Reblog: Justin Lee

There have been a few ripples in the blogosphere (once again) over gay Catholics discussing their orientation openly, since Fr. Gary Meier of the Archdiocese of St. Louis came out of the closet. This is something of a pet peeve of mine, as I've often mentioned before, because of the lack of intelligent sympathy with which most Christians approach the issue -- not that most of the Christians I've ever known intend to be jerks, but that they are trying to do too many things at once: show love to people (uh, usually), convert non-Christians, win a kulturkampf, practice chastity themselves, and maintain orthodoxy. Combine that with a history of bad blood and with not understanding the experiences of LGBT people from within, and you have a dangerous exposure to FIMS (Foot-In-Mouth Syndrome). 

Justin Lee, author of the excellent book Torn and founder of the Gay Christian Network, wrote this essay recently when Jason Collins came out, and it addresses certain of the problems in the dialogue between Christianity at large and LGBT folks.

All Roads Lead To, Part V: Deicide

This is Part V. Go to these places for The Interior Castle, The Blasphemous Saint, The Monster In the Dungeon, and The Consolation of Philosophy.

So I had gone from rationality to theism; but I wanted more. I had been raised a Christian, and I wanted to remain one, even while at the same time I wanted to repudiate Christianity. At any rate, I couldn't simply ignore Jesus. Unhistorical, or misunderstood, or what the Church claimed He was, or some combination thereof -- whatever the truth might be, He was too compelling to ignore.

The intellectual question was actually rather easily settled. The notion, popular in some circles and especially among those whose knowledge of the New Testament is wholly at secondhand, that Jesus probably never existed, may for convenience be described as a lie.* The number of scholars who seriously believe that there was no Jesus hovers somewhere around none of them. Nor was the hypothesis ever an obvious one: if there were no Jesus, why would the primitive Church (which everybody admits existed) bother to come up with Him? More particularly since it had a tendency to get them somewhat killed? I think that really the idea that there was no Jesus is merely a relic of an intellectual fashion -- academics have fashions like anybody else -- for deconstructing things, dating to the nineteenth century. But I digress.

The martyrs do not prove that Jesus was who the Church claimed He was. They do prove that the Church believed He was who they claimed, and that belief may be considered as evidence about Jesus (though not as exhaustive or unimpeachable evidence). For of course that belief must have come from somewhere, whether from Him or not.

Looking at the Gospels -- our only direct evidence about Jesus (unless one counts a passing reference in Josephus's history, which was almost certainly in the original but has also almost certainly been doctored by a Christian redactor) -- we do get a distinctive picture of a fascinating Person. Their testimonies do diverge at some points; very occasionally (chiefly in the timing of events during the Passion narratives) they are inconsistent with each other, and far more frequently they give differing, but not incompatible, information -- as when a parable is recorded in Mark but left out of the other three Gospels, or when John records lectures in the Temple and in synagogues rather than the mostly open-air addresses of the others. Indeed, their divergence rather strengthens than weakens their testimony; a lie must be circumspect, but the truth, seen from different perspectives, will be fundamentally consistent and still have a hangnail here and there.** The commonplace belief, popularized by such academic and respectable sources as The Da Vinci Code, that the Gospels are grossly inconsistent with one another and totally incredible to a critical mind, is -- how may I put this politely? -- about as accurate as this:

What's even better is that this is apparently part one of eight.

So they present, truly or falsely, a picture. In considering that picture, I couldn't help noticing that, if one accepted the possibility of miracles -- which, since I was already a theist philosophically, I couldn't prima facie rule out -- there was really nothing else at all difficult to believe about the Gospels. The people represented in them were extremely credible; if they were fabrications, they were highly accomplished ones, presenting people more realistically than Aeschylus or Virgil had done: every word and action of every person made sense in view of their attested character. And as for the miracles, I could see no reason in the abstract to assume them impossible. The only grounds I could think of for believing that miracles were categorically impossible were those of scientism -- the assumption that there is no supernatural realm, and therefore nothing to invade and reorganize the natural realm -- and I had already dismissed scientism as self-defeating. I therefore felt that I had no real grounds to suppose that the Gospels were presenting a false picture; so the natural thing to do was to accept it as a true one.

