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.
Monday, July 4, 2011
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.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Doctor Martin Luther King at His Particular Judgment;Masculine Chastity as the Foundation of Social Justice
“St. Thomas relates the totality of sins against chastity to the common weal…and to justice as well.” (Josef Pieper, The Cardinal Virtues, p. 158.)
Particular Judgment: the confrontation of the soul with Christ the Judge immediately after death… distinguished from the General Judgment of all souls (re-embodied) at the end of time.
Young man: “What is it to be a good man, a real man?”
Wise man: “A real man is one that takes good care of women and children.”
Doctor King, upon departing his body, immediately approaches the pearly gates, with some trepidation, and is escorted by St. Peter to the Great Judge. St. Peter sadly reports mortal sins against the 6th commandment. The Lord seems untroubled but gazes with immense joy and love into the eyes of the pastor and says: “You are the one who so generously served my children who are poor, victimized, mistreated. Did I not say that what you do to the least of my brethren you do to me? Enter in, my dearest son, to the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of time.” The reverend’s heart swells with joy! “Even beyond that, my beloved disciple, you taught my little ones to forgive and love their enemies, racists in the South and the North both, you truly practiced my way. Enter into the highest realms of my Kingdom.” The minister’s heart is now bursting with happiness and praise. “And even beyond that,” continues our Lord, “you made the ultimate gift, you gave your life. You are a martyr. As a martyr, you are welcomed immediately into all realms of our Kingdom.” Bursting with joy, the great activist looks deeply into the piercing, pure eyes of our Savior. Something starts to trouble his spirit. He just doesn’t feel right. He feels unable to move into heaven. Glancing beyond Christ, he sees our Lady and, contemplating her immaculate virginity, he becomes more at ill-at-ease. Seeing the legion of martyrs to her right, he is relieved at the thought that he will be joining that heroic contingent; but then, looking to the left, the sight of the lovely virgins in their interior splendor awakes a deep sadness and regret. He closes his eyes and thinks of his beautiful, good wife and recalls how he had betrayed her. His eyes are now tearing. He then recalls the women who had looked to him, in trust, eager to be loved and cherished. He knows that he had abused and violated them. Then he is granted a vision of his country in the coming years, the last decades of the 20th century. He sees the abuse of women; the millions of abortions, so many of them by young women of color; the broken families; the sea of pornography in which the young men are emasculated. He owns his own part in this sad legacy. By now he has torn his clothes and is on the ground, hysterical with contrition. Pulling himself together, he turns to Peter: “I must go back. Let me make it up to my wife. Let me repair the harm I have done. Give me another chance to cherish these women and teach my followers to be pure of heart.” But Peter is shaking his head: “We do not do re-incarnation. You only get one shot at this.” Just, truthful, persistent man that he is, King will not budge: “I cannot enter heaven as I am. I am unjust! I am unclean!” Peter, still shaking his head: “We can’t force you into heaven. It is all about freedom. There is purgatory of course, but as a martyr you are spared purgatory.” “Do I look like a Catholic? We Baptists don’t do purgatory! Why would I do that?” “Well,” Peter patiently explains, “purgatory is a fierce, suffering, cleansing place where you endure great pain to repair the harm done on earth and become worthy of heaven.” A courageous, virile man…never one to back down in fear…he exclaims: “I want it! I demand it! I welcome it! Give to me this fierce, cleansing fire! I cannot…I will not advance into Glory until I repair my harm!” Charging into the deepest, fiercest depths of purgatory, the good Doctor finds himself exultant with joy and hope and pain as he declares the Miserere (Psalm 51) of the greatest penitent, King David himself: “Create a clean heart in me O Lord, and renew in me a steadfast spirit; cast me not out from your presence and take from me not your holy spirit; my sin is always before me, against you, you alone have I sinned, what is evil in your sight I have done; wash me and I shall be clean, cleanse me and I shall be whiter than snow; and I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.”
The foundation of social justice is virile chastity. Reverence and care for women and children is the basis for justice: in the family and at every level of society.
The Liberal Fallacy: Sexuality is Private
At the time of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, a fine Catholic remarked to me: “It is like a shoemaker. If he is a good shoemaker, you bring him your shoes. It doesn’t matter what he does in his privacy. It is the same way with the President.” This comment is classic contemporary liberalism: sexuality is strictly private; it doesn’t hurt anyone else; it is no one’s business; it has nothing to do with social justice or the public order. This “privacy” concept is a very bad idea! By contrast, St. Thomas taught that every sin against chastity is an offense against justice.
King David: Adultery as Injustice, Violence, Chaos
King-Saint David was, with Abraham and Moses, one of the “big three” covenant partners or “best friends” of God in the Old Testament. But the Bible does not sugarcoat his sin, his sin which is clearly an offense against justice. The adultery with Bathsheba leads quickly to the murder of her husband Uriah. Violation of the sixth always leads to a breaking of the fifth commandment. Uriah was himself a foreigner, which is to say a minority. In sharpest contrast to the lecherous monarch, this brave warrior maintains his holy, warrior abstinence from intercourse even when intoxicated by the scheming adulterer. The piercing scrutiny of prophet Nathan takes the form of a parable of a wealthy man who, unwilling to sacrifice a lamb from his own large flock, steals the only and beloved lamb of his poor neighbor. David is rightly enraged by this injustice which pales in comparison with his own sin.
David’s promiscuous, adulterous compulsion proves to be far more than a private flaw. Jealousy, lust and rebellion are rife among the sons of his many wives. Amnon lusts after his half-sister Tamar and rapes her. After the act, she pleads for him to protect her honor but he despises her and casts her to the gutter. Her full brother Absalom eventually kills Amnon. Later, the wise Solomon defiles the Davidic dynasty by marrying pagan women and falling into idolatry. From there, the Davidic line goes from bad to worse to horrendous.
Adultery, lust and unchastity corrupt and destroy the Davidic legacy. It will be finally and decisively restored only with the coming of the chaste Bridegroom. David remains for us, however, arguably the most important and fascinating and emulation-worthy character in the pre-Christ drama of salvation not because of the covenant or because of his heroism or his exuberant praise of God, but because of his profound repentance, his heartfelt contrition: “My sin is always before me; against you, you alone have I sinned; what is evil in your sight I have done!”
What is Chastity?
