Latest / Spiritual Hot Sauce / “Suffering & God: The Deep End Series (Peter Rollins)” Ep#43

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“Suffering & God: The Deep End Series (Peter Rollins)” Ep#43 · Spiritual Hot Sauce

• 0:00
  Today, I'm joined by someone who needs no introduction, known for the term pyro theology.
• 0:06
  He offers unique lens and perspective into the journey of faith, Mr.
• 0:11
  Peter Rollins.
• 0:12
  Welcome.
• 0:13
  I'm Chris Jones, and this is Spiritual Hot Sauce.
• 0:20
  Welcome to the sauce, Pete.
• 0:22
  Thank you.
• 0:23
  I feel like uh I didn't really make the connection between hot sauce and paro theology.
• 0:28
  So we're both dealing with spicy things.
• 0:31
  Exactly.
• 0:32
  I've heard you speak many times.
• 0:34
  Lately, you've been talking about embrace the lack.
• 0:38
  And that's a powerful message because a lot of us, I think, are headed towards religion, trying to get God to uh fix our lack.
• 0:46
  And you're saying we find God in the lack.
• 0:49
  I'm just going to give it to you and ask you to please open this up and explain what you mean by this.
• 0:55
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 0:56
  Well, thank you.
• 0:57
  I'll start then with this notion of lack, because you mentioned that and then we can see where it goes.
• 1:04
  You know, one way of describing this, there's a lot of ways that we can go.
• 1:09
  And I'm always wary that I can't describe everything in one podcast.
• 1:14
  So I maybe I'll show some of you say the answers without the working out.
• 1:19
  And uh the working out's the most important bit.
• 1:21
  So if this was an exam, I would feel.
• 1:24
  But just to give a little bit of a kind of overview of what I mean by the lack, there is this idea in existentialism and in psychoanalysis as well, that there is a fundamental trauma to being human.
• 1:38
  It's not just the traumas that happened to us, it's not just that some things occur historically to me and they're different from you and they're worse for other people.
• 1:47
  There is also the trauma of being human.
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  That even if everything inverted commas goes right in your life, you can still feel despair.
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  And uh conversely, somebody can have a very difficult life, but not feel that existential despair in the same way.
• 2:05
  And so this kind of bears a little bit of reflection.
• 2:11
  From a psychoanalytic perspective, when we are creatures of language, when we come into language and we're part of a community, there is something that we miss.
• 2:23
  It's almost like the fantasy is this that we're almost in oceanic oneness with the mother.
• 2:29
  And as we separate from the mother, we feel we've lost something.
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  But the trick is that as we separate, we come into being.
• 2:41
  It's not that there is a me before the separation, it's almost like separation is part of what requires subjectivity.
• 2:49
  I become conscious of myself, and that is now I'm separate from you, I'm separate from everything else that's in the world.
• 2:56
  I'm connected as well, but I can see myself as apart from.
• 3:02
  And this generates, to cut a long story short, this desire to return to oceanic oneness, to find something that will fill us, something that will make us feel complete, certain, and satisfied in a way that we often feel is missing in our lives.
• 3:20
  There's four different ways in which you can say this lack or dissatisfaction imprints itself on our bodies.
• 3:29
  I'll very briefly mention them.
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  They're called partial drives in psychoanalysis.
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  But the first is objects that promise satisfaction, things that we're we get, commodities.
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  Commodities never fully satisfy.
• 3:43
  When we think we're going to get the new car, the new relationship, the new iPhone, whatever it is, good as it might be, if we think that that's gonna fix the existential trauma of being human, we'll always find some level of disappointment.
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  And we fantasize some object, some commodities, something that will not disappoint.
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  So that's the first one.
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  That's called the oral phase.
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  The second is related to our, let's say, relationship to others.
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  We seek non-toxic, non-antagonistic relationships with other people.
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  We want to find someone, a leader or a partner or a teacher of some kind who we can have a non-antagonistic oneness relationship with.
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  And again, the reality is there's always disappointment.
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  All relationships have antagonism, all relationships have some level of toxicity.
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  There is no non-toxic kind of relationship.
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  So that's the second.
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  The third is that we long to be able to say what we mean and mean what we say.
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  I want to be able to communicate what I think is my inner essence and my heart to somebody else.
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  And I want them to be able to bear witness to their deepest self, to me.
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  And yet there is always misunderstanding.
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  There is always a sense in which I can't quite communicate what I want to.
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  I always say too much or too little.
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  And then the final one is the most complicated, but I'll just say it is called the descopic.
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  But it's where I'm in the world and I'm looking at the world, and then I see myself being looked at.
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  Suddenly I become an object to somebody else, and I see things about myself that I don't like.
• 5:40
  I see myself through the other person's eyes, and I can be destabilized and de-centered by that.
• 5:48
  So, for example, many of us seek community to protect ourselves from the gaze of the other.
• 5:53
  The other isn't monstrous because of what they believe and practice.
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  What's truly monstrous about the other is often that if we see ourselves through their eyes, we realize that we're monstrous, that we're weird, that the things that we take for granted about politics and family life are actually can be strange.
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  And we don't encounter that strangeness until we see ourselves through the eyes of the other.
• 6:18
  So, very briefly, those are four ways that that let's say lack inscribes itself in our body.
• 6:25
  And my argument is this, and we can dissect this, and it's not just my argument, of course, but what I would argue is that there the religious God, the God, there is a God that we all believe in.
