Sexual Reverence (3): the Dark Side

"Fair and foul are close of kin, and fair needs four" I cried. Yeats As the holiest creation, sex can become the darkest reality. For many of us...maybe most of us in today's world...the abuse of sex is the quickest, easiest, smoothest path to hell. Because it is SO good, it can become SO bad! Since it is so dangerous, it demands a profound and delicate reverence. Even at its best, as spousal love, it retains four essential aspects that are dark in a deep way that requires decency: its intensity, its brutality,its association with lower bodily actions, and its relationship to death. Firstly, sexual arousal is an intense passion that takes over the person...physically, hormonally, mentally, volitionaly...to such a degree that we can say that the person "loses" his soul in the sense that intellect and will are overcome by emotional-physical desire. Again, within the protective and sanctifying shelter of marriage, this "loss of self" is blessed by God, open to life and motivated by a mutuality of self donation. It is, nevertheless, a real "loss of self" and demands a certain awe, protectiveness and fear. Secondly, even at its best as mutual conjugal surrender, the act of love retains a violent aspect: it is, after all, a penetration of the feminine by the masculine body. When invited and welcomed by the recipient in a posture of hope, trust and surrender, it becomes holy and good. But the brutal aspect remains even as it is transformed. We need to be aware that delicate spirits, especially females who are young and innocent, can be sensitive to this and even repelled. This is not abnormal or unhealthy, but a wholesome and realistic attitude. Advocates of the Playboy philosophy but even some students (usually men) of St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body sometimes are carried away by their reaction against puritanism to such a degree that they lose a sense of the complex, delicate, and profound nature of sex. Thirdly, we need not dwell on it but we need to acknowledge with Yeats: "Love has pitched it's tent in the place of excrement" and "'Foul and fair are near of kin and fair needs foul' I cried." Providence has associated the sublime with the ridiculous, the most holy with the very most profane. Why? I really don't know. But maybe He intended to further heighten the reverence, the delicacy, the protectiveness and the care we give to this, His holiest natural creation. Lastly, sex is close to death, psychologically and metaphysically. The deep exhaustion, release from tension and letdown after orgasm is itself a premonition of death. When the action expresses love, of course, this love endures and fills the ensuing quiet with deepest peace. But outside of such profound love, the act ends in desolation, despair and contempt: death! Other than death itself, sex is the most intense experience of "the flesh" and in its extreme volatility and fickleness it resounds with mortality. Sex is, then, a taste of death. As such, it needs to be redeemed by a love stronger than death. AS such it needs to move into such a deeper love: a love that is chaste and faithful unto and beyond death. And so, to review, these four deep, dark dimensions of sex are unavoidable. They require a deep reverence. The catechesis delivered to the Church by St. John Paul II has definitively proclaimed the positivity, the wholesomeness, the holiness of sex. But this positivity incorporates and transforms these four dimensions. And these four, in turn, add a gravity, a density, and a reverence to this Mystery.

Sexual Reverence (2):The Holiness of Sex

Sex is the holiest natural, physical creation for three reasons that mutually penetrate each other. First, it is God's plan to create new persons, souls that will live with Him forever. This alone makes it incomparably glorious, profound, and hopeful. Secondly, the physical union creates an incomparably deep union between two persons at every level: emotional, spiritual, intellectual, volitional and social. Because body-and-soul are a unity, the mutual penetration of the body creates an infinitely deeper union of heart, mind and soul. Therefore, in the right place, marriage that is blessed by God, it is a sacrament, an encounter with God Himself. Outside of that sacred precinct, it is a grave violation against God, the other and oneself. Thirdly, sexuality reaches into the deepest place of a person's mind, heart and soul. Sex is NEVER just sex. It is always a universe of moral and spiritual meanings: loyalty or betrayal, reverence or contempt, tenderness or brutality, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness, surrender or control, selfishness or generosity. Hildebrand notes that sins in this area pierce more deeply into the soul than comparable acts like gluttony, avarice, sloth or anger. Consider: which would be more toxic for a marriage and a family...alcoholism, anger or adultery? I would have to say that the last is far more intimate, profound, hurtful and disastrous. Since sex is sacred, it needs to be covered and sheltered by reverence in the way we speak, think, dress, look and act.

