Modern world doesn't acknowledge, but in our time many yearn to break free of a prison of flat secular materialism.

Wait, wrong podcast.

But if you aren't already listening to Lord of Spirits, you definitely should be.

The modern health paradigm is just as beholden though to materialism.

We're constantly bombarded with Wellness trends, diet fads, and self optimization strategies, but very few consider health through the lens of Orthodox Christianity.

This podcast, Here to Change that, will dive into topics like fasting, prayer, stress, nutrition, and even physical training, and while staying rooted in the timeless wisdom of the Church.

Each episode will break down key health topics from an Orthodox perspective, bringing in guests, whether they're priests, health professionals, or experts in traditional wisdom, to help us navigate the practical and spiritual aspects of true.

Well-being welcome to Orthodox health the podcast.

We explore the intersection of Orthodox Christianity, physical health, mental well-being and spiritual growth.

I'm Doctor Michael Christian, joined by my Co host John, and we're excited to take this journey with you.

So grab a cup of coffee, lots of clean coconut for fasting and let's get started.

Blessed.

Is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked?

For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

Welcome back to the Orthodox Health Podcast.

I'm Doctor Michael Christian.

I'm here again with my good friend and.

Co host John and I'm happy as always to be here with you.

Absolutely.

So you've been with us for episodes 2021 and 22, and today we're going to be closing out that four part arc, the exploration of where man is headed, or rather what he's being turned into.

Yes.

And we started with Gavin McCourt in Episode 20, Men's health Testosterone, the decline of strength and discipline.

And from there we said, OK, what is replacing real embodied masculinity?

Right, and that took us into disembodiment, the virtual man, the simulated self.

And that was episode 21.

Last time in episode 22 we looked at the seductive promises of AI driven medicine, the gospel according to the algorithm.

And that brings us here because if you've got the eyes to see and the ears to hear all of this fitness tracking, AI diagnostics, gene editing, implants, it's not just quote UN quote progress.

It's not just technology.

It's a new worldview, a new anthropology, a new soteriology which is a theory of salvation, and underneath it is a war, non tradition or on the past bond something far, far deeper.

The war is on the incarnation, on the idea that God became man, that flesh matters, that our healing comes not through our self optimization but through the cross.

And so today, we're honored to be joined by a guest that's been writing and warning about this for years, Father Zechariah Lynch.

Absolutely.

Father Zechariah is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, or OCA, the owner and author at the Inkless Pen blog, and he is a deep theological finger, and he's not afraid to speak plainly about where all of this is heading.

Absolutely.

He's written about transhumanism, the spirit of the Antichrist, and the New World religion, which isn't coming.

It's already here, and it's being preached through code, through implants, through wearables metrics, and through medicine.

Absolutely.

So in this episode, we're going to ask a couple things.

What happens when man forgets that he is dust?

What happens when health simply becomes data analysis?

And how do we as Orthodox Christians live sacramentally in a world being catechized by the machine?

So like we said, we'll get into wearables, implants, AI, medicine, and even the cult of fitness, but but also where it has its place because it's all connected.

And we'll explore the true gospel, the gospel of the Incarnate Christ, the Logos, the second person of the Godhead, who remains the only real healing for a world that's trying to outrun death by digitizing itself.

Absolutely.

So let's get into it.

All righty.

So welcome, Bobby Zechariah.

How are we doing today?

Thank God, wonderful.

It's a joy to be here with you both.

It's a real a blessing to be part of the work that the Lord's laid on your hearts and blessed you with.

And the big topic, this is a huge, very important topic because as you said, it's, it's not something that's coming down the pipeline.

It is something in which we are waiting right now.

Absolutely.

And so going back from the heaviest of that, let's take one step back because we always ask our guests whether or not they are cradle or convert and what brought them to the church and ideally how that would tie into health as well.

Yeah, I am a convert.

I can brief.

I converted out of evangelical Protestantism in the very early 2000s.

I think ultimately would brought me to the church.

It was it is the Lord's says if we're drawn to him, it's by the Holy Spirit.

So ultimately the Holy Spirit is guiding everyone we participate with that and sure, I could say I read things and did other things like that, but ultimately it's that the Holy Spirit draws us by his mercy and so thing I am very grateful that I entered the church orthodoxy, his body.

It's a living thing, not an institutional, although institution as a part of it, but ultimately it itself is the living Organism, the living body of Christ, as the Scriptures tell lesson.

That's very important for us to remember, because then our bodies, our humanity, everything is an icon out of that reality.

And it's important to keep in view theologically as we discuss these things also.

Yeah.

That's fantastic.

So in looking at our subject matter for today, we've said a couple of times that we want to reinforce the idea that the flesh matters.

And I've thought about that a little bit, and it's interesting because there's a sense in which, yes, the flesh matters.

And we're talking specifically in this context about our flesh, the flesh God gave us.

Because there's also the flip side to that equation in this discussion where it's not necessarily that flesh matters, it's a hyper focus on general material mattering.

And we'll talk more about that, I think, when we get to things like the implants where it's becoming part of your body, but it's not your body.

So where I'm going with this would be that how is our understanding as Orthodox that the body comes from dust and that God made it from nothing for us unique?

And how does that differentiate from the way this transhumanist new world thinking about the body does?

I think ultimately the transhumanism does not see the body as something that's come from God.

I mean, ultimately it's based in a will say, generally evolutionist world view.

The body is an intrinsic part of who we are as humans.

We'll have a resurrected body.

Of course, my body currently is corrupted by sin on which we've all activated, all of sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and we feel the effects of that in our flesh as it currently is.

But there's the two extremes, the one where we're trying to cling to this bodily existence and the other, of course, which I think the church really dealt with in the early times of Hellenism where you're going to lose the body, right?

You become this disembodied orb of some other kind of existence.

Whatever Platonism origin ISM these things.

And Christianity is always proclaiming the true balance, of course, the royal path of our true existence, that my body is good, but it's the lowest part on the hierarchy of my being as God has created me.

It's going to be resurrected.

I'll have a resurrected body.

It will be changed, not fundamentally in the sense, but it will be glorified.

It will be the way it was intended to be.

But as we're in the flesh, we're called to be good stewards of our spirit, and the body is part of who I am.

But again, within that proper hierarchy of my being, if I overemphasize it, and that's the problem today, all I have is my body.

That's all I have.

And when you're stuck with that, you're going to try to make it last as long as I have because modern ideology, materialism, whatever we're going to call it, nihilism, ultimately, it's all you have.

There's the spiritual world is nothing.

Absolutely.

That's something we've really been trying to hammer home on is that there appear to be two sides moving into this future in that there are those who are saying no, I have to make my body live forever.

The longevity at any cost movement and I'll do whatever it takes, whatever supplement, whatever injection.

And that's where we're getting into some really squirrelly territories.

But whatever it does, it's that root, this absolute fear of death.

