This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity
Stan Grant: Is there any greater father baggage than Christ in the garden of Gethsemane?
As he says father, take this cup from me? and in a sense we inherit our Father's cups and carrying the weight of that with all of that complexity and the sacrifice that it demands us. I dunno that we can know our fathers until we know sacrifice ourselves.
Evan Rosa: This is Stan Grant, an Australian and the son of indigenous Aboriginal people, Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, and Dharawal people all intermixed in his blood.
Stan Grant: And of course, Christ in that moment on the cross when he says, why have you forsaken Ben? And I wonder if we don't all feel that at a moment when we're called into the deepest test of our adulthood, or to use a, a word that might be unpopular in our current age, our man for fathers and sons, the particularity of the masculinity of that relationship and the expectation of the burden of that masculinity, of that relationship.
Mentality of that relationship that I saw in my father's scars that I felt in his harshness to me, in trying to toughen me up for a world that I was gonna be knocked down in
Evan Rosa: Stan's, a journalist, a former radio and television host, a writer, a theologian,
Stan Grant: and ultimately in the act. The forgiveness of Christ on the cross, you find again what sits at the heart of the Father-Son relationship more broadly, which is that we must forgive our fathers. It is the only way that we can forgive ourselves and live in a world of forgiveness with the other.
In that gift exchange, you are invited into shared spaces where we forgive ourselves. For we speak, and in that act of forgiveness, we are drawn into a deeper dialogue that allows us to speak from the heart and not the mind. And it was in the performance of the book that I think I even transcended the words on the page themselves.
Evan Rosa: You might remember him from a previous episode in late 2023 when he joined me for a. Very open discussion about the experience of the world through the senses and spirituality of his indigenous heritage. Exploring the wiradjuri concept of yin jamara winning Ghana. An ancient concept embodied in Australian aboriginal life.
Yin jamara is a life of respect, gentleness speaking quietly, walking softly in a beautiful world that's worth living In. Listening to Stan, speaking with him closely, it's an invitation to occupy a different conversation. He's fully, and I'd say unusually present. He's somehow prepared to be unprepared the way a jazz musician intentionally seeks that unpreparedness for the sake of the art, for the sake of the eternity encapsulated in the moment.
Stan Grant: Jazz is improvisational. That comes from a deeply rehearsed space, and that's our lives. If you consider the lives of our ancestors, the world that we are born into. Rehearsal. Then we occupy that space of generational rehearsal with our own improvisational lives, and I think that's why someone like John Coltrane speaks to me so profoundly is that you have someone who is a master of his craft.
Whose hours of rehearsal who has embodied in his art, the ancestral connection to his people faith God. And then in that improv is able to make that connection. And that's, that's how I approach writing in general. I mean, I, I often surprise people when I say this, but I have never written a second draft.
Every book, the 10th book I've written Now, the, the form that the reader receives it is the form in which it was written. Uh, you know, of course in the editing process, you go back and you might want to add a little bit or, or, but in terms of changing it, in terms of restructure, in terms of writing it, again, I don't do it because I, I, I want to get to the point where the rehearsal has prepared me for the improv.
It is in putting those words on the page in with the immediacy of that, that I think I get past the artifice of editing or the artifice of second thought. Second thought can be a place where we hide. It can be a place where we lie, and I love the idea. Of the immediacy of that connection, you know, you think of Christ and, and Christ's parables.
I mean, the incredible thing is that Christ, of course, writes nothing down in the parables in his immediate connection to the human connection. You. You have a depth that, I dunno, you get in the more studied form. That's how it works for me. That's always been my approach. I don't think I could do it any other way.
Evan Rosa: The idea that you would forgive yourself before speaking too. I don't think I've ever heard anyone else say that. That forgiveness for oneself is at the ready. Even before speaking, it has to be. That's the only way to avoid the second thought.
Stan Grant: It has to be you. You are right. I mean, we're never gonna say things perfectly.
We are imperfect. There is something in the reaching that is embodied in language, the space between the thought process and the human heart that we must allow ourselves to be forgiven. We are imperfect and in this age, Evan, that is so censorious, so judgemental and so hostile that we are judged and we are persecuted.
Not just for what we may say, but what we do not say. You know, the, the idea that silence is violence and you hear this now, this sort of. Aphorism, this idea that silence is violence. If silence is violence, then we have redefined the very nature of violence itself, and we are all at this point, culpable.
