The Importance of Suffering | Jonathan Pageau EP 1

there's a mystery about how the world exists which is that the image of the lamb which is sacrificed before the foundation of the world so this is an image you find in scripture and it's very mysterious because we tend to think of the crucifixion only as a consequence of the fall that is right adam died and so christ has to has to fill that up like god has to fill that up so so god comes in and then fills up death with himself and so there's an extent there's a real there's a aspect of that which is true but there's also an aspect of it which is more mysterious which is that for something to exist there has to be a sacrifice because there has to be compromise there has to be so imagine like there has to be poke so imagine like a pure form you know like a like the hindus think talk about this cosmic egg that's there at the origin it's like this pure form that has no multiplicity that has no parts it is just like this pure oneness but that oneness has to be something has to happen to it it has to be broken somehow in order for the world to exist and so that can be understood as sacrifice [Music] hello everyone here you are at tammy peterson's podcast thank you for joining me today today i have a very special guest he's a very dear friend of both jordans and mine jonathan pajo jonathan has agreed to speak to me on a number of occasions i have a number of different podcasts devoted to the holy rosary of the blessed virgin mary i wanted to delve into the meaning behind the rosary and jonathan agreed to talk with me now if you don't know jonathan pago he's an artist a symbolic thinker a youtuber the editor of the orthodox arts journal an expert icon carver of the eastern orthodox tradition we talked today about the crucifixion we have a couple of different conversations about that this is the first one that we're going to launch easter is coming up and so we thought that this came at a good time it's not like we planned it really but we did choose which one we were going to release first and so that's going to be today's conversation i hope that it brings some uh interesting thoughts for you and maybe some understanding to what it's all about because it's quite a mystery uh the biblical stories are difficult to understand straight off and so jonathan is going to give us some help [Music] so here we are we're going to continue speaking about the sorrowful mystery and we're getting to the last part of the mystery and um this part is about the crucifixion about carrying the cross and the crucifixion and it is a complicated and delicate subject so i'm not going to say very much i don't think i'm going to let you talk about it if that's all right with you sure i mean it's it's difficult to talk about the crucifixion so hopefully if there's some things that you're curious about then you know i mean i think it's good that you you can ask um and i also it's important to say that i definitely don't have i'm not going to pierce the mystery that's not i don't think that's really possible so we're kind of talking around something and uh and i think that's okay because it's the crucifixion is probably one of the hardest things to understand i think in the world at least as someone who's interested in stories and someone who's interested in in history and all these things so it's difficult to it's difficult to wrap our head around what exactly is all of it what's going on during the crucifixion i guess there's there's one because of what we've been talking about and because of this understanding that i have now that comes to me in different situations based on how you interpret the biblical stories i feel like i understand the crucifixion better because of the profound death and rebirth and ascension and so then i i see those as a real top and a and a a very a very low point in a very high point um more uh understandably but i would say that is the extent of my understanding so far yeah yeah and so the the crucifixion is obviously how can i say this it's the place the maybe the best way to understand it at first is to understand it as a as the cross itself and so the cross itself is not arbitrary you know and it's funny because you hear people argue about whether the cross was actually an actual cross like that or whether it was just a post or something like that and you know people who talk up talk about it that way are missing the entire point which is that the shape of the cross is actually part of the mystery it's part of the meaning which is that it's uh the cross is something like uh it's something like a cosmic shape it has everything in it because it has the middle it has the center and then it has a vertical which is let's say heaven is the best way to understand the vertical itself the verticality right and a ladder is is is heaven and then it has a horizontal which is earth or which is the particular and so the cross is the place where the the invisibles and the the ladder of heaven meets the particulars and so in itself you know you know it's a it's an image of that but then it becomes more mysterious you so you could just see it that way so when you just see cross you understand it's basically a point of attention it's like everything is moving towards that it's the place where you are in space and then there's the four directions it's all of this type of of thinking basically you know even like i said even in terms of sp spatiality it's the it's the middle with the the directions it's all of that which is there in the symbolism of the cross but the mystery of it is why is it someone being killed that's the hardest part to understand um and it of course it has to do with the idea that the existence of multiplicity in our world or the world of the fall the world of this death deadly body that we have is something that in the christian story is seen as a consequence of a fall seen as the consequence of of a compromise of pride of all of these things which brings about