success?.m4a transcript

I was just thinking a little bit about the idea of success and victory.

Not in terms of personal success and victory, but in terms of a movement or society.

I think that sometimes, if we’re talking about Christian renewal, we have the wrong vision of what success looks like.

Because success, total and complete success and victory is a dead man on a tree.

We’re talking about God Himself, God Himself, who’s all-powerful, knows everything.

The way He achieved total and complete victory is by being tortured and killed in the most shameful, horrific, painful way, humanly possible.

Maybe you want to quibble with me about humanly possible, and maybe you want to come up with some other examples of what could be more terrible than the cross.

Well, I would say that first, take a closer look at what crucifixion actually was during Jesus’ time.

And second, if you have a more terrible way to die that you can imagine, let’s start using that as another way to talk about what Jesus endured.

Because we need to shock ourselves out of our anesthesia out of our complacency about the cross, because the cross is the center of our faith.

And the center of our faith is a man who was executed by the state, egged on by religion, and that was the great victory.

And so I think when it comes to ministry, for example, I mean, if you talk about business or, you know, trying to make a living in the world, you know, you’re trying to talk about, you know, how to somehow thread the needle of being a Christian and a father who has to make a living, that’s a good discussion.

It’s not as complex as one might think, but that’s another discussion.

But I think when you’re talking about pure ministry, pure kingdom work, our model is, by the world standards, a complete and utter failure of the worst type.

You couldn’t have failed any more than Jesus failed from a worldly perspective.

But, and I think that, you know, some people talk about, you know, is St. Paul discontinuous, or kind of a different trajectory, or is there a discontinuity between St. Paul and Jesus?

And I say, hell no.

And I’ll leave it to the academics to squabble.

But to me, St. Paul, what he does is he takes the crucifixion, where Jesus is already dead, and then he takes it further.

So Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection, however you conceive of those things, that is the key to reality, that is how we understand reality, is through the life of Christ.

And what St. Paul does, he comes along and picks up where Jesus left off, and interprets the crucifixion.

And I think St. Paul’s writing is kind of a double espresso of the Gospel.

I think that St. Paul distills the Gospel into its most potent, concentrated form.

And that’s why I love St. Paul, but it took me a long time to get there.

But anyway, I think that if we’re talking about building a ministry, or a movement, and we’re going to be successful, we’re going to have to say if we’re bringing lots of people in, if lots of people are responding and are thinking that we’re great, I think that should be a warning sign.

As I say, being crucified by the world doesn’t surprise me, doesn’t scare me, because I’ve found peace in Christ.

Not being crucified by the world, that scares me, because as Jesus says, a servant is not greater than his master.

And if they crucified Jesus, they’re going to crucify us too.

And so if we’re talking about building a movement, building a coalition, if anybody out there is listening, I think that we should expect to be crucified.

And I’m not saying go hire a publicist and get into meaningless squabbles on television.

I’m talking about in our own lives, our day-to-day lives.

We will be crucified.

And as Jesus says, every day has enough trouble of its own.

We don’t need to worry about the details.

And we don’t have to worry about what the quote-unquote impact will be.

We just need to follow our dead man on a tree and get in tune with the Holy Spirit and move forward as the Spirit directs.

And as Saint Charbel, an Eastern Catholic monk, taught me, I don’t know if it was directly or indirectly or both.

And other people have taught me the same thing too.

The world and the world’s success is empty, but ministry’s success is also empty.

The only thing that matters at the end of the day is, are we going to be told, well done, good and faithful servant?

Or are we going to be told, you buried your coin in a napkin and put it in the ground or somewhere in the middle?

And it’s very tempting to say, hey, I want to be a big shot.

I want people to like me.

I want to have a big name.

I want to have lots and lots of people join this movement.

And by this movement, I mean whatever movement, I mean the little movement I’m trying to articulate or whoever, whatever, I think that if people are telling us, hey, great job, you’re really doing a good job, I really get a lot out of what you’re saying, congratulations on your growth, can you come speak at my conference?

I think that should be horrifying.

That should be horrifying.

That is exactly what Jesus turned down.

Jesus was given a chance to have all the kingdoms of the world, if he would just bow down to the dollar bill or bow down to whatever, you know.

Obviously, it was in the scriptures, he turned down Satan, but Satan has a lot of different offerings, you know, and if we’re going to be successful by the world’s standards, then that is horrifying.

