Communal Living as Spiritual Practice: Friendship, Formation, and Renewing the Senses

29:17He talks about de-centering as one of the main things that religious rituals do. They take us out of an egocentric and we re-center onto something or someone else. And that's a very powerful way of triggering transformation in human beings. But he's also got a new book coming out. I'm reading the proof of it because I'm writing a blurb for it, which is which converges with work that Dan Schiappi and I have done which is the idea that human beings form distributed networks that give rise to a collective intelligence Jonathan Pajot and I have talked about this repeatedly and now there's more and more evidence that they have an independent causal power that collective spirit independent access to information like They can access patterns of information that we can't access individually.

30:11They exercise agency. People can, they solve problems. In fact, growing evidence that we are much more rational in a really technical sense when we dialogue together in group than rather being the classic Cartesian thing of just talking to ourself on our own. Our rationale is actually very poor under those conditions. I'm so, again, you both know me. I'm not trying to secularize what you're talking about, but I'm trying to do also what, you know, what Winn and other people say, you know, Aquinas. Can we get a bridging language between the spiritual descriptions of the phenomenology and the functionality and a secular account of the phenomenology and the functionality that can talk to each other in a mutually informing fashion?

30:58So I guess, Chris, what I'm saying is you don't need this by any means. But there is a large body of cognitive scientific work that is giving more and more insight into why what you're doing actually makes sense, that it is reasonable. And that's important because what you're doing, and you've both given voice to this, is subversive. You're subverting the model of the atomic individual who lives alone and is autonomous and is completely self-directed. And their greatest allegiance is to their true and inner self. I think almost all of those claims are false. and i think a combination of living examples like what you two are doing and really good science could be a good a strong basis to challenge and subvert that rather tyrannical picture that has us in a script sorry that was a bit of a speech myself uh but i mean i don't know would you like Go ahead.

32:12So first of all, like, amen to that, right? I've no problem with secularizing, by the way. I learned years ago that the word secular comes from the word secular, which is Augustine's word for the present. So it's this profoundly, the secular age is, and Charles Taylor's work on that was very formative in my own life. The idea of a porous self is huge. but also we live in a curious time where we've talked ourselves out of certain ways of being and thinking and knowing and doing. Maybe we're in a time now where we're relearning the wisdom that we talked ourselves out of. There's a certain kind of ascetism that as a culture, as a philosophical community even, we need to unlearn some of the habits that we got ourselves into of talking ourselves out of certain things.

33:11Just to give you one illustration, today in the serious metaphysics group in Cambridge there was a wonderful woman called Tatiana who was trying to retrieve the wisdom of some medieval mystics. I think her name was Heidewick of Brabant, a 13th century mystic. We must put her in touch with Laura Fabericki and the Begginage stuff. But there was so much preamble of trying to justify how this mystic woman who was writing poetry about love could possibly have anything to say in a context of modern epistemology. The fact that you have to preamble a talk like that in that context to persuade philosophers that the business of philosophia, the love of wisdom, had something to do with love, to me is a tragedy.

34:08It's a tragedy, but it's a peculiarly modern tragedy, right? And we don't realize how tragic it is because it has presented itself as a certain form of education right um so for my part when i had when we had kids i just felt like i all my education was utterly redundant and i'd been educated into imbecility because i before i'd ever learned anything about political philosophy or whatever i'd i'd in i'd been brought up into this vision of the progressive life that was basically right do well at school in the subjects which you know maths physics stem subjects which are valorized as well as you can if you're really good at that you can go off to university it's a function of privilege and wealth and i it's nothing to do with me or i didn't earn um i leave my mom and dad leave the place i'm grown up leave my friends go to a city that i've never been to so cut myself off from anyone who's not being born or, or, you know, anyone who's not my age, rage, station and class, basically.

35:20If you're really good at that, then you might go to another city and get a job. And if you're really good at that, you might live on your own. And that was the kind of... It's the dream. That's the dream. And there was a moment in my life when I was like, where's the wisdom now? Because that feels like stupidity, but it was all this world reveals and wars to own, place of your own. So look, all I'm saying here is a kind of confession of my own ignorance. And that's why for me, meeting people who've learned the wisdom of a different way to be feels like what I want to grow into rather than what I want to grow out of.

36:03It's a long answer, but -

36:12I'm fascinated in neurotheologians. I'm fascinated by the way we don't need to put these disciplines against each other. We can say, yes, the cognitive science has a huge amount to tell us, as does sociology, as does the neurology, as does the philosophy, as does literature. They all seem to be pointing towards a level of entanglement that completely undermines the individualist anthropology on which we have built most of our society and all of our assumptions. I do think in answer to your earlier question that we have we have a buddhist friend who talks about the next buddha will be the sangha you know the the yes yeah there's the sense of is is there something between us other than a bunch of individuals in a house knocking our corners off just for the it's up the idea of community sangha yeah yeah yeah it's like the the the equivalent of the body with the fell the fellowship of the followers of the way i feel free to correct me because I don't want to butcher Buddhism.

