Pints With Aquinas - Russian Orthodoxy, Fairy Tales, and Good Story Telling w/ Dcn. Nicholas Kotar

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Fantasy and Sci-Fi Writer Nicholas Kotar joins the show. Watch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2g80ls-nicholas-kotar.html Dcn. Nicholas Books: https://nicholaskotar.com/books-by-nicholas-kotar/ https://www.amazon.com/Certain-Kingdom-Fairy-Tales-Russia/dp/1951536185 Podcast: https://nicholaskotar.com/2020/09/17/introducing-in-a-certain-kingdom/

Hey everybody, I want to give you a bit of an invitation. Holy Week is upon us and I would like to do a 40 hour fast with folks. So there's a group of us over at Locals. I actually put this up just before I came in here and I said, anyone do a 40 hour fast with me? And Thursday said no, because he's a fat loser. But a lot of people said, you gotta laugh. If you don't laugh, it just sounds mean. Is your mic even on?

Yeah, no, well, it is now. Okay, let's. So obviously you can do the 40 hour fast, however you want to do it. But if you want to go over to locals, matphrad.locals.com, you can sign up there. You don't have to pay me, by the way. Like you can follow me on locals the way you would follow somebody on Twitter, but you have to sign up to the platform in order to get access to stuff. You can support us over there, but you don't have to. Here's the point. Starting at 8pm on Thursday, there's a group of us over at locals who are going to fast, which means no calories, so just water and black coffee if you need it, and you do, until 12pm on Easter Saturday. So if you're looking to do something to

kind of prepare for Lent and you want to do it with a bunch of people, go over and sign up over on Locals. And again, these posts aren't going to be exclusive to people who support us, so you can, we're going to kind of document, we're going to post, we're going to let each other know how we're doing, we're going to journey together. Because if you're like me, and most people in like Western countries, I don't know if it's just Western countries that are gluttonous.

Anyway, you might need some support. That's the point. MattFried.locals.com. Is that all right? We're like Nicholas Cotar. Lovely to have you. I should say Deacon. Thank you. Lovely to have you. It's very nice to be here. Thank you. Yes, indeed. This is fun.

I always like doing streams at night. Just feels like more of a party time. Yeah, it's also Russian thing to do. So what's that? We come alive at night like a teach me party time. Yeah. It's also a Russian thing to do. So what's that? We come alive at night. Like, teach me all about the Russians. How much time do you have? I'm going to Ukraine on the 30th with a friend of mine, father Jason. Yeah. I said to him, what if we like, and I don't know what your opinion on this is,

but I said like, how difficult would it be to get into Russia? It's like, first of all, Ukraine, he's like, first of of all get that idea out of you. Yeah You might be able to get in but they may not let us out. Yeah. Well, I don't know I think they're they're okay with people coming in right now all that stuff about when they maybe criticize the war Well, I don't know who's angry are the Russians or the conservatives with me. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, it depends No, I mean all that stuff is mostly happening in the big cities and people that are kind of in the public eye. But if you're from what I can tell, if you're talking just to regular people out in the middle of nowhere, it was very distant from them. So they're not even they're not really even thinking about it much. Your mom is Russian or your dad or both both sides. I mean, we're all American, third generation, but. Yeah, we still consider ourselves to be Russian American. I spoke Russian before I spoke English.

That's so cool. Same thing with my kids. What is it about Russia that just so excites the imagination? Well, I'm inside it. So it's it's a different perspective when you're inside the pot being boiled. I mean, the frog can't really

tell, you know, as it's being killed. But it's it's lovely in there. I don't know, there's something, it's really fascinating to me because it's true. It doesn't matter how much Russia in whatever iteration it happens to be and does on the international stage. It doesn't matter who's killing whom. It doesn't matter who is the dictator, du jour.

Still people love their Nostoyevsky, they love their fairy tales, they love their Tarkovsky. They, yeah, there's something about it. I think that was part of what got me into becoming an Eastern Catholic was reading Dostoevsky. Really? And then just becoming kind of enamored with that culture and reading Tolstoy and then, yeah. I mean, a lot of people come to come to faith through those to those authors. So there's something about it and Yeah, it's a

these personal Accounts of people coming through the literature to Christ are a wonderful argument I think for against all those people that say you shouldn't you know read fiction you should just focus on You know reading the Holy Fathers and reading the Bible and doing your prayers and all that. So there's, I just keep hearing more stories of people coming to the faith through, through literature again and again and again. So yeah, it's powerful. I heard that Anthony Esalen, who's a Catholic author and professor, said that good literature is the unused artillery in the culture wars. Yeah. Unused because it's difficult to use it. Because if you're going to use artillery in the culture wars. Yeah, unused because it's difficult to use it.

Because if you're going to use it in the culture wars, you have to be careful not to make it into propaganda. Because as soon as you cross that line, you're not using that artillery anymore. You've changed the kind of rocket and it can't fire. Terrible, sorry, terrible. No, it's all right. But yeah, and it's very easy to tell a story in a way

that becomes propaganda and you don't even realize it. Rings of Power is the most obvious. Did you watch it? I did and I opined on it with a friend of mine for hours and it was a lot of fun on YouTube. Yeah, those episodes were probably the highest, had the highest views. Yeah, it was fun.

You're a lover of Tolkien. Yes. So was it like sacrilege in a sense? Okay, well, I was really excited about the idea. Okay. I didn't watch a second of it for context, I haven't. Yeah, yeah. I've watched some of your conversations

with other people about it, so I know a little bit. But yeah, I've always been, so just for a little bit of context, in 2001, when we first found out about Peter Jackson coming out. Um, I have this vivid memory. I was 17 at the time. I think how old are you now? I'm wondering how 39. Okay, i'm 39. Yep. Well done. Yes, we've made it How are you? That's amazing thursday's 14 24 Oops That's amazing. Thursday's 14. 24. Oops. Yeah. So 2001, right? And those of you who were

my age or so will remember that this is like right when dial-up becomes the next level. And we had this wonderful moment when the first trailer came out, right? And you didn't stream it on YouTube. There was no YouTube. You couldn't stream it on anything. You had to download a QuickTime file in order to be able to see this trailer, right? And it took three and a half hours to download this stupid QuickTime file for a teaser trailer that had footage from all three movies that was badly cut

and didn't look like anything. And it had that one money shot where the entire fellowship goes over the mountain. Do you remember this? No, not really. Yeah, so that one scene in the fellowship where the they've leave Elrond's council and there's, there's those aerial shots showing how the other great distances that they have to cross the middle of something that brings a power does so badly.

One of the many things. Um, so you get the sense of scale. You see them going through and the music is going up, up, up. And then it reaches the crescendo. Howard Shore is doing this wonderful thing with his music and then they crest a Mountain pass right at that moment and we see every single member of the fellowship Yes, I remember right so that was the money shot in the original trailer and as I was watching this I was weeping right because Finally I've read the book what at that point I probably would have read it six times or so Wow Yeah, I've read it 11 now. That's amazing. Yeah. It's, and it doesn't get old. No, it doesn't.

It just, every reading has a new emphasis. Hasn't you say that my wife just went on a road trip with my son, Peter, and they were listening to an excellent rendition of the fellowship. And she said, she, she spoke to me, like she, she thought maybe there was new things added. And of course there isn't, but just like you're saying, you get new stuff every time. And it's, you get older and you see things differently. And that's the mark of great literature. And honestly, that's why, why I think it's, it is going to be mentioned

amongst amongst the classics, even though I'm not sure that Chronicles of Narnia will be for that same reason, because I don't think that Gronkhs of Narnia ages quite as well as you age. I just reread it to my children. They loved it. They were enchanted. They got everything that I got out of it when I was a kid. But I realized that there was a lot of things that I wasn't crazy about as I read it. To me, it feels like he's forcing a narrative whenever I read him. I tried, you've heard me say this if you watch the show, but I tried reading the space trilogy and my line is like, I felt like I have my elbows up against a looming allegory. Did you ever read? Okay. So you,

did you only read the first book? Okay. So then I decided it was better just to go and read Dostoevsky. Okay. Well that's certainly true, but I will, I will make the argument for CS Lewis. I will say that, uh, you shouldn't stop at out of the silent planet. That book is an inferior book in all of his Okay Paralandra is possibly one of the greatest science fiction books ever written

That's book two in the series and if only to read if only to understand the prescience of CS Lewis as a thinker you should read that hideous strength because We just talked about this in the before before we came in with plenty of friends yeah he predicted the exact rhythm of the transhumanist immortality project down to the chopping off of the head and freezing it you know that how people are cryogenically freezing their heads in the hopes of eventually some sort of digital immortality. Not only that, but he also anticipated how a lot of these transhumanists do say out loud

that they believe that the technology they are creating has an emergent will that is its own, and they're helping it. They're the midwives of the technology, and they're talking about artificial general intelligence, right? This is the thinking machine that's going to basically, that's the singularity, right?

That's the ultimate aim of human evolution so that we can then become, or one person can then become that. He talks about that, or rather the story's about that. And if only for its prescience, if only for its incredible insight into the way that the scientific mindset becomes the demonic mindset very quickly without even thinking about it.

I would recommend that you read it. But read Dostoevsky again. But I liked your point that you offered very quickly and which I think you were saying, or you would say that just because Dostoevsky is like the greatest, it doesn't mean you can't read inferior novels. Yes.

And then appreciate them for what they are. See, as a kid, I didn't read anything. I wasn't like you who read The Lord of the Rings that many times. The first book I read was like a choose your own adventure book. And then when I became a Christian at the age of 17, I started reading the lives of saints,

but I still hadn't read a fiction book. I'm 18. I hadn't read a book. Wow. And so the first book I got into was Dostoevsky. And I think- You started with- I started- Yeah, I started Dostoevsky. And I think you started with, you started fixing. Yeah, I started, actually when I was about 24 or five is the first big novel I had ever read. Which one? It was the brothers. You started with the brothers? Let me tell you what

happened. So I, I, I, the reason I read it is I wanted to be the kind of person who liked Dostoevsky. So it came out of a pride thing. But then I accidentally like fell in love with him. So I tried reading the brothers and I just, I couldn't. Yeah. Okay. I read crime and punishment and fell in love. Yeah. Well, that's, that's probably the best I've ever read.

And then I read the brothers and I didn't under, I don't understand how I didn't understand it the first time. Yeah. I've read it now four times, five times. I love it. Yeah. Have you read The Idiot? I've, I, you know, that's a good question.

I've read about half of it and then I just got tired of shrieking hysterical Russian women and just, I don't know. I just I know it's excellent. I get no, no, it's it's OK. So this this guy has a really he has a cinematic lifestyle. His life, his life is not lifestyle life. His life is like a novel. And it was actually made into a TV movie in

Russia a little while ago and it watches just like one of his dramas. It's really amazing. But he wrote The Idiot under a lot of strain and pressure and I think it was, I believe it was before he was happily married, before he had children, if I'm correct. So there is a very heavy streak of melancholy and deep depression. That's baked very, very profoundly deep into the writing of that novel. And when I, the first time I finished it, I threw it against the wall. Um, then I read it a second time and I really, and then I apologize to the book. I did. Yes. Well, that's interesting because I mean, the, the main character Michigan, Prince Michigan is like the anti Roskolnikov or the other way around. So it's interesting that given how dark Roskolnikov is, it's interesting because I mean the main character Michigan is like the anti Roskolnikov or the other way around.

In a lot of ways, yeah. So it's interesting that given how dark Roskolnikov is that Michigan, Prince Michigan wouldn't would come out of a deep depression. He's what's interesting about what the thing about Michigan is that he is very much the Christ figure, right? Yeah. Parak Solans, but he's unable to enact the project of incarnation. He comes into the world, he tries in the second part, especially tries to become a member of society.

He tries to enter into the rhythms of high class, very Europeanized Russian society and he fails miserably at it. And as you're reading, you feel really awful for him because it's not what he's supposed to be. And so in the end, when he has to go back to the set, uh, the, uh, sanatorium, I always get those two words mixed up. Um, yes. Yeah. The only reason I know that cause I was a big Metallica fan, master puppets sanatorium thing is the fourth son of the album. Continue. This is how I spent my childhood.

Anyway. Um, yeah. So when he has to go back, it's like, it's as if Christ came down and then went back without the Without the crucifixion and the and the dissent into hell So he tried to do it tried to get in but he couldn't do it Because and that was very much a I think this is my personal thought I think it was very much a commentary on Russians the Russian society at the time from the Stavsky's point of view He wrote it in in exile Yeah, so he loves Russia. He couldn't live without it, but he couldn't live in it.

So, I mean, you probably live in Russia, could you? I could live in Russia. Yeah. Has there ever been a desire to? So that's a story. Oh, Lord. Okay. We weren't going to talk about Trump, but I think we have to talk about Trump. Yeah. Because this was 2016. My wife is from Belarus. I stole her from her parents, almost literally. She was the kind of person, you know. You might want to qualify that. This is YouTube.

Please don't leave that where it was. It's a joke. Yeah. No, she was, I mean that she's the kind of person that her entire outlook on life is America is the great Satan. Okay. Nothing can possibly be good coming from America. And then I show up and I'm like, let's go. And she's like, okay. And they're a very traditional family. And at the wedding, her mother kind of said, you must follow your husband. And so that's why I make the joke that I stole that was stolen because her entire heart

Hmm entire everything everything was there. She has her sister's there. They have their extended family. Her father's a priest He's built four or five Churches of two monasteries very active wonderful man So it was hard for her. So we decided we would try out the Belarus experience. The Belarus is different from Russia it's quite different Russia is a behemoth and you do very much feel the hangover from the Soviet system in Russia. Ironically much more than in Belarus in spite of the fact that the Western media would paint Lukashenko as the final dictator in Europe, which was what they said before the war. Of course

now they're calling Putin that. But in Russia, you do feel that there is a lot of corruption. It's palpable. There's this general sense of kind of if I don't know you, I will swindle you because I have to. Otherwise, it's because it's a matter of of survival. But Belarus is a big family. It's largely an agrarian society to this point.

Like they make their money selling tractors. That's one of the biggest inputs into the GDP. And they call their president, you know, not the ones who are more Western leaning, but the vast majority of the people there call them daddy. That's what they call them. That's what I call Trump. So. No now why Trump?

Because we went one of the reasons we went is because we were so sick of the whole election cycle and we were totally convinced it was going to be Hillary Clinton. So we thought this, if ever it's going to be now. So I was there. The day you, you moved during that time. Yes, we were there during the election cycle in Russia, looking at election returns in the middle of the night. It was, I couldn't believe it. I was like, what?

I leave and this is what happens? My goodness. But it was very difficult for us to be there for, it was the middle of winter. It's a different rhythm, different kind of life. We were very early in our marriage. We had two toddlers, they were getting sick a lot. So it was hard, but we've been subsequently back

quite frequently until COVID. And there's something about the rhythm of life there. It's a lot simpler. The people are a lot gentler. They're a lot kinder and they're thinking about Americans, right? They, they're very open people, right? They, and especially in rural America, people are very helpful. They're very kind. Upstate New York, where I live, you know, if you're sitting with, I remember this one time I was traveling on a Chinese bus, and that's a thing, on a Chinese bus to New York City from near Albany. And I was sitting in the lobby of a Walmart in the middle of the night, because that's when the Chinese bus goes.

It's a thing. And every person who walked by stopped and asked me if I was OK. I was like, no, I'm waiting for the Chinese bus. And they're like, OK. I promise it's a thing. No, they know the locals know about the Chinese bus. It's fine.

Yeah. So that was my experience, too, coming. By the way, everyone should know I am finally a U.S. citizen starting today. The day that I just started jailing our political opponents is the day I joined. Somebody said, what's so evil? Someone said, what's it like?

And I said, it's like a homeless man being given a dilapidated house. Oh, dear. I'm humbled. But like, wow, I don't know if this thing is going to last much longer, but I'm I'm really honored to be here. But I remember you hear a

lot of things about Americans and we all like simple narratives. So everybody's got like a one line of what the French are like and the Australians are like. And but when I moved to America, I went to Texas and was outside of Houston. So it wasn't like rural. Yeah. But people were so open, open and welcoming and in a way that I didn't experience. Well, Texans are special. All right. And they would actually not like being called Americans, I think, for the most part. They're different. It might be different if I went to... Well, I was in the Bronx. We had our tires slashed.

