Transcript

Our speaker this evening is the founder and director of Patristic Nectar Publications and the pastor of Saint Andrew Orthodox Church in Riverside, California.

A native of Southern California, Father Josiah Trenham was ordained to the holy priesthood in 1993 and earned his PhD in theology from the University of Durham, England in 2004 with a dissertation on the teachings of Saint John Chrysostom.

Father Josiah has recorded countless reflections, interviews, podcasts, and videos for Patristic Nectar Publications and other outlets, and has published numerous books and articles on Eastern Christianity and the teachings of the church fathers.

He and his wife have been married for over 30 years and have 10 children.

Please welcome to the Institute of Catholic Culture, Father Josiah Trenham.

Welcome, Father.

Thank you, Father Hessagias, and also you, Peter.

And brothers and sisters, I'm super happy to see you even on a computer.

Greetings to all of you.

Maybe we can pray, huh?

Please.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Oh, Heavenly King, Comforter, the Spirit of Truth who are in all places and fill all things, treasure of good things, giver of life, come dwell in us, cleanse us from every stain, inspire our discussion, and save our souls, oh, good one.

Amen.

Amen.

Father, the, uh, microphone is yours.

Forgive me for drinking coffee, uh-

That's great.

at this hour of the day.

Uh, I do it without shame.

Well, our subject, as, as far as I know it, is marriage, monasticism, and martyrdom in the early church, yes?

Yes, yes.

Uh, there is hardly a, a subject that is, uh, more juicy to me than that.

You know, when our Savior came to the Earth to save us and to redeem the world, he brought newness into fruition for the human race that had grown old.

We had been, for so many millennia, suffering from death, from enslavement to the devils and to our own sins, and even the greatest God lovers yearned for Christ to come and to break into what they knew as fallen reality and to take a, a TNT and just completely blow the whole thing to smithereens, which is exactly what our Savior did.

You know, in the classic icon of the resurrection that Father was mentioning earlier, the most reproduced icon of the resurrection is the icon of the resurrection from Chora in Constantinople, and it has the Lord Christ ra- ri- uh, raised from the dead with Adam and Eve being pulled out of their tombs.

But if you look closely also, underneath his feet are, are the doors of Hades, but they're flat.

They're smashed to pieces and they're flat because he kicked them in.

And then you see in the blackness of Hades, uh, you see at the bottom a hideous man who is death.

He's per- death personified, and he's now in chains.

The man who was chaining the world is himself now in chains.

And then little pieces of locks, like, are scattered in the background of, uh, this in- uh, infernal regions because Jesus just did a number, an absolute number.

Death ate him, and then he ate death.

Death thought it had in its grip a man, and found itself face to face with God.

That reality, the reality of Jesus' sacrifice, his plundering of Hell, and his destruction of death and his resurrection, this is the reality that has made all things new.

The life that we know as believers, the life that Jesus offers us is completely a new reality that flows from his saving acts.

So this is the first thing that I want to say.

This is why Saint Paul says in his second epistle to the Corinthians, Behold in Christ a new creation.

This is what has been accomplished.

And that newness, which has its root and its expression in the church, the church is simply God's rule on the Earth, the continuation of the incarnation, uh, on the Earth, that place where men who are in the grip of death can come to breathe, to live, to be joined to Christ himself and become a member of the family of God, to experience life, uh, resurrection life, to commune on the deified body and blood of Jesus and to participate of the life of the Kingdom of God now.

This is all the fruit of Jesus' saving deeds.

And even the noble way of life in the Old Testament, noble marriage of the righteous .

and family life went through a radical, catastrophic, uh, redefinition, uh, as a result of Jesus' saving deeds.

Of course, our Savior shows this, demonstrates this by working his first public miracle at the wedding feast of Cana in Galilee.

There, uh, he, by his very presence, showed the lawfulness and the dignity and, uh, of marriage and that marriage would continue, but he also showed, besides the fact that marriage is holy and from God, and something that he himself would celebrate and did celebrate, he also showed by his presence what marriage would become in the new covenant, what actually would take place to marriage as it was known by the righteous in the old covenant, how it would be radically transformed by his presence.

He demonstrated this by performing his first public miracle, by demonstrating that a husband and a wife and Christ was intended to be transformative, to become a place of miracles, and he also demonstrated it particularly by changing the common stuff of life, water, natural marriage, into the finest of wines.

The way that he did this miracle confused even the, the guest master, even the man who was in charge of the feast, who said that usually people served their best wine at the beginning and then after people have had a few drinks, they can get away with watering it down and s- serving the cheap stuff.

He said, But you have saved the best wine until now.