And the things that we have not done, things that we have not said. And so I think, I think forgiveness. For oneself and forgiveness to the other person has to be at the ground of all human discourse because we will always fall short of the reaching for that connection that we seek to verbalize.
Evan Rosa: In this episode, we explore his 2025 book, murriyang Song of Time, traversing topics such as the Giftedness of Life, and that which is given and received.
The meaning of fatherhood and how to understand and forgive our fathers masculinity and vulnerability, forgiveness and sacrifice, prayer and poetry, and the whole human experience of time and eternity. Thanks for listening and glad that you're spending some of your precious time and eternity with me and Stan.
Grant. Stan, it is such a delight to talk to you again.
Stan Grant: It's really wonderful. Our last conversation was a real highlight for me, so I'm really pleased to be here.
Evan Rosa: Absolutely. I think this new offering is, well, I'll just go ahead and reference the opening, the intro. It's a gift. A gift. Yeah. I, I realize that the nature of it as gift, it probably feels like a gift to you.
It probably feels like a gift to readership. I wonder and would expect that it feels like a gift to your father.
Stan Grant: A gift from as well. And, and I see this as a gift from God, a creator that allows us to, to find each other again. And I, I, I wanted to ground it, Evan, in the idea of exchange, because so much of our society is predicated on transaction.
It's one of the hallmarks of liberalism and democracy that in its attempt to find neutral ground and attempts to create. Political compromise that can hold capacious space and mediate difference, it lurches into a transactional space that we seek. We, we, we then fail to find each other in our humanity and we become subjects or citizens.
And I wanted to return to the idea of exchange that predicates all human interaction. We offer the gift of ourselves to each other.
Evan Rosa: Song of Time is a genre bending book. That's part personal memoir. Part biography of his father part Emotional catharsis, part theological reflection part epic poem. Part one, man play, part liturgy, but holy, an entirely gift to help understand what that could mean, the meaning of a gift.
I asked him to start there with a reading from the book's, opening lines. This book
Stan Grant: is Assaulter, a Wiradjuri book of prayer. It is a contemplation of the sacred of time, God and my Father. Each meditation on time and the creator is followed by a memory of my father. Dad taught me about Y India. Mara, a way of being wiradjuri.
It means to be quiet. Respectful, kind and forgiving. Yj MA is not a philosophy, but a theology. A way of contemplating God. Dad never speaks about yj ma without talking about by army God with God's guidance. I wrote this book more as a poem, seeking silence and warmth. And a shelter from the Noise of modernity.
I offered this to you to be read slowly open at any page, and I hope you find your own place of peace. Please look at the stars. Please feel the breath of the wind. Please listen to the songs of Birds. Please let in beauty. And lock out evil. Turn off the tv, throw away newspapers. Block out the words of politicians.
Media kills politics, kills babies, smile and trust before they learn to hate. We cannot survive without each other. We were not made for chaos. We were not made for war. We were not made for greed. God is love. God is love. God is love. Praise to God. Praised to by army in Anne. Praise to God in heaven.
Evan Rosa: Seen from its liturgical side Song of Time has a structure resembling a cyclical conversation between Stan, his father, and heaven.
No chapter titles, no chapter numbers. Just a volley between two Wiradjuri concepts. First Marie Yang. Part of the book's title, which Stan defines as a thin space between earth and heaven, where the mystical realm was a breath or a touch away that alternates with Bain, the wbay word for Father. And as he tells me later in the conversation, the book became a kind of rhythmic improvisational breathing of the Lord's Prayer.
Our father. Who Art in heaven. Father in heaven. Heaven. And Father. Father in Heaven. Heaven. And Father, you start by calling it Salter. Mm Uh it's a book of prayer. It's poetry, it's song. And I think it's, it's, it's genre bending. I really like this about it.
Stan Grant: I love how you picked up on that. You, you know, I had this, um, this thought when I handed the manuscript in that maybe I should call it a work of fiction, and I really did.
I thought if this was offered as a novel, it would be a way of sort of reinterpreting. What a novel can do, and I love novelists like, uh, it Calvino or Milan Kra and others who play with form and move in and outta philosophical spaces, um, narrative spaces, emotional spaces, and in first person voice. You know, Calvino will talk about mm-hmm.
Someone reading in Avino book, in his own book, and I loved the idea of playing with. Form. And when you say genre bending, you are the first person I've spoken to who has really kicked up on this, that this did not sit in a very, in a categorized form. This was something that I saw as expressing. Something of the soul that doesn't have to be categorized in fiction, nonfiction, um, memoir or whatever that might be.
