Certain matters of sex and the believing deacon

Over the past few weeks I have been having what I think is a very fruitful dialogue with an old friend, a Christian brother who I love very much. We have been discussing Church teaching on the matter of homosexuality. While I believe and seek to personally adhere to what the Church teaches on matters of sexuality, I don't presume for one moment to have it all figured out.

The immediate cause of our exchange was a homily he heard at Mass in which the preacher, in an apparently very forceful manner, was heard not only to condemn homosexuality, but homosexuals. For a variety of reasons, not least among which his son, a baptized Catholic, identifies as homosexual, this gave my friend pause. I have no intention of re-hashing our whole correspondence, but our discussion took an interesting turn as the result of my post earlier this week on Camus. Reading that prompted him to read Camus' "The Unbeliever and Christians." He was struck by Camus' insistence in this talk, given to a group of Dominican friars, that "the world of today needs Christians who remain Christians." I think this admission goes some distance to support the point that Camus knew there was more to Christian faith than he was often willing to admit, for whatever reasons.

In his lengthy newspaper correspondence with the recently deceased Umberto Eco, the late Cardinal Martini (their correspondence was published in book form, entitled in English Belief or Non-Belief: A Confrontation), specifically writing about why the Church does not ordain women, said- "The Church does not fulfill expectations, it celebrates mysteries."

When it comes to sexuality, it seems to me the mystery involved is well-summarized in verses 31-32 of the fifth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians, concerning the meaning of marriage. It begins by citing what I usually call the Bible's ur verse on marriage, Genesis 2:24: "For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." The next verse notes, "This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church" (Eph 5:32).

In the wake of finishing the second book of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, Perelandra, last fall, I took a stab at addressing this matter: "Metaphysical dialectics vs Sophiology." After finishing Perelandra, I went on to read Lewis' memoir Surprised by Joy. I was very much struck by what he wrote at the very beginning of the book's seventh chapter about the schoolboy homosexuality at the boarding school, Wyvern, he attended in his teens:

Here’s a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral and religious writer, and now, if you please, he’s written a whole chapter describing his old school as a very furnace of impure loves without one word on the heinousness of the sin [homosexuality]. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.

("This means, then, that all the other vices you have so largely written about…" Well, yes, it does, and more’s the pity; but it’s nothing to our purpose at the moment.)"

I found much for personal application in this passage. In the same chapter, Lewis went to observe: "There is much hypocrisy on this theme [of homosexual relations]. People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? Because those of us who do not share the vice feel for it a certain nausea, as we do, say, for necrophily? I think that of very little relevance to moral judgment."

At least for me, it's not necessary either to figure everything out all at once or figure anything out once and for all. By "figure out" I am referring to the why of things, not the what, which is pretty straightforward and easy to grasp. I've found it's good for me to re-visit matters and be open to the Lord's leading. Being open does not include expecting God to contradict himself, especially given how central marriage is to the divine plan; the Bible, after all, practically begins with a marriage and certainly ends with the wedding feast of the Lamb.

I suppose the question that I find relevant is a variation on Msgr. Giussani's all-encompassing "Is it possible to live this way?" - "How do I live the truth in love?" I've found a compelling and provocative answer in Micah 6:8, which tells me what the LORD requires of me: "Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God." Especially as a deacon, it's not my place to judge others, but it is my God-given duty to lovingly serve them in persona Christi servi. The only person I am in a position to judge is myself and I do so each and every time I go to confession. This reminds me how much I persistently have to be humble about.

Rejecting faith as a resource

I am not up to much mental heavy-lifting today, but I can't help but post something as the result of reading an article this morning in the on-line version of the Los Angeles Review of Books (LRB). The article, by Robert Zaretsky, is entitled "The Limits of Absurdity." Zaretsky reminded me that it was 70 years ago this month that my dear Camus made his one and only visit to the United States. While here he delivered an address that served as something of an outline to what I consider his magnum opus, L'Homme révolté, the English title of which is The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Reading The Rebel as a twenty-something new convert was transformative for me. The other work of Camus that made a deep impression on me are some fragments of a talk he gave in 1948 to some Dominican friars at the Monastery of Latour-Maubourg. What was written down appears in an English language collection of Camus' essays - Resistance, Rebellion and Death - under the title "The Unbeliever and Christians."

In his New York lecture, "La crise de l’homme" (trans. "The Crisis of Man"), Camus proposed metaphysical, as opposed to political, revolt as the answer to the absurd predicament in which humanity found itself in the wake of the desolation wrought by the modern world (i.e., World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, especially under the shadow of the mass murder of European Jews). In light of these bloody catastrophes and others, Camus felt everything and virtually everyone was discredited, which is why he insisted that only through such a rebellion could a person gain authenticity by living in solidarity with poor and oppressed of the world.

