Paul Vander Klay, Spencer Klavan, and Michael Martin: Presence and Community in the Internet Age

praise him praise him in the morning maybe I can start off with yourself well I when I started this YouTube thing I decided that wherever possible I would have a disposition to say yes to things and um of course Marcus we met um we met online and then we did the the Ireland thing with my trip to Europe which was great fun and I met Joe with his just for Joe Channel and you guys said oh why don't you come to DC and do something and I thought let's see if it fits and like I said it um I I have family on the east coast and so it's a good excuse to get to the east coast and a little jaunt to DC is not a big deal so and and of course I I'd spoken with Michael before and and we're sort of swimming in the same channels especially around sort of the Grail country Channel and Spencer I'd heard about before and I'd watch some of his father's stuff on daily wire and so um I thought no it'd be fun to talk to these guys too so why not why say no so I said yes thanks for that Paul and uh what about yourself then Spencer you know I mean like Paul I've had an online relationship with a lot of you I think Michael's the only person that I've ever been physically in the same place with and he and I had a moment which at least to me was one of those sort of tugs on the sleeve uh that you sometimes get where Michael quoted Thomas to Hearn I had just read Thomas to Hearn for the first time and been absolutely lit a flame by him so I turned to him after the conversation and I said oh I just love Thomas to Hearn and I'm so excited to have found him and it turned out that Michael wrote the introduction to and edited the Edition that I had been reading and so suddenly you know we had all sorts of things to talk about and and that was in DC too that's right I hadn't even I hadn't even thought about that but yes we meet again we have to stop meeting like this we should go somewhere next hour yeah um yeah no and then the other the other aspect of it is that I am really interested in um developing and finding ways to mediate between these very strange sorts of relationships that now come into being if you have any sort of online presence or even if you don't um that that are that can be quite intimate but that don't actually have any you know physical embodiment Joe and I talk all the time about how you know we hit it off and I was promoting my book on his channel and then suddenly it sort of you know I forget whom I've met in person and whom I haven't and at the same time I have this really profound sense that online is not enough you know online has opened up all of these interesting new avenues but it also seduces us into kind of forgetting that we have bodies and forgetting that we are in human relationship and all this stuff um and so when I go on to podcasts and stuff and promote my book which is called how to save the West it's 60 000 words I thought that was succinct at the at the price but so people will often say like how do you save the West in two sentences and I always say uh log off and go to church and so this is like right in that wheelhouse and I know that it's not possible for us or even maybe desirable to just totally you know monastically Retreat from online but um yeah I will end I guess by quoting my little nephew who when he was born you know my sister and I were living in different areas and we have this kind of Skype relationship where I would call them that read it so often and we'd see each other and she'd have the baby and then the first time or second time maybe that I visited when he was really starting to talk he said oh you've come out of the computer like you you've entered into real life and then when I left we were joking like okay I'm going back into the computer now and I yeah I I'm interested in like how you sort of step outside step through the screen and out into into real life um and I think I'm hoping we'll kind of be practicing that even as we also talk about it um so there's a lot and I'm just excited to meet all you guys in person hey guys thanks Spencer and that's one thing I really appreciate about Michael's work through in this kind of emphasis on alternative modernity we're not sort of just Retreat into Nostalgia or anything but we're not um succumbing to the the dark sides of modern technology and so on and I think that's part of why I thought this would be such a good mixture I see that on all of you guys would you like to speak that a bit more and what appeals to you about this event Michael oh that was so good that food that was so good yeah and we had horseradish vodka with lard I know it sounds horrible but it was the best thing ever uh well that's it you know like expensive the same you know you know I'm a sociologist and I'm a farmer so things in the real world are much more interesting and important to me the virtual world I mean as much as I appreciate the opportunity like right now we're having this conversation which I do appreciate right but it's a different experience be with someone right it is it there's and you can say I mean you know to in a way it's uh it mirrors the the idea of of church you know where and because it's you know how it is it just feels different when you're with people you know and it and there's more of a presence and that's why for me when I met Spencer at DC last time I was there every time I go to DC my wife's starting to talk um it was like like like Spencer said it was like this kind of tug I mean it was like an indication to me that I was I was in the right place at the right time you know and I met the right people and it was right after my mother's funeral I mean the day after I I got on the plane to go there and here I was you know and not only that Spencer was we had assigned seats and he was right next to me you know you know so we're sitting next to each other and did God put you here for a reason I think yes right yeah and it was it was really uh you know like like someone said you gave this little tug is for a little reminder of why we're here and I would pref you know I would prefer that to to anything and that's where in these live experiences I mean I think you know the experience so um you can see a film that's that's moving to you right but there's something when you go to the theater when you come out of a theater when you come out of the out of a movie you might be enthused and excited but there's also a tiredness that comes from staring at the screen right but when you come out of the theater you've you feel enlivened because you have been seeing real bodies moving in real time and and we and we forget that and we forget that and the same thing with music right you're mentioning music before we before we went to record and do a demonstration with college students when I can you know um by showing them the difference between music played live and music that's recorded because most of their diet of music comes from recorded music and it started off I happened to be a piano in the room I was teaching in and I couldn't get them to get the idea of phenomenology I couldn't quite get it so hold on here I'll just do this so I played the recording of The Beatles playing Hey Jude and then I sat up went to the piano and I'm not a great piano player Adam no Paul McCartney but I I sang the first few bars and played the piano I said which one's different or how are they different and they all always prefer the one with me and it's not because I'm I'm Paul McCartney is equal it's because if and I say why is it because it feels more real feels more real um it's important even done it with a guitar with actually a recorded one of the songs I recorded and show them the difference between me recorded and me in the same room and there's there's no comparison and I think um we live in a world that has less and less of those experiences where where our experiences are mediated through technology and I would like like to you know like I like to fight the technocracy right a man and a Joe and I uh for on the plus side of technology I have a developed this friendship very quickly and we're kind of struck by how similar the our kind of stories were he interviewed me for his channel we had a great conversation and then we've had follow-up conversations obviously from a channel and um like me Joe was into all of this kind of abstract philosophy New Age sort of stuff and um eventually by God's grace came to Christ and saw the importance of the Incarnation and courage everything to do with the unconditioned and so on and they I suppose this is an extension of that I think and the importance of embodied community and so on but I'd love to hear a few of your thoughts Joe but uh what you hope to get out of an event like this and uh how it builds upon some of the stuff that you've been doing