At the heart of any political vision is a core model, value or belief. For the communist this would the dictatorship of the proletariat; for the Islamist it is Sharia, complete obedience to the will of Allah, for the libertarian it is unfettered individual freedom, for the fascist it is the ethnic nation state.
For our American Right, especially the Tea Party movement, the core value is The Market, the free market. Their faith is that The Market, as a system of unobstructed exchanges between free agents, is able to create wealth for all, to eliminate poverty, to ensure the liberty and well-being of all. This is religion, a leap of faith. It isolates the individual as an autonomous agent, separate from the family. Family becomes a private hobby, an option, a personal preference abstracted from the public realm.
For the Left, the Messiah is the State: the democratic government as protector of the poor and weak; re-distributor of wealth; and provider of education, health, and general well-being.
For a Catholic, the core model is the family, nestled within the Church, and nourished by broader communities according to the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. The family is the first and foundational community. The individual is never an isolated automaton, but always son/daughter, brother/sister, spouse, mother/father. The well-being of the person and the family depend upon and infuse each other; they cannot be separated from one another. The family as a value and a community precedes the state, the party, the market and all other social institutions.
All other social constructs spring from and feed into the family. Their value is determined by their impact on the family. The primary social values include:
- Marital fidelity and chastity in general.
- The cherishing of every human life, especially those most weak and vulnerable.
- Primacy of labor over capital; the family wage; the complimentarity of gender and the privileging of maternity; the widest possible distribution of private property and political power; parental rights in education; the protection of religious freedom and conscience; the empowerment of local, concrete, person-to-person communities and endeavors over more globalized, giganticized and distant institutions of state and commerce.
We can see that as currently constituted, the Democrat and Republican parties are both hostile to this politics of the family, although they are not morally equivalent. Both isolate the individual from the family. The Left is more directly hostile to the family in its destruction of innocent life and its ethos of sexual liberation. The Right defends the powerless and the family but subordinates it to the isolating, deconstructing, disintegrating dynamics of global capitalism. The Right is culturally supportive of the family culturally but not economically and structurally.
Increasing, a Catholic political vision is cynical about “politics” as such; it is becoming more intensively counter-cultural in reaction against broader, alienating cultural forces on the Left and Right; and more interested in engagement that is local, concrete, limited, and personal.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
What Was He Thinking?
How is it that decent, even admirable, people like Joe Paterno and a litany of monsignors can look away, do the minimum, and essentially tolerate the sexual abuse of children? In a fine Nov. 15 NY Times piece, David Brooks deflates the righteous indignation that pervades public commentary on the scandal and shows how prevalent and even normal such irresponsibility is among us feeble humans. It helps to understand why people “look away” when confronted by sexual abuse. Three motivations stand out: institutional loyalty, personal loyalty, and, most importantly, a primal shyness, sensitivity, and tendency to glance away from sexual matters.
A common analysis of the tolerance of sex abuse ties it to organizational loyalty: we need to protect the reputation of the Church or the Program. This motive is condemned as odiously self-serving in the case of higher level officials whose own status, wealth and power are identified with the institution. So, the thought that a coach or administrator would sacrifice the innocence of a child to the reputation of a program is unspeakably repugnant. And yet, loyalty to the group (family, Church, nation, corporation or team) is clearly a good thing. We raise our children to renounce selfishness and serve the common good: to be loyal to the larger group. The urge to protect the reputation of my family, my Church or my football team is on the whole a praiseworthy thing. No doubt there is a temptation to idolize such collectivities and this may have played a role in the various sex scandals; but I see it as a secondary, not a primary motivation.
Personal loyalty, to the perpetrator, is probably a stronger motivator in the suppression of an aggressive prosecution of sexual wrongdoing. Here again, we have a morally praiseworthy motive: loyalty to comrade or friend is among the very deepest and truest of moral sentiments. Where would we be if we did not instinctively protect each other…especially in hostile environments like warfare, football, business and (yes!) the spiritual life of the Church? If I find my best friend or brother in wrong-doing, is my first impulse to call the police? Of course not, I want to correct him and protect him; I want his well-being as well as the broader, common good, specifically the protection of the innocent. Nevertheless, this good can itself become an idol and a moral atrocity if we were to consciously sacrifice the innocence of children to protection of our comrades.
A deeper, more primal force is at work in the avoidance of sex abuse, especially among those who are basically innocent morally: shyness, a reticence, a sense of delicacy about things sexual. Sexuality is so precious and tender that the natural, the innocent reaction is to shelter it, to glance away, to avoid it except in the proper and protected context. John Paul II’s groundbreaking understanding of the relation of shame to sex in the world after the fall underscored wholesome “shame” as a protection, a shelter, a delicacy about what is most precious, vulnerable and valuable about our bodied selves. This motive is even stronger among the innocent and pure. In the article cited above, David Brooks speaks of “motivational blindness” and studies in which people are shown images and those uncomfortable with sex look away from the more graphic ones. This seems to be a wholesome and natural, deeply primal response, to what is precious and sacred. And it would be stronger among those most innocent. Many of us, coming upon a scene of grown men beating up a small boy, would instinctively jump into the fray to protect the little ones…Penn State football players certainly would not hesitate. But we are not so prepared, instinctively, to deal with the erotic intimacies of others. Instinctively we look away, avoid and hopefully forget about the disturbing sight. I recall chaperoning high school proms and being directed by my principal to patrol the dance floor and intervene where the girls were “too close” to their dates. I went through the motions but religiously avoided the couples that were out of compliance: I found it unbearable to intrude on such a personal, intimate reality. This instinct to “look away” is in itself a wholesome, reverent one. Tragically, it is not the correct response to abuse of the young.
Most of us, especially the more pure and wholesome among us (Joe Paterno and a number of bishops), are not well prepared to deal directly with sex abuse. Most families and groups have swept these matters under the rug, not out of moral depravity, but out of a painful shamefulness and awkwardness. This awkwardness is heightened, culturally, among those who came of age in the more Victorian society prior to the cultural revolution of the 60s. My dear aunt of happy memory, born in 1910, told me of her first job and how shocked she was when the boss explained that she would be replacing a woman leaving the workplace due to her “pregnancy.” That he would use such a word in her presence was, for her, unthinkable. She was of the same generation as the bishops who were to govern the Church when the sexual revolution exploded in the 60s: they were not prepared. The Great Generation was not sexually confident, knowledgeable or comfortable enough to directly and clearly address the sexual issues that were thrown in their face. They looked away. And this “looking away” continues today. The rapid and widespread acceptance of homosexuality as a lifestyle is possible only because we look away from the facts and details intrinsic to that behavior. Pious Catholics are able to vote Democrat, albeit with some discomfort, because they divert attention away from something like partial-birth abortion. The sexual libertines are winning the culture war because decent, notably Catholic, people look away and prefer to remain unengaged in such intimate, personal affairs.
This “avoidance response” may spring from innocence, but it is an immature innocence: shyness, awkwardness, timidity, and anxiety. A mature, confident innocence will be able to soberly and calmly see the real, judge it, and confront it in justice.
This is not at all to justify or condone the toleration of abuse. On the one hand, it is an attempt to practice the exhortation of St. Ignatius Loyola: “Put the best possible interpretation on the action of another.” It is also a way to deepen our own self-understanding so to train ourselves in sobriety, vigilance and preparedness for the confrontations with evil that can take us by surprise. The Brooks’ piece, drawing from the social sciences rather than a faith tradition, establishes how prone we all are “to self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do.” Without implying a moral equivalence, we sense a shared spiritual blindness: we are all of us so weak, fragile, and prone to error and evil.
May we all bring ourselves, victimized and victimizing, humbled and weak, into the Mercy of the one Victim who does not accuse or condemn or victimize; the victorious and regal Victim himself, Jesus our Lord.
A common analysis of the tolerance of sex abuse ties it to organizational loyalty: we need to protect the reputation of the Church or the Program. This motive is condemned as odiously self-serving in the case of higher level officials whose own status, wealth and power are identified with the institution. So, the thought that a coach or administrator would sacrifice the innocence of a child to the reputation of a program is unspeakably repugnant. And yet, loyalty to the group (family, Church, nation, corporation or team) is clearly a good thing. We raise our children to renounce selfishness and serve the common good: to be loyal to the larger group. The urge to protect the reputation of my family, my Church or my football team is on the whole a praiseworthy thing. No doubt there is a temptation to idolize such collectivities and this may have played a role in the various sex scandals; but I see it as a secondary, not a primary motivation.