And that is a- a covenantal commentary.

He has saved the best for his coming.

Now that Christ has come, uh, marriage and love has been, have been raised to a whole new level.

And, you know, in ou- in, in our tradition it sa- it said that the, the couple were Simon the Zealot and his wife, and that the presence of Christ in their life turned their marriage from an earthly focus into, uh, a missionary focus.

They ended up becoming apostolic missionaries in the world.

And let me speak a little bit about that con- that conceptual transformation from what someone could expect in the Old Testament for marriage to what someone would expect in the church age, uh, after Christ had worked his wonders.

You know, if, if you read, for instance, fr- in the love, Moses, you could look in the 26th and the 27th chapter of the Book of Leviticus, the third book of Moses, or you could look in, uh, the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy, for instance.

You would see there the promises that God made to his people if they were faithful to him.

If they loved him and they bound themselves to him, God made all sorts of promises, marvelous promises, uh, that inspired the people of God in the Old Testament.

He made promises about long life, about fruitfulness, that they would have lots of children, that the children would be healthy, that their fields would bring forth, uh, beautiful crops and be free of devastation, that they would have political peace, victory over their enemies, protection from war.

Those are all nice things, but notice the commonality between them.

The promises were promises of the earth, very earthly.

Promises that we would all be happy with, I think, but promises that are beneath the Christian.

The shock is that Jesus did not teach that way.

He shared the theme with Moses of motivating the people of God by promises, but the actual promises themselves, radically different.

Now, Jesus didn't promise long life.

He promised eternal life and probably an early death by martyrdom.

He didn't promise that everything is gonna go well.

He promised just the opposite.

He motivated people with eternal promises.

He, he promised paradise, he promised heaven, an inheritance of the Kingdom of God, and he promised hell for those who would betray his father and would not keep his words.

That emphasis upon the great escholo- eschatological end of a, of a transformative vision that wasn't focused upon the earth, this is the core of the movement from the ethics of the Old Testament to the ethics of the New Testament, and it had a deep impact upon how marriage was worked out.

That same movement from earth to heaven expresses itself in the ambition of marriage.

Marriage remains something on the earth.

We still live together.

We still have a home, a, a certain essentiality of possessions, but the ambition of those who are married becomes a heavenly one, right?

Jesus addresses this right smack in the middle of, uh, his most famous sermon, The Sermon on the Mount.

Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything on the earth will follow.

Put your focus there and not here, and the here will take care of itself.

And how that has worked itself out in Christian marriage, how that has produced saints in the state of marriage, um, is a radically new thing.One of the expressions of this newness in marriage is that a certain way of being in the Old Testament is now beneath us.

There were thir- certain permissions that God gave, uh, to His old covenant people, for instance, divorce.

Jesus addressed the, this subject of divorce and He said, The reason that God allowed it is because the hearts of the people were so hard, God granted them divorce.

But He said, With you, it's not that way.

Those days are over.

This is why we don't talk in the Church, n- you'll never find a Holy Father talking about so-called Judeo-Christian ethics.

There is no such thing as Judeo-Chri- there are Jewish ethics and there are Christian ethics.

If you mean Judeo-Christian ethics, what you mean is that, uh, in a, in a correct way, I guess you could use it in a correct way if you mean the progression from the old covenant to the new covenant, not as though we share a common ethics with the Jews.

We don't.

Uh, Paul calls that way of life, the Jewish way of life, a child's life, child's play.

Uh, it's not the Christian way.

Christian, uh, the way of life is much, much higher from that.

Matter of fact, Jesus said with regards to the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, He said, If you don't surpass that, you're never getting in.

It's never happening.

So the best of the old is beneath the worst of the new.

So here, this is an example of the, uh, of the radical Christianization of, of marriage, how marriage moved and became a servant for the supremacy of Christ in our lives, a servant of the Kingdom of God and heavenly ambitions.

Now, something else that took place when Jesus conquered death, and, and never lose, dear ones, never lose your awe at what Jesus did to conquer death.

It's very hard for us to get into the mentality of all human beings before the resurrection.

We who have lived for 2,000 years, our families who have been Christians for so long, for us, living on this side of the resurrection makes it very, very difficult for us to have a sense of the despair of the, of the dark cloud that hovered even over the minds of the righteous in the Old Testament when no one, literally no one had ever conquered death.

Only two had been spared it, Enoch and Elias, the great prophets, they had been spared it, but they didn't defeat it.

Matter of fact, the Church has never even known where they are.

We have no idea where they are, except that they're with God somehow.

