from all the things that you can choose to look at those things that you value high enough to attend to."

"Yeah. And that's our point about worship, isn't it? What's the highest value to you? Everything else will follow from that. Yes, if you read Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, he said all you need to know about a person you can find out by asking one question: What does he will worship? And everyone, of course, at me. Sam Harris worships something that worth-ship. What's of highest worth to you? Oh, then your life will be organized accordingly."

"The biblical idea seems to me is if it's other than God, you will disintegrate on the inside, and the society around you will disintegrate as a consequence. Reading you like—if the logos is that element of being, let's say, that's allied in some sense with consciousness—that doesn't confront potential and that does cast it into reality as a consequence of ethical choices, then I can't see how it can be otherwise. Then that has to be regarded as the ultimate value because it's the thing that continually creates the world anew. And you know, we know it perfectly well that you know, you can take the opposite tack. Let's say I don't worship courage and truth in the face of the potential of being, and that I worship instead cowardice and deceit and vengefulness—and, well, then we know where that goes."

"You know, we had the entire 20th century as a template for the whole thing. We went in the template from every perspective. We know every—it's obvious. It's obvious beyond a shadow of arguable doubt that human beings as individuals are capable of generating something around them that is so akin to hell. Even metaphysically speaking. Then the difference is, is you have to be PK, let's say, to quibble about the difference. And I do think there's something metaphysical about it. I mean these things that we see on earth, let's say, seem to me to be reflected continually at deeper and deeper levels of reality. You know? I mean, I don't tend to talk about specifically religious issues because I think that would in some sense compromise the approach that I'm attempting to take, you know, which is a conciliatory approach in some sense to those who are possessed by the scientific viewpoint but curious about the religious point."

"But if you abandon those initial presuppositions that the sovereignty of the individual, the necessity for courage in the face of being, that the moral imperative to struggle uphill with your cross towards the City of God—I mean people understand these things if they're explained carefully and they know in their souls that they're true. And they’re all over the culture. That's been a presupposition of mine, doing this work, is I tend not to begin with, you know, direct instruction or moral finger-wagging. But I tend to begin with something going on in the culture, and you've talked about this: you know that the hero myth is in practically every movie you watch. But I—the Christian themes are everywhere."

"One of the most remarkable to me being, I just saw that TV the other night, was Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino. If you want to see the best exemplification, I think, in fiction of what the Church Fathers meant by the meaning of Jesus' cross—in other words, a move of self-sacrificing love that exposes evil and liberates those who are under the tyranny of evil—that's how they read the cross in a very clever way expressed in more mythic language, you know. But the ideas are very powerful, and they're beautifully exemplified in that movie, the move that Eastwood's character makes at the end. Of course, as he dies, he's in the figure of the crucified Jesus, lest we miss the point."

"Because I actually made a video where I used a picture of Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount, I think, and I put on fifty splits face superimposed it on top of his. And it was for exactly that reason; it was that the reason that that's exemplified in Gran Torino?"

"Yeah, because, I mean, Eastwood in that movie, he's a very harsh character, very—right? He's like the Christ that comes back in revelations, right? He's very, very, very judgmental, right? And he cuts no one a break except that he actually does; like he does separate the wheat from the chaff. And he's even interestingly, in that movie, you know, he ends up being more akin to the foreigners who he hypothetically hates. Maybe who's the Good Samaritan? It's the same idea: is the good right becoming more family to these people that he hypothetically hates than to his own children because his own daughter is ungrateful and unworthy and these new immigrants are striving to be good people."

"Yeah, that's a very interesting movie."

"Oh, yeah, it is. And it was a good example of a principle, one of my professors years ago said, that once the integrated Christian vision, let's say, a Reformation, Enlightenment sort of blew up, and the pieces flew every place. And they're kind of twisted and they're charred and everything, and they've landed here and there. So as you go through the cultural landscape, you see them all over the place. So there's a bit of, you know, eschatology, or there's Christology, or there's the Trinity, and so on, but they're usually in distorted form. So that's a good example of there's the Christus Victor theory, to give his proper name: that Christ is the victor over sin and death. He's conquered the dark powers and liberated us in the process. There it is, but it's in somewhat distorted form, of course."

"But that's been the game I've played a lot, is to try to find these—that's merely common, it's universal, because, yeah, you—this is, of course, one of the reasons that I became so deeply interested in archetypes is that if the story doesn't have an archetypal foundation, then it's not a story."

"It means something made something," a story. It's just a random collection of statements or images, and so it has an archetypal structure. And, you know, I think what's happened in the modern world, at least partly, is this fractionation that you've described, but also something that a student once made me think deeply through. She came up and asked me after a class, 'Well, if these archetypal stories are the fundamental element, let's say, the psycho-biological reality, then why not just tell the archetypal story over and over again?' And I thought, well, first of all, to some degree, that is what cultures did for a long time, they repeated the archetypal story. But in our modern culture, what literature seems to do is to take the archetypal story and to bring it closer to the individual. It’s like it’s brought closer to earth, almost like the Renaissance paintings brought the divine figures closer to earth, closer to the actual individuals."