on the gist with Joe for example oh yeah thank you and I will say you know um yeah the gist with Joe is is on maybe like a little Hiatus um and I this is not the space to get into it because I I kind of just started a whole new career I have not had the time um or energy to really get out and and an interview interesting men such like yourselves but you know whenever I have little pockets of time I do plan to continue and I and I hopefully one day will that one day very soon hopefully within the next month have some time where I can sit down and you know begin to record again after a month but I I really don't think I say it any better than what you gentlemen have already said right I mean this is exactly why I'm so excited about the event and this is why I'm excited when Marcus asked me to essentially you know help him create this experience I was elated because yeah I mean I the way I put it is I'm I'm I've never been really um an internet guy and obviously I I am on the internet a good amount of time but you know maybe three four years ago I decided to be social media free and that has been like a really difficult it's been a really difficult thing to to continue that's a very difficult thing to abstain from I mean relationships I had from undergrad have been lost right because I can't talk to them anymore or you know I'm not posting really cool things on Instagram or I have a lot of things that I want I have a lot of things both professionally and personally in my life that I'm very proud of and that I do want to show off right and and the platform to do that is right I will post a picture of my wife and I doing something fun on Instagram or we'll talk about our growing family etc etc I could I have platform to discuss my new job yeah these are all very difficult things not to have because your ego gets in the way and you go I want to do this too um but what I've done and I've well I've done the opposite right and I've tried to just keep a close circle of friends friends that I engage with personally um but when I realized that I wanted to be I don't know I guess just part of the conversation anymore that's when I decided that uh um I wanted to start the YouTube channel and again this is the Avenue that I met all of you gentlemen and it's been great and it's actually showed me so before I you know I I kind of was the extreme I was like well you know you shouldn't you know we shouldn't have social media at all right it's it's a hindrance to our life and buy my YouTube channel by meeting all of you and specifically specifically speaking the friendships that I've created with Marcus and Spencer and how their actual like real friendships like these aren't just you know we're hopping on and we're playing you know video games for an hour and a half and then we're hopping off I mean no I I talked to you know these individuals on a daily basis for you know with that being said it's I've learned that the internet is obviously a very valuable tool and without the internet we would not be doing things like this right now I mean Marcus is in Ireland you know Paul's in California I'm in Ohio Tennessee Michigan respectively but again because the thing that unites us all is Christianity right that would be though I mean I'm sure we'll get into other commonalities that we have but I think the most important commonality that we all that we have is that we are all together in Christ in some way and because Christianity is right incarnational it is our task as Christians to well create and to make more Vivid the incarnational truth that Christianity has so getting together and holding events and taking time scheduling time throughout all of our busy year right I mean our year is probably booked with things and we've scheduled This months in advance but to actually say I'm going to take out time and effort and I'm even going to spend money to get to a particular location so that we can all meet each other and join each other in community I think right there in and of itself expresses how important it is that we connect physically with one another and that's why I'm just so excited to to have this event excellent thanks for that Joe and um when looking at this uh big picture I thought what's we're quite an idiosyncratic bunch I think um and I I was Discerning some key trends some of which you just hinted at and I think with Spencer's book I I thought that might be a good place to look to explore some of those commonalities that you're speaking about too so in your book Hardesty of the West sponsor a what she and I spoke about with Jonathan vigil which was amazing but um because he one of the first things he says obviously I haven't read your book yet yet but that always cracks me up but we never go there's intelligent things to say about it yeah yeah exactly so that just I think speaks to the point that we're we're exploring these common spaces but um that was such a productive conversation and you getting you together with people like Paul would really work and I think um your conversation recently kind of Vindicated me and not too but um I thought it might be cool to maybe we can go in different directions but I thought maybe cool to map on to your book and see how that um pertains to this little corner of the internet as this talked about and so on so we found that this crisis of reality so we talk a lot in this little corner they didn't about the meaning crisis would you talk speak about five major crises and one of them is that crisis of reality where we were the the virtual world almost becomes a simulacron for these embodied communities and so on and we perceive people as their little avatars and Joe mentioned this Instagram kind of Lifestyle whereas you're only seeing the positives of someone's life and it whenever it comes to that extent you're not actually seeing reality um maybe I'd like to speak to that and I'd like to then jump into some of the the Pastoral implications of that for Paul and then here's some make us thoughts too does that make sense Spencer sure absolutely um I it's funny because as I was listening to each of you talk and even as sort of I was listening to myself I I was struck again with this thought that the real what is what is real is such a palpable thing for each of us and so obviously desirable I mean Michael when you were talking about that specific sense of sluggishness that descends over the eyes after a long period in front of a screen even if the content that the screen is mediating as real value is Rich and significant the difference between watching Denzel Washington do Macbeth very beautifully on the screen versus going to the RSC or even just to your local theater I I was reminded again that for me at least the idea of the real is urgently important and also resists the kind of neat philosophical definition that that people like me are typically quite comfortable with and anything that you come up with to nail it down into a sort of platonic or Aristotelian syllogism always fails to fully capture quite the qualitative aspects of what you're looking for that the maybe the best way to make a distinction between real and unreal or more real and less real is to do what you were describing this sort of phenomenological approach to listen to this live music and we all know that somehow you know on one level of course everything that we're doing right now is real it is really the case that I am sitting here in front of my phone talking to you guys and I believe that you are real on the other end of the line and all those those things and yet there is some sort of fissure or intervention that's going on between us that that we don't get in in person and so I was sitting here and thinking about you know my my book begins kind of with a little essay that takes you from Zuckerberg's metaverse to Plato's Cave and and it's supposed to illustrate that this is a perennial Temptation and a perennial problem to just try and seize control of an elusive an illusory reality and I guess one thing that now that I'm talking through this and thinking about it with you guys one one way of talking about the real is to say it's the thing that you can't wish away right it's that it has some aspects to it that is not responsive to the mere will you it is possible to Will and then execute changes in the real world but it's not possible simply by wishing it to to restructure reality and one thing that online seems to me to do is tempt us with the illusion that we can actually change sort of the way that our universe at least is structured with with increasingly small gestures of the will with the Press of a button right um and I think for instance about how much more charming and self-assured I am over text message than I am in person I've noticed recently that I'll get these like text message exchanges with people and think oh