Some fathers even think that they're the, they're the two witnesses promised to return in the apocalypse and that then they will be slain by the Antichrist and then participate in Christ's resurrection.

I don't think that's a teaching, so to speak, of the Church, but it's a, it's an opinion.

Sounds like a pretty interesting one, actually.

But no one had ever gotten into the ring with death and won.

Every single person before Christ, even the greats, patriarch Abraham, Moses, uh, they had all gotten into the ring with death, no matter how righteous they were, no matter how much they loved God, and they were all slain, KO'd.

Death was absolutely the uncontested champion, never before defeated, until our master, the vanquisher of death, the conqueror of every sorrow of ours, our Lord Jesus Christ actually got in the ring.

And then, the most overconfident, death, was absolutely defeated.

Death died.

Christ strangled it out, choked it out, literally KO'd death.

The catastrophic change that that provoked cannot be underestimated.

We have to get into the mentality of those who lived prior to death.

Death held dominion over mankind.

Saint Paul says in Hebrews 2 that death was the great weapon in the arsenal of Satan, who kept people in the fear of death, kept them in the terror of what was coming.

Once it was gone, once it became a nothing for us, once we learned to, peh, literally spit on it like those who are preparing for baptism do when they are facing the west and they renounce Satan and spit in his face, that kind of Christian confidence caused paradise to erupt on the Earth.

It didn't just take marriage and unshackle it from its earthly reality.

It did that such that we, we touch the things of this earth lightly, uh, in, in the marriage estate.

We do what Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7 when he says, Look, I wish everyone was as I myself am, a consecrated celibate.

Nevertheless, every person has his or her own gift from God, one in this manner, another in that.

And he said, he gives counsel then for how to contract marriages, how to live in marriages, how to maintain sexual chastity in marriage, how to govern ourselves correctly.

And then he says, I want those who are married to be as though they were not, to make full use of the world, to live in the world, but to not make full, take full possession of the world, not to make full use of the world.

This is an incredible test, text that has inspired the Christian way.

How do we live in the world and not be dominated by earthly things?

We keep our hearts and our minds set on the things above, where Christ is.

We define our marriage in calculation to the relationship to the Kingdom of God, its growth in our life, and we use the things of this life, of this world, that are necessary and are constituent parts of marriage like, um, sexuality, lovemaking, a home, possessions.

All of those things, we engage and hold them in a way that's justified by the love of God and by their use, by their use.

So for instance, Saint John Chrysostom says, How should a married couple relate to their family home?

How can they actually own things, uh, and not be defined by them, not be shackled to the Earth by them?

And he said, Home real estate, architecture is justified by its use.

He said, A family should have a home that fits their needs like a good shoe fits your foot.

It shouldn't be too big such that when you're walking, the toe keeps getting under and tripping you, nor should it be s- too small that in the process of walking, you're in pain and so you don't wanna walk.

He said, It should fit you.

It should fit you.

And so, when you have children, you, you, if, if God blesses you to have a home that accommodates them so that you can raise them comfortably and they're not, you know, six people in a room.

There's been plenty of beautiful families that have lived that way over the centuries, no doubt, and God bless them for their piety.

But the idea is, uh, the things of this Earth, we justify our use of them, uh, and our possession of them by a proper use.

And he said also one of the ways to have, to be related to your family home and still have a Christian disposition on what's, on the Kingdom of God is he said, Take one room, if you have it, and write a little plaque, Jesus' Room, and put it above the entrance door, and then use that room for charity all the time.

Host people in your house.

Bring them over for hospitality.

Bring the, your priest to your house, traveling people who are believers who are going through, monks and nuns.

He said, Sanctify the floor of your kitchen.

This is the, uh, the counsel of the fathers.

He says, And keep a little box, a little ciborium, a little, uh, alms box.

He goes, uh, In, in your prayer corner, wherever you set up a place to pray in your house.

He goes, And always put money in there that you're gonna share with the poor before you pray, and God will sanctify your home, your whole home.

He says, Keep a little, uh, image of Christ by your door, and when you walk out of your house, kiss it and renew your baptismal vows when you go out of the house and say out loud as you go out into public, 'I renounce thee Satan, and all your works, and all your service, and all your pride, and I serve thee.

I'm loyal to thee, oh Christ.' He goes, This is the way to move from your family home into the world to serve.

He has so much beautiful counsel, uh, on how to Christianize marriage and the family home.

Super beautiful.

He talks a lot about the enthronement of scripture in the home, the conversations.

He gives us a lot of, a lot of advice on the kind of conversations to nourish.

He assumed families were always talking to each other.

That needs to be said, I should say.