which kind of leads into fragmentation and to to a fall um and then there's a pro there's a mystery which is that to return to the middle or to return to the center there's a there's a kind of death which needs to happen or a consciousness of death or or a conscious death it's maybe the best way to understand it so you're you're a slave of death because of the fall that is you know we all have that experience we have we're pulled apart we're ripped apart by our thoughts by our desires by by the world right you're gonna die where we're gonna at some point our bodies gonna fall apart and we're gonna die and so there's a sense in which the way to deal with that is is also to die and it's weird because it sounds so contradictory but once you once you kind of pierce that mystery you realize that it actually makes sense in a very basic way um something to do with medicine like take your medicine maybe is a good way to understand it the idea of the need to do something unpleasant consciously so that it doesn't happen to you unconsciously well people say you have to get to your lowest point before you get a new understanding and i've experienced that i know that that can happen and it does happen daily that you come to difficult places and then if you can pause for a while you can see a redemption a tiny redemption in that you can get out of whatever difficulty you have at the moment there's something about accepting the situation you're in you know and not how can i say not refusing it or denying it that is also part of that that salvation so repentance that's why there's a relationship between the idea of of the cross or crucifixion at least in our experience and repentance you know and it happens intuitively in all kinds of weird ways people will tell you things like you have to repent to be saved in all that type of language which sometimes might seem a bit superficial and arbitrary but there is a man in which that's true in the way that you said which is that if you have to recognize your state before any change can happen to you you know as you're if you deny it then and then you have to embrace a dying but it's not it's not exactly the same kind of dying it's usually a dying which is which is binding you to that suffering because we we suffer and then we're kind of we identify with the suffering we but we bind we bind ourselves to our suffering and usually that happens mostly here it's your thoughts it's not your body as much like your body is making you suffer but your your attachment to that suffering is happening up here and it's happening in your emotions and your in your thoughts um and so there's a manner in which embracing death is freeing yourself from death because you no longer are a slave to that suffering even though it's happening to you i mean it's not doesn't mean that it's not going to happen it's going to stop necessarily of course there are images of healing i think your experience is one of those uh and i remember when you described it to me the first time when i saw you a while ago i guess in january two years ago a year and a half ago uh you talked about this yeah exactly kind of this this opening up and letting things come to you like letting the prayers enter you and not not not crisping yourself and and you know just resisting the resisting what was happening to us which is usually one a large part of our suffering you know it's funny because as a child when you go when you're born into a family and the family the parents have a way of relating to each other and it's never perfect it's always a process and then the children are subject to that and then they learn their own way of behaving based on what they're given and then you grow up that way and you might have you might have had a mother that was felt victimized and a father who was absent say something like that and so then maybe you feel sorry for your mother but you take on you can take on something to deal with that then you grow up in a way and you've got this way of behaving that stops you from the surrender that it the acceptance and that's a very well i guess that's what going to church is for is to find that surrender and acceptance because you know when you were young say you were until you were 13 you had a way of dealing with things that was kind of working or at least you thought it was working pretty well you know and then you leave your family at 13 or so and go out into your with your friends and negotiate relationships from then on and those relationships have to be updated and in order to update you have to give up what you have and uh that's that takes some trust right it takes trust did you learn that at home when you were a child maybe not so right so it's so complicated to get to this place christ got to that place where he could totally surrender which is unbelievable yeah and so so you can see that in the so in the image of the cross what you're seeing even in the the form with his arms out you know and filling up the cross so it's actually a it really is a filling up of the world and that's the way to understand it really in terms of theologically is that so theologically we would say that you know in order for god to save something has to assume it and so god enters becomes man and then dies and fills up death and transforms it into something else it transforms it into glory really is the best way to understand it um and so this there's a relationship between death and glory like even in the story there's a sense in which in the old there's a there's a all these traditions would talk about how before the fall adam and eve had garments of glory and that when they fell then they received garments of death garments of skin but there's also a weird mysterious thing which in scripture many places in scripture seem seem to hint at the fact that those two are related very intricately that one is actually an aspect of the other but just not fully assumed you could say so there are verses in scripture which talk