The Fundamentals of Being an Orthodox Christian Man (PODCAST - FULL TRANSCRIPT)
Equality is Bad — Patriarchy is good — Masculinity in the context of the Orthodox Christian Faith — Paul Lloyd Robson & Fr. Joseph Gleason
PODCAST
Masculine Relationships — with Fr. Joseph Gleason
On this episode of As Iron Sharpens Iron, Paul Lloyd Robson interviews Fr. Joseph Gleason, "The American Orthodox Priest who moved to Russia". This is the third installment in their focus on relationships and Paul uses the interview as an opportunity to get in behind the politics and delve into the values on which we base our understanding of manhood in relation to others and society. Topics covered include:
- The false dichotomy between the macho dominant man and the pushover weakling
- Pornography and selfish desire as a barrier to human connection
- Marriage as a picture of Christ and the Church
- How pornography and homosexuality are the same type of perversion of God's gifts
- The path to mature masculinity requires travelling alongside other mature, godly men
- The false dichotomy between judging others and accepting everything
- Sins of ignorance and sins of presumption, and Paul's personal example regarding abortion
- King David and his example of sin and repentance
- How society deals justice towards unintentional sin
- How the word “Patriarchy” sums up 2000 years of wisdom about how to be a man
- Why hierarchy is better than equality
- Lastly, a practical approach for men to look after your woman and "stomp on the head of the snake"
To ask questions or get in touch with the hosts of As Iron Sharpens Iron, please join their Telegram Group here: https://t.me/isipodcast — Please tell them Fr. Joseph Gleason sent you.
Full podcast transcript below . . .
As Iron Sharpens Iron — a podcast for men, encouraging masculinity according to the Orthodox Christian Faith
PODCAST
NOTE: This transcript is longer than allowed by some email applications. If you received this article via email, part of the transcript may be cut off. To see the full transcript, read the full article online: https://movingtorussia.substack.com/p/being-a-christian-man
FULL TRANSCRIPT
As Iron Sharpens Iron gathers leading voices in the recovery of authentic manhood according to the teachings and practices of the Orthodox Christian faith. Father Michael Butler, Father Hans Jacobse and Paul Lloyd Robson are on a mission to challenge and inspire with content, interviews, and guest speakers specifically for men. Here they are with today's episode.
Welcome to Iron Sharpens iron. My name is Paul Lloyd Robson. I'm your host, and this is going to be an interview with Father Joseph Gleason. He is the American Orthodox priest who moved to Russia together with his entire family.
And we're about halfway in our first season of this podcast. We're dealing with the fundamentals of being an Orthodox man. We use the term the “three P's”, which is Practice, People, and Purpose to frame that discussion. And this conversation is going to be about people. So that means your relationship with other people.
And I also decided to use the opportunity of interviewing Father Joseph to get in behind a man and understand him from a deeper level than just why he decided to move to Russia, and what is it about Russia, and how's life in Russia, and all that kind of thing. Father Joseph is, of course, a man who is not at all afraid to speak his mind, and he's also a man of action rather than ideas. I asked him for this conversation because I've noticed on several groups that I'm a member of, that there are a lot of young men out there who really appreciate his input. I think there's a kind of masculine directness and power to the way that he speaks, especially about sexuality and relationships, which I think a lot of men are yearning for.
So of course, it's important to note here that Father Joseph is talking to an Orthodox Christian audience. I'm used to talking mainly to non-Christians, actually, in my work, and I really appreciate the clarity with which he's able to engage with these topics. For example, in the conversation coming, he sums up 2000 years of wisdom on how to be a man with one word. And it's a very you know, it's a it's a really powerful approach. And he's also able to engage on topics such as homosexuality without any hesitation. And I think that's really appealing for a lot of people. So with this interview, I really wanted to investigate to see behind the high level stuff and see if I can get into some reflection and depth as to his insights and his ability to be able to explore topics together.
And I want to mention now as well the elephant in the room of this conversation, which of course, is that it's happening across a widening schism. Father Joseph is sitting in Russia and I'm sitting in Denmark. And so we're increasingly realizing is there's a war really happening between Russia and the West right now. Many Western leaders are calling it a necessary defense against tyranny. Jordan Peterson has interestingly called it a civil war in the West, or especially within Christendom, I guess you could call it.
And I personally believe that in a situation where we're likely seeing the further escalation of conflict, even to the possible point of nuclear war, there's a real value in trying to create better communication across this divide. And I think our shared frame of reference of Christianity is a good place to start that. So for non Christians, this conversation might be very alien. A lot of these points would certainly require some more explanation to be able to understand them. But there's definitely a lot of things in this conversation that could be offending people.
So I want to make it clear that I am a Danish citizen and I really appreciate living in Denmark. I have based my life here, I have my children here, I have my home here. I'm even a member of the Danish Home Guard. So in the Home Guard, we regularly talk about defending that which is close to us. And I really, I'm there with my whole heart. Denmark is actually a constitutional monarchy. And so our head of state is the queen. It's the queen of Denmark. She is actually in the same family and stock as the Russian Tsar’s family of Queen Dagmar. And just a couple of days ago, I was listening to the Danish Queen's New Year speech together with — almost the whole population of Denmark listens to the speech — and I heard it together with my parish where we celebrated New Year's Eve together.
And so we were a group of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Moldovans, people from all different walks of life, also Danes, of course. And we were just very touched and moved by what was a very balanced, insightful, and powerful perspective on the conflict at the moment. So I hope that this conversation can play a little bit of a part in bridging the gap and starting a deeper reflective process about how we're bringing together the different values that are splitting apart in the West right now, and being able to gain a deeper understanding of of views that are different from our own. So here goes.
Paul Lloyd Robson:
Father Joseph Gleason, welcome to Iron Sharpens Iron! Where I wanted to start was, we have this massive movement through the culture, through media, movies, everything about kind of deconstructing what it means to be a man. And so what I see increasingly is people swinging between two kind of caricatures of being a man. The one is the macho, tough guy who has who's on top of everything and knows how to do everything. And then the other side is like the very vulnerable, soft, sensitive, nice guy. So how would you say how does one navigate between these two extremes or caricatures?
Fr. Joseph Gleason:
Well, it's a really good question, because one of the things that the devil loves to do — and he does it through his through his minions, through his agents in society — and that is to give us a false dichotomy, two choices which are equally wrong. And then he presents those as if those are the only choices. And this is a good example of that.
So, what should a man be? A big, macho, “my way or the highway”, “give me everything I demand”, or the nice guy, you know, the pushover, the wimp, the guy that just kind of smiles no matter how how hard you kick him, and no matter what happens, he just lets everybody else walk over him. And the truth is, really, neither of these is a picture of the biblical man, the man that God created in his own image.
Neither of these is a picture of Christ, and we can see that just on the basic level, just by looking at the life of Christ. Christ was no wimp. He was no pushover. Yes, when the time came, he allowed himself to be crucified. But that was on his terms at his time. How many times did we see them try to kill him? And he just walked through the crowd like nothing was happening. It was easy for him to escape when he wanted to.
You know, when he was going to heal that guy of the withered hand and he's there — this is in Mark chapter nine in the Gospels — and he's healing the guy with the withered hand, and the Pharisees are standing around, and they're just cold hearted. They have no compassion for this guy that needs to be healed. And it says that Jesus was angry with them. You know, Jesus — the perfect man, the God-man — had anger, and he didn't need anger management classes. You know, Jesus, the God-man, saw money changers, bankers in the temple where the worship of God was supposed to be going on. They were in there trying to make a profit, and he became angry and he pushed over tables and he got a whip. That means this was premeditated. And he drove these guys out.
He was very manly, but he wasn't somebody who is just always demanding his own way. Nobody looked at Jesus and said, “Man, there's somebody who's selfish.” “There's somebody who is just determined to get whatever he wants, and he doesn't care about anybody else.” And quite the opposite, he had everything, you know, sitting at the right hand of God in heaven as one of the members of the Trinity. What didn't he have? He had the whole universe. He's the one who created it. And yet he takes on the form of a servant. He takes on human flesh. He willingly suffers. Now, you want to know what manhood is about? We're kind of discovering it right there. It's willing to suffer for a good purpose. He willingly suffered so that he could save those that he loves. So he wanted to obey his father in heaven. And he also wanted to save us and to accomplish that suffering.