And then the flip side of that is the transhumanism of we're going to upload our now into the cloud, which gets more into a Gnostic area, right?

Of, well, the spirit, quote UN quote, whatever that might be, you know, evolutionist, materialist framework is the only thing that matters.

And so we're just going to upload our psyche and we're going to live forever there.

But in the same vein, it's a fundamental fear of death, is what we've been trying to argue.

It is remarkable, as you mentioned, Father, how a lot of these ideas about this are not new and that the flip sides of either glorifying the body to an excessive degree or wanting to entirely cast it off is not new.

That there was this sense in the ancient world even that the body is evil and that we should not worry about it and look for the spiritual reality coming next and that that that's a higher thing.

Or then that we're going to obsess over the body and try to make the body itself eternal in this new transhumanist augmentative sense.

It's just very interesting to note that nothing really changes.

Yeah, that's important.

The devil's not really that creative.

Only God is truly creative.

So he he just kind of recycles, he's repackages his deceptions and we buy them under new packaging, so to speak.

And then we have technology now to aid these old, I hate to call them philosophical, but using that in, in a very just kind of general term, all these ancient philosophical errors regarding humanity, who I am as a person in my structure.

Absolutely.

So we, we've discussed before on the show how even while I was in my graduate work, the rise of big medicine of all the metrics, all the data collection and personalized medicine from there, precision medicine, they've had all these different terms and names for it.

And a lot of it was originally wearables and then that start to move into implantables.

And we've really start seeing an uptick on that in the last five years in the post C vid era.

And health tracking was a big aspect of that too.

We're going to track and trace every detail to the point that Apple started installing on your iOS updates.

No, if you come within 6B to somebody.

So it's starting to get in some really squirrely territory.

And when it comes down to those ideas of having to measure down to every last detail, what does that do to our understanding of the body?

I think like a lot of things in the world, modern medicine, I would say there's a lot of positives we could say.

I mean, I had my appendix out.

That's pretty amazing.

They went in with little robotic arms and cut it out.

I mean, some great things, but The thing is this man has been compartmentalized.

We're just a data stream.

If you get into transhumanist thought, that's all you are.

You're a biological essentially computer, and that's the way they view us.

And we're putting out biological data all the time.

And that data is ultimately what matters.

You get into Harare, who writes about data ISM, he speaks of it in very religious terms.

And these people might seem a little wacky to just general folks, but they are in some sense the ones cultivating an ideology that is shaping what we'll call the upper echelons of the world system in the way that they're approaching humanity, which is completely anti Christian ultimately.

And so you are broken down and that's what all of these things are doing to break you down into all your data streams like a computer program.

And that way they can try to see how you're operating.

I think ultimately it's really for control, control being sold as we care about you.

And that's commonly helped.

They sell these things.

Absolutely.

All that was great and I want to move forward off of that.

But let me add one note.

I am truly sorry that you had to have your appendix removed.

Once it reaches the point of bursting or other serious complications.

You have to do what we have to do.

That said, this does tie into how an evolutionist or materialist framework can change our view of the body.

Many so-called quote UN quote vestigial organs, whether the appendix, tonsils, the adenoids, the lymph nodes, the thymus, the spleen, or even the payer's patches in the small intestine.

They all act as either a microbiome reservoir and repopulation site or part of the immune defense as entry point, the help of the development of T cells and blood filtration, immune response, and even just immune monitoring.

And despite what many in the Biological Sciences and in healthcare professions have been taught for years, they all serve critical roles.

When you lose them, there is a real biological cost.

Yes, you can live without them, but their removal is not neutral.

It does result in the loss of function.

And that's just a reminder of how having the wrong understanding of metaphysics can have very real downstream effects on health.

Yes, it can, absolutely.

Yeah, it is interesting that if you don't have a worldview that everything that is created and you understand it is being created and therefore having a telos, everything has imbued meaning baked into it.

So there's nothing in the world that you can look at and see and say that is purposeless.

So.

Right.

There's a sense in which, if you do have the understanding of creation, you could look at something ago.

I might not understand what that's for, but I know it has some purpose here, so I have to figure it out.

But you're not just going to disregard it as vestigial or useless.

Yeah, it's like some evolutionary mystery, right?

The appendix, they're always talking, oh, we don't know it.

Like Doctor Michael was saying.

They're treated like, oh, we don't know why this thing is here.

It's some evolutionary leftover or something rather.

Yeah.

When it's swollen, it is going to burst.

That was my situation.

It was just going to explode, which can be very problematic.

But otherwise, yeah, they treat it that way.

But it does have a purpose.

And I know from losing it, I definitely felt how it threw my body off kilter and had to kind of find its rebalance.

Because they're important.

Every bit of us is important, we might say, in the function of how God has created us.

Irreducible complexity.

Exactly.

And that's it.

Though again, not to just beat a dead horse on this one, but that's what it is.

After a course of antibiotics, when your gut bacteria is destroyed, the appendix is supposed to come back and replenish it, repopulate the bacteria because it's stuck off to the side.

So whether we're doing them today with pharmaceutical antibiotics or you're eating garlic or golden seal or something like that in the wild, traditionally your microbiome wouldn't be completely knocked out.

The pathogenic ones, the bad stuff would all get killed in your gut.

The the appendix would do its job.

However, unfortunately, yes, bad ones can weasel their way into the appendix itself, leading to the equivalent of a dysbiosis, but in the appendix or something like a sepsis.

And that's where the problem arises.

So yeah, once it gets that far that super inflamed that it's going to burst, then well, you got to do what you got to do so.

So in our previous episode, we did mention sort of the move by the Trump administration into the AI advances in the field of medicine and the Pharmaceutical industry.

And that for us thinking within this context, it certainly problematic or at least we're very skeptical of it.

And we talked a little bit about predictive medicine and how in a lot of cases for people, that can become almost a type of prophecy for their life, and it alters the way we view our life and how we live it.

I'd like to ask your thoughts on that.

I think that's true.

Humanity is looking like we can't escape it.

We're looking for something, be it we're turning to crystals, Pagan this or Pagan that.

Humanity feels that something should be guiding us, right?

We should be with someone.

It's a longing.

I think we can point to God, it just gets misguided.

And in the modern context, we're turning to our own creation, which always look at as a type of idolatry.

Idolatry is making something the image of the world around, you're attributing it kind of a divine status and then worshipping it.

I think AI is a type of, I mean, I understand computers working with a certain algorithm and intelligence.

It's been around, but this modern manifestation of AI definitely I think fits that bill.

And so we're looking to that kind of thing to guide us.

We're looking for a type of Providence, but it's a digital Providence, one that is again, reading, so to speak, by biological algorithm, translating it and giving me almost the equivalent of the digital horoscope of my health.

You put it in those terms.

So it's tied to that.

On the personal level, I think that's what appeals to people.

