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.
Monday, October 3, 2011
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.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Society Against Itself, by Howard Schwartz
In Society against Itself: Political Correctness and Organizational Self-Destruction, Howard Schwartz offers a lucid and profound root analysis of what Christopher Lasch famously called “the culture of narcissism” as rooted in rage against the paternal. Drawing upon Freud and Lacan, Schwartz views the increasingly infantile, Dionysian nature of our society as rooted in an inversion of the normative Oedipal path. According to this model, the healthy person (especially the male) eventually distances himself from the nurturing, encompassing mother by identifying with the “paternal” which stands for objective, rational society which is indifferent to the needs of the self. By identifying with the father and all associated values (rationality, obedience, authority, sacrifice, effort, efficiency), the mature adult is able to work and deal with reality and eventually move towards an always-partial restoration of the primal maternal unity in a new marriage and family. The anti-Oedipal narrative, by contrast, sees the paternal as hostile and competitive in that it deprives the victimized of the pleasurable love of the affirming, indulgent mother. By this radical inversion, the paternal is no longer life-giving and protective, but destructive and oppressive. The inflated, self-centered Ego therefore despises any assertion of law, tradition, standards, or authority as evil impositions of the father (patriarch) as greedy competitor for the mother’s love.
An organizational theorist, Schwartz offers vivid, concrete case studies of organizations self-destructing by the embrace of politically correct values like diversity. Particularly striking is the case of journalist Jayson Blair of the NY Times. Eventually fired for gross inaccuracies, plagiarism and fabrications, his entire career with the Times was a blatant contradiction of the “paternal” values that publication has traditionally embodied: objectivity, accuracy, and painstaking research. As an African-American, he was indulged in his irresponsibility for the sake of diversity. Particularly fascinating is the contrast between the prior publisher (the epitome of formality, integrity and objectivity) and his son and successor, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. The later came of age in the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and has committed the Times to the maternal values of The Age: abortion and gay rights, diversity, and an egalitarian disgust for authority and tradition. It becomes obvious that this anti-Oedipal logic, brought to its logical conclusion, can only destroy the paper as a journal of repute. This logic is inherently destructive of any organization.
His argument is entirely convincing, illuminating and provocative. It is enhanced by graphic examples and a lucid writing style. What is less than satisfying, however, is his understanding of the paternal. For him it is the objective and non-indulgent order, industriousness and efficiency, exchange values and market dynamics, organization and bureaucracy. It represents the public order of our contemporary world in that it is impersonal and mechanical. Schwartz seems to have internalized the contemporary split between the private as comforting and the public as impersonal. And so the reader asks: Is this really what it means to be a father?
Hardly! Surely the paternal can equal the maternal in the tenderness and intensity of its love. What sets it off from the intimacy of the maternal is a quality of reverence and awe that is filial, pious, and religious by nature. If the mother is always psychically attached to the self, the father is ever different, strange, fearsome, powerful and admirable. The tenderness and intensity of his love is surprising, therefore, since it is not already “a given” and “taken for granted” and antecedent to every other emotion and thought. Rather, it is a dramatic intervention, entirely gratuitous and startling. What is marvelous about the father’s love is not just that he represents a distant, strange and hostile world; nor even that he has mastered that world and made it safe; but that he stoops to the fragile, precious child and brings all his prowess and status into the tenderness of his embrace. If maternal love always and already precedes and even evokes the personality of the little one, paternal love enters at a later stage, dramatically and astonishingly, to encounter a Thou that has already emerged even as it continues to emerge.
Faced with the choice between the maternal as affirming, nurturing and indulgent and the paternal as objective, demanding and impersonal it is small wonder that our society opts for the former. Schwarz’s presentation is itself a symptom of the problem he unveils: an impoverished understanding of masculinity and paternity. Respect and love for the paternal (Roman pietas) can only develop in a religious context in which there is awe before a Transcendent God. Pietas was for the Romans a far more powerful reality than our anemic, sentimentalized understanding of piety. It represented filial loyalty, gratitude and devotion to family, authority, tradition, and ancestors. Our word “religion” itself derives from the Latin religio which refers to these ties of affection and loyalty. Today’s widespread preference for “spirituality” over “religion” shows the infantile, narcissistic orientation of the Self in its disgust for bonds of obedience, loyalty and sacrifice. That is to say: it demands the indulgence of a corrupted mother and despises the demands of the father.