Sexual Reverence (1): For Women

Dietrich von Hildebrand's magisterial and inspiring Purity: the Mystery of Christian Sexuality has intensified my awareness of sexual reverence. In this posting, I want to reflect on the reverence we men give to women. My iconic, Christ-like virility is rooted above all in the mutual infusion of tenderness and reverence for women. Tenderness is the response, from my own gentle, peaceful, confident strength to woman in her sensitivity, preciousness and vulnerability. This tenderness is infused with a reverence before something inexpressibly sacred, holy and good. If virile tenderness is in part appreciation for feminine goodness-and-vulnerability, there is another reverence which genuflects before womanly strength, dignity, and honor. In this the male perceives a deeper, stronger, truer goodness in the woman, including the woman as bride, wife, mother, companion, sister, daughter and friend. In regard to the transcendentals, I have seen that women embody Beauty and Goodness more vividly and concretely while men are more vigorously oriented towards Truth. In this, we are created to balance, complement and fulfill each other. Proper virile reverence requires first of all the truthfulness of humility: this means that I consciously acknowledge my masculine sin towards women. This includes, of course: arrogance, lust, covetousness, superiority, fear, shame, and indifference towards what is most sacred and precious in women. Manly modesty and humility moves towards awareness of the distinctive strengths and charisms of women: the sensitivity, compassion, resilience, quiet wisdom, emotional intelligence, religious sense and innate purity and innocence. Esteem for and deference towards the distinctively feminine has the effect of awakening, strengthening, purifying, and directing all the energy, power and weakness of masculinity. Every woman is, then, for us men, a sacrosanct temple of infinite value. Along with Don Quiote, our purpose, mission and identity as "knights" absolutely requires that we honor each Dulcinea we meet, regardless of whatever mistakes mar her past. Catholic tradition instructs us to genuflect on the right knee before God alone, as in the Eucharist; but we may and should genuflect on our left knee to honor those of special worth. And so, as a man, I genuflect (interiorly) before every woman that I meet. Such inflamed reverence, allied with tenderness, is the only sure path to purity of heart: the sexual passions are so overwhelming that they do not yield to actions of the will and intellect unless those are themselves moved by passions more deep, purposeful, reliable and powerful. From the cross our Savior gave each of us a Mother, his own. I have found it miraculously helpful to consciously involve our Blessed Mother in every relationship, especially those that might be inflamed by sexual or romantic desire. Even more powerful, however, is the Eucharist: when I eat His Body and drink His Blood I ask Him to give me his attitude towards women...peaceful, confident, reverent, tender, delighted, generous, affirming, strong, protective, and innocent. The Eucharist, aided by regular confession, inflames me with a Love that purifies, lightens, and strengthens all my loves.

Divorce-Free Marriage Guarantee

The fine moral theologian Janet Smith famously gave her college students a guarantee that they would enjoy a guaranteed divorce-free marriage if they would do four simple things. She offered a $1,000 payoff for any student who did the four and came back to her divorced. The four are: go to mass every single Sunday, tithe 10% of your income to the Lord, wait until marriage for sex, and keep every act of love open to new life (no contraception although Natural Family Planning is fine.) I heartily agree with her. If you get money, worship, sexuality and new life right, you are in very good shape. Regarding the tithe I am loose: I don't see the 10% as sacrosanct. Those with weaker faith and/or smaller incomes might start off with 5% or even 2%. The idea is: give the top of your earnings to the Lord in the Church and in the less fortunate. Rick Warren started at 10% and increased it every year and currently he and his wife are giving 91%. I would, however, add a fifth...and a sixth practice to ensure a good marriage. The fifth: pray together! A couple HAS GOT TO pray together. It can be as simple as a Hail Mary or an Our Father...or a decade of the rosary...or simple spontaneous prayers: Lord, guide us! Jesus, we trust in you! Father, we thank you! Dear Lord, help us to understand each other, forgive each other, help each other! Marriage is difficult, at times impossible, even under the best circumstances. I know: I have the best circumstances. I have the best wife in the world and sometimes I just want to kill her! The misguidance of the world, the weakness of the flesh, and the lies of the devil all conspire to destroy marriages and families. If a young Christian couple cannot pray, just simply, together, something is wrong. It could be as simple as an embarrassment that has to be overcome by practice. Or it could be un-repented sin, or disbelief, or a resentment or toxic belief of some sort. They need to seek help from a good priest or minister. Prayer is essential! The sixth: Plug into some kind of more intensive Christian community. You simply HAVE TO TO hang out with people who are imitating Jesus. We are all mimetic...we are always and everywhere looking at others and imitating them, deliberately or unconsciously. You have to hang with folks who hang with Jesus. I pray especially for you young people who are now of marrying-age: May the Holy Spirit lead you to feed your heart and mind and soul with all you need to have fruitful, joyful marriages!

Did the Resurrected Jesus Appear to His Mother?

How did our Blessed Mother know that her son was risen? Did she learn from Peter, John or Mary Magdalen? Did she receive her own appearance? Or (as I will suggest) did she know, with certainty, in a more fitting manner? The Scriptures have no mention of a separate appearance to Mary and (aside from a misunderstood reference in St.Ambrose) there is likewise no evidence of such a tradition in the first millenium. Even St. Thomas knew nothing of such a revelation. However, just after the time of Aquinas, the tradition of such an appearance spread quickly and gained remarkably unanimous assent in medieval Christendom. St. Ignatius of Loyola has a meditation based on this event and assumes that anyone who doubts this reality is clearly a heretic. I think his logic is sound but I differ slightly in my conclusion. Our own St. John Paul II advocated forcefully for acceptance of this tradition in an audience in which he stated: "...the unique and special character of the Blessed Virgin’s presence at Calvary and her perfect union with the Son in his suffering on the Cross seem to postulate a very particular sharing on her part in the mystery of the Resurrection." http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/audiences/1997/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_21051997_en.html) Here again the logic is impeccable: Mary is close to Jesus at his conception, birth, private life, (not so clearly in his public life), in his passion, at Pentecost and now in heaven. It is hard to imagine that she was sidelined for the Resurrection. My suggestion is that she knew with certainty, through her mystic union with her son, that he was risen. She did not need an appearance: such would have been frivolous. We know that the disciples, with their lack of faith, desperately needed our Lord to show himself to them: doubting Thomas who touches the wounds, the discouraged and uncomprehending disciples at Emmaeus, the disbelieving apostles and their fishing expedition, and Peter with his three-fold denial redeemed by his triple-profession-of-love. But Mary did not need her son to appear: she already knew. I imagine it happened in the following manner. When Mary held the corpse of her son (the Pieta), she would have sunk into the deepest possible grief. When Jesus died, she herself died a psychological or metaphysical death, even as she continued to breathe. With his passion finally ended, there ensued the infinite quiet of death and she herself would have been relieved of the state of immense tension she suffered throughout the passion and would have relaxed into a quasi-death state herself. I imagine a psycho-neuro-physical collapse similar to what we know as "rest in the Spirit" or "being slain in the Spirit." Her sense of desolation was so complete and profound that is it more than metaphorical to say that she herself descended, with her Son, into hell. This dark night surely was deeper than that of St. John of the Cross or any other mystic. However, as she grasped her sons's corpse, as she collapsed in her own meta-death and sunk to the pit of hell, she knew, quietly and intuitively, deeply in her spirit, not emotionally or cognitively, but deeply-deeply-deeply that He had triumphed, that God had triumphed, that He was alive. Perhaps she was not discursively aware of it: she would have been incapable of saying "He is risen!" But she knew! Rising on Saturday, she would have gone about her day quietly, still exhausted and deeply grieving, but slowly and organically the Joy and Hope and intuition would grow. She would have been comforting others and in this her sense of God's presence and victory would be emerging. By the time she went to bed on Saturday night she would have known: Jesus is alive! She would know with complete interior certainty. And Sunday morning she would awaken and rise with her heart and soul exploding with Joy and Love! She had died, as a mother dies if her child dies, but she was alive in heaven...in heaven on earth. It was just a matter of time before her body would be taken to be with her soul which was already with her Son. Before, during and after Pentecost she would be a bounteous, flowing fountain of the Holy Spirit for the Church. She would be assumed into heaven, possibly from two distinct locations, Jerusalem and Ephesus, as differing traditions affirm. Since the Church has not spoken definitively on this question, we have the theological freedom to entertain any of these three, or other, views. However this third understanding does the most justice to what we know of the boundless union of love between Mary and her Son.

