What's The Point Anyway?
It seems like much of the Western world is lost. The interesting trend over the last few years is that more and more people are working that out.
More people have worked out that endless materialism and chasing things that never actually satisfy us aint it.
So what’s the point of it all, anyway?
What's The Point Anyway?
Episode #28 - Sean McMahon on how an agnostic half-Jewish free spirited musician became Catholic
After interviewing Mesh Mesha on this podcast several weeks ago, I've been fascinated by how a Protestant Christian can become a Catholic. Catholicism gets a bad wrap in general, but as a 'Bible believing Christian' I've held a particular negative view towards the institution - having written about its deceptions and even spoken about them on this show many times.
Speaking to Mesh with an open mind has made me realise that some of my presuppositions are very wrong. Now this does not mean that I am all of a sudden a Catholic, but it has forced me to reevaluate my position with a fresh perspective.
Sean McMahon, therefore, was the perfect guest. He grew up more or less agnostic, with one Catholic parent and one Jewish parent. Pursuing his love of music, he spent his early 20's looking into things like mysticism and new age, before exploring his Jewish roots further and finding faith in Jesus due to his studies on the Book of Daniel. But just over a year ago, as he continued his study, he came to the view that the Catholic Church is indeed the true Church established by Jesus Christ in the first century.
We talked through his journey to get there, and what that means for him now.
Sean is a father of 2 (possibly now 3 with his 3rd child imminent) and is trying to make the move into full time ministry. Please support him by checking out all of his work - both in music and theology.
https://www.youtube.com/@realSeanMcMahon/videos
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1xiPmXZfm2DeEmCVYHXd20?si=g76PnePMSCiRBI4tuuYqRA&nd=1&dlsi=dc44833a6027411a
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you Hey, I just hit start recording. I've got some of your guitar there, which maybe I'll add to the intro. Alright, so do you hear this or do hear this? I that's the headphones. Yeah, that's what you're hoping for. Yeah, I've just set up at a new, I've started using this like community house up the road. So I've got three kids under like three under four and a half. So our house is a mad house. And today's my first time in this office space. So I thought I was about to get kicked out of the current room I'm in, but we're all good. Very good, yeah, I'm about to live in a madhouse too. We have our third kid on the way any day now. They got a six year old and a two year old. Yeah, okay. have fun with that Sean. It's no, it really is the best but three. Our house now is just insane. I bet. And he said they're all under the age of four. Or I guess under the age of they were all born our eldest was like Just turned four when the youngest was no she was about to turn four when the youngest was born. Yeah, we're one Almost three and almost five now So pandemic babies. Yes, first one Emilia. She was born April 2020. Wow, just made it. just made it. Yeah, the start of a crazy period in my life that continues to this day. So I was in Melbourne, I've been in Melbourne the whole time. But we were the second most locked down city in the world. I heard all about it. I had a friend named Dan Gibson, a musician in a band named Kingston, and he was living out there. And I heard all about it. Like you guys couldn't leave your homes. Oh, we were, it was insane, insane. Yeah, we had like, you know, 2K limit on our homes. I could only leave to go get groceries. I mean, I could only laugh when I look back at it now, just the times that we were living in. And I was an atheist when it hit. wow, so you've been on a journey sir. Wow. have I ever. Yeah, absolutely. And you too, and all the best for what's ahead with your youngest. Have you got boys or girls? I've got two girls and the one who's about to be born is gonna be our boy. Right, so you got the mix. I'm sort of the opposite. We got girl and then two boys. Yeah. Well you got a lot of moral support and I'm about to have my little guy, my little sidekick. it should be fun. Well, Sean, I'm really, thanks for taking the time. I'm really excited to chat to you. I'll mention this when we sort of get into the conversation, but honestly, six weeks ago, I'm like pretty hard core, like anti-Catholic, even though when I first came to faith was at a Latin mass Catholic church. And then I've been speaking to Mesher, I'm like, Oh dear, hang on, have I got a whole bunch of my presuppositions wrong? So I'm not Catholic yet, but I'm a little bit scared that maybe I'm gonna end up there. So I'm going to be cross-examining you, in a bad way, but because I'm actually really interested in the answers you're gonna give. Sure. Well, I'm only an incidental or coincidental representative of the Catholic Church, just because I happen to be Catholic. But I'm not a priest, I'm not a bishop, and I'm not the Pope. So you can take me with a grain of salt. Well, hey, I've seen enough of your background to know that you've got some very interesting, interesting insights and different backgrounds. we'll get into it. What I'll do is I'll just introduce you quickly. And then my opening question always is what's the point anyway? So that's just your perspective on what is the point of life? Why are we here? You can answer it any way you wish and then we'll spend an hour or so unpacking it. So welcome back to What's The Point Anyway. With me today is Sean McMahon. He's a folk singer under the name Workman Song. He's got a million plus listens on his song, No It's Not. Over his journey, he's been an atheist, Jewish, Baptist pastor, and now a Catholic. So he's got many perspectives that I'm looking forward to picking his brain on. Sean, where you've got to today, what's your answer on What's The Point Anyway? What's the point anyway? The point is the cross because the cross is our suffering embodied and yet it's also our transcendence of that suffering embodied in Christ Jesus who showed us how to suffer. He didn't teach us the sensation of suffering as the Buddha did. He taught us what to do with our suffering and where it was gonna take us. And at best it's going to take us into the world to come where we can pretty much help other people suffer too. And we can look down on this world and help people for all of eternity just like our Lord did and continues to. Nice. So I know she mentioned Buddha there. And from my understanding of your background, I mean, you may have even spent some time as a Buddhist, right? But you didn't grow up Christian. What was your journey to believing that the cross was the point? To summarize, beginning to present, I was born to an Irish Catholic immigrant father who married my assimilated Jewish mother, which is to say she wasn't religious. They chose to raise us kids without religion. And so we were pretty agnostic leaning on the atheist side. By the time I watched Fight Club, I was a full on atheist. You know, and then I watched the matrix and I became a bit of a Gnostic and I became interested in stuff like that. And in college, the culture there of basically like hippie culture was very interested in the Eastern religions. And that's where, that's where all of your cultural cred would come from. If you're a little hip to Buddhism, especially. it just so happened that my mother's father lived in the area and he was a Zen Buddhist. So I had a little bit of a of an entry point into that and I got really into seeking as they say in those college years and I remember spending hours upon hours and days upon days in UMass Amherst University Library looking at every book I could on spirituality so long as it wasn't a Christian book because that to me Christianity was just a joke to me. I believed all of the mid late nineties, cultural lampoons of Christians and born again Christianity and all that. So I just thought it was a joke and it was only because of my mother's mother who was