Chastity is far more than abstinence from adultery, promiscuity, pornography and the like.
Chastity is the power and energy of the gendered-sexual person to give love and life. Assisting charity and infused by charity (like all the virtues), chastity is:
- Interior serenity, composure, focus, sincerity.
- Sobriety, prudence, and the ability to see reality in all its splendor.
- Reasonable, intelligent, and logical in the logic of the Logos himself.
- Reverence, tenderness, and care for the feminine in its nobility and delicacy.
- Virile confidence, honor, courage and magnanimity.
- Fruitfulness, hope, promise and exuberance.
- Freedom from fear, shame, guilt, jealousy and inferiority.
Chastity is:
- St. Joseph protecting the virgin with child, mentoring the God-man, cherishing the most beautiful woman that ever lived.
- Patriarch Joseph of Egypt rejecting the sexual advances of his mistress out of loyalty to his master and then being unjustly imprisoned for many years. Note: unchastity leads to injustice. Note also: his purity of heart gives him clarity and sobriety of vision so that he is able to anticipate the famine,efficiently administer an empire, and feed the entire Mideast.
- The young prophet Daniel discerning and protecting the innocent and beautiful Suzanna from the lust-based accusations of the lecherous elders. (Again: lust =injustice!)
- Quintessentially, Christ with the woman caught in adultery. Effortlessly he disarms the lynch mob, eliciting humility and contrition in place rage and judgment. He then receives her tenderly, rescuing her from death, freeing her from guilt, and sending her forth to live freely in joy and love.
- Roman Holiday: The princess (Audrey Hepburn) is given a thrilling, delightful holiday by the older, experienced and virile journalist (Gregory Peck) who cherishes and protects her in her precious, lovely, delicate innocence.
- Aragon (Return of the King), strong now in his regal identity, at the final battle when his men are frozen in panic before an enemy that vastly outnumbers them, announces: “There may come a day when the courage of men fails; when we forsake our friends and break all fellowships. But this is not that day!”
Chastity is gentle, controlled, intelligent, virile, reverent strength. In his bargaining for the city of Sodom, Abraham got God to spare it if he could find 10 just men. “Just” here clearly means “chaste” as the obvious sin of the city was against chastity. So, in our age, if we have just, chaste men, we will have justice.
Mixed Legacy of the Sixties
As sure as David killed Goliath, Doctor King and his movement destroyed racism as a root cause of injustice. Well before the Obama presidency, this was obvious in the logic of the market. In the 80s, as a supervisor in UPS I was put through a series of workshops on inclusion and diversity. UPS had been traditionally a white, (largely Irish) male company. But the message was emphatic: without inclusion and diversity, we could not compete and flourish in the global economy. Unambiguously: the logic of the market and global capitalism has zero tolerance for racial discrimination. I realized then that racism as a pervasive system of injustice was extinct in the globalized market economy. This was the bright side of the impersonal market logic which also tends to deconstruct positive ties of ethnicity, family and religion as it redefines every individual as a unit of production and of consumption. In all the influential arenas of Western culture (faith, academia, entertainment, commerce) racism became the single most politically incorrect attitude. The only competitor for this title would be advocacy of sexual chastity as a public, justice issue.
In a recent book, Disintegration: the Splintering of Black America, the perceptive, liberal, black, Pulitzer-winning journalist Eugene Robinson argues that we no longer have a monolithic Afro-American community, but at least four distinct groupings: a majority have merged into the working-middle class, a small elite of the influential and wealthy (Oprah, Tiger, Barak), a newer group of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and the “abandoned” poor who are stuck in poverty. His reading is persuasive and implies that race itself is no longer a primary cause of poverty. What then keeps the “abandoned” poor? Daniel Patrick Moynihan (surely the brightest mind in American politics over the last 50 years…but so sadly mistaken on the protection of innocent life!) answered this question years ago: the family structure. And the family structure means masculine loyalty, which is to say chastity. Most of our poor are single mothers with children. Marrying and staying married is the single smartest financial decision one can make; what we are seeing now is that the affluent know this and do it but the underclass (of whatever race) is suffering most from the deconstruction of marriage and family in cohabitation, divorce, and adultery.
It is now common knowledge that during the summer projects of the Civil Rights Movement in the South of the early 60s, it was commonplace for young, white women to sleep with the dynamic, charismatic black male leaders. Black women were enraged. It was here that sexual liberalism became “one flesh” with the political liberalism which until then had been closely bonded with Catholicism and its cult of family, life and chastity. The “wheat” of social integration of this period is hard to separate from the “weeds” of sexual liberation. To this day, the strongest argument for legitimizing homosexual actions is the comparison with racial discrimination. Imagine if Doctor King had insisted on sexual chastity as rigorously as he did on active non-violence: there may have been no Roe, no sexual revolution, no gay militancy, no flood of pornography, no destruction of the family, and no corruption of the Democratic Party.
Where to From Here?
It was just reported that 41% of pregnancies in New York City end in abortion. The average age at which boys start using pornography is now 11. Social workers report a pandemic of the practice of oral sex among adolescents. Abuse of women and girls is rampant and getting worse. This must be the way things were in Sodom when Abraham could not find 10 chaste men.
Most of today’s argument about social justice pivots around the impersonal mechanics of the economy: we need to expand government to ensure health care for all; or, we need to shrink taxes, the deficit and debt and let the impersonal market lift everyone’s boat. The Tea Party is the mimetic opposite of Obama-philia: both seek justice in impersonal economic mega-systems rather than in pure hearts.
Neither is a genuine path to justice. Justice is always first a cardinal virtue, an attribute of a person, not a system. And even more, it is a characteristic of relationship, especially that between men and women and most essentially in marriage and family.
Let us withdraw our energies and loyalties, our hopes and resentments from ideologies of the right and left! Let us attend to the little, the immediate, the concrete: purity of heart, happy families, faithfulness, care of the poor around us, immersion in prayer, and continual conversion of heart. Let us pray the Miserere with the penitent David and the contrite Reverend:
Create a clean heart in me O Lord; and renew in me a steadfast spirit.
Cast me not out from your presence; and take from me not your holy spirit.
My sin is always before me; against you, you alone have I sinned; what is evil in your sight I have done.
Wash me and I shall be clean; cleanse me and I shall be whiter than snow.