"Say, that and the Baroque paintings did. And so you have this meeting place of the divine, the archetype, and the personal that constitutes something like popular culture. And there's some utility in that because it reopens a doorway to the presence of what's missing that's being closed by whatever has happened to the Church over the last—what?—150 years, the accelerating degeneration of the Church over the last 150 to 200 years. So I see it as a good thing, although it isn't obvious that people understand that it's happening."

"You know, I explain movies like The Lion King and Sleeping Beauty and so on to my audiences, and they don't know that—they don't consciously see the Christian symbolism or the Christian symbolism in works like Harry Potter, which is unbelievably deep symbolic structure. I mean, she did that so beautifully. Goodness, True Grit—when the Coen brothers did it, they beautifully brought out these religious themes that were not in a John Wayne version I saw as a kid. Or even like there was a remake Kenneth Branagh did of Cinderella, and you say it's a charming, sentimental story, but it's a deeply Christological telling, and he got all that and brought that out."

"I mean, so those are there for sure. I mean, within the Western framework, it seems, it doesn't seem like I've been accused, let's say, although I've stopped apologizing for it. I should have stopped long ago fundamentally speaking to young men, you know. I mean, most people on YouTube are men. So there's a baseline problem. But, you know, it seems to me that partly what I'm suggesting to young men is that there really is an ennobling heroism about the fundamental Christian vision, which is to accept with gratitude your privileges and your limitations."

"The privileges—those are talents you have, a responsibility to make the most of them. That's the price you pay for the talents. The obstacles, you're limited being, and you pay a price for being, and the price is that limitation. And so you have to be grateful for that, in a strange sense, for your limitations—maybe the same way that you're grateful for the idiosyncrasies and whimsies of the people that you love. And then that your task, your extraordinarily difficult task. There’s no more challenging task than to accept all that, you know, with gratitude and goodwill toward being and to attempt to work towards making things better than they are, or at least not worse."

"Understand that, oh yeah, no for sure."

"But yeah, let me press something here because I think all that's true from the sort of psychological and human side—the hero's journey and our call to, you know, move toward a transcendent moral good, etc., to give ourselves for the sake of the other—the themes within the Christian and the biblical framework. But see, what I think is really interesting, where the fireworks really start, is that God has gone on a hero's journey, you know?"

"So it's not just the story of this human being Jesus going heroically to his cross, et cetera, but that, strangely, it's God going heroically to that place. It's God going into dysfunction."

"And whatever heroism we can summon is predicated upon this primordial grace that was given to us, you know? Because the danger—you know, look, I'm a Catholic. Catholics like faith and reason, so we like to operate in both sides of that divine. So Thomas Aquinas constructing cosmological arguments—well good. Those work fine, but that's from our side of the equation. We're kind of moving our way toward God, but the fireworks start with God moving toward us. God acts."

"And grace is operative, saying, 'I can't manipulate. I can't control. It comes as a gift,' you know? And so at the cross of Jesus, it is Clint Eastwood. So there's a human being imitating the great move, and that's indeed what we're called to—to become other than Christ—but he's also, if you want to press it, he's—that's God."

"That's what God does: God enters into our weird, dysfunctional, off-kilter world and suppresses evil, awakens our freedom. And that's when it really gets interesting. You know, it seems to me that this has to do with this theme also popularized about rescuing your dead father from the underworld."

"Yeah, well, you know, if you take on a heavy burden of responsibility, then that changes you. It calls forth from you things that would never be otherwise called forth. It hardly because you encounter new things and learn, but also because the psychophysiological demands of the confrontation. And we know this biologically turn on new parts of you that are dead genetically, and it isn't, you know, there's an immense potential that lurks inside of human beings, and it's a potential of unlimited scope, in some sense. And I think that that's alluded to in the idea that there’s a relationship between logos, Christ, and God and man."

"And that the way that you become closer to God in the literal sense is by adopting that burden because that transforms you into what it is that you could be. And I think that's, you know, you look, the other thing you said was really interesting: you talked about the fragmentation of Christianity—and you know in the old Egyptian story, when Osiris is overthrown by Seth—who's the precursor of Satan etymologically and in conception—Osiris is willfully blind. And Seth is his evil brother. And Seth waits for the opportune moment, and he chops Osiris up into pieces, and he distributes him all over the kingdom. And so Osiris can't pull himself back together."