Anyway, I don't want to talk about it. But yeah, no, but okay. Fine, we don't want to simplify too much, but there is... Russians generally have this understanding of Americans being kind of entirely on the surface and that's their openness is genuine But the fear that Russians have is that there isn't much behind that facade the facade is open It's wonderful to let you into their house that'll sit you down, but they won't have a very substantive conversation That's how Russians view Americans. Oh, okay, and the reason they do is because The way that Belarusians and Russians are is that they're the exact Inverse of that they put up a stone face to you. They don't trust you.

They don't want to have anything to do with you. Um, and if they do, if they are friendly immediately, you should run because they know you're American and they're going to go for your money. Yes. Um, but if you get past that initial, so you know how the Russian, uh, hut has three three parts to it like, like the cosmos, you know, everything in Russia is tripartite, like the Trinity and like all the symbolism in, in, in the liturgy and all that, like, you know, this is how it is explained that the three parts of a heart. Yeah. The three parts of the church building are also, oh

sure. Right. So the name of the, the, um, I had to call different, different things, the main part of the church and then the sanctuary, right? So the nave, the, you call different things, the main part of the church and then the sanctuary, right? So same thing in the Russian house. There's an entrance, which is the place where you put everything in winter that doesn't, that you don't worry about freezing. Then there's the main part, which is the warm part. And then there's the heart, which is the hearth, because the Russian hearth is not in the center of the, of the hut. It's at the edge of it where there's a big, and this is where we're getting folksy a little bit. This is a bit of a folksy generalization because you don't really see houses like this anymore, but that's how the village hut would have been.

You would have this stove at the end of the house that would take up the entire wall and it would have a ledge on top. And that's the warmest and the best place to sleep. So you want to be there. That's, that's the place given to Baba Yaga, to the idiot to the hero of the to the heroes of the story Always because it's the heart of the matter, right? So just like the Russian house the Russian Person also has three levels of acquaintance Belorussians do so. Hmm. The initial one is very cold. It's winter outside all the time, right?

So you're walking to the to the entryway. They're cold You're not gonna feel a lot of the warmth, but if you all the time, right? So you're walking to the entryway, they're cold, you're not going to feel a lot of the warmth. But if you can make it into the next level, you're going to get a lot more of the homey, open, warm experience. And if you're really lucky, they're going to feed you. Because the food comes from the stove, right? From the wood-burning stove.

So if you get there, you will find no warmer, no more heartfelt people than the Belarusians and the Russians. And the Ukrainians too. Perhaps even more so, actually. So that's the experience that I love when I go there, is that the complexity of being an American with all the different things that that means kind of goes away and you can just be. People are very simple. They don't have a lot of desires, not a lot of aspirations. It's a poor country, but if you weren't part of fat part of the family, it's the most warm and welcoming thing you will ever experience. So that's always, I could live there. Yeah. But at this point,

with the war and everything, no. Did you have a conversion to Christianity as a child? So my father's a priest. The family story is that there are 10 generations of priests. I'm not sure how actually technically accurate that is, if you were to actually count the numbers, the number of years, but it's a nice brown number. So I was baptized as a baby.

That being said, I think everybody has to have a moment of decision when you turn towards the person of Christ and decide that that's who I'm going to strive towards. And it's not going to be simply a set of rights that I perform because I'm, because I'm of Russian heritage and I had several of those of differing intensities I Remember very clearly as a teenager deciding that this was not going to be something that I just played at I must have been 13 And so I took it seriously and I started to do it seriously

There was another phase of that when I was in college and that was an interesting one because that that was a decision that I had to consciously make that I was going to be Orthodox Christian first and Russian second. That the ethnic nature of our manifestation of the Orthodox experience was not going to be the primary thing because that's what I saw a lot of it when I was growing up in my parish. There was a lot of people who were Russian first and they went to church because they were Russian, not because they were looking for a deep experience of Christ. A hundred years ago or more that would have been in New York City, you would have had the Irish Catholics, the Polish Catholics.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that was in college and that was a very intense experience. I want to get to that. But what was it like growing up with a dad who's a priest? You hear these horror stories about kids. Yeah. Yeah.

Past the kids. They go off the it's hard. It's hard to be wise because people hold you to a high standard. And in my case, it was simultaneously annoyance that people didn't feel like I could be fun, but it was also annoyance that people couldn't kind of... this is gonna sound terrible, but like I said, my conversion experience came around 12-13 and while that and that was pretty much the age when a lot of my friends started to get into smoking and eventually there's some drug use in the community, unfortunately. And it was always a kind of feeling that they would clam up whenever I came into a room

and wouldn't talk to me with the same ease. They couldn't let their hair down and just be casual with you. Right, yeah. And that was really annoying because I wanted them to be open to me. But on the other hand, I also kind of wanted them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and kind of be open with me, but on a slightly, you know, like come up and be here to me. But on the other hand, I also kind of wanted them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and kind of be open with me, but I'm not slightly, you know, like come up and be here with me. It's really nice here. Like there's no need to wallow in the dirt. And that sounds really judgmental. I understand. But, um,

what was it like, um, you know, having a dad who was likely revered in your community and then, you know, none of us can be, unless your dad's an actual saint maybe. He could be I have my suspicions. Okay. Yeah, but like growing up. I'm sure like encountering things that that happened behind closed doors that maybe he repents of I know I've done this so many times my gosh. Yeah, no, my father's a real model to me. So in terms of that, the behind closed doors reality,

there are things in his character that he grew out of through a constant experience of serving the liturgy that are very relevant to me and to my particular failings. I'm not going to say anymore because it's not appropriate, but the way that happened was through suffering. He gave his whole life to the parish and to a school that my mother and he established, a K-12 classical Orthodox school, one of the first K-12 institutions of the sort in the nation. And as soon as they did that, although there was an immediate sense that God's presence was there and we had a lot of help, especially from our patron saint, St. John, whose relics are in the church in San Francisco, incorrupt.

Recent saint died in the sixties. There was still a lot of betrayal. There was a lot of backstabbing. There was a lot of very painful reality that happens when you dedicate your life in such a way to such a noble cause. So I saw them come through this and never really condemn anyone and never really blame anyone except the devil. And it was, and I could see how that was like a sloughing off of the skin of the old man, for my dad especially, because there

were some things that when he was younger that were very evident and they just went away with time. Yeah, it's really amazing. So so yeah, that was that was something. And, you know, to have a priest every day in your life means that you could serve whatever service you need at any given moment. So every time there's, you know, we're about to go on a trip, we go and serve a service.

You go to confession to you. So that's an interesting question, actually. There is a practice in, in Russia currently that allows for a priest to confess his children. It's actually not, it's frowned upon. I'm not sure if it's actually a canonical issue, but the oldest Russian tradition is to not allow children to go to the, to the father because it's hard enough to confess without having to admit things to your dad. In the Orthodox Church do you call it the seal of the confessional like we do? We don't use that that terminology. You get the idea. Yes. So I'm just imagining how a son would manipulate his

father. That's another thing right? Yeah. Unless your penance is really severe. Right? Which you could do. No, but it's more, it's more than just the embarrassing and the embarrassing itcher of having to tell your father the things that you secretly do that, you know, that you're ashamed of. Um, obviously your father will never blame you for it, but just the possibility that you would hold back. Um, and confession is such an important, um, part of the, especially Russian experience, because in the Russian Orthodox tradition, confession and communion are linked. Not like the Greeks who tend to confess more rarely and commune more often in the Russian church, because of various historical

things, confession and communion are very close. So if you don't confess properly, it has a kind of a direct relevance to how you commute. And so that's that's putting the danger in the father's lap, so to speak. So because he's he's responsible for who he forgives. So what happened in college? So I it was just I went to Berkeley University of California Berkeley, studied Russian literature. Surprisingly, it was actually one of the most robust Russian literature programs in the country, although it didn't have that reputation

and it didn't have that ranking. But they had some real hidden gems, some people who were very deep into the love of the work. So there was very little of the critical theory type stuff that was really starting to come up during the time when we were in university. I saw that in the English department and I ran screaming and I went right back to the comfort of studying Russian literature because the people there, they were there because they love the Stoyevsky. So I could focus almost entirely on the classic literature. I love how you say Dostoevsky. Well, better than my Australian.

Dostoevsky? Yeah, yeah. I love him. He was my thesis, so I wrote about sin, suffering and salvation in Dostoevsky's novels. The real gem though there was a now unfortunately deceased professor from Moscow University, who was at the time one of the leading Russian philologists in the world. And somehow he got a deal with Berkeley to teach there half the year. This was a guy who was translating Maximus, the confessor directly from Greek into Russian. I mean, one of the biggest names

in the Russian university system. And somehow, funny little man, he looked like a character from Russian fairy tale. And somehow he ended up half the year in Berkeley. And he was just a wonderful human being. And he really helped. But really it was, you know, being in there, seeing the reality of what Russian history was, which of course was sanitized when I was growing up. I basically got the fairy

tale version of Russian history. So I came to terms with what it meant to be a Russian, historically speaking, with the ugliness of Russification in the 19th century, with all the stuff that that had happened, the good and the bad, you know, the the persecution of the old believers. And there's plenty of things there that that are not very pretty. And I had, I mean, I had been raised with an almost pathological veneration for monarchy that's quite probably alarming for people these days. So it was very much a surprise. Well, maybe, maybe yes, I suppose I'm going to say, but to come into terms with the historical reality of

Russia for me, that meant I wasn't going to abandon it because it was so much a part of who I was even though I was an American. So I decided that the way to get out of that problem was to really focus on being an Orthodox Christian and to sort of even maybe sanctify the past by doing the Orthodox thing, which is at the heart of all of Russian culture really. And I mean, Russian history is all about

how close or how far the people are from a monastery, from their baptism in, in Kiev and that the very beginning. Um, but you're right. It's, it is about the monasteries. It is about, uh, Russian culture did, you know, was there a lot of Orthodox at, you said you were at Berkeley? Yeah. Yeah. There weren't a lot of Orthodox at Berkeley. There were a few, um, I actually hung out mostly with with people in in The pre-med because I was thinking about becoming a doctor at that point Even though it studied Russian literature never mind But I grew up in a community where there were a lot of Orthodox so I had friends friends and things

So yeah, that was that wasn't hard. Yeah, and it was like I said, we spoke Russian to each other until we were four or five So it was a very sheltered community in the middle of San Francisco of all places, but it was in a, it was in a place where there was mostly Russians, Jews and Chinese. So you could very, you could be very okay with, you could walk around. Basically you could learn no English whatsoever. You'd be fine as long as you spoke Russian or Chinese, you'd be fine. So it was an interesting place to grow up. What would be some things you could teach me about Russian society that would help me better appreciate when I read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?

The historical women comment. So there is something about, uh, emotion untrammeled, like let out and exploding that is very important to understand in the proper context, I think because Russians are generally not very emotional people. They're generally quite reserved. This is even pre communism. Oh sure. Yeah. Yeah. No, of course you have your individual. Each individual person is going to be his own version of that. Some people are of course very emotional, but as a people, if we can talk about them as a people they're not they're not you know Italians again, sorry to stereotype but

There's a lot of stuff going on under the surface though, okay, so that when it comes out Yeah, and it's a very long history, right? It's a very it's there's thousands of years of unified culture that goes all the way back from a pagan years of unified culture that goes all the way back from a pagan soil that was seeded very early with Christianity and that came out in a way that in some ways honored the old ways but in other ways cut them out and there is that tension and it continued to be in the people for a very long time up until now probably there's what you say the tension. Between the kind of pagan wildness

and the civilizing effect of Christianity. And that tension is very active in Russian culture and in Russian people. So in the Streltsy, when you have emotions kind of untrammeled, that's a signal for you to pay attention. This is important. Like we're breaking the rules of the comedy of manners or the living room drama or whatever

other tropes you have in 19th century literature. And it's kind of the infusion of the old wildness that was always there that actually threw it through that wildness. The steps I think would say that's how you, that's actually where you want to go. You want to go into that wild place because too much domestication kills and you want to have that, that ancient old wildness, which is why there's so many, so much of a Holy Fool tradition in Russian stories And I might be wrong in making this statement, but it seems to me this emphasis on mysticism

Yeah in a way that is certainly present in the West but not in this to the same degree Is that also well that's also have that also has to do with the fact that so much of Russian culture was born In the courtyard of the monastery because the monastic tradition is an Atheid tradition. It's a mystical tradition. It comes from Greece, comes from the East, comes from Gregory Palamas basically. And the growth of Russia as Russia happened because of the spread of the monasteries. The monasteries would go into the wilderness, they would domesticate, people would come, they would move further, people would come. And that's how Siberia was won, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, there's always been that.

And because- Everything okay with the camera? Okay. Cool. And because of that, and this is, I don't know if this is a particular Russian thing or if it's just true of Christianity, because Russian culture has, from the very beginning, has

been very clear about its connection to the Orthodox root. The spiritual struggle is often played out on a very large scale, not only on an individual scale. So you have these extremely violent political and cultural explosions. And so it's like the same sort of thing you see in your own personal life of struggle with passions, but played out on a huge scale. And if you see, if you read the Stavsky in that way, if you're understanding it happening on several levels, like of course, each individual character is having that spiritual battle and coming to terms with it, but it's also

happening on the level of the village. It's happening on the level of the region, on the level of the society, on the level of the entire country, on the level of the cosmos. And it's all happening at the same time. And that's especially seen in The Demons or The Possessed, which is an incredible book. Not his best, but it is an incredible book, partially because he accurately predicted the way that the revolution would happen almost 50 years before it did. Um, especially the intensity of the demonic possession aspect of it or the ideological possession of it, how communism couldn't just be content with being a social movement.

It had to eradicate to the root the Russian people's connection with their ancient, uh, religiosity, with their ancient Christianity. That's why you have the killing of priests. that's why you have the toppling of churches, that's why you have the eradication of relics, the burning of them, or alternately setting up a state cult where Lenin becomes the new relics, right? So it was, yeah, that's how it is. Nothing is ever subtle. It's always played out in a huge

scale over there, which is also what we're seeing happen right now in Ukraine. And it's it's part of that's that perspective is something you won't see on either side of the commentary. Unfortunately, could you give us your opinion on what's going on? If it's okay, I mean, please, it's it's a very difficult subject. subject I mean you have a kind of window into this world that I certainly don't yeah I mean when it happened it was it was a bit of a crisis of identity for me because I was utterly convinced that that there would never be an invasion coming from Russia towards Ukraine I was totally convinced and at the time I had only only had access to to Western media outlets.

And I generally tended to ignore Russian state outlets just because of the tenor of the information. So at that point, I was unwilling to separate the, the, the way the information is presented from the information itself, right? Because they, they, the Russians do information warfare very badly. They lie about everything all the time. So, but sometimes the truth, they're actually saying the truth, but because they're lying all the time, you can't tell when what they're saying is actually true. It's like the New York times.

Yes, yes. There are a few, uh, articles that come out every once in a while. They're actually good, but yeah. So at that point I was, I was just crestfallen when the, when the war started. I did, I didn't understand what was going on. I thought this is just the worst thing that could possibly have happened. And did you begin listening to media from Russia? I began to listen to media from all over and it really began, it really started to destroy me because there was no,

there is no truth in any of the media. Coming from the right, coming from the left, there is no truth. Or if there is, it's coming through in very subtle ways. And to be able to discern that truth, you need to have a lot of historical context. You need to have boots on the ground. You need to talk to people who are actually there seeing things. And even that is extremely limited. Because of course, it depends on who you are and where you are

even when it's boots on the ground, it's very easy to manipulate information with an iPhone very easy But I've come to see this thing not Not as the patriarch Declared it to be as a kind of we're doing this so that there won't be LGBT Patriarch declared it to be as a kind of we're doing this so that there won't be LGBT parades down the streets of Kiev. I don't think I understand what he was

saying. What he was saying was essentially this. What the Russian government is doing is setting a red line to the spread of NGO style liberal democracy and Ukraine unfortunately has been a buffer zone and a kind of test case for for the spread not of a political system but of a system of values that is espoused by the elites only and because there's a lot of money coming in from the West, there is an inherent tension between the elites of Ukraine and the elites of Russia. What ended up happening, I think is that Putin was totally convinced that he would come in there and

that the people would accept him with open arms. And the reason I think that is because he ended up within one or two months of the war, he ended up firing 75% of his, uh, his, uh, spy, uh, the FSB, right? 75% of them in this, in the spy, uh, section were fired. And this was a quiet bit of information that was put out and nobody commented on it. I think he had bad information. I think he was convinced that what he was doing was liberating people. But once he was in there, because this is a Russia versus

the West thing, he can't retreat. It's a matter of not just saving face because that would be a terribly brutal thing to do, but because he had set as his goal a kind of red line between what he sees as the incursion of a very particular system of values, not politics, because the problem is that with all these colored revolutions, no matter how you look at it, the thing that comes in together with the money is an insistence, unfortunately, on the adoption of the Western liberal cultural milieu. It happened. It happened in Georgia, happened in Ukraine. It happened everywhere. So do you stop the incursion of values with mass ground war?