And if you think about St. James, he talks about teachers being judged more strictly, and that makes it double horrifying, and so, you know, the important thing is that we have interior peace and freedom, that is what matters.

And the only reason to do anything, whether it’s, you know, getting up out of bed in the morning or starting a ministry or changing a diaper, is because the Holy Spirit told us to do it.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit has to tell us every little thing that we do throughout the day, you know, it’s our intention, our intention to follow Christ, and sometimes, some people get more frequent, more specific directions, other people get nothing, you know, most of us get some of both, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.

But what matters is that we follow Christ, because that’s what matters, and it’s not even just like a, you know, you die and you go to heaven, you get judged, it’s like every moment, if you start trying to chase metrics, you’re just a business, and that’s a fool’s game.

It’s a fool’s game for business, and it’s a fool’s game for the church.

Businesses don’t know any better.

The church should know better.

And so, the only reason to do anything is because the Spirit tells us to do it, and we ought to be listening to the Spirit, praying and discerning and listening, and trying to do what the Spirit says to do.

You know, I think it was Thomas Merton who said, you know, even if we don’t do what God wants us to do, if we were trying, God appreciates that.

And as we talked about in the story of Jonah recently, Jonah was fleeing from his assignment, and God was able to use that, turn that into good.

And of course we talked about St. Paul, I think we talked about St. Paul says, you know, of course we don’t do bad things to make God do more good things with it.

But I think I’ve communicated the point, which is that the only reason to do anything is to follow the Spirit.

And we don’t want to have the Nirvana problem where Kurt Cobain was, as I understand it, I don’t know a whole lot, but my understanding is, setting aside his death and his mental illness, but just the idea of, you know, his being a grunge band and wanting to be authentic and trying to walk the line between selling out and being a big commercial hit versus staying true to the grunge roots, you know.

And for us, we follow a third way, which is the way of the cross.

We’re not trying to split the hairs between happy positive, doing good things versus nihilistic, you know, I don’t know, my metaphor wasn’t very good there.

The point is we discern the Spirit and we let the Spirit coordinate the details and we do the best we can and we try to have peace.

And the only place you’re going to have peace in my view is through being co-crucified with Christ.

And if our path of being co-crucified with Christ means that we become part of a group of other people who are trying to do the same thing, then praise God.

But if we are trying to manufacture a movement, then we’re just another business.

And again, I’ve been in business for many years.

I’ve been in sales and corporate life and businesses are foolish.

They’re completely foolish.

And the sad thing is that in my view, churches are equally foolish, if not more so, because at least businesses know they’re out to make a buck.

You know, they may have some kind of fancy PR team that talks about their philanthropy effort or whatever, but you know, businesses are out to make a buck.

And even if they have, you know, higher intentions, the financial system that we’re in, the global financial system we’re in, that a brilliant Anglican scholar at Yale who, I forgot her name, wrote a good book about it.

But the global financial thing, and I got to be careful because this is not my expertise, but basically the financialization of everything means that a business, if it’s going to survive, it’s got to play these games.

And that’s why you have like, you know, doctors and dentists and plumbers and electricians being financialized.

It’s ridiculous.

So, but if churches are doing the same thing, if churches are doing the same thing, good Lord, I mean, that’s just the stupidest thing I can imagine.

We’re supposed to be stupid, but we’re supposed to be stupid in a way that is faithful to Christ.

We’re supposed to be foolish by the world’s standards.

We’re supposed to be foolish.

But if we’re doing things the way the world is doing things, if we’re mimicking the world, then we’re not doing holy foolishness, we’re doing stupid, ignorant, evil foolishness.

If we’re using the same logic that the world uses, we’re just as bad as they are.

But on top of that, we’re sacramentalizing it.

We’re telling people that this is the way of Jesus.

And that’s just, I mean, that’s not the scandal of the cross.

That’s just a scandal.

And nobody’s talking about it.

Maybe they are, I don’t know.

I don’t get out much.

But St. James gives us a warning.

So, not only is following the world’s way ineffective in terms of the kingdom, it’s also actively deceiving Christ’s beloved sheep.

So don’t take it from me.

Take it from St. James.

Take it from Jesus, who says, better to have a millstone tied around your neck and being thrown into the depths of the sea than to deceive one of these little children.

