Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Christ is risen! He truly is risen! Good evening. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi is taking your calls tonight, which we will get to in the second part of our show.

So the word “blessing” is probably one of the most nebulous religious terms of our time. People say, “God bless you,” when you sneeze, and Christian celebrities showing off their wealth do so with “#blessed.” A lot of the time the word “blessings” just seems to mean “good stuff.” What about cursing? Is that just bad juju? So what exactly is a blessing, or a curse? Are these just religious-sounding synonyms for good or bad things? What does it mean when God blesses or curses? What does it mean when the Scriptures tell us to bless God? How does that even work? Do the blesses and curses of human beings actually do anything? Is this some kind of Christian magic?

So this is what we’re talking about tonight. And does this mean that especially since it’s allergy season, here in eastern Pennsylvania, this is the one episode where I’m allowed to sneeze on the air? What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes, but you’re only allowed to sneeze twice in a row.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: If you sneeze a third time or more, you’re milking it and just trying to draw attention to yourself. [Laughter] And we have to have a discussion about humility.

Fr. Andrew: There are people who—and I’m not one of them, but there are people who have, like, massive—a huge number of successive sneezes in a row: bam, bam, bam. Like, it is a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah, I’m not talking about that, like that woman on That’s Incredible. Remember, with John Davidson and Fran Tarkenton?

Fr. Andrew: Wow! I haven’t seen…

Fr. Stephen: Who sneezed for, like, seven years straight or something? I mean, there are outliers.

Fr. Andrew: Our first ‘80s pop-culture reference for the night!

Fr. Stephen: But your average local parishioner does not need to sneeze more than twice in a row, and if they really do, they can politely excuse themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Well, maybe I should have technical difficulties tonight. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’d be different!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! We could try that! [Laughter] Sorry, Fr. Andrew’s having technical difficulties while he goes and sneezes because of the pollen. All right, well, we are talking about blessings. We’re not starting with Genesis, though, this time, or Çatalhöyük, but Deuteronomy.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, not that we couldn’t. We are going to hit up Ugarit later on in the episode.

Fr. Andrew: As one does.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but not right here at the beginning. We’re actually beginning at the end—of the Torah, not the end of the Bible. We’re not beginning backwards. We’re beginning at the end of the Torah, in Deuteronomy 28-30, which most people have not read or heard publicly a whole lot, but which everyone should hear more. And for our fellow clergy out there, it really preaches, throwing out the how it begins when God says, “Today I lay before you life and death, blessings and curses: Choose.” I mean, that preaches. You can work with that.

Fr. Andrew: I think that would be good for a wedding sermon. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Or a baptism. So there’s sort of a hackneyed way this gets read, or sort of shortened when it is read, and then there’s sort of a deeper way, and hopefully we’re going to… We’ll start out with the sort of hackneyed way, and we’ll go a little deeper. So the hackneyed way is basically: If you obey the commandments, good stuff will happen to you, and if you disobey the commandments, bad stuff will happen to you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, this is a narrative you see all over the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or at least the sort of hackneyed version of it. This is Job’s friends: Job’s friends showing up and saying, “Hey, all this bad stuff happened to you. You must have done something awful, man, to deserve all this.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, was it like that tower that fell on people? Where was that? “Do you suppose these were all worse sinners than everyone else in that city, because the tower fell on them?”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I once knew a man who preached on that text the Sunday after 9/11 happened.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, whoa!

Fr. Stephen: I said, “You, sir, are bold.” Not recommended.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Wow!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so that is a way, and I say it’s a hackneyed way, but you will find some very sophisticated biblical interpreters basically taking that skim on the Old Testament, saying that’s how the Old Testament works: if you do good stuff, good stuff happens to you; if you do bad stuff, bad stuff happens to you. This is basically the secret. “Put good stuff out into the world, and good stuff comes back to you; and bad stuff and bad stuff.” But that’s not really what’s going on in Deuteronomy.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because bad things do happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Yes, the rain falls on the righteous and on the unrighteous, and that’s not just a new revelation in the New Testament: the aforementioned book of Job.

So we sort of ended up, last time, talking about the sense in which the commandments—the commandments of Scripture—have life in them, and what that means: that it’s by actually doing, by putting the Scriptures into practice, that we find sort of life in abundance. And this is the sense in which we see the blessings of the covenant, the blessings which come for keeping the commandments, which come in relation to keeping the commandments, is in this sense, that the commandments have life in them. And then the opposite, then, is what we find in the curses, so that “curse” is sort of… If a blessing is life, a curse is like anti-life; it’s the opposite: so death, corruption, all of these things.

We see this in sort of one of the… I mean, these are obviously—we’re not going to read all three chapters, but when you read these, one of the main contrasts—we’re dealing with an agrarian society, so people are farming—so in the forefront of the blessings is: The rain will come in its season. The ground will be fertile for your crops. Things will grow; there will be life in that sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s why people often read this as: “If you do good things, then good things happen to you,” because that is a reading. It’s a very flat reading, but it is… Those connections are being made.

Fr. Stephen: But that having a life in good order sort of produces, then, life. So then that’s contrasted in the curses with this curse situation of the sky being like iron and the ground being like bronze.

Fr. Andrew: Which is just great imagery for farming not working, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, flat grey sky, bronze ground: nothing’s growing out of it; no rain’s coming from it. And so that is the way in which death and corruption sort of spiral from bad order or false order. It’s not a complete descent into chaos, but there’s actually a sort of negative order or an evil order, a tyrannical order like slavery. And that kind of order does not produce life; it produces corruption and death: it produces the opposite. And so these are the two sets of images that are set up here, and you can see from that example we just gave about the crops and the sky and the ground that this has to do with the relationship between humans and the cosmos, the world, the universe, the creation. That this is about how humans live in creation, and that human activity in creation then bringing about either this abundance of life or the sort of corruption, the sort of anti-life corruption.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which just connects back to the mission that God gives Adam and Eve back in Genesis, to fill the earth and to cultivate it. That’s the task, so they can either cultivate it well, or they can mess it up, but either way humans are going to affect the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the good order that humans can produce is an order that’s in harmony with the order of the cosmos as God created it, and that’s what’s found in keeping the commandments. This is a way to live in the world which is harmonious with the order which God put into the world, and therefore is conducive of life. And then, of course, the opposite is true. When human activity operates against the order which God has put into creation, it’s destructive both of humanity and of the rest of the created order around human persons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because man is not an island. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So later on in the Scriptures, when it talks about “the curse of the law,” it’s talking about Deuteronomy 29-30, because remember the law here is the Torah: the curse of the Torah. This is it, here at the end, the curse of the Torah—which have come upon humanity, through humanity not keeping the commandments. And these are actual consequences. This isn’t just: “Well, everything’s fine from our perspective, but God is really mad, off somewhere.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not like we’ve been declared guilty because… It’s an actual existential harm that’s being done, like living against the way that the Torah says you should live actually does hurt you, and it does hurt the world. Like you said, it’s not just God being mad that you broke his rules that don’t actually do anything or connect to anything.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s that this has produced this state of corruption and death, in ourselves and in the world around us, through our wickedness and our evil activity. And so a person who is in this state of curse is a person who is then alienated from the rest of the creation, from his community, from his family, from himself, from God—because all of those things represent at least a potential harmony, and so when our actions are disharmony, we alienate ourselves from all of those things.

And so we talked before about how everything in creation is connected in this web of relationships, and that is sort of what gives it its identity. So when that web of relationships is fractured and that harmony is broken, things become twisted and become other than what they are. So that part of what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about blessing, is blessing over against that cursed state. So blessing always involves a certain level of reconciliation, of reconnection, where those points of alienation have taken place.

Fr. Andrew: Putting things back in order.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because blessing is when that web of relations is affirmed, when it is tight and everything’s working. This is closely related to the idea we’ve talked about of justice, where we’ve talked about how justice is everything in the right place and working correctly, whereas blessing and curse focuses not so much on the overarching order but on that web of relationships that makes it up, that constitutes it; that constitutes the bigger overall order.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s about harmony, not just order itself. It’s about the harmony of the order, or the harmony connected to the order.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that makes it up, that constitutes it. So it’s like looking at a salt crystal would be like talking at justice, and looking at a salt molecule would be talking about blessing and cursing in this web of relationships that make up the crystal, in their proper portions and connected properly.

Fr. Andrew: Got you. So I imagine that one question that some people might have would be: Is this the same thing as natural law? Like there’s this whole natural law tradition, particularly in Western Christianity… I mean, we don’t need to go too deep into it, but I imagine some people are just thinking: Okay, is that exactly what we’re just talking about?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You know, I said something nice about Thomas Aquinas last time… [Laughter] This isn’t really aimed at him. Before the natural law concept—the natural law concept is really a product of Western Christianity, because it’s combining two previous concepts. One of those concepts is the idea of divine law, which really arises in the West as such. We’ve talked about this before, about St. Jerome’s translation using the word lex to refer to the Torah. And so the idea of God, then, as law-giver, as promulgating laws, that was combined with Aristotle’s idea of natural right.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so explain that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that comes out of the eudaimonian ethics. And Aristotle’s idea of natural right is basically that there’s an order in the world and the cosmos, that order he sees primarily but not exclusively as being teleological; it’s being what things are aimed at, the purpose. Everything has a purpose. Everything has a purpose, and everything has sort of a mature form. So the acorn is growing into the oak tree; that there’s sort of an aim and a goal and a purpose for everything, that all of those, taken together, constitute a harmony, and therefore, for any given thing—we’ll use humans. So for a human, there is this telos, this end, this mature form of a human, what a human could be, and therefore anything that a human does which aims at that and is conducive to that is sort of naturally right, and the right thing to do. And anything which pulls you away from that is wrong. So you can see how, when you take that and the idea of God as law-giver, you get the idea of natural law; you get the idea that the law is sort of written into the nature of things.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: But what we’re talking about is not identical with, but more like what Aristotle was talking about, in that there is this correct relationship based on the nature of any given thing. God created the nature of everything in this; God created human nature. And human nature has qualities to it, and therefore since it has qualities, those qualities have—can be excellent or they can be deficient. So a chair can be good at holding and supporting people or bad at it, and based on that you say it’s a good chair or a bad chair, on how well it fulfills its role. And so the same thing is kind of true with humanity. Human nature, of course, has a special destiny in God that we’ll be talking about as we continue tonight. We’re a little different than a chimp, or even than an animal, but the idea there is sort of the same, that humanity—a human person is created to become something, and therefore the path that leads there is sort of the blessed path, the correctly ordered path.

And so before we get more into blessing and develop out more what we were just saying, we’ve got to do a little ground-clearing and a little bit of deconstruction on, as you mentioned in your intro, some of the ways in which the term “blessing” and “blessings” gets used in our modern culture. Not so much the sneezing thing. We’ll leave that alone for now; we’ve covered that.

Fr. Andrew: #blessed.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. So other ways.