In these days with these, uh, these crazy things that are always stealing our, our face-to-face interaction, he said, When, when fathers come home from the Sunday service, he s- he said, they should think about what they heard, the readings, the hymns, the sermon.

He goes, And they should twist it like a fine, like imagine that they had a flower that they picked from the, from the garden and, and they're walking home.

He goes, Twist it and look at it from different angles so then you can go home and talk to your family about it.

Tell them, summarize to your children.

Make sure they understood the word of God at, at the, at the Holy Mass.

It's a beautiful word.

So marriage is Christianized.

Monasticism reappears on the Earth as a fruit of the resurrection.

The fathers teach that virginity collapsed with the fall, that the state of Adam and Eve in paradise, which was one of a perpetual gazing upon God, one in which they were living in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and in the, in the grace of God and in a face-to-face communion with God which was their greatest honor.

That was absolutely destroyed.

And with it, la- with the disappearance of paradisal life and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, so went the life of complete consecration, so went the life of, uh, unsullied virginity.

And it didn't appear again except in, in a few lives of the prophets.

Um, people like the Prophet Daniel, who lived this way.

That, those, those prophets like John the F- Baptist, John the Forerunner, these, they were preparing the world for the explosion of virginity which took place, uh, in Christ's life, in his mother's life, and after the resurrection throughout the church, so much so that in the first three centuries of the church the numbers of Christians who became, who were baptized and then took up the life of virginity just exponentially increased.

So much so, uh, that the a- the apostles were planting it all over the place.

I mean, the life of Saint Thecla is a good example, uh, Saint Paul's spiritual daughter and the protomartyr of women, just like Saint Stephen is the protomartyr of men.

Virginity and the life of complete consecration grew radically.

Women couldn't form convents in the early centuries.

It wasn't appropriate for women to live outside of their father's home.

The cultures didn't sustain it, so they but many, many women lived as monastics in their family homes.

Men immediately began following the apostolic ways.

The apostles, most of the apostles lived this way and, and modeled it for us.

And by the time of Saint Anthony, who was the first to kind of organize monasticism in the desert, by the time that Saint Anthony was an old man, he died in 356, it's estimated that half, half of the Christian population lived in the deserts.

This was Saint Athanasius the Great.

Can you imagine?

For us, I mean, most of you are Catholic.

If you just go back to, let's say, 1950, which was kind of the apogee of Catholic influence.

I mean, Catholicism was winning America, and the number of monks and nuns, off the chart.

I think 95,000, something like that.

I mean, just unbelievable numbers.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen's catechizing 10,000 people a year.

I mean, that's what was happening.

Imagine that.

That was nothing compared to the fourth century.

If Saint Athanasius is right, and reasonably half of the Christians, half of the empire had become Christian, 30 million of the 60 million by around 350, and of that, half he's saying were, had already retreated to the desert.

Can you imagine?

No one had to justify becoming a monk or a nun.

Today, today families sometimes have problems if one of the daughters or one of the sons wants to become a monk or a nun.

And we priests, we have to like calm it, like calm it down , encourage the parents.

Uh, then?

No discussion.

You know what was being discussed in the first three centuries?

You know what was a threat to the church?

Many who were saying that marriage has no place for Christians.

Today, we have to justify monasticism.

In the early centuries, the fathers had to justify marriage.

There were so many zealous ascetics seeking the Kingdom of God that the temptation for some of them who had, uh, a, an inappropriate, uh, excessive concept of escholo- eschological reality, they thought marriage had been done away, that somehow marriage was exclusively an Old Testament reality.

In the Orthodox wedding service, the priest says, May He At the end when he makes his dismissal, the priest says, May He who by His presence at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee declared marriage to be an honorable estate, Christ our true God.

We say that.

You know why we say that?

We say that be- to answer people who thought monasticism was the only way, the only authentic way for Christians.

Now, the church considers that opinion heresy.

Saint John Chrysostom, in a treatise that he wrote called On Virginity, makes a, a, the classic argument from the fathers saying, As soon as you say that, as soon as you say that marriage doesn't exist, then you don't honor monasticism.

You actually insult monasticism.

Because monasticism's become, becomes, if, if marriage is illegitimate, monasticism is not a free offering of love above the law, above what's required.

It becomes required.

It becomes the only way that is acceptable in Christianity, so you're not doing any You're, you're actually taking away the reward of our monks and nuns who, though they could have married, chose out of, as a love gift to Christ to offer, uh, that devotion to Him and to give up the happiness of, uh, earthly Christian family life.

But the pendulum has definitely swung.

The pendulum has definitely swung.