"Like, he's still there in nascent form because there's no destroying something that's divine—not permanently. But you can make it very difficult for it to get its act together for some period of time, let's say. That fragmentation I think is—has occurred in our cultures—the death of God. I think Nietzsche's wrong about that. I think it's the dismemberment of God, not the death. And something that's dismembered can be remembered, huh? What we need to do is to remember."

"And we do remember in our literature and our art and our popular culture. That's all a form of remembering. But we also remember when we act in a way that works in accordance with our conscience, and that sets our soul into a configuration of peace, you know? It's been fascinating; I've had hundreds—mostly young men, I would say—come and talk to me after my lectures, and many of them had been in very, very dark places."

"You know, addicted. Yeah, or suicidal, chronic pornography users, capable of settling into a committed relationship, vengeful, nihilistic, cynical. And also possessed by a kind of inertia that made them immobile during the most vital part of their youth. And you know, they told me, 'Look, I decided I was going to develop a vision for my life. I was gonna imagine what things could be, and then I was going to try to tell the truth, and I was going to try to act responsibly. Responsibly—and not in a passive, public manner, but in the manner that began with cleaning up my room.' Say, a fairly humble act. And then comes the kicker, and this is one of the things that's kept me going through this entire hundred-and-fifty-city tour—they all say, 'And my life is way better.' It's like I'm healthy; my job is going well; I've had three promotions; I'm making twice as much money; I've spoken to my father, whom I haven't talked to in ten years; I'm putting my family together.' It's like things—good things are just happening left, right, and center, amazing stories."

"You're in touch with the deepest rhythms of reality. It's an ethical movement, a metaphysical move that, as you mention, the Sermon on the Mount of the Lord. I mean, that's how I look at it. It's not just giving—you know, moving ethical recommendations. It's trying to get us aligned to the fundamental non-violence of things."

"I mean, the fundamental move of God is to give rise to the world, and so of course your life comes together again. Right praise gets you online and knits you back together. That theme, to me, is really strong in the spiritual tradition of the knitting back together and the splintered self."

"That's what I like. You know, things do—you know, as a psychotherapist, you deal all the time with this. But like in the Scriptures—so you mentioned Satan, you know, as the autonomous system being the accuser, and there's a lot to that. But the other great word for that, the dark power, is the diabolus, right? The scatterer, the one that divides and separates. And so the demons always speaking the plural in the New Testament, and Jesus brings them back to themselves, back to the center. But that's all of us sinners! I mean, we're all over the place—our mind and will and passions and sexuality and body; they're all going different directions. And then it's like orienting for people. It's very young, using an anxiety-provoking, to be going in all those directions."

"Yes, I'm right, and that's what do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? You know, and the answer is 'yes.' I have come to destroy this disparate reality and knit you back together. So she didn't eat you for a second because I'm gonna ask you about that. My conviction is atheists—both old and new—so the Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris today, but then go back to the Feuerbach and Nietzsche's and company, that they're rebelling quite properly against a false God. What I would carry is a false God, the God who is posing a threat to our freedom, the God who broods over us in this moralizing and dehumanizing way—the God who, I would say, is a Supreme Being among other beings."

"All of that I applaud them. I mean that the atheists—old and new—are rebelling against that. But it's partially because I think Jung saw this in his own father, who was a Calvinist minister—that we got so bad at proclaiming the true God who is not brooding over our freedom in this sort of moralizing or oppressive way, who’s not competing with our flourishing. But, you know, the glory of God’s a human being fully alive, says Irenaeus. That's the biblical idea. Or the burning bush: the Father's love that is the bush that's on fire but not consumed. Well, that's the way the true God relates to creation, is he makes it beautiful and radiant, but doesn't burn it up."

"Like, it's so many of the Greek and Roman myths with when the gods break in, things have to give way, or they're incinerated, or they're destroyed. But the Bible presents this very unique and humanizing view of God and then culminating in the Incarnation with God becoming one of us without. That's why it's so beautiful to me in those seemingly abstract formulas about the two natures that come together in Jesus without mixing, mingling, and confusion. You say, 'Well, it's a lot of these Greek abstractions.' But notice it's very powerful that God and humanity can meet in such a way that humanity is not overwhelmed and destroyed."

"See, that's what the atheists quite rightly—old and new—are objecting to is precisely that false understanding of God. But as it's a very disturbing analogy that I've always thought of is that Nietzsche played the same role as maggots do in cleaning out a wound. Yeah, you know? I mean he—he's a very sophisticated thinker. And Nietzsche's simply an atheist. I think it's a terrible mistake. I mean, he certainly had plenty of good things to say about Catholicism, about the fact that Catholicism was an anti-diabolical movement that united Europe and united under the rubric of a single mode of thought and discipline—the European-minded."

"And he also had wonderful things to say about Christ as a figure, you know? He said, 'What made you believe that the only true Christian was Christ?' And right criticism was essentially saved for the dogmatic structure of the Church."