Pope Francis: Exemplary or Exceptional Jesuit?

To moderate the passionate imbalance of my previous post, I contemplate Pope Francis as a Jesuit: on the one hand, he is the quintessential Jesuit (individual), in the best sense; on the other hand, he is exceptional (anti-elitist, fully enfleshed with the poor) in a splendid manner. He is an individual...in the classic sense of Issac Jogues or Francis Xavier. He is his own man: free and spontaneous, invulnerable to intimidation or pressure, with a fine and educated intellect and a will made of flint and steel. Could he be the last of the Mohicans? I hope not! He is certainly NOT an elitist: on the contrary, he is an anti-elitist, with a vengeance! He has buried himself among the poor, all by himself, like an urban Charles DeFoucauld. He is far from the Georgetown that is trying to be Princeton or the Prep school counselor counting his Ivy League acceptances...as a matter of fact, he is the opposite! Nor is he a de-fleshed, "transcendental" thinker: he is enfleshed with the very poor as he rides their buses. What troubles, puzzles and fascinates me most about him is his retreat from the Culture War in the West. He is no libertine, he is more than capable of fighting the good fight, he could hardly be indifferent! He radiates the aroma of purity, chastity and innocence so he surely shares with his two predecessors a spiritual disgust for the degradation and defilement of lust. It may be that he has a different spiritual temperament: more allergic to greed and injustice than to lust. Or it may be that he has decided to take a gentle, indirect pastoral approach: aware of the evil, he purposefully chooses NOT to address it directly as he engages the sinner in a non-threatening, welcoming, and merciful way. He is blatantly not a vocal advocate of the cultural agenda of the previous dual-pontificate, but he is certainly not an opponent. Properly understood, his approach may be a brilliant compliment and development. George Weigel explains that when John Paul II came to the Vatican, there were two approaches within the Church competing on how to deal with communism: the culture war approach he shared with the native Church of Eastern Europe and the Ostpolitic diplomacy of Paul VI which accepted the reality and tried to make the best possible deals with the tyrants. Brilliantly, he kept Paul's Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli and authorized him to continue that accomadationist approach WHILE he himself, more covertly and subtly, waged a fierce culture war. He was intelligent enough to know that he could best defeat the enemy by waging two kinds of warfare, brilliantly coordinated in a most covert way. The KGB did not know what hit them. Could it be that our two sets of Popes (the two that were canonized today and the two neighbors in the Vatican) wink at each other and secretly relish the risible incomprehension of the Western media who love to set the two lungs of the Church against each other?

What Happened to the Jesuits?