And I will teach transgressors your ways. And sinners will return to you.
Particular Judgment: the confrontation of the soul with Christ the Judge immediately after death… distinguished from the General Judgment of all souls (re-embodied) at the end of time.
Young man: “What is it to be a good man, a real man?”
Wise man: “A real man is one that takes good care of women and children.”
Doctor King, upon departing his body, immediately approaches the pearly gates, with some trepidation, and is escorted by St. Peter to the Great Judge. St. Peter sadly reports mortal sins against the 6th commandment. The Lord seems untroubled but gazes with immense joy and love into the eyes of the pastor and says: “You are the one who so generously served my children who are poor, victimized, mistreated. Did I not say that what you do to the least of my brethren you do to me? Enter in, my dearest son, to the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of time.” The reverend’s heart swells with joy! “Even beyond that, my beloved disciple, you taught my little ones to forgive and love their enemies, racists in the South and the North both, you truly practiced my way. Enter into the highest realms of my Kingdom.” The minister’s heart is now bursting with happiness and praise. “And even beyond that,” continues our Lord, “you made the ultimate gift, you gave your life. You are a martyr. As a martyr, you are welcomed immediately into all realms of our Kingdom.” Bursting with joy, the great activist looks deeply into the piercing, pure eyes of our Savior. Something starts to trouble his spirit. He just doesn’t feel right. He feels unable to move into heaven. Glancing beyond Christ, he sees our Lady and, contemplating her immaculate virginity, he becomes more at ill-at-ease. Seeing the legion of martyrs to her right, he is relieved at the thought that he will be joining that heroic contingent; but then, looking to the left, the sight of the lovely virgins in their interior splendor awakes a deep sadness and regret. He closes his eyes and thinks of his beautiful, good wife and recalls how he had betrayed her. His eyes are now tearing. He then recalls the women who had looked to him, in trust, eager to be loved and cherished. He knows that he had abused and violated them. Then he is granted a vision of his country in the coming years, the last decades of the 20th century. He sees the abuse of women; the millions of abortions, so many of them by young women of color; the broken families; the sea of pornography in which the young men are emasculated. He owns his own part in this sad legacy. By now he has torn his clothes and is on the ground, hysterical with contrition. Pulling himself together, he turns to Peter: “I must go back. Let me make it up to my wife. Let me repair the harm I have done. Give me another chance to cherish these women and teach my followers to be pure of heart.” But Peter is shaking his head: “We do not do re-incarnation. You only get one shot at this.” Just, truthful, persistent man that he is, King will not budge: “I cannot enter heaven as I am. I am unjust! I am unclean!” Peter, still shaking his head: “We can’t force you into heaven. It is all about freedom. There is purgatory of course, but as a martyr you are spared purgatory.” “Do I look like a Catholic? We Baptists don’t do purgatory! Why would I do that?” “Well,” Peter patiently explains, “purgatory is a fierce, suffering, cleansing place where you endure great pain to repair the harm done on earth and become worthy of heaven.” A courageous, virile man…never one to back down in fear…he exclaims: “I want it! I demand it! I welcome it! Give to me this fierce, cleansing fire! I cannot…I will not advance into Glory until I repair my harm!” Charging into the deepest, fiercest depths of purgatory, the good Doctor finds himself exultant with joy and hope and pain as he declares the Miserere (Psalm 51) of the greatest penitent, King David himself: “Create a clean heart in me O Lord, and renew in me a steadfast spirit; cast me not out from your presence and take from me not your holy spirit; my sin is always before me, against you, you alone have I sinned, what is evil in your sight I have done; wash me and I shall be clean, cleanse me and I shall be whiter than snow; and I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.”
The foundation of social justice is virile chastity. Reverence and care for women and children is the basis for justice: in the family and at every level of society.
The Liberal Fallacy: Sexuality is Private
At the time of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, a fine Catholic remarked to me: “It is like a shoemaker. If he is a good shoemaker, you bring him your shoes. It doesn’t matter what he does in his privacy. It is the same way with the President.” This comment is classic contemporary liberalism: sexuality is strictly private; it doesn’t hurt anyone else; it is no one’s business; it has nothing to do with social justice or the public order. This “privacy” concept is a very bad idea! By contrast, St. Thomas taught that every sin against chastity is an offense against justice.
King David: Adultery as Injustice, Violence, Chaos
King-Saint David was, with Abraham and Moses, one of the “big three” covenant partners or “best friends” of God in the Old Testament. But the Bible does not sugarcoat his sin, his sin which is clearly an offense against justice. The adultery with Bathsheba leads quickly to the murder of her husband Uriah. Violation of the sixth always leads to a breaking of the fifth commandment. Uriah was himself a foreigner, which is to say a minority. In sharpest contrast to the lecherous monarch, this brave warrior maintains his holy, warrior abstinence from intercourse even when intoxicated by the scheming adulterer. The piercing scrutiny of prophet Nathan takes the form of a parable of a wealthy man who, unwilling to sacrifice a lamb from his own large flock, steals the only and beloved lamb of his poor neighbor. David is rightly enraged by this injustice which pales in comparison with his own sin.
David’s promiscuous, adulterous compulsion proves to be far more than a private flaw. Jealousy, lust and rebellion are rife among the sons of his many wives. Amnon lusts after his half-sister Tamar and rapes her. After the act, she pleads for him to protect her honor but he despises her and casts her to the gutter. Her full brother Absalom eventually kills Amnon. Later, the wise Solomon defiles the Davidic dynasty by marrying pagan women and falling into idolatry. From there, the Davidic line goes from bad to worse to horrendous.
Adultery, lust and unchastity corrupt and destroy the Davidic legacy. It will be finally and decisively restored only with the coming of the chaste Bridegroom. David remains for us, however, arguably the most important and fascinating and emulation-worthy character in the pre-Christ drama of salvation not because of the covenant or because of his heroism or his exuberant praise of God, but because of his profound repentance, his heartfelt contrition: “My sin is always before me; against you, you alone have I sinned; what is evil in your sight I have done!”
What is Chastity?
Chastity is far more than abstinence from adultery, promiscuity, pornography and the like.
Chastity is the power and energy of the gendered-sexual person to give love and life. Assisting charity and infused by charity (like all the virtues), chastity is:
- Interior serenity, composure, focus, sincerity.
