Nolan's The Odyssey: a Cultural Zeitgeist

In this inspiring episode, we sit down with pastor and theologian Anthony Delgado to discuss the continuum between classical Greek mythology/philosophical tradition and burgeoning Christian doctrine. We identify the thought forms, tenets, characters or figures, enduring archetypes and story templates that thread STORY together over time, from both a comparative religion standpoint and a more esoteric, mystical lens. Best of all, to drive the connection home, we analyze an over 3,000 year-old hero's journey that has become a cultural zeitgeist in 2026, due to the enduring truth it speaks about the human condition: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. 

Guest BIO: Anthony Delgado is a pastor, author, and Bible teacher in Southern California with nearly two decades of experience in Christian leadership and biblical education. He studied Christian Reason at Sterling College and holds an MABTS from Knox Theological Seminary. He sees the Bible as a single story of God's redemption from Genesis to Revelation and traces that narrative through the threads woven across Scripture. In books, preaching, articles, and YouTube videos, he explores the text in its Ancient Near Eastern context and highlights the Bible's supernatural worldview to equip Christians to follow Jesus with radically ordinary faithfulness. Anthony is the author of The Gospel is Bigger than You Think (2024) and The Watchers and the Holy Ones (2023), and he serves as Lead Pastor at Palmdale Church. He hosts the Biblical Reenchantment podcast and YouTube channel. He treasures time outdoors with his wife and three kids, biking, kayaking, and hiking.

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Clowns, Fear, And The Return

SPEAKER_02 0:45

I have a friend that's a trained clown, and he went on tour after his training. He went on tour with Barnum and Bailey. And then, of course, they went under. So he got stuck in some other part of the country. But he takes it very seriously. And when I when I said I have a healthy fear of clowns, and I do, because I was abducted at Cirque du Soleil once by clowns. And I wrote a short story about it. So yeah, it's been ingrained. The creepy clown archetype is alive and well in my psyche. But he was very evented. He's like, I think people think they're afraid of clowns. He had like a whole argument about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

That's really interesting, actually. Well, I'd love to talk about that another day because I have a I've written pretty extensively about the symbolism of clowns ever since that.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Maybe there's grievances looking for a cause sometimes. Like clowns are the least of our worries right now. The clown in the what the White House, I think, would be a clown to worry about.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

That's actually really funny. That's one of the things I've written about. Both the necessity and the ridiculousness of clowns and what they do, what they actually do for and to our society. Anyway, but we don't need to go there.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Hi guys, and welcome to Language of the Soul Podcast, where life is a story. As some of you probably know, our regular listeners probably know, Virginia and I took a pretty extensive break longer than we would have liked, but we're glad to be back. And we're not really changing anything up in a major way this season, but we have decided to do a couple, you know, in addition to finishing up the chapters of the book, Language of the Soul, which inspired the podcast. We are intentionally inserting episodes here and there that are just more pop culture based and related to cinema and literature, but specifically what's on the cultural zeitgeist in the moment, and just talking a little bit off the cuff. That also means maybe a little less prep. I I kind of used to go above and beyond in terms of researching my guests. I would literally watch every interview they had ever done on YouTube, and it helped me formulate my prompts and just know the areas in which I want to pick their brain. In this case, I didn't do any of that. So I'm sort of flying by the seat of my pants here. But the beauty is I'm interviewing my nephew. So there's a lot I already know, and inevitably there will be inside jokes, I'm sure, and anecdotes that might need some explaining. And normally Virginia would uh man that operation and fill in the gaps for listeners or get us back on track, as you know, the case may be. But she is uh missing in action today, unfortunately. I'm just winging it solo. So wish everybody luck. But this again is a nephew, and uh I'm just hoping I can fill in any uh context that's necessary. And I don't know everything about him. That's the beauty. I've been dying to have him on, dying to learn from him and just simply listen, which I'm the host, so and I'm also Italian, so that's always a challenge. But I'm gonna we're gonna do the talking stick thing for sure. And I just really do look forward to listening. I'm an expert in nothing, but I do have a love of story, hence this podcast. So without being cryptic, um he's a theologian and he's a minister, and he has a love of the Bible, and I think, not to put words in his mouth, specifically the way story functions in scripture. Uh, he can correct me if that's not a correct characterization. But uh in that spirit, we both were so excited about the Odyssey. I have been wanting Anthony on forever to pick his brain, but it seems like the right moment because of, again, I keep using this word, cultural zeitgeist. Movies are back. People are actually getting up off their butts and going to the theater rather than watching films on their phone. It's a very exciting moment. Post-pandemic, I think there were a couple movies that were meant to bring people back to theaters, but they didn't necessarily accomplish that. Right now, numbers are way up. So I'm excited about um the Odyssey, and that was a little bit of the impetus to put a gun to his head and force him to come on. Uh, because I've seen him speak in the past about the connection between Greek classicism and Greek myths and Greek philosophy and scripture. So, anyway, this could go a number of directions. I hope I don't scare him off and maybe he'll come on for a part two, because there's so much to delve into. My goal today would be to pick his brain a little bit about his ministry in general, his calling. Uh, I don't want to say his brand, but he does have a podcast and a YouTube channel and just what he's offering, what he's imparting, and then slyly transition into the Odyssey. That's my goal. Okay, so he's waiting patiently in the green room. And uh, as usual, I will read his bio and then invite him in to correct anything that I might botch in the bio. All right. Anthony Delgado is a pastor, author, and Bible teacher in Southern California with nearly two decades of experience in Christian leadership and biblical education. He studied Christian reason at Sterling College and holds an M A

Meet Anthony Delgado

SPEAKER_02 5:55

B T S, I'm gonna ask what that is, from Knox Theological Seminary. He sees the Bible as a single story of God's redemption, from Genesis to Revelation, and traces that narrative through the threads woven across Scripture. In books, preaching, articles, and YouTube videos, he explores the text in its ancient Near Eastern context and highlights the Bible's supernatural worldview to equip Christians to follow Jesus with radically ordinary faithfulness. I love that phrase. We're gonna ask about that too. Anthony is the author of The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think, 2024, and The Watchers and the Holy Ones, 2023. And he serves as lead pastor at Palmdale Church. He hosts the Biblical Reenchantment Podcast and YouTube channel. He treasures time outdoors with his wife and three kids, biking, kayaking, and hiking. Welcome, Anthony Delgado.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Uncle Nick. It's uh I've been wanting to come on, you know that, and just busy with lots of things. And so I'm really just thrilled to get to sit down and have a great conversation about, I guess, the Bible and Greek mythology and all of that intersection. Yeah, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02 7:07

Frank, absolutely, yeah. Thanks for fitting it in. I think we're both pretty busy. So it's a small miracle, a small miracle that we're both here in cyberspace and Zoom land. And speaking of miracles, um, I guess I'm gonna start by asking you the road question we've been asking pretty much all of our guests, beginning maybe the top of season two, and it's a beautiful way not just to stay on brand, because that sounds a little reductive, but stay in the spirit of our podcast. And again, it becomes a fascinating cross-section when you compare some of the responses from various guests. Okay, so simply put, it's a two-parter. The first road question is what do you feel is the role of storytelling in culture? Very broad. And then part B is has that role evolved over time?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Oh, goodness, definitely. Um the role of storytelling in culture has has evolved based on the way that people have perceived and I actually perceived isn't the right word, valued story. I think that the ancient world uh kind of lived and died by story. And part of part of what happened through um, I mean, it starts earlier. I mean, you even see it

Why Story Still Runs Culture

SPEAKER_00 8:30

with like the Stoics and the Greeks, but really where it took off for our contemporary world is during the Enlightenment, where you get this rationalistic approach to everything, where now what's true is what makes sense, like logically or something like that. What we can mathematically, scientifically prove.

SPEAKER_02 8:51

I was gonna say empirical, that's the word I often use.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah, yeah, empirical. You can you can take apart this, you know, you can take apart the pieces of the earth and find how it works, and and and that's what's true, and that's what should therefore drive society and politics and culture and all of that. Uh, the funny thing about that is even though that's what happens in the mainstream, you know, uh, and as far as like world philosophies and things like that, it's just never actually been true. I I always say that people people don't believe anything they don't want to believe. And I actually I really think that, and I can prove this because you can even find writers through the you know, 17th, 18th, early 19th century talking about cultural narrative. And what they're talking about is sort of the way, like the story that the people believe. And so, even in a world where they're saying, like, you should believe what's rational, what's empirical, what's you know, what's what can be evidenced through science, and and perhaps by implication, little or nothing else, uh still, you know, things like world religion and uh all sorts of occult types of things. I mean, the esotericism began during uh the sort of modernistic post-Enlightenment period, right? When all of these things were at their peak. Uh, people understand very intuitively that there is a story to there is a human, a generally human story, and that that story is developing in all these different threads through different societies and different places, different times, and um different families, even. I, you know, our our our family definitely has some story, you know, some stories that are unique to our family, right? Right. Um I'm sure every family feels like that, right? That it's like, oh, this is our family narrative. And so there has always been this sense of what we what's really driving us, what's really motivating us to live and to act in the world is the narrative, the story that we bought into. And all the enlightenment really did is cause people not to think about what that story is. It didn't change the fact that they were still living by a narrative. And so um I I just love, and you were asking about like, has it has it changed? I think it's evolved, and I think that um I think just to say a little bit about my own field, the Enlightenment definitely affected the world of biblical studies. And um my my degree, by the way, it's an M-A-B-T-S, so it's a master's of the arts in biblical and theological studies, and that's a combination of two different master's degrees, a master's in Bible and a master's in theology. And so it's it's kind of like two, but it's one. Um, and uh, so it's nothing nothing too tricky or fancy. It sounds fancier than it is. But really, what's interesting about that is biblical studies through the Enlightenment period became all about like grammar and syntax and what the words have to mean, and then theology became about like sort of like sifting it, uh sifting all of that rationale for what it has to mean. And that's why you get like, you know, my my book, The Watchers and the Holy Ones, is um based on first Enoch, um, an ancient text written in the first through third century BCE. And uh it's commenting on Genesis 6, 1 through 4, and it's this whole supernatural narrative. Well, what the Enlightenment did is kind of suppress that because even the Christ, so the Christian story became about um like really tight and concise doctrines. Like if you don't believe exactly this about Jesus or about God or about the church and things like that, and sort of what it meant to be be a Christian, the the n you could say the narrative was rewritten to all that the story means now is a set of propositional statements. Instead of like really, when you read the Bible, it's all about like um it's all about like being invited into the story of what God is doing in the world. And you know, most of the Bible is narrative, it is story, and even the parts that aren't that are like more like teaching. Think like Paul's letters in the New Testament, he's writing to a church, but he's writing he's writing about things that are really happening. He's commenting on a story that's developing throughout, you know, throughout these first generation of the church. So it's all it's it's all story. And so what the focus of my study has really been is what's called biblical theology, which is almost a meaningless term, honestly. Um, but what biblical theology is sounds a little redundant, but doesn't it, right? Yeah, it's like we separate into Bible and then theology, and now I'm like, oh, but I I'm a biblical theologian. It's like, what the heck does that mean? But um, all it means is that um the focus of my study is I don't really um I I study, I don't stress too much, but like in my in my work that I do, I'm thinking mostly about the story of scripture. So I'm thinking about like what I call the mega narrative or grand narrative of scripture, which is just like what is the actual story that's being told? And looking at all these different texts and their cultural linguistic context and asking, like, you know, what's the story that's being told? And you know, in my bio, I mentioned the the you know, developing the supernatural narrative because that's that's what the Bible is, it's a supernatural narrative, and there's lots of things happening in the supernatural world in the story of the Bible.