But I want you to see, uh, just how normative and what a signpost monasticism is.

Monasticism is of the essence of the church.

It is brought into existence by the conquering of the devil and of death.

The fathers teach that the, the springtime of chastity has come again, and it's a witness to the, uh, the dic- man being dignified and being raised to a certain level such that now even, even the dividing line between the monastic estate and the Christian marriage is very thin, such that there's a, a natural symbiosis between the two states.

Without marriage, there would be no monks or nuns.

Marriage is the, is the fruitful field of the divine husbandman, Clement of Alexandria says, and the children are, are the fruits of that field, of the seeds sown in the maternal field.

And it's from that harvest that mo- monasteries exist.

And then monasteries, monks and nuns retreat from the world, not because they despise the world but in order to root themselves in God and then join God's embrace of the world.

This is the symbiosis between, uh, marriage, the marriage estate and monastics.

And in practice on the ground, uh, our monasteries are supported by the- generous contributions, not just of children, but of money and time of the married, and then the monks and the nuns pray for us and offer us their constant, uh, devotion.

And so you have this mutual support.

And that line, that thin line of separation between the married state and the monastic state is also demonstrated by the, the fact that many Christians throughout our history who are married have chosen to embrace the monastic life later in life, especially after the death of a spouse.

They might have lived for many, many years in marriage and, uh, as we hope to do with our beloveds, but then when, when your flesh, your heart is taken by Christ and goes across the veil, a huge part of you has gone there, right?

She or he with whom you are one flesh has moved across the veil into the kingdom of God and your life will never be the same.

Saint John Chrysostom says when, uh, one spouse reposes in the Lord and the other remains, he goes, For the one who's remaining, he says, imagine This is, he goes, Let me describe what your life is gonna be like.

It's gonna be as though Jesus, from the right hand of the Father, leans down to look at you and then He takes His hand and He extends it to you who have been left behind on the Earth and He says, 'Take my hand and step up higher.' It's a beautiful vision for the potential, the spiritual potention- potential that we have when we lose a spouse.

You know, what are the chances that two spouses are gonna die at the same time?

Minuscule.

Someone's going to be left behind in almost all cases и the spiritual potential, the promise that God makes to widows and widowers is, is not for no reason.

He makes all sorts of special promises He doesn't make to His children in general, to those who have been left behind and, uh, the incredible opportunity, this is why so many take it, uh, and become a monk or a nun after their spouse has reposed instead of doing, uh, the lawful, but usually ridiculous thing of starting all over again.

Y- you know, w- we, we priests don't stop someone from doing that if their spouse has died, but if they've lived many years, we certainly, uh, if we know what we're doing, we certainly don't encourage it.

We don't say, Oh yeah, yeah.

Get married again.

Start over.

Now we can, you can do that, but why not consider the potentiality of the moment and what Christ is going to offer you, uh, as a widow or as a widower?

This is why in the early church we had a whole class of, uh, of believers that was a list, a widows' list, and they gave themself to assiduous prayer and to charity.

When Saint John Chrysostom was a arch- was a priest of the church in Antioch, for 12 years he was the cathedral preacher there, and before that he served as deacon.

When he was deacon, he was in charge of taking care of the practical needs of the widows.

The church supported 3,000 widows in and around Antioch when he was a deacon.

Can you imagine the ministries that were driven by those women?

They formed the younger women.

They spent a lot of time teaching the younger women how to love their husbands, how to love their children, how to practice hospitality, how to do good to the poor.

They were in the churches night and day trimming the lamps, uh, making prostrations, fasting like Anna in the temple, uh, a- and we wonder why the, the church prospered so, is that we had this heavenly, this heavenly orientation.

And let me say, uh, thirdly, having said a little bit about marriage and the transformation of marriage and a little bit about this, the springtime of monasticism and the growth of virginity again as a result of the resurrection, let me say a little bit about martyrdom because that's the third subject, uh, that Father asked me to speak about.

Saint Athanasius the Great says that there's ultimately two proofs, two ultimate apologetics that have stopped the mouths of the pagans with regards to Christianity.

One is the eruption of monastic life, he said, And the second is the presence of martyrdom.

He said, The ability for Christians to consistently, century after century, die without fear and with a smile on their face can only be explained, in the history of mankind, can only be explained by the fact that death is no longer valid, that it's been destroyed by Christ.

And I'll give you an example, uh, of what the kind of thing he meant.

Remember, Saint Athanasius is writing in North Africa, huh?

A little to the west of where he was, in the city of Carthage, uh, lived an incredible, uh, community.

The priest's name is Saturninus.

This is, uh, at the time of the Decian persecution, 258 or so.