"No, you know, I actually have more sympathy for Dostoyevsky, who I think thought more deeply about this than Nietzsche, which is quite a frightening thing to say because Nietzsche is such a deep thinker. But you know, in the Grand Inquisitor, when Christ comes back to earth and is then arrested by the Grand Inquisitor of Seville, of the Spanish Inquisition, you know, the Grand Inquisitor takes Christ into the cell and tells him why it's necessary for him to be put to death again."

"He says, you know, 'The Church has worked diligently to humanize the impossible load that you've placed on people and to make it bearable for the common man. And the last thing we need is someone as perfect as you, and terrifying as a consequence, as a judge, because something that perfect is a judge coming back to mess up all our work.' And you know, that's a sympathetic portrayal of Catholicism, I would say, or maybe Orthodox Christianity as well—that that it had that merciful element, that the demand for perfection was antithetical to—but then, of course, Dostoyevsky has the brilliance too when the Grand Inquisitor leaves, hypothetically having sentenced Christ to death again, he leaves the door open."

"And I've often talked about that. So true of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, Protestantism as well, that for all their faults and for all the faults that people like Nietzsche and Hitchens and Dawkins and etc lay at the feet of these traditions, they at least did preserve the tradition and leave the door open. And that's not an easy thing to do over the course of centuries. I think the institutions deserve a certain amount of sympathy even though I'm very concerned that they're degenerating and disintegrating in a manner that doesn't look easily forestall-able."

"Can I let me ask you a quick question about the Brothers Karamazov? Because, you know, twice in my life I tried to read it, and I think I just got bogged down with the Russian names stuff. So I failed both times. I got a little further the second time, but then just about six months ago, I got an audio of it because I'm in the car all the time in California coming back and forth, and I just about finished with it. I love it! Love it. It finally just—it's amazing how powerful it is on audio. It's wonderful."

"Wonderful. How do you read, first of all, the silence of Christ in the presence of the Inquisitor? But then secondly, his—the kiss—the kiss on the lips at the end, you know? So he sits in silence as this great accusation is read but then kisses him full on the lips at the end."

"Well, I think he—the thing you said about Christ in the Gospels, which I thought was indescribably brilliant, was that Christ—not entirely, but it's presented as a figure of mercy. And you who was wise enough to know that—you used religious sources for this idea that God rules with two hands, with mercy and with justice. Because if it's just mercy, then all it is is always forgiving, and you have no responsibility and you're an eternal infant. But if it's all justice, then look out because every single transgression you commit, you—you'll be held to account for in some infinite manner, and people are so fallible that—well, you kind of see that happening on Twitter now."

"And the master category is love, right? And to be sentimental about it, love leads to will the good of the other. So that always has a judgmental dimension because if you have a child or, yourself, it's like—and I felt this when I was a psychotherapist practicing as a psychotherapist. I mean, Rogers said, 'Well, you had to have unconditional love.' No, I have unconditional positive regard for the part of my client again, driving toward the light. And I am a cold enemy with that part against the part that's trying to drag that person down."

"And then I tell you, can I tell you that an entire generation of Catholic priests was formed under the Rogerian assumption? Because that's what my generation got. No, I mean, I learned things from Rogers and that whole—it works in a way when I was doing pastoral ministry and counseling early on as a young priest. You know, that whole idea of just kind of mirroring back to someone what they're saying and giving them the—I mean, I get it. I get it. But I agree with you, there's a severe danger in that."

"If that's all we're doing with people, we're not moving them in the manner of a spiritual teacher. I had a student years ago who said to me, 'What we're missing from the Church is Yoda on our shoulders.' He meant Yoda on the shoulders of Luke Skywalker, instructing him and pressing him and telling him what he's doing wrong and how to get going. You know that we were—we were all Rogerian—meaning just were unconditionally positive regarding everybody. But we were through."

"It's a great compliment. See, the other thing that's made me popular among young people—this is so perverse. I have a hard time believing any of it, really. I mean the first thing that I—have a hard time believing is that, you know, I can attract audiences of 5,000 people and tell them that the problem with their lives is that they're not bearing nearly enough responsibility, and that's where they're gonna find the meaning that sustains them. It's a pretty rough message."

"Yeah, the second thing is especially with young people because the message has been V for 50 years and this is part of the humanist from the 1960s is 'Well, you're okay the way you are.' Yeah, and I think there isn't anything more damning, that you're well, you're okay the way you are—especially if they're suffering and nihilistic, out of—well, hi, I want to get out of this state."

"That's right. They want to crawl right out of their skin. And so you tell them instead, 'No, look man, you don't know anything. You're barely beginning your suffering because, in a sense, because you are steeped in sin to an almost unimaginable degree.' And I'm saying that compassionately, right? It's mentally. And that if you want to put your life together, you have to start small and you have to be careful and awake. And if you do it carefully, then you can eliminate these flaws in your character that no one's like. Really celebrating and Clint."

