The Forked Tongue of Bishop Tobin

He is the son of one Saywell, he dwelt in Prating-row; and he is known of all that are acquainted with him, by the name of Talkative in Prating-row, and notwithstanding his fine tongue, he is but a sorry fellow. … Religion hath no place in his heart, or house, or conversation; all he hath lieth in his tongue, and his religion is to make a noise therewith.

—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

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CW: Sexual abuse and sacrilege.

Bishop Tobin of Providence (of whom I had not heard before) tweeted several days ago that Catholics must not attend gay Pride events, since they are incompatible with Catholicism and harmful to children. He was promptly hung, drawn, and quartered by half the internet.

He deserved it. This is the man also had the gall to say, about a year ago, that back when he was the auxiliary Bishop of Pittsburgh, he did know about cases of child abuse but didn’t do anything about them because ‘My responsibilities … did not include clergy assignments or clergy misconduct … I was not contacted by the Grand Jury, interviewed, nor mentioned in their report [well have a fucking cookie Your Excellency] … In my experience, the Diocese of Pittsburgh has been very responsible and transparent in responding to allegations of sexual abuse’—which is why, when four priests of that diocese took photos of a fifteen-year-old boy stripped naked and posed as Christ crucified, we all learned about it at the time, and not decades later when the truth was forcibly extracted by the pressure of the law and incorporated into the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report. The responsibility and transparency of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, we have these to thank for the fact that Fr Richard Zula was removed from ministry and reported to the authorities the first time a complaint was made about ‘violent sexual activity with a minor,’ as opposed to, say, letting him rake up one hundred and thirty criminal charges and two confessions of his own before informing the authorities. The snake who learned about cases just like these and decided ‘Not my area’ wants to warn us about other people’s conduct being ‘harmful to children.’

Is Bishop Tobin the most hypocritical and corrupt member of the USCCB? I doubt it. Have another cookie.

I was frankly outraged to see Bishop Strickland of Tyler speaking in Tobin’s defense, given that Strickland was one of the few American bishops for whom I had any respect left, since he seemed like he was going to practice some real, public repentance and reform. [1] That list is now down to pretty much just Bishop Persico of Erie, who actually met with the Grand Jury and has made some concrete effort to deal with his diocese’s guilt. Whether Tobin's right (which, no) is irrelevant. After the way he's behaved, he, like many, many other Catholic bishops, should be deposed and degraded yesterday.

I remain a Catholic (one with sins of my own that I cannot take back) by God’s grace. Nothing else. As Flannery O’Connor said, the one thing that makes the Church bearable is that she feeds us Jesus. Literally, and in spite of herself.

It rips me up inside to think of people who lose that because the behavior of her priests was so sick and sadistic, and that of her bishops so self-centered and cowardly, that they couldn’t bear to be near it. Those for whom a golden cross evokes memories not of the gift of the Eucharist or the tender Heart that endured the Passion, but of unwanted hands and tongues and eyes. And it disgusts me that there are still Catholics willing to go to bat for the same bishops who allowed this stuff to go on unchecked, these hirelings that care nothing for the sheep, and blame those who leave for being driven away.

I’m staying. I’m staying for the Eucharist, which is Jesus. I hope those who have been driven away come back for Jesus. But I don’t blame them for running from the wolves; nobody should. Nor do I blame them for not trusting shepherds (hell, I don’t trust shepherds), when they know shepherds chiefly as men who bring wolves into the fold and tell everybody they’re sheepdogs.

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[1] In fairness to Bishop Strickland, perhaps he didn’t know about Bishop Tobin’s atrocious remarks last August. They weren’t front-page news.

The Economy of the Cross

August and September's extended conflict between certain authors who shall remain nameless and the Side B/Spiritual Friendship community left me feeling extremely hurt, angry, and bewildered. The refusal to heed explanation and argument from people who live directly in the tension between the queer world and the Church, and are thus more or less forced to know what we are talking about, was the source of the bewilderment; the hints at heresy despite our unanimous orthodoxy, and the apparently total and callous disregard for the devastating effects of their language on actual gay-identifying people, especially young people, was the the source of the anger and the hurt. Ron and Beverley Belgau's address at the World Meeting of Families last week helped some -- it felt like a vote of confidence, or at the least a listening ear (which is one of the things we have so largely been crying out for), on the part of the bishops to invite them.

But the fact that there are so many Catholics out there who would rather scold and judge us, not even for our failures, but for whether and how we talk about the mere fact of being gay, is a long-standing bitterness to me. I suppose it makes sense that the devoutly religious should be among those who accuse, rather than those who help to shoulder the cross. "Shut up and carry your cross like the others," a constant refrain of these writers and their commenters, is the language of the soldiers, not of St Veronica or the Mother of Sorrows; and it rightly provokes disgust and indignance in those who encounter it, and has scandalized some to the point of heresy or apostasy.

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure 

heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem 

the Arabian: were doubtless men of public spirit and zeal.

Preserve me from the enemy who has something to gain:

and from the friend who has something to lose ...

-- T. S. Eliot, Choruses from "The Rock," V.1-3

But my own self-righteous craving for not only vindication but revenge -- that our, and my, opponents should be not only corrected (which need not be a wholly arrogant desire, though it is usually mixed with arrogance), but embarrassed in the process (which is always an evil desire) -- is certainly no better. Stewing over the faults of others, real or imagined, is wrong; it's what moral theologians call morose delectation, a common flaw of religious people like me, and of many people with an idealistic streak like mine. It's a great way to nurture hatred, sullenness, nasty-mindedness, and self-conceit -- including, interestingly, the decision that we are martyrs. For of course, the mark of a martyr is that he suffers for God, in Himself and in the martyr's fellow-man, and bears these sufferings out of love. But it is perfectly possible to parody the sufferings of the martyr for the sake of our own diabolical ego. Indeed, that sort of spiritual corruption is one of the greatest dangers of the spiritual life, partly because it can be difficult to detect and, correspondingly, difficult to cure.

Thank God for the bottomless wells of grace -- that is, of His Being, of the divine life -- that He shares with us. For that is really and truly the only remedy; no amount of self-examination can assure any improvement, however much it helps.

Trying to find some right, loving way of responding, even if that response were only keeping silence, drew my mind to the whole economy of the Cross on which the Kingdom of Heaven (that is, the Church) operates. In his short book He Came Down from Heaven,* Charles Williams points out the striking contrast between the proclamation of St John the Baptist and the gospel of Christ proper:

What, apart from the expectation of the Redeemer, was the gospel of the Precursor? It was something like complete equality and temporal justice, regarded as the duty of those who expect the Kingdom. What has happened to that duty in the gospel of the Kingdom?

Titian, St John the Baptist in the Desert, ca. 1542

The new gospel does not care much about it. All John's doctrine is less than the least in the Kingdom. It cannot be bothered with telling people not to defraud and not to be violent and to share their superfluities. It tosses all that sort of thing on one side. 

... What then of all the great tradition, the freeing of slaves at the Exodus, the determination of the prophets, the long effort against the monstrous impiety of Cain? The answer is obvious; all that is assumed as a mere preliminary. The rich ... are practically incapable of salvation, at which all the Apostles are exceedingly astonished. Their astonishment is exceedingly funny to our vicariously generous minds. But if riches are not supposed to be confined to money, the astonishment becomes more general.