• 6:38
  So someone like Nietzsche would argue this, but the existentials would as well, is that there is a type of God that atheists, theists, agnostics all believe in.
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  And it is the God who gets rid of those, that lack, those, those dissatisfactions that we experience.
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  So our God is whatever we think will give us a satisfying object, will give us a non-antagonistic relationship, will allow me to say what I mean and mean what I say, and will prevent me from being destabilized by the gaze of the other.
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  This is the God that Nietzsche says must die, the Nietzschean God.
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  And I think that's a religious project as well, to see the death of that God.
• 7:24
  That's the God that promises wholeness, completeness, satisfaction.
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  And sometimes you get that in religion, but I moved to LA for many years because for me, that's the mecca of that God.
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  It's about, you know, wealth will make you whole and complete, health will make you whole and complete, success will make you whole and complete.
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  It is whatever it is that will get rid of this sense of lack.
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  And my work uh and the in the work of psychoanalysis as well is is to explore the idea of a of the notion of God, not as what covers over the gap, but as the gap itself.
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  And I'll say one more thing and then please jump in.
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  But religion, the word religion means a kind of one of the ways to etymologically understand it is a binding to the sacred.
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  And what I'm talking about is a type of binding to an absolute unknowing, to an absolute impossibility, a binding to the lack.
• 8:22
  And what that means is that faith is not what kind of wipes away the lack, but rather what allows us to endure and enjoy it, to be able to embrace otherness, unknowing, doubt, complexity, dissatisfaction, and to find in those negativities something emancipatory.
• 8:48
  So that's kind of the project in an overview.
• 8:51
  You were talking about this idea of God.
• 8:54
  In just about all religions, we seem to come to God and serve God in the hopes that He'll serve us.
• 9:00
  You know, I think traditionally you would say that, God, please give me your grace, give me your favor, give me a beautiful spouse, give me strong and healthy children, give me bountiful crops, even give me favor and war, you know, give me favor with my neighbors.
• 9:17
  So I am elevated that it's almost a transactional relationship with God.
• 9:23
  Yes.
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  The other thing related to this, maybe make a couple of comments, is something that's that we often miss is that human beings don't just desire things.
• 9:34
  So we, you know, desire if you're thirsty, something that will quench your thirst, or if you're hungry, something that will kind of satisfy your hunger.
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  As human beings, we also desire desire itself.
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  Now, this is what makes us different from other animals, where you know, an animal eats a certain amount of food and then is satisfied until they're hungry again.
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  We will want to eat more, or we'll enjoy eating less, or we'll kind of like we we have this insatiable dimension.
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  And it's partly because desire is itself desirable.
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  If we could be fully satisfied, this would be a disaster, right?
• 10:10
  So we kind of go like actually to be fully satisfied in a strange way would be to take away all the most interesting dimensions of life.
• 10:19
  And so in psychoanalysis, there's a difference between pleasure and enjoyment.
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  Think about pleasure as opening a Christmas present, and there's a certain pleasure in opening it and getting the gift, but enjoyment is all of the excitement that you have in the run-up to Christmas and in opening the present, right?
• 10:36
  That's why you wrap presents and you have them sitting there to maximize enjoyment.
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  Enjoyment is related to not having, pleasure to having, enjoyment to not having.
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  And in a way, pleasure, these pleasurable moments are good, but sports is a good example.
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  In sports, if your team always won, it would actually become depressing, right?
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  You actually need the the enjoyment is in your team winning and losing and the closeness of your team winning, and that's where all of the enjoyment is.
• 11:06
  And the reason why sports do so well is they've mastered enjoyment.
• 11:10
  How to so, in other words, a a lot of sports, if a team is doing too good, they find ways to even the score again, whether it's weighting a horse or whether it's kind of like you know, ethic in American football, if you come very if you're last in the season or something, you get to make first choices, you get some advantage.
• 11:30
  So, in other words, what sports want to always do is keep keep the closeness to keep the enjoyment.
• 11:36
  But then the more radical move, and this is the move of radical theology, and I don't expect you know your listeners to go with me on this or anything, but I like to parse it out.
• 11:47
  In I would say in religion, in religion in general, the the basic structure is you experience yourself as alienated from the absolute.
• 11:58
  And religion offers a way of bridging that alienation.
• 12:04
  So whether the alienation is real, as in the Western religions, where there's a real something has happened, a real fracturing of reality, and something has to put it together, or it's a it's an illusion.
• 12:18
  The fracturing is not real, but is at the level of an illusion that has to be seen through.
• 12:24
  But there's a sense in which there is an alienation and we can be reconciled.
• 12:30
  What's interesting about Christianity for the radical tradition and for someone like Slavio Shizek is, and Sheizek calls it the joke of Christianity.
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  The joke of Christianity, not in the sense of this is like funny, but a joke always has a counterintuitive dimension.
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  So the joke of Christianity for Sheizek is somebody goes into a church and they look up to the altar and they're in tears, and they say, I want to be one with you, my God, but all I feel is loneliness, agony, despair, and desolation.
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  And then they hear the voice of God, my child, now you're one with me.
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  Right.
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  Now, that's very counterintuitive because what you want out of religion is an absolute that's whole and complete that will make you whole and complete.
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  But within Christianity, you have this notion that God also experiences forsakenness, internal alienation.
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  Uh, you know, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
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  The idea of Christ on the cross experiencing a fundamental alienation from itself.
