Mr. Christian Gonzalez: Hey, everybody, Christian here: happy summer! I know we officially took our summer break from Pop Culture Coffee Hour, but—surprise!—here’s a bonus episode. It’s a little different from how we have normally done things, though. Steve and I were asked to co-lead a presentation for a Parish Life Conference, and they asked us to discuss the theme of identity and how we come to understand who we are. Naturally, we thought it might be interesting to do this through the lens of some of our favorite pop culture universes, so—you’re welcome!

If the opening feels a bit sudden, or if you’re wondering what happened to the silliness in the follow-up, though I know very few of you probably are, we’ve replaced it instead with a little introduction to Pop Culture Coffee Hour. If you’re one of the 13, you get the schtick, and you just feel free to skip past this part and get to the good stuff, er, just… the stuff. At any rate, thanks for tuning into this bonus episode of Pop Culture Coffee Hour. Without further ado, here’s… well, us.

Pop Culture Coffee Hour is a project that we’ve been working on for the last six years, and it’s been really… for me, really, really fun, simply based on the project of— For those of you who may have never heard of it, that’s why I’m trying to give this little run-down of what it aims to do. It’s to take up the challenge that we say in that prayer to the Holy Spirit, that we really seek to see and find Christ as everywhere present and filling all things, to trust that prayer is true, and that we can go looking for him anywhere. For us, that’s actually been… I think pop culture has actually been one of the avenues that we’ve tried to kind of find, at least as some sort of conversational piece or whatever, to say, “Where do we see the story of God at work?” in some of these other narratives that are filmed or written or sung about or whatever.

Mr. Steven Christophorou: Yeah, which, you know, instead of us being sort of defensive as Christians, but to be offensive, and to engage with the culture and to figure out what are things that, to use another phrase from some of our other work, how can we be the bee in this situation? What are sort of elements of blessing and grace that we can pull out, something that is beneficial and uplifting for us, and what are things that we can leave behind? This is something we do in this podcast. Like Christian was saying, we’ve been doing this for six years now, which just makes my back hurt just thinking about it. But, as you can probably tell from this as well, our podcast is very extemporaneous. It’s just a conversation between two friends. As we were actually saying beforehand… Naomi was sort of pointing out one of the things about the podcast that she enjoys is that it’s just two friends talking and just being Christians and taking the faith seriously and taking Christ seriously and engaging with the world and pop culture with some level of confidence and self-assuredness and not defensiveness.

And that’s really what we wanted to do today, so you’re probably used to, especially in this context, a prepared talk, a presentation. I think so much of the joy of Pop Culture Coffee Hour is not necessarily telling people what to think about a particular piece, but maybe modelling through the conversation a way to engage. We thought that, especially as we’re dealing with these deep, very modern questions of the self, to use the lens of pop culture to maybe model a way to wrestle with these questions rather than just kind of offer an academic thesis in the abstract. So there will be diversions. Different kinds of beloved candies from our childhood I’m sure will pop up! [Laughter] I’m wearing a Harry Potter t-shirt for the occasion, so this, again, the tone of what you’re getting into. If you’re looking for footnotes, this is the wrong podcast; I apologize.

Mr. Gonzalez: I have Darth Vader on, but I don’t know if you can see what he’s saying because he’s down here, but it says, “Eh! May the forest be with you,” and he’s holding a tree as a light saber.

Mr. Christophorou: Oh.

Mr. Gonzalez: Get it? It’s a dad joke.

Mr. Christophorou: Is that like a…

Mr. Gonzalez: It’s a dad-joke shirt. “May the forest be with you.”

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] I thought that would be sort of a Paul Bunyan crossover sort of thing: What if Paul Bunyan fell into a lava pit and needed to be rebuilt?

Mr. Gonzalez: [Laughter] That’s… I’m glad you picked up on the interweaving narratives there. That’s very good.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, yes, yes. Narrative threads are totally what we pick up.

Mr. Gonzalez: Special crossover.

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] Exactly! So that’s what we aim to do.

Mr. Gonzalez: So when we were originally asked to do this, we were asked to talk about the theme of identities, as it is something we’ve talked about in a lot of different ways. Current culture… I think if I was going to say that there was one kind of cultural project that is ubiquitous, it is the construction of the self. Who am I? What do I do? Individualism is the bedrock of 21st century American life, I would say.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah. Just to pause it there, to highlight that, I think it’s important that the phrase there is “construction of the self,” not necessarily discovery, not necessarily receiving, but construction. It’s this thing that we make, which I think also shapes the contour of the project itself.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, and I think really in some ways it could point to— Do you remember those ads, maybe ten years ago, maybe a little bit more, the “I am a Mac; I am a PC” kind of stuff?

Mr. Christophorou: Yes!

Mr. Gonzalez: That to me is probably one of the most explicitly overt movement into this thing, of seeing the construction of the self. Because what Mac was doing—they weren’t selling you a machine; they were selling you a personality profile. And if you could buy that, you were going to be the hip, cool young guy instead of the nerdy PC user, who was unattractive and not interesting. But functionally, people probably use PCs and Macs to do just about the same thing, but at least if you bought a Mac to do the same thing as you were going to do on your PC, it said that you were a misunderstood artist, and that was, you know, kind of the cool thing that was Mac was selling, was that it was a personality.

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] Do I like like I lived in a loft in Brooklyn? That’s kind of the aesthetic I’m going for with the Mac.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, exactly. And that’s just one instantiation of this. You could pull so many different things out from anywhere. The phrase that we find all over the place, “You do you,” these kinds of things, they don’t make sense to a culture that isn’t tied up in this kind of construction of the self project, which is interesting, isn’t it? It’s an interesting moment that we find ourselves in. So, yeah, I think that it’s good that we get to talk about it. But rather than kind of maybe going at it from just like, “Let’s talk about identity,” I think the way that we felt we would best approach this is to look at the question of identity and all the questions that are wrapped into that question, that larger question, through the lens of three fictional universes that we really, really love, and those are Harry Potter, Star Wars, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, and two of those universes are reflected in the t-shirts that we’re wearing.

Mr. Gonzalez: Indeed.

Mr. Christophorou: So, again, it’s there.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, exactly. And if we’re unable to resist the urge, we might even go full nerd and dabble into other territories such as Narnia or Lord of the Rings—who knows? You never know. You never know what you’re going to get with us. We’re wild like that.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, yes, yes, you listen to our podcast on your toes, because that’s the best physical posture.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yes, indeed. [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: Don’t get caught flat-footed with the references. But, again, the reason we do it is even think about the way that we wrestle with these questions as modern people. We don’t wrestle with these questions in the abstract or in the void; the construction of the modern self happens in the light of the attitudes and feelings and preconceptions that are floating in the air of our pop culture. This is the air that we breathe. It’s like the old joke about a fish swimming through water and the other fish looks at him and says, “Water’s nice today, right?” and the first fish says, “What water?” It’s important to kind of shine a light through this and be very intentional about understanding the kinds of things that are in the air, so we can sort of be aware of the unconscious thought-patterns that we have as modern people and also especially when it comes to questions of parish culture and ministry and so forth. We can kind of be a little bit more aware of what’s out there and how to maybe have a constructive engagement with these questions rather than, again, defensive, on-our-heels posture when it comes to the larger culture.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right! Yeah. So since everything that we’re discussing today is… Because we’re going to bring up all kinds of stuff from MCU and Star Wars and all this stuff. There’s all different kinds of new shows. Not everything is contained to the international statute of limitations regarding spoilers and giving things away, as was initially drafted by the great Entmoot of the second age and later ratified by the Wizengamot of 1643. We feel like there’s probably some things that we need to do to warn you about what’s coming up. Steve, do you want to explain what we do to warn people about what they’re getting themselves into?

Mr. Christophorou: Yes! This is one of the many inside jokes that we carry with us as we ask you to keep on your toes. We have a particular sound that initiates the fact that we’re re-entering into potential spoiler territory, and one of the sounds that we really like, because it is such a bizarre, silly sound, is the sound of Porgs, these lovable, fluffy little birds from the new Star Wars movies. So we unleash the power of the Porg as a spoiler warning that we are getting into potentially the spoiling of plots on relatively modern things. So, Christian, I’m going to ask you, without further ado, to unleash the spoiler-Porg as we proceed into spoiler territory.

Mr. Gonzalez: [Spoiler-Porg noise] Let the sound of the spoiler-Porg resound with joy and triumph, declaring that you have been warned that spoilers are forthcoming! Let the people declare and rejoice.

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] So may it be. Yes! I feel like we normally don’t do that with this level of mock-gravitas, but I appreciate that.

Mr. Gonzalez: I think it was pretty late when I wrote that introduction at one point. I think I might have been a little goofy at that point.

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] That’s okay. That sets the tone perfectly for our conversation.

Mr. Gonzalez: Exactly. So let’s get to it, shall we?

Mr. Christophorou: Let us get to it. Let’s get to it.

Mr. Gonzalez: Cool. So I feel like the place where we need to maybe begin is stating what is the ultimate question behind identity. When we talk about this construction of the self—and I do feel like at its most basic level, the question is: Who am I? And there’s a lot of things that we could say about that, right? But it’s such a… That’s a pretty self-centered question, but I do feel like the way that we live it now is relatively individualistic, as I’ve said. I think you can see that really through something, for example, even the phenomenon of bumper stickers. When we put bumper stickers on our car, we’re basically marketing ourselves to the world, saying, “I’m the kind of person who thinks this is funny or who blank or who likes this thing, who voted for this person.” There’s just a kind of identifier that goes along with the bumper sticker. I remember, I was behind— Go ahead.

Mr. Christophorou: As you alluded to with that whole sort of Mac/PC marketing campaign, you can really think about so many consumer goods that we pick up as bumper stickers for our lives, because of the choice of our phone, the choice of our backpack, the choice of the brand-name clothes that we wear, or whatever it is: they’re not simply functional things, but they actually are telling a story, which, again, is why we buy them under kind of current advertising rules. So, I mean, it’s helpful to think about it in the literal sense of bumper stickers, but I think we are all displaying more “bumper stickers” in a figurative sense, on a daily basis, as well.

