Sexual Authenticity

Absolute Subjectivity

2012-01-27T15:27:00.000-05:00

I've realized that my last couple of posts might have given the idea that I think that LGBTQ people who do believe that their homosexuality is caused by family dynamics are just “making it up,” that it's “all in their heads,” that it's a rather dull delusion being projected onto their experience. I wanted to be clear that this is not what I'm implying.

First, family dynamic stories are not boring, reductive or unhip by nature. Tenessee Williams, Robertson Davies, David Foster Wallace and countless other writers have produced absolutely fabulous, gripping stories out of family conflicts. These narratives are not only valid, they elucidate the core of archetypal meaning which is to be found in human relationships. They are a revelation of a truth that is much deeper than mere fact. As James Joyce so eloquently showed us, when a person has an experience of conflict within the family, and especially of the resolution or forgiveness of that conflict, this can be an epic adventure equal to the Odyssey or The Lord of the Rings. So long as the narrative is genuine, so long as it arises from the true experience of the subject, it has the capacity to be a manifestation of truth. These stories only become dull and uninspiring when they are subjected to formulaic constraints – when they cease to be a genuine expression of the individual personality, and they become the psychological equivalent of predictable Hollywood schlock.

More fundamentally, though, I would like to emphasize that subjective realities are not delusional or “untrue.” One of the great errors promulgated by the Enlightenment is the privileging of objective truth to the denigration of subjectivity. This notion of objectivity, which is exemplified by the dogma that the Earth goes around the Sun and not visa versa, rests on the assumption that more distance you have from a thing, the more accurate, reliable, verifiable and therefore true, your observations about it will be. This distance can be achieved through physical removal, psychological disinterestedness, intellectual abstraction or conditional controls (think of the kind of detachment from real life implied by controlled laboratory conditions.) The artifacts of the human interior, because they cannot be subjected to external verification or objective study, become increasingly suspect in such a scheme. They are trusted only in so far as they can be abstracted by psychological metanarratives, rationalized by statistical data gathering, or otherwise placed under artificial surveillance.

This kind of objectivism produced a kind of scientific totalitarianism – not only in the political order but in the order of knowledge itself: a totalizing metanarrative founded on the presumed superiority of objective observation. This metanarrative, which has formed the intellectual substrata of Western thought throughout the modern era, is profoundly at odds with Christianity. When the Church fulminated against the Copernicans, it was not because She was insisting on an inaccurate way of looking at the universe, but rather because She was trying to preserve a worldview which placed personality, not impersonality, at the centre of Knowledge. She was attempting to preserve humanity from the inhuman excesses of humanism.

What Christians believe in is not objectivity, but absolutism. We believe that truth really is true, but that it is vouchsafed not by disinterested objectivity, but by a profoundly interested Divine personality. All of the objects of scientific inquiry will pass away, but the person, his soul, his experience, his loves, his interests and his subjectivity will persist. It is the subject that God loves, the subject that is made in the image and likeness of God. Absolute truth is not “out there” but in here: the “Kingdom of God,” which is “within.” Verily, verily, God Himself is not an objective, abstract deity, but a communion of persons: a triune intersubjectivity possessed of free will, capable of loving, and hating, and experiencing. This God is not watching us from a distance, He is watching us from the Centre of the World, the Cross, through the eyes of a body which is the Body of the whole human race in time and throughout eternity. This absolute personality includes and verifies all of our little subjectivities, not by getting outside of them, by seeing with a more objective eye, but by getting inside of them, by becoming united to them.

These subjective truths are not judged according to the logic of objective science, but rather according to the logic of narrative. The Saints have “Lives,” that is, they have stories which vouchsafe their sanctity. God does not decide who will get into heaven by taking a statistical survey of the opinions of the neighbours, nor by adding up a utilitarian calculation of goods and evils committed in this life, or even by asking whether a person performed any scientifically verifiable miracles, but rather by examining the interior logic of the personality: whether it produced a story-shaped life, and whether the story that was lived conformed to the True story of the person of Christ.

Paragraph Breaks

2012-01-26T10:20:00.002-05:00

Hello all. I've had several complaints about the problem of paragraph breaks not existing in my recent posts. Aaargh. I am aware of the problem. Sadly, ever since Blogger last updated itself in order to serve me better, it's been failing to register paragraph breaks. Apparently my browser is no longer supported, presumably because it has settings that don't allow Google to hack directly into my central nervous system in order to analyze the contents of my brain to power AdSense. I've tried a lot of different ways of trying to get it to recognize my para-breaks, but so far, no dice. I'll keep looking into it.

UPDATE: This should be fixed now. Adding the html code seems to have worked.

Mmmm....I Love Wisdom

2012-01-25T21:53:00.000-05:00

I've spent most of the day listening to lectures and reading philosophy, and I'm reminded of how much fun there is in the contemplation of Beauty and Truth. Fun, perhaps, is the wrong word. Pleasure. A tingly, jangly, boyous feeling that rises from the soles of the feet to the crown of the head and which causes wild ejaculations of unbounded joy to issue from the lips. (No accident, I think, that the same word has served in the English language to describe a momentary gush of ecstatic prayer and also male sexual climax.) It's not in any way a disembodied pleasure. Spiritual and intellectual joys are also physical, they are experienced through the body, and they make the entire organism feel wonderful in a way that really puts the orgasm to shame.

Philosophers have long been wont to talk of these pleasures as the “higher,” or “nobler” pleasures. These terms have unfortunately come to take on the baggage of stuffy, pretentious, elitism. It would, I think, be more accurate today to speak of these as greater pleasures: that is they provide more avenues and possibilities for sustainable pleasure than can be found in the realms of sexuality or in other forms of purely sensual delight.

Greek philosophy acknowledged this. Socrates, in both the Symposium and the Phaedras, refers to an experience of the Beautiful which serves as a foundation for the love and pursuit and wisdom. This experience is so profound, and fills the soul with such joy, that anything else pales in comparison. Socrates, and others before and since, discovered that they could increase their access to these sublime pleasures by channeling the force of erotic desire, avoiding sexual fulfillment in order to fly up into the realms of heavenly contemplation. Eros, in this scheme, is not abandoned or repressed, but rather harnessed and sublimated for the sake of that greater pleasure.

The question is, why, if the pleasures of Truth, Goodness and Beauty are greater than the pleasures of sex, food and wine, do people so consistently opt for the latter? There are several reasons. The first is that the initial experience of the sublime – that experience which Christianity tends to refer to as “conversion” or “mystical experience” -- can come at any point in a human life. For some it seems to come later rather than sooner, and these people naturally find it difficult to appreciate that spiritual pleasures really could outshine worldly ones “as daylight doth a lamp.” The second is that the so-called “base” pleasures are easier to access. A chocolate eclair is pretty much plug and play: you stick it in your mouth, and you have instant pleasure. There's no delicate and sophisticated interior balance that must be struck, no training of the faculties, no slow expansion of the heart or arduous practice of virtue necessary to prepare to receive it. A third is that the pleasures of Beauty, Truth and Goodness are voluntary. Those who do not practice them will suffer, certainly, from various forms of spiritual malaise: depression, boredom, cynicism, anxiety, and a sense of meaninglessness. None the less, these forms of uneasiness don't immediately and obviously translate into a “hunger and thirst for righteousness” in the same way that sexual frustration translates into sexual desire and that nicotine addiction translates into tobacco cravings. The suffering that comes with the suppression of physical desires is more violent and more immediately recognizable than the suffering that comes from spiritual starvation, and so people are generally quicker to satisfy their physical cravings.

Finally, and this deserves a paragraph all its own, there is the problem of Jansenism. There is a tendency amongst those who have experienced the pleasures of the sublime to become proud of these pleasures. A rather silly form of Puritanism quickly comes to infect the soul, and the genuine, ecstatic and ultimately humbling pleasures of being in the presence of the Beautiful and the True is slowly replaced by the much uglier pleasure of feeling that you are better than other people because you have such rarefied tastes. This pleasurable pride, in its extreme, pretends to eschew pleasure altogether: it starts to make absurd claims about indifference, apathy and disinterestedness and lays claim to an inhuman and disembodied altruism from which it derives the terrible pleasure of diabolical self-congratulation. This tendency, which can be found in Socrates' disdain of sex as “that which the multitudes account blissful,” and which also too often infects Christian piety, is the very spiritual poison which causes the righteous to rank below the prostitutes and tax collectors in the queue for heavenly bliss. Such self-righteous pleasure is so evidently unappealing and manifestly disedifying that it often serves to alienate and repel people from the pursuit of spiritual joy.

* Socrates is sometimes a little sour-grapesy about sexual pleasure. He doesn't seem to have gotten much out of his marriage, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if he was one of those gay men who is capable of paying the marriage debt but not capable of deriving much pleasure from the performance. As to his legendary ability to withstand homoerotic temptations, he's a bit of a show-off in a way that really impressed people like Plato, but you'll notice that most of the guests at the Symposium laugh and then traipse off after Alcibiades rather than lingering to listen to Socrates pontificate.

The Straight Story Part II: Redemption Songs

2012-01-24T14:14:00.000-05:00

I promised to say something good about the reparative therapy narrative, so here we go.

What reparative therapy offers is an origin story, an etiological myth, to explain the genesis of homosexuality. The client accepts and internalizes this story and then resolves it: he moves through a series of interior confrontations with the father wound and the spectre of the overattached mother, he defeats these internal demons, and in doing so, he is healed.

This is a classic form of healing, found in all societies. A Magus figure, a shaman, guru, or psychologist (I think it's Peter Kreeft who points out that the latter are the Priest-class of scientific modernism) claims authority over the cause of illness. This illness may be psychological, physical or spiritual. The Magus tells a story which harkens back to The Beginning, and then symbolically moves the one in need of healing back into that time when the illness first came to be. There is then a confrontation, an interior struggle in which both the medicine man and the patient participate together by invoking the deity who has the power to overcome the ancient evil which is gnawing away at the patient's body or psyche. Through this confrontation, which may take the form of a rigorous psychological trial, the evil is defeated. Both the Magus and the patient return from the past-time and the patient is healed.

Now I personally like my etiological myths to be mythology flavoured: I prefer stories that go back to when the ancestors were wandering in the dream-time, or when the people used to be bears, or when Adam and Eve lived in a perfect garden from the centre of which flowed four rivers. Scientific materialism requires etiological myths that are somewhat less spectacular, that have the illusion of being “objective” and “verifiable.” Hence the reliance of traditional psychoanalysis on “family of origin” narratives to explain all sorts of psychological problems. The original family serves, in these stories, as The Beginning, the psychological beginning of the person's life, and the healing takes place by returning to that time and resolving conflicts there (religious anthropologist Mercea Eliade uses the lovely Latin phrase “in illo tempore” to refer to that special time in which etiological myths take place.)

Putting my personal tastes aside, however, the reparative therapy narrative does offer most of the essential features of a good medicine song. It goes back to The Beginning. In The Beginning, there are evils to be confronted. These evils are archetypally valid, and they exist in a valid archetypal relationship with the Magus figure who is leading the patient back into the past in order to bring him healing. The parasitic, overcontrolling mother is a classic figure in the “father quest,” that is in stories of self-discovery and identity creation. The distant father is an ambiguous figure, he could be a true Father, a Magus figure who the child rejects because he is too forbidding and austere, or he could be a disgraceful father who fails his children because he is too absorbed in himself. In any case, the child confronts these figures, throwing off the yoke of the overcontrolling mother and reconciling with the distant father. The reparative therapists themselves say that their methods are more effective than mere psychotherapy because they use Christian spirituality to bring about reconciliation. This is the invocation of the deity, another important element of true healing stories.

What this means, is that reparative therapy may be effective for some people, but its efficacy relies on the client's ability to buy into the narrative and accept the authority of the therapist. This is where the comment about family of origin stories being “boring and reductive” becomes an issue. If the story that the medicine man tells seems ridiculous, insufficient, or otherwise not compelling to the patient, then the medicine will not work. This, I think, is where reparative therapy suffers. The trope that's on offer is just too square. It's obviously the sort of thing that straight people would think up to explain homosexuality, but worse, it's the sort of thing that straight people would have thought up sixty years ago. It's in an outmoded, modernist, Freudian idiom that just seems weird and alienating to postmodern queerdom. It is, in short, tragically unhip.