yeah we have this really great connection and then you meet them in person you suddenly realize that I've been flattering myself somehow with this confected version of myself that is purely textual and and also purely digital um so coming up against the hard boundaries of a reality that that can't actually be wished away or fabricated away um has struck me again and again as it's a kind of path to God to be as blunt about it as as possible um C.S Lewis talks about the tug on the other end of the line that it's sort of alarming to us to think that God is not an amorphous jelly disseminated through space or a power field that we can access um but you know the hunter the king the friend the the individual on the other end of this Cosmic line um and I think from there kind of the reason that the most essential aspect of that in our experience is is your brother is your friend there's other people because other people embody that incarnate that for us um and the sort of real inescapable fact of of them of others um is what iris Murdock arrives at when she says that you know love and so art and morals all consist in the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real and and that that um being forced to confront that reality again and again um is is the maybe the thing that's most kind of come back to me that that I've wanted to dwell on more since writing that book um and thinking more about it that you know um it's the it's the um inescapable reality of other people um that that seems like most maybe most needful to recover or remind ourselves of in this hyper digital environment oh go ahead Marcus I'm so sorry no jump in there too I was resonating with what you were saying and I'm thinking about so I you know I people who don't know you know I I have a I'm studying I have a young family right and so I have I have a two-year-old at home or he'll be he'll be two and he's now and Michael and Paul I think you'll know exactly what I mean obviously raising your own kids so now he's at the point and he's been at this point for a couple of months now where you know he knows obviously like what what a tree is right so he can go outside he can look at the tree and go oh tree tree or bird birdie birdie birdie but then when it's on the screen or if he sees a picture of a tree or a bird and let's say like he knows like what an actual real life bird looks like right and the cartoon birds right that he's that he's witnessing don't look like real birds but he can actually still understand that this is a bird right or that the tree in the book that we're reading to him is a tree even if it looks nothing like well it does well it does look something like obviously but it doesn't look exactly the same way as the tree um outside and so I think it's so interesting and I'm having missing the mark on this but I do think it's very interesting that how quickly maybe just because that's how it's the only way we can exist in the world but how quickly we can lose right the understanding of what is truly real so like my son can truly say what it he can truly understand what a tree is but he also is able to sense that something is a tree and like the picture of the tree is not actually a tree right it's just a representation of the tree but he thinks it's still an actual tree and it's just what I'm trying to get at is it's just very interesting how quickly we lose and we're able how quickly we can identify that which isn't actually real it's just a symbolic representation of the thing that is truly real and we've never taught him this right so this is like not something that my wife and I have I've said oh hey you know this is a tree and this is a tree but it's it's different no no this is something that he just is innately done and I just think that's so interesting that well just so you know at two years old already you you can quickly I don't want to say lose because not losing obviously what is what is truly real right the actual tree itself but it makes the I guess it just makes the water's a little more murky right may I that makes sense may I so here here's the thing about this has been my anxiety about the internet for the longest time because the internet or social media wants to turn you into an avatar yeah of yourself right and that's that's the temptation to be we have the temptation to behave is as the Avatar of ourselves just like a card you know like those avatars that Facebook's always trying to get you to use I don't want to be a cartoon right but but but that's the tendency I I don't know I don't know what that is but if there's a tendency to turn oneself into an avatar and to interpret other people as avatars as well right if you're talking about the real I mean this is the the medium is the message right so this medium tends to do that to people it's reductive in that way right and and this is Marshall mcluh knew this long ago right to the medium is the message right this is the this is the containing box in the virtual reality this is the step towards virtual reality and and this meeting we're going to have in in in DC and anytime we get together in the real world that's the kind of the antidote to that because and you know and it's interesting because my uh now everybody here I met online except for Spencer i i in fact I didn't know about Spencer's work until I met Spencer and then I checked him out so it's a very different experience when you when you meet somebody in the real world and I mean and I think it's impossible to not project uh an aspect of our personalities uh especially in the kind of informal ways of you know whether it's a Twitter poster a Facebook post that's that's only a little less like a little sliver it's not the being right and if we have the experience of the being you know the pre and this is this is the thing and I think this is important to what you were talking about Joe with um because I think we're all stumbling toward is trying to describe a sacramental reality right and and this is the this is what makes life worth living right it certainly is right whether it's love between whether it's friendship whether it's love between two people whatever you know the Arts this is I think Spencer and I Spencer really is into memorization of poetry because it's not memorization it's recitation it's it's lit it's dwelling in the poem right it's and you have when you when you do that you take on a different relationship to to the language and to the end to the person who wrote it right you you you dwell in it in a heideggerian sense that you you live in it right and and that's and I think you know and going forward is Humanity you know that's the one of the things that's going to be the challenge is how do we how do we keep that alive how do we keep that and especially I mean I think this is accelerated as we all know during covet when everybody was sent home to to work online as a professor that was hell just telling you right now and not only teaching online is hell but then going back to school and teaching in masks is also was also hell because you and you never very rarely could in fact if you think about that it's a mask right it's it's something in between the being being and the world right it's a persona it's projection it's projection and what we're interested here is is peruzia and presence right and that's and I and I and I when I when I figured out that parisia means presence and not Second Coming that really changed my understanding of the New Testament right from Saint Paul because that's what we're that's what we're trying to um live into is that presence and this is in this thing in DC we're going to do in a couple weeks that that's how I kind of um envisioned that participation right as a participation of presence yeah thanks Michael and uh Paula I'll be Keen to hear some of your thoughts as a pastor on this a topic specifically whether that is say reflected on your early work as a pastor versus now some of the different challenges some of the different possibilities I think you've said in the past that they don't call me your pastor or like online which I was almost tempted to do and uh yeah you're an internet Master there's no such thing exactly yeah little farm games that people have that yeah and but but it's it's that it's the tension that a number of you have already noted that actually I am people's internet pastor and I usually make sure I keep the word in there because I I always I lead with reminding people that um your real Pastor knows you not via a screen but in this in this physical world yet part of what has been interesting has been that I so I've been doing this internet thing for about five years people through the internet will come and tell me things sometimes not all but that some of my uh in physical space membership won't um this is this is analogous in some ways to why um