And he was willing to endure that for our sake. So he was never pushed around. He was never a wimp. He was always outspoken. And yet when the time came, he was willing to suffer and even to die to to save those that he loves. And I really think that's what we need to do.
We need to get away from this false dichotomy of a big, tough, demanding guy or a wimpy guy, because ultimately both of them are childish. Both of them are self seeking, whether we're talking about the 35 year old guy who, you know, the proverbial guy that plays video games and eats Cheetos while he's in his grandma's basement. Okay, well, what is he doing? He's saying, “I don't want to get out in the world. I don't want to face anything. I just want comfort, comfort, comfort.” It's selfish, self-centered. But likewise, the guy who's working out and he's buff and he's ripped and he's getting out there and demanding his own way for everything and saying, you know, he gets all red pilled and he wants the girl to just come to his side and do whatever he demands. And what she wants doesn't matter. It's his way or the highway. Well, that's selfish, too. And Jesus is neither a pushover nor is he macho. But the deal is he's not selfish. He is somebody that's willing to get out there, suffer for a purpose, work hard. But he's not doing it for himself. He's doing it for somebody else.
Paul:
Yeah. Yeah. That's such a great insight, that it's actually the same dynamic that's happening with both of those people, and this understanding of Christ that you said like it was on his terms that everything that happened to him was done. So yeah, one of the things I noticed was all of the examples you gave, is like it's it's all how we appear socially. It's an interaction with other people that our manhood comes into play somehow or our way of being as well. And when we spoke about that, then in our first conversation, we were planning this podcast. Then there was one issue that very quickly came to the fore as standing in the way of us reaching intimacy with other people. And so I thought, well, why don't we just get that out here right in the beginning as well? Because it's something that I think a lot of men struggle with and battle with, and that is, of course, pornography, which is a major issue. What is that? And if one is facing that kind of thing, then if one and wants to start working on one relationships, how does one start dealing with a habit of pornography?
Fr. Joseph:
Well, it comes back to, are we living life for ourselves? Are we just completely selfish creatures who are out to fulfill our own selfish desires, and not to relate to any other human being in any other way unless it benefits us? That obviously is not what a Christian is. That's not what Christ is. That's not what the followers of Christ are. And C.S. Lewis and many writers have talked about how a problem with pornography and obviously the sorts of self abuse that come with that, is that it's completely, completely selfish activity, because for all practical purposes, there's no other person involved.
Now, yes, you've got the people that are the actors on the screen, doing whatever they're doing, but they're not actually in the room with you. There's no involvement with them. As horrible as it is, as sinful and wicked as it is to go see a prostitute, that's actually less twisted than what happens in our mental mind games that go along with pornography. Because whenever you're just alone in a room and you're watching something, or you're just in alone in a room with your pornographic thoughts, because those are ultimately where the problem are, what are you doing? You're basically just with yourself. You're not with another human being. You're not relating to anyone but your own selfish desires. So it's literally the opposite of what God created sexuality for, which is literally to come out of yourself and to engage intimately with the other, in this case, your wife.
But it also fundamentally, it actually ends up being a Christological heresy. If you really want to use the nine-dollar theological words for it, it's not just a psychological problem or a health problem or an interpersonal problem. If we're going to talk as Christians, it's even more serious if we mess up what the Church is, and we mess up who God is. These are theological heresies.
And how could there be any connection at all between pornography and a Christological heresy like Arianism or Nestorianism or something like this? Well, we must understand what marriage is. And I don't mean what it should be, or what it could be, or what we imagine it might be. I mean, what it is, what God says that it is, because he created it that way. And multiple times, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, God says that marriage is a picture of God and his people. Marriage is a picture of Christ and the Church. Now, even if you're not a Christian, that's still what it is, because even if you do not subscribe to Christian beliefs, you are still created by the Christian God.
You know, it's sort of like people who grow up not knowing who their parents are. They still have them. Do a DNA test, and you find out this guy over here is your father. Well, he's been your father the whole time. You just didn't know it. And so it is with marriage. You know, you can be a couple of atheists in a marriage. You can be a couple of Muslims in a marriage. You can be a couple of Buddhists in a marriage. You may not know that Jesus Christ is the one who created this institution and who created the joining together of man and woman into one flesh. But the Christian God is still the one who created marriage, and marriage is what you entered into.
And so your marriage is a reflection, for better or worse, of God and his people, of Christ and the Church, whether you like it or not. Now, it can be a good reflection of them, telling the truth. Or it can be a bad reflection, telling lies. But what it cannot be is not a reflection. So any time two people get married, they're living out their lives telling the world this is what Christ and the Church are like, and they're either telling the truth or they're lying about it. And God created sexuality as an integral part of what marriage is. It's the joining together of two people into one flesh.
And I realize there's the one-in-ten-thousand case of the monk and the nun who are saints, and they're married, and they live as brother and sister. But that is definitely an edge case. That's not the norm, not the normal world that most of us live in. So I'm not going to deal with that case.
99.99% of the time, marriage is where a man and a woman come together in a commitment for life, and they come together as one flesh. And so that sexual union, that joining together in one flesh, that marriage as a whole, that relationship is a picture of Christ and the Church.
And so if you distort that, if you twist that, if you put a man and a man together, this fiction of “gay marriage”, that is not only an abomination, it's not only nasty, it's not only a sin, it is also a Christological heresy, because it lies about who Christ and the Church are in their relationship with one another. The relationship between Christ and the Church is not like two men pleasuring each other in a bed, because there can be no fruit from that. There can be no fruitfulness from that. A woman and a woman cannot be a marriage, because that cannot picture Christ the Church. Again, there can be no fruit from that. Two women, even if they say they're “married”, there's not going to be any children born from that union.
And exactly like so called “homosexual marriage” or “lesbian marriage”, whenever you have a man by himself in a dark room with some filthy pictures in his head, and then he does what he does, it’s exactly the same. It's not going to be fruitful. There's going to be no children born from that.
Many years ago, there was a pastor I was listening to, and what he said just really struck me. He said: When a man is doing that, he's not having sex with a woman. He's having sex with a man. So the act itself is fundamentally in the homosexual realm.
And that may be shocking to some men to hear that, because they're like, “Well, I was thinking of a woman in my mind.” But think about it. If two guys were together in a so-called homosexual union, but at the moment, they have pictures of women in their minds. Would that make it okay? Well, of course not. It's just fundamentally pleasure seeking, strictly for the sake of pleasure, with no view of the future, no view of fruitfulness, absolutely no view of this picture of Christ and the Church. And so not only does it distort a person and their psychology and their relationships, but it actually is a Christological heresy, and distorts our very understanding of who Jesus is and what his relationship is to the Church.
Paul:
I sometimes say it's like a short-circuiting of Eros somehow, right? Like, it short circuits. And what I'm also hearing you saying — tell me if this makes sense — is that God has provided a model, a blueprint, a plan of what paradise looks like. And so the Christian path really offers us an opportunity to model our lives on that. And so us rejecting that blueprint and saying like, “Oh, no, I'm going to do it this way,” whatever my reason is, it's really just myself that it's going to hurt.
I wonder what you think about… I remember when I was younger, when I was a teenager, I once asked my dad, I reached the age where I was struggling with sexuality. And so I said to my dad, I said, “Dad, are sexual sins worse than other sins? Or is it not? Or is less?” Or something like that. And he kind of said, “Yes, yes, it's worse, and no it’s not worse,” or something like that. He gave some arguments about it. I think also C.S. Lewis spoke about this as well, where he actually said something along the lines of, because the sexual sins are so obvious, they're not as hidden as like, you know, pride and self indulgence, or more of the hidden underlying things as well. The sexual ones are not as bad, but the dangerous thing about them is they create habits that that can really create a lot of shame and kind of like a feeling of starkness as well. That's what it is as well. But what are your thoughts about that, Father Joseph?
Fr. Joseph:
Well, it's important to remember, there’s a whole range of sexual sins, all the way from — You have Job in the Old Testament, I believe it's chapter 31 where he says, “I made a covenant with my eyes not to lust after your young girl.” So at that level, you're walking down the grocery store aisle and your eyes notice a magazine off to the left that's just not quite modest. And instead of bouncing your eyes and looking away and saying the Jesus prayer, you kind of stare for a few seconds and admire something that you should not admire.