"Right. Light up when you tell them that—it’s great."

"It's so strange; it was a real pastoral failure on the part of the Church that as I was coming of age because we were—we were reacting against maybe a hyper-stress on sin. So my parents' generation probably got that, especially sexual sin. So I understand that there was a hyper-reaction, but that is exactly the problem: you ended up with a generation of Catholics that felt like, 'Okay, God is love; I'm okay; everything will be fine.' So—and there's no energy, there's no direction, there's no sense of purpose, there's no sense of spiritual struggle."

"Right. There's no real evil—everything dealing with, you know, situations like Nazi Germany. Right? Right. But no, that was a huge pastoral failure, one was intellectual, as coming-of-age. We became very deeply anti-intellectual, and this problem of a hyper-kind of Rogerian-ization of our pastoral practice."

"See, I like to—I like Rogers a lot because one of the things Rogers really taught me to do was to listen. Yeah, right. Yes, advice about listening and then restating to people what you heard."

"Yeah, so this with you—that's unbelievably powerful because it—yes, of course, you listen and, but Rogers was a seminarian and he did dissonance with the idea of evil and the devil fundamentally. And he fell into the trap of Rousseau, welcome. You know, the idea was that people were basically good. And that's just—it's such a devaluation of people to say that they're basically good because it's clearly the case that people have an unbelievable capacity for malevolence."

"And to me, that's—that's heartening, you know? Like again, I can talk to my audiences and I can say, 'Look, you guys, just sit on the edge of your bed and you think about all the things that you're doing wrong that you know that you're doing wrong—the way that you're leading yourself and other people astray. Those things will come to your mind momentarily. And imagine briefly where that would take you if you allowed your imagination to take you to where it could in its depths.' And everyone norms their head because they bloody well know. And they say, 'And imagine just for a moment that if you have that capacity for absolute mayhem and malevolence, then obviously, the opposite also exists.' And you—then it's also possible to make a case for people to believe that good has the capability of triumphing over evil, but you don't do that by minimizing evil. You do that by maximizing evil."

"That's right. I mean I would say part of spiritual direction is helping people see what they're really capable of, and I mean that in the negative sense. Help people to see: like, I'm really capable of some really wicked business, and if I'm hiding from that all the time, I'm suppressing it all the time. That's not the thing because from now a religious standpoint you want to say—Christ goes all the way down."

"Now, that's the descent in the healthy, but that happens in us. He goes all the way down in me to the bottom of my dysfunction. And people like to know if they have ski—or he could—that's showing that dimension of life. But if we don't do that spiritually, then they’re not understanding the cross; they're not understanding redemption—salvation—that we're healed by this downward journey of the Son of God. But he goes with us; there is Dante. Now there's the journey downward through all the levels of our dysfunction till you find, I think he's dead right about that. You find some originating dysfunction."

"So the Satan whose wings beat the air and create the atmosphere of Hell—there's something in me that is generating all the different levels of dysfunction. But until I find that, I'm not going to solve it. And I've got to go all the way down—no, they don't. Inferno is right; there's just like there's a hierarchy of good; there's a hierarchy of evil. Right? Don't take places to be traitors, at the bottom weights. Right? Right. Yeah, this is rude."

"Because, you know, one of the fundamental necessities of positive interpersonal existence—even with yourself, much less or let alone other people—is trust. It's like essential trust. Yeah, and it's a form of courage. And another thing I talk to my audience is about trust because, like, we tend in our society to worship naive trust by making the claim that people are basically good. And the problem with that—and this is what entices so many young people into that nihilistic atheism—is that they're taught this idea, and then they're betrayed very badly by themselves or by some other person, and that's the death of innocence."

"And so then they go from naivete to cynicism. And cynicism is actually an improvement over naivete, but it's not the end. And then they don't know that because the next step is to trust as a consequence of courage and to say, 'Look, I'm going to extend my hand once again to myself or to my friend or to my family member despite the fact that I've already been betrayed and hurt. Because by extending that hand again, I allow the person the possibility of redemption, and I open up a space for us to rekindle a productive relationship.' But that's predicated on courage and not naivete."

"I know that. It's like—not to stretch out a hand to a dog that's frightened and barking and looking like it's going to bite. You know, it's still the best way, if you're careful to establish peace, let's say, with that animal. And the problem with the betrayers is that they take trust—which is the most fundamental necessity for interpersonal relationships—and then they violate the very principle of trust, and it undermines everything. Incidentally, that's why they're at the bottom of Hell, that's where Cassius and Brutus, Judas are there."