culturally Jewish. She got me into what I'd inherited as a Jew. And I started reading about Jewish traditions. Then I started reading the Torah. And once I started reading the Torah, you know, I started wrestling with the law. was like, how, frankly, I was like, how is this mystical? Because I know that Hasidic Jews, I was hanging out with Hasidic Jews. I know that they're very mystical, but this law didn't seem mystical to me at all. And it just, was a very difficult thing to wrestle with what my identity was supposed to be as someone who'd inherited this thing and you know, waiting for the Messiah, you know, I was just trying to make sense of that. I really wanted to understand what I'd inherited. And eventually I stumbled into the book of Daniel. And I was just kind of surprised to see that there's an actual prophecy that talks about when Messiah would come. And I, you know, I asked around, you know, what do these weeks mean? You know, what do these 70 weeks mean? And with the help of the internet, I, you know, learned that it meant, you know, 490 years from the time of the decree to restore Jerusalem, which, so it's very difficult to read that and realize, oh, this major prophet was talking about the Messiah coming in the first century AD. So it was not Jesus, who is it? So that's kind of. were your Hasidic Jew friends saying at that point? Well, I was dancing around it. I was very self-conscious about Christianity in general, but especially in that circle, because I was in Hillel and I was in Chabad. In the Chabad time actually overlapped with when I actually had embraced Christianity. That's another story. But I was very coy about it because I got very negative reactions. were a few people, students who were okay with Jesus. who saw him as a rabbi, who saw him as a mystic or a misunderstood, you know, historical figure. But I learned pretty quickly that, you know, what the Talmud says about him, that he's, you know, an awful person and he's burning in hell. So I realized it just wasn't polite to ask about him. And so I kind of wrestled with that stuff on my own. And by the time I was in Brooklyn and in the Chabad community in Brooklyn, which is a very intense Chabad community. There's a great rabbi there that I was learning from, but I didn't really talk much about the fact that I'd already converted to Christianity at that point. Right, so you'd convert it, but you're still staying in the bar circles. Yeah, yeah. Well, because when I first decided that I wanted to pursue Christianity, I'd been convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. I decided to go into like the first church that I stumbled into, which happened to be an evangelical ministry. And I struggled for a year to like make sense of it theologically and couple that with some personal crises I was going through. I ended up leaving that church and that area to go to New York City and pursue music. Yeah. But I walked away from that first year of Christianity realizing, geez, like in spite of all of my aversions to Christianity and evangelicalism and all the things I thought I knew better about spirituality, within a year, I still got sucked into this sort of very fundamentalist way of looking at things purely because of social pressure. Like I was... I was trying to view all of my own study in light of a tension with Calvinism at that church. And that was just a tough tension to be in because it didn't make sense to me. And I was in my twenties. I can say now like, I should have walked away earlier simply because there was a disconnect. I just didn't really believe what they were preaching, but it was my first experience. that's why when I ended up in Brooklyn, I ended up in a very progressive Episcopal ministry that met in a bar, know like mimosas and cocktails at 10 in the morning listening to a blue-haired female priest and and then Chabad because Chabad was still connected to that more mystical allegorical Antigone go way of looking at scripture which over the years I finally realized that that's where it's at. It's just you can't get too literal with scripture. I mean, there's plenty of literal things said in scripture, it's not the only way to look at it. So that's why I ended up off the beaten path of Christianity for a while. And there was some other stuff. There was a Eastern Orthodox priest who was a mentor. There was, you know, my father's mother is a devout Irish Catholic. I was a Baptist pastor for three years during the pandemic. And I toured the world in a rock band, you know, and kind of backslid or, know, maybe I was never on the path. It's, hard to say, but I've, I've been there. I've been everywhere, man, as Johnny Cash said. So, you know, I have a lot of stories and a lot of encouragement for anyone who ever worries about not having a, road to Damascus moment. So what was it like, like, you're in your early 20s, you're in New York, or whether you, I think you said you became, you considered yourself Christian before you went to New York, but you know, like, you're studying music, you'd looked at Buddhism and seeking, which I think is highly sort of, and I also did the same in my 20s, very sort of individual and sort of you're in control and mastery. Whereas Christianity is very, you're sort of subservient, right? Like you become a servant to Christ. How did you go with that transition? Well, in New York, I don't think I got out of it. And also, you know, I had friends who were doing like yoga cults or like co-ops, I should say, like living and it's long story. But I was still sort of in the culture and I was still interfacing with a lot of new age communities because that's just a lot of musicians tend to be that. Mm-hmm. But I actually found or have found over the years that, I mean, all of my experiences going to like meditation groups and retreats are far more uncomfortable and kind of a group think is the word that comes to mind than any church service I've ever been to. Even that evangelical community that I sort of spoke less high about. Because there's just such a reliance on the foreign languages when it comes to Buddhism. It's very interesting. And you mentioned that you had a moment at the traditional Latin mass. I understand there's a mysticism around foreign languages, but you don't fully understand what's being said or if it sounds more musical, like a Latin chant or a Hindu chant, et cetera. It can sound very beautiful and you can let go of yourself a little bit more. But I found that a lot of those Eastern spiritual communities, tended to, people really lost their identities in them. But to be fair, I was rolling in circles where the people were also like, you know, smoking a lot of weed, doing a lot of psychedelics, all that stuff. there's other reasons that people would lose themselves in that. Yeah. And what was the, when you did become Christian, what was the thing that tipped you over the line? Like you mentioned the book of Daniel and there was some historical credibility for this Messiah that was spoken about in the Hebrew Torah coming in that first century. What elements of it? were there for you that made you believe that yeah okay not only was he this messiah spoken about but he was actually indeed the son of god and you know the only way to the true living god As I recall, reading the prophecies of Daniel and realizing that they pointed to the first century, that made me curious about reading the New Testament. And so I started reading the gospels and I was very dismissive of them all except for the gospel of John because I was a mystic. so the gospel of John really resonated with me. It struck me these were all like riddles. Mmm. I loved riddles. loved Koans, Zen Koans. So I figured maybe I could crack the code and maybe that I figured I might be the first one in history to ever figure out the real truth about Jesus. know that, he was just, he was just a rabbi who got misunderstood and he was basically like actually a Zen Buddhist. So I was reading that a lot. And as I started to understand it, you know, in my own spiritual language that I had at the time, I started to really respect. Jesus the rabbi. And I remember, I