In his LRB piece, Zaretsky, Camus' biographer, noted:

In a world shorn of sense, [Camus] stated, too many people had concluded that whoever succeeded was right, and whatever was right was measured by success. For those who resisted this conclusion, for those unwilling to live in a world of victims and torturers, neither faith nor philosophy offered a resource. Instead, the only source of justification 'was in the very act of rebellion.' What we fought for, Camus concluded, 'was something common not just to us, but to all human beings. Namely, that man still had meaning'

Admittedly, the Church in 1945 was badly in need of reform. Many of the needed reforms would flow from the Second Vatican Council. Even Pope Pius XII, considered by too many as nothing more than a reactionary arch-conservative, grasped this and did a lot to initiate reforms between the end of the Second World War and his death in 1958.

I think perhaps Camus was too generic about what Zaretsky dismisses as "faith." Properly grasped, faith is not a "resource" upon which one relies, a mere coping mechanism. It especially bears noting on this Easter Monday that faith is faith in a person, Jesus Christ risen from the dead and already reigning at the Father's right hand, transforming the world from within by the power of the Holy Spirit. This transformation is the rebellion and revolution Jesus came to bring. Jesus' revolt is very much in line with what Camus suggests in The Rebel. In his LRB article, Zaretsky provides some evidence for this assertion by pointing out something that happened at the New York lecture:

At the end of his address, Camus invited the audience to join this rising tide of rebellion. “As for the American youths listening to us,” he announced, this generation of European rebels “respect the humanity that animates you and the freedom and happiness reflected in your faces. They expect from you what they expect from all people of good will: a loyal contribution to the dialogue they wish to establish in this world.” No sooner had he finished speaking than a Columbia official revealed that a burglar had broken into the ticket office and stole the evening’s earnings, all of which had been earmarked for orphanages in France. From the audience a voice suggested that everyone pay again on their way out; by the time the last person left the hall, there was more money in the register than the first time around

Camus once told his friend Paul Raffi- "Catholic thought always seems bittersweet to me. It seduces me then offends me. Undoubtedly, I lack what is essential." Perhaps it was because he viewed faith too generically, as a resource that allows a person to avoid the reality of a screwed up, broken down, world. It may well be the case that Camus' grasp of faith can be attributed to the Church's reductive and narrow proclamation of the Gospel at the time. It was right about this same time that this narrow, simplistic, and reductive proclamation was starting to be challenged by theologians like Henri De Lubac, Yves Congar, and Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Von Batthasar once described what is often termed neo-scholasticism as a pastry with a lot of dry crust.

My own experience has taught me that I do not "have" faith to provide me with simplistic answers to life's most vexing questions. I think it's faith that allows me to shout "Why?" in the assurance I'm not shouting the most human of questions into a void. I receive this assurance by seeing that between where I stand and the void stands the Cross of Christ.

Far from negating or obliterating the absurdity of the human condition, Christ's passion and death only serve to highlight our plight without in any way reducing it by making sense of it all. In other words, faith in Christ does not spare the believer from reality. Rather, faith in Christ forces the person possessed of it into a fatal collision with reality. It seems to me that The Rebel and "The Unbeliever and Christians" are necessary reading for anyone who is serious about anything remotely approximating what is termed "New Evangelization," much of which takes the form of religious propaganda. This is why, with Pope Francis, I still believe Bl. Pope Paul VI's Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi still serves as our blueprint for evangelization. Pope Francis' Apostolic Exhortation, which, like Paul VI's, came at the end of an Ordinary Synod of Bishops dedicated to evangelization, Evangelii gaudium, strikes me as a twenty-first century update.

In Evangelii gaudium Pope Francis wrote this about Christ's resurrection:

Christ’s resurrection is not an event of the past; it contains a vital power which has permeated this world. Where all seems to be dead, signs of the resurrection suddenly spring up. It is an irresistible force. Often it seems that God does not exist: all around us we see persistent injustice, evil, indifference and cruelty. But it is also true that in the midst of darkness something new always springs to life and sooner or later produces fruit (par. 276

Conversely, Camus, while being largely pessimistic, was insistent that it's important not to give in to despair. But he was unable to offer hope. As conceived by Camus, metaphysical rebellion did not end in victory, except the victory of living authentically, but was otherwise largely futile. I think he was correct when he asserted in The Myth of Sisyphus that only question that really matters is whether or not life is worth living. Beside this question, he insisted, "Everything else is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question." Indeed, we must.

I don't think the turn to faith can be merely pragmatic because such an approach sets aside the question of truth, which is an evasion of reality, even if "the truth" is always bigger than our ability to grasp it. Granted, in the first instance, turning to Christ might be a pragmatic move borne of desperation, but it must deepen. If it does not deepened, then faith rooted in pragmatism is like the seed in Jesus' parable that falls on rocky ground, where the soil is not deep. The seed that falls on rocky ground withers when the sun of life beats down on; it dies "for lack of roots" (Matt 13:5).