SPEAKER_02 14:29

So yeah, if I could jump in, I mean you covered a lot of ground there, and the beauty is you're speaking our language. You basically yeah, speaking our language, and that's basically you encapsulated my book in a nutshell. Everything you said, I could expand upon. You know, I'm excited because we have a similar take. But to backpedal a little bit, I just want to parse a couple terms because I think at one point you said a rational and empirical view of things, and in my understanding and philosophy, the two are opposites. So the empirical worldview is one that's more like the scientific method, that which your senses can reify, which is subject to flux, right, and all these other things. Now, permanence, on the other hand, is a rational structure. So, does the the term teleological mean anything to you?

SPEAKER_00 15:21

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

Teleological has yeah, having to do with the ends. Well, I understand it is like a system-based worldview. So a teleological worldview is um not a rational. I'm sorry, is a rational one. Anyway, it doesn't really matter, but I think the terms have been flopped in in contemporary culture, but rational used to mean teleological, system-based. A belief system is logical. You know what? Empiricism isn't. There's flux, there's you know, perspective, there's circumstances and conditions that mean nothing is ultimately true. I don't want to get too abstract yet, but that's no, but I didn't mean to conflate those two for the right.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Uh what I was kind of doing was both empiricism and rationalism, like like were on the rise, you could say, I think they exist in nuance throughout history, but they they rose during the enlightenment and then the post-Enlightenment modernism to the point that they do become sort of philosophical opposites.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

They are opposites in my understanding. And I wasn't bringing this up to correct you, I wanted to then go on to say we do have the same understanding of it 100%. But uh, I just want to say if that's true, um, and I'm sure there's room to dispute that, but I personally see them as opposites. And I notice in the world people tend to adhere to one or the other for a variety of reasons left brain, right brain, who knows, you know, convergent thinking versus divergent, blah, blah, blah. But I just wonder if you see it this way, if we share this. I call it the grand illusion. The fact that most people adhere to empirical evidence now, and they call it the scientific method. I view that as the tip of an iceberg. Because metaphysically, there's a hell of a lot more going on here than can be reified. And further, like scientific that which gets canonized is just consensus from peers. So I call the Grand Illusion the fact that everybody's and it's kind of an amazing fluke, considering people, you know, Copernicus, you know, people were being beheaded, that it's gone so far in the other direction. Isn't it fascinating?

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Yeah, no, it really, it really is. Um, this whole I idea of um I I I like that you said it's that empiricism is the tip of the iceberg. To me, it's like um it's like all the like the tip of the the iceberg tells you there's an iceberg, right? So so the the iceberg. The visible part you mean the yeah, the visible. I'm sorry, yeah, that's what I mean. The bit the visible part of the iceberg tells you that there's something greater underneath it. And I think what rationalism does is it helps us to to ask the questions about what's underneath. Thank you. Instead of story using it to only the tip. Yep, and story helps us do that, doesn't it? Yeah. Well, when when I um when I kind of lumped them together, I was kind of pitting them against and and I and I realize I agree with you that they're opposite terms in philosophy, but I was pitting them against what

Enlightenment Thinking And Disenchantment

SPEAKER_00 18:25

we might call um something like uh like a subconscious um uh oh I just had the word a second ago, like a subconscious existentialism might be a way to say that. Because I do think that people are people are living by a greater body of knowledge than they even could articulate, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:44

And that that greater body of knowledge is the story. Yeah. Let me see if I fully understood that. It's an experiential, well, it's almost redundant, right? But like an experiential worldview is not an examined one, and so maybe empiricism and and you could correlate rationalism and empiricism with this again, I call it an illusion, this silly standoff between science and faith. It's ridiculous because they're both seeking to do the same thing, perhaps, which is examine the iceberg below the surface. It's been I'm not the first one to say it. Science and faith are attempting to explain the universe, they're attempting the same thing using different means. And uh, that's all. I just wondered if you shared that idea that there is a metaphysical iceberg beyond the empirical, and it's uh different uh personality types, maybe, and brain chemistry inclines people to explore the iceberg or just be perfectly happy ignoring the iceberg.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Yeah, it's it's interesting. I'm not sure this is a perfect analogy, but uh C.S. Lewis has this analogy that he uses uh in one of his essays. The name escapes me at the moment, but he talks about a traveler going to a foreign country. And to me, I hate to, I'm sorry to pick on any empiricists out there listening, but to me, the empiricist is like the first traveler in his story. So the first traveler goes to this foreign country and he finds a hotel that to stay in that is much like his hotel back home. Um, that has, you know, they have tea downstairs and because C.S. Lewis is British. So, you know, they have tea that he likes. It's obligatory. So that yeah, so that as he goes out to sort of see the this foreign world, he can return back to the hotel to the safety of that environment. Um, so he he's willing to look, he's willing to, you know, he's even willing to touch, maybe willing to taste, things like that, but he's always returning to what he knows and understands what what's fundamental to him. The uh that might be like the empiricist, the um uh writer, you know, there's been uh essays written about this story, and most of the essay writers will call call it an egocentric approach. So empiricism is because it empiricism is fundamentally egocentric because it's all about how you perceive the world, right? Right, you have five senses, and you know what I mean, and how you and I perceive the world might not be the same thing. I can't stand the texture of certain foods that other people love, you know? What empiricism fails when we say that like it gives us a um maybe a static or an objective uh data about the world. And so, but then the you get the you get the other guy, right? And this other guy goes and he's just excited to, even though it's going to be uncomfortable and different, he's excited to go and sort of live like the native people do. So he's looking for to make friends that where he can go to their homes and sit at their tables and hear their stories and and to experience their culture. He doesn't want to get on a tour bus to go see, you know, whatever thing. He wants to get in the in in the car with some locals and go, you know, show show us your watering hole, show us the place that you visit when you're when you go on vacation or whatever, right? Or when you take a break. And so he's becoming more immersed in in the in the in the in the setting that he is exploring, and without even having any presuppositions about what he's going to be able to experience, because you can't you just can't know that if you're gonna put yourself in that situation. And so to me, that that's that's maybe it's not the rationalist approach, but it's but it is sort of the existential approach that that says like I'm in this for the experience so that I can know how these people live, right? Now, maybe rationalism comes in later to kind of then evaluate and you know, um, you know, perhaps to to judge the values of that experience.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

Because I think to a degree we all well here's what I'm sorry, sorry to interrupt. Here's what I'm hearing in all of that. And tell me if it resonates. But you know, mysticism is very experiential. It's defies language almost. That's the definition of mysticism. It's the ineffable, it's the numinous. And so I I kind of see a correlation there. But the minute you try to figure out, oh, what makes somebody conservative politically? What makes them left, you know, left wing or right wing, all the things you said make sense. And we talk about this every week. I don't know if you know this. Virginia is, she just got her uh licensure as a counselor. So she's very immersed in psychology. So there's a lot of overlap. But you know, we could talk till the cows come home about again, left brain, right brain, convergent thinking, divergent thinking, our emotional experiences and imprints and how they affect our intellectual curiosity or our brain plasticity, and we'll never figure it out. But that's the beauty of the human condition. We have all of it, all of us have all of it. It's just uh, you know, varying degrees, and there are gamuts. So that's what I love. And I'm I'm headed somewhere with this. If we all have all the archetypes living in us and we have all these different inclinations, I mean, I see it all the time. I moved from being very linear and logical to embracing the opposite, whatever that is, the nonlinear, the absurd, the abstract. And now hopefully I'm finding balance. But I see growth and movement in all the individuals. So when you take all of this into consideration and the subjective and the objective, what we're talking about is if you're living like a lizard, right? And you're using your lizard brain and not your prefrontal cortex, maybe that's an experiential way of being where you're reifying the data, but you're not examining it the way we said or deliberating. So maybe, I mean, do you know the word noisphere? That's a word I I love and I've been using it a lot.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

I I haven't.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

No, I'm I'm assuming it's tied to Gnosis, maybe? Maybe. Oh, I maybe, yeah, yeah, probably. Uh, but it's a guy, a French guy named Pierre de Chardin, popularized it. And it's my understanding of how this all works. It's just the invisible realm, maybe call it the conceptual realm. It's the invisible realm of our ideas, thought forms, codes we live by, morals, ethics, the codes that become law. It's literally our conceptual realm, which is inextricably linked to language. And now I'm just quoting my book, but like maybe our thought forms didn't explode conceptually until the advent of language. Yeah, that's why in my book, anyway, I make the case that it's story is the inherent means by which we evolve that Noah sphere. Story is the way to express right the abstract, the conceptual. You don't have to agree.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

Is that clicking at all? No, it completely sounds sounds right to me. And I now I'm kind of like in my brain, like I'm like thinking through like what this means and wanting to actually pause this podcast to go Google it and do some research. We're not gonna do, yeah, but no, I'm I might have defined the idea.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

I might have defined it, I probably botched it, but I've walked away with this idea that you know, the evolution of our ideas is as crucial as that of our biology. Now I am the book again, and so it's ever evolving, and we can contribute to that, and that's why I'm a storyteller, frankly. But what exactly the Noah sphere is, yeah, Google it, Google it later.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

But I yeah, I'll do it. I'll do it later, obviously. But it did make me think of this like that. Um, you know, not I don't mean to like belittle anybody, but most of the population isn't getting on a podcast to try to talk through sort of like the way that story functions in society and life. Most people are sort of they're lit, they're but they are living a story, and they sort of fundamentally, you could say subconsciously or primordially are you calling them calling them lizards, Anthony? Well, I mean, if I want to be super pressed, even lizard-bling people are still experiencing and living a story.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

I guess that's my point. But I'm here to say the unexamined life is not worth living.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

Well, but I don't have an agenda, right? I I do think I do think it's like um, yeah, I think it's I think it's kind of sad and depressing, but I do think that people are experiencing a story and living a story, and they're like a lot of the values that people have, they can only have because they have story, even if they don't understand that's what it is. So, like, I think these conversations are extremely important because the more that you can evaluate your story and then evaluate the story of the culture and and and the world and all these different threads that have happened through different, you know, movements of society, blah blah blah, right? The the more you're gonna understand who you are. Totally agree with all that. I just I just think it's very interesting that um that yeah, that there is sort of a governing that I guess all I'm trying to say is this story still governs everyone, whether it's examined or not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like that that should, if it's if it governs you,

The Metaphysical Iceberg Beneath Facts

SPEAKER_00 27:55

you probably want to understand it.

SPEAKER_02 27:56

Like, yeah, I think the conclusion of my book literally says, like, for creators, I'm not here to tell you what kind of story to tell. There's no good, bad, right, or wrong. I mean, within reason, but I am here to just champion an awareness of story and how it functions in our lives, unexamined. And again, I'm just using little catchphrases from both the book and the podcast, but we're all like crabs in the boiling water abiding the narratives left and right without realizing that life is story, and so I just am you know championing an awareness. Then creators can take some responsibility for how they're contributing to the collective in our march toward human potential, ideally, right? And then you can also be aware of ooh, all that movie did was cement my addiction to cortisol and adrenaline. Yeah, it wasn't uh meaning making of any kind. I I don't know if you're making sense, but an awareness, I'm agreeing with you.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Yeah, I actually was just thinking about movies like that because I mean they are telling a story, just maybe not a tour a story that you should be letting shape you, but um you know, a very simple story, I suppose. But uh no, I was thinking about the difference between um, and you can tell me if you agree with this or not. I'm not married to it, but uh for me, I'm always uh people always want to pit formalism against relativism, or sometimes they say postmodernism, but I think that term is getting kind of tired. So if you if you think about like formalism versus relativism, which I guess would be um formalism being unveiling the meaning that sort of the the artist put behind a writing or a story or a movie or whatever, that would be formalism, and then relativism being sort of like, yeah, but I'm it's speaking to into me and my story in this other way.