about how the the an old person's white hair is their glory that's a really beautiful image that's a very powerful image because on the one hand the white hair becomes like light which is emanating from your head right you have light emanating from your head so it's very visually right but it's also that white hair is is death and and it's a way of dying basically and so there's an aspect there's an idea in which that's it it's like a way of dying gets transformed into uh into glory and it's funny because you we i say that and it's it might sound so arbitrary to some but if you can think of examples in your life you'll realize that which is exactly like the the person that gives themselves to others openly not out of resentment not out of but you you've met if maybe a few people in your life if you're lucky that have really lived in service of others and and giving themselves to others and when they're with others they they give themselves and so they're they're dying to themselves constantly without without resentment but that dying to themselves is them filling up the world you know and those are the people that when they die you realize that their story has completely filled up all these other stories and now you know they're the person that that will receive great testimonies and people say they changed my life that these all these things that they've done so all of a sudden that that death is actually filling its glory like that's what glory is like glory is this thing that moves out of you and shines out and so so there's a way in which christ is revealing the you know the way in which the world actually exists like the way in which community exists the way in which our relationships are are rich let's say this may be the best way to understand it so the more empty i can become uh and that's the that's the idea it's hard to accept i mean i don't want to do that most of the time but i see it like i see the moments where i have and i also see it in those that i know that have been the most luminous you know uh those are the people that in a way are the most empty but it's surprising because they they are also empty but they also become very particular it's not like it's a weird thing it's as if there's this image in in uh one of the books one of my favorite books called the the life of moses by saint gregory of nisa where where moses ascends the mountain to meet god and as he's ascending the mountain he's basically giving uh giving up everything right so he he gives up his friends he gives up his sandals he gives up all the coverings that he he has um and so he enters into the divine glory to the glory of god then when he's there he receives them all back in a way but almost like in a pure form so he receives the pattern of the tabernacle when he's in the glory of god and saint gregory talks about how in the pattern of the tabernacle is everything he gave up like all these things that he all his friends all of this now is returned in this kind of architectural thing which is also the church which is which is kind of this universal pattern that he receives and so i think that that's the mystery too is that when we empty ourselves we actually find something which is truer to ourself you know that seed you know when christ talks about selling the field to get the pearl or you know getting rid of all the externals to to to get to the to the kernel of what you are see when i was before i was um in a better understanding of being centered with my belief i had a tendency to do things for others but then would feel empty but not in a good way you know not in a good way because maybe because i wanted to be thanked and now i realize well no no it's not about that it's not about being thanked it's about seeing where it's necessary to do something and uh knowing that that was meaningful and worthwhile but so for a long time most of my life probably i misunderstood what service was it was difficult for me to understand that and the stories of the bible and the crucifixion are so hard to understand that it wasn't obvious to me how to change that or how to get better at it it took well it took a community and uh and a lot of people before me to help me to get a different understanding and now i realize more what that is and so i'm not as afraid now to go out and to be among many people because i know that there isn't a higher purpose there and and that that's that's enough to just have a higher purpose i thought i thought there's way more to it than that and that's not it's not saying that that isn't much but it's easier to understand that now than it was before and it'll still be a big challenge but it it's a challenge maybe now with a more clear purpose but to get to that i nearly died to get to that i i don't want that for people i want them to be able to find what i have found in a sooner and in a easier manner i heard a story about a woman last night she said that she was born with alcohol in her bottle i mean she said she was born and right from day one she was drunk and she was drunk every day till she was 25 24 i think it was and she said she was also she was from a very a very dysfunctional family where there were a lot of drug dealing and a lot of pimping and all of this stuff you know and her mother was an alcoholic so she was she had no chance really to be to begin with and when she was 24 she woke up one morning and she felt a burning light on her and she woke up and she said what's that and the person that was with her said it's the sun and she said take that away it's burning me but then from then on she was more conscious she said it was that day that she felt the sun was the first day she'd felt the sun and from then on she started to recognize when she was taking advantage of people and she had been taking advantage of people and of herself right she wasn't she was homeless she wasn't taking care of herself but she's now well put together and in the service of of god and i think holy crow um what a what