think I decided I would give the Gospel of Mark a chance. I believe it's Mark because in Mark when he goes before the Sanhedrin, they ask him, are you the son of God? And I was shocked because I was always told Jesus never claimed to be the son of God. But in that account, he answers point blank, yes. Yeah. I believe it's Mark and that kind of ripped away some presuppositions. And so I started reading more and you know, the moment the rest became history, I can't really talk around this one. I was just reading scripture and I had sort of an inner vision of Christ, the word made flesh. It was as if the entire Torah the words the he drew characters had taken the form of the man when i saw him walking into Jerusalem, you know, for his triumphal entry in this form. was, you know, almost, maybe I watched too much Matrix, almost like the code, you know, but it was kind of like that. And it was very meaningful to me. And like I say, it's an inner vision and it could have purely been the sum of some unconscious stuff I was accumulating, studying all this scripture. And basically that last bit of resistance of not wanting to be a Christian guy, not wanting to be an, I love Jesus guy. just fell away because there's too much going on pointing towards him being who he is. And so I had to submit to that. So I was probably about 21 or 22 when that happened. Yeah, I think there's that, you know, that C.S. Lewis quote that talks about basically the options Jesus leaves with his words around who he could be. And I think it's so true. Like, I mean, I've had guests on this show that love the idea of Jesus the man, they've got no, you know, they definitely don't call themselves Christian, you know, but when you start to read it, He really knew, there's too many things he says where you're like, this guy's either the truth and I have to submit to it, or he's just a liar. And if he's a liar, then I can't follow him at all. He can't be this good guy, this good teacher, and it's just a complete, a moral lie. So when you hit that point, did life look like in your 20s growing up as this Christian? And then I'm interested in knowing the Jewish background as well. I've had guests on the show and a lot of Christians and probably myself included are critical of Zionism and its role. What's your perspective on Judaism now? Hmm. Well... the first Jewish guest I've had on the show, so I think it's a good perspective. Okay, should we jump to that or talk a little bit about the 20s too? Let's go two days and then we'll go back and then I want to get back to your journey a bit more and where it's got to today. So Judaism for me is a very tragic thing in a way because, you know, this is a very subjective thing that I'm about to share, but I'm the first generation of Christian in the Jewish lineage that I'm aware of. And so it's very lonely and it's very strange to try to explain myself to that side of my family because what I believe Christianity was before I embraced it is what a lot of my family still thinks it is. So, you know, I would have like, no one disowned me by any means, but I think people would have been more excited if I'd come out as gay rather than a Christian, you know? That's just kind of the culture and it's just not cool. And I've been told for, you know. decades at this point, like, why do you gotta put Jesus in your songs? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure if I've been brought up in the Bible belt, you'd all love this. So, you know, it's personally very alienating in my family and in this region, in New England. You know, I'm wearing like blue Massachusetts, blue Martha's Vineyard. So all that. cultural stuff is very difficult. where that interfaces with Judaism, I would say is, um, It makes it, I'm very, very sensitive about preaching what I preach, because I was a preacher for three years, because I'm aware that what I'm saying is essentially going to be interpreted as either replacement theology or supersessionism, which is to say the new covenant, ta-da, is superior to the old one. I'm very aware of how personally Jewish individuals could take that because I used to take it very personally as well. And that's only gotten more intense as I've studied eschatology and then embrace Catholicism, which essentially relies on the idea that the new covenant burst out of the dead shell of the old. and is the same kingdom of God that was there in Eden. But it slipped out of the hands of the apostates in the first generation. Now, I don't believe that there is a perpetual blood curse. When it says in the gospel that the Jews said, his blood be upon us and our children. There have definitely been Catholics over the years who have said that that is a perpetual curse. I don't believe that because my, you know, my eschatological studies have led me to conclusions that preclude that interpretation. But I'm highly aware of the potential for misinterpretation. And yeah, it... I'll be blunt about it. It sounds patronizing, but I feel sad that my Jewish brothers and sisters don't see this, don't see Jesus, and can look past their own scriptures in such a way as to completely miss the point. Although I understand why, because I did for a long time, and all of our ancestors did, and plenty of other people do, but you This is our inheritance to look at these laws and to look at these scriptures and the words of the prophets. And again, I was in my twenties when I discovered that my ancestors for the past 2000 years have had access to the book of Daniel. saying what it says and it's very sad to me that that's overlooked. That's the way the cookie crumbles. so it's, I mean, it's interesting now and you touched on it then, you know, calling yourself a Catholic and you describe it as, you know, Catholicism, I would agree, it is basically the new covenant kingdom here on earth that rules the world. That's really the claim of the, you know, Catholicism is, makes a claim it is the true church of God and it does have dominion over all the nations. And then Judaism and probably particularly through the Talmud has a similar idea of dominion over the world. But a different version of that is it's an interesting conflict, isn't it? It is. So I had friends in the Jewish community and just Jewish friends in my like circle. And a handful of them like straight up had messianic complexities because when you're Jewish and you know, the psychology is in all of us, but when you're Jewish, there actually is the potential that you might be him because, you know, barring all these time statements in the prophets, which have already been swept aside for 2,000 years. Basically, you're the messiah if you end up ruling the world. So you might as well try, right? And I've seen it. It's really wild to see messianic complex at large among people. So yeah, the whole dominion thing is very tricky because Kind of what I was saying earlier is, you know, the Catholic claim to world domination, basically. It's in conflict with the Jewish hope of the Messiah. And then also it's in conflict with everyone's secular view of history, because we were all raised basically to think and to believe that the Catholic Church was a force for retrogression, a regression and a retrograde force in the world. that progress is best. Well, how do I put it? Where we're at now is progress, right? The enlightenment was progress. Walking away from the church was progress. The reformation was progress, not simply because it reformed, but because it just utterly detached. And that the papacy is backwards and that all these power structures and measures of control are somehow backwards, which is so ironic in our times. mean, come on. yeah. So, you know, Dominion is prophesied for the church and for the saints of the most high. Jews at least are honest about that in so far, you know, like I should say Orthodox Jews, you know, people who are really devout about those scriptures and take them literally enough, you know, bad timing aside to look for something like that. But it goes a little against human nature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what was it like for you then, Sean? So you're Catholic