SPEAKER_02 29:48

So it's almost like the new I think the new criticism says the projections of the patron are all that's relevant or significant. I think isn't that what we're talking about? Like subjective versus objective, or the intentions of the artist versus what the patron brings to the table as projection and attribution.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

Yeah, yeah. No, it's exactly what I'm saying. Like those are definitely the differences, and they're usually pitted against each other. But for me, and this is the way that I study the Bible, it's also the way that I study Greek literature, it's the way that I watch a movie, it's why most movies bore me because sometimes I get the sense that I watch a movie and I feel like I don't think that I think the objective here was to make money. I don't think the objective here was to tell a story, you know? And so that bores me when I watched it. Of course, dude. Come on, yeah. So, but but then if I watch a but then if I watch a very interesting movie, um, and you know, I don't know if you want to go here yet, but like the Odyssey was fascinating to me because it wasn't exactly the Odyssey, um, even though he's very faithful to a lot of the story. Uh, but it was he was really that it was very obvious that he was trying to tell a story. And so whether I agree with his story or not isn't the point. It was it grabbed me because it was obvious he was trying to tell a story, um, and it held my attention. So now I can let either my agreement or my disagreement um uh with what he says begin to shape and form my own experience of of my story and the story of my family and my my my world, right? So I think that I think that the formal leads to a more profound uh relative approach or subjective approach, if that makes any sense. That without the formal, I'm almost left with uh watching every every movie. Like if I'm not willing to consider why the artist did did anything, I'm just left with this. It might as well just be another money grab movie because I'm not thinking about the story. Um and that yet it is still changing me subjectively in a way in in certain ways that I probably can't explain.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

Right. Wow, yeah, there's a lot there, but tell me, there's a phrase the more personal you can make a work, the more universally it will land. So that's the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. My personal feeling is we have access to the entire reservoir of human experience. That's what you know archetypes are all about. And Madeline Lingell, you know, wrote a lot of things intuitively by tapping in to the human experience that's arguably in our DNA. Um, but I just love that irony that the more personal and subjective you make it, the more universally it will land. I think that's related somehow. But anyway, there's a lot there. But I I'm gonna thank you for making that transition toward the Odyssey. Because I think it's you know, it's kind of a dead end road to talk about commercial versus artistic integrity and literary value. But every week on the podcast, I'm the elitist who will say, Oh, yeah, I mean, it's very clear that's for the almighty dollar. And then over here is something meaningful that we can, yes, attribute and project on and create meaning out of, regardless of the intention of the artist. Hopefully, there's an alignment there. But do you know what I mean? Like it's a no-brainer that I think creating for the almighty dollar is at an all-time high in the context of social media and branding, and that's at an all-time high. And people don't even recognize what I'm as the elitist that I am, calling artistic integrity and literary value. I went to art center, I was raised on very elitist definitions of not just artistic integrity and literary value, but why we create in the first place. So follow me a little bit. I am such an elitist, but I am driven. And I this is why I have a book and a podcast. What's missing in the equation, I think, when you just create content, Aunt Renee would say vacuous content or vapated content, if it's not really saying anything or contributing anything meaningful, or at least providing, like you're saying, the opportunity for people to project on it and create the meaning, if it's not starting a conversation or provoking or any of those things, then really it's a detriment to society because either you're glorifying something, as we said, or it's reductive and it's maybe perpetuating counterproductive tropes, or literally, there's an entire book about Vietnam and how there was a guy named Dave Megassi who wrote a book after leaving the NFL saying all you know, all professional sports does is habituates people to violence and literally feeds an addiction to cortisol and adrenaline. And he made the case that it justified the complacency around the Vietnam War. Because it was in that moment he left the NFL during the Vietnam War, which was, you know, I was a kid. But that's how far you can take it. Like if it is vacuous and it doesn't really have a quote, something to say, right? Then it's probably feeding an addiction to cortisol and adrenaline, something like that. But I just want to say, because I have to, that, and maybe consider it that I'm not here to say what's divinely inspired. I think that's pretty elitist as well. What's true? The word of God, what's divinely inspired? I think all creators have access to collective consciousness. And collective consciousness knows what's needed in our dialectic to promulgate, if that makes sense, to persist, the persistence of life itself. I'm getting pretty abstract now, but true inspiration comes from the universe because it knows what's needed in human dialectic. If you eliminate if you use AI and just create slop, you know, now I'm being really elitist, but if you're just doing something derivative by I guess hacking together a bunch of old tired tropes, that doesn't that doesn't that wasn't inspired. That is for the almighty dollar over titillation or whatever for brand building, but it's just noise in my opinion. Now I've said it all.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Yeah, I don't I don't think we're I don't think we're super far apart on that. I mean, uh I I would say that I'm it's not that I don't have like dogma, right? In my but I but when I sit down to like say read the Bible or to read the you know read read Greek mythology or to read to watch a movie or a contemporary story or whatever, it doesn't matter what it is. I'm not really asking, um I'm not really asking if it's divinely inspired, so much as I'm asking how is it divinely inspired?

SPEAKER_02 36:43

So does that mean what kind of truth does it speak about the human condition or about the nature of the metaphysical universe? Like, what is your I guess line? What's the determination?

SPEAKER_00 36:53

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so, like, the reason that I do like have a particular value for the Bible, um, and I sort of do see a lot of things in hierarchies, not just this is in or this is out, right? Right, right. I love all stories, so like, but the reason I have a particular value for the Bible is because I find that story extremely compelling, um, and I would say I would even say extremely divine. And so, but that's not to say that I don't see divinity everywhere everywhere else. I tend not to use the language of the universe, but if I do believe that in a in a God that is um that that transcends, he doesn't transcend because he doesn't, he doesn't, he isn't comparable to the creation. But just for lack of you know, failing to describe God according to the English language, if I believe in a God who transcends time, space, and existence itself, then what am I considering? The everything I'm considering in the universe is within that God. It's actually really interesting. If you look at Dante Divine Comedy, um, I brought this up for a lot of people, and oh, I don't have my copy in here. Well, I guess we're doing audio only anyway. But um, if you look at it, there's some uh what what I call cosmology charts in there, and they show a picture of the the universe that is

Noosphere And The Unexamined Life

SPEAKER_00 38:15

not in any way scientific, but um, and that's fine, like because I actually feel like I learned more from that, you know what I mean? But is it the one where was it earth-centered or yeah, um it's kind of like a uh it's it's some of the ones you see online if you ever see it like with the flat earth and then the dome over it, right? Um but it's but it's actually it's far more sophisticated than most of the ones that you usually see. And what's interesting because he's trying to show the story, so he's got he's got inferno and purgatory and paradise in there. And what's interesting, and and and sorry, Dante scholars, if you're out there, I'm gonna be extremely reductionistic. But Dante gets to the end of paradise, he's risen to the highest level of paradise, and then he he finds out, you know, his his guide has taken him so far, and he finds out that there is something further, and it's this pure divine essence that that is that that is God Himself, that that everything in existence, whether in you know heaven and hell or on the earth, you know, or in the atmosphere, whatever, everything in existence is wrapped in this divine essence that is sort of like the pure ethereal god. And it's so it's so neat. So honestly, I mean this is just the way that I suppose we perceive story, but when somebody says, you know, that like you know, some people just say it very tug-in-cheek, like, oh, the uh ions in the universe aligned or whatever, right? Like, um, that's all I hear is that like that they're experiencing what in theology we call the common grace of God, that He loves the world, you know, that's basic to Christianity, and they're they're experiencing the common goodness of God in their life, you know. So it's like different language for the same thing. Like, I'm not offended by that type of thinking, like thinking at all.

SPEAKER_02 40:02

You know, I think when I said there's a grand illusion that rationalism has taken hold of public imagination, um, that's what I'm talking about. I think we need to stop splitting hairs, stop creating imaginary opposites, you know, and just realize everything is lingo, everything, every system just uses different vocabulary. And as you hinted at, language is far insufficient to approximate the ineffable. So settle down, everybody. And actually, my book is literally reconciling this imaginary standoff between religion and science. It's just silly when you back up, consider the role of perspective and semantics, and yes, language and flux. We're all kind of often saying the same things. So I actually I don't, I'm not an expert in anything, but I take the little I know about quantum mechanics and the latest discoveries, and I actually reconcile it with the terminology you might use, if that makes sense, in a theological context. That I kind of have that agenda too. Like the divisiveness that is coming to a head right now, even political divisiveness, it's all based on imaginary binaries because people don't understand the function of language and often the figurative function of language.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

Yeah, I mean, I can't disagree with that at all. I mean, uh everything is every everything that is said, I mean, this this podcast itself is being uh it's being interpreted by everybody who's listening to it. And so the fact that uh the fact that we're speaking and people are hearing mean this is this is interesting, actually. I I've been thinking a lot about this, that language isn't doesn't carry meaning itself, it's it's all analogous to other truths, right? And just like with all other analogies, all analogies ultimately fail.

unknown 42:01

Right.

SPEAKER_02 42:02

Well, it's the the Socratic method. Do you know that? Well, literally anything definitive you can say, you can disprove if you ask enough questions, right? And that is the Socratic method, and that's exactly what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Yeah, but I'm also thankful for language because like the alternative to speaking is you know not great. So I'm I'm thankful that we can use words and actions.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

Well, that's the meeting ground. That's some people say words are cheap, it's actions that matter, and some part of me is like, but it's all we have. Like the codes, we can't build bridges or send rockets into space without having this meeting ground that yes, is empirical and relies on language, but thank god. And then if you don't want to send a rocket into space, then yeah, be mystical, explore the inner realm. You don't expect anybody else to meet you there, right? But they all they function together. I think we're getting a little abstract, and I I love it. Well, I think we're getting very philosophical, and I do love it, but I do want to back up maybe because uh and steer it toward the Odyssey in a way. Uh yeah, because I did have some things I really wanted to pick your brain about, and um, I just I'll leave you alone for a year, then I'll beg you to come back on because there is so much we could talk about, but yeah, it's gotten pretty philosophical, and I see a lot of alignment in the way we experience the world, and um I'm happy. I I there's always more too, right? When you go back and listen to this, it's like, wow, I mean, my I should have said this, I should have said this. It's kind of but it's always more linear than I realize. Yeah, uh for three years I've said Virginia, that felt a little chaotic. Then you go back and listen, like, oh no, it was totally linear, but you can't always be in the other person's mind space. I mean, we're all human, we all anticipate what we're gonna see next, and we all have the filter that you hinted at, but I just think it's better to have these conversations than not, and I thrive on it. So I think there's a lot there already. But if I could slow down and back up and slyly steer this toward the Odyssey, the way I would do that is to say, I had a lot of questions, like what drove you? Calling is a good word, but what drove you to want to study theology in the first place? I wanted to ask about your current ministry and then the extension, which is your your books and the podcast. There's a lot I want to talk about. So feel free to slip in any of that context. Okay. But I'm gonna jump straight to if there is this idea of human dialectic, right? If our thought forms are always evolving and maybe there's a cutting edge or not, and then I use the word noosphere. That's my take on all of this is. Evolution of our ideas is as crucial as that of our biology, that we would have been extinct a long time ago if our ideas didn't evolve in kind, right? I think you adapt or die. That includes, yeah, even our Noah Sphere. We're adapting to technology that's advancing at an exponential rate. And uh, you know, and there's changes in the brainstem as a result of that. So our ideas are always evolving along with environmental factors and you know the the arguably havoc we're wreaking on the planet. And so if you agree with that at all that our thought forms are meant to evolve, I think it's kind of a no-brainer if you look back through history. Um, but again, not twisting any arms here. But if you agree that there is a maybe a Noah Sphere and that it does evolve and that it's a continuum, I want to ask you what from Greek classicism or the archaic period or Hellenism, anything from Greek culture, maybe that centers around what we're talking about, which is storytelling. So anything from the Greek myths or Greek philosophy, what carried over into scripture, into Christian scripture? And I know you have opinions on this.