This then confronted me with Jesus' claim to be God. And it is indeed His claim to be God; it has been asserted that this was claimed for Him by His followers later (a less-than-plausible idea, given that all His earliest followers were devout Jews and kinda had the monotheism thing down), but this is not true. Most explicitly in the Gospel of John, but also in the first three, He attributes divinity to Himself, both by direct assertion and implicitly, e.g. in His claim to forgive sins or His calling Himself the Son of God -- this last being specially notable, in that it was the basis of the blasphemy charge that He was finally executed upon.

The three-horned dilemma, sometimes known by the nickname "Liar, lunatic or Lord," expresses the logical options fairly well at this point. If He wasn't God, and knew it, He was -- well, a very bad man, and a rather baffling one. If He wasn't God but thought He was, he was a whackjob. Lying, and maintaining the lie to the point of death, simply didn't seem credible to me; and reading the sort of man He was, lunacy seemed equally unlikely. That left me precisely with the Christian explanation.

And that brought me up to the threshold of faith. But not across it.

Thus far, the whole question was one of what I thought was true; what opinions I was convinced were true. But at this point, that question receded. From evaluating a philosophy, I had suddenly been put in the position of judging a Person. The Gospel of John is a good model for all this: from the beginning, it puts the reader in the position of judge -- its constant refrain of witnesses and testimonies, its setting forth of miracles as evidence, and its lingering over the two ecclesiastical trials and the cross-examination of Pilate; all closing with an imprecation to the reader to judge rightly, a gentle reminder to attend to the subject -- the Person of Christ -- rather than to curiosities, and an affidavit that the Gospel is indeed the truth. I, like Pilate, was asked to deliver, not a philosophical opinion, but a verdict.

I could draw back. I could accept Christianity as a fascinating and probable hypothesis, continue my Christian practice as the sensible response, and never engage with Christ as a Person, but only as an idea. I could wash my hands in that worthless water, that threatened nothing because it did nothing, conveyed nothing, cost nothing.

Or I could wash my hands in blood. I could accept who He was, and make myself His executioner. For that is part of what it means to be a Christian and mean it: it is to charge oneself with Deicide. We are, all of us, Pilate; we who choose to believe, confess that we are also Judas. People talk about a "personal relationship with Jesus" as though it were easy. But that is what it means. It means a great deal more than that; not less. To relate to God in Christ as a Person, that is the cost. And to trust Him -- i.e., to have faith -- is by definition a personal act, not an abstraction. That is why we refer to it, not as changing one's mind, but a change of heart.

*I say "for convenience," because I do not consider it my business to impute deliberate deceit or malignant irresponsibility to others. Some people who claim that Jesus never lived, &c., may in fact know better and be lying; however, the matter is adequately explained by the more charitable, if still unflattering, supposal that they just don't know what they're talking about.
**Due to space considerations, I've left out a thorough treatment of whether the Gospels as we have them are 1) the same as they were originally written, and 2) written within a reasonable period after the events they describe and based on eyewitness accounts. To the first, we can simply say: Yes. The manuscript tradition of the New Testament is literally the best in existence from the ancient world; it is orders of magnitude better than even the second best manuscript tradition, that of the Iliad. As to the second, it was quite fashionable during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to ascribe all of the Gospels to the late second or even the third century after Christ. So far as I know, there are now no reputable scholars who take this view; even the latest Gospel, John, has been unarguably dated to the beginning of the second century at the absolute latest -- early enough that direct eyewitness testimony would still in principle be a possibility. For a standard of comparison, imagine a book written today about the Second World War.

All Roads Lead To, Part IV: The Consolation of Philosophy

This, as you can see, is Part IV. Here are links to Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Considering the turmoil I was in, apostasy would have been a very understandable reaction. I did try to abandon my faith; but it would not abandon me, for three reasons. One of those reasons was, obviously, God -- He does have a tendency to land at the top of the initiative roster somehow.

