So So I think if I do that, I think it will be here.

Although it's harder to rent this theater during the academic year.

But if it isn't here, it'll be somewhere else.

And because I'd like to continue doing this, I'm learning a lot off from doing it.

And, uh, once a month would really be good, because then I could really do the background work.

And, uh and I could probably do that for a couple of years because obviously this is going very quickly.

But that's okay, you know?

I mean, it shouldn't go any faster than it can go, And that's how that's how it seems to me.

Anyways.

So, uh, this has Bean.

This has bean a very steep learning curve for me with regards to these stories, because I didn't understand them very well, and I've got better at using the resources on line to help me do my background investigation.

I have a lot of books, and some of you may have noticed that, um, online, I posted a conversation I had with Jonathan Paseo and his and his brother Matthew.

Um, I hope it's Matthew.

Names escape me so badly, but I believe that's right.

He just finished a book on the on the Bible.

And so I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about these stories, trying to understand what they're about.

And and then there's all these commentaries.

There's a great psych.

I think it's called Bible Hub that has every single verse of the Bible is listed there, and then with each verse, there are like they've aggregated 10 commentaries from about 10 commentaries from over the last 400 years.

And so there's like a dense page on every line.

And that's one of the things that's really interesting about this book, too, is that it's It's aggregated so much commentary that it's that it's it's much bigger than looks.

The book is much bigger than it looks, and so is being very interesting to become familiar with those two.

And the fact that this site is set up with all the commentary split up by Versace means you can rapidly compare the commentaries and get a sense of you know, how people have interpreted this over while at least several 100 years.

But of course, much longer than that, because the people who wrote the commentaries were, of course, reading things that were older than that.

So that's being very, very interesting to last week.

We talked about a couple of things.

We talked about how you might understand the idea of a divine encounter, and then we also paralleled out with the idea that God disappears in the Old Testament.

He he bows out as the stories progress, and that seems to be a an emergent property of the sequencing of the stories.

Right cause all the books were written by independent people know different people, and then they were aggregated by other people.

And so the narrative continuity is this some kind of emergent property that's it's a consequence of this interaction between people, readers and writers over centuries.

And it's it's strange that, given that there are also multiple, coherent narratives that united, you know, it's really it's really not that easy to understand that.

But it does at least seem to be the case, and so and the third thing we talked about was that as God by was out so to speak the the the the individual personality seems of the characters that are involved in human characters that are involved seems to become more and more developed.

And it isn't exactly clear what that I mean.

What it means is that God steps away in man steps forward.

That's what it means.

But why it's arranged like that, or they or the say ultimate significance of that is by no means clear.

And so So Abraham, who we're going to concentrate on today, is quite a well developed character.

And I would say there are two there multiple endings and beginnings in the biblical stories.

The most important ending, I suppose, is the ending of the of the Garden of Paradise and and the the disenchantment of the world enough and the sending forth of Adam and Eve into history right into the future, into a into a motive.

Being that has a future as part of it and that has history as part of it and that has the necessity of sacrifice and toil is part of it.

That's obviously crucial.

And then that's that is replayed with the story of Noah because everything is destroyed and then the world has created a new and then sacrifices have to be made in order for the world to begin.

And then you see the same thing happen again after the Noah story in the Tower of Babel.

Because history, as we really understand, history seems to start with Abraham because this story's of Abraham sound like historical stories and no scholars debate about the historical accuracy of the Bible, and I suppose there's there's no way of ever determining once and for all the degree to which you might regard the accounts as equivalent to modern empirical history.

But this is a psychological interpretation of the biblical stories, not a historical interpretation.

And it certainly does seem to be the case that, from a psychological perspective, we enter something like the domain of the modern conceptualization, relatively modern conceptualization of history, with Abraham beyond the accounts of divine commands that Abraham carries out.

This is from Freedman Man I mentioned in the last lecture, who wrote the disappearance of God in a variety of other books that are well worth reading.

The narrative also includes a variety of stories in which Abraham acts on his own initiative.

He divides land with his nephew Law.

He battles kings.

He takes concubines, he argues with his wife, Sarah.

On to occasion, he tells Kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife.

He arranges his son's marriage in the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness.

There are, in the case of Abraham, the stories of a man's life, and one of the things I was really struck by reading this in depth and reading the commentary is how much like a story about a person it iss know.

Abraham isn't a divine figure in any in any archetypal sense, precisely when he has archetypal elements, because he's also obviously the founder of a nation.

But fundamentally he's a human being and and he makes.

He has the adventures, and he makes the mistakes of a human being.

And that's it's the mistake part that really struck me, you know, because I did it.

I was talking with a friend of mine this week, Norman Deutsch, who's a very remarkable person in many ways, and he was taking me to task.

He was reading my book, which I'm going to publisher, which will be out in January.

And in the book in one section, I contrasted the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament, made the case sort of based on northward, fries ideas that the God of the Old Testament was really harsh and judgmental, you know, and that the God of the New Testament was more merciful and, you know, at least to some degree more sweetness and light.

And Norman took me to task about that, saying that that was overly Christianized interpretation, which would make sense because I derived it in part from Northrop Frye and I really have come to understand that more than that, he's right because that he's right about that, because the God in the Old Testament is actually far more merciful than he's generally made out to be.

And you really see this with a It's good news.

Fundamentally, if you regard the representation of God has somehow key to the description of being itself.

Abraham makes a lot of mistakes, you know, serious mistakes, and and yet he has a life, and he's and he's blessed by God, despite the fact that he's pretty deeply flawed and engages in deceptive practice.

I mean, he's a good man, but he's not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination, and and things work out really well for him.