SPEAKER_00 45:59

Oh, yeah. Um, that's a that's a really fascinating question, actually, because I normally wouldn't frame it as what carried into scripture, but especially as we're talking about the New Testament, it is true uh that you know all of like the Greek myths do predate um the New Testament, but even in the Old Testament, um a lot of a lot of a lot of the same myths exist, like a lot of the Baal myths are the Zeus myths. Um they're just coming from a different language.

SPEAKER_02 46:32

So yeah, well, that's I should qualify this by saying I just said what carried over. I'm I should have said which thought forms carried over, which characters, right? Which which templates, which story templates carried over. So I'll just to steer this a little bit, I'll give you a silly example that does bring us to the Odyssey. The idea of zinia, yeah, which is xenophobia comes from that. You know, zinia was kind of you know, just in case that beggar is a god in disguise, and they wouldn't have said karma, but you don't want the wrath or the ire of that god, so better treat them as you would wish to be treated. So hospitality to the stranger was a big value. And you know, I went to Petra in Jordan and it's this amazing place, and I was told, well, it was the Las Vegas of its day, because they were known for taking in the weary traveler, entire caravans, and literally entertaining them for the night. So they they had a uh like what do you call it? Uh what's the Coliseum? A stadium, I guess, that's almost as big as the Coliseum. So it was the Vegas of its time because it was such a strong value to take in the weary traveler and extend hospitality to the point of giving the parting gift. A lot of traditions that still exist today. And then they say, I you can correct me on this one, but I understand the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was it's in hospitality. It wasn't a lot of the go-to's, it was literally it's in hospitality. When he raped the stranger, instead of giving them a parting gift, kind of not okay. But anyway, I just know from having spent some time over there that it's still alive and well, this idea of zenia. Uh isn't the correlation in Christian terminology due unto others? It's the golden rule.

SPEAKER_00 48:22

There, there's actually a tighter connection. Uh, the author of Hebrews says uh that we should be careful to show hospitality because we might be entertaining angels unaware. Um, literally, exactly what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 48:38

Thank you. So that's one example. So I was just gonna kind of wind you up and let you go. I actually have a whole list of corollaries, but I wondered if you had just anything to say about that idea in general, that you know it's almost unavoidable culture

Art Intent Versus Audience Meaning

SPEAKER_02 48:55

informed the Judeo-Christian tradition as it evolved.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

I have one big one that I wanna that I do want to talk about. And uh in the in Nolan's film, um, he didn't make much of this, and I was like, what is that? But it's the it's the Lyce Dragonians, they go to this island and they're there. Let's just keep on the hospitality. They're there with the expectation that they're the stranger who should receive hospitality. Oops, yeah, right, but but but it but it flips because what have they been doing?

SPEAKER_02 49:34

Exactly, raping and pillaging, and right, right.

SPEAKER_00 49:37

And so um the Lystergonians are the children of Poseidon and Gaia, and yet they're humanoid, so they very much parallel, um, they very much parallel oh the angels creating giants with humans, in other words, yeah. The Enoch uh myth and the that's commenting on Genesis six when the sons of God came down and uh took wives from the daughters of men, um, which I think that take is a really important term in there. That it's it's like a forced um it's a for lack of a better word, it's a forced um bastardization of heaven and earth, right? Like there's a there's an appropriate way for heaven to come to earth, and then and then there's an inappropriate way. And uh that so that was an inappropriate way because it's it's it's it's heaven, um uh it's it's heaven, it's it's heaven asserting uh asserting themselves onto earth in a way that um that that doesn't actually accord with like God's natural ordering. And so that's actually what happens there is that you've got Poseidon and Gaia, and and Poseidon's the sea, and Gaia is the earth, and uh and and Poseidon comes to the sea uh to form the Lystragonians. Uh when when really properly speaking, they belong to different realms in the biblical narrative. And I think we can prove this from the Greek narrative too, but it's easier in the Bible. And the in in the biblical narrative, um, the sea is chaos and the earth is order. And so uh yeah, so like yeah, because so like in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and and the what the the darkness of the waters was over the earth. So you've got the darkness of the deep, right? And then as he begins to create, he brings the land out up out of the deep and begins to create all of the things that are necessary for human life, and then finally humanity apart.

SPEAKER_02 51:35

Well, that's kind of amazing because life came from the sea, the biological soup idea, you know. Sure, I see a corollary there. Let me ask you this because I think you mentioned it earlier. Uh I love everything you just said. The Lyce Dragonians, though, didn't you correlate them possibly with the Philistines as well? Like with history, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:55

So then in history, the the Lyce Dragonians could be, you know, I don't real is such a weird word, but like they could be a real people. Um, uh, because I think that's what that's how myth works. Myth is mystery, uh, myth is mystery coming to bear on history. Wait, slow down, hold on.

SPEAKER_02 52:15

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

SPEAKER_00 52:15

Yeah, say it again. Myth is mystery coming to bear on history. I love it. So it has to do with that limits of language. Like, how do we explain what's happening here? So I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_02 52:28

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 52:28

I'm sorry. I was just gonna say, I usually won't tackle the question of whether the lice dragonians were actual giants who you know ate human human beings um that became cannibals on the earth and ate human beings. I don't care about that as much. I I think that perhaps, but I do think that they that they are a mystery that has come to bear on a history beautiful that is the I uh the the Phoenician people and the Greek culture, because that's what you know, and the and the Philistines, which are the same basic people, but in the in the biblical uh terminology, so they they're the same, they're the same basic people.

SPEAKER_02 53:05

And in Chris Nolan, Christopher Nolan's terminology was that the sea people? Yeah, okay, yeah, because he coded everything too, you know, xenia he just called Zeus's law that didn't exist in Homer's version, no, but I like that he kind of created a code for everything, including Xenia. But you know, I I want to steer this a little bit toward uh, you know, Christopher Nolan has his worldview, and he's admitted, oh, I carried over a lot of the themes I was exploring in Oppenheimer. That's just how it works. You know, when you're an artist, if your psyche is exploring certain territory, it's uh I guess one of his interviewers said, Well, the Odyssey seems like a sequel to Oppenheimer. And he didn't disagree. A lot of the same thematic content. But I guess let's go there because I feel like a three, I'm just intrigued by the idea that we evolve pretty slowly. You know, technology increases exponentially, but we're a little slow to the party. So that's why Shakespeare still resonates. That's why the Greek tragedies still resonate, because human nature and the human condition arguably evolve much more slowly. So there's a lot of universality, in my opinion. And I feel like, oh man, the Odyssey didn't need Christopher Nolan's help. It still resonates. And I feel like he did honor it in terms of its thematic content, but he gave it words like um Zeus's Law instead of Xenia and a number of other things. So I do you want to talk about that a little bit? Like I do.

SPEAKER_00 54:42

I I think it's where I was headed with it.

SPEAKER_02 54:44

I think that what are Christopher? I think it's every creator's job to make a story relevant for contemporary audiences. And I know exactly because I've listened to every literally every interview with him and the cast. And the cast are just as actors bringing their projections to his intent. But I've heard him say it, you know, and I've heard it from the horse's mouth. I know exactly how he made it supposedly more poignant and relevant to in this moment. But I do feel he so honored the themes. So, where do you fall on that? Like, what themes do you feel he honored from Homer's version? And what did he maybe add to the equation?

SPEAKER_00 55:21

Yeah, I think, I think, well, I mean, in many ways there's so many different themes, but let's say if I can just stick with my single stream of thought for a second with the Lyst Dragonians. I I really think that he he was creating a sequel to Oppenheimer in in that he's showing Odysseus, like he's he's saying, so here's the sea people that you're afraid of, but who you should really be afraid of is yourself. You're the real sea people, just like the Lyce Dergonians. I actually wish they had um had developed this more. The Lyce Dragonians are are cannibals, they actually eat eleven out of 12 of Odysseus's ships worth of people. Well, they were hungry in the Odyssey.

SPEAKER_02 56:06

They eat them, they're you know. Well, they're zenia again, they're accommodating the stranger, right? They were extending hospitality. Eat me. No, no, not the right interpretation.

SPEAKER_00 56:17

That's it's the inversion, it's uh it's Odysseus extending the hospitality to them, right? Right, but I think I think what uh Odysseus is supposed to understand there is like, oh, I'm the sea people, and then Nolan does that in the film. It's said many times that they realize that they're actually the sea people, and they go back to back to you know, because it's not in this is from uh the Iliad, the the whole uh you know, Trojan horse event, you know. But then he goes back to that and how they came on the sea, they make a big deal about on the sea, dragging the horse from the sea and all of that, right? They are the and then he reflects and goes, Oh, we are the sea people, like what we did in Troy was unjust, right? So I think with Oppenheimer, it's like look at like it's supposed to make us look and go, Oh, we're we're the sea people, or at least we are capable of being the sea people.

SPEAKER_02 57:08

Well, it's almost like he what is it, he who doth protest too much. I think, yeah, no, when we demonize others, it's usually the capacity in ourselves to be probably even more egregious. So I do see that, but I also maybe

Nolan’s Odyssey And War’s Aftermath

SPEAKER_02 57:25

the idea of regret and sort of PTSD, like in Oppenheimer, he was haunted by what he had done. He was haunted by what he had created, and yeah, similarly, I would say, even though on that very first um stop on their journey, Odysseus did say, Let's not rape and pillage, how about that? And then they did it on their own. The crew used free will, they asserted their own agency to do that against his wishes. But in the end, I think he was just human and he made a lot of mistakes. So I think it was made relevant by Christopher Nolan in that yes, we might be demonizing or otherizing, otherizing when we're, I'm sorry, the capitalist pigs who exploit and exploit and exploit. And also, I mean, I saw a very direct connection with ice, just the free will everybody brought to the table. And you know, when Circe turns everyone into their true nature, brings out the appearance, they're all just pigs. She's not wrong.