"Yeah, it reminds me of the story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio. Francis, you know, it's like a dream, that story. Francis reaching out to the animal that's been threatening the town, you know, and frightening everybody. But Francis has to trust to reach out to the animal, maintains it, and then it makes a deal. If you feed the animal, then he will harm you and so on. But it doesn't Jung say a lot that dreams aren't animals function that way of dimensions of ourselves that we're kind of—"

"Well, that's a dream for sure because what, again, is that, you know, there's a part of you that's ravenous and malevolent and not being fed properly, right? And that's often because you're not attending to it. You're putting it in a blind corner, and it's acting out because it demands recognition."

"And like people do this with their own—it's the power that gives them integrity. You know, I've had clients, and I would say they were more often female than male, who had this particular problem, but who had a very acute and judgmental intelligence—very, very bright people—but they were also unbelievably agreeable. And so their intelligence would report to them something that was not positive about someone, you know, it would see around the corner, it would simply hidden motivation and reveal a negative truth, and the person temperamentally was so shocked by the revelation that instead of regarding it as a genuine insight, they felt that there was something wrong with them for thinking that way."

"And then that's the same thing as keeping that ravenous wolf um unsaid—it's like the particular client I'm thinking about. I spent hours talking to her about what she thought about people because she was a very pleasant person, and it caused her a lot of trouble. She was far too much mercy and not nearly enough justice, and her insights into the malevolent motivations of people were unbelievably accurate and deep. Almost completely incapable of allowing that to be real."

"You ever remind me of—we eventually Cohen brothers earlier. They're a remake of True Grit. Remember that the young girl in that, who's just—she's seized by justice; she wants to get revenge because her father was killed. And she just—and people are dying around her; corpses are piling up because she's just going to get what she wants. Where she's bit by the snake, which has a certain archetypal overtone, and she loses her arm, you know? But she's carried after the snake bite. She's carried in the two arms of Rooster Cogburn, who's a lawman. He's a man of justice, but you find out that he's also a man of mercy. He's a man of deep human connection."

"And the story is prefaced by the line—the only thing in the world that's truly free, and that's the grace of God. I just thought it's that wonderful. It said the grace of God is not just mercy and not just justice—it's the two arms of it. She ends up, she's all justice. So what harms missing Brewster's got the two arms able to carry her, you know?"

"But I think that's what we've been missing a lot in the Church, is the two arms. We've become just too much—for mercy, you know. No, you're not—you’re not giving them hell."

"Yeah. No, I think there's something right about that, and that's the Yoda on your shoulder. So he's there, someone who's kind of pushing me and telling me in teaching me and bringing me on that downward journey. Like the Virgil move that you're gonna accompany this person all the way down."

"Now the importance here is like Pope Francis is really good because accommodation and the Church is a field hospital, he says, for people deeply wounded—that's really right. And we got to accompany people though all the way down."

"My generation got, I think, a very superficial sort of, you know, 'Everything's okay. God is love, and you'll be fine.' But that led to a lot of drift. And see, when my generation came of age and we got hit by life, I can testify there’s a lot of my class—they left religion in a heartbeat—because we got a very superficial, childish, one-sided approach. But then life hits all of us inevitably, and the religion had nothing for them."

"Yeah, love is a dreadful thing, right? Incursion dreadful thing. No, if you love your children, you don't let them get away with anything, right? You comment on their transgressions. And then I remember, you know, this situation with my son when he was about four or five, and I had a really good—have a really good relationship with my son. You know, I've always assumed that he had the capability to make intelligent judgments and expected him to do so from a very early age."

"Yeah, and you know, when he was four, he was talking to me, and I thought he was lying to me. And I didn't know because I couldn't tell, but you know, that internal daemon was saying no, there's something that's not right here. And I wasn't going to let him get away with it because I couldn't let him learn that it was acceptable to do that or that I would put up with it."

"And so I told him in this weird thing—it's kind of like feral, or it's kind of like God hardening Pharaoh's heart. I said, 'Look, kid. Here's the deal. I think you're lying to me, and we can't have that. But if you're not, I want you to put up a tremendous fight here to defend yourself because if you're being honest, well, then I won't know that, but I'm not gonna back off because I don't believe that what you're saying is true.'"

"And so I went after him, you know, for a long while, and it did turn out that he was telling me something that wasn't true, which hardly came as a relief, you know? I mean, children do that and it wasn't a surprise to me. But that love is—if you really love someone, you can't tolerate when they're less than they could be."

"Right, it hurts. And so when someone comes into the Church and it's all forgiveness, yeah, there's no care there. It's like, 'Man, what the hell are you doing?' It's like, 'Look at you. You're addicted. You're—you cheat on your wife. You're doing a terrible job at work. It's like you don't take care of yourself. It's like, what the hell is wrong with you? It's like where's the real you?' Yeah, and if you don't do that, you're not willing the good of the other. In fact, you're trying to move into an easy space. If I'm nice to this person, they'll be nice to me, and we'll all be happy. But that's not—"

"At the beginning of the Inferno when Dante, you know, he sees the hill with light on it? 'Oh, there, that's where I need to go. I know I'm lost. I'm in the wood, but that's where I need to go.' And off he goes, with then he's blocked by the three animals, right? That's a wolf and the leopard and the line, I think. So there's no easy route as the point. There's no easy route to that hill. You've got to go down, and all the way down."