Fr. Andrew: Next time someone says, “God bless you,” when I sneeze, I think I’m going to sneeze, I think I’m going to say, “#blessed.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You do that, and they’ll groan, and they’ll move on with their lives. They’ll be okay, but…

Fr. Andrew: It’ll be a minor but slightly amusing joke.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] “Blessings” gets used a lot by some of our friends who have, wittingly or unwittingly, desiringly or unawaredly, fallen into the prosperity gospel trap.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Come out from them! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And this includes more… I mean, there’s a gross form of this that we’ve all seen. A person who shall not be named, because he is deceased and it would be mean to pick on him, once on TBN gave one of the greatest sermons of all time on the four horsemen of the apocalypse. He said that he had had a vision and seen the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and that Christ’s return was near. And the four horsemen of the apocalypse were getting ready to ride out in his vision, and they were chomping at the bit to ride out, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and their hooves were churnin’ at the ground; they were churnin’ at the ground in heaven, heaven with the streets of gold! And as they’re churnin’ at the ground there in heaven in the streets of gold, flakes of that gold were falling down from heaven and landing in the checking accounts of people who donated to TBN.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, this is a thing, though! Some of these preachers, they’ll have these glitter bombs that are up in the rafters that are gold dust or whatever, miraculous gold… I mean, we’re not—we’re not making this stuff up!

Fr. Stephen: So that’s the gross version. That’s the gross version, and we can all look at that and say, “Like, what?” There are more subtle, way more subtle versions of this, though, where people kind of are like Job’s friends, and so if someone is well-to-do and successful at the moment, then, hey, they must be doing everything right; they must be holy people; they must be moral people. If somebody’s not doing so well—

Fr. Andrew: Marks of election, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And the opposite is true. If they’ve fallen on hard times, it must be because they’re lazy or whatever, whatever, whatever. And this is not a new thing; this is not an American thing. This has been going on forever, because St. John Chrysostom chews his people out about doing this, about judging the poor. So this has been a constant thing. And this is—essentially what this boils down to, the whole problem is that it equates blessings with stuff. It used to be money, blessings with money. Now that we’re in late-stage capitalism, it’s stuff: junk, having lots of stuff.

Fr. Andrew: So I can’t “count my blessings, name them one by one”?

Fr. Stephen: You could hypothetically, but if it’s a list of objects you own in your house, then you need to start over, start your list over. [Laughter] And blessing isn’t stuff; blessing is a relational category, as we were just saying. It’s a state in which you are.

Fr. Andrew: Blessedness.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you’re in a state of blessedness, or you are accursèd, which no one wants to say, and you shouldn’t go around saying, probably.

Fr. Andrew: And not a popular hashtag! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, #anathematized. [Laughter] Yeah, you don’t want to say that. Because generally the people who are in that state don’t generally realize it, or don’t want to admit it. So then what is the relationship with stuff? Because there is this sort of—it’s not really attention, but people will call it attention in the Bible, where they’ll point at figures in the Old Testament, like Abraham or Job, who are described as having sort of all this wealth, as sort of a mark of their favor with God. And at the same time, you get to the New Testament, and Jesus doesn’t say a lot of nice things about rich people.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: Other than: “Give all of your money to the poor and become one of my disciples.” And so people will just treat that as attention or what have you, or they’ll say that’s a difference between the Old and New Testament; in the Old Testament blessings were material and now they’re spiritual, something like that, sort of quasi-Marcionite kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: That’s how you escape being in the prosperity gospel. You say, “Oh, it’s about spiritual blessings now.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so there’s kind of a chicken-and-an-egg issue here. So the problem is that the one side says, “Well, you’ve gotten stuff; therefore you’re blessed,” whereas what we’re talking about is: No, you’re blessed; you’re living a life keeping the commandments of Christ. You’re living a life in harmony with God and your neighbor and your family and your community, and because of that, there is life that’s happening, and sometimes that life includes stuff, but life does not consist of stuff.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No.

Fr. Stephen: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away: blessed be the name of the Lord.” The stuff can come and go, but as long as you’re living in that harmonious state—this is part of what the book of Job is about—whether they come or they go, the stuff, that harmony remains; that state of blessedness remains. And you can lose all your stuff and still be living in harmony with God and his creation and your fellow human beings, and then you’re not cursed. Or you could have all the stuff and be alienated from God and alienated from your family and alienated from your community and from the world, the natural world, and sit in your palace of stuff, all alone, and be cursed.

It’s interesting. As technology and everything progresses in our contemporary world, it gets less and less hard for people to imagine how someone with all the stuff could be lonely and alienated and miserable.

Fr. Andrew: Sure, just think about people with the psychological problem of being hoarders. They are surrounded with their stuff, and yet they’re destroying their relationships; they’re destroying their lives. They’ve got plenty of stuff, way more than they could ever use, that’s all rotting on their shelves.

Fr. Stephen: Or even the celebrity, the rich guy.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So yeah. And these bad understandings of what blessings are and what blessing is—one of the places where you really see the rub of that is that the sort of historic Christian understanding of asceticism makes no sense with it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, give everything up. Why would you do that if blessings equals stuff? The most blessed person should be the person with the most stuff. And in Orthodox tradition, some of our—most of our highest, highest saints were people who were utterly impoverished from the world’s point of view, and in many places gave it up very voluntarily.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but even—even… And I mean, this isn’t just— I’m going to briefly defend our Protestant friends here. There are certain levels and types of asceticism that got jettisoned pretty fast. I mean, old Luther went and married a nun. [Laughter] But if you look at, for example, the Reformed traditions, the Calvinist traditions, they were very strongly against the spending of money. You were to work hard, and having success in your hard work was seen as a mark of God’s favor and even a mark of election in the Calvinist understanding, but people who went out and profligately spent money—on clothes, on houses, on cars, that kind of thing—were… That was taken to be the opposite; that was taken to be a mark of… That profligacy was seen to be a mark of reprobation, and so you did not do that. And that is a type of asceticism.

Fr. Andrew: Of course.

Fr. Stephen: If you have a million dollars in the bank but you’re driving a 30-year-old car and you own one suit that you wear to church on Sunday, that’s a kind of asceticism that gets practiced. So it’s not just “Oh, Protestants don’t get asceticism,” but if you go even in Reformed circles today, for example, you don’t find as much of that as you used to, in the United States, for example. Even the places where that was that kind of— I mean, you find—Baptist groups in the United States: you don’t drink, you don’t smoke. There were certain…

Fr. Andrew: “Don’t smoke, drink, or chew, or date girls that do.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. If you’re going to—if you absolutely have to dance, at gunpoint, you leave room for the Holy Spirit in between you and your partner.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. It’s all true, folks; it’s all true.

Fr. Stephen: But again, all of that is going away now. All of that is going away now. And it’s even getting, like in the United States… I mean, it’s mostly been bleached out of Roman Catholic life, fasting during Lent even, and it’s working on it in the Orthodox Church, too. No one’s immune to this. And it’s because, fundamentally—again, good old late-stage capitalism we’re experiencing now has sort of reduced what a human person is to just a desiring thing, just a bundle of desires that are marketed to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which works its way out in numerous ways. It’s not just about stuff. Like the great—like what is— I was about to say, “What is love?” and everyone’s going to go—

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: “Baby, don’t hurt me!”

Fr. Andrew: Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: “Don’t hurt me.”

Fr. Andrew: But what is love considered to be? It’s considered to be authentic desire. That’s what it comes down to: Do I really desire this person? Do I really want them? Do I really want to be with them?

Fr. Stephen: And do they meet my needs? The emotional needs or whatever other needs.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is part of what’s behind so much of the confusion about gender identities and deviant sexuality—all of this stuff is, as you say, based on this idea that human beings are basically just desires. And so if you are— Then the key is to correctly identify your desires, and once you’ve correctly identified them, then go be that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, then go consume that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right.

Fr. Stephen: Consume that in the never-ending quest to satisfy that desire. And the reason our culture has done that to humanity is it serves the ends, because once you’re just a bunch of desires and consumption is the answer to those desires, then you can be marketed to, and that’s what the entire advertising industry has done now for 75 years, is find ways to take whatever their product is and tap into some desire of yours and tell you that it will be fulfilled.

Again, this isn’t something that just affects one political side or one political group. There’s sort of a lie that’s told on both sides—on the US, at least—political spectrum. On the conservative side of liberalism, the lie is: Everyone can be rich. And then once you’re rich, you’ll have all your desires met. But all it takes is hard work: you go and you work hard, and you’ll be rich, too. And that’s a lie, because Starbucks needs thousands and thousands of hourly baristas, and they only need one CEO.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, there’s just— Or, as I got flayed one time, because I actually said in a sermon, “Every kid cannot grow up to be president. We’ve had 40-some, and we have hundreds of millions of people.” It’s not—the math doesn’t work out. It just doesn’t work.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so that’s the answer: at the end of the trail, you just work hard, hard enough, long enough, do all the right things: you, too, will be wealthy, and then once you’re wealthy you can satisfy all your desires that you can’t satisfy now, because you haven’t worked hard enough for long enough yet.

And then the flip side, the progressive side of liberalism, the lie is that everyone can have all of their personal desires satisfied, and they’ll never conflict with each other. Everyone can be completely sexually fulfilled, everyone can be completely personally and emotionally fulfilled, and no one’s desires will ever conflict with anyone else’s desires. And that’s exploded.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Pretty spectacularly, lately.

Fr. Stephen: Exhibit A being the sexual revolution and now “me too.” So the idea that everyone could just satisfy their desires, and then: “Oh wait, you can’t do that without stepping on a lot of other people and consuming a lot of other people.

So both of those are lies. Both of those are lies, but you have to function with one of those lies in order to function in a system in which you’re just a ball of desires, and that’s a fundamentally misshapen view of what it is to be human. That’s reducing a human to a giant, consuming mouth.

Fr. Andrew: We have images of giant mouths in Christianity…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s usually the gaping maw of hell.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly! It’s the way to the underworld, I mean, literally. Right. I have an awesome icon here in my studio which is exactly the hell-mouth.

Fr. Stephen: So we have to set aside, having seen that, that that just fundamentally doesn’t work and isn’t—it’s not only not real; because it’s not real, it’s not what the Scriptures tell us, and it’s not what the Church teaches us, so the person who has their desires fulfilled is not the blessed person, and the person who has their desires denied is not the cursèd person. That’s not at all… Even though that’s how many of us have been brought up through and in the culture—and even church culture—to think.

So, getting back to what we were saying in the introduction to this first half, and going into the terms that are used for blessing in the Scriptures, the Hebrew word, the verb is barak, to bless. The noun form of that is baruch, which is a name, a given name, often, in the Old Testament, that means the blessed one, the one who is blessed. But barak, the sort of root original meaning of it is “to kneel.”

Fr. Andrew: Ha!

Fr. Stephen: So this makes a lot of sense when you think about the phrase: “Bless the Lord; bless Yahweh!” That would be to kneel before the Lord.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think a lot of times when we see it say, “Bless the Lord,” we usually have this sense that blessing is something a higher person does to a lower person, and so when we hear that—

Fr. Stephen: Giving stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, giving stuff. So when we hear “Bless the Lord,” I’m like: “Well, what does the Lord need from me? I don’t have any stuff to offer him!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s not stuff.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not stuff.

Fr. Stephen: But that gets a little trickier; the kneeling thing gets a little trickier when we talk about God blessing you, because that doesn’t mean God kneeling before you. It means more like God kneeling you. [Laughter] And if you think about—and this is not, by the way—we’re not trying to portray God as General Zod. I know that’s what many of you were thinking, but that’s not where we’re going.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Kneel before me!” Our second 1980s pop-culture reference—at least, that I’m aware of—for the evening.

Fr. Stephen: So if you think about kneeling in a quite literal sense, kneeling is changing your posture or your orientation. You are changing your posture. If you bless the Lord or bless Yahweh, you are changing your posture or your orientation toward God. And if God blesses you, if God kneels you, he’s changing your posture or orientation toward him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s like the difference between “retiring” and “being retired,” in short.