there's therapy and this will touch on your your discipline Joseph um psychology where you meet you know the therapist meets the patient you have all that medical framing around it the therapist needs the patient in a room it's not the therapist's home it's not the patient's home there's no family members aren't there the therapist likely has no knowledge of anybody else there's there's a degree to which the internet and these screens are like that whereas with with the people that are in my physical Church I have known them I've been here at this church for 25 years I know their children to a degree I know their parents do degree I know their siblings to a degree I know there are some of their co-workers so it's it is a very it is a question of these boxes you know Michael as you were talking I was thinking about um the fact that one of the things that has developed in churches is that the the church itself has a context also governs presence when people come into church there's usually a masking and this is something pastors deal with all the time uh they they come into church and there's a masking there's a masking of certain sides of their life that they don't want others in church to see or know about they might have other communities that know about it but they don't want the church people to know about it and so one of the things that that we are very Adept at as as human beings is this identity shifting this shape-shifting in different places and so you have people who come to church and they're one way uh in the business world they're another way you know maybe they have a second family um in when I worked in the Dominican Republic there was the one way to sort of always get at another Pastor if you really wanted to do them in was accuse him of having a second family in Haiti you know one in the Dominican Republic and one in Haiti and part of what the internet has done is on one hand created these there's a uh Georg Mueller Hans gay org Mueller is a is a teacher's philosophy and I think Macau um he's got his own YouTube channel and he talks about profelicity how what is happening on the internet with Instagram with Facebook with YouTube is we are curating a profile of ourselves and and in that sense we're com we're continuing to segment reality and in the process segment ourselves by multiplying our faces to all of these different Arenas one of the most interesting conversations I've done this year which will probably come out in my channel over the next week or so is with an Israeli who got into professional wrestling in Middle School and when he said that it was like what exactly are we talking about here when people are playing basketball or or soccer or some of these other things he started playing around with professional wrestling in middle school and we talked about the fact that over time in terms of the reaction between the audience and what's going on inside the ring a character emerged and for him it's Lenny Levi and that's different from guy Landau the the in real life guy who has a girlfriend and is developing a course on uh modern Hebrew as a second language and all of these other things but in the in the ring he's Lenny Levi and and what we've done with these internet spaces is you know so I'm Paul Vander clay but what Paul Vander clay means for thousands of people out in the world is a little bit different than what Paul Vander clay means or Pastor Paul means in this building and then father means in that space and like Joe with your son your son is because this is this has been a reality of human beings you know this is not new but we have created an entirely different Arena and new arena for this profile identity shifting which then sort of goes back to Spencer's question about okay when we use this word real what do we mean uh Eugene Peterson passed away not too long ago was very much a mentor for a lot of sort of moderate Protestant clergy and Eugene Peterson without was always irked he was a Mainline Pastor in the DC area I believe and he'd have these smart businessmen or political types who would say oh Pastor fine sermon now I'm heading out into the real world and of course Eugene Peterson would always bristle with that and say no you've been in the real world now you're heading out into something else and so for all of us now we're we're wrestling to figure out these multiple worlds and what in fact transcends them governs them and then the multiple personalities that we are and and where is the through line and the thread that holds them together you know there's so much here Marcus can I jump in for a second yeah right um Paul as you were talking it suddenly occurred to me what going on your channel reminded me of because I so enjoyed our conversation and there's a certain feeling when you really get a sense of being being listened to um as I told you then and I just realized that it felt like stepping into a confessional Booth it felt like there was this there the the online uh boxes of the two of the zoom call almost were like the you know the priest and the Confessor sort of separated by that screen in a Catholic Church and it speaks to the fact that whereas we absolutely are kind of tempted into this masking online um it's also possible across the same medium to unmask and all of this talking that we're doing about artifice and certainly the split personality the multiple personalities um it sort of raises this it heightens I guess this problem that is perennial which is is how is it possible to be sincere at all how is it possible online or off anywhere to take this totally ineffable and indeed infinite thing called the psyche the human soul and somehow like reify it into a gesture a word a grunt uh you know a painting anything at all and it it strikes at the heart of you know whether you believe it is possible to really use language of any kind leave leave digital out of it for for a second because what we have in the Facebook avatar which by the way and importantly doesn't have legs like doesn't have an existence below the belt um and so is sort of detached even from like it doesn't have existence yeah for now because a lot of the internet does well that's the right well but this is so okay but this this oh you're onto something because this is so important you know so much of the internet famously right is saturated with this kind of uh over sexed uh like porno pornographic stuff even if it's not porn it sometimes feels like porn you know on on Instagram or whatever um and yet that whole phenomenon has taken on this really weird desexed denatured quality um that it's now it's now got this dialectic between like an imaginary sex fantasy that no human body can actually fulfill in an intimate in a real intimate relationship and you see this all the time with you know young men especially that then get into relationships and expect things out of their girlfriends that they're totally either unable to provide or totally disgusted at having to provide um so there's obviously some kind of fissure there or disjuncture going on between real life and and fantasy and fantasy kind of replacing real life um and then like at the opposite end of this you have if everything is sex then nothing is sex right and that if everything is kind of this erotic uh panoply this extreme um then then really you are stop being able to be aroused or or in your body at all um and so this kind of again just really aggravates a long-standing philosophical problem which is okay that we know there is the sign we know there is the symbol um but does the symbol refer to anything is there anything behind the screen behind the word behind the gesture behind the glance and one reason why the real is so hard and difficult and and kind of ineffable I think is that it does rest on a leap of faith that behind any of these material gestures these outward signs inadequate or incomplete as they may be um the thing communicated actually exists when AI became a big deal I went back and read turing's 1950 paper on the Turing test on how you can tell whether something is sentient or not and it was incredibly striking to me that the whole project of that paper is to wave away the question whether communication actually originates in any sentient experience turing's whole point is if a machine can do the things that people do when they think then it is thinking and his Central argument for this is that when people do the things that make us think they think we don't actually have any proof other than the outward show that they are having the experience we have when when we think and so if we can't prove that here in this relationship across Zoom across a room in an artist in an art gallery um why should we expect machines to prove that and it seems like to me this is a perfect articulation of exactly the wrong way to approach the question