And then on the grand level, I mentioned already, I just come back to ultimately it's demonic, but it's it's odd to me how humanity is certain volunt humanity just wants to control other people.

And, and this is absolutely just how I'm functioning.

The interior life, be that of the soul or of the microbiome within me and all of that.

They just want to know everything and they want me to reveal that about myself, to give them, so to speak, a God like status over me, promising me that there's going to be some kind of periodical benefit from it.

Of course, most of the time those kind of periodical promises, starting with the French Revolution have all turned into very, very hellish true manifestations.

And I don't think there will be much, especially something's only as good as the quality of people behind them.

I wrote an old article called the the masters of death are now the ministers of life.

I think back in this sea vid days.

And and that was the question, how can we expect people who are obviously not following the virtues or not following after God?

How can we expect them to have the good of humanity at heart?

And that's the thing that we're turning over our data to whom, right.

And even if they were virtuous people, I don't think they'd want to have that much control over people.

Then it's incredible.

There is a sense in which this predictive modeling is very much akin to in the ancient world, sort of the Pagan priest reading the organs of the sacrificial animal or something of that nature.

And we have this hunger for knowledge and gnosis, but we don't have the spiritual maturity to do anything good with it.

But we're still seeking it through these artificial means.

And now it's of course more sanitized.

It's leaned up.

It's packaged and given to us in a way that seems, what would you say?

Secure, safe, scientific.

Yeah, with an air of authority to it.

And people eat it up, But it's just, again, this thing.

Wait, you mean I don't need to cut a pig open to use chat JPT?

Exactly.

Yeah, just type in your data where this little whatever it is.

To that point, that really seems like the most important question.

Where is that data going and who's collecting it?

That's been a major concern of mine for years when these technologies were first coming out.

And as someone from a clinical perspective sees a lot of utility, some potential for benefits, all the things I could figure out just from my material level at least of things going on, almost like they always be on your car.

Or there's diagnostics codes that can pop out in different patterns that can be elucidated by some of this data.

And yeah, I do functional blood analysis, so I will still examine blood work, but it gets to a point of where how well we're going to be using our genomic sequencing and now we're going to pinpoint every last detail.

The heart rate stuff gets a little bit too much into the biometric tracking for me.

So while I like the idea of heart rate variability tracking, in theory, if it was for yourself and you would explicitly tied to my own device and ideally not even tied into the Internet at all.

But sadly they don't make those machines.

But if it was up to me, it would my own data.

It's for me.

It's not going out into the ether, just not going anywhere.

Because once you have that steady pattern, if it got into the wrong hands, I mean, yeah, you can change it, but it's still a unique physiological signal specific to the individual.

Once they have that pattern, it's almost as unique as your fingerprint or your eye scan or any other biometric detail.

But I mean, that's more of John's field anyway.

He has a lot more experience with those.

It's just one that's always spooked me a little bit, stepping off of that soapbox.

When we're talking about medicine in that framework of we're just going to be tracking all the metrics, what do you think happens with the mystery suffering and the meaning where illness is only something to be defeated?

Death is the final enemy, yes, but death has already been overcome.

So what does that mean?

Illness and death and suffering in this postmodern transhumanist framework.

A It's interesting to me that the more we're doing this, the more we do see the rise of all kinds of other strange, or we would say somewhat novel diseases.

I mean, sadly, tragically, explosion of cancers.

I mean, you can, I'm from afar.

I try to look at it from the spiritual perspective.

I'm not so much involved in the data like you would be Doctor Michael.

But it seems like there's an explosion, unprecedented almost of cancer, Alzheimer's, all of these very odd diseases that the more we try to conquer, something else comes up.

Because ultimately in the Christian perspective and understanding, true sickness is tied to our continual sinning.

It doesn't mean everyone who's sick is because they sinned.

That's not what we're saying, but we're saying the existence of sickness in the world is a result of man's rebellion against God, and it it's a reminder of that.

And when we encounter it, Saint John Chrysostom says there's nothing truly evil except for sin and rebellion against God.

Poverty, he says, ultimately is not evil because it can't keep you from God.

Sickness ultimately is not evil because it can't keep you from God.

In fact, if rightly encountered, it can become a tool for my salvation.

Doesn't mean it always will.

I have to have that spiritual disposition to do that.

But the modern world, because it's so reductionist it it refuses ultimately all of this is, I think, part of the greater construct of trying to make a world, so to speak, without God as if it were possible, where man is trying to be his own God once again, which is an ancient problem.

And so that I think this is what it ties together, right?

We think that if we do enough, somehow we can.

I mean, back even in the Siva days, we use this kind of militant language war against this, we're going to defeat.

No, these things aren't defeated in those ways.

Why?

Because we can't defeat our own brokenness of sin outside of Christ.

And this is, I think, symptomatic of man wanting to build his own Tower of Babel.

There's so many things that in the Scriptures that speak about this, we will rise to the heavens and we will be our own God and our health in the preservation and trying to escape from sickness, which becomes a reminder to us of, of that reality that we need to be healed both in our bodies and most of all in our souls.

Because sickness, I mean, there's a deep sickness in our my own soul, which is sin.

And Christ is the only one who can heal us from that.

Absolutely.

You mentioned the idea of the war on quote UN quote, the war on cancer, the war on disease, the war on everything, and at the end of the day, that language became popular during the rise of germ theory in contrast to terrain theory.

My view is that both have truth, but as I've discussed before, while I think the terrain is more important, the germ still exists.

We need to acknowledge both.

We can also see a clear analogues to these concepts in the spiritual life.

Yes, there are external invaders, whether infectious agents, allergens, toxins, or other harmful influences, and these correspond to demons, passions, and temptations that come from the outside.

But our terrain, quote UN quote, is our inner capacity to fight them off, to resist them, to cut them off at the pass.

So from my perspective, both physically and spiritually, we should strengthen our terrain so that we don't need to constantly be, quote UN quote, at war.

It's better to be that worry in the garden, right?

Prepared, equipped, fortified.

But one who doesn't have to fight because of terrain is very secure.

And that is the core focus of what we're trying to do here, is to help people prepare their terrain.

So much of this has threads that through all of the things we talked about where even with things like your fasting, where you are in some sense take a physical hit to your body in order to grow spiritually in that ascetic struggle.

So it's not that if you're looking at just the data points and what you can see materially, you would say, oh, well, you should probably not do that or maybe not do it in the way that the church says.

But that's not what it's about.

They're not seeing the benefits or the relationship that is then being cultivated because in a sense that is immaterial.

They can't measure that.

It's outside of their material experience.

So what we want to talk about next then is modern fitness culture, how we can both mimic and also completely reject orthodox asceticism.

There's a tension between that self mastery, that stewardship of the body, but also self glorification, divanity.

And I know that you yourself are very much into lifting.

Father, you post some very impressive videos going out there and are definitely inspiration.

