Live No Lies Podcast | Episode 1 with David Brooks

[Music] if you're in a healthy community where generosity is the norm and gracious hosting is the norm [Music] that'll be you and so i think a lot of moral formation is being enmeshed in beautiful communities with noise [Music] david it's great to be with you it's great to be with you in your home thank you for your hospitality welcome i don't know if people can see the piano but i'll be playing shortly yeah we'll have a little short podcast break where you can just entertain us with jazz or whatever your motif is i've been reading your column every week for many years and so it's really a gift and an honor to sit with you really appreciate your time thank you pleasure to meet you john mark i yeah pleasure to meet you i quote you in my book from a column that you wrote sometime in the chaos of 2020 last summer and you said over the last half century we've turned politics from a practical way to solve common problems into a cultural arena to display resentments and another column somewhere around the same time you know basically made the point that politics has become less about legislation and more about i think you use the language of performing your zeal and that feels like a a fair critique that kind of cuts across partisan lines in my opinion but it made me think of the missiologist and kind of thinker leslie knew begin who back in the 70s as he was kind of helping people in the west understand kind of the growing tide of secularism and post-christianity and what that could even mean you know he made the prediction that as the west secularized if it continued to do so that religion would not go away instead it would just kind of get transferred over onto politics and he warned of the rise of what he called the political religions and i'm curious as somebody who's covered politics for many years like would you agree with that disagree in what ways is politics becoming kind of a quasi religion for america and other western nations yeah you know i last week in my postcovid life i got to go to my first broadway show in a long time congratulations i want to see springsteen on the broadway i'm a big springsteen guy and so we all get there before and everyone starts talking to each other because we're all part of the same church the church of bruce and when they start telling the stories everyone's telling the moment they discovered it so everyone has their comments like it's like a born again kind of born and then we saw this and then we saw this show 150 times and so i realized oh it's church it's just a religion we have a god-sized hole yeah and it's going to get filled and there are better ways to fill it in worse ways to fill it in my view the better way to fill it is with an actual actual faith than god because that gives you meaning and it gives you truth and it gives you a way to live and and it gives you somebody to love um but if you don't feel it that way you will fill it yes and so bruce is not a bad way it's not as harmful away as it might be it's a little less divisive than some of the other options right but ethnicity for some people is their god and they'll worship at an ethnic or whatever in a racial category the worst possible ways is politics and that's been shown through history what was communism communism was a secular faith it was something you could have sent to it was a way of living vision of paradise yes and it turned into a nightmare turned into hell and what we have is just as bad politics is usually a competition between partial truths if a liberal says equality a conservative is going to say freedom and they're both sort of right and you yeah in politics is really about striking the balance between when truths collide and we should spend a lot of money this but we can't afford it so we find the balance that's all it is it's a way of settling differences across disagreement it's not an ultimate truth it's not a source of identity it's not a thing that's going to give you meaning you know sometimes political services can be meaningful right but it's not ultimately going to fill your soul and if you ask politics to do more than it can do it turns into a fanaticism right and so it's become a fanaticism for people who wake up i remember years ago and this is no knock on fox news but i was with at fox executive and at the bottom of the screen they had a little fox news chiron the little thing that says fox news and some people would get up turn on the tv at 8 in the morning and they'd keep fox on until midnight and the problem was that would burn into their tv screen the little fox news would burn into the screen and so they had to move the chiron around so they wouldn't destroy everybody's tv sets wow and so when you're that addicted then you've made politics your idol and as a friend of mine andy crouch he's probably not the first to say it says when you idols at first they give you everything and ask nothing and by the end they ask for everything and give you nothing and that's what happens when you idolize politics and do you think the root of that is secularization or is it something else or is it just like most things very complex yeah i think it's i think it's the root of just so many people turning in politics has always been a divisive thing since our nation was founded but for sure i mean i've just never seen the level of identity that people put into it the level of utopianism on both sides the level of vitrol when people would dare to disagree you know it feels new to me right i think it's the collapse of other identities yeah so before you were in it you were presbyterian and