In a way, we’re all little children, including actual little children.

And I would say that a majority of the clergy don’t have a freaking clue about what the gospel actually is.

Or if they do have a clue, they’re not preaching it.

Which one’s worse?

Total ignorance or active abdication of their kind of catechetical responsibilities.

So, to get back to sum up, our goal is to follow Christ, which looks foolish to the world, which looks like a failure according to the world’s standards.

And if we do anything else, we’re going to lose our spiritual peace.

We’re going to lose our discernment.

And we’re going to have condemnation heaped on us by St. James and Jesus himself.

And that will probably be felt as despair.

Because even if we’re doing the wrong things, God still loves us.

But if we’re doing the wrong things, and we should know better, we’re going to have to face judgment.

Whatever that looks like.

What Saint Joseph Teaches Me About Fatherhood and Masculine Strength

One of the things that I love about the Roman Catholic tradition, even if the words sound to my ears a bit awkward, is this concept of vocations. Now I have a Catholic friend who told me that in the Catholic context, vocations usually means or usually refers to those who are pursuing the priesthood, those who are pursuing the priesthood.

FWIW ICYMI

Personal suffering and complex family dynamics are central to Boyd Camak’s understanding of Christian theology, profoundly shaping his perspective and leading him to a raw, authentic, and often confrontational vision of faith. His lived experiences have forged a theology that emphasizes the transformative power of suffering, the liberating nature of truth, and a direct, unvarnished encounter with Christ.

Suffering as a Path to Deeper Knowledge and God’s Presence

Camak repeatedly asserts that deep knowledge and true wisdom are almost always born through suffering. He describes his own life as being “torched” and “burned to a pulp” by the Holy Spirit, repeatedly, leading to a profound awareness that he is not God and is infinitely distant from God, yet still feels God’s love. This intense personal experience, which he calls being “drowned in Christ’s vortex of humility and raised”, leads him to believe that suffering is not meaningless, but “cruciform”. He sees it as a “real-time sharing in Christ’s crucifixion”, where believers are “with Him on the Cross” when they suffer with love and faith.

He views Christ’s crucifixion not as an abstract historical event, but as the “ultimate revelation” of God’s infinitely extreme love. In this revelation, God is “in the trenches with us” and “took the hit” rather than saving himself. This perspective allows him to see going through difficult times as a grace, arguing it is “the only way to draw closer to God”. He even starkly states that “the only way to draw closer to God is through suffering, through persecution. Everything else is just delusion, fantasy, whatever”. This suffering, for Camak, “doesn’t destroy—it purifies. It softens and deepens” and opens the door to real communion with Christ and others. He sees heaven not as a relief, but as a “different stage of the battle” or “another stage of the fire that refines”, an “eternal aliveness” and “endless intimacy” in the presence of God.

Family Dynamics and the Unveiling of Truth

Camak’s early life was profoundly shaped by familial expectations and pressures. From a very young age, there was an unspoken assumption that he would become a doctor, fulfilling his father’s “failed ambition”. This created internal conflict as he realized he was not temperamentally suited for the hard sciences required for such a path. His “first authentic choice” was to step away from the pre-med track and pursue philosophy. Even after this, he remained financially “enmeshed” with his family, with informal exchanges of money and an expectation to attend a prestigious law school.

A significant turning point came with a severe health crisis, during which his family of origin “could not be bothered to come and visit” him in the hospital and was more concerned with “what other people in the community would say” about him. This moment became an “apocalypse”—a revealing—when his family made the “insane demand” that he leave his wife, cease treatment, and move back to his childhood home. This crisis exposed the “suffocating, wicked, absurd demands” of his family of origin and their unhealthy system, forcing him to choose between his family’s esteem and demands, and his own healing, marriage, and truth. He describes this as Christ bringing a “sword” to cut away conflicting desires, worldly prestige, the desire for money and power, and the need to please the “tribe”. He notes that he “never had an elder worth a damn in this world, but I have them in heaven”.