So I actually did consider saying, let's call this a novel.
Evan Rosa: My takeaway on the genre bending nature of it is that it, it's kind of like speaking to the empty space around our perceptions of these genres. And so. Any individual might bring their own use to it. Right. Like your even suggestions of use of just like open a page and then allowing yourself to be in that particular space or, or I thought also.
I would love to see you perform this or something, like to read it, read the whole thing aloud as a one man play,
Stan Grant: you must be reading my mail because this is exactly where I wanna take this. I'm, I'm actually talking to someone at the moment. Adapting this into a one person performance we had at the Sydney Writers Festival this year.
I really wanted to try something different with this book. And I said to them, rather than have me with an interlocutor, rather than do the normal sort of interview form, um, with a little bit of reading, how about I do it? One person performance. And what I did was I, I began, before I even came out onto the stage with the Australian Chamber Orchestra doing a performance of a piece of bark.
And I came out to that, it was from Sam Matthew Passion. Mm-hmm. And I then came out of the end of that beast and I started to. Talk about the book and I, I wove that through passages of the book and we finished with a closing piece from Bark. Mm-hmm. So that I incorporated music, poetry. It was the meditation on time, the relationship to my father culture, yeah.
Mortality. And I did it as a one person performance. It was quite a high wire act because I bet I had no script. I didn't structure it, I didn't plan it. I wanted it to be in the moment. Yeah. I wanted it to have intimacy and immediacy and spontaneity, and it really worked to the point where I had people coming up the next day in tears actually saying how it had moved them.
Evan Rosa: This life is radically contingent and every kid sooner or later comes to realize the extent of this contingency, if not for the. The exact causal pattern of this physical universe. It's hard to imagine how you or me, or anyone could have otherwise existed. It happened just so, and it just kind of had to be this way in order for us to be here.
And I'll spare you all the biology and physiology this implies. But what we have in murriyang and what we have in Stan Grant is a gift from his father, Stan Sr. Stan describes the father-son gift in ways that are at once exactly particular to their unique relationship and their own timelines and personal family and aboriginal history, and yet also somehow universal, or at least archetypical for this present age, picking up on a very familiar experience of all of our fathers.
As a son, I saw my own dad in these pages, and as a dad, I see my kids in these pages.
Tell me a little bit about your dad.
Stan Grant: Dad is, um, is the person, the idea, the soul that I have wrestled with my entire life. Um, he was, he's a deeply. Fallen fallible man, a deeply scarred human, a, a deeply, an incredibly heroic singer, a man of immense courage. But he's someone who, who was an aboriginal person in Australia.
I've always described him this way. He wears. The history, history of Australia on his body. Mm. His body has been a battleground. He was an aboriginal man born into a time of, of people being segregated. Mm mm-hmm. People being excluded. He was born onto the margins of Australia. He was born into an Australia where aboriginal people at that point were considered a dying race, that we would simply disappear.
He endured all of the harshness of that, including at times beatings at the hands of police he has on his body. As I say, um, wounds a, a stab wound in his shoulder. He has the tips of three of his fingers missing from working in saw mills having to put food on the table for us. He has tattoos that are not the sort of.
Illustrations, the sort of cosmetic tattoo that people might wear today. But you know, those hard blue ink tattoos almost carved into your body. They tell a story themselves. He had almost every bone in his body broken at some time or another. My image of him when I was young, Evan was, um. We, we, we were an itinerant family.
We moved around a lot. Dad was a manual laborer and he worked in sawmills. He worked wherever he could find work. And he was always exhausted. He was difficult to know. He was difficult to get close to, primarily, I think because of the sheer exhaustion carrying the weight of survival. Yeah. And I remember once when I was about six years old.
My father in a bath. My mother used to have to boil hot water outside because we didn't have hot and running water. And she'd boiled up the hot water and she'd made this bath. And my father, he'd come home from the mill. He was lying in the in the bath, and I remember the water being almost black with sap and blood and dirt, and he was lying there and his eyes were closed.
And.
All of the pain of the world away,
and, and it has always struck with me. He was aloof, he was difficult. I felt he was harsh as well because he was raising me for a very harsh world. He used to say to me constantly, boy, the world is going to knock you down. And so I, I was raised with this idea that I had to. Bump to the world.
What was beautiful, Evan, was that in later life. He found a Renaissance, a a, a Second Life Australia was changing. There was more awareness and appreciation of aboriginal culture. A linguist came to my dad and asked if he would work with him on a project of retrieving our language, which at that point was almost lost.