you were episcopalian and believe me the perspectives and episcopalians probably hated each other the catholics in the process so but identities lead to some time identity clash or you were polish american or italian-american and you had your ethnicity and you were living in your italian neighborhood neighborhood you knew who your people were you know your history but as just to take the italian example you probably assimilated and you moved out to the suburbs and suddenly you sort of knew you were italian-american but it wasn't the same as when everybody around you was italian american and bubby was speaking italian and so that identity goes away and so politics has leapt in to fill the void and the problem is when it becomes your identity to compromise your identity is dishonored it touches on the deepest part of who you are and so i can't compromise because it's dishonor and i define myself against the other and that's more or less what's happened to our politics so you know i i wish people would you know i cover politics that's what i spend a lot of time thinking about it but it's like the fifth or sixth thing i love about life yeah uh and i wish more people would just tone that down and find other loves now you came to faith later in life this beautiful story uh that you've spoken about written about of many decades as a kind of atheistic jew coming to a beautiful expression of faith in a mature adulthood has that changed your perspective at all on politics on the role of politics on maybe it's its boundaries and its limitations you know obviously there's a lot of talk about its potential um to make our world a better place in our society more just but there's not a lot of talk about its boundaries and its limitations does that alter your perspective at all or or no yeah weirdly coming to faith i think has altered a few things um probably my views on life issues one i always thought people had a soul but when you really think a person is a soul mate in the image of god it changes a few things but it's had surprisingly little effect um for this reason i already grew up in the biblical metaphysic i grew up with the ideas i went to church school i weird background and i went to hebrew school we kept kosher through much of my adult life but i also went to episcopal church school because in new york city i was you know the choir which i was in was like 30 jewish and so we would sing the hymns and to square it with our religion we wouldn't sing the word jesus so the volume would go down evangelical tradition jesus would be and but so i grew up with the stories and in the jewish story it's welcome to stranger it's exodus but i was familiar with the jesus story and i was familiar with beatitudes and so those ideas were already in my head they were they were wisdom literature right that over the course of my adulthood became truth a series of stories that were powerful but that came alive and so exodus is not only a book about wisdom how you form a people but it then it becomes something it becomes a covenant yeah and so my political views change relatively little because the stories were already there yeah what i worry about is the people who aren't raised those stories who who don't have it in their head the last shall be first i mean right that welcome the stranger the poor closer to god i think you can get that and the power of those stories was striking to me when people would go see that fred rogers movie yeah and so some of it is so counter-intuitive like there's a little boy in that movie you remember in a wheelchair and fred rogers asked the guy the little boy to pray for him and the a journalist is following him around very great journalist named tony judd and says oh that was very clever you asked the boy to pray for you when probably most people are praying for him and frederick said no the way he's lived he's closer to god than i am i need his help and that it can be startlingly counterintuitive but when you see the movie you don't have to be christian or not you just feel the power of that inversion of what seems normal yeah and if you grew up in a culture that had where faith is at least around yes i think you sort of absorb some of that something of that is there yeah you know when the fred rogers there was that cascade i think it was the documentary that came out first which was really interesting because it played in like all the kind of indie theaters in portland it was like all this buzz these very secular kind of millennial people were super into this and what the combination of nostalgia with you know the father figure thing and then there was the movie and the book and all that and i didn't realize like i grew up like with fred rogers there but i didn't realize like he was a presbyterian pastor and had permission from his denomination for that show to be his ministry and that whole thing was based very much around his not just christian world view but around his like pastoral call you know there was a whole world view that informed that posture he had toward the world right i think about that um in part we after he died we had his widow over to our house for an unveiling of a portrait of him and she was quite unlike what i expected she was super spicy that actually doesn't surprise me at all with how calm he is but you know and this is something i think about speaking to secular audiences yes so i'm a secular writer and some but a lot of what i do is translate ideas i've learned in the faith to the secular world right and so how do you do that so a word like sin i was wrote a book called um the road character and i was on a tv show talking