Fr. Stephen: They produce the same result.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly! They produce the same result, but one is done to you; the other you do yourself.

Fr. Stephen: And ideally they’re both happening. Ideally, they’re both happening, and this is true not only when we talk about us blessing God or God blessing us humans, but when we in the Church bless objects—and I know we’ve said this before on the show—you bless holy water, you’re not making it magic water to kill vampires, and you’re not making a material component for a third-level cleric spell. You’re taking water and you’re returning it to the correct orientation within the world; you’re returning it to where it belongs in that web of relationships people are talking about in the world. Whatever it may have been used for before that, now it is going back to… We’ve talked before about the difference between the chalice and my Wrath of Khan collector’s cup. It is not the material; it’s the use and the purpose, the where it fits into that web of relationships. And blessing houses, the same idea. It’s about putting things back into the correct orientation, and relinking them, reconciling them within the web of relationships, that makes up the order of creation.

So the Greek word—

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Also slightly surprising.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and is really interesting—to nerds like me, at least—because before it’s used to translate the Old Testament, this word is not, to our knowledge, used in explicitly religious contexts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the word is evlogia, which—hey! Let’s do a little etymology.

[Theme music] Father Andrew’s Etymology Corner! [Baby cheer]

There you go. There’s little baby Eleanor once again. [Laughter] Right, evlogia, it’s that beginning e-u-, epsilon upsilon, which means “good” or “true,” and then logia is from logos: “word.” So it literally means “good word,” but it doesn’t just simply mean “good word” in the ancient world.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and actually—um, actually—logia can also mean “actions.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Yeah, that broader sense of logos.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s important for all of you Papias fans out there, when he talks about St. Matthew having written down the logia of Christ, that doesn’t just mean the words. So get out of town with your Q theory! [Laughter] Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! Throwing shade at a very specific set of people.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I went down a little rabbit-trail there, but now we’re back.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so okay, what does it actually mean, in usage in the ancient world, especially prior to the Bible?

Fr. Stephen: It basically meant to endorse, to sort of co-sign, to give the imprimatur.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so that lends us to all kinds of fun stuff, like our modern English word, “eulogy,” comes from this, quite directly, evlogia. I mean, I’m just imagining now, someone knowing this etymology who is about to preach a sermon at a funeral and saying, “I will now give the endorsement of this person who lies dead here before us.” [Laughter] But I mean, it is kind of correct. You’re commending that person to God, which—I mean, what is that? That’s an endorsement, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And you can ask somebody to “put in a good word” for you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we do have that expression in English, “a good word,” and I think that that’s the only— There’s two ways that that gets used in English. “To put in a good word” is explicitly about an endorsement. Then the other way it gets used is if someone speaks a good word, which just kind of means that they said something good to you or edifying or whatever—it might be a blessing, interestingly. And then the other way that it gets used in the same matrix of meaning is that the word “blessing” is used in English for a sense of permission, but it’s often permission that it’s almost basically an endorsement, so you get a woman’s father’s blessing to marry her, which is basically you’re looking for his endorsement. Which, you know, people don’t always get that, and sometimes they get married anyway. So it’s not just permission…

Fr. Stephen: Kids these days.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s not just permission; they are looking for kind of an endorsement. And then of course we also use the word “blessing” to refer much more explicitly to permission, and within the Orthodox Church, “I need to get my priest’s blessing for that, or my bishop’s blessing for that.” And again, it’s that sense of a word being spoken that is about, again, a kind of endorsement, like: “You are blessed to do this. You have an endorsement to do this.” So it is there in English; we just don’t tend to think of the word “blessing” as meaning endorsement, but we have all that within English.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it is there. So then the question becomes: Well, how do we reconcile these two ideas. We have a word that in Hebrew means “to kneel”—

Fr. Andrew: Kneeling.

Fr. Stephen: —that gets translated into Greek with a word that means “to endorse,” which don’t seem to have a huge Venn diagram overlap in meaning. [Laughter] Well, so the place where these come together is this idea of harmony, that we were talking about with kneeling: kneeling in terms of posture and orientation, being in this web of relationships harmoniously. But if you think about endorsement or favor or co-signing, there are always two parties involved. You have one party who is doing something or who is something, and then you have the other party who is co-signing them, who is giving their agreement with that or endorsing that or recommending that.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, we use the word “endorse” really to refer to signing something. Again, that’s there in the way we use these concepts in English.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so these two come together in the idea of divine works, the divine energies, God working in creation. God’s blessing brings you into harmony with what he’s doing in the sense of adjusting your posture and your orientation toward it. And also there’s that endorsement and co-signing idea, that cooperation idea, where the two are brought into alignment. And so that’s the place where these two ideas sort of come together in terms of what’s going on with blessing in the Scripture.

And there’s a couple of other sort of phenomena within Scripture regarding blessing that we need to talk about, just to be exhaustive and exhaust everyone and have the first half of the show go over an hour.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m pretty sure it’s going to.

Fr. Stephen: Yep, we’re there. So the first is the idea of this kind of recursive way in which “blessing” is used: blessing oneself, that you bless yourself. And we use this language to refer to making the sign of the cross sometimes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, bless yourself.

Fr. Stephen: And so from what we’ve just said, the idea of blessing yourself would be bringing yourself back into a correct posture or orientation, getting yourself back on board with what God is doing. But there’s one particular place where this concept comes up that is kind of important to biblical theology, and by “kind of important” I mean explains Pauline theology—sorry, Calvinists.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We can just say it’s Genesis-level stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because it’s in Genesis. And so an example of this is in Genesis 12:3. This isn’t the only place where this happens with regard to Abraham, but this is one of them. So a lot of English translations of Genesis 12:3 have something like: “In you will all the nations of the earth be blessed.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which—we did a sort of survey of every English translation we could find, and almost all of them said pretty much something exactly like that: “In you will all the nations of the earth…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, with some variation. So the Hebrew is actually more like: “All the nations will bless themselves in you,” which is kind of a weird turn of phrase that those different translations are sort of trying to figure out how to render into English.

Fr. Andrew: And I would say… So if I were going to speculate—I mean, I can’t just lay out a history of every single English translation ever made over the last thousand years in ten seconds, but if I were going to speculate why it was going to be, or almost always is this other way, is that the idea of blessing yourself, that concept doesn’t seem to exist in most of the English-speaking religious cultures that are making translations—does that make any sense?—the idea that you are putting yourself into harmony, into order—because there’s this idea that being blessed means receiving something good, so why would you say that the nations are going to do that to themselves? And the idea is that God is doing this. So: “In you, Abraham, God is going to do this to them,” which of course is not incorrect, but that’s not actually the most literal way of translating this verse.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the idea of blessing yourself in another person also is kind of odd.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And you’ll get rearranges. As longtime listeners might not be surprised—the NET Bible comes the closest to sort of reflecting the original, although even they punt a little, because they have it as: “All the nations will bless each other in you.” So they’re trying to find a way to bring out that recursive, so they have the nations blessing each other.

Fr. Andrew: Blessing each other, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The best place to understand what’s going on here, though, in terms of that original translation, other than just a weird Hebrew idiom, which is also a nice punt—just saying, “Oh, that’s a Hebrew idiom”—is to see what St. Paul does with it in Romans, does with Abraham in Romans, and this text and other related texts in Romans. So we talked back at the beginning of this first half about the relationship of justice and blessing, blessing being about these connections in the web of relationships that make up the overall order of justice. And I’m pretty sure we’ve talked before on the show about how justification, the primary meaning of justification in the Scripture is more like justification in Microsoft Word than something that happens in a courthouse.

Fr. Andrew: Being put straight, put in order.

Fr. Stephen: Right, left-justified means it’s lined up on the left side, right is on the right side, full is all around: it’s all put in order.

Fr. Andrew: I’m always fully justified in my writing.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Then you get those weird spaces in the middle of your work. Anyway, justification is a related concept, too, so when St. Paul wants to talk about how the nations—and remember, “Gentiles” means the nations; it’s one of those things that we translate differently in the Old and New Testaments for no apparent reason—so when he’s talking about how the nations are justified, how they’re set right, how they’re reoriented, he goes to Genesis 12:3, and he goes to other related passages and says that this happens in Abraham. They’re justified—and the way Abraham is justified. So St. Paul makes this theological connection between entering the state of blessedness and justification. And he does it through Abraham and his understanding of what’s going on in passages like Genesis 12:3. So this is key to understanding what he’s doing and how he’s weaving those together, what he means when he quotes, “Blessed is the man who sin is not reckoned against him.” Once you understand that, then all the sort of juridical stuff sort of falls away that it had layered into it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s an actual state. Okay, so what else?

Fr. Stephen: By certain lawyers who became Reformers. [Laughter] So that reciprocal idea is not only present in this kind of idea of someone blessing themselves, but also that, as we talked about before, in an ideal situation God is blessing us and we are blessing God, that there’s this cooperation within this state of blessedness, so we’re always blessing and being blessed. And that doesn’t—again, like everything, this isn’t just an individual and God, but this happens within a community. So Christians as a community are blessing each other and are being blessed by each other. We’re blessing the elements of creation, and we’re being blessed by God and blessing God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which— I mean, this is simply—if we need to see a model for how that works, that’s the life of the angels. I mean, that’s just what they’re doing. They are putting things in order, they are being ordered. All of that is happening. I mean, they’re not dealing with it in terms of sin the way we have to, but still it’s about— Because being put in order is not about repairing a break; it’s also about beautification, which is not necessarily about fixing something that’s broken. You can make things more and more beautiful by blessing them even further.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and there’s a nice Greek term in Scripture for this, this state of blessedness, of blessing and being blessed and of the community, and that’s koinonia. And those of you who studied Greek in the Anglophone world will have to occasionally pardon our Greek pronunciation of the Greek.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We’re not going to say “koy-NOH-nee-ah”? Urgh!

Fr. Stephen: The Greeks would come after us. They know where we live, so we cannot do that Erasmian stuff even if we wanted to. But, yeah, and koinonia gets translated a lot of ways, “fellowship” being one of them.

Fr. Andrew: “Communion.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and “fellowship” is a word that’s been greatly sort of denuded in our Western church life.

Fr. Andrew: When I was growing up, it meant fried chicken and mashed potatoes and casserole. Many casseroles. Casseroles, yes. Fellowship.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, just people hanging out. People hanging out; that’s fellowship: drink some coffee. And it’s not saying that that’s not it or not part of it, but it’s much more than that. So this word, koinonia, that gets used in Scripture to describe this participation and communion with one another is the same word that, for example, Plato uses to describe the relationship between objects and the forms, the eternal forms in the heavenly places: objects participate in them. And that koinonia, that participation, makes them what they are. So this is again this idea, this web of relationships, but now within a community between people. And again, as we’ve talked about before, it’s those relationships and those roles and those functions, as we all function together with one another, that define our identity and define who we are, not some kind of isolated, individual thing.

And so then, last but not least, there is another word that is translated “blessèd” in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and even in the Old, if you’re looking at the Greek Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, in the Greek Old Testament, and that is makarios.

Fr. Andrew: Makarios, which is the first word in Psalm 1, “Blessed is the man.” We’ll talk a little bit more about that later. Of course, it’s a name, too: Macarius.

Fr. Stephen: And it begins the Beatitudes.