My dad was one of the last. Fluent speakers. Wow. And together they worked on writing the first dictionary of our language. Dad went back and studied again. He got an honorary doctorate for his work. Ah. He set up a language and culture school at one of Australia's leading universities. He won an. Order of Australia Medal, one of the highest awards you can receive in Australia for his work in saving our language.
Amazing Aboriginal people all over Australia. We have a ceremony every year to mark Aboriginal achievement and aboriginal people all over Australia. Voted for him to receive. The lifetime achievement award for what he had done. Wow. And to see my father, the arc of his life go from that exclusion, segregation, the hardship, the difficulty years, the distance, the, the sense of walking through the world brace for a punch, to being able to give a gift back to Australia of language and culture that he is now loved and appreciated.
And to see him now as an old man. As he approaches the last years of his life where the physical strength is gone. Yeah. He's frail, he's vulnerable. He needs us in a way that he never did before. Yeah. And that has recast my own relationship with him.
Evan Rosa: Right. The way you depict your relationship with him. In the book, it seems to be this wonderful example of the complexity of a relationship and the, the, the winding nature of a relationship in the same way that you seek to resist.
The use of words and to, and to allow the silence of being to be there. I mean, we live in a culture where father baggage is just widespread. And this has to do with, I mean, like clearly your experience is a, uh, where Roger Manna and that your father's experience growing up in 20th Century Australia, that has its own particular mark on it.
But I'm curious what you would have to say about the father-son relationship. More broadly what you've learned through your meditations on it.
Stan Grant: Is there any greater father son baggage, uh, than Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane when he's on his knees alone and says, father, take this cup from me. And in a sense, our father's, we inherit our father's cups and carrying the weight of that.
Complexity and the sacrifice that it demands us. I dunno that we can know our fathers until we know sacrifice ourselves. And of course, Christ in that moment on the cross when he says, why have you forsaken me? I wonder if we don't all feel that at a moment when we're called into the deepest test of our adulthood or to use a, a word that might be unpopular in our current age now, man.
Yeah. For fathers and sons, the particularity of the masculinity of that relationship and the expectation of the burden of that masculinity, of that relationship. The physicality of that relationship that I saw in my father's scars that I felt in his harshness to me in trying to toughen me up for a world that I was gonna be knocked down in.
And ultimately in the act of forgiveness of Christ on the cross, you find again what sits at the heart of the Father Son relationship more broadly, which is that we must forgive our fathers. It is the only way that we can forgive ourselves and live in a world of forgiveness with the other. It is for boys and we're speaking about fathers and sons, the critical relationship.
You know, I was much closer to my mother in terms of the intimacy of our relationship. I was soft and I think my father perceived in my softness, in my bookish. I love nothing more than to stand there with my mother and, and, you know, dry the dishes with her and have conversations. I would sit with her and she'd, she'd rub my forehead and, and I suppose in some ways there was a, a contest that all fathers and, and sons go through for the love of the mother and the wife.
And there was, in my parents' relationship. Such an intimacy in that image in the bath of my rubbing the back of his neck, and the softness that mother. That was the thing that connected us through the softness that my mother brought. And I thought, my father, in many ways looked at my softness and saw a weakness.
He may be feared for me that I would not be tough enough for the world that was going to knock me down. So I think for many of us, you know, as fathers and sons. We traverse that in different ways. We're all born into different circumstances, but at the heart of it is a masculine exchange. The idea of what it's to live as a man in the world towering the wounds of our fathers and the inheritance of that cup and what it requires of us in our
to. That load and to release ourselves. At the same time.
Evan Rosa: I wanna go to the structure of the book a little bit in, in its format. It's, um, the, the form it takes of assaulter and the kind of alternation that you have between murriyang and Bobby. YI, I think also in the context of your statement, that it's one long wiradjuri prayer in one breath.
Yeah, it is.
Stan Grant: It's a salter and it is a brand. It is something, as you said, to be, you can open it to any page and find something there like you can with the Sams. It was tied to Wiradjuri culture because this is my inheritance, this is my, when my relationship to God begins grounded in my culture, we all come to God.
Through our culture, our families, our particularities that open ourselves to the universal, you and I on different parts of the world can talk about a father son relationship that we inhabit differently. Yeah. And yet there is a universality to that particularity, and I wanted it to have that intimacy and that feel.
It was a book that came together in a quite mystical way. I was never meant to write this book. I was contacted by a friend of mine who was beginning a, an imprint for Simon and Schuster, and she wanted me to write the first book of the imprint. It was an indigenous imprint. Amazing. And she asked me initially, Evan, she said, would you write about your father?