Probably not a very effective way of doing it, but it is true that the war that there has been a con ongoing conflict there since 2014 and some people have suggested their information i don't know if it's good or not that there was going to be a massive offensive coming from the ukrainians to just end the east ukrainian problem so i look at it as a continuation of the age long conflict conflict that Russia has been waging with the West. This is a conflict that goes way back. It goes back to the time of troubles in the 17th century when Russia was ruled by Catholic Poles. It goes back to even before that when you had issues with with church hierarchy and who was going

to be under whom. It goes back to the 19th, when you had issues with with church hierarchy and who was going to be under whom. It goes back to the 19th century when Russia kept getting betrayed by its allies. It goes back to World War Two when it was betrayed by its allies. World War One. It's a very complicated and very difficult thing to fully understand. And the fact that it, that so many innocent people have to be cannon fodder is a horrible reality But I'm not sure that

I'm not sure that there could have been another Way out of it not with everybody Taking the stance that they are because nobody's backing down. Certainly not the West and certainly not Putin. So What one thing I will tell you, there is a lot of spiritual activity going on in Ukraine right now. Very powerful spiritual activity. Like what? There are a lot of miracles. There have been sightings documented completely verifiable of icons floating down rivers towards besieged villages, which is the kind of thing you read in the lives of the Russian saints. It's the

kind of thing you read in the Pateron of the cave caves, the kind of stories you think are closer to, you know, sort of fictional, hagiographical genre. Not fictional, it's happening. You have accounts of people, just regular people who aren't even religious, coming out into the middle of a field as the tanks are approaching them from both sides, stopping in the middle of the field to pray and the tanks moving away from that place for no apparent reason. As soon as the Kiev Caves monastery was taken away from the canonical church, the crosses turned black on the day of the taking away, which is, if you understand the story, the kind of storytelling

tradition again, I don't mean this in a fictional sense, but in the sense of the repeated patterns of stories as they happen in the lives of saints. This happens a lot. It happens in the in the Byzantine lives of the saints. It happens in the Russian lives of the saints. I'm sure it happens in the lives of saints. This happens a lot. It happens in the Byzantine lives of the saints, it happens in the Russian lives of the saints, I'm sure it happens in the West. If there is a manifestation of some sort of blackening of a holy object, watch out. It's not good, right? And there's been a slow, gradual, but strong move back to the church amongst the both Russians and Ukrainians. A lot of people are turning back to God. So I'm not saying that it's a good thing that Putin did this because therefore we have a

religious awakening on our hands. I'm saying that with the literal impossibilities of political situations, because we have to remember we do not live in a place This fallen world of ours that has solutions all the time for political problems the myth of progress the machine myth of progress as Paul King's Norse that we have it has fooled us into thinking that there is a Always a solution politically. This is something that a lot of Westerners simply believe to be true. And because they believe that to be true, because it's a myth in the improper sense of the word that they've come to accept, then there has to be a good guy and a bad guy.

Always. And they have to be very, very clearly delineated, and you have to declare your allegiance publicly and loudly to the one or to the other, hence all of the flags everywhere. Right? It's very important. It is a form of virtue signaling. It is. I'm not putting it down. That's exactly what it is. Virtue signaling because in our myth of progress we have to believe that there is a solution to the political problem and we have to be on the right side of history Right. I'm towing a dangerous line here. But my point here is that there is no good solution to the problem of Ukraine Politically speaking there isn't and so what we're living through is the ramifications of many many many years of bad decisions by all sides

in spite of that God is active on the individual level on the individual level, on the level of church, on the level of history. It's not apparent to everybody. You have to really look for it, but it's there. When you say there are no political solutions... No ideal political solutions. Yeah, what I mean is... Of course there are political solutions. What I mean is there isn't an ideal political solution that's going to be the perfect one for everyone because that's not how politics works. That's not how this world works. There is

no political solution that is going to be objectively and virtuous, objectively virtuous and perfect, right? But we like to believe that that's the case. And again, like the argument that I would make is that this is, this is a myth that we have in Bible. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So again, um, I don't know how this is going to end. I don't know. I know you were there. I know you, you were boots on the ground. You saw the horrors of it. Well, I went to the border. That's all. You didn't get in.

No, this month I'm going in. Yeah. Yeah. So I have no idea what it's like there. I honestly don't. But I do see a lot of photographs and video of people living there, going to church in their thousands, you know, in the midst of the bombings and all that. And it's a very strange thing.

It's a very strange thing to be living in the midst of such a major war and to be seeing the things that you read about in the lives of saints happen right in front of you. Things like more streaming icons. Things like, like I said, these icons going against the the current up to up to places. Icons that shouldn't be there. And why are they floating? They shouldn't be floating. They're heavy objects covered in, you know, metal metal decorations. Very, very strange things. Very beautiful things. And my hope is that through all of this... And one thing I also want to say is that the really frightening thing to me is that in the latest manifestation of this conflict is the the political persecution of a religious group. So what's happening right now is the government is insisting that the Kiev Caves monastery, which belongs to the canonical Ukrainian church, which is nominally connected to Moscow, and they have been called, basically

they've been called spies and agents of the Russian state, even though they no longer commemorate the patriarch and they're completely autonomous and independent, do everything on their own. That there is an essentially illegal seizure of that property to give to the non-canonical church. We don't have to get into that. It's a very, it's a very complicated thing. If they were commemorating the patriarch, would you think it legitimate?

What? If it were indeed the fact that you have groups who are spying or at least working along... That's also, it's not that easy to answer that question because the reality of the Russian church in the 20th century is that it was a church under siege during this communist times, and you had KGB agents that were priests. That absolutely was true. But you also had saints, you also had martyrs, who were part of the official church. So the simplification of the narrative is something that is absolutely to be avoided.

But what I will say is that what's going on right now, and there's footage, really frightening footage of the of the abbot of the monastery being being taken away by policemen and then being put under house arrest, the rhythms of that are following 1917, which was the beginning of one of the bloodiest prosecutions of Christians in history. More bloody than the prosecutions of the Romans against the early church in terms of numbers. And this is coming from a side that many of us feel affinity for because they've been invaded. That's really frightening. How do you then pass out what must be true and what isn't? I mean, you began with that

really humble statement, like, it's all lies. If it's not lies, it's coming through filters. It's not easy to discern so when you see something like that that you object to I Mean that's that to me is is the so I'll put it this way It's a kind of ray of light that comes into illuminate particular reality of the of the larger whole But that's the kind of thing that the human person is most adept at understanding. We are not really meant to look at the whole picture, the whole series of events and all of the political context and the historical realities. That's really difficult, right? Because there's as many points of view as there are people and every single one of them can say things that are absolutely historically true. But when you have a situation where a light shines on a very specific action on a very specific person and

you can see without a doubt that what's happening here is a man of faith who was not an agent of the Russian state. There's no possibility of that because there's no affiliation between the two churches anymore. They were cut off essentially. They cut themselves off for the sake of the Ukrainian people. They did it as it's an almost illegal act what they did but they did it for the love of the Ukrainian people and the church in Russia did not object. A point that by the way nobody's talking about which is interesting But when you see that the kind of ray of light shining on that specific moment That's I think what people really are meant to focus on like look at what's happening here. That's not right So let's stop for a moment thinking about the larger picture and let's focus on what's going on here

Because if we don't pay attention to what's happening here now if we don't understand and don't internalize it and don't act on it then we know what happens in history with similar situations like this because the the movement of historical forces is very difficult to stop you can only stop it at the early stages right it's like this massive machine that once it gets going forget it you're gonna get bowled over so this is the moment at which everybody can stop and say wait a minute something is going on here something important so I don't know if it's a matter of getting people in the same room and talking about it I think we're all done with

talking at this point but and I don't know what we can do except fall on our knees and pray yeah and do everything we can to become saints what what's the solution to this kind of binary view between good guys and bad guys? You become the saint. You become the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. That's the only answer. You. Because the only way Christianity makes any sense, and this is something that by the way that you see in all the stories, but the only way it makes sense is if the actions of a single individual have repercussions beyond way beyond that one person's small circle. When Saint Sarah from a sort of says, acquire the spirit of peace, peace and a thousand people around you will be saved. That's not a euphemism. I'm thinking of St. Francis of Assisi. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go.

A Western holy fool. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. And it's often the fools that do it by the way. So maybe the answer, and this is an answer that the fairy tales give us in a time when everybody's too intelligent become the idiot mmm, and I can do that. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about fairy tales. Yeah, I love fairy tales Children love fairy tales. They're not like the modern books. They Propaganda books they pump out from target to Walmart about how great Kamala Harris is. Kids will love it. Read it to them like, no, they won't know.

But you read the brother Grims. And I want to thank you for your excellent translation of what's the book called? Sorry. Another in a certain kingdom, in a certain kingdom. Actually, I'd like to ask Thursday to put a link to this book in a certain kingdom on Amazon. Would that be okay? Yeah.

You did a translation of these Russian fairy tales. It was like reading the brother Grimms, but like they had just done a bunch of crack. Yes. Or dropped acid or something like that. Oh, my kids loved it. And I loved it very much. Yeah. These stories are insane. They're they're utterly wild. Things make absolutely no sense. And for somebody who's been raised in kind of enlightenment, heavy educational system, you read these stories and either you feel an immense sense of freedom because none of the rules apply, so anything can happen. And there is something very freeing and very, by the way, true to life about that, because that's what you want to happen to your life.

You want these incredible acts, unexpected and undeserved acts of grace to happen to happen to you constantly Yeah, which is exactly what happens to the hero the hero is always doing something stupid But because of certain things that the hero does the hero always receives an unexpected grace at the end the eucatastrophe that talking talks About in his wonderful ass on fairy stories. Sorry real quick. Is it Saint Tico's monastery impressed? No, the same you can help him find it. No, I found the book. I'm just trying to. Is that the publisher? No. Okay. The publisher is way stone press. Okay. Thank you. But you can, you can find it on Amazon. He gave

it to me. So so he knows. Yeah, that's my translation of the of a 19th century collection of stories by a guy named a Fanasieff who was a he actually in critical circles. He's considered to be kind of a bastard eyes over the tails but they've become so part of the fabric of storytelling it doesn't even matter anymore yeah the big wheels have begun moving and there's no stopping that's right exactly like we said yeah but yeah they're crazy stories let's back up a little bit and I want to let people know this too especially our local supporters that after this interview we're going to do a separate video for our local supporters where we actually

read a Russian fairy tale and then break it down. And it's going to be wild. So you might want to wait after the great fast. I have a couple of vodkas and then it might make a lot more sense. Maybe I'm not sure, but I look forward to that. But can we back up a little bit and just ask what is a fairy tale? Well, that's a very good question, Matt. It's not pay me to the locals.

It's not easy to answer. And it's actually not not an answer that I can give categorically for everyone, because different traditions have a different answer to that question. The Russian philosopher, Ivan Ilyin, who is very unpopular now because Putin loves him, is an absolutely wonderful philosopher who has some wonderful things to say about Christian culture. He has a lecture that he gave in Germany in the 30s to a Russian audience about the spiritual significance of fairy tales. And he's very open about it. He says that the fairy tales are the

He's very open about it. He says that the fairy tales are the distillation and the memory of the Russian people passing from paganism to Christianity. So all of the worries, all of the desires, all of the strivings, all of that, that roiling underneath massive insanity that is the human condition is distilled into these tiny little stories that Many of whom many of which don't have any direct references to God don't have any direct references to the church and still have this Just like Beowulf has right Beowulf has that Definitely definitely has that that sense of we are in a pagan world, but the pagan world has already been illumined and The illumination kind of goes back into the pagan reality and transforms it in the past. So that's what he believes. He believes it's the best and most authentic distillation of the historical memory of the Russian people as they entered into what we now know as historical Russia. So and some people go even deeper into that and will break

down some of the archetypes and explain how you can actually see the remnants of the old religion in some of the images and characters like Baba Yaga was probably a tell people about this well, Baba Yaga is is the traditional villain of the Russian fairy tale. She's terrifying. She eats children. She for some reason jumps around in a mortar and propels herself. It's a flying mortar and she propels herself with a pestle. I always get those two mixed up though, which is the bowl, the bulls, the belt, the bowl is the pestle. Okay, so she she propels us

right the first time. Yeah, okay. I was at the first time that's rare. All right, very good, but anyway she propels herself with this. Something is not supposed to be able to fly a very strange image and she's dangerous, but she also helps the hero sometimes and she's this image of the wild forest mother that we see in a lot of fairy tale traditions, the kind of untrammeled feminine chaos force that civilization tries to put down a little bit but can never fully eradicate. So sometimes if you're not careful she will

eat you if you don't do the if you don't have the proper forms of respect to her but if you do the right things if you go through the proper rituals if you have the right attitude of reverence before the wild, which is often a metaphor for the other world like fairy then she will help you sometimes but she's Very popular just because she's such a pervasive character in Russian fairy doesn't because she's such a vivid Character, you know one hair coming out of a bald head through two teeth one leg is is

metal her hair coming out of a bald head through two teeth. One leg is metal, her lower tooth kind of grows into the ceiling. There's a lot of different versions of her, but she's very vivid, she's very exciting. So she's probably everybody's favorite character, even though she's the one that scares the children the most. There's some pretty dark stuff in those fairy tales, but yeah, she's's great she's a lot of fun. It sounds like we're getting back to this idea of the hysterical women what dosdewskies idea it sounded like you were saying that, when you kind of break through that uber rational way of looking at the world yeah something true a can sometimes emerge that's not to say the way to truth is, sometimes emerge that's not to say the way to truth is.

LSD and irrationality yeah well that so in the in the fairy tales there's a movement that always happens the hero has to leave the city has to go into the forest and she's in the middle of the forest again this the hero has to leave the city and go into the forest so yes this is the hero's journey paradigm right. The one that we see in Lord of the Rings and all of the great stories even in Star Wars right so the hero has to leave the comfortable, pleasant confines of wherever home is, which is effectively the city, even if it's a village. It doesn't matter. It's cultivation, it's civilization. And if he wants to have the fulfillment of his desires, which is enlightenment, which is the princess, which is gold, which is all the good things that you can have in this life and the other life, then you have to cross the border from the civilized into the wild. Same thing that Sir Gawain has to do, right? If he's going to become a knight,

he must go into the Green Chapel, which is in the middle of a very crazy wild place. If you've ever read that poem, there's a bunch of stuff that happens in the forest that isn't dramatized by the poet. In four or five lines, he basically talks about a bunch of adventures that Gawain has in the forest.