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  And so this idea is salvation or the or the emancipatory movement isn't in overcoming your lack, but seeing that your lack is shared by the big other, by you know, the universe or God or whatever you want to call it, but also by all little others, all other people.
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  That this realization that our alienation is shared is the emancipatory movement.
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  And that's quite different from confessional religion.
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  But it's something that's over there or something we're trying to get to or achieve, whether that's through religion or through uh whatever we feel like will give us a temporary fix until we can get to whatever we perceive in our mind.
• 14:21
  So it's almost like we are seeing it as a physical place that if we can surround ourselves with certain things and be in a certain space, then we'll find peace.
• 14:31
  But what you're saying is, is it sounds like peace is something else.
• 14:35
  Yeah.
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  I mean, you could say it like this is that the the libidinal economy that we experience is there is there is something that if I can get, then I will be, you know, then I'll find satisfaction.
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  And we're invested.
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  This is what gets us to buy new products, to work really hard, to kind of kill ourselves sometimes with being efficient and being kind of like maximizing the day, seizing the day, life hacking.
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  We become we we see this because we're searching, desiring something that would make us full incomplete.
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  And one of the things that happens with this is that, you know, in a nutshell, what what occurs is we start to get libidinally invested in this frenetic pursuit itself.
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  So what that means is Rennie Girard tells this parable of a man who is told that there is a treasure in a stony field.
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  So he goes into the field and starts lifting up all the stones to find the treasure.
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  He can't find a treasure, so eventually he tries to find a stone so heavy that he cannot lift.
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  And what Girard is showing us here is that, you know, as we pursue objects and relationships that will make us happy and complete, and each one feels in some way, one way or the other.
• 15:53
  So for example, we start off by saying we want to do well at school, and then we maybe do okay at school and we want to get a job, and then we want to get married, or but then we want kids, and then we like as in there's no there's no stoppage, there's no stoppage to desire.
• 16:06
  And often then we get caught up in like roadrunner, this frenetic pursuit.
• 16:12
  What I'm talking about is a yes, a way of being in the world that frees us from this frenetic pursuit that's that that breaks that libedinal frenetic thing so that we can basically be in a different in a different kind of way.
• 16:27
  So that's that's the project.
• 16:29
  Aaron Powell It's almost like normalization and deviance, that we all are running towards something that we all are kind of aware that it's wrong, but yet we all still run that way because we are all running that way.
• 16:43
  So we've we've we're in normalization and deviance.
• 16:45
  Yeah, we've made it normal to do what's wrong.
• 16:47
  Yes.
• 16:48
  We can never catch the roadrunner.
• 16:51
  You never catch the roadrunner.
• 16:52
  And if you do catch the roadrunner, as it this happened in Family Guy, they had a little breakaway where uh road Wiley Coyote catches the roadrunner and he basically eats it, he loves it, and then his friend goes, What are you gonna do now?
• 17:05
  And he says, Oh, I don't know, I'll maybe get a job.
• 17:07
  And then you see him get watching daytime TV, and then he gets a job he doesn't like, and he tries to kill himself with his catapult, you know, because you know there's only one thing worse than not catching the roadrunner, and it's catching the roadrunner.
• 17:18
  Yeah.
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  Both are both are devastating in different ways.
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  Yeah, it becomes your purpose.
• 17:23
  Yes.
• 17:24
  Yes, exactly, exactly.
• 17:26
  And so for me, the answer is not, however, in the getting rid of your what's called drive, is getting rid of this this this drive, but rather enjoying the the lack itself, to enjoy the struggle and to to get pleasure from wins occasionally, but to realize that there's something about life that is about struggle, that is about dissatisfaction, that that's an engine for everything that is meaningful.
• 17:53
  And this creates a different type of social bond.
• 17:56
  This is very important.
• 17:57
  Is so community, which we chatted about a little bit uh via email, but community is a social bond that is forged around shared beliefs, practices, values, obstacles or enemies, right?
• 18:10
  So you build a social bond around, you share the same love of music, you share the same outlook in the world, you share the same desire to overcome an obstacle.
• 18:19
  Whatever it is, this is kind of what community is like.
• 18:23
  And there can be a lot of solidarity in that.
• 18:26
  What I'm interested in, however, is a different type of social bond.
• 18:30
  It's a social bond that is not connected to identity, but connected to the fact that we are all subjects of lack, that we all have doubt and unknowing and difficulty.
• 18:43
  And to think of a communion, think of something like AA, where people actually who have very different political and religious views and class positions and society come together because they have a shared response to a difficulty in their life, right?
• 18:58
  So the shared response is alcohol, alcoholism.
• 19:02
  So they're unified by this shared oneness, by this shared defense against the trauma of being.
• 19:11
  What I'm interested in is a kind of a universal communion.
• 19:15
  Again, I connect this with Christianity because communion is a meal around the death of God, right?
• 19:20
  So it's a meal around a shared fundamental loss.
• 19:24
  And what I'm interested in is developing that type of social bond where you find yourself you find yourself finding freedom and emancipation and connection, not through all having the same political and religious views, for example, but rather by realizing that all of us are by virtue of being human, experience some form of the trauma of being.
• 19:52
  So, yeah, so that comes out of this as well.
• 19:54
  This message and this approach is very counter kind of the message that we get in sacred and secular ways.
• 20:03
  Like really everywhere we turn, in terms of say social media is a great example, we're surrounded by the promise that we can get rid of this kind of dissatisfaction, that we can find a certainty.