'cause my father has this status as a cultural leader, and I initially said no to that. I said, I just don't think I can get there for all the reasons we discussed. Certainly. And I said, what I would like to write about. Time. The idea of time. Yeah. I was very influenced by TS Elliot's four quartets and the way that he grapples with that idea of time and mortality and our relationship to the earth and to God and I, I had that sort of idea in my mind of a meditation on time that took us.
Quite miraculous mystical happened. I was at Mass and I had an experience at Mass that was transformative. It was an outer body. It was a transcendent experience. I disappeared. I left my body and I was standing for the homily and. I've had the experience of going not just outside of my body, but drawn into a place beyond the beginning of the universe, and the only way I can describe it, mm, whatever is there.
Before the Big Bang, I was there and there was a face that came out this void, and the face nestled on mine. Right against my face, and I dunno how long I was in this state, but when I came back to myself, everyone else in the church rec seated, and I was still standing, and I'd had this feeling that it had been a very long time.
When I left, I had this, this thought over and over, and it said right about your father. Now at this point, I had written all of the meditations on time. There were no, it was all the Murray Young paths were written, but there was no B in. I. Write about my father. So I sat down, I started to write about my father in memory because memory is how we traverse time, uhhuh, we exist in time through the recollection of time past as we move into time future.
Mm-hmm. And, and I started to just. My father in memory, and it was a way into this relationship that otherwise I would not have been able to find because it took us to a place beyond the temporal realm and I, I was in, in a place of that was infinite in this place of memory. Then I've realized something when I was writing it, I realized that what if I call each meditation on time, mur Young, which is heaven, sky world, and what if I call each meditation on my dad each memory, Bain, which is Wiradjuri for father?
And so I structured the book, Bain Young, BA Young, and it alternates. It wasn't until the end that it suddenly dawned on me, Evan. In that structure, I was saying the Lord's Prayer, my father in heaven, my father in heaven, and I wondered about that voice and that face mass that said to. Talk about your father.
Father was he actually saying to me, talk about your father on earth and your father in heaven?
So it was a magical process that I was not aware of, and yet this is what I was doing.
Evan Rosa: The conversation that ends up taking place. There again, I, I acknowledging the fact that this is like you coming at this as a piece of art and through so many different genres and, and meanings the conversational nature of using reflections on time in heaven, God, and then finding places in concrete, family history, blood and land and community, you're able to kind of drop into particularity when you're addressing your memory of your father.
And seeing that chapters laid out as they were. It was disorienting to me actually at first because I was like, where are the chapter titles? Right? And now being able to see the conversational nature of, of this searching in both and allowing oneself to inhabit like this space out, like you said, outside of your body, but then coming back into your body or abstract and then going into particular.
Universal and then concrete and it's sort of represents the very in betweenness that we all seem to be.
Stan Grant: Yeah. And, and we are in between, you know, Martin, Heidi talked about design, you know, the being there and in a sense we are born tossed as his friends tossed into the world. And we are, we're tossed into this history.
We're tossed into this time and space that we experience. Onroad Bergson called the dur, the experience of time in time. Each tick of the clock has time in between us that we don't necessarily register, but we experience, we inhabit. And you think about the way that in a, in the Western. Project, which is the Taming of God, the Western project that inserts history and time where God may have been even to a a, a, a Hegelian Historicism.
That's, that has its own eschatology. A working out the divine project, not now in the will of God, but in the engine of history itself, which is he says, can be a slaughter bench. But in, in the end, the wager is that it'll all have been worth it. All of the pain and the suffering to reach the absolute spirit.
It's an inversion of the tic love of God, which is not actually, the measure of it is not the pain at all. The measure is the love, but we have inserted of replacing. The divine. And what I wanted to do in this was to reject that. Reject, because what that does is, Evan, that reduces us to abstraction. Yeah.
You know, man is not made for history. History is made for man. Mm-hmm. And this is a, this is a dangerous turn for us because at the heart of that. Is an idea of a human as an abstraction, a subject, something, a point to be made rather than a human in all of our frailty and all of our love and our need for forgiveness and our brokenness, and we're born into this world.
And I suppose in this way, even in the, in the Mo Young Bain chapter headings, I'm bringing you back to a return, a breath out. In the intimacy and writing about my father in that way. You used the word grounded. It did ground me in something that is not an abstraction. It's flesh and blood. It is a, it is a human life.