Urbi et Orbi - Easter 2016

URBI ET ORBI MESSAGE
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
FRANCIS

Easter 2016

“O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
for his mercy endures for ever” (Ps 135:1)

Dear Brothers and Sisters, Happy Easter!

Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God’s mercy, out of love for us, died on the cross, and out of love he rose again from the dead. That is why we proclaim today: Jesus is Lord!

His resurrection fulfills the prophecy of the Psalm: God’s mercy endures for ever; it never dies. We can trust him completely, and we thank him because for our sake he descended into the depths of the abyss.

Before the spiritual and moral abysses of mankind, before the chasms that open up in hearts and provoke hatred and death, only an infinite mercy can bring us salvation. Only God can fill those chasms with his love, prevent us from falling into them and help us to continue our journey together towards the land of freedom and life.

The glorious Easter message, that Jesus, who was crucified is not here but risen (cf. Mt 28:5-6), offers us the comforting assurance that the abyss of death has been bridged and, with it, all mourning, lamentation and pain (cf. Rev 21:4). The Lord, who suffered abandonment by his disciples, the burden of an unjust condemnation and shame of an ignominious death, now makes us sharers of his immortal life and enables us to see with his eyes of love and compassion those who hunger and thirst, strangers and prisoners, the marginalized and the outcast, the victims of oppression and violence. Our world is full of persons suffering in body and spirit, even as the daily news is full of stories of brutal crimes which often take place within homes, and large-scale armed conflicts which cause indescribable suffering to entire peoples.

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Religion vs. relationship

Most of the time when Protestants, usually of the Evangelical variety, talk about rejecting religion in favor of a personal relationship with Christ, Roman Catholics have no idea what they are talking about. In the first instance, the confusion stems from the fact that "religion" is a complex term, it is equivocal instead of univocal. A univocal word is a word that possesses only one, fixed meaning. By contrast, an equivocal word has a variety of meanings. Without a doubt the word "religion" is equivocal.

It's important to act in good faith by granting the person seeking to draw a contrast between religion and relationship the benefit of the doubt. One does so by understanding that, at root, a person who speaks of rejecting religion in favor of a personal relationship with Christ is talking about rejecting empty ritualism and having things imposed on them from without. In other words, they emphasize experience, which is always personal, and inner conversion. Insofar as that is what such a person means, I agree with them, but not only does that not make me a Protestant - though I make no bones about identifying as an Evangelical in the healthiest and fullest sense of that term- it makes me very Catholic. It makes me Catholic because it enables me embrace the both/and. In my experience, it is often the case that the healthy impulse often becomes exaggerated and leads to a false dilemma- either religion or relationship, which dilemma leads to privatizing Christian faith.

What makes the exaggerated pitting of religion against relationship a false dilemma is that it not only leads to a faulty and deficient ecclesiology, but to a non-existent ecclesiology. This lack of an identifiable ecclesiology arises from a mono-Christic theology, which replaces a full-blown Trinitarian theology. After all, God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit, is a communion of divine persons. The Church, at least in its essential and ultimate form is the communio sanctorum (i.e., the communion of holy people and things). The false dilemma between religion and relationship turns God and we into Jesus and me.

Resurrection, by Pietro Perugino, 1496, part of the artist's Polyptych of St. Peter

Recently I've been reading and re-reading Luigi Giussani's At the Origin of the Christian Claim. Today, backing up once again to the beginning of the book, I re-read a blurb that appears on the very first page of the English-language paperback edition. No author is identified for this abstract of the work. It was reading this that prompted me to write what I wrote above. It states that in his book,

Giussani argues that if we accept the hypothesis that the mystery entered the realm of human experience and spoke in human terms, the relationship between the individual and God is no longer based on a moral, imaginative, or aesthetic human effort but instead on coming upon an event in one's life. Thus the religious method is overturned by Christ: in Christianity it is no longer the person who seeks to know the mystery but the mystery that makes himself known by entering history (i)

I think this expresses what is at the root of making the distinction between religion and relationship before the exaggeration occurs. This brief summary also leads to a robust ecclesiology, especially when we consider the Christian event did not last for only 30+ years more than 2,000 years ago, but is on-going.

Whether people realize it or not, whether they like it or not, it is just what Giussani highlights here that Pope Francis is trying foster. Let's call it Christian maturity.

"He's risen, Alleluia! Alleluia!"

It would not be Easter for me without listening to Keith Green's "Easter Song." I think he captured the beauty and intensity of Christ's resurrection.

Christ is risen! Truly he is risen! Alleluia! Come let us rejoice.

Paschal Vigil

Christ is risen. Alleluia!