Personal loyalty, to the perpetrator, is probably a stronger motivator in the suppression of an aggressive prosecution of sexual wrongdoing. Here again, we have a morally praiseworthy motive: loyalty to comrade or friend is among the very deepest and truest of moral sentiments. Where would we be if we did not instinctively protect each other…especially in hostile environments like warfare, football, business and (yes!) the spiritual life of the Church? If I find my best friend or brother in wrong-doing, is my first impulse to call the police? Of course not, I want to correct him and protect him; I want his well-being as well as the broader, common good, specifically the protection of the innocent. Nevertheless, this good can itself become an idol and a moral atrocity if we were to consciously sacrifice the innocence of children to protection of our comrades.
A deeper, more primal force is at work in the avoidance of sex abuse, especially among those who are basically innocent morally: shyness, a reticence, a sense of delicacy about things sexual. Sexuality is so precious and tender that the natural, the innocent reaction is to shelter it, to glance away, to avoid it except in the proper and protected context. John Paul II’s groundbreaking understanding of the relation of shame to sex in the world after the fall underscored wholesome “shame” as a protection, a shelter, a delicacy about what is most precious, vulnerable and valuable about our bodied selves. This motive is even stronger among the innocent and pure. In the article cited above, David Brooks speaks of “motivational blindness” and studies in which people are shown images and those uncomfortable with sex look away from the more graphic ones. This seems to be a wholesome and natural, deeply primal response, to what is precious and sacred. And it would be stronger among those most innocent. Many of us, coming upon a scene of grown men beating up a small boy, would instinctively jump into the fray to protect the little ones…Penn State football players certainly would not hesitate. But we are not so prepared, instinctively, to deal with the erotic intimacies of others. Instinctively we look away, avoid and hopefully forget about the disturbing sight. I recall chaperoning high school proms and being directed by my principal to patrol the dance floor and intervene where the girls were “too close” to their dates. I went through the motions but religiously avoided the couples that were out of compliance: I found it unbearable to intrude on such a personal, intimate reality. This instinct to “look away” is in itself a wholesome, reverent one. Tragically, it is not the correct response to abuse of the young.
Most of us, especially the more pure and wholesome among us (Joe Paterno and a number of bishops), are not well prepared to deal directly with sex abuse. Most families and groups have swept these matters under the rug, not out of moral depravity, but out of a painful shamefulness and awkwardness. This awkwardness is heightened, culturally, among those who came of age in the more Victorian society prior to the cultural revolution of the 60s. My dear aunt of happy memory, born in 1910, told me of her first job and how shocked she was when the boss explained that she would be replacing a woman leaving the workplace due to her “pregnancy.” That he would use such a word in her presence was, for her, unthinkable. She was of the same generation as the bishops who were to govern the Church when the sexual revolution exploded in the 60s: they were not prepared. The Great Generation was not sexually confident, knowledgeable or comfortable enough to directly and clearly address the sexual issues that were thrown in their face. They looked away. And this “looking away” continues today. The rapid and widespread acceptance of homosexuality as a lifestyle is possible only because we look away from the facts and details intrinsic to that behavior. Pious Catholics are able to vote Democrat, albeit with some discomfort, because they divert attention away from something like partial-birth abortion. The sexual libertines are winning the culture war because decent, notably Catholic, people look away and prefer to remain unengaged in such intimate, personal affairs.
This “avoidance response” may spring from innocence, but it is an immature innocence: shyness, awkwardness, timidity, and anxiety. A mature, confident innocence will be able to soberly and calmly see the real, judge it, and confront it in justice.
This is not at all to justify or condone the toleration of abuse. On the one hand, it is an attempt to practice the exhortation of St. Ignatius Loyola: “Put the best possible interpretation on the action of another.” It is also a way to deepen our own self-understanding so to train ourselves in sobriety, vigilance and preparedness for the confrontations with evil that can take us by surprise. The Brooks’ piece, drawing from the social sciences rather than a faith tradition, establishes how prone we all are “to self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do.” Without implying a moral equivalence, we sense a shared spiritual blindness: we are all of us so weak, fragile, and prone to error and evil.
May we all bring ourselves, victimized and victimizing, humbled and weak, into the Mercy of the one Victim who does not accuse or condemn or victimize; the victorious and regal Victim himself, Jesus our Lord.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Catechesis of Desire: Lessons from Monsignor Giussani, Bill W., and Rene Girard
Anyone who reads the Magnificat liturgical prayer journal on a daily basis, especially the short, introductory mediations, is being gradually, systematically catechized into the spirituality of the Communion and Liberation movement, which might be called a catechesis of desire. The key insight of their founder, Monsignor Luigi Giussani, is that the human heart is a desire for God, a longing for infinite and eternal Love.
This is, of course, a classic Catholic intuition: St. Augustine famously said “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You O Lord” and St. Thomas Aquinas held that all human desire is implicitly, even when erroneously, a movement towards the good, or towards God. Perhaps no one, until Monsignor Giussani, has developed and expanded this insight into a comprehensive path to God. In sharp contrast to residual Jansenism, which developed Augustine’s more negative evaluation of human desire, Giussani celebrated desire with an exultant positivism. The tone of his writing is unrestrainedly euphoric with the good news: our desires, even in their often-deformed state, are fundamentally good and destined for fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ. In contrast to the negativity of moralism, he exults in the Beauty and Joy of life in Christ. Monsignor Albacete, his friend and American protégé, recounts the story of when Giussani came upon two young lovers in a passionate, erotic embrace on a starry night. They were embarrassed but he only asked: “What does what you are doing have to do with all these stars in the sky?” The disciple Albacete explains: the tender mutual longing the lovers have for each other is reflective of the even deeper human desire for a Love that is Eternal and Infinite. Far from being upset or judgmental about the lovers’ embrace, the Monsignor is in awe of it.
We encounter here an extravagant positivity about human desire as fundamentally good, as essentially a longing for God and as destined to be more than fulfilled. This excessive affirmation seems incongruous, however, with what we experience as the irrationality, toxicity and destructiveness of so much of human desire. This approach might well be complemented by two different, contemporary evaluations of human desire: that of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the mimetic theory of Rene Girard.
The AA of Bill W and Doctor Bob unveiled the dynamics of addictive desire as compulsive, self-destructive, and insatiable. This might be called “false desire.” By definition, addictive desire is beyond the control of the person who is enslaved and powerless. Much of the practice and insight generated by the 12-step programs is a retrieval or re-statement of traditional understandings of sin. The passage to freedom and interior peace includes a series of quite specific steps and practices, mostly involving regular meetings and personal sponsorship, and an underlying spiritual attitude of confession of wrongdoing and surrender of one’s will and life to God. These steps are, then, a journey of liberation from false desire into genuine desire, desire for God.
A third dimension of human desire has been thoroughly explored in the mimetic theory of Rene Girard. According to this, human longing is incessant and insatiable but has a vague, undefined nature, in contrast to the structured instincts of animals. We desire but don’t know what we desire so we are ceaselessly looking to and imitating others. We are made to image or mirror another, starting with the smile of our mother. Each of us, in everything we do, is always a reflection of the desire we see in another. Desire as mimetic is neither good nor evil but is a possibility for either. When we look mimetically upon evil we ourselves emulate and become that evil and so associate ourselves with greed, violence, and covetousness in all its forms. By contrast, when we look into the face of genuine Love, we ourselves are moved inexorably (one might say, efficaciously) to reflect that love.
Our behavior, then, springs not from an autonomous, self-directing will, but out of the mimetic, emulating, unitive gaze to the other, the other as Godly or ungodly, the other as gracious or vicious, the other as generosity or as covetousness.
These three approaches move in a shared direction: decisively, they reject a moralism that locates the springs of human agency in an independent, autonomous, self-directing will. They all see human desire as infinite, incessant, and itself more deeply constitutive of the human person than the intellect, the will and the emotions. Combined with an understanding of sexual desire as outlined by Pope John Paul the Great, these complementary visions of human longing promise a most rich anthropology of the person as infinite desire.
This is, of course, a classic Catholic intuition: St. Augustine famously said “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You O Lord” and St. Thomas Aquinas held that all human desire is implicitly, even when erroneously, a movement towards the good, or towards God. Perhaps no one, until Monsignor Giussani, has developed and expanded this insight into a comprehensive path to God. In sharp contrast to residual Jansenism, which developed Augustine’s more negative evaluation of human desire, Giussani celebrated desire with an exultant positivism. The tone of his writing is unrestrainedly euphoric with the good news: our desires, even in their often-deformed state, are fundamentally good and destined for fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ. In contrast to the negativity of moralism, he exults in the Beauty and Joy of life in Christ. Monsignor Albacete, his friend and American protégé, recounts the story of when Giussani came upon two young lovers in a passionate, erotic embrace on a starry night. They were embarrassed but he only asked: “What does what you are doing have to do with all these stars in the sky?” The disciple Albacete explains: the tender mutual longing the lovers have for each other is reflective of the even deeper human desire for a Love that is Eternal and Infinite. Far from being upset or judgmental about the lovers’ embrace, the Monsignor is in awe of it.