about it before it came out and i talked about the at the struggle against sin and i got an email from a publishing editor not my editor saying you know i would i love the way you talk about the book but but don't use the word sin that's such a downer use the word insensitive it's like i don't think insensitive really discovers capture the problem but you think okay how do i use the word sin yeah where it won't set a lot of my readers into thinking of puritan depravity or something and what i came upon with the help of a guy you know tim keller was talk about disordered loves yeah we all love volunteers yeah and but we put some we all know love some loves are higher yeah and if you tell me a secret and i blab at a dinner party i put my love of popularity above my love of friendship and that's a sin yeah and that way you can talk about sin without saying depravity right and so you gotta think about how you do this in the secular sphere and i tell pastors i'm your gateway drug i try to talk people to get them i'm not going to convert anybody right but get the categories out there because i find them useful like if you're out on a date imagine the other person has a soul and if you treat them as a soul mate in the image of god whether you believe in god or not you'll probably treat them right right whatever happens and so i say i don't care if you believe in god or not that's not my job but try to believe that there's some piece of you that has no size weight color or shape and it makes you of infinite value and that slavery is wrong because it's an attempt to insult a soul and if you think you have that thing in you then i don't know if it'll lead to faith or not but it'll make doing the kind of job i do worthwhile like if i'm out there writing a story about somebody and they're just a sack of skin yeah what's the point like why am i writing the story they're just meat right but if they're soul then the story has meaning because you're telling the story of a soul and so i've personally found that very useful in first in how to treat people but then actually in coming to god like if yeah if somebody's a soul well where'd that come from and i in coming to faith i had all sorts of things came to me in the wrong order so i experienced grace before i experienced god which yeah does not seem to make sense but that's just how it happened and i did not have one moment where like jesus walked across the water and here i am come worship me it's i didn't have that moment i had no dramatic moments really but it was like i'm worried about it at one point where it was like you're riding in a train everyone we're just sitting here in the train suddenly you look out the window and you realize you've covered a lot of ground you're not where you used to be you crossed a border somewhere and so just gradually over years with some accelerations but just crossed the border and it hasn't made it um there's a great writer who i recommend everybody um named chris wyman christian wyman yeah who wrote a book called um it's a beautiful beautiful book and he says in there i wanted to tell you if faith was supposed to be provide me with serenity and peace it ain't working for me i assent to that yes so you're at this fascinating kind of border where you you know you for years have been articulating kind of sociology and politics at a journalistic kind of op-ed level now you've come to faith and like you're doing it more and more informed by this moral spiritual backdrop as you kind of look at the landscape obviously you're a 30 000 foot kind of thinker like you look at broad themes down through history and culture what do you see the role of religion in general and i shy away from the phrase christianity but whatever you want to call that the christian faith or the way of jesus in particular in kind of america's culture moment right now like what what is the impetus and the onus on us as followers of jesus what's our what's our role in this kind of public sphere and our very secular very pluralistic kind of culture yeah i mean i um i know there's not like a right answer to that i'm asking your like what's your take you know this is a broad kind of array of diversity of opinions and the christian tradition down through history on this very question right right so it's one of the ones i don't really know the answer to i just want to ask it of all the smart people i know what's your take the first thing i'd say is is just be not afraid yeah what i find most troubling about many churches is the siege mentality the sense the culture is against us and i always feel like when i'm at a sermon and a pastor says the culture yeah i always want to stop say huh stop yes go take a nap because that phrase the culture usually leads to a series of bad generalizations right and like my job is sort of sociological like this is what i do for a living and i find most pastors are great at pastoring not great at sociology yeah and so don't think the whole culture is out to get you and that siege mentality is what leads to the desperation and the fight and the anger and the tribalism yeah the fear-mongering and so when i look at the church and especially mostly being in a secular world what i see you have what the whole world wants you have a spiritual vocabulary you have an ultimate story with a happy ending why don't you just share that and it's from a position of abundance you know i go to college after college and in the secular schools the kids are working their tails off but they don't know why you know um and some of that's also true to christian college but at least you're thinking about the problem yeah and so