um which is helpful in some sense that and you see this now all the time with people have no way of saying of distinguishing between a machine that can pretend to think and the another person that can actually think because we've basically lost our faith that anyone is doing anything other than than pretending then putting up a kind of screen or artifice um and and yeah I I guess I feel a sense of urgency about this precisely because if there is a leap of faith that people are having trouble taking it's that there's something on the other end of the line something behind the symbol and the signified one reason why the pastor who says no this is the real world or the Jonathan pojo who says no the symbol actually gets at something realer than the physical the material of the symbol um which is basically Freud in inverse like it's again flipping Freud and touring on their heads and saying actually underneath the symbol is something that the only the symbol can get you into which is uh which is reality full stop and and you have to kind of assert that in order to stay human at all I guess and you know one thing in my training um doing Psychotherapy is just how like you know my mentor over and over again say you have to sit in the silence you have to sit in the silence so like when you when I have someone across from me you well number one so like when you close the door and Michael you were alluding to this and Spencer you said this I think you were also touching on this so yeah like you know online therapy is huge today but when you actually invite someone in and you have the client and you have me in the same room and you shut that door well two things usually occur okay from my experience thus far is that number one is that when you both sit down and you make eye contact there's a silence that occurs whether it's like and that ranges from honestly like us one second to 15 seconds right before you you know before you have that Mexican standoff right and you and someone talks that's number one but number two it derives from the first thing right and even if it's just a second which is really hard because I never actually verbalized this before to anyone but yeah you both have this acknowledgment that the silence actually just created something and again it doesn't matter how long the silence was hey I'm one second as an airplane flies over my house we can't hear it I can't hear it oh so even there like you know um oh that's good and even that like you know people the silence right it's I guess that right there was just a great example right so like you're preparing for something so when the psychotherapist and the and and the client have that silence you acknowledge that again this Spirit just came into the room that you just created something very real and if you don't have that silence right if you go up into the room and you close the door and you just automatically start talking it's interesting that the counseling relationship automatically will look different than uh individual that you worked with where the silence was was actually acknowledged right because you in some way that's that that silence right what you're actually acknowledging is that for me you know is that okay well you know God the spirit has just literally entered this or we've both realized that there is something real that we cannot necessarily verbalize right and then it frees you and it makes you more open to having a more honest conversation my wife and I always joke around about this I might either be a testament to I guess how our marriage and maybe that you know we need to talk more but my wife and I because we're all married here and so I'm actually just curious um what your experiences with this when we go out to a restaurant by ourselves which is now far and few between but when we used to go to a restaurant by ourselves um and when we have the the date night we you can almost always tell how long someone's been married or that they're dating with how much talking they're doing while eating so you know my wife and I have not been married for long we've been married for five years which is by no means long but we've also been together since we were 18 years old we know each other very well and we are very comfortable with silence and when we're out to eat maybe it's because we have you know a crazy two-year-old at home but I actually think it's because we sit in the Silence with each other and we almost are communicating where there's an energy that we're that we both acknowledge and we're almost communicating through the silence rather than through any verbalization and again Spencer to what you were saying it's just like that's the acknowledgment of that we're acknowledging that something is something actually very real is taking place someone might look at us and say oh my gosh look at that married couple they're not talking but they must have a horrible relationship but no actually quite on the uh the actual opposite side of that right the other side of the coin is that no we're comfortable in the silence and we acknowledge that silence is actually good because we were acknowledging that right there's there's something very real taking place during the situation during the phenomena that we're both in thanks Joe so actually I'm going to take a slightly different direction um just what you're speaking about in a few things have made me think about it if you want to explore this weekend if not that's okay so like you said there I was listening to Stephen Meyer on Joe Rogan's podcast too and he was critiquing figures like Hume and this notion of just the sense perception there is no integral self I think that's part of the problem with the transhumanist a fiction so to speak that there's no coherence which makes sense if there's no God I think the Buddha is right that there is no self either and I don't know why one would bind them's house to an idea that there is a unified self or a soul or whatever but obviously the biblical perspective is that we are the snafesh and uh I'm curious about that contrast between our Christian understanding and some of those other worldviews as it pertains to these very these very real things that we're speaking about it's not just abstract philosophy with no practical significance it's ultimately significant and um so in Spencer's book he talks about this the crisis of the Body for example and I'm curious how do we live convert convivorely as Ivan Ilitch talks about so he uses this example I think um of being comparable within limit so the car came along and life became better in some ways but so you could move more quickly but then eventually you had so much traffic that it slowed down so that you want to get this balance of kind of convey reality and so on and I'm curious what a convivial Christian Life lived through the body so we are those personas that Paul was talking about and Roger scrutin is really good in this then that I can't remember the German word he uses for that that part of ourselves can be real but if we make it kind of like an idle of it then it becomes hyper real so I'm curious if any of you guys have any um obviously from a customer check if I trust what God has revealed to us that we are this unified person this nephe embodied soul and so on but I'm curious about a how we might understand that why it's important does that make sense the way I face that or does anyone want to speak to that uh yes you know last time I went out to visit my parents we my dad and I went on this walk together and we were talking about artificial enhancements to the human person so if you can put a microchip in your brain and get smarter or if you can be faster and you know we're both relatively comfortable with the distinction between restoring a healthy function and maximizing or enhancing an otherwise perfectly functional organ so if you're blind and then you have a machine that can make you see that's fine or at least that's one sort of that's one kind of thing and if you however are basically a average Baseline human being with sight and then suddenly you have a machine that shows you other wavelengths of light and therefore different colors there's there's sort of a difference there but then we we got to talking about IQ and I was toying with this problem that you know if if you made me or somebody else you know 200 IQ points smarter somehow I feel that my personhood would have been irrevocably compromised um that there would be a you would have blown the boundaries off of me so that there was no longer an outline of of Spencer on the other hand if you may be one or two IQ points smarter my intuition is is that is not really that I would that I would be a totally different person um and this got me thinking about Thomas Aquinas has this concept of the um Inseparable accident um which is something that's not