Mr. Gonzalez: 100%. And it’s kind of a funny thing, because I do feel like we often… We feel like we’re buying these products, but we’re really the commodity that these products are helping us advertise for. Like: Look at this particular thing. This is all borne out of, I think, a larger quest for authenticity. We want to be authentic people, and I don’t think that that itself, that impulse, is bad. The individualist part of this is good if it’s a part of it, I think. What do you think about that? Is that a fair statement? [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, yes. And I think this also, in terms of the tone of the conversation, it’s that things are far more nuanced than just kind of binaries—yes/no, black/white, up/down. And I think this also kind of gets to, again, that sort of be the bee curiosity posture when it comes to these things. What is redeeming about some of these questions about “Who am I?” and how can they be salvaged and not just thrown away? Because I think that people, from the first time that human beings looked up into the stars and thought deep thoughts, like Socrates on the Stoa in Athens asking deep thoughts—people wrestle with these questions. I think that the deeper question is: What is the other universe of questions that we’re answering. Is it just this individual sort of quest or is it balanced by anything else? I think this is hopefully a kind of model that we’re offer to maybe reframe some of these conversations, and then we’ll get into the fandoms to maybe make it a little bit less abstract as we kind of use concrete examples.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. So the framework that I think we’re trying to have this conversation within is something that I had heard recently. It’s this model called—it’s a silly kind of phrase for it, but hopefully it’ll make sense as we explain it—the cosmic egg. For the sake of this conversation, I don’t know where it came from, but I know that I heard it through a Franciscan friar named Richard Rohr, who introduces this concept of what he calls the cosmic egg, that it has three layers. So at the center of the egg, the yolk of it, kind of our first experience of life and meaning and identity is what he would call “my story.” So it’s that individualistic, my own level of that. And in the white of the egg—the yolk exists within this larger framework that he would refer to as “our story.” So there’s “my story” at the center, “our story,” and then the shell that holds all of those things together is what he would refer to as “the story,” the overarching larger metanarrative, holding all things together.

I think—hopefully as we keep going it’ll make more sense; I don’t know if that was too weird and abstract…

Mr. Christophorou: No, I think it makes sense, and even to use that to talk about this modern quest for authenticity, I think right off the bat one of the problems I think that we as modern human beings wrestle with is we just kind of separate the yolk from the rest of the egg. Right, the yolk is savory, the yolk is flavorful; we love sort of obsessing over these questions of “Who am I?” but without the rest of the sort of structure of the yolk, of the white of the egg and the shell of the egg, I mean, it’s just kind of… It falls apart by itself. So it’s not that this is a bad question, but that this is ideally one of three questions, one of three sort of existential questions, and as modern people we’ve just sort of tipped the balance a little bit too much, and we focus overly on the me—my story, my quest for authenticity, my construction of self—without regard to any of the constraints and background and givenness of these other stories.

Mr. Gonzalez: Although, interestingly enough, I do think that what we’ll find, too, is that when we begin to realize that the self is—the kind of “my story” component of it—a pretty fragile narrative. It’s small; it’s not nearly as centralized as we would like to think that it is to all the other “my story"s that exist in the world. You can see that it can actually dissolve into an “our story.” You can get lost in an “our story” and think that “our story” is “my story.” Maybe that’ll make more sense as we begin to explain kind of what we mean through these three fictional universes: Star Wars, the MCU, and Harry Potter. I’m excited. This is a big undertaking, and we’ll see.

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] Yeah, I think this is the most ambitious pop culture-style thing that we’ve done, because we normally will pick one movie or one book.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yes.

Mr. Christophorou: Basically, this is like: Here is a theory of everything, presented with, like, three everythings. It’s a lot.

Mr. Gonzalez: According to Steve and Christian.

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] Yes! Buyer beware.

Mr. Gonzalez: Exactly. So let’s see what we’ve got here. I feel like maybe again, because we’ve started so much off on the individualist, maybe where we want to start is with what we’re calling “my story,” that that is maybe the… Again, it’s the most immediate experience I think that any of us have of the world and of anything. It’s located primarily within the individual, and I sort of like to think about it like if someone were to ask you, “Hey, what’s your story?” and you would expect something along the lines of a life history or an autobiographical series of events.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, and maybe even to think about this, too, from a different angle, which just occurred to me. People might be familiar with Joseph Campbell, who has kind of this theory of the hero’s journey, and he has this narrative that he would suggest is at the core or the background of sort of every story that is told in cultures around the world. I feel like even that sense, that the fundamental story, at least as we are wrestling with as human beings, is this “my story,” because I do think we tend to see everything as “my hero’s journey,” my quest for authenticity, my quest for whatever it is. And maybe we jump into it right at the beginning.

You think of somebody like Harry Potter, whose t-shirt I am proudly wearing, because that is one of the fandoms that I enjoy very much, the entire Harry Potter universe is ultimately and approximately at the very beginning, the sense of “Who is this boy?” because we meet him when he’s ten years old or whatever it is, and it’s his quest for understanding identity, realizing that he’s not just an ordinary boy; he’s a special boy who’s actually a wizard, and his sense in the world actually begins to click into place when Hagrid comes and tells him that he is a wizard. And then his adventures, all of which are trying to unpack who he is and what is place is in this wider wizarding world—it’s all about him. It’s all about his quest for self-discovery, his quest for authenticity, his quest for constructing the sort of person that he wants to be at the end of the day.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, and I think what’s important to recognize, too, there is the “my story” of Harry, it’s not simply just that he’s a wizard and that’s it, because you really get the trauma at the beginning of the story, where he’s not just an individual, because if he were, if we just were individuals, then there wouldn’t be such a lasting impact, for example, on being a boy who was locked in a cupboard, because he could exist in there just fine by himself. But he’s locked in a cupboard, his parents have been dead, he has no idea who they actually were, has no ability to understand the strange things that he can do—so there’s some sort of thing that he’s been deprived of, in this fuller understanding of who he is. It’s not just a “Who do I say that I am?” kind of thing; he has to be intrinsically linked to other people to find his narrative, because that’s where he begins to find out who he is, because once he discovers who his parents were, once he discovers what actually happened to them, how they died, all the weird narrative stuff around like the lightning scar on his forehead, finally there’s this opening up of who he is.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, which I think is a nice way again of showing the connection between those first and second layers, the connection between the “my story” and the “our story.” That we frame it, I think, sometimes culturally as this quest for creation, but in the example of Harry Potter, it is this question of discovery. So many of the things that shape the contours of his hero’s journey are these just kind of these givens, these things that have happened to him. His entire life is shaped by the fact that this character called Voldemort exists, who killed his parents, who is locking the wizarding world in a war. The “our story” is the thing that actually gives the “his story” the contours to it, and I think it’s important. That’s kind of a helpful first step of realizing these questions are more linked than we sometimes realize as people. I think sometimes young people in particular can be drawn to this sort of story because they feel misunderstood or they feel alienated or whatever it is, but it’s interesting that Harry finds himself in the context of this larger thing, and I think it’s important that young people especially find themselves in the context of this larger thing rather than figure it out for themselves.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, and I think the same is true with Luke Skywalker. Luke is… he just is… When you first meet him, I mean, he’s just so whiny! [Laughter] “But I was going to go to Toshi Station to pick up some power converters! [Whining] I think I’m going nowhere! [Whining]”

Mr. Christophorou: Which is everybody’s idea of a bright weekend, I have to say.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, exactly. I mean, Luke is just… He is just so whiny! But then when you discover that his dad was this famous Jedi who was killed by Darth Vader as the story [goes], who fought in the great war with General Kenobi, then all of a sudden this desire that Luke has to go and join the rebellion makes a lot more sense. Like, oh, he’s born out of this story in this way that he hasn’t known, that’s been kept from him. In some ways, part of who he is has been kept from him, because he’s been cut off from that larger narrative. It’s tough, because there is a burden that comes with getting that part of that story, a responsibility, as Uncle Ben would tell Peter Parker: “With great power comes great responsibility!” Or, “You’re a wizard, Harry!” “You’re a Jedi, Luke!” Oh, God, now what do I do? “We can expect wonderful things from you, Mr.—” or terrible… What is it? “We can expect wonderful things from you, Mr. Potter, terrible but wonderful?” I can’t exactly remember.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes.

Mr. Gonzalez: Oh, he did terrible but wonderful things, wonderful things but terrible…

Mr. Christophorou: Oh, Ollivander?

Mr. Gonzalez: I can’t remember.

Mr. Christophorou: Ollivander, right? With the wand?

Mr. Gonzalez: Ollivander says something about Voldemort, and then he’s like: “Oh, he did wonderful things. Terrible things, but they were truly wonderful. I think we can expect great things from you, too, Mr. Potter.” There is a burden that comes along with kind of that discovery of the fullness of the story. And the same is true, I think, even with the MCU. You see, again, a bunch of origin stories that are really pretty interesting, and it would have been so easy for Marvel Studios to just make an Iron Man movie, a Captain America movie, a Scarlet Witch movie, whatever, and they would have been… People would have gone and seen them, because they love superheroes, but they didn’t do that. They ended up weaving this incredible project. I was watching Iron Man II the other day, and Scarlett Johansson showed up in it, and I was just like: “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe they were already doing this ten years ago!” They were weaving all of it together from the very beginning, which was just incredible. But anyway.

Mr. Christophorou: It’s good storytelling, which raises the stakes. So much of this question of identity is also raised, connected with this connection of the call. It’s not just an opportunity. Being a wizard doesn’t just mean that you get to fly around on a broomstick all day. Being a Jedi doesn’t mean that you sort of get to make rocks float around. There’s actually a terrible burden that goes along with this as well, which is interesting, because I think this is the tension sometimes when we think about, in our world, in our modern world, the way that we frame this story, the “my story.” The “my story” is sometimes framed in opposition to responsibility; it’s framed in opposition to… rebellion against family, senses of alienation and retreating, constantly retreating from, but the shape of these heroic journeys.

