Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Alexander 0:00
The beauty of Christianity, which is divinity and matter, as the full incarnation of each one of us. This is what's distinct about our tradition. This is the conversation and the offering that we have at table with all the other great traditions. The other great tradition left a little bit off of the fullness of incarnation and Christianity comes in and says, “Oh, no, divinity is totally within matter and matter lives totally with divinity”. Again, it's this Aramaic oneness, where is divinity? Divinity is in matter. There's no desire to separate divinity from matter or matter from divinity. So therefore, going to this concept of theosis, the first theological perspective of Christianity is that we are made fully from the nature of God, which is divinity and matter brought together; that’s who we are, and that we're going to live our lives ever more living into this great nature that is who each of us is.
Seth Price 1:34
Hello, my friends, welcome to the Can I Say This At Church podcast, I'm Seth. I'm so glad you're here. Brief announcement: see the show notes go to the website as soon, hopefully in March, there will be a smaller community group inside of the Can I Say This At Church community intentionally digging into some of the work that Alexander writes about, it has been very impactful for me over the last December of 2017 until today and actually was reading a bit of it again today. And by today, I mean, you know, end of January here. I look forward to doing that with you. And if that's something that interests you digging in deeper to the text of Heart and Mind, I will begin plugging that on social media. And there'll be links for that. And we will walk through it together as the best way that we can. Before the episode starts a recent uptick again. And it seems like every few weeks, there's another uptick in patron support. And if you've not yet done that, I appreciate every single one of you that does so I would encourage you to do that; it is entirely affordable and makes a much bigger impact for making the show become something more. So do that. Spend some time today take a minute and a half go to patreon.com/CanISayThisAtChurch and jump into the community. I look forward to meeting and talking with you there.
If you ask anyone on the street, and I've done this, who is Jesus Christ? They will give a whole bunch of answers but no one for the most part. Nobody says, you know, he's more than words can comprehend, or the Christ is more than Jesus can contain. Or Jesus is the best representation of the Christ that we've had on planet Earth. No one says that no one breaks the Christ apart into a larger context, for the most part, where I'm at here in Virginia, where you live may be entirely different. But Christ is so much more than words on a page and Christ is so much more than words can explain scripture is pretty clear on that. And I would argue so are my interactions with Jesus to this day. The weekly interactions, the daily interactions, that I have, I shot Alexander an email right as he got back from his last Camino and said, Hey, will you be willing to come back onto the show, and let's talk about theosis and let's talk about a cosmic Christ and let's talk about truth and let's talk about radiance and light and darkness. And let's see how they fit together for 2019. This is the very beginning All beginning of an entirely much bigger conversation and it's a conversation that requires intention. And it's a conversation that requires patience. And I'd like to leave that there. And so I'm going to roll the tape on this Martin Luther King Day recording with Alexander Shaia.
Seth Price 4:36
Alexander Shaia, you are the first three times let's say friend of the show repeat guest that's come on and I am so delighted to have you on the show today. Thank you for coming back on to the Can I Say This At Church podcast.
Alexander 4:49
Seth it's an honor. It truly is an honor. I love every minute that we're together in conversation.
Seth Price 4:55
So one of the things that I have valued most of getting to know you a bit is a lot of the guests that I've had on prior, we may email back and forth or get on Twitter or something and talk back and forth. But I've developed a relationship with you that I would come closer to calling you friend than anyone else for the most part, except for maybe a handful of people that I've had on the show. And so from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much. It truly means a lot to have someone dive in and engage in to the work that you do, and the community that you try to build, and then be intentional in sustaining that. And so before we get going, I did want to say thank you for that.
Alexander 5:33
You are welcome. And you've got me almost speechless and a bit teary. Thank you.
Seth Price 5:39
So I wanted to bring you on because the work that you do, touches a lot on many things, and specifically the way that you talk about the Gospel of John, it blows up Jesus in such a manner that doesn't sit well with the way that I think church works today in America. I find so often that we don't talk about Jesus as the Christ; it's just Jesus Christ as if Christ is Gods last name. And so I wanted to talk a bit about that the concepts of theosis, the interplay between light and dark, and kind of where all that goes. But before we get into that, what is new with you? I know that you're recently back from the Camino and you're currently traveling. So for those listening, what's been new with you since the last time that they heard from you?