• 20:16
  And again, it's it's everywhere that when psychoanalysis they call it the uncustrated other, that we see someone else who doesn't suffer like we do, and we're told, oh, we can also have that.
• 20:28
  And this can fuel resentments, jealousies, envies, sense of dissatisfaction in your life.
• 20:37
  Weirdly, the pursuit of happiness is a great thing to be able to do, but we also need the pursuit, the freedom from the pursuit of happiness, which means freedom from this frenetic pursuit of wholeness and completeness to kind of be able to enjoy this not having together.
• 20:54
  And so this is a very counterintuitive message.
• 20:57
  And I would say it's just very natural for us to want to escape the pain of being.
• 21:04
  The other thing I'll mention, by the way, and this is very important because I think a lot of people miss this.
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  In popular discourse, it's usually said that people are made up of biology and psychology, right?
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  So there's the biological, the body, and there's the psychological, the mind.
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  And in terms of biology, problems arise, such as disease and illness that can be, you know, fixed to some extent by doctors, medical doctors.
• 21:29
  And then there's the psychological, and the psychological is things like depression, you know, where that and that you can go to maybe some sort of counsellor to be to help with that.
• 21:39
  But there's a third level that is of interest theologically and existentially and psychoanalytically, and that is what's called the structural.
• 21:49
  And this is what is called this is where existentialism kicks in.
• 21:52
  And existentialism says that at the level of the body, there is disease, right?
• 21:58
  At the level of psychology, there's There's depression, but at the level of the existential, there is despair.
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  And so Sorin Kierkegaard, for example, in his wonderful book, Sickness Unto Death, he argues that you know, basically depression is contingent.
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  Some people are depressed, some people aren't.
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  Illness is contingent, some people are ill, some people aren't.
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  But existential despair is universal.
• 22:20
  That's the argument.
• 22:21
  And that's the theological argument as well.
• 22:23
  Someone like Paul Tillich is that to be human is to experience a certain amount of dissatisfaction and in despair, even if you don't know you're in despair.
• 22:34
  That's very key.
• 22:34
  Kierkegaard says most of us don't even know we're in despair, but we still are.
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  And that is the condition.
• 22:42
  And this for me is what kind of what I want to address is how do we live beyond this existential despair?
• 22:51
  How can we embrace life without avoiding or running away from this inherent lack that we all experience?
• 23:01
  Well, how do we do that?
• 23:04
  Here's the key.
• 23:05
  The key is, I would argue, is it's not an intellectual thing.
• 23:08
  We can we we can believe what I'm saying and we can go in our own lives, we see how things are dissatisfying, or we can not believe it.
• 23:17
  It doesn't matter.
• 23:18
  We can still act as if.
• 23:20
  So for example, so in Nietzsche's Madman, for example, who where this madman goes into a marketplace and starts shouting, God is dead, God is dead.
• 23:30
  Well, he starts by the way saying, Where is God?
• 23:32
  I'm looking for God, where is God?
• 23:34
  People begin to mock him.
• 23:36
  And then he says, God is dead and you have killed him.
• 23:39
  And in the parable, he's not talking to people who believe in God.
• 23:43
  He's talking to people who don't believe in God.
• 23:45
  And he's saying, You do not know what you've done.
• 23:48
  His blood is on your hands, you have loosed the earth from its sun, and you walk around as if nothing's happened.
• 23:54
  And really what Nietzsche is saying there is he's kind of saying that you might think that you've got rid of this religious notion of God, this religious notion of the God that fixes everything, but you still have that in your body, you still look for it in the way that you consume, in the way that you do relationships.
• 24:15
  It's almost like you know it in your head, but you haven't existentially felt it.
• 24:19
  The the interesting thing for me is to really experience the emancipatory power of lack, you need music and art and poetry and deep connection with others.
• 24:32
  And what I mean by that is if you've just had a breakup and you go to a nightclub and you get drunk and you listen to some pop music, that can help for a while.
• 24:43
  But then you come back, you have a hangover, you have to do it again.
• 24:46
  But if you say go to an Irish pub and instead of getting drunk, you have a drink.
• 24:51
  And instead of listening to some pop music, there's somebody in the corner who is singing some sad song about how he once loved and he lost his beloved to consumption and he'll never love again.
• 25:02
  Some depressing piece of music, right, being sung in the corner, and then you get talking to the old guy at the end of the bar, and you tell him your breakup, and he tells you about his tragic life, right?
• 25:16
  That liturgy that you've just had is one not in which you're told, Oh, you can overcome this pain, but where the pain is reflected in the symbolic, it's reflected in the music, it's reflected in that conversation with that old man.
• 25:34
  And the drink, instead of trying to get drunk to overcome the lack, you have a drink and maybe you're able to kind of talk more openly.
• 25:42
  And what I'm trying to say there is that weirdly, that's more powerful than going to the nightclub, where you try to avoid confronting the darkness and the pain.
• 25:52
  What we need in order to be able to experience this is a place where you go and you're immersed in music and art and spoken word, and you introject that into yourself, you symbolize it, and then you're freed.
• 26:11
  And for me, that is liturgy.
• 26:13
  So the liturgy of a radical church, and I I explained do something called Church of the Contradiction, but in a radical liturgy, that's what happens.
• 26:21
  You enter this service, you hear hymns that embrace doubt, unknowing, and complexity, you hear a sermon that poetically touches upon that lack.
• 26:32
  You basically see the crucified Christ.