We kind of skip over it and get to the good stuff at the end, but that middle bit is just as important in the fairy tales. And the writer of Gawain would have understood that. He would have known that the readers would resonate with that and they would stop there and they would insert their own fairy tales into that section. And then he moves on into the depths of the forest where he has to encounter, uh, the thing that he fears the most, which is the underworld scene, right? Um, so you have to cross the border, but if you do it incorrectly,

then your horse will be eaten. Uh, you might lose your life, you might lose a family member, your brother might be turned into a goat, that happens. And interestingly, it's not entirely clear immediately why these things happen, but if you understand the paradigm of entering the wild as a kind of awakening to the deeper reality of the created world around us that isn't just the things that we see, but the more profound reality that points to the Creator, which would be the Christian way of saying it, the more animistic pagan

way we talk about kind of the spirit presence of the world itself as a kind of deity, right? Which Christianity very easily takes that sense and redirects it to the Creator. So it's not the thing that is divine, but it is the Maker. So then any encounter with the wild, no matter how animistic, how bizarre, how strange it might seem on the surface, is effectively a kind of metaphor for an awakening to a deeper reality and that always involves some sort of a loss some sort of stupid decision that needs to be rectified and there are certain things that the hero has to do to put himself into the right pattern with respect to the wild they involve things like sitting on a on a

stump and crying that's a metaphor for having the proper humility towards the no longer feeling oneself, the hero with the sword brandished, you lost everything. You sit, you sit down, you cry. At that point, you're able to receive the help that comes from the wild, right? Not if you come barging in, which is something that happens a lot for the heroes. Um, or you're insane or you act insane and by doing that you are

The wild recognizes you as one of its own Which happens in a lot of the I've even the idiot? cycle which is a whole cycle of tales where the third son is always acting out like the like the idiot his family treats him like the moron and In spite of the fact that he seems to be incapable of living life, every time there is an incursion of the wild into civilization, which usually happens in the form of a horse stomping on wheat. And the horse has fire as a fiery mane. So it's not a regular horse. It's something from, from the uncanny or the

firebird coming into the garden and taking the apples, which is another image of the wild coming into cultivation and kind of where it's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be out there in the forest, not not in the garden, eating the apples. The idiot comes and he's able to conquer the wild thing because he's already wild himself. While the hero, the prince, has to adopt a posture of humility, because he doesn't realize that if he continues to act out the role of the conquering hero, he will be killed, just like his horse was eaten by the gray wolf just five minutes ago.

And he never, he always forgets it, and at the end, very often, he gets chopped into little pieces, and he has to kind of be brought back from, from a very Humiliating death in a last act of grace coming from the wild and only then can he come back to the to the cultivated world, but already as a transformed person with Who has acquired beauty or some virtue or something like that and then coming comes back and then transforms the the place that he came From so if you start looking at it from that perspective then the back and then transforms the place that he came from. So if you start looking at it from that perspective, then the crazy and wild things that happen aren't arbitrary.

They all have a very strict logic, but the logic is not a worldly logic. It's the logic of the wild. It's a logic of the other world. And it's not out of tune with the logic of the lives of the saints, especially the holy fools, because the holy fools will always be doing silly things. It's funny you say that because I just picked up a book on the sayings of the desert father such a great book and you read some of the like. This just sounds like a fairy tale. Yeah, yeah, yeah, throwing somebody into an oven and the

oven becomes a fridge or something cold or yeah, and there's dragons and all kinds of interesting animal stories and yeah. Oh, yeah, and there's dragons and all kinds of interesting animal stories. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah The the proper way to look at that I think is that and this isn't I'm this is not an original thought to me This is something that's that's been talked about from age of memorial, but When you go away from the center the center being civilization Camelot the city And you move to the to the fringes to the margins. That's where When you go away from the center, the center being civilization, Camelot, the city, and you move to the fringes, to the margins, that's where the chaos is, that's where the wildness

is, that's where the potential is. So you encounter things there that don't make sense. You encounter things there that are shape-shifting, are demonic, are strange, and you have to have the proper posture to them. And in the lives of the saints, in the in the saints of the desert fathers That's a very clear thing. It's a it's they go out there to battle they go out there to Go into their inner self and then Fight all the things that happen to them. So those those sayings are incredible

Seems that there's a father's and there's another one I'm not sure if the Losaic history that one is just wild. Same kind of. So what would you say to someone like me who's reading this for like inspiration to grow closer to our Lord? Yeah. And I come across these stories and like, well, this is obviously bullshit. This is this clearly didn't happen. Do you see? Yeah. How should one read them? Yeah. Then because this is this clearly didn't happen. Do you say yeah. How should one read them? Yeah. Then because this is a this is a really important topic. I'm glad we're talking about this and so let's let's go at it this way. First off,

I think that it's very useful when you're approaching these stories to have the posture of humility of the of the idiot. So when you're approaching these stories to have the posture of humility of the, of the idiot. So when you're approaching these stories, you, there is a student. Yes. I think it's very useful to just say, what if this could happen? Just allow that as a possibility. And I'll explain why in a second. Unfortunately, this is not something that comes easy to the 21st century modern person, not least because there is a tradition in both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches to discredit certain types of saint stories as clear fabrications. There was a, there was a

encyclopedic effort to separate the wheat from the chaff in the Catholic church that began in the 16th century and culminated in the 20th. So you have the lies of the saints and they've been properly, uh, I forgot the names of the, of, of the, do you, do you remember? Are you talking about the collection, the bottles lives of the saints? No, no, no, not those. This is something else I don't remember and I should have, I should have checked before I came here because I knew we were going to talk about this. So shame on me, but, um, perhaps we can put it in the show notes later if I remember. But anyway, um, there was a concerted effort to kind of separate the

wheat from the chaff and kind of show these are the real ones, these are the not so real ones, and there's some, there's some value to that because it's clear that in the medieval storytelling tradition there are some stories that are very clearly Christian legends that are not lives of saints. There's a wonderful example of this in the Russian tradition. So they're the of saints there's a wonderful example of this in the Russian tradition so there the patron saints if you will now though Orthodox don't like to use that terminology because they see it as limiting but let's just use it for the sake of argument the patron saints of marriage in in the Russian Orthodox setting are a prince and his wife from the 11th century I believe possibly

later oh gosh what are the names this is embarrassing 11th century, I believe, possibly later. Oh, gosh, what are the names? This is embarrassing. It's good for us. Yeah, it's OK. I will remember at a very inopportune moment. Yes, we're back to talk about the war. I have I have silly old Russian names in my head. They don't have anything to do with the story, which is very embarrassing.

Oh, yeah. I was having a very, yes, St. Peter, St. Peter and Fibro and Catholic Jamie, everybody is very embarrassing. Oh, yeah. I was having a very, yes, Saint Peter, Saint Peter and Febron. Catholic Jamie, everybody. All right. Here we go. To give Catholic Jamie a raise, click that thumbs up button. If we get eight million thumbs up, I'll give him 20 bucks. Hey, almost there. Say it's Peter and Ferronia.

They were an actual couple lived. We know that for a fact. Husband and wife married. Eventually be eventually became monks, monks and nuns, like agreed to. couple lived. We know that for a fact husband and wife married eventually be eventually became monks amongst and nuns like agreed to separate towards the end of their lives and there's a wonderful verifiable story that is part of the official lives where they were separate separately. They died on the same day first of all or like one day after the other something like that and they were separately buried because it was inappropriate for a monk to be buried with a nun. And they would leave them in their coffins and the next day one of the coffins was empty and they were together in the other one.

And this happened several times. So finally they just let it go and they buried them together. And now their relics are incorrupt and you can actually see them in the city of Murom in the north of Russia. relics are incorrupt and you can actually see them in the city of Murom in the north of Russia. But there is a tale of Saint Peter in Feverunya that is clearly a fairy tale because there is a serpent tempter, a shapeshifter, who takes the form of the brother of Saint Peter, who is the head prince, and he seduces one of the local women, one of the local princesses and Saint Peter comes to fight him and in the process. Oh, and by the way, he gets a magic sword to do

this, of course, because that's what you do. You go to the mountains and you get magic swords. That's that's absolutely you have to do that. So he goes and he fights the shape, shift or demon and he gets the demon is apparently has a capillaries and and a and and blood because he chops his head off the blood spurts on him and he has these huge incurable source. Nothing basically I perceive there's nothing you can do about it. None of the doctors able to help. It's a demonic affliction right, so he finds out about this village healer who's named Feveronia and she lives by herself in a small village. Basically doesn't do anything. He goes there and he asked her

for healing and she says, well, you have to marry me. That's how it's going to work and this part of it actually is probably true. She probably was a village healer He probably his incurable source. He's like I got a settle for whoever it'll have me. Yeah, that's what he did He said I agree and now we're back to the legend part not the actual life part which gets confusing to untangle sometimes But in the official life he agrees to become her husband and she heals him then he breaks his word and he gets sick again. And after that he understands it's God's. Okay. So that's the official version in the legend. She purposely leaves a sore on him because she knows that he's going to, yeah. So that detail is too salacious to be included in this life. So we have,

we put that into, into the legends, right?? So and then she demonstrates her power by doing things like touching trees and they grow in a single second And there's all kinds of other insane things. So they're the basic bare bones of the Historical life of these saints is there but then it's elaborate. It's elaborated. So that's Legend it's important You said in one sense to be able to to distinguish those because it's clear that some stories are legends that were just told Around the fire as a kind of yeah part of the storytelling fairy tale tradition That just included elements of the now accepted Christian culture, right? but

There also are Lies of the Saints that seem that have a lot of very strange things happening in them But they do not but that do not belong to the oral storytelling, very clearly don't belong to the tradition that has elaborated on the existing officially accepted lives of the saints. You especially see these in the collected lives of monastic saints from the cave caves, Lavra from St. St. Holy Trinity, St. Serg Lava, outside of Moscow. And you see all the way back to the lives of the desert saints. There is a category of life of saint where there are things that are clearly miraculous and involve very strange interactions with beasts. Sometimes there

are dragons and it's unclear whether the dragon is just an animal that has been mislabeled or it's a demonic apparition There was a very concerted effort. Like I said both in the Catholic and the Orthodox, but especially the Catholic tradition to really keep these separate and anything that smacked of Fairytale tradition get rid of it It can't possibly be real by virtue of having those elements that you sometimes see in the legends in pre-historical mythology also because you see things like Idols toppling when when martyrs walk into a church, right?

and this is a repeated trope or an ascetic saint not taking his mother's milk on Wednesday and Friday, right or ascetic saint not taking his mother's milk on Wednesday and Friday, right or Manifestations of power that directly mimic stories of the Greek heroes and gods So a certain kind of mindset will say look at the parallels clearly the writers of the stories Sorry, the writers of the lives were using the models that came before and are making a point about the victory of Christianity. And so you can take these, you can read them, they're edifying, but don't think of them as real.

But that's not the way that the medieval and the ancient mind actually accepted these things. And if you're looking at an authentic perception of these lives you have to you have to just be honest about the fact that there has never been a shift really not officially in the way that we look at these certainly were no official proclamation on from either Pope or anybody to make these things somehow invalid and it's I believe that they absolutely did happen all all of those stories, the ones that sound like the, the tales of the heroes. And for one specific reason, Tolkien talks about this in, in, on fairy stories.

Christ coming into earth the way he did mimics the heroic pattern of certain kind of mythological, in fact all basically mythological structures. All right? It was myth coming into history. That's the way Tolkien and Lewis talked about it. That's how Lewis eventually converted, right? But there was a template that was provided there. Christ entered into a story and embodied the story that had been told before him by many different traditions, by many different peoples. So then what happened was that the Saints ended up doing a similar thing, embodying the tropes and

the patterns of storytelling in actual historical fact. So the things that happened to them happened for a reason, not because some scribe decided that they should Demonstrate the power of Christianity over paganism, but because Christianity Was a power over paganism and so the way that these things were manifested Naturally echoed the stories that were told because that's how God showed the people there that this is the truth. Yeah, and I think that is the most Authentic the most realistic way of approaching it. It's also very difficult. If you don't mind, I can expand on this a little bit. It requires a completely

different way of looking at the life of a saint. Not as a historical account at all. Not as something that is historical in the sense of 20th, 20th, 21st century historiography, where you're looking at extant artifacts, looking at things that were written about a person, and being able to verify from the given evidence about the existence of this, that, or the other. Yeah? Okay. Yeah. That's not how the church looks at its storytelling tradition, at the lives of the saints. It looks at the lives of saints as an embodying of the tropes that were given in the fairy tale tradition before the coming of Christ, because fairy tales are very old, they go way back thousands of years.

So there's something about this and prophetic in the way that people told these fairy tales, there's something about those repeated tropes, the repeated patterns that the stories all have. Oftentimes there are repeated patterns in different parts of the world. That's not to say that there aren't different storytelling traditions with their own particular affects. Absolutely, that is the case. But you still see certain patterns in all storytelling traditions that point to the coming of Christ. That's just simple fact. So when then the saints have their lives written down by people sometimes who live three, four, five, six hundred years after those saints

died, the writers of those lives, they don't go looking for the archival tradition. They don't go looking for appearances of these saints in some manuscript in some dusty library. That's right. They treat it as an icon. So icon has an icon is, has tropes when you draw an icon of a, of a certain kind of sin, you're going to follow a certain kind of pattern. Why? Because that pattern reflects the reality of that saints life. So if you're an aesthetic, you're going to have a long beard,

you're going to have a very narrow face. Uh, you're going to have a certain kind of way of dressing, right? St. Peter always has a short beard. These are things that become part of the tradition of iconography that has nothing to do with a historical archival tradition, as we would understand it in the 19th, 20th century sense, right? So then what ends up happening is the writer of a life looks at existing commonalities and tropes and infuses them into what he already knows about the life of the saint, even if those things are not verifiable historically. So let's give an historical example. For a medieval mind, for a medieval writer of a saint life. For example, there's two ascetic saints named Saint Kirill, who lived in Russia.

One was in like the 14th, the other one was in the 17th century. This is a point, by the way, made by the wonderful novelist Eugene Vodolaskian in an article in First Things, which is called The Age of Concentration, I think. It's a wonderful article, highly recommended, where he talks about how their two lives of the two saints serials who lived 300 years apart have almost exactly the same rhythms. The lives look almost identical. When you show that to a 21st century person, it says, oh, well, clearly the 17th century writer looked at the model of the 14th century and copied it. But a medieval person, when seeing these two and asked, why are these saints lives the

same? Their answer would have been something like, well, of course they're the same. They're both named Saint Kirill. So it's a totally different way of relating to it. Since they're named Kirill, there's something ineffable about the choosing of that name. And that name is a pattern and reflects a certain kind of storytelling that is then reflected in actual real life. So it doesn't even matter if you don't have archival information about the details of that person's life. You prayerfully approach the writing of the

of the Saints life with the models of the previous Saints and then you just go from there. So if I can go even further I I'm really hogging it, I'm sorry. But I'm enjoying it. We had a, so I teach at an orthodox seminary. Okay. Young men coming through this very rationalistic tradition, many of whom are our priest children, doesn't matter. You're still imbibing the spirit of the enlightenment with your mother's milk. Nothing you can do about it. So this Saint John that I mentioned earlier, whose relics repose in the San Francisco Cathedral, he was a saint who lived in the first half of the 20th century, Saint John Maximovich of Shanghai in San Francisco, an incredible ascetic, hardly slept ever, constant man of constant

prayer and also man of incredible love love who was constantly doing acts of mercy He would walk around every night. He would go to the local hospital and just Minister to people didn't matter who the Orthodox not you would just that was his everyday life he would pick orphans up from China when he was the the bishop there because Girl children were often thrown out into the streets to die He would pick them up, take them, build an orphanage. A lot. Some of those people are still alive in San Francisco today. There is a story about him that he walked around barefoot all the time. The reason being that he always gave away

his shoes. So my mother knew him personally, and as far as she can tell from talking to people that knew him very intimately, he never really did that, historically speaking, right? He did walk around in sandals and sometimes he took them off because his feet would hurt, he was always on them standing and praying and sometimes he would hand them to people who had no shoes on their feet. But it wasn't something that he constantly did right. So the a lot of the apocryphal stories, especially if you read some of the children's lives of the children's lives of saints version of his life, it makes it sound like he always walked around barefoot, sort of

like Saint Francis, right, which was probably not the case. Historically speaking now, I gave my students a thought experiment. I said look, you're going to get into a Police a blue police box that's bigger on the inside All right and you're gonna fly 300 years into the future and you're going to open the door and out you come into this Jordanville 300 years in the future and you're going to look at the received official life of st. John of Shanghai San Francisco I'm telling you right now you will probably see in the official Received life the detail about him walking around barefoot and they were like, no, we know

the history. It's not going to happen. And I said and I said to them guys, that's not the point because that detail is hey, geographical. It might not reflect an precise historical reality, but it reflects the absolute reality of who that person was, and he probably did it once or twice. So you can say that he did it, but to make this big deal out of it, like he always walked on barefoot, that's mythic consciousness, that's hey, geographical consciousness. It's a different way of relating to the saints because the saints are greater than we are. So I got, you know, to sort of I don't know if there are objections,

but just sort of two ways of pushing back against that. The two concerns I have with documenting the Saints lives in a way that did not actually happen. That's one thing if you're going to talk about shoes. It's another thing if you're going to say she was then buried by a lion or something even more seemingly incredible. Right. The two issues I see with that is if you have things that actually didn't happen mixed with things that actually did and are just as seemingly incredible, you will be tempted to throw out what actually happened. Okay. Yeah. The second thing I see,

can we address that? Can you, can you put a pin in the second one? Just so I don't lose my track. Sure. So in the thought experiment that I gave him, I postulated that the historical record was hazy on the details of whether or not he actually gave away these shoes. You as a person who lived closer to him in history, having traveled in time, 200 years, no for a fact, right? But it shouldn't bother you that the received tradition, meaning the information that we actually got. We don't have any information in the country is my point right. It's not like there's there's a manuscript rishon that says he never took his shoes off right.