I think it’s an interesting tension between that maybe sort of cognitively speak to our heads and the things that speak to our hearts, because these stories that capture the imagination—the Harry Potters, the MCUs, the whatever-it-is—there’s a greater depth there than sometimes we even imagine in the way that we just think of ourselves and conceive of ourselves in the wider world, because how we think about sometimes “my story”—how I think about “my story”—is not even necessarily the way that Harry’s wrestling with his story is presented, or Spider-Man, Peter Park, is wrestling with how his story is presented. These are compelling stories precisely because they are wrapped up in something bigger than just themselves, which I think is an interesting sort of schizophrenia in the culture, because we’re still drawn to that even though, in our own lives, we may not want to think about that.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, and I think that that’s… It kind of makes sense to me, because I do feel like why that happens, what you were just talking about, of the obsession with “my story,” is really that it’s rebelling against an “our story” that someone doesn’t feel like they fit into.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah.

Mr. Gonzalez: When an “our story” becomes almost too rigid, or the story feels like it’s closed or ended in some way, and someone’s “my story” doesn’t feel like it fits into that “our story,” they probably do feel like they have no other choice but to rebel against “our story” and to kind of strike out on their own. Because I think we see some of that when you start talking about “our story”; I think we’ll see some of the things of the stuff that we’re… the shadow side of some of these things, because I do feel like once someone discovers that “my story” is important, but there hasn’t been room for it in “our story,” they’re kind of swept away in the allure of it, because it’s an important component to this whole thing. I do believe it’s a good impulse. I don’t think that it’s, like, someone being snatched away by the jaws of secularism or anything like that, to want to have a “my story,” but I do…

Mr. Christophorou: That matters.

Mr. Gonzalez: That matters, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that when we start to get problematic is when we close off our stories from “the story,” we close off “my story” from “the story,” and we become defined by the things that have happened to us: Who hurt me? Who did this to me? Who said that about me? All of it. We kind of over-identify with our wounds, which I think is the shadow side of the “my story,” kind of being sucked into our own narratives of hurt and being kind of overwhelmed by blame. [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, which is interesting, right, because I think so much of this comes from this… lack of security? I’m not even sure the way to frame that necessarily, this desperate desire for meaning, this desperate desire for the story to make sense, and if it can’t be grounded in something healthy, then it’s going to be grounded in something unhealthy, unfortunately. I think there’s a really interesting contrast between the way that our wounds sometimes in contemporary society define us and the fact that, when Christ rises from the dead, he still carries the imprints of the nails on his hands and feet. And that suffering continues to be important, and it’s something that still exists on his resurrected body, but there’s a very different ethos on the way that Christ carries those wounds and the way that we sometimes carry the wounds that have led to our own sense of bitterness and oppression and whatever it might be. I think that even those might become this interesting foil.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, because I do think we get locked into this cycle of victim and victimizer. It’s just what you see in drama: someone who’s a victim can—not always, but can—become a victimizer, and I think that that’s actually one of the things that the MCU captured really well with the show WandaVision. That show… I’ve had some people, by the way, give me a lot of grief for our conversation, because they were like, “She was going through trauma!” and I was like: “And she, like, enslaved an entire town!” [Laughter] I get that she was really sad about her boyfriend’s death and stuff, like, that is really sad, don’t get me wrong, and she did take a lot of people hostage, so…

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, like, mentally and emotionally and spiritually enslave them. It was bad. Don’t do that.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, exactly.

Mr. Christophorou: If I ever draft a set of rules to live by, like, “Don’t enslave an entire village” is going to be very high on that. Don’t. Just don’t. Just don’t! I don’t care how sad you are: Don’t.

Mr. Gonzalez: I’m not saying that it’s number one on my list, not enslave a bunch of people in a town; like, I’m not saying that’s number one, but it’s pretty high up there.

Mr. Christophorou: Top five, fine.

Mr. Gonzalez: Top five things not to do.

Mr. Christophorou: We can negotiate, yeah. [Laughter]

Mr. Gonzalez: But, yeah, I mean, I think that the reality is that Wanda is so wrapped up in her own pain and so defined by her pain in that moment, that she has no idea how much anguish she’s causing people around her. Like we said, literally mentally taking them hostage, and everyone is there to serve her, to serve her story. They are supporting actors in her television show. I mean, it’s called WandaVision. It’s super telling.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, and it’s a shame, right, because the series itself is this really interesting exploration of trauma and grief, which I think goes deeper than a lot of the other stuff in the MCU, but it also falls flat in that way, because it does seem to be this consequence-free thing, and it’s really interesting to hear feedback from people who actually defend that, who were kind of so… I mean, again, it’s not about pointing fingers, but it’s interesting how sometimes that preoccupation with the “my story” can totally lose sight of the way that this has consequences for other people. I think it’s one of the myopias of the modern condition sometimes. We are so interested in construction of the self that we kind of forget that there are other selves out there doing this thing. It’s interesting to me, for instance, there’s this word that somebody had to invent, some time relatively recently, called “sonder,” which is this sense of realizing that other people have independent existences besides ourselves. It can be so easy to get wrapped up in my sense of self-creation that other people are real and matter and are not just background characters in my story.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, and I think that actually is one of the gifts that we need to embrace of the cross, that helps us see that we are not the center of the universe. Our “my story,” whoever we are, really truly does need to be relativized against every other “my story.” That is the only way for us to move forward, is to understand kind of… And I don’t mean “relativize” in the kind of “There’s no such thing as truth; make up your own” kind of thing, but like: “How can I expect my story and your story at all to be the same, or to be held under the same sort of information or anything?” It’s just my story is my story, your story is your story, your story is your story, etc., etc. That there are an infinite amount of “my story"s.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, which I think is this interesting balance between the objective and the subjective, which I think is important for us to keep in mind, just as beings navigating. There are things which are objective and sort of true, and yet they are perceived subjectively, and we all bring our own subjectivity and our own perceptions to the table, because you’re looking at the world through your eyes and I’m looking at the world through my eyes, and part of the difficulty of being a human being is navigating that in the sense of something bigger and deeper.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah. It’s interesting, the kind of a situation that comes to mind for me, of where we need to make space for all these “my” narratives, “my story"s—I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where maybe you have a friend and they say something mean to you, and then you tell another friend, “Hey, so-and-so really hurt my feelings with this thing that they said,” and then that other friend goes, “Well, they’ve never said anything like that to me.” And it’s just like: No, we’re not talking about your story; we’re talking about my story right now. Well, they did say that to me. So that’s something that needs to be reckoned with. Just because you have never experienced this dark side of Friend X does not mean that I have not and that I’m not somehow struggling with it.

Mr. Christophorou: Your experience is true. Not helpful in this moment.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yes, but if I’m going to be defined by my story and the bad things and all of this kind of stuff that has happened to me, then we start getting into the shadow and backside of the “my story.” I mean, consider if Harry Potter had actually over-identified with the things that happened to him. Parents were killed by Voldemort, and all this other terrible stuff has gone down. He was locked in the closet from the time of his youth, and he finds… everyone’s calling him a freak, he has to wear clothes that don’t fit him, snakes talk to him. There’s all this weird stuff going on.

Mr. Christophorou: His hair is uncombable.

Mr. Gonzalez: [Laughter] Yeah, look at this guy! Can’t even comb his hair! Also, it’s really interesting to me the things that they can use magic for, but the things that they can’t use magic for. Really? You can’t just, like, I don’t know, set that with a spell or something? There isn’t a perma-hair charm? I don’t know. There’s got to be some sort of, like…

Mr. Christophorou: An anti-cow-lick charm?

Mr. Gonzalez: Exactly!

Mr. Christophorou: Surely Mrs. Weasley would know it if anybody does.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yes, exactly! “Harry, dear…” But, yeah, he could have easily over-identified with his wounds, and we would have had a completely different story if that had been what had happened.

Mr. Christophorou: Which his foil kind of does, right? One of the interesting tensions that exists—I forget where it is in the series, once you get to book four or five or six or whatever it is, Harry begins to have this dawning realization that he is uncomfortably… He holds a lot of things uncomfortably in common with Voldemort. A lot of their backstory, like the fact that half-Muggle-born, yaddah yaddah yaddah. But the difference is the way that they respond to this. Because what Voldemort does is does exactly what you’re doing: he makes his trauma and his pain and his fear of death the center of the world, which makes him ultimately the center of the world, because he wants to become magical dictator over all things. His self-obsession actually imposes his story upon everybody else, and actually kind of elevates his story and his desires, as this petty little dictator, into the “our story” that plunges England and potentially the entire world into war.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, and to the point where he can’t even fathom the idea that other people would have the same name as him. Like when Dumbledore comes to visit him in book six, he says something about his name or whatever. He’s like, “Tom: I hate that name.” “Why? It’s a great name.” He’s like: “Well, there’s a lot of Toms.” That’s like one of the big issues that Tom Riddle has with his name, that he was named after his Muggle father. You see that he has to redefine himself as unique and special, and, in some really weird sense, precious. There’s a preciousness to him, because he has to be defined by his hurts, and that’s all that he can do, and that’s ultimately the thing that leads him to want to come out on top. He ends up killing his servants because of this. When he believes Snape is the master of the Elder Wand, he kills Snape. Some of the final words he says to Snape are: “Only I can live forever,” which is such a haunting line.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes.

Mr. Gonzalez: Because imagine being the only person who could live forever.

Mr. Christophorou: What a lonely, cold thing. And yet, he is so broken and twisted that I kind of feel like he’d be fine with that.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, which is why it makes no sense why he has a baby with Bellatrix Lestrange in The Cursed Child. Zero sense.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, that should not be canon.

Mr. Gonzalez: No. Nope! [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: What a weird play.

Mr. Gonzalez: It is parallel universe!

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, yeah, it’s legends or whatever it is. And you compare that, the vision that the Voldemort has, because he is so defined by his hurt, because he is so… His “my story” is so out of balance with everything else that his end game is isolation. His end game is like him floating through time and space by himself, completely alone. And yet, what is Harry’s end game? He’s actually willing to die for his friends. He’s willing to disappear so that they may continue to live. He is willing to love in a way that Voldemort can’t even conceive. He’s able to change and repent in a way that Voldemort isn’t able to. The interesting thing about Voldemort as well: the more he is defined by this particular vision of “my story,” this constructed self—because he kind of goes from who he is—Tom Riddle, with all of his family back story and so forth—to the creation that is Voldemort: he’s inflexible, he’s rigid, he’s incapable of showing any remorse at the end. There’s nothing supple and alive in him, and eventually he ends up as dead as he is on the inside. The guy with eight Horcruxes ends up dead, and Harry, the boy who was willing to die, is the one who lives at the end of the day.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, dude. It’s so good. [Laughter] Having just reread those books to my kids—man. I was like, this is good stuff, especially that seventh one, where you’re just like: Holy cow! It all just comes together so incredibly.