Alexander 6:33
Well, at this very moment, I am in Sacramento, California in a dear friend's home, and it's the first sunny day in a week and everybody around me seems to be out with a leaf blower. So I'm wandering rooms to see if we can get a quiet portal here. I, yesterday, here in Sacramento, I presented to a pilgrim group on my new book Returning From Camino and it was really touched that so many people came out who have not walked or even intend to walk the Camino but are understanding so many journeys in their own life is pilgrimage. And we just had this rich conversation.
I woke up this morning, with my mind and heart sort of buzzing from this conversation yesterday about life as pilgrimage. There were people there who are recovering from cancer as pilgrimage, people who have gone through other sudden death experiences as pilgrimage etc. And so that's new. And the other piece, which is new is I now have seriously begun the next book, which I'm tentatively calling the 13 Days of Christmas, and the title might change, although that that title seems to be working for folks. It's just enough of…it's like Well, what do you mean 13 days and Christmas? Anyway, that's that's what's new and with grace and breath, I hope to have that book out by the Fall.
Seth Price 8:05
I hope you do as well. I remember the last time that we spoke, it was around lint of 2018. Well, the last time we spoke for the podcast, you were talking about doing that, but also working on the Camino book as well. So I'm, I'm glad I've heard some of that stuff and other parts of your work. And so I think that that book, specifically around Christmas is needed, mostly because I find myself wholly inadequate when my kids asked me about, hey, why do we have a Christmas tree? Or X, Y or Z? I didn't have good answers.
Alexander 8:38
Yeah. And, it hurts my heart for people to think that those are not related to the Christ, that it's “some foreign element” which has come into Christianity and come into Christmas and nothing could be further away from the truth. And that really kind of kind of leads into this topic of Christ. I think that our early ancestors were very focused on the Christ and Jesus as the Christ, but the Christ is what's foremost and Jesus is the doorway into that reality.
Seth Price 9:14
So when we say that, just to recenter that, well actually let me…one thing on Christmas. So, oddly enough, one of hopefully by the time this airs, The Work of The People has some of your videos coming out and one of them you talk about the winter solstice. And the reason you know, for it being or the reason that we center Christmas around that time, and I was driving to church with my son, and we got to talking about why it was so dark. He's commented, like, it's been dark all day. I was like, Yeah, but that's this is how it works. And he's like, okay, so why does that matter? And I was able to kind of take some of your stuff and reframe it. And you could just see him get quiet and process in the backseat. And I was like, here we go, we're doing it right. I'm really hoping that maybe my kids have a bigger concept. have Jesus, then I did. And that is what it is.
Alexander 10:05
Well, you know, and just to piggyback on that, for a moment, I'm already being urged as soon as the 13 Days of Christmas is done, is to immediately take that material and to write a children's story with beautiful illustrations. And so the next piece is to begin to find that incredible Illustrator.
Seth Price 10:31
When we talk about Jesus as a bigger concept and Jesus filling into the shoes of Christ. I feel like most people today say Jesus Christ, like I say, Seth Price or like you say, Alexander Shaia. When we blow that apart I feel like we're really good about talking about Jesus the man and we're not good about thinking about Christ as a part of the Trinity or Christ as it's related to the cosmos. And so how do we rip that apart a little bit?
Alexander 10:57
Thank you for bringing us to this discussion because it's core. And for me, let's go back to first century Israel, Palestine, and try to understand what's there as our tradition is birthed from our mother Judaism. So their word because they were Hebrew / Aramaic, was not “Christ”, their word was “messiah”. And hear how I'm pronouncing that I'm not pronouncing it as you might say it in English “Messiah”. I'm using the Aramaic meh C..ha. And the actual end of the word is the expulsion of breath from your mouth. And Aramaic as a language has very few words in it. It's a very, you want to use the term primitive. I think Aramaic has something like 2000 words in it and Aramaic was the language of the common folk in Israel, whereas Hebrew was the language of the priests and the scribes in the temple. So, Jesus probably is speaking Aramaic as he travels around Israel, certainly as he travels around Galilee, etc.