A second was that being religious was simply the sort of person I was. Interestingly, that seems to be something I've partly grown out of only as a Catholic. Catholicism is so mammoth, so blatantly and entirely independent of me, that it enables someone of my type to let go of being religious. I'm not espousing here the "Jesus without religion" stuff that you see among some Protestants, from the quite appealing Rick James to the insufferable Rev. John Shelby Spong; but there is a personality, a type, that is religious in mode and not simply in belief -- the sort of Protestant who litters his conversation with "Praise the Lord" and posts Bible verses as pointed status updates, or the sort of Catholic with five pro-life bumper stickers who shakes his head in disgust if he sees somebody wearing a Rosary like a necklace. But I digress. My religion was woven into me, and so was my religiosity -- to abandon those things I would have had to undergo a metamorphosis as extreme as a caterpillar going into the chrysalis and emerging as a butterfly, and I just wasn't ready for something that drastic. Handling the realization that you're gay is hard enough without anything else in the picture.

But the third reason was that, after examining Christianity, I believed it. (I did also believe it during the examining, but I did my best to keep objective and not let my beliefs determine my conclusions.) I went from rationality to theism, from theism to Christianity, and ultimately from Christianity to the Catholic Church -- foundation, pillars, arches, and bell-bearing spire.

My reasons for progressing from rationality to theism were mostly variations on a firm belief that nothing comes from nothing. This not only means that there always had to be something: Bertrand Russell may, for all I know, have been right in saying that there could have been an infinite regress of dependent beings (though my instincts definitely side with Aristotle in feeling an infinite series of things, other than numbers themselves, to be ridiculous). It also means that all things that exist must have a cause at least as great as, if not greater, than themselves.

Where this becomes problematic for the scientific materialist, I feel, is the phenomenon of intelligence. St. Augustine's memory, intellect, and will* seem to me to be manifestly non-material things, and human beings, if nothing else, exhibit these things. For conscious intelligences to exist: there must always have been a series of other conscious intelligences bringing them into being; or they must have been self-existent; or there must be some intelligent being capable of bringing them into existence who has done so. For me, the first two explanations seemed quite unsatisfactory, and also, being many rather than one, seemed to violate Occam's Razor. I chose the third, and was content to call that conscious intelligence God -- the word seemed no worse than any alternative. It was from there that my thin theism progressed into the more robust form set forth by most theists in the West, drawing on Judaeo-Christian and Platonic roots.

Other arguments could be cited -- such as the cosmological argument, that the universe exhibits order, and that order which can be discovered by a mind has been put there by some mind.** Or the argument from aesthetic experience, put best (to my mind) by Peter Kreeft: "There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore there must be a God. You either see this one or you don't."

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

But I shall leave those arguments aside; they can be found in the works of C. S. Lewis, as everybody doubtless knows, and in numerous other works such as the above Kreeft's collaborative work with Ronald Tacelli SJ, A Handbook of Catholic Apologetics.

I leave these aside because I want to discuss argument itself. One of the things that I think is of paramount importance here is precisely the power of argument to convince. In the fifth century, a Roman named Boethius, who had been ruined on suspicion of plotting against a usurping, barbarous Emperor, wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy, in which he puts himself into a perspective of (in his own view) appropriate detachment towards earthly fortunes, exploring the whole question of fortune, Divine omniscience, Divine justice, and free will. A historian called Gibbon, several centuries later, sneered at it, saying that ideas had no power to subdue the human heart. But another author countersniped, saying that no one ever thought they would subdue Gibbon's, but it sounded as though they had done something for Boethius -- leaving out the implication that since Boethius was the one who was both suffering and sublimating that suffering into philosophy, we might perhaps give Boethius more credit than Gibbon for knowing what he was talking about.