But the same is true with Emperor Palpatine. Palpatine is similar. He’s a character who’s stuck in his own story. There’s only Palpatine in his rise to power. We can talk about the sequel movies all we want and cry about The Rise of Skywalker—

Mr. Christophorou: I will.

Mr. Gonzalez: —but you can just see how, really, at the end of the day, when there’s these stories that are locked into themselves, the only logical end is death and destruction. That’s the only place that they can lead. When there can only be one, then all others need to go away; all others need to be destroyed, all others need to be eliminated, dominated, overwhelmed, overcome. That’s all that can happen when there’s only room for one. Again, why it makes no sense that he has a granddaughter—unless… Unless she’s the daughter of a clone of his, which is what I’ve heard, which that would make a little bit more sense to me, because that would be more in line with the “I’ll live forever” kind of thing. And then one of his clones is disobedient, falls in love with other people.

Mr. Christophorou: But that’s a vanity of story-telling. If you have to read into the movie, the movie didn’t do its job.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, exactly. That’s true. So I reject you!

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] That’s right. But, yeah, I think there’s a really interesting thing between Palpatine and— And notice the thing that Palpatine and Voldemort have in common: both of them have this quest for life and immortality. Voldemort is trying to figure out a way to live forever, and at the end of the day he wants to be the only one that lives forever. Palpatine is this one who is like… He promises the ability to live forever, essentially, to Vader, but he’s the… I mean, he’s willing to kill Vader at any point in time. He wants to… As we see again in the later movies, he’s coming up with all these ways to artificially extend his life, because all that matters is his story, and, as a result of this, again, he continues to impose his story upon other people. Any other narrative begins to go away. Again, it’s the opposite of sonder: other people don’t have agency, other people don’t have matter—don’t matter, I should say. It’s the death of empathy; it’s the death of love. It is the cruel sort of end, the cold, logical end to this desire to kind of create the self.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, it’s that rugged individualism that has to do away with everyone else. Just as you were talking about that, for some reason I started thinking about, like, James Bond movies. Have you ever thought about how many people James Bond kills who are just like at work that day? They’re people who are like: “All right, honey, see you later,” and he just kills a bunch of Russian spies. Like, they’re just all dead now. What if there was a movie about one of those guys: leaving for the day, going to work, doing his normal thing, getting his daily doughnut, and it just ends when James Bond kills him. Like, that would be a really interesting story to me. “Oh, you’re right. I didn’t think about that. This is a guy with a wife and kids.”

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] Not even spies!

Mr. Gonzalez: And James Bond murdered this dude.

Mr. Christophorou: Like intelligence analyst, or the guy who’s just a security guard at the back of this facility that James Bond blows up. That’s really funny.

Mr. Gonzalez: When he comes smashing out of the garage in his BMW, he just… They’re there.

Mr. Christophorou: Which looks super-cool on film, all of this building things. It’s this weird sort of perverse violence that frames the triumph of the “my story,” but you don’t sort of see all the people who are charred along the way, because there’s no regard. There’s no regard.

Mr. Gonzalez: Exactly. And that’s all that can happen, is a cult of death around the individual. And Thanos is the same way in the MCU. Ultimately he wants to position himself as a god, someone who possesses the Infinity Stones, the things that are linked to the beginning of all the universe! He alone possesses them and can control them, and he says, “And I will look down upon a grateful universe.” That’s a really frightening image. Thanos being extremely… Even the word being kind of close to “death,” thanatos. It’s a very interesting thing that you get going there. His whole thing is trying to make life as good for as many people as possible, but in order to do that, he has to wipe out half the universe! [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: And it’s interesting, right? This is the way that art can sometimes encapsulate life and what is happening. As I think it’s not an accident that, as far as we can tell, the bloodiest century in human history is the 20th century, which is kind of the modern project sort of pushed to its limit. And who knows how the 21st century is going to end up? Lord knows, we certainly speak about each other in these kind of violent, nihilistic ways. It all kind of came to a head in the 20th century, and we did not do a terribly good job of that as human beings. This inward-looking nihilism just sort of spilled out into hundreds of millions of dead. So it’s kind of interesting. It’s not just art or philosophy; human history sort of bears out some of the problems here. [Laughter]

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, totally. That I think is definitely what’s partially conscripted into some of the “our story” stuff, once we get to that component of it and how we buy into different “our” narratives, “our story"s, that allow us to live into an us-versus-them kind of thing that allow for all kinds of horrible things to happen, and not only allow, but almost, again, necessitate the destruction of things, much in the same way that this obsession with our own identity and our own story at the individual level can easily be just a dead end at the end of the day. We have to and almost necessarily get wrapped up into the wounds that we’ve endured, because they’re kind of the thing that make us unique. Like, who, what happened? I think this is what cancel culture is kind of taking on the thing that it’s taken on: Who’s done what to whom? And we’ve got to point the finger at somebody, and all this kind of stuff. There’s no room for repentance, and it’s just all about all of this different kind of stuff.

Again, we can have a conversation about different structures that are at play and things that people have done wrong and all of that kind of stuff, but when it gets into this being defined by our wounds, being brought into them, and saying, “This is the thing that makes me who I am,” there’s almost this weird way of saying, “These are the things that makes me special. This is my specialness. My specialness is defined by who did bad things to me, or all the bad things that have happened.” And so we need an archvillain in our story, and it’s the people who’ve done something wrong to us. In Voldemort, we sort of end up using our magic to hurt them or to take things away from them, like reputation or… And again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t call people to accountability, especially when there’s abuses of power or something like that, but I don’t know, man. I don’t know.

Mr. Christophorou: How is it done? So much of it, even the framework that we’re working with—the “my story,” “our story,” “the story”—it’s about holding these three questions, these three fundamental questions, in some sort of balance and tension. What I think we’re… As we’re pointing to Palpatine and Voldemort and Thanos, these are consequences of that first question becoming an obsession in and of itself and not holding the rest of it in balance. I mean, so much of life at the end of the day is balance and wisdom. There’s a reason that wisdom is a virtue, as opposed to scientific precision. You can be very precise about one of these questions. Thanos and Voldemort and Palpatine approach that first question, this question of self-creation, with a scientific precision, literally, in the case of Palpatine: Death Stars and all these scientifically precise things that he made in order to align himself and his power—but it’s totally out of whack.

Mr. Gonzalez: I was like: Death Star is a little on-the-nose, Emperor Palpatine. Also, Death-Eaters… Like, come on! You’re not even trying any more; you’re not even trying to hide what you guys are doing! [Laughter] Yeah, but I do think that there is an important impulse to this, of the specialness, and the reality is that we are all quite precious and special, but this is a preciousness that is given to us by the sight of God, that we’re his: we’re his beloved, uniquely and infinitely loved—just like everybody else! [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: Yes.

Mr. Gonzalez: You’re uniquely loved, just like everyone else. You’re unique, just like… [Laughter] It’s a paradox, but it’s true!

Mr. Christophorou: It is, and it reverses the trajectory of these questions, because I think so many times people start with this question of the “my story,” but I think if we want to frame it responsibly, the “my story” flows from the “our story.” It’s actually kind of the reverse of the modern project. And it’s so interesting, that paradox, like this is the interesting thing about who we are as Christians, that we are adopted into the Sonship of Christ. Christ is there, he prayed… He talks about my Father, but when he teaches us to pray, we refer to “our Father,” because even though we are loved uniquely and Christ died for us and there is sort of beautiful sense of uniqueness, we are sort of… that uniqueness comes in our common entering into the Sonship of Christ. None of us gets to call the Father “my Father” in the way that Christ does; he’s our Father—and yet, even so, that is this brilliant and beautiful and wonderful thing which shapes the contours of “my story,” that I am loved, that you are loved: we are all loved. Like you said, we are loved equally.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right. I think that the problem is to want to possess that preciousness, to want to possess the specialness, instead of… Because it’s good for us to want to have that gaze of infinite love, to want to experience it, to want to feel it, to want be defined by it, or at least as one part of the thing that defines us—but we can’t have it be the thing that defines us over and against someone else. We need to recognize that that infinite, that gaze of infinite love is given to every single person, regardless of their place in the Church, whether they’re Christians or non, that it’s given to the Jew, the Muslim, the neo-Nazi, the Marxist, whoever. They’re all given this gaze of infinite love. I don’t know how we miss that! We want to hold onto it. It’s so easy to think that we’re the ones that, you know, get to hold onto that just for ourselves.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, right? It’s so easy to be the parable of the prodigal son. It’s so easy to be the younger son who—what does he do, ultimately? He embarks on a journey of self-discovery and self-creation. The younger son looks to his father, tells him, “I wish you were dead. Give me half your inheritance, because we’re going to pretend you’re dead right now,” and then he goes and he tries to make himself, and all he does is he falls into ruin. That’s one of our impulses, but then the other impulse is the impulse of the older brother, who wants to sort of be the special one in that situation: “I didn’t err. My father has to love me more than anybody else,” and he complains when the father welcomes the younger son. Both of these are sort of like “my story” impulses that come from very different angles, but both of them come from this lack of attachment, both of them come from this insecurity and fear, because it comes from this scarcity thinking at the end of the day, as if any love for you somehow diminishes the love that the Father would have for me. It’s biological thinking. In the real world, energy is a finite resource, food is a finite resource, but the love of God is not a finite resource!