It's that there is a consciousness, but they might be. I mean one of your mother's friends may write that down maybe maybe, but let's let's say that there isn't okay. All right, because I think if that were the case, then probably it wouldn't be received into the, but I think that the more important thing is that there is a kind of supra historical consciousness about the saints that allows for not a historical material, but material that is beyond history because it reflects the deeper reality of who they are. So, as an example, there is a saint who lived in the second century. His name is Saint Aberkius of

Yerki in Russian. We know nothing at all about him except that there is a stele that was discovered several hundred years after his death that has a few things written about something having to do with him being a bishop in this or that city. In spite of that, the church officially the church, this is fourth or fifth century, so there's no did no divisions, nothing. This is the church right, uh, commissioned a life and the life is very elaborate. He goes and he, he casts out serpents from a, from a statue. He gets tortured in elaborate ways.

These are things that are not found in anywhere and yet they make their way into the life and they are accepted by the church as the life as received within it, within the church. It's like an icon of what this saint could have been and was because this is how we received it. So I think there's a level of trust that the person who writes down the life is given a responsibility that is a very serious one, just as the iconographer has given a very serious responsibility.

When he approaches this task and when he doesn't have the necessary information He works within an existing Pattern an existing system to make sure that what he passes on will say everything that it can't about That saint but in a way that can be edifying for us who listen to his life Because it was clear that he was somebody who triumphed over paganism So they kind of I'm thinking of St. Patrick would be another example. Oh yes. The apparent saints out of Ireland. Absolutely. No, the whole tradition of St. Patrick's stories is very interesting. I'm not, I'm not an expert,

but I will tell you that the reception of the St. Patrick legends right now amongst people who are coming back to Christianity is not one of skepticism. It's one of great joy. People love to read stories that involve weird manifestations of animal activity that involve kind of bizarre, a historical, they love that stuff because to them it speaks of a, of a reality of the inhabiting of God on Earth that isn't limited by historical contingency, but that points to something greater. And that's something that people really want to reach towards. They can read their history books whenever they want, but in their lives of saints, they want to have inklings of something greater than simply the hard facts and realities of

history. So again, I'm not saying that people make stuff up and fictionalize these things on purpose. I'm saying that just as an icon doesn't actually look like the portrait of the saint. So the life of the saint may not, as far as we know, mimic the historical reality of that person. We just don't know. But you're not saying therefore we shouldn't be concerned whether or not it mirrors the historical reality of that person. We just don't know.

But you're not saying therefore we shouldn't be concerned whether or not it mirrors the historical life of the saints? No, because there are historical lives. We have the lives of saints that are very clearly historically documented. I don't just mean historical figures in the sense that they existed, but that there were certain miracles they may have performed, and then there were other things they almost certainly didn't do. and to talk about both of those things as if they actually happened, it seems to me, would lead someone to be skeptical of both of those things. Right, which is why you make the, which is why I argue you make the distinction between legends and lives.

So that's a distinction I think is a fair one. In the medieval tradition, there is a very rich tradition of medieval, of Christian legends that are not a part of the tradition of the lives of the saints. So my second concern is that if you're reading the story of somebody who's engaging in all of these fantastic things, that you then look at your own life and you look at the people around you and you conclude that no one is a saint and no one could possibly be. Because in order to do that, I've got to be abstaining from my mother's breast milk on Wednesdays and Fridays. And I didn't do that. I didn't pray when I was a kid. And therefore that's I can't become a saint. That's an interesting thought. I hadn't thought of that. I have

you not ever thought that personally though. I mean, I know as a Christian, I'll read the lies of the saints. No, no, no. In that sense. Yes. I mean, I, I never thought so much about the abstaining from mother's milk because I never really had a calling to monasticism. And that's, that's very clearly a kind of monastic thing. Um, and it does appear primarily in very old saints lives. That's not something that appears in more recent lives. So maybe that's a reflection of a certain storytelling tradition, just like it's a reflection of a certain iconographic tradition. I don't know. I'm not. I'm not able to say that my answer to you, though, is we're not looking hard enough because I have encountered people who absolutely do those kinds of things.

Absolutely give us one example. If you don't mind, if it's not too personal, well, it's not too personal, well, it's clairvoyance is the easiest thing, right? Somebody walks into a room and Saint John of Shanghai San Francisco turns that person and answers the question that's on their mind. Sure. All right. It is quite remarkable that I don't sure how much you know about Saint Padre Pio. No, I don't know that he was said to, um, oh, what's the word? By locate. By locate, where you're appearing in two different places and you've got people actually documenting

these things. He also- Or he would read a soul in confession and tell them their sins, the stigmata, all these sorts of things. He floated over his village once during an air raid. Cool. Floated over his- that was part of the by location because he was said to be somewhere else while he was floating over his village during an air

raid. But it is kind of cool because if you, I mean, as a Western, I guess, if you want to put it that way, 21st century person reading a story like that, you go, OK, I can see how people might believe that if this happened in the second century. Another weird... But this dude existed during the time of the Beatles. Yeah. It's pretty wild.

Another example is a recently a Kennedy Saint, Saint Porphyrios of Athens, who as a child could see through solid objects. He knew when somebody was coming to the monastery, you know, there was a mountain between him. And these were things that were, you know, very easily documented because it was very recent. So I'm with you that these things occur.

They do. And I'm willing to accept them. We don't see them because we don't look for them. The thing is, again, this is, this is getting back to the rhythms of storytelling. We're not comfortable with them. We think they're weird. They're not part of our everyday existence. Some, you know, hopefully we can get more into, we can teach our children to do that. But the,

the rule is you have to go away from this, from the center to see those things. So you have to go into the monasteries. You have to go into the, into the deserts. Fair enough. It also, maybe the danger isn't so much leading people to believe that saints could engage in these sorts of things, but that in order to be a saint, these are prerequisites. It's it's not as if every saint was no engaging in. Yeah, definitely like this. And maybe that's the thing. Yes, that's true.

So like like the superhero aspect of it is the thing that makes him a saint. No, these these are extremely that's the only sign of your saying. Could it be the same? The answer to that is in the sayings of it is the thing that makes him a saint. No, these these are extremely only sign of your say could write the answer to that is in the sayings of the desert fathers. There was one I forgot his name, but one of the one of the monks, he became very proud. He thought I've reached perfection and he talked to his angel who whom he saw regularly, of course, and he said to him, look, what else can I do, which is a great thing? Never a good say. Yeah, well, it's great that you can see how human they are even when they reach such heights of spiritual perfection,

right? They're still, they're still very human. So the, the angel says, hold on, hold my beer. He didn't say that, but yeah, and he drops them into the middle of Alexandria. Alexandria is like Las Vegas, right? It's like San Francisco. It's the pits. He drops him in the middle of a city. Have you ever heard this? I think I have. Yeah, Keep going in where there are two housewives okay, yes, living normal lives and they're holier than their earlier. They clearly hold him so but no, no great manifestations of power, no, no defeats of demonic adversaries, nothing like that and yet these are holier than you

are and also throughout the desert fathers of these this this idea that the obedient one out of the three of you is the holy one, not the one who's engaging in these other supernatural activities. I want to get back to fairy tales. Why is it that it was so easy to go in and out of saint stories and fairy tales there? Yeah, well, because they follow the same pattern. Which is? It's something about... Collective memory? pattern, which is it's something about if memory. Well, I don't know if I would call it that. I think it's just the way it's just the most clear and most. So it's the historically distilled version of a single human life. It's

really hard to have saint stories in a hundred years from now when we're like do we have his twitter feed? We saw what he said on the second. I think there's something to be said about it. Yeah, we saw what he said on a second. I think there's something to be said about a prerequisite for sanctity being not posting on twitter. Yeah, I think that's right. Might that might become something that's just I just think that you on twitter. I am on twitter, but I don't I don't tweet. I'm just there in case

people want to contact me there, but no yeah, I don't. I don't it's a great idea to quit it. I would highly recommend it to everybody. Yeah, no, I don't do it. I mean hardly even go on there. So my life's only gotten better Yeah, like not in a way nothing changed when I deleted it, right because it's all virtual. It's not real Yeah And it's but it's not just that but even just kind of the influence part of it or the Advertising of different things that I'm doing. I had this sense that well, I kind of need it right Yeah, I didn't need it at all ever and I know that's true of everything else now, right? It's all we're not highly recommend people who are

watching this delete your Twitter account right now yes I I second that motion absolutely but it's a good question so what is it what is it about those common rhythms it might be just the rhythm of a life it might be the rhythm of what it means to become holy it might be the rhythm of a spiritual life any given spiritual life because if It might be the rhythm of a spiritual life, any given spiritual life. Because if you look at the rhythms of both fairy tales and the lives of saints, they're cyclical. They involve the same kind of movements that you see in the Lord of the Rings or in any heroic tale. It involves leaving the comfort of home to go out into a wild place.

It involves a lot of try fail sequences where basically you're testing out your metal against enemies that you think you can defeat and they end up defeating you in very embarrassing ways again and again and again. Oh don't forget the mentor figure is very important. There's always a teacher or a mentor and then at some point there is the Dark Knight of the Soul, the underworld, where you think that you are gonna die or you actually do die and at the other end of it There is a you catastrophe as token talks about it an unexpected sudden turn that is partially determined by your actions

But is still independent of them meaning that you don't deserve it but by showing the right kind of attitude and Point of view or other point of reference to the holy then the Holy can come in because you've become broken by your experiences and humbled by enforced humility, that vessel can then be filled with the grace, which is either actual grace in the lives of the saints or wild power in the fairy tales. But it's effectively the same thing.

Now, why are these so different? Because I'm only talking about Russian fairy tales here. But you can partially extend this to other traditions as well, especially if you're talking about a Christian culture. In the movement from paganism to Christianity, you are going to have certain strivings of the human spirit that are the same whether you're pagan or Christian. And that's what makes the pagans come to Christianity. It's the recognition that these are things that I know are true. So in the, for example, in the in the ministry to, in the Russian ministry to America in Alaska,

there are repeated stories of shamans coming to the Russian priests putting to speak the local languages and stories of shamans coming to the Russian priests who didn't speak the local languages and through interpreters the shamans are telling them our spirit, our great spirits told us you were coming. And so you still in Alaska, you still have people with deep Orthodox faith because it's embedded in into their identity as indigenous people. Not something you hear very often, not something that's popular to say by the way, and probably I'll get in trouble for saying that, but it is absolutely true. So there's something in that movement from paganism to Christianity historically that is reflected in the fairy tale and that is then brought into everyday reality, historical

reality, if you will, in the lives of the saints. You're familiar with AS stops fables yeah uh the little moral that's inserted after everyone is later yes i don't like those at all i hate them good so i guess the question i had for you then is you know you read these stories to your children and you know what's interesting is you tell your child a story that's kind of more chronological historical factual and they might say they might have a lot of questions about it. You read them a fairy tale that makes no sense and they never say, hang on a minute. Isn't that interesting? It's there. They have a sense for the rhythm of fairy tales that is innate. It's very strange,

but it's absolutely true. Yeah. And why is it there or should we then refrain from trying to draw out a nice, neat little moral for our children? I think refraining is best. I'm not the only one to make this argument. V. Gungrin and his wonderful book, tending the heart of virtue also tends to underline the fact that the stories themselves are formation enough for most people. That's right. But sometimes they have questions sometimes they want to know more sometimes especially as they get older with a very gentle hand

carefully, yes, you can go into the elaboration and the end but try not to make it into a moral. Yeah, because They turn off as soon as they understand that you're talking at them. That's it. They're not paying attention So we're the same age. Did you ever play Sonic the Hedgehog? Yeah, of course. So there was a cartoon they made on that. And I remember at the end of every cartoon, Sonic came on the screen and he told you a little lesson.

And I think I'm getting that right, unless it's a different video game that was turned into a cartoon. We watched a very different Sonic cartoon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I remember just like, just being so... See, I don't even remember that. So remember just like just being so. See, I don't even remember that, so I must have.

Blocked it out. Sonic. Yeah, go on, let me know in the comments if I'm right or not. But I just remember being so disappointed. I was just like so bored immediately. You think, well, why? I mean, I'm sure the creators of Sonic didn't see that coming. It's like, no, they love Sonic. They've just seen this wonderful little adventure with Sonic and Tails, and now Sonic's

going to tell them some wisdom. So they'll want to hear it. And I have a distinctive memory of my just heart falling. I don't know how else to explain it. I just was like, oh, I don't. That's a very good expression. I love that expression, because that's exactly what it is. So children are much better at understanding what's.

Are you trying to look that up? I got it. Shut up It's called Sonic says Is there any quotes there well there videos, but I don't think we should play You are one wait what oh dear Binary bison. That's in my search history now, by the way. That's great. Okay, so what's Sonic? But yeah, so what is it? What is it about that then? That switch from the- I have no idea, but look. Great answer. Yeah. Well, it's true, but they know.

Okay, so I told you this a little bit before kids are not bothered by the things that we think they should be bothered by violence. They don't see it like we do. They don't see the vivid imagery for them. Violence is is a very stark expression of reality. They understand consequences right. They understand that they live in a chaotic world. They understand that they are sometimes in not in control of their emotions and monsters under the bed. Yeah, they know this is true. Right. So they're not interested in the morals that tell them it's fine. There are no monsters into the bed. They know that there are monsters, but it's like that which is

right. Children. Yes, yes. It's like that quote was it's Chesterton Lewis who talks about how you know we shouldn't ask her to chesters and write about the teach them how to kill the drag is not that there aren't any something like that right, but just as an as a vivid example of this so that the the sharp show perot version of Cinderella, which is a very enlightenment version, and it's all about Cinderella being a very passive good girl that receives everything she is due because she is a passive pious girl who doesn't do

anything. The grim version is much grimmer, yes, and she's not passive. She's quite active. She does things that are expressions of her piety, but they're active involvements in her life. The end of the story is quite violent. Let's do it. Let's tell it. Okay, this is my one of my favorites. So there's two different versions of it. I think that I've read, but maybe, but the one I'm thinking of, there probably are different recensions, but okay. So you

know how in the, in the Disney version, she's always, um, she always has the, the birds on her shoulders. Yeah. Okay. So that's actually a very dark thing. Okay. Because when she comes into the, uh, church to be married to the prince, yeah. Um, as she walks in, one of the doves, their doves, right? So they're images of the spirit, clearly the doves right, so their images of the spirit clearly the Grims were a particularly Calvinist kind of Christian Christians, but they were Christians. They walk in the first stuff picks out the first set of eyes of each of the

daughters, yeah, and after the ceremony they come out. That second of comes and pecks out the second set of eyes. Kids don't mind that they don't. They understand the concept of these. These sisters vile. In the grim version, they don't ask forgiveness. Right. They try to ingratiate themselves to their now powerful sister. They're playing power games. There is no forgiveness to be given because they have not asked for forgiveness. So then the last thing that can happen is a kind of you catastrophe. It's a brutal one, but it is a kind of restoration of order. They were blind now in their entire lives. Now they're mine for real. Yeah, I might be misremembering this, but wasn't the mother given a pair of like scorching

hot slippers and she had to dance until she died? That's one of the versions. I'm not sure that's the grim version though. Okay. Yeah. I do in the grim version, they cut off their toes, the other sisters and their heels, which is how do you cut off a heel? I don't even know. With a very sharp knife. Maybe.

I can't even imagine how you would do that. At least the toes are, you know, articulated. Look, I just want to encourage everyone right now who's a new parent, especially, because I was just joking with you earlier, although it wasn't a joke, that being a father has a lot of it has just been dying to all of my ideals. Oh boy.