now, but then you come to faith in your early 20s and then live out sort of a, you know, almost sort of mystic sort of new age Christian lifestyle still in the music scene and a lot of friends in that space. I'm guessing you're pretty anti-Catholic in your late 20s, early 30s. Did you ever possibly imagine yourself becoming Catholic? Well, yes, I could picture it because there was a sentimentality there around my granny, my granny Joan. And also when I first joined that evangelical church, I just ended up meeting this Greek Orthodox priest through music. I was teaching his son guitar lessons. And so I learned a lot about the ancient faith from him. And I went to divine liturgy and I thought it was beautiful. And so, you know, I started reading the Church Fathers very early on, and I was open to the idea that the Church Fathers were the ancestors of both the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic Church. I've always been very ecumenical. I mourn the separation between the East and West, let alone with Protestants. It should all be together. I think there's a lot of theological straw men that get thrown around that just make things worse. So, you know, I could always picture it spiritually, but part of what kept me where I was in my 20s, I was not the most responsible. I was a starving artist and I loved the idea of people like St. Francis and other ascetic monks simply because I could justify my poverty, you know, as a starving artist. but you know, that, that led me into communities where I basically, you know, docilely went along with like anarcho-communist, you know, meetings and stuff and dumpster diving, all that type of stuff. So I, I very, unconsciously like zombie walked into very far leftism and, was in very progressive circles. So there's an aspect of Catholicism which seems accessible from there, like Dorothy Day's Catholic worker and all that stuff. lot of like communists and anarcho-communists have embraced her because Catholic social teaching has a little bit of overlap or seems to. So I was friendly with it, but aside from that, you know, Catholicism was this like hard line. tell you what to do, know, breast beating guilt trip, right wing, you know, patriarchal thing that I didn't want anything to do with, because I just wanted to like cut the collars off my shirt and be an androgynous like rock kid. And so when did, what was the moment where that started to change? Because then, know, I know then, as you say, it's pandemic, you're a Baptist preacher. And now you're Catholic, what, how did the, how did that shift happen? It was the Trump era and the pandemic. I discovered, too much to my surprise in 2017 and 2018 that Trump was not Hitler. And then I had a child, I became a parent and I was married and that naturally settles you down and makes you a little more protective. Someone told me, you know, when you first become a father, if you have a boy, you're going to you spend your money on boats and fishing poles, but if it's a girl, you're gonna buy guns. And my first kid was a daughter and that changed me a lot. went from being this kinda, I mean, my life didn't think I was a feminine, but I think I was in retrospect. I was in the rock scene. really, like my style was somewhat androgynous and I always thought of myself as kinda like the skinny David Bowie type. And as soon as I had a daughter, said, I need, I need to like eat some steak. need to work out and I need to have a shotgun on the table for when my girl's first boyfriend walks through the door, you know? and then the pandemic happened and I was as I joke about this, I was radicalized as they say, I wasn't really radicalized. I would just, I just learned some common sense because I was a professional musician and the government told me I couldn't do it anymore. And, I was scandalized by that, that I couldn't provide, you know, put food on the table for my, yeah. So I had to break the rules in order to feed my family. And very early on in the pandemic, the Baptist church where I was doing music ministry, it's mostly elderly people. And they were like, we can't do this Zoom stuff. We don't know how to do it. So we started meeting. And I got called into the pulpit when the preacher there left. So I was ordained in house, you know, like in the Baptist tradition, the congregation lay their hands on you and you're ordained. So that's how I was ordained. And in 2020, I became a pastor. It was like right into the fire. I had to keep a church open. I had to keep a church open when we weren't allowed to meet. Yeah, so it was illegal, because like in Australia, as I was saying before we started the convo, churches were completely shut down and I was an atheist when it hit. So when I first, I was just looking to attach myself to anything and I found a Catholic church, which was like the only one that was like meeting underground. So you were forced to do that. Yeah, it wasn't as acute as it was there. It was the devil in the details for us. There were certain things we had to do in order to be legal and capacity and spacing and all that stuff. And we just didn't do it. And it was a trust fall because these weren't like rebellious people in the congregation. They're just elderly and their attitude was, we trust each other and if we die, it's our time. Yeah. but it was fine because, you know, we all know what COVID was now. you know, it was what, it was what all the cooler minds said right at the beginning of it. It's a coronavirus. We know what that is and we've had them before and we usually call it a cold. probably what was really getting people was the bird flu that that's getting people now, but I digress. so that's really what got me a little more explicit with my. shall we say, like harder line values. I always joke with my wife that I used to be floppy, know, like, I was very relativistic, very postmodern, philosophical approach to everything. And then I started really believing in right and wrong and good and evil, you know, around that time. you know, three years into preaching and putting together sermons every week and the Bible study that then entails I had an experience that a lot of preachers do and a lot of seminarians do, which is I started looking at church history in the Bible and realizing like, weird. The Bible is actually telling the tale of a very Catholic looking church in the New Testament in the book of Acts. And the first church fathers that we read about, they're confirming that that's what it's like even more so. you know, so what am I doing here in this kind of Baptist situation? And I need to clarify, like I didn't have any issue, like no negativity towards the Baptist way or anything. was more just when I was licensed to preach there, I had to sign a document saying I believe certain things and they're small, know, two ordinances, they're not sacraments, et cetera. And if I stopped believing within those lines, I had to resign. So that's why I ended up resigning because I started believing in more than just two ordinances. Yeah, yeah. So that's what happened there. did it go? Can I just ask while you're talking about that? Because I know you're obviously a full preterist as well. Heaps of my guests have been preterists, I'm preterist myself. And there's definitely an aversion to trusting too much about the church fathers and early creeds and this sort of stuff from preterist guys. How did you view that? Well, I think I'm willing to play ball with it a little more. Like I've talked to a couple more cessationist, full preterists, you know, so they'll have issues with like the creeds that say, you know, we believe that the Lord will come again, resurrection of the body. know, Apostles' Creed says, you he ascended into heaven. sits at the right hand of God, the father almighty from thence he shall come to judge living in the dead. Like I believe I am going to stand before the throne. and in some ways I already am, and, and the entire world is already there. So I don't take any issue with that. Like hardline historical preterists just believe that that symbolic image was literally fulfilled and only fulfilled, in the first century. And