The Straight Story

2012-01-23T19:03:00.000-05:00

I'm back. I was away for a bit because I had to have one of my teeth pulled out. Really weird feeling, because they kill all of your pain receptors, but your can still feel a bone being slowly wrenched out of your jaw and it feels like your entire maxilla is being stressed almost to the point of breaking. I wish that I could say that I had some great spiritual insight that I gained as a result of the suffering which attended this event, but the only thing I've ever really learned from dental pain is that brandy is a salutary remedy.

Anyways, someone left a comment on “Wake Me When I'm Straight” that I wanted to address in detail.

“I recently interviewed someone who has been helped through "exodus." they help people walk out of homosexuality. the guy i was interviewing seemed to believe that the "distant dad, too close mom" was true for him and others he ministers to. now to my question...hmm...i'm not sure I can formulate a question. there is one in mind somewhere, but don't know how to articulate it. I guess i'm just a little hesitant to agree with what you're saying. What if those narratives people create are true? I don't think there is no way to prove it or disprove it, right? why is "reductive and boring" a bad thing if it is the truth? Thanks”

The difficulty is that the smothering mother/distant father narrative is a narrative. Narratives aren't “true” or “untrue” in an objective sense. They're a means of structuring subjective experience in order to extract meaning from it. Subjectivity is, by definition, not subject to the same laws of objective truthfulness as objective reality. The laws of truthfulness for this realm are similar in some ways, but ultimately they are more aesthetic in character than those for the objective sciences. A narrative is part of the way that a person structures their life in order to make of it a “masterpiece,” a work of art complete with a coherent plot structure, obstacles faced and overcome, villains, lovers, big reveals, character development and a stirring climax.

What this means is that a person is constantly making decisions about how to experience and process their memories. People are constantly telling and retelling their own stories to themselves. I have absolutely no doubt that people in Exodus, and people in Courage who accept the reparative therapy story, have come to understand their memories in this way. Others who, for whatever reason, find these narratives repellent will deliberately shape their memories in order to negate or deny any evidence that might support them. On the whole, though, the evidence is necessarily going to be there for anyone who is willing to do the work to substantiate the theory.

With regards to the “distant father” part of the narrative, as Leonard Cohen says “It's Father's Day and everybody's wounded.” Having a “father wound” is not a characteristic trait of queer men, it's a characteristic fact about human beings. It's what skeptics call a “Barnum Statement,” that is, a statement which sounds like it really gets at the depths of a profoundly private personal reality, but which could really be applied to the vast majority of people. Such statements are, incidentally, the stock-in-trade of phone psychics and cold readers; there are lots of things that people think are really secret and individual that are nearly universal, and if you know what they are you can convince lots of folks that you have psychic powers. Most people, if they were dedicated to the cause, could find evidence that their fathers were distant or insufficiently supportive, because most men have difficulty with expressing their emotions, with voicing their approval, etc. If all of my straight readers would step back for a moment, and try to search their childhood for deep, perhaps even hidden, evidence that their father wasn't really there for them, emotionally, physically, the way that a representative of God the Father ought to be, I'm sure that they'd be able to dig up more than enough to substantiate claims that they too have a “father wound.”

Likewise with the “overattached mother.” Mother's are naturally strongly attached to their kids. They're naturally apprehensive about male aggressiveness. They're naturally protective – especially if they happen to have a child who is sensitive and/or subjected to bullying, which is pretty common with “effeminate” boys. In short, the narrative described by the reparative therapists is a narrative that could be formed out of the experience of almost anyone who was willing to buy into it, anyone who was willing to shape and construct their personal history to meet the theories of the psychotherapist who was offering them hope of release from painful personal circumstances. In the case of gay men in therapy, the psychological motivation to find evidence to substantiate the psychotherapist's theories is overwhelming – especially since reparative therapists tell their clients up front what kind of personal history they are going to discover in the course of therapy.

Anyways, I risk exceeding the attention span of internet readers. I do have some positive things to say about the reparative therapy narrative, which I'll try to address in my next post.

Blame and Responsibility

2012-01-16T15:23:00.000-05:00

Ever since Adam and Eve ate the fateful apple, human beings have tended to frame the idea of responsibility in terms of blame. There's a sort of “let him who made the mess clean it up” mentality, which leads to a strong desire to inquire into the question of who made the mess. In the case of homosexuality, this leads to various different kinds of blame-narratives, most of them centred on the parents of people with SSA. The best known trope of this kind is the “distant father, overattached mother” narrative which reparative therapy borrows from an older Freudian model. This, however, is far from the only finger that has been pointed at the parents of LGBTQ kids. From the molly-coddling fears of the 1950's, to theories that Satan gets into the womb as a result of marital infidelity during pregnancy, theories to explain how parents cause their kids to end up gay abound.

The legacy of this is not difficult to see. I've noticed that Christian parents of gay and lesbian children often react as though homosexuality was a much greater tragedy than any other sinful inclination. Part of the reason for this, as Foucault very aptly describes it, is that “The...homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, an amorphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle...It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature.” Realizing that not everyone speaks Foucauldian, I should clarify that what he's saying is that the Middle Ages understood sodomy as a class of sin, an act which a person might engage in, whereas in the modern era we have come to think of homosexuality as a condition which effects a person in their entirety. Their childhood and the way in which they were raised is therefore naturally implicated. For the parents of LGBTQ kids, this means that their child's sexual inclinations are not merely temptations, and not even merely a disorder, they are the evidence of personal failure on the part of the parents themselves.

Christianity construes responsibility in a different way which I think could be much more helpful to parents of homosexual children than the guilt-saturated models. The tendency to accuse the parents for the sufferings of the child is not new: there is a striking example in the New Testament. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, for him to have been born blind?” The disciples ask Jesus in the 9th Chapter of John. Christ replies, “Neither he nor his parents sinned. He was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as the day lasts I must carry out the works of the one who sent me.” Christ dismisses the question of who is responsible for the blindness of this man in terms of blame, and moves immediately to a discussion of who is responsible in terms of healing. His attitude is not that the person who is responsible must make amends, but rather that the person who is able to fix the problem is responsible for doing so. He creates a different kind of narrative, a narrative of restoration in which the blindness of the man becomes a locus of grace rather than an indictment for past sin.

For the parents and families of people with same-sex attraction, I think that this same principle can be applied. There are many ways in which parents and relatives of homosexual people are inclined to apply blame. Some feel that a son or daughter's homosexuality means that they were bad parents, others become resentful and try to escape from a sense of personal guilt by arguing that the gay or lesbian child is responsible for their own condition, while still others push the guilt further away, blaming homosexual partners or a gay-friendly culture for corrupting their beloved child. I think that instead it is more useful to focus on looking for ways that a child's homosexuality can become an opportunity for grace. The genesis of homosexuality is, as the Catechism points out, unknown. It is also not especially important. The much greater and more essential truth is that this too is a way in which the works of God might be displayed in a human life, and that we are all called to take responsibility – not blame – for “All are responsible for all.” (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

I Can Talk!

2011-12-15T17:16:00.000-05:00

My husband has had me in public speaking boot-camp for the last couple of weeks. He's trying to train me not to say “umm...”, or “you know” about issues where my audience could not possibly know, and to eliminate my tendency to giggle awkwardly at my own jokes. And, glory be to God, there has been some improvement.Therefore I am introducing to the world a series of talks on homosexuality that I've been developing. If anyone reading is aware of an organization that might be interested in having me speak, please write me and let me know. My e-mail address is melinda@vulgatamagazine.org.

Yours Queerly – Through the story of my conversion and marriage, I explore the issues surrounding gender, sex, attraction and identity. This talk contrasts the stereotypes of “ex-gays” that appear both in Christian propaganda and in LGBTQ discourse in order to understand how someone with same-sex attractions or a queer gender identity can be a faithful Catholic without ceasing to be herself.

(Ideal for youth groups and parishes.)

Loneliness and Gender – By examining of the role that socialization plays in forming sexual identities, and the advantages and disadvantages that befall the “outsider,” I discuss how Catholics can more effectively understand LGBTQ people, and how we can provide the sort of environment that supports the genuine interior freedom of people with same-sex attractions.

(Ideal for high-school classes or other venues where the audience may not be sympathetic to Catholic teaching)

Somewhat Over the Rainbow – Catholic teaching provides both a unique form of hope, and also a unique form of challenge for people who have same-sex attractions or unusual gender characteristics. This talk looks deeply at the difficulties involved in living chastely, preserving the positive aspects of an LGBTQ identity, avoiding the repression trap, and coming to love and accept oneself while living in accord with magisterial teaching.

(Ideal for same-sex attracted Catholics, their families and friends.)

Objects of Scorn, Subjects of Love – The Church is losing the culture war on the homosexual front because our efforts are directed towards homosexual issues rather than towards homosexual persons. Our hatred for the sin is palpable, our love for the sinner is mostly abstract. In this talk, I look at the ways that Catholics can avoid alienating and demonizing the homosexual person, I examine the reasons why we should want more gays and lesbians in our Churches, and I ask how we can more effectively minister to our LGBTQ sisters and brothers.

(Ideal for educators, priests, counselors and others involved in ministry to homosexual persons.)

Queers in Heaven – Homosexual tendencies and queer genders are not sinful, and are not incompatible with sanctity or wisdom. Men and women from Socrates to Joan of Arc have found unique paths to virtue, not by repressing or denying their atypical sexual identities, but rather by finding a way to incorporate their “queer” personalities into the search for truth, beauty and goodness. This talk looks at role-models for LGBTQ people that both affirm their fundamental human dignity, and at the same time provide models for chaste spirituality.

(Ideal for highly polarized audiences in which both sides of the “culture war” are well represented.)

Language of the Body – We examine the meaning of sexuality and the role which language plays in shaping the discourse surrounding sex. How can Catholics use the queer language of the postmodern world in order to convey truths about human sexuality in a way that will reach the heart of contemporary men and women? We will also look at the meanings which are inherent in the body itself, in order to understand the profound underlying logic of Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

(Ideal for a more educated, academic audience.)

Wake Me When I'm Straight

2011-12-15T03:31:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about reparative therapy recently, and I think I've figured out why I find it hard to relate to. My difficulty begins with a deep suspicion about the social sciences: I don't think that there are accessible, fixed, “objective” truths about subjective human experiences. I don't know what happened in my past, and I can't know, at least not in a scientific sense. The information that pours in over the course of a human life is just too much: it can't all be processed, much less intercorrelated and accurately interpreted. The problem begins with primary data: when you're living, at the very moment when you're intaking information from your surroundings, you're always filtering, deciding what's left out and what's left in. That means that a large proportion of your experience isn't even accessed at the point when it is immediately present. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that when you're looking back, accessing the small quantity of pre-filtered data that you actually recorded for recall, it's still far too much to make sense of it all. Most of it can't even be reliably brought to mind, but the parts of it that can are still a mass of information far too large to be looked at simultaneously. The result is that people are constantly forced to produce narratives – sort of like editing together a single, coherent, two hour long documentary out of ten-thousand hours of footage.

Narrative construction, like essay-writing, generally begins with a thesis or a script. There's some sort of concept that will be developed, and mnemonic proof texts will be brought forward to support whatever hypothesis the mind has settled on. Several classics come immediately to mind:

1. The Conversion Narrative: After a religious conversion, the person often goes back into her past and finds the evidence of God acting in silence before she knew that He was there.2. The “Born Gay” Narrative: The gay-identified man reaches into his childhood for evidence of early SSA. (There's actually a lesbian writer who re-wrote her autobiography after the gay-gene hypothesis mainstreamed, in order to more cleanly dovetail her recollections with that theory.)3. The Hand of Fate Narrative: A person imagines that he is fated to fulfill a particular great role, and seeks signs and portents in the past which indicate his future glory.4. The Emotional Abuse Narrative: After a divorce, a woman comes to construe her entire marriage as a series of degradations, manipulations and delusions.Obviously, we could multiply this list more or less infinitely, and there are countless private variations. The point is that the data of the past is organized in order to fit the psychological purposes of the present, and in order to create a coherent story that locates the individual within a teleological framework that provides life with meaning.