The long tradition of Christianity as the unofficial but real civil religion of Western society has muddied this a great deal. When the same institution that was premised upon transcending the law must also make itself responsible for first instructing people in the law, and must accordingly develop an intricate body of knowledge and technique for doing so, to say nothing of the rules it has to develop to govern its own worldwide operations -- well, keeping the natural and the supernatural distinct from, yet in contact with, each other is fantastically difficult; as difficult as understanding the simultaneous distinction and union of the human and the divine in Christ. Apollinaris, Nestorius, and the rest didn't fall into heresy out of mere inattentive stupidity. It is horribly easy to suppose that a properly Christian society, or a properly Christian individual, substitutes explicit and pushy religiosity for all other cultural or personal substance, or that the "moral values" of the faith are the thing for which it's chiefly important (as though non-Christians didn't have moral values!).**

An age like our own, in which Christianity has largely but not entirely ceased to be the civil religion, and in which, at the same time, the actual moral standards of society have shifted significantly, is practically begging for believers to confuse natural morality and supernatural grace. But they are as different as they always have been. Natural morality operates on the economy of law, of wrong and right in action and intent; and we cannot do without it, as we cannot do without food. But we can no more treat law as grace than we can treat the Blessed Sacrament as ordinary bread.

Kyri-o's: Intinction never tasted so good.

The economy of law knows justice as its highest virtue, and, when wronged, seeks only recovery and redress; many versions of "forgiveness," like the kind that seeks to forgive because it relieves the stressful distraction of resentment, belong to this economy rather than the other -- i.e., trying to use the golden paving stones of the Heavenly Jerusalem to pay for anti-anxiety meds.

But that is not the economy of the Cross. Its operations are the operations of the Holy Ghost, who cannot be detected, still less caught, by human means. It isn't only that you can't buy grace with money or good looks; you equally can't buy it with intelligence or good character. Truthfulness, patience, kindness, and yes, chastity may all be animated by grace; none of them can earn it.

And that economy, of grace from without, and, with it, of forgiveness and good will towards all others, as universal as that which God showers upon us, is step one of the Christian faith. We don't get to make exceptions based on how horrible somebody was to us. Whether their behavior was, or is, really and truly worse than ours doesn't enter into it; that is a return to the economy of law, of relative goodness and debts owed and just deserts. The first movement of grace is to cancel, not simply our own debts, but debts; currency is made meaningless for the Christian, save insofar as its beauty can furnish decoration to lay beneath our feet. To insist on My Rights and My Wrongs is, simply and to that extent, to excuse oneself from the economy of the Cross. Everything is gift, and so, unrepayable.

What then of our injuries? Well, admittedly, the wind bloweth where it listeth, and we do not all receive the same graces or receive them on the same schedule. We shouldn't presume on our strength, and there are times when we may and must withdraw ourselves from being injured further. But, to return to Charles Williams:

The new way of pardon is to be different from the old, for the evil is still to be known. It is known, in what follows, by the Thing that came down from heaven. ... It remains still exclusive and inclusive; it excludes all consent to the knowledge of evil, but it includes the whole knowledge of evil without its own consent. It is 'made sin,' in St Paul's phrase. 

... Men had determined to know good as evil; there could be but one perfect remedy for that -- to know the evil of the past itself as good, and to be free from the necessity of the knowledge of evil in the future; to find right knowledge and perfect freedom together; to know all things as occasions of love. 

... It was not inappropriate that the condition of such a pardon should be repentance, for repentance is no more than a passionate intention to know all things after the mode of heaven, and you cannot know evil as good if you insist on knowing it as evil. Pardon, as between any two beings, is a reidentification of love ... It is all very well for the Divine Thing of heaven to require some kind of intention of good, not exactly as a condition of pardon but as a means of the existence of its perfection. Men were never meant to be as gods or to know as gods, and for men to make any such intention a part of their pardon is precisely to try to behave as gods. It is the renewal of the first and most dreadful error, the desire to know as gods ... [I]t is precisely the attempt to convert the Godhead into flesh and not the taking of the manhood into God. The intention to do differently may be passionately offered; it must never be required ... The ancient cry of 'Don't do it again' is never a part of pardon.

This is a hard saying. It is, also, hardly more than a commentary on the dictum that we must forgive our brother seventy times seven times. Only Dory and that guy from Memento could do that while also expecting of the offender that he not repeat the offense.

[Image: a devout penitent leaving the confessional]

Grace to others isn't optional. It is the stuff of the life of faith. It is Jesus in action. If we don't know how to show it, or try and can't manage, that's okay; God is not as a rule taken by surprise. We can be weak. We can be one big, gaping, aching need. But what we can't do is refuse grace to others. I admit frankly that I am, for now and probably for a long time yet, avoiding the unnamed authors from my opening paragraph; I have not succeeded in forgiving them, and I can't do it by myself; thankfully God is not bound by my powerlessness. But to forgive, to love, and to want reconciliation -- even if the other party refuses -- is the goal we must have in every conflict. The meanwhile of that, we can offer up to God in unity with the Cross. Every economy has production and consumption; the pain and the hope are our raw material, and love is the refinery.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His,
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, ll. 9-14

*Unfortunately I don't have my copy at hand as I write this, so I can't provide page references.

**The regular recitation of the Athanasian Creed, wisely enjoined upon Anglicans by the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, might -- if it had been rightly used -- have done something to prevent this, with its often dull but soundly detailed definition of the Incarnation. Dorothy Sayers' excellent essay on the subject (and on the general fiercely practical character of theology) can be found here, and in her excellent collection of essays Creed or Chaos?

An Apologia for the Romantic Way

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkinde

That from the Nunnerie

Of thy chaste breast and quiet minde

To Warre and Armes I flie. 

True; a new Mistresse now I chase,

The first Foe in the Field;

And with a stronger Faith imbrace

A Sword, a Horse, a Shield. 

Yet this inconstancy is such

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee (Dear) so much

Lov'd I not Honor more. 

-- Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta, Going to the Warres, 1649

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1870

Before I differ from Tyler Blanski's article The Protohomosexual of a few weeks ago, I'd like to note an important agreement between us. He writes movingly in his final subsection ("We Are Oriented") of the intrinsic human impulse toward sexuality-as-procreation. There are other reasons that we are interested in sex, obviously, and other ways in which we display the urge to create; about the only thing we are told in Genesis about God, before being told that we are made in His image, is that He is a maker, and our creative drive is in a sense our most thoroughly human attribute. We share freedom and intellect with the angels, and we share body and social instinct with animals; but creativity appears to be a distinctly human phenomenon, and in sexual reproduction, every level of our being -- spiritual and animal -- is involved at once. No wonder it's so pleasurable, and so complicated.

So, as a philosopher* and as a Catholic, there is important overlap between Blanski's views and mine. And, in the last resort, I hold that that overlap is weightier than our divergence, not only because we are both Catholics (and therefore agree about things beside which even sexuality is almost trivial), but because our views of this topic are, I think, more similar to one another than either is to contemporary secular orthodoxy.

That said, there is a difference, and it is important.