We encounter here an extravagant positivity about human desire as fundamentally good, as essentially a longing for God and as destined to be more than fulfilled. This excessive affirmation seems incongruous, however, with what we experience as the irrationality, toxicity and destructiveness of so much of human desire. This approach might well be complemented by two different, contemporary evaluations of human desire: that of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the mimetic theory of Rene Girard.
The AA of Bill W and Doctor Bob unveiled the dynamics of addictive desire as compulsive, self-destructive, and insatiable. This might be called “false desire.” By definition, addictive desire is beyond the control of the person who is enslaved and powerless. Much of the practice and insight generated by the 12-step programs is a retrieval or re-statement of traditional understandings of sin. The passage to freedom and interior peace includes a series of quite specific steps and practices, mostly involving regular meetings and personal sponsorship, and an underlying spiritual attitude of confession of wrongdoing and surrender of one’s will and life to God. These steps are, then, a journey of liberation from false desire into genuine desire, desire for God.
A third dimension of human desire has been thoroughly explored in the mimetic theory of Rene Girard. According to this, human longing is incessant and insatiable but has a vague, undefined nature, in contrast to the structured instincts of animals. We desire but don’t know what we desire so we are ceaselessly looking to and imitating others. We are made to image or mirror another, starting with the smile of our mother. Each of us, in everything we do, is always a reflection of the desire we see in another. Desire as mimetic is neither good nor evil but is a possibility for either. When we look mimetically upon evil we ourselves emulate and become that evil and so associate ourselves with greed, violence, and covetousness in all its forms. By contrast, when we look into the face of genuine Love, we ourselves are moved inexorably (one might say, efficaciously) to reflect that love.
Our behavior, then, springs not from an autonomous, self-directing will, but out of the mimetic, emulating, unitive gaze to the other, the other as Godly or ungodly, the other as gracious or vicious, the other as generosity or as covetousness.
These three approaches move in a shared direction: decisively, they reject a moralism that locates the springs of human agency in an independent, autonomous, self-directing will. They all see human desire as infinite, incessant, and itself more deeply constitutive of the human person than the intellect, the will and the emotions. Combined with an understanding of sexual desire as outlined by Pope John Paul the Great, these complementary visions of human longing promise a most rich anthropology of the person as infinite desire.
Monday, October 3, 2011
The Third, Lay Magisterium
We Catholics defer to the college of bishops in union with the pope as our magisterium, our indefectible teacher, inspired by the Holy Spirit to guide us in faith and morals. In the wake of the 2nd Vatican Council, an alternate, frequently oppositional magisterium took shape in the form of the theological guild. With their status immensely enhanced by their input into the Council and their ability to straddle the ecclesiastical and the secular academic worlds, they gave voice to a progressive consensus that mimicked the intellectual fashions of secular elites and thus criticized the Vatican, tradition, authority, classic Catholic piety and sexual norms.
Subsequently, in a much more gradual and dispersed manner, a third magisterium emerged, mostly from the laity. Counter-cultural and reactive against liberal fashion, an array of lay voices articulated a staunch, militant, “thick” Catholic vision. These voices were usually lay in two senses: not members of the clergy (or religious orders) and not credentialed academic theologians. Many were associated with the new ecclesial movements; most aligned themselves passionately with the dual pontificate of John Paul/Benedict. They draw from different sources and take distinct shapes but all tend to be: populist and reactive against cultural elites; filial, humble before authority and tradition; evangelical, exultant in the Person of Jesus Christ; pious in traditional ways; critical of modernity; skeptical of the hegemony of a reductive science and an overwhelming technocracy; militant in defense of innocent life and the family; and keenly aware of the supernatural including the diabolical, the mystical, and the communion of saints beyond death. The distinct streams of this rich, symphonic lay synthesis include:
- Charismatic lay leaders (Ralph Martin, Steve Clark) who incorporated the legacy of Evangelical/Pentecostal Protestantism into a new Catholic gestalt. Prominent in this group is Neal Lozano whose ministry of deliverance from evil spirits is gentle, Jesus-centered, counseling-based, and user-friendly for the ordinary layman.
- The brilliant, new-yet-traditional , extended and arduous catechetical itinerary of Kiko Arguello which may join the ranks of Classic Catholic achievements such as the monastery, the mendicants, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius, the mystical heritage of St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila, and the French Catholic Renaissance in spirituality.
- EWTN lay personalities (Marcus Grodi, Raymond Arroyo) who reach an astonishingly wide audience, including the elderly, sick and isolated. Mother Angelica so shrewdly yielded control of her powerful network to a Board of red-meat Catholic laymen, just as the American bishops and the Vatican were both considering a “hostile take-over” through her vow of obedience.
- Psychologists like Paul Vitz and the Institute for Psychological Sciences who integrate good psychology into a Catholic anthropology and critique the secularist biases of mainstream psychology.
- Gil Baile who develops and popularizes Rene Girard’s breakthrough anthropology of mimesis and sacrificial violence and integrates it with the theology of Balthasar, John Paul and Benedict.
- Converts: The steady flow of high calibre (intellectually and spiritually) converts is infusing our lay leadership with new riches. These bring an intense appreciation for specifically Catholic values (authority, Eucharist, Mary, the saints, etc.) as well as enrichments from their own traditions. This includes the Jewish converts of the Association of Hebrew Catholics as well as Evangelicals and other Protestants who give their stirring witnesses on EWTN's The Journey Home. Interestingly, ministers and Rabbi converts become, ordinarily, Catholic laymen and so infuse the laity with rich theological and ministerial resources.
- Other lay conspirators from the Marian movements, pro-life groups, Natural Family Planners, Theology of the Body enthusiasts, micro-Agapic-initiatives (Jean Vanier, Dorothy Day), Latin Mass afficionados, and allies in the new religious orders (Friars of the Renewal) and academia (notably, the outstanding lay theologians of the John Paul II Institute in DC under the leadership of David Schindler.)
Blessed John Cardinal Newman observed that it was largely the faith of the laity that preserved the Catholic faith during the Arian controversy when a majority of bishops went into heresy. So today, we see the lay defense of crucial Catholic values and beliefs that are disparaged by liberal elites and often avoided by an irenic, conflict-averse episcopacy. In their opposition to liberal consensus, these voices are able to be more militant and emphatic than the more diplomatic, moderate institutional magisterium of pope and bishops. They are often to the “right” of official leadership. For example, they may be more vigorous politically in defense of human life and the family. They are more likely to see the negative side of issues like evolution as a mega-theory, global change as manmade and catastrophic, and the UN as an actor for the common good.
These voices tend to be reactive against post-enlightenment modernity. They are more sensitive to the darker powers operative under the cover of rationality, individual freedoms, science, technology, big government and business. In a prophetic mode, they alert us to contemporary evils in a manner not accessible to one like our current Pontiff whose every utterance is a masterpiece of balance, moderation, nuance and complexity.
Outside of the specific areas of faith and morals are the vast, complex arenas of culture where our papal and episcopal magisterium enjoys no direct, divine guarantees. In these areas of peril and combat, in our discerning of spirits and reading of the signs of the times, we do well to heed the voices of the laity in the trenches, those close to family and ethnic faith, those distanced from and so less deceived by illusions of prestige and privilege, those loyal to our heritage and our ancestors.
Subsequently, in a much more gradual and dispersed manner, a third magisterium emerged, mostly from the laity. Counter-cultural and reactive against liberal fashion, an array of lay voices articulated a staunch, militant, “thick” Catholic vision. These voices were usually lay in two senses: not members of the clergy (or religious orders) and not credentialed academic theologians. Many were associated with the new ecclesial movements; most aligned themselves passionately with the dual pontificate of John Paul/Benedict. They draw from different sources and take distinct shapes but all tend to be: populist and reactive against cultural elites; filial, humble before authority and tradition; evangelical, exultant in the Person of Jesus Christ; pious in traditional ways; critical of modernity; skeptical of the hegemony of a reductive science and an overwhelming technocracy; militant in defense of innocent life and the family; and keenly aware of the supernatural including the diabolical, the mystical, and the communion of saints beyond death. The distinct streams of this rich, symphonic lay synthesis include:
- Charismatic lay leaders (Ralph Martin, Steve Clark) who incorporated the legacy of Evangelical/Pentecostal Protestantism into a new Catholic gestalt. Prominent in this group is Neal Lozano whose ministry of deliverance from evil spirits is gentle, Jesus-centered, counseling-based, and user-friendly for the ordinary layman.