Psychoanalysis is basically the art of helping people to construct productive and useful narratives. The anchoring illusion of objectivity provided by the scientific metanarrative bolsters the feeling that a person is discovering the “truth” about him or herself, and this gives the process additional authority, and therefore additional psychic force. When a psychologist goes delving around in a person's childhood to find the “cause” of their present sufferings, what they're actually doing is finding evidence that will help the person to build up a coherent narrative to explain present problems. By establishing a series of archetypal struggles and images, the psychologist is able to provide the patient with a means of resolving their suffering by symbolically or actually defeating whatever bogeymen get summoned up to fulfill the role of the antagonist. So, for example, if someone “discovers” that their insecurities are the “result” of an over-critical mother, they can then find a way to reconcile with, or stand up to, or otherwise confront the spectre of that mother. If done properly, this confrontation will bring relief, and the insecurity will begin to subside.

The difficulty is that the therapist has to present a narrative that the patient is able to accept and believe in. Reparative therapy has several such narratives on tap: the “father wound”, the “sports wound”, “peer-rejection”, etc. These childhood origin stories purport to explain SSA, and to be fair, I have encountered some people for whom they are able to fulfill this role. However, as Eve Tushnet puts it, “there are all kinds of cases where family dynamics don't explain very much. And honestly--family dynamics are often a reductive and boring explanation for homosexuality.” To me, this really sums it up: the narrative of healing that Nicolosi and company put forward is boring. It's not that I can't find evidence to support it if I go rooting around in my past, it's that if this is the archetypal journey that I'm being asked to undertake then I can't be bothered. Neither the villain nor the prize is sufficiently interesting to justify the quest.

Morbid Beauty

2011-12-13T12:37:00.001-05:00

I have an on-going difficulty with telling my conversion story, because the part of it that is the least interesting to me is the part that other people are most interested in. They want to know how I went from being a lesbian to being straight. The truth is, I don't think that I even necessarily did that: it's very rare for anyone to be exclusively homosexual (that is, to be unable to have reasonably successful sex with members of the opposite sex.) If you make a clear and unilateral decision not to have same-sex relationships, there's a certain chance that your libido will take the path of least resistance and swing in the opposite direction. In any case, I never made a conscious decision that I was going to get myself hitched to some man. I was pretty happy with the idea that I would simply not have romantic or sexual relationships as a part of my life, I had never really believed in “love” in the erotic sense anyways, and I didn't believe in orientation change. I made a decision to break up with my girlfriend, that's all, really.

My conversion didn't have much to do with homosexuality. It wasn't a big deal. That sounds really counter-intuitive, until you consider what it is that conversion is, what it entails. There I was, a little baby dyke with short purple hair and a wardrobe that I'd stolen from John Paul Sartre. I had an intense love-hate relationship with God that had been going on for years. On the one hand, I just couldn't get it out of my head that there must be some sort of ordering force behind the universe, that I was a character living in a created world and that there was an author filling in symbolic values and prodding me towards a meaningful narrative in a multipotential Free-Will Positive space. On the other hand, the image of a crucified man who was God terrified me. Literally, terrified. I looked up at the cross and I saw the total sacrifice of humanity to the most terrible suffering, the acceptance of the unacceptable, the moral contradiction which Christians placed at the heart of the world. I couldn't have it. I wouldn't. If that was the sort of universe that I lived in, then I would respectfully return my ticket.

The problem of suffering was the crux of the issue (pun unintended). I had encountered Jesus, semi-accidentally, on some Good Friday when I went to church to please my mother. The story of Gethsemene just stuck in my head, and the idea of a man, a morally perfect individual, choosing to give up His life in that way was so profoundly beautiful and unsettling. I think I cried. Not in the Church, of course, there I was too busy meditating on how I liked all of the black and purple, and the morbid beauty of the Good Friday celebration, but how, at the same time, I felt alienated by Christianity. It was later, when I got home, I dug through the junk on my bedroom floor and unearthed a copy of the Bible that I kept there so that I could go rooting around for contradictions when I had nothing to do at night. I felt as though I had been sucked into the text and I was there, standing in the garden, confronting Him. I had nothing to say. I was literally in awe. The strength, and weight, and depth of human free will, and all of its moral dimensions were there, represented in that figure. Yet He was a figure that I couldn't bring myself to accept.

I dealt with this by busily trying to construct an alternative narrative where Christ was just a man, a figure like Socrates, whose beautiful sacrifice had been co-opted by this mechanical heteropatriarchal hierarchy. I don't know. It wasn't rationally coherent. My aesthetic sense told me unequivocally that Christ's sacrifice was beautiful, and that God existed, and that the perennial human fascination with death and tears and blood pointed towards some deep magic that undergirded the world. Since beauty was basically my religion I couldn't discard this evidence. On the other hand, my defences against the reality of suffering in the world. It was about accepting God's creation on God's terms. It was about wanting beauty badly enough to accept the price-tag attached to it. It was about falling in love with the one who had made me. And once I was in love with Him, how could my lesbian lover possibly compete?reason was adamant that it was all nonsense, and the most dangerous kind of nonsense at that.

Conversion, then, wasn't about homosexuality at all. It was about laying down my rational defences against the reality of suffering in the world. It was about accepting God's creation on God's terms. It was about wanting beauty badly enough to accept the price-tag attached to it. It was about falling in love with the one who had made me. And once I was in love with Him, how could my lesbian lover possibly compete?

Creative life, communion and the gift of self

2011-12-09T22:29:00.001-05:00

There's a question that I didn't get asked tonight on Catholic Answers Live (listen here) that I had prepared a lovely answer for, so I'm going to post my preparatory notes in a slightly expanded form:

The question is, what should a person do if they have same-sex attractions and they want to try to live a chaste life in accord with the teachings of the magisterium. This is one that I did some research on, and I'd like to express my indebtedness to Ron Belgau and Eve Tushnet (Eve has a blog that is definitely worth a look) for insights that I've pillaged from their writings.

Basically, I think that there are three basic psychological needs which are fulfilled through sex and family life in the case of married people. These are creativity, communion and self-giving. If a celibate person does not find a way to express these elements of personality in other ways, they will find themselves inevitable, and perhaps compulsively drawn to sex as a means of assuaging the hunger. Eve observes that you need to develop a strong relationship with artistic beauty, and I would add that for most people having a creative outlet is essential. Also, as Socrates observes, the road to Truth is very often, perhaps most often, via the Beautiful. The need for communion has to be fulfilled through strong friendships, same-sex friendships in particular in the case of queer people. Same-sex attraction, at least in my mind, is constituted by a disordered sexualization of an ordered desire for close communion with members of one's own sex. Finally, the role of self-giving is essential. John Paul II relates masculinity and femininity, in their most essential forms, to fatherhood and motherhood – and points out that these elements of personality can be expressed spiritually by those who are not biological parents. People who wish to live a celibate life need to make some sort of corporal work of mercy a major part of their spirituality. I would add that works which concentrate on ministering to the needs of those who are deeply lonely, outcast, alienated or ostracized by society is probably a good idea for LGBTQ folks, because let's face it, most of us have a pretty deep experience of alienation ourselves. Eve references prison ministry. I personally did ministry to the homeless. I would also add that AIDS hospices are desperately in need of volunteers, and that Catholic outreach in this area is lacking, to say that least.

Little Lost Boiz

2011-12-06T18:33:00.001-05:00

The tone of my last few posts has been towards the bitter end of the spectrum...if I may be permitted to understate the case. I would like to make it clear that I don't resent the kind, straight Catholic ladies who are inspired by my story. It's good for people to be inspired by seeing the power of God working other people's lives. It's one of those feminine tastes that I tend to think of as sentimental, and it's a vibe that I find it really hard to get into, but I'm able to see that it's a good thing. Also, just as God's way of making fun of me, since my last post two different people with SSA have confessed to being “inspired” by my story...

Anyways, with regards to the bitterness, it's partially because I've been reading a whole bunch of stuff from the reparative therapy crowd recently. I'm not ready to try to write about that. I think there's too much anger for me to see it clearly, and I'm still in the process of researching. The point is, that it's reminded me of the connection between same-sex attraction and childhood ostracization/bullying. This is one of the few connections that is generally admitted by both sides of the debate (though, of course, there are dissenters in both camps...) The causal relationship is not agreed on: groups like NARTH say that bullying and rejection by same-sex peers causes SSA later in life, while LGBTQ groups say that homophobia causes people who are innately gay to be bullied in childhood. Anyway, the thing that really got to me is that apparently there's this diagnostic test that will allow the shrinks to pick out the gays, and one of the main things that allows them to suss us out is that we will be able to name very few, or no close same-sex friends during childhood.

So it becomes a sort of feed-back loop. All of the kids that no one wanted to hang out with on the playground grow up to be the adults that no one wants to hang out with because we're “unnatural” and “objectively disordered.” I realize that's not what the Vatican means, but it really is what's meant by a lot of Christians who aren't able to distinguish between “disorder” as a moral-theological term, and “disorder” as a psychological illness label.

Thinking about this has also dredged up a lot of stuff from my own childhood. Like there was this monkey-bar climber at school, and I remember that the popular girls used to come along and tell me that I had to get off of it, because it was “theirs.” I also know that I hurt myself on that climber, and dislocated my shoulder, and something in my brain keeps telling me that these two things are related – that I fell and dislocated my shoulder because I was being pushed off the monkey-bars by the popular girls. But I can't remember whether that's true or not, and if it is true, I'm pretty sure I never told anyone. It's really bothering me, at least in part because it draws attention to the malleability of memory, to the fact that all of our past selves are deeply self-constructed.

The irony is that some of the traits that caused me to be excluded and picked on as a kid were feminine traits. I liked to wear frilly girly dresses with puffed sleeves, or pioneer pinafores that reminded me of Anne of Green Gables. All of the other kids were wearing blue jeans, spandex bicycle shorts and hypercolour t-shirts. I also refused to watch any movies or TV shows that were violent or gross – though if I'm going to honestly deconstruct that one, it wasn't out of any feminine sensibility, but out of a belief that such programs were immoral. I liked Nancy Drew, and Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it was hard to find other kids who could sympathize with that at ten years old.

My experience seems to fit in with Riche Savin-William's finding that children who go on to develop SSA tend to gravitate not towards gender-bending activities, but rather towards solitary activities which are not gender specific. (From The New Gay Teenager) What this suggests, at least to me, is that a big part of the difficulty facing queer kids is that our society has a needlessly narrow understanding of what constitutes “feminine” or “masculine” behaviour: that there is an excessive concentration of attention on particular masculine or feminine stereotypes, and the kids who don't fit into these one way or another get singled out as weird, sissy, or queer.

Calling All Reparative Therapy Success Stories

2011-12-06T16:58:00.001-05:00

I'm going to be on the radio on Friday (Catholic Answers Live -- 7pm ET December 9) I fear that I might be asked about reparative therapy, father wounds, NARTH and all that jazz. I have never personally been involved with any of that, and I've heard a lot of bad press from the ex-ex-gay movement, and from various people that I know within the Catholic SSA community. I know that the reparative therapists themselves claim to have had lots of successes, and happy clientele, but I've never actually met one of these people or had a chance to talk to them about their experiences, so I feel that I'm rather in the dark when it comes to that side of the issue. I'm putting out a general call for reparative therapy clients to contact me and let me know about their experiences, good or bad. If you have been through this, or know someone who has, please send me a comment or e-mail me at melinda@vulgatamagazine.org. Thanks for the help.

My 'Inspiring' Story

2011-11-26T11:42:00.001-05:00

One of my readers reprimanded me for the content of my previous post "Gay Cooties." The substance of the argument was that my story is inspiring, but that being outraged by homophobia in the Christian world isn't helping my ministry. I've considered this very seriously, however on reflection I've realized that the opposite is true.