I think that. You know, just to take that point, the destruction of Jerusalem was the historic fulfillment of that vision, but the event itself was also a symbol. was a sign. I mean, the Bible says it's a sign, the sign of the parasy of the, the parasy of the son of man. So it's not just that John was seeing visionary signs of a historic event that would happen. He was having a vision of the Lord's day, the day of the Lord. in which he would see this historic event, which was in itself a sign of a spiritual reality, the parousia, which I tend to translate as presence of the Lord. So that's how I look at that. I tend to maybe be on the more realized eschatology side of things than the historic full preterism. But I think there's I think there's kind of crisscross between the two. yeah, I don't really take issue with some of these creeds because I think the more you dig into the early church, you see that they were using this language differently than we're trying to impose upon it. yeah, we look at it anachronistically, for sure. And so what was the, as you're going through this, you're reading the Church Fathers, I agree, I think if you read all the early Church Fathers, Catholic, if you read the Book of Acts, you've got clearly a hierarchical sort of system being set up with bishops and elders and presbyteries and... and pastors, know, or, you know, in these congregations that then certainly seem to sort of somewhat report into the head at the time, which seemed to be, you know, Peter and Paul and the initial apostles. As a lot of, as preterists, a lot of us need to say that they were simply fulfilling a task that ended in AD 70 because the only... the only group that can claim to have that authority still and structure still in place is either the Catholic church or you might argue the Orthodox. It certainly can't be any of the Protestants because it didn't exist for a thousand years or more, 1500 years. What then as you were starting to this and you started to go outside of the bounds of what was acceptable in the Baptist. Talk to me then about starting to see Catholicism and was it, did it scare you? And then what were the dominoes that started to fall? done. Well, when I was preaching my sermons, you I would go by the liturgical calendar and I was always very interested in, you know, what did the historic Christians think of this Sunday? Like what were they celebrating this Sunday, you know, 2000 years ago? What are the traditions, you know, especially for feast days and what can that tell us? Because each saint can... can kind of tell us so much about the Christian Walk. So I was always very friendly to Christian history. I like delving into history. And so, you know, I'd find things like, you know, the story of Saint Denis during the, like the plague of, I think it was the third century in Rome. was like, basically, I resonated. It was like the first plague that a Christian presbyter had to deal with. And There was an edict that no one can get together. The churches had to close. Everyone had to quarantine. And St. Denise was like, no, we're going to keep meeting. You know? And I was like, yeah. You know? Um, and I became, you know, like self-aware. I was like self-conscious. was like, Oh, I look into Christian history a lot. That's interesting. Like, why am I limiting myself to the early church? You know, like I might as well start looking like in the, you know, the forbidden. middle ages, know, the dark ages. Yeah. And I started to realize like, wait a minute, this was awesome. This was like a very cool age. It wasn't that dark. It has a bad rap and it's all based on, you know, straw manning the Catholic church because we have this very post-enlightenment, post-reformation view that we've inherited. And so, you know, just slowly started to appreciate Christian history. In addition to the you know, reformation history that I already kind of appreciated. Um, but, know, I, I remember, you know, Halloween is reformation day. And I remember studying some Martin Luther and just not being terribly convinced by him. I was like, you know, I can relate to what this man was going through. Like he's struggling with scrupulosity. You know, he's struggling with certain teachings. And he probably wasn't trying to break away, but then he, you know, just a lot of things conspired to make Luther who he was and to make Lutheranism what it became. you know, and I'm. I just saw what I believe went awry with him and his story, not to say that the Catholic Church didn't need a little someone to call them out. you know, so I was interfacing with church history in such a way that eventually I found myself realizing, I'm just plumbing Catholic history. So I started to just feel Catholic. Yeah. You know, I started to feel like I was just swimming in a tradition that was basically Catholic. And then what really changed things for me was doing a full Preterist study on Isaiah 126. It's like a 12 part study in my YouTube channel. And it was about restoring the judges, you know, as they were in the beginning. And I kind of figured it was going to take us to this kind of, know, the first century church was established. Ta-da! Historic full preterism, it's done. I figured I was going to come out the other end kind of antinomian and we're free and there's no accountability and we don't have to worry about ever sinning again, et cetera. And the more I dug into it, it's such a long study because I just kept hitting this stuff. I was like, wait a minute, why? Why did Jesus say that Peter was the rock? Like, who is Eliakim? Like, why was this guy, this prime minister given the keys to the kingdom? How come the other apostles weren't given the keys to the kingdom? What does this mean? All that stuff. And by the end of it, I came out kind of accepting the fact that the early church in the Bible was a hierarchical church, all that stuff. Because of the centrality of Peter, I was like, okay, like I'd love to be Eastern Orthodox. It's so mystical and theosis is so well articulated in that tradition, but they don't got Peter. So the papacy. why it was Catholicism not Eastern Orthodox. So it's the papacy. Because most people go Eastern Orthodox because of the papacy. Yeah, yeah. And I'm doing a study now called How the Papacy Fulfills Prophecy. And it's basically covering some of the ground that was starting to come out at me in parallel to that Isaiah 126 study, but I didn't actually cover in that study. But yeah, the Peter stuff popped right out at me. like, in Daniel 2, it says that a rock is going to be thrown at the Roman Empire, basically, and take it over. And I haven't encountered any other church writers who talked about this, but Jesus called him the rock, you know, and for some reason, Rome has just become associated with St. Peter. And in this study that I'm doing now, how the papacy fulfills prophecy, like I still believe the papacy fulfills prophecy, but there's no like, how do I say it? Like there's no like killer. argument. Like you look at Peter, it's like he's very flawed. You know, he doesn't spend a lot of time in Rome, even in the apocryphal stuff. He's killed there. He doesn't stand before Nero. Paul does, you know, but there's this indelible connection historically, and you can't ignore or deny the fact that everything that prophecy said would happen regarding the kingdom of God and the beast kingdom. would be around at the time the kingdom of God was planted. Like it all happened and it is no coincidence that all this language about the rock and you know the mountain and all this stuff, I don't think it's a coincidence that Jesus wanted us to understand it a certain way. So I don't think that like Peter has any like special personal thing going on. Like he wasn't holier than any of the other apostles. Like I think he really is the first among equals. I think his ministry flowed out of the apostolic ministry in general. And he wasn't supposed to lord it over anybody and the popes really shouldn't lord anything over anyone. And I think I actually agree with questionable Catholic theology named Hans Kuhn, who basically put it nicely. That's why I agree