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, because I think in our social media age, we’re all competing for followers and likes. It’s a zero-sum game, so we have embedded in us this idea that we’re competing against one another for likeable points, that we need to win in the eyes of God or win in the eyes of the world, and it’s not a zero-sum game. This is where I think we’re encouraging… We have to think non-dualistically here, that it’s not just “you’re just precious and everybody’s precious”; it’s like: “yeah, you’re precious, and you’re really not that special for that.” [Laughter] Like, you being precious doesn’t make you all that special. And the brain has a hard time with that, because it’s… You’re special just like everybody else—that’s a paradox, and we don’t know what to do with that. Your life matters, and also your life is not about you. Your life matters, and yet you’re going to die. There’s something to that that we need to be able to embrace the “both/and” in order for “my story” to actually take its rightful place. Once I can contextualize that—my life is not about me, and I’m not that special, and I’m not the center of the universe—that is a gift! That’s a gift that frees me to live for my neighbor. If I can actually internalize that truth in a positive way… [Laughter] Instead of the “I’m going to die one day! O God! Better go to all the parties…”

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] Yeah, it’s totally the difference between wishing death upon somebody else in order to kind of prove your specialness, which, again, is kind of what the older brother does in that parable. The older brother would be totally happy with the younger brother being rejected, sent back to the pods and the pigs to slowly starve to death out on a mountaintop somewhere, because when we think about specialness in those imminent terms, in those biological sort of scarce terms, because we can’t all be special—somebody has to be at the top of the food chain; somebody has to be eating somebody else. There’s the predator and the prey, and we can’t think… we can’t conceive of specialness without the prey.

Mr. Gonzalez: You know, what you’re actually saying right now to me is reminding me of— [Laughter] This is maybe really bizarre, but Demi Lovato’s song, “Sorry, Not Sorry.”

Mr. Christophorou: How so?

Mr. Gonzalez: Have you…? Do you know the lyrics to it?

Mr. Christophorou: Not off-hand.

Mr. Gonzalez: It’s… I could sing it, but I won’t. [Laughter] It just goes… Okay, I will. “Baby, I’m sorry. I’m not sorry! You being so bad got me feeling so good!” There’s this idea of: I’m sorry that I’m not sorry that you’re suffering so bad. Like, you’re going through some stuff, and, man, that’s making me feel great! It’s schadenfreude! It’s the “Aw, yeah! You’re getting knocked down a few pegs, and I’m sorry I’m not sorry about that…”

Mr. Christophorou: Because that makes me feel great.

Mr. Gonzalez: It does, yeah. Everything… “Today is going to be a great day—because everything sucks for you.”

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] Yeah!

Mr. Gonzalez: But when we get so stuck in ourselves… And this is really what I think the potential for the pandemic was was an actual gift to free us from “my story,” because think about what happened! We see how easily the fabric of “my story” begins to unravel. We lost access to all of these different things that we think of as being about me, about my life: my friends, my gym, my job, my whatever. There’s this loss… Don’t get me wrong; I’m not celebrating any of that, but I do think that there’s something that we had an opportunity for, to realize: “Oh man, I’ve been at the center of my world, and I’ve been clinging to ‘my story’ so much,” and I think what we begin to see is that is such a fragile breaking-point for us, that it makes sense to me when that was all taken away, while we saw this increase in mental health issues and increase in substance abuse, and even an increase, so sadly, in suicidality, that once “my story” began to unravel, because I was locked up for a couple months—man! We need to give people something better, something to hold onto when “my story” crumbles, because who knows what’s going to happen three months from now!

What this revealed to us, I think, is we get so stuck in “I’ll do this tomorrow, and I’m going to go to the whatever, and next month I’m going to go to California for vacation, and I’m going to…” But we begin to see how quickly all that can just go out the window. It’s just [Snap] gone in an instant. That, to me, says “my story” is unfinished, and I need to have some humility about that. I need to have some humility about the fact that “my story” is still being written, and to locate our story within that larger frame of “anything can happen.”

Mr. Christophorou: Totally. It’s the illusion of the rich fool, who has all of this plenty and kind of wants to build his bigger barns, and the angel of the Lord comes to him and tells him, “Sorry, dude. Your soul will be required this day.” I mean, obviously, this is one of the dangers also, because this modern project, of this “my story,” I think also emerges from wealth; it emerges from leisure time; it emerges from some of the comforts that we have as modern people. I don’t know that necessarily my grandmother who spent all of her time farming and taking care of her six siblings and whatever it is was engaged in this kind of artificial creation of self. She knew who she was in the context of her family and these other sort of bigger stories: who she was as a Christian, the love she had to show to total strangers. We have this… Again, it’s the same delusion of the rich fool, I feel like. And when those barns begin to crumble, we panicked, which is a shame. So many, actually, of the controversies, it’s interesting, over the last year and a half, have actually been this me-versus-you, and been this sort of doubling down on “my story” and even sort of fragmenting of “our story"s, because instead of changing the orientation of our parts and thinking about how “the story” reflects “our story” reflects “my story,” we actually just kind of leaned into that scarcity and leaned into our backs against the wall and just kind of clawed at each other.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, and I think part of that actually—and that kind of brings us into the next narrative, I think, or the next level of the cosmic egg, which is “our story”—

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, the albumen.

Mr. Gonzalez: The what?

Mr. Christophorou: The albumen. The white of the egg.

Mr. Gonzalez: I don’t… I don’t… Please don’t swear at me.

Mr. Christophorou: Isn’t it called the albumen? The protein…?

Mr. Gonzalez: I don’t know! I don’t science. Do I look like a science to you?

Mr. Christophorou: I… I mean… You have glasses!

Mr. Gonzalez: True. I do. I do have those.

Mr. Christophorou: You can thoughtfully remove them at a moment of crisis.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, have you ever seen Zach Galifianakis when he does what he calls the pretentious illiterate? [Laughter] It’s hilarious. He goes, like: “I told you: I can’t read.” [Laughter] That’s it. That’s the pretentious illiterate. “I told you: I can’t read.” And what’s even better for that is he takes glasses from somebody in the audience to do it. He’s like: “I’ve been working on this character called the pretentious illiterate. Can I borrow your glasses? I need them for this.” And it’s just so he can take them off to say that.

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] That’s amazing!

Mr. Gonzalez: I know. It’s really good. Anyway, so as we move into the… albumen…

Mr. Christophorou: A-l-b-u-m-i-n. Albumen, that’s a word! It’s a protein! … I’m pretty sure.

Mr. Gonzalez: Did you… Did you win the spelling bee? The spelling be the bee? Be the spelling bee! That’s… That is the next series you should do.

Mr. Christophorou: Spelling be the bee? No, confession! Confession: I was very uppity, pretentious child who defined himself by his academic achievements. I flubbed the sixth-grade spelling bee. “Scissors.” I got nervous and I misspelled “scissors,” and it stuck with me for the rest of middle school.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yep. It’s that silent “x.”

Mr. Christophorou: [Stammering] That’s not correct!

Mr. Gonzalez: “I told you. I can’t read.” [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: I can’t spell!

Mr. Gonzalez: [Laughter] So anyway, “our story.”

Mr. Christophorou: “Our story.”

Mr. Gonzalez: “Our story,” the white of the egg, the albumen. The idea is that our yolk, “my story,” is kind of contained within this larger story, and I think, sadly, actually, the “our story”… The biggest temptation—and I’m going to… maybe it’s okay to say this just from the get-go, because I think that this is what we’re going to run into the most as we talk about “our story” today, is that we often confuse “our story” for “the story.”

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah.

Mr. Gonzalez: We think that the “our story” that we’re a part of is the narrative, like “the story.” I think a lot of us, myself included, get stuck in “our story"s and maybe even lateral shift from “our story” to “our story” to “our story” to “our story.” And I think that that is the big danger, and I think one of the things that we’ve actually seen at play today, even in our country, again, kind of on the heels of the pandemic. I wonder if part of the unravelling of the “my story” has allowed for these “our story"s to become galvanized in some way, for people to cling to them more desperately, because they’ve had no need to hang to any more. They needed to hold onto something, so they took hold of whatever kind of political structure fed that narrative best, because they needed something to hold onto. It was wild to me just how much it happened.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, all around, whatever that narrative was, it became this next layer up. The ground is collapsing, so I just sort of reach up, and this next layer is this “our story,” whether it’s left or right, up, down, whatever it. It became the other, as the “my story” became quicksand, it became the other sort of firmish thing that people could latch onto.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yes, because I think intuitively—and I’ll think we’ll get to this—that we began to understand the weakness of the individual. We began to understand just how fragile we are as individuals, that we really can’t exist locked in a cupboard by ourselves. We can’t do that. So, yeah, I think that that’s kind of what we ended up doing. You see this again taking shape in the stories that we’re talking about. Who are we? We’re the Avengers, we’re the Rebel Alliance, we’re Dumbledore’s Army, we’re the Death Eaters, we’re the Galactic Empire—there’s this move toward belonging to something. The MCU has these interweaving stories—a bunch of “my story"s that come together to form an “our story,” which is I think pretty cool, the way that they’ve pulled that off over the course of the last ten years. The same is true with the rebels and Dumbledore’s Army. There’s strength in these numbers, and when people are cut off from it, you begin to see how vulnerable really they are.

Mr. Christophorou: Because there needs to be an “our story.” There’s the individual who becomes a person in this interwebbing series of relationships: the family, the community, the neighborhood, whatever it is. There does need to be an “our story.” The issue comes, just like with the first layer, the yolk, the “my story,” the issue is when it gets out of whack, and we turn the “my story” into more than it actually is.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, exactly. And I think it becomes really easy for us to think that because we have this particular “our story” that “our story” is always the good guys. The Avengers, for example, are the good guys—aren’t they?

Mr. Christophorou: Not if you’re, like, a citizen of Sokovia! [Laughter]

Mr. Gonzalez: Exactly. The Avengers’ “our story” is that they’re the good guys: they’re there to protect, and they’re there to serve. But what’s Sokovia’s “our story” of the Avengers?

Mr. Christophorou: “You dropped our city out of the sky!” or whatever it was. [Laughter]

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, exactly! So we have these kind of what at least initially appears as these competing “our story"s.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah.

Mr. Gonzalez: Either we’re the good guys, or we destroyed your city. “But, like, we were just trying to help!” [Laughter] And that’s really the big thing that’s problematic which you hinted to at the end of WandaVision, that she just gets to…

Mr. Christophorou: Go away?

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, because she’s been through some stuff. Like… [Laughter] “It’s fine. It’s fine. You’re sad! You’re really, really sad!”

Mr. Christophorou: [Laughter] That’s right, it’s wine-o-clock somewhere, Wanda. It’s fine.