Aramaic, having so few words in it, has to use body posture to also convey what the meaning is. So when messiah ends with that out breath, well what does messiah mean in Aramaic? It's, it's more like a verb than a noun. Aramaic is a language which does not have defined tenses. It's a language that tends to be more about “nowing”, rather than yesterday or tomorrow. And it's a language which is about an ongoing now. So there's very little in Aramaic which is static.
So it's really important that when we say messiah in Aramaic, that we're understanding about a present moment, ongoing, reality, not, as we might think a figure back in time somewhere or forward in time somewhere, but a reality that's right now, and is dynamic right now. So the other thing about this word messiah is it can mean “anointing”, but in the Aramaic, in the Jewish metaphor of the day, anointing is to breathe on someone else. Anointing is something very close to the miracle of breath into the ongoing reality of breathing.
So just what's in this name messiah is like the ongoing breath of God that's living in you right now. It's like you're breathing, because God breathing in you. And, Paul is going to be the person, St. Paul, first century, who is the educated type, who obviously knows Aramaic and Hebrew, and apparently knows Greek and Latin as well. It falls, Paul, to convey this very dynamic reality of God's breathing in us and to try to put it into a Greek word. And Paul is the one who chooses the word, the Greek word, (Χριστός ) Christos, and here's how I pronounce that again. There's, a clearing of your throat at the beginning of the word. And as you say this word again, there's the expulsion of breath.
So Paul is translating messiah, from the Aramaic, into the Greek word Christos. But when he does that, he also has to inform people that the Greek word, which sounds like a figure in time, is actually an unknown reality. And so Paul has got to begin to break down this static reality of the Greek language because the Greek language is very much about time; past, present, future. Aramaic is about the eternal now and the ongoingness of now. And so, Paul has got to surround the term Christos, with this ongoing “in” breathing reality. So it's not, though he is using the Greek word, he's trying to give the Greek word an Aramaic understanding. And so he's got to teach the Hebrew even and he’s got to remind them. Who was with Moses in the desert? Who was with you as you came out of Egypt? The Messiah! So this Messiah, is an ongoing reality. Messiah certainly didn't start when Jesus was born it is a visible manifestation of a reality that's always been. And so Paul is trying to help us understand that in the presence of Jesus, we have a way to fully appreciate and touch something that has always been true-that's been there from the beginning of time.
Seth Price 16:49
I hear you say all that and two things come to mind when you talk about breath and anointing. I can't help but think of the poetry and allegories in Genesis 2 to specifically on what humanity is, you know, God breathing in or maybe I'm stretching it too far I don't know, Hebrew or Aramaic. And so if I'm wrong, please tell me but you know God breathing in or anointing humanity in that, but that that seems to elevate. I don't want to anthropomorphize Christianity in a way that's undue but it also breaks my brain as I'm sure that it would have been in Paul's time. How does a word like that in Aramaic deal with the concept of eternity if everything is currently now?
Alexander 17:34
Eternity is a Greek concept. If we go back to our Jewish mother, our Jewish nature in Christianity is only about now. And the “nowness” was so important that they didn't actually develop a concept of what happens after you take your last breath, in terms of an afterlife. And we Christians today have gone back and put in a lot of afterlife focus into the Scriptures which is not there in the original time of their writing. They are focused on heaven and earth, here and now, the reign of God now. And that if we live the reign of God, now God will take care of whatever's going to happen after our last breath.
There is this huge transition, Seth, and I don't think that we totally appreciate this. You know, what continent is Israel and Palestine on…they are on the continent of Asia. And there is more in common with Hebrew and Aramaic with Japan and India than with Greece. Even though they are right next door to Greece, the Aramaic and the Jewish mindset is Asian. Greek is about breaking everything in reality down into its smallest parts and examining it. The Asian worldview, everything is about how everything fits together in right relationship. And so in an Asian worldview, it's very hard to do what, in many ways science has beautifully done the last couple of hundred years in terms of breaking things down into its specific classification. Because the Asian worldview is, let's put everything together and look at it in its whole-there's a very different understanding of Christianity when you stay in the Middle East.
Seth Price 19:49
So I can hear that Asian influence in the Walking The Camino book specifically with that concept of I'm gonna say it wrong. Kintsugi. No, that is how you say it. The thing where the pottery is broken apart and then melded back together with gold, I find that whole allegory beautiful. rBut when I say when we're talking about truth and in basically epistemology like you know all the way back to Aristotle and whatnot and Christianity, or faith or religion as a whole, being Hellenized, what does a wisdom of oneness and science How do those two counterbalance each other? Because they have to for today's world there's no way to detach one from the other.