- Sobriety, prudence, and the ability to see reality in all its splendor.
- Reasonable, intelligent, and logical in the logic of the Logos himself.
- Reverence, tenderness, and care for the feminine in its nobility and delicacy.
- Virile confidence, honor, courage and magnanimity.
- Fruitfulness, hope, promise and exuberance.
- Freedom from fear, shame, guilt, jealousy and inferiority.
Chastity is:
- St. Joseph protecting the virgin with child, mentoring the God-man, cherishing the most beautiful woman that ever lived.
- Patriarch Joseph of Egypt rejecting the sexual advances of his mistress out of loyalty to his master and then being unjustly imprisoned for many years. Note: unchastity leads to injustice. Note also: his purity of heart gives him clarity and sobriety of vision so that he is able to anticipate the famine,efficiently administer an empire, and feed the entire Mideast.
- The young prophet Daniel discerning and protecting the innocent and beautiful Suzanna from the lust-based accusations of the lecherous elders. (Again: lust =injustice!)
- Quintessentially, Christ with the woman caught in adultery. Effortlessly he disarms the lynch mob, eliciting humility and contrition in place rage and judgment. He then receives her tenderly, rescuing her from death, freeing her from guilt, and sending her forth to live freely in joy and love.
- Roman Holiday: The princess (Audrey Hepburn) is given a thrilling, delightful holiday by the older, experienced and virile journalist (Gregory Peck) who cherishes and protects her in her precious, lovely, delicate innocence.
- Aragon (Return of the King), strong now in his regal identity, at the final battle when his men are frozen in panic before an enemy that vastly outnumbers them, announces: “There may come a day when the courage of men fails; when we forsake our friends and break all fellowships. But this is not that day!”
Chastity is gentle, controlled, intelligent, virile, reverent strength. In his bargaining for the city of Sodom, Abraham got God to spare it if he could find 10 just men. “Just” here clearly means “chaste” as the obvious sin of the city was against chastity. So, in our age, if we have just, chaste men, we will have justice.
Mixed Legacy of the Sixties
As sure as David killed Goliath, Doctor King and his movement destroyed racism as a root cause of injustice. Well before the Obama presidency, this was obvious in the logic of the market. In the 80s, as a supervisor in UPS I was put through a series of workshops on inclusion and diversity. UPS had been traditionally a white, (largely Irish) male company. But the message was emphatic: without inclusion and diversity, we could not compete and flourish in the global economy. Unambiguously: the logic of the market and global capitalism has zero tolerance for racial discrimination. I realized then that racism as a pervasive system of injustice was extinct in the globalized market economy. This was the bright side of the impersonal market logic which also tends to deconstruct positive ties of ethnicity, family and religion as it redefines every individual as a unit of production and of consumption. In all the influential arenas of Western culture (faith, academia, entertainment, commerce) racism became the single most politically incorrect attitude. The only competitor for this title would be advocacy of sexual chastity as a public, justice issue.
In a recent book, Disintegration: the Splintering of Black America, the perceptive, liberal, black, Pulitzer-winning journalist Eugene Robinson argues that we no longer have a monolithic Afro-American community, but at least four distinct groupings: a majority have merged into the working-middle class, a small elite of the influential and wealthy (Oprah, Tiger, Barak), a newer group of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and the “abandoned” poor who are stuck in poverty. His reading is persuasive and implies that race itself is no longer a primary cause of poverty. What then keeps the “abandoned” poor? Daniel Patrick Moynihan (surely the brightest mind in American politics over the last 50 years…but so sadly mistaken on the protection of innocent life!) answered this question years ago: the family structure. And the family structure means masculine loyalty, which is to say chastity. Most of our poor are single mothers with children. Marrying and staying married is the single smartest financial decision one can make; what we are seeing now is that the affluent know this and do it but the underclass (of whatever race) is suffering most from the deconstruction of marriage and family in cohabitation, divorce, and adultery.
It is now common knowledge that during the summer projects of the Civil Rights Movement in the South of the early 60s, it was commonplace for young, white women to sleep with the dynamic, charismatic black male leaders. Black women were enraged. It was here that sexual liberalism became “one flesh” with the political liberalism which until then had been closely bonded with Catholicism and its cult of family, life and chastity. The “wheat” of social integration of this period is hard to separate from the “weeds” of sexual liberation. To this day, the strongest argument for legitimizing homosexual actions is the comparison with racial discrimination. Imagine if Doctor King had insisted on sexual chastity as rigorously as he did on active non-violence: there may have been no Roe, no sexual revolution, no gay militancy, no flood of pornography, no destruction of the family, and no corruption of the Democratic Party.
Where to From Here?
It was just reported that 41% of pregnancies in New York City end in abortion. The average age at which boys start using pornography is now 11. Social workers report a pandemic of the practice of oral sex among adolescents. Abuse of women and girls is rampant and getting worse. This must be the way things were in Sodom when Abraham could not find 10 chaste men.
Most of today’s argument about social justice pivots around the impersonal mechanics of the economy: we need to expand government to ensure health care for all; or, we need to shrink taxes, the deficit and debt and let the impersonal market lift everyone’s boat. The Tea Party is the mimetic opposite of Obama-philia: both seek justice in impersonal economic mega-systems rather than in pure hearts.
Neither is a genuine path to justice. Justice is always first a cardinal virtue, an attribute of a person, not a system. And even more, it is a characteristic of relationship, especially that between men and women and most essentially in marriage and family.
Let us withdraw our energies and loyalties, our hopes and resentments from ideologies of the right and left! Let us attend to the little, the immediate, the concrete: purity of heart, happy families, faithfulness, care of the poor around us, immersion in prayer, and continual conversion of heart. Let us pray the Miserere with the penitent David and the contrite Reverend:
Create a clean heart in me O Lord; and renew in me a steadfast spirit.
Cast me not out from your presence; and take from me not your holy spirit.
My sin is always before me; against you, you alone have I sinned; what is evil in your sight I have done.
Wash me and I shall be clean; cleanse me and I shall be whiter than snow.