And the church is going gangbusters in Carthage.

The emperors have forbidden us to meet for liturgy.

It's forbidden.

We don't care.

We don't defy God, who has commanded the service, in order to obey governors or kings.By the way, we all A lot of us forgot that during COVID.

No public health officer has any standing in the Church of Christ at all.

We appreciate their medical guidance but when they start to mess with our religious obligations, the Christian attitude is, who cares what you're saying?

We'll obey God rather than men.

When they say you can't meet, you can't worship the Lord, I'm sorry, dream on my friends.

Dream on.

Not in 1,000 years do we take orders against God's orders from any man who thinks he has authority on the Earth.

And we have a long history of this.

This is why Christians were constantly being arrested in the first three centuries of the church because they were ordered by their civil authority not to worship and we did anyway because we don't view worship as something you do when you feel like it.

You wake up on Sunday and you say to yourself, Well, I wonder if I should go to church today.

No.

That is not how we wake up.

We wake up on Sunday and we say, Yes.

Thank you Jesus for the incredible honor of being summoned into your court, children of the King, to actually come to your table and to have that intimacy with you.

No, that, that's what we say.

Right?

That's what we say.

And so our brothers and sisters in Carthage were doing that and in the middle of the liturgy, there were 48 people at liturgy, Saturninus, Father Saturninus was serving the liturgy, and one of his parishioners was a young woman named Victoria.

And the soldiers busted in.

We had all sorts of, uh, door keepers back then.

We had We were spy We knew how to spy, like, make sure that w- but this time we didn't do a good job.

And they came in the liturgy, everybody got arrested and, uh, they all end up being slaughtered but first, uh, they, they tried to convince us to offer sacrifice of course.

It wasted their time.

We have the, uh, court records for the trial of Saint Victoria of Carthage, this wonderful young virgin.

Can you hold on one second?

Let me grab the record.

I have it actually right here.

So in the record we have the questions that the judge and his, uh, prosecutor were putting to her and, uh, it just tells you very much so the mentality of our brothers and sisters in the early church and what they thought also about death.

Uh, I- I find it just absolutely superb.

So the, the interrogator is saying, Why did you defy the emperor?

And so his name is Analinus and Analinus says, Why did you celebrate the Eucharist contrary to the imperial edict?

Hmm.

And Victoria answers, We cannot do without the Eucharist.

It is a foolish question.

Can you imagine?

She's getting interrogated and she's calling the man a fool.

It is a foolish question as if anyone could be a Christian without the Eucharist.

As there can be no Eucharist without Christians so there can be no Christians without the Eucharist.

It is the hope and salvation of Christians.

I was at the service and I celebrated it with the brothers because I'm a Christian.

This is the mentality.

This is the mentality.

No kowtowing, no shame, no fear.

She ended up being sent into the arena with the wild animals to be eaten and she was actually gored by a boar.

And the first time he tried to Uh, the first time the boar got her, he got her in the side and he lifted her Sorry to be so graphic, but, it is graphic.

He lifted her and he threw her and she a- went far away, she landed on the ground, she's of course bleeding terribly, but she's not dead.

And she was really concerned because she had Was all ready for the, she was all ready for the martyrdom and going to see her s- her Christ whom she loved, right?

Her bridegroom.

And she had her hair all just right and she had a big hairpin through it and in the process of being gored and throon- and thrown, the hairpin came out.

So she gets up, right?

She gets up and she goes, Stop, stop, wait.

And she looks for her hairpin, she finds her hair s- her hairpin, she fixes up her hair, she sticks it through and then she summoned the animals.

Come on, finish the job.

This, uh, this is the mentality of the church.

This is the beauty of martyrdom that won the empire.

This is why people believed, uh, that Jesus had actually done what we said he did because his presence in us is what has enabled us to live this way, both in marriage, by having a heavenly orientation and letting the things of the Earth be only justified by their use, by the erection of monasteries for monks and nuns and the explosion of that and the mutual support that monasteries and married people give to each other and by the marvelous courage and even joy of our martyrs who have considered death for the sake of Christ to be the highest form of love as, as our savior said, right?

No greater has, love has a man than this than to lay down his life for his friends.This is the Christian way and these are all sign posts, sign posts to the world to help in the conversion of men and women to the faith.

This is why for us dear ones, if we can live this way, if we can have that mentality, that heavenly mentality, then the Gospel succeeds through us.

I've told my parish more times than I can count, You wanna grow?

You wanna help people find God?

Love each other.

Be faithful to each other.

Live the mystery of Christian marriage, live it.