From my youth I have loved the Society of Jesus and specific holy Jesuits have influenced and guided me in my adult walk with Christ. But the order is a deep disappointment! Traditionally the brains, the guts, the storm troopers of the Catholic Church, fiercely and militantly loyal (in a particular way to our Holy Father) they, as a society, caved into the cultural-sexual revolution of the 1960s without a fight. Certainly there was, and still is, a tiny remnant of intelligent, noble, even heroic loyalists: Avery Dulles, John Ford, Henri DeLubac, Kenneth Baker, Joseph Fessio, Joe Whelan, James Schall and others. But these lost the battle for the soul of the order to the opposition, a small, militant faction of dissenting, sexual liberators. They lost the fight because the bulk of the Jesuits were indecisive, detached, and clueless in regard to the Culture War that erupted after the Council. Even theological geniuses like Lonergan and Rahner betrayed the Vatican and our Tradition on Humanae Vitae and the cascading flow of issues related to life, family and gender. That 1968 Encyclical was a powerful proclamation: It is either right and inspired from heaven or it is wrong-headed and disastrously toxic! You have to love it or hate it...passionately! But most Jesuits prefer to ignore it. I have known many Jesuits and (paraphrasing Will Rogers)I have never met a Jesuit that I didn't like...and admire...for his intelligence, erudition, humor, refinement and spirituality. But many of them seem to be walking in a world of their own, unconnected and unaware of the powerful, catastrophic, and mimetic cultural forces that are wrecking havoc on our society, particularly our youth. Many have bought into an anemic political ideology of the left and a soft humanist psychology bereft of the virile, vigorous ethos Ignatius left his followers. What happened to the Jesuits? The backbone of the Church for four centuries, why did they fall without resistance after the Council? I see three root causes in their spirituality: individualism, intellectualism, and elitism. The spirituality of the Spiritual Exercises is strongly individualistic, in contrast to the far more communal ethos of the more traditional monks and friars. Rather than immersion in a shared cult, community and culture of faith, the exercitant is led by his director to recognize, in his own spirit, the movements of God and those against God. It is a very individual, private thing. The Jesuit culture is one of individualism; there is not a powerful, shared culture in which one surrenders individuality to find personhood in communion, humility and obedience. Rather, classically, each Jesuit was trained to be another Francis Xavier: a rugged, independent individual, groomed to go alone to India or China or anywhere to share the Gospel. The danger, however, is that you can end up with a group of bachelors: intelligent, refined, pious, and highly motivated...but basically autonomous bachelors. Fine friendships; lively, informed, and enlightened conversation at happy hour; high motivation and brilliant insights; but there is little or no "there-there" in the community. Such a society did not have a shared culture to shelter and defend itself when the broader society went dark right about the time of the Council. Each Jesuit was an individual, in his own field of study or ministry, isolated and vulnerable. And for the most part they continue that way to this day. The epitome of Counter-Reformation, Baroque Catholicism, the rugged individualism of the Jesuits seems to have been reliant upon the broader, embrasive Catholic culture so that it decomposed when that world capitulated to the emergent, "late-modern" secular order of the West. The second cause of debility was a certain intellectualism that tended to be abstract, detached, and elevated above the flesh. Contrast the stark, almost-anti-intellectual corporality of the Franciscans. It is hardly an accident that the dominant theological school of 20th century Jesuits was called "transcendental Thomism." What is the probability of a Jesuit retreat house, college or high school addressing something like our pornography epidemic? There is a quasi-gnostic, ethereal, dualist quality to "Ignatian" spirituality that somehow distances the intellect and spirit from the grimy, messy realities of flesh, sex and real desire. Even the brilliant and flawlessly loyal Cardinal Dulles seemed uncomfortable with the relentlessly conjugal imagery of the Communio theology of the dual papacy he served so vigorously. And so a critical mass of Jesuits accomodated rather than resisted the sexual revolution out of a lack of conviction, a discomfort possibly rooted in the soft Janseenism of their mostly Irish past. Lastly, a taste for elitism moved talented young Jesuits in the mid-20th-century to aspire to academic excellence in terms defined Ivy League culture, just when that world was turning decisively from its Calvinist past to a militant secularism. Eager to "find God in all things," intoxicated by the honeymoon between the Catholic Church and post-WWII America, and opening "the windows of the Church" to the world, young Jesuits flocked to the Ivy's and surrendered themselves trustingly, abandoning the hard, critical realism that had been the glory of the order. Infatuated with a new love, ambitious to succeed in Academia on its own terms, the emerging leadership of the order diminished their affection and loyalty to Mother Church and their appreciation for core Catholic values like virginity and apostolic authority. And so we see that a perfect storm of individualism, de-fleshed intellectualism, and aspirant elitism together made this order singularly unprepared to face and challenge the the libertine, militant secularism that was taking over the broader culture just as the Council ended.