And I will teach transgressors your ways. And sinners will return to you.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Nuptial Mystery
In The Nuptial Mystery, Cardinal Angelo Scola synthesizes insights from John Paul II and Balthasar to highlight “nuptiality” as the deepest truth about Being and Transcendent Being, God’s very self. “Nuptiality” he sees as the circumincession of three realities: (sexual) difference, love, and fruitfulness. The key text is the creation account of Genesis: “male and female he created them, in their own image he created them.” Taking these words literally, we see that the “communion of persons” between male and female, in all their radical difference, is inherently fruitful (procreative) and a privileged icon or image of the inner life of the Trinity which itself is that same threesome: difference of persons, love between them, and infinite fruitfulness (the Holy Spirit.)
Tradition has always found the image of God in the human’s distinctive spiritual nature: intellect and will. This view ignores the physical as participating directly in the imaging of the Divine. Following John Paul and Balthasar, Scola integrates the tradition into a new synthesis: the community of the Trinity and the Infinite Self-donation of each of the Three is imaged fully in the communion of persons, especially marriage, and the complete gift of self which is physical as well as spiritual, intellectual, volitional, emotional and social.
He echoes Balthasar’s understanding of the dramatic nature of the person: a created freedom who interacts with infinite, creative Freedom. He finds three distinctive polarities: man and woman, body and soul, person and community. The human person is, therefore, always a dual unity: a communion of contrasting polarities which are held in tension and yet in union with each other, with neither ever losing its identity by melting into a single monad. The person is never complete in himself, but always dramatic: always in relation to the other, always in tension, always “on the way.”
The body-soul polarity is perhaps best captured by the question: “Which is more true: I have a body or I am a body?” Most initially answer “I have a body.” This is contradicted by the conclusion that if I torture or make love to your body, I am not doing it to you but to something you have, something extrinsic to yourself. On the other hand, “I am my body” is a complete identification with my physical self and tends to deny transcendence and the possibility of life beyond the mortality of the flesh. So we see that both statements have to be held in tension: “I am my body, which is to say that my body is me, but I transcend my body, I am more than my body, which is the spiritual dimension.” But the two are married together so that they cannot be separated but also cannot be confused and must be distinguished.
And so, regarding sexuality, every human is male or female…which is to say that each person is already directed to the opposite. Each person is a unity but a unity directed to the opposite so that it is only in the meeting of the two that you have complete humanity. Neither man nor woman is a completed human and yet each is completely human. The completion of humanity is found only in the couple.
But the Greek myth (Aristophanes) which held that female/male are the two halves of what was originally an organic whole is rejected by this understanding of nuptiality. It is NOT true that man and woman complete each other by forming a completed, satisfactory whole. Rather than complete complimentarity, there is asymmetric reciprocity. While there is partial complementarity in the spousal union, there is also asymmetry: the two do not perfectly fit together. If anything, a genuine love between man and woman will accentuate and recognize the difference between the two. There is distance and difference between the two which never disappears but is bridged by love, surrender, gift of self, and reception of the other in her very difference or alterity.
Out of this union in difference, love in alterity, there emerges no completion, but the fruition of another person, the child. So the love of man and woman does not lead to satisfaction, completion, wholeness, and rest; rather it self-transcends (imaging God’s own inner life of superabundant fruitfulness) into another person, another love and another mission…actually two loves and two missions, those of maternity and paternity, which are themselves distinct, complementary and asymmetric.
So we see that the sentimental language that speaks of “my soul mate” or “the one who completes me” or “my satisfaction” or even “my better half” is misleading: nuptial love does not complete or satisfy itself in the union of the two, but it opens itself up to the Other, the third: the other who is the child, the other who is all the other beloveds (family, community, the needy), and ultimately the Other who is God.
Today’s Unique Historical Situation
All human cultures have always intuited the circumincession of the nuptial realities: sexual difference, love, and fruitfulness. Modern technology, initially contraception and now an entire network of bio-technical processes, has torn the three apart. The Pill separated sex (and love) from fruitfulness; in vitro procedures and cloning tear procreation away from the love act itself; and the gay movement diminishes the iconic meaning of sexual difference. Modernity tears apart the nuptial icon, the very image of the Divine in the human person, the spousal union of man and woman.
(Circumincession is an important term: it refers to the Mystery by which the three persons in one God “live within each other.” So complete is their love for each other that they literally indwell each other: to see the Son is always to see the Father and the Spirit. By analogy, in the created realm, we are able to “indwell” each other to the degree that we really know each other but especially when we love each other. So, spouses “indwell” each other by a finite, limited “circumincession;” as do parents/children and friends, To the degree that I love my mother I carry her within me as a good son; to the degree that I love my daughter, I carry her within me as a good father. All of reality, imitative of the Trinity, at the various degrees (analogy) within the hierarchy of Being, is oriented to donation-of-self and reception-of-the-other. The classic formulation is that “being diffuses itself.” Every reality gives itself: the rose its aroma and the bird its song and the lover his heart. Ultimately, or eschatologically, we will live in God and in all of reality. All of Being, in other words, is nuptial.)
Modern culture can be understood as the disparagement of "difference:" men are not really different from women; the foetus not really different from tissue; the Creator from the creature; and the animal from the human. Catholic, Trinitarian faith by sharpest contrast exults in "le difference!"
Providentially, this deconstruction has occasioned the articulation of the nuptial mystery in all its splendor in a genuinely novel manner. The “communio theology” of Benedict, John Paul, Balthasar, Schindler and Scola is penetrating into this magnificent mystery in a way hardly glimpsed by Thomas and Augustine.
For instance, while Catholics have always known that women cannot be priests, now we know why that is so. Christ’s love for the Church is a nuptial mystery: he is the groom that loves his bride. He is the initiator, she the responder; he the donator, she the receiver; he gives his life, his blood, his body, his word, and his seed (of eternal life) and she receives the same, sacramentally which is to say in the flesh. So, the priest who re-enacts the role of the groom, in word, sacrament and governance, is playing a masculine role, a spousal role, a paternal role…and clearly is a man.
The consecrated or virginal life is itself a higher form of nuptiality since it is the direct surrender, body and soul, of the bridal (ontologically “feminine” or receptive, even if male) person to the Godly groom. If marriage is the highest icon of the Divine in the created or natural realm, the virginal life transcends this in entering into an eschatological or heavenly marrage, a participation in the Triune Life itself in a physical, historical, concrete manner.