Blanski, in seeking to answer the question of why so many straight people are pro-gay, turns to the Western romantic tradition, and particularly to the revolutionary shift that took place in the movement of Courtly Love. Of course, classical antiquity and the early Mediaevals knew perfectly well that people sometimes fall in love, but it hadn't been customary to admire them for it -- largely because no one can help observing that people make some absolutely terrible decisions under the influence of erotic love. The twelfth-century poets of Courtly Love practically invented a new way of looking at eros, of which the Arthurian tradition (especially the story of Guinevere and Lancelot) is probably the best-known modern survival among English speakers. It became a sort of erotic cult: the devotee considered himself the slave of his lady, and his love for her mixed the romantic with the worshipful. The Church was scandalized more than once by the tradition of Courtly Love; and, for their part, the troubadours were divided among themselves: some counted themselves dutiful sons of the Church, while others preferred to flaunt their dedication to their ladies as against the faith.

Edmund Blair Leighton, The Accolade, 1901

That lovers are inclined to rebel against any limits on their devotion is, of course, human nature, and did not begin with Courtly Love. What those poets did introduce was a quasi-religious attitude in which the service of the beloved became a kind of separate moral dispensation, one that could override other ethical principles. And it is this characteristic of Courtly Love which Blanski fixes his argument upon, citing its tendency toward narcissism, its removal of eros from the realities of daily life, its readiness to deceive and to betray, its dismissal of children from lovers' concerns, its general lawlessness. All of this forms it (Blanski argues) into a proto-homosexual disposition; i.e., it turns sexual love into an end in itself, instead of a means to the creation of the family, and therefore containing in itself the seeds to the modern LGBT rights movement.

Now, these were real traits of Courtly Love, both in its poetic theory and its lived practice. Nor -- though it has decayed considerably over the last century, largely due to the influence of Marxism (which decries the lover's service to his lady) and many forms of feminism (whose criticisms are more diverse) -- have we seen the end of the erotic tradition the troubadours gave birth to. But Courtly Love was not as simple as Blanski implies, nor can it be dismissed as summarily as he seems to want to do. The vigorously Catholic rebuttal to this element of his argument can be summed up in a single word: Beatrice.

Gustave Dore, Paradiso: Canto I, 1868

Dante, perhaps the greatest poet of Western history, didn't just write the Inferno. It was preceded by La Vita Nuova, which chronicled his earlier acquaintance with and love for Beatrice, and followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso, in which she comes to him after her death and rescues him by grace and illumination. And the common thread that runs through all of them is precisely: Courtly Love, employed by a wholly orthodox Catholic, as a way of the soul to God. Beatrice is Dante's beloved, and she functions to him, from the first moment of their meeting, as an image of Christ. In her, Dante beheld the glory of the Creator; her mere presence is enough to fill him with humility, joy, and love, and he responds neither with rejection nor with idolatry, but with veneration -- that kind of mingled delight and awe that we pay to the angels and the saints. Many lovers have felt it, and it can be used as a way of seeing God; like anything can.

Using erotic love as a way of the soul has its dangers: covert narcissism, overt idolatry, foolishness, lust, impatience. They must be acknowledged, and the professed romantic must be as cognizant of these dangers, as firm in his purpose, and as faithful to the doctrines and the sacraments, as the professed religious brother or sister has to be. But none of this renders it unusable as a way of the soul, nor, I believe, should erotic love be dismissed or hedged off as something that only great souls may attempt. Greatness and sanctity come from devoting oneself to the Way,** not as pre-existing superiorities that justify the use of the Way.

Incidentally, Dante's love for Beatrice illustrates the antidote to what I believe Blanski's error to be. Both Dante and Beatrice were married to other people, yet there is no hint that Dante regarded this as at all relevant. This is not because they were adulterous and simply didn't care: there's no evidence that they had anything but the most casual contact -- he himself reports going into raptures when, after nine years of acquaintance, Beatrice condescended to say hello to him in the street one day. Dorothy Sayers, in her introduction to her translation of the Purgatorio, that this love

is not the febrile anguish of the death-Eros, in which possession forever mocks desire; nor yet the simple and affectionate exchange which does not look beyond possession. It is in fact not concerned with possession one way or the other, though it may survive loss. It is a love whose joy -- and therefore whose fulfillment -- consists in the worshipful contemplation of that which stands over and above the worshipper. True to its origins in courtly love, it finds its entire happiness in being allowed to do homage to its acknowledged superior. ... If earthly love, as such, is but a type and an overflowing of our innate (though it may be unrecognized) desire for God, then it is inevitable that there should always be something in its nature which transcends and eludes possession.***

The troubadours might have said the same; C. S. Lewis notes in The Allegory of Love that there was debate among them as to whether sexual intimacy with one's lady was the pinnacle of eros, or something beside the point. Dante took the latter view.

As ... seen here? Possibly?

The point is, eros, though it's become linked in our minds with marriage, is really an independent phenomenon. It is not incompatible with marriage; but there is nothing in Scripture, and little in history, to make either one the necessary companion or guardian of the other. The idea that eros necessarily leads to marriage or forms a good foundation for it is, in fact, about as young as words like homosexual and heterosexual. Eros is a tradition that may be entered by any loving soul who will, regardless of the object of love -- conditioned, as Dante's love was, by the same orthodox structure of ethics and economy of sacraments that governs all of Christendom. More briefly, the Romantic Way rightly considered is part of the Way as a whole, and operates on the same principles and within the same limits.

These conditions are not foreign to the tradition of erotic love. Nor is Dante a lonely example; the Cavalier and Metaphysical poets of seventeenth century England were exponents of the same in their own milieu of royalism and romanticism. Poets like John Donne and Richard Lovelace knew well how to combine eroticism with religious devotion, and the divided tongues of fire that we call Baroque art exhibit this synthesis magnificently.

Does this open to door to the possibility of a homoerotic devotion? I believe it does, in principle, though -- since marriage exists in its own right, independently of eros, just as eros exists independently of marriage -- marriage is still defined in its own terms, which, as a Catholic, I admit and even insist are oriented toward the family. Homoeroticism of this kind, used as a way of the soul, would be obliged to renounce sexual intimacy with the beloved. But this is no new idea. Its earliest expression in the West may be Plato's depiction of Socrates' erotic mysticism in the Symposium, and, in one form or another, it has continued, all the way down to (admittedly, sadly obscure) examples like Dunstan Thompson and Philip Trower. The notion that a love which cannot lead to marriage is intrinsically perverse, in my opinion, smacks of a baptized Freudianism that I have no truck with.

What of the Catechism's phrase that same-sex sexual desire is "intrinsically disordered," i.e. a misdirected impulse (like all sexual desire that is in itself unable to issue in life)? Well, that's true. But eros can't be reduced to the desire for sex, and, though it seems it generally does, it doesn't always produce the desire for sexual union with the beloved. I've been in love once or twice without any conscious desire to sleep with the person in question. It wasn't any less or otherwise romantic love on that account.

For eros is not primarily a way of craving, but a way of seeing; and the seen beloved is being seen in her or his archetypal goodness through the lens of erotic love. The beloved may not live up to her or his archetype of possible goodness, and the lover may in one way or another be disobedient to the heavenly vision. But the heavenly vision remains, and the heavenly vision isn't really about sex, even when it's connected to sexual desire. It is, on its minor scale, an intimation of the Beatific Vision, in which seeing is receiving and receiving is loving: None is afore, or after other; none is greater, or less than another; but the whole three Persons are coeternal together, and coequal. And the Romantic Way is defined by a maxim from the same creed: One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of that manhood into God; one altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person. That is, the Way has not been changed in its own nature, so that the beloved is made an idol, but the Way assumes the lowers Ways into Itself, redirecting their natural courses toward a supernatural end -- so that, if we open ourselves by grace to the possibility, all roads lead to that Rome where Christ Himself is Roman.****

From Saint George and the Dragon as told by Margaret Hodges, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.