with him. He said, you know, the Catholic hierarchy shouldn't be a hierarchy of office. It should be a hierarchy of ministry, just as Jesus spoke about. It should be a hierarchy of, if you want to be the best, you got to be the least. If you want to serve, then you'll be on top. know, some people, especially Catholic apologists, really want to like nail these polemical arguments that make Peter this like, incredibly unique figure among the apostles. But actually, you know, I really agree with the traditional dialogue between the East and the West, where the East says like, hey, it's supposed to be this kind of equals thing. I agree with that. But. Also, I disagree with them that. We can break the bonds of charity and communion simply because the. Pope can be annoying sometimes politically. I think dominion has a major role to play with this. And this is why think that eschatology needs to be revisited in all these traditions because I think it can bring people together. If we're able to all agree, actually the kingdom did come. The church is supposed to be in dominion and we gotta stop fighting amongst ourselves because we're failing the world otherwise. Then I think some major stuff can happen that would really please our Lord. Definitely, because it's, mean, one thing that's got, you know, there's many things at the moment. had Mesh Mesh on the show and she's Catholic and she sort of rocked my world a little bit with learning that she's Catholic because I agree with her on so much. So, and now, and it's forced me to challenge a lot of my presuppositions on previous episodes. I've been really critical of Catholicism. So if I start to take the turn that you have, I'm gonna have a lot of egg on my face, but that's okay. It won't be the first time. But one thing that I've found interesting about Catholicism is, I mean, I, as I mentioned, when I first came to faith, I was going to a Catholic church. And then as I started to come out of it, I started to believe, you know, the things that you would hear often in sort of Protestantism that the Catholic church is sort of the... Mystery Babylon and it's the, you know, read Revelation, it's basically talking about Rome and that the Roman Empire didn't end, it simply became transformed into the Catholic Church. And then in looking at full preterism, I realized the total failure of those arguments are completely wrong, know, complete sort of straw man, they misrepresented. So then you're left with this question of, well, if it's not Mystery Babylon, what is this? entity slash empire that has existed throughout all of history with flawed people leading it from from beginning to end. And, and that's, want to ask you about the Pope because I mean, even now I look at Francis and you're like, don't know if I could possibly accept this guy as sort of the head of the church, but maybe the lesson from Peter is that If Peter was indeed made Pope, then one of his first things to do was to deny the Lord three times at the cross. Does that help you reconcile this idea of bad Popes and that the Pope is not necessarily a role that needs to have a good guy in the seat? Right. mean, ideally there is a good guy in the seat. A pope is a president. you know, one of the straw men that people throw at the Catholic Church is like, oh, the pope's infallible, but how could he be infallible if he's, you know, this big fat, you know, dummy? papal infallibility comes about when a pope speaks ex-cathedral, which basically is akin to a presidential executive order. So mean, Donald Trump says a lot of crazy stuff that we all love or we all hate, but not everything he says is an executive order. So when he makes the executive order, he's falling back on a certain authority that he has due to his office. And that's where papal infallibility comes in. So that's all to say. Sometimes these arguments against the church and against the pope are based on misunderstandings. So papal infallibility does not require that the character of the office holder is perfect, although, I mean, one thing that the church wrestles with is if you're gonna have papal infallibility, then you really have to trust that the Holy Spirit is not going to allow someone evil with no scruples to use that ex cathedra in order to say something insane. Yeah. and anti-Christian. But people kind of forget, like if you get into Catholic communities where people are arguing about Pope Francis and other things, people kind of forget that the Catholic Church also has these very reasonable checks and balances built in, one of which is that things basically have to accord with Scripture. And if they don't, then... chances are it's wrong and the church is going to figure it out eventually. That's basically the attitude of the magisterium. You see it explained and articulated in many places. So as far as this pope goes, I withhold my judgment on his character because I've heard him say plenty of things that seem reasonable enough. And as far as Vatican II goes, I people say that Vatican II and all the popes from the sixties until now, including Francis, there are all these kind of like Freemason, deep state, deep church, like, I don't know. But, but I can tell you, mean, the church is full of people like that. They're in like anti-popes and like three popes at a time vying for authority. You know, but you know what? Like America is still America, even though we had a civil war and we did have two presidents at one point too. The difference between America and the church is that the church has this kind of seal and stamp of promise, not just approval, but promise from God. I'll tell you what I think of like Rome, you were talking about like mystery Babylon and all these Protestant critiques. So, St. Augustine lived in a time when Christianity had become ascendant in Roman society, but Rome itself was starting to crumble. And so he realized, okay, well, clearly if the church appropriates Rome, that still doesn't protect Rome itself, know, corporal, corporeal role from crumbling or for being sacked, right? So. In the first millennium, Constantine built a new Rome in the East, Constantinople. And then Moscow claims to be the third Rome. And many people could argue that America is like a fourth Rome, you know? So everyone kind of wants to be Rome. And like, I would sort of argue that America is the Rome of our era. And... It's only Rome in so far as it's kind of like fueled by Christianity. It is an extension of Christendom, but the fact that we have to call ourselves the first, second, third, or fourth Rome still points to some sort of Roman primacy in the historical narrative. Like Rome is Rome, not just because of what happened before Christ, because that's long gone. It's Rome as we know it because it's Christendom. So I argued in my papacy fulfilling prophecy video that one of the ways this plays out is the fact that our Supreme Court actually has recognized that the precedent for colonization and the right of the Europeans to live here and claim the land goes back to papal bulls from the Middle Ages. So if our existence has a legal foundation in the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church expressed through the temporal power of Rome, and there's this connection between the two that just can't really be pulled apart. So it's not by virtue of Rome. Like Rome has no virtue in and of itself. It's just that God chose it. Like he wanted it to be the sign. unavoidable if you really look at history from that perspective. and it's that tie into like Daniel's prophecy that basically has Rome as the last empire that would ultimately be conquered by Christ's empire. But there, you know, there would be no Rome after Rome. Yeah, I think, think Constantinople, Moscow, et cetera. I think that bears that out that again, it's, it's not carnal Rome that matters. It's Christendom. You know, we would just call it Christendom and Rome, Rome is kind of this, city of Rome, I should say is sort of the stake in the ground. It's always going to be where, where Christendom. I shouldn't say where Christendom was founded because it was founded at Calvary, that's where the hordes of Christ were going. Dr. Taylor Marshall in his book, The Eternal City, basically says, if you look at the book of Acts, it ends abruptly in Rome. Why is that? It's because Rome was the goal. That's what was promised. I'm going to rant for a second, but like a lot of Christians find themselves in this, what I consider to be like a pointless argument or apologetic where they're saying like, well, you know, the thing is like the Jews expected this militaristic conquering Messiah, but they're wrong. He was really actually meant to be this like puny spiritual guy. And they go into this kind of like dualistic world versus spirit thing and like, well, the real thing that Jesus wants us to do is be nice guys, you know? And if you ignore the history of Christendom, then sure, you're stuck with having to interpret things that way. Or you could simply say like, you know, the Jews were looking for someone, they just kind of sided with the wrong people. They didn't recognize that this, this Christ who came, he was telling the truth. And like he, he exacted revenge on his enemies in 80, 70 and took over the empire that the Pharisees hoped they were going to take over, took over the empire that the zealots hoped they were going to beat, you know? So, you know, you can't say that the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ, didn't utterly take over the world. It happened. it's a more powerful way of looking at eschatology if the Catholic Church is true. Like the world changed, you know, more than just a spiritual reality, but basically churches were planted in every single city around the world and it became the empire that has persisted through rise and fall of any other empire that comes and goes. So I was listening to this... What was he named? John Bergsma on Matt Fradd's podcast recently. And he, yeah, and he gave fellow Aussie actually. But he gave the most incredible articulation in that about the transition of the six covenants over time and that the six covenant, the new covenant which would come was Christ's kingdom. And then he spoke about Revelation 22, which everyone that I've ever heard sees as being sort of the eternal state, as we call it, where, you know, the tree of life would be in the midst of the garden and its trees were for the healing of the nations and there would be living water and, and preterists point at this all the time and say that's, you know, that's here and now and everyone else says, no, no, like, there's no way that's here and now. And then John Bergman talks about how the he's like that's talking about the reality of the Catholic Church and that the sacraments of the living water and the healing of the nations is happening. And yet he then still speaks about a future second coming. So how have you wrapped your head around believing in fulfilled eschatology, believing in the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church not necessarily affirming that position? That's the question. So I can only follow my intellect as far as it will allow me to go. And then I have to obey my conscience in accordance, right? So, you know, I have enough to be a Catholic in good conscience. Like I was compelled to enter the Catholic Church. And like I said, I have my own way of understanding some of the creeds. But going back to what you were just saying about how... Christendom is a fantastic proof for the victory and triumph of Christ and the fulfillment of prophecy. I do look at the Catholic Church's understanding of itself as an implicit declaration of fully realized Fraternist eschatology. It clearly understands itself as the kingdom of God on earth. and goes a little bit further than everyone else in assuming the rights thereof. So I think that's big. And then nuts and bolts, I think. I think there's wiggle room because eschatology is very sensitive in the Catholic Church. Like there is, there's a layer of Catholic hermeneutic and teaching that interprets all of the book of Revelation as first century related. And then there's a layer of speculation throughout the ages about a future fulfillment that has been consistently incorrect. And because of that, to this day, like the church, like the popes, the bishops, good priests, they'll always say, we need to be careful of such speculation. And they're for that reason, they're very cautious of any like Marian apparitions where people think she's talking about like the end of the world or in times events. And they're also very careful about interpreting what seemed to be legitimate Marian apparitions as referring to end of times events when she's not actually saying that. So that caution is based on it's kind of an admission that these predictions have always been incorrect. the hermeneutic is questionable. And so they're intentionally, mean, vague is a weak word, but they're intentionally open. And so a lot of theologians have stepped in with mystical interpretations. And I tend to go in that direction. In a lot of my like post conversion Catholic eschatological studies, I've looked into people like Clement of Alexandria, Ephraim of Syria, Origin a little bit, know, other people like him, and also like apocryphal stuff, and even some of the Nahumadi stuff, the quote unquote Gnostic stuff. There are a lot of people in the early church who talk about being raised from the dead in baptism in a very serious way. There are a lot of people who talk about the resurrection of all humankind in Christ Jesus or in the mystical Christ, right? In Christ the Son and in the church and in the body of Christ. as you're saying, you know, in the Catholic church and in the mass, in the Eucharist. So there is a lot of highly realized eschatology in high Christology, in high ecclesiology. And so that's where, that's where I munch on that stuff. And I find a lot of good in that, that, feeds my eschatological study and theological learning as well as my spiritual life. So that's sort of how I reconcile it. And, you know, like right now I'm really into the writings of Margaret Barker. She's, she's not Catholic, but she's Catholic adjacent because she, she's digging something up that I really resonate with. which is that there's a reason the Pharisaic and Sadducee establishment just could not understand Christ, could not accept him. And she kind of speculates about how that happened. But the thing that she's recognizing, which I think is spot on, is that there was clearly a different strand of tradition that someone like the prophets were coming from, someone like John the Baptist was coming from, and of course Christ, because Christ had a completely different hermeneutic for the scriptures and that's why he used them against the Pharisees constantly. I think this because I'm reading her right now, Margaret Barker is unusually adept with the the Naakamadi scriptures and she's basically able to interpret them in an orthodox way, which I find fascinating. And, you know, she's also able to, like forensically reverse engineer them to their Hebraic roots, which is kind of like a cutting edge thing in academia right now. Like people used to assume that, the Gnostic and Nag Hammadi writings were all Hellenistic and came from Greco-Roman thought. But she's pointing out like, no, if you look, if you look in the Targums, this, this thought is here. If you look. in some of our earliest copies in the Hebrew and the Aramaic, all this stuff. mean, all this stuff is not natively Greek. It seems to be natively Hebrew. So I think a lot of that stuff is somehow, even though it's so ancient, like it's just being dug up right now. Like we didn't have the Naguamati scriptures. and or the Dead Sea Scrolls until very recently. Dr. John Bergsma is a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and he's a Catholic scholar engaging with that stuff and he's seeing the same things. He's realizing whether the Essenes became a Christian community, whether the Qumran community was a church or not, it's clearly the most, it's the closest match for the early Christian Christology, conception of the church, conception of what we now call the Trinity. There's a lot of really deep stuff there. And, you know, I'm going on