a moment and what is that moment these moments they come to us you know i can remember being in university and being very depressed and being down on the uh banks of a river in ottawa and praying to god and someone walking by me and saying god be with you someone walked by me in the park you know yeah yeah yeah yeah i think i think anybody who is attentive to their lives uh will see that yeah that's how it's there and how things happen yeah well it's uh staggering to me these uh it shakes us out of our materialism it takes us out of our our idea that the world is just kind of ambling along and that these things don't matter you know and so but i mean there are times when we crowd to god and nothing happens too and so that's also a reality for us yeah well i don't know how long i prayed before the guy walked by me it might have been months might have been months although squirrels had come to spend time with me and i thought at that point if i never have another relationship with a person i will still have squirrels come to be with me and that's okay [Laughter] oh man but that's getting low that was low yeah and i still didn't understand it for years after that i still didn't understand i was kind of illiterate i think actually yeah in terms of biblical and this is the mystery that's hard also for us to accept and it's hard it's hard to digest because there's a sense in which when you when you read in the church fathers there's a sense in which our suffering is in a way there to create opportunities for change like that's actually what suffering is is for and so because it it puts you in a position of weakness right you know because this is the problem we have is that when we're strong then we've got it and uh and we don't we don't have the we most people some people do and it's not impossible but most people don't have the capacity to change unless they have an obstacle forcing kind of pushing them or revealing something about themselves or or you know revealing some weakness that they have um and so it's like i you know i i don't want to make light of people suffering but that at least we can understand it in our own lives when it when we've seen it happen you know or if we have families you know often there's someone in our family that suffers i can remember my sister telling me she thought that i'd had a hard life and then within a few years of that her husband left her and you know when i when she said that to me i thought everybody has their time of suffering and uh it'll it'll and it's gonna come from no matter what it's coming it's coming it's coming no matter what that is it might if it doesn't happen to you in a way that surprises people because they say you're too young or you're too healthy or whatever it's gonna happen anyways when you're old and it happens to every single human being in the world uh and so there that's also part of one of the the aspects of the idea of dying you know before you die that is that if you learn to to give up some of that these things that we hold on to then when death comes then we won't hold on so much like we won't we won't suffer we'll suffer physically but we won't suffer the impotence that dying comes with you know so i was reading about crucifixion and the holding the being held by your hands and how you can't breathe because you need because it stretches all of your muscles your diaphragm your you can't inhale because you need that freedom of muscular uh of the of your muscles the movement of your muscles to breathe in and out oh my god that horrified me when i read that yeah running out of of breath basically a slow yeah yeah painful and and that is at the center of that crucifix where that's what's happening there yeah wow you can understand it as a descent you know so the the image one of the images the traditional image of christ on the cross like the the is you see christ on the cross and then at the bottom of the cross you'll see a little mountain it's not a mountain it's a little bump basically but it's supposed to represent a mountain uh and then you'll see a skull there's a cave and there's there's a skull hidden in the cave and usually there's blood coming down on the cross which will start will drip on the on the skull um so that is what you're seeing happening you're basically what you're seeing is this filling up of death that christ is doing you know this idea that christ as he's dying he's descending down into death completely filling it up and as he's filling it up from the the lower part he's also filling up the higher part because when he's on the cross there's a sign on his head which says jesus christ king of the jews and it's meant to be ironic uh but it's also written it's written in several languages which makes it so but it's it's like a double irony which is again like the crown of thorns uh that we talked about before you know it's actually revealing a truth about what's there what's actually happening you know even though people think it's mocking so when christ dies what happens is the veil of the temple is ripped and that's those two things happening at the same time the veil of the temple is equivalent to the top of the mountain of paradise it's the summit of of of the space where god and man meet you know where moses went up the mountain and saw god is the same as the priest going into the holy of holies and encountering the glory of god in the holy of holies so ripping the veil is christ going all the way into the holy of holies and going into death at the same time and joining them together right i talked about this idea of making death into glory and and that's what's going on so it's it's not it's a pretty astounding thing which is happening uh on the cross in the story itself like when you read it what what it what it's referring to let's say it also says that there the the thieves the thief that was first tongue they broke his legs when they took him down but they didn't break christ's legs they pierced his side and water and