37:25But I think what it feels like to be in the house and trying to grow up our souls alongside each other does feel just on a sort of basic functional level where our housemate always says, you are the average of the six people that you've spent the most time with. You're becoming. Yeah, becoming. And so there is a collective formation that's happening. We have chosen joint rituals. We are turning our attention. My definition of formation is just basically, what are you paying attention to and what relationships are you in? That's who you will be becoming. We are becoming in the same direction a lot of the time.

38:07It's the hope. We hope that we are oriented and animated by a spirit already at work that we are trying to dance with, to be in collaboration with, to be on a creative adventure with. Trying to do that together rather than alone does often feel like we see truer things. We see truer things in ourselves and that's really uncomfortable. The true things I see in myself are rarely the things that my ego wants me to see. We see truer things in each other. We're able to name things in each other and speak things over each other, which bring freedom often and bring healing and call out the best in each other.

38:57And, you know, we would frame that as that the Holy Spirit is at work amongst us trying to make us more truly the body of Christ. and I imagine that something that feels very similar is happening in those that dialogue us that uh that process that you were talking about in which people are grasping at the at the truth together and I think both those things are true so that's very helpful uh that's some very powerful connections I mean uh one is well there's two two uh

39:32two, I guess, scholastic connections I'm going to make. One is to, I was participated in the, the, a consensus paper on sort of the, most of the researchers, scientific, philosophical, on the nature of wisdom. And one of the core things, in fact, this was one I pushed very hard for was perspectival metacognition that one of the unique feature of people that are growing in wisdom is they have a wider repertoire of perspectives and they have a flexibility of moving smoothly between them and of course you can't pick up a perspective by reading a book or it's hard I would say I would say you maybe can with a novel a really good novel that's Triggerous.

40:20I was actually just about to literally say that sentence, which you said for me. Sorry. I'll let you talk. What I meant was a treatise. Yes. A novel that is about perspectival knowing or poetry, I think, can convey that. But what I mean is you have to bring in the perspectival and the participatory kinds of knowing. Yeah. Right. You have to – the evidence we're now getting, and this is research done by atheists, by the way, Gervais and others, is that why people are religious or not – not that, Gervais. Why people are religious has not to do with whether or not they're analytic in their thinking or irrational or associational or if they have hyperactive agency detection.

41:08All of that doesn't actually track with the empirical data. What matters is who are the trusted people in their life that they regard as credible, right? Who are the trusted people? And credible is important because it means from your perspective, they're doing things that look kind of stupid or costly. But because you also see them doing better in wisdom and virtue, you place your faith in them. You trust them and you start to imitate them. And that's how you actually internalize all these perspectives. And I've always thought that that's what Plato was trying to do with the Socratic dialogues, to give us the opportunity to do this circumambulation around Socrates so that we could better internalize him.

41:53So first of all, it strikes me that what you're talking about is there's a way in which being with and through other people and people that you regard credible and have perspectives that don't always make sense to you, knock your corners off, as you said, seems to me to be irremovable in the cultivation of wisdom. I'm trying to really strengthen your position on your behalf. I mean, there's a reason why, you know, the academy or the monastery, you know, and cross-culturally, Buddha, Buddhism, Ananda, who never gets things right, comes to the Buddha and says, you know what? I think that half of the path is friendship.

42:37And the Buddha said, no, Ananda, you're wrong, which is what he always says to Ananda. It is all of the way. It is all of the way. um um and so um wow i i like now that that's the that's the that's the light side of the force not the dark side of the force i read a really powerful book i was really i was on i was on the beach on the beach in cancun with sarah and i'm i'm reading a a really profound book it was so beautiful and with you know i'm in a beautiful place with a beautiful woman reading beautiful philosophy. It was just like, it was amazing. And anyways, he makes a point about how, and he builds on what you said, Chris, about the buffered self and the attendant meaning crisis.

43:27And he talks about how intimacy, which is, I take it exactly this. I take intimacy as exactly that willingness to trust people so you indwell them and internalize them. That's more than having pleasure with people or having fun or even having shared political goals. I think intimacy is, I will dwell in you and you will dwell in me, and we will commit to doing that, and we will thereby draw out the best in each other on an ongoing basis. Now, he argues that intimacy is a profound problem for the buffered self. Now, this is really a weird performative contradiction, because if wisdom and self-reflection depend on intimacy with multiple perspectives, then the buffered self's inability to actually grok, you might not know, that's from Robert Heinlein, Stranger in Strangeland, really perspectively and in a participatory way get intimacy means it's actually making itself progressively more and more vicious, foolish, and irrational.

44:44And Eberstadt does something aligned with this, how the West really lost God. She argues that the most secular societies correlate very strongly with societies where people live as individuals, isolated individuals. and more religious societies is where people live in a more extended fashion. Now, the dark side is, right, Kimbrill says what we've done is we've isolated and individualized and this is where the problem comes in, we've eroticized intimacy. We've said, okay, we're going to allow intimacy, But what we're going to do is we're going to brush it down to this one kind of relationship. And it's going to bear all of the intimacy that's in friendship and in relationship to community and to history and tradition and to the sacred.