I am not altogether sure whether everybody can process ideas the way Boethius did: internalizing them until they really and truly have the power to change, even heal, the soul. But I think a lot of people can, and I suspect that a lot of people who think they can't, can. I don't believe ideas are mere abstractions. I am enough of a Platonist to believe in the independent reality of certain archetypes -- ideas exist just as men exist. And men can relate to ideas as men relate to one another; I have been in love, more than once, and I have observed that something of the same feeling runs through romantic love as runs through the serious contemplation of certain ideas. Beauty, for instance, and justice, and love itself. It is of course this which makes the line in V For Vendetta so perfect -- ideas really are bulletproof.

It is because of this that I was willing to be persuaded even in the midst of anguish. It wasn't simply that the anguish didn't count. It was that the truth was not just weightier than the anguish, but more radiant: more real.

*I get the impression from my very sparse reading on this subject that the great African saint, when he said in Latin memoria, meant not so much what we mean when we say memory, as something more along the lines of what we express by the word consciousness; but I am not competent to address the question.
**Not to be confused with its popular vulgarization, the argument from design. Intelligent Design theorists seem to waffle between the cosmological argument proper and the vulgarized form, which maintains not only that there is order in the universe but that that order is beneficent. The existence of order is quite easy to prove, and the beneficence of that order more or less impossible to prove. It has therefore been subjected to scorn by scientific materialists and also by some theists, with some justice.

Quotation: Brideshead Revisited

On Wednesdays I usually post reblogs or songs I like. Today I'm putting up a passage from Evelyn Waugh's magnificent Brideshead Revisited, which I just finished. Spoiler alert, it is from the last chapter of the novel. If you don't believe in books, the BBC miniseries with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews is outstanding and accurate.

"I didn't know till today. Oh, my dear, if you could only understand. Then I could bear to part, or bear it better. I should say my heart was breaking, if I believed in broken hearts. I can't marry you, Charles; I can't ever be with you again."
"I know."
"How can you know?"
"What will you do"
"Just go on -- alone. How can I tell you what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from his mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable -- like things in the schoolroom, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with -- the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's. Why should I be allowed to understand that, and not you, Charles? It may be because of mummy, nanny, Cordelia, Sebastian -- perhaps Bridey and Mrs. Muspratt -- keeping my name in their prayers; or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, he won't quite despair of me in the end.
"Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand."
"I don't want to make it easier for you," I said; "I hope your heart may break; but I do understand."

All Roads Lead To, Part III: The Monster In the Dungeon

Go here for Part I, and here for Part II.

While my mind went its way through intellectual labyrinths, there was also a horrible secret inside me. I kept it as secret as I could -- notwithstanding a few people's accidental discoveries of it.

I had been anticipating adolescence for years before it arrived. I was excited at the prospect of falling in love, getting married, raising a family; I wanted a lot of kids. The pageantry of the wedding was an exciting thought, too; which might have tipped me off, if I hadn't been so generally odd anyway.* But when adolescence did arrive, my interest in girls was minimal even at its highest ebb, and even then it was emotional, not sexual -- indeed, when I learned about sex, and when I looked at girls as a teenager, I was nonplussed that other guys were apparently so thrilled about this. Good for them, I supposed, though not without twinges of jealousy that they were in on a secret I couldn't understand. What happened to me was a slowly flowering interest, one that abruptly burst into an overpowering, intoxicating bloom, in those other guys. I didn't grasp what it was at first; for a brief period I wondered whether it was a private idiosyncrasy -- perhaps it was rather funny. Perhaps it was quite innocent.

But it wasn't long before I had learned -- without deliberately revealing my quirk to anyone -- that it was a dangerous, horrible, wicked thing. Something to be disgusted at and ashamed of. Something punishable, in the Scriptures, by death.

So I shut that monstrosity in a dungeon, deep in the recesses of my heart. It was very accessible; I visited the monster daily, fascinated as I was by its appearance. Fascinated, too, by why it was a monster, which I didn't understand. But I was the only one with the keys. I unlocked it for visitors, on a very few occasions; but the monster was to be kept out of sight, while I sent my intellect as a knight-errant to find some way of breaking the spell that was, evidently, upon it, to turn it back into a person. God only knows how ferociously I searched for a cure. I was in counseling for that very purpose (among others) for three years; I read every book I could lay my hands on, which wasn't very many, and those were remarkably poor. Once I got to college, I dabbled in Exodus, the famous ex-gay ministry** run by Alan Chambers; I attended seminars at retreats; I immersed myself in prayer and the Scriptures and accountability groups and devotionals.