- The brilliant, new-yet-traditional , extended and arduous catechetical itinerary of Kiko Arguello which may join the ranks of Classic Catholic achievements such as the monastery, the mendicants, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius, the mystical heritage of St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila, and the French Catholic Renaissance in spirituality.
- EWTN lay personalities (Marcus Grodi, Raymond Arroyo) who reach an astonishingly wide audience, including the elderly, sick and isolated. Mother Angelica so shrewdly yielded control of her powerful network to a Board of red-meat Catholic laymen, just as the American bishops and the Vatican were both considering a “hostile take-over” through her vow of obedience.
- Psychologists like Paul Vitz and the Institute for Psychological Sciences who integrate good psychology into a Catholic anthropology and critique the secularist biases of mainstream psychology.
- Gil Baile who develops and popularizes Rene Girard’s breakthrough anthropology of mimesis and sacrificial violence and integrates it with the theology of Balthasar, John Paul and Benedict.
- Converts: The steady flow of high calibre (intellectually and spiritually) converts is infusing our lay leadership with new riches. These bring an intense appreciation for specifically Catholic values (authority, Eucharist, Mary, the saints, etc.) as well as enrichments from their own traditions. This includes the Jewish converts of the Association of Hebrew Catholics as well as Evangelicals and other Protestants who give their stirring witnesses on EWTN's The Journey Home. Interestingly, ministers and Rabbi converts become, ordinarily, Catholic laymen and so infuse the laity with rich theological and ministerial resources.
- Other lay conspirators from the Marian movements, pro-life groups, Natural Family Planners, Theology of the Body enthusiasts, micro-Agapic-initiatives (Jean Vanier, Dorothy Day), Latin Mass afficionados, and allies in the new religious orders (Friars of the Renewal) and academia (notably, the outstanding lay theologians of the John Paul II Institute in DC under the leadership of David Schindler.)
Blessed John Cardinal Newman observed that it was largely the faith of the laity that preserved the Catholic faith during the Arian controversy when a majority of bishops went into heresy. So today, we see the lay defense of crucial Catholic values and beliefs that are disparaged by liberal elites and often avoided by an irenic, conflict-averse episcopacy. In their opposition to liberal consensus, these voices are able to be more militant and emphatic than the more diplomatic, moderate institutional magisterium of pope and bishops. They are often to the “right” of official leadership. For example, they may be more vigorous politically in defense of human life and the family. They are more likely to see the negative side of issues like evolution as a mega-theory, global change as manmade and catastrophic, and the UN as an actor for the common good.
These voices tend to be reactive against post-enlightenment modernity. They are more sensitive to the darker powers operative under the cover of rationality, individual freedoms, science, technology, big government and business. In a prophetic mode, they alert us to contemporary evils in a manner not accessible to one like our current Pontiff whose every utterance is a masterpiece of balance, moderation, nuance and complexity.
Outside of the specific areas of faith and morals are the vast, complex arenas of culture where our papal and episcopal magisterium enjoys no direct, divine guarantees. In these areas of peril and combat, in our discerning of spirits and reading of the signs of the times, we do well to heed the voices of the laity in the trenches, those close to family and ethnic faith, those distanced from and so less deceived by illusions of prestige and privilege, those loyal to our heritage and our ancestors.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Feminine Dimension of the Masculine Priesthood
If masculinity becomes mature, complete and fruitful only in union with the feminine, normally in marriage, what are we to make of the male-only, celibate Catholic priesthood? How does the priest fulfill his virility without intimacy with a wife or lover? Consider the custom of past generations in which a young man as young as 13 or 14 would leave his family for the minor seminary and live out the remainder of his life in the male-only environment of the rectory or its equivalent. Normally, such priests would be cautioned to avoid private, intimate, one-on-one relationships with attractive women as near occasions of sin. Are we to assume that such priests were destined for a sterile bachelorhood, permanently expelled from closeness with the feminine? Consider also that men are less adept at intimacy and relationships than are women so we can easily imagine a typical priest as lonely and isolated: friendly with his fellow clerics but in a shy, distant manner, devoid of real intimacy. Recall the classic injunction in seminary formation against “particular friendships” and we seem to have a sure-proof recipe for a lonely, isolated, sterile and one-sided masculinity.
Clearly, the sterile and desiccated virility of the bachelor is a danger for the celibate. And surely we have known fine priests who have suffered in this condition. The prevalence of alcoholism in an earlier clerical culture was surely symptomatic of this deeper loneliness. And much of the animus against mandatory celibacy draws from an aversion to such virginity as sterile, misogynist and dysfunctional.
But the reality proves this anxiety to largely mistaken: so many priests are balanced, virile and appreciative of the feminine. How can this be?
A preliminary observation is that many priests are close to their mothers and even attribute their vocations to mom’s faith. It is not unusual for a daughter to identify quite closely with the values and aspirations of her father and the son with those of his mother. Think of Augustine and Monica.
We can see then that many men are drawn into the priesthood from a close, nurturing, affirming relationship with mother. If they successfully complete the oedipal transition into mimetic identification with the father they carry through their life a liberated closeness to and appreciation for the feminine. It is true that inordinate attachment to mom may itself be a sign of immaturity and an incomplete oedipal passage but surely a healthy attachment-to-and-detachment-from mom is the first building block for a healthy priestly identity.
Consider also that a priest’s ministry is mostly with women. Certainly in our culture, women are more religious and more attracted to the Church. Daily mass, in my experience, usually shows at least a 2-to-1 ratio of women-to-men. So a priest may be far more involved with women, on a daily, basis then with men.
At least some of this involvement, in confession, spiritual direction and pastoral counseling is of a most intimate nature in that the woman unveils her interior sufferings and longings. Imagine such a reception of confession of sin, suffering and longing and the dispensation of absolution, comfort, guidance and encouragement…Is it possible to imagine a more tender, virile, donative, generative and even spousal intimacy?
A harder case would be the priest who works only with males: in an all-boys school , a seminary or the military. Note, however, that the priest is usually in the role of father, pastor, healer, guide, protector, consoler and encourager. It is especially important that for us Catholics the priest is always “Father”… this indicates that he is paternal, masculine in the fullest sense of nurturer, giver of life, tender, protective… He is, in other words, the embodiment of virility in its maturity, including the feminine dimension. A recent study showed that testosterone levels of men decrease when they become fathers; no doubt a similarly wholesome development occurs in ordinary fatherly ministry.
The priest sacrifices (“makes holy”) and sublimates his own spousal and paternal urges to express the uber-virility, the hyper-spousality, and the super-paternity of Christ. He surrenders himself to a virginal, fraternal , but also bridal, intimacy with Christ in order to become himself an icon of Christ the Groom and Father. He allows himself to be filled with Christ’s love for his bridal Church. He assumes the most masculine of roles as father, authority, governor, guide, groom, teacher, law-giver, disciplinarian, leader, and sanctifier…in relation to the Church and each person as bride, son or daughter, and beloved. The priest surrenders his virility…his sexuality, his autonomy, his time and resources…in sublime appreciation for and donation to the feminine… the virginal, maternal, bridal, Marian Church.
Clearly, the sterile and desiccated virility of the bachelor is a danger for the celibate. And surely we have known fine priests who have suffered in this condition. The prevalence of alcoholism in an earlier clerical culture was surely symptomatic of this deeper loneliness. And much of the animus against mandatory celibacy draws from an aversion to such virginity as sterile, misogynist and dysfunctional.
But the reality proves this anxiety to largely mistaken: so many priests are balanced, virile and appreciative of the feminine. How can this be?
A preliminary observation is that many priests are close to their mothers and even attribute their vocations to mom’s faith. It is not unusual for a daughter to identify quite closely with the values and aspirations of her father and the son with those of his mother. Think of Augustine and Monica.
We can see then that many men are drawn into the priesthood from a close, nurturing, affirming relationship with mother. If they successfully complete the oedipal transition into mimetic identification with the father they carry through their life a liberated closeness to and appreciation for the feminine. It is true that inordinate attachment to mom may itself be a sign of immaturity and an incomplete oedipal passage but surely a healthy attachment-to-and-detachment-from mom is the first building block for a healthy priestly identity.
Consider also that a priest’s ministry is mostly with women. Certainly in our culture, women are more religious and more attracted to the Church. Daily mass, in my experience, usually shows at least a 2-to-1 ratio of women-to-men. So a priest may be far more involved with women, on a daily, basis then with men.