Well, that's sexual sin. It needs to be repented of. If you do not repent of it, it can cause much worse problems later that day. But at that level, have you done a sin that is greater than theft, greater than murder, greater than adultery? No, I don't think so. But it certainly can lead to things that are very bad.
But let's word it a different way. Are there sexual sins which are worse than almost every other sin? And I would say to that, “Yes.” If you read Saint John Chrysostom — and you know, we're Orthodox Christians, and we look at the teachings of the Holy Fathers — he wrote a great corpus of writing. I have not finished all of it, but so far I have only found two sins that Saint John Chrysostom picks out and says, “That's worse than murder.”
So that's pretty bad. Even our modern, degenerate, laissez faire, “anything goes” society looks at murder as a pretty bad thing, looks at it as something that — if you go out and in cold blood, you just kill somebody — yeah, you need to die, or you at least need to be locked up forever. And Saint John Chrysostom, one of the greatest saints, one of the greatest teachers of the Church, said that abortion is worse than murder.
So you take and kill an innocent child while it's still in the mother's womb. You are worse, not equal to, but worse than a murderer. And that should get our attention, because abortion is pretty widely accepted. Not universally, thankfully, but it's very widely accepted today. And we need to recognize that if a woman kills that little baby in her in her womb, or a doctor helps her with that, that is something worse than murder. That is something that's very wicked.
And the other thing is homosexual acts. St. John Chrysostom picks those out. And I'll tell you, people say that I preach pretty hard against homosexuality, but I'm really just a nice and easygoing guy on that subject, compared to Saint John Chrysostom. If you really want to be scandalized, if you really want to hear a hellfire and brimstone sermon, just go read St. John Chrysostom’s commentary on the book of Romans, specifically his fourth homily. And it's free online. You can Google it, and you can read it.
And he says that homosexual activity is worse than murder, because he says if you murder somebody, you only killed their body. But their soul may still be innocent. Their soul may still go to heaven. But whenever you engage in these kinds of acts, you murder them both in body, because that kind of lifestyle often leads to death, and you murder their soul. That’s assuming this is a consensual act, that basically these two people are not loving one another. They're doing the opposite. They're engaging in an act which is eternally harming one another. And Saint John Chrysostom actually calls it worse than murder.
So I'm not going to say that all sexual sin is somehow less than this or that or the other. There's some of them that really have a very great weight, and which require a great deal of repentance. And thankfully, with baptism, confession, and communion, God is able to forgive any sin, including this. This is no exception. So, I even have some family members who fell into that kind of lifestyle, and it's no exception. In fact, I know a monk. I know of a couple of monks, in fact, who lived that type of homosexual lifestyle, repented of it completely, came out of it, and became very godly men, very godly monks in the Orthodox Church. So it's not unforgivable, but it is serious. It's a big deal.
But you also make a good point. I mean, these are very visible, obvious sins. And we don't want to fall off in the other direction and say, “Okay, as long as I'm avoiding the physical obvious sins, as long as I'm not physically with another person doing something, then it's not so bad,” because you're exactly right. Just simple pride — that's the one that gets all of us. Pride can destroy anyone. Unkindness, lack of love, just cold heartedness to our brothers. You know, these things can destroy our souls just as well.
The devil is perfectly happy to drag you to hell if you are completely pure sexually, and you never look at pornography, you never look at anything that would taint you in that way, but you just refuse to forgive your brother of his sin. You hold a grudge, and you just refuse to forgive. The devil is perfectly happy to take you to hell for that, rather than for the sex. So we need to keep both perspectives alive at the same time, and not fall into a false dichotomy. Yes, sexual sins can be extremely serious. Yes, they can condemn you, but there's also a whole lot of other ways that the devil can get us.
Paul:
Yeah, Yeah. And certainly I think in my own life that shame has played a big role in creating knots around my heart, to not be able to move forward as a human being. And especially for most of my adult life, actually, I haven't been a Christian. So I've actually been an atheist. And I think there was a deep unconscious sense of shame, coupled with just rationalization based on a culture which, you know, doesn't just accept, but promotes and glorifies a very kind of radically different sexual morality, which leads to a lot of confusion and ignorance and difficulty for a lot of guys.
And so what I've really seen is needed — and this is a big part of the reason we're doing this podcast — I'm using this phrase: “Men need men.” In order to move towards mature manhood, we need other mature men around us who are examples. And then in our previous conversation, I really appreciated how we were able to expand that. You of course, there's like men who are your spiritual father, your priest or father confessor, you have other men in your parish, but we also have all the saints as well. And so . . . we spoke a little bit about comparing it to, like, if you want to be a football player, then how do you look at how you associate with other men and professional football players as well as as a way of of being able to learn the right principles and approaches to living?
Fr. Joseph:
Well, before I give this analogy, just to be very clear to all the listeners, if you're wanting to conquer sexual sin and live a godly life, looking at professional football players is generally not the best way to do it. But simply as an analogy — it's amazing how when we're dealing with almost any other subject, you know, if you're talking to people about what it means to be a man or if you're talking to them about what it means to be a good parent, it's like they treat this totally differently — but on any other subject, it's almost intuitive:
If you want to be a great football player, what do you need to do? Well, you need to study great football players. You need to have them as your heroes, somebody to look up to. You find out: how do they eat, how do they work out, what's their training regimen like? How what's their story, what's their life story? What were they like as kids and teenagers, and how did they get to be where they are now? And and it's not just with sports, it's with anything.
You look at people that want to become great military geniuses. Well, what do they do? They study at West Point. They read the books about the great battles of history. They read The Art of War. They they read all the literature. They try to meet other men who are good at these things.
If you want to be great in politics, what do you do? You study the great politicians. If you want to be a great speaker, you study the great speakers and if possible, you meet them in person and you ask them questions and you try to watch them and glean from them what they're doing. And it's the same way with great chefs.
In almost any field, people just intuitively understand, if you're going to be great, you're going to have to rub shoulders with the great.
And this is no different. If you're going to be a good parent — and we can talk about that another time — but if you want to be a good parent, you can't just do whatever you think is good for your kid. You have to get around good parents and learn from them, not just the stuff you agree with, but the stuff that maybe is the opposite of what you thought. But you look and you say, “Hey, these parents know how to parent!”
Well, it's the same way with just being a man, just being masculine in a godly way. There are 10,000 examples in pop culture of what it means to be a wimpy man, or what it means to be a self-centered, lustful man, or what it means to be a macho, self-centered man. If you are going to have any chance at all of being the same and swimming upstream against that current, you are going to have to get around real men and learn from them.
Now, in centuries past, you know, you weren't really the “salmon going upstream” for that. It was just part of culture. If you grew up on a farm with your family out in the country, and you watched your dad out there being a man every day, working his tail off just to support the family, or you saw your grandpa working hard in the coal mines, you know? You looked around town and you saw many men that were working hard to keep their families alive. And you said, “Okay, this is what it means to be a man.” You saw the men work hard six days a week, but then on Sunday, they're all in church and they're worshipping God. And you say, “Huh, this is how to be a man.” Unfortunately, at least in America and the West, you can't just do that in culture anymore. You can't just look around you, see what all your neighbors are doing and say, “Oh, that's what it is to be a man.”
Because now all of your neighbors are idiots, you know? They're 40-year-olds playing video games in the basement. They're “macho” men who are working out and sleeping around and doing their own thing, you know, being MGTOW men, if you know what that is. And yet they don't know the first thing about self sacrifice. They don't know the first thing about living for something higher and more important than themselves. And you certainly don't find most of them in church on Sunday anymore.
So what do you do? What do you do in a world where everybody around you is trying to push you towards hell? Well, you diligently seek godly men. You hunt them down. You climb over every hill. You look under every rock. You look behind every tree, until you find a godly man, and you grab hold of his ankles and you don't let go until he tells you how to be like him.
And how do you do this? You read the scriptures, instead of playing video games. You read the Church Fathers. You read what the Saints said about how to be a godly man. You find somebody in your community, or if you can't find anybody in your community, you find somebody online who is an Orthodox Christian, who is a godly man who is setting in a great example, and you go and you beat his door down, you know, you beat a path to his door and you hit the doorbell and you knock until he answers.