blood flowed out that is that that's what they mean is that is that the filling up too that well yes and so the if the hemography of the church and and many of the church fathers they interpret that as the birth two things it's the it's a new creation you could say and so it's creation which is pouring out and but it's also the creation of is relating to the creation of eve that it's it's the birth of the church uh because the because eve was taken out of christ's side and so this water and blood which is coming out of christ is something like the water paradise which is coming down into the world if you think of the paradise as a mountain and the sources of water coming down into the world of four rivers of paradise and it's also the birth of the church um and so and it's a it's a mystery i've talked about this recently i don't forget where i think on on um on a q a where there's a mystery about how the world exists which is that the the idea that the image of the lamb which is sacrificed before the foundation of the world so this is an image you find in scripture and it's very mysterious because we tend to think of the crucifixion only as a consequence of the fall that is right adam died and so christ has to has to fill that up like god has to fill that up so so god comes in and then fills up death with himself and so there's an extent there's a real there's a aspect of that which is true but there's also an aspect of it which is more mysterious which is that for something to exist there has to be a sacrifice because there has to be compromise there has to be so imagine like there has to be poke so imagine like a pure form you know like a like the hindus think talk about this cosmic egg that's there at the origin it's like this pure form that has no multiplicity that has no parts it is just like this pure oneness but that oneness has to be something has to happen to it it has to be broken somehow in order for the world to exist and so that can be understood as sacrifice and so what's happening there on the cross is that it's like basically the creation of the world where out of christ the world flows out but it it has to be like a poking wow i see yeah but that stuff is hard to think about it's hard to understand too oh that's fascinating i need to know more about that so so i've started to read some poetry about crucifix and i was reading george herbert he's from like 1600 and he writes about the crucifix and john dunn he's from about 1600 i was told by some notable person recently to read those and i'm going to be sent some of those poems um there's so much to learn about the crucifix that it's uh i can see how someone could devote a lot of time to i don't know if there's any is there someone who just spends their time around the crucifix all the time and i don't know but like i said we haven't even started like we haven't talked about the actual the the wood the cross the tree the nails there's so much to talk about like there's so much going on at the same time in this story that it's it's difficult to uh to talk about uh you know why so why is it that christ has to be fixed on the tree you know what is the relationship between christ and the serpent on the tree because there's definitely a relationship going on there because christ said that he you know as the as moses rose as moses lifted up the bronze serpent in the desert so to the son of man must be lifted up and so in the story of the bronze serpent these serpents are are biting people and so moses makes one out of bronze lifts it up on a pole and now everybody who looks to that serpent is healed and so christ is the serpent is that serpent so he is the bronze serpent on the pole um and he's kind of a flip side of the serpent in the garden of eden in a way because serpents bite serpents yes but serpents are strangled they're also related to death in the sense that they're not stable you know they they move and they're in so many places at the same time they don't have uh there's an image in um in scripture where moses grabs the serpent by the tail when he grabs the serpent by the tail becomes the staff so it moves from multiplicity variability uh change to solidity identity uh you know all of that verticality and then when he lets go then it turns back into a serpent so those are like two aspects of reality basically the tree and the waters or the tree and the change stability and and multiplicity all of that is related to this now christ on the cross is like both at the same time right so it's both christ it's a serpent on the cross but the serpent is also being fixed to the cross um in a way that it's just these categories will just blow like they just blow your mind because it's it's like this variability being fixed and by doing that it's healing so it's death again so death being raised up and because it's raised up in a certain manner then it heals you from death so it's it's like it's like a a cure it's like a it's like a cure for a poison where you take some aspect of the poison and then you make a cure out of it and now you give meaning to it and when you do then it heals you from the actual poison and so that has to do with this idea of dying like true dying or dying in a way that is conscious so you take some aspect of death you give it meaning right you raise it up so that it becomes meaningful and then when that happens it heals you from accidental dying you could say well that's part of i think maybe maybe it's part of being grateful for having cancer for instance right it's great great being grateful for the suffering that i went through to bring more understanding and uh to bring me up grace really to bring me closer to grace every day waking up or and wanting one say wanting to control something that you have no control over and recognizing becoming aware that you're controlling and realizing that with by letting go of that control you have freedom now you have freedom and peace because now you're not obsessing about anything but