Now, full transparency here, I haven't lifted in a couple of years, but there was a time, and I was very big into lifting.

Then during the seabed years, I'd already moved down to Arkansas and I didn't have a gym down here, so I haven't lifted in a while.

I'm definitely getting a little soft on that front, but honestly, I think I still get muscle memory.

Check back in lots of jiu jitsu, though.

It's still lots of jiu jitsu.

That's good, yeah.

But to that point, let's get into how you feel that tension between self mastery and self glorification.

The idea of treating your body as a temple versus being being glorious about.

Sure, no, that's an important topic when the we could unpack quite a bit.

Probably don't have the time, but I think ultimately the body, again, there's a proper care of it.

There's an ascetic reality that the body, especially a monasticism, which Orthodoxy has a strong monastic tradition obviously.

And we get a lot of the monastic understanding of asceticism, which is very important for us and I think gives us a grounding and Orthodoxy and of course from the scriptures itself.

And so as a priest, my brief experience was connected to my appendix, connected to other things.

I got pretty I'll, I'm not going to unpack that.

And then just doing it again really helped me function better.

And I realized that, wow, if I'm going to do services, pray, function as a priest, there's an importance to having my body function also, right?

And there's a certain amount of control that we have over that.

That's I think very true.

God works together with us.

So that helped me understand, I started exercising again, slowly getting back into things, eventually weightlifting what you referenced.

And I think any kind of movement, I think the body honestly was meant to move.

I think part of the problem is in the modern age, it's very sedentary.

It gets us sitting at a lot of jobs or office jobs.

Whereas obviously the body was meant for a purpose.

There is a certain movement to it.

Even in the monastery.

Monks aren't just sitting around.

They pray and they work.

And so work does have an important part of that.

Now, some of it is that we can find ways in the modern age to keep my body mobile because I think that does help it work properly.

So as a married priest, I think as a married man, basing on, of course, scriptural understanding and the deep ascetic tradition that is primarily monastic, I came to the understanding, or at least my own balance.

I'll say it in that sense that for my ministry, for my service to my family, I have to take as best that I can care of my body, but keeping it in its proper place, understanding that it is passing away, that it's going to get older.

And I know that I'm, I'm two years shy of 50.

The older you get, the more you kind of feel that your body is going in the natural direction that it will go.

It's inevitable.

And I think there's a reality when we encounter the fitness or whatever we'll call it, it's big, you know, the fitness culture.

And there is a problem that it's part of that desperate grasp to hold on to my body.

I to hold on to this, whatever it is, youth that we glorify.

And I think the orthodox approach has to be we're trying to do it for a good stewardship of my body so that whatever we find ourselves, if, you know, married men especially, I think have a duty to be a defenders, to be leaders of their family.

And I think a natural strength is part of that and meaningful ways.

Not everyone has to weightlift.

Not everyone's going to like that.

But I think there's other things that that people can do.

I just encourage people to have a discipline of some sort.

And as you alluded to, I think there's a connection between the ascetic life.

Obviously, the word for asceticism came from trading for the arena, but the ultimate asceticism is in the soul.

But I've noticed with a lot of guys, I'll just end on this coming in.

If they can get disciplined with their body, it's going to help them with the discipline of the soul.

It carries over.

And I think there's a real practicality because a lot of folks coming in, we'd live such just generally undisciplined lives currently.

And so just establishing a basic exercise routine has a spiritual benefit, I think, for an Orthodox Creek.

That's all fantastic.

And I think a lot of it does come down to, in so far as fitness is concerned and the way that that interacts with our ability to build virtue, that the acceptance of voluntary suffering is one of the key components to my thinking.

And that if you are able to accept a voluntary suffering in the body, and we do that a lot of ways we could do it through our exercise.

In a certain sense, we do it through fasting, even to a certain degree.

When you do your prostrations, you're performing something that's physically arduous.

And a lot of times it's a lot of the lives of Saints.

I'm sure you could hear about people that have done immensely large amounts of prostrations, numbers I can't even imagine doing.

But the small amount of suffering that that entails compared to the type of mental, emotional, spiritual suffering that you go through when you deny the passions is so much more difficult.

And if the lower part, the physical body is not willing to suffer, how can the higher part be willing?

Yeah, I know there's a lot of analogy.

The material universe, although it's not the end all, it has so much science and symbol interlaid in it.

And ultimately it's there so that we lift our eyes up to those things that are eternal and everlasting as you're alluding to, I think.

And, and yeah, funny enough, there was a monk, he said, if we can't, if we can't say no to a hamburger, how are we going to say no to anything bigger?

Generally speaking, it's true.

If these things do all tie together, they're not compartmentalized realities.

And if we look at them in the totality of my life in Christ, then they're infused with meaning and purpose.

And then of course, I can guard my heart.

But we can make anything vain.

We're just good at that as humans.

The Pharisees made prayer vain, not that they it's that becomes a problem of my own heart that I'd have to work out through the therapeutic realities that the church gives us to deal with that.

So again, I had great points, John, I appreciate.

That I just had another little thought just to take you back off because we talk a lot about the suffering and when Father, you mentioned right there at the end about it being therapeutic, that it's not necessarily ongoing suffering forever, that it doesn't have to be that way.

And a lot of the time, the more you grow up, be it physically or spiritually, you do get to a point where there is a great joy in it that you sort of come out of the suffering.

I think in something like jiu jitsu, this is something you could look at where someone that doesn't practice the sport might look at people getting thrown around on the mat and choked and it's like, that looks horrible.

Why would you want to do that?

You've just been doing it for so long and you have such a competency and familiarity with it.

You're like, Oh no, like this is my favorite part of my day.

I love this.

You sort of come up out of the suffering and you're still feeling all the same things.

You're still tired, you're still sore.

You're getting beat up a little bit.

You've gotten to a different type of relationship with the Activity.

Absolutely so cycle back for a second.

That is very much my thought on fasting.

When it comes to I can't do this then how am I even going to have a chance?

IA lot of other things at the heart of passions and for me, I'm fortunate to be in health position where fasting isn't as arduous on me.

I just love bacon.

Anybody that knows me, when they first heard that I was not going to be eating bacon for about 180 days out of the year, they said, wow, you're really serious about this Orthodox stuff, huh?

I was like, yeah, no, I really am.

Because it's a well established fact that Doctor Mike thinks that bacon is a health food.

Amen to that.

Amen to that.

Right, absolutely.

I have argued that very much and I have the receipts.

I can back it up.

So it very much is to that point.

It's a matter of that one little thing, that one little voluntary suffering you can undertake to hopefully avoid more involuntary sufferings that are more arduous.

Obviously, we're not earning it, but you know what I'm trying to say.

So two last things on the fitness end.

One, what's your favorite lift?

Because John and I both have backgrounds and try the conditioning.

So we always like know the answer there.