Or you find his email address and you say, “Please help me. I'm in the dark here. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” And he'll either help you, or hopefully he'll at least point you in the right direction and say, “Hey, I know this priest in your community,” or “I know this online group of godly men, or at least men who are trying to be godly. They're struggling in the right direction.”
And that's where the community comes in. You get around men who are either on the same path as you, trying to get godly, and you spur each other along, or you get around — even better — you get around men who already have succeeded in this. They're already living it. They're already demonstrating godly manhood and masculinity. And you say, “Teach me. Show me. What do I need to do, so that I can do what you're doing, and be like who you are?”
Paul:
Yeah. Now, one of the big challenges that I have in my own life, I would say, is meeting men at an eye-to-eye brotherly level. And I think it's hard for me, actually. I understand on a theoretical level that it's our goal to see Christ in every person that we meet, and somehow to see the goodness in them. I think I should try and do that even with people who are not Christians as well. And it probably leads me to take a little bit too much when you say that “everyone around you is an idiot”. I just read Saint Paisios in one of his spiritual councils books, I think Virtues and Passions. I'm busy reading, and he said this tendency to not see the good in other people is a real loss for you as well. You think you're better than other people, and so you don't see the goodness that's all around you as well. And so that's that's a real difficulty for me. I would say that I have a tendency to judge, and I think a lot of that judgment is probably actually holding me back from becoming a better person myself.
I was just reading in Matthew seven, where this passage says don't judge others, where Christ tells us this. And it's really hard for me actually to kind of unite that with, for example, like the martyrdom of Stephen, where he's telling these people, “you killed Christ! . . .” So how does one avoid, again, the caricature of being a judgmental, fire and brimstone Christian, pouring wrath on your neighbors, to also see Christ in people who maybe haven't grasped the fullness, or never had an opportunity to understand, you know, who God actually is.
Fr. Joseph:
Well, that's an excellent question. And it's just another place where, unfortunately, modern society and even a lot of us in the modern church, we've kind of lost our moorings, we've lost our ground, we've forgotten where we came from, or have forgotten the examples that were set for us and even written down for us.
Certainly we should see Christ in everybody. That's very important. Even if you have a muslim neighbor, an atheist neighbor, you should find Christ in them. You should try to understand what's good about them, what is shining through of Christ that can be appreciated. Even in the case of masculinity, you will find that there are some atheist husbands who are really, really good to their wives, and really work hard and sacrifice, and try to do good things for their children. And if we see that, then of course you praise that. Of course you see the good in that — you see Christ in that.
My statement was more of a generality, that however a person may reflect Christ, doesn't mean that they reflect Christ in every way. And specifically on this point of masculinity and godly manhood, I think the majority of people today, unfortunately, are idiots. And I don't mean to say that they're evil people and that God doesn't love them. I don't mean it in that sense at all. I mean it more in the sense of just ignorance. And that's the good thing about ignorance, is that it can be fixed. You know, you can learn your way out of ignorance and not be ignorant anymore.
It's in the same category as if you're wanting to get a really fit body. You know, you want to have a thin waist, big chest, big muscles, and you want to be ripped. And you look around, and if 90% of your neighbors are wearing triple XL T-shirts and spilling out of their clothes, you're not being evil and judgmental if you recognize that these aren't the particular people you want to go to for advice about what to do in the gym.
That's not judgmental. That's not looking down on them or thinking yourself better. I mean, you yourself might be worse than them. You might be 400 pounds and be in a 5x T-shirt, and you might be way more overweight than all of your neighbors. But you still look at them and you say, “Oh man, these are just not the people I need to be going to for a personal trainer.”
And so you use wisdom. And when you say, “Look, I'm going to turn my life around, I'm going to get fit, I'm going to get in shape, I'm going to look good,” what are you going to do? You're going to go to the gym, first of all, not to the Little Debbie Snack Cakes factory. And at the gym, you're going to find a personal trainer. And you know, he looks pretty good. He looks buff. And you say, “Okay, I want to be ripped like you. And you're giving lessons. I'm going to sign up for some.”
You're not being judgmental to your neighbors when you do that. You just recognize, “Hey, all the people on my street are fat, and I don't want them training me, so I'm going to go to the trainer. I'm going to go to the guy who's at least made good progress on this road. You know, maybe he's not Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he looks way better than myself and all the neighbors on my street.”
And so that dovetails into this really good question that you bring up, which is, what do we do with Matthew chapter seven? “Judge not, that ye be not judged, for with the judgment that you use, you shall be judged,” right? Well, it goes a little farther than that. First of all, there's Christ saying a funny statement. He says, “you hypocrite, you've got a plank in your eye, and you're trying to pick the little speck out of your brother's eye.” He says, “Take the plank out of your own eye.” And then what? He says, “and then you'll see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.”
Paul:
Mm-hmm.
Fr. Joseph:
Now, this is crucial. This is important. It does not say, “Now, don't go picking specks out of your brother's eye.” That's not what Jesus said. All Jesus said is, “Do things in the right order.” Don't try to pick the speck out of your brother's eye before you get the plank out of your own.
So if you're buried in pornography and you can't find your way out, you are not the one to be giving purity advice to your brothers. Not yet. Just zip your lip. Keep your comments to yourself. Fix yourself. Take that plank out of your eye.
But guess what? Once you've taken that plank out of your eye, Jesus tells you just the opposite. He says, “No, you go take that. You can see clearly to take that mote out. You can take that speck out of your brother's eye.”
So it's funny, the very passage that people use, trying to say, “Don't try to tell your neighbor he needs to change anything, don't try to point out the sin in your brother,” ironically, is the actual passage where Jesus says to do that very thing. He just says to get the plank out of your own eye first, before you do that thing.
And once again, Saint John Chrysostom, he's my hero. And he addressed this head on, because this question has been around ever since Jesus said it. I mean, people have argued and discussed about how to understand this “judge not that ye be not judged”. And Saint John Chrysostom, in his commentaries, he deals directly with this, and he says that this is talking about nitpicking. So if you're going to try to pick out every little flaw in your brother, you're going to wear yourself out and him, and you're going to alienate everybody. And don't do that. Don't do that.
But what if your brother is contemplating entering into an adulterous relationship, violating his marital bonds and getting in bed with some other woman that seems more exciting to him now? What do you do? Would you say, “Oh, well, I don't want to judge”? You know, that's an effeminate response. That's not a godly, manly response. Saint John Chrysostom said, “it is for this purpose that God gave you a mouth, that you may correct your brother.” I'm going to say it again. “It is for this purpose that God gave you a mouth, so that you may correct your brother.”
So telling your brother that he's 5 pounds overweight, that's nitpicking. Keep your mouth shut. Telling your brother that he should have come into the church via the Serbians instead of the Russians, or whatever — just don't nitpick. Just don't even worry about things like that.
But if somebody's thinking about pornography, somebody is thinking about adultery, somebody is thinking about contraception, somebody is thinking about stealing money from their boss, from their corporation, somebody is thinking about sending their kids off to some government school that's going to teach them atheistic evolution and spend all day trying to turn them away from Christ, these are not nitpicking things. These are not tiny little things that you just brush off to the side and say, “Oh, I'm not going to judge.” When you're talking about major, crucial things that separate us from God and destroy relationships and separate other people from God, woe onto us if we do not open our mouth and talk to our brother about these things.
Paul:
Yeah. Yeah. And I really like that you say — I mean, for me, especially in a man-to-man, my male friends relationships — there's a real space for for doing that. And I want to kind of cultivate the kind of trust and brotherhood with my male friends, where we can address those kinds of of things directly.
I think that when you use the word “nitpicking”, it really makes a lot of sense for me. I think I nitpick the most about thoughts, and my own projections about people's motivations for doing what they're doing, where I kind of see someone doing something and I question their motivation, and I see all kinds of dark, shadowy things. And I realize a lot of the time, well, probably I really don't understand what's actually happening in their internal world and why they do what they're doing. And and so, yeah, I do that mainly with my wife I guess as well.
Fr. Joseph:
Yeah, that's a huge pitfall for I'd say basically almost all Christians. That's what the Holy Father's called — Well, they had various names for it, but when the Holy Fathers talked about this, this event, this thing that happens where we want to judge other people's internal thoughts, the word I see most used is cunningness — this idea that you can look at your brother's actions or your sister's actions, and just by looking at what they did, you can figure out what they were thinking at the time. You can figure out what they meant by it. That's super dangerous. And most of the time you're going to be wrong.