Fr. Andrew: The Beatitudes, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is the point in the program where— Last time it was Hegel. Tonight I say something nice about David Bentley Hart.

Fr. Andrew: See, this is going to become a running gag now, too. Along with “our whatever friends” you don’t want Fr. Stephen De Young to say something nice about you. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well… I’m going to say something nice about David Bentley Hart, and that’s specifically about his New Testament translation. Thanks, Yale, again, for the review copy, because it was free and I’m Dutch. [Laughter] But he chose to translate makarios as “blissful,” which I think is a great translation, and here’s why: because that word is used in other Greek literature to describe the life of the gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, if you pull out your Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon that everyone should have on their shelf…

Fr. Stephen: Which size do you have?

Fr. Andrew: Right, the little Liddell… I have the middle Liddell.

Fr. Stephen: I have the full size.

Fr. Andrew: You have the Great Scott?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I have the full-on Oxford, back when they published books…

Fr. Andrew: I have the middle Liddell, which is pretty good. I mean, if you look it up, it literally says this. It says “of the gods” or something like that. That’s just the dictionary definition in the lexicon.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this is eating ambrosia, eternal life, hanging out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we should all be imagining the moments in Clash of the Titans with the big, fake beards, and they’re standing around the fountain there. “Oh, Lord Zeus!” Why do Greek gods have British accents in 1960s American films? I ask you this.

Fr. Stephen: That movie wasn’t made in the ‘60s! Clash of the Titans is ‘80s, man!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, that’s right, ‘80s! I’m thinking of Jason and the Argonauts and stuff like this, that era.

Fr. Stephen: The Ray Harryhausen stuff, now there’s the classics.

Fr. Andrew: Those are the kinds of films that I was allowed to see when I was young, largely the films that had been made 20, 30 years before. Sword-and-sandal epics. I don’t regret a moment of it.

Fr. Stephen: And you can see how that would have a—that would be a blessed state. Sharing in the life of God is a blessed state, the life of the angels, as we were just talking about. So you can see how this idea is connected, too, and why it would get translated in the same or similar ways. But so this is one of the keys in understanding that the Beatitudes are actually about eschatology. They’re about eternal life, and so especially if you look at St. Luke’s version, where he’s got the woes. When he says, “Blessed are you who are poor,” that the person who is poor is living this divine life, is already experiencing divine life, whereas the person who is rich: woe to him, like he’s the one who’s accursèd. And all through, there are these sort of inversions to carry across the same idea that we’ve been talking about most of this half, that we’re talking about a state; we’re talking about sharing in the life of God; we’re talking about communion with God and with your fellow creatures and with the creation, not about stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Stuff, right. [Laughter] All right, well, having said that, we’re going to go ahead and take a quick break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. It’s the second half. Call in with your hashtags for blessings and curses. We want to hear from you. All right, we just talked about blessings…

Fr. Stephen: Oh, wait. Fr. Andrew, I don’t want to call you out publicly or anything…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, but go for it. You might as well.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I was just going to say that some folks, when they have a popular podcast, and they have commercial breaks, they would use that to draw the attention of their audience to the works of other people.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Hey, I don’t pick the commercials!

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t!

Fr. Stephen: Okay, as long as we’ve resolved that.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, if I told Trudi to play a commercial with one of your books, we know you’d run out of the room, and we can’t have you do that. You might knock something over; you might break something.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I have enough technical difficulties as it is.

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter] So anyway, well, you know. Welcome back, everybody! Thank you for that call-out. I do appreciate it. It’s good for my humility.

Fr. Stephen: I was just, you know…

Fr. Andrew: It’s all good. Like I said, I don’t pick the commercials.

Fr. Stephen: There are people out there thinking about it, so now you’ve been able to address the situation. [Laughter] You don’t pick the commercials. It’s just a coincidence.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, look, it’s the marketing department. They… What can I tell you? It’s just the way it is. It’s not my…

Fr. Stephen: There are people out there with a desire to learn more about St. Ignatius, and you’re here to help them.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, exactly! [Laughter] All right, so: Ugaritic death curses, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Ugaritic death curses and you.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the title of your next self-help book.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, because you don’t want any of them Ugaritic death curses. So we’re going to actually talk about one. I briefly thought, “Hey, maybe we should read it,” and then I’m like: “Nah, we shouldn’t do that out loud. That’s not good.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t say those things on the air—or ever.

Fr. Stephen: Not on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, don’t read them out loud. Ever.

Fr. Stephen: There’s some guy out in a cabin listening. His girlfriend would get possessed by a dead-eye, and it would all go sideways. So we’re not reading it, even in a recorded format. But, in perusing some Ugaritic death curses not that long ago, as is my wont, I found one that I think is the original evil eye, or at least the oldest one we have, the oldest reference to an evil eye sort of idea that we have. And this was a curse that you would put on somebody, and the curse is basically trying to attract the eye of Anat, our old friend Anat.

Fr. Andrew: Isn’t she Baal’s—

Fr. Stephen: Sister-wife of Baal.

Fr. Andrew: Sister-wife of Baal, yeah. Smashed her father’s head in, if I remember correctly.

Fr. Stephen: Threatened to smash her father’s head in.

Fr. Andrew: Threatened to: Oh, excuse me. There you.

Fr. Stephen: If he didn’t give Baal a palace. And then I would search them out and destroy them and all their stuff.

Fr. Andrew: “Come on, Dad/Father-in-law, give him a palace!” [Laughter] “Or I will crush your skull!”

Fr. Stephen: So the idea here is that these kind of curses in the ancient world were invoking spiritual powers. It wasn’t that there was a person who has the whammy and can put the whammy. It’s not like they’re asking Danhausen to curse somebody for them. This was—you’re invoking a spiritual power.

Now, there were people whom they would go to to put curses on people, but those were people who were seen to have sort of pre-existing relationships with these spiritual powers, who were in some way already religious or magical functionaries related to these particular spiritual beings, who would be the ones who would do the whammy.

Fr. Andrew: I’m just thinking suddenly of that game show, Press Your Luck. Do you remember that?

Fr. Stephen: Press Your Luck, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: “No whammy.” Wow. They were actually invoking the eye of Anat; I had no idea.

Fr. Stephen: Just don’t ask me to explain to you the scientific basis of the whammy. So these kind of curses were used in all kinds of situations. Before you go into battle, you’d curse the other guy. In commerce, you’d curse the rival. Affairs of the heart—

Fr. Andrew: Isn’t this what what’s-his-name was trying to get Balaam to do to Israel? Curse them, so that I can beat them?

Fr. Stephen: Go put the whammy, yeah. And we tend to think of it, when it’s used in affairs of the heart, we tend to have a very… rosy, romantic view of it, where it’s like “Oh, get my crush to fall in love with me.” It was usually more like: “Kill my romantic rival. Make it so that person’s spouse is on the market again.” It was a lot darker than that.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, because clearly if you invoke a demon to kill another person, then they will be fine with you after that. Their spouse or their mate will be happy to be with you, like: “Oh, well, it’s okay.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Or at least—well, they’ll be too scared to not! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That sounds like a loving relationship.

Fr. Stephen: But of course, so that means that in this kind of cursing, cursing someone isn’t just a question of you as a human having ill-will toward them, nor is it just a question of some evil spiritual power doing something to them, the malign spiritual power; but there’s this participatory element, where a human person is cooperating with this evil spiritual power, in order to bring about this cursèd state, in order to have this happen.

Fr. Andrew: So, having said that, we actually do have someone who has called in who has a question about all of this. So, Sarah, are you there?

Sarah: Yes, I am.

Fr. Andrew: Hello, Sarah. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Christ is risen!

Sarah: Truly he is risen! My question, I guess, would be, when it comes to blessing or cursing physical objects in our culture, especially popular culture, they kind of sensationalize it. Is there, in a way… What I’m gathering from listening is that by participating in the life of the Church, that’s a blessing. I don’t know if it would make sense, but is that kind of a blessing, but then if you become… Especially if— I’m an Eastern Greek Orthodox, and they like to bless objects and certain things, and I think I’ve even discussed this before in the group page on Facebook, the evil eye type thing. And people want to have them blessed, like when you get a kid baptized and things like that. But putting too much faith, I guess you could say, in those type of objects: could that itself become a curse? That’s what I’m curious about, the objects, especially with idolatry and things like that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right, so we’re going to talk about this a little bit more, but to bless an object is to put it into the correct relationship to God that it should have, its full… For instance, to bless holy water, it’s to make water what it truly should be. But then to take— It’s funny you mention the evil eye amulets, the mati, right, in Greek? And there’s other languages; I think it’s called a nazar, and there’s various versions of this. But if someone… Think about what they’re doing, right: if someone asks that that be blessed, say, with holy water, and then they use it as some kind of talisman against a curse from someone else, not putting their faith in the cross of Christ, not putting their faith in the Church, but “if I have this magical thing because the priest put the magic on it,” then they are effectively putting it in the wrong, the other relationship.

Sarah: Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: That’s effectively what’s happening, and we’re going to talk more about what curses are and what they do, but, yeah, I mean, certainly people can use objects in a cursed way, if you use them in a way that’s contrary to God’s intention for them. Does that make sense? I don’t know if, Fr. Stephen, you had anything to add or correct with what I just said?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, just to add. One of the interesting things about that good old Ugaritic death curse is not only… One of the interesting things about it is that after it puts the evil eye on the other person, it then concludes with an incantation to ward off the evil eye from the person giving the curse, because there’s the idea that once you enter into that world, it can bounce back at you, or someone else could attack you with it. So to me the big issue with using any kind of amulet like that against a curse like that is you’re kind of entering into that world of tit-for-tat. And that is not advisable, because what the Scriptures are clear about is that it’s Christ who has defeated all of those demonic powers, and therefore can and does protect us from them. We don’t need to try and enter in and fight fire with fire.

Sarah: Yeah, to make over and place Christ with these objects. Because I remember, growing up—for me, growing up in the ‘80s when Dungeons and Dragons… I was Protestant, and obviously everyone thought it was Satan and satanic and things like that. And I remember being at a youth group meeting, and they were explaining to it why it was, and they said, “Oh, these objects that you play with can actually come alive.” [Laughter] I’m not kidding; they actually told us that at a youth group meeting.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Sarah: Luckily, my parents—we were all sitting there—my parents were like: “What! No… I don’t think so.” Yeah, so I was just… I find this interesting, because, like I said, you see this stuff in popular culture, and it’s so sensationalized that people don’t think about it, like: “Oh, stuff’s going to come alive in the middle of the night—dolls and things like that—and come and attack me.”

Fr. Andrew: It’s like Toy Story! [Laughter]

Sarah: Yeah, well, Toy Story or Puppet Master or anything crazy like that. Go from Toy Story to Puppet Master; that seems fun…

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, you know, if I ever see… So you sometimes see the little blue-and-white eye amulets—those are really, really common, the mati, and then especially among some Middle Eastern people, they’ll have a little blue bead or a little blue stone or whatever. And I’ll be honest, if anyone ever brought one of those things for a baptism—because you mentioned they’d be brought to baptisms—if anyone brought one of those things to a baptism, and they wanted that to be put on the child after baptism, I’d say, “Absolutely not. No! That is a cross; you might put an icon on there, that’s okay, but none of that amulet stuff.”