You know, like before you have kids, you've got all these ideas, you've got all this advice to give to everybody doesn't have kids. And you know, you might think, gosh, I wish you were the kind of family that could sit around and read the Lord of the Rings. But you know, I'm pretty sure my kids have ADD and I'm pretty sure I want to be with my wife and I don't want to read this long with the children, but you know, I'm pretty sure my kids have ADD and I'm pretty sure I want to be with my wife and I don't want to read this long with the children. It might be all sorts of things, but the fairy tales are your friend because it'll take you 10,

15 minutes to read and it's a self in contained story. It doesn't have to go into the next night and the children love them. In spite of their objections to it. So I started to reread Pinocchio to my kids. Pinocchio is very, very much in the real Pinocchio, the Carlo Collada original. It's very much in this story in the fairy tale tradition. Yeah, very much.

The underworld. Yes, no, the rhythms are all there. It's a little bit preachy, but the kids don't notice it. And I'll tell you, I started to reread it. My eight year old was going to be nine soon. Initially, it was like, please, I've read this so many times. Please don't do it. Five seconds.

You're so much cooler than mine. Well, five seconds into the reading. Five seconds into the what? Five seconds into the reading. He's completely absorbed, completely. So it overcomes their own objections to the stories themselves. So do it.

It's beautiful. And they don't care about the violence. It doesn't hurt them. No, and read the violent themselves. So do it. It's beautiful. And they don't care about the violence. It doesn't. It doesn't hurt them. Ones more violent, the better. Now we've got your father for the belly of the whale. Jordan Peterson, well done. So we've got a link to your book in the description.

But yeah, if you're going to get a Brother Grimm's Fairytale, make sure it's the original. Hey, let's have a break. And then when when we come back are we on rumble right now? Yeah, but it is this really a rumble Yeah, but it didn't stream it to it streamed it to your account not your chance son of a nutcracker So we are going to we'll take questions from our local supporters I'm about to throw up a post there and we'll take super chats. And then don't forget that after this whole conversation is over, there's going to be a special video just for our local supporters in which

Nicholas and I read a Russian fairy tale from beginning to end. And then Nicholas is going to draw out the nice little neat moral, moral make it all very, very boring. No, just check. So if you haven't yet got the app, Hello, what are you doing? If you have a smartphone, go and download Hello. But first go to hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Hello is the number one Catholic prayer

and meditation app on the web. And it's fantastic. And it actually beat TikTok recently as far as in the app store. Did you know that? It's crazy. It's legit. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Go over there, sign up. You'll get three months for free. If at the end of the three months you don't want it anymore you can quit and

you don't have to pay a cent. They have sleep stories, they'll help you pray the rosary. It's really fantastic. Also if you've got kids it's nice to play little sleep stories for them. Hello. H-A-L-L-O-W dot com slash Matt Fradd, click the link in the description below. I want to say thank you to a new sponsor, EverythingCatholic.com. Maybe you like Amazon but you're tired of giving them money. What if you could give your money to a Catholic company that sold everything Catholic and in so doing not only support that Catholic company but support Catholic artisans and craftsmen as well. I've got a bunch of stuff that they just sent me.

We have a chrism scented bee wax candle which Thursday think smells delightful. We even have chrism lotion cream. They have rosary bracelets. They have kids books. They have what is this? This is like a merry doll for your children, rosaries, kids books, all sorts of stuff. Go to everythingcatholic.com right now and when you use the promo code PINCE you'll get 15% off. So go support an excellent Catholic company as well as, as I say, excellent Catholic small businessmen and craftsmen. EverythingCatholic.com. to to to Two back. So you just said a moment ago that the Grims come out of this Calvinist tradition. Oh, could you open that door for Derek? He's locked out.

We're coming. Thank you. Yeah. coming. Thank you. Yeah, you on that single camera and these poor Derek, just everybody knows my mate Derek is here sitting in the corner, went to the bathroom, we locked him out. So sorry, Derek.

Yeah. But do you think that, I mean, all of these fairy tales probably emerged prior to Christianity or at least they were the crossover? Yeah. Okay. So have they been influenced by orthodoxy in a way that the Grims have been influenced by Calvinism and what would be one of those main kind of distinctions or differences? Well, it's hard.

It's hard to say what they would have been like before the coming Christianity because we don't actually have the stories as they were in the old way. So that's the point that you want. The deal was making about the fact that a lot of these stories don't actually talk about god in any real way. Like there's no churches, there's no priests, especially the the really old stories, but you still have have a very clear rhythm that, like we said, mimics the kind of rhythm of The Lies of the Saints. That being said, there are, you know, you do sometimes have stories that, you know, that will have a person in church on a Sunday, and that

being part of the rhythm of the story. I think it's more to just, so just like the Grims are inspired by their Calvinist spirit, and that comes through in some of the things that happen to the characters, less so in the... There's no Calvinist doctrine in there or anything, right? The worldview comes out a little bit. Same idea with the Russian fairy tales. It's undeniable that these are told by Orthodox people. I mean, it's just in the rhythm of it. with the very Russian fairy tales. It's undeniable that these are told by Orthodox people.

Yeah, I mean, it's just in the rhythm of it. Is there a single volume that you might point people to if they wanted to get into Russian fairy tales other than your own, which we've linked to? Whatever, so the stories of Afanasyev, he's a good story collector to go to. Okay, you ready? Catholic jamming there's a always ready. There's a big volume of collected tales by a for nice

of it's like six hundred pages. A lot of the stories like I'm always ready, but you're going to need to spell a f a n and a s i e v we're only we're only spelling it once a good line. Yes, okay, that's that's there's one that has like this a bunch of his collect collect details a lot of those tails aren't very good. So yeah, nevermind So the best option really is to find a collection with a with a smaller number of fairy tales that are nicely illustrated sure because usually for the ones that are

Smaller they're gonna be choosing the better ones the older ones the more ones that have more residents for for Western ears. Yeah, like there's a frog prince instead of a Yes, no frog princess. Okay, frog. Is it for me? Yes. Sorry. Yes The grim version is the frog prince the Russian version of the frog princess And there's this there's basically a dude and a frog instead of a Sheila. Basic difference. Yes. Yes. Getting getting married to her.

So in the Russian one, does the frog turn into a princess when she's kissed or married or she turns into a princess? It's very good. This is a great story. She she turns into a princess whenever she feels like it. Ah, but it's it only happens to see the husband being like said, do you feel like it now, because you know we're a dinner and you're a frog. Yeah well, so this is what happens. It's not like you're laughing, but literally there's a feast

right. The the the king declares that all the sons, there's three of them have to bring their wives and the wife is a frog. So he's like, what am I going to do? And she goes, don't worry about it. Go without me. And then when you hear a sound of thunder, just say, Oh, it's my little froggy in her box. And it's a gorgeous princess in the most gorgeous, uh, uh, chariot carriage you can possibly imagine. So she keeps showing up at these inconvenient times, but it's always preceded by him being terribly embarrassed. So again, the humility thing.

And then there's that rhythm, that common trope where he goes and takes, when one of the times where she becomes a human person, he goes and takes her frog skin and throws it in the fire, at which point she has to leave and marry a evil sorcerer. Yeah. It's great. All right. We got, we got questions coming in. I just want to apologize to everybody for how pretentious these glasses are. There's no way you can put glasses on like this and not comment on them. I bought a bunch.

Just so I can have it. I bought a bunch like 20 bucks because I can lay on my pillow and read them because they don't. It doesn't matter. Shut up. I don't need to justify myself to all these hundreds of people watching. All right, let's have a look at some questions. Uh, Idaho Mark, thanks for being a local supporter says as an adult, would fairy tales be a good place to help retrain my brain to read? I used to love reading as a child, but now with so much screen time

and I think in part my ADHD makes it very hard to remember what I just read, you know, or should he be perhaps reading other stories along a similar line? So I've I've made the argument and I don't have any empirical evidence for this, but I think there's something to be said about reading stories the way they the way that the West has received them So start with fairy tales move on to epic poetry Move on to the class 19th century classics Move on to Tolkien and Lewis in that order now if it's hard to read and these fairy tales are

Sometimes hard to read because they don't follow any sort of logic and we want logic. We really do. No, even just a little bit, just like a little tie in at the end. No, no, no, no, no, we do not like that. Yeah. So maybe if it's difficult to read them, listen to them. And I do have a podcast not to plug myself, but no, no, please. Yeah. They plug myself like a bathtub. Yeah.

Because that's how the stories are. That's how the stories were received. You're supposed to read them out loud. What's your podcast called? In A Certain Kingdom. And do you read them? Yes. I make voices and everything. It's fun. Yeah.

So, yeah, maybe if it's still difficult for you to read, start by listening to them and then go back to the ones you've heard and then read them. I think that might be a good. I like that. Yeah. This is what I recommend to people all the time who say they want to get into the classics. I always say, like, begin with their

short stories. Tell me if you've read this short story and you've heard me say this because you apparently watch the show. OK, there's a Dostoevsky short story that I read, after which I read. It just destroyed me. Which one? I looked into the

haven't done the I got to really ham this Which one? I looked into the, I haven't done the, I got to really ham this up for a second. I looked into the mirror and my face was almost unrecognizable. I had cried so much. What's that? The double? No, it was a short story. A gentle creature. You ever read that?

I did. Yes. Dear Lord, that broke me. Yeah. Yeah. It broke, it broke me because I saw my own wickedness in the wickedness of that husband. Oh, yeah. I recommend, yes, so people could read that, like so to this fella

and other people who are like, well, how do I start reading again? You know, you could read a short story like that or the best. I only I've read a bit. I read half of Anna Karenina and got bored because I didn't like her. And then I... She's not the hero. It's a very badly titled book. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't know. I got to read the rest of it, I suppose. But she does die in the end. So that's something.

Yeah. So saving it. But no, the death of Ivan Ilyich was... I went on a vacation with my kids to Florida, and over two nights at the beach, I read them this beautiful meditation on death Well, that's the Russian thing to do or just that's gorgeous. Yeah. Yeah, so like read a story like that But yeah, definitely the fairy tales you can get into them Yeah, no, I don't know I don't know if this is so I've been reading and following a guy named Angus Fletcher who is not a a Christian, who's about Darwinian Angus Angus, a great nine. Yeah, he's, he's a really interesting guy

and a lot of things that he says actually agree with, but he has a book called Wonder Works where he makes the argument that approaching literature historically in the sense of reading the things as they came out through history, you're mimicking the way that Western civilization happened. That's really neat. So like you yourself are a microcosm of all of Western Civ. And if you do it that way, he argues that there's something about the way that the brain

is wired that actually helps you assimilate information, that information better. And it can, yeah, it's very interesting. That's good. I mean, I imagine not contradicting that point, but I imagine it also makes sense that of course you don't have a taste for Shakespeare. You never had a taste for like mother goose as a child. Do you know what I mean? Like these things. Yeah, for sure. It's an acquired taste and you can't just jump into the deep end and expect to know Shakespeare is a great example because Shakespeare is so referential to previous literature

and you can, you're missing all this stuff stuff if you don't understand everything that came before it because he's constantly referring to something. I've never got into Shakespeare. Yeah, it's better to watch it anyway than read it. That's how it's supposed to be experienced. Now I got a question from Kyle Whittington and I already know it's probably gonna just be a joke. Whenever Kyle writes a thing, I'm just like.

But it's always funny. When you were on Derek's channel, maybe it's not, and I'd like to apologize publicly to Kyle. When you were on Derek's channel. Maybe it's not. And I'd like to apologize publicly. When you were on Derek's channel, I asked your opinion on why someone would pose with a picture of Missouri. Did you find out or are you dead to me? We're not going to address that publicly. We never will. But I will tell you the answer after. OK.

Wow. Yeah. But if you tell anybody, I will be killed. I understand. I read the fairy tale. I know what will come after you. Is it a name? Baba Yaga Baba Yaga Baba Yaga. OK, so this question is from C. Pasquelanga. Thank you for being a supporter. He says, are fairy tales appropriate for children before the age of reason? Yes. My thought process on this is as follows.

We're working on catechizing our young children. If we teach them about our Lord and our resurrection, etc., could that make Christ and his miracles seem less real? No. If they're combined with fairy tales? You see the point of the question. No, of course I do, but that's a mindset that is divorced from historical reality, because the point is that throughout history children have always received their

Catechism together with their stories, especially in traditionally Christian countries always there has never ever Historically been a movement to ban oral storytelling in a Christian country ever except in 20th 20th and 21st century America It just doesn't happen So if they were comfortable with it if you have entire centuries of Christian culture in places that continue to have a rich oral and written storytelling tradition, that should be all the answer you need. And practically speaking, it reinforces the other, as I hope we've been making that argument. Because what you're seeing, you're entering into a way of seeing the world that is not materialistic, that sees the the world that is not materialistic, that sees the presence and indwelling of God's Spirit as constant, especially in moments of chaos. And that's something that you get in both stories

and the gospel. And we can even expand that. I read a book that just blew my mind recently, although it's not a new book. It's called The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter, who's book. It's called The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter, who's one of the first two active proponents of literary readings of the Old and New Testaments, which generally are not my cup of tea because they tend to deconstruct a lot of what's going on and look at it kind of divorced from reality. But he makes essentially the argument that every single genre form that we have seen develop in history has its analog or maybe even source in the different storytelling traditions as expressed in the Bible, everything from mythic

everything from myth to fairy tale to epic poetry to psychological drama to realistic realistic novel form, and it's true. If you look at it's unusual for, let's say the story of David and Saul, there's a tremendous amount of internal dialogue and psychological development that goes on in the treatment of those characters. That's not normal for that time period for that for the literature of that time period. So he doesn't make this argument. He stops short because he talks about the Bible as fiction, but he's talking

about it as Jean in the terms of genre, not in terms of it being made up. And I would extend that argument to say that actually what that suggests to me is that every every kind of authentic old age tested storytelling technique and tradition is essentially baptized by the different forms of storytelling that we find in the Bible itself. I think that's true and until he made that point that I didn't really think about it, but I think that's absolutely true. Okay, Mel He made that point that I didn't really think about it, but I think that's absolutely true. Okay, Mel, darn me not having my just put them on.

No, but then I go. Okay. Advice to writers. How did you get your foot in the door of getting published thoughts on self-publishing verse traditional? So I'm interested in this, but in addition to your like translations, you've written a book, haven't you? I've written 12 books. What came out recently that you, oh wow.

All right, shut up, impressive. 11, 12. You've written 12 novels? Get to it Catholic Jamie. 12 books, good luck. It might be 11, I lost count. I'm sure he just has a website you could send people to. Yes. I didn't realize that.

Yeah, yeah, novels and novellas. So both. Yeah. Difference between a novella and a short story is it's shorter. Short story is shorter. Difference between sci fi and fantasy is OK. That's a very interesting question. And I will not say this is the joke I heard from. Right. Right. Right. Who's the fellow who wrote?

Well, I forget it. I forget the author. He'll forgive me or he won't But he said the difference between sci-fi and fantasy is fantasy has pictures of trees on the front cover. Yeah, come on Derek thinks it's funny But we're gonna get this person's we should we want to get that you can do the fantasy sci-fi thing But we do have to get this person's question because they probably are serious How did you get in your foot is the door in the door? So all right. So how, like how long is your longest book?

My longest book is about 120,000 words, which is 350 pages or so. Yeah. Yeah. And what kind of short by the way for fantasy fantasy, generally doorstoppers. Yeah. I write in, in the tradition of Tolkien. That's what I aspire to anyway. But with Russian fairy tales being the substrate, the soil of the story. Here's a question for you, because sometimes you'll read Dostoevsky or Tolkien and you're like, I just, I'm never gonna pick up a pen again. This is, here's a question for you.

I haven't read you and this isn't an insult, but how do you write knowing that you're no way near as good as these people? Well, you start early. In my case, that's how, I mean, I started writing when I was five. So there's still an actual copy of the first story I wrote. It was a collaborative effort. It's called the Golden Evergreen and it is a total ripoff of Narnia. It's not even funny. There's a stone, there's a stone witch and there's a, there's a lion who manifests himself in his absence as a

cloud formation and for some reason his name is sees. I don't know why spelled S E A Z E and the way you invoke his help is you scream at the at the cloud sees sees. So this is what we would do as children. We outside screaming at the clouds sees at the top. So this is what we would do as children. We would be outside screaming at the clouds, seas at the top of our lungs in the middle of San Francisco. I don't know what the people around us thought. Very, yeah. Were you doing it in Russian as well?