i was i would go to campuses workshopping books and at academic places i was teaching at yale and they gave me tough criticism but at wheaton with christian school in illinois where my wife went they had practical advice because they were used to transcribing moral principles to actual life yes and that's what the church and church gives you a tense of living with intentionality and so that's not only the faith it's also like how we can do marriage well there's actually a big literature on how you do marriage and all the meaningful questions that tend to not get asked in our society get asked and people think how do i do sabbath and so there there's all that yeah there's thousands of years of of wisdom yeah you think about the book of proverbs like how it's interacting with you know all these different pagan sources of wisdom and it's becoming this competium of just kind of basic wisdom for living and some of it is listen and some of it is ritual like in my jewish background let's say you met a woman whose husband had died yesterday and you want to give her some comfort the first thing in your mind would probably not be we're going to throw a party at your house for the next 10 nights and you have to host it and feed us all that would not be your natural go-to piece of advice but the jewish shiva rituals where the community gathers at the home of the bereaved is genius yeah because it gives everybody something to do yeah and a community rally around them and they're all sorts of deep wise things embedded in when you're sitting shiva with somebody you allow them to talk about the dead if they want or not or not and so there's just all that wisdom about how to actually live that's embedded not only in the what we read in the bible but in the practice and how to live together right not just at an individualistic level but at a communal level right you know your last few books which have been so good i think in a road to character in the second mountain have essentially been about you would never call it spiritual formation because it's you know again to a secular world but moral formation the formation of human personhood of of souls of the growth and which is like that's the question that gets me out of bed in the morning as a pastor i'm really not interested in you know organizing stuff for non-pro you know important stuff but i think what gets me up out of bed is how does the soul make its journey back to god and how does it expand and enlarge in its capacity for love you know like that's that's the question that gets me out of bed in the morning and you've written extensively about that and about kind of moral formation or spiritual formation if you want to call it that and you've also written about kind of the the growing absence in our in the culture you can review me in a minute of kind of like good streams of moral formation for an emerging generation you know as the saying goes all education is formation right which is true but increasingly as you know somebody with kids in the public educational system like other than some very high values for tolerance and diversity and equality there's not a lot of moral formation that goes on so a big part of me wonders is that a part of the role of the church or what do you see as you look forward to in your preferred future for america what does the moral formation of people look like what are the best mechanisms and means for that is it government is it local organizations is it churches is it families like as you think about that deeply as solutions not just problems yeah what do you see yeah you know i'm struck in germany and the netherlands or netherlands and the scandinavian countries around 1870 they said we're teaching kids we're not doing moral formation and the germans being the germans they have a word for this it's bildung it means moral form they have a word for everything but we should have a word for moral formation it's a problem it's a sign of something that we don't even have a word for this and so they really did it through the arts literature and local culture and it worked for them they their idea was to have a happy society people should have be able to have complex interior lives uh and so i guess my the the the two books you just mentioned have different theories which have a piece of the truth the one is the word character was about confrontation with sin it's about self-confrontation it's about understanding what's your key weakness and how you can work on that weakness uh the um and so i mentioned that book um dwight eisenhower yeah his key weakness was anger he was an angry guy and so he worked on it every day and slowly built up a character which was careless and happy and not hating the second book this second mountain it's about desire it's about loving the right things and elevating your desires just mostly by admiring like one of the people who's important in my life early life this guy named wes we were in a camp together and he was just a beautiful human being and he turned into an episcopal pastor and i was attracted to his kind of beauty and it had a lifelong impact he died about five years ago um so we're attracted to beauty and i think now the third part of the answer i would give is that we're decent at learning stuff we're fantastic at imitating if you put us in a community with a certain sort of person where certain sort of norms will emulate yes so if you hold up an example if you're sitting in ancient greece and homer says ulysses odysseus i think those guys are so cool i want to be like them yeah so you begin copying but if you're surrounded by a community where you behave