My inspiring conversion story is not inspiring to LGBTQ people. I've never once had a letter, or a comment on my blog, or a phone call, or someone come up to me after a talk and say "I have same-sex attractions and I'm really inspired by your story." I've had dozens of people tell me that my story is a real inspiration, and a testimony to the grace of God, but every single one of them, to a woman (they're almost all women) is straight. Really conspicuously not even questioning. This doesn't mean that I don't have a ministry to LGBTQ people. I have had same-sex attracted people come up to me, and thank me, and ask me questions about Catholic sexual morality, but it's not because they were inspired by my conversion story. LGBTQ people generally just think "Oh. So she's bisexual and she's chosen a Catholic marriage. I guess that's her choice." The one thing that gives me any credibility with the same-sex attracted crowd is that fact that I'm willing to stand up and tell the faithful Catholics that they're not better than the gays.

After I noticed this, I thought, "Oh. But what about the story of the Prodigal son?" When Jesus went out to preach to the tax-collectors and the sinners, He told them a story about a boy who goes and squanders his inheritance in the city, who sinks into a mire of depravity, and who then repents and returns to his father's home where he is joyfully welcomed. If that's not an inspiring conversion story, I don't know what is. So I flipped open my Jerusalem Bible to chapter 15 of Luke, and re-read the story -- but this time I noticed something that I've never noticed before. Christ does not tell the story of the Prodigal son to the tax-collectors and the sinners. He tells it to the Pharisees. The whole story with the sinner in the pig-sty is just a set-up for the part at the end about the kid who complains that his father has never given him a goat. The parable is actually the parable of the Good Son.

Now this isn't to point a finger and threaten all Catholics with brimstone. I think it's important to remember that the Pharisees ought not to be stereotyped and judged any more than the rainbow folks. The Pharisees were people who genuinely wanted to do good, to serve God, and to obey His ordinances. Several of them are spoken of very highly in the gospels, and some were converts to Christianity. St. Paul, the prototypical Christian convert, was a Pharisee. So Pharisee shouldn't be a dirty word. The purpose of drawing the parallel between faithful Christians of today, and the Pharisees of yesterday, is that just as gay-sex is a perennial temptation to queer folks, self-righteous pride is a perennial temptation for religious types. The moment that we forget this, that we start to think that we're okay, that we begin to thank God that we're not like those homosexuals down at the bathhouse, that's when it's time to look again at all of the things that Christ said to those who thought they were good.

p.s. There's a fabulous Nick Cave song called The Good Son, about this parable, and I highly recommend it to all.

Shame and Guilt and Guilt and Shame and Guilt

2011-11-25T19:43:00.001-05:00

I am officially calmer now than I was yesterday, so I'm going to try to write something more coherent about homophobia, what it is, and what it does.

In conservative Catholic circles, the general going theory is that “homophobia” is a fictitious psychological disorder made up by people in the LGBTQ contingent in order to shame Catholics into silence. (Oddly enough, this is exactly that the same way that LGBTQ people feel about “homosexuality” being defined as a psychological disorder...) In so far as the term refers to an alleged mental illness, this is fair enough. There are cases of real homophobia, mostly, as far as I can make out, in men who were sexually assaulted as young boys or in men with strong and severely repressed same-sex attractions. This is the disorder that leads to fag-beating and other forms of violence against homosexual persons, and admittedly it's not widespread within the Catholic world. However, the term is also used in a more colloquial way. Just as people will casually refer to particular behaviours as “obsessive compulsive” even when they occur in folks who don't fit the DSM-IV's definition of OCD, people will refer to other behaviours as “homophobic” even if they are not on the level of an actual, literal phobia.

Homophobia, as it is used colloquially, refers to an unreasonable fear of homosexual persons. This can be a fear that one will become “infected” with homosexuality, that one's children will be seduced, that gays are going to destroy civilization by having anal sex, that all gay men are sexual predators, that being around gay people will inevitably scandalize one's children, etc. Basically, when straight people are more apprehensive about being in the presence of homosexuals than they would be about being in the presence of other groups of sinners who are committing comparably severe sins, this is homophobia. It is often ideological, cultural or spiritual much more than it is psychological. To put it into Catholic language, it is the sin committed by people who are tempted to neglect the paragraph in the Catechism about avoiding unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, and it is a sin against charity.

Homophobic Christians avoid contact with homosexual persons. They resist forming close friendships with gays and lesbians and may counsel others that it is “sinful,” “scandalous” or “imprudent” to associate with “obstinate” homosexual sinners. They often justify this with the belief that somehow by ostracizing, shunning or otherwise refusing to associate with gays and lesbians they are sending a clear message about the evils of homosexuality: they are showing LGBTQ people that their sins are objectively damaging to society. In doing so they believe that they are witnessing to the truth in a charitable way. They tend to be afraid that if they take part in social situations where gay or lesbian couples are behaving in a normal way, they are helping to “normalize” same-sex relationships, and that they are thus guilty of scandal.

These beliefs are dangerously untrue. I know a lot of LGBTQ people, many of them people within the Church. I've read numerous conversion stories by LGBTQ folks who converted to Christianity. In absolutely not a single one of these stories was the shame or guilt associated with being shunned and cold-shouldered by Christians a source of edification, or a spur to repentance. On the contrary, one of the primary reasons which LGBTQ people give for leaving or despising Christian communities is that they were constantly subjected to homophobic behaviours and attitudes on the part of well-meaning Christians. Contrary to the claims made by people who are ideologically committed to homophobia, these behaviours and attitudes are not generally directed at homosexual acts, but at homosexual persons themselves. The claim that by being together with a partner a homosexual person is “flaunting” their sin justifies a series of behaviours which, if we directed them towards any other people, would clearly just be rude.

More to the point, a lot of LGBTQ people have been deeply affected by homophobic reactions on the part of Christians. Often these behaviours do actually have the intended effect: that is, they cause feelings of shame and guilt in their targets. The problem is that homosexuality is deeply connected with experiences of ostracism and loneliness, particularly on the part of same-sex peers. When a person feels ashamed, guilty and isolated because of their homosexual inclinations, this produces feelings of profound self-hatred and despair. It makes people feel “dirty.” They come to believe that God hates them, and they often end up acting out homosexually, either in order to assuage their loneliness, or to take solace in sensual pleasure, or because they despair of salvation, or out of a self-destructive impulse. In other words, what homophobic reactions actually do is not call the sinner to repentance, but put the sinner in a situation where they are compulsively driven back to their sin in order to gain some sort of relief.

The same can be said for sexual sinners of all kinds which is, I believe, the reason why Christ was so gentle with those who sinned according to the flesh. He told them about salvation, forgave their sins, delivered them from persecution, and bestowed on them the dignity and self-respect necessary to go and sin no more. The fire-and-brimstone diatribes he saved for the wealthy, the complacent and the self-righteous.

Gay Cooties

2011-11-24T13:14:00.001-05:00

I'm blogging today about something that I found on the Catholic Answers Forum. Here is the featured question from yesterday:

Re: Should I be forced to celebrate Thanksgiving with a gay "married" couple?
My sister-in-law invited her gay brother and his "husband," who are "married" -- as defined by our judicial system here in Massachusetts. There will be about twelve adults and ten children attending, children ages 13-19. I have a big problem with this being forced on me and am not going to be with my family this Thanksgiving. I feel that it is thrust upon me and confusing the children about what we believe as Catholics. I'd like to do the charitable route and go, but I feel I must stand up for what we believe and be a witness of our faith to both the adults and the kids. What do you think?
Michelle Arnold's Response:
Before I get to the point at which I basically agree with you, which I plan to do, let's first look at this from your sister-in-law's point of view.
Thanksgiving is a family holiday, one at which your sister-in-law evidently has taken responsibility to host for her husband's family -- a family that, by your estimation, will include over twenty people. Is it surprising that your sister-in-law would like to include her family in this celebration by inviting her own brother to the event? If she is not Catholic, or is not convinced of the Catholic position on homosexuality, she may even consider it rude not to invite her brother and his "husband." (Of course, it may be that your sister-in-law invited her brother and his "spouse" to someone else's home for Thanksgiving. In that case, take up the matter with whoever is hosting the event.)
My point is that someone is going to a lot of trouble to host over twenty people for Thanksgiving dinner this year, and either chose to include or chose to allow someone else to invite a family member and his "significant other." For another guest to make a fuss that two men are being welcomed over to someone else's home for one of the biggest family holidays of the year is going to appear to them to be churlish.
Now, back to your point of view. I completely sympathize with your discomfort over the idea of seeing teens given an example of "gay married life" over their turkey and cornbread, especially if the men are not willing to behave for the sake of the children as if they are merely platonic friends. By attending such an event, and appearing to sanction such a relationship, you could indeed be contributing to the corruption of the morals of children. In that light, attending such an event is hardly "charitable." I also completely sympathize with your outrage at feeling that you are not able to spend Thanksgiving with your family because one family member did not feel the need to consult with other adults in the family about the appropriateness of including this couple at a family event at which children would be in attendance. But, just because you are correct, does not mean that you need to contribute to the family drama by making a show of your disapproval.
Here's one possible plan of action:
* Call the host with your regrets. * Simply say that "something has come up" that prevents you from attending. (This is true.) * Do not allow yourself to be pressed into explaining what came up. (This will make it all the more obvious what the problem was without you appearing to be a "spoilsport.") Just keep reiterating how sorry you are that you're unable to attend. * Arrange your own Thanksgiving celebration this year. * As early as possible for next year, perhaps over Christmas this year, let your family know that you would like to host the family Thanksgiving next year. * If your sister-in-law asks if her brother and his "spouse" can come to your home for Thanksgiving, regretfully explain that you already have a "full house." * Then allow her to decide where she and her immediate family will spend Thanksgiving.

I've attempted to stir up some controversy over this in the forums but I'd also like to post a response here.

This is a category of question that I've seen a lot of times, and it basically rests on the assumption that if we agree to do everyday normal things in the presence of people who are in gay relationships, that we are somehow sanctioning their relationships. The corollary is the belief that by refusing to participate, we send a clear message about the morality of same-sex relationships and we witness to the truth about homosexuality.

When we refuse to get involved in the lives of LGBTQ people, we do send a very clear message, but the message has nothing to do with the truth. We send the message that we are bigoted homophobes who think that gays are icky. We send the message that Catholics don't want anything to do with those nasty fags, and that we're afraid that our children will catch homosexuality like a disease if they're brought into even the most casual contact with gay couples. We send a message that we really care a lot about hating the sin, but that we're not even willing to eat at the same table as the sinner.

Feminine Socialization

2011-11-23T13:25:00.001-05:00

Maura has pointed out that the activities which I was not able to comfortably participate in as an adolescent girl are not essential to femininity, that they are superficial and culture bound. I think it's important to acknowledge that the superficial, cultural expressions of femininity are not actually irrelevant. These are the social activities that women perform in order to socialize one another. Feminine social grooming takes place at the mall, in the cafeteria, at sleepover parties where girls give each other makeovers, and so forth. Girls get together as girls and they learn from one another how to be feminine, how to present themselves as feminine in the wider culture, and how to think and identify as women. Basically, there's a set of techniques for developing the self, a stylistics that communicates and signals femininity to other people. When a woman develops a feminine aesthetic that is acceptable to her culture, it also produces a corresponding sense of comfort within her own psyche. Her femininity is constantly reinforced and buttressed within the social sphere, and this contributes in a substantial way to her ability to relate to herself and to other women in a way that is conceived as “feminine.” This whole process happens very naturally for women who are “cisgendered,” that is, who are largely or completely comfortable with the identity between their physical sex and their social/psychological gender.

There are any number of reasons why this might not happen for a particular woman. Sometimes it's a matter of social opportunities, isolation, exclusion and so forth, in which case I would say that a person is accidentally queer – they have gender confusion as a result of having been left out of the loop during the process of gender-socialization in childhood and adolescence. On the other hand, I think that there are characteristics that are related to femininity in all cultures which some women lack. Excitement and apprehension about the development of female sex characteristics is, for example, a more universal feminine experience; it's normal for a girl in any culture to have a desire for womanhood and to work that out in the context of a female social sphere where her feelings are validated, shared and possibly given some sort of ritual catharsis. That's why I think that there's some basis for gender-queerness that goes a little deeper than mere socialization. If it were just that I found the cultural expressions of femininity in postmodern North America alienating and dull, that would be a fairly superficial matter. The problem is that there are certain elements of female development and female psychology that are generally included in notions of “essential” femininity which I happen to lack.