Alexander 20:34
Say that again…what do you mean by counterbalance? How do they fit into harmony or how are they in tension of opposite?
Seth Price 20:43
So either those really but what I hear you saying is, you know, Paul is writing to people that have to break things down to their logical common denominator. And India and Japan and other Asian cultures were dealing with the the whole truth, not a two plus two plus three plus five equals, I can't do the math in my head, because I made those numbers up. And, so one if one of those if the math is what I want to call science, and if the Asian or Indian or you know, you know Israel culture, is dealing with what we're going to call oneness and wisdom, how do those two interplay because both of those now, both of those cultures, greatly influenced the world that you and I live in?
Alexander 21:25
We do and we need to understand how each has a beauty and in some ways, how each has a limitation. Think of the incredible scientific advances that have come from being able to break things down into their smallest units and observe them and theorize about. It's like, we went to the moon and came back partly because of that ability. And yet when it comes to spirituality, that sort of reality is largely not helpful because the spiritual nature is, let's look at how everything is rather than a separate increment, let's look at how everything fits together and an incredible recipe.
So we need both of these realities, and we need to know which one is appropriate to the task at hand. And so much, Paul, I think, would be greatly saddened to see the state of religion today, which has taken Aristotelian Greek concepts and thought of it as the paragon, when he sees it as the sin. He sees Greek and Aristotelian thought as missing the mark, sin, missing the mark. Because it's breaking things apart, and in the Aristotelian world they thought of the world as a series of competing opposites. They thought if Heaven is fighting Earth, and that our obligation was to align with Heaven. I thought that men and women fight each other and in their view, men should win and so we should align with men, etc, etc,. They thought that light and dark are opposites that were in competition with each other and that our job was to align with light.
So it is the Greek mindset that Paul is so strongly against, the language of the Greek concept of the world is competing opposites where everything is intention and fighting the other, is the language and the worldview of oppression. And the Christ reality is to bring us away from that repression back to understand everything belongs.
Seth Price 23:53
I heard you say light and that makes me think of two things. I recently read. Something by Merton. And he was talking about walking around and trying to…he was talking about theosis, which is a fancy word for becoming like Christ, you know, becoming little gods. And he said,
How is it possible to tell them
…and he's talking about all the people around him,
that we're all walking around, shining like the sun.
And then he went on to talk about the sun as more than light and more than dark, and all about glory, and radiance. And I know a lot of the work that you've done recently talks about light, and dark, and radiance. And so I'm curious, how do you reconcile the way that we as a church, the big church, a capital C church, talk about light and dark, radiance and glory, and I guess the inverse of that would be sin and darkness?
Alexander 24:52
Well, yeah, I mean, and I we’re recording this conversation today on the feast of Martin Luther King, Jr. And what I want to raise up for us to take very seriously now, in my mind, we've got to rewrite most of our prayer books. And we've got to rewrite almost all of our hymnity. Because if any of us want to stand against racism, we must scrub from our minds and our hearts every concept that darkness is sinful. And if you go back to the English language, particularly all the way back to five to 600 years ago, you're going to understand that in English darkness has meant “soiled, contamination, garbage, the sin of Cain”, all of these associations, which are the “missing the mark” of the Anglo culture that were in the minds and the hearts of the Europeans who went to Africa and saw dark people and felt obligated to evangelize them. Because they were black because they were dark skinned they were therefore garbage and sinful and had to be retrained.
And just yesterday I was in church and we were singing this hymn and I had to stop singing, because the whole humn kept talking about dark in sin, dark in sin, dark in sin. Do we not understand that dark is of God? Do we not understand that dark is beautiful? Do we not understand that dark is not sinful in and of itself. Light can be sinful. Dark can be sinful, but dark and light can equally be of God. And every time we make this very simple equation of dark is sin or dark is pain, how many times do we describe a painful or a chaotic situation as a dark experience? There is nothing dark about it! It's painful, it's chaotic, it's hurtful, (and) we suffer. But there's nothing dark about suffering inherently. We've have written racism into our prayers and our hymnity, and we need to stop it.