"I think we probably did tell our people that there's an easier route, you know? Everything's okay. You're okay. God is love. But then everyone finds out soon enough that the road is blocked. Everyone does. But then what's the way forward? And there should be spiritual masters in place that know exactly what to do—the Virgil move. I know what we got to do here. We got to do a searching moral inventory and go all the way down."

"That's the descent before the ascent, right? You know, right? Because that's a classical form of man's story. It's the story of Exodus—is part of the reason that people aren't enlightened is that if you're gonna go up, man, every up is predicated by a down of equivalent magnitude. Right? Because look, if you're gonna improve, you're gonna discover that you're wrong about something first, and then to be wrong about something means you're going to fragment, and it's going to be painful to recognize the fact of that error or to recognize the consequences of that error across your life, to have to reformulate yourself so that that error is no longer acting out as part of your personality and your life. It's unbelievable dissent."

"Yeah, that's another thing that this is part of the reason why, for all the respect I have for Joseph Campbell, you know. Campbell says 'follow your bliss.' That is certainly not something that Jung said. Because you said you'd search out what you're most terrified of and what you're most disgusted by and the place you least want to go, where you have to bow the lowest, and that's the place where salvation might be found. And that's like—I believe that's true, and I believe it's terrifying."

"The pathway to redemption is through recognition of error, not through bliss. Ravens, where Campbell got enamored of a kind of mindless Buddhism."

"The only way up is down, and that's in all the spiritual teachers. Or go back to Origen; you mentioned Exodus, you know, where he says that the Egyptians and the Israelites symbolize—the best of us is often in slow lane to the worst of us, honey. The Egyptians, the slave masters, represent the worst instincts in us and the most twisted and dysfunctional aspects of us, and the Israelites symbolize, he felt, in our creativity, our intelligence, our courage—all these good things."

"Our friendships forward. But the best of us is enslaved the worst of us. And so you've got to come to terms with who are the Egyptians in you, and they're making you do two things, he says. They're making you build fortified cities for them. So we take the best of ourselves to build fortifications around the worst of ourselves to protect them, and they build monuments. Hey, look at me! So, I mean, how much of life, he says, is spent doing those two dysfunctional things? Defending the worst of ourselves and then building monuments to the worst of ourselves. To get free of that and get to the promised land."

"But I mean, he was the original master of all that psychodynamic reading, I think, of these texts. It's also surprising that so few people know what a multiplicity of readings the Bible has actually."

"Because we live up on this goofy fundamentalism, which is a 20th-century phenomenon. Scopes trial stuff and all that. In America especially, but in the West, we got hung up on it."

"You mean Augustine, who is deeply indebted to Origen, you've got these very creative interpretive strategies in place around Genesis. For example, it's not literalism by any means. And that's, we're talking Origen—We're talking the third century."

"You're in a second-century? Augustine, fourth century? These are really early figures, and these are thinkers, right? They're not hung up on is. The realism is right. So yes, we need to recover that. I think even as Christians, our own biblical interpretive tradition."

"So what are you hoping for in the coming year for you and for what you're doing?"

"Am I hoping for? What would you like to see happen as a consequence of what you're doing?"

"I think what I'm doing right is beginning with the Semion of Araby, is the Church Fathers' idea: the seeds of the word. The seeds of the word are everywhere, or that's the bits of the fragmented Catholicism that are found in the culture. So I tend to begin with the culture and lead from there. I think that is more winsome. So I tend not to begin with a lot of preaching or, you know, a moralizing approach but begin with a cultural approach."

"And I think that's been more appealing. I mean, if I wanted to, my ultimate goal is I want to bring people to faith in Christ in the Catholic Church. I mean, that's my ultimate goal. I'm an evangelizer, but I'm using certain methods to try to draw people to that point, realizing that there's an awful lot of obstacles in the way."

"You know, I'm trying to kick open some doors. I'm trying to—part of it is to help people with their intellectual blocks. There's so many, especially younger people, they're just stuck because certain intellectual objections have occurred to them and they heard them from their university professors or whatever—to clear up some of that."

"To knock over some of those obstacles, that's part of it. But then to open up, and I think that's what you're doing too. I mean, open up the richness of this spiritual tradition because it makes people—it's not just an intellectual feast; it saves your soul, you know? That's what I want to do. I want to help people."