At least some of this involvement, in confession, spiritual direction and pastoral counseling is of a most intimate nature in that the woman unveils her interior sufferings and longings. Imagine such a reception of confession of sin, suffering and longing and the dispensation of absolution, comfort, guidance and encouragement…Is it possible to imagine a more tender, virile, donative, generative and even spousal intimacy?
A harder case would be the priest who works only with males: in an all-boys school , a seminary or the military. Note, however, that the priest is usually in the role of father, pastor, healer, guide, protector, consoler and encourager. It is especially important that for us Catholics the priest is always “Father”… this indicates that he is paternal, masculine in the fullest sense of nurturer, giver of life, tender, protective… He is, in other words, the embodiment of virility in its maturity, including the feminine dimension. A recent study showed that testosterone levels of men decrease when they become fathers; no doubt a similarly wholesome development occurs in ordinary fatherly ministry.
The priest sacrifices (“makes holy”) and sublimates his own spousal and paternal urges to express the uber-virility, the hyper-spousality, and the super-paternity of Christ. He surrenders himself to a virginal, fraternal , but also bridal, intimacy with Christ in order to become himself an icon of Christ the Groom and Father. He allows himself to be filled with Christ’s love for his bridal Church. He assumes the most masculine of roles as father, authority, governor, guide, groom, teacher, law-giver, disciplinarian, leader, and sanctifier…in relation to the Church and each person as bride, son or daughter, and beloved. The priest surrenders his virility…his sexuality, his autonomy, his time and resources…in sublime appreciation for and donation to the feminine… the virginal, maternal, bridal, Marian Church.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The Interiority of Masculinity
Even before birth, each of us is created into a web of relationships as a gendered person, in order to image the Trinity precisely in relationality. Our destiny is to share, eternally, in that Absolute Relationality of Love, God. Gender is an image of and pathway to God. It is creation’s primary icon. It is the first and fundamental “sacrament” (“physical sign, instituted by Christ, to give grace”) of the human personality. Gender is oriented to generativity in that it always gives out of its abundance (Being) or elicits, by its poverty, the generosity of the other. Virility, like its complement, femininity, has four distinct, but mutually interpenetrating forms: filiality, fraternity, spousality, and paternity. My every relationship as a man combines these four dimensions. Virility, like relationality, constitutes my identity. A non-virile or un-gendered relationship, decision, action or aspiration is not possible for a masculine person. A human person cannot be neuter: “Male and female He created them.”
Filiality is the first, last, foundational and essential form of masculinity. Prior even to birth, I am a son. I am son of a specific mother and father, of a distinctive family, tribe and nation. At a deeper ontological level, I am son of my heavenly Father. At baptism I am restored to intimacy with my Father through immersion into our Mother the Church. As a creature, I am first, always and already received. That I exist at all and every aspect of my being is gift. Before I am conscious, decisive or active I am received…with an utterly unique DNA, physique, historical and familial and cultural circumstance. As I grow into consciousness and action and decision my foundational and primal movement must be humility, gratitude, loyalty, reception and obedience. Filiality entirely dominates the early stage of life, before we are capable of spousality or paternity, and the last years of decline, if we live that long. It is the basis for, indeed the interiority of, the later stages of masculinity. Because I am a son I can become a father, emulating my own father (or father surrogates) who love me and model masculinity for me.
Fraternity is the bond of loyalty to sister/brother and friend. In contrast to the deep asymmetry of the parent/child union, this bond is rooted in similarity and equality but entails a symphony of difference, hierarchy (big sister), complimentarity, and conflict. Fraternity is already informed by a shared filiality: you are my sister because we share a mother and a father. I recognize the stranger, the foreigner and even the enemy as my brother to the extent that I sense his filiality in my own creator Father. Genuine spousality as well as paternity is rooted in fraternity. My ability to surrender myself into nuptial union depends upon the depth and strength of my prior fraternal bonds, with women and men.
Spousality infuses shared filiality and fraternity/sorority with the energies of erotic longing, the depth of self-gift and the permanence of promise. It arises from a synergistic explosion of intensified need (eros) and fullness (affection, friendship, charity.) If not rooted in genuine filiality and friendship it degrades itself quickly into lust, use, dominance and deception. If properly rooted in the prior and foundational loves, it moves spontaneously and exuberantly beyond itself into paternity and maternity.
Paternity is the goal and purpose of virility: the engendering of life and love. As originator I most closely emulate and participate with God in the creation of an eternal (bodily and en-spirited) person; in our desperate dependency upon the feminine and maternal we recall our creaturely, needy, beggarly nature. The thrill of paternity is in the surprising newness and startling difference of the child who carries on one’s blood line and cultural inheritance but in an excess of novelty, abundance and alterity.
Masculinity is open to, inclusive of, and defined by femininity. As the Father lives in the Son, so my masculinity is interiorly constituted by the feminine. The human person is bi-polar by virtue of gender: my virility is a limitless longing for, dependency upon, fascination with, and gift to the feminine. My masculinity is mature and fruitful to the extent that it accepts, cherishes, admires and self-donates to the feminine. As male, I am reception of, hunger for, and goodness towards the feminine. Prior to birth, as a fetus and embryo, I am enclosed within, nurtured, protected, and cherished by my mother. Ontologically and ultimately I am always son of my heavenly Father; but within the created realm I am primarily son of my mother and only secondarily of my father. In created filiality, the maternal is primary; we see this even in Jesus who has a real human mother but a only foster father in Joseph. Creaturely paternity is representative but maternity (which is only creaturely) is substantial. So my masculine filiality is first constituted in relation to the feminine, the maternal, the Marian. Fraternally, my male identity depends primarily upon peer friendships with other young men; but fraternal love for my blood sisters and female friends is also constitutes my masculinity which is always directed to the feminine. A man without (non-erotic) female friends would become a cipher, a caricature, a cartoon monster. In the spousal embrace, I the groom receive my bride into myself: physically, emotionally, spiritually and every which way. I “take” my wife…she comes to dwell within me and I in her. One cannot encounter me without encountering her. And finally, the paternal is always a partnership with, a compliment to the maternal.
In my masculine poverty, especially the desperate longing for the feminine, I know my creaturely humility; in my virile magnanimity, I image the goodness and greatness of God.
Filiality is the first, last, foundational and essential form of masculinity. Prior even to birth, I am a son. I am son of a specific mother and father, of a distinctive family, tribe and nation. At a deeper ontological level, I am son of my heavenly Father. At baptism I am restored to intimacy with my Father through immersion into our Mother the Church. As a creature, I am first, always and already received. That I exist at all and every aspect of my being is gift. Before I am conscious, decisive or active I am received…with an utterly unique DNA, physique, historical and familial and cultural circumstance. As I grow into consciousness and action and decision my foundational and primal movement must be humility, gratitude, loyalty, reception and obedience. Filiality entirely dominates the early stage of life, before we are capable of spousality or paternity, and the last years of decline, if we live that long. It is the basis for, indeed the interiority of, the later stages of masculinity. Because I am a son I can become a father, emulating my own father (or father surrogates) who love me and model masculinity for me.
Fraternity is the bond of loyalty to sister/brother and friend. In contrast to the deep asymmetry of the parent/child union, this bond is rooted in similarity and equality but entails a symphony of difference, hierarchy (big sister), complimentarity, and conflict. Fraternity is already informed by a shared filiality: you are my sister because we share a mother and a father. I recognize the stranger, the foreigner and even the enemy as my brother to the extent that I sense his filiality in my own creator Father. Genuine spousality as well as paternity is rooted in fraternity. My ability to surrender myself into nuptial union depends upon the depth and strength of my prior fraternal bonds, with women and men.
Spousality infuses shared filiality and fraternity/sorority with the energies of erotic longing, the depth of self-gift and the permanence of promise. It arises from a synergistic explosion of intensified need (eros) and fullness (affection, friendship, charity.) If not rooted in genuine filiality and friendship it degrades itself quickly into lust, use, dominance and deception. If properly rooted in the prior and foundational loves, it moves spontaneously and exuberantly beyond itself into paternity and maternity.
Paternity is the goal and purpose of virility: the engendering of life and love. As originator I most closely emulate and participate with God in the creation of an eternal (bodily and en-spirited) person; in our desperate dependency upon the feminine and maternal we recall our creaturely, needy, beggarly nature. The thrill of paternity is in the surprising newness and startling difference of the child who carries on one’s blood line and cultural inheritance but in an excess of novelty, abundance and alterity.
Masculinity is open to, inclusive of, and defined by femininity. As the Father lives in the Son, so my masculinity is interiorly constituted by the feminine. The human person is bi-polar by virtue of gender: my virility is a limitless longing for, dependency upon, fascination with, and gift to the feminine. My masculinity is mature and fruitful to the extent that it accepts, cherishes, admires and self-donates to the feminine. As male, I am reception of, hunger for, and goodness towards the feminine. Prior to birth, as a fetus and embryo, I am enclosed within, nurtured, protected, and cherished by my mother. Ontologically and ultimately I am always son of my heavenly Father; but within the created realm I am primarily son of my mother and only secondarily of my father. In created filiality, the maternal is primary; we see this even in Jesus who has a real human mother but a only foster father in Joseph. Creaturely paternity is representative but maternity (which is only creaturely) is substantial. So my masculine filiality is first constituted in relation to the feminine, the maternal, the Marian. Fraternally, my male identity depends primarily upon peer friendships with other young men; but fraternal love for my blood sisters and female friends is also constitutes my masculinity which is always directed to the feminine. A man without (non-erotic) female friends would become a cipher, a caricature, a cartoon monster. In the spousal embrace, I the groom receive my bride into myself: physically, emotionally, spiritually and every which way. I “take” my wife…she comes to dwell within me and I in her. One cannot encounter me without encountering her. And finally, the paternal is always a partnership with, a compliment to the maternal.
In my masculine poverty, especially the desperate longing for the feminine, I know my creaturely humility; in my virile magnanimity, I image the goodness and greatness of God.
Monday, July 4, 2011
The Masculine Exodus: Journey to the Father
The masculine life trajectory can be understood as a journey from the womb of our earthly mother towards and into the arms of our heavenly Father. This movement is a liberation from inclusion within the maternal/feminine by identification with the masculine or paternal. This is not an entire break from the feminine; rather, the mature, strong man eventually is able to relate to women from a liberated and generous virility in the mode of spousal and paternal love. On the road to this destination, there are four distinct, but interconnected, transitions…passages which are re-enacted and reinforced throughout a man’s entire lifetime: movement from Mom to Dad; from family to male friends; from Dad to other mentors and father-figures; and into the solitude of the desert for intimacy with our heavenly Father.
From Mom to Dad
The Oedipal resolution, recognized by Freud, is an identification with the father by which the infant son resolves his envy and dependency upon maternal enmeshment. By the age of two, the mother must symbolically “hand over” the boy to the father. She must release him as her possession or extension, entrusting him into the care of the man she herself loves and trusts. The infant imitates the trust and love the mother obviously has for his father and is able himself to confidently draw close to this large, strange, awesome presence. Eventually, he comes also to emulate the father’s reverence and tenderness towards the mother so that he grows into a wholesome, even holy masculine affection for Mom, and for all women. Frank O’Connor’s short story “My Oedipus Complex” is a masterful and moving memoir of a successful transition. He recalls his earliest years as euphoric union with his mother. Upon his father’s return from World War I, he is exiled out of mom’s bed to one of his own where he is resentful, jealous, lonely and disconsolate. With the passage of time, however, a dramatic event intervenes to comfort him: a new baby arrives and his erstwhile opponent, Dad, is himself exiled from the warmth of the maternal bed and becomes bedmate and best-friend to the grieving boy. The two comfort each other in their shared loss of feminine enclosure and warmth. This image, little guy and big, each mourning the loss of feminine enclosure, doing their best to console each other in a world become cold and hostile…this image sums up much of a man’s life. If each endures this disconsolate passage, he will return to the feminine not in need but in strength and generosity.
This transition is rarely complete and perfect and must be reworked by every man throughout his lifetime. Failure in this primal passage is probably a root cause for most forms of virile weakness and degeneracy: insecurity, homosexuality, rage and violence towards women, inordinate obsession with sex, debilitating dependency upon feminine affection and approval, inability to commit, and infidelity.
Fathers today spend twice as much time with their children as did dads in 1960. This bodes well for the oedipal passage. On the other hand, the large number of boys without fathers or father figures is THE defining catastrophic of our time. In addition, the smaller families of the contraceptive culture worsen things as emotionally frustrated mothers focus attention and affection upon only sons. In that sense the large families of the 1950s facilitated the passage as mom was so occupied with the other children that she could hardly obsess about one son.
This primal transfer of the baby boy from the mother to the father is the basis for the next three transitions which themselves reinforce and seal the initial exodus from enmeshment to wholesome interdependency and genuine generativity.
An Exception that Proves the Rule
One may wonder: what of all the young men growing up without fathers? Is their condition hopeless? Hardly! Providence has a way of supplying surrogate fathers in the most surprising and marvelous ways. An Oprah Winfrey show profiled Sidney Poitier and how he had impacted families, especially single women raising children alone, precisely as a surrogate father figure, albeit from a distance. The media presence alone, of a strong but tender paternal figure, powerfully impacted both women and children.
Closer to home I have a very concrete example. I am privileged to know quite intimately a most virile young man, outstanding husband, father and leader of men, whose father passed away when he was at the tender age for the crucial “handing over” from Mom to Dad. Through the years he was blessed with surrogate fathers but it was an enigma how he developed so nicely without the physical presence of a father at the end of infancy. This puzzle was solved in conversation with his mother. To this day (some 35 years later) she speaks of her husband as a living, loving and much loved presence. He is not “gone.” She happily reports that he has always been present in their family life and helped raise the children by his heavenly presence. She is so sincere in this that one feels his presence as she speaks so happily of him. Clearly, her trust in and love for her husband was so deep that his presence and influence has continued through the decades. The spousal communion of bride/groom, feminine/masculine, and maternal/paternal was so total that his spiritual/emotional influence continues despite his bodily departure. A woman of deep faith, her heart and her home has remained open to our Father and their father within the communion of saints. And so, the growing boy was not smothered by an anxious, grasping, possessive femininity, but liberated and empowered by a spousality/maternity open to the masculine, in a more markedly spiritual and emotional mode. We see here also that the paternal influence is always mediated by the mother who always has privilege of place with the child. It is the mother’s respect, trust, loyalty and affection for the father that ensures a successful passage to paternity.
From Family to “the Guys”
The next masculine migration is from the protection of the family to the challenges and rewards of friendship with other boys. This involves competition and conflict as well as bonding and camaraderie. The boy will be tested and must prove himself. The most obvious arena for this is sports but it can take other forms such as the fierce argumentation of scholarship, as in Orthodox Judaism. Here again, failure to make this transition can leave deep deficiencies. Psychologists speak of the “sports wound” associated with the homosexual attraction as many with this condition have suffered an inability to perform in this area and a subsequent failure to bond with other boys. This process again continues throughout a man’s life well into adulthood. Unlike a woman for whom femininity is an endowment, fluent and effortless, a man must prove himself by some form of test and conflict. Classically, this entails a rite of passage demanding courage and ability which earns the young man the approval of the elders, his peers and himself. Thus “ordained” or “certified” as a “made man,” the young man experiences the confidence needed to make a total giving of himself to a religious vocation or marriage as a husband and father.
Male bonding, more than just testing and conflict, leads into the intimacy and loyalty of fraternal camaraderie. Most of our needs for affection and intimacy must be met by chaste same-sex friendship: men with men and women with women. When these needs are met by such friendships, we are freed from sexual compulsions and inordinate love dependency. We are empowered to love the other sex in generosity and lightness.
Unfortunately, our society has deconstructed traditional rites of male passage and left our young men bereft of any clear itinerary of formation. Many remain suspended in a state of adolescent insecurity and self-absorption. Nevertheless, this male passage is so primal and irrepressible that it remains vibrant, in the face of the feminist and homosexual assault on gender, in arenas like sports, military, religious/clerical circles, and academics.
From Dad to Other Mentors and Elders
The adolescent needs to be fathered by additional mentors and role models as he differentiates himself from his own dad: coaches, teachers, bosses, and so forth. A classic expression of this is Jesus, separated without notice from his parents and “lost” in the temple. He makes it clear to his mother, in painful candor, that he was hardly lost, but was “about his Father’s business.” He has reached a stage when he must leave his carpenter-dad to come under the influence of the broader community of elders. Every young man, having identified successfully with his own primary father (or surrogate father) moves on to broaden, deepen and individuate himself under the tutoring, coaching and encouragement of “secondary” fathers. Here again our society largely abandons our young men who are largely stuck in a peer culture through high school and college and beyond as we have largely segregated our emergent adults away from older mentors in a suffocating, media-saturated peer culture of narcissism.
This need for mentoring is not just a phenomenon of youth but continues for a man’s entire lifetime. Well into retirement the grandfather stage and up to death itself a man needs to be guided, protected, and fathered. A pernicious assumption of our society is that an adult, especially a man, must be autonomous, self-reliant, and absolutely independent. The truer reality is that each of us is always, always, always filial at the core of our identity: son or daughter of a fleshly mother and father, of our heavenly Father and our ecclesial Mother and, in our weakened, infirm state, desperate for guidance, correction, accountability and protection. Liberalism inflates each individual Ego into a demi-God but there remain subcultures which preserve a fierce ethos of humility, obedience, and authority: the military, 12-step programs, and of course Catholicism.
Into the Desert for Intimacy with our Heavenly Father
Eventually, however, our young man must leave even the company of the elders to go into the solitude of the desert, the territory of the Adversary himself, in order to be further tested and purified and finally find intimacy with The ultimate and absolute Father, his final and true refuge, strength and support. Stripped of any human or cultural support, be that family or friends or mentors, he must come to trust in God alone and surrender himself completely into His hands. The elders can point the way into the desert but the young man must venture there in solitude. St. John the Baptist most clearly represents this stage: he wore camel skins and ate locusts and wild honey. This is raw, stark virility at its best: naked and humble before the Father, victorious over the Evil One. In the desert, bereft of comfort and support, one becomes truly a son of the heavenly Father. Absorbing the radiance and splendor of the Almighty Father, one slowly becomes an icon of paternity. Blessed Joseph Kowalski was a Polish priest, known for his (filial) devotion to Mary, who ministered his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz. A sadistic guard pointed to those who had just been tortured and taunted him: “You are losing souls, Father, look at them…you are losing souls…what are you going to do?” The priest responded by falling to his knees, praying the Our Father (to his Father) and singing the Salve Regina (to his mother…Does this remind us of the Carmelites of Compiegne singing the same hymn en route to the guillotine in 1794?). They then drowned him in a sewer tank. Father Kowalski had been into the desert. He knew his Father, and his Mother. He had nothing to fear. He had defeated the Adversary. He was a man!
Darth Vadar
Darth Vadar means “Dark Father” and it is the perverse Skywalker paternity that ties together the entire Star Wars saga. Anakin Skywalker becomes a dark father first of all because he himself was never fathered. To the age of 9 he is raised by his mother and there is the suggestion of a miraculous conception, without a biological father. He becomes, then, an inversion of Christ, the son of the Father, as he is a superhero, bereft of a father, un-protected, un-faithful, non-obedient, self-assertive, deeply fearful and angry. Indeed, the underlying ontology of the Lukas’ series is a fatherless universe: instead of Creation, willed into existence “from nothing” by an almighty Father, the universe is pantheistic, uncreated, and infused with an inherent, non-transcendent Force. Anakin is already genetically endowed with an astronomical number of mid-chlorians, a mysterious biological-spiritual micro-life force (think Teilhard de Chardin!) connected to the Force. So, the core of his identity is vital power in a fatherless universe. He remains then overly-enmeshed with his mother and fails to transition to any father. Unfathered and unprotected, he becomes desperately anxious, and eventually rage-filled, despite his super powers, in regard to the vulnerability of his mother and later his secret wife. Yoda and the Jedi Council sense this danger from the very beginning. But his Jedi mentors Qui-Gon and then Obi-Wan Kenobi defy the Council and insist on training Anakin as a Jedi. This represents a second weakness in the paternal connection: his mentors are themselves defiant and disobedient to their legitimate authorities or father-figures, the Council. The Council is like the Catholic hierarchy and Anakin similar to the disciple of a dissident Catholic: loyal to one who is himself disobedient. The flow of authority, loyalty, affective obedience and humble power is broken. Eventually and miraculously, we know, at the end of the saga, benign paternity resurrects itself and triumphs, but in an arbitrary, incoherent, dues-ex-machina manner. This inexplicable triumph of paternity in a fatherless universe is an entirely incoherent ending to an otherwise consistently pantheistic legend. At the end, it seems, an inchoate hunger and trust in the Father cannot be repressed.
The Virile Itinerary of Jesus
Jesus himself, having left his Father, demonstrates for us how to return to him and perfectly exemplifies the four passages. Already as a baby he is presented, “handed over,” in the temple by Mary and Joseph and received by Simeon and Anna. As mentioned, at the age of Bar Mitzvah, he further distances himself from his blood family, curtly reprimanding his mother: “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s work?” He is equally abrasive in the next interaction between mother and son: “Woman, do you not know that my hour has not yet come.” And later he diminishes the value of her physical maternity by responding to the acclamation “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that gave you suck!” with the correction that “Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.” The few interactions between the two show us Jesus pushing his mother away and preferring the will of his Father. He is brutal in his assertion that his life about the the plans of his Father rather than the concerns of his mother. Only from the cross, his virile journey now complete in the tortured crucible of stark obedience, does he turn to his mother affectionately and appreciatively: “Mother behold your son; son behold your mother.”
In Jesus we see, in perfection, the movement away from dependency upon the feminine and maternal into intimate communion with the Father. We see that heaven prepared for him on earth not only an immaculate mother but a holy father to model and mentor him. We see him moving away from the warmth of the hearth into the temple, the desert, and aggressive spiritual combat. We see him bonding with a group of men, especially his 12 apostles and his three chosen ones. We see him entirely comfortable in his own masculinity and free and generous in his relations with women: those caught in sin and the sorrowful ones who are faithful to him on Calvary and to whom he appeared that Sunday morning. We see him finally reverent, caring and generous before the radiant femininity of his own mother, whom he assumed into heaven and crowned Queen of all heaven and earth, of the saints and the angels.
From Mom to Dad
The Oedipal resolution, recognized by Freud, is an identification with the father by which the infant son resolves his envy and dependency upon maternal enmeshment. By the age of two, the mother must symbolically “hand over” the boy to the father. She must release him as her possession or extension, entrusting him into the care of the man she herself loves and trusts. The infant imitates the trust and love the mother obviously has for his father and is able himself to confidently draw close to this large, strange, awesome presence. Eventually, he comes also to emulate the father’s reverence and tenderness towards the mother so that he grows into a wholesome, even holy masculine affection for Mom, and for all women. Frank O’Connor’s short story “My Oedipus Complex” is a masterful and moving memoir of a successful transition. He recalls his earliest years as euphoric union with his mother. Upon his father’s return from World War I, he is exiled out of mom’s bed to one of his own where he is resentful, jealous, lonely and disconsolate. With the passage of time, however, a dramatic event intervenes to comfort him: a new baby arrives and his erstwhile opponent, Dad, is himself exiled from the warmth of the maternal bed and becomes bedmate and best-friend to the grieving boy. The two comfort each other in their shared loss of feminine enclosure and warmth. This image, little guy and big, each mourning the loss of feminine enclosure, doing their best to console each other in a world become cold and hostile…this image sums up much of a man’s life. If each endures this disconsolate passage, he will return to the feminine not in need but in strength and generosity.
This transition is rarely complete and perfect and must be reworked by every man throughout his lifetime. Failure in this primal passage is probably a root cause for most forms of virile weakness and degeneracy: insecurity, homosexuality, rage and violence towards women, inordinate obsession with sex, debilitating dependency upon feminine affection and approval, inability to commit, and infidelity.
Fathers today spend twice as much time with their children as did dads in 1960. This bodes well for the oedipal passage. On the other hand, the large number of boys without fathers or father figures is THE defining catastrophic of our time. In addition, the smaller families of the contraceptive culture worsen things as emotionally frustrated mothers focus attention and affection upon only sons. In that sense the large families of the 1950s facilitated the passage as mom was so occupied with the other children that she could hardly obsess about one son.
This primal transfer of the baby boy from the mother to the father is the basis for the next three transitions which themselves reinforce and seal the initial exodus from enmeshment to wholesome interdependency and genuine generativity.
An Exception that Proves the Rule
One may wonder: what of all the young men growing up without fathers? Is their condition hopeless? Hardly! Providence has a way of supplying surrogate fathers in the most surprising and marvelous ways. An Oprah Winfrey show profiled Sidney Poitier and how he had impacted families, especially single women raising children alone, precisely as a surrogate father figure, albeit from a distance. The media presence alone, of a strong but tender paternal figure, powerfully impacted both women and children.
Closer to home I have a very concrete example. I am privileged to know quite intimately a most virile young man, outstanding husband, father and leader of men, whose father passed away when he was at the tender age for the crucial “handing over” from Mom to Dad. Through the years he was blessed with surrogate fathers but it was an enigma how he developed so nicely without the physical presence of a father at the end of infancy. This puzzle was solved in conversation with his mother. To this day (some 35 years later) she speaks of her husband as a living, loving and much loved presence. He is not “gone.” She happily reports that he has always been present in their family life and helped raise the children by his heavenly presence. She is so sincere in this that one feels his presence as she speaks so happily of him. Clearly, her trust in and love for her husband was so deep that his presence and influence has continued through the decades. The spousal communion of bride/groom, feminine/masculine, and maternal/paternal was so total that his spiritual/emotional influence continues despite his bodily departure. A woman of deep faith, her heart and her home has remained open to our Father and their father within the communion of saints. And so, the growing boy was not smothered by an anxious, grasping, possessive femininity, but liberated and empowered by a spousality/maternity open to the masculine, in a more markedly spiritual and emotional mode. We see here also that the paternal influence is always mediated by the mother who always has privilege of place with the child. It is the mother’s respect, trust, loyalty and affection for the father that ensures a successful passage to paternity.
From Family to “the Guys”
The next masculine migration is from the protection of the family to the challenges and rewards of friendship with other boys. This involves competition and conflict as well as bonding and camaraderie. The boy will be tested and must prove himself. The most obvious arena for this is sports but it can take other forms such as the fierce argumentation of scholarship, as in Orthodox Judaism. Here again, failure to make this transition can leave deep deficiencies. Psychologists speak of the “sports wound” associated with the homosexual attraction as many with this condition have suffered an inability to perform in this area and a subsequent failure to bond with other boys. This process again continues throughout a man’s life well into adulthood. Unlike a woman for whom femininity is an endowment, fluent and effortless, a man must prove himself by some form of test and conflict. Classically, this entails a rite of passage demanding courage and ability which earns the young man the approval of the elders, his peers and himself. Thus “ordained” or “certified” as a “made man,” the young man experiences the confidence needed to make a total giving of himself to a religious vocation or marriage as a husband and father.
Male bonding, more than just testing and conflict, leads into the intimacy and loyalty of fraternal camaraderie. Most of our needs for affection and intimacy must be met by chaste same-sex friendship: men with men and women with women. When these needs are met by such friendships, we are freed from sexual compulsions and inordinate love dependency. We are empowered to love the other sex in generosity and lightness.
Unfortunately, our society has deconstructed traditional rites of male passage and left our young men bereft of any clear itinerary of formation. Many remain suspended in a state of adolescent insecurity and self-absorption. Nevertheless, this male passage is so primal and irrepressible that it remains vibrant, in the face of the feminist and homosexual assault on gender, in arenas like sports, military, religious/clerical circles, and academics.
From Dad to Other Mentors and Elders
The adolescent needs to be fathered by additional mentors and role models as he differentiates himself from his own dad: coaches, teachers, bosses, and so forth. A classic expression of this is Jesus, separated without notice from his parents and “lost” in the temple. He makes it clear to his mother, in painful candor, that he was hardly lost, but was “about his Father’s business.” He has reached a stage when he must leave his carpenter-dad to come under the influence of the broader community of elders. Every young man, having identified successfully with his own primary father (or surrogate father) moves on to broaden, deepen and individuate himself under the tutoring, coaching and encouragement of “secondary” fathers. Here again our society largely abandons our young men who are largely stuck in a peer culture through high school and college and beyond as we have largely segregated our emergent adults away from older mentors in a suffocating, media-saturated peer culture of narcissism.
This need for mentoring is not just a phenomenon of youth but continues for a man’s entire lifetime. Well into retirement the grandfather stage and up to death itself a man needs to be guided, protected, and fathered. A pernicious assumption of our society is that an adult, especially a man, must be autonomous, self-reliant, and absolutely independent. The truer reality is that each of us is always, always, always filial at the core of our identity: son or daughter of a fleshly mother and father, of our heavenly Father and our ecclesial Mother and, in our weakened, infirm state, desperate for guidance, correction, accountability and protection. Liberalism inflates each individual Ego into a demi-God but there remain subcultures which preserve a fierce ethos of humility, obedience, and authority: the military, 12-step programs, and of course Catholicism.
Into the Desert for Intimacy with our Heavenly Father
Eventually, however, our young man must leave even the company of the elders to go into the solitude of the desert, the territory of the Adversary himself, in order to be further tested and purified and finally find intimacy with The ultimate and absolute Father, his final and true refuge, strength and support. Stripped of any human or cultural support, be that family or friends or mentors, he must come to trust in God alone and surrender himself completely into His hands. The elders can point the way into the desert but the young man must venture there in solitude. St. John the Baptist most clearly represents this stage: he wore camel skins and ate locusts and wild honey. This is raw, stark virility at its best: naked and humble before the Father, victorious over the Evil One. In the desert, bereft of comfort and support, one becomes truly a son of the heavenly Father. Absorbing the radiance and splendor of the Almighty Father, one slowly becomes an icon of paternity. Blessed Joseph Kowalski was a Polish priest, known for his (filial) devotion to Mary, who ministered his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz. A sadistic guard pointed to those who had just been tortured and taunted him: “You are losing souls, Father, look at them…you are losing souls…what are you going to do?” The priest responded by falling to his knees, praying the Our Father (to his Father) and singing the Salve Regina (to his mother…Does this remind us of the Carmelites of Compiegne singing the same hymn en route to the guillotine in 1794?). They then drowned him in a sewer tank. Father Kowalski had been into the desert. He knew his Father, and his Mother. He had nothing to fear. He had defeated the Adversary. He was a man!
Darth Vadar
Darth Vadar means “Dark Father” and it is the perverse Skywalker paternity that ties together the entire Star Wars saga. Anakin Skywalker becomes a dark father first of all because he himself was never fathered. To the age of 9 he is raised by his mother and there is the suggestion of a miraculous conception, without a biological father. He becomes, then, an inversion of Christ, the son of the Father, as he is a superhero, bereft of a father, un-protected, un-faithful, non-obedient, self-assertive, deeply fearful and angry. Indeed, the underlying ontology of the Lukas’ series is a fatherless universe: instead of Creation, willed into existence “from nothing” by an almighty Father, the universe is pantheistic, uncreated, and infused with an inherent, non-transcendent Force. Anakin is already genetically endowed with an astronomical number of mid-chlorians, a mysterious biological-spiritual micro-life force (think Teilhard de Chardin!) connected to the Force. So, the core of his identity is vital power in a fatherless universe. He remains then overly-enmeshed with his mother and fails to transition to any father. Unfathered and unprotected, he becomes desperately anxious, and eventually rage-filled, despite his super powers, in regard to the vulnerability of his mother and later his secret wife. Yoda and the Jedi Council sense this danger from the very beginning. But his Jedi mentors Qui-Gon and then Obi-Wan Kenobi defy the Council and insist on training Anakin as a Jedi. This represents a second weakness in the paternal connection: his mentors are themselves defiant and disobedient to their legitimate authorities or father-figures, the Council. The Council is like the Catholic hierarchy and Anakin similar to the disciple of a dissident Catholic: loyal to one who is himself disobedient. The flow of authority, loyalty, affective obedience and humble power is broken. Eventually and miraculously, we know, at the end of the saga, benign paternity resurrects itself and triumphs, but in an arbitrary, incoherent, dues-ex-machina manner. This inexplicable triumph of paternity in a fatherless universe is an entirely incoherent ending to an otherwise consistently pantheistic legend. At the end, it seems, an inchoate hunger and trust in the Father cannot be repressed.
The Virile Itinerary of Jesus
Jesus himself, having left his Father, demonstrates for us how to return to him and perfectly exemplifies the four passages. Already as a baby he is presented, “handed over,” in the temple by Mary and Joseph and received by Simeon and Anna. As mentioned, at the age of Bar Mitzvah, he further distances himself from his blood family, curtly reprimanding his mother: “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s work?” He is equally abrasive in the next interaction between mother and son: “Woman, do you not know that my hour has not yet come.” And later he diminishes the value of her physical maternity by responding to the acclamation “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that gave you suck!” with the correction that “Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.” The few interactions between the two show us Jesus pushing his mother away and preferring the will of his Father. He is brutal in his assertion that his life about the the plans of his Father rather than the concerns of his mother. Only from the cross, his virile journey now complete in the tortured crucible of stark obedience, does he turn to his mother affectionately and appreciatively: “Mother behold your son; son behold your mother.”
In Jesus we see, in perfection, the movement away from dependency upon the feminine and maternal into intimate communion with the Father. We see that heaven prepared for him on earth not only an immaculate mother but a holy father to model and mentor him. We see him moving away from the warmth of the hearth into the temple, the desert, and aggressive spiritual combat. We see him bonding with a group of men, especially his 12 apostles and his three chosen ones. We see him entirely comfortable in his own masculinity and free and generous in his relations with women: those caught in sin and the sorrowful ones who are faithful to him on Calvary and to whom he appeared that Sunday morning. We see him finally reverent, caring and generous before the radiant femininity of his own mother, whom he assumed into heaven and crowned Queen of all heaven and earth, of the saints and the angels.
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