Most of the time you're going to get in big trouble by going down this path. And what is the difference between that and what we were talking about? There are cases where an outward activity is objectively a sin. It's objectively wrong. It doesn't matter what they were thinking at the time. A perfect example of this would be adultery. It really doesn't matter what your intent is. It doesn't matter what justifications you had in your mind or what was going on. If that woman in bed with you is not your wife, then I can objectively look at that and say, “This is sin. This is wicked. You must stop now.” And I'm not saying anything about what you were thinking at the time. I'm not saying anything about what you meant by it or intended by it. I'm just saying God said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Don't do this. Same thing goes with pornography.
Paul:
Yes, there is a — let's take abortion, for example, because I was in a relationship probably ten years ago, where I had a girlfriend and we were living together. And we had a conversation where I said to her, and this was based on that. — I actually don't really believe that anybody had at any time, clearly, to me, laid out the argument against abortion, even when I was a kid. I remember asking my parents this, and they said, “Well, we don't really know.” This was, you know, in the eighties. I grew up in South Africa, and it wasn't a big subject there. It wasn't something that was carried on. So I grew up in a Christian home and my parents said to me, “We don't really know.” — So as an atheist in my twenties, you know, I say to my girlfriend, “Well, if you get pregnant, you're going to have an abortion, right?” And she said, “Well, I don't really know about that. I'm not sure.” And I'm like, “Well, what? Like, of course we can't have a kid right now. Right?”
And so, when I look back on that right now, I can see like there was a self-centeredness, a lack of taking responsibility, a boyish playboy kind of, you know, total irresponsibility for my actions, and then I’m trying to push something terrible and dreadful which I know today is incredibly traumatic for people when they do it. Especially the woman, of course. Right? I was trying to push this onto her. And thank God that she never fell pregnant, because it never happened. But, you know, that could have happened as well. But I also see what you said about, you know, it's not because I was an idiot, but I was certainly very ignorant. And that caused me to do a very idiotic thing. Maybe I wasn't. I guess I was. I was acting like an idiot.
Fr. Joseph:
Absolutely. Acting like one!
Paul:
Yeah, but I mean, you know, it's not like there's a difference between a twisted manipulation through a knowledge of the truth. And, you know, if I had to be honest with myself, I had all of the prerequisites for knowing that what I was doing was wrong. But the human mind is very forgetful and very good at compartmentalizing stuff, I guess. Something like that.
Fr. Joseph:
Exactly. And so there's a whole there's multiple things going on at the same time here, all of which are very important. And thank God that regardless of how all these things interplay, you know, fast forward a few years: You became a devout Christian, you were baptized, you were brought into the church. Any sin whatsoever that you ever committed was washed away, and is not on your account now, and you're not guilty. So, you know, regardless of what happened ten years ago, none of that is on your account now. None of that needs to be on your shoulders at this point.
Paul:
I'm still paying the price and carrying some of those things, I will say, though. I will say, it wasn't without consequence, the things that I did in that time of my life.
Fr. Joseph:
Yeah, there's a temporal cause. There are temporal consequences. I'm just saying eternally, God is not holding anything against you at this point. But I think it's important to bring this out, because people wonder about this. They bring out, “Well, what if I was just ignorant? What if I didn't know that was wrong? What if I really thought I was doing the right thing?”
And that's an important question. First of all, you know, we see passages in Holy Scripture — which again, Scripture was written by the Saints, the Apostles, those who walked with Christ — and it says the days are coming — and it talks about the end times. It talks about when the antichrist reigns and wickedness is abounding. But it says, “The days are coming, that those who kill you will think they do God service.”
So people are going to become so twisted in their minds, that in their minds they're really going to believe they're doing the right thing. They're really going to believe they're doing what is good. They're going to believe that when they kill certain classes of Christians, that they are pleasing to God and that they're doing service for God.
And Scripture never says, God never says, “And so they'll be rewarded and they'll be just fine, because they thought they were doing the right thing.” It never says that. It never gives them an out. It never gives them an excuse. So, you look throughout Scripture. I mean, even way back in the Old Testament, even just the first five books of the Bible, you read through Leviticus and the offerings. You look at all these sacrificial offerings that were given. And we, unfortunately — we should study our roots a lot better than we do — but a lot of Christians just have this vague idea that, “Well, Christ hadn't come yet, so those were sacrifices for sin.” Okay. That's true as far as it goes, but it doesn't go deep enough.
All the sacrifices in the Old Testament that were for sin, those were only for the unintentional sins. So, our unintentional sins — and this is even explicitly talked about in Leviticus chapter four, for example — that if you sin against God, you disobey a command, but you didn't know it, you didn't realize it, it was a complete mistake, then okay, here's how you reconcile with God. Here's the sacrifice. Here's what you need to do. That says that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it. That you will be held accountable even if you didn't know.
Now, thankfully, it gives you ways out of that. It says if you did this and you realize that, okay, here's the sacrifice that takes care of it. And then you say, “Well, what about presumptuous sins? What if I commit adultery? What if I commit fornication? What if I kill somebody? What if I intentionally do something against God's law?” Well, that's where the Old Testament called for the death penalty, not a sacrifice. You intentionally violated one of these big commands of God. Then you were just to be put to death, and that was it. So that puts things in a different perspective.
It's not that, “Oh, all the sacrifices were just for presumptuous sins, and then if you didn't know it was a sin, it wasn't a sin at all.” It's not true at all. If you didn't know it was a sin, then the sacrifices took care of it. If you knew it was a sin and you intentionally did it anyway, you're in big trouble. And that's what created such a huge deal out of King David, because he committed adultery and he killed a guy. And then God doesn't put him to death. He's the king, but God doesn't strike him dead. And out of this whole story, you get the 50th Psalm, one of the most famous — in Western Bibles it’s Psalm 51 — and it's one of the greatest prayers of repentance in the history of the human race. It's just phenomenal.
And even in that prayer, he basically says, “If you desired sacrifice, if you wanted sacrifice, I would give it to you in a heartbeat. I would sacrifice anything and everything. All my cattle. It doesn't matter.” But what he's implying there is that that's not what God desires. Well, what does God want? “A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” God wasn't looking for the blood of bulls and goats. He was looking for a broken heart that was broken over his own sin, and that learned to condemn that sin just as much as God condemns it, and to recognize that complete inability of ourselves to give anything of value, to pay for that presumptuous sin.
And then in that brokenness and in that helplessness to just say, “God, please have mercy on me, a sinner,” and then God does. That's the amazing thing. God does have mercy on you, but you have to know that you're broken and that you're at the bottom and that you have absolutely nothing to offer, before he can finally do something with you. And then he forgives you.
And now King David is one of our great saints. He's one of our heroes, somebody that we look up to. And so this is really important.
And it's not just an Old Testament principle. It's in the New Testament too. You go to the Gospel of Luke, for example, where Jesus is talking in chapter 12, and Jesus says that those — and I'm paraphrasing here, I don't have it right in front of me — But Jesus says that those who sinned and knew that they were sinning will be beaten with many stripes, but that those who sinned and did not know they were sinning — they did ignorantly — they shall be beaten with few stripes. So being ignorant of the sin doesn't get you out of punishment. It just lightens it. It means it's not as bad as if you knew what you were doing.
But it's not just a biblical thing. Because we might look at that and say, “Well, that's not fair. If you didn't know, then you shouldn't be punished at all. You shouldn't be held accountable at all if you didn't know.” But before we start shaking our finger at the Bible and shaking our finger at God . . . Our own society, you know, American society itself does the same thing. What is this, when you have a drunk driver and he kills a family of five, and for drunk driving and manslaughter he ends up spending five or ten years in prison?
Now, did he have any intention whatsoever of killing anybody? No. He was smashed drunk. He didn't even know that those other people were there. He didn't know who they were. He didn't have any animosity towards them. There was no intent to kill whatsoever. But instead of seeking wisdom, he sought pleasure in the moment and he had a reckless disregard for the future. And because he had a reckless disregard for the future and he took some foolish course of action, he ended up being the instrument of death to that family of five that he killed in a head-on collision.