SPEAKER_00 58:28

So it's all interwoven. Does that make sense? It it it is because you can take any of those images, right? You can say you all of them are point driving at the same point. Like the fact that they're turned into pigs, it's interesting that they first encounter like these great cats, right? So not everybody who's come to the island is is internally a pig, right? But then his people who all they want to do is like rape, pillage, you know, they want to get for themselves at the at the cost of others, and they do so with with clear conscience, like that's that's that's that's that piggish, ravenous uh behavior that just that just lives to consume, I guess, right? But it's everywhere, and that's um, I think, you know, in the la Ly Stragonian narrative, that the that if they're the sea people who eat people, but then they're going, oh, but you're the sea people who eat people, and so then we're supposed to go. I mean, just to go the full length of the of of how we understand it, I think we're supposed to go uh look back to Oppenheimer, how we're the C people who eat people, and if we if we're not careful, we will consume ourselves. Wow, yeah, that way wait because he's definitely saying, look at all the war in the world, and and I would and I don't pretend to know a lot about politics, but I just know that ultimately war is unjust, and so look at all the unjust war in the world, and uh at least that's my theological perspective. So look at all the unjust world world, look at all these different groups who are consuming each other when they are really the same people, they're they're actually consuming themselves, yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:08

Well, yeah, it's it's kind of it illustrates interconnectivity and how how it all works, you know. We are we are one, but the main thing for me, and maybe you can tell me if this resonated for you, you know, all and I know you're not huge on Joseph Campbell. You say he goes too far in some ways, but you know, Carl Jung had a entire book called Christ as the symbol of the self. So if you like comparative religion or Joseph Campbell at all, there is a hero's journey template, and it's largely the Odyssey. You know, almost all stories you can trace back to the Odyssey, and it's been blowing my mind since having seen it twice, just how many stories are plucked from that narrative. But I guess if you believe in the hero's journey at all or if it resonates, to me, the coming home idea, I experienced the Odyssey because I wasn't familiar. Everyone I'm talking to lately read it in high school. I slipped through the cracks. I've never read it and I'm dying to. But so I've seen it twice and it's blowing my mind. And then, of course, I'm watching all the interviews and I'm kind of re-familiarizing myself with the myths that were always told out of context, right? Right, right, which is one of my beefs about the way mythology is taught to children. It's they're all in isolation when it actually it's an overarching narrative. Yeah. So, um, anyway, I guess what stuck out to me, being the weirdo that I am, is the journey home is so universal. And to me, it's just returning to your core essence. So we all betray ourselves at some point. That's in some parlance, that's the definition of sin is betraying the self, betraying what you know to be right. And that's a whole dead-end road. Do we have an internal compass or do we need a book to tell us blah, did you did your mama raise you right? Do we have an internal compass or not? These are all tangents we could go down. But if I think the re the journey home, whether it's the wizard of oz or the alchemist coming home is the idea of returning to your true nature, your core essence, your spiritual essence after disillusionment, after futility, after all these things, uh steer you off course. But anyway, so watching the Odyssey, I was like, ooh, on a macro level, it seemed like there was a huge theme, which appears in my writing, which is the hide and seek we play with God or divinity. How there is a grand illusion, and we only see little glimpses of divinity. And then, I mean, there's even a line in Odyssey. He asks, I think Calypso, or no, he asks Athena, why don't you just present yourself? Like, why do you make us do all the work, you know? And uh, so I saw that again, the tip of the iceberg thing, how the metaphysical is not revealed, and that's what the seeking is, is to find the iceberg. But then on a more I guess micro level, the return home to me, especially in this version, was you can't go back once the blinders are off and you've seen what human beings are capable of, meaning the horrors of war in this case, you know, he'd seen too much. All the men had seen too much. They literally had what we would call PTSD now. So I thought it was so relevant because there are a lot of wars waging right now, there's a lot of people returning home disillusioned. And what do you do with it? How do you go home after you've the blinders are off and you've seen too much? This was an instruction manual on how to return home. And I mean, if you resonate with any of that, what was the trick? How do you return home after you've seen the horrors of war? And I'm I'm using fanciful phrasing for a reason. After you've seen too much, the blinders are off. If you agree with any of that, how do you return home?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:57

I agree with all of this. I actually definitely think it's I definitely think it's a hero's journey. Um, I do I do agree with Campbell on that, on that level. It's definitely a human hero's journey, and I think it's more obvious in Nolan's telling than in the original because you you get to really watch, uh, for example, with the sirens, he's tied to the post and he says that he's I can't remember exactly what he says, but he basically is the sirens are the song is revealing to him all the atrocities that he's done, essentially, right? So it's it's this it's it's it's rewriting him, you know. And so it's he's definitely growing as he goes through until he gets to the end. Uh, I thought the coming home was fascinating, also. Um, and this isn't uh this whole idea that he gets there and then he has to leave. Um well, what did that mean to you? I'm curious. So yeah, so so exile. I'm gonna use a word that a lot of people might not like, and then I'll and then I'll clarify it. So the word is repentance. Uh now, most most of the time we hear the word repentance as you know, God has these rules, and uh, and if you're gonna repent, that means you're gonna stop breaking those rules and do the right thing. That's actually not actually what repentance is. What about redemption?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:07

Is redemption okay?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:09

Yes, repentance is um is is uh repentance is fixing it, and so that's what he's doing is he he go the reason his reason for going to the west is that he's done all of this horrible stuff, and he's uh and the even when he's in Hades, right? And they're they're like, You didn't even bury our bodies properly, right? And so he says, uh when I get home, I will go west to honor the dead. So he's he's making right what he's what he's broken. That westward imagery. I don't know if Nolan did this on a on purpose, but that westward imagery is extremely fascinating from a biblical perspective.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:49

Let's stop for one second, yeah. Uh, because you hinted at something too. He didn't just break the code of Xenia, he lied to Elliot Page's character, I don't remember the name, but he that was a bad law. The lying was bad, yeah. And uh he broke Zeus's law, supposedly. And yes, every one of them used free will to do the wrong thing, and like you said, maybe exploit or consume. But you just you said one more bad move they made. What was it? Oh, not burying the dead properly. So he literally broke code after code. So I just wanted to point out that's what I meant by betraying the self. Like they the whole journey was oh, here's an opportunity. I'm gonna give you a cyclops that represents this about the human condition or the collective human psyche. And so, you know, confronting one's demons, it's almost like Beowulf that's the quintessence. Of confronting the shadow of human nature. And so, anyway, I just saw it as an odyssey that we all go on, which is a hero's journey. And then one by one, you know, standing off or facing up with our demons as collective humanity and our individual demons, and then thereby eventually finally, hopefully redeeming ourselves, and that's the return home. I didn't like all the killing in this version once he got back home, and like, yeah, that's not the coming home I imagined, but I thought the true coming home, maybe, was the exile. So that's the surrender of ego, isn't it? Like, okay, I'm just old now and I'm gonna stop fighting and just be an exile. To me, that felt like a really peaceful surrender. So is the is the coming home because he killed so many people when he got home? I'm like, that's not how I understand homecoming to the true essence. That was maybe where the fixing you're talking about. That was the um repentance. I don't know what is the significance of because they referenced it earlier too. Penelope wanted to escape to the horizon. So, what is the significance? Is that the true homecoming? Is the exile?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:56

Yeah, I I I think uh I think I wouldn't have said it that way, but I'm I'm listening to what you're saying. I think you might be right because uh there they're also narrative is weird, so like um a lot of time like killing doesn't always need to be understood as killing because like with Penelope, you know, she's entertaining

Xenia, Hospitality, And Hebrews’ Echo

SPEAKER_00 1:08:15

because uh what's the son's name? Oh my gosh, I'm horrible with names. He he's he's like constantly like, Why are you having here? Yeah, Telemachus. He's like to his mom, he's like, Why are you having them here? And her reason is because Odysseus said to that that right, right, she needed to take a husband, so she's doing what's required by by how showing hospitality to the suitors, so she's recognizing that he hasn't come home and she needs to honor him and his wishes by having them there, even though she's not given up that he's not coming back. So she's sort of playing both sides. So when he returns, um, he he write he in a sense writes it by killing all the suitors. I don't love that either, because it sort of feels like uh I don't think this was Nolan's agenda, I think he was just telling the story.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:01

But like symbolically, maybe he was killing something symbolically.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:05

Well that's what yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Yeah, but he was with his wife, because he's the one who imposed that situation on her and on to Telemachus.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:16

Yeah, I think my only and I did love the movie, but I felt like that just went on too long. And that's the nature of our ADD society. Like, you gotta give them what they want, you gotta make the action adventure make them as long as possible. But I felt like that was too much emphasis on that. That could have been cut down just in you know, and then focus more on the exile, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:38

Yeah, yeah. No, the exile was really interesting, and Jamie and I have talked about a lot about this. My wife for the podcast listeners, um, about this. Also, the the going to the west is really interesting. First of all, it is what happens in that might be a shout out to uh the Lord of the Rings, because that's what happens at the end, sort of as they in we should understand, you know, the going get, you know, Frodo getting on the ship with the elves to go into the west. We should understand that as sort of an ascent to heaven. Um, and so it's it's after it's at the end of the hero's journey, um, uh, you know, sort of transcending the the base human functions of the world, like the the base humanity of the way that the world operates, which which is sort of left to our own pretenses to consume each other. So they're escaping that. So I think there's a reference there, but where that whole West thing in Tolkien comes from is actually from the Bible, and and it's a it's an inversion of a pattern that we see in Genesis, where Adam sins and he's set out of the garden to the east. He has kids, Cain kills Abel, Cain Cain goes into the wilderness to the east and builds a city. And there's always this whenever whenever like society is becoming fractured, you know, greater and greater fracturing, you're always seeing to the east Abraham when he sins with uh Sarah's uh concubine and and Ishmael is born, and that that causes issues with you know God's direction with Isaac, then he sends Ishmael and Hagar to the east, right? So, like it's always this eastward movement that represents the fracturing of of humanity, and so westward movement always symbol it symbolizes the reconciliation of humanity.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:28

Love it. So has it ever occurred to you that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:33

I I would guess that, yeah, sort of that like entering into the darkness versus coming into the light, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:40

Or just the destination, it seems like the sunsetting would be the goal, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:46

Yeah, I think that's just tying the the two points of darkness and light to east and west, I guess was my point. Um, interestingly, on most ancient maps, uh east is up and uh and so and and south is I'm sorry, west is down.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:01

And so really, I did not know that.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:03

Yeah, and I think if you want to tie that to like a heaven and hell imagery, it's backwards. But I've thought a lot about that, and I think it's uh I think it's supposed to say that that to go east is to actually go further who I'm supposed to be, and to go west is to become closer to who I'm supposed to be, right? You know, and I and I did one quick other comment. Um, you were kind of you kind of defined sin as that which takes you away from your true self or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:30

You said straying something straying from your true truth.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:34

I did want to say on that point, I don't actually think that's so different than what the Bible teaches. In that uh in in this, I would just put God as an agent in that. That the way that sin is constant consistently described throughout the Bible is not that God has some weird abstract set of rules that you have to follow or otherwise be damned. Like I know we hear that type of thinking a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:56

Well, Jews, sorry, so sorry, I'm gonna do this in Judaism. There's religious sins and then moral sins, right? That's true. But sins against God versus sins against all of mankind. That's the corollary that I make there.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:12

Yeah, I don't I don't actually think that. Um I don't I don't I don't see that. I mean, I think that could be something that's developed in contemporary Judaism. I don't really see that. Well, what was the distinction you just made then? Um the distinction I wanted to make was that it's not so different than what you're saying, except that God is an active agent, that God does define sin in the Bible, but he does so according to what will destroy man, right? Right and just to to what destroys uh uh human society and things like that. And so, especially if you understand God as the way that I was trying to explain it, um, to explain him, like we understand him as the as the supreme divine essence that everything is wrapped in. Um, which I do think there's personhood. I don't want to devote, you know, to any Christians listening, I'm not denying you know historical theology there, but the I do think there's personhood to God, but I think that uh what he's doing is portraying um his love to humankind by presenting moral law so that yeah, so by giving us moral law so that we know that as we stray from the moral law, that we're not offending God. I think that's something that's broken in the way that a lot of modern Christians talk about God's law. The problem isn't that we offend God, the problem is that because God loves us, it only offends him because it destroys humankind.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:31

Right. Well, that's what I was kind of getting at in terms of a propagating force. The creating, you know, the creator is the intelligent force that binds everything together. It wants us to persist, he wants life to persist. So I think we're saying the same thing using different vocabulary as well. I'm not as interested in splitting hairs, though. I think you hinted at the idea that God is in everything, right? Rather than we all have God in us. No, other way around.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:04

Oh, I would say that everything is in God.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:06

There you go. Okay, people get people love to get hung up on that one. I yeah, I think those are kind of dead end roads. Anyway, I hope we didn't force you into uncomfortable territory, but this is fascinating to me, and especially the way I don't know, uh, metaphysical truth is just always inherent in storytelling. I often read the academic consensus or the uh critical analysis of literature, and I'm like, Yeah, nope. I you focused on the fact that it's a parable, you know, like Lord of the Rings, which you mentioned. Oh, it's a parable for World War II. Okay, all historical romances, for example, have a setting. But I'm sorry, Gone with the Wind was not about the Civil War, it's a context for an emotional arc, right, that represents something very universal in the human condition. This setting is just the setting. But most critics go on and on about the superficial stuff, and I'm like, no, no, no, no. And I'll really because I know how artists think and I and work, and I know the creative process, and I know how inspiration arrives and then is executed. So often the critical analysis, in my opinion, is the furthest thing from the intention of the artist. I don't know if that makes sense, and then I'm I go even further, and I'm like, I don't care about the human condition as much as what is it saying about the expression of consciousness in the physical realm? Like everything is loaded. If you look, do you know what I mean? Experience it on that level, the micro and the macro both.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:42