*I don't mean philosopher here in any technical, still less exalted, sense. I just mean a person who likes to think about how reality works and how we ought to live in it, and really that's a much commoner pastime than we sometimes realize; almost everybody does it, at least a little bit.

**I.e., to any of the specific forms of the Way into God which is God, namely Christ. The way of monastic devotion is one of these ways, and one of the most obvious due to the renunciations it involves. But the other ways, those that accent affirming the image of God in His creation (rather than accenting the distinction of substance between God and His creation), are nonetheless the Way.

***Introduction to Sayers' translation of the Purgatorio, p. 43.

****Dante's Purgatorio XXXII.102.

Arizona Versus Uganda: Which Is Worse?

I wrote a rant yesterday about the ghastly bill signed into law in Uganda recently. I hadn't really finished letting off steam, so I got in touch with a pastor friend of mine and cantankered* at him for twenty minutes or so. As I was finishing off, I said, "It just feels like nobody's listening."

"Can I tell you something?" he asked me.

"Sure."

"Nobody's listening."

How awkward was it, you ask? Look no further.

He went on to give a nod to the controversy surrounding the Arizona bill that Governor Brewer recently vetoed, and similar stories (look at the collective "meh" our society gave to Ellen Page's coming out last week), and the way they saturate so much of our current media. People are sick of hearing about it, he said, and the LGBT community reacts with such ferocity to such minor affronts, it's no wonder that something like the Ugandan situation should hardly merit a blip on their radar.**

Frankly, I kind of agree with him. From what little I can discern of what the Arizona bill actually says, as opposed to what people say about it (and even the link I've provided is partisan -- though, it seems, sound enough -- and doesn't help you find the bill's text easily), I honestly agree with Matt Walsh's view. It may well be that the language of the proposed bill was too broad, but the principle that people should be free to operate their businesses according to their consciences surely stands: private businesses are by definition not departments or extensions of the government, and the First Amendment applies to them as much as to anybody else. You don't charge a Jewish deli with religious bigotry because they won't cater Saturday's pork roast. Likewise, if, say, a gay couple want wedding pictures from a Christian (or Moslem, or Jewish) photographer, and he declines to provide this non-vital good or service, the photographer is within his rights, and the gay couple is perfectly free to find another photographer. The photographer may well also be a jerk about it, either forthrightly or in the privacy of his mind, but there are no laws against jerkdom, nor should there be.

That is the price of a free society. Some people believe that gay marriage, for example, is wrong, and therefore decline to imply otherwise by providing for its trappings; I don't know that I consider such a stand necessary, but other people's consciences are not my business (thanks be to God). However, I am fairly certain that no one's conscience binds them to receive non-vital goods and services from any specific person or business; and I have absolutely no sympathy with the perspective that being inconvenienced by having to find another business to patronize, is an evil commensurate with legally forcing someone else to choose between their principles and their livelihood.

You may, if you like, argue that the price of a free society is not worth paying. But let us at least be clear who is arguing in favor of what.

The fact that this bill, or the off-the-cuff words of the star of Duck Dynasty (who is of no importance whatsoever and never claimed to be), can cause a media sensation, while there has been approximately no reporting on the Ugandan tragedy -- except, as far as I can see, from a small handful of gay Christian blogs like this one, whose interest is topical and long-standing -- is an appalling commentary on the narcissism and frivolity of our nation. It would be pathetic if it weren't so ridiculous, and ridiculous if it weren't so pathetic. That Jim Crow laws have even been brought up in the same context as the Arizona bill is an outrageous insult to the plight that has afflicted blacks in this country, and should have shamed those who mentioned it into silence. Kidnapping, torture, slavery, and disfranchisement are in a different category from even the most intense distress that faces a wedding planner.

Slightly worse than checking the second page of Google search results.

My pastor friend (as I knew, and as he took the trouble of saying for clarity's sake) didn't mean by his remarks that the cruelty of the Ugandan bill was genuinely unimportant; his point was that the childish caterwauling over the Arizona bill, et al., was one of the things that made people, Christians included, unresponsive. The LGBT community has had a hand in making people sick of hearing about this through its own lack of perspective: not the only hand, and it's happened for understandable reasons, but a hand nonetheless. All the more reason to be intellectually and morally rigorous with ourselves first, and only after that start being rigorous with other people.

As for the Christian response, or rather, the lack of it -- I don't know that I can trust myself to write rationally. But I will say that no matter how tired one is of hearing of the afflictions of others, they are important in and of themselves. We are not omnipotent, and must accept that we cannot fix everything or help everyone. But what we must not do is be complacent. What we must not do is regard Uganda, or anything, as merely somebody else's problem.

Pictured: a real place that is not in America.

For Christians, there is no "somebody else." We know all others only through Christ, the Second Adam; we all coinhere with one another in Him, and He is the principle and the Person who interanimates us, all and each; for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. John Donne said it well, in his Meditation XVII, which I have been intoxicated with today:

Perchance hee for whom this Bell tolls, may be so ill, as that he knowes not it tolls for him; And perchance I may thinke my selfe so much better than I am, as that they who are about mee, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The Church is Catholike, universall, so are all her Actions; All that she does, belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concernes mee; for that child is thereby connected to that Head which is my Head too, and engraffed into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a Man, that action concernes me: All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated; God emploies several translators; some peeces are translated by age, some by sicknesse, some by warre, some by justice; but Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie open to one another ...  

If we understand aright the dignitie of this Bell that tolls for our evening prayer, wee would be glad to make it ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might bee ours, as wel as his, whose indeed it is. The Bell doth toll for him that thinkes it doth; and though it intermit againe, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, hee is united to God. ...  

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. ... [I]f by this consideration of anothers danger, I take mine owne into contemplation, and so secure my selfe, by making my recourse to God, who is our onely securitie. 

            At inde                                                         The Bell rings out, and tells
Mortuus es, Sonitu celeri,                                            me in him, that I am dead.
    pulsuque agitato.***

*A verb form of cantankerous that I made up today.

**Go ahead, make the joke, get it out of your system.

***From Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a series of reflections Donne wrote while seriously ill. I've preserved the spelling and use of italics according to the collection I own (which has followed the manuscripts very closely) -- I object to emending authors' work when it isn't strictly necessary, though I have gone as far as to introduce paragraph breaks for the sake of readability. The second paragraph I've quoted, which is perhaps a somewhat dense "Metaphysical" conceit, is using the imagery of a bell summoning us to evening prayers as a symbol of death and of the life beyond death; it is something like, and unlike, Keats' famous lines: Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain. The likeness is plain enough; the unlikeness is that Keats was referring to a purely aesthetic experience (total aesthetic satiation upon hearing a nightingale sing), whereas Donne was looking to the coinherence with God and with mankind-in-God that awaits on the other side. The English lines at the bottom right are a very loose translation of the Latin epigram at the bottom left.