Small wonder than that our Catholic father, the Pope, elicits such hatred in the Western world: he stands alone as the epitome of paternity. It would be impossible to imagine better father figures than our John Paul and Benedict: gentle, reverent, protective, lucid, assertive, reserved, controlled, steady, d humble and yet magnanimous. And how are they viewed by our dominant anti-Oedipal culture? They are seen as: misogynist, judgmental, moralistic, controlling and yet indulgent of pedophiles.
Schwartz’s understanding of religion itself exemplifies the triumph of the feminine over the masculine. He understands religion as the pathway through the paternal back to the embrace of the maternal. The final goal is restoration of primal, blissful union with the mother so that the paternal is a transitional discipline, a means to a greater end. This goal finally eludes satisfaction and can only be partially and tentatively realized in marriage and family so there is a final despair that lays over his viewpoint.
Schwartz would find an entirely refreshing and exuberantly hopeful alternative vision in Benedict’s first book on Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps the pivotal insight of that work is that Jesus is first and always Son of the Father. From this it follows that we are, all of us, created to be, eternally, sons and daughters of the Father, in the Son. Life on earth, in this view, is always a journey from the originating womb of the mother into the arms of our heavenly Father, who is infinite, absolute Joy and Love and Life. This journey is not into the impersonal, but towards the Absolutely Personal.
Even prior to the creation of space and time, God is always Father…and Son…in the Spirit. Paternity, along with filiality, is the very essence of God: Absolute Perfection, Being, Goodness, Truth and Beauty. All earthly fatherhood, then, is intended to image or reflect the absolute Paternity of God. Motherhood, by sharpest contrast, has its own integrity and definition as a creaturely reality and does not represent anyone or anything. In the created order, than, femininity and maternity are the very highest values. Mary reigns as Queen of heaven and earth, of the angels and the saints. Joseph, as stepfather, is a representative; as are Peter and the twelve. Masculinity is always representative of something greater than itself; while femininity has its own fullness and integrity. Masculinity to be true to itself, then, must be humble, as well as generous, strong, protective and chaste. No wonder than that there is such disgust for masculinity and patriarchy: since Adam himself, we men have been proud, selfish, weak, and impure.
Schwarz’s chapter on hysteria has relevance here on the nature of femininity. Pushing political incorrectness to the limits, he retrieves the idea of hysteria as a strategy of the feminine to dominate, rather than be dominated by the masculine in its effort to define and signify. If desire is normatively the drive of the male to reconnect with the maternal, than the female is free of desire because she identifies with her mother and so experiences a certain fullness or plenum. Bereft of desire, she is undefined and therefore looks to the masculine logos for definition and meaning. So different is the feminine from the masculine, however, that the male inevitably fails to comprehend his woman within the categories of logos or reason. The feminine response to this failure is hysteria.
So we have here a circle of futility: the male longs for reunion with the mother, something he can never achieve; the female needs to be understood, interpreted, or signified by the male, something of which he is incapable. Quite a dismal picture!
Our Blessed John Paul, of happy memory, would have much to offer our saddened organizational theorist on the nature of femininity. I suspect he would agree that woman exudes fullness, integrity, abundance and an overflowing generosity expressive of her very femininity as maternity. He would also agree that the male tends to undervalue and misunderstand the feminine in its sublimity, tenderness, and loveliness. Gazing at our Blessed Mother herself, however, the Pontiff sees joy and glory, overflowing life and mercy. Surely her spouse, Joseph, fell short of comprehending Mary in her glory; but he contemplated her with chaste and reverent awe even as he served her and her Son, as he remained eve r docile and obedient to the promptings of the heavenly messengers.