And even our modern secular, godless society holds him accountable for that, even though he didn't intend to do it. And so, if we can recognize that it would be unjust to let that drunk off scot-free and give him no consequences for those people dying, then I think it makes it a little easier to understand why if we we murder an innocent child in the womb or out of it, that to say “I didn't know that was wrong” is not sufficient as a defense.
Paul:
And I think realizing as well that it's to your own advantage, even though what you're saying is like — the level where you realize more things, as you understand reality more, as you see things clearly the way they are, your level of responsibility is going to go up. Your level of accountability is going to go up, like the consequences are going to get bigger and bigger. Right?
And it's strange how this just works. Like I've really seen it in my own life. Like it is the way that reality unfolds. As you see things more clearly, you're given greater responsibility and therefore the consequences of failing . . . . It's like you can't step wrong, so you're kept more naturally on that path. And then sometimes I stray off the path. I take a step wrong and I very quickly notice, like, things that I kind of strayed with ten years ago, if I do that now, it's just impossible.
For me, it really underlines the value of having relationships with men where I talk about things very, very directly. I grew up, I think, where guys were people who I competed with, and then if I had pain in my heart, if there was if there was something that I was unable to deal with, I then went to my female friends, and they gave me sympathy and they said, “Oh, it's okay, Paul, and you're great, and it's their fault, and don't worry about it.” Right?
And so is was at some point, when I was reaching the end of my twenties and somewhere at the start of my thirties, that I realized, “Well, that's actually holding me back a lot from becoming a better person,” because I didn't have these male, strong, direct relationships which were also vulnerable at the same time as well. I think it's a very private thing as well, but having men where I really talk about what's not working in my life and how is it that my understanding of reality is not properly aligned, is actually causing me to be just butting my head in.
Fr. Joseph:
Exactly. Well, and here's the thing — direct speech — really getting real with another man and not coddling him, not just patting him on the head, realizing that, if you're training and you're wanting to become the fastest in the world at the mile, you know, if you kind of jog around the track and you finish the mile in 10 minutes, you don't want a coach that's going to say, “Hey, that was a great job. I'm going to give you an A for effort. Good job.” You want the coach that's going to yell at you and tell you to speed up or get off the track. You know, the one that's going to be real and tell you what you need to change so that you can get to that four minute mile.
Paul:
Can I give an example of that? You know, I've been watching a couple of documentaries recently from military special operations courses, where they show acceptance into different military units. And I don't think as a man, if you just have like a bit of testosterone in you . . . it's really hard . . . Every man will be inspired by seeing these guys who are just pushed to the utmost limits of their physical ability, and they have these guys yelling and screaming and they're giving everything that their heart has, and every muscle that they have on their body as well. Right? And it's something that I think is so lacking for young men today, to experience that kind of thing. So I think they see them. They're inspired by it, but also scares them. But my experience, again and again and again, is like, when a man goes into something like that where he's pushed to give more of himself, to sacrifice more, that it awakens a flame inside of him, that he suddenly realizes, “Oh, I actually have so much more to give than otherwise,” Right?
Fr. Joseph:
Yeah, it's inspirational. It motivates. And I'll go even further, you know, on the personal level, we're all looking for that connection, seeing that other people who we respect will respect us back and approve of us and look at us as someone having worth and value.
I really believe that one of the reasons it works so well to speak directly with other men is because it's a way of showing respect to them. Now, a lot of people think the opposite. A lot of people think that, well, if you're really going to show respect and love, then you should couch everything in obscure terms and come at it through the back door and watch out for their feelings in every possible way. And don't say anything too harsh. But actually, you know, when you coddle somebody, you're saying, “I really just don't think you can handle the truth. I think you're you're too immature to handle what really needs to be said.” And I think, on at least a subconscious level, men recognize that that's not respect. Somebody who respects me and thinks that I'm a man and thinks that I can do it, they're not going to talk to me like I'm two.
Now there are bad ways to go about it. If a man treats me with disrespect and he's cussing me out and and he looks down on me, I don't like that. Nobody likes that. But a man who's willing to look me in the eye and say, “Look, you need to get your act together on this because you're going down a bad path and you're not going to like where it ends up. And so just listen to me and listen to me carefully. Here's what you've got to change about your life right now, if you're going to get on the right path . . .” I can tell that the other man respects me. He loves me, and he thinks that I can do it, you know? And that connects with me.
Even though he's kind of getting after me, even though he's getting on to me about something, I think it's a way for men to convey respect one to the other, is by iron sharpening iron, you know, one man's countenance sharpening another. You get face to face with another man, and maybe he's better than you in ten other ways. But there's one particular way in which you have already taken the plank out of your own eye. And you see there's a speck in his. And because you're a man, you're going to speak up and you're going to tell him where it is, and you're going to tell him how to take that speck out. That's powerful. And that's how we get real, meaningful change in men's lives.
Paul:
Yeah, well, I know you have guests coming for lunch, Father Joseph. So I want to go into the last area, which I think is an area where I've really seen that you've been helping some guys both see some specks and some planks maybe, and that's been in the family and their role as the man. So what is the man's role in the family and how does he handle that? How does how does he see that? What are the principles that can guide him in in taking the role as the leader and father of his family?
Fr. Joseph:
All right. Well, to learn what that role is, we have to turn to the Holy Scriptures, which God has given us and the Holy Spirit has inspired, and that are trustworthy. And we have to go to the Church Fathers and the Saints of the Orthodox Church — 2000 years of holy men who have written about the things that God has revealed to them, and who have lived those things out in their lives. Now, we don't have time today to go through all of that, to go through all of the biblical information and all of the patristic information. We would need to set up an online course to cover all of it. But in a nutshell…
Paul:
Could be a good offering in the future!
Fr. Joseph:
Yeah. I mean, just to sum it up in a single word, if you're going to be a godly man in a family, a godly husband to your wife, a godly father to your children, then the word which you must embody is patriarchy.
Patriarchy is what is needed in the family, if it's going to be a godly family. And of course, that's exactly the opposite of what the world wants us to believe today. And so much of the world, unfortunately, has been soaked up into the church, you know? And when I say the “church”, I mean with a small “c”, our local congregations. So many local congregations have accepted so many of the lies of the world, that this idea of patriarchy is very, very unpopular today.
But, you know, truth has never really been popular on this planet. Truth has never been determined by taking votes and figuring out what most people want. And so when we look at Scripture, when we look at the teachings of the Saints, we find that a godly household is one in which the man is the king. He has authority. He has responsibility over his wife, over his children, and the wife is the queen. She submits and obeys. She submits to her husband and obeys him. But she rules over her children. She has authority over them. And there is a very clear and direct hierarchy. And this plays itself out in the marriage. It plays itself out in the parenting and the way that the children are raised. But it's a little kingdom of God. It's a little paradise. It's a little Eden, where even though you have a small number of people, there's still a very clear hierarchy.
Paul:
Yeah. So the society that we're in, as you mentioned, is radically different today. And I think a lot of men, you know, we have different types of types of situations. But I think one very common situation is a married couple, where the marriage has been influenced by — the original meeting of the couple was influenced by the culture. And men have maybe been trained since they were young to be, you know, this “equality” discourse of men and women being “equal”. And the importance of that from society has influenced a relationship that's been built up over many years, and it's been functioning in that way for a long time as well.
And so maybe even men who are aware of this, and they might have even tried to take responsibility of being the king of the relationship to a greater degree, and address some problems and some issues in their relationship, and met pushback from — not least — their wives, who are not used to being spoken to in that way, or treated in that way maybe, you know, and so have just a different pattern of relating together. So how does one do this as a man, when everything is pushing the other other direction?
And it's difficult, It's not easy. And you know, it's not it's so easy . . . your emotions also get tied up on these things, because there's probably been some things that you've been holding back with for a long time. And so allowing them out as well — it can cause a bit of an explosive, emotional, clumsy attempt to, you know — being like a king is obviously not emotionally clumsy, but that's just where a lot of men are today as well. Right?
Fr. Joseph:
Right. And so it's important, it's very important, to make it very clear and to communicate that this is not something that we men came up with. This is not something where some overbearing husband sat in the back room cackling like a mad wizard and said, “Ah, I have this idea. I'm going to invent patriarchy and I'm going to dominate everyone.” If this was a self-serving thing, something that I just came up with out of my own head, then of course they should resist it and they should ignore it.