Austin Ruse's "The New Homophiles": A Response

It tickled my vanity to find, through a friend, my own name in (e-)print a few days ago. Crisis Magazine published an article by Austin Ruse, titled "The New Homophiles," reviewing the blossoming gay Catholic movement. I don't know anything about him except what I read in this article, which has already called forth responses from Joshua Gonnerman and Elizabeth Scalia.

It's very odd to read about yourself from an outsider's perspective. Joshua Gonnerman compares the article to an old-fashioned anthropologist's study, in which the customs of a people are described with some detail and some justice, but it doesn't seem to occur to the anthropologist to talk to the people he is studying, or to try using imaginative sympathy. That would be unscientific. Now, to do justice to Ruse, I don't know whether Crisis allows for links to sources, though I'd be surprised if they didn't; but I gather from the aforementioned people, as well as Eve Tushnet and Chris Damian, that Ruse didn't actually speak to any of us before deciding to speak for us. He does admittedly quote us, but the quotes are not referenced or given any context, which leaves me unimpressed, at least with his method.*

I'd like to make several specific replies:

Tushnet is out, proud, celibate, and a Catholic faithful to the Magisterium. Tushnet says she is in love with the Church, its "beauty and sensual glamor." ... Tushnet is a true believer but she also speaks fondly in remembrance of her own lesbian experiences. All this is enough to give faithful Catholics vertigo.

Not to quibble, but a moment ago he just described her as a faithful Catholic, too. I assume, then, that by this he means faithful Catholics who also happen to be heterosexual; but Elizabeth Scalia (whom he has, for reasons best known to himself,** declared the "Momma Bear" of the New Homophiles) isn't a lesbian, and she specifically states in her own reply that it doesn't give her vertigo. What I think I sense here -- and one of the things that I tend to write about a lot here -- is a conflation of faithful Catholicism with social conservatism. The two gel quite nicely in many respects; but they are not the same thing, and shouldn't be treated as the same thing. Indeed, I think that the traditional alliance between conservatism and Catholicism (if we may call something traditional that has only been a social phenomenon for forty or fifty years) is going to become more of a hindrance than a help in the next decade, if it hasn't already.

One thing that social conservatism is unused to is, well, the LGBT movement. About the only category that conservatism has for openly gay people seems to be, roughly, Dan Savage: highly political, hostile to Christianity and especially the Catholic Church, and rather rude. And admittedly very unlike Eve Tushnet. Also, as it happens, unlike most gay people; we're really just people, except gay. Being gay -- that is, attracted to the same sex -- is our only distinguishing feature. Granted, that means we have a lot of shared experiences, but only in the same sense that heterosexuals have a lot of shared experiences.

She [Elizabeth Scalia] likely understands how difficult this new message is for the kind of Catholics who read her.

Here, I have to confess I lack due sympathy. And I don't mean that simply as a passive-aggressive "That's your problem"; I mean that the problem is legitimate, and I am really not good at sympathizing with it, which is a shortcoming of mine.

At the same time -- there are people killing themselves over this. My own outlook is of course jaundiced, not least because I have considered suicide. The woes of Catholics who are being asked to think outside of their accustomed boxes (without questioning Church teaching), are something that I have great difficulty even imagining, and whether I'm being fair or not, I am at any rate sick to death of the awkward feeling that some people get over a point of view, one just as orthodox as theirs, being given the lion's share of consideration in this discussion, by people who voice no interest in even understanding what it's like to deal with what we deal with on a daily basis.

Gay exceptionalism and charism are a regular theme for the New Homophiles. Gabriel Blanchard who calls himself a "gay, anarchist Christian" ... claims gay exceptionalism allows gays to have "lower tension in dealing with the opposite sex" and "a more intuitive understanding of certain forms of mysticism." Perhaps.

That I claim gay exceptionalism is news to me, chiefly because I don't know what that means. Exception to what? It comes in the context of a quote from Larry Kramer, a gay playwright who used that phrase; but I don't really understand what he meant by it, either.

My own words cited here, from my post Rethinking My Gay Celibacy, I would tend to stand by; though they did come before an important turning point in my blog, and, again, are cited without the context that gives them their real meaning. (Not that I would wish to accuse Ruse of distorting me -- I don't think he has; just that what I say sounds sort of arbitrary in the truncated form in his article. It bears saying, though, that Chris Damian has complained of being misrepresented in this article, and, having read the blog post from which Ruse quotes, it must be said that the point being made was that it doesn't truly matter whether Newman was what we'd call gay or not.)

The New Homophiles believe because of their gayness they have a unique ability to build close friendships, something that is lacking in our modern age.

This is also news to me. I do think we have a peculiar tendency to form deep friendships, but that has more to do with the fact that, since we don't normally have an erotic outlet (to the extent that we are living in accord with the Church's teaching), we're likelier to pour a lot more of ourselves into friendships than our married friends tend to. There's quite a difference, though, between that sort of generalization and the thesis that we have an innate talent for forming profound friendships as a natural corollary of being gay. That might also be true; I have no idea.

They are inspired by the works of St. Aelred of Rievault, a twelfth century Abbot and writer ... Aelred has been adopted by many gays, some of whom celebrate his feast day. Some claim he was gay though gays have a penchant for claiming historical figures as gay, often with little real evidence.

Admittedly, and that tendency annoys me too; though it could equally be said of Catholics that we love claiming people we like as being "so Catholic" in this or that way, sometimes in defiance of their actual profession (C. S. Lewis is a good example). In both cases, that's just the normal human instinct of liking it when someone seems to be on your team, so to speak; that isn't a specifically gay failing.

However, there is in fact concrete evidence that St. Aelred was gay (though of course, since the concept of a gay identity didn't then exist, he wouldn't have put it that way). Melinda Selmys mentions it in passing in her second comment on this post on her blog. Some of us are indeed inspired by St. Aelred -- Spiritual Friendship, founded by the formidable Ron Belgau and Wesley Hill, is a splendid example -- but this has to do with his teaching precisely on friendship and its importance in a healthy spiritual life; it isn't necessarily linked to whether he was what we'd call gay or not. (I do celebrate his feast day, but that's because I'm Anglican Use and inclined to be pedantic, not because I'm gay.)

Their ideal is that you can draw close to someone of the same sex, love them intimately and intensely, yet never cross the line into sexual activity. ... But here they are playing with the hottest of fires. Perhaps this is possible for Christ and for saints like Newman but for others it could be a serious problem. This is why married men should avoid intimate friendships with women and why priests should also. This is why married men and priests who form intimate friendships with women often lose their way and ruin their vocations.

Well, again, it's news to me that we all have the same ideal, and that this is that ideal. Perhaps we had a group meeting to which I wasn't invited. Now, it so happens that I do think that the kinds of relationships he seems to be talking about here are possible -- I know more than one couple who are making precisely that experiment. But it's scarcely our defining trait. Some of us don't in fact think it wise; others of us are romantically as well as sexually celibate; some of us, like Melinda Selmys or Kyle Keating, are married.