Mr. Gonzalez: Girls’ night!

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, which, again, is this Avengers thing, though, and that’s one of the cool thing that I have to say about the MCU, that it actually does help us understand the tension of what happens when we overly absolutize the “our story,” because there is no perfect “our story.” Insofar as we are flawed as individuals, we can be flawed as communities, as polities, as narratives, whatever it is. And, sure, you… Yeah, it’s Civil War, I think, where that really comes out in the MCU; it’s like they, in the aftermath of defeating Voltron or Ultron or whatever it is: “Oh yeah, we dropped a city out of the ground and lots of innocent people died… We shouldn’t do that.” [Laughter] “Don’t do that, Iron Man; don’t do that!”

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, but Captain’s like: “But who else is going to do it?” [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: Who else is going to drop this city out of the sky?

Mr. Gonzalez: Someone’s got to do it, I mean! My name’s Captain America, not Captain Sokovia! [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: Right, but isn’t that interesting, too, because in the same way that I… To the extent that there is an “I” means that there is a “you”; to the extent that there is an “us,” there’s a “them.” How do we sort of privilege and prioritize “our story” over the story of the other? The tension between Jew and Greek, the tension between male and female. Again, even in the… So much of the Christian narrative—and this is where “the story” begins to bump against this—it helps us sort of overcome some of the limitations and the myopias sometimes of “our story.”

Mr. Gonzalez: Yes, and I think that this has been one of the harder things that I think we’ve been running into even in the last year, with all the… You know, it was really interesting, because I was visiting—I went to Portland for a wedding not too long ago, and it was during the week of the 100th anniversary of the week of the Tulsa Race Massacre—

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, which I never heard about, growing up as a kid!

Mr. Gonzalez: Which is what I was going to say. None of us knew about that! But you know who did know about that? Right, this is the thing: It’s been cut out of “our story” as the dominant narrative in America. But now we’re beginning to realize: “Oh, there’s actually some different ‘our story’s.” We think about “our story” of America from our position, and we think about the founding fathers and this Christian nation that we have, and all of this other stuff, but then we have to really stop and ask ourselves, “Well, is that really the ‘our story’ of the Native Americans? Is that their story of America? Or of Black Americans? Is their ‘our story’ the same as our ‘our story’?”

And what we begin to see is there’s all these different “our story"s at play, and I think so much of what happens in dialogue is we try to almost silence or convince each other that our story is actually the right one, instead of going: “Hey, maybe this is actually an opportunity for our story to transcend itself, to become bigger than what it was.” Like, our story of a country includes founding fathers and some really pretty terrible stuff. How do we take ownership of everything, the good and the bad, the yucky and the not-so-yucky?

Mr. Christophorou: Which is mature, right? Because, again, the Avengers are doing good stuff and maybe we should drop less cities out of the sky, you know? [Laughter] And this is funny, right, because it actually plays out, because there’s this one group of Avengers that has this sort of defensiveness that really wants to, in the face of redemption, repentance, in the face of realizing the limitations of their currently defined “our story,” do want to put up a wall and remain inflexible, whereas some are going to realize that we can do better in this moment. And I think sometimes our impulse as human beings who want to push back, who sometimes— especially in the case of social media, which is built upon the premise of constant inflammation, I think this is sort of the reason why there’s always two sides to something. It’s always simple and simplistic and it’s easy for the human mind to get a good cortisol hit and just get mad and angry and upset, but somebody needs to sort of defuse this and realize: “Yes, look the Avengers are doing great things—and…” Our “us” is doing great things—and…

Mr. Gonzalez: Yes, exactly, and I think that the problem that we get into is that binary, and this is why I’ve said earlier, too, we need to do away with this dualistic thinking, that there are good guys and there are bad guys. That’s how we’ve been trained in some ways to think, and it’s just… Anytime we find ourselves in a binary… I mean, I struggle to think of a time that that leads us anywhere really great, because either it’s like you’re the good guys or the bad guys; you’re on my side or you’re on their side; it’s us versus them—and that’s just not what we need. This is I think the shadow side of the “our story” that we get into. We see that we need to undo or blot out or suppress or destroy any “our story” that doesn’t fit with our story, any other “our story.”

This is what’s so darkly compelling about the Galactic Empire, that it shows the shadow side of how easily we begin to confuse “our story” for “the story.” They’re trying to make their “our story” the dominant story of the galaxy. It’s wild, and you see this in Solo in particular, I thought, where he joins the Galactic Empire—I mean, we could talk about the “my story” part or not, but there’s one interesting moment where they’re—I forget what planet they’re on—he goes: “Why are we here exactly, Captain?” The captain goes: “We’re here to eliminate the hostiles,” and he goes: “But this is their planet; doesn’t that make us the hostiles?” [Laughter] It’s such a good moment there, where you go: “Oh, you’re right.” But the “our story” is that we’re the good guys and they’re the hostiles. So once everything becomes Galactic Empire, that is where we start to conflate “our story” with “the story.”

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, yeah, and I think the trappings and the aesthetic of the Empire are so interesting in that regard, because you think of the Stormtroopers: the Stormtroopers, especially if you go back far enough, are clones, number one. They start as clone warriors, literal clones, because there is this sort of banal uniformity that is imposed on everything. And they’re all these faceless automatons, grinding out this system, whereas the Rebellion is this uneasy, at times tense, collection and alliance of all these different sort of groups that are together, not sort of trying to impose their will and rule the galaxy, but just trying to live together in the galaxy. It sort of breaks this binary of the us-versus-them, and says, “What about us? How can we sort of live together?” Because, again, it’s not… It’s a little bit over-simplistic to think about “us” as necessarily the good guys, because if we think about ourselves as the good guys, that means the other guys are inherently bad and need to be exterminated.

Mr. Gonzalez: Right, and therefore, and also that everything that we do is good.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes.

Mr. Gonzalez: And that’s what Rogue One did brilliantly, I thought, with the character of Cassian, when he assassinates some dude, and he’s going to go kill some other guy, and you begin to realize: “Oh, there’s some shady stuff that happens in the Rebel Alliance as well!” because for them it’s about this “our story,” and the same is true in The Hunger Games. Do remember, you get President Coin who wants to overthrow President Snow?

Mr. Christophorou: Yes.

Mr. Gonzalez: And you’re kind of like, “Oh yeah, she’s great!” But then Katniss kind of realizes that…

Mr. Christophorou: She’s the same kind of politician.

Mr. Gonzalez: She’s a shyster, too?

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah!

Mr. Gonzalez: And Katniss kills her, and you kind of go: “Oh! This is all… It’s just too much of the sameness.” It’s the wanting the “our story” to kind of win out. Again, I think you see this happening now, people getting dragged into narratives that are sold as “the right side” to be on, the dualistic language, the us-versus-them, right-versus-left, blah-blah-blah blah-blah blah-blah, on and on and on. It just gets to be exhausting.

Mr. Christophorou: And it’s the same… It’s this very annoying way of taking the transcendent and reducing it in a very unhealthy way, of sort of bringing it down to the imminent level. And as we think about this, the thing that comes to mind, honestly, is this is sort of a pagan narrative. You think about multiple cultures throughout history, who would set up their emperor or ruling person as essentially a deity that needed to be worshiped. I think this is what happens: taking the my narrow culture, my narrow tribe, my narrow group, and elevating it to the level of something—it’s the rebellion of the fallen angels is really what it is! [Laughter] It is unseating—or trying to, anyway, because it’s ultimately futile—it’s trying to take this thing that is small and petty and trying to build it into something universal and big, which it’s not. And there’s no humility there. It’s rebellion; it’s demonic rebellion against God. It’s the rebellion of our culture or polis against the divine order. It’s too much, and it’s not healthy, and again, it leads to… like we saw in the 20th century, this us-versus-them category led to people trying to take over the world. Not helpful. Not helpful! [Laughter]

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, well, exactly, and that’s exactly what goes on here with the Galactic Empire, and again, even within the world of Harry Potter. This is Voldemort’s rise to power, is that he overthrows the Ministry of Magic, all of this different kind of stuff. He’s got his Death-Eaters; he’s got people who are explicitly with him, and he’s got people who are passively with him. Really, looking through book seven, I was like: “Oh, dude, this is like basically… Resisting tyranny is what that book should be called!” Harry Potter and the Quest to Resist Tyrrany.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah!

Mr. Gonzalez: And that… And what you see is that when the “our story”… Well, let’s look at… Let me back up and go to Solo. When Han decides to join the Galactic Empire, it’s because his story, his “my story,” has crumpled. His “my story” was to leave with Qi’ra, to go start a new life off of Corellia, to go do all of these really cool things, but then she’s kept behind, and so he has to… He does nothing else but to go join the dominant “our story” at the time. That’s all he can do.

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, because it will give him a sense of identity and belonging and purpose

Mr. Gonzalez: And in some sense there’s nothing really he can do by himself. What can he go do? “Mmm… I’ll go camping?” [Laughter] Like, what’s he going to do? Take a gap year? [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: That’s great!

Mr. Gonzalez: So he has to go join it, right? But then there’s no place, and you see this even in the Galactic… He is sassed a little, he sasses a little bit, and he’s given grief. He’s like locked up! There’s no place for the individual to exist when the “our story” becomes dominant, when it’s too inflated. This again is the case in Harry Potter. Think about Sirius’s brother, Regulus. He has a moment of conscience when he decides that he’s not going to stand with the Death-Eaters, because he finally realizes what Voldemort’s up to, and he has enough courage to make his “my story” stand against the “our story” that he’s a part of. He finally realizes that “ ‘my story’ doesn’t fit within the ‘our story’ that I’ve been a part of any more. What do I do? My options are limited.”