45:39And that's going to be your romantic relationship. It's a lot of weight to put on one thing. Did you say this book's by Sam Kimbriel? Is it Sam? Yes. He's a very dear friend of ours. I've read it. Well, I would love to meet him and congratulate him on that book. I was literally about to quote him when he started talking because I didn't catch one. He should be friends. He's an extraordinary man. Yeah. I was profoundly impressed by his book. Yeah. Anyways, I mean, he's saying a lot of other things in this book.

46:09And I'm not trying to ask this in a salacious manner. Given that our culture has enculturated people to be deeply confused and reductive about intimacy and what you're all trying to do is explore, like even saying the sentence is going to wrinkle some people's ears. You're exploring intimacy. You can hear. Imagine that little soundbite just getting taken out. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So, again, I'm not trying to be salacious. I'm trying to get at there's a philosophical, psychological issue here about how do you acquire the tastes of these intimacies if your culture has starved you of them? That's what I'm trying to ask you.

46:57Yeah. Oh, it's. Wow. I mean, we have talked to Sam about this at length. And I have a post called Expanding Eros because I am really interested in. Ideootics of the city. Yeah. The, the sense that the, the, the Hartmut Rosa stuff about the uncontrollability of the world, right? That, that, that, that, the, the, the, the posture of openness to what is uncontrollable to you. Um, there is no way to be in relationship with humans and control them, right? That real relationship, not extractive, not, um, to, to, to, to really see and be seen in that Martin Buber way, right? In that moment of communion, of intimacy.

47:47So we had to explain to the people on our street when we moved in that we are not a polyamorous commune. The couple. You're the couples. Which we are. Yeah. It is. And you know what? I wrote a piece in the New York Times about our house and I had three people write to me to say, your husband's going to cheat on you with your housemate or the other way around. Right? Like this, this, this sense of like unnaturalness of humans living up close with people that they're not having sex with and that they have not given birth to, um, is fascinating to me. Given like the biblical model of the household, given the extended household groups in which humans have lived for so long and until the chimney it was basically the invention of the chimney until the chimney was invented people had to literally sleep in the same room at night yeah or they would die like in northern europe to be close to the fire yeah yeah the hearth right yeah yeah yeah beautiful like i mean i've had a whole thought this week about the hearth and the replacement of the hearth by the TV and then the replacement of the TV by a screen.

49:06I think that healthy religious practice is one of the places that you can learn other forms of intimacy that are not sexual. That the Sangha, the Ummah, there are these categories of fellowship or... I learned one today, Minna in Dutch. Right.

49:36There is a language, there is a thick culture, there are a set of stories. Like David and Jonathan in the Hebrew Bible, there are lots of queer readings of that. And the idea of covenant friendship between two men in which they would lay down their lives for each other as a model. or something beautiful that other cultures worthy of the name understand much better than I think like hyper individualised Western societies that put so much weight on romance so I'm quite hard headed about all the risks of living in community, it's not something that we are not aware of, we don't guard against, we're not naive I'm the I'm the like doomer in the house who's always naming the risks and I'm the opposite of that kind of story-eyed idealist.

50:31Insofar as you can have access to yourself and what's really going on in your life and in your household, I think what we're seeing in our very small, we don't want to overclaim for this, it's only a slightly bigger than a normal household. It's not huge. I know a level of relational intimacy with these other adults in my house that I'm not married to that is profoundly life-giving and rare because we have witnessed each other's lives up close over time and we have driven each other nuts, right? This is not premised on, are you making me feel good all the time? Are you serving my needs? Are you making me look good?

51:11It's premised on a common project of wanting to grow up our souls and be of some use to our neighbours. And the sense that we can see each other more clearly as we really are, i.e. messy and fallible and often annoying, I'm mainly talking about me, and love each other and be so solidly for each other. I have never experienced it anywhere except in the places you're supposed to find it, you know, parenting relationships and sexual relationships. And I have great friends. I have really good friends. And some of them come a bit close, but without the proximity, without the proximity over time, where you are forced together even when you have not chosen to be together, it's actually really hard to drop down through those layers.

51:57And I think because we have language for it in scripture, we're not freaked out by it. And because actually our tradition slightly, it's not that interested in romantic partnerships and it's not that interested in biological family, actually, as the main site that we learn to love each other. Jesus profoundly subverts a lot of those models and is offering this sense of what the body of Christ could be, what the family of God could be, what these groups of people called together to live these radical lives of love might be. I do wonder, for people who don't have access to those religious traditions who might have very good reasons to be skeptical or nervous around them, where else might be the training grounds maybe it's in your groups but but creating actual safe containers not like weird subverted eroticism avoidance systems um seems like a high need that that's a great answer um i just want to apply to it um and also allow me to correct for an error i didn't actually reference the book by kimbrielle which it which echoes your answer uh friendship as sacred knowledge and his proposal that especially the gospel of John gives a model for inquiry of a binding together of inquiry and knowing and friendship and fellowship that addresses the concern I raised.