Am I saying anything here? Yeah, you are. I think it's interesting. I listened to um a perspective on the Odyssey by uh an Eastern Orthodox symbologist named Jonathan Pajot. And he said something that was really interesting to me. He was like, We should, and he's an artist, he's a he's a wonderful artist, and his symbolism is off the rails. He understands symbolism like nobody else. And uh yet he goes, We should probably be careful, especially with like a known artist like Christopher Nolan, not to try to tell him what he meant by this by the story. Well, yeah, um, but instead to like try to understand what like it's fair to say here's what it means to me, um, but not to say here's what he necessarily meant, other than what he what he said, because I because he is an artist and he is so we should never look at anything in it as if it was like accidental. Well, that's and you know, that or to reduce to reduce the meaning to like this has to do with the war instead of something deeper and more meaningful.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:48

Yep, I'm with you 100%. And um, I would trace that back a little bit to literary criticism was birthed by liturgy. So if you decide you're gonna be the authority on what was divinely inspired, that's a huge responsibility, and literary criticism came out of that. So we're gonna analyze your story instead of wrapping our brain around your intention and seeing how well you honored that intention, we're gonna decide if it has literary value or artistic integrity. It's all very elitist. But I, in my opinion, just a great artist follows the muse, follows the inspiration, it lands how it lands, you know, whether it's gonna change one person's life or affect the

Giants, Sea People, Chaos, And Order

SPEAKER_02 1:18:35

entire trajectory of human dialectic, who knows? But um, I I do think there's an alignment. You listen to Tori Amos's lyrics, and you're like, again, it's that whole thing of like the more authentic you can make something, the more universally it will land, the more personal you can make it. You read her lyrics and you're like, what the F is she talking about? I have no context for this, and yet it magically resonates because it was authentically inspired, and then she followed that muse. It still resonates.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:05

I wonder if I was I was gonna say if I could ask you a question, doesn't because I'm I I'm I'm a better experiencer of art than I am a producer of art. The um d as an artist, would do you do you like um are you thinking through every little nuance or are you trusting that there's meaning even things even in things that you don't do intentionally?

SPEAKER_02 1:19:29

Wow, I love that. Um let's flop this. You interview me now now. I've done plenty of talking, but I love that question because number one, I agree with something you just said, which is there are no mistakes. Everything's by design. A great an artist who with a developed voice, anyway, right? If there are no mistakes, it's all by design, whether consciously or subconsciously. So we've heard it a million times. You go to school, if you take your journey seriously, you learn all the rules, perspective, light logic, color theory, or if it's storytelling, learn about the Western storytelling arc and the archetypes and the story templates, and but once all of that, maybe what you were calling form earlier is under your belt, it's kind of like you know you get to know the rules so that you can break them. So once you internalize all of that and let the dust settle and then just are free to pursue inspiration, I think it's all of the above. I think that a great artist like Christopher Nolan, I'm sorry, spends a lot of time structuring and honors the inspiration. You know, there's if you look at the creative process, there are seven accepted models of it. All the steps are similar, but they come in a different order and it's not the same for everyone, but there's some universality to it. So I think a great artist who has wrangled with the creative process does a lot of things intentionally, but I call them happy accidents. If I know where I'm headed with a novel, for example, if it was inspired, it tells itself all I have to do is be the antenna and do you know what I mean? Channel the initial concept. And yes, you bring in technique, it's so universal. It exists whether you're a violin player or a singer or a writer, you wrangle it, you bring in the technique to execute the inspiration, right? But I've said many times, if I know where I'm headed with something and I'm not problem solving in the writing or the execution of a novel, then my subconscious is free to bring in the organic, happy accidents that the universe literally provides. I could give you an example. But if you know where you're headed and you're not problem solving, the things I've given up on or never finished, and I think this is true of a lot of people, are the things where I didn't know where I was headed. And I hit a wall because my technique wasn't there or because I didn't know where I was headed. So if you have the structure and the lighthouses, then magic happens because your subconscious is free to do its job. So I'll give you two quick examples. A butterfly came in in one of my screenplays, just happened. I'm sounding a little bit like Madeline Lingle now, but you know, my technique mind goes, Oh, well, you clearly need to foreshadow that. So just don't analyze it, just be intuitive, but bring them in before. Okay, now you need to follow through and bring them back later because I sense that it has meaning and you know it supports the thematic content. I don't analyze it, I just bring the damn butterfly back. It became the strongest metaphor in the whole piece ultimately, not as metamorphosis or transition, which is the cliche, it was something entirely different. Does that make sense? But I trust you hinted at trusting.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if you didn't trust it, you would have you would have cut it, you would have gone back like let's redo the scene without the stupid butterfly, you know. Like if you didn't trust it, you would have you would have taken a different approach.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:55

Maybe, or I just sometimes don't analyze, you know, Madeline Lingle has said, Well, that character had to die. I I didn't plan it, it just took on a life of its own and it just had to happen. And she trusted that, you know. She, if you've ever read Wind in the Door or um, what's the other one? I said there's leaf blowers outside my window. Um, wrinkle in time, or trust those leaf blowers. Anyway, I loved Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door. There might have been a third one because she didn't do a whole lot of research, she just intuitively guessed at cell biology. Have you ever heard that? Yeah, and they say whether it's true or not, it could have been become a myth. But you know, Emily Bronte hardly left the house, and she wrote literally the quintessence of gothic romance. She wrote Wuthering Heights just from this internal reservoir of archetypes that I think we all have access to. I'm just using a bunch of terminology, but you know, I mean, you could reconcile it with cell biology and uh yeah, it's epigenetics, epigenetics. Sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:59

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think that's what I would have guessed, you know, that like you know, when you do something, uh it's not it's not purely relativist where somebody go somebody finds meaning in something you didn't mean to do, and therefore, like we should all take a postmodern approach that that there is something about the subconscious of the artist that's involved in it. It didn't come from your unconscious, it came from your subconscious. Your subconscious is your it's your intuition and your insight, it's how you've been formed and it's it's how you it's how you think when you're not thinking. And so yeah, so I no, I I totally, I totally that's what I would have guessed you would have said. I just I just wasn't sure because it sort of feels to me like if every single little detail was was purposeful, then we can then we can just let AI tell our stories.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:46

Right. Every artist should speak for him or herself. There's a lot of variation on the creative process, and I'm just one guy with one opinion. But I do think there are schools of thought, like we hinted at earlier, there's you know the new criticism. Jim Urbanovich is big on this. It doesn't matter the artist's intention, all that's significant in terms of meaning making is the projection and projections and the attributions of the patron. I personally love when I do a film like The Passerby, which you've seen. Yes, I worked it all out. I of course I knew what I wanted to say. The thematic content is not a byproduct of telling a superficial plot, it's the whole impetus for doing it. I'm different than some artists. Some just want to be a part of a tradition they love, like the books they grew up on or the films they loved as a child, and it's largely unexamined. I wouldn't write something if it wasn't inspired by either a concept or something that I wanted to express. Does that make sense? So the thematic content is not a byproduct, it's the whole reason for doing it. Having so I structure it toward that end. How can I best impart what I wish to impart? Not an agenda. It's going to be all sides of the thematic coin. It's not propaganda, so it's not an agenda, if that makes sense. But I hope I'm sophisticated enough and my voice is developed enough where I can do the hard work of structuring it, which allows me the freedom to, in the moment, on the sly, while executing, be more organic and use the intuition that you're calling the subconscious. I don't parse that much between the conscious, subconscious, and the unconscious. Uh I but I think when you say unconscious, you're referring to the Jungian collective unconscious. Anyway, the the point is I think all artists are different. I think their schools of thought on how important the intention of the artist is. But when I did the passer by, you know, I knew what the diamond meant. I knew some people have said the passer by himself was Christ. I love that. You know, offering redemption, like just appearing, you know, and ultimately leaving the tip, which allows her her freedom. There's all these words you can use. When I put out a book, so this the example is the diamond was beauty, truth, meaning, redemption. There's a number of things. Everybody that wrote in the book at the uh premiere, the rap party, got it right, but according to their own vocabulary. Right. I love that. So I'm like, oh my god, I didn't use an iron-fisted approach to telling them what to feel. You know, those like commercial films use the score to tell you what to feel at every single moment. I use a more hands-off approach and I allow them to have their own experience, but I just feel lucky that when people tell me what they got out of my films or even my writings, it's always right on the mark. So I did my job, but according to their own projections. I love that about the creative process.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:50

I think that's what I meant earlier when I was talking about how formalism leads to lead to the to the relative approach. So that yeah, so that hopefully I I do understand, like I am after what you tried to convey in you know, the painting or the movie or whatever, right? Or the book or whatever in the story. Hopefully, I'm after that, but that I can express that now very internally from my own position and my own story, and that's the relative approach. So the the formal leads to the relative. Instead of instead of the I can only imagine and as an artist,

Repentance, Exile, And Going West

SPEAKER_00 1:28:25

if everybody were taking a purely relativistic approach, and you're like, I'm gonna quit, like none of y'all are getting anything, you know. Right. I I would I think it would be devastating to me as an artist, you know, to to feel like nobody understands what I'm doing whatsoever. Why am I doing this? You know.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:42

Yeah. Again, I think all artists are. Different and their intention is different and the driving force is different. But I have taught, as you know, um, for 20 years, and I founded the entertainment track. So I've learned more by watching the artistic the chemine artistique, the artistic journey of others and their relationship with the creative process evolve. And I keep in touch with my students long after they graduate, so I see where they land and you know how things evolve over time. And yeah, I've come to some universal observations. And um, I do think you're gonna get a lot of different answers. My friend Rob Zabrecki came on, and he's uh he was the lead singer of Possum Dixon in the 90s, very well known, and now he's a magician, and he appears like every week you'll see him on NCIS playing himself. He's kind of a cultural icon. And you know, he he basically says, write for yourself first, and um don't worry about the outcome. And I do think it quickly becomes propaganda if you have an agenda. I think you can honor an inspiration and it maybe allow, like you were saying, allow your subconscious to do the work, and then it's going to be universal no matter what. I just think if things are loaded inherently, an archetype is gonna invite a lot of rejection, you can't control what people get out of it. But it is satisfying when they're on the mark a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:11

Yeah, yeah. I'm sure Christopher Nolan had uh objectives, you know, that he was hoping to get across. Um, and yet the fact that you can, you know, peruse the internet and see all these different perspectives on what the people think he was doing. I think I think it does prove that. Like I think everybody knows it's a little bit about like a modern commentary on war and the ties to Oppenheimer, and yet also at the same time, you know, some people are hating because they think he's saying something else, and some people are loving because they think he's saying something else. And I think that's I think that's just a demonstration of that interplay.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:44

Yep. Well, and it's done its job. I think he might identify as a provocateur, you know, and that's one definition of art is to start these conversations, start a dialectic to provoke. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I'm guessing he identifies a little bit. He creates a lot of in I did hear him say in one interview, I leave some ambiguity with an ending, for example. I intentionally want it to be ambiguous and open to interpretation. Now, some people would say, Oh, is it a happy ending or is it melancholy? Is it noir? What's the ending? Does it have a bow on it? He's just saying, I leave ambiguity, but you know what? I I know all the answers, and I have to know the answers. Whether it's interstellar, right, or any of his films, he knows the answers, but you're not gonna spoon feed it.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:32