"You know your fellow Canadian, Charles Taylor, the great Catholic philosopher, talks about the buffered self—the self that's caught in his little space and there's no sense of a link to the transcendent. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to knock holes in the buffer itself and let in some light from a higher dimension of reality. So, I mean, ultimately, to bring people to salvation and so I want to do. But knock some holes through the buffer itself. I want to keep doing that."

"And I said this—I was in Rome and I told, we were at this month-long synod with the Pope on young people. And I was elected to go to that synod, and it was interesting, you know, 'What's our strategy for reaching young people?' I said, 'I think a miracle of providence right now is we have this massive problem of young people leaving, but we have this new tool of the social media, which we didn't have.' I mean, heck, 10 years ago we couldn't do this."

"But now we can reach out to young people in their space because in Catholic, we tend to say, 'What programs can we develop? You know, lecture series that we can develop? What people are coming to our institutions for all kinds of reasons?' But we can sort of move into their space with the social media. So that's kind of how I see what I'm up to."

"And, you know, trying to do with all those beautiful cathedrals?"

"Yeah, well, that's—I wrote about them years ago. I studied in Paris, and I used to give tours at Notre Dame. I was a doctoral student. I was a priest, but a doctoral student. And we were told by the tour guides, 'Now, don't talk about religion.' We were just meant to talk about, you know, how tall the building was and what it was built for. But I used it to sermonize, really—to talk about the Christian faith. And I've written a little book on the spirituality of the—you know, I'd like to—I'd like to read that."

"I mean, is there a decent bibliography in that book? Because I know cathedral architecture. No, I mean, to the little—I broke this years ago; it's a little book of kind of spiritual meditation. So it wouldn't be, you know, with an academic apparatus. But I read a lot of those books at the time, and I loved the cathedrals too because they're—they're just talk about, you know, like moving into a dream space of archetypal realities all over the place."

"Chartres is my favorite place in the world, maybe my favorite covered space in the world is Chartres Cathedral. I don't think anything is richer. I'm ever spending a weekend there. I went down from Paris on a Friday. Just got a hotel room, and I stayed there till Mass on Sunday. And I made sure I saw everything in it. I walked all around the outside, all over the inside. And my Old Testament imagination was so engaged by Chartres, you know?"

"Because there's your thing about the allegorical: they read the Old Testament in constant relation to Christ, you know, as the fulfillment. And the sculpture—the sculpture is just incomprehensible. The real medieval windows from the 13th century. Nothing sings to me more—the way it situated the topography of it, you know? You kind of come up to Chartres, and when you go back behind it, you take the pilgrim's route up to it, and all of that."

"The pilgrim's journey is implicit there, but the windows look like—they look like diamonds on a black velvet background. They're like jewels. And it's that—it's the shining jewels of the New Jerusalem. So there's the anagogical sense—it's all about the journey to heaven. And then the labyrinth, which unfortunately has been kind of co-opted by a New Age-y spirituality with the original labyrinth that most of the ones we see today imitate—are there?"

"Yeah, extraordinary. I walked it several times, and it's a very powerful experience. Anyway, Chartres has all of that in it and more, you know?"

"Yes, well, it's such a shame that these buildings, you know, you see what happened in Europe. I don't understand it, is that Europe went through this several hundred years-long period of time where beauty was worshiped in a profound way. And see that manifested in the construction of these great cathedrals that took centuries to build, and they were—these people were—"

"Well, the bricklayer wasn't just laying bricks. The bricklayer was building a cathedral to honor God. No, which is how our life should be, right? Yeah, every little thing that we do should be imbued with that higher vision, which is possible if you have that higher vision, you know?"

"That the contribution of that vision to Europe and to world cultures is absolutely priceless. I mean, people make pilgrimages from all over the world to view these insanely beautiful and complex buildings. And they were driven by a spirit that was hopefully unconquerable, but certainly of sufficient potency even in a fundamentally atheistic age to pull people in for reasons they don't even understand—just the sheer awe at what—the daring of the architects."

"And it talked about a door or window? Transcendence! And that's a way of punching through the buffer itself—those cathedrals. And don't get me started on church architecture, too! Last week, you know, like 40, 50 years when we largely adopted the kind of brutalist modernism within cathedrals and built what are called the great barns."

"You know, these spaces—and we wonder, you know, well then why are the young people leaving in droves? The church building itself didn't sing to them in any way, which they used to do even though we like imitation gothic buildings from them from the 1930s. But man, a young Catholic coming of age at that time was surrounded by the imagery of the faith and the whole narrative of salvation, and I was just an Incarnation of stone."

"Yeah, talked about part of the goal of salvation, let's say, to bring everything together to have everything come together with a kind of integrity—in any union. And of course music portrays that better than anything else, as far as I'm concerned. And those cathedrals were symphonies in stone. Absolutely! They portrayed architecture—exactly what music attempts to portray aurally. And it works! I mean, it works."

"Oh gosh, yeah!"