53:24So. Sounds like the gospel of John Verveke. No, that would be a very bad idea. I'm only half joking. I'm only half joking. But, yeah, there's something right about that. And Rosa wrote a book that's parallel but almost convergent, Why Democracy Needs Religion, because religion gives us what he calls holy listening, the kind of listening that affords residents that can educate democracy towards the good. and your proposal is something like that the place where we can do the serious play that gives us the acquired taste of I'll call it non-sexual intimacy because I agree with you about expanding the notion of eros back to what it originally meant but that non-sexual intimacy that religion is probably one of the best places we could go for that needed education.

54:32And because it's about acquiring a taste, again, we can't do that by just rolling through inferential relations between propositions. Right. Well, I mean, I think, John, you're one of the few people I know who speaks about religion as this notion of religare, right? yeah you know i mean it's a bind really to bind again it comes from this notion of ligament the same root of the word ligament you know is it when yes yeah when your body's out of joint you need to really and um in a sense the the one thing the scriptures of the hebrew bible and the letters of the greek new testament um including the letters of the beloved disciple um we call in john uh uh are all about how to bind again, right?

55:29How to re-bind, reconnect. Now, is it about religion in a sense? Yes. On true religion, this notion comes from the Stoics and through Augustine. It's about care, right? True religion is this, the brother of Jesus said, look after the orphans, right? In their distress. Care. That's a very different notion. And Peter Harrison has been so formative on my historical understanding of this. Oh, his work on just destroying. That's another fable of the European enlightenment, that religion and science have always been at war with each other. And he has just demolished that. So you've got atheists doing it with the social psychological research saying no that's not how people become religious and then you've got great historians saying nope sorry that's just not how it has unfolded the very notion of a religion where if yeah was a virtue of care in fact not even one of the theological virtues not even one of the cardinal virtues of fortitude temperance um uh prudence and justice it's just one part of of the virtues, namely justice.

56:48He tells this story where the objectification and reification of what was a virtue of the well-ordered soul, part of justice, becomes a thing, a religion. It becomes reified and objectified and the sort of thing we map. It's all bound up with empire. With empire in 1648, cuius regioeus religio, whose region is religion. Suddenly, religions in the modern sense become a function of regional power. Of course they are. Oh yes, very much. Because they become things you can map. And so when we go colonial and we find other regions, we invent these other religions, and then we've got the question of the world religions, which is just a projection of colonial power.

57:27But the point is of this long and windy story. No, I mean, I'm glad you're covering this ground. I do it in my course on seeing God again for the first time. You're one of the people I hear in public who actually understands this stuff. And you're speaking so much more intelligibly about what this actually is. The rational reconstruction of the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and the letters of the New Testament as if they were a book embodying a thing called the true religion. So far from what they are that we don't even realize it. And religions become a way of dividing us again, rather than stitching us back together again.

58:07Yes. which is what we kind of actually all need. And the question is, how do we do that? Where do we do that? And it's, it'll start with care. So, I mean, I think that's profound. Isn't it? I mean, there's a lot of, I would, but I, part of me wants to go in and, you know, and that means religions, there aren't, their religiosity is porous. There's no pristine religions religions that are born out of other religions and it's all and it's this it's very messy and it's like natural ecologies and all that i want to go down that road but i'm going to put that aside i think that's important uh well maybe in another one of our our conversations the one i want to pick up on now is um uh all of this well first of all just one quick just a quick like fact question are there non-christians in your group or is everybody a christian or are there people that are buddhists or of other faiths or i don't know what i'm just using a label to just ask a quick question or everyone who lives here is very keen on jesus okay okay Very keen on Jesus.

59:25We have a lot of people who spend time here who would sit under a whole bunch of other labels. Some are very nervous about Christianity, but they love it. I am very nervous about Christianity. He likes Jesus, doesn't like Christianity's label. I'm increasingly worried about what Christianity represents. You and I are going to talk about that too. Okay. So basically it felt, okay, short side but on that, it's so hard living together. It's so hard loving each other in general. Like none of this comes easily. none of it is rosy tinted none of it's utopian learning to love each other despite the fact that humans are going to human uh is the work of a lifetime and what having a shared set of references and a shared commitment to a set of scriptures does it means we're at least we at least all know we're trying to do as a language we have a language we have actually quite a lot of guidance because the new testament is all basically squabbling small communities trying to learn to love each other um but it felt like trying to do do it with people who we weren't have sharing the same starting point would be like olympic level and we're like local amateur football club no no i i that's why i was asking the question meaning i mean heidegger wittgenstein yanaras meaning is communal um it's made by communities it's modified by communities it's evolves through communities.

1:00:45Personhood and meaning are bound up within the same communal milieu. And so now, but that, so that now, a reverse question comes to mind. And given Eberstadt's work on how the West really lost God, people who don't have, and the term I have used, and you've used it too, for this category is fellowship. Because we know friendship and we know what romantic relationships are and familial relationships, but we've lost fellowship, which is why people are so enamored of the fellowship of the ring and things like that. It's like, whoa. So here's my question from the other side. If people do not have any deep taste, and I use that word very advisably, of fellowship, is religion accessible to them?