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, right, and he can appeal to something higher than that at the end of the day, because there is a higher story to all the multiplicity of “our story"s that are out there, some sort of actual truth that stands above the limited, relative this or that group, something that stands above the Galactic Empire, something that stands above the Death-Eaters. And one of those troubles, again, when things are out-of-whack, is when we try to absolutize the thing that is just a piece of the puzzle. Like the Jedi sort of realize this in the sequel movies as well. There’s that really beautiful encounter between Luke and Rey, sort of realizing that the Jedi don’t hold a monopoly on truth, that the Force is bigger than them. And, yes, again, it doesn’t mean that the Jedi aren’t the good guys, historically, but there is a level of humility around it, like the Jedi are not synonymous with the Force. The Force is something bigger, and they have to stand with some level of humility around it. In the same way that we can’t start with “our story” and move to… We can’t start with “my story” and move to “our story”—it’s not about creating the self and then trying to extrapolate outwards—who I am flows from the “our story”—“our story” has to also flow from something bigger than it as well. “Our story” has to flow from “the story.”

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, and ultimately I think that “my story,” “our story” have to be places where we encounter “the story,” but we have to recognize that there’s something beyond every level of that for each of us. “The story” is… we can’t think that just because we’re part of this particular “our story” that that’s the only place that “the story” breaks through. That’s where I think we start to get into some of this dangerous kind of tyrannical way of being. Like I said, when “our story” becomes the dominant narrative, there is necessarily difficulty in holding onto “my story” or any other “our story” that doesn’t align with that, which is why Voldemort, the Galactic Empire, Thanos have to crush every other “our story” that doesn’t jive with theirs. Yeah.

Mr. Christophorou: And again, that becomes the punchline. Instead of building up from the creation of the self, these things kind of waterfall outwards from the story. To use that egg metaphor again, it is the shell that gives everything its coherence. Without the shell, it’s just a mess.

Mr. Gonzalez: It’s goop.

Mr. Christophorou: It’s goop! It’s goop. It may be goop that we hold onto really firmly, it may be goop that we love and are really attached to, but it is goop at the end of the day.

Mr. Gonzalez: I mean, I like my eggs goopy, so you’re making me hungry right now.

Mr. Christophorou: Runny sunny-side-up eggs, the best!

Mr. Gonzalez: Or just raw. [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: You’re going full Rocky! [Laughter]

Mr. Gonzalez: “Yeah, Adrian! It’s me, Rocky!”

Mr. Christophorou: I like my eggs in a glass.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah! Two ice cubes, please. [Laughter] Gross! But yeah, I think this is what ends up happening: we find these “our story"s desperately grasping at creating order. That’s what they’re trying to do at the end of the day is, through death and destruction, through their measured use of death and chaos, they’re trying to bring order, because the thing that they fear is chaos, which is the thing that they’re using to enact and establish that order. But I actually really think that the thing that they fear is not chaos: the thing that they fear is otherness; the thing that they fear is paradox; the thing that they fear is… which feels like chaos, because what it does is it presents a new take that maybe your story and your “our story” aren’t the only “my” or your stories, and we don’t know what to do with that, because we’ve conflated those things with “the story.” We’ve gotten so lost in those things that we just have to crush them. [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah! Right, and isn’t that why it’s so important that the basic theological method that we’ve received as Christians is this balance between the apophatic and the cataphatic? This balance between things we can say and things that we can’t say, things that we can sort of articulate—not define, necessarily, but articulate—and things beyond, in the face of which we stand in sort of reverential awe. When we forget that, that is what kind of is heresy sort of leads to; that is when we sort of take this one relative thing or minor thing and decontextualize it and turn it into capital-T Truth when it’s not. That’s then we elevate our group or our particular theological method, or even our—here’s a way to think about it, too, right? I have a beef, sometimes—and we’ve talked about this before—even when we refer to Orthodoxy too much, when we sort lose sight of the fact that it is the mystical body of Christ that is the Church rather than a set of dogmas, rather than a philosophical club or sort of a… I don’t know. I think there’s a difference when we’re sort of approaching the Church as this divine-human mystical reality versus an Orthodoxy that we can define a little bit too clearly, a thing that we possess, and a thing that we can sort of triumphantly say, “I’m okay because I’m in the ‘good’ club,” as opposed to…

Mr. Gonzalez: That is 2,000 years old, because that’s specifically what we’re talking about. It’s a 2,000-year-old thing. We’re an ancient faith, we’re 2,000… rather than this kind of… The word that we should probably grasp at more is “universal,” i.e., “catholic.” It is the universal faith. Yeah. Because the ancient faith is “our story,” and we think it’s “the story.”

Mr. Christophorou: Yes, which is a shame because it actually gets the story wrong. There’s a difference between saying, “The Church is 2,000 years old” versus “The Lamb who was slain before the foundation of the world.” That’s a bigger story!

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, and if you start to begin really… If you really want to blow out with some crazy patristic thought, when St. Maximus the Confessor suggests that all of the created order—all beings and all places and all times and all ages—Christ circumscribes those; that Christ contains all of those within himself—that’s what that means, “to circumscribe.” Then all of that—all of it—becomes Church, because he fills everything, because he’s everywhere present, filling all things. It’s not just this 2,000-year-old institution that we hold onto so firmly. And that’s where we start to have to allow for “our story” to be transcended and to go into… wow. To fall down before the Lamb of God.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, which, to use a very minor example of that, is kind of again the reason for projects like this; that it is a way to sort of model for people that being a Christian is not simply a thing that you do on Sunday morning. But you don’t check Christianity at the door when you’re watching movies in the MCU or watching or reading a Harry Potter book, or just engaging in the culture. You are still an Orthodox Christian Monday through Saturday, and Sunday afternoon and Sunday evening. I think sometimes the story that we offer young people in particular is too small. It’s a story that we can define. It’s a story that we can sort of control, but it’s a story that’s too small, which is why I think it’s helpful for us to—even if nothing else—that the Church is: Here are Christians talking about these things and wrestling with these things, not saying, “Those are secular things,” as if: Here’s the little boundary that we have. But, no, we are the Church, kicking down these doors, triumphally entering into this, realizing that we can engage with these things.

Mr. Gonzalez: You’ve said a couple things there that I want to comment on, because they’re really, really good, because we talked about this earlier: when we give young people an “our story” that’s too small—in other words, when they don’t fit within the “our story,” when their “my story” doesn’t fit into the “our story” that we give them. I mean, we already kind of discussed that: What other choice do they have than to rebel against it?

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah.

Mr. Gonzalez: There’s really no other option. “Well, then I’ll have to go find my own ‘my story,’ right?” The other bit of it is we so much, I think, want to bring people in and say, “Here’s how Christ is present in the Church,” as opposed to: “Here’s how the Church reveals to us that Christ is present everywhere.” This is the “our story” that helps us see “the story” out there. Christ in this flickering candle is… every fire is Christ. Christ in the faces of all these saints on the walls. These are… Everyone’s an icon with Christ’s face. It becomes instead of a school, it reveals to us the true shape of reality, rather than the place where we’ve over-localized God. [Laughter] We’ve locked God in a cupboard and we’ve called it church.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, and this becomes an interesting challenge when it comes to young people as they wrestle with that identity. It’s interesting to observe sometimes that young people will fall away from this—again, this narrow, constrained vision of “our story” that we’ve given them—out of a sense of piety, which is interesting. There’s a story that we’ve shared before. Naomi at the top actually referenced the We Are Orthodoxy interview podcast where we talked to young adults.

You had a conversation with a young adult named Sean who grew up in the Bay Area who tells this really powerful story of, as he became aware that the “our story” was bigger than he realized, that here’s his community in the Bay Area—thank God they all had enough to eat; they grew up in a certain level of comfort—there were people not very far away who didn’t have those comforts, and he’s like: “You know what? We’re Christians. We should be doing something for them.” And he raises this issue with parish leadership, and they’re like: “Yeah, we’re kind of doing our food festival right now.” And he raises this issue a couple of times, and it continues to fall on deaf ears. So he goes and starts getting involved with non-profits that are out there to take care of disadvantaged kids and so forth and so on and eventually drifts away from the church—not out of a sense of impiety, but out of a sense of piety.

We’ve talked about this before, Christian, too, like James will say this in his universal epistle: What is true religion but to care for the widows and the orphans? This young guy named Sean saw that, wanted to care for the orphans in his neighborhood, and the folks in the church are like: “That’s not our story. You’re doing it wrong!” [Laughter] And what a tragedy! But he fell away not because of hedonism, not because of sort of secularism or sometimes they way we defensively say it’s the fault of young people for leaving. He left the church out of a sense of piety, and what a slap in the face that is.

Mr. Gonzalez: Well, and to be fair, to bring it even more home, Jesus is ultimately crucified at the hands of “righteous men” because he didn’t do their “our story.” He didn’t fit into their “our story,” because “the story” was too big for their “our story.” They wanted to cut it all off. They couldn’t handle it. So, yeah, I think we do; we need to have some of that humility to kind of recognize that, much in the way that you brought up Luke and Rey, that if the institution that we call Church were to go away forever, as we recognize it and know it, if that 2,000-year-old institution dies, is it fair to say that the light dies? That’s vanity, as Luke would say; to say that if the Jedi dies, the light dies is vanity. Can you feel that? I think we need to have some sense that if the institution that we call the Orthodox Church died, to say that would mean that the light dies would be vanity. We need to know that it’s bigger. It’s bigger than us, even though it’s fully instantiated in us. It’s revealed and the place where we can begin to see the true shape of reality, but it’s not just about ending there. We have to keep going back to remember what it looks like, to keep looking in the mirror, to remember our face.

Mr. Christophorou: To keep being called into repentance. And this is one of the things I think about “the story,” and maybe we’re kind of shifting there as we begin to wind down towards the end. I think it’s really interesting that we’re talking about this shift, because the modern impulse is to sort of start with the “my story” and then shift upwards to the “our story” and then shift upwards to “the story,” but it’s in reverse. We don’t enter the Church; we are received into the Church, and we’re received into the Church naked. We don’t bring any “my story” into the Church, into the “story”; we don’t bring any “our story” into “the story.” The beginning, the alpha and the omega, is “the story,” and “our story” is what flows from that, and “my story” is what flows from that. And it is a difference between discovery—sort of reception; I don’t know what kind of verb you want to use to it, but it’s not construction. The flow is not from “my” up; the flow is from “the” down. It’s the shell that gives the egg its coherence. It is the shell that gives this thing its order. We are received into the Church naked, and then we are clothed, as opposed to coming in with our own particular baggage, “my story” baggage, or coming in with my own cultural preconditions, “our story” baggage. We’re received naked, and then we’re clothed, and then we go forth.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, I mean, I was baptized as an adult, so I wasn’t naked, but I get what you’re trying to say. [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, well, we don’t do it any more because we’re Puritanical, but for a long, long time, even adults were baptized naked.