Changing from gay to straight didn't happen. What did happen was an increasing, devouring hatred of myself. A lot of people told me that the problem was "identifying as gay," but it wasn't. Mere vocabulary was not what was making me scared to be alone, because I might fall; what was making my face hot with shame and self-disgust, whenever I saw a guy who was even moderately attractive; what made me take a knife to my flesh, because I was such a repulsive thing; what made me hope that God would kill me in my sleep.

And then I would wake up, morning after morning. Still me. Still gay. And I'd swallow the bitter disappointment of being alive, and brace myself for the restless anguish that the next eighteen hours were going to be. All that before even getting out of bed.

No, it wasn't because I was using the word gay. It was because of the church.

Note that I say church, not Church: the latter I use specifically of the Catholic Church, and I don't hold her peculiarly responsible. Note also that I say church, not doctrine: I don't know that my difficulties stemmed from the mere belief that gay sex is wrong. But the actual conduct of Christians -- I don't even know what was worst. The universal assumption that everybody either was, or could become, straight, and that the only fate anybody needed preparation for was marriage? The vitriol, repeated in every magazine, every pamphlet, every conversation it sometimes seemed, directed at The Gays And Lesbians? The categorical (and, to me, still baffling) hostility to coming out of the closet, up to and including punishing us when we did -- bizarrely combined with an almost technical pity applied to homosexuals, within or without the church? They're so brave to leave The Lifestyle, someone might say; and then, almost in the same breath, Can't Those People see how disgusting it is? And then the stereotypes of masculinity and effeminacy, the AIDS statistic scare tactics, the arguments linking homosexuality to drug abuse and pedophilia and suicide. Was any of that supposed to be helpful? With all that piled on them -- that's what people like you are like -- who wouldn't daydream about working up the nerve to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, or cut their flesh because the physical pain was a welcome and relieving distraction from the incessant psychic pain of being a pervert?

Why couldn't You just leave us alone? I thought, over and over; at times I think so still. We aren't hurting anybody. We just want to be left alone.

The church fell down on the job. What should be one of the safest places in the world for a hurting, scared teenager to simply tell the truth, has become the one of the most terrifying, and everyone knows exactly why. Or if they don't, they should.

What has any of this got to do with my conversion to Catholicism -- and not only that, but my predilection for traditionalism? Well, a wise priest I know has pointed out that the superabundance of damask and lace at traditional Masses could hardly be expected only to attract heterosexuals.

Nothing fabulous about this.

Yet there is more to it. As usual, I will go into more detail later. But for the present, the chief thing is that this is the person God is working upon. And, I'm sorry, a person's sexuality is inseparable from who they are. It doesn't constitute their identity, true; but to treat it as though it were an extraneous quality is not just insulting, it's deeply damaging. It implies that their most powerful passions and affections are at once filthy and insignificant. Bad or good or indifferent, the one thing that gayness can't be is unimportant. You can say our hearts need fixing; but this is still how they beat.

*Besides, I dare say a lot more heterosexual men than would care to admit it are excited to have the wedding they've been dreaming about ever since they were little girls.
**Famous, or at any rate notorious. I did not know at that time that Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper, two of the ministry's founding members, had left the group (and their wives) to be with each other only three years after Exodus was founded; nor that John Paulk, another once-prominent member, was caught at a gay bar in 2000. Paulk has recently made a public apology for his involvement in ex-gay programs; Cooper and Bussee have also become decades-long critics of Exodus since their departure. Chambers himself has shown a marked withdrawal from orthodox ex-gay thought in recent years, even drawing fire from other prominent figures in the ex-gay movement, such as Anne Paulk, Joe Dallas, Andy Comiskey, and Dr. Robert Gagnon.