1:01:41Dへ

1:01:50What a question. Yeah. I'm going to resist the urge to complexify all of the words in that sentence.

1:02:00I believe we are made for each other and we are made by each other and we can live as if that's not true. But to be really on the nose Christian-wise, I think all humans are made with an orientation towards God. And we can bury it. And that's sort of what sin does in my tradition. It creates scar tissue, right? It makes the deep longings of our heart fainter and fainter and fainter under a pile of short-term dopamine treats.

1:02:40Sorry, I just love that turn of phrase. It's a purely aesthetic response. Please continue. I like it when people like my words.

1:02:52So I think there are lots of people who the taste for fellowship, you talked about the taste for transcendent the very first time we spoke yes the taste the the the ability to get out david foster wallace calls it our tiny skull-sized kingdoms that whose cells are so buffered yeah that those walls feel impregnable um often often just don't feel any need right don't don't don't go looking but if even like the tiniest like faintest little crackly signal is getting through, then there are always ways. And my recommendation, because I get now, being this weird public Christian who obviously doesn't hate people who aren't, which is a sad thing that you have to be that clear.

1:03:41I get lots of people writing to me saying, I'm hearing the tiny, tiny signal. I don't know how to believe. I don't know how to access this. It all puts me off like, well, what do I do? And my response is always, you are going to have to participate. You are going to have to find a communal ritual you can tolerate and do it over some time. You're going to have to have these forms of attention. You might have to have some contemplation. Basically, you're going to have to practice. Practice makes progress. Practice thins the walls of the buff itself. But I've never thought about it as just a taste.

1:04:14I think you're right. What we have when we encounter divine love, for those of us who that makes even sense is a phrase, and what we have when we encounter another human being in their full raw exposed humanity are very, very, very, very tied. Well, I think, like I agree with everything you say, I see the signs, but that, I mean, and Kimbrill makes this point in his book that we really, it's a formative contradiction to pretend that we don't want the intimacy of fellowship. This is why we flock to see the Fellowship of the Rings or the Avengers or the Justice League because we want to see... The festival games.

1:04:59Yeah, we want to see superheroes that could represent raw individualism bound into fellowship. And we flock to it and we worship it. You once said, what do you give your time and attention to? well this is what people you know until it all collapsed under the heavy hands of disney um this is what people were giving all of their time and money and their identities to they would dress up as these characters so i think our i think i i agree with you we're buffered but i agree also with kimbrill that we're hungry in the buffer i think that those two together is what makes the meaning crisis but before i hear what chris says like i'm crafting a bit of an argument here um which is something like the communal spiritual maturation argument, which is, right, you can't, like, you should not, this sounds really heavy-handed, you should not enter into the theistic-atheistic debate unless you've gone through communal spiritual maturation until you have, in fellowship with other people, have aspired to sagehood or sainthood.

1:06:14I'm going to use both of those interchangeably right now. As the child is the adult, the adult is the sage. And so we shouldn't be stopping at adults. We should be living in a way that can grow us up. You both use that phrase into sainthood and sagehood. That's the New Testament, by the way. I'm not saying anything that the New Testament doesn't say. And then, of course, you can ask, well, if the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage, who is the sage to? And the sage is to the sacred. And I think of it that that is the most powerful argument, actually, for the sacred, the degree to which we can belong to that lineage and aspiration of development.

1:06:57But precisely because the only thing that makes people ultimately religious, I think, is, again, this credibility issue of having others around that are exemplifying something that we want to imitate. This doesn't make it irrational, by the way, because as I argued earlier, this is central to how you become rational. It's not an irrational thing. It's also how we choose all our positions and positions, right? Exactly. We are mimetic. We are persuaded of things because people that we trust and respect or people who we think would trust and respect us if they met us think it. That isn't just religion.

1:07:40That's everything. Right. And so what I'm trying to be very clear here is I'm not giving the standard argument from religious experience. I'm saying something else. I'm saying like you acknowledge. I'm not talking to you two. I'm talking to whoever I'm debating with right now, that the adult has access to truths unavailable to the child. And therefore, the adult has a responsibility to help grow up the child so that those truths become available to them. The sage has the same obligation to the adult, and the adult should therefore put themselves in a position. Now, I propose to you that trying to live with a saint or a sage is kind of hard these days.

1:08:28But if the next Buddha is the Sangha, there might be a way in which the body of Christ, the community, can stand in for the sage and launch us into that acquired taste. Namely, I would say to people, before you reject God, go through some communal spiritual maturation and then come back to me. That's the argument I'm making. I think, yeah, everything comes back to relationship for me. The more you move towards other people, eventually the more you move towards God, frankly. Martin Buber agrees. I'll hand it to you in a second. But the so-called secular concept that's reminded me of is rupture and repair.