Honestly, right now I just like dead lift.

It's fun to me.

I don't know, I just enjoy it.

Yeah.

So my favorite that current is dead lifting.

Awesome.

That's a very good answer.

Personally, I'm a squawk guy myself.

I'm not the tallest guy in the world, OK.

And I have very dense Rook cage expansion and very dense legs, so I was built to squat.

Yeah, it lives though.

Or close second, I hate bench press.

OK, OK.

I like cleans, but deadlifts are a really good choice.

Excellent choice.

Yeah, that deadlift for certainly my top of the list as well.

And I absolutely can't stand squats, but that just means that I should be doing them all the time.

Yeah, yeah, I have to motivate myself for squats.

That's great.

See.

I mean, I almost guaranteed probably haven't lifted in about for the steady program out of five years.

I guarantee though that I could

still be under the bar for 3:15 for multiple reps.

Yeah, that's great.

Beyond that, the one question that we established pretty early on in about Episode 4 or so was that anytime we had a priest on, we're going to ask them, can yoga be Christianified?

I don't see the purpose or why why we would do that.

I mean, I think yoga itself is definitely something that came out from Eastern religions and has a particular purpose because they're even the Eastern religions understand, although not in a Christian manner, but they understand the connectedness of the body with the soul.

And I mean, there's stretches people can do that are outside of very particular poses that even yoga itself, I mean, using its own claims, it's claiming that some of these, they're named after Hindu gods, they have a particular purpose.

Why would I want to be part of that, right?

There's other things I could do.

If I'm looking for a health reality, stretching is great.

I feel so much better when I stretch out.

There's a lot of mobility exercises people can do.

Why would you do yoga?

It just doesn't make sense to me.

That was by far the most diplomatic answer we've gotten so far, Father Sean Wheeling said.

Isn't that an oxy moron, right?

And Father Jonathan, I'm not, literally didn't let us finish.

The question was just no, no, no.

No, no, no.

9 Yet it was hilarious.

So that was definitely the most diplomatic answer we've gotten.

I appreciate that, Father.

That was great.

I'm sure the Yogi's will too.

We got to be nice to them sometimes.

Yeah, we hit him pretty hard.

Yeah, why would you do it?

Just find other stretching.

Yeah, we've tackled it ourselves beyond the times that we've asked the priests.

And we also had on choir director Rob Cerico as a guest in our Stillness Without Christ episode.

So yeah, we've been pretty rough on the yogi's.

Yeah, though it's and it's sold everywhere.

I don't know.

I'd be curious some pit times just like is it just some of it marketing?

I think it is.

Is it just?

I don't know.

To that point, it might go back to the same idea.

Who's doing the marketing exactly?

It's a matter of why are they doing this?

Well, it's promoting a non Christian understanding in the world.

Yeah.

It is, it is, and I think that's important for people to understand.

Yeah.

And to tie it into sort of what we're talking about with the mechanistic understanding of how the world works and that when they practice those poses and those stretches, it is ritual.

It has for them a mechanistic purpose that if you do XY and Z within this context, this is going to happen to you.

Sort of formulaic.

Yeah, 'cause those have a spiritual, I mean, good.

The pagans understood basic things and they understood that there's a human energy that is created.

I think that's undeniable.

But our job is to harmonize ourselves with Christ.

And it's only through Christ that happens that I'm healed.

And then I can use my created energies, which are from God properly.

And paganism understands well, I have these energies moving about in me, right?

And they, there's a certain power to that because they're created, but we feel that certain level of power, right?

And we may stake that for spiritual life.

And they kind of observed how if you do this and that, then you can move your energies around.

But that gets dangerous, absolutely dangerous without Christ.

So again, it's a falling short of those things to which we were ultimately called.

I don't know, in the West, we just, I feel like we lose sight of that sometimes.

We've been so materialized.

We lose sight of of the fact that we do have a created human energy and people mistake that commonly for a spiritual experience when all you're encountering in some strange way is your own energies, your own soul, so to speak.

And then that can lead us to pray list, right ultimately in Orthodoxy.

Absolutely.

So let's tie that together as we move forward.

In those Far Eastern projects, we were discussing the idea of physically improving oneself in order to spiritually elevate 1's status in the next life.

We see a claim that the body is simply a means to a spiritual end, and that mindset shares a striking similarity with a transhumanist goal to transcend or escape the body all together.

In this view, the body is no longer received as a gift, but treated as a project to be redesigned, upgraded, or even discarded in pursuit of becoming a quote and quote ascended master.

So then, let's explore what happens when we stop seeing the body as a gift, valuable in and of itself, and instead see it as something to be remade or transcended.

Well, the transhumanists speak about it.

It's the singularity.

I mean, that's what they're after.

That's the the term.

I'm sure your listeners are familiar with that.

I think there's a disgustedness.

I'll pick on that.

Here we go.

This is the priest.

I'm not promoting it necessarily.

I'm just saying it's a cultural touchstone, right?

If people remember the Matrix movies, oh, humanity's disgusting, right?

There's a disgustedness that we have a kind of a self loathing because we need Christ to deliver us, right?

But we feel that there's something in us that is broken, that needs healing, that is not right.

We just sense this everywhere.

Paganism senses it, Even secularism senses it.

Or else why are they coming up the with these things?

You're not complete.

There's something lacking in humanity that has to be said or right and corrected, right?

They're essentially admitting a Christian reality, but their answer to it or their solving of it, then they refuse to take the answer that God has given, which is His only begotten Son, and to create our own, so to speak, deliverance from the mass of human existence and the brokenness that is inevitably part of it.

And so I think in transhumanism there is a demonic loathing for humanity, for who we are.

We're going to make it better.

We're going to do better than God, right?

We're going to augment humanity to make it something that is really super, but.

At the same time, it's strange because what, like you talked to Michael alluded to, we're going to just upload our consciousness into some digisphere or we're going to degradate people to the fact that essentially you're just a monitored slave all the time.

So there's no good or beneficial or redemptive answer that is offered to the crisis of being human.

But every human is born and has to face the crisis of being human, and the only true resolution to that crisis, Jesus, is Christ Jesus, who became Incarnate for our salvation.

Now, absolutely, and to that point, even the language from the initial question when Doctor Mike is saying what does it mean to improve upon what God has made, correct me if I'm wrong.

I believe even Adam, when he was created, there was a sense in which he was created incomplete in in a sense that he was spiritually not mature.

He wasn't ready to partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

So within that context, you could say that to improve upon what was made would simply be to let it take its course to mature along the lines of what God had made it to be.

But then what happens after the fall and what we continue to do is that we don't take that track.

We don't Orient in alignment with the will of God.

We Orient our own will independent of that and unknowingly in most cases for a lot of people is that it's a synergism with the demonic will.

And then that's where we get into what you were saying about how these things are debasing humanity.

They're seemingly to our perspective improving an improvement is relative to what your desire is.