• 26:35
  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
• 26:38
  You feel that, you interject that.
• 26:40
  And through that process, you begin to become freed from this frenetic pursuit of wholeness and completeness and find a way of being in it that is different.
• 26:54
  Wow, it's interesting that you would call that liturgy.
• 26:56
  There's something about sharing in the suffering.
• 26:59
  Yes.
• 26:59
  Communion over community.
• 27:01
  Is that what you mean?
• 27:03
  Yeah, I mean, I would say like so I would say that we all have community, right?
• 27:07
  Community is universal.
• 27:08
  That's again almost like a universal God.
• 27:10
  We all want something that so community is something we all get.
• 27:14
  And that might be we all like to play poker, we all like to go to a certain coffee shop, right?
• 27:20
  So I I'm kind of almost saying that community is very natural for us.
• 27:24
  The problem with community is so community has to be balanced with what's called the commons.
• 27:32
  The commons is where you encounter people who are different from you.
• 27:36
  So if community is about surrounding yourself with people who have some shared identity, then the commons is like a park or like going to a family gathering where there's like family members who you're very different from, or it's going to a public library.
• 27:52
  It's those spaces where you rub shoulders against people, not only who you disagree with, but who you disagree about what the disagreement is about.
• 28:02
  And that's very key.
• 28:03
  So what makes things difficult is not that you disagree with people, it's a double twist.
• 28:07
  You disagree about the about the very coordinates of how to understand the disagreement.
• 28:13
  Now, what has happened in society, I'll take COVID as one example, just in the sense of when we were all kind of in our own places and locked away, we didn't rub shoulders with people who were different from us as much, right?
• 28:27
  Because we we can't, we couldn't, we weren't able to.
• 28:30
  And the problem for that in society, uh, even if it was necessary, right?
• 28:35
  But the difficulty is we do need spaces where we rub up against the toxic other, the other who we think we don't like.
• 28:42
  That's actually where love occurs.
• 28:44
  In in in dating apps, for example, you're always looking for people who have the same interests or whatever.
• 28:50
  But real love stories, if you look at Romeo and Julia, you look at any great love stories, it's often two people who are completely different, who clash together, and through the difference, they something incredible happens and they become attracted not to the sameness of the other, but the otherness of the other.
• 29:08
  So the commons is what happens, whereas I say we rub shoulders with others, but increasingly in modern society we have community and we have less spaces of the commons.
• 29:21
  Now, the third thing I want to talk about is communion.
• 29:25
  So the three C's community, the commons, and communion.
• 29:29
  So if if community is a social bond forged around shared identity, beliefs, obstacles, and enemies, and the commons is not a social bond.
• 29:40
  It's simply a space where you bump into people who are different potentially from you, then communion is what's called the negation of negation.
• 29:49
  It is a social bond forged on negativity itself.
• 29:53
  It's a social bond forged around the sense in which we all experience doubt, unknowing, and complexity, mystery.
• 30:02
  And it's a binding to mystery, a binding to absolute otherness.
• 30:08
  It's a showing of vulnerability.
• 30:10
  And this is very key because in in Sorin Kierkegaard, this is a good example, actually.
• 30:15
  He talks about the work of love.
• 30:17
  For him, love is not psychological.
• 30:19
  There's psychological dimensions to love, and you can talk about Eros or whatever, but but there's a type of love that is not about liking a person, it's not about them making you feel good or anything like that.
• 30:31
  It's where you give the gift of your vulnerability to the other, and they give that gift of vulnerability to you.
• 30:39
  So in a room, for example, you say, My name is Peter, and here is here is my wound, and they say their name and they say this is my wound.
• 30:49
  And and so you could say that in that moment where you give the gift of each other's wound, you're loving the other.
• 30:56
  Doesn't mean you like them.
• 30:57
  You might think they're an asshole, you might think their politics is awful, you might think all it's but in that act of sharing your vulnerability, your lack with the other, and them sharing their lack with you, I would say there is there is a work of love.
• 31:11
  And when we do that, we create a stronger social bond within society.
• 31:17
  So it's not so much com communion is over community, but that if we don't have communion and if we don't have the commons, then community becomes tribalism and becomes all-out civil war.
• 31:30
  It seems like if we allow judgment into that formula and what you're describing, that's where you start having problems, where you start judging people for their wounds.
• 31:39
  Yes.
• 31:40
  I think maybe that's why in scriptures it's so emphatic that we don't judge, that we love and we accept.
• 31:48
  If we do that, then we can come to this place of communion where we can actually share our wounds.
• 31:53
  That's beautifully said.
• 31:54
  And and this is why within Christianity, one of, you know, I obviously I Christiana have got a lot of affinity with here, grace.
• 32:02
  So grace is kind of like the opposite of self-help.
• 32:06
  So in self-help, what what's happening is you're at A and you want to get to B.
• 32:12
  So A is maybe you're single and you want to have a relationship, or A is you haven't written a book and you want to write a book, whatever it is.
• 32:19
  And self-help kind of is what it is about helping you get from A to B.
• 32:24
  And you engage your will and you get advice and all of that.
• 32:27
  And that's all great.
• 32:28
  Again, there's nothing wrong with that.
• 32:29
  We all need a bit of advice from time to time.
• 32:31
  But grace is radically different because grace does not say that you should get from A to B.
• 32:37
  Grace says you're at A, that's okay.
• 32:40
  Right?
• 32:40
  You you're accepted.