Seth Price 27:18
How do you go about the practice of fixing that? I mean, there's so much, not tradition, but there's just so much inherent, I don't know what the word is foundation. That's not the word either. It's built in, whatever that word is called. Like, it's built in, like the church that you go to in the in the conversations that you have. It's the inherent foundation of the topics. So how do you go about that?
Alexander 27:43
So I mean, I've been at this for 40 years, and I have no illusion that we're going to change because we have this incredible conversation. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to wake us up to stop the unreflective(ness) about how we use the word or the colors of darkness. And to realize I mean, I was reading a Martin Luther King talk the other day and realized that he talked about darkness as pain. Just because he was a black man doesn't mean that he was totally aware of his own language. So we've got a long journey ahead.
And I don't know when we're ever going to get there if there's anywhere to get. But what I'm asking us to do is to wake up and begin. That's all-just wake up and begin. Just immediately begin when we see the word dark in our songs and in our prayers to look at how it's being used and disconnect it. Disconnect the equation sign we have inside of ourselves, between the word dark and sin, or the word dark and pain. One of the things I like to talk about is the most destructive reality on the planet is light. A nuclear explosion is the closest thing we have to pure light. So actually, the word light is probably closer to evil than the word dark.
Seth Price 29:16
I don't like that. I don't like hearing that out loud because I don't have an adequate response like the part of me that wants to logically say something finds no words, it's painful.
Alexander 29:30
It is painful. But go back to the Thomas Merton quote because, you might notice in my languaging and the poetry that I write and the prayers that I compose, is that I removed light and dark from the conversation and basically have gotten to the word radiance. Because radiance has two things at the word light and dark do not have. It has movement and radiance is the interplay of light and shadow.
Seth Price 30:06
I like that.
Alexander 30:07
And that's my offering at the table. I don't know if this is the best way to go. It's like, we're too early in this conversation to have answers. What I'm inviting us into (in this conversation) is let's have questions. And let's really notice what happens inside of ourselves. And let's notice the beauty of nature. And let's understand that the beauty of nature is the holiness of God. One of the metaphors for the holiness of God, and the night sky is utterly beautiful. But our languaging has made it sinful.
Seth Price 30:48
I think I emailed this to you when I read when I when I watched one of your most recent videos and you talked about radiance, I actually got up and went outside and in the cold, it's like 20 degrees out here. I tried to see what I could see tried to look for new stars that have always been there and I've just never had to use a Biblical language. I've just never had eyes to see them. They've obviously always been there. One of them was an airplane that isn't always there, (laughter) but most of them, most of them, we're always there. But it left me longing to go to open spaces, because I'm curious what else I'm missing. And if I drill that down to my life as a person, I'm curious what else I'm missing. Because all I see is the light and dark that's currently around me and not the light and dark that actually is there.
Alexander 31:39
And if we go back to the Aramaic for just a moment, the Aramaic language was a language of nature. The Greek language was a language of concepts and concepts are beautiful and helpful, but concepts don’t really live anywhere in nature. So Aramaic could only describe what a person could experience in nature. So therefore, Aramaic has no word for light and has no word for dark. You can't say that. Aramaic, if you want to talk about daytime, the Aramaic language will have words in it that describe the quality of the light say at 10 o'clock in the morning, and the type of shadow that might be cast on the ground. Or if you want to talk about dark, the Aramaic language is going to have words that describe the night sky on a night it's moonless on a night that has clouds, on the night that has full starlight, so that you see what Aramaic is doing is saying, dark and light are always in interplay with each other. You can't separate them in Aramaic, therefore, because you can't separate them you certainly can't say the dark is evil.
Seth Price 33:36
When I think about light and dark in nature, as you were talking there I thought to myself that the only way to then feel home is when I'm out and engaging with nature and creation. Because the light and the dark on the trees and on me only looks the way that it looksw hen I'm where I belong. If that makes sense. Like if I go to Australia, the light is different. The stars are different. The moon is in a different position, the Earth is at a different angle. Everything is entirely different. And I can still fit in but I'm not necessarily home. Curious with parallel archetypes of a cosmic Christ or the cosmic man. You're like, in Buddhism, there's the Buddha nature in Hinduism, there's the cosmic man. And so I'm curious your thoughts on how multiple religions talk about this concept of a being that needs to be incarnated physically here.