Sarah: Oh, definitely. Yeah, I’ve seen that happen. Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. Thank you very much for calling, Sarah. Okay, we have one more caller that we’re going to take right now, and that is Brett.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know. Now that she brought up Puppet Master, I think we might just want to turn the rest of the episode into a meditation on the filmworks of Charles Band.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s not this podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Because we would segue very easily from Puppet Master to Demonic Toys…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that would be a monologue on your part.

Fr. Stephen: Doll Man vs. Demonic Toys.

Fr. Andrew: No, we have Brett!

Fr. Stephen: Oh!

Fr. Andrew: Brett is waiting for us on the other line. Brett, are you there?

Brett: Yes, Fathers, I’m here.

Fr. Andrew: Christ is risen!

Fr. Stephen: Did you remember your question?

Brett: No, Father, but, yea, verily, he truly is risen indeed!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’ll cover it. That’ll about cover it.

Brett: I promised Fr. Stephen this question is not about furries. Instead, my question is about how much do we need to worry about curses in today’s aspect, especially particularly from, I suppose, a neopagan mindset? I know a lot of popular idea of neopaganism is to avoid cursing people, but you can’t help but think of the popular idea of the edgy goth-witch teenager in the popular movie, who makes a voodoo doll and puts a curse on the main character or—forgive my use of the slur‐gypsy woman whom you bump into at the supermarket and she gives you a curse: how much do we need to worry about that, and how do we protect about it if we do need to worry about it?

Fr. Andrew: I’m going to punt that directly to you, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. He doesn’t want anyone to drag him to hell, I guess, is what’s saying, or for him to get thinner. Man, lots of horror movies this half. Who knew!

Fr. Andrew: Well, you did bring up Ugaritic death curses, so…

Fr. Stephen: That’s true.

Fr. Andrew: We only started getting the calls after you said that. I’m just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what the people want. I’m giving the people what they want. They want Ugaritic death curses.

Fr. Andrew: Because they’re just big balls of desire.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: For Ugaritic death curses. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, the answer is really that we—as Christians, we don’t have to worry about much. It’s not because that stuff’s all hokum and we’re not superstitious—I mean, maybe a little “stitious,” but not superstitious. [Laughter] It’s not even that, because that stuff is real. Now, whether any given modern human is doing the real thing or doing something goofy out of a book they got at Barnes & Noble is beside the point just in the sense that we don’t have to worry about it as Christians. There is a real thing. A lot of the sort of modern stuff outside of horror movies is not the real thing; it’s kind of goofiness. That doesn’t mean it’s innocuous to the people who are dabbling in it or participating in it, but even if it is the real thing, as Christians— And this is…

Several of the psalms—I know we’ve talked about a couple of them on this show before, but several of the psalms specifically are talking about—those kind of sub rosa a lot in English translations—are talking about those particular demonic powers of disease or of famine or of death, like Psalm 91 (or Psalm 90 in the Greek), and sort of enumerating them, and enumerating them in order to say none of them can touch you as long as you are blessed by the Lord in the sense that we’re talking about, because we’re talking about a state of blessedness and a state of cursedness. If you are in a state of blessedness where you’re correctly aligned and orientated toward God and toward your neighbor, then there’s nothing you have to worry about from demonic powers. They can take your stuff—look at Job again—but the stuff isn’t the important thing, as we were saying. They can even take your health, like with Job. They could even, theoretically, take your earthly life, but again, if you’re correctly oriented in these other ways, that isn’t something you have to worry about, because no one can harm the righteous man.

So, yeah, we shouldn’t worry about it. You shouldn’t get involved in it. Friends don’t let friends use witchcraft. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So does that include the Fairuza Balk movies, or…? Just kidding.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I actually have a little story to tell related to what you just said, Father, so, Brett, humor me for a second. This is actually a story that my wife tells, and I’ve heard her tell it a bunch of times, so hopefully she won’t be unhappy with me passing it on. So there was one time she was actually out, I think with our children somewhere—this is several years ago—and she was somewhere, in public, like at a store or something like that, and this woman approaches her who has kind of an odd look to her. And she turns out to be some kind of fortune-teller or psychic kind of person or whatever, and she sort of made an offer to my wife, like: “Would you like blah-blah-blah?” or whatever it is; I don’t even remember what it is she offered to her.

And my wife—if you’ve ever… You guys… Fr. Stephen, you’ve met my wife. You know that she says whatever is on her mind to say, and she says it very clearly and boldly 99% of the time! And she turned to this woman and she said, “We are Orthodox Christians and my husband is a priest.” And apparently the woman just sort of recoiled and kind of ran out of the room! Which, I mean, just illustrates this. In the immortal words of—oh, I’m forgetting the name of the actress, but when she said to David Bowie, “You have no power over me.” I mean, that’s—oh, man, I can’t think of her name! But anyway, another ‘80s reference.

Fr. Stephen: Are you thinking of Jennifer Connelly?

Fr. Andrew: Jennifer Connelly! That’s right! Jennifer Connelly at the end of Labyrinth! “You have no power over me.” But, I mean, it’s true. It’s true: as Christians, we are—we belong to the Lord, and we’re being protected by his angels and saints. So it’s not a huge concern. Is that helpful to you, Brett? Did we lose Brett? I think we might have lost Brett.

Fr. Stephen: Speak to us, Brett. Who did this to you?

Brett: I’m sorry. Oh, thank you, Fathers, I do appreciate it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right! Thanks for calling in. Okay, well, moving on—not with Ugaritic death curses, but something slightly else.

Fr. Stephen: But not unrelated.

Fr. Andrew: Not unrelated: it’s all related.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s all related to Ugaritic death curses.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t recommend our t-shirt maker makes something like this. I know we’ve said “Ugaritic death curses” about twelve times, but I don’t recommend you put that on a t-shirt. Just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: “Ugaritic death curse” would be kind of an awesome band name.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that is true.

Fr. Stephen: I have to say.

Fr. Andrew: That is true! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So when we’re talking about a state of curse—and now we’re going to the other side from the state of blessedness—so a state of curse, then, is this state of alienation, of being out of harmony, being out of sync, being broken out of that web of correct relationships. And that can be a human, that can be a thing, because if we say that when we bless water or a house or whatever that we’re putting it back into that correct web of relationships, then that means it can be out of it: it can be in a state of curse.

And there are—that’s talked about in the Old Testament in particular, but also in the New Testament, in the ideas of impurity. And impurity is divided into sort of two different types. [Inaudible]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a really, really important distinction, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, and this is a big part of what confuses a lot of people, especially about the commandments and the Torah and how they relate to each other, is that there is moral impurity and there is ceremonial impurity. And those are just categories; they’re not categories that are internal to the Bible, so don’t read too much into the words or anything; it’s just a way of categorizing those two things. And so moral impurity obviously has to do with actions, with actions that are taken; ceremonial impurity has to do with a state of uncleanness that results from something else. So moral impurity would be the result of, say, murdering a guy, whereas ceremonial impurity might be from using the restroom. Both of those render you unclean, but in different senses, like in radically different senses!

And both of those have to be sort of taken care of; those situations have to be taken care of, and both of those are kind of related to a state of curse, though there are differences in degree and that kind of thing that we’re going to talk more about now. Like I said, this caused a lot of confusion. It’s a question that arises very naturally when you start reading Leviticus, and it’s like: Well, okay, these people are unclean because of fornication, and these people are unclean because of going to the bathroom or a woman’s time of the month or something like this, and those don’t seem to be in the same category to me!

Fr. Andrew: Right, like: it’s not their fault, or they were doing something they necessarily had to do. Somebody’s got to touch the dead body. You can’t just—

Fr. Stephen: To bury it.

Fr. Andrew: —leave it there, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so here’s sort of how this works out, and it’s part of our understanding of this state of curse and the way that it affects the created order. So what we’re talking about when we’re talking about moral impurity is we’re talking about something very much like that Ugaritic death curse in the sense that you have a human person participating in the actions of spiritual—evil spiritual powers. We’ve talked about this before, where we talked about demonization: sort of becoming partakers—having, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, koinonia with demons, this kind of idea.

So what we’re not talking about, again, even though we use the word “moral” and the way we think about morality now—some people went straight to “law” again: you did something that’s against the rules—that’s not what we’re talking about; we’re talking about something very different. And this is how we’ve been talking about sin pretty consistently on this show, and this comes out of the way, for example, St. Paul uses the word “sin” in the singular to refer to this kind of force out in the world and the way the Fathers talk about the passions, which are called “passions” because they make you passive—they act upon you and through you, but render you passive—so when you’re seized by anger, the anger has control of you; you’re not consciously and actively being angry; lust takes hold of you, pride, envy: these are things that take hold of you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’re overcome.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this is related to another distinction that we’ve talked about. We talked about—last time we talked about the divine energies, this distinction in Orthodox theology between God’s essence and his energies; we talked about how people and things have essences and energies, too. But this idea of energies, this idea of energeia, comes out of—is sort of picked up by the Greek Fathers from a distinction that’s made going back to at least Aristotle, where Aristotle, in Metaphysics Theta, talks about this distinction between dynamis, which would be a power or a strength that is proper to a nature—we were talking about this a little bit earlier in this episode—and that’s different for different types of creatures, so the nature of a raccoon, a trash panda, has different powers than a human; and then that is distinguished from energeia, energy or energies, which is the thing—the hypostasis, the thing, the person—exercising that power. So it’s not just the exercise of the power; it is—and we talked about this a little last time—

Fr. Andrew: It is that person doing it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, we talked about this a little bit last time. So we talked about how, when we talk about the divine energies, we talk about God’s energies, we’re not just talking about things God does, but we’re talking about God doing things: God loving, not just God’s love, like separate from him, but God himself, loving. And so when you are using your human energies, it’s you exercising the powers of your human nature. And so all humans have the same nature; we all share human nature, but what distinguishes you as a person from all the other human persons—seven point whatever billion other persons in the world today—is our particular energies: where and when and how, at what point in space and time and all those things, we are actually putting those various powers of human nature that we all share into practice, actually exercising them, because humans don’t all utilize the same powers.

But the dynamis that are the powers of sin are not part of human nature; they’re not proper to human nature as God created it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a really important point. A lot of the Fathers, especially the ascetical Fathers, talk—particularly when they’re talking about the passions, but they specifically say that sin is alien to us. It is not a power of humanity to sin, but we do sin, so why do we—how is it that we are able to do that?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the demonic powers—one of the reason they’re called demonic powers, dynamaion, is that when we sin, we’re exercising—we’re energizing, we’re actualizing—a power that’s foreign to our human nature: a demonic power.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. When you sin, you’re using demon power!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: That’s scary. Scary! But it makes so much clear. When you sin, you’re using demon power, because it’s not a human power. God didn’t create us to sin.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and in 1 John, St. John talks about Christ purifying the world from sin as destroying the works of the devil, that he works through humans, as he further clarifies in 1 John as he talks about Cain, whom we’re going to talk more about in a little bit here. Cain does the works of the evil one, and that makes him the son of the evil one, as we’ve talked about before, the son being the image of the father. But so, because this sin, this sinful, demonic power, is foreign to our human nature, it is destructive and corrupting to our human nature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s channeling something we’re not supposed to channel, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and when we talk about “curse” as a noun—“curse” as if it were stuff, stuff that needs to be purified out, talking about “curse” ontologically, like you could locate it in a place or on a person—we’re pointing at that corruption; we’re pointing at that rot or decay. So this is why you’ll see some of the Fathers say that sin doesn’t exist—it doesn’t have an ontological existence—because it’s just a corruption of something that exists. So if you see an animal, a dead animal that’s decaying, the decay is not something that exists in and of itself that has been added to the animal—

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s just a mode.