The lack of interest in my nascent femininity during adolescence is one example. Another is the fact that I'm generally oblivious to social cues and body language. Most people who try to describe essential femininity will include the idea that women are more sensitive to other people's emotions and to the subtextual cues in social interaction. One of the classic examples in the Catholic world is of Mary noticing that the wine has run out at the Wedding at Cana. She sees this and intervenes to remedy the situation before it becomes socially embarassing. It's generally felt that this kind of awareness is one of the great strengths of femininity – and it's something that I don't have. Now I happen to know that the reason I don't have it is that I come from a family where practically everyone can be pegged somewhere on the autism spectrum. If I was at the Wedding at Cana, I wouldn't notice anything: I'd be suffering from massive information overload and would be only vaguely aware of my surroundings at all. In a social situation there's simply too much information to process, so my mind either fixates on a single person or a single activity and becomes completely oblivious to everything else, or else I sort of sink into a cloudy haze where I'm not even conscious of what I'm doing or saying. In a private conversation, I'm almost completely blind to the subtle cues being given off by the other person – this is another classic high-functioning autistic attribute. My ability to process or read other people's emotions is exceedingly primative, and I often get it wrong. I miss massive clues and I'm unaware of subtle shades of meaning. In this respect I'm more incompetent than a lot of perfectly “masculine” men. Needless to say, the inability to participate in conversation and social life in this respect serves as a massive impediment to full inclusion in the female social world. I come across as weird, masculine, “queer.” This creates a sort of self-perpetuating cycle, where because I'm inept at being included, I am excluded, and because I am excluded I become increasingly inept.

Yours Queerly

2011-11-21T14:23:00.001-05:00

I've had a couple of commentators ask about the whole gender and homosexuality issue, so I'm going to try to cover some of what I think about that. This is an issue that weighs pretty heavily on my mind, because it comes to the heart of the question about whether “sexual orientation” is something that can be changed. The LGBTQ position is that sexual orientation is fixed, that it cannot be changed, and that if you're gay, you were born that way. The right-wing Christian position is that it can be changed, and there are numerous ex-gay ministries that are supposed to bring this change about.

I weigh in somewhere in between these two positions. I think that most people who are gay, lesbian, bi or transgendered really are queer – that is they possess distinctive traits that are either innate or fixed so early in childhood that they can't possibly be considered culpable, and that they cannot be altered. For example, there are certain formative experiences that have to do with gender-identity development that have to happen during a certain, relatively brief period in a person's life. In some cases, these events don't take place. In my case I never went through the part of adolescence where a girl looks forward to becoming a woman, where she wants to wear training bras, and hopes to get her period, and twitters excitedly with her girl friends about the cute boys in her classes. I read Are You There God, It's Me Margaret, and I felt totally alienated: I couldn't relate to this normal teenage girl who was anxious and excited about her emerging femininity. Reparative therapists tend to opine that experiences like mine are the result of failed socialization, that a lack of close female friendships cause women to be adrift when it comes to developing feminine feelings. I don't think that's how it worked for me, though: I remember the point when the other girls on the playground were discussing these things, and I remember having the opportunity to participate in those discussions. I made the decision to walk away and not get involved, because the subject made me uncomfortable, it didn't seem to concern me, and I wasn't interested in it. The point is that that discomfort and disinterest weren't the result of social ostracization: the causality was the other way. As I reached the age at which other girls were increasingly interested in distinctly feminine activities and concerns, I became increasingly unable to relate to them, and I dissociated myself quite naturally from their world. Instead of hanging with the girls and talking about the New Kids on the Block, I went and hung around with the shy, sissy flute-playing soprano boy who I'm sure has since gone on to be a wonderfully talented gay musician.

The conservative party line is that I was suffering from “gender-identity disorder,” and that presumably I could have been fixed if I'd been taken aside and taught how to conform to certain standard gender development patterns. I've seen enough testimonies from people who were put through that personality-normalization wringer to be extremely wary of this claim. I also have my own experience of trying to gender-normalize myself during late middle-school and early high-school. I made a concerted attempt to enjoy going to the mall, to watch Melrose Place to talk about girly things and to care about the back-biting politics of the high-school popularity scene. I managed to work up a couple of artificial crushes on boys so that I'd be able to participate in the whole adolescent erotic game, but the effect of it was an increasing feeling of depression, isolation and inauthenticity, accompanied by a profound compulsion to escape. A lot of the time I would get out of class, and would be time to head to the lunch room and gab with my girl friends, and I would have this intensive feeling of dread. More and more over the course of those years, my reaction was simply to flee: to get out of the building and go down to the ravine where I could walk along the side of the bubbling creek and lay in the sunlight on the big flat rock that jutted out into the stream, and where I could immerse myself in the worlds of beauty, imagination, melancholy and Truth.

Someone out there is going to object that none of those things listed above are inherently unfeminine, and I'll agree. However when the kind of beauty that appeals is the beauty of the female body, and the kind of Truth that appeals is the rationalism of Immanuel Kant or the Stoicism of Epictetus, and the imagination tends to favour either extremely masculine female role-models or an outright retreat into an explicitly male headspace, then it becomes increasingly clear that gender-identity is at stake. It's not that I'm transgendered, though I think that if I were to honestly peg myself using the LGBTQ taxonomy of sexual identities, I'd have to admit I'm gender-queer.

For obvious reasons, this is an issue that requires a much longer discussion than I have space for in one post. I'll try to return to it soon, particularly in terms of whether alternative gender identities can fruitfully be categorized as “disorders,” whether these identities are fixed or malleable, and what relationship that has with the whole sexual orientation change debate.

Loneliness and Gender

2011-11-11T10:35:00.001-05:00

There's been more than one occasion where I've been talking to someone who has strong, even compulsive same-sex attractions, and where it is clear that the fundamental underlying issue is a profound loneliness. Many reparative therapists have argued that SSA is basically caused by a failure to connect properly with same-sex peers during childhood and adolescence. One formulation of this theory is the EBE, or “Exotic becomes erotic” hypothesis. According to this account, a person's sexual attractions are formed on the basis of a feeling of difference, distance, and therefore desire. It's very similar, actually, to the account of desire that Socrates gives in the Symposium, where he suggests that distance and lack of a thing are absolutely essential to Eros (love, desire, attraction.) So basically, if an adolescent is starved for same-sex companionship, that desire will become sexualized in the heady atmosphere of high-school hormones.

There may be something in that. Research (even research done by people sympathetic to the gay cause) suggests that teenagers with same-sex attractions are more likely to be drawn to solitary activities. The chicken and egg phenomenon of course exists – does the “difference” involved in being gay cause a person to be alienated from “straight” peers, such that they naturally turn to solitary pursuits in order to amuse themselves, or does the interest in solitary pursuits lead to social exclusion and from there to this EBE sexuality and hence homosexual attraction. Frankly, I think that it's one of those inextricably linked phenomena, where you have two factors that feed into and play off of one another, and where neither of those two factors are wholly or exclusively responsible for the result that you get.

In any case, irregardless of which side of the pro hoc propter hoc divide you find yourself on, the fact is that a lot of people with same-sex attractions are lonely – gay because they're lonely, or lonely because they're gay, it really doesn't matter. The loneliness itself is worth discussing, because regardless of which is the cause, and which is the effect, there is no question that sexual temptations of any kind are amplified by loneliness.

The difficulty is that no matter how you slice it, most people in the LGBTQ crowd really and actually are different. Not everyone, but most. It's something that I still deal with in my own life, because frankly all of the personality traits and weird gender-attributes that made me think I was lesbian in the first place are still here, and they're not going away. It means that it's difficult, in many cases, for LGBTQ people to form friendships with straight folks – and especially with straight people of their own gender. I've met a lot of lesbians who think that straight girls are just weird. For gay guys, it's often even harder because the general opinion of most men, if you get them outside of a context where they feel that they have to be politically correct, is that gay men are effeminate and fruity. This leads to emotional distrust which is difficult to overcome.

Reparative therapy tends to try to deal with this by getting people to adopt behaviours and interests that are more typical of their gender, in order that they'll be able to become more acceptable and better able to make friends. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, there are things that are kind of like that that I do myself. On the other hand, I think it's really important to do that in a way that is “natural,” in the sense of being compatible with my own personality. What this means, in terms of Catholic outreach, is that it's really, really important for Catholics to understand that the “faggy” or “butch” behaviours of LGBTQ people aren't necessarily affectations, and they're not necessarily some sort of psychological disorder that needs to be overcome. They're differences, but it is the responsibility of those who would become Christ to the world to accept and love those who the rest of the world is inclined to reject.

Foucault

2011-10-03T14:06:00.001-04:00

I've just started reading volume two of Foucault's History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure. Here's my guilty secret: I love Foucault. I'm very familiar with his place in the Catholic discourse about postmodernism, to whit, that he's a dangerous atheist who circulates incoherent ideas and tries to break down the foundations of truth and to unravel the moral fabric of modern intellectual life, and also that he's a(n) (insert slur word of your choice here) homosexual.
So what's to love?

Basically, Foucault is an historian of ideas. This means that his method is not evaluative; he's trying to examine and describe the ways in which ideas were formed, the concerns that drove people to formulate different philosophical problems, and the complex interplay between concepts and practices. I can see why readers who are fundamentally unsympathetic to sexual morality would come away from this book feeling that it's all just a matter of cultural powers suppressing the natural sexual good of human beings, but that's because they have certain premises which Foucault does not seem to share, and which, at times, he explicitly denies. The premise, for example, that because an idea develops within the social sphere and is promulgated throughout the populus by various means, some of them coercive, some of them persuasive, that the idea is therefore an impingement on individual liberty. Basically this involves doing something that Foucault himself seems opposed to: namely, attempting to take a thoroughly modernist framework for understanding the past, and using it to judge the way that people thought historically. Foucault explicitly states that this is not his intention, that in fact he perceives one of the primary goods of philosophy to be the fact that it makes it possible to get outside of one's own sphere of reference, and to have a deep, ultimately sympathetic understanding of ways that people think and have thought in other cultural contexts.
Hence my excitement about this book, which deals with the development of notions of sexual morality from ancient Greece through to the early Christian period. So far, it is about as far from an indictment of Christian sexual morality as you could hope to find, given that it is written by an atheist who practices male love. Not homosexuality. Foucault thinks that homosexuality is a product of the modern psycho-medical concept of sexuality, but that's an entire blog entry in and of itself.

New Article for Courage

2011-10-01T14:45:00.001-04:00

A new piece I wrote for the Courage website is now up. Read it here.

Romans 2

2011-09-27T15:29:00.001-04:00

I'm currently involved in a debate on the First Things website as a result of an article that I wrote dealing with the distinction between the pastoral and theological aspects of St. Paul's letter to the Romans, particularly the infamous verses 1:26-27 of turn-or-burn fame. You can find it here.

When I was writing the article, I only gave a superficial glance to Romans chapter 2, but I've been rereading it now with considerable interest. The psychological thrust of this letter is really interesting. What St. Paul basically does is gets his audience all riled up about the sins of those godless pagans, and then hits them hard between the eyes with a diatribe against Pharisaical self-righteousness. Look at the transition here:

“In other words, since they refused to see it was rational to acknowledge God, God has left them to their own irrational ideas and to their monstrous behaviour.”

(Paul is referring here to the “Greeks,” i.e. the Hellenic world in general, who he's been castigating for idolatry, homosexuality and various other abuses for the last 10 verses.)

“And so they are steeped in all sorts of depravity, rottenness, greed and malice, and addicted to envy, murder, wrangling, treachery and spite. Libellers, slanderers, enemies of God, rude, arrogant and boastful, enterprising in sin, rebellious to parents, without brains, honour, love or pity. They know what God's verdict is: that those who behave like this deserve to die – and yet they do it; and what is worse, encourage others to do the same.” (Rom 1:28-32)

And here's the tipping point: “So no matter who you are, if you pass judgement you have no excuse. In judging others you condemn yourself, since you behave no differently from those you judge.” (Rom 2:1) Paul's point, which he develops more fully in the rest of the letter, is that everyone is a sinner, everyone in need of repentance and salvation. The moral indignation that his readers are inclined to pour out on others ought to be turned inward, so that it can lead to a scouring of the heart.