Make your marriage authentically Christian, not earthly, not Jewish, not Muslim.

There's a thousand competing visions for marriage, huh?

There's one Christian vision.

I said, Live a Christian marriage and you're not gonna have to say much.

Be faithful.

People are gonna come here and they're gonna go, 'Oh my gosh.' And f- forgive me, I used to say that without a lot of evidence, but, uh, I've been in my parish 25 years now and there's a lot of evidence.

Now it just the, the church is absolutely full of children and people come in and they ask to convert because they see the love of God.

It's not a you know, it's not gimmicks.

There's no gimmicks here.

We don't have any great plan, you know, for converting the world, but I mean, we have 80, that would be 8-0 catechumens right now that come up to the front of the solea to have prayer every Sunday, that are trying to get into the church.

And I don't make it easy on them either.

They have to go for they s- they spend at least a year studying and repenting and learning to confess and Why are they here?

I think the subject that we have today that we're covering today is the main reason that they're here.

They see Christ and We also have, at the parish, four, uh, of our parishioners have become monks and nuns over the years.

One of them has become, uh, was she was, she was a nun and then she ended up taking 12 nuns from her monastery, a- under the direction of her abbess, and going and repopulating a- a- another monastery that had gone defunct.

She just was back this, just this last weekend.

She came and she gave uh, s- multiple lectures here to our young people, to our catechumens, and to the whole parish, uh, after the Sunday liturgy.

And these, these monks and nuns, though they've been gone She s- she left here in 1999.

She used to be my babysitter for my She wa- she was the babysitter for some of my oldest children.

I gotta, I've gotta updo my, uh, redo my CV that you read, Peter, because I got four grandchildren now and those are the most important thing in my life, so I need to get them , I need to get them on that, on that thing.

Uh, but, you know, these, these, these monks and nuns, they never their, her life is prayer and they asked me to send, they asked, a- and my secretary, Martha, does it.

She sends them updates of everybody who's sick, everybody who's a catechumen, everybody who's having a crisis of faith.

You know, these they're constantly praying for us.

This symbiosis is a reality.

So that's my initial salvo.

Maybe I could stop for a minute and drink a little bit of coffee and you guys can ask me some questions.

I- thank you, Father, thank you very much for the gift of your time and being with us today.

Very, very honored to have you here at the Institute of Catholic Culture and I was getting uh, you know, you're talking about this, the stupid phone we all have sitting there, but I kee- kept trying to put it away because so many people were texting me how much they're enjoying your, your presentation today and, and, uh, especially our dear friends, reader Eric and Monica Ortiz and their new baby just born this past weekend that are here with us in the, uh-

Oh, congratulations.

yeah, here with us in the, uh, the program this evening.

Father Josiah, we've got quite a few questions coming in.

I'm gonna just k- try to combine two of them that are jumping out at me, if I can do that.

They're kind of a little far apart on my list here, but o- okay.

I'll, maybe I'll just do, read them both to you and you can kind of .

But what does a transformed marriage look like for someone who is, who's, who is just starting out, but resolves now to turn around a worldly marriage?

What steps can be taken in our home and in our life?

See if I can get down here to this other one.

Ah, I don't know.

It was related to that, but I think it gets to the point anyways.

You, you know, Father, there's a lot of people that are so we got a good group of people on here tonight, a lot of people that, challenged by what you presented, certainly challenged by the witness of the early church, but what do you do about it?

Because we find ourselves so oftentimes in this kind of almost trying to balance out we're in the world, we're s- we're doing all the things we're supposed to be doing with our f- you know, retirement and our jobs and our cars and our homes and all this, and we're supposed to be Christians on the side over here.

But this challenge of what you're talking about of this, this interdependence between monasticism and marriage and this submission to a, a, a heavenly end is certainly challenging to many.

That's a wonderful question, and it's, uh, just a exact kind of question that any priest speaking on the subject wants to hear .

After you hear something like this, the thought should be, How do I do that?

How do I do that?

And that's a question that God-lovers ask every day of every week of every month of every year until their last breath.

How do we do that?

And we're going to be doing that and deepening that for all eternity.

I mean, Saint Gregory the Theologian says that, Eternity is a progressive knowledge, like a circle that pushes out into con- to the heart of God that has no end because God's heart has no end.

You're gonna be learning about God, being conformed to his image, literally forever .

literally forever.

So get on the program is what I, the first thing I would say.

If your marriage is not formed in such a way that it is the plant, the central plant of your earthly existence that you're cultivating, putting into the sun, trimming when it needs to, you know, dead leaves are there, weeding.