1:09:12That's so key in our household. When we're talking about intimacy, what we see, and actually you can see it at congregation level, congregation level is quite painful and complicated, but we've lived it, is that relationships stay at a certain level and they can be frictionless because sometimes you just hide everything. You don't actually show your full self. You can just bumble along and it's fine. And the vast majority, I think, of human relationships stay here out of fear, understandably. But as soon as you actually spend time together or you're honest with each other, something will come up that hurts someone or you'll disagree and there's a rupture and we are continually formed at that point to dissipate, to move apart from each other, protect ourselves.

1:09:59And when you can repair, as good parenting teaches you and all the interpersonal stuff teaches you, you actually get a stronger bond. Oh, for sure. That intimacy is only possible through conflict. That is only possible through friction. when you get close enough to each other to rub each other's corners off. I think that there just aren't that many containers for it anywhere else because the market has monopolized. You pay your money and you show up and you get a service at your choir or your running club or whatever. And as soon as you're not liking it or someone's annoying, you will withdraw your custom and you will go somewhere else.

1:10:39And it sounds authoritarian to lock yourself in. We've literally locked ourselves in. Can we pull a house with these people deliberately to anchor ourselves from running away when it gets hard? But I think that's good. And I also want to hear what Chris has to say. But what I'm proposing to you is, I think the taste of this, is there any other way other than communal spiritual maturation to get intimate with sacredness? I don't see how.

1:11:18It's not a deductive argument. It's kind of the only game in town kind of argument. Right? Right now, which is like, if you want, the thing, I mean, when I was doing the European leg of the philosophical Silk Road, and then also when I talked at length to Nicole Baden, who is a Zen abatist, and then I'm also thinking of Bishop Maximus. and I had a sense of people that I found. I said the Bishop Maximus was like my telescope to theosis. I could see something through him that I couldn't see on my own. There was a presence. There was an intimacy with sacredness. Same thing with Nicole. And I have now decided that one of the things the pilgrimage has given me with is how do I come more and more into that?

1:12:15that kind of situation. I'm sorry, I'm going on, but I'm trying to convey what, like,

1:12:26it's, we may be arguing in a vacuum when we are arguing against secularity because they have lost the sensorium for the sacred. That's what I'm trying to say. So who's the they, John? um the the the they are the people that still speak on behalf of the so-called secular framework of modernity that are arguing that notions like sacredness or fellowship or non-sexual love or as kimbrill argues friendship he quotes in his book several analytic philosophers who argue that friendship is immoral uh because it it frustrates the impartiality that true justice requires sorry okay that's what i'm talking about when i say yeah i mean yes yeah thank you i mean the reason i ask is because there's something i think I can say this several ways, but the framing that I find very helpful comes from St.

1:13:43Paul. And he has this framing in what Rowan Williams has called Ephesian Rhapsody. Rowan Williams lent lectures on St. Paul are extraordinary. And he basically has this letter to the Ephesians, um with the great goddess artemis was um hailed in in all sorts of ways one of the wonders of the ancient world if you ask the the ephesians who the gods are you'd like go down the street you'll see tons of them right uh certainly images of them um but there's a guy in new york city who died actually, he used to say that you can tell what a city worships by looking at the biggest building project in the city.

1:14:32And that's a kind of dochimium thought, right? What is sacred and to whom is the ordering principle of any society. Now, you don't have to endorse that wholesale to just see where that's pushing. But the point is, into that context, there's this letter that's written to a terrified young man who was neither Greek nor Jewish. He was sort of neither this nor that. his identity was profoundly queered, if you like, to use Julius Butler's sort of idea. And in fact, just while I'm on the subject, Julius Butler came to the LSE recently, and someone asked her a question along the lines of the question that maybe certain kind of ties are immoral, saying, should we be basically anti-family?

1:15:23We abolish the family. Right. And her response was really interesting. Her lecture could be summarized in two ways. It was a no to that question. She was like, we shouldn't be anti-family, we should be pro-queer family. And the other point was she said, we need to make truth sexy again. There was this really interesting line where I was thinking, who am I listening to here? it. She was saying how the notion of post-truth has been co-opted by the Putins and the Trumps of the world. The notion of the pro-family is now Judith Butler, right? Yeah. Where are we? Yeah, yeah. Back to Ephesians. Back to Ephesians.

1:16:02If you want to see a queering of the notion of the Aristotelian household, which masters slave dialectic, parent-child, ownership, all of this stuff, husband and woman. There is no word in Greek for wife. It's just woman. You see it in this letter. You see it in the letter to a man called Philemon. You see it in this letter to the Ephesians. It starts with this radical claim. We too, like the rest of mankind, are in the same boat. But God, because of the great love with which he loved us, has made us alive. That That framing, I call it the we too framing, for me is the source of a faithful narrative of Christian self-identity, I think.

1:16:45Insofar as you have a narrative of Christian identity or faithfulness or whatever you're going to call it, that begins something like this, we, unlike the rest of mankind, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, because God or therefore God. I think that's self-deceived. Insofar as the New Testament is pushing us to an identity, It's an identity which begins, we too like the rest, in the same boat.