essential essential to you as a quality um that you can Define or talk about a person without reference to that thing and yet you can't actually extract that away and I was wondering if if Aquinas says that that sex is this that male and female are inseparable accidents so it's not essential to your Humanity to be either male or female you can be either one and still be defined as a human but you can't remove or flip one of them and and retain the self um and I I'm starting to wonder or worry over whether almost all of our accidents might be somehow Inseparable that um it's our incarnate Humanity our embodied Humanity that sets the limits in the boundaries of us and at least if those things are going to change they have to change in a gradual and continuous way that has a certain Logic the way that a tree growing out of an acorn has a logic um and the only other thing that I have to say about this which is which is not I I'm afraid I'm not going to land This Plane this is not I'm not going to you know resolve this into some neat package but um Joe and I have been reading this book meditations on the tarot together and it's been incredibly uh challenging and Rich and interesting and one of the things that we last night when we were talking about it um started to realize or arrive at is that this book has a a whole kind of attitude about prayer that amounts essentially to uh stilling the monkey mind it has a real resemblance to Buddhist or Zen meditation and it it often will freely make reference to uh yogic practices and all of these things that Christians are typically somewhat allergic to or suspicious of and one thing I was saying is you know the the fundamental difference here between this and anything I've ever done is a mode of you know yoga meditation or or Zen practice um is that the point of emptying yourself out in this kind of Christian prayer is for somebody else to come in that that your personhood is not designed to be dissolved around the edges but it's designed to be filled up fleshed out and made complete in relationship with other Minds um and so maybe I am circling around to something like a point here which is that um it's actually in relationship with one another which is mediated through the body which can't happen except by uh so if you have limits and I have limits and there's a space therefore between us um it's it's in that interchange that we become most fully ourselves we don't even you know have a fully formed personality I don't think until we form these relationships where we're able to manifest the kind of ineffable in Kuwait selfhood that that is so famously within us um and perhaps it's this that makes me so worried or concerned over the pro the question of sort of customizable human beings uh because it's it's the fact of us the givenness of us and the and that is embodiments there's no you know distinction really for me between that and embodiment um that makes it possible for us to face one another and community mean one another um and in doing so to be the kind of thing that we are well you know gesture wasn't yesterday before yesterday one of my students at the college where I teach I contacted me because he wanted to get myself he's the editor of the college newspaper and he want to get my thoughts about Ai and chat GPT and what that means for teaching and scholarship and and students writing papers because I know I already know the students have been using jet GPT to write papers oh yeah um if they're using you know those you can get those you know I could call it crappy papers.com why write your own C paper when you can buy one for five bucks right um but he actually we recently wanted to talk to me you know he's he's a pretty perceptive student but he read the article I wrote for Spencer oh yeah wow the Droid stares back which actually the the joke about my sub stack the Druid stairs back because I was looking up the Droid stairs back and I misspelled it and it came out and Drew it that's catchy I might use it but anyway the thing I we talked about or I talked about when it when he called me was that you know we're at this weird moment where Ai and chat GPT as Spencer was mentioning earlier is starting to imitate you know like with the Turing test human intelligence and it could trick you certainly where on the other hand people some people not everybody but the danger for for humans is there's this kind of reciprocal relationship where where humans become more machine-like and as such was the saying with this idea of you know you can retrofit your your body to fit how you think you are right or your feelings about what you are is extraordinarily dangerous because this is what transhumanism is right it's it makes it's the other side of transhumanism you know the one side is making the human more machine-like or more technology like but the the flip side is making technology more human-like um which is dangerous right and and it's and it's a an escape from the real and and what is the antidote to that right what is the antidote and I it's it's almost like a sickness that's running through our society right now that and and so if we think when Spencer was talking and a big influence on Valentine tomberg who wrote meditations of tarot was Rudolph Steiner and he who has a really I think sound anthropology and one thing he talks about is the personality right and if you think about yourself right my personality now is certainly different than it was though some things are certainly common then when I was 18 or 19 right um and but some things are very different from my personality now from it was 10 years ago five years ago but but the other part of that is what Steiner calls the individuality right so which you know is closer to what we would call the spirit of the Soul right the individuality who I mean who you are right and personality is more uh chameleon-like and adapting to the to the environment sometimes you know what I mean I mean the personality is formed by environment I've noticed since I kind of got out of the the throes of Academia when I hear people talk like academics oh just stop you know what I mean yeah just can you use real world words please uh but they're they're but that's personality right that's personality and and what is it this Colonel this individuality and which you know that's you know the image likeness of God in a way you could say um but but it's also the uniqueness of the individual at the same time so it's kind of a Curious Thing right so where and so that that part of our being in which we participate in in God and and Spencer was mentioning um the some of the prayer practices in that that tomberg talks about in that in that book but what was interesting for me now my doctorate is in early modern English literature in particular with religion religious literature and when I was getting ready to do that and getting geared up for running the dissertation I decided I really need to to do it do a deep dive in medieval English mysticism because I had to understand the English religious tradition because it's it's different um and when I was working on in particular the metaphysical poets like John Dunn and Thomas traherne and George Herbert Henry Vaughn um but doing going into medieval English mysticism was really important and in particular the importance of The Cloud of Unknowing which is very Buddhist like in its way in the way it the the prayer recommended there is not like we wouldn't think of prayer it's it's a kind of deactivation of the intellect right so and it's a it's a prayer method that is almost like uh when they call it practicing the presence of God right it's that kind of it's that kind of being present which is for me that has been probably the richest prayer experience of my life is entering into that and it's very simple and because it's very simple it's very difficult but it but it also it disables yeah the the intellect right just like in phenomenology the idea is to disable or to bracket our assumptions about whatever the thing is we're presented with and to be to learn how to be present to the phenomena itself [Music] yeah just that we both found very striking in the first chapter of meditation on the terrorist message in which uh Saint dionysius is beheaded and walks with his head in his hands to his burial place of choice and this is kind of an image of the sort of um prayer but also just engagement with the world that the authors is uh advocating yeah that like not that not that you're had less altogether but that your head's not the one doing the leading that's very interesting what I'm hearing is that um we're gonna be at our event we'll come in and we're just gonna be silent the whole time yeah just groups that's a fat chance I'm not gonna say a damn right right it's just absolutely no and we'll get in no talking and that's what it will