Yeah, that's good.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:33

Okay, well, Anthony, thank you for indulging me on the Odyssey. I could backpedal and ask you some of the questions that I have on my list, but I think maybe in a year I should force you to come back on.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:45

That's all maybe not a year. It's fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:49

Uh well, it's all about you. I know you're very busy. So with that in mind, I'm really there's so much we could uh I think we we already went off in the weeds a little bit, but in a really good way. But I think there's so many tangential conversations that are yet to be had. So, yes, let's keep that in mind. But in terms of bringing this to a close, is there anything you feel inspired to impart? What I didn't get to is I really wanted to hear a little bit about your inspiration for creating. I'm just blown away by the idea that you're constantly writing books, and that is the creative process, by the way. But I also see it as your way of um remaining plastic, meaning brain plasticity, continuing to feed your intellectual curiosity and to discover, to seek and discover. Do you identify with any of that? And then my question is do your three how many books do you have all together?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:47

Um, I'm dropping a fourth one in October, and I'm halfway through a fifth.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:53

So do they have anything in common or do you feel they're a series? So those are there's a lot in there, but what drives you to write? And do your books have an agenda or anything in common?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:07

I mean, what every book I've written is for a different reason. The when I wrote on first Enoch, it was because a lot of evangelical Christians are like, that's demonic, don't read it, you'll get demon-possessed, or something weird like that. And I just wanted to kind of say, actually, there's some really interesting history here and some imagery. And so I wrote on first Enoch, um, mostly just for our church, just to educate them, and then other people start reading it. Um, I wrote on the gospel because that's just important for Christians. Um, that just seems pretty fundamental. Like, what did Jesus actually do and what's tied up in that um throughout the story of scripture? And uh that very that book very much is focused on story, but then it does become somewhat dogmatic at the end of every chapter, so you get kind of both. Um, so it's it's always always a different reason. Uh the um the book I'm in the middle of right now is rather interesting. It's there's a lot of themes involved in it, but it's it's tracing the narrative of uh Christ's descent into Hades and what happens in his ascent. And um very much it was so it's something I'd been studying. I had said something in a newsletter about it, and then a major publisher, I'm not allowed to say who it is yet, it's a very, very, very, very major publisher reached out to me and asked me if I'd write this book. Um, I'm not under contract yet because what because of summer and vacations and stuff like that. We're waiting for their board to get together, but um, I'm writing the book anyway. I'll publish it with somebody else if they or or self-publish if they you know if it if it doesn't come through. But that's they wanted they saw that I'm working on this already, and they it's a it's a big part of Mel Gibson's sequels to The Passion of the Christ that are coming out in May of 27 and May of 28.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:52

So I I didn't know those were in the works. Wow, yeah, yeah, those are in the works, and um this whole idea of the harrowing of Hades and uh Christ's descent and the conquering of the you know, conquering of the spirits and um the devil as the as the as the mouth of hell and all of these well if I could jump in beautiful imagery that's bringing together real quick because that is one of the many things we didn't get to is I'm intrigued by Christ's descent into Hades, and I don't know much about it, but it does hint at maybe the the corollaries I was talking about between pre-existing Greek philosophies and myths and Christianity. Do you see in all of that a corollary with Orpheus or who is the other one? Uh well, so I mean, the other the other one Well, I always get them mixed up. There's two big descent into Hades stories in Greek mythology.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:53

Well, so Persephone, Persephone, right? You know, she's being imprisoned there, and that's in my mind because of Hades.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:59

It explains the seasons, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:01

Yeah, and it explains the seasons because then she's released, but then uh Eurydice dies, Orpheus goes to try to rescue, yeah, rescue her out. Uh, Jesus is an anti-Orpheus, um, because he actually uh where Orpheus goes down into Hades and ultimately is unincapable, and he's told by Hades that it's not gonna work, even though he makes away. Um, when he he leaves Hades because he doesn't belong there, he's still alive. Um, he ultimately fails to rescue Eurydice. But in uh the Gospel of Nicodemus, where we see this story, this account of um Christ descent into Hades, uh, he descends and he and he rescues his beloved, the saints of they're all the saints of the old testament, David, Abraham, so on, right? But he he actually rescues his beloved out of Hades. So it's uh it's a it's an inversion that is that is absolutely in my mind, I can imagine not riffing on the on the Greek mythology there. But that's the Orpheus. I've mentioned Orpheus at least twice already in in in eight chapters, so I think a lot, but it's there.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:04

Yeah, it's just where my brain goes. Like there's some archetypal meaning to, and I don't think Hades is directly a corollary of hell, I just don't. But I think it's it's almost impossible not to make some comparisons. And in fact, when I saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, I was like, that's not the Hades I understand. You know, there's only so many ways to get there, number one, and so going where the river of fire meets the river of water is like a different way we haven't really seen to get to Hades. But then the idea of the shades being diminished versions of their earthly selves that just spoke to the really important value of cherishing life in Greek culture, a life above all else, you know, and there wasn't this glorified idea that you become your fuller self, that you're you know, that that death is just a transition and you, you know, and you return to your full spiritual essence. It's a diminished version. The shades are saying you better cherish life and every moment of it, if that makes sense. But then I read because I always thought Hades was a nice place, you know. Sure, you want to end up in Elysium or have immortality, but if not, yeah, Hades ain't so bad. So I think it's the archetype of the subconscious and where everything germinates under the surface. I have a whole section in my book about how Hades is the place where everything germinates before coming to fruition. So it's it's a fertile place. It's literally um, in terms of the uh what do you call it? We're both getting tired. We should the uh the the etymology, you know, it's uh it's the place from which the invisible realm from which richness derives. So, you know, fertile crops result from you know fertile soil, and then riches like diamonds and other gems come from the earth. So it's in my opinion, the archetype of the subconscious where all the meaning and truth resides before it comes to fruition, where everything germinates. But then I saw the Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's. I'm like, ooh, these shades are pretty creepy. Is it hell? Like, what is being said with Hades? So there's many views on it.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:19

Yeah, there's a lot that could be said there. I suspect that he I don't I don't remember that Hades was described exactly that way in the Odyssey, but I didn't read the whole thing recently, so somebody could correct me. Um, I think that that is a little bit closer to what you see in um some of the esoteric stuff. Uh, it actually shows up in Pirates of the Caribbean when they kind of go to Hades, it's something similar. Um, and the Pirates of the Caribbean being comes from yeah, the Johnny Depp ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can't remember which movie it is, but they actually go to the place of the dead, and it's very it's a very similar scene. And and that that imagery comes out of some of the some of the kind of the 17th, 18th, early 19th century esoteric literature, I think. So so who knows? But um, but yeah, I I I also thinking about Hades a lot lately, have kind of saw that scene and went, I don't know if that's quite right. Although I did appreciate the that there was still a consciousness and a reflection on life, which I do think is um fairly common for Hades in the Greek world and as well as SHEOL in the is what basically the parallel to Hades that's like you said, not a perfect parallel, but Sheol in the um in the uh uh biblical narrative. So yeah, hell is um hell is a actually very complicated term in English.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:39

I try to avoid it. Good, thank you. Yeah, we shouldn't open another can of worms, but I next time I would well, I would love to hear about it because you know my understanding is there's very few references to hell in the Bible, and some say it is just a trash heap outside of Jerusalem, right? It's a parable about don't get thrown on that trash heap, it's kind of ends right there, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:41:02

I I mean, in a sense, I mean, except it's uh that that gehenna, the trash heap, well the the place of burning dung and bodies and everything else is an image of is used as an image of the lake of fire, right? Which is which is also not a punishment uh so much as it is a a means of purification of the earth.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:21

So anyway, but that's and that's the gnashing of teeth that whole all those passages, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:27

I I don't um I don't talk about this a lot, but I don't I don't necessarily think that that image is meant to be portrayed as an internal punishment so much as a purifying uh about what exists and the purification of it, yeah. So yeah, I again we don't need to split hairs, but that resonates I think another episode could be talking about this, especially after I've finished this book. You know, get a copy in your hands, and we could there there's just so much.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:52

I would love to because I do think fire and brimstone

Christ In Hades And Anti-Orpheus

SPEAKER_02 1:41:55

is overrated, and you know, I think that um I resonate with what you said because I prefer to think that you know it's parabolic and you can create your own hell on earth that everything exists here and now. Do you know what I mean? You you can that is definitely another episode, but I brought up the books and the podcast to say number one, congratulations. I love that you're always seemingly seeking and discovering and then sharing it. I love that. And I briefly asked about the intention. I guess I just I can't resist. I have to say I liked your words, the enchanted corners of the Bible. So, in terms of the mission of the podcast and the YouTube channel, what are you hoping to impart to listeners or viewers about exploring those enchanted corners of the Bible?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:50

I I mean the big thing is I'm, you know, my sort of my, if you want to say mission, uh that sounds like a little overly formal, but anyway, my purpose is that I recognize that uh Christianity, and more so in certain sects and denominations than in others, but has been relatively disenchanted, like rationalism, um, especially. But uh yeah, it's just sort of the enlightenment thinking and it has deconstructed a lot of what's there to say, uh, because what I think the Enlightenment has done is not allowed us um an imaginary or or a uh tangible way to understand imaginary things, so much as it's sifted the imaginary out of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:34

Yes, I call it. Tell me if this correlates. I often say we've thrown out the spiritual baby with their institutionalized religion bathwater. Yeah, like there is a lot of disillusionment with institutionalized religion, and some of it is well earned, you know. Yeah, there were molestations, there were bloodbaths. I think it's kind of a rite of passage, and it's very fashionable. Do you know what I mean? To be a staunchly atheist or staunchly agnostic, and you know, and that's why we have that's why pop culture really distinguishes between a personal spirituality and dogmatic religion right now, right? But I think again, these are imaginary divides if we get over ourselves, and yeah, I think they are imaginary divides.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:17

I think it shouldn't surprise us to see that there's like sinful humans in position it, you know, operating within systems. I don't justify it that way, but I just don't see it as an evidence that everything is untrue. I think the system that I'm mostly skeptic of, especially regarding the enlightenment, is more the academy than the church. And actually, perhaps part of that problem is the separation of the academy from the church that happened during the sort of during the modern period. So that's a whole different historical thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:47

But yeah, I'm I'm you mean the way the way educat sorry, I want to make sure I understand that the way education has diverged from the academy.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:57

Okay, yeah, by the academy, I mean people who their job is to sit and think about uh theology and existence and stuff like that, and perhaps also to teach in the universities and stuff like that, but that's their whole job instead of uh historically like pastors, elders, whatever priests, whatever you want to call them, were the theologians, and so it was always a it was always a with the people process of theology instead of um the modern period produced this uh well well what we call the academy. Sometimes they're called the the you know the ivory towers, where people you know they're completely detached from reality, and their entire job is just to kind of you know mole over and think through and create systems out of things that ultimately what's produced is a denial of um the the true spirituality in the scriptures, and so yeah, just I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to tell the you know my limited audience and my my sort of circle that that's not the natural way to read the Bible, it's not the historical way to read the Bible, and it's not even a helpful way to read the Bible, right? Like, at least if it were producing something good, we'd be like, well, you know, but like I'm actually I just in the church I experience people that are more afraid that like if they sin that God's gonna be angry at them, instead of um, well, perhaps not so much in my congregation, but like you know, that's what I encounter more than people who really are just looking for a way um to be well, to use like sort of a motif of scripture, to become like the like Adam before the fall, to become like the person God designed them to be, but apart from uh apart from sin, or or you could say healed from sin is actually something a bit more beautiful than um you know that that says that we've gone our hero's journey and we've become who God designed us to be. And so that like I'm I'm seeing it more that way, like like it's about who I'm who I who I'll be in Christ, not the punishment I escape in Christ.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:06