• 32:42
  But ironically, by staying at A and just kind of contemplating, which what's the Moon Vei would call contemplation rather than will.
• 32:52
  So will gets you from A to B.
• 32:54
  Contemplation, you stay at A.
• 32:56
  In grace, where you're able to simply be and then look at yourself, experience forgiveness from others, and to be able to potentially not judge yourself, you're actually able to see the various barriers that are stopping you from achieving maybe what you want to achieve.
• 33:14
  And so ironically, and we can't get into the mechanism here, maybe we can't have got time, but ironically, grace is more effective at moving you than will.
• 33:23
  Because weirdly, grace and saying you don't have to do anything, you're accepted, you show your wound around other people who also show their wounds, that allows you to lower your defenses and allows change to happen.
• 33:39
  So one example of this is AA.
• 33:41
  Although AA is famous for the 12 steps, there is the one thing that the first step they don't talk about really is step zero.
• 33:50
  And what I call step zero is simply being a room, being in a room of people who don't ask you to change, who just say, like, if you want to say your name and say you're an alcoholic, great.
• 34:00
  If you don't, if you feel you can't say that, you can just pass.
• 34:03
  But step zero is a space in which you're just radically accepted for who you are.
• 34:08
  And I think that's actually what allows the 12 steps to be effective, is that experience of radical grace where you can just be honest.
• 34:18
  Yeah, I think in a lot of religion, because it is so much of us trying to earn our way to God, we tend to hide our wounds and and hide our shortcomings.
• 34:27
  We don't have these moments of sharing in our suffering.
• 34:30
  We have these moments of presenting a person that doesn't have the suffering.
• 34:35
  Yes.
• 34:35
  Yes.
• 34:36
  So we ironically, because in Christianity, this is the the major innovation of Christianity, really, is a God who experiences existential alienation.
• 34:45
  So that's that's quite a radical move.
• 34:47
  And, you know, there's a few reasons why that probably happened.
• 34:50
  One of them being the early church having to, or the early Christians having to try to turn this tragedy into a victory or whatever.
• 34:57
  But but what we end up with is an image of Christ.
• 35:02
  And in Catholicism you see this very strongly, is in the crucifixion of Christ crucified, wounded, experiencing not just psycho not just bodily pain, right?
• 35:13
  So there's the biological, he's his body is suffering, not just psychological pain, there is psychological anguish, but also existential alienation.
• 35:22
  Then my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
• 35:24
  So you have all three.
• 35:26
  You have the bodily suffering, you have the psychological suffering, but more fundamentally you have this what's called ontological suffering.
• 35:33
  And that's a radical move within Christianity that actually I don't think has been fully grasped by what I call the confessional church.
• 35:42
  That this is the salvatory move, is that that in a way, what I and someone like Viesel writes about this beautifully with the where is God when when during it was in a concentration camp, three children are three men and a child, I think, are executed for trying to escape the concentration camp.
• 36:03
  And as they're being hung, someone is asking, Where is God?
• 36:07
  And Viesel, as he's looking at this child struggling between life and death, because he's lighter than the others, he's not dead instantly.
• 36:15
  And he says, There's God hanging on the gallows.
• 36:18
  That there's a sense in which we're we've got an image of God as one who suffers and is in the suffering, and there's something very, very powerful about that.
• 36:28
  So, yeah, that's that's this existential insight, which by the way, you see again in psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis is different from psychology, it's different from depth psychology, analytic psychology.
• 36:41
  In psychoanalysis, the purpose is not to better orient you to the world, better integrate you into your relationships or anything like that.
• 36:51
  It is about helping you enjoy the fact that you're in the world but not of it, to enjoy that you're a weirdo, to enjoy that you don't fit.
• 36:59
  So, psychoanalysis, the cure is really where you try to overcome your basically, you go to analysis because you want to get fixed in some way, you think you're broken or whatever.
• 37:08
  And in psychoanalysis, you just go into deeper and deeper dimensions of your dividedness as a subject.
• 37:14
  And the cure is when you're able to enjoy your not at oneness.
• 37:20
  And again, this is I so this mimics the Christian salvatory move where salvation is in identifying with the alienated other.
• 37:32
  When Jesus resurrects from the tomb, it's his scars that speak.
• 37:36
  You know, it's Thomas that has to touch the scars.
• 37:39
  But there's nothing Jesus is going to be able to say to convince Thomas of this is the way, he has to touch the scars because that is our communion with the divine.
• 37:49
  It's it's in the scars, it's in our suffering.
• 37:51
  Yes, yes, absolutely.
• 37:53
  And and interestingly, so Christianity comes to this idea of an inherent scar, right, within the absolute.
• 38:02
  That's a very profound idea that is first developed, it theologically is developed by Luther, and then philosophically by Hegel, and then existentially by people like Nietzsche.
• 38:14
  But the the idea is that that's actually a precursor to the modern world.
• 38:20
  So within the modern sciences, we also come to this idea that reality is not at one with itself.
• 38:27
  So if the name for reality, ultimate reality not being at one with itself is the crucified Christ, right?
• 38:35
  That's the religious name for this, then you see this happening in other disciplines.
• 38:39
  So in mathematics, for example, Girdles Incompleteness Theorem shows that mathematics, when it is sufficiently complex, uh falls into a type of contradiction where there's something that's true and not provable.
• 38:52
  In biology, the not-at-on-eness of the biological organism with itself is called evolution, evolutionary theory.