be yeah everyone's gonna demand their money back not enough words that's enough words and do you have any key thoughts on that Paul if you like to sure yeah I I oh I just found every what everybody said very interesting it made me think of the in part of what's been rolling around in theology has been I mean process theology where you know sort of following Whitehead where we're going to one way to think about it perhaps to sort of simplify it is a skepticism of a skepticism of nouns and a prioritization of verbs let's say and but the but the truth is the sentence is fairly meaningless without both nouns and verbs and John verakee has this term he calls the transjective which I think in many ways is sort of the space between nouns and verbs and in some ways what I what I hear us sort of pinging at is the space between talking and listening listening is in many ways presence um it is not it it is not obliteration it is not Annihilation because there is Faith there there is presence there um I you know so every week at the end of the service because I haven't decided to memorize a bunch of other common doc solid or um blessings from the New Testament I just usually use the Mosaic blessings and you know the Lord turned his face towards you um the Lord bless you and keep you and turn his face toward you and I you know so on one hand we started this conversation talking about the prolifer the proliferation of our own faces there's um you know there's Pastor Paul there's intern there's YouTuber Paul there's um Paul who's the the husband and the father and the neighbor so we have this proliferation of faces we have this cultivation of prophylicity cultivation of profile in order to use our faces to affect the world in a certain way but we've been talking now about um faces uh faces that listen you know one of the big pastorally The Silence of God and the problematic presence of God is is a is something that comes up again and again for people now what I mean by the problematic presence of God Nathan Jacobs uh got his PhD at Calvin Seminary good for him and to the to the dismay of those professors at Calvin Seminary he went to Orthodoxy after that and you know it was kind of like Peter Creek getting his Calvin college education and becoming Roman Catholic these things aren't supposed to happen in the Christian Reformed Church we educated you stay with us but uh so Nathan Jacob does a made a film which was mostly uh conversations with people who had walked away from church the nuns and the duns and surprising no one the problem of evil comes up for many people and I don't think the problem of evil is as abstract as we like to imagine it is that sort of sounds disembodied the problem of evil what I think in a lot of ways it is is the problem of presence that well God is God one woman tells a a moving story of her uncle a beloved Uncle who died in a house fire because he fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth and this was kind of this is a this was a big deal back in the 70s people would talk about it you don't hear about it much anymore but you know you're smoking and you're laying in bed and you fall asleep with a cigarette and the cigarette falls out and lights the she and starts a conflagration and you die and and the woman's the woman's the woman's narrative about the problematic presence of God was would it have been so hard for an omnipotent God to just pick up the cigarette and put it in the ashtray and so in many ways what has happened with nuns and duns is that it's easier to remove God's presence from the world it's easier to re to have a God either at either a um impersonal God who cannot Act or an absent God who at least won't be to blame when the cigarette tumbles from the mouth and consumes a beloved uncle and so it strikes me pastorally these are many of the issues that we deal with um okay yes I want God's presence but what if and this is always the problem in a relationship when in a middle class Church in a in a poor church people come to the pastor hoping for help with a lot of practical things that can be helped without too much money or too much difficulty in a middle class or upper class church people come to the pastor wanting help with all of the people's relationships yeah right because you can't get my spouse to do this I can't get my kids or my parents to do this and again that's more problematic presence and so it's this in between space between faces that in many ways this is where we're sort of looking for agency um where we're hoping Deliverance can come boy you're reminding me I I had I met these Catholic Educators at this at this bar after like after work kind of thing they invited me I said I don't know anyone talked to me about but they were they got one guys telling the story about this church Festival where there's a contest where you feel like a Tankard with ale and you see who can hold it out the longest right it's like an Iron Man contest and they're they're big they're big tankers right and apparently there are these big muskrit dudes right and they're holding it out and they're like they give them 10 minutes and they start shaking and there's this little skinny guy who pulls his he's got his tanker down he's shaking a little bit too but he's in his other hand he has his Rosary right yeah so the guy's getting into this story and tell me all about this and saying and so the skinny guy wins the contest and I remember he was kind of mad at me afterwards they said well too bad God couldn't do that about the Holocaust you know who cares more about a beer contest than the holocausts in the wrong place oh man huh yeah I'm shocked I'm shocked that didn't go over well Michael uh apparently there weren't enough rosaries in Germany that was the real problem yeah if they had rosaries no let's see of course it's coffee it's coffee right right um I think I almost went to one of those competitions once that um in in Texas they have a beer festival every year and we went and there was one but we kind of missed it because we were busy doing other things probably drinking beer um don't get against the Mystic that's right that's right we should have brought our rosaries um yeah I'm thinking this this stuff about the transjective um maybe this is already a feature of the discourse so I forgive me um but it does occur to me that you know Hebrew words have precisely that character that they are nouns and verbs sort of interchangeably I mean it's it's not that they can serve any purpose at any time but that the same the same route will transform easily from from word from from thing to action and that in general the one of the reasons why Hebrew kind of blew my mind in in grad school is that it's such a good language for talking about God for precisely this this reason that on the one hand God's actions are very much in time on the other they're always sort of complete at every moment and stand out outside of time and that yeah like easy answers to these questions of of pain and presence and suffering are in some ways a kind of insult to the sufferer and to God I mean that it always feels that way to me at least you know that when when people come with this stuff um the the immediate impulse is to make it okay and that's the first thing you probably shouldn't do or try to make it to try to say it's okay um and for me one of the biggest arguments for Christianity coming to it from the outside was that actually nothing makes it okay this side of of paradise that in fact the only conceivable answer is the inconceivable one that must that has to take place in in Infinity I mean this is sort of what happens in um in the brother's karamazov but the the Yvonne can't accept the only form of consolation that could possibly be accepted for the suffering for instance of children which is that parallel lines meet at Infinity that that you're really dealing with um something that that requires you to accept like uh the existence of something completely outside of all space and time I don't know if anybody can hear if you can't hear the airplane you probably can't hear the big old thunderstorm the Thunderclap we just got in in here but uh we're primarily in for a big one um the only other thing to dwell on Hebrew for a second is that this it occurs to me that the great command I mean I love this idea of May the Lord turn his face to you and then of course the other great command is the Shema here listen o Israel the Lord your God the Lord is one um and right listening is in fact like a maybe the highest form of of presence for for humans right is that the the the only answer to suffering that has ever done anything like satisfying for me is that is the suffering God that God's presence in suffering is the answer um and and not his sort of like making up for it anyway um you know especially that was that makes total