It is something that is real that we can touch. And in our modern world where we live on screens, which is the turning the human into the ultimate abstraction, where do we go for that human touch? And I really wanted to speak back to this, but I didn't wanna do it in a, in a philosophical or lecturing form.
Even though there are philosophical, you know, there is philosophical discourse in the book. I needed. The bit of my father, so that this was not an abstraction. This was fleshing blood. Yeah. I've been talking a lot about, about my dad and, and the Bain bits. Would you mind if I read a bit from the Bain section?
Please do. This is referencing my dad in the bath.
I'm five years old and staring at my father. He's in a bath, and the water is stained black with blood. Sack from the trees that he has sorn all day. Working in the sawmill, my father's eyes are closed tight, and from where I stand I can feel him. His muscles are sore and he's exhausted. It seems to me that he is bearing the weight of the world and right then I wanna take it from him.
I worried so often. When I was young, I worried about my mother and my siblings and my grandfather who lived with us off and on. But mostly I worried about my father. I worried that the world would take him from us, that one day he would go to work and never return. What would he do then? Sometimes if it was late and my father was not home, I would curl up against the window and stare into the distance waiting and hoping to see the dust kicked up on the road by his car.
Only then I knew he was coming home and I could breathe again. There's a beautiful memory that I have. My father slumped in a chair. His head bowed and his eyes shuck tight. I sense that he does not know if he can go on, and then my mother appears and gently strokes the back of his neck as she walks by and dad smiles.
That touch that human touch. Mm-hmm. The human frailty, the fear that we all have. Can we get through this world? And, and I was writing things that I wasn't even aware that I was writing, which is. We can't get through this on our own. We need the human touch, the stroke at the back of the neck, the forgiveness.
We need that desperately. And I suppose Mur was my answer back to an age that has stolen so much of that for us.
Evan Rosa: What about that kind of pain, the pain that you observe in your father's face, um, represented in that the dirtied water. And it's not to say that this isn't a universal human experience, but I, I do think that it's appropriate to ask about the, the pain specific to men and the working through of that.
As you, again, like in the context of the father-son relationship and in an understanding of, you know, being a father yourself, what can, what can be said? I mean, like, I realize that to some degree the answers gonna end up being, well, not much can be said. Uh, there's a kind of quiet required in order to, um, in order to appreciate someone's pain.
Mm-hmm. But nonetheless, you are a man of words. So what can be said about, about the pain that you. You observed in him the pain that you have felt in your own life and a comment for, for men who are working with pain, that feels unworkable.
Stan Grant: I think Simon Vay puts it beautifully when she talks about attention and the need to be attemptive, which which does require a silence, and it certainly requires a forgiveness.
Brokenness she used
being.
Of our very humanity. It chills us down to our souls and we become not a human, but merely a thing. And I think in our own age of abstraction where the suffering of humans becomes something we see on screens, that they are an abstraction, they are rendered merely a thing that, as I said before, we become not human, but subject and at every point of tension.
Societal discourse in the human discourse where we reach a point of tension, where our words fail is when the human being is reduced to a thing and we're no longer attentive to the soul. And I think for men especially, who have been untethered. Um, the ground has shifted beneath our feet. For my father, being a man required a physical strength, a resistance, frankly, a violence that had to meet the violence that he was subjected to.
That was my inheritance. Of what a man should be. And yes, I was strangling that world where thankfully to be a man to express masculinity was changing and we could put away the armor and we could open ourselves to what is seen as more feminine characteristics of softness and beauty and and love. And I worry that in today's age, we're at the point.
Contention our words fail, that a lot of boys are feeling prejudged, that in their masculinity in having to acquit for the sins of misogyny. That they are seen as an abstraction, that they are not seen as human beings as men trying to make our way in the world as we're with all of its messiness, it's dark sign, it's being tossed into the world.
If we see boys and men as just subjects, as abstractions. We're not going to allow that dialogue, that discourse across the sexes within male relationships to be able to, to take place. And I think my relationship to my father is emblematic of this because we have rubbed up against each other. I, I recoiled from.
Of his world. Even I didn't know that I tough enough live in world, he in me a softness that he perceived as a weakness and yet. We walk in the world as boys and and men carrying the weight of a history of masculinity and misogyny that rightly people are suspect of. But if we cannot get past those abstractions, those fears, to the point where we can truly be attentive to the human being in us mm-hmm.