Fr. Stephen: —rather, it is the corruption and the falling-apart of the animal. It is the lack—the lack of life, the lack of wholeness, the lack of ability of the animal. And so this is why: it’s destructive to human nature and destructive, through that web of relationship and destroying that web of relationships, it’s also destructive to the creation around us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which includes other people.

Fr. Stephen: Which includes other people. And this, by the way, is why repentance, from an Orthodox perspective, is not just saying, “Sorry,” and getting the imprimatur: Okay, I won’t hold that one against you on the day of judgment. It’s not about guilt or innocence of a crime or getting a pass on a crime; real repentance is about—is restorative. It’s about trying to repair what we’ve broken and what we’ve destroyed and what we’ve corrupted, and heal what we’ve damaged—in ourselves and others.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, I mean, I was going to say: and that’s why repentance affects other people, and that’s why we speak of repenting on behalf of other people, is that that repair of the web of relationships and bringing things into right order is communal, because we’re connected; we just are.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and reconciliation is key to the whole thing of blessedness, taking something from cursed to blessed is going from alienation to reconciliation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and here’s the beautiful thing; here’s the flip-side of all that nasty stuff we’ve just mentioned: When human beings cooperate with God, when we synergize with God, then we are making use of divine energies. They don’t belong to us; they’re not natural to humanity, but because they’re from God, they heal, and they bring us into right order. It’s why the saints can do things that are not natural to humans, because they’re making use of God’s energies, because they’re cooperating with him. So there’s a flip side.

This is part of what we mean when we talk about theosis, and then demonization or whatever, because it’s—again, even though they are not equal and opposite actions—to cooperate with the energies of God is not simply the opposite of cooperating with the energies of demons—we can at least conceptually think of them as opposites, even if existentially they’re not simply the same thing, plus or minus. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they’re not equal opposites.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly: they’re not equal opposites. They’re opposites, but they’re not equal opposites. And I think understanding this idea of co-energizing, synergizing, co-operating, and understanding that that’s not just something we can do with God—it’s something we can do with the dark powers as well—I think that that makes clear a lot of what it says in Scripture about participating in God’s works, participating in the works of the devil, and what that does to you.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’re able to do that with demons because they’re our fellow creatures. They are created beings that have become corrupted, whereas being able—we’ve been made partakers of the divine nature and are able to cooperate with the divine energies because of Christ’s incarnation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because he became a creature.

Fr. Stephen: Because in the divine Person of Jesus Christ, taking on our shared human nature, he has united our shared human nature to God and made that possible, opened up that possibility for us, which previously did not exist. And this is why, in Orthodox theology, the Incarnation is so critically important to salvation, even more so than some of the elements that are more focused on in the West.

So all that is about what we called moral impurity and the state, that state of curse, that’s brought about by that. So how is ceremonial impurity related to that? It’s not the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Right, why is it that some of the same words are used?

Fr. Stephen: So what happens, though, is that, in the world we live in, we become exposed—even if we’re living in a state of blessedness, we become exposed to the products of sin and death. This is why touching a corpse makes you unclean. This is why you don’t eat an animal that you find dead. This is why bleeding makes you ceremonially unclean. These are things that wouldn’t happen or wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the presence of sin and death in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so the one thing that occurs to me that is not obviously in this category that does make you unclean is if you touch one of the scrolls of the Torah, that makes you ritually, ceremonially unclean. What’s going on there? Why is that…? The Torah’s not the product of sin and death in the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right, only in a very roundabout way.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, that’s not why. And this is true with other holy things, too. If you get the sacrificial blood on your sandal, as a priest, even though it is sacrificial blood that is holy, when it hits your shoe, your shoe now has to go get burnt because it’s unclean. And the reason for that is that when something is by its nature holy… So once that blood becomes sacrificial blood, or once that particular piece of vellum or parchment becomes a Torah scroll, it is now by nature holy. So if you do something that would defile that holy thing, it kind of rebounds on you is the idea. So I can’t, by my will, defile the sacrificial blood now that it’s sacrificial blood, so anything that I do that would defile it, like spilling it on my shoe, actually defiles my shoe, and then, by extension, me.

Fr. Andrew: Got you.

Fr. Stephen: So when I, with my filthy sinner hands, touch the Torah scroll or the Gospel book or whatever, I can’t corrupt it. I mean, you could destroy it so it’s no longer a Torah scroll or no longer a Gospel book or no longer an icon or no longer whatever it was, but, barring that, it will remain holy, and I will be the one defiled by my defiling activity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, well, that makes sense, then.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s how that bit works.

So in the Scriptures as a whole, not just the Old Testament—because it comes up more than people at first may realize in the New Testament; I already mentioned once in 1 John—we have a sort of archetypal person when it comes to curse. There’s an archetypal cursèd one in Scripture, and that’s Cain, not Adam. We’ve talked before about there being multiple “fall” events, even though that’s all gotten balled up in the West into Adam; that it’s actually Cain. And while most people listening to this were probably at some kind of Pascha service at the end of last week maybe, and saw the icon of the Anastasis, and saw Adam getting pulled up out of Hades, you notice you don’t see Cain getting pulled up out of Hades.

These two are different cases. So we see kind of that distinction made in the text of the Scripture itself in Genesis 3 and Genesis 4 when we compare them. Adam, when he is cursed, he’s told, “Cursed is the ground because of you.” So because of what he’s done, he sort of alienated from the ground partially. Now the ground is going to bring forth thorns and thistles instead of food sometimes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s much harder for him to do agriculture now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there’s this level of disharmony now between him and creation, and him and his wife, and him and God, that there was not before. But when we get to Cain, after he kills Abel, he is cursed from the ground, where he is sort of totally alienated from the created order and from his family and from everyone else, meaning he’s told the ground will not bring forth food for him. Agriculture becomes impossible. The sky is now like iron and the ground like bronze as far as Cain is concerned, because of how corrupt he has become.

So it’s not a coincidence that he has to find a way to live and so he goes and he founds a city. From that city he founds grows, as we go across this genealogy and see his descendants, comes civilization, comes technology, and he can’t live in harmony with creation, and so this is how he has to do it. He can’t grow food, so he’s going to have to take food, or he’s going to have to trade for food, or what have you. And so his alienation produces this mode of life that then further alienates his descendants.

That technology includes not only what we would consider technology—things like metallurgy and that kind of thing—but also what you could call spiritual technology: all the way up through Josephus, Cain is always identified as the first heretic. He teaches his descendants to follow his ways. He’s sort of a founder—a civilization founder figure. So you find things like sorcery and witchcraft and seduction and those kinds of things being created by his descendants, which is a sort of technology to be used just for sin, basically is the idea, for the participation in these things.

This gets to a theme that we’ve talked about before, of this idea of the city versus the extended family that you see with Abraham and Lot, when Lot goes down to Sodom and Abraham lives nomadically, where, rather than, like with the extended family or the village kind of model we’ve talked about, the blessed community we were talking about in the first half, you now have the city as sort of the community of the alienated, like everyone is alienated and they’ve all gathered there at that place.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, think about the level of that now. That’s even… If that was true with Cain, it’s amazing the sort of conglomeration of people that exists now, and yet they’re even more isolated from each other, frankly because of the way that we use technology.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, from each other and from God and from the creation, the created world. It’s the same progress of further and further alienation and atomization, and that state is what it means to be accursed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yep. Well, on that depressing note, we’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Stay with us, folks!

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back, everybody! See, that commercial was not for one of my books, Father. Does that make you happy?

Fr. Stephen: It does. We’re sharing the love.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. Yeah, it’s a lovely set of short stories, actually. It’s great. It’s good stuff. Good stuff! We endorse it. [Laughter] See what I did there?

Fr. Stephen: We bless it, even.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, we bless the work of Fr. Stephen Siniari! All right, well, welcome back. We talked about blessings in our first half, and curses and cursing in our second half especially, and now, in the third half of this show—because, once again: this is a show and a half—we’re going to talk about what it means to become a curse. Everybody remember that, that language from Scripture when it talks about our Lord Jesus Christ “becoming a curse” for us. So what does that mean, in light of everything else that we just said?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s a long story, Father.

Fr. Andrew: So, settle in, everybody! [Laughter] Get yourself another cup of something.

Fr. Stephen: We always give listeners their value for the dollar, at least in terms of quantity if not quality. [Laughter]

We’re going to be talking now about the atonement again, as is my wont in particular, as we’ve done on the show before, but coming at it from this perspective.

Fr. Andrew: I was suddenly reminded of that meme we’ve seen in our Facebook group where it says, “I am once again asking to read Fr. Stephen’s dissertation.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which is now available on ProQuest!

Fr. Andrew: So there you are, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: If you have access to the ProQuest dissertation database, you can find it on there now. And I think it is literally because the Amridge University Library was getting requests from people and they got sick of it, so they uploaded it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Good job, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Poor Terence Sheridan. Shout out to Terence Sheridan, the librarian there, for doing that for everybody. I don’t know that he listens, but, hey.

So in terms of atonement and why we’re coming back there, in understanding the death of Christ and the way that curse language is used there, we have to approach atonement and ask the question: What is the problem that’s being dealt with here? A lot of our friends in the West will say that the problem that’s being dealt with here is God’s justice requires him to punish sin, or God’s wrath against sin has to be appeased, or some variation of that. There’s all kinds of nuances on that. But I would submit that, if we’re approaching this from the perspective of especially the Old Testament and the Torah, what is the problem that is set up by the Hebrew Bible, by the Old Testament, that is going to be solved by Christ in the New Testament? That problem comes down to curse, to curse and impurity in the two senses we talked about, with obviously what we called moral impurity being the paradigmatic one, because if you take care of that, taking care of the rest of it, the ceremonial part is relatively easy, because it results—the latter results from the former.

So this state of curse, this state of corruption, within the whole created order has to be dealt with, and so we see in the Torah, the covenant at Sinai, the covenant with Moses, this entire system of sacrifice and the Day of Atonement and all these things is set up to manage curse, to manage this curse that infects and this rot that comes into— This is why mildew and stuff are used as sort of object lessons for it.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? Yeah, it’s one of those things, like: Yeah, there’s commandments in the Torah for dealing with mildew and destroying walls that have been infected with mold. I was reading that one time; I was like: What is this about? Why does God care about it? I understand that God cares about everything, but it seems like a weird thing to kind of point out. [Laughter] But as you said, it’s about this sort of infection and corruption and all that kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: And leaven, how it gets into everything, active yeast cultures. But so this keeps coming up. You keep offering the sacrifices, but people keep committing sin. And every year, then, on top of that, you have to do the Day of Atonement, and you’re just constantly managing the situation so that God won’t have to leave or God won’t break out; his holiness won’t break out and destroy the people in the camp or in the nation. And that’s what ends up happening, of course.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like trying to keep a house clean when you’ve got small children living in it.

Fr. Stephen: There you go! It’s a Sisyphean effort

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m reaching out to a huge segment of our listenership. They’re like: Yes, that’s what it’s like!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but having curse properly managed is not the same as being in a state of blessedness. It’s not the same as participating in the divine life; those aren’t the same thing. It’s like managing a chronic illness: having it well-managed is not the same thing as being healthy. And so that covenant, as St. Paul and as Hebrews are going to point out again and again, was never really aimed at solving that problem; it was aimed at managing that problem until the solution came.