like say the brits in a stiff upper lip way like that's just the way you are yeah the my kids when they were little watched this show thomas the tank engine mm-hmm and there was a phrase in the star yeah that was so british it was one of the engines says it isn't wrong we just don't do it and so like that's so british yeah like it's just not who we are and so if you're in a healthy community where generosity is the norm and gracious hosting is the norm be you yeah and so i think a lot of moral formation is being enmeshed in beautiful communities with norms you know one of the things that i grew up in the kind of evangelical protestant wing of the church and one of the things that that tradition there's many good things about it but one of the the bankruptcies of that tradition is its absence of saints you know you think of other church traditions the orthodox the catholic and others there's just like the saints play a key role i spend you know about a night a month there's this benedictine abbey that's about less than an hour drive away from portland so i'll go out and just take a day in prayer whenever possible once a month and they have this like daily reader this catholic daily reader that you know is next to the bedside table and i don't think i've ever been there and had in their you know very complex roman catholic church calendar it'd not be the feast day of some say sometimes i recognize the name and sometimes it's like some obscure person i never don't know the person from adam but like there's such a high value it's a jesuit priest that i'll text with regularly and he'll just say oh happy whatever day to you i have no clue i'm just it's thursday but for him it's the day of the saint and i just wonder if the shift from saints to celebrities has bankrupted our culture and i was just thinking the exact same thing because um uh i'm i'm on tv so i'm known somewhat right uh and as i entered the christian world first i would go to church and i would get there and everybody would want to introduce me to everybody else and then when you pause to shake hands with people around you people would come up and then i would leave and then they'd come to me to talk and usually i'm great but i'm totally great with it but i was going to church i was new to the faith yes i just i wanted a spiritual position yeah and so then i started arriving at church after the services started and leaving before it ended and i've that made me feel lonely and so i thought wow this community is way more celebrity obsessed than any place i know interesting and that remains true and i've always wondered why why is it some sense of inferiority complex or marginalization why why the draw to celebrity and frankly it's fine if you don't talk to me i'm really genuinely happy but it gets harmful when you turn people into ravi zechariah yeah and the power of celebrity uh and and i never made the connection they need some saying some real yes some real people to aspire to yeah and i am i was teaching and one of the books i teach when i can is the long loneliness by dorothy day who is not a saint but i hope will be someone soon yes uh and so there are 24 kids in the class and last term we read 14 books in this class and the last essay question is pick one of the 14 books we've read and apply it to a problem in your own life of the 24 kids completely secular mostly 2019 picked dorothy days long loneliness when they could have picked victor frankel's manchester united plato they could they went for her and they went for her hey because her faith was so emotionally drenched and i think there's a great hunger for emotional experience to understand your own emotions especially a place like yale um but because of just the extraordinary way she was committed to a way of life yeah and surely devotion to the poor and so we need those exemplars i mean if you're gonna fail don't fail because you had an inadequate idea yes have a high idea yeah it's interesting the older i get the more time i spent find myself reading biography memoir which i didn't have a large draw to when i was younger and i think if it's well written and if it's honest there's a lot of biographies a lot of christian biographies that aren't honest but if it's honest it does two things it it right it raises the horizon of possibility for me on human personhood like well this this is what can happen to a soul over a life arc of 60 70 80 years like this is this is the capacity of a soul you know it just raises my horizon of what what is possible same thing happens to me when i spend time with elderly people who have been devoted not 10 years or 20 years but 60 70 80 years to moral formations birth information whatever but it also humanizes like reality because it's literary you know what i mean nobody ends in this heroic burst of kind of thor glory or whatever and so whoever picked your hero of choice you know now and or willard or day like they all had their shadow side they all had their demons they all had their literary moments of ending you know ambiguous kind of moments of ending but there's something about that combination that both humanizes my life makes me feel normal and not as neurotic but also like raises the horizon of possibility i just feel like we've lost a lot of us have lost yeah i mentioned i'm working on this book on the art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen so i read a lot of psychology books and even psychology but i also read a lot of memoirs and so the psychology books are interesting the memoirs are blow you away yeah like each individual human life is way more interesting than a group of human