So if your desire is for Christ and improvement would be to be in closer relationship with Christ, to be more Christ like, if you're the desire is to actualize your own will, that could be anything.

We have a whole lot of sins out there and they're all just different movements of the will contrary to the will of God.

So this debasement is real and it's so clouded by our own self worship.

Yeah.

And there's an aspect in it that I think is always trying to mimic God.

We want to be all seeing on all knowing like God.

And we think AIS are our creation, right.

Human's creation of these algorithms and whatnot is going to give us that control.

Somehow we'll be omniscient.

And so it's it is like you were saying, this strange.

Christ brings us freedom.

He calls us into free fellowship, a free response.

See his love through the cross and through his resurrection.

But all of this is ultimately going to whether you want it or not, it's a enslaving of people and it's totally debasing.

And they say it.

Their own philosophers say they don't believe that there is such a thing of free will.

We made that up.

If you read Harare and Atta Lee and other guys, that's what they're all telling us.

You don't actually have free will.

That was a coping mechanism.

So get over it.

Your only existence now is to feed the algorithm, which is going to not make you a better person in the long run.

If you eat of the tree, back to that right, If you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you'll be like God.

If you only surrender all of this, whatever, we'll be like God again.

It's against same problems.

New day.

We still have that longing.

We still want to be gods without God, but ultimately it becomes the tyranny of hell.

Absolutely.

So as we're recording this right now, we're in the middle of Dormition, fast heading into the feast.

And by the time you're all hearing this, we'll have exited.

But maybe you can expand on the importance of the Pia Tokos in the Incarnation and how both her being the God bearer and even her falling asleep.

Yeah, I know our Western friends might disagree on that, but we believe that she fell asleep in the Lord and that she's now sitting at the right hand of Christ and everything.

But her life and her death, her falling asleep are are very important in my mind.

Maybe you can expand on that a little bit.

Absolutely, Evans.

He's vital, especially to the incarnation.

Here we are speaking about the body and how fundamental the incarnation of God is to this whole discussion because it is ultimately incarnational.

We're Speaking of and in the Christian perspective, an incarnational reality that our humanity was created ultimately by God to enter into fellowship by his divine grace, to be are takers of his divine glory and to be transformed by that encounter with God.

And God is so intent upon that that he enters into the womb with a virgin and becomes fully human, except for sin, because sin's not part of who we actually are.

It's it's a sickness.

It's an element to which we fall succumbed in the theatogas.

I tell a lot of people coming in from Protestant backgrounds that the Saints say this.

She's the animate ark of our salvation.

What happened in the Ark of the Covenant, which was a type and a shadow?

Well, God came down and met with man, right once a year in the Holy of Holies.

That's where that would happen.

That was foreshadowing the fact that the God man, the second person of the Holy Trinity, the divine Logos, would descend from the heavens and unite himself, right?

Unite hypostatically to himself, the fullness of our human nature.

And that happened in the womb of the Theotokos.

She was the one who encountered God in his the fullness of his person, which is incomprehensible to me.

Just that's what happened and she was not consumed.

The word overshadowed in the New Testament that is used for the overshadowing of the holy Theotokos is the same word used in the Septuagint for the overshadowing of the temple and the Tabernacle.

And at that time no one could enter into it.

The glory of God was so overwhelming, right?

But this is what happened with her.

And even beyond that, because those were just types and shadows.

So our humanity ultimately, I think what it bespeaks of is that of course in Christ, but in the Theotokos we see this reality that humanity encounters God and she did it in a unique way that will be unrepeatable because no one else bears the second person of the Holy Trinity, just no one will.

That's a one time act.

But nonetheless, our humanity encounters the fullness of the second person of the Holy Trinity and is not consumed.

Both, of course, in the hypostatic union with our Lord Jesus Christ and with the Theotokos herself, because she was the vessel of that union.

And she encounters the fullness of that, the full force of it, and is not consumed.

Thus the burning as an image for her.

O the reality of that is to what we're called to as humans.

And I think as Christians, especially Orthodox, we have a very unique understanding that is desperately needed in the world today.

And I think the more that we can really convey that to the world, that there will be a deeper understanding.

Because the world is hungry and longing for eternal truths ultimately.

But it's being fed that these longings are being offered cheap counterfeits as an answer in the form of transhumanism, in the form of all these promises, the Internet of bodies, the Internet of Things, and all of these things are promising.

But ultimately those longings are only fulfilled when we plug into Christ.

It's like the Saints, so many of them would know things.

How did they know?

Because they knew where there were God who knew all things.

That's the reality.

And we we want a mimicry of that.

We want to be all knowing without entering into to Christ.

It won't happen.

It just won't happen.

We'll achieve a Symbian of it, but it will ultimately be a downfall, a great and terrible downfall of humanity.

I don't know what that would look like if God would let it go to that end, but ultimately AI in its current manifestations would be a terrible end of it.

Yeah, it is remarkable.

It fantastic, Father.

And you mentioned the burning Bush and of course the Theo tocos, the burning Bush not being consumed.

There is a sense too, in which I suppose in this unique way, when you're baptized and then prismated and the Holy Spirit indwells you as an Orthodox Christian in that unique way.

That hadn't happened previously.

We're not consumed, we're still here.

And the opposite occurs when you allow yourself to be indwelt, not in the same way of course, but when you allow in the influence or the augmentation of these artificial things.

The the AI, like we talked about in our previous episode, how some people after too much interaction with the artificial intelligences are experiencing fits of psychosis.

And there is this very real consumption or degradation of the person in that particular instance.

You see it psychologically.

Then in other ways, there's the physical augmentation where the body itself is to be crude, could be hacked apart, taken apart, replaced.

So where God indwells you and you're not consumed, your wholeness is honored and respected and then conjoined to Him.

The opposite is the case in the demonic that you're destroyed.

Yes, yes, absolutely, because that's its goal is to destroy.

It's always curious that knowledge, true knowledge, right?

We want information.

AI gives us information, but it can't give people wisdom or knowledge and we're called to wisdom and knowledge right.

The scriptures, St.

Paul talks all about the knowledge, whereas AI just type things in whatever people use this ChatGPT.

They talk about downloading a whatever chip so that you can just download information, but the human is not a being of information.

The human is ultimately a being of knowledge and wisdom, and that comes from God alone.

And so we're supplementing again with a false reality that somehow if I just have the information, that's all I need, whereas that's not a true acquiring of knowledge.

Whereas in the orthodoxy we see Saints are from peasants to very educated people.

It doesn't inhibit their acquisition of wisdom and knowledge because that's a divine reality.

And so again, another cheap counterpart of this is that somehow if I just have the information of my fingertips or whatever downloaded into my brain, somehow I've acquired something, No, And wisdom and knowledge are acquired through, as you said, suffering and moreover, sacrifice.