If you're not doing that, then get in the, get on the program, 'cause your, your priorities stink.

Uh, so fix them.

Just alter your priorities and tell yourself that cultivating your marriage into something- that Jesus re- rejoices at Oh, look at that, my better half just called me.

To, to cultivate that menta- to get into a program where your marriage is about spiritual growth and it is about increasing your love and shepherding it as a stewardship before God, this is basic.

This is basic.

Some practical steps?

Well, let me just say, say two.

One is, since we're mentioning marriage, espe- especially in the context of monasticism, if you don't ve- go to a monastery, then change your life.

Go to a monastery.

Make, find out the, where the lo- a, a s- a serious monastery is near you and visit on a regular basis.

Go there, bring something.

Don't be a burden, right?

Bring something to offer to the monks or the nuns.

Pray with them.

Get to know people who have given their lives exclusively to the service of Christ.

This is normal for us.

This is absolutely normal.

And, uh, I know it's harder today than it has been in the past.

Uh, you might have to drive a little bit, it's, but it's worth the drive.

To be around people who, who smell like paradise, I mean, who, who literally spend all day trying to find ways, new ways to love God.

This is greatly encouraging.

Uh, and the second is to create what I would call, in your house, a domestic typicon.

A typicon is a word that we use in the Orthodox Church to describe the arrangement of the services.

The typicon, the ecclesiastical typicon tells you what hymns you're gonna sing on what feast day, how you combine them, what comes first, how it goes.

Uh, that's, that's how it's done in the church.

But every home should have a typicon, meaning that there should be a sacred rhythm that you establish with your family.

That's fundamental.

Uh, this would include prayers, family prayers.

When are you gonna do family prayers?

Your own kanona, your own personal prayer discipline.

When are you gonna do that?

How is it gonna relate to a time that you might pray together in the day?

What are you gonna pray before your meals or after your meals?

What are you gonna read?

What are you gonna, to collaboratively read and share with each other?

I mean, what services are you gonna go to at church?

Going to church on Sunday is nice, but my friends, that's a Protestant idea.

Orthodox and Catholic people don't go to church just on Sundays.

You have feasts, you have services during the week.

This is normal.

This is the way our people have always lived.

It's the greatest honor to be able to go, uh, and pray and be near God.

So create, create a, a typicon.

Have some intentionality, uh, in the cultivation of your family piety and build on it.

You know, one of the things that I learned very early from visiting a monastery is to ask forgiveness of everyone in the house before we go to bed.

So when we say our prayers, when we fa- say our family prayers, the last thing we do after our, after our night prayers And we say those night prayers no matter what, I mean, no matter what.

And we don't wait till the very end of the night to do them when the little ones maybe are already asleep and they can't stay up.

No, usually we do them, you know, relatively soon after dinner.

We gather, we say our evening prayer, and then one by one, uh, I'll, I'll kiss the icon of the Mother of God and then I'll come and I'll s- I'll take my place.

My wife will come and she'll kiss the icon, and then I'll bow in front of her, touch the ground, and I'll say, Forgive me, a sinner.

And then she'll say the same to me.

And then I bless her, she kisses my hand, and then the next child comes.

And they, they go to their, after they go to me, they go to their mother, they exchange a kiss of peace, they gi- they give each other's forgiveness.

That's how we've lived in, in our home for 35 years.

Saying, asking each other's forgiveness, and then the chances that your sleep of peace is gonna be a sleep of peace , whew, goes way up.

You're not carrying any burdens and there are no bitterness into, uh, the night.

You're not letting the sun go down on your anger, in the words of the sage in Saint Paul as well.

Uh, so those are just some practical things that, that you could do.

Father, Teresa Cotter's writing in asking, uh, you referred to several church fathers on, uh, Christian marriage.

Is there one or two works that you would recommend, specific writings?

For sure.

For sure there are.

I, I, in my dissertation, which I published under the title Marriage and Virginity According to Saint John Chrysostom, that text, besides having a deep dive into what Chrysostom says, uh, it has a 70-page, uh, introductory chapter which surveys the teaching on the church through six major figures in the first three centuries.

So if you wanna know more about what the early church thought about these subjects, Western and Eastern, you can look in that text, Marriage and Virginity According to Saint John Chrysostom.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Father.

Really appreciate the time you've spent with us today.

It's been a blessing to have you here at the Institute of Catholic Culture for the first time.

Yay.

And we, we hope it's the first time of, uh, many visits here to be with us to teach us really beautiful insights, very challenging words.

So with that, Father Josiah, could you please, uh, close us with your blessing?

The blessings of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be with you all tonight and forever.

Amen.

Amen.