lives and so like i just finished a memoir her name is elaine gornick it's about her mother it's called fierce attachments i think and so they lived in the bronx in new york in the 50s her mom was the only one in their building who had a happy marriage that was her identity the husband dies of a heart attack she tries to throw herself into the grave at the cemetery at the funeral she tries to open the casket and jump in she spends the next 40 years of her life as a widow as a professional widow like who does that but each individual life has those moments that defy anything you could put in a category yeah and so we've built universities that are really good at studying people in general a psych department or an econ department but how do you get to know one person that's a very different proposition and it it's a it's a an art i'm trying to figure out yeah and the complexity of each human soul that just transcends the tribal categories you know and one thing i've learned first you have to approach them the way the bible teaches you to know like in the bible the word know is not only to study it's to fall in love with relation to have sex with kind of covenant with it's like a very emotion like the distinction which we draw between reason motion they did not draw yes and they were right and we were wrong yeah and so you have to and then you have to accompany let them you know you approach a person the way dh lawrence wrote this the way a deer approaches where the way you would approach a deer in the forest yes just gently and softly yeah and you show empathy and then finally just ask them questions one of the things i've learned from my research is that we think we can take somebody else's perspective i can guess what's going on in your head nope can't do that like they study this now and the average time when someone's talking with the other person and they ask what is that other person thinking and they can do this later um we get it right about 20 of the time some super socially attuned people get it right 50 a lot of people get zero and if it's a closer person to you you get a little more but you're still not very good and then the thing i learned in the research is that husbands and wives get worse at knowing what the other is thinking the longer they're married wow and that's because they really were in love with earlier in the relationship and so they just put in their head and modeled the other person yeah but then they changed yeah and the model was still there but the other person is somewhere else and they have an interpretive grid now by which they so um so really the key is have conversation it's interesting the intersection there too between what you're talking about with relational ways of knowing and learning another human soul and moral or spiritual formation you know i've been thinking a lot last week or two about the one time that eternal life is defined in the new testament is by jesus himself and it's like not how most protestant theologians would define eternal life there's nothing about life after death or how long that lasts you know jesus says this is eternal life that they may know you and so it's a relational knowledge of god an interactive experience of the trinitarian community of love that we call father son and holy spirit that's what eternal life is in jesus mind it begins now not at death interest yeah no we see through a glass darkly and yes we will see face to face and you know jesus whole kind of theory of spiritual formation in john 15 and about is it this relational form of relational connection is the mechanism by which human persons are formed in that metaphor into fruitful people right now and it's interesting in that context that the disciples don't recognize the risk in christ that they're the dramas of non-recognition yes which pervade the bible you know where this interesting moment in culture kind of coming out of covid and you know some of the cultural anarchy we're experiencing and yet lots of optimistic signs of life and renaissance so i was i was texting with a couple pastor buddies you know last night as i was in my hotel room think i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna sit with david brooks uh what would you ask him you know my buddy john tyson you may know from new york city said ask him if he thinks they'll be another greatest generation and i was thinking about that uh right after i text with him we were walking around i'd never been to dc before and so i just did like a quick you know three hour walking tour and i was walking through the world war ii memorial and walking through the section of the pacific and my grandfather fought in the pacific and just this there's that feels almost like a sacred space that some touched me at some level emotionally just because my own experience and the role of that war in history and it got me thinking about that question so how would you answer that do you think there will be another you said recently in a column this generation could not have won world war ii yeah i don't know if that was you on a bad day or you know or sort of believe that i guess um they had some advantages and they had a lot of disadvantages um you know their advantages was they were really raised in a culture of of humility yeah a culture of and biden was raised in this culture i know better than anybody else but nobody's better than me yeah that and the idea of putting on airs was really looked down upon uh and now we're fine with demonstrating our superior 100 yeah performing new zealand yeah i am i was driving home i wrote about this one of my books listening npr and i listened