Like I it might have been during the pre-interview in the green room, but I I I said sometimes there are grievances looking for a cause, you know, and there's also the idea that you don't beat the drum of a grievance, you create, you create the solution. So I love what you said, and I'm on board. Do you think it's important to challenge the academy for on a grassroots level is it important for ministers to do what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:47:34

No, because a lot of a lot of cults have done that, um, and that's not gone in good ways. Um, I actually think there's I you know, I think there's a place for the academy. I just would rather I just would rather see like I can think of some academics that I know who just like really love people and are also active in churches. So like I just I kind of want to just to see the the church and the academy come back together um more than to challenge the academy. Um, that would just be my thought on it, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:04

You know, uh again, I my dad obviously was raised Catholic, and as you know, there were many practicing Mormons on my mom's side. So, needless to say, nothing was imposed on us at all. And we all four of us kids just kind of found religion or spirituality on our own by some fluke. But I will say, in my limited experience with the Catholic Church, there's an irony in that we view it as all pomp and circumstance and ritual and a huge institution spanning centuries, but it can be the most earthy grassroots institution, really. Do you know what I mean? The Catholic charities. We've actually had a former nun on the podcast, and I find it very personal, if that makes sense. It's not all completely the pageantry, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:53

The pageantry, yeah. I mean, so our church, even though we're, you know, to be transparent, we're on paper Southern Baptist, but we're liturgical in the sense that uh not in the sense that you used it earlier, and I understand that usage, but liturgical in the sense that of story, like our services tell a story. So the the prayers and the songs and the the hymns and this and this the literal psalms out of the Bible that we sing are working through a story of what you know of what Christ is doing to restore humanity. Um, and so we're we're rehearsing that every every Sunday in our liturgy. Um, so I think story is very central, but that comes from a lot of the historical traditions, you know, uh the Orthodox, the Catholics, the Anglicans that came out of Catholicism and so on. Uh, evangelicals have largely rejected that for the silly reason that it seems like pomp and circumstance. But really, the Catholic liturgy is doing the same thing, it's rehearsing the story of at least their perspective on how they see the scriptures, and that's why they have all of the beautiful. What do we do? You know, we go to Europe and we go to all the churches, you know what I mean? Because we see there. Um, and I think I think the biggest failure is of the Catholic Church is that they they uh they're failing to teach to they're they're showing beauty without meaning. They're sort of being post-well, yes, yes, they're letting people go in and go, Oh, this is so pretty, here's what it means to me. And they've actually failed to like educate them literally the masses upon on the meaning behind it.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:19

Yeah, yeah. I think the first time I went to a communion, it was in Burbank uh growing up, and I did. I was like, I don't know Latin, number one. And like everything felt like it was being done by rote, you know, and there was nothing to feel, period. And so I developed that opinion early on that rich, but I love ritual now. I love routine, I love ritual, I think it's so important. But I will say this the first time I went to St. Peter's. Peter's Cathedral, you know, in Rome. I and any abbey, I'm sorry, in the French countryside. I saw a lot of churches. Aunt Marnay had a religious experience just walking into a little crumbling church in the countryside. Every church I went to in Europe, but especially St. Peter's Cathedral. I walked in and, you know, I was in my twenties. So I was bashing institutionalized religion like every 20-something year old. And but I walked in and I'm like, we can be as cynical as we like about the power structures or the early church and its agenda, blah, blah, blah. But there was some earnestness in that equation. You know, even though the artists were being commissioned to sometimes create fire and brimstone, they also knew sacred geometry. They knew how to build something that was awe-inspiring. I felt like you can't walk into an abbey like that and not have a transcendent experience or walk away inspired. So, do you know what I mean? I was like really pleasantly surprised that there was some earnestness. Yes, there's also corruption.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:48

But yeah, exactly. It's gonna, it's always gonna be both because it's human, you know, and um, you know, we're you know, it's you know, the wherever that corruption is, that's that's the sea people, it's odysseus, and hopefully they're coming, you know, they're coming to uh the West. But the um just to use that as an as a method, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:07

Thanks for bringing that back.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:08

I think that Christianity wouldn't exist if uh if it wasn't meaningful on some kind of uh you know ethereal, spiritual, you know, more meaningful than just utilitarian, you know. If it wouldn't exist if it wasn't more meaningful on a greater level, and so because we have utilitarian systems rise and fall all the time, you know. Um they're only you they don't they only serve until somebody you know leverages it in a way that it doesn't serve anymore, and then a new construct arises. But Christianity hasn't really done that. Um, and not to say that it hasn't developed and changed, it has, but um, but I just don't think strictly from a utility standpoint, and so yeah, so we can always find the beauty in it and all of that, and I think that that's what one quick story. Um, I know we need to wrap up, but um, we were in London this last winter, which was an interesting choice of time to go to London. But we went and worshipped at uh on we were there on us over a Sunday, so we went to Wells Cathedral in the city of Wells, it's a 14th-century

Reenchantment, Liturgy, And Real Meaning

SPEAKER_00 1:53:15

cathedral, absolutely stunning, beautiful. You know, the artwork, the stained glass, the iconography, the everything, you know, and the full liturgical Anglican church, the choir, you know, the Anglican choir, everything. Um, and and it was uh it was such a beautiful experience from from that perspective. Uh, but then like the the priest and one of the deacons, they both came and invited us to um, you know, to a coffee, coffee and tea hour afterwards, because we were guests at their church. So it was like it was funny. It was like small family church vibe, like our church, um, here at home, with just like this historical, um, it very much felt like at home, but in this very transcendent uh uh atmosphere. And it was it was just a very unique, I don't know what more to say about it. It was just so unique, and it reminded me that like both of those things are are are meaningful.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:11

Yeah, I I didn't protest Protestantism largely seek to remove not just the iconography and the false idols and all of that, but it really stripped down uh to a very minimalist approach that literally the church is and the whole um religion. Isn't that the whole idea between uh behind Protestant? I'm getting really tired. Protestantism is to remove the ceremony.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:37

Uh no, that's just that's actually something that happened a little bit later. Uh the it was it was papal abuses, really, is why Protestants left. The Eastern Church doesn't have a pope. Um, that's they were excommunicated by the West when the West appointed a pope, and the and you know, so it what we call the great schism. So if the the the reformers or the protestants, the original folks would never have left the eastern church. So, like I know you grew up with like I remember all of our Greek, you know, basically family, our Greek friends of the family, uh the the the reformers never would have left their church. Um, but in the Catholic Church, because of those abuses, the view the very human things that we were talking about, um, because of the abuses that were coming from an authoritarian structure, that they they basically they actually were trying to fix the Catholic Church and were excommunicated for it. So then that's where Protestantism comes from. Uh, it wasn't until the evangelical movement in the United States that um anything that looks even remotely Catholic started to get stripped out of out of the out of the worship. So, you know, because for example, Anglicanism still has all the pomp and circumstance to use the term, um, but they are a reformed church. Same thing with like Lutherans, they're very liturgical, they have a lot of imagery, um, even iconography in some some Lutheran, you know, synods, and uh so uh, but yet they they've just deconstructed the things that the reference that Luther you know wanted to reform.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:09

Got it. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Well, there's again so much to explore, but I think about 15 minutes ago we were bringing this to a close. So I will suffice it to say, if there's anything more you'd like to say about the idea of biblical reenchantment, I'm so fixated on that phrase. Please share, or just really about anything. Any closing words of wisdom?

SPEAKER_00 1:56:34

Yeah, I I would just say I'm gonna go with the words of wisdom and and just be slightly pastoral here, I guess, but just like don't get caught up in the day-to-day rat race to the point that you don't consider um fundamental realities, you know, like who we are as people. And I don't I don't I don't want you know, there's a reason.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:56

Is this pragmatic mean anything to you?

SPEAKER_00 1:56:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That everything pragmatic is for a purpose. And so, like, don't don't live a pragmatic life that where everything is for a purpose. It's a it's an old trope. It's like Jesus says that you know, if you go and you, you know, you're very successful in your harvest and you build bigger barns and you fill those storehouses, uh saying to yourself, then you know, in years to come I'll put my feet up and I'll relax. Um, and then he says, You fool, for tomorrow you'll die. And we you know, it's like it's like we don't want to get caught up in what we for some reason, so you know, it's like society is always putting this pressure on us to to produce something with our lives that just builds anxiety and uh it and it just feels fairly meaningless. And the only reason that we continue in it is because we have a hope of something future that like and what's that hope of something future? Like, I never want to just sit around drinking iced tea for 10 years straight, you know, watching the news. Like, nobody wants that life. So I think it's more about like understanding sort of like some of these fundamental human realities, like like learn to slow down and watch, you know, watch the world and to see the story of the world to consider the story of your own life, to learn from story, you know. I'm I think I'm I'm saying this partially just because I'm on your podcast, but really I do that's what that's what biblical reenchantment is about. It's about um not just living your life according to structures and expectations, but according to meaning. So build structures and have expectations, but let let let those be undergirded by the meaning. Beautiful, um, not just like societal expectations.

SPEAKER_02 1:58:41

Yeah, Virginia's gonna love this because she's a big fan of um logotherapy, which is Frankel and meaning making. You know, logotherapy is just all about meaning making, as is storytelling. So, yeah, thank you. Beautiful words, and um, I know there's a lot there. I'm gonna hear more later, and our listeners will definitely be inspired by everything you've shared. So, thank you so much. Love it, and I'm definitely happy to have you back. And there's a lot of anecdotes we didn't get to, like the lasagna, the lasagna and the mouse, and still about that. That'll be the next episode. But I also wanted to say, I think in the enchantment idea, somewhere in there is a really long conversation about how literal or figurative to take the parables in the Bible. And I just felt like saying, I don't know if you know this, but Carydad, your grandmother, and Alex, literally in the late 70s, before you came along, I think I remember Carydad saying literally, oh, in my sect of Catholicism, we're not taught to take it literally. Jonas did not sit, and who would have thought? But at least her sect of Catholicism, the Cuban, wherever, whichever sect that is, she said they were taught to 100% take it as a parable. But let's should we not open that can of worms yet?

SPEAKER_00 2:00:01

Seems like you I have a I have a simple response that we can talk about extensively at another time. I'm a I'm a big fan of uh using the biblical language to explain things. Jesus actually models that with Jonah, he uses the biblical language. Um, but so like using the biblical language, but then understanding the constraints of language includes the figure. So, like, I don't really care if Jonah was actually in the belly of a whale. Well, certainly it doesn't actually say whale, it says a great fish, but anyway, right? That's not what's important about that story. So, like, I actually don't even I just I guess I don't care about that. Like, none of us asked once whether anything in the Odyssey really happened historically, right? And yet we had a very meaningful conversation. So, my my my thing is like use the use the language the story uses so uh to the degree that it's that it's helpful and life-giving, and don't worry about um, I just don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:03

Thank you. Yeah, beautiful. Well, that it definitely means uh we did open a can of worms, but I'd like to bring in the giants next time you come on as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:11

Oh, yeah, that's my wheelhouse. Why I don't know how it didn't come up.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:14

Yeah, next time. Well, we talked about the life stragonians. That's true, yeah. And but I think you have an entire book about it.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:19

You know, I the the the watchers and the holy ones is about uh the the the watchers, the angels that came down, and the giants they produced. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:29

That'll be next time. There's a little cliffhanger for everybody. And that'll be dun dun dun. Okay, thank you so much. And um, I guess this is goodbye to our listeners. Remember, life is a story, and we can get our hands in the clay individually and collectively. We can tell a new story. See you next time.