Because again, suffering devoid of sacrifice becomes pointless, right?

Christ contextualized in the divine sense, suffering through sacrifice.

And then that way, if I take the suffering of my humanity and offer it through the sacrifice of the cross, that's why I take up your cross, then it's imbued with meaning.

And that which before it was kind of this heavy burden of humanity and its suffering, it becomes vivified through to a love offering of sacrifice that the Christian is called to give.

Beautiful.

All right, so we've kept you here for about an hour at this point.

Maybe you can give us some thoughts on what can Orthodox people do to remain rooted in the flesh, not seduced by the simulation.

Well, I think ultimately the church is incarnational, right?

We have to resist.

I think the Internet, even Internet, OK, it's good.

We can use it for certain things, but it we can never let it substitute authentic human relations.

So I think it our resistance, if we can speak in those terms, starts on the ground level.

It starts in the local church community because that's the incarnational reality.

And we have to maintain that incarnational in hypothesization, we might say in the local church community in a world that is moving rapidly away from that, especially in the West, especially in and we see that attack on other places.

I mean, it would probably be another topic to get in that we see cultures, any cultures that have more human interaction to it are always attacked by this modern Western.

I'll just call it for that.

I don't know, system, be it Ukraine right now, Romania or Georgia, you see this attack to kind of get people stuck with computers, right?

And there's a point I appreciate seeing friends across.

We're doing this interview and I think there's a positive we can use that It's a tool we should use.

What is positive, but only that much.

It can never take a substitute.

If someone's just feeding themselves online, then they're making a grave error.

We got to pick up books.

We got to encounter humans, right?

We do that in the church.

And most of all, we have to encounter the God man.

And then on a practical level, I think just we have to resist the ease that is the seductive part of the whole technological thing that they're pushing towards us, right?

I just saw an article about the facial scans of TSA that they're doing now, right?

I'm always opting out.

I'm that guy that's saying, here's my thing, I don't want my photograph.

But an article, for instance, was like, oh, it's going to be so much easier.

You might not even need your ID.

You just have your face scanned, right?

No, those are the things I think on a basic level, we can just say, no, I don't need that, right?

It's they're going to kill us by convenience.

They're going to enslave us for our desire for convenience.

So let's do things that make life a little bit more difficult outside of the church.

Let's find the farmers market.

Let's support the local grower.

Let's do these things if possible.

A big cities have a different God bless people living in big cities.

It's a different dynamic, but if that's possible, but we need those local human connections to stay alive.

And we really have to labor to do that because that's what's under attack.

Not just on a Christian level, just on a basic human level to completely isolate us, to get us looking into a screen, thinking that somehow reality when it's deeply controlled by who knows how much of it is bots and other things controlling this Black Mirror kind of reflection of things.

Algorithm spitting back to me what I want to hear and see.

That's not reality.

And I think we have to understand that.

So there's a lot there because we have an immense task.

I think in some sense we have a task before us that is unprecedented in the experience of humanity.

Not necessarily new because there's nothing new under the sun, but the expression of it is unprecedented.

This whole intrusion of technology.

Technology's been around for a long time, obviously, in the basic primitive understanding of what technology is.

But on this level that we have now, it's, it's definitely one of the goals of those that would use it would be to dehumanize, to decommunify.

If that's a word, right?

If it's not, I just made-up a word.

It's to disincarnate us.

So right now we have a real chance to shine, especially as Orthodox Christians.

We have to Incarnate those things and make sure we're doing just really human stuff, really human stuff, just in a good authentic human way and not get lost in this new thing.

Whatever.

I we can't necessarily 100% escape it.

I don't know.

That's the point.

But if I can use it with wisdom and know its limitations and then refuse the obvious mechanisms that are going to be a digital gulag.

I've written about that before and that's the goal.

That's, that sounds hard and heavy.

I don't listen to all your things and maybe you've gone that hard and heavy, but I think really the the goal is make the digital gulag where I don't have to round people up and put them somewhere.

We just monitor them wherever they go because they're willingly tracking.

Sorry Don, to take it, but I think it's Harare's.

It's interesting.

He says Freedom of Information is not what you think it is, right?

He says it's the fact that you have no right to obstruct our extracting information from you.

You have no right to stand in the way of the flow of information.

So it's not your right to be informed, right?

Which most people would think.

There's telling us that we have no right to say my, you don't want my face scanned, right?

I have no right to deny implants because I have to allow data to flow.

And the more data that flows, the more they supposedly are going to feed the AI God, right?

He demands that sacrifice.

And we have no right to stand in its way.

So I think the best way is say, OK, how do I stand in that way, right?

How do I not do that?

If that's what they want me to do, then how do I not give them all of that?

I don't have an easy answer or a clean answer for that.

But I think we have to grapple with it.

And I'm excited to see you guys here trying to grapple with those realities.

Absolutely.

That was a wonderful answer, and there's a lot of different directions I can respond back to that with.

But on the first part of that, just touching grass, right?

I made that joke.

Yeah.

Just go out there both metaphorically and literally touch grass.

There's physiological benefits, there are mental benefits.

And yeah, actually getting out and seeing people.

That's exactly it.

We did the whole episode with Father Jonathan Ivanoff about the parish as a hospital and the building of community and on the ground level.

That's just so important.

And just touchback one last time to this evening, which I knew was going to be a major topic in this discussion between us.

But that was the part that really blew me away the most, where I knew something squirrelier was going on was the isolation.

You can't go to the gym, you can't go to a park in public where they're spaced out.

You can't go to church.

There's so many different things.

And I understand from a public policy level, a lot of people who were forced to implement them did so in a manner that they were obligated to.

And I get it.

But from the top, the top of the ladder, the ones implementing those policies, none of it made sense.

Right.

Absolutely.

From a common sense level all the way down to the understanding of the science of it.

And it was very clear from the jump that it was meant to take away that Freedom of Information.

You mentioned the freedom of your own information, like you were saying before about tracking, tracing a database and everything, and also leading us towards a very specific experimental procedure.

That was always the plan from day one, yes.

If you actually look back at it, and this actually ties it all together, those procedures themselves were not developed from the actual isolate Organism or technically strand of protein and whatever.

But if you want to be pedantic about it, but they were working from a computer model, from a Chinese sample.

And it was in early January of 2020 that Moderna and Pfizer were already working from that computer readout of what they thought might be the proper genomic sequence.

And that is what the initial trials were based on.

And they are already putting it into arms within the first month.

If you want to talk about the issues of rushing something to market based on big data, ironically enough, there is no better current example.

Yeah, the effects of that have been catastrophic and fortunately they have not exceeded my wildest fears.

Thank God.

We haven't reached that point yet, unfortunately, and God willing, it never gets to that point because there are a lot of ways that's could have really went South, and it has, but it could be so much worse.

Yeah, Amen.

Thank God it didn't.