Like seas and then other. No, because that story belonged in English. So because it was inspired by Lewis. So I think it's a good question for in my case. I didn't even think about it because I was just telling stories. Yeah. Because I loved them so much

I wanted to tell my own version of it, but I think there's something to say about If you really are a lover of the kind of fantasy that Tolkien and Lewis wrote there's not a lot of it out there So I don't think it's so much a matter of brazenness to try to try to write something in their spirit Because you'll be forgiven for not getting to that point simply because there's nothing So if there if you offer something a lot of people are just grateful for the for the effort And I found that to be the case people have been very generous. Have you read Michael O'Brien? He's a Catholic author from Ontario, Canada He's written written books like father Elijah. Oh like the the sword and serpent that one. No, no, that's someone else a different fella

No, I haven't read it's quite good Yeah, but again when you're reading Dostoevsky everything else next to it looks like horse manure beautifully Manure and next to that mine just looks like who the hell knows you know I'm not calling Michael O'Brien's work. This is going poorly you keep talking But you know what I mean like you you can't you read. See, this is my problem. I started with Dostoevsky and then, you know, you try to read some of the states. Cause really early stuff. Read some of Tolkien's early efforts. Um, they're,

they're not, no, they're nowhere near the level of what they eventually became. And that's, that's an encouraging thought. I think, I mean, this is a gift that people have, you know, and it's, it would be worse to not develop it than it would be to take a posture of false humility. That's really good. What the fella who wrote a game of Thrones? Yeah, George Martin. Do we want to go there before we answer the question? The question because that's a, that's an entire yeah. That's a long yeah. How do you get the foot in the door publishing versus so wishing I I was one of the lucky ones to get the call from from an agent.

Initially, it was just me shooting manuscripts into the wind and getting absolutely nothing. It took me. It took me some work. It took some workshopping with actual agents and editors who were acquiring at the time. So it was paid to actually get my foot in the road because they were, they were able to give very concrete advice on how to make something, especially the beginning of a story appealing to an agent or an editor who doesn't have time to wait for the story to actually, I say, yeah, because the slush pile, which is the unsolicited manuscripts is so high, so huge that

people just don't have the patience. So the literally reading the first line, the first line appeals them to read to the end of the first paragraph, seeing the first paragraph appeals them to read to the first page. And at that point, maybe they'll finish to the first. That's how I read books that I've bought. You are a born agent. You missed your calling. That's what you should have been doing. So somehow I got a call from, from an agent in a big New York house. I won't see who he is. Although I should, as you will find out, because he should be doxxed, but, um, uh,

yes, I know a guy he should be absolutely awful. What happened? He basically what's his name? First? No, let's try just real quick. That was his name. Be careful how much information you give me. I am a magician with Google. Oh my goodness. I'm not saying the name of the of the agency. Nothing. So he York City. Well, clearly he's a man. There's a lot of those. New York City. Well, clearly he's a man. He's there's a lot of those. He took me on as I found out as a basically as I found out later typing

right now. Yes, I know you're using jeep chat gpt for is that I have done that before we can talk about that later. Sorry finish anyway. He called me and said look. I like your your thing can. we, can I represent you? I was immediately put off by the fact that it was a handshake agreement and there was no contract. I was already informed enough to know that a handshake agreement is not a good idea in any situation, but I found out as the Russians say on my skin when a year later, nothing had happened and I had, I had to call him for him to pay any attention to me and by the end of that year when I was calling him he

couldn't remember who I was and this was without any input or help from him he didn't tell me how to improve something he didn't give me any updates absolutely nothing so in the process of waiting for him to do something with my manuscript I started to read some wonderful independent publishers and advocates of authors kind of holding on to their rights. Their names are Christine Catherine Rush and Dean Wesley Smith. They're very prominent in the in the publishing space, their personal friends with George Martin. These guys are, they know what they're doing and in their books they talk about

how publishing has become a business that grabs rights primarily in intellectual property for the purpose of intellectual property valuation so they can have a bunch of figures on a page and there's not much effort or Ability to provide new authors with the kind of support and help that they would have received maybe even thirty years ago. So nowadays with in fact, I'll tell you this in in cove it something like ninety percent of newly published books sold less than two thousand copies in a year. Now to put that in context a

steven king bestseller in the nineties would have sold over a million copies within like the first month. So ninety percent of all books published now are selling less than two thousand. It's actually less than that. It's insane. I'm doing better than that. My books did better than that. Yes, so the top ten percent mom. The reality is that there's a lot of turnover in publishing. It's a because of amazon and because of various changes in the in the industry. There's a lot of flux

and there's not a lot of ability for people to offer. Like I said, support for young people. Most of the money comes from existing back list titles, so it's better for people to go and buy huge existing. What's the word I'm looking for? Um, it's, this is what's happening all the time. People are not buying new work. They're buying existing estates. So Roald Dahl was recently his entire state was sold to Netflix. Um, and immediately Netflix started to do things with it, right? But, um, everybody's buying old books because old books sell because nowadays people aren't willing to try out new authors. So if you're willing to stick with it and actually treat the writing as a business, the publishing as a business,

independent publishing for me has been very not lucrative so much. I mean, I am making a living wage off of it, not making tremendous amounts of money, but it gives you the kind of freedom to be able to hold on to your intellectual property so that if, as happened with me once already, a producer from Hollywood comes and says, I'd like to option your idea for a movie, you get to reap the money that comes off that option. So there's actually a lot of money and a lot of interesting ideas that could be developed if you have control over your IP. That's the primary reason why I publish myself through my own publishing company. Mostly it's because I know that nobody will change my stories to include modern publishing's

imprimatur to include queer characters and all kinds of other things that I don't want to do. And it also just means that since I have control over it I can do whatever I want with it and it's a lot of fun I really enjoy it. So yeah I would heartily recommend anybody who has a desire to do this for the long term and wants to work at it as not just as a side gig but as an actual business idea go independent. Okay George Martin. By the way I've never watched an episode of Game of Thrones, nor have I read a book or even a chapter of a book or even a

first sentence of a first page. Yeah. What are your thoughts on him? Yeah, he's, uh, he's a really good writer. He's a very good writer. I ended up reading almost the entire, uh, I got up to book the middle of book five in a space of a month and a half. I skipped a lot because he does have very explicit scenes Sexual scenes the the violence doesn't bother me so much. I don't know what that says about me. But yeah Same yeah, it's easy to skip them though, you know when they're coming It's not like in a movie where suddenly there's a cut and you have you know, a naked body staring at you And the books are there, they, the first one, the first

book I think is a work of great literature. Um, and I will say it for this reason. He is an anti Tolkien, absolutely no doubt about it, but he goes about it, especially in the first book in a very compassionate and very humane way. His approach is not to extol the hero but it is to give voice and agency to the downtrodden. And he does that with not the kind of overbearing propaganda that everybody does that thing now in storytelling. He does it with compassion. He does it with compassion. He does it with love for his characters.

His characters are absolutely living, breathing human beings with all the frailties that we'll, that we notice in ourselves and in everybody else. And in the first book, you get the sense, not so much that there isn't, as you do in the later books, that everything's kind of, nothing matters and everything's nihilistic

and there is no good in the world and you might as well just become the worst possible version of yourself. In the first book there's a lot of compassion for for those who are lesser and in the second book he immediately stomps on that and goes for the cheap thrills and it's really disappointing and I was very unhappy with it because in the first book it felt like he was trying to do something I was very unhappy with it because in the first book it felt like he was trying to do something that was very beautiful. He would never have been able to accomplish it because his worldview is necessarily nihilistic and

he's very open about that. He doesn't believe in the possibility of true heroism because he doesn't believe in the possibility of virtue because he doesn't believe in God. And so his it's more interesting and more important for him to demonstrate human frailty in its in all of its excesses. So that we know what is possible and take care, but he did that in the first book and still managed to keep a beautiful touch of compassion for his downtrodden. And then in the second book, he starts killing children in bloody and Very brutal ways. Yes, that's a historical reality But there's ways of doing that that you can get the message across without it being Winsor lacious when does a story become propaganda? Where's that line?

when the author Insists on his message being the only message so the act of writing is a very dangerous one because you have to write in such a way that allows for the freedom of interpretation. Complete freedom. This is what Christ did with the parables, by the way. There's, I never thought of it this way until recently, but the beauty of the parables is that you have to encounter them yourself without the interpretive literature.

It's there to help you if you need it, but ultimately you will only be transformed by the stories that Christ gives in the parables if you encounter them yourself. And that means that Christ gave each one of us utter freedom to encounter those stories the way that we can at the moment that we encounter them. He's not afraid that we're going to interpret them incorrectly because they can be encountered throughout our lives again and again and again every time they'll say something different and they're always pointing to the truth to Him. So what is there to be afraid of? If we interpret incorrectly one time, life will teach us otherwise, we'll come back

to it and we will eventually we'll get to the point where we understand more of what he was trying to say. That's a very scary thing to do for an author, very scary, because it's likely that people will misunderstand you and describe all kinds of things to you. So it's much easier to just put the messages into the story. The way that works is the characters start doing things that are not natural, that are intended to produce a very obvious set of circumstances. It happens again and again and again in rings of power. It's one of the reasons why it's such an ineffective piece of art is it's constantly veering into the kind of preaching that is almost propaganda. There's a scene in in Numenor where if you had closed your eyes like and not

watched and just listened and had no context what was going on you would have thought it was a Trump rally because the language that was used was so divorced from the rooted reality of Numenor in the second age and was so similar in its cadence and its rhythm to the kind of nativist rallies that you will sometimes see on the news that it completely destroyed any sense of verisimilitude and you see it didn't matter what the in fact the author the writers at that point were destroying their own ability to convince someone because they were not giving the viewer any freedom to interpret what they were saying freely.

So if you want to convince people, you have to tell the kinds of stories that move hearts so that people have no choice but to be carried along with the journey and through come and coming through the experiences of the characters, will be forced. Yeah like it or not Flannery O'Connor talks about this in one of her letters where she says that you have a you have to have enough respect for your characters Yes, so the respect for the characters is an even deeper reality Which means not just that you're giving the freedom of interpretation to the reader But you're also giving freedom of action to your characters.

In other words, you might start with a series of, of goals or desires for your character. What happens almost every time is that in the process of writing, the characters start doing things on their own and you can't do anything about it. And if you stop them, they will stop, uh, inspiring you. They will stop being the kinds of characters. They'll stop working. It's really weird. But it's not just weird.

I think that's part of how the creative act manifests. I think that's part of the symphony between us creating and God helping us create. Because the characters become sub-creations in the same way that God created us in the image of him. These characters are images of us, but he created us in utter freedom. So if we can't create them in utter freedom, then they won't be, they won't be good characters,

convincing characters. Hey Matt, just real quick. I sent you questions. Thank you. I saw that. I just want to get to our local. So we've got a lot of questions actually that have come in. Okay. St. Patrick, probably not his real name said, I just had my first born child last Friday and I love the Brothers Grims. At what age do you think it's appropriate to start reading the more intense fairy tales, i.e. the Robber Bridegroom?

That's what I told you about today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Juniper Tree, any Dr. Seuss book. Also bonus question, do you think children are more likely to mimic behaviors that they see in TV movies? Yes, then they read. Yeah, absolutely. Can I just make a point about the Robber Bridegroom? So the Robber Bridegroom is the most graphically violent Brother Grimm's fairy tale.

I mean, it involves let's just say, well, there's no way to say it. Men butchering females eating them. I'm reading this because big brother Grimm's fairy tales and I'd read it to my kids every night. Right. And I'm I'm reading it and I'm like, oh, this is getting a little strange. Gee whiz. And then I can feel my wife looking at me and I can sense her anxiety. And I'm like, no, it'll come good. It'll and it didn't.

Yeah, well, I'm glad I read it, though. I'm really glad I read it. Like at the end, the father of this bride, I believe he drives a stake through the head of the dude. That's good. Yeah, I mean, you do have to have discernment. You can't just read any story that you encounter. And... Oh.

All right, no need to contradict me right on my own show. No, no, no, I'm not saying the bad sh... I'm not saying that story wasn't... That probably wasn't. I don't know. No, no, I don't. I don't remember that story with enough detail. I think all the grim stories are probably okay. There are certain storytelling cycles in in Russia. Even there's a basically a kind of trope, the soldier and the demon at the crossroads. That's an entire subgenre stories. Those are usually you want to stay away from

those any story that involve actual priests in the Russian tradition You want to avoid? Yeah, because they it's all about making fun of Clerics those are all much later They're not they're not part of the ancient storyteller tradition. They're not the ones that come from 6,000 years ago things like that So yes, they're okay so I think that anybody who's interested in this needs to read a vegan groynes book on cultivating the tending the heart

of virtue because he shows very specifically how you can develop your own sense of moral imagination to then teach it to your children. So I don't think there's an absolute answer about what stories can be, what stories you should read and when so much of parenting is just instinct. Isn't it bad? I mean, like you just, you're going through it and suddenly, you know, this is what I need to do. And you do it. And sometimes it doesn't work and that's okay. And sometimes you do exactly the things you need to do at the exact right

moment. And it's not you. It's just, well, it's God's providence. Let's put it that way. Right? So there's some of that, but the more you can prepare yourself by, by having a cultivated moral imagination yourself, the better you're going to have a sense of what children can take, but it's not you know, they're okay with the violence for the most part, and sometimes that violence needs to needs to be read unless yeah, like for example in in Carlo Collada is Pinocchio Pinocchio right? He kills the he kills the Jiminy Cricket right? He kills him in the first scene the crickets dead

That's it. He's gone, but he comes back as a ghost and then a few scenes later. He's back Like living and it like he never died and that's a very important symbolic moment that the children really understand Yes, because they know they're like Pinocchio. I do kill my conscience, so to speak, right? They don't think of it in those terms, but they understand exactly. And the fact that he comes back alive without Pinocchio doing anything. Think about what that tells the children. You can do the worst kind of sin and it's okay if you have the right disposition, it can be forgiven and think restitution can happen. Right? So you need to sometimes dig into the deep, the violent stuff. I want to try to get through these next three questions somewhat quickly if that's okay,

because these wonderful human beings have given become given us super chats and I want to make sure we get to them. Tony Stark. Come on says just join stream wondering if you've read the sequels to enders game. Yeah, I have. And if so, what's your opinion on them? They're set in a sci fi future on a Catholic Portuguese ish. So the Speaker for the Dead is, I think, the best science fiction novel of all time.

It's better than Ender's Game. It's a fantastic novel. It is incredible. I don't know how I don't know how he wrote it. It is so profoundly Christian. It is incredible. Everybody has to be in his mormon. Yeah. By the way, it's that fella who made that joke about trees on the front. Oh, right. So he's a serious sci-fi reader. Good.

No, sorry. It was the author who wrote those books that said in this game. Who is the author of in this game? Orson Scott Card? Yeah. He's the fella who said, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, got it. All right, Sammy. And I'm sorry, but how am I supposed to say yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay got it. All right Sammy and I'm sorry, but how am I supposed to say? J DN Surgeon Sammy surgeon says our JDN. That's that could be a Serbian name actually. Yeah. Yeah How do Russian fairy tales influence your own writing?

well, all of my stories are inspired by Russian fairy tale, fairy telling, fairy tale telling tropes and some of them are direct adaptations of stories of actual stories. So everything I write is somehow involved with a, with a Russian fairy tale. You probably couldn't divorce yourself from it. If you tried given how yeah, I've tried. It doesn't work. Nicholas Anthony read that one at a time.

Okay. Good. I can't. Oh, okay. Oh yeah, well, I that's to be can reach out. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for telling me to do that.

All right. Here's a question from Sylvie writes 13. Please speak out against Disney fired fairy tales. The original fairy tales by the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson and others were tales of morality, actions and consequence and redemption. Check out the original Little Mermaid, for example, which is an incredible story until Disney destroyed it by turning it into a tale of vanity and self-absorption.

Yeah, absolutely. Disney Disney fight fairy tales are terrible, so don't watch them. Just read the original. There we go. That's the answer. What's the best Disney? Snow White, because it's the earliest. Fantastic. When is it appropriate to introduce children to fairy tales and are there discussion guides you can recommend? Yeah, this is what we're saying.