This experience led him to realize that his previous faith, a “particular species of Protestantism,” was “insular,” a “closed loop system,” and “enmeshed” with his family’s tribal loyalties, thus unable to contain his lived experience. He emphasizes that he now puts up “healthy boundaries” against “dysfunctional, emotionally abusive behavior” from family, especially to protect his children. He feels the “presence that I am embodying” through the Holy Spirit confronts his family’s dysfunction, much like the light is not comprehended by darkness, creating a “fear” in them similar to his own fear when he first stepped into the unknown to pursue truth. He also reflects on “The Slippery Wound,” a type of deep hurt that is “never quite nameable, but very real,” given “in the guise of love,” and so “entangled with his very sense of self” that he can’t clearly name it to heal.

Critique of Conventional Theology and Embracing an Existential Faith

His personal journey enabled him to develop a critical understanding of conventional Christian theology that he perceives as often superficial or distorting.

• He rejects doctrines like the Roman Catholic teaching of eternal damnation for mortal sin as “complete bullshit”.
• He labels certain popular interpretations of Calvinism (TULIP) as “metaphysical rape” and a “theology of death,” arguing it denies human dignity and God’s love. He found that a “rock has more liberty and capacity for authentic existence and love than a human in this construct”.
• He critiques the conflation of “Christ’s Kingdom with Western Civilization, or with America” by Christian nationalist movements as a “profound theological error”. He believes Christ’s Kingdom “IS Reality,” but it’s often “veiled, hidden, and has to be revealed”. It is “not of this world” and does not need to be preserved by political power.
• He dismisses the Evangelical focus on moving “from success to significance” as self-driven and rooted in the ego, arguing that true significance comes from being a child of God, regardless of achievements. He believes “every single thing that happens is significant”.
• He expresses his own writing process as “vomiting things out” rather than using “intellectual firepower,” as his intellect has been “digested by reality” and “burned by the Holy Spirit”. He views his blog as a “burden” he has been “given to birth”. He believes the power is not in the words themselves, but in “how God inhabits them”.
• He stresses that theology’s purpose is to “preserve the mystery” or “preserve the revelation,” not to build “intellectual frameworks around frameworks”.
• He is sympathetic to issues like gender studies and non-binary individuals, stating he wants “people to have access to Christ”. He points to Saint Maximus the Confessor as defending a Christ “who could fully include every part of your humanity”.
• He critiques “codependency” and manipulation, even in seemingly virtuous actions, as a “poisonous internal condition” that directly harms the soul, drawing parallels with Bowen Family Systems Theory. Repentance, for him, is the “fire of the Holy Ghost” that liberates one from such patterns.
• He presents the prophet’s role as a “line leader” who “jumps into that blackness only to reveal that he’s jumping into the arms of God,” undergoing a “cleansing bath” through which the “whole community can benefit”.

Liberation and Authentic Living

Through these experiences, Camak sought a deeper understanding of Christ, exploring various Christian traditions (Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Quakers, Lutherans, Church of the Brethren) and other spiritual paths (Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle, Hinduism, Islam). He found alignment with Karl Rahner’s concept of the “anonymous Christian,” believing that “if Christ is truth with a capital T, if you’re pursuing the truth, you’re pursuing Christ whether you know it or not”. He emphasizes that salvation is a “bloody brutal messy affair” and Christ is “right here in the trenches with us”.

His personal suffering and the subsequent breaking of unhealthy family chains led him to a “radical contentment” and “perfect freedom” found in aligning with Christ’s will. He notes that his security is “not dependent on what the world says security is based on” but on Jesus Christ alone. This freedom is not an escape from suffering, but an embrace of it as part of the authentic Christian journey, enabling him to “love others without looking for [his] own agenda.” He lives with a profound awareness of his “woundedness, [his] selfishness, [his] utter dependence and how Christ has been faithful” to him. He sees Saint Joseph as a model of quiet, strong, and gentle presence, who is also fiercely protective, embodying a divine strength that “will burn the hell out of you” if you “mess with my child”.

Camak’s understanding is deeply rooted in the Eastern Orthodox tradition of “Theosis,” which he describes not as becoming God by nature, but as “becoming more and more saturated with God’s life, love, and fire. Forever. Eternally drawing closer, never exhausting the depths”. This perspective allows humans to “participate in divinity”. His writing itself is characterized as “lived truth” and “crucified truth”, fulfilling a call to “tell your story. Your healed story” like the Gerasene demoniac in the Gospels. This deep, raw, and often confrontational honesty in his theological reflections is a direct outflow of his personal journey through trauma and seeking authentic faith.