Alexander 34:34
Well, and I think I'm going to slip a little bit to the left of that, and talk about The beauty of Christianity, which is divinity and matter, as the full incarnation of each one of us. This is what's distinct about our tradition. This is the conversation and the offering that we have at table with all the other great traditions. The other great tradition left a little bit off of the fullness of incarnation and Christianity comes in and says, “Oh, no, divinity is totally within matter and matter lives totally with divinity”. Again, it's this Aramaic oneness, where is divinity? Divinity is in matter. There's no desire to separate divinity from matter or matter from divinity. So therefore, going to this concept of theosis, the first theological perspective of Christianity is that we are made fully from the nature of God, which is divinity and matter brought together; that’s who we are, and that we're going to live our lives ever more living into this great nature that is who each of us is.
I mean the psalmists have said that you are God's. Thomas Merton talks about the fact you are brighter than the sun shining. That to be a follower of Jesus the Christ is to aspire to do the work to fully live into our divine human nature. And Jesus shows us how to live into our divine human nature. And most other traditions will pull back from that with the fear that that's too much for a human to assume most of the other traditions will set quote unquote, the Buddha nature or divinity as something over there, not something that truly lives inside of us. I think, yeah, I'm going to always be listening to the other great traditions and have them teach me but I think that's what's been being shared. And Christianity comes in and goes oh no theosis. We don't get atonement theory in Christianity for a good 400 years. The first 400 years of Christianity is seeped in this idea of theosis. That we are fully born conceived in the fullness of the Divine human nature, and that we will spend our whole lives gradually becoming evermore that in which we already conceived. We don’t come from a sinful nature, we don't come separate from God. We come with the ability, the innate ability, to draw ever closer into the union with God, which is who we’re intended to be.
Seth Price 37:43
I like that. I like the part you said we don't come with an innate ability to not do it, and this does not require response, but all I keep thinking when you say that is nobody told that to Augustine and in Augustine, is what, you know, filtered down to most of the church or at least the Protestant church today. I wish that had been communicated better to him.
Alexander 38:04
Well, actually, the problem with Augustine is that we read Auguatine by the lesser people who followed him and interpreted him. If you really read Augustine for Augustine and had the idea of theosis; yes, he does talk about about sin and how we need to overcome that. But it's not really a starting place. I don't think, I think that Augustine is was was lessened by the people who came after him and interpreted him to us.
Seth Price 38:35
I don't know enough about all that all I know, is what I've read of people that I trust.
Alexander 38:41
Yeah, and what's happened by the time of adjusting is the foundation that theosis are being undermined. Because Christianity, in my mind, is always best when we're not part of a state government. When we stay is primarily a process of transformation. But by Augustine’s time, we're tripping over into the trappings of state, and government. And we're taking on powers and privileges, which I don't think are the role of search spiritual traditions.
Seth Price 39:20
Knowing that the bulk of a lot of the cosmic language you know, in Ephesians and Colossians, and John 1, the first paragraph of Hebrews and 1 John, I don’t remember the verses, but definitely the first part of 1 John. I'm curious, o how and I know that most of those were written, if not all of them were written before the gospels were all the way written. So in Matthew and Mark and Luke, and all leave john out because john talks very well about a cosmic portion of Christ or cosmic knowledge of Christ. How do we drill this knowledge back into the Gospels because knowing that we're, right now as we come in by the time this airs will be Lent and coming up on Easter and so we're gonna have a lot of conversation about the incarnation, about resurrection, about glory and about salvation, and so how do we hear a cosmic Christ in the other gospels that aren't John?
Alexander 40:17
In my heart mind, I always go to what I think of is the high point of before gospel journey which is John and which is the prologue and which is John's passion, death, and resurrection account. And then through that doorway, I understand how Matthew and Mark lead to that door and how Luke is the outflow from that door. But if I want to understand the deepest reality of who Jesus Christ is, I go to John's prologue; and I understand that what John is doing that, John, is the first spiritual text, and you probably heard me say this, and I'll keep saying it. John is the first spiritual text that we have on the planet that we know of; there may be other texts that have been lost or that are not generally known to us, but right now John is the first text that was written as a spiritual text for all people. Even Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the first audience for Matthew, Mark and Luke, were for the Hebrew people or for the Hebrew people who are adding to their understanding of the Messiah in Jesus the Christ.