Then we're never going to be able. To live free of this history of the inheritance that we all carry women. I dare to say, do this better. Because as an antidote, as a way of surviving the violence and the brutality of masculinity. Mm-hmm. That they're more developed in the interpersonal relationship and vulnerability.
That men are only just beginning to learn how to express, but we need that. Kindness and forgiveness of the art of those relationships, if we're all going to be able to live together in this.
There's another aspect of this relationship too that is central and that is what do I do with my father's history? Right? What do I do with the history of being an aboriginal person? In Australia, we have a, a truth telling process as other countries have had. Mm-hmm. Where we're now starting to open up to some of the darker aspects of our history that we have not spoken about.
Yeah. And, and it is necessary as a cathartic mechanism, but I doubt it's utility as a means of justice. Redistributive justice.
In history and seeks to bring meaning from history to quote ts Elliot. Time is no humor. The victim is no longer there. Part of my journey has been to say I am an Aboriginal person born into the mess of this history with Aboriginal ancestry, white Irish ancestry. I'm a combination of these things. I am my father's son, but I'm not him.
I, I, I have. My mother's story, I have all of these things in me, and I don't wanna be an historical being. I don't want to be an historical abstraction as I want to be a gender abstraction or a racial abstraction. So part of this too was saying, how do I express being an Aboriginal person where. I'm free to create that for myself where my history does not speak for me before I've even opened my mouth.
And so part of this is wrestling with those today? Yeah. Of identity, truth. History, justice rights, which in many ways, and Simon Vey, I have to thank for this. Mm-hmm. She sees those things as words of the middle region. They are the transactional words, but I wanna reach for those words she called of the higher region God.
Love forgiveness, and she says they're the most dangerous words when the truth will set me free. That is the truth I experience in the mystery of the Eucharist. That is the truth I experience in sharing communion of faith. Whatever denominations or faith, it's a truth of a relationship to God beyond the subjectivity of our humanity in its fallen state and young in its own insufficient way, because we're always going to fail, is my reaching for that.
I wanna be free, free of it, the history that we're all born into.
Evan Rosa: This makes me want to ask even more about time, a song of time and the interplay of time and history and where an individual or where a species a family maybe interacts with it. And I think you did refer to in the book the fact that time seems to move forward.
But we only ever step into now, and I think whether it's constantly living in the past, plenty of people also live in the future too. In states of anxiety and fear. Mm. It is difficult to inhabit now. Well, there's nothing you can do except that, but how was your understanding of time changed because of these reflections of yours?
Tell me more. It's a, it's
Stan Grant: a tricky space. Saint Augustine famously said in his confessions, what was God doing before he made time? He was making hell for the over curious. And you know, I think we're playing with fire when we come into time. I mean, the whole idea of time is God in time. Well, if God is in time, then time is God.
If God is out time and we are in time, do we experience something God does not experience? And how can God these of location of ourselves in time, even to of timelessness. Imputes an understanding of time. It is an, it is, uh, is a, it is a negative idea of time. We have removed time from time eternity. When you talk about eternity, it is boarded by the possibilities.
The imaginative space of time itself, it reaches to an horizon. But what is beyond the horizon? Um, for modernity, of course. Time is the big story. To be modern is to reinvent time. It's to be new. Modernity and technology is all about taming time. You know, Zigmund Bauman, the great sociologist, um, talked about the in instant.
The instant moment that we live now in a world where space is irrelevant because we don't locate ourselves spatially. You and I through technology are traversing time. You are in a different time zone that we are speaking now at different times, in a different day in a different country, and we have entirely collapsed the spatial separation between us.
And time is instant in ways that our ancestors, our grandparents would never have been able to do. And he says. Bauman says there is a danger in this, in that neutralizing the space in collapsing time means that we no longer have spaces to dwell with one another. And creating those spaces is really imperative.
And so I think as said before, the idea of history as well, history then becomes the engine. Of what is seen as human progress rather than a divine will. This is a very modern idea, Evan. Our ancestors for tens of thousands of years lived entirely in a world of an objective relationship to the divine of everything around them.
It's what ordered their world. They would never, they were not existentially baffled. And yet the invention of time that frees us from God, that empowers us to create ourselves as God also bedevils us. And what, what is the extension of the modern project that we never die? Forever. We push the boundaries of human longevity out to the outer limits.
We are now on the verge of a transhumanism where our consciousness will survive our bodies. So Evan Rosa and Stan Grant will persist. Consciousness beyond the limitation of this human form. It raises questions about the soul. It raises questions about the meaning of life. If life has no end, does it have any meaning?