Tonight our celebration of the great mystery of faith reaches its culmination as we celebrate with great joy the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. Tonight we celebrate our creation in God’s image and likeness, our fall, and our redemption. You might ask, “Celebrate our fall, are you serious?" I am serious. To support this bold assertion, I appeal to these stunning words of the great Exsultet, sung at the beginning of this Vigil:

O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ/O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a redeemer

Think about it, it’s mind blowing: Our sin, our fault, our rejection of God did not earn us God’s wrath, but earned us Divine Mercy. How good is God? Only God can take our rejection of him, our attempt to displace him and establish ourselves on his throne, and turn us back to himself through love and not by punishing us.

The orders of nature and grace go together, the one, nature, being brought into existence by the other, grace. Created in the image and, at least initially, in the likeness, of God, human beings, made male and female, were created for communion with God, with each other, and with the rest of creation. Being created for communion means being made to participate in God’s divine life - the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Stated simply, we are made for eternal life.

While the image of God is ineradicable and can never be lost, our likeness to God is lost through sin. Losing our likeness to God through sin while retaining the imago Dei, the image of God, is perhaps best described as a divorce between the orders of nature and grace. The best proof of this great divorce is death.

Death is the result of sin. Death was never meant to be. Death is a sign that something is deeply wrong with us and with the world. While death is a part of nature, and so, natural, it is only “natural” because the order of nature has been disconnected from the order of grace. Christ came to restore this vital connection. He did it by his passion, death, and resurrection, thus proving that love is not only as strong as death, but stronger than death.

In his First Letter to the Corinthians, in light of Christ’s triumph, the apostle Paul taunted death:

Christ's Resurrection, Jacopo Tintoretto, 1679-81

Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? (15:54b-55)

Just as God delivered the Israelites from Egyptian bondage through the waters of the Red Sea, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God delivers us from sin and death through the waters of baptism. This is exactly what St. Paul is getting at in our reading from Romans. “Are you unaware,” the apostle asked his readers, “that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” In baptism we die, are buried, and rise to new life, “so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Rom 6:3-5).

The new life we have in Christ does not begin at mortal death; it begins at baptism, our paschal death and resurrection. Eternal life begins with our re-birth, with our dying, being buried, and rising with Christ to new life in baptism. It’s not a dream deferred, let alone just a nice idea. Our baptismal vocation is to make God’s reign a present reality. It's not an easy call. It usually means swimming upstream against the cultural current. Living this way can even mean being killed, which is why it’s the only way to be truly alive. Our Lord told his followers, “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body but after that can do no more” (Luke 12:4). Speaking in ultimate terms, you can’t be killed because you already died and rose in baptism.

If Christ was not raised from the dead, then, taking a cue from Monty Python, baptism is a farcical aquatic ceremony signifying nothing at all. As St. Paul wrote to the church in ancient Corinth, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins,” before concluding, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all” (1 Cor 15:17.19).

The good news is, my friends, Christo anesti. Alithos anesti – Christ is risen! Truly he is risen! And so, we are not the most pitiable people of all. We are the most blessed people of all because, through Christ, we have conquered death. Jesus is not merely an historical figure from the remote past, who lived a long time ago in a land far away as part of a culture that is difficult for us to understand. To view Jesus, either exclusively or primarily, as an historical figure is to “seek the living one among the dead” (Luke 24:5), like the women who, upon discovering the empty tomb, were puzzled to find the Lord gone (Luke 24:4).

My friends, Jesus Christ is alive. He remains present in us and among us by the power of his Holy Spirit until he returns in glory. Our elect, who are about to be baptized, are living proof of this reality. But the surest proof that someone has encountered the risen Lord is that s/he feels impelled to become a witness, sometimes even to the point of death. After all, martyr is simply another word for witness. So, let us go forth from this place, filled with joy, bearing witness to Christ’s death and resurrection as we wait in joyful hope for his glorious return.

The Triduum: Good Friday

"He mounted the Cross to free us from the fascination with nothingness, to free us from the fascination with appearances, with the ephemeral."- Servant of God Msgr. Luigi Giussani

Crucifixion, by Rembrandt, 1631

We worship your cross, O Lord, and we praise and glorify your holy resurrection, for the wood of the cross has brought joy to the world (Antiphon 3: Morning Prayer for Good Friday)

Johnny Cash with the Carter Sisters sing our Good Friday traditio, "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord."

Today marks a rare convergence, the Solemnity of the Annunciation (9 months to the day before Christmas) and Good Friday. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church this year transferred our observance of the Annunciation from 25 March to Monday, 4 April. Rather than de-conflict these days, a very modern and rational thing to do, I think it would be good to let them collide. I wonder

Rembrandt Sketch of the Annunciation, ca. 1635

This convergence also happened back in 1608, I don't know how many times between then and now. It prompted John Donne to write a poem - "Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day. 1608"

This Church, by letting these daies joyne, hath shown
Death and conception in mankinde is one