John’s text is written primarily to all the tribes, all the people on the planet, and saying, there is this reality from the beginning of time in which you are all formed by whatever name you call it. So John has to go back and because we're going to be the tradition, the first tradition on the planet, again that we know of that resolves tribalism. We're the first tradition that no longer made people go to any particular temple site and say that this is where your god or goddess lives. We are the first tradition that said, we are part of a tradition that understands that God is everywhere already. We're not going to go anywhere and bring Jesus we're going to go everywhere and find Jesus already there. Because this reality that we call Jesus is across all time, and already across all place. So it's like, go discover the great truth that's already another in the soul of the cosmos, that don't have any arrogant belief that you're gonna go bring Him there.
And that all comes from John's text because John doesn't want to create a hierarchy amongst Christians, it doesn't matter whether your doorway into the Christ was your Yahweh or Zeus. The reality is go through whatever your doorway was back to the Oneness that was there at the beginning of the time. And that Oneness comes from God in is of God and God has put God’s very self into the diversity of the cosmos. And we are going to be the tradition that welcomes the cosmos to sit at our table, not to be some bland uniformity, but to be a rather dynamic diadem in tension. That's who our God is. So, John has got to in his text, go back and finish the work to the book of Genesis particular. In the book of Genesis we hear about a God who breathed out into creation and ultimately all of that led to the Jewish people being the first people to hear the promise. And John wants to say, and the Jewish people's promise is a promise that actually was given to every part of creation; and was given to every people and has been the radiance within them this whole time.
Go back and look at the prologue because you have the reality of this oneness that God has breathed out into everyone and everywhere for three stanzas. Before you get to the stanza that opens up and the Word became flesh and the flesh lives amongst us. So when John is talking about this oneness in this reality, this incarnational reality of God which is everywhere. He's inviting you if you are a follower of Dionysus, great go through Dionysus back that to the One. If you're a follower of Zeus, if you're a follower of Isis, if your a follower Hector, wherever your starting point is, don't stand in the doorway and say this is the final reality (but) go through that doorway, back to the one breath of God, from which we have all come. And we understand that one breath in the reality and the name of Jesus the Christ.
Seth Price 45:27
Amen.
I can't think of a better way, then to end on that, except for to tell people as you deal with this (to) be prepared, and honestly, Alexander, as you were talking, I realized the faults in my question. My question was how do I break apart the Gospels individually when really, I shouldn't be breaking them apart? There's still that left part of my brain that I cannot seem to dissolve myself of breaking things apart. That's what makes me tick, but it's not always the right way to do it.
Alexander 45:59
Seth can I bear on you just one last thought before end, knowing that this is going to come out somewhat as we are in the lead up to Lent or as Lent begins.
Seth Prie 46:10
Yes.
Alexander 46:12
The idea of Lent beginning by our being marked by ashes, comes in the Sixth and the Seventh century, it's a very late development. It's not how the early Lent started. The early Lent did not start by being marked with ashes and understanding that we need to grow ourselves or have the grace to grow or so back to God. The early Lent was something called the Rite of election. Because an election was not going to the polls and checking people in ballots. It comes from this beautiful word, that at the first moment of creation, God “elected” the cosmos. And that in our conception God elected each one of us.
And so this ancient lent began with this ritual called a Rite of Election, that may be a bad word that we need to change today—don't get hung up on that. The impact of the ritual was, we begin lent celebrating that we are made in the image of God, that we are loved, and that the love that we are made of is called to be more love. We are elected to love the cosmos, we are elected to love each other. And the work that we do this Lent, in the ancient Lent, the work that we do is not because I feel guilty about being separated from God, but rather I understand God's love for me and because that love is so enormous I want to be a better vessel of that love.
The ancient call of Lent was the call of love to love. And everything of the Lent was not about your sinful nature. The reason purple was put on for Lent—purple is not a penitential color, purple is the Royal color. We put purple before our eyes in Lent, for those who do, to remind ourselves of the royalty of our nature as human divine beings created in the image of God
Seth Price 48:25
Yes.
Alexander 48:26
Another book.