When we look at the Day of Atonement ritual itself, you’ve got the two goats, and the first goat, which is identified as the goat for Azazel, that goat becomes a curse; it becomes accursèd in the sense that that moral uncleanness,—that curse, that corruption that comes through the participation with the demonic powers, the sinful actions of the people—is all put on and in that goat, and that goat carries it away, and he carries it back to Azazel where it came from, back to the demonic powers from which it came originally. Then the second goat, the goat for Yahweh, the blood—blood is used to purify the ceremonial uncleanness, the residue, the result of that sin, on the physical objects within the tabernacle, within the holy place and the most-holy place. All of that is then purified from that sort of ceremonially unclean residue that came from that corruption and curse within the camp.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I was going to say, everybody, if you’re new to the podcast and maybe this is one of the first episodes you’re listening to, if you’re interested in way more about everything we just said about the goats and so forth, there’s an episode we did called “The Priest Shall Make Atonement,” which is all about the Day of Atonement, and for you long-time listeners, this is indeed the episode where we first started saying, “Christ is both goats.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: To sort of hypertext one of our episodes to another.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] All these hyperlinks! So this is, then—this “curse” language is particularly connected to the mode of Christ’s death, the idea of that Christ dies hanging on a tree, that Christ is crucified in particular. So all the way back in Deuteronomy where we started tonight’s episode, Deuteronomy 21:23, we’re told that “cursèd is anyone who’s hanged on a tree,” and then they do this is in Joshua with the King of Ai; they go and hang him on a tree. And so that having to… That brings a curse upon the person; that sort of makes them a focus of the curse. This was done to the king of Ai because he was the king of the city, the head of a giant clan, who was responsible for this sort of corruption.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, hard to get more cursed than that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in Galatians 3:13, St. Paul then talks about—cites this verse and is talking about Christ’s mode of death, that Christ died in that particular way to take the curse upon himself, à la the first goat.

Fr. Andrew: The goat for Azazel, right. So sort of the transport mechanism that takes “taking out the trash,” as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and then Christ then descends into Hades and returns it to sender.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: But also, this is why—this idea of curse and the purification of curse and replacing curse with blessedness, this idea of reorientation and reconciliation—also gets brought out when the New Testament talks about the cross of Christ. So John 12:32, after Christ refers to being lifted up the way the serpent was lifted up in the wilderness…

Fr. Andrew: Right, he says this, this very famous line: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” And everyone knew that he meant crucifixion, because don’t they say, “Wait, wait, what do you mean? We’re told that the Christ stays forever.” So they know he’s talking about his death; they know he’s talking about being crucified, but the result is everybody is going to be drawn into a right relation—they’re going to be drawn to a right relationship with Christ. They’re not all going to do it, but they’re going to be drawn toward a right relationship with Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he’s pointing to, in the book of Numbers, when the Israelites are suffering from the venom of the serpents, which is killing them, and the way they were purified from that was by looking upward to the image of what was afflicting them. And so Christ becomes a curse; he becomes the image of what he’s—from what he’s purifying us, but that’s John 12:31: Christ points to that. And then the result of that, in verse 32, is this reconciliation, this drawing all men to himself.

Fr. Andrew: Cool.

Fr. Stephen: And St. Paul does the same move in Romans 5:10.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and a little bit more Pauline language, slightly more complicated, so just listen, everybody.

For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, remember, that reconciliation is the same kind of idea St. Paul has been using in these early chapters of Romans, of being the one who is justified, the one who is blessed: reconciled to God, no longer alienated; reoriented, redirected to this blessed state. That’s happened through the death of Christ, and now, being reconciled, salvation and life come, the positive part—salvation and life come through the blessed state.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, now that you’re sort of plugged back in like you should be, you can then receive what you should be receiving by virtue of that communion with God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so then that’s goat one, and goat number two, the goat for Yahweh, that blood is taken and that blood is used, as we said, to purify that curse; the curse is wiped out by the blood. And so this is talked about in different ways in Scripture, but this blood thing is counter-intuitive to us. I’ve said before, I’m glad when I go and bless houses I don’t have to go in there and throw sheep blood all over the place. [Laughter] I think I’d get fewer invitations to bless houses if I did. And I don’t think they’d think their house was particularly pure and clean when I was done, either; it definitely wouldn’t smell that way.

But there are several places where this is talked about. One important one is Hebrews 12:24, which is talking about actually the blood on the Day of Atonement.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it continues on a previous sentence, but this is the next clause:

...to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

Fr. Stephen: And Abel’s blood, shed by Cain, is there in the ground, crying out for justice, crying out for the restoration. And so his blood being there in the ground and not in his body, and him being murdered, is an emblem of the curse. The blood in the ground—the ground is not where it should be.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s some weird icons of this. There’s these weird icons where you see… I think it’s where Cain is speaking to God after this, and you see what looks like a little man, a little naked man, on the ground who is all red, with his hands lifted up: and that’s Abel’s blood calling out from the ground for justice. So that’s sort of the way it’s depicted iconographically. It’s very strange; it’s very, very strange, but it does exist in some icons.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And the parallel, then, is Abel’s blood is sort of the emblem of the curse, what is wrong, where as Christ’s blood purifies and restores and deals with the curse, therefore being better. And so, as we talked about in “The Priest Shall Make Atonement” episode aforementioned, the killing and exsanguination of goat number two are not ritualized; we’re not told how they killed, how the blood was extracted exactly, just that it was done. And that means—when something isn’t ritualized, that means it’s not important to the meaning of the ritual. So what’s important is what is done with the blood. So it’s about the blood. In order to get the blood of the animal, you have to kill it, and you have to remove the blood, drain the blood, but those are non-ritualized, just sort of precursors.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just: do that. There’s not specific prayers that go with it, or… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So the very brief version, the very short version of how this works is that we’re told several places in the Torah that the blood of a person or an animal is their life. So it’s “life stuff.” And we just talked about curse, how curse is corruption and “death stuff.” So you use “life stuff” to get rid of “death stuff,” to purify from “death stuff.” And, as it talks about in Hebrews, it compares the blood of bulls and goats to the blood of Christ. Christ, being God, his life is eternal; it’s the life of God himself, which is both—

Fr. Andrew: Which is why it has a much bigger effect—not just bigger: a very different effect than simply with animals.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the blood of an animal, so that there’s no comparison. And so Christ’s blood is therefore—his death and then his blood are able to do this once and for all: solve the problem, not just continue managing it. But this identification of blood as life is also, of course, why—and I think we’ve talked about this before on the show, too—there are all these strict prohibitions against the drinking of blood and the eating of animals with the blood still in them, in the Old Testament and continued in the New Testament. It’s like sexual immorality, idolatry, and eating and drinking blood that the Gentile Christians are not allowed to do.

The reason for that is that you are making very direct and very clear and acting out life feeding on life. And the Scriptures are putting forth another paradigm, which is life destroying death, which is pointing us to Christ, whose life destroys death.

Fr. Andrew: Which is why the Eucharist, in which we drink the blood of Christ, does not violate this prohibition against the drinking of blood, because it’s not life feeding on life; it’s life destroying death. We are the ones who are deathly, and it’s Christ’s life destroying death in us. It’s not us feeding ourselves with the blood of an animal. So you have to understand this a little bit more deeply; you can’t just say, “We’re not supposed to drink blood. How can you have the Eucharist?” Again, remember, the Lord himself gives it. He says, “This is my blood.” So we have to try to understand why he would say that and that he’s not violating the Torah; he’s actually revealing what the Torah was kind of always about, that it was always pointing ultimately to this, that the Eucharist is, among other things, a kind of—I don’t know if inversion or subversion or reversal—I’m not sure which word we should use—but it’s not the same thing because, as you said, Christ’s life is in that blood, which is a different kind of life than created life.

Fr. Stephen: God’s life.

Fr. Andrew: It’s God’s own life, right, exactly. And it’s why you don’t eat and drink the sacrifices of demons, because then you’re feeding on demons, and they destroy you.

Fr. Stephen: You’re entering into koinonia with demons when you do that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, literally the same word St. Paul uses: “I don’t want you to have koinonia with demons.” You only have that with God, and we do that in Christ, and we do that, in this life, most intensely, in the Eucharist.

Fr. Stephen: So, penultimately, by way of summary, we wanted to take a quick stroll through Psalm 1.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, which as we mentioned earlier starts out with the word, at least in the Greek psalms, makarios: “Makarios aner, Blessed is the man.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this will—I think you’ll see here summarized a lot of the things we’ve been talking about tonight.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, pretty cool. Okay, we’re going to take this verse by verse, so we’re going to break it down, yo.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, just straight-out J. Vernon McGee-ing it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It only took him five years to get through the Bible!

Fr. Stephen: I may finish by the end of this calendar year; it is not impossible.

Fr. Andrew: Really!?

Fr. Stephen: It only took twelve and a half. Twelve and a half, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And then you’ll loop around. All these people are going to be ready for…

Fr. Stephen: Genesis 1?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if you finish it by the end of this calendar year, it’s going to be, what, next June or July before the podcasts will…

Fr. Stephen: Before it actually—yeah, before anyone hears it.

Fr. Andrew: Just tantalizing. Just be patient, people; be patient. Okay, Psalm 1:1.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.

So we’ve talked about that word “blessed” a lot, that it’s this… And of course, in this case, it’s not evlogitos; it’s makarios in the Greek, that the blissfulness, blissful life of the gods… So we’ve covered blessedness, so what about the rest of this verse? How does that fit into this?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s the emphasis on walking, which means this is a way of life. This is not: “If you do this, God will give you a blessing.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not about accomplished deeds; it’s about a way of living.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the person who lives in this way will be in this state of blessedness. And you see that in this case the state of curse, just like the state of blessedness, is sort of communal, because it’s about sharing the counsel of the wicked, the way of sinners, the seat of scoffers. This is about having koinonia, about having communion with the wicked, which the blessed man does not do. He is therefore sort of correctly oriented as opposed to these others who are not. So that’s verse one.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So verse two: “But”—so this is in contrast.

But his delight is the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.

So “law” there, that’s the Torah; that’s the commandments of God.

Fr. Stephen: In Hebrew it’s literally the word “Torah.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so his delight is in the Torah of the Lord, and on his Torah he meditates day and night. So basically he’s a biblical scholar?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s what it’s saying.

Fr. Andrew: Just throwing that out there. We should all be, on some level!

Fr. Stephen: Just the Torah, though.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: Taking it super literally. We have to remember, this is one of those things, this is always translated “law,” even in an Old Testament verse like this, but it’s literally the word “Torah,” which includes Genesis and which includes all the narrative parts of the Torah. So if someone wants to make a distinction between the Torah and the law, like they’re two different things, you’re going to first have to tell me what Hebrew word you’re referring to as “law” and where I would find that, because here it’s talking about the “Torah,” which means “teaching,” as we’ve said before.

So rather than sharing this communion with the wicked, he focuses on the commandments which have life in them in the Torah, and this is his focus. He is living his life in this way and acting in a way of good order which is going to bring forth life, one might even say “life, and that abundantly.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I don’t know what the word is in the Greek or the Hebrew, but the word “delight”: “his delight is in the law of the Lord.” It’s not… It’s funny, following laws, we don’t tend to think of it as delightful—“It’s so delightful to drive the speed limit”: we don’t think of it that way. But it is described as delight here, because it’s not just about obeying things that are in a law book; it’s this whole blessed way of life. Okay, so verse three: “He is like a tree”—so again, this is talking about the man who is blessed.