But let's linger over the point a bit. To begin with, I have to agree with this essay (by Melinda Selmys, it so happens) that this perspective on relationships is kind of foreign to me. Perhaps I'm secretly Canadian or something. I gather that this wasn't normal a generation or two ago, but among my generation, it is completely unremarkable to have close friends of both sexes; and not only are we in fact able to keep all the relevant bits in our pants, but the sexually charged atmosphere imagined to attend such friendships is, if I may trust my experience and that of my friends, quite simply not there.*** The idea that any genitals that can fit together, will, if they have only the time and something to hide behind, strikes me as paranoid and weird.

I have to wonder, too, whether this isn't a partly self-fulfilling prophecy. Name the devil, and he appears. You don't see the phrase often today, but Catholic moralists used to talk about the dangers of "morose delectation": that is, pleasure in thinking and speaking of the wickedness of others. I feel I see a great deal of this in a lot of conservative narratives about those godless liberals sexing each other with their sexy sex orgies all the time, and don't ever put yourself in a position where sex with someone is logically conceivable, because then you're just asking for it.**** One consequence of this -- it certainly has been for me -- is that it not only draws the mind to think about sex more than you would otherwise, but also strengthens the idea that sex is somehow irresistible by any but miraculous force. It is, in both senses of the word, demoralizing. By contrast, I've found that treating sex as simply part of the human experience enables me to realize that, yes, you can also not have sex with someone, even if they're attractive; you can have morals and common sense and everything.

More importantly, I think this approach represents a wrong-headed approach to spirituality. It's so fear based. Take the concession Ruse makes about Christ and certain saints. Well, the Scriptures command us to imitate Christ, and one of the things that a canonization means is precisely that a person is worthy of imitation. If we aren't supposed to imitate Christ and the saints, then who the hell can we imitate? Backing away from sins, and even from risks, is an obvious but wrong strategy. It is pursuing God that matters, not avoiding sin as though non-sin were an end in itself. Pursuing God always means taking some risks, and often means taking very big ones. And when we consider that we are talking precisely about building human relationships here, which are the context in which the love of God is normally expressed (as the dreadful parable of the Sheep and the Goats makes plain), I think we need to consider what we do to ourselves when we refuse to form relationships, too. After all, it is pride, not lust, that is the root of sin.

All that being said, I would add that I'm not unaware of the risks involved in this kind of thing. I attempted just this kind of relationship, and I did ruin it precisely with a selfish, stupid decision that I made because of lust. I regret that decision, the wound I inflicted on a man who was my dearest friend, and the consequent shattering of that relationship, every single day. I'm not saying there is no risk in that direction, or that the risk isn't important. What I am saying is that that is only one dimension of the issue, and possibly not even the most important one.

Other experts at lay celibacy include every faithful Catholic who has never been married ...

Well, two things. First of all, this seems to me to be a massive oversimplification. Just because you're in a situation doesn't mean you understand it (a paradox I know only too well); let alone understanding anybody else's situation. And secondly, if he really means "every" here, then we New Homophiles count. We believe the Church's teaching, we're trying to live it out, and we're mostly unmarried.

There is also something narcissistic about this claim of gay-exceptionalism, that they are experiencing things no others have ever experienced, or that they have unique gifts given to them by dint of their sexual orientation.

Ouch. I mean, I don't think this is at all fair to most of us; but for me, that barbed arrow hit home. Anyone who has spent a little time with me thinks I'm a self-centered show-off. Anyone who has spent a little more time with me sees I actually do have a lot of self-esteem issues and the like. Anyone who has spent a little more time with me still, knows that they were right the first time. I write for other reasons too, but, yeah, this one I have to concede.

What they want more than anything is a development of doctrine.

I think that's fair. I tend to speak more about a difference in spiritual style, especially when it comes to evangelism. Certainly I believe that a lot of concepts that right now are held suspect or even categorically dismissed by most Catholics, such as sexual orientation, are actually useful and helpful, if only as mental tools to help us sort of the lived experience of LGBT people. I think, too, that the language we use -- not the essential message, but the language -- has serious defects, not because of internal problems, but because of the divergence between what the Church means by certain words and what the culture at large means by them. And the thing is, when it comes to evangelism, it is we who need to go to the world. We don't get to just sit around waiting for them to recognize how right we are because they finally got around to reading a theological dictionary. It is we who must translate our language, not because Catholicism isn't right, but because it is, and its rightness is being obscured by terminological discrepancies between the Church and the culture. When that is kind of the barrier we're dealing with, stubbornness over terms suggest pride and laziness rather that steadfastness about the truth. Those outside cannot be expected to just intuit what we mean, or to just see instinctively how important it is to investigate the Catholic faith.

After all, there are good men and women trying to be faithful but who reject the gay identity, and others who are trying to deal with the psychological genesis of unwanted same-sex attraction, a process the New Homophiles largely dismiss.

When the head of the largest ex-gay organization in the world shuts it down and publicly apologizes for it, I feel fairly comfortable saying that the ex-gay movement is discredited. At least, discredited to the extent that association with it causes scandal; scandal being a worry I've heard about an awful lot in connection with being a Catholic who identifies as gay. I've written about the theoretical problems that I at any rate have with ex-gay theory before, as well as of the severe practical problems that have plagued the ex-gay movement since its inception, and the fact that I don't see much point in it. This is not mere casual dismissiveness; these are grave objections to the philosophical groundwork of the ex-gay movement and its actual results in people's lives, borne not only of abstract analysis but of personal experience.

However, I think I tend to be on the more emphatically queer end of our little Catholic rainbow anyway (other than Aaron S-C of An English Gay Catholic; I am perhaps the indigo to his ultraviolet). En masse, I don't get the impression that most of us set as much store by gay identity as I tend to, or are as hostile to attempts at conversion therapy as I am. What does definitely seem true is that the subject really doesn't interest us. I am inclined to view it as a subtler, baptized form of precisely the same sex-worship that pervades American culture in general, at least insofar as it's aimed at making us suitable for Christian marriage. But, whether that's a fair or accurate evaluation or not, neither conversion therapy nor opposition to it is a main concern for any of us, as far as I can tell; neither is how people identify or describe themselves vis-a-vis sexuality. What we're concerned with is how to play the hand God has dealt us, not whether it's possible to swap some cards.

I must admit I started out annoyed.

Don't feel bad; I'm annoyed, too.


*Fortunately for me, I have never misrepresented anyone or forgotten anything or made any mistakes, ever.

**To be clear, I would be perfectly happy for her to be given this title: she's a thoughtful, rational, devout writer whose work I greatly enjoy, and she has written of us with great kindness and intelligence.

***Obviously, as a gay man whose friends are very largely straight men and some women (I don't run to stereotype in the female friends department, for whatever reason), my experience here is going to be shaped by that. But I'm taking into account my friendships with other gay and bisexual men, Christian and non-Christian, and also both my observations of my friends and the things they straight-up tell me.

****I have tried to think of some way of removing the double entendres from this sentence. There is no way.

Raw Tact, Part XI: Prolegomena to Any Future Gay-Christian Dialogue

This is my final installation in the Raw Tact series. The chief purpose of this series, throughout, has been to facilitate gay-Christian dialogue. I admit that I have developed an aversion to the word "dialogue"; it seems like it's become one of those Christian-hipster catchwords.

I'm trying to live an emergent missional paradigm that imbues ancient-future values into an intentional community.

On the other hand, it's probably a little rich of me to be annoyed by other Christian hipsters. (Or maybe it's the crowning jewel of my Christian hipsterdom.) In any case, dialogue seems like the most serviceable word.