Don't you know discussion guides? Just read the story. Read them and read vegan groin's book on cultivating the moral imagination. I'm going to keep repeating myself here. Teddles says fairy tale and magic go hand in hand in many of the classics, not saying it's a dive into the occult, but should we guard against these being a nighttime staple for the kids? No, because the the rules of fairy tales are so different from real life that no child

will ever actually make that leap. The only argument that I would entertain, although I probably wouldn't agree with it, is that if you're telling a story that's firmly set in the real world and that doesn't follow clear fairy tale rhythms, then be careful. But I wouldn't even say it about Harry Potter. I think Harry Potter is a perfectly fine book to read. Age appropriate. I wouldn't give it to anybody younger than 12 or careful, but I wouldn't even say it about Harry Potter. I think Harry Potter is a perfectly fine book to read at age appropriate. I wouldn't give it to anybody younger than 12 or 13, but it's they're very strong stories. T Bryant 95 says, has Deacon Nicholas read GK Chastain's orthodoxy?

If so, where are his thoughts on what Chastain has to say on the chapter, the ethics of Elfland? Oh, gosh, I read that a while back. I don't have I don't remember enough of it to be able to comment. Sorry. That's OK. I should read it again, though. Thanks for reminding me. OK, Jared J. Peters, thanks, mate.

He says, why do so many fairy tales revolve around cannibalism? Were they all written by Protestants as polemics against the Holy Eucharist? Well, okay. So there could be some of that. Yeah, let's be honest. Um, but I wonder what, what fairy tale collections you're reading. Um, there are some collections nowadays that, uh, really purposely emphasize the grotesque. That's one of the most common postmodern stances towards the fairy tales. The first one is let's disenchant them and invert them and

mash them up. And the second one is let's bring out the worst aspects of them and look and kind of raise them up for ridicule. A good example of that is the Tale of Tales, a very strange and horrifying movie that came out a few years ago Which is based on Italian fairy tales, but it does exactly that it just focuses in on the grotesque Final question here from Anna Lee as a teacher in a secular school I have to be very careful what I say about religion Any suggestions about how to respond when students have been reading fantasy that involves magic and start looking for spell books at the library. Yeah. I want to protect them from dangers they're not aware of, but I'm not their parent and it's not a religious school. Yeah. So that's really, that's very interesting.

I hadn't heard that people were doing that, but it doesn't surprise me. The issue here is not the importance of banning story, fantasy stories that have witchcraft. The issue here is that there is no, that these children have no moral imagination to be able to understand the magic within the story for what it is doing. So if I'm assuming this has to do with Harry Potter, I could be wrong because there are some stories that probably shouldn't be read that have to do with magic just because they go into the dark kind of gratuitously.

But if you as a child don't have, if you haven't been raised in these fairy tale traditions, if you don't have the proper intellectual moral imagination to be able to distinguish fairy tale reality, mythic reality from what I see outside of my room every day, then the problem isn't that you're reading books with witches, it's that you have no ability to actually walk through the world in any intelligent way. Because you're constantly going to be controlled by your emotions, every new thing that comes

your way you're going to grab at it and it's going to become the entirety of your experience. And your experience of self-identification is going to be constantly shifting from one thing to another because you're not rooted in anything real. So this is the big problem of our time. Teachers cannot be parents. What is the answer? Try to inspire the parents. With a vision of something beautiful. So that they start doing it themselves.

That's probably the only way. How do you do that? I don't know, with a lot of persistence, with a lot of prayer, with a lot of patience. It's very difficult. Breaking Bad? I've never watched it. All right, you get the idea. Yeah.

Guy's life becomes chaotic as he begins to sin and he spirals out of control. I'd like to see movies that reverse that order. Yeah, yeah. Raskolnikov might be an example of that. Yeah. Why aren't we seeing more of that? It seems like there's a lot of this. Because postmodernism can't look at redemption without laughing at it. Um, that's it's impossible for a postmodern person to look at a story of

redemption without laughing. That's why Joker's so popular. Yeah. Um, it can be done. People are ready for it. Jonathan Peugeot was starting to move in that direction. He's going to be publishing a series of illustrated fairy tales that are taking the classics and tying them together and very interesting and somewhat postmodern ways and forming the imagination of his readers to understand how the fairy tales eventually become hagiography. So I think that's how you do it. I think you have to reintroduce the real original stories into common parlance.

Interesting thing. Apparently the new Puss in Boots is very good. Yes, precisely because it seriously takes the tropes of fairy tales and doesn't make fun of them. So it's in the Shrek universe and it doesn't anti Shrek. So it's like it's like the inversion has inverted itself. Yes. Come back to the beginning. So if any moment is ripe for it, it's probably now interesting. So it might happen. We'll see. You know, I rings of power is not it by the way. Yeah. I don't know who said this, but it was something who said something to the effect of God doesn't exist and I feel sorry for him.

And there was God for not existing. Yeah. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. But there was there was like this affection after the kind of condemnation of God. And I wonder if that's kind of what we're talking about here, where you say that modern man can't look at redemption without laughing at it. You know, it's kind of like someone you pick on at school. You can only laugh at them with scorn for so long before you realize you're the trash heap. Well, there's so much in in the postmodern way of thinking in the left in the leftist

way of living that emphasizes empathy, feeling and being together with the marginalized. And eventually, if you marginalize the, you know, if you marginalize Christ enough, you're going to empathize with him sooner or later. There was an element of redemption in Breaking Bad, but it was an afterthought. I mean, people might not agree with that. They might say, no, it was this pinnacle, but it was clearly like as far as like time wise, it may have been like 15 seconds where he looked at his wife, Sky Skylar and said, I did this for me and admitted his selfishness and wanted it done to the family.

Well, that's step one. I mean, that's not, that's not redemption. That's, that's, that's what we're calling it. Like of bowing to the ground and kissing the four sides of mother earth. But that's not the end of the novel. He has to go because he's angry. Remember he goes into prison and he's not redeemed. The prison experience is not making It's not changing him

It's only after when he takes the gospel and when the sacrifice of Sonya begins to touch his heart Only then does the transformation begin to happen Excuse me So why is it then that we can't look at redemption without laughing it other than just saying something simple like well because modern man Doesn't believe in God and therefore doesn't believe in redemption why This is the this is just the posture of postmodernism saying something simple like, well, because modern man doesn't believe in God and therefore doesn't believe in redemption. Why? This is the this is just the posture of postmodernism. This is how postmodernism looks at everything

old and traditional, because it's the safe thing to do. Otherwise you have to encounter it as a real as a reality that you have to contend with. This is why we laugh at the poor. We scorn the poor. They can't bite back. Yes, exactly. Because it's a huge reality that if you if you take it seriously,

the responsibility is yours. That's a huge job, especially having been raised in it. Suddenly you're faced with the entirety of of this incredibly rich, civilizational. Richness, gosh, I'm being very writerly today. What do you do with it? You can't. It's too much. Much better to ridicule it because you feel so good about yourself when you do it.

Yeah. Yeah. Scorn. It's a real thing, huh? It's a delightful thing. And the devil loves it so much, doesn't he? Yeah. And we're all doing that today.

Oh, yeah. Too much. You can you can share your experiences in Orthodox but I mean as a Catholic like the amount of looking down our nose at each other, yeah and dismissing each other and I'm in a seminary with young men. It happens a lot. I have to Luckily God takes care of his own and if we do that What will happen is that life will beat us to the curb and then kick our faces in.

And at that point, we finally take the proper posture of the hero in the story and sit down on the stump and cry. And that's when the change begins to come because there's no other way except through a broken heart. You know, in the Catholic church, a lot of us are not inheritors of the tradition that you could argue is rightfully ours but it was sort of severed with the abuses after the second

Vatican Council let's say yeah and so now there's this like we're in this like awkward space where we're trying to reclaim what wasn't given to us which makes for a sort of kind of awkwardness well because you can't reclaim a tradition unless you've grown up in it this is what what's happening in Russia. So the Russian church, that's what I was going to ask you. Like, how is that true? No, that's, that's a, that's a very tragic, but very real truth. So what's happened? It happened in Russia because effectively the church was not eradicated, but it lost all connection with its existing tradition because the carriers of

the tradition were either wiped out or moved out of the, out of the country. Those who left Matt tried to do what they could, but it was not enough. So what ended up happening is with the restoration of the church's freedom, starting in late 90s and early 2000s, you have this massive amount of money and buildings and support from the government that suddenly comes into the country, but no living tradition to inhabit it. So they did what they could, but a lot of it is new. So if you're going to create a new tradition,

there's a wonderful conversation with a musicologist, a Russian musicologist that I keep coming back to, where they're asking, how do you create authentic culture in a secular world? Because Russia is much more secular than the U.S., than the American is in spite of its orthodoxy because of the because of the ravages of communism the sort of average Russian is far more secular Americans are generally religious people we can see that even in the woke because it's a religion that it really is it's a replacement religion but it's still a religious impulse in Russia. You see it, you see a very, very deep secular secularism. It's very profound. So I lost my train of thought. Well, I was talking about reclaiming a tradition that wasn't given to right. I was talking about the musicologist, so he was asked

how do we either reestablish or create a new tradition? He said, well, it's simple. You go to the countryside, you live there for 300 years, and then maybe at the end of it there might be something that you can pass on to your children. So it's like the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages. I'm not satisfied with that answer. It's very difficult. I know that there's a lot of people, especially from Protestantism, that are converting to Orthodoxy right now. So I have no doubt that in this seminary that you teach at, you're encountering Protestants. They're clearly not inheritors of this tradition, and yet you want them to be, so you don't just tell them to go wait for 300 years.

So what do you do? We are bearers of the tradition because we haven't lost it. So the particular historical reality of where I am is the inherited tradition of Pachayev Monastery, which was founded in the 16th, 17th centuries. And that comes from Kiev. So we have an unbroken liturgical and, it's a good, that's what you said earlier, because you said you can't be given a tradition that you weren't raised with or you can't have, unless the tradition is there. Right? So in other words, what I'm talking about is if you're trying to

reclaim something that is not given to you by those who have it already, you just find it in a book. Yes. Yes. You're trying to reclaim something that is not given to you by those who have it already just find it in a book Yes. Yes. You're trying to recreate something That's a very difficult thing to do because you have no idea if what you're doing is right, right? Because it's it's a thing in that sense then I'd want to kind of backpedal a little yeah I don't think that's entirely the case and those in Catholic traditional circles. It's not as if the traditions been lost entirely Yeah, so there's there's people that can give you properly. It, so then the untangling untangling can be a very difficult process and finding someone who's able to really give you the unbroken tradition. That's what you

need to do. And that, that might mean going to the margins and finding the crazy people out there who are being saintly. Tell us about the old Russian believers because their story fascinates me. Yeah. I mean, it's a really complicated history. So much of it is tied in with the, with Russians, particular stubbornness and their, their incredible ability to hold onto the truth so hard that it becomes a problem and that they're unable to bend and move and because the tradition has to live, it has to breathe, it has to change with the times.

So there was a particular historical moment where there was a lot of traditions that were received that had become mangled and had lost their richness, primarily not because of a loss of the source, but because the soil wasn't allowed to breathe. Things didn't organically change and shift with the changing realities, political, cultural, et cetera, of the Russian nation. You have to do that. If you don't do that, your tradition becomes rotten because it becomes a kind of Phariseeism. So this happened. There was a holding onto the old way of doing things,

but unfortunately the old way of doing things had a lot of errors because books are copied sometimes by not very educated people and those things do tend to get compounded. And if you have the proper understanding of how our tradition is passed on, you have the tradition has room for people to go in and fix things. That's how traditions work. You have to be flexible enough to say, that thing that we do doesn't make sense. Here's why. Let's shift a little bit.

And it actually might be that we're either shifting away from the original, but we might be shifting back to it a little bit. But that takes a lot of courage because it's a creative act between you and God, especially when you're having to do with the tradition that's old and ancient has to do with things like dogmas and liturgical structures and things that what there was a group of people that were unwilling to do that and

Unfortunately the flip side as I said, no historical movement is ever pure There's no historical side is ever 100% virtuous the other side the side of the innovators so to speak were very dependent on new sources of tradition that were not natively Russian. They were Greek, but from a the provenance of those Greek books was much more recent than the original books that the Russians received from the Greeks. So those had their own received errors as well. Some of them were perceived, some of them were actual. So there was a clash between worldviews.

One is we must change because we are so backward that it doesn't matter. We just have to take the closest thing that we have. Let's infuse it into into our history and to our cultural reality. And the other side was this is what our fathers gave us. What are you doing? And this is a tension that I feel every day in Jordanville and the monastery where I live because in the in the aftermath of communism coming to Russia and World War II and everything,

the tendency is to hold on to what you've received without thinking about it. And there are already it's less than 100 years. There are already things that have crept into the cycle of services that are simply silly that make that have absolutely no Routing in any actual received traditions that are just this is what I've been told to do, but we forget things It's like you know like time passes you've forgotten what that person told you he's been dead for 20 years How do you know that what you're doing is exactly what he told you? It's entirely likely that you've changed it in some way because you're fallible because you forget because you're human So it's an internal problem and in Russia it became such a problem that there was a real schism

within the Russian people where an entire Group entire section of the Russian population was essentially became non people and were persecuted for hundreds of years and some of them eventually moved to the West and and were persecuted for hundreds of years. And some of them eventually moved to the West and became a kind of Russian Amish type of community with no priests. They basically believe that the end of the world is coming and there is no more Episcopal,

what's the word I'm looking for? The jurisdiction. No, no, no, the apostolic succession. There's no apostolic, it's been cut off. So there's no point in- Wait, are people like that? Yes. And there are still communities of those living apostolic succession. There's no epistols. It's been it's been cut off, so there's no point in like that. Yes, and they there's still communities of those living in in various places of the

US and Canada, very interesting. They have very deep traditions that go back way way way back into the way the people dressed in Russia in the sixteen hundreds. So the people the way the Russians sang in the sixteen and it's really fascinating, but like the Amish, they tend to be very inbred, not in the sixteen and it's really fascinating, but like the Amish, they tend to be very in bread, not in the not in the offensive physical sense, but in the sense that there's no room for the tradition to breathe. So they lose a lot of people and the people that stay there are very narrow. They have they're very dogmatic and they don't let anybody in. So it's another one of these historical realities that is so tragic because no side was right and

everybody suffered because of it, but you know, I just, I think we have to learn to come to terms with the fact that no historical reality in this world will ever be anything other than fallen. And the best that we can do is feed our community with our efforts. How do you avoid the trad spiral, as we might call it? By understanding the tradition is a living, breathing organism that needs to change. And for me, that's very simple because, for example, I conduct the choir at the monastery.

The fathers want me to sing only one kind of music. And I'm constantly being yelled at by the old people for not singing the stuff that they grew up with, the real stuff. What I do is I find works by new composers. Eagles wings, on Eagles wings, that kind of stuff. Yeah, no. Russian.

One body, yeah. No, no, no, of course not. But yeah. There's a fine line, of course not. But yeah. But it's a fine line, right? It's hard to point to. It's hard to know where are we being inflexible and unwilling to have the tradition breathe. And then where is the innovating that's taking place? And the other thing that happens is whenever your community suffers a blow, like the old

Russian believers, like the traditional Catholics, you double down on your to quote our Holy Father rigidity yeah because you're like we're under attack yeah yeah so we can't breathe because if we give in the whole thing falls like sand yeah and those situations you just you know you hunker down and you wait until things get a little better and then don't forget to start breathing again when it becomes okay. All right. Here's what we're going to do. We are going to record a bonus episode for our local supporters in which, if you still have the energy, this has been quite a long show. All right.

We're going to read a Russian fairy tale and then comment on it. So we go over to matfrad.locals.com and we'd love you to support us over there. You also don't have to, you can just go over there and follow us this this week. There's a bunch of us over on locals who are going to be doing a 40 hour fast. So from 8 p.m. on Thursday to 12 p.m. on Easter Saturday.

And we're going to be talking about it with each other. We're going to be posting. We're going to be kind of like, you know, yeah, supporting each other so you can go over there. Matt frad dot locals dot com. Thanks so much. Thank you, Thursday. Thank you, Seraphim.

Thank you. Thank you.