to the show that was broadcast live on vijay day when the americans discovered they won world war ii and at that moment bing ho bing crosby this yes movie star gets up says we've just learned we've just been told we've won world war ii but at the moment like this we don't feel proud we're just humbled we're just glad we got through it we're known better than anybody else and i get in turn on the tv watch football game see a defensive player tackle a guy after a two-yard game he's like doing this victory dance it was like a bigger self-puffing victory dancer after a two-yard game than winning world war ii um and so they had that sense but on the other hand i don't want to if you were black in world war ii yep you were it was not so great and you know you look at the number of prisoners we shot yep just like so it's not all dresden all this stuff yeah right so and the i mean it really was raw racism the war both against the germans and germans of japanese so um i have somewhere i'm some things i think are great about the generation if i can make general generalizations generationally one is the emotional openness uh i i'm talking about the current job of the career generation that's really a gift and they're not repressed and they demand when people like me are with them um emotional openness too they just they're gonna demand it um i think the the mental health i don't quite understand what's happening with depression but depression is really running through not only every generation of america i wish i understood why that is i imagine that's something to do with loneliness or social disconnection but it's really a startling thing when you go to every college and the mental facilities are swamped yeah and the teenage suicide rates are skyrocketing but am i hearing you say that's part of the role that you think the church and followers of jesus can play is in building small local communities of love welcome ritual moral formation you know i think a question that i'm asking right now is in a culture that is so fractured and fragmenting that is so polarized between right and left and in a kind of marketplace of ideas in western culture that is pluralistic um as followers of jesus we come with uh i hate i hesitate to use this language but with exclusive claims you know to mean that jesus is lord is our essential claim that's an exclusive claim because by by defact you know that means caesar is not or biden is not or whoever is not and that doesn't make us not good citizens in theory should make us better citizens of this kingdom of this this nation but there is a tension there between the exclusive claims we make about jesus and living in this open pluralistic you know non-religious secular kind of broad cultural milieu and so i think one of my fears is how do we hold stay faithful to our faith in jesus our discipleship to him without just adding to the polarization and the division you know what i mean how do we contribute to unity without just kind of turning everything into a unitarian kind of kumbaya yeah you know i early in my journalist career i interviewed jeff immolt who was the ceo of general electric and he said when i became ceo i thought i had to play down my american-ness because we're a global company and i'm all over the world a couple years and i realized they want me to be american they want to know where i come from they want to know what i believe and so my particularity was part of being a good leader of a global company yeah and i guess i would say to the christian world or the jewish world the muslim world whatever you're you are your strength like this is who you are and to rest in that with self-confidence and then to show how that plays out in the world um is is the beauty i mean you know i was drawn to faith more by christians than by god i mean i the first steps were wow what a beautiful human being wow saint augustine is the most brilliant person i've ever encountered wow dorothy they really you know or you know and so you're yeah you're like you you see an image of goodness and you see it at people who take their faith seriously and it's super particular uh and my orthodox jewish friends believe me it's very particular and it doesn't make sense jews can't eat cheeseburgers you can't mix the meat and the dairy crazy but that particularity is the thing itself yeah uh and so what i look to for the church is a an example of goodness be the beatitudes were for me were the the spiritual grandeur they weren't just words they were there that could not have happened what he said back then without something else yeah and so that was opening up the heart and then i find the faith because it's built around love is for a workaholic emotionally avoidant culture it's refreshingly emotional yeah and to even to talk in the language of spiritual formation you don't go to a sixth grade class in public school and people are using that language it's like we got geometry here yes um and so that's what the world is hungering for and to live with intentionality around that i i was really surprised when i entered this world like i would meet a friend of my wife he he was intentional at they grew up went to wheaton he gets 10 of his buddies they form a giving circle and so every year they put money into a pot and every year they gather somewhere to decide where the money's going to give away and the charity is nice but the fact that through the rest of that guy's life he's going to have 10 friends he's going to know from college to death that's there's nothing religious about that but it's living intentionally how do i want my life to be and how do i want to to