May we all contemplate Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the many sublime, mysterious dimensions of paternity and maternity, filial piety, and spousal virginity…and thereby restore and strengthen the (religio) bonds of loyalty and affection, authority and obedience, that unite us with each other in God!
An organizational theorist, Schwartz offers vivid, concrete case studies of organizations self-destructing by the embrace of politically correct values like diversity. Particularly striking is the case of journalist Jayson Blair of the NY Times. Eventually fired for gross inaccuracies, plagiarism and fabrications, his entire career with the Times was a blatant contradiction of the “paternal” values that publication has traditionally embodied: objectivity, accuracy, and painstaking research. As an African-American, he was indulged in his irresponsibility for the sake of diversity. Particularly fascinating is the contrast between the prior publisher (the epitome of formality, integrity and objectivity) and his son and successor, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. The later came of age in the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and has committed the Times to the maternal values of The Age: abortion and gay rights, diversity, and an egalitarian disgust for authority and tradition. It becomes obvious that this anti-Oedipal logic, brought to its logical conclusion, can only destroy the paper as a journal of repute. This logic is inherently destructive of any organization.
His argument is entirely convincing, illuminating and provocative. It is enhanced by graphic examples and a lucid writing style. What is less than satisfying, however, is his understanding of the paternal. For him it is the objective and non-indulgent order, industriousness and efficiency, exchange values and market dynamics, organization and bureaucracy. It represents the public order of our contemporary world in that it is impersonal and mechanical. Schwartz seems to have internalized the contemporary split between the private as comforting and the public as impersonal. And so the reader asks: Is this really what it means to be a father?
Hardly! Surely the paternal can equal the maternal in the tenderness and intensity of its love. What sets it off from the intimacy of the maternal is a quality of reverence and awe that is filial, pious, and religious by nature. If the mother is always psychically attached to the self, the father is ever different, strange, fearsome, powerful and admirable. The tenderness and intensity of his love is surprising, therefore, since it is not already “a given” and “taken for granted” and antecedent to every other emotion and thought. Rather, it is a dramatic intervention, entirely gratuitous and startling. What is marvelous about the father’s love is not just that he represents a distant, strange and hostile world; nor even that he has mastered that world and made it safe; but that he stoops to the fragile, precious child and brings all his prowess and status into the tenderness of his embrace. If maternal love always and already precedes and even evokes the personality of the little one, paternal love enters at a later stage, dramatically and astonishingly, to encounter a Thou that has already emerged even as it continues to emerge.
Faced with the choice between the maternal as affirming, nurturing and indulgent and the paternal as objective, demanding and impersonal it is small wonder that our society opts for the former. Schwarz’s presentation is itself a symptom of the problem he unveils: an impoverished understanding of masculinity and paternity. Respect and love for the paternal (Roman pietas) can only develop in a religious context in which there is awe before a Transcendent God. Pietas was for the Romans a far more powerful reality than our anemic, sentimentalized understanding of piety. It represented filial loyalty, gratitude and devotion to family, authority, tradition, and ancestors. Our word “religion” itself derives from the Latin religio which refers to these ties of affection and loyalty. Today’s widespread preference for “spirituality” over “religion” shows the infantile, narcissistic orientation of the Self in its disgust for bonds of obedience, loyalty and sacrifice. That is to say: it demands the indulgence of a corrupted mother and despises the demands of the father.
Small wonder than that our Catholic father, the Pope, elicits such hatred in the Western world: he stands alone as the epitome of paternity. It would be impossible to imagine better father figures than our John Paul and Benedict: gentle, reverent, protective, lucid, assertive, reserved, controlled, steady, d humble and yet magnanimous. And how are they viewed by our dominant anti-Oedipal culture? They are seen as: misogynist, judgmental, moralistic, controlling and yet indulgent of pedophiles.