Oddly, Romans 1:28-32 have been interpreted historically to refer to the homosexuals described in vs. 26-27, not to the Greeks referred to in vs. 18-25. This interpretation was used at various times to justify applying the death penalty to people caught engaging in “sodomy,” and the idea that these verses are primarily applicable to homosexuals is one that I've encountered in anti-gay Christian sources of more recent date. It's an argument, however, that makes very little sense, unless you want to go verse camping. The paragraphs that precede 1:26-27 make it fairly clear that Paul is talking about the Greeks in general, and particularly about the effects of Greek philosophy and paganism. Homosexuality is merely the most forceful of his examples of the depravity of the Greeks: not only are they idolaters, but they're also committing unnatural acts with one another. To assume that Paul is saying that homosexuals, specifically, are “steeped in all sorts of depravity, rottenness, greed and malice, and addicted to envy, murder, wrangling, treachery and spite. Libellers, slanderers, enemies of God, rude, arrogant and boastful, enterprising in sin, rebellious to parents, without brains, honour, love or pity,” is a stretch. But even if we were willing to make that stretch, it would make total nonsense of Romans 2:1. Presumably, if Paul's readers were willing to accept that homosexual acts were shameful and depraved, they weren't hanging around the bathhouses chatting up the catamites.

The more coherent interpretation is to assume that Paul is writing a comparative analysis of sinfulness amongst the Greeks, and sinfulness amongst the Jews, an interpretation that seems to streamline with the rest of the letter. His point is that every single adult human being has, at least at some point in his life, been depraved, rotten, greedy, envious, treacherous, spiteful, rude, arrogant, boastful, or rebellious. All of these sins render people deserving of death. No one is exempt, and anyone who thinks that he is, is deluded. The letter is a call to repentance, not for the Greeks, or the Jews, or the homosexuals, but for each and every reader, personally.

Contractual Obligation II

2011-08-09T18:09:00.001-04:00

Okay, I think the first thing that probably women need to keep in mind when they read Theology of the Body, whether in the original or in the popular versions, is that what John Paul II was envisioning was human sexuality as it was “in the beginning.” What did marriage and sex look like before the Fall? It’s a very illuminating approach, but when you go to apply it, you have to keep in mind that what you’re trying to accomplish is the closest possible approximation to the way that things were before concupiscence entered the scene. No one, even in the best of all marriages between two Saints, is going to get all the way there. No one starts out anywhere near there.

It’s kind of like St. Thomas Aquinas et al telling people that the proper interior order of the soul involves the total subjugation of all passions and appetites to Reason. Everyone knows that that’s how it’s supposed to be, but if you try it you quickly find that it’s a project that takes a lifetime. Sure, you can get much closer than people usually are, but it takes a tremendous amount of work. Theology of the Body is the same kind of thing. Unfortunately, a lot of folks seem to fall into the mistake of thinking that if they take the Christopher West marriage prep course, and go on a few couple’s retreats, they’re going to get something that looks pretty close to what JPII is talking about. If this is your expectation, disappointment is inevitable – and it’s a disappointment that I’ve seen amongst a lot of really committed Catholics, especially Catholic women.

When Eden cannot be reclaimed, we tend to blame the other spouse – a familiar pattern to those who’ve read the Genesis narrative. If you talk to women, the problem is always with the man. If you talk to men, the problem is always with the woman. Catch 22.

The difficulty arises, I think, from the fact that when people hear about someone else’s responsibilities towards themselves, they immediately think of it as an entitlement. Men did this to women for years: they read the first Letter to the Corinthians, turned to their wives and said, “You see that, woman? St. Paul says you gotta obey me. I have a right to be obeyed.” But St. Paul did not say that men were entitled to their wives’ obedience; he said that women should obey their husbands. These are two very different statements. Also, the men tended to gloss over the part that said they had to love their wives like Christ had loved the Church. Women have now picked up on that part, and are saying to their men, “See, see what is says there? I’m entitled to have you treat me like Christ treated the Church.” Again, not what Paul said.

The key is to concentrate on making sure that you are truly giving your own gift sincerely. A gift that is given on the condition of reciprocation is not a true gift, it’s a commodity exchange. If there’s any sort of contractual obligation, explicit or implied or even just understood within one’s own mind, then the gift loses its gift-likeness. The economy of gifts follows a logic that seems like foolishness: “Give and there will be gifts for you, poured out without measure.” You can never see where those gifts are going to come from, and there has to be a real act of faith, where you throw your gift out into the darkness without any idea of how it is going to come back to you. This works in the realm of economics – if you are generous, your generosity will be mysteriously repaid – and it also works in the realm of sexuality. But you have to somehow get over the temptation (and a mighty strong temptation it is) to count the cost and tally up the revenues.

How do you do this? You have to begin by focusing on taking joy and pleasure in giving your gift to the other person. Ideally, what you’re aiming for is to take greater pleasure in the other person’s sexual climax than in your own, and to want to be satisfied yourself primarily so that the other person can have the joy of having satisfied you. Out of the gate, that might sound impossible, but it really isn’t. All you have to do is decide clearly that that’s your objective, and sink all of the energy that you would otherwise sink into fighting with your spouse to make sure that you secure your piece of the marital pie into that goal. I think any reasonably committed person could probably achieve this in under three years, which, in the scope of a marriage, is peanuts.

So that’s the impossibly demanding marching orders for the sexual via dolorosa; but here’s the carrot: as you do this, your entire way of seeing your marriage will begin to change. A lot of the time women set up conditions wherein it is functionally impossible for them to receive or perceive their spouse’s love and affection. They have a set of particular “needs” which they feel are not being fulfilled, and they fixate myopically on those things. Often the husband really is trying to show genuine affection, but it is overlooked, dismissed, or even belittled because it is not in the correct form. As soon as the we stop worrying about being entitled, it becomes possible to notice those things, to enjoy them, and, by enjoying them, to encourage them. A man will find it much easier to show affection to his wife if he sees that his efforts are bringing her joy; if he sees that she sees his efforts as paltry, insipid, or unworthy, he’ll tend to clam up and stop trying out of a sense of insecurity.

Also, if a woman is constantly, joyfully giving herself to her husband, the husband will come to feel a greater affection for her. This is just natural. As his affection grows, it will express itself naturally in a much larger number of ways, and it will feel more authentic – because it is more authentic.

Finally, once enough of the hostilities have cleared, and love and affection are being freely exchanged in whatever ways come most naturally to each of the spouses, it’s not hard at all to get affection in the form that you want. All you have to do is wait for an opportune moment and say, “My dear love, do you remember how you used to give me footrubs when we were courting? Those were amazing footrubs. I don’t suppose that I could get one now?” When a man responds to such a request, it doesn’t feel like he’s doing it out of a sense of resentment and obligation, and it doesn’t feel onerous to have to ask for what you need.

As a final note, let’s say that you do all of these things, and you do them for decades (and if you’ve got a particularly tough nut of a husband, or a particularly stubborn inner child that keeps throwing temper tantrums, it might take decades), and your husband passes away, and the reciprocation never comes? If what you’re doing is genuinely taking joy in being a gift, then it makes no difference. The reciprocation is icing on the cake. The real prize is the joy of pouring out love, and the attainment of self-mastery. Even your husband never does build you that dream swing in the backyard, you will gain freedom from the suffering of disappointment and resentment, and your reward will be great in Heaven :)

Contractual Obligation

2011-08-06T12:37:00.002-04:00

My post “Just Sex” opened a potential can of worms, so I’d like to go a little deeper into the relationship between the sexes, and the role of sexual responsibility in solidifying marriage. Anonymous commented that “I agree that if the relationship is working outside of the bedroom, a truncated period of foreplay shouldn't cause offense. That, however, is a big ‘if’. Unfortunately there aren't many marriages that I have seen where affection outside of the bedroom (or inside for that matter) is a priority for the husband.”

Okay, there are a couple of issues at play here. The first is the issue of male responsibility. Men do have a responsibility to provide their wives with affection both in and outside of the bedroom, and, as John Paul II pointed out to the scandal of the prude brigade, they also have a responsibility for making sure that their wives achieve orgasm. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that the latter responsibility will be fulfilled every single time a couple makes love – there are points in a woman’s hormonal life when bringing her to sexual climax could be numbered with the labours of Hercules – but the woman’s satisfaction should be a priority for the husband.
The irony is, I think it actually is a priority for a lot of men, but they just don’t know how to go about it. Having sex when your partner is disinterested, reluctant, unresponsive and unenthusiastic is humiliating. There’s a reason why all of those spam messages offering men the opportunity to have their woman “moaning for more” actually work to sell erection pills. It’s important to a guy’s self-esteem to feel that he’s actually a good lover – that’s why some women resort to faking orgasm if they’re not able to achieve the real thing. The point is, in those marriages where the woman is totally unsatisfied and feels that it’s the result of her husband’s sexual selfishness, the man is also profoundly frustrated, but he usually keeps quiet about it.
The lack of affection, and sometimes open hostility, outside of the bedroom are a response to this mutually frustrating situation. At this point, the woman will often start making excuses to have sex infrequently (too tired, slight headache, in-laws visiting, kids going to wake up soon, too much work...) which exacerbates the problem. A man who’s been waiting with increasing frustration to be able to make love to his wife is not going to be able to pull off a long, satisfying encounter. When the sex finally happens it ends up being quick and desperate: the wife goes away unsatisfied, and the husband goes away humiliated, and the whole cycle starts up again.
Here we arrive at issue number two, which is women’s tendency to resort to passive-aggressive strategies to get what we want. Let’s be honest here, most of us when faced with sexual frustration don’t sit out husbands down and explain the situation in clear, simple, honest language that a man will be able to understand. We feel like if he really cared about us, he’d know what to do. He’d read the little signs, and he’d take the time to pamper, and caress, and make us feel desirable. So when he doesn’t, we shut him out emotionally. We come to bed the way a martyr goes to the rack, we send out little barbed messages throughout the day, and we make sure that he knows that he’s in the doghouse. Ultimately, we may resort to the Lysistrata stratagem, and go on a sexual strike until we get the affection that we want.

Problem is, you can’t make someone affectionate by twisting his arm. If the husband is thinking, “Fine, I’ll rub her shoulders, and give her kisses, and snuggle up to her on the couch, because otherwise the &*$@! is never going to put out,” any woman with any emotional sensitivity will notice. The affection will feel like a demand for sex, because that’s what it is. It couldn’t possibly be anything else: the decision to withhold sex until hubby is appropriately sensitive situates the entire conflict within the realm of contractual, as opposed to covenential, exchange. If a woman says, either explicitly or implicitly, “You give me affection, and I’ll give you sex,” the affection becomes a form of payment for sex – and any form of payment is always a form of demand for the thing that is being paid for.

All right, this post is becoming book length, so I’ll leave it there for now, with a solid description of the problem, and I’ll take a stab at the solution next time.

Golden Bones

2011-08-03T16:22:00.002-04:00

I just got the sample copy of Leading Edge magazine with my story "The Golden Bones of Grandma Bo" in it. It's the 30th Anniversay Issue (oooh!) and it also contains work by the three guys who do my favourite writer's podcast, Writing Excuses. Of my short stories, this is one of my personal favourites. It concerns a young philosopher, a ghost that won't behave, and a confrontation with Death in the form of a seven headed eel. Great fun.