you have to accept it was necessary you have to accept that that control was necessary to get you here to get you here to this point where you can accept it so maybe that's the bit of bringing that um incomplete or misunderstood behavior to the present from the past seeing its worth seeing its worth that it brought you here even though it was a sin practically maybe what you were doing may have been a sin then you get to this place and you can be grateful for it because now you can let it go and be something new i don't know no you're i think you're right and i think that there's a there's really a mystery in like there's a mystery in sin you could say which is that although sin is bad you know everybody agrees sin what it also does is it creates an opportunity every time every time you lie like let's say you're you're talking to someone and then for some reason i don't even make yourself look good you say something untrue what it'll do to you is you'll feel like if you're attentive to yourself you'll feel that fall and in that moment you have an opportunity to change to be aware to become conscious to be a conscious of your sin and to say oh i'm doing that and it's like that when you realize that oh i'm doing that then that's not that's really an opportunity to change and so the the difficulty is that often we sin without knowing like we sin without realizing what we're doing but if we sin and we become aware of it then it's a it's yeah it's a it can be a gift in disguise not the sin but the situation you fall in so i want to talk a little bit about uh relation of relationships marriage uh and um in order to have a marriage that works there has to be a lot of um surrender and what i've learned because i've been married for what 32 years this year and i've known my husband for like 32 years oh for you know 55 years something like that i've just known him forever right so he's yeah yeah so i've just he's just been around for a very so we have quite a long relationship and so we have had many experiences together and we have a good relationship jordan and i we try to get through our troubles we we argue and get to the bottom of things often and repeatedly and i just want to say something about this is a tricky thing to talk about but anyway i'm going to be i'm just going to say what i have to we can edit it out if we have to we have to okay okay okay so in order to truly make love with your husband in order for a woman to a for a wife to make love with her husband she has to be willing to be vulnerable say you have to be vulnerable truly vulnerable you know not just playing at it truly vulnerable and and i think i'm pretty good at that and i've practiced that and but now that i have this better understanding of my service to a higher good then i can bring that into my relationship with my husband at that time and so so and and i don't mean that just in terms of my relationship with my husband i mean that in terms of my relationship with with god and so in that moment when i making love with my husband if i am in service to god it is a much more complete experience [Music] that sounds true like i don't know it sounds true doesn't it but i but it was a it's an it's a process of learning and it seems to be very important something i didn't take seriously enough was my relationship to god in everything i do it makes everything better it's you know it's not just my relationship with my husband or my relationship with myself or my relationship with my children my relationship with with god comes first it comes first and if it comes first then it's right yeah oh i just can't believe that i mean it's it's just yeah well that's that's the that's the trick of of our life is that it's it's when we the secondary goods of our life you know our relationships you know all the things that we have they only become truly good when they're in the right order or else they become a slave master they become a tyrant they become all these things you know yeah and so it's the surprise of sacrifice in a way it's the surprise of of uh yeah it's the surprise of giving up your desires in order to find them again yeah but it's hard to do man it's hard to do so i'm i i think it's wonderful to hear you uh to talk about that and to seem to be really discovering that like i find that very hard to do because i i'm willful and i have all these things i want to accomplish you know have this plan i think i have this vision of what i want to do and even if my vision i think that my vision is in service of god sometimes it's not right sometimes it's like it's in service of me and so it's it's yeah yeah well it's it's uh it's constant reflection right it takes constant reflection well not what yeah constant reflection it does it does and attention uh constant attention and even when you have constant attention you know our self-will is very strong and and it has to be i guess or it wouldn't be yeah so it's good that it is it's just it makes the challenges most extreme within us because it's between self will and god's will self will and god's will it's constant it's a constant uh you keep having to surrender you keep having to let it go to give it to god because we are so used to being the guys that are running the show but we're not so we have to remind ourselves all the time and the crucifix people wear them you know they wear them on their they put them on in their cars they have them they put they have them in their pockets to remind them yeah that's to remind them that they're not that we aren't in control that we're not running the show and that it will be better that way it'll turn out better that way or it'll turn out the way it's supposed to it might not be better but it'll in the long run it'll turn out the way it's supposed to and sometimes that isn't well eventually that isn't good because we all die yeah yeah and there's a way in which there's a way in which when we give up control we also we also kind of rediscover the places that we