This nuptial mystery is the key to all of reality as it reveals the inner life of God and permeates all of creation which is in his image. The different levels of Being show this reality in analogous ways. The crucial doctrine of analogy identifies a similarity within always a greater dissimilarity. And so, I as a man am an image of God…as a son, a brother, a husband, a father…in all of this I image God; but there is an infinitely greater dissimilarity between me as creature, and him as creator; me as finite, him as infinite; me as historical, him as eternal.
Even here, however, the dissimilarity, the gulf between us, the difference between God and us is not absolute. What is absolute is Love. He created us to love us, to enjoy our difference, to bear fruit with us and in us and through us. He delights in our “not-Godness” as we rejoice in his “Godness” analogously as we men delight in femininity and we fathers cherish our daughters.
The Bible ends with the wedding feast of the Groom and his Church. Each of us is conceived in the nuptial embrace; each of us (and all of reality) was originally imagined and envisioned in the nuptial intimacy of the Trinity; each of us lives each second of our earthly lives within the love and difference and fecundity of Nuptial Being; and we are all together, nuptially, moving dramatically towards the Great Wedding Feast.
Tradition has always found the image of God in the human’s distinctive spiritual nature: intellect and will. This view ignores the physical as participating directly in the imaging of the Divine. Following John Paul and Balthasar, Scola integrates the tradition into a new synthesis: the community of the Trinity and the Infinite Self-donation of each of the Three is imaged fully in the communion of persons, especially marriage, and the complete gift of self which is physical as well as spiritual, intellectual, volitional, emotional and social.
He echoes Balthasar’s understanding of the dramatic nature of the person: a created freedom who interacts with infinite, creative Freedom. He finds three distinctive polarities: man and woman, body and soul, person and community. The human person is, therefore, always a dual unity: a communion of contrasting polarities which are held in tension and yet in union with each other, with neither ever losing its identity by melting into a single monad. The person is never complete in himself, but always dramatic: always in relation to the other, always in tension, always “on the way.”
The body-soul polarity is perhaps best captured by the question: “Which is more true: I have a body or I am a body?” Most initially answer “I have a body.” This is contradicted by the conclusion that if I torture or make love to your body, I am not doing it to you but to something you have, something extrinsic to yourself. On the other hand, “I am my body” is a complete identification with my physical self and tends to deny transcendence and the possibility of life beyond the mortality of the flesh. So we see that both statements have to be held in tension: “I am my body, which is to say that my body is me, but I transcend my body, I am more than my body, which is the spiritual dimension.” But the two are married together so that they cannot be separated but also cannot be confused and must be distinguished.
And so, regarding sexuality, every human is male or female…which is to say that each person is already directed to the opposite. Each person is a unity but a unity directed to the opposite so that it is only in the meeting of the two that you have complete humanity. Neither man nor woman is a completed human and yet each is completely human. The completion of humanity is found only in the couple.
But the Greek myth (Aristophanes) which held that female/male are the two halves of what was originally an organic whole is rejected by this understanding of nuptiality. It is NOT true that man and woman complete each other by forming a completed, satisfactory whole. Rather than complete complimentarity, there is asymmetric reciprocity. While there is partial complementarity in the spousal union, there is also asymmetry: the two do not perfectly fit together. If anything, a genuine love between man and woman will accentuate and recognize the difference between the two. There is distance and difference between the two which never disappears but is bridged by love, surrender, gift of self, and reception of the other in her very difference or alterity.
Out of this union in difference, love in alterity, there emerges no completion, but the fruition of another person, the child. So the love of man and woman does not lead to satisfaction, completion, wholeness, and rest; rather it self-transcends (imaging God’s own inner life of superabundant fruitfulness) into another person, another love and another mission…actually two loves and two missions, those of maternity and paternity, which are themselves distinct, complementary and asymmetric.
So we see that the sentimental language that speaks of “my soul mate” or “the one who completes me” or “my satisfaction” or even “my better half” is misleading: nuptial love does not complete or satisfy itself in the union of the two, but it opens itself up to the Other, the third: the other who is the child, the other who is all the other beloveds (family, community, the needy), and ultimately the Other who is God.
Today’s Unique Historical Situation
All human cultures have always intuited the circumincession of the nuptial realities: sexual difference, love, and fruitfulness. Modern technology, initially contraception and now an entire network of bio-technical processes, has torn the three apart. The Pill separated sex (and love) from fruitfulness; in vitro procedures and cloning tear procreation away from the love act itself; and the gay movement diminishes the iconic meaning of sexual difference. Modernity tears apart the nuptial icon, the very image of the Divine in the human person, the spousal union of man and woman.
(Circumincession is an important term: it refers to the Mystery by which the three persons in one God “live within each other.” So complete is their love for each other that they literally indwell each other: to see the Son is always to see the Father and the Spirit. By analogy, in the created realm, we are able to “indwell” each other to the degree that we really know each other but especially when we love each other. So, spouses “indwell” each other by a finite, limited “circumincession;” as do parents/children and friends, To the degree that I love my mother I carry her within me as a good son; to the degree that I love my daughter, I carry her within me as a good father. All of reality, imitative of the Trinity, at the various degrees (analogy) within the hierarchy of Being, is oriented to donation-of-self and reception-of-the-other. The classic formulation is that “being diffuses itself.” Every reality gives itself: the rose its aroma and the bird its song and the lover his heart. Ultimately, or eschatologically, we will live in God and in all of reality. All of Being, in other words, is nuptial.)
Modern culture can be understood as the disparagement of "difference:" men are not really different from women; the foetus not really different from tissue; the Creator from the creature; and the animal from the human. Catholic, Trinitarian faith by sharpest contrast exults in "le difference!"
Providentially, this deconstruction has occasioned the articulation of the nuptial mystery in all its splendor in a genuinely novel manner. The “communio theology” of Benedict, John Paul, Balthasar, Schindler and Scola is penetrating into this magnificent mystery in a way hardly glimpsed by Thomas and Augustine.
For instance, while Catholics have always known that women cannot be priests, now we know why that is so. Christ’s love for the Church is a nuptial mystery: he is the groom that loves his bride. He is the initiator, she the responder; he the donator, she the receiver; he gives his life, his blood, his body, his word, and his seed (of eternal life) and she receives the same, sacramentally which is to say in the flesh. So, the priest who re-enacts the role of the groom, in word, sacrament and governance, is playing a masculine role, a spousal role, a paternal role…and clearly is a man.