Just Sex

2011-08-03T14:40:00.000-04:00

There are two sides to the modern North American hysteria about sex. One is the side that we get to hear about all the time in the Catholic press: the hysteria about how sex is so great, so much fun, so liberating, so all-pervasively important to human life, etc. etc. That is, the hysteria that fueled the sexual revolution.
The other side of the coin, however, is the Catholic over-sanctification of sex. A problem that I’ve encountered enough times to think that it’s probably a quiet, underground endemic within the Catholic community, is the problems of Catholics – especially Catholic women – feeling that sex is somehow wrong, dirty, or dehumanizing if it is anything less than the scintillatingly personalistic vision of fleshly union that appears in the writings of John Paul II and Christopher West.
It’s just sex. If you don’t have it, it’s not the end of the world. If you do have it, and it’s rushed, mediocre, and half-asleep, it’s not the end of the world. A lot of the time, you end up with a situation where there is a strong biological imperative to make love on the part of one spouse, and a total lack of interest on the part of the other. This isn’t reductionistic and selfish, it’s just biology. (Worth noting: if you’re a young woman, and you’re frustrated with feeling that you’re just being used as a sex object to fulfill your husband’s depersonalizing sexual demands, baby, your turn is coming...)
“But hold!” my Catholic feminist interlocutor cries out, “Are you saying that I have to allow my body to be used as an object of male lust just because one day I might suffer from an excess of lust myself? Surely on that day, I shall be self-possessed and considerate and will put the flesh to death for the sake of my rarefied spiritual sexuality.”
Maybe, maybe not, but let’s examine P1 here, which is the contention that you’re allowing your body to be used as an object of male lust. There is a difference between lust and sexual desire. Sexual desire is good. If your husband has given his entire life to you, and he provides for you, and talks to you, and loves you, and interacts with you as a person on a daily basis, then his relationship with you is not reductive. (If he doesn’t, the problem is not lust but a failure, usually mutual, to relate properly outside of the bedroom.) The association of biological urge with spiritual lust is based on a false understanding of the goodness of the human body. The physical desire of spouses for one another is ordered. When a man or woman, confronted with strong feelings of sexual arousal comes to his or her spouse, they are conforming their sexuality to reason. If they go to the internet, or the brothel, or into their imagination, and have sex there, that is depersonalizing, inhuman and irrational.
It is not the desire of spouse 1, but the lack of desire of spouse 2, that is disordered. I don’t mean here that it’s a moral fault or a psychological disease, just that it is contrary to right reason. It represents a sort of acedia, or spiritual sadness: an interior resistance to something that is genuinely good. Now, I also don’t mean that you can just reason it away: many things are contrary to right reason but can’t be rationally blown off. The point is that when one spouse experiences the other’s desire as a violation, it generally means that they have an excessively elevated opinion either of themself, or of the loftiness of sex.
“Now wait just a minute. We are talking here about an icon of the interior life of the most Holy Trinity, the image of the relationship between Christ and His Church, the fountainhead of human life, and the foundation of all human community. How could a quick, cheap shag in the shower possibly be commensurable with the dignity of such an act?”
All right, let’s take a look at another bio-spiritual act: the act of eating. As Christ points out in His Eucharistic discourses, all eating is a sign and symbol pointing towards the Lamb’s Supper, the sacrifice of the Cross, the wise providence of God, and the economy of salvation. Ideally, each meal would be undertaken in a spirit of gratitude and joy, shared in community with friends and family, offered up as a thanksgiving offering to the Lord, and enjoyed in the full consciousness that here we receive the fruit of the earth and work of human hands. Yet sometimes, if you are hungry, and you are in a rush, you grab a granola bar and munch it absent-mindedly in the car. Yes, technically that is not fully in accord with the dignity of the granola bar, but it would certainly be a form of disorder, based on serious scrupulosity, if you allowed yourself to become malnourished because you refused to eat unless the conditions allowed for the perfect expression of the highest spiritual meanings of the act. If you refused to feed your children unless you were completely satisfied that their motives in eating were perfectly pure, it would cease to be a mere scrupulous disorder, and would become a serious dereliction of duty.
Ditto with sex. “The husband must give his wife what she has the right to expect, and so too the wife to the husband. The wife has no rights over her own body; it is the husband who has them. In the same way, the husband has no rights over his body; the wife has them. Do not refuse each other except by mutual consent, and then only for an agreed time, to leave yourselves free for prayer; then come together again in case Satan should take advantage of your weakness to tempt you.” (1 Cor 7:3-5)

Where Have All the Firebrands Gone?

2011-05-27T19:21:00.003-04:00

It's been a while since I've blogged -- mostly a result of internet malfunctions and a total lack of energy caused by late pregnancy. I'm due to give birth in two days, so any prayers that you can throw my way would be very much appreciated. As a note, I know that Gerard Majella is the saint most popularly invoked by mothers-to-be in the present age, but St. Margaret of Antioch is my personal favourite pregnancy saint. She got the gig because she is supposed to have been swallowed by a dragon, and to have burst forth from its stomach after making the sign of the cross while she was in prison preparing for her martyrdom. Seriously cool.
I've just been reading through all of the comments that have been left on various posts of late -- as I noted, my internet access has been really spotty over the past month, so this is the first time I've been able to actually look at my blog. The comment that caught my eye was the one in which there is an extensive quotation from St. Peter Damien on homosexuality. Needless to say, the quotation (written in the High Middle Ages) is not in the gentlest of all possible veins... So I thought that I would try to deal with the question of why it is that I would counsel a much less abrasive tone, when so many of the Saints of earlier ages wrote so much really scathing vitriol against the Vice of Sodom.
I think the first thing to note is that the Vatican itself has undergone a serious change of tone over the past hundred years or so. Older encyclicals almost read as nothing more than a series of condemnations: "Let him be anathema who holds that..." whereas obviously the modern encyclical is written in that highly polished, extremely charitable if slightly technical dialect that we all know and love as Vaticanese. Why the change?
One reason is that there is a difference of audience. The Church prior to Vatican II was writing primarily for an audience of Bishops. An encyclical letter was one that was circulated throughout the higher levels of the Church's hierarchy. They weren't read and commented on by a popular mass media, and they couldn't be easily downloaded on-line by any curious lay-person. The papal writers were basically giving orders about matters of doctrine to their subordinates, which meant that they could simply say "This bad, this good," and expect to be obeyed.
This leads us to the second, and wider, difference: the expectation of obedience. You can speak very differently, and it is appropriate to speak very differently, to a group of people who acknowledge themselves to be under your authority than you can to a group of people who feel that they have the right to independently evaluate and weigh your claims. General Patton was an extremely popular and effective speaker when he was addressing his troops -- and a spectacular public embarrassment when he was addressing anyone else. When St. Peter Damien wrote his book, he could assume that he was writing for an audience of people who already a) believed in God, b) acknowledged the authority of scripture, c) believed in the existence of sin, and d) respected the authority of the Church. A harsh dressing down from a respected authority figure can sometimes be enough to change someone's heart; a harsh dressing down from someone who has no authority in the eyes of the audience will only provoke hardness of heart.
Thirdly, I think it's worth noting that the standards of etiquette in public discourse have changed. This is an important consideration, because I think we have to understand that cultural context changes how much a person is likely to be hurt by things that are said to them. For example, the average person living in this culture will not care at all if you throw around the most vulgar and indecent terms in their presence. The "F" word is not even a bad word in a lot of contexts (in Canada it's a form of verbal punctuation...). People call each other "mofo" as a term of endearment. These words, which would have been sufficient cause for people to start talking about shooting each other in a gentlemanly manner in order to obtain satisfaction several centuries ago, mean nothing. People are totally desensitized to them, and you have to get really, really obscene and filthy before you'll hurt someone's feelings with a swear word. On the other hand, people are extremely over-sensitized to language that seems "judgmental" or "intolerant." Obviously, in the eleventh century the situation was very different. People were used to have anathemas fulminated at them, they were accustomed to vitriol being poured out on their heads by clerical firebrands, and they had a taste for the sort of spiritual highs and lows that get produced by hellfire preaching. Instead of being a scandal, this sort of over-the-top writing about the filthiness of sin was expected -- and it was popular. People liked grisly momento mori, they liked paintings of the Last Judgment, and they liked graphic descriptions of the ruin which sin wreaks on souls. The Saints of the time could offer fraternal correction in as high-handed and fiery a manner as they wanted, and that was perfectly culturally appropriate.
It's not appropriate now. Yes, the truth has to be told, but it has to be told in charity -- and that charity has to correspond to the actual needs and condition of the human heart that is being addressed, not to an abstract "love" which considers all presentations of truth to be "charitable" because the truth is always good for the human person. The truth is always good for the human person, but it can only reach the heart of the person if it is spoken to them in a way that demonstrates understanding and compassion for their situation. And when it comes to homosexuality, that situation has changed a lot since St. Peter Damien was alive.

Sixth New Baby

2011-04-23T19:04:00.001-04:00

So I’m having my sixth baby. I’m due to give birth in a month, but this particular baby has decided to be troublesome, so I’ve been having hardcore Braxton Hicks contractions for the past three weeks. It’s pretty exhausting. With my other babies, I didn’t have to put up with this until a week or two before going into actual labour.
I can feel the threshold of fear hovering on the horizon. It’s one of those things that I think you can’t actually avoid if you’re approaching massive physical pain. It sort of shimmers there, threatening, and sooner or later it’s going to manifest and become real. I don’t know how other people deal with this, for some reason all of the pregnancy preparation books mention it without ever doing a really great existential analysis of the problem. Some of them advise you to do cheesy imagination exercises, or yoga. Maybe the problem is just that all pregnancy manuals are written for people whose aesthetic is antithetical to my own. I’ll give you my method:
In Frank Herbert’s Dune, there’s this wonderful little Bene Gesserit prayer called the “Litany Against Fear.” I memorized this back when I was fifteen years old, and it goes like this:
“I will not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will allow it to pass over me and to pass through me. Where the fear is gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Apart from being put in a wonderfully appealing idiom, it’s actually a very good pulling apart of the anatomy of courage. You start with the statement that you’re not going to be afraid, which of course is never actually true. I don’t care what the Stoics say, I’m sure that Socrates had his private little Gethsemane moment somewhere out of sight of Plato before he went out and faced the hemlock tea with a smile on his face. At the point where you’re saying, “I will not fear,” you’re already afraid. Still, you need to resist the fact, to put it in its place as the enemy of whatever you’re hoping to accomplish. It doesn’t matter whether it’s giving birth, or making a scary phone-call, or fighting a Balrog, or asking someone out on a date; the basic fact is the same. Fear is the mind-killer. It’s the thing that will totally paralyze you, and bring about the little death which, if it is allowed to take root in the soul, will ultimately lead to total obliteration. There is no Cross without facing fear, and no salvation without the Cross.
Now you get to the acknowledgement that the fear actually does exist: “I will face my fear.” The determination to confront the enemy, where it is, now, without succumbing to the temptation to wait for that distant moment when it won’t be scary. There is no such moment. You have to face the fear, and you have to let it “pass through me.” That’s the lynch-pin image here. You’re going to confront fear, and you’re going to feel afraid. The fear will be actually present within your psyche, and your body, and it will pass through you. It will awaken like the Kraken in its depths, and it will rise through you on its way to the surface where “once seen by men and angels,” it will “rise in roaring and on the surface die.” So you accept it, you let it pass through, and then it goes. And where it has gone there is nothing, only the self, strengthened and ready to face whatever trial you have to face.

Six New Books

2011-04-23T19:02:00.001-04:00

I’m currently working on, and need prayers for, a few new book projects, as follows:
1.The Marriage Quest: A book on courtship and marriage, jam-packed with literary examples and paradigm-shifting advice on how to woo and be wooed.
2.The Wayfarer’s Guide to the Malice and Snares of the Devil: A spiritual warfare guide, in a tongue-in-cheek style. Ancient insights with a modern edge.
3.Theology of the Body for the Married Woman: A Theology of the Body book that applies John Paul II’s insights specifically to the female body, and which provides practical insights into married sexuality without sinking into schlock sentimentality.
4.A Crisis of Passion: This was supposed to be released this Winter by the late lamented Circle Books, and is now seeking a new publisher. It ports the best of Postmodern thought into a Catholic context, examines how Catholic art can speak to the postmodern generations, and answers questions like “What is postmodernism anyway?”
5.Slave of Two Masters: This already has a publisher, but I need to get it drafted over the next couple of months while giving birth to my sixth baby. It’s about how Christ’s teachings on poverty apply to lay people, and especially families, with an emphasis on how to have more fun with, and get more out of, the economic downturn.
6.Octavia: This is my pet favourite, because it’s a novel. It’s about a sixteen year old girl, the youngest of eight, whose parents like to pretend that Rome never fell. Six years ago, her best friend fell into a sinister well that was dug at the Beginning of Time in order to hide all of the secrets that had to be kept from the eyes of God. Young adult supernatural horror, with geeky Classical references.
Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated, and of course, throw St. Francis Xavier a line and ask him to shepherd these projects into print.