• 38:59
  In but in politics, the not at oneness of the social body with itself is called democracy, right?
• 39:06
  It generates democracy.
• 39:07
  In physics, kind of wave particle duality is, in a sense, the non-at-on-ness of material reality with itself.
• 39:15
  In psychoanalysis, the unconscious is the name for the non-at-on-eness of consciousness with itself.
• 39:20
  So there's a weird way in which this notion of ontological wound is not simply a religious notion.
• 39:28
  It's also a notion that you find in different registers within whenever, basically, when a science comes to enough maturity, it discovers this ontological wound.
• 39:41
  There is a woundedness to reality.
• 39:43
  What I would simply argue is that the the kind of I think the privileged name for this is the crucified Christ.
• 39:50
  As in, that's a first sight where this idea really comes into being.
• 39:54
  You don't really have it before before that.
• 39:58
  God is not lacking.
• 40:01
  Generally in religion, the idea of the one thing that can't die is God.
• 40:06
  The funny thing is, in philosophy, there's a notion that God, not only can God not die, God necessarily exists.
• 40:13
  So God kind of God cannot in any way not exist.
• 40:18
  There can be no death in God.
• 40:20
  The traditional religious notion of God is fundamentally opposed to the idea that the absolute is asymmetrical with itself.
• 40:29
  But that's exactly what I think the radical reading of Christianity argues.
• 40:33
  And you know, Kierkegaard, he has a very precise definition of faith, and he spends a lot of time arguing for it, right?
• 40:43
  But if I boiled it down, he basically is saying faith is this, and he kind of says it's madness.
• 40:51
  It's a kind of it sounds crazy when you say it.
• 40:54
  It's the it is the absolute renunciation of the world, of what makes your world valuable, and the act uh and simultaneously the absolute embrace of the world.
• 41:05
  And so it's not like so, faith is not, it's a form of of absolutely living, enjoying, being, while at the same time embracing absolute renunciation and absolute loss.
• 41:17
  You know, Kiergore says it's kind of easy to do one or the other.
• 41:20
  Like sometimes people avoid despair by losing themselves in the crowd and getting drunk and doing stuff, and you try and avoid depression.
• 41:29
  He says, and then there are the better movement.
• 41:32
  Because here's the funny thing is often when I lived in LA, they talked about spirituality as something good, right?
• 41:38
  So like religious experience is something wonderful, which I always find very funny because you know, things like you would go to the mountaintop or you'd have an ayahuasca experience, it'd be wonderful.
• 41:46
  And it's almost like spiritual experiences like this.
• 41:49
  Within Christianity, there's this notion of really religious experience is horrific.
• 41:54
  It's crucifixion, it's what uh Lacan calls subjective destitution.
• 41:58
  Religious experience absolutely ruptures your life, right?
• 42:01
  And Kiergar got this that for him, the higher path from kind of losing yourself even in in good things, right, is the person who experiences, he calls it the night of infinite resignation.
• 42:15
  The knight of infinite resignation is someone who experiences the pointlessness of the world.
• 42:20
  They don't try to hide from it, they absolutely embrace it.
• 42:23
  That's higher spiritually for Kierkegaard, and it's worse, but it's higher.
• 42:27
  But but the but the beyond of that is what he calls the knight of faith.
• 42:32
  And the knight of faith is the one who can absolutely embrace renunciation, absolutely go through crucifixion, and yet absolutely embrace the world and embrace the beauty of it and the kind of the the return of what is lost.
• 42:48
  That's that was his definition of faith.
• 42:50
  He got it from Abraham and Isaac and all of that.
• 42:53
  But that's that's the type of life that that I'm explaning to help people walk into, which is not a joy that comes from escaping the difficulties and the pain of life, but a joy that actually comes out of fully facing that, fully embracing the horror.
• 43:13
  And Paul Tillich talked about this in the Courage Debate.
• 43:15
  It sounds crazy.
• 43:16
  It's like the last thing you want to do is go into the darkness.
• 43:20
  But in dialectics, so dialectics is this idea that when you're you've got two options in front of you, light and darkness, for example, we all want to go to the light.
• 43:30
  But the dialectic says no, you go into the dark, and only when you go into the dark will you find the light.
• 43:36
  It's the idea that if you want life or death, you go into death, and it's only in death that you will find life.
• 43:42
  It's so counterintuitive that it's almost impossible for us to grasp.
• 43:46
  But again, in psychoanalysis, the idea is you don't go to a psychoanalyst and they say, Oh, do some positive affirmations, right?
• 43:53
  They would do that if it worked, right?
• 43:54
  But what they do is they go, Oh, you're here because you don't want to go into that basement with all those monsters.
• 44:00
  Well, you know what?
• 44:01
  Annoyingly, I'm going to push you into that basement.
• 44:03
  And together we're going to look at those monsters.
• 44:05
  And you go, well, are they being sadistic?
• 44:07
  Maybe they are, right?
• 44:08
  But it's because they know that only by going into that basement full of the monsters can you find freedom and life.
• 44:16
  So, counterintuitive as it sounds, it's like into the darkness of despair, embracing that fully can give birth to a type of life that is that is full of joy and meaning.
• 44:30
  And I think that is life and life in all its fullness.
• 44:33
  That reminds me of the Desert Father and Mothers.
• 44:35
  They called it the noonday devil, that they go into the cell in isolation and they it's kind of embracing suffering to find life.
• 44:43
  Yes.