have influence which is a true influence but hopefully then that becomes in service to the higher the higher good instead of just serving our own our own desires but i can imagine i mean i'm not a man i'm a woman so i've been reading esther harding and all about the moon it's kind of fun to read after harding it's all about mythology and uh moon phases and all of the all of the greek gods and all that that's very fascinating stuff to read i haven't read that kind of thing in years and years jordan decided i should read dexter hiding so i've been reading this and i've been enjoying it he said i said george yesterday what a you know i like it but i haven't figured out why i'm reading it yet he said oh it'll inform your dreams i said oh okay okay it'll inform my dreams yeah and then maybe i'll get some further understanding of what direction i should be going in but this this change of this change of being with god all the time is helping me to be a more uh to be more on my side and to share my needs and and be aware of my needs and to be and not to hide them yeah so this is a different way to to live and it's new for me it hasn't been like this for a very long time so i'm very i'm very grateful that i've had all this this experience and this time with george this year of hell really a couple years of hell um it leaves me speechless but it's done yeah yeah i mean it's it's pretty it's hard to imagine everything you have been through it's just hard to it's hard to think about it like it's so crazy i've been through so many things now that it that i'm not the same person i was and i couldn't be but i am in some ways more the person i was than i was before i guess like you said we uh spend so much of our time in the world that we lose ourselves in it yeah and i feel like i've regained myself and i'm hoping that when we go on tour i can maintain that i'll have to maintain it i'll have to i know now that it's life or death for me to maintain that i know that that forgetting who i am would put me in peril in peril yeah yeah well it's good that you aware of that it's you know travel is you know there's a reason why we we pray for people who travel because it's a it's a dangerous place like it's traveling is dangerous for us because we because it energizes us in a certain way but it distracts us and it creates opportunities to forget you know to forget what's truly important because there's everything is moving and everything is there it's changing so much everything is changing and so your schedule is hard to keep you know you eat it's hard to eat the right way it's hard to it's hard to keep a schedule for a prayer to do all the things that we tend to do and so it's a it's a challenge well i'll pray every morning as i do uh i often meditate sometimes i meditate with sam harris i still can't get over that i don't know i don't do it all every day but yeah he was and you know i was walking i was walking and i turned it on he was talking about walking meditation i thought that's good i'd like to walk and he was just talking about you know spreading paying attention to your peripheral vision and noticing where you are in the whole visual field that you have in front of you and that's kind of a that's a meditative state and it puts you where you are very set very centrally so sometimes he just well you can get that from anyone though you really can [Laughter] but i'll do that i'll do that george said he likes to do that when he drives so he drives and he pays attention also to hopefully he's paying attention to the road but he's also paying attention to the trees and how they come towards him yeah well there's something just about because we we tend to move up here and then we're kind of up here and we're not we don't remember ourselves and so i think that you know it i think that remembering yourself is definitely useful just yeah just being aware that you're there you know no matter how you do it is definitely a good thing to do because you you'll you'll notice things about your thought patterns more when you're doing that you notice things about how you're reacting and how you're interacting with others so yeah i think so yeah i think so so i'll continue to do that in my mornings and geor i won't let jordan talk to me until 9 15 in the morning that's hilarious i know we got the sauna the other day and he started talking i said jordan it's only eight o'clock and he goes oh is that the rule for the sauna too [Laughter] yeah so i think i think we're i think we've probably done as much as we're gonna do today i think regard to that's that's quite the subject the crucifix it it stretches your head yeah no it's very difficult to to it's very difficult to think about it because there's a lot of other stuff going on like should we talk about it again should we talk about it again sure we could i would maybe have to think about the elements that we missed a little bit yes yes like you said the the cross itself yeah there's all these really interesting uh traditions about what the cross is okay i'll read about that and so and then um and you know and that mary is at the foot of the cross yeah did we talk about the two thieves as well i don't know no we haven't talked about that yeah so yeah there's so much to talk about so yeah we could okay let's talk about that again all right it's good to talk to you good to talk to you too all right see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Tammy Peterson

Views: 63,093

Keywords: Tammy Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Suffering, The Crucifixion, Jesus Christ, Prayer, ideological swings, Podcast, sacrifice, Surrender, Scripture, prayer, Christian Podcast, The cross, Jesus on the cross, spirituality, religion, the Bible, bible reading, meaning of the Bible, Jonathan Pageau, Biblical symbolism, Theology, Bible interpretation, Biblical podcast, the sorrowful mysteries

Id: zEe_K_wofys

Length: 52min 24sec (3144 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022