serve who am i serving um that what people are hungering for and even before i had no faith i was reading a lot of augustine or reinhold niebuhr or abraham joshua heschel you were interested in spiritual formation long before you're a christian right i mean the question of goodness how do we become good and i didn't get that from some psychology text i got it from theo theology the bible and you know i got it from c.s lewis before cs was c.s lewis to me um and so i think that's the core and the strength i gave a talk when i was just a new christian called ramps and walls and i said the church has ramps and walls the walls you try to be keep keep us out who want to come in yeah and one of the walls is invasive care god put it on my heart to totally invade your privacy uh another wall is the combination of intellectual inferiority complex and spiritual superiority conflicts yes lethal um but the the the ramps are spiritual knowledge yeah um the gift of uh just expressing love yeah uh and i have a guy who sends me a text every friday's done this for five years in a row i told him maybe seven years now i told them fridays were sad for me because when i left judaism i guess i left i don't feel like i didn't leave but um i stopped having friday night shabbat dinner and i miss that friday night about tuner is a great time my saying is that every church service is more spiritual than every synagogue service but every friday night about dinner is more spiritual than every church i'm christian we have friday nights we've got dinner every week so so he knew what we said so he every friday night without fail for seven years wow i get a text from jerry and um that's faithful friendship that's faithful service you know in the road to character i think it's in your opening chapter of preface i think it's the most sticky part of the whole book you have your kind of resume virtues versus what you call you eulogy virtues resume virtues are what our culture is built around where'd you go to school what's your job you know what things have you done how cool are you how many followers do you have on instagram whatever but when we come to death what matters is eulogy virtues and we talk about a very different constellation of you know human personality traits at a funeral than we do at a cocktail party right and even in our increasingly amoral culture well i'm not sure i'm sure that's true but you know at death really what matters is not did you have a good life but did you become a good person like i've never been a funeral like this person just rocked it on tinder yeah this person knew how to eat drink and be married you know this person just bought a lot of toys right like you you search for the best in that person which normally involves some kind of self-sacrificial generous formation into love right and that seems to be at the center of what jesus is doing on the sermon on the mount the center of what he's doing through his death finding a way to deal with what's most deeply wrong and wicked and wounded both in the human personhood and find a way to bring healing salvation to it you know yeah and it's a belief in change yes um and i'm a poster boy that you're never too late to change yes like um i'll tell i'm not going to do the total name drop but i i when you go on book tour you interview certain people like the only time you see them is when you're on book tour and so i did interview with this person and then five years later another book comes out another interview and this happened to me twice but this one i remember she said i've never seen someone who changed so much wow you were so emotionally blocked before and i was very proud i guess the sin of pride did come to me then because yeah i hope that's true yeah and it's not just me there's a study called the grant study which they took started harvard kids in 1940 young men who were at harvard and they interviewed them intensely for the rest of their lives and there may be a few still living but pretty much and then there's one moment this guy his last name was newman and he was stiff and rigid in college pretty stiff and rich through much of life and his daughters hated him but he loosened up he went to sudan and served there and then he became sort of a farmer organic farmer and he was hugging people by the end of his life and birds were feeding you know saint francis and they sent him his interview transcripts from when he was in college like 40 years before and they just sent him to him you might be curious he said he sent them back he sent he sent me the wrong guy's transcripts he said no that's you he said that was not me i don't remember any of this that was not me they said no that was you and so between 20 and 80 that guy had changed so unrecognizably he did he literally did not recognize his own self wow and i think that just happens to us yeah mostly gradually but sometimes all at once yeah what a gift well thank you for your time for your wholesome for the role that you play and the gift you are to so many of us we appreciate your work and continue to read you and follow you and and uh we're really really grateful for your time good i appreciate it i'll see you in some day in portland absolutely [Music] [Music] you

Channel: John Mark Comer

Views: 5,873

Rating: 4.9826088 out of 5

Keywords: John Mark Comer, David Brooks, Politics, John Mark Comer Podcast, John Mark Comer Interview, Live No Lies Podcast, Live No Lies, God Has A Name, Loveology, Garden City, My Name is Hope, Bridgetown Church, JMC Interview, JMC

Id: RN-tKkDeJhc

Length: 45min 48sec (2748 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021