1:17:13Creatures wrecked by sin, whatever you're going to call it, composed of like them, of eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same, but loved with an everlasting love. Those things are so deep that I think those are the things I want to grow into. do. The question for me constantly is, in a sense, I don't care. The question Jesus asked was not, tell me, Peter, who do the crowd say that they are? There's a narrative of Christian identity that I'm very worried about right now, which is one which says, we unlike the rest of mankind are the Christians. It's what Luke Bretherton calls Christophobic Christianity.

1:17:56It's all about us. It's all about our identity, who we are and who we're not. That to me cuts right against the Holy Spirit of the New Testament. That's become a test, a litmus for me. Is it we too like the rest or we unlike the rest? The deep solidarity. Yeah. Just to sort of curve that thought, when you get into that chapter in Ephesians That's Ephesians 2. The third, fourth chapter has this image of children growing up, children who are no longer tossed to and fro by the waves, but a body growing as each part does its part, does its work. A kind of growing up. It talks about, then we'll no longer be infants.

1:18:41It has this phrase, having lost all sensitivity. There's this really interesting relation to the word there is a catharsis. Catharsis is in Aristotle's Poetics, this notion of a mimesis, right? That's a truthful representation. That doesn't mean a true proposition. It means a mimesis is something true. You see something true in an actor who's actually going through the motions and processing what's happening. Paul says, don't be like the Gentiles who've lost all sensitivity. They've lost all sensitivity. They can't feel. You mentioned Mark Wynn, Is he the new Noleth Professor at Oxford, right?

1:19:18Yes. Yeah. He's a fascinating shift from Richard Swinburne. Yeah. Fascinating shift. Renewing the senses and spiritual traditions. Right. What's that? I'm so interested in that. Like, what is it to be regaining our sensitivity, coming to one's senses, discovering what it is to feel again? That's what I'm asking you. That's exactly what I'm pushing for. I mean, we're going to have to close it off for today, and I'm going to propose that's the second thing. I've been going through this a lot, and the idea about what it is to renew the senses, and this goes back a long tradition, back to origin, in fact, of the spiritual senses, but it can be connected to some very current cognitive science in some very powerful ways.

1:20:04and so Chris that was that was an excellent it was very excellent yeah it's there's depth here right there's a way in which there's a way in which there's a way in which we can only wake ourselves up educate I don't know what is that the right verb our sensorium broadly construed so that it covers not just physical sight but insight not just physical hearing but that sense of being called, not just physical contact, but the sense of being in contact with what's really real. That's the waking up of the senses. And everything is now new, as the New Testament talks about. And, you know, when goes through William James is talking about people who have had these conversions experiences.

1:20:54And it's not that they see new focal objects. It's not adjectival. It's adverbial. It's that the way everything is to them is different. And so what I was proposing, I kind of want to ask, I mean, I've been talking a lot to William Desmond. We've actually recorded four conversations together, which is going to be on my channel. You know, they say don't meet your heroes. Well, I met mine and he was amazing. Just really, we're going to do more work together and record more together. He really, he really, he thinks my, I mean. You can say it. Go on. He thinks my work is really, really important and really good, the cogs I am doing.

1:21:38So, you know, he talks about that we're in default atheism because we have things like all value is merely subjective and objective reality is valueless. I won't go through the whole argument. But, you know, but I'm wondering if, because I think the buffered self was also the blinded sensorium and that there's a way in which you educate the sensorium through living with people in this communal fashion. This is the hypothesis I'm exploring with you. Yeah, I think it's a great one. And the, not to be, I'm sorry, we're very Bible-y people, so we'll keep quoting the Bible at you. But the biblical language is they hardened their hearts.

1:22:26Yeah, yeah. And that, I think, that is something to pull out. And I agree that it's actually really hard to unharden your own heart. It's really difficult to unharden your own heart. Well, in the Bible, God is the final hardener of Pharaoh's heart, which is a really interesting point. And elsewhere, even in the New Testament, there's some very spiky, jagged references around what's going on there. But there is something profound about having lost the sensitivity. Yeah. But I think John's question is, is there something about being together in proximity over time, communal spiritual formation, which is inherently linked to this sensitizing, sensitizing our ability to, I would say, be open to the possibility of divine love or to the transcendent or the sacred.

1:23:16Honestly, I don't know how to... I'm going to go away and think about it before we talk again, because instinctively it sounds right to me in that the more we move towards each other, generally the more life in my... there are limits in my book. I'm enough of a trad Christian to believe that there are moments where people encounter the divine alone in the middle of nowhere, in prison, in the desert, right? There can be a breaking in, there can be a revelation, but insofar as it depends on us, yes. Well, we'll talk about that too. I mean, if we're in a sort of maturational developmental line of argument, and this is only meant as analogy like if you if you have i'm going to call them human organisms and you'll see why in a sec and they're and they're brought up they're feral or they're neglected now there's confounding variables there but um you know the romanian orphans are are better uh because they were given all their physical needs were being met anyways you don't get you you often don't get you don't get a sense of self-developing you you don't like they they their sensorium their their cognitive light cone is seriously truncated.