The consecrated or virginal life is itself a higher form of nuptiality since it is the direct surrender, body and soul, of the bridal (ontologically “feminine” or receptive, even if male) person to the Godly groom. If marriage is the highest icon of the Divine in the created or natural realm, the virginal life transcends this in entering into an eschatological or heavenly marrage, a participation in the Triune Life itself in a physical, historical, concrete manner.
This nuptial mystery is the key to all of reality as it reveals the inner life of God and permeates all of creation which is in his image. The different levels of Being show this reality in analogous ways. The crucial doctrine of analogy identifies a similarity within always a greater dissimilarity. And so, I as a man am an image of God…as a son, a brother, a husband, a father…in all of this I image God; but there is an infinitely greater dissimilarity between me as creature, and him as creator; me as finite, him as infinite; me as historical, him as eternal.
Even here, however, the dissimilarity, the gulf between us, the difference between God and us is not absolute. What is absolute is Love. He created us to love us, to enjoy our difference, to bear fruit with us and in us and through us. He delights in our “not-Godness” as we rejoice in his “Godness” analogously as we men delight in femininity and we fathers cherish our daughters.
The Bible ends with the wedding feast of the Groom and his Church. Each of us is conceived in the nuptial embrace; each of us (and all of reality) was originally imagined and envisioned in the nuptial intimacy of the Trinity; each of us lives each second of our earthly lives within the love and difference and fecundity of Nuptial Being; and we are all together, nuptially, moving dramatically towards the Great Wedding Feast.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Three Maryknolls
Maryknoll, soon to celebrate its 100th birthday, has sent forth thousands of missionaries…each entirely distinctive and unique. Nevertheless, like any community or organization, it does develop a shared or corporate personality. I have known three distinct Maryknolls:
- The original Maryknoll of the founders: China-loving, anti-modernist, Tridentine Maryknoll.
- Transitional Maryknoll of the 1945-65 years after World War II: modern, Latin America-loving, Americanist, social action Maryknoll.
- The declining Maryknoll after Vatican II: multicultural, post-modern, leftwing, psychology-as-religion Maryknoll.
The Maryknoll of Price/the Walshes/Ford was a classic expression of Tridentine Catholicism as it emerged from the combatative, countercultural immigrant American Church. This Church was reactive against a hostile Protestant culture and therefore fiercely loyal to the institutional aspects of counter-reformation Catholicism: the sacraments, moral teachings, hierarchy, and traditions of piety including love for Mary. The primary focus of their mission activity was pagan China which needed to hear the Good News and to come to know the saving power of Jesus Christ as mediated in the one, only, Catholic and apostolic Church. This Maryknoll might be described as anti-modern at least in the sense of anti-modernist in theology. Its concern was to bring the Catholic faith to unbelievers and was in no way enamored with nationalism, politics, technology or social engineering. It was classic, traditional, sacramental Catholicism …nothing more or less.
The end of the war found Maryknoll expelled from communist China and refocusing, largely on Latin America. This was a Catholic continent, not in evident need of evangelization, but plagued with material poverty. By contrast, America was now THE superpower, materially, economically, technologically and culturally. American economic expansion in those two postwar decades was something extraordinary: surely unparalled, in sheer quantity and mass, by any period in the history of the world. Maryknoll shared this American confidence and therefore entered into mission with a great concern to feed the hungry and clothe the naked using all our cultural resources (credit unions, cooperatives, etc.) In this period, Catholicism became widely accepted within American society and the Church in turn took a positive view, free of ambivalence, of America and all the modern developments including democracy, free markets, trade unions, and the secular academy. Maryknoll Magazine was everywhere and full of inspiring stories of confident, virile missionaries teaching the natives agricultural methods or how to form coops or credit unions or trade unions. At this point there was no break with tradition or hierarchy as the fundamentals of Catholicism (pro-life and pro-family, sacraments, etc.) coexisted peacefully with the dominant revivalist values of the USA of Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen. The Church was no longer at war with a Protestant America but was becoming enamored of her and would finally fall into bed with dominant elite culture at the close of the Vatican Council. Ivan Illich was possibly the most incisive critic of Maryknoll as a vehicle for American cultural imperialism and his work was one of many forces that worked for Maryknoll’s rapid deconstruction after 1965.
1965, the close of the Council, is the beginning of end of Maryknoll as she joined most of the Catholic elites in opening wide the windows for renewal, understood as mimicking a secular world that was rapidly turning agnostic, relativist, and post-modern. An enchantment with change spread through Maryknoll in a radical disconnect from tradition, authority, pious customs, and traditional sexual morality. Maryknoll is not a religious order and never had a distinctive unifying spirituality but the late-Tridentine piety of the founders was clear, deep, and motivational. In the late 60s this piety was scornfully dismissed. A collage of fashions was to take its place: liberation theology, humanistic psychology, and alertness to God’s presence in other cultures and religions. Maryknollers continue to do beautiful work with the poorest of the poor all over the world. Indeed, the word “beauty” might best characterize their work. Maryknoll Magazine always offered splendid images, especially of the human face in all its agony and magnificence. This tradition continues. For example, the mission museum at Maryknoll is filled with such photographic icons. But noticeably missing from that collection is any real focus on the dogma, the morality, or the liturgy of the Church. The beautiful has become detached from the true (dogma…which is a dirty word for the postmodern), and from the good (morality, which is scorned as moralism when it shows its absolutism). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is this disconnect: beauty is accepted but truth and morality as absolute claims are rejected. The only absolutes are tolerance, relativism, and inclusiveness.
This soft, inclusive, aesthetic Maryknoll, uprooted from authority, tradition, and law cannot attract our young. It lacks the virile backbone of the earlier Maryknoll as well as its gentle Marian piety. It is a neutered, de-gendered, sterile and impotent hybrid, similar to its Episcopalian sister, champion of contraception, choice, homosexuality and (the latest fad) masculine, Episcopal nuns. (I am not making this up.)
Maryknoll as an institution does not seem to have much of a future. Surely, we will never again see the “glory days” of the mid-twentieth century and the remarkable synthesis of American confidence and Catholic piety. Nor can we return to the Tridentine Church of the founders. The drastic decline of the society over the last ½ century is a sorrow for those who have loved her.