He is like a tree, planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither; in all that he does, he prospers.

So, again, this is not— [Laughter] This is not prosperity gospel!

Fr. Stephen: Prosperity!

Fr. Andrew: There it is!

Fr. Stephen: See, there it is!

Fr. Andrew: God is good all the time!

Fr. Stephen: Notice the chicken and the egg thing here. So he’s like a tree, but notice the tree is planted in a particular place. So it’s not just a question of “Wow, he’s a really great tree,” because if you put the really great tree in a desert, it would not yield its fruit in its season, and its leaf would wither. So there is a question of a system of relationships here: being in a certain orientation, being connected and in harmony with the rest of the created order around him so that he yields the fruit and so that again you have the unwithering leaf, the idea of eternal life, ongoing life. And so then, because of that bringing-forth of life, there is this prosperity, but that prosperity isn’t—again, the tree isn’t collecting a lot of stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s yielding fruit.

Fr. Stephen: The tree is successfully being a good tree, growing tall and strong and producing fruit, like we talked about with the good chair and the bad chair. He’s fulfilling his purpose for which he was created.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and thus this lights up statements like “you shall know a tree by its fruit.” You can know that it’s a good tree because it produces the good fruit. Okay, so verse four:

The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

So this is now talking about the curse: this is the cursed way of being. And it’s interesting: it’s not that they’re dead stuff or whatever; it’s chaff, which is garbage in its very nature. You don’t want it at all. It can’t be fixed; it’s just bad.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s been cut out. It’s been cut off from the ground; it’s been cut off from the fruit it was supposed to bear. It’s the garbage part; it’s the useless part, but it’s been severed from everything and it’s dead. It’s alienated and cut off from everything.

Fr. Andrew: There’s this threshing going on that makes the chaff blown away in the wind.

Fr. Stephen: And the wind blows and—it’s gone, because it’s not connected to anything.

Fr. Andrew: Mmm. It’s not substantial. Okay, verse five—we’re getting close to wrapping up the psalm here.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

So this is interesting because this is talking again about that context of the communal life, and this uses a couple of different images: the judgment, the congregation of the righteous. This is the divine council that comes together. They’re assembled, they’re presided over by the Lord, and they render judgment, meaning they put things in order—because, remember, everybody, that’s what justice is: being put in order. They render judgment; it’s the congregation of the righteous: these are the people who are in tune with God, who are doing his will, who are being obedient to him. And this verse says that the wicked are not there, that sinners are not there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they’re the blessed community that’s blessing and being blessed, that’s sharing this participation, this communion, this koinonia, with each other and with God, and the sinner, the wicked, have cut themselves off from that. They have alienated themselves from that and not been reconciled.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, the final verse, verse six. I think probably some people, as they listen to this, they remember that this is sometimes used as a communion hymn, “Blessed is the Man.” And isn’t it also used, I think in a festal great vespers, toward the beginning?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, verse six:

For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

Emphasis there on the way, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it’s the way of being in the world, the way of life, the way of living, the energeia of these two groups. And notice it’s not two individuals: it’s two groups, two communions, two communities. One has one way; the other one has another way. And the path, the way, of the righteous: the Lord is part of that; that’s why he knows it. He is a part of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that knowledge of experience and communion together.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the wicked have cut themselves off from that again, and so it’s just curse. It’s just corruption. It has no substance, and so it just gets wiped away.

Fr. Andrew: Cool. All right, well, some closing thoughts. I think we might have mentioned this—I know that you certainly have in other places, Father, but I think we’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but I just wanted to underline it, especially in light of this episode about blessing and curses, which is—you know, this last word that we mentioned, which has to do with blessing, makarios, which is a description of the blissfulness… In pagan religion, it’s the blissfulness of the gods with their most-high god, but it’s used in the Bible to refer to this way that the angels and saints are with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And this gets used in the Beatitudes, where Christ gives this sermon: “Blessed are the poor in spirit… Blessed are the meek…” And there’s a series of “Blessed"s, and again it’s not the word evlogitos, which, again, is related to, is from evlogia, this endorsement or the good words, so it’s not wrong—that wouldn’t be wrong—but it does specifically use makarios, which is this word that refers to this communion of gods with God.

So the Beatitudes get used in a couple places that I think are important for us to just note. One is in a funeral. So in the Orthodox funeral service traditionally, we sing the Beatitudes. You might wonder why. Why is that being sung or read, or however, whatever it is in a particular tradition: why is that there? It’s because, in the funeral service, what we are doing is commending—endorsing, as it were—this person who has died, and what we’re specifically commending them to God for is this blissful, divine life with the righteous, this life was lowercase-g gods who serve the one God, the Most-High God who is above all gods, King of kings, Lord of lords, God of gods. It’s speaking about handing them over to God, and our prayer is that they be received into that life. So we use the Beatitudes in the funeral service for this purpose.

The other place that it shows up—and probably a lot of Orthodox Christians may not know this, because their tradition doesn’t always include it, but especially for those who are more familiar with the Slavic liturgical tradition—but, frankly, if you go to… even in the Greek liturgical tradition, if you go to a monastery, you’ll hear this—is the Beatitudes are used in the antiphons at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy. So, again, it’s not a normal part of life if you’re at a Greek Orthodox parish or an Antiochian Orthodox parish, some others normally, but it is included; it is one of the traditional hymns that’s sung toward the beginning of the Liturgy. If you go to a church with a Russian tradition, liturgical life, you’re going to hear it all the time, the Beatitudes that the Lord speaks.

So why is that in the Divine Liturgy; why is that there? It’s there because the Divine Liturgy—there’s a lot of things we could say about it; I’m going to say this thing—the Divine Liturgy is an entrance into and a participation in that blissfulness, that divine happiness that the angels and saints share with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that blessed righteous community in community that they participate in with each other. That’s what’s going on there, so when we participate in the Divine Liturgy, we are entering into that life; we are entering into—there’s a reason that at the beginning the priest says, “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” It’s because we’re entering into that kingdom of God as we participate in that.

Now, that doesn’t mean that all the other services of the Church don’t also do that if they don’t include the Beatitudes, but there’s something particularly powerful about the way that the Divine Liturgy does it that’s kind of above everything else. And like I said, within the scope of the funeral, we’re handing the person over, in a sense, to the eternal divine liturgy that is what life in the kingdom of God in the age to come is about.

And I wanted to point that out because one of our goals with this podcast is to always refer people back to actual life in the Church, because that’s where you actually do this stuff. You don’t do it by listening to a podcast, as fun as it might be; you do it by participating in the life of the Church, which means especially its liturgical life and everything else that flows out of that. And I think to point out that this blessedness, as we described it, this blessedness, is what is being sung about, particularly in those two contexts but in so many others as well. I think that it helps to light up our experience of the liturgical life. That to me is one of the big experiences of all the things that I’ve learned in the course of doing this podcast, is it lights up the liturgical life for me: I see things everywhere that I didn’t used to see. It’s such a delight! And it draws you more deeply in.

So that’s the stuff that I wanted to walk away with from this particular episode. I think it’s—again, I’m just astonished at the wonders and the richness and the depth of the knowledge of God that’s given to us in his body, the Church. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So, insofar as I have a part in picking topics for the podcast—and I had a part in picking this one—I often pick them based on things I’m currently thinking about. And in this case, part of the reason for our topic tonight is that someone who is not a Christian asked in my presence, semi-rhetorically, “What does Christianity have to say about alienation?” specifically about the alienation of modern, contemporary life. And, as a non-Christian who’s been exposed primarily, and at a distance, to certain forms of Western Christianity, the question kind of makes sense in the sense that, for a person like this, Christianity seems to be primarily—at least any form of Christianity they would take seriously—seems to be primarily focused on salvation aimed at an afterlife, the idea that Christianity is about “What must I do to be saved? If I die tonight, where would I be; where would I go?”

And if you’re thinking of that type of Christianity, I don’t know what that type of Christianity would have to say to someone who’s feeling alienated and alone and cut off in this world, other than, “Hey, if you do X, Y, Z—whether it’s pray this prayer or whether it’s join this particular church and particular sacraments or whatever—then at least when you die you’ll have eternal bliss.” And it actually gets far worse if you go down the road of our Universalist friends, because that really lets you off the hook, because, hey, starving children? Well, don’t worry, because an eternity of bliss awaits them! Everyone else in the world… So all this stuff becomes super relative; you don’t even have to do X, Y, Z, necessarily.

Then on the other side, in certain segments of modern Christianity and rebelling against that, they go in the opposite direction, where they don’t talk about that at all; they might not even believe that that exists, that death is just it, and so you have sort of vague social concern, and, to be honest to history, not a social concern that’s produced much actual good in the world, at that, and that’s really done anything to fight people’s sense of alienation and loneliness and being cut off.

So sort of what’s the answer, then? Another weird habit I’ve developed for years now is I read Nietzsche during Lent, and it’s helpful because it kind of beats up your intellect if you listen to him, amongst other things. But there’s one place where Nietzsche talks about what’s been called by people who interpret him the idea of the eternal return, which is where he says, “What would happen if, at your darkest moment in life, a demon came to you and told you that essentially all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again?” On an infinite timeline, everything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times. And so the idea being, Nietzsche is saying, the life you live now, you’ll live over and over and over again, every bad part, every good part.

But then he asks the question, “What would that do in terms of how you live your life?” So I don’t agree with Nietzsche that that’s how it works, obviously—I don’t even know if Nietzsche even agreed with Nietzsche that that’s how it really works—but the idea that eternal life, the eternal life that is talked about in Scripture—you can especially see this in St. John’s gospel—begins now, and it is shaped by now, and has as its model like we live now. I think Nietzsche unintentionally gives us kind of a way into that, that eternal life—that life of bliss, that blessed life—is not something that awaits us in a future if we keep the rules or do the right things now; it’s something that has the potential to begin now. It’s a life that can begin to burst forth now and then continue into eternity.

And so I think what Christianity, what real Christianity has to say to the alienated person is that now, today, is the beginning of the time to be reconciled, not just to be reconciled to God through some kind of religious procedure, but to be reconciled to God by being reconciled to your neighbor, to your literal neighbor, to your friends, to your family, to your community, to the world itself, and then, through reconciliation to those things, to become truly reconciled to God, and through being reconciled to come to participate in his life, as we read St. Paul speaking about in Romans 5.

And this isn’t, again, an esoteric idea; this begins with picking up a phone and calling someone we haven’t talked to in years and saying, “You know what? The last time we talked I was a jerk, and I’m sorry, and I want to fix it, and I know it’s weird that I’m calling you after all these years, but I don’t like how we left it.” Or calling the person whom you just haven’t talked to in years who you have a sneaking suspicion might just need to talk to somebody. Or talking to the person you see every day and don’t talk to. Beginning to fix those things, very simple things that any one of us can do because they don’t cost us any money; they cost us very little time, and we have more than enough of that that we’re wasting on technology and trying to satisfy our desires—but those little steps that begin to lead to something that is beautiful and blessed and lasts forever. So those are my concluding thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you for listening, everyone. If you didn’t get through to us live, we would still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific, which, Lord willing, will actually be live for a while now.

Fr. Andrew: Amen! If you’re on Facebook, like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend that you know, or suspect, is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night, God bless you. Christ is risen! He truly is risen!