Life on the Rock

2011-04-23T18:57:00.002-04:00

I’ve been baby-brained, and my internet has been down, so I forgot to put up a link to my appearance on EWTN’s “Life on the Rock.” If you’re interested, you can see me look all nervous and awkward on national television at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQx2zScTsOk.

God Made Me This Way

2011-04-05T09:52:00.002-04:00

One of the most difficult arguments to deal with in the debate about homosexuality, is the “God made me this way” argument. The argument in its logical form runs something like this:

P1: I have a strong desire for a good thing: sexual love with another person.
P2: I am able to fulfill this desire only with members of my own sex.
P3: (This is usually a hidden premise) All desires for good things must come from God.
P4: (Also usually a hidden premise) God would not give a desire and then prohibit me from fulfilling it.
Conclusion: God made me gay, and it is therefore morally legitimate for me to act on my homosexual desires.

Most Christian apologetics on the matter focus on attacking P2. Protestant groups especially have tried to demonstrate that homosexuality is not fixed or innate, and that gay people can be brought around to happy heterosexuality. For obvious personal reasons, I’m suspicious of P2, but I do think that it’s fairly clear that there are some people for whom it is true; if not in an absolute sense, certainly in a practical sense. The actual problem, however, is with P4. Christianity must fundamentally reject this premise – and I’m going to argue that any belief in a good and all powerful God must necessarily rest on its rejection.

There are obvious cases where the argument would produce moral nonsense, for example:
P1: I have a strong desire for a good thing: justice.
P2: Justice can only be fulfilled in case X by a vigilante execution.
P3 and P4 as above.
Conclusion: Therefore God has given me the right and duty to lynch this murderin’ son of a barnacle.

We need not, however, resort to cases of obvious immorality, because P4 is untrue even when both the desire and the fulfillment of that desire are unquestionably morally licit. This is one of the central truths at the heart of the Passion. Christ kneels down in Gethsemane, and He asks God for permission to cling to life. The body does not wish to die, human life is a good thing, it is a gift unquestionably given by God, and Jesus, as a man, wants to hold on to it. He asks that the cup of suffering and death be removed – and then adds the most profound statement of Christian faith, “But not my will, but thine be done.”
God does not give permission. He sends His own only begotten Son out to die on the Cross. He says, “No,” and Christ assents to that no, and in assenting, in setting aside His legitimate desires, brings about the salvation of the world.
Oh ho. But perhaps we are talking about a special case here. Christ was God, and He made that sacrifice voluntarily, and presumably He was in on the plan before He was even born. He chose to come into the world to suffer and die, whereas ordinary people have made no such choice. A beneficent and humane God might expect such superhuman self-sacrifice from Jesus, but He would not demand it of us.
The problem with this is as follows: whether God’s “no” comes in the form of a moral prohibition, or in some other form, its effect on the human psyche – not to mention the human life – is the same. It is a readily demonstrable fact that people frequently go to God and beg for things that are objectively just and good, and God says No. People falsely accused rightly ask God to grant them liberty, that they may not spend the next twenty-five years incarcerated for a crime they never committed, and God, through the instrumentality of twelve honest folks, says No. A soldier prays to survive the war that he might return to his family and provide for them and raise his children up to love and serve the Lord, and God says No. An African subsistence farmer prays that the locust swarm may pass to the west, so that she might be able to have food enough to produce milk for the unborn child in her womb, and God says No. Examples can be multiplied endlessly: this is the problem of Evil, and it is the primary objection to the existence of a good and almighty God.
If you don’t believe that God would ever demand profound suffering and privation of human beings, you must become an atheist. There’s no good pretending that a different kind of God exists, because this is the sort of world that we live in. It is a world in which the denial of the ability to enjoy sexual love doesn’t even make the grade on the list of grievous trials which human beings are called to endure. It is a world that could only be justified and redeemed by an act as radical as the Cross: by the absolute and unswerving demonstration, on the part of God Himself, that suffering is not a negation either of the existence of God, or of the meaningfulness of life. That, on the contrary, suffering is the foundation of meaning, that the Cross itself is the way of truth and life.

Determined to be Scandalized

2011-03-21T20:22:00.000-04:00

About once a week, an “action alert” arrives in my mailbox from an organization called “change.org.” They’re basically a left-wing slactivism web-site; occasionally they achieve useful results, but a lot of the time they’re worked up over very little. Rather like most right-wing slactivism sites in that respect.
Yesterday’s alert really brought this into focus. Last week, the big news was that a change.org campaign against corrective rape in South Africa had produced hundreds of thousands of signatures, and sparked a furore of interest within the international community at large, causing the South African government to promise to do something about the issue. Corrective rape is basically a form of sexual violence deliberately inflicted on lesbian women, either as punishment for their homosexual behaviours, or as a means of “curing” them. Often this is done with the consent or complicity of family members, or by family members themselves. (How, exactly, a traumatic heterosexual experience is supposed to encourage someone to abandon a lesbian identity, I don’t know. But there are people who think this way – and not just in Africa. I personally know of one person who it happened to in the States, and am peripherally aware of others.) Needless to say, this is a serious human rights abuse, genuinely deserving the attention of the human community.
So yesterday, following on the heels of this victory, the change.org action alert was (roll drums, strike up the fanfare) Exodus International has released a Smartphone applet. Yes folks, that’s right, time to get out your little clicky finger and petition Apple: the evil ex-gay organization is now making it’s resources available to its members on their cell-phones. This controversy is almost equal to the pro-life Krispy Kreme donut protest (yes, it’s true, we actually successfully petitioned to have the word “choice” removed from a donut add, even though it had nothing to do with abortion) in terms of its asinine petty-mindedness.
I’m not going to bother defending the applet. As far as I can make out, all it really amounts to is that Exodus members will be able to use their phones to get information and resources that are already available on the net. It’s should hardly be a scandal. Yet the LGBTQ community is determined to be scandalized.
This is an important point. I talk a lot about the fact that Christians often scandalize gay and lesbian folks with hypocritical, judgmental or homophobic behaviours – and this is certainly true. I have talked a lot less about the fact that sometimes people who identify as homosexual are hell-bent on being outraged by anything that the Christian community does, regardless of how inoffensive it actually is. To argue that Apple is promoting homophobia, or that Exodus International is contributing to gay teen suicide by producing an applet, is not only hysterical, it stretches credibility beyond the point of the absurd.

Language Politics and Family Fun

2011-03-04T13:00:00.002-05:00

I've just been reading some of the comments on my previous posts, and since I've taken so long getting around to responding to them, I figured I'd dignify them with an entire post since I don't expect people to be patient enough to keep checking back to my neglected comments pages.
There were several people who commented on the language politics questions of "what do you call people who are attracted to members of the same sex"? This is a complicated and controversial one. Courage recommends "people who experience same sex attraction" or "persons with same sex attractions" that's clinical, not judgmental, and sidesteps the identity issues that are tied up with the gay/lesbian nomenclature. The Vatican uses "the homosexual person," or "homosexual persons." I think that both of those are fine, and not especially controversial -- "same sex attraction" used to be a term that only really appeared in Christian/anti-gay sources, but it's started to appear in clinical research on the LGBTQ side of the fence because it's inclusive of those who are same-sex attracted but who, for various reasons, do not like the various more politicized terms. I use gay and lesbian for people who have adopted a gay or lesbian identity, and LGBTQ (that's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered and Queer/Questioning -- the last term differs depending on whom you are talking to) to refer to the gay movement/culture (don't use the outdated GLBT -- the lesbians got really mad about being placed second, because it trivializes women...). Queer is controversial. I like it, and it's used fairly frequently in LGBTQ circles, but occasionally you'll run into someone who is really offended by it. I suspect that in Toronto and San Francisco, it's run-of-the-mill and non-offensive, and that in the American Mid-West it's still a slur word.
I also occasionally use more colourful terms that really only appear in gay writing about homosexuality -- "eromenoi" is the ancient Greek for "beloved," and is used in various ancient texts to refer to the younger male partner in a homosexual relationship; Sapphic is an alternate for lesbian that refers directly to the poetess Sappho; then there are more specific terms like "ladyboy" or "leatherman." Generally, it's not a good idea to use these unless you've got a really splashy idiom, or you have to write about homosexuality often enough that you get really sick of using the same terms over and over again.
So that's that. The second thing that I wanted to deal with is the fraternal correction issue. I do realize that in families fraternal correction is almost never actually offered in an ideal way -- there are few of us who are capable of being perfectly rational agents at all times. I do think, however, that the standards set by St. Thomas are a good ideal, and a lot of the time it is possible to be more reasonable than we are inclined to be. To be honest, I'm thinking about the issue to a large degree in terms of issues other than same-sex attraction that have arisen in my own family. I'm not perfectly rational in offering correction, and I know how difficult it can be, but I've found over years of non-productive fighting that if you actually work hard and train yourself to follow St. Thomas' advice, you can move towards a much more effective and fruitful discussion. Note that I'm seeing this as something that you work on over a period of years, not something that I think most people will be capable of in the minutes after their son/daughter/wife/husband comes out of the closet. That said, it's probably a good idea to cultivate a general habit of reasonableness, and to contemplate in advance the likelihood that one's nearest and dearest relations are likely to develop serious patterns of sin, which will require charitable correction. It's the same as being prepared in advance for the times in which personal temptation will be especially strong, and for the likelihood that you will occasionally fall down. If you get it into your head that you're never, ever, ever going to sin seriously ever again, then when you do, you'll be shocked and stunned and angry and ill-disposed to deal with it. If you resolve not to sin, but accept that some day you probably will anyways, and get yourself ready to repent, and accept the fact of your own weakness with humility, then when it happens, there's a lot less wounded pride to get in the way. Same deal, I think, with being prepared to deal with the sins of others, especially sins that are likely to cause hurt and grief to oneself.

All things to all men

2011-02-17T05:36:00.004-05:00

I’m currently listening to a boxed set of CDs of the New Testament, the “Truth & Life Dramatized Audio Bible,” to review it for Tiber River. So far most of it has been done in a style that seems to prevail in Christian/Catholic dramatizations of the Bible, but which no one that I know actually likes. It’s the kind of souped up, cheesy, over-the-top rendering of Biblical texts where Jesus sounds like He’s perpetually on the verge of breaking out into tears or being transformed into a being of pure light. It has the same emotional melodrama as a Queen anthem or a Judas Priest power ballad, but without the essential element of camp to make it clear that it’s not quite taking itself seriously.
I don’t know who it is that goes in for this sort of thing, but I suspect that the way that I read/hear Jesus would sound equally absurd or uninspiring to some other people. In my head He usually sounds like a very sane and reasonable philosopher, with just enough humour to make Him endearing. Perhaps to others, He sounds like a comforting friend, or a voice of thunder on the mountaintop, or the quiet whispering of conscience in the silence of the heart.
It raises the difficult problem of how to convey the power and personality of a figure who is literally “all things to all men.” The personality of Christ is sort of like a redeemed voice of Saruman. Every person who comes to Him with an honest and open heart, finds a radically appealing, personally compelling figure. It’s just that the exact nature of that personality is chameleonic. There is a relationship established there that is highly personal; just as He was willing to come down to Earth and take on a human form in order to unite Himself to humanity, He is willing and able to take on a form, for each of us, that will speak directly to our inmost selves. To the rationalist, He is reasonable. To the Romantic, sentimental. To the lonely, friendly. To the proud, a stern rebuke. To the self-conscious, a voice of encouragement.
For someone trying to put together a dramatization this presents a considerable obstacle. No matter how well it is done, it is probably going