And he's the founder of the nation and all of that.

And that's good news for everyone, because perfect people are very, very hard to find.

And if the the the only pathway to having a rich and meaningful life was through perfection, then we would all be in deep trouble.

And so that's very satisfying to read that and, um, the other.

The other thing that I've been struck by is that, you know, Abraham and I think this is actually absolutely key to the interpretation of the story.

Abraham goes out and does things.

That's the thing.

And so one of the things that I've noticed in my life is that nothing I've ever done was wasted, and by done, I mean, put my heart and soul into, you know, like like attempted with with all of my effort that always worked.

Now it didn't always work the way I expected it to work.

That's a whole different issue, But the payoff from it was always positive I always something always something of value always accrued to me when I made the sacrifice is necessary to do something worthwhile.

And so I think part of the message in this in the story of it and the Abrahamic stories is Go do something and and I've thought about this in a variety of ways outside of the interpretation of this story.

Because I have this program some of you might be familiar with, which is called Future Authoring Program.

And it's it's designed to help people make a plan for 3 to 5 years into the future, you know?

And so what you do is you you answer some questions.

It's a writing program.

You answer some questions about how you would like your life to be what you would like your character to be 3 to 5 years down the road if you were taking care of yourself like you were taking care of someone that you actually cared about.

So you kind of have to split yourself into two people and treat yourself like you, like someone you have respect for and that you want the best.

For now, it's not easy because people don't necessarily have respect for themselves, and they don't necessarily want what's the best for themselves because they they have a lot of self contempt and a lot of self hatred, lot of guilt and a lot of existential angst and and a lot of self consciousness and all of that.

And and so people don't necessarily take care of themselves very well, And I think it's, I think it's I think you have an obligation.

It's one of the highest moral obligations to treat yourself as if you're a creature of value, and that is in some sense it's in some sense that's independent of your actions.

And you might think about that metaphorically as a recognition of your divine worth in the biblical sense, regardless of your of your sins, so to speak.

And I think that's that's that's powerful language as far as I'm concerned, once you understand it anyways with the self authoring program the future authoring program, you you ask the answer questions about what?

What, how you would like your friendships to be conducted because it's useful to surround yourself with people who are trying to move forward and and, more importantly, who are happy when you move forward and not happy when you move back backwards, not when you fall.

That isn't what I mean.

But when you're doing self destructive things, your friends shouldn't be there to cheer you on.

And because then they're really not acting like friends.

Obviously, you know, I know it's obvious, but it still happens all the time and people allow it to happen.

It's not a good idea.

And now how would you like to sort your family out?

And I was thinking about this this week, too, because I was thinking about Noah's Ark, and there was a phrase in that story that I didn't understand, which was that Noah was perfect in his generations.

I thought, I don't know what that means, and you know, when you're when you're going through a book like the Bible.

If you don't understand the phrase that actually means you've missed something, it doesn't mean that that's just not, you know, that's not Germaine to the story.

It means you're stupid.

You didn't get it, man.

You didn't get it.

You didn't understand it.

And so the idea that Noah was perfect in his generations, and that's why he could build an ark that would sustain him and him and and humanity itself through the flood.

It meant that he not only did he walk with God, which is something that we talked about it in the context of the sermon on the Mount, but that he established proper relationships with his family with his Children.

And so what that meant was that his not only was he well integrated as a person, but his level of integration had reached the point where it stretched out beyond him and encompassed his family.

And so it was no and the family that was in the Ark.

And I can tell you, and I really understood this this year because I had a very tumultuous year.

You could think about it from a personal perspective.

I could think about it as a year that had no shortage of floods and and part of the reason that I was able to get through it.

I also had terrible health problems and well, one of the reasons I was able to get through it was because my family really came together around me, my kids, my wife, my parents and my friends as well and particularly a certain group of friends.

And that's partly all of that came together in my mind this week, and I thought, Oh, that's what it means to be perfect in his generation's meant that he hadn't just straightened himself out.

He'd also straightened out his relationships with his family.

And I can tell you that when crisis strikes you, which it will, it will.

The flood will come right.

That's why the apocalypse is always upon us.

The flood will definitely come in your life, and to the degree that you've organized yourself psychologically and also heal the relationships between you and your family.

That could be the critical element that that determines whether you live or die when the crisis comes, or or whether someone in your family lives or dies.

And so the idea of the the Ark containing the man who's who walks with God and whose generations are perfect and that that's what sustains humanity through the crisis.

It's like you couldn't be more psychologically accurate than that.

No.

The other thing I was thinking about this week, I was thinking about another line in the New Testament.

I think it's from the sermon on the Mount, but I'm not absolutely sure Christ compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed.

And so I was thinking about the mustard.

Seed is a very tiny seed, and it grows into quite a spectacular, complex plant.

And I was thinking about how you should operate in the world in order to make it a better place, assuming that that's what you should be doing, and that is what you should be doing.

And there's lots in the world to fix.

Everything that bothers you about the world and about yourself should be fixed and you can do that.

And my dawning realization.

I have a friend lives in Montreal.

His name is James Simon.

It's a great painter, and he's taught me a lot of things.

Help.

He's helped me design my house and beautify it, and I bought some paintings from him a couple of years ago, Um, and he did this series of paintings where he went around North America and stood in different places.

And then he painted the view from here down, and so it's his feet, planted in different places on roads in the desert, on the ocean.

I have one actually hanging over my toilet, which is him standing at a urinal?

Um, yeah, well, you know, he was trying to make a point, and the point was that wherever you are, it's worth paying attention.

And that's because, you know So all these places that he visited, he looked exactly where he was standing by the side of the road in the desert, sort of mundane in some sense.