• 44:44
  But yet they are famous for what they were able to do in helping other people.
• 44:48
  They became kind of fully synthesized and dying to self, that they could find peace in their suffering.
• 44:54
  And then from there, they became something that was useful to humanity.
• 44:59
  Yes.
• 44:59
  How we share in the suffering and we grow from the suffering to become something better, more evolved, that without adversity, we can't grow.
• 45:07
  Yeah, yeah.
• 45:08
  And it's great that you're bringing in the mystics, which I know you're you're influenced by the mystics, and my some of my early work was in the mystics, is that they have that dialectic.
• 45:16
  The mystics are a version of what I'm talking about in an historical moment.
• 45:23
  But some of the greatest mystics, they absolutely understood the dark night of the soul, the cloud of unknowing.
• 45:28
  You know, Meister Eckhart, probably the greatest of the mystics, who said, I pray God rid me of God, was is a similar movement.
• 45:36
  Only by getting rid of God can God appear.
• 45:39
  Only by going into the darkness can there be life.
• 45:42
  Light.
• 45:42
  And this this is a difficult.
• 45:45
  This is why, by the way, I keep coming back to liturgy.
• 45:48
  And the reason why I believe in liturgy is because it's so hard to do that we need the poets and the artists and the musicians and the great sermons that help us to be able to kind of enter into this experience that it's just so hard to do otherwise.
• 46:08
  The problem is there is a liturgy that is designed to cover over this, to kind of prevent.
• 46:15
  It's like a nightlight liturgy, I would say.
• 46:17
  It's like it's a dark night of the soul, but with the night light switched on, right?
• 46:21
  The liturgy is designed to kind of like you know comfort you.
• 46:24
  It's not designed to kind of bring you into that space of darkness, to that space of the cry, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
• 46:31
  And I understand why that liturgy exists.
• 46:34
  And I think there's a more powerful secular version of that liturgy today, but I understand why that liturgy exists.
• 46:41
  But I want to provide a liturgy that actually helps people walk into that darkness.
• 46:47
  And this is the radical reading of Christianity that I'm interested in.
• 46:52
  I like that.
• 46:54
  What would you leave people with, a final thought?
• 46:57
  Oh, yeah, that's a good one.
• 46:59
  I suppose in relation to you know everything we're saying, I just the hope is this.
• 47:05
  Like I I would almost say it's like the good news that we think is if I was saying to people, you can be whole, you can be happy, you know, you can find something that will fully satisfy you, you can find a relationship without antagonism.
• 47:21
  You can communicate who you are to others without misunderstanding.
• 47:26
  You can be a subject in the world who's not de-centered by other people, right?
• 47:32
  And and that's the good news.
• 47:33
  And that will sound wonderful, right?
• 47:35
  But that's bad news because the more you try to find the object that satisfies, the more dissatisfied you feel.
• 47:42
  The more you try to seek a non-antagonistic relationship, the more antagonisms arise and the more problems arise.
• 47:49
  And weirdly, in pursuing a certainty and satisfaction, you become more dissatisfied and uncertain.
• 47:56
  So what I'm would love to leave your listeners with is the idea that this sounds like bad news, right?
• 48:04
  Like that life is difficult and you don't have the answers.
• 48:07
  Come to the front.
• 48:09
  That ultra call sounds like bad news.
• 48:11
  But what I want to say is, no, it's good news.
• 48:13
  The good news is we're all divided, alienated, struggling.
• 48:18
  There are contingent struggles that are worse for some people and others, but even when everything is great, there is the struggle of being, the struggle of being human.
• 48:27
  And that is not just the struggle that you and I have, it's also woven into reality itself.
• 48:34
  And as we can connect with that lack in the other, we can that we rob that lack of its sting in ourselves.
• 48:44
  And when that lack is robbed of its sting, we can live in a more beautiful, free way.
• 48:51
  Not necessarily a happier life.
• 48:53
  This is not the this is not uh an advert for happiness and satisfaction.
• 48:58
  It's simply saying that one can enjoy one's being in the world, find meaning and purpose in the struggle and the difficulties, and truly know what it is to live before death.
• 49:11
  If people want to connect with you, how do they do that?
• 49:14
  Yeah, so there's lots of stuff online, YouTube.
• 49:17
  I've got I do monthly talks.
• 49:19
  First Sunday of every month, there's a free talk online.
• 49:21
  Obviously, social media, I do stuff there.
• 49:24
  So I do lots of free things.
• 49:25
  And then if people like that, then I do like a lot of book studies and stuff online through Patreon.
• 49:32
  But as I say, if people are just looking for more of this content, just go on to say my YouTube and you'll find hundreds of hours of material.
• 49:39
  Yeah, we'll put links in the episode.
• 49:41
  Oh, thank you.
• 49:41
  Pete, thank you so much.
• 49:43
  I appreciate it.
• 49:44
  This has been fantastic, and thank you for your time.
• 49:47
  And I hope to get to talk to you again very soon.
• 49:50
  I appreciate it.
• 49:51
  And listen, real honor to be invited onto the show.
• 49:53
  Really appreciate that.
• 49:54
  Thank you.
• 49:55
  Thank you, Pete.
• 49:57
  I think it's easy for us to get carried away in the idea that we are constantly in a posture of asking God for relief in our suffering.
• 50:08
  And that today was a reminder that God came down with us in our suffering, and that is where we find hope.
• 50:16
  Guys, follow, share, thank you.
• 50:19
  I'll see you again next week.