Schwartz’s understanding of religion itself exemplifies the triumph of the feminine over the masculine. He understands religion as the pathway through the paternal back to the embrace of the maternal. The final goal is restoration of primal, blissful union with the mother so that the paternal is a transitional discipline, a means to a greater end. This goal finally eludes satisfaction and can only be partially and tentatively realized in marriage and family so there is a final despair that lays over his viewpoint.
Schwartz would find an entirely refreshing and exuberantly hopeful alternative vision in Benedict’s first book on Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps the pivotal insight of that work is that Jesus is first and always Son of the Father. From this it follows that we are, all of us, created to be, eternally, sons and daughters of the Father, in the Son. Life on earth, in this view, is always a journey from the originating womb of the mother into the arms of our heavenly Father, who is infinite, absolute Joy and Love and Life. This journey is not into the impersonal, but towards the Absolutely Personal.
Even prior to the creation of space and time, God is always Father…and Son…in the Spirit. Paternity, along with filiality, is the very essence of God: Absolute Perfection, Being, Goodness, Truth and Beauty. All earthly fatherhood, then, is intended to image or reflect the absolute Paternity of God. Motherhood, by sharpest contrast, has its own integrity and definition as a creaturely reality and does not represent anyone or anything. In the created order, than, femininity and maternity are the very highest values. Mary reigns as Queen of heaven and earth, of the angels and the saints. Joseph, as stepfather, is a representative; as are Peter and the twelve. Masculinity is always representative of something greater than itself; while femininity has its own fullness and integrity. Masculinity to be true to itself, then, must be humble, as well as generous, strong, protective and chaste. No wonder than that there is such disgust for masculinity and patriarchy: since Adam himself, we men have been proud, selfish, weak, and impure.
Schwarz’s chapter on hysteria has relevance here on the nature of femininity. Pushing political incorrectness to the limits, he retrieves the idea of hysteria as a strategy of the feminine to dominate, rather than be dominated by the masculine in its effort to define and signify. If desire is normatively the drive of the male to reconnect with the maternal, than the female is free of desire because she identifies with her mother and so experiences a certain fullness or plenum. Bereft of desire, she is undefined and therefore looks to the masculine logos for definition and meaning. So different is the feminine from the masculine, however, that the male inevitably fails to comprehend his woman within the categories of logos or reason. The feminine response to this failure is hysteria.
So we have here a circle of futility: the male longs for reunion with the mother, something he can never achieve; the female needs to be understood, interpreted, or signified by the male, something of which he is incapable. Quite a dismal picture!
Our Blessed John Paul, of happy memory, would have much to offer our saddened organizational theorist on the nature of femininity. I suspect he would agree that woman exudes fullness, integrity, abundance and an overflowing generosity expressive of her very femininity as maternity. He would also agree that the male tends to undervalue and misunderstand the feminine in its sublimity, tenderness, and loveliness. Gazing at our Blessed Mother herself, however, the Pontiff sees joy and glory, overflowing life and mercy. Surely her spouse, Joseph, fell short of comprehending Mary in her glory; but he contemplated her with chaste and reverent awe even as he served her and her Son, as he remained eve r docile and obedient to the promptings of the heavenly messengers.
May we all contemplate Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the many sublime, mysterious dimensions of paternity and maternity, filial piety, and spousal virginity…and thereby restore and strengthen the (religio) bonds of loyalty and affection, authority and obedience, that unite us with each other in God!
Friday, February 25, 2011
Prelates Preaching on Prudential, Pragmatic Policy
This week the American bishops criticized proposed federal budget cuts as unfairly targeting the poor. Good point! One wonders, however, where they would cut: Social Security, Medicare, or defense. Over the years the bishops, the Vatican and even our popes have spoken clearly on any number of prudential, pragmatic policy issues: the Iraq invasion, the death penalty, immigration policy, the value of the United Nations, abolition of nuclear arms and the list goes on.
The problem is that these policy issues are prudential, pragmatic, and sometimes technical judgments which do not fall within their apostolic authority to preach faith and morals. They do certainly involve moral principles but such principles as applied and intermingled with empirical, practical judgments, estimates, and anticipations which are always tentative, multivalent, uncertain, and positional.