But it's sort of like the difference between a husband who tells his wife, “Honey, we're going to have to sell the house and get all the kids’ things together and our things together, and we're going to move across the country.” And she says, “Why?” And he says, “Because I feel like it. . . ” versus the husband that says, “Honey, we've got to sell our house and move everything and go across the country.” And she says, “Why?” And he says, “Because I work for the military, and they're moving us on to the next project, the next city,” or, “My boss said that they're closing down the offices here, but I can keep my job if we move.” That puts everything in a totally different perspective, when the wife and the children hear this was not Dad's idea, but he himself is under authority, and he's being obedient to his authorities.
That changes everything. So I think it just starts with getting back to Scripture, getting back to the teaching of the Saints. So the first question I would ask the man is, “Is your wife a Christian? At all?” If not, then start there. Lead her to Christ before you try to convince her of patriarchy.
But let's assume that your wife is a Christian and she is an Orthodox church along with you. And so you at least have this common foundation, this understanding that we must be obedient to the Scriptures, we must be obedient to the teachings of the Orthodox Saints, the teachings of the Church. And once you're at least to that starting point, that common foundation . . .
You know, I'll just give some soundbites here. There's way more to this, but I noticed one of the things you brought up. It's this catch phrase that goes around today, and that's “equality” . . . “equality this” and “equality that.” And it's just ground into us from an early age, this idea that equality is a good thing, that equality is desirable. And the truth is, both Scripture and the Saints teach that equality is a bad thing. It's a negative, it's something to be avoided, and hierarchy is much, much, much better and godlier than equality. I'm going to give a couple of examples here.
St. John Chrysostom — I'm always quoting him, I love this guy — in his 20th homily on the book of Ephesians, St. John Chrysostom says:
"The wife is a second authority; let not her then demand equal honor for she is under the head. Nor let him despise her as being in subjection, for she is the body. . . . He places the one in subjection, and the other in authority that there may be peace, for where there is equality of ranks there can never be peace, neither where a house is a democracy, nor where all are rulers, but the ruling power must of necessity be one." - St. John Chrysostom
And then fast forward several hundred years, to St. Theophylact. In his commentary on the book of Ephesians, St. Theophylact says:
"Equality in everything between husband and wife creates instability in the running of the household. Therefore, Paul instructs the wife to have reverence for her husband, so that by means of her reverence for him, there might be a single authority." - St. Theophylact
Now, this is something you see repeated again and again throughout the early Fathers, the later Fathers, the Saints of the Orthodox Church, and that is, equality is a poison. Equality is to be avoided. Hierarchy is good. There's another passage from Saint John Chrysostom, where he explicitly says that even in the Garden of Eden, even before there was sin in the world, that God created a hierarchy so that he [Adam] would govern and she [Eve] would obey.
So this is something this is not just a result of the fall. This is something rooted in the very fabric of creation itself, that hierarchy is a good thing. Look at the angels. We read about Saint . . . if you've ever read Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, he writes about the nine orders of Angels, and how each rank is obedient to the rank above them, and so on and so on, all the way up to the highest angels of all.
And you say, “Well, but these are perfect beings. They've never sinned. They’re in heaven. They're in the very presence of God.” And even in that situation, even in heaven, even when dealing with perfect beings where there is no sin, God likes order. He creates a hierarchy. And that's no different from the way that he created man.
So hierarchy is not something we should draw back from or cringe away from. Equality is not something that we should seek. We need to question the very foundations of modern philosophy, the very assumptions that we use to make our decisions, and [we need to] go back to the Bible, go back to the teachings of the Orthodox Saints and say, “Look, this is the way God created the world. Let's make our decisions based on those assumptions, not on modernistic ones.”
Paul:
So I live in the country in the world that's probably gone the furthest — this is Denmark — gone the furthest, in making equality not just the implicit spirit behind the laws, but also the explicit goal of of many, many laws are made. And this has gone down from the state level into the families as well. So I think it's probably the place in the world where you would find — Sweden, Denmark, these countries — where families have made “equality” the most central organizing principle of their family as well.
And I have to say, I've never been in a country where I've visited so many families where it's so incredibly unequal. The woman is holding the whole space and leading the spiritual direction of the family, especially. And so, I think what that really shows to me is that reality is fundamentally hierarchical. And when we take responsibility, or when we accept that fact and see it as men, then we're able to also be much more explicit about, well, what is our hierarchy organized around? Because that's the important thing, right? It's not, should we be equal in flats, or should we be hierarchical and vertical? It's more, no, we are going to be vertical. There is going to be hierarchy. And so what is it that's at the center of our hierarchy? What is the highest point of that as well?
You use the word patriarchy to define, like, “this is what we need to use to organize things.” Right. And so there's been this distortion of the word patriarchy, where I don't know, what would you say? What is patriarchy based on? What is the high point of patriarchy?
Fr. Joseph:
Well, you know, it's really important that we do not anthropomorphize God. And it's a mistake to look at human fathers and to say, “Oh, well, we know this thing about fatherhood. And so when we are writing about God, we imagine that God is like that, only bigger.”
It's actually the other way around. God is the original. There's the Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that was reality, the fundamental reality of the universe, even before God created the universe. So even at the very moment of creation of everything that you see, the entire cosmos, even prior to that point of creation, fatherhood was already an eternal aspect of God's being.
God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That's not an anthropomorphization. Rather, whenever God created the human family, whenever God created Adam and Eve and gave them the ability to procreate, God was saying, “I am Father, and so I'm going to create this this copy.” So human fatherhood is a copy of that fundamental reality of the universe, that fundamental reality of God's identity that even precedes the universe.
So our fatherhood is a copy of His Fatherhood. And so where this really starts is not with fathers, but it starts with The Father. You know, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .” That's patriarchy. What is this word, Patriarchy? “Patri” comes from Latin for “father”. And so Patriarchy is a “Father-archy” — literally “ruling by the father” — a hierarchy that begins with the father.
To ask that question, and to answer it in that way, answers the rest of the question, “Why is the world fighting against it so hard?” It's because the devil hates the Father. The devil hates God. This is a very old score that he's still trying to settle, and the devil can't get to God. He can't hurt him. He can't rise up into heaven and punch God in the face or anywhere else. So what's the next best thing? Well, find all the pictures of the one that you hate and burn those, curse those, spit on those, deface those, you know, rub feces and mud onto those.
And that's what the devil does with us. We look like the Father. We're created in God's image. And he hates the Father, and he hates anything that has to do with fatherhood, Which is why in the three aspects of human society that reflect the fatherhood of God, the devil has attacked every single one for centuries, relentlessly and without mercy.
When it comes to the Church, the devil has attacked bishops, and attacked and attacked until finally, you either get people that just reject the Church altogether, or you get ones who reject bishops altogether and you end up with some sort of a Protestant ecclesiology where there are no bishops. Or you get something like the Episcopalian Church that defiles the very idea of patriarchy and fatherhood, and so you have women bishops. And all of these attacks on the Church in various ways are an attack on the fatherhood of God, that hierarchy, that patriarchy.
You look in society, and it would take a long time to defend what I'm about to say, but there's a lot in the Holy Fathers about this. There's a lot in the Scriptures about this. And God's plan for human government is monarchy. And what is the King in a good, godly, Christian, Orthodox society? The king is like the father of the whole country. He's not there to dominate. He's not there to be pompous. He is there to be the father of the people and to try to lead them well and to try to take care of them. And because the devil hates fatherhood, he has worked relentlessly to get rid of monarchy worldwide as much as he possibly can, and to become very infuriated and angry when anybody tries to go back in that direction.
So ecclesiastically, the devil attacks fatherhood by attacking bishops and priests. Politically, the devil attacks fatherhood by attacking the very concept of monarchy and kings. And then in the family, the devil hates fatherhood. So he tries his best to destroy dads, just to turn them into glorified sperm donors. “You're just there to make a baby. And then after that point, you're really of no use except to be disrespected, spit upon, cheated on, thrown out. And even when you're deprived of your wife and children, we're still going to make you work the rest of your life to pay for her new relationship with whoever.” And even if you stay married, like you said, in Danish society — but also in a number of American homes and elsewhere — you have the man that is the father, but who is a bad one. He refuses to reflect patriarchy. He refuses to lead.