For it is dialogue, rather than dogmatics, that I think useful and desirable here. Now, there can (in my view) be no meaningful dialogue between people without defined beliefs, if only because in that case they have nothing to discuss; and dialogue is, as the word suggests, bidirectional* -- I want the gay community to listen to the Church quite as much as I want the Church to listen to the gay community. But the point is that I feel strongly that the Christian approach to queer issues has, with whatever good intentions, been seriously misguided, from the Sexual Revolution up to now. And it is especially gay Christians (I Tiresias, throbbing between two lives**) who have to pay for that.

I've stated before my affirmation of Catholic teaching, on this subject as on all, which follows from my belief in the Church's infallibility. But that applies to her teaching, not to its application in pastoral practice, and certainly not to the attitudes and behavior of Catholics in general, let alone of Christians in general.

There are many particular mistakes in the Christian (and specifically Catholic) approach to this that I could point to: the dismal failure of the ex-gay experiment, itself largely premised on the profounder mistake of idolizing marriage, to say nothing of homophobia; the damaging and unjust conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia; the nightmarish fact that Christian parents have been known to cold-shoulder, brutalize, and even expel children who admit to same-sex feelings and experiences. But I think that there is a more fundamental error underlying the wrong-headed tactics: one that is much harder to correct and requires in amendment a great deal more humility and love than apologizing for a specific offense.

That fundamental error is that of not listening to the gay community.

Surprisingly, no one's mind was changed after this exchange.

The reasons for this are legion, including some that have an appearance of great wisdom; as that the Church must be wary of the influence of the World. That is quite true. But the World does not only try to influence the Church to dilute her sexual mores and her authority to define them; I think that, in the American churches particularly, it has infected her with its view of success and of "winning" in controversies. Far be it from me to say that, e.g., political stances are unimportant, whether in themselves or as instantiations of religious freedom; but does anyone seriously believe that one single soul would be won by the passage of any law whatsoever? If they do, why do they think that, when the very Torah was powerless to save anybody? If not, why do so many believers give the impression of caring far more about laws than about the people with whom those laws are concerned?

I'd argue for the following basic points, in order, as Christians, to approach gay-Christian dialogue with intelligence and love:

1. Keep always in mind Martin Luther King's powerful saying, "Whom you would change you must first love, and they must know that you love them." And the thing about love is that it isn't conditional. It isn't a matter of loving people because that will change them.*** No change will happen without love, precisely because real love makes space for authentic change by not demanding it, by being present and open to the beloved simply because the beloved is there.

2. Listen before you speak. If your beliefs are settled, you can talk about them any time; they're not going to run away. If your beliefs are not settled, not listening to the group of people whom those beliefs chiefly concern is, well, either foolish or bigoted. By not listening, you're setting yourself up to be powerless to communicate -- you have no frame of reference for what the other person thinks or cares about, or for what language will actually convey your real meaning.

3. Learn to distinguish between being right and knowing what you're talking about. In my experience very few Christians know what they're talking about when it comes to LGBT issues, with the mostly consistent exception of LGBT Christians ourselves (and some of us leave something to be desired). A given moral stance about behavior is one thing. To suppose, based on such a moral stance, that you have the faintest idea what it is like to be one of us -- that is where the clumsiness and offense typically come in, especially when that actual gap in knowledge is filled by assumptions derived from a mixture of media portrayals and aging stereotypes that were shallow and crass even in their own day.

Note the tiny mustache, the age-old visual Esperanto for "creepy pervert."

4. Drop the language war. If "gay" is good enough for the Pope, it's good enough for the rest of us. The Gay Agenda did not persuade people because it stopped using the phrase "same-sex attracted." No one cares except you, and it's making you look hysterical and stupid.**** Considering the disadvantage we're at in proclaiming both Christian love and Christian truth to the culture at large, I don't think we can afford either the energy or the bad rap that this costs us.

5. Drop the social war. I am not saying here that the Church's doctrine does not impinge upon politics or has no right to do so; but I'm not talking here about politics. I'm talking about everyday life. A lot of Catholics seem to think that by doing normal things with LGBT people -- like having a gay couple over for Thanksgiving dinner -- they're somehow lending their approval to a sinful lifestyle. Do you apply that same rubric to literally any other group of people? I damn well hope not. Christ invites us to love as we have been loved, and our sins and shortcomings (many of them unrepented and even unacknowledged) are far more visible to His love than anybody else's are to ours -- yet here He is, in the midst of our messy lives. And if, by being involved in the lives of gay people, we find ourselves accused of being gluttonous men and winebibbers, friends of tax collectors and sinners ... well, I guess we must be wrong then, better cut that out right now.

It may seem strange to some readers that I spend so much more time talking to, and rebuking, fellow Christians, than I do trying to evangelize fellow gays. There are a lot of reasons for that, one of them being that I'm not stupid.

Famous last words.

Fellow gays who are already believers are, well, already believers; and those who aren't, if they read a Christian blog at all, are not likely to be persuaded by a stranger telling them how they ought to conduct their lives, whether he's also gay or not. If I were someone they actually knew, then I would try to live as a witness; but that primarily means displaying love, not proselytizing; and considering my life, I don't know that I dare proselytize anyway. I'm narcissistic like the next guy, but I'm not quite as narcissistic as that.

I've never even attended the VMAs, for one thing.

But there's more to it than that. Christians have a unique calling, and a higher standard of conduct. That the sons and daughters of this age should live as if they were not intimately acquainted with the love of God, that they should prize success and winning a kulturkampf, that they should treat certain groups of people as their enemies, all this is comprehensible. For Christians to do that, when we consider the supernatural Life to which we are called, is squalid and pathetic. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, and our victories are not political or social in character. There is no human being, living or dead, whom we may legitimately hate, even if we may legitimately oppose them in one way or another. Sit back for a moment, and contemplate the fact that Jesus washed the feet of Judas Iscariot, too.

Since childhood, I have seen the interaction between gays and Christians take the form of a culture war. Even as a child, this struck me as utterly nonsensical. Shouldn't we have been expecting to be at a disadvantage, to be shoved aside, to be socially -- perhaps, one day, politically -- disfranchised? Why the shock and outrage? Why not, if we are so convinced we are being persecuted, put the Beatitude that blesses the persecuted into practice? Why not imitate the Apostles, who rejoiced that they had been found worthy to suffer for the Name? It's not like God can't take care of Himself, anyway.

Though He does consistently choose not to.

But. It does take two to tango, and the incredible butthurt that characterizes gay-Christian dialogue is not only the fault of traditional Christians.

I would therefore close on a note of equal appeal to my queer sisters and brothers. I would, first of all, beg forgiveness for our errors and sins, and ask you to believe that, though not all, yet many of those errors and sins were committed out of ignorance and clumsiness rather than spite. I would ask that we be judged individually and on our own merits, not based on your experiences of other people, or worse, what you assume or imagine might well be the case about us. If you revolt at the injustice of other people treating you that way, you must be just as careful not to do it to others; that is only right. I would ask that you take care to understand exactly what we are saying, and to take it from us, rather than relying on hearsay and reacting in anger. I would remind you that some of us, including some traditionalists, are gay ourselves, and are just as hurt by being lumped together with deranged homophobic fanatics as you would be (perhaps, have been) by being lumped together with criminals and lunatics. In a word, I would repeat that "Whom you would change you must first love, and they must know that you love them."