sense uh you know and we were Spencer and I were having a private conversation probably what last week um and I I was actually almost venting to him and I I was talking about well I guess the the part this particular conversation within the larger conversation was about evangelization and how I personally struggle with you know I I feel like my spiritual life is beefing up right and I'm I I'm I feel closer to God than any other point in my life right now but I feel guilty I was telling sir I feel horribly guilty because I don't know and Spencer and I like and part of it is actually because of our reading on on meditations on this tarot and I don't know how do I how do I properly evangelize these things to individuals and I mean you kind of actually told me what you were just stating now you said something well I don't know if you remember this but you said you just have to listen to them right that's that's the first step is listening and that really stuck with me because what I've noticed and I I apologize that I keep on alluding to my my career but it's so important I Spencer I've told you this before I've told my wife before how I don't feel more human right I feel like I am literally living the most that I can I'm like living at the highest capacity that I could I could live almost when I am counseling someone and it's because what I'm doing is I'm just listening to them Paul you have to know exactly what I mean um being a pastor because um the the commonplace between the pastor and there's a there's a serious overlap between the pastor and the therapist right it's just like when you just are truly listening to someone I mean I think of for for some false that he has I mean I think that's was the greatest uh that's that's the greatest Insight um that Carl Rogers had right with an unconditional um positive regard is just sitting with someone and listening to them and you don't actually have to it's funny like in this in in like the psychological world we call them micro skills right and it can be anywhere from um making a meaning reflection to making a repetitive word reflection but what Carl Rogers did and truly what he still continues to to do is just sit there right let the silence happen and just sit there and just listen and I've never felt I I feel so strong and so alive and I feel like the best version of Joe during that counseling session because my phone's in my office I don't have a worry in the world and I say a prayer before I start all my counseling sessions right for myself and for the and for the client um and and I just listen right so God to give me you know give me his ear almost and it's and this is exactly what you are all describing in some way and like I said Paul you have to know exactly what I'm talking about being a pastor yeah well that's that's a dirty little secret of pastoring which is in most cases you don't have anything any advice that you can give to people to fix what it is that they desperately want fixing most of the time the best you can do is listen well and be with them in their suffering pain shared is pain divided um Joy Joy shared is Joy multiplied thank you very much for your time today Jackson I have most enjoyed listening to you guys pardon me to terminal almost upon there and um yeah so this was just I know you have to go in a few moments so I wanted to just say uh we've got a good flavor of what to expect in DC what do you like to say to those who maybe are thinking about coming that haven't went over the edge yet or any closing thoughts it'll start with yourself Michael well I just hope to see people there and because you know I think it's a it's a great opportunity to be in the real world and to and to uh you know and like you know we're looking to the to the Future in a way in the scene of this conference um but there there is no future without a present and without presence right so I think that's an important thing excellent thanks Michael and Paula well I you know I started out saying I say yes to things well it's not true that I say yes to everything but I do say yes do things like this which are about presence and uh none of you were at the Chino event that we just did in Southern California but what was so remarkable about that event what people told me because I asked quite a few people okay why did you come why are you here what did you get out of it and for for almost all of them it was exactly what Michael described that these are people who had you know been listening to myself for vacujo online and what was what was big about the conference was not so much what we said on stage that was recorded and you can find it on my channel and that was good that was fine what was big in the event was the conversations that people were able to have with each other right away and I just did an estuary I just did my local Estuary Thursday night and again same thing and one of the one of the one of the women said she said you know I'm an introvert and so I hate like all of the I feel very insecure about the small talk and all of this and and so often you have to get through all of these levels to to get where I want to go in the relationship or in the conversation which is and again it's about presence and it's about face and it's about listening and caring it's all of those things and I can't promise you can talk to Joe if get your money back if you're dissatisfied I suppose but um but what these events have done is given people a chance to get into a space where they could very quickly be present and meet others and and have that kind of uh community and I'm hoping that happens here I can't guarantee it obviously but that is that is what I go for eign well I certainly want to co-sign everything that's just been said when I started my podcast I found it very jarring to speak into a camera or into an iPhone or whatever because you know if you if you listen to podcasts you may not kind of realize that on the other end there's somebody with this kind of big gaping black eye staring at him and or this metal you know apparatus this weird machine called the microphone and it's at first extremely difficult to or I found it very difficult to get natural to to be present in in that mode until I realized that the secret is the the eye the camera the machine whatever it's not actually the camera it's not it's not this black hole it's somebody else making breakfast wondering about their kids thinking about what to do at school up against some problem and it from then on truly the best thing for me about making content quote unquote of any kind is just imagining myself in relationship with all these other people on the other end of that line and so if you're you know a listener to this stuff or you've the encounter any of our work and you're listening to us here now I guess I just say like come to the table like we want to meet you you know we we're um we're in your ear a lot and so you've invited us into your lives and that makes us feel really grateful but it would be amazing you know to to just see your face and that that's the value add here that's kind of what we think I think we're offering is you know come to the table and and like let's let's make this a two-way street beautiful thanks Spencer and your Chef Joe the maestro I don't have anything to say um I guess you know every I think everyone else said it perfectly you know I just I I hope to see oh I guess you know it's interesting because I I do hope to see more people come but for those of you who've been on the uh event red page you know that even if we reached Max Capacity it's still going to be a small event right 80 people Max that's very small Paul how much really quick what was Chino you know it was 200 people so right exactly and we're I always say this much we are not at Max Capacity through not have 80 people coming that's a blessing in in some way right because yeah with so many people who want to be part of the conversation who have really profound beautiful good things to say and Spencer put it right come make this a two-way street and as it thunderstorms now in Cleveland Ohio I don't know if you can hear the rain but um yeah I guess I'll I'll just Echo what he said and make this a two-way street really excited to meet everyone and just truly excited to see what is created out of out of this event thanks Joe thank you very much gents it's been a pleasure to listen to you today thank you looking forward looking forward to seeing you yep me too two weeks uh the uh the at least if you're watching this on my channel the link is below in the description so you can find it too and uh you can click on it there so thanks guys take care [Music]

Channel: More Christ

Views: 558

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Id: 5-7pwFUSC6g

Length: 87min 34sec (5254 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023