Seth Price 48:29
Write it, right after the Christmas book because I need you to finish that one. So well and the children's book with it, honestly, I find that I want to read the children's book more than the other one. Because I feel like the other one…I find in children's books, I get more heart knowledge and less head knowledge and oftentimes I need heart knowledge and need people to explain things to me at an emotional level, not a logical one; so often.
Alexander 48:55
I understand that and for me, the process of writing the “adult book” will help me find what the children book will be. But I got you, I got you. I have a great lover of children's books.
Seth Price 49:11
So there's no telling how much longer you'll be on this continent, and so while you're here, how can people connect with you and get involved in both, you know the message of the Quadratos? And in all the stuff that you're plugged into how would people connect with you, Alexander?
Alexander 49:29
Well, thanks. Yes, I mean, firstly, I would say go to the quadratos website, and sign up for my sort of, maybe twice a month blog that I'm sending out a small video with some aspect of understanding where we are in the seasons and and the gospel.
Secondly, these films are coming out, I think even next week, they're going to be To be released by The Work of the People. And you can access them by going on the work of the people website and signing up for a year's subscription to a whole host of films that they offer incredible work. Or you can go on the Quadratos website and rent those films, I think are films are going to go for $4.44 cents, sort of a metaphoric number for a two or three day rental, and each one of the films is like 35 to 40 minutes.
What I'm hearing back from people who have seen the films is that there's some magic that's going on and then no credit goes to me it's totally the beautiful people at The Work of the People that have created these.
Lastly, I really want to invite people to do something countercultural, which is begin a long, slow journey of transformation by Perhaps reading the book Heart and Mind with one or two other people and using the companion guides that we have available through the Quadratos website. And people, and I know this is this is a real stretch, people have been walking through this process, a year and a half, two years and more and without fail every group, every circle, has communicated back to me that their lives have changed. Their perspective on how to live as a Christian has changed. This is not an intellectual, philosophical, or Bible study class. This is a…you want to really transform your heart and mind? Here's a journey that has the grace of 2000 years of our ancestors, let them and God work on you.
Seth Price 51:56
Absolutely. And I would I would echo that. So I've been dealing with your work. Now for when did I buy that book and send it to Christmas of 2017? I feel like that's right. It's…I well, either way, that's a different podcast, but I highly would echo that. The book itself but more importantly, the work that's associated with a book is entirely worth it is not the right adjective or not the right disclaimer, I don't know what the word is, but it's definitely doable.
Alexander 52:29
I don't either. I just know if people will slow down and let the grace of Christ work on their heart. They grow. They change.
Seth Price 52:39
Absolutely.
Alexander 52:40
They become people of deeper love and the ability to access love and to share love.
Seth Price 52:46
Well, Alexander, I will give you back to the leaf blowers, and to California, and to temperatures that are not it's like 24 now, right now it's the hottest part of the day and it's 24.
Alexander 52:59
Oh geez.
Seth Price 53:01
I’m very appreciative of you coming on.
Alexander 53:01
Seth, it's always a delight and you are very close to my heart in my words and my prayers and your listeners as well, thank you and take care.
Seth Price 53:38
So it's been a few days since that conversation with Alexander and the more that I think about it, the more that I realized that I'm still, and I probably always will be, in the middle of whatever journey religion is intended to take me on. There are parts of my brain that still break things apart to logically often in their other parts of my brain that still refuse to embrace emotion. And until I personally figure out how to make those to blend in and out of each other like a braid of thought, you know, the logic and the emotion and my heart. There'll be parts that I always struggle with. And I think that that's just gonna have to be okay. I hope that you will wrestle with the concepts of truth and light in radiance in Christ as a bigger piece of everything and Christ is something entirely bigger than what you thought Christ was yesterday.
Today's music was used with permission from Joshua Leventhal. His music is fantastic, you should definitely check out his new EP and I am in love with his song Goliath, which was also included in this episode. The other tracks that were with this episode will be included as always on the Can I Say This At Church Spotify playlist, which if you have not listened to go to the website, find the Spotify playlist, or you can just go to Spotify and search Can I Say This At Church, one will be the podcast, the other will be like 200 songs. It is it's very good hope that you'll engage in and I will talk with you next week.
Thank you all for being here.