*Heh.

**T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, III.218.

***It should be unnecessary to clarify this (but unfortunately it is necessary): when I speak of "change" I am not taking about reorientation, direct or indirect.

****I'm not saying that language is unimportant or that it doesn't shape how we think; I studied Classics so that I could read the New Testament in the original language. But the particular fight over the word "gay," which is now common parlance to both sides of the A/B divide, and doesn't in fact have any specific philosophical connotations (even if it used to), has become so pointless and pedantic that the only practical effect it has is of making the people who conduct the fight look like homophobes, and, in Louis C. K.'s sense, faggy.

Raw Tact, Part X: Agony, Ecstasy

I've been struggling a lot with depression over the past few weeks. What would have been my anniversary with my ex-boyfriend came up late last month; work has been running me into the ground; and I'm feeling like a real moral no-show -- alternating fits between unchastity and anger, with the occasional nervous breakdown for flavor.

Regrettably, adorable drunk lesbians formed no part of any of this angst.

2013 has been a rough year: a dear friend of our family died, my youngest nephew was born nearly two months premature, one of my sisters had to have her thyroid removed, my car (as of today) is in the shop for the third time in six months, Brett Ratner is still alive.* One of the things I've found disappointing and disconcerting is that, in all of this, my main focus has been on Me: My pain, My loneliness, My holiness, not only in contrast to all the suffering people all around me (that is, everybody), but even in contrast to my family and my friends. In one sense I take that to be a good thing -- I mean, that I'm increasingly aware of my selfishness. Saint John of the Cross says that one of the illuminations Divine grace gives us is an awareness of our imperfections, so that it seems at first as though we are losing ground, simply because we're seeing shortcomings that had escaped our notice before. "Dark with excessive bright Thy skirts appear," Milton says of God somewhere in Paradise Lost** -- the light is so brilliant that, until our eyes adjust, it causes blindness rather than sight. At least, I sure hope that's what's happening.

The question of why I would remain a Catholic through all of this, when I could greatly simplify things by, at the least, renouncing the Church's teaching on sexuality, has been posed to me more than once -- not only by others but by me. The simplest answer is that I'm persuaded that the Catholic faith is true, and with that comes the conviction that the Magisterium is reliable. Any dissent from the substance of her teaching on my part would be intellectually inconsistent, and, for someone built like I am, knowingly engaging in intellectual inconsistency would be the height of dishonor. I can be a whore, and that's one thing; but being a liar -- that would be a far deeper violation. It would remove the conditions by which I am able to sin and still repent, and I need those to function as a Christian. Even, perhaps, to function as a man.

"You think a wife might feel sensitive about her husband's honor -- even if it were sacrificed on her account?" said Miss Stevens. "Well -- I don't know." 

"I should think," said Miss Chilperic, stammering a little in her earnestness, "she would feel like a man who -- I mean, wouldn't it be like living on somebody's immoral earnings?" 

"There," said Peter, "if I may say so, I think you are exaggerating. The man who does that -- if he isn't too far gone to have any feelings at all -- is hit by other considerations, some of which have nothing whatever to do with ethics. But it is extremely interesting that you should make the comparison." He looked at Miss Chilperic so intently that she blushed. 

"Perhaps that was rather a stupid thing to say." 

"No. But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort -- and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment."***

But there's something else going on, too. Something I don't understand, except that I sense its presence, and it is not simply intellectual; it's deeper than that (by which I don't mean it is emotional -- as important as emotions are, they are not more core to a person than the mind, just different). I certainly haven't got the strength, and don't know whether I will receive the grace, to continue on the path of celibacy. But, deep within, something is happening -- God is doing something in the dark.

Man, this guy. He really knew what was up.

Why remain here in the dark -- without hope of marriage or children or earthly happiness or simple rest? So many answers pop up, even within the doctrinal framework I accept, that I just can't espouse: like You could still get married some day, or Everyone experiences loneliness, but it passes, or Celibacy is a beautiful gift from God -- you can do so many things as a celibate that married people can't, or You can adopt, you know, or ... the mind swims in a sea of meaningless encouragements. 

Meaningless, not because any of them aren't true in fact, but because none of them are what I want. When a man wants water, explaining to him that he can have as much steak as he likes is not likely to console his thirst. And what I want is a husband.

And that, on Catholic premises, I cannot have. Not even "am not allowed to." It just plain isn't possible.

I'm sure (on the basis of my theology) that there is some -- how can I put this -- some legitimate meaning in that desire, which I can have; but I don't really know what it is. I have for many years repudiated the ex-gay explanation that it is a confused mixture of the desires for a father, for male friends, and for a wife (because when you put all those roles in a blender, a husband comes out, obviously). Yet in this confusion and uncertainty, I can sense something happening, some activity of God's. I don't get it, and I don't sense it all the time -- in fact, more often than not, I'm simply unhappy. But when I do sense it, it is unmistakeable.

It would be very easy to interpret all this as comforting self-delusion, built to protect me from the vulnerability of a relationship or the risk of questioning my theology. Given that I'm a convert to Rome who passed through Calvinism, atheism, and witchcraft first, and that I've had gay relationships and gay sex, I do not find that way of reading the facts convincing; but you could read them that way if you insisted. What is at least equally interesting is that one can put the shoe on the other foot and read a lot of the LGBT movement as showing signs of an elaborate evasion of God**** -- not so much in its deviation from traditional morality or the explicit irreligion of some of its members, but rather, in its determined exaltation of romantic love as something almost like salvation. And that, I think, is something that a lot of us can sympathize with, gay or straight. Apart from Divine grace, it is called "idolatry," which is open to people of both sexes and all sexualities. With grace, such love can become something more like an icon of salvation, a means of approaching the Creator through the created -- as Dante did with Beatrice.

But I digress. (Maybe.) The point is, such suffering, and being in the dark about it, are not necessarily signs that God is absent, or uncaring, or trying to nudge me to go in a different direction. Christ Himself, in His agony in Gethsemane, shows us that. What God is doing, I don't know, and I don't know what comes next, nor how I will fall and fail. But my faith is in Him and not myself; if He knows, then the person who chiefly needs to know knows. Consoling? Occasionally. The point, whether consoling or not? Yes.

And when I do feel it, when I do receive consolations --

     the fire that breaks from thee then, a billionTimes told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

*Yes I'm still angry; the franchise started so well with X1 and X2, whatever their fridge-logic flaws. And then X3 was -- well, "Everyone says forgiveness is wonderful, until they have something to forgive," C. S. Lewis said.

**I don't know where, because the only place I recall reading this line is in Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost -- oddly, though I have very little taste for Milton, I find Lewis so engaging as a literary critic that I read his commentary over and over again, at least once a year.

***Gaudy Night, pp. 376-377, by Dorothy Sayers, who was incomparably wonderful in all the ways. This is one of my favorite novels, of hers or anybody's, and gave me a clarity about the interplay of heart with intellect and about discernment that I have never gleaned from any deliberately spiritual manual.

****It should go without saying (but regrettably doesn't) that this would not apply to those Christians who, for theological reasons, take a different view of sexuality, like Justin Lee or Matthew Vines. That is also an important dimension of gay-Christian interaction; but it is a different one.