The future of mission is, however, another story. Institutions, like Maryknoll, come and go but the Church will endure until the end of time. The Church is a garden that is ever new and fruitful, giving birth to new orders and movements in every age. The spirit of the founders of Maryknoll, the love of Christ specifically IN His Church, is alive in a new flowering of groups fiercely loyal to Mary, apostolic authority and the sacramental life. We are in the midst of a renaissance of Catholic life as the bridal Church is being aroused with a fervent love of the Bridegroom who loves her so intimately in sacrament, apostolic Word, prayer, and Marian holiness. Some disparage this renewal as “Romantic Conservatism.” Nevertheless, the founders, heroes and martyrs (“witnesses”) of Maryknoll must smile as they look down on the corporal acts of charity still practiced by aging but faithful Maryknollers as well as the flourishing of Catholic life and mission in so many new, thrilling expressions under the shepherding of John Paul and Benedict.
- The original Maryknoll of the founders: China-loving, anti-modernist, Tridentine Maryknoll.
- Transitional Maryknoll of the 1945-65 years after World War II: modern, Latin America-loving, Americanist, social action Maryknoll.
- The declining Maryknoll after Vatican II: multicultural, post-modern, leftwing, psychology-as-religion Maryknoll.
The Maryknoll of Price/the Walshes/Ford was a classic expression of Tridentine Catholicism as it emerged from the combatative, countercultural immigrant American Church. This Church was reactive against a hostile Protestant culture and therefore fiercely loyal to the institutional aspects of counter-reformation Catholicism: the sacraments, moral teachings, hierarchy, and traditions of piety including love for Mary. The primary focus of their mission activity was pagan China which needed to hear the Good News and to come to know the saving power of Jesus Christ as mediated in the one, only, Catholic and apostolic Church. This Maryknoll might be described as anti-modern at least in the sense of anti-modernist in theology. Its concern was to bring the Catholic faith to unbelievers and was in no way enamored with nationalism, politics, technology or social engineering. It was classic, traditional, sacramental Catholicism …nothing more or less.
The end of the war found Maryknoll expelled from communist China and refocusing, largely on Latin America. This was a Catholic continent, not in evident need of evangelization, but plagued with material poverty. By contrast, America was now THE superpower, materially, economically, technologically and culturally. American economic expansion in those two postwar decades was something extraordinary: surely unparalled, in sheer quantity and mass, by any period in the history of the world. Maryknoll shared this American confidence and therefore entered into mission with a great concern to feed the hungry and clothe the naked using all our cultural resources (credit unions, cooperatives, etc.) In this period, Catholicism became widely accepted within American society and the Church in turn took a positive view, free of ambivalence, of America and all the modern developments including democracy, free markets, trade unions, and the secular academy. Maryknoll Magazine was everywhere and full of inspiring stories of confident, virile missionaries teaching the natives agricultural methods or how to form coops or credit unions or trade unions. At this point there was no break with tradition or hierarchy as the fundamentals of Catholicism (pro-life and pro-family, sacraments, etc.) coexisted peacefully with the dominant revivalist values of the USA of Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen. The Church was no longer at war with a Protestant America but was becoming enamored of her and would finally fall into bed with dominant elite culture at the close of the Vatican Council. Ivan Illich was possibly the most incisive critic of Maryknoll as a vehicle for American cultural imperialism and his work was one of many forces that worked for Maryknoll’s rapid deconstruction after 1965.
1965, the close of the Council, is the beginning of end of Maryknoll as she joined most of the Catholic elites in opening wide the windows for renewal, understood as mimicking a secular world that was rapidly turning agnostic, relativist, and post-modern. An enchantment with change spread through Maryknoll in a radical disconnect from tradition, authority, pious customs, and traditional sexual morality. Maryknoll is not a religious order and never had a distinctive unifying spirituality but the late-Tridentine piety of the founders was clear, deep, and motivational. In the late 60s this piety was scornfully dismissed. A collage of fashions was to take its place: liberation theology, humanistic psychology, and alertness to God’s presence in other cultures and religions. Maryknollers continue to do beautiful work with the poorest of the poor all over the world. Indeed, the word “beauty” might best characterize their work. Maryknoll Magazine always offered splendid images, especially of the human face in all its agony and magnificence. This tradition continues. For example, the mission museum at Maryknoll is filled with such photographic icons. But noticeably missing from that collection is any real focus on the dogma, the morality, or the liturgy of the Church. The beautiful has become detached from the true (dogma…which is a dirty word for the postmodern), and from the good (morality, which is scorned as moralism when it shows its absolutism). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is this disconnect: beauty is accepted but truth and morality as absolute claims are rejected. The only absolutes are tolerance, relativism, and inclusiveness.
This soft, inclusive, aesthetic Maryknoll, uprooted from authority, tradition, and law cannot attract our young. It lacks the virile backbone of the earlier Maryknoll as well as its gentle Marian piety. It is a neutered, de-gendered, sterile and impotent hybrid, similar to its Episcopalian sister, champion of contraception, choice, homosexuality and (the latest fad) masculine, Episcopal nuns. (I am not making this up.)
Maryknoll as an institution does not seem to have much of a future. Surely, we will never again see the “glory days” of the mid-twentieth century and the remarkable synthesis of American confidence and Catholic piety. Nor can we return to the Tridentine Church of the founders. The drastic decline of the society over the last ½ century is a sorrow for those who have loved her.
The future of mission is, however, another story. Institutions, like Maryknoll, come and go but the Church will endure until the end of time. The Church is a garden that is ever new and fruitful, giving birth to new orders and movements in every age. The spirit of the founders of Maryknoll, the love of Christ specifically IN His Church, is alive in a new flowering of groups fiercely loyal to Mary, apostolic authority and the sacramental life. We are in the midst of a renaissance of Catholic life as the bridal Church is being aroused with a fervent love of the Bridegroom who loves her so intimately in sacrament, apostolic Word, prayer, and Marian holiness. Some disparage this renewal as “Romantic Conservatism.” Nevertheless, the founders, heroes and martyrs (“witnesses”) of Maryknoll must smile as they look down on the corporal acts of charity still practiced by aging but faithful Maryknollers as well as the flourishing of Catholic life and mission in so many new, thrilling expressions under the shepherding of John Paul and Benedict.
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