So I, I wrestled with all of these things, and I suppose part of the book as well, in, in coming to my father, the end of his physical life was to confront the beauty of that mortality. My father's gift to me is his death, and I've struggled with this The first time I held my dad in his physically broken state.
He's, he needs help in and outta bed into the bathroom, the little things that he cannot do anymore. The first time I held him, his legs shook underneath me. His body was soft. The muscles were no longer there, and I was repulsed. This was not the father I knew. I wanted my strong for Harper back, but he was offering himself to me, his vulnerability, and I had to hold that.
And he has taught me the lesson in mortality. His gift of his death to me is the meaning of my life. If we don't have that. Experience. Where is the human touch? I think.
Transhumanism, human redundancy, detaining of time, the idea that we will never die. That means life itself does not have the desperation of our limited years. I want to hold onto this mortality, this fragility, the idea that Christ himself suffered and died a human death. Which we all will have to do as a way of opening ourselves to the eternal life that I'm promised in my faith.
But that's not what humans have been reaching for. From the Copernican revolution to now, we've been pushing back the boundaries of science, taming time and space still in God, and we are on the cusp of being Gods that never die. And consider this as a final thought. It is entirely possible. Within a generation or two, another human will never be born.
Human birth rate is now at almost, you know, at historically low levels. Mm. In Australia now, it's, you know, at the average family, a woman will have one child, maybe in places like Korea, Japan, yeah. China, women are not having children. And if we're in a place where the human being is not defined by the give and take of the, of a human relationship in the birth.
All of.
Where are we as a species? And these are, these are fundamental questions that are coming at us right now.
Evan Rosa: What I really appreciate about what you do generally, but this book is an example of it, is allowing your reflection on these really big ideas. They are big, they're hard to wrap our minds around, and they do require.
Close attention and a familiarity with philosophy, theology, culture history, but with a really deep appreciation for the form of this text and your laying bare. You know this part of yourself, this part of your family. You are working with what you have. Yeah. And I think that is one of the deepest challenges to anybody because the temptation is constantly to be seeking something from the outside, from somewhere out there, someone to come in and, and save us.
And yet you're working from within your tradition and your relations and within your own body and your own mind. And it's just the result is like just a really beautiful piece.
Stan Grant: I, I, I would've added, I am only working with what I have. I, I, I, I see the limitations and the of it. I see that even in this book, there are places and spaces to go to beyond this.
It, it, it has led me to the next book I'm going to write. It's a continuation of this. Wrestling with these questions, but all we have is what we can offer in this moment to this time that, as I said before, predicated on a forgiveness in a gift exchange rather than a transaction that allows us to begin to have just the type of conversation that we've had.
Today. It changed me a lot. This book, Evan, it brought me even closer in my relationship to my faith. Certainly it had allowed me to put a lot of the complexity and the challenges of that father relationship into a different space. It has opened me to a different. Way of writing and thinking. I have explored the, the sort of capacity and the possibilities of writing beyond categorization and genre.
So it has changed me as well. And I suppose that's the nature of the human experience. We are not fully formed. We don't arrive fully formed. We don't leave fully formed. And I think one of the, the things that I worry about for our young people today. Is that they are expected to be able to solve these things and have answers to these things.
They're expected to have opinions about everything. They're expected to be constantly engaged, and there is no time for the silence, the repose, the doubt, the fear, and when fewer and fewer people. Are engaged in the act of reading, um, which invites you into dialogue in quiet places. We are losing the possibility of that.
And this book, I suppose is my attempt to say, I want to try to offer something into that space to come back to our starting point. It's a gift
Evan Rosa: that's fitting because I think what is indicative of, um, of what I learned in your, in your book, which is the endless loop of things to just end up where you started.
In my end is my beginning. Yeah. And a brief.
Stan Grant: Yeah.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Indeed. Indeed.
Stan, thank you so much for joining me. It was amazing.
Stan Grant: It's been an absolute pleasure. Evan. Always is. Thank you so much
Evan Rosa: for The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for. Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Stan Grant production assistance by Noah Senthil. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show For more information, visit us online at faith dot Yale dot edu at life worth living dot Yale dot edu.
There you can find all sorts of educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new listener, welcome friend. Remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss our next episode. And if you've been listening for a while, consider sharing this episode.
Help us expand the reach of this podcast or. To the extent that your means allows, consider making a financial gift at faith dot Yale dot edu slash give. Everything we do relies on the generosity of people just like you. Thanks for listening, friends, we'll be back with more soon.