Right, and I'm trying to be as agey and verbose about because I don't know how much YouTube is still angry about it.

So I'm trying to be as obscure in my phrasing as possible, but I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about.

I think even to talk about someone like an Aldous Huxley, who said that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but they'll rather enjoy it, right?

And that's been happening for quite some time.

And I think the hammer came down a bit too hard during those dark times.

They pushed a little too much and people did not rather enjoy it.

It was a boiling frog.

The temperature of that water got too hot too fast.

And I thank God for it because now I think that that did spur a lot of people in society and just society more generally to a revulsion of that type of behavior in government and policy and an awakening to some of the things that we're doing as a culture that made that possible to begin with.

So there is, I think, thank God, a swing back toward a more Incarnate life where there is an appreciation of.

Interfacing with each other physically, face to face, not trivializing these very real and necessary relationships that we were designed to have.

And that being the case, God willing, try as they might, that won't happen again.

At least not the way that it did in the past.

Yeah, Amen.

Thank God our hope is in the Lord.

Ultimately I think people have to remember and he's in control of all these things.

I mean, we'll see.

We know things from Revelation and other things.

Things get sketchy, but God's still there.

Yeah, it's.

I mean, another you see kind of the strange a Canadian bands from hiking in the woods.

It's just weird.

Still there's this jockeying to control and so God help us, I think we have to be aware, we have to be soberly aware of things that are happening so that we can be wise in the Lord.

And then and ultimately, I think after that, we saw how the Lord used a lot of what happened, as John was saying, actually to really wake people up and that a lot of people are coming over to Christ to the church.

Churches are getting full because they saw wait with this is happening.

We need the truth to the Lord to kind of took this evil agenda of men and people's hearts did get shaken.

If that continues, we there will be hope.

There's always hope and repentance.

Ultimately that's it.

A turning of our heart back to the Lord and that will really ultimately stay whatever the station of evil or evil agendas that we encounter in our lifetimes.

That turning of our heart back to the Lord.

There's a hope there.

So God help us.

Amen.

Amen.

Amazing.

I know you mentioned it at the beginning, but where else can I listen to Spind you Father?

Yeah, did I have a blog inkless pen dot blog.

I'm also on sub stack, so there's a little bit of variety few things on stub stack that you don't find on my blog and vice versa.

But anyway, I like writing I.

Highly recommend it.

I mean my Instagram kind of moved towards lifting stuff, so if you like lifting, you could find me on Instagram and follow my journey towards buy over 400 deadlift.

Nice.

Beautiful.

I love.

It in a cassic of all things.

Exactly.

That's what I love most about it though.

It's awesome.

So last little thing on that.

How do you feel about kettle bells?

Are you a fan of kettle bells?

You know, I just haven't tried them.

I I've intrigued by them.

Honestly, there's a lot of things my basements rather restricting because the ceiling is low so a lot of swinging.

I would inevitably put a hole in the basement ceiling.

So so probably that.

Got it.

OK.

Well, you can go with like shoulder height lift.

I'll have John send you over some training, some basic ones that you can go over.

There we go.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Yeah.

I have access to any kettle bells right now and I know Father John Wheeling is a big fan of them and unfortunately he has some limitations.

But that was his answer was forget yoga, kettle bells is the way to go.

And it's the fact that they're rushing too, so you know.

I honestly, I really like calisthenics.

I'm working on a few of those, like the human flag hold.

Very cool.

Anyway, I kind of like those things that are challenging.

You got to achieve something, do it, set a goal, work towards it.

My brain kind of works well with that.

Yeah.

So I like calisthenics too.

I just somehow that deadlift video of me and the cassock were like 3 million views or it was something ridiculous.

So anyway, I guess I had to run with it, right?

You know, once you go viral, you just got to go Lord adversity.

Beautiful.

I absolutely recommend that you head over to the Inklest Pen blog.

He's been putting out a lot of amazing stuff for many, many years now and it's all been some very edifying stuff for me.

So definitely check that out.

And I know he's got Telegram too, that he posts some stuff on a lot of it's reposted, but but he finds a repost other stuff.

So when you head on over to the Orthodox Health Telegram, make sure to head over to the Inklest Pen Telegram as well.

Yeah, that's still my kind of like political outlet, my political and sociological and all of that stuff.

My telegram went that way.

Instagram used to be but then all of a sudden this lifting took off.

So just go with that on Instagram.

Beautiful.

So, yeah, hopefully you'll be coming back to this conversation more than once because I know we went to a lot of deep stuff regarding what the technocratic world has been trying to pull us into, the whole abstraction, the simulation.

And we need more reminders that although we are made from dust, that's not all we are.

And we're definitely not just dated to be collected that our salvation isn't digital at that is Sacramento that's lived out in the world.

Absolutely.

We do hope that Father Zechariah's words struck you as they have struck us.

And this wasn't just a philosophical episode, that we did get into a lot of interesting philosophical discussion.

In a lot of ways, this was a true spiritual warning.

The religion of the post human is real, but so is the church and even more so in her there is real healing because Christ became flesh and that changes everything for us.

Absolutely.

So stay right there in the flesh because next week and the week after that, we'll be going back to the body.

We're going to be talking about what that means.

So we're going to call this next one the School of the Body.

We're going to look a little bit at the theology and ask what it looks like to actually live embodied lives and disembodied age.

And maybe I could convince John to give us a mock protocol, a mock program?

TV, some practical tips?

Sure, sure.

I could do something like that.

Absolutely.

So we're going to be talking talking about all of it.

We're talking about your movement, your strength, things like posture, even your play, labor and worship.

Because the body isn't just a machine to be optimized or to escape.

It is a teacher.

It's a battlefield.

It's a sacrament in motion.

Absolutely, and we'll get into the practical rhythms of movement, the role of physical strength and spiritual resilience, and why reclaiming your body is one of the most radical acts of resistance that you can offer in this age of the algorithm.

Just going out and touching grass, like we said.

And so we'll be following up with another special guest.

I'll hold off on the announcement on that for just a little bit before episode 25.

We'll finally be doing our Orthodoxy and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu episode, so really excited for that.

As am I, so I encourage you all, if you're not already, please subscribe, share and stay stay tuned because we have a lot more.

We look forward to discussing with you all.

And until then, stay grounded, stay grateful, and remember that you are not a program.

You are a person made for communion, not control.

God Bless is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and all of your other favorite listening locations.

And you can also find us available on YouTube at Doctor Michael, Christian Rumble at Orthodox Health and Subsac at Orthodox Health podcast.

You can also follow us on social media for more insights, discussions, and behind the scenes content.

Connect with us on Instagram at Orthodox Health or in our Telegram group at Orthodox Health Podcast and join the conversation.

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Goes a long way.

Helping others stuff Orthodox help.

Until then, stay strong in faith, take care of your temple, and keep Christ the center of your health journey.

God bless.