a big wind up here, but, you know, I also agree with Barker and a few other scholars that say that the Gospel of John is post AD 70. And it's intentionally basically a cipher for the temple. It's talking about temple theology in a Christological way. And it's meant for a community to learn from post 80s, 70s, post end of the temple, et cetera. Yeah, interesting. is it, you don't have an issue with the idea that if the Catholic Church is indeed what it claims to be, that it's the true Church of God established by Christ, that it can go through the years and be incorrect on certain doctrine. yeah, I mean, cause I don't think- How would I put this? Do remember the doctrine of limbo? Tell me about it. Limbo is the idea that usually they called it the limbo of the infants that if an infant passed away, you know, be in this in-between space. Church used to teach this pretty explicitly and just sort of backed off of it. In the same way the church decided to dogmatize the immaculate conception, the idea that Mary was born, you know, without sin, etc. These teachings evolve and sometimes it's not only additive, but it's also subtractive. So, you know, I wouldn't be so bold as to presume that my view is a hundred percent correct and that maybe one day the church will catch up to me. However, I think that the church, the fact that they're are so many Catholic theologians and scholars engaging with the Dead Sea Scrolls, engaging with the non-Kamadi writings. To me, that signals that there are going to be changes. And the fact that Vatican II happened and we're so much closer to... Unity on some level, you know with with the Eastern Orthodox and Protestant I think these things are all going to develop and They always have they just always have It so I I would love to see a world, you know, I'd love to look down from heaven one day and We can all kind of laugh and shake each other's hands smack each other on the back as we look down on earth and realize that like this schism between East and West was only, you a thousand years and the schism with, you know, the Protestants only lasted 500 years. then, then unity went on to last for like thousands upon thousands of years with occasional centuries of discord, you know, just like we've experienced in the past 2000. I just think. You know, as much as I love eschatology and as as scandalous, I think it is to assert that that that the messianic prophecies were not fulfilled in the first century, which really cast doubt on whether Jesus was the guy. I don't like, frankly, I think. You have to be hyper obsessed with this particular topic in order to really clue into that, given how rich the rest of Christianity is. Like you could be forgiven for never knowing about the discrepancy or any of the confusing questions in eschatology, especially if you're Catholic, because every Sunday you are going in the Spirit to the day of the Lord in the presence of Jesus Christ who is coming. know, like he comes and he judges us. The entire Eucharistic liturgy is the emergence of the high priest from the Holy of Holies, Day of Atonement, know, Day of the Lord stuff. you know, good Catholics, shall we say, are more fixated on the Eucharist. And frankly, I think that's at the heart of what he left us, because, know, Christendom wouldn't be Christendom simply because of Rome. It's Christendom because Jesus is the King. Yeah. And that's what he gave us. He gave us his body and blood. He said, do this in remembrance of me. This is my body. This is my blood. I mean, it sounds kind of crazy and too simple, but that's the whole scandal of grace. It is too easy and too simple for us because that's how much he loves us. correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the only mention of the actual word, the New Covenant, the New Testament, in the New Testament itself is that verse that talks about, this is my body and this is my blood. Sure, in the gospels, mean, the epistles talk about that, Hebrews of course talks about it. yeah. But yeah, 100%. It's at the center. That's the center of it all. Sean, I've, I've loved chatting to you. Thanks so much for being open. There's, I've learned a lot and I think others will as well. And you've given me much to ponder. Maybe just a final question. What's, love to know what's been the biggest change for you now that you are Catholic? What is? How has that flowed into your day-to-day life and your living out what's the point anyway more than what you were as Protestant and even atheist and New Age before that? What's it mean to be Catholic? Well... Like I said, when I was a preacher and I said, I'm already in the Catholic tradition. Once you can go up there and take the Eucharist, I know this is just hope no kids are listening, but it's like when you get married and you can fulfill your marital vows, you know? And I would even go so far as this, like I... I did plenty of stuff I wasn't supposed to do in my 20s before my conversion. So I know what it's like to do what you're supposed to do in marriage, outside of marriage. And when you do your marital duties when you're married, it feels right. And there's a sense of fulfillment and completion there because it's right and good and true and beautiful. And... There's something about being Catholic that's like that. I because I would never, I would never tell anyone who's not Catholic that they're not Christian and that God doesn't love them and that they're not in communion with Christ in some way. Catholic church teaches that like everyone's relationship with Christ flows from the Catholic church. Like even if you're not, even if you're not a Catholic and in some cases, even if you're not Christian, which is very scandalous. So. You know, I, since I became Catholic and I get to go to mass and I get to take communion, knowing that everything is just true and in right order, it's going to sound silly. I've already made the marriage analogy, we're moving on from that. But in addition to that, as silly as it sounds, like I really feel like I'm like in Lord of the Rings, man. Like I feel like I'm actually in the kingdom of God. And it's like all the barriers that blocked my way into that world are gone because God provided certain steps that we can take in good and right order in order to be involved with him on that level and to be in his kingdom. And I took them and... No other way to explain it. I feel like I'm a hobbit, you know, and Aragorn is in charge and everything's right and good. And, you know, before that, like, I was, you know, I was still Christian and everything was still good, but yeah, I can't really, yeah, can't totally quantify, yeah, can't totally quantify what the change is. Cause I'm trying to put it into the terms of my experience of what I did, but it feels like something that did not purely come from my decision. It's grace. It's grace is what I'm trying to say. There's some, there's some extra grace going on. Yeah, awesome. I've loved the chat. Thanks so much, Sean. God bless you in the next few days. I know you've got your third child and first little son coming. So I hope that all goes well for you. May that bring plenty of joy and equal chaos in your life. And if you want to, you've got your guitar there and I think you're the first sort of million plus hit artist I've had on the show. I'm gonna have to ask you to give us a little 15 second outro for the pod. Alright, let's see. Well you mentioned the song No It's Not, so I'll give you a little chorus of that. No, it's not. And I thought that a dream was never coming true. And I thought it was strange that me instead is you. I thought that oceans only wave when I look. I thought they needed a white writer But no, it's not No, it's not No, it's not Thank you brother, I love it. And I'm gonna share in the show notes all your links, including links to your music because I actually love your stuff and I think a lot of us. Thanks a lot, buddy. Yeah. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you and you know, stay in touch. I love, I love a good old fashioned correspondence. CS Lewis JR token. Just let, let it out, bro. Amen. Take care, Sean. See you, my friend.