Mr. Gonzalez: Let the record show that Steve is advocating for naked baptisms and a rejection of Puritanical culture.

Mr. Christophorou: I’m okay with that, actually. I will go on record! [Laughter]

Mr. Gonzalez: I do remember your saying that we should all go to church in our baptismal robes, and let’s just call it that. Let’s just do that.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, I’d be okay with that!

Mr. Gonzalez: Exactly. But, yeah, you’re right. That ultimately is the reality of “my story.” “My story” is I was born naked, I come into the world with nothing, I leave naked, and am eaten by worms and I feed the earth. That is the shape of the human life, and to make it not so dismal, but there is a necessary humility that feeds all of that. I think that what we need to embrace as “the story”… Well, to recognize that the fruits of identity can only be borne when “my story,” “our story,” and “the story” line up and can include other “my story"s and “our story"s without being against them or feeling the need to prove anything. That I think is where we can really begin to be free, because what we begin to see is that the overarching narrative is that all things are headed back to Christ. If we don’t… I would say, if we don’t have a conviction that this is all going somewhere good, no matter what we do, then we’re going to get wrapped up into “my story” and “our story” and confuse it for “the story.”

But “the story” of the Church, of whatever and time of beyond what we call the 2,000-year-old institution of the Orthodox Church, it’s going somewhere good, and that’s the kingdom of God. That’s “the story. That’s “the story,” and we, in the Liturgy, celebrate that: “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That is what we… That’s where we’re headed, and that’s where all of this is headed. It’s not just this transportation of time and whatever; it’s not just that, but it’s the declaration and the promise and the pledge of where all of this is going. And if we don’t have that conviction that this is going somewhere good, then we’re going to get wrapped up and fight about things and try to prove that “our story” is right and “your story” sucks and whatever, and bring down that person and all of that. But we need to have the conviction that this is all going somewhere good, which, I think, the way that I would…

I need to turn to the MCU again, because I think they get that. When Dr. Strange is playing out all of the scenarios in the future, where things are going to go okay, he says there’s only one scenario that plays out in which we win, out of millions and millions and millions of possible timelines that he can look into the future and see. And after he says that, he gives Thanos the Time Stone, and you’re like: What is happening right now!? Because he’s foreseen that this is the only way; the only way is to give Thanos this victory.

Mr. Christophorou: To accept defeat.

Mr. Gonzalez: We have to let him win right now.

Mr. Christophorou: To voluntarily accept defeat.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yep, which is—taking up the cross, baby! [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: You know, Dr. Strange and all the other—half the universe is disintegrated! [Snap] And that’s the only way. [Snap] The only way is for half of them to be disintegrated, and ultimately the only way is for Tony Stark to give his life, to be the one who does the snap, all of that kind of stuff. Dr. Strange had some sense that he needed to embrace the chaos that was going to come. He needed to embrace the being turned to dust for the story to play out the way that it needed to, because he had faith that it was going to go somewhere good. If it wasn’t for that faith that it was all headed somewhere good, regardless of what it looks like or feels like—wounds, whatever: it’s all going somewhere good; our personal narratives. If we can have that idea, that the things that have happened to us—you know what, it’s all going somewhere good—then I don’t need to blame anybody any more, because God has got it all wrapped up; he’s got it in his hands. And that’s what the Liturgy reveals, I think, to us, that this is all going somewhere good.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yeah, and the only way forward is through. The only way forward is through the cross; the only way forward is through that chaos, which then gets reformed and transformed.

Mr. Christophorou: Which is the opposite of what “our story” wants to do. “Our story” wants to create order and make everything make sense and certainty, certainty, certainty, certainty and this is the right way and da-da-da-da-da-da-da, but what we see through the cross is that the cross actually includes the nihilo. The cross includes nothingness; the cross includes death. “The story” transforms chaos into reorder, resurrection. It’s not… It’s wild!

Mr. Gonzalez: Which resonates even with Sean’s story that we were talking about earlier, because what is Sean’s idea that he takes to his community? He’s like: “Here’s these hungry kids that are out there. Let’s figure out a way to help them. Maybe that there’s no room in the budget, but let’s figure it out.” And the response is: “We need to do our food festival, because we have to have a fundraiser.” Those are interesting, because they’re so kind of on-the-nose with each other. The willingness to let go, the willingness to sort of enter into chaos: “All I know is that God wants me to feed these people. All I know is—whatever sort of particular call of the Gospel exists in that moment.” But we have sometimes this fear about budgets. We have that insecurity. We have that very narrow sort of… in this world sort of framing. And who knows? I’m not going to say anything big picture about the state of that community or whatever it is, but maybe Sean would still be an Orthodox Christian if his community in particular was willing to walk into that chaos faithfully rather than not.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, because “the story” includes the chaos. It doesn’t seek to simply do away with it. And we need to let that all line up. We need to have enough humility to see that, really, the cross is God’s way of standing fully in solidarity with humanity: all of the chaos that we endure, all of the chaos that comes our way. And in doing so, he reveals himself to be the Master over death. He masters chaos, not by running away from it or trying to smash it into orbit, but by bearing it, by taking it into himself, by willingly submitting to it. Again, just like Harry Potter. When he goes to his death, he does that willingly, voluntarily. There’s that great line from Dumbledore, where he says, “The true master of death does not seek to run away from death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying.” It’s so good! It’s so good!

Mr. Gonzalez: [Laughter] Yeah.

Mr. Christophorou: But, yeah, I mean, we need these “my story,” “our story,” and “the story” to line up. I think it’s only there that we begin to… that we have any sense of identity, true identity anyway. And if I were going to put that in one place, for the individual, the communitarian, and the cosmic, kind of all line up—it is in the Eucharist. It is an individual, communitarian, and cosmic event, all at once. It gives us who we are and unites us to the true shape of things. You can’t make that stuff up; it’s too good!

Mr. Gonzalez: And isn’t it interesting that another thing we learned from that podcast, We Are Orthodoxy, is that even those young adults who have fallen away from the Church, a thing that they miss almost to a person is the Eucharist. They might not miss the parish squabbles and they might not miss some of those other things, but even those who don’t identify as Christians any more, there’s something about that experience that still haunts them in their hearts. That seems so counter-intuitive, even if we think about this, because sometimes we would rather stress the “our story,” the story of a particular event, the story of a particular experience, as opposed to starting with this “our story.” I think it’s fascinating that even those who walk away are still haunted by the memory of that, the cosmic story, how “the story” shapes everything; how the thing that haunts their hearts and the thing that they’re missing is that moment when we say, “It is time for the Lord to act.”

Mr. Christophorou: Well, and I think it is because it’s the moment that unites, transcends, includes everything. Schmemann himself says this is where the whole world is headed, is toward Eucharist. Reunification with God: that’s where everything is headed. There’s physicists that believe the universe is going to collapse on itself, possibly within seconds. [Laughter] It’s like, maybe that’s what that is, that everything is headed back to reunification with God; maybe that’s what happens in the created order: everything just collapses.

Mr. Gonzalez: Who the heck knows?

Mr. Christophorou: I don’t know, but it’s a good image, anyway. And, you know, if Christ’s cross, his spilt blood, his broken body is what unites him to all human suffering—he stands in solidarity with all human suffering—when we go and we commune with his body and blood, we also are uniting ourselves to all human suffering. Like, no wonder they miss that, because it’s the thing that’s the most true. We’re united to all spilt blood and to all broken bodies, which we all have. Every spilt blood and every broken body that Christ has united himself to: that is the individual, communitarian, and cosmic reality of all things, is the Eucharist. It’s too good! It’s too good!

Mr. Gonzalez: [Laughter] Two thumbs up.

Mr. Christophorou: I give Jesus two thumbs up. [Laughter] But if we all have that conviction that this is all headed somewhere good, then nothing can threaten us. We can look for Jesus in things like Harry Potter, and we can listen to the suffering of other people’s stories.

Mr. Gonzalez: Yes, there’s no us-versus-them any more, and we can help people who are struggling with that sense of identity, like, actually have a framework upon which to figure this out, not struggling at it from the wrong direction, not struggling to construct a false “my story,” but to embrace “the story” and to see how everything else cascades from it.

Mr. Christophorou: True that, man. True that. Well, anything else?

Mr. Gonzalez: No.

Mr. Christophorou: I don’t think so.

Mr. Gonzalez: It’s all about the egg: the incredible, edible egg.

Mr. Christophorou: Yep.

Mr. Gonzalez: That was a commercial back in the day. I don’t know. I can’t think of a way to punchline this, but… [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: You said it, buddy. You really do have a way with words.

Mr. Gonzalez: [Laughter] I do. I do. I do. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just like… It’s a powerful thing, and I wonder how things would be different for people who are struggling with that sense of identity, if that’s the posture, the confident, hopeful posture. We’re starting with the cosmic—everything is alpha and omega and everything sort of flows from him—how different that would be for people who are having those struggles.

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, I think that it could totally reinvigorate the way we conceive of catechesis, because we get so much kind of stuck in telling… And I do think that it’s really… we need to tell our story. People need our story when becoming Orthodox.

Mr. Gonzalez: Totally!

Mr. Christophorou: But when we get so stuck in “our story,” we forget that “our story” is the—is an instantiation of “the story,” and we need to use that as the way that we begin to see what Christ looks like everywhere present and filling all things. That’s really the end game.

Mr. Gonzalez: Was that an MCU reference? [Laughter]

Mr. Christophorou: It was. It was a little bit of one. It’s fine.

Mr. Gonzalez: Well, since we’ve reached End Game, I think we’ve reached the end of the discussion.

Mr. Christophorou: I agree. It was fun.

Mr. Gonzalez: [Laughter] This was. I enjoyed exploring the egg. I hope we didn’t scramble it for people. Is there any way we can make an egg pun at the end? I don’t know. Thanks for having us!

Mr. Christophorou: Yeah, thank you. We’re happy to be with you.

Mr. Gonzalez: We had a lot of fun.