1:24:31But again, as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage, right? And there's a sense in which can we, I'll play with words a little bit. Unless we grow up through other people, can we regrow our lost senses? That's the question I want to leave you both with. So this connects to something that I'm thinking deeply a lot about, which is about attachment, basically. attachment and attunement and the sense of... So I came across the work of this woman called Reverend Julia Robinson-Moore, who is a theologian of René Girard and race, but does work with lots of groups, including groups of people who are both the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners, and does a lot of really good classic peace-building reconciliation, helping people notice when they're going into amygdala hijack and playing with this idea that when we're seeking someone to attune with us, to be glad to see us, is one of the neurotheologians definition of joy.

1:25:39Someone who is glad to be with us is what we need to steady ourselves and to settle ourselves. That can be the divine. If we have poor attachment, if we don't have those relational memories and pathways, that there are certain forms of healthy spirituality that we can securely attach to, essentially, which I'm just sort of sitting with that and do not know enough, but you know more than me. So I'd like to talk about that next time, please. Can we put it on the agenda? Well, we want to put, I mean, so two things about that. I've been proposing the idea for the Philosophical Silk Road that people have a secure attachment to their home religion that actually enables them to enter into deep philia with other religions and faith.

1:26:22So we can talk about it in connection to that. And then if you allow me an electricity transmission kind of analogy, the child is attached to the adult, the adult to the sage, the sage to the sacred. And that's my argument, that that's the attachment machinery is how we actually get what is needed to conduce and afford intimacy, direct transmission, to play with the metaphor a little bit more, of sacredness into people's lives. and there's no I don't think it's any coincidence that religions cross historically cross-culturally use extended familial metaphors people in the monastery are all brothers and there's fathers and and all these sort of things to try and pick up maybe even to activate the attachment machinery and exact it repurpose it into a growing up and like I say and regrowing our lost sensorium.

1:27:23I'm going to shut up because what I'm going to say is I'm going to thank both of you. We've got two more conversations, so we're not done. We're merely pausing. But for this, each time, I want to give each one of you the chance for any final kind of word you want to give. Reflective, summative, provocative, anything. But first, thank you very much. I found this very rich. You have allowed me to explore something that's on the very horizon of my thought and my heart right now. And so I appreciate that. That's lovely. Well, thank you. Thank you, John.

1:28:04I think what I would want to say is I'm a little wary of abstractions, um like sacredness and i think i think i think i'm not this isn't a gotcha right in any sense i just think it's important to name that the very same means and powers that you're naming there are precisely what enables toxic religion to flourish right so so so you can so the say the the figure of the sage, um, it's, it's a, it, it needs discernment in the language of the New Testament. You need to discern between the spirits and the way in which those very same cognitive, uh, gadgets, whatever you're going to call them can be manipulated.

1:29:02Um, I would say pseudo religion, like pseudoscience takes the name in vain. um and if i totally agree i think that's a part of our cognition the very processes that make us intelligent make us perennially prone to self-deception this is one of my central theses and i do want to talk to you about that this is why i was i mean an additional point was does does the collective uh group because it has extra problem solving powers ability to grasp patterns that individuals could it help refine discernment uh could the body of christ help the discernment of the sages could the platonic academy help pick out the next scholar i mean this is again a cross-cultural pattern uh and chris i i don't want sacred to be an abstraction um i i'm using it as i'm trying to use a neutral term between religious traditions that's my only purpose for doing that 100 with you 100 i guess all the language falls apart like the film that i would most recommend is terence malik's film a hidden life because there you get a very beautiful i mean pete bradshaw called it a cathedral for the senses which is a beautiful phrase for a piece of art well that's that all of his films tend to be that way yeah yeah even even the thin red line right no yeah is it the is it the thin red line is is that the name of it yeah yeah yeah yeah i could i want to hear from elizabeth now i don't have any smart summary but you we're slowly turning to each other which is what happens when i spend a lot of time with each other but i also when you when we can come back to it next time so we're running time but the child to the adult add to the sage sage to the sacred thing i did have a little huh i don't know what think about that.

1:30:51And it is partly, I think, because I have complex... I love Jonathan Pajot and a lot of his work I'm nodding along with, but the centrality of some of those hierarchies in his work, I have an instinctive thing with. And I'm sure it's partly... There's lots of reasons for that, some of which are more or less useful. But it's also because Jesus very specifically says something about the child and the flow. Yeah. So I would love to understand more what you mean by that next time. And I love that friendship has been the thread. That's why we said we were here and friendship is the whole path, said the Buddha.

1:31:35And Sam's work on friendship with sacred knowing is extraordinary. And I would love the word friendship to sound less... like a thin, nice to have around the edges of people's lives and see it as the engine of our becoming fully human. Aristotle, the friend is the second self. Right. So, yeah, that's very much. So we are leaving everybody with a pregnant pause here. There is so much that we need to go into and explore. And I want to thank all of you who have watched this and have wandered along with us. Please come back. We're going to do a lot more. Take good care, everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you.

1:33:06Thank you. patchwork of stitched together tools and gaps. Don't wait for the next attack. Secure and accelerate your business at Rubrik.com. Again, Rubrik.com.