And again, this is an attack on God himself. This is an attack on the very idea of fatherhood, because the devil hates God the Father. And it reflects the first sin in the Garden of Eden. We keep repeating it over and over. You have Adam and Eve in the garden, in perfect relationship with each other, in perfect relationship with God, no sin. But then enters the snake and the snake starts talking to the more vulnerable of the two, which is the wife, the one who is more likely to follow, the one who is more susceptible to deception. And even in the Garden of Eden, this was the case. And so he talks to her and talks to her and gets her to lust after this forbidden fruit, and gets her to touch it and to pick it and finally to partake of it.
And where was Adam this whole time? You know, a lot of people think that he was off on the other end of the garden looking at squirrels or something. But it says right there in the Book of Genesis, that Eve ate this forbidden fruit, and then she gave it to her husband who was there with her. So he was right there. He was like a piece of wallpaper, a wallflower just passively sitting by, watching his wife commit the first human sin in history and doing nothing about it.
Now, if this had been a masculine man, if this had been a godly man, if this had been a patriarchal man, then he would have gone and attacked that snake and driven it out of the garden and said, “Don't you dare talk to my wife. Get out of here!” and “Woman, don't talk to any more snakes!” Now, that's what Adam should have done.
And so ever since, in every marriage since, every husband is tempted to commit the same sin. He sees his wife try to to wear the pants in the family, and to take the spiritual leadership of the family, and to call the shots, and to talk with the devil. And instead of stepping in and saying, “No, we're not going that way. We're not going to do what the devil says. Snake, get out of the house, or I'm going to come over there and stomp on your head,” instead of doing that, the husband just passively sits by and watches the train wreck happen.
And then when the dirty deed has already been done, the wife tries to draw her husband into it. She gives the forbidden fruit to her husband, who's there with her, and like a complete wimp, he just takes a bite and follows her lead. And every marriage is tempted to do the same thing. And from what you're telling me, it sounds like that's basically the the hierarchy that we have in Denmark now, which is where the woman talks to the snake, the woman leads her husband into whatever the next sin is going to be, and he just goes along with it.
And that's a real shame. And the women too — the women are tempted to the same sin, even the godliest of women, even the best of women. In every marriage since the beginning, the wife is tempted to try to usurp her husband's authority, to listen to the snake, to listen to new and interesting philosophical and religious ideas, and then to try to push forward and take religious authority in the family and to get her husband to follow her.
And so, how can we have a godly family? By doing the opposite of what we're being tempted to do. Men, do not follow Adam's lead! Do not passively sit by and just let your wife go off into heresy. Stop it. Get in between her and the snake and do something about it.
Women, do not try to usurp your husband's authority. Even if the snake shows you some food that looks really pleasing to the eye, just say “no” and go talk to your husband and say, “Hey, honey. What do you think about this? Should we do this? Is this a good idea?” And assuming that you're married to a Christian man, a man who's trying to follow God, he's going to clearly see that this is not the path that we need to take. And hopefully, if he's a godly man, he's going to try to protect his wife from this type of thing.
Paul:
Yeah. I was going to ask you the last thing. What are the practical steps that a man should take if he realizes that he's falling short sometimes a little bit on this on this field? And I think that all of us men, sometimes we realize, you know, we're tired. “Oh, there's so many things . . .” like it's always easier to let things slide. But increasingly, I realized that the price to be paid afterwards is, you know, to watch my wife eating the fruit.
Fr. Joseph:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of men are intimidated and understandably so, because for the past 20 years, you should have been studying the fathers, you should have been reading the Scriptures, you should have been seeking godly counsel, but you didn't. And so now you're unprepared, you're ignorant, you're unknowledgeable. And so now it's not that you lack the will, it's that you lack the knowledge of what to do. And so that's a valid problem. It's a valid question.
And the answer to it is, again — it kind of circles back around to the first part of our talk — What should a man do if he has godly intentions? He wants to lead his home spiritually. He wants to have a godly hierarchy in his home, where his wife can look up to him and follow his lead. But he's terrified because he says, “I don't know how to lead.” And the way you solve that problem is through manly, godly Christian relationships. You seek out diligently — just like you would seek out a personal trainer in the gym, just like you would seek out a great professor in physics or mathematics, if that's what you're wanting to learn — seek out godly men who are already doing it right.
Some of those you can find in the Scriptures. You know, St. Paul was a godly man. You can trust what he says. St Peter. Jesus obviously is a godly man. You can go to the Church Fathers: St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great, St. Theophylact, St. Theophan the Recluse is a rock star — definitely read him!
And then modern men that are walking around that you can see face to face — seek out seek out godly priests, seek out godly husbands and fathers who maybe don't have any special titles, but you just look at their life and you say, “Man, this guy's been married 20 years. He's got multiple children. The teenagers are not rebellious, they're godly. His adult children are not rebellious. They're godly.” And you say, “Huh, he's doing it right in his marriage. He's doing it right as a father. I'm going to sit down with him and I'm not going to let him go until he tells me how he does it.” I think any young man, even if he doesn't know the first thing to do, he can start with that. And that path will lead to success.
Paul:
Thank you very much, Father Joseph Gleason. I really appreciate straight talk from from you and guidance as well. And thank you for taking that role for many young men. And I've seen you helping out, and certainly I've got a lot of value. Maybe just where can people find you if they want to follow along with what you're doing?
Fr. Joseph:
Yeah, sure thing. I have a blog on Substack which is movingtorussia.substack.com — a lot of articles are there. You can comment on there, and people that want to try to get a hold of me through there, that's one way to do it. I'm happy to have conversations one-on-one through email or Telegram. There's also a Fr. Joseph in Russia Telegram channel. I don't know how your blog is set up, but I could give you a link to that if people want to join that. And that's an easy place to reach me if you want to send me messages.
I've also done a lot of work on this excellent news website. It's called Global Orthodox, and the URL is https://gorthodox.com/en. A lot of good Orthodox Christian news comes through there, and I do a lot of work there. And then the other one is Russian Faith. I've done a lot of work publishing and editing on that website as well. So probably the easiest of those would just be to get on the Moving to Russia Substack. And even if you're not wanting to move to Russia, I write about a lot of different things, and it's a good way to get ahold of me if you want to talk about this or any other topic.
Paul:
Okay. Well, thanks very much, Father Joseph. Much appreciated with your input, and I hope we have more conversations in the future as well.
Fr. Joseph:
Yeah, me too. God bless! And thank you so much for having me on your show. I look forward to talking to you again!
To ask questions or get in touch with the hosts of As Iron Sharpens Iron, please join their Telegram Group here: https://t.me/isipodcast — Please tell them Fr. Joseph Gleason sent you.
Dear Fr Joseph, I have been following your newsletters with great interest. Originally I was following Russian Faith , it's an amazing Orthodox webseit where I found lots of interesting and helpful information for our family and in particular for my two sons, they read quite a few very good articles and even used some informs for their school projects. I just wanted to say that today I was listening your interview about masculinity with the Dutch guy who was interviewing. What a great article for young people these days. The boys will definetely listen to your talk on masculinity during holidays . Living in Australia for 17 yrs I can't believe how many things got change , lots of rubbish LGBTQ, Black Lives matter etc are woke agenda that is sick " trend " of today world. Thank you for these such important talks for young people of today. I know that you also cover lots of things regarding life in Russia etc. I have moved to Australia in 2006 from Ukraine. I am from Gorlovka, Donbass by the way. And I have very important question. Because of very difficult situation in my region since 2014, my Ukrainian passport is expired both internal and foreign. Also,if I was to apply for Russian citizenship as my both parents who live in Gorlivka received russian pasports. But i can not apply here in Australia for Russian cituzenship. So basically I am not Ukrainian anymore as I am from Gorlivka, but at the same time do not have Russian passport. Only Australian. And its very frustrating that if I need one day to go to Gorlivka as I have parents there, I do not have any documentation at all. Only Australian passport. Why pick people like myself, can't get Russian passport being born.in Gotkovka and lived there till 2006 . This is my frustration
Anyway, thank you for all your articles and talks, they are extremely helpful! Svetlana
As well, only Australian.