Since hearing Eve Tushnet speak in lower Manhatten several years ago I have been pondering this question. She is fascinating: openly lesbian, Catholic and chaste. Raised in an atheistic, liberal Jewish family, she came out as lesbian at an early age; attached herself with enduring affection to the gay/lesbian community; converted to Catholicism and is deeply committed to chastity. She is unique, an outlier, but has a special mission and message for our age as gay, Catholic and chaste.
Let's be clear on our terms! What does it mean when one says "I am gay!"? This can include several affirmations.
1. I am attracted to my own sex.
2. I am not ashamed. I will not be shamed.
3.This is an important dimension of my identity and I want to be known and loved for who I am, including this.
4.I want to be in community with those who share this and with those who love and accept us.
5. There is nothing morally wrong with same sex intercourse.
6. So I feel free to engage in it, whether promiscuosly or monogamously, without regret and will encourage others in the same.
Clearly, the last two (5,6) are directly contradictory of chastity as understood in the Church. However the first four, in themselves, are not. Clearly, there are tensions and ambiguities in the integration of those four affirmations into Catholic life but I think that Tushnet is doing so successfully. A small, emergent community of such gay, chaste Catholics would be very salutary for the Church. They would present the ideal of chastity in an attractive way to the gay movement and indeed the entire world of cultural liberalism. At the same time, they might bring the fresh air of openness, relaxation, peace and hope to a Catholic conservatism so tensed up in a posture of anxious, angry defensiveness and prone to negativity judgmentalism.
Here is an even more interesting question: how about an openly gay priest or bishop? This would be challenging in many ways. But my thought is that if he were clearly, passionately, convincingly (if not perfectly) chaste in the mode of Tushnet it would be a good thing. Again, his aclamation of the gospel of chastity would be stiking. The message of acceptance for those with this condition, the deliverance from shame, would be powerful. A certain relaxation and mutual acceptance of each other in our very weakness would be healing.
The virtue of chastity is a difficult challenge for so many of us; virtually an impossibility without the grace of God. But it is a message of great joy and hope.
For me homosexuality is a great Mystery...awesome, sacred, frightening, intriguing...in three manners. It is a cross, a suffering, a frustration, an agony. It comes with rich charisms including empathy, depth, generosity, sensitivity, tenderness, wisdom. It also comes with disorder, confusion, weakness and an inclination (conscupiscence as shared by all of us) to sin. The Catholic conservative has obsessed about the third and not revered the first two. The cultural liberal seems indifferent to all three in the urge to homoginize the condition into dreary, sterile, indulgent, secular, individualistic, bourgeois mediocrity.
Eve Tushnet reminds me of Dorothy Day.Both bridged two worlds usually incompatible with each other: the Catholic Church and the radical left; both were outliers, misfits in both worlds; both shattered steroptypes in a refreshing freedom of the spirit.
Both exemplified what anthropologist Victor Turner called liminality or luminosity: transcendence of customary social categoriez into a zone of light, lightfulness and freedom. Both gave a us a fresh, serendipitous expression of our faith in its depth and novelty. They join a cohort of radiant, splendid eccentrics like Heather King, Zorro, Ivan Illich, Alyosa Karamosov, Charles de Focault, Caryll Houselander, Robin Hood,Catherine Dougherty, Kiko, Albasette, Giassani, Mr. Blue, Adrienne von Speyr, Edith Stein, and Etty Helusun. But above all my little-big-brother-in-Christ John Rapinich: Way-walking, God-praising, poem-writing, art-doing, wife-loving, beatnick-befriending, Rush-listening, book-reading, self-teaching, Jewish (by his mother), New-York-knowing, eccentic, beloved friend who died with his boots on, dancing and limping vigorously into the Glorious Kingdom! Call them Bohemian Catholic!
Emulating them, let us tenderly, generously embrace each other in our shared weakness as we encourage each other in pure love.
No comments:
Post a Comment