Such teachings, for the loyal Catholic, are advisory but not binding. A good Catholic can in conscience dissent from the Pope’s view on the Iraq invasion or the bishops’ policy on immigration.
The role of the clergy is to proclaim the Gospel and teach morality. The application of these truths to complex, actual policy situations is very involved. Competency in these areas is not conferred by ordination, seminary training or the clerical culture but involves multiple areas (politics, diplomacy, economics, etc.) which are properly the “worldly” concern of the (non-ordained, non-consecrated) laity.
There are a number of problems when the hierarchy and clergy instruct us on social policy:
1. They usually do not clarify that the teaching is prudential and tentative and not morally binding. So, for example, people are aware that John Paul II and the bishops oppose the death penalty but they do not realize that this involves an empirical calculus and is entirely different from Church teaching on essential evils like infanticide or military targeting of civilians. Thank God for Cardinal Avery Dulles who clarified for us the nature of this teaching!
2. Such teaching involves an unrecognized clericalism: a conviction that society needs clerical guidance on policy issues because the laity is not competent without rather specific direction.
3. By teaching on such a range of issues, our prelates dilute and diminish their influence on the really important issues as well as on the moral and spiritual truths of the Deposit of Faith which they truly do protect and articulate infallibly.
4. Such specific, concrete policy positions inevitably align the hierarchy with certain partisan, ideological positions. The American bishops usually line up with the Democrats on issues in which the later do not directly contradict Church teaching. Even the Vatican sometimes seems to be echoing the sentiments of sophisticated European elites. The transcendence of the Church is compromised, then, by overly specific identification with concrete policies and causes.
5. This temptation to identify with particular ideological visions is rooted in a diminished sense of the power of the sacraments and apostolic teaching. The passionately ideological priest, prelate, or bishops’ conference is probably suffering from a loss of faith in the cult of worship, sacramental efficacy, the kerygma, and catechesis.
Does this mean that priest, bishop and Pope need to be completely silent on policy issues? I think such an absolute “wall of separation” is not necessary. Some policy issues involve clear and direct moral evil (e.g. racial discrimination) and many others have important moral consequences even if they are more complex and ambiguous (e.g. budget cuts.) Moreover, as citizens, a clergyman has the same right as anyone else to speak his mind on these matters. They must be careful, however, lest they invest such political opinion with ecclesial authority. In doing so, they would be more helpful to us if they:
- Clarify the advisory, prudential, non-binding nature of such teaching.
- Avoid over-extension into so many policy areas, trusting in the competence of the laity in “worldly” matters.
- Focus with fierce intensity upon the really crucial, really clear issues: protection of innocent, powerless human life; concern for children, women and the poor; and the dignity of sexuality.
- Recognize the indirect but immense influence upon social situations of inspired worship and teaching.
As in so many things, we are blessed to have among us an extraordinary exemplar for such teaching: Pope Benedict XVI.
The problem is that these policy issues are prudential, pragmatic, and sometimes technical judgments which do not fall within their apostolic authority to preach faith and morals. They do certainly involve moral principles but such principles as applied and intermingled with empirical, practical judgments, estimates, and anticipations which are always tentative, multivalent, uncertain, and positional.
Such teachings, for the loyal Catholic, are advisory but not binding. A good Catholic can in conscience dissent from the Pope’s view on the Iraq invasion or the bishops’ policy on immigration.
The role of the clergy is to proclaim the Gospel and teach morality. The application of these truths to complex, actual policy situations is very involved. Competency in these areas is not conferred by ordination, seminary training or the clerical culture but involves multiple areas (politics, diplomacy, economics, etc.) which are properly the “worldly” concern of the (non-ordained, non-consecrated) laity.
There are a number of problems when the hierarchy and clergy instruct us on social policy:
1. They usually do not clarify that the teaching is prudential and tentative and not morally binding. So, for example, people are aware that John Paul II and the bishops oppose the death penalty but they do not realize that this involves an empirical calculus and is entirely different from Church teaching on essential evils like infanticide or military targeting of civilians. Thank God for Cardinal Avery Dulles who clarified for us the nature of this teaching!
2. Such teaching involves an unrecognized clericalism: a conviction that society needs clerical guidance on policy issues because the laity is not competent without rather specific direction.
3. By teaching on such a range of issues, our prelates dilute and diminish their influence on the really important issues as well as on the moral and spiritual truths of the Deposit of Faith which they truly do protect and articulate infallibly.
4. Such specific, concrete policy positions inevitably align the hierarchy with certain partisan, ideological positions. The American bishops usually line up with the Democrats on issues in which the later do not directly contradict Church teaching. Even the Vatican sometimes seems to be echoing the sentiments of sophisticated European elites. The transcendence of the Church is compromised, then, by overly specific identification with concrete policies and causes.
5. This temptation to identify with particular ideological visions is rooted in a diminished sense of the power of the sacraments and apostolic teaching. The passionately ideological priest, prelate, or bishops’ conference is probably suffering from a loss of faith in the cult of worship, sacramental efficacy, the kerygma, and catechesis.
Does this mean that priest, bishop and Pope need to be completely silent on policy issues? I think such an absolute “wall of separation” is not necessary. Some policy issues involve clear and direct moral evil (e.g. racial discrimination) and many others have important moral consequences even if they are more complex and ambiguous (e.g. budget cuts.) Moreover, as citizens, a clergyman has the same right as anyone else to speak his mind on these matters. They must be careful, however, lest they invest such political opinion with ecclesial authority. In doing so, they would be more helpful to us if they:
- Clarify the advisory, prudential, non-binding nature of such teaching.
- Avoid over-extension into so many policy areas, trusting in the competence of the laity in “worldly” matters.
- Focus with fierce intensity upon the really crucial, really clear issues: protection of innocent, powerless human life; concern for children, women and the poor; and the dignity of sexuality.
- Recognize the indirect but immense influence upon social situations of inspired worship and teaching.
As in so many things, we are blessed to have among us an extraordinary exemplar for such teaching: Pope Benedict XVI.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Prosperity Gospel
The prosperity gospel is not preached by the Catholic Church. It is very American, very Protestant (Calvinist), and very capitalist. It is often proclaimed by a wealthy televangelist who presents himself as an example for a life of material abundance based upon an active faith in God. The basic premise is: an active faith in God is a path to material abundance as God will bless the believing heart with riches. The preacher testifies about his own journey from impoverishment to affluence through an active faith in God's providence. The emphasis upon trust, activism, and positive expectations all combine to release positive energies. The problem is a concern with material abundance that is hardly evangelical.
Jesus himself was poor and not affluent and therefore following him clearly draws us to poverty.
Jesus proclaimed: "Blessed are the poor." He did not say "Blessed are the affluent and the successful."
Jesus told the rich young man: "Sell all you have and give to the poor and come follow me."
Jesus said it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle.
He called love of money "a root of evil."
Jesus associated with and valued the poor. He associated with the rich and called them to repent and to share their wealth with the poor.
Catholic imitation of Christ always involves the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience...strikingly so in the consecrated life (e.g. the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal) but also in married, lay life in the preference to "live simply so that others may simply live." (Mother Theresa)
The saints all find in the poor a privileged presence of Christ.
The Prosperity Gospel is a flight away from poverty and the poor Christ into material surplus, hyper-security and status. It reflects a longing for economic safety and abundance. It arose in a non-Catholic, Calvinst enviroment that had discarded the efficacious sacraments as infallible signs of God's love, had abolished the evangelical/consecrated life of the vows, demoted the role of Mary as our mother and queen, and replaced ecclesial authority with "sola scriptura" ("only scripture.") A Christianity without her mother and queen, without the objective assurances of salvation (e.g. confession), without authority and without the witness of the consecrated life is impoverished and searches for signs of salvation, primarily in subjective consciousness such as the experience of "being saved." But subjectivity is always volatile and the Calvinist doctrine of double-predestination (some are saved, others are damned) added urgency to the need for external assurances. And so the emergent bourgeois class found assurance in their material prosperity which they interpreted as God's validation of their interior righteousness. This is a novel and perverse gospel.
The affluent assure themselves of their righteousness by a logic that sees material abundance as a blessing given to reward faith and righteousness. The inverse implication of this principle is a curse upon the poor: your poverty is the result of your disbelief. And so, "Blessed are the poor" is transformed into "Cursed are you poor because of your unbelief and you will remain cursed by poverty unless you believe."
We are left to wonder: What would these affluent preachers have to say to the impoverished people of Haiti who are utterly bereft of any path to abundance? Or to people in boarding homes who are disabled and without the abilities or resources to rise above their $705 monthly SSI check? Or to the saints who have given away all they own to be with and serve the poor? Or to the poor Jesus himself and his mendicant (beggar) disciples?
And so the Catholic Christian loves the Poverty Gospel:
- Receiving from God every voluntary and involuntary deprivation as a grace.
- Cultivating contentment and gratitude rather than restless ambition.
- Fierce aggressiveness on behalf of the Kingdom of the Father, rather than one's own portfolio.
- Eagerness to dispossess and give generously to the needy.
- Tender and intense love for the most deprived.
- Affectionate, intense devotion to Christ in the poverty of the Eucharist.
Jesus himself was poor and not affluent and therefore following him clearly draws us to poverty.
Jesus proclaimed: "Blessed are the poor." He did not say "Blessed are the affluent and the successful."
Jesus told the rich young man: "Sell all you have and give to the poor and come follow me."
Jesus said it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle.
He called love of money "a root of evil."
Jesus associated with and valued the poor. He associated with the rich and called them to repent and to share their wealth with the poor.
Catholic imitation of Christ always involves the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience...strikingly so in the consecrated life (e.g. the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal) but also in married, lay life in the preference to "live simply so that others may simply live." (Mother Theresa)
The saints all find in the poor a privileged presence of Christ.
The Prosperity Gospel is a flight away from poverty and the poor Christ into material surplus, hyper-security and status. It reflects a longing for economic safety and abundance. It arose in a non-Catholic, Calvinst enviroment that had discarded the efficacious sacraments as infallible signs of God's love, had abolished the evangelical/consecrated life of the vows, demoted the role of Mary as our mother and queen, and replaced ecclesial authority with "sola scriptura" ("only scripture.") A Christianity without her mother and queen, without the objective assurances of salvation (e.g. confession), without authority and without the witness of the consecrated life is impoverished and searches for signs of salvation, primarily in subjective consciousness such as the experience of "being saved." But subjectivity is always volatile and the Calvinist doctrine of double-predestination (some are saved, others are damned) added urgency to the need for external assurances. And so the emergent bourgeois class found assurance in their material prosperity which they interpreted as God's validation of their interior righteousness. This is a novel and perverse gospel.
The affluent assure themselves of their righteousness by a logic that sees material abundance as a blessing given to reward faith and righteousness. The inverse implication of this principle is a curse upon the poor: your poverty is the result of your disbelief. And so, "Blessed are the poor" is transformed into "Cursed are you poor because of your unbelief and you will remain cursed by poverty unless you believe."
We are left to wonder: What would these affluent preachers have to say to the impoverished people of Haiti who are utterly bereft of any path to abundance? Or to people in boarding homes who are disabled and without the abilities or resources to rise above their $705 monthly SSI check? Or to the saints who have given away all they own to be with and serve the poor? Or to the poor Jesus himself and his mendicant (beggar) disciples?
And so the Catholic Christian loves the Poverty Gospel:
- Receiving from God every voluntary and involuntary deprivation as a grace.
- Cultivating contentment and gratitude rather than restless ambition.
- Fierce aggressiveness on behalf of the Kingdom of the Father, rather than one's own portfolio.
- Eagerness to dispossess and give generously to the needy.
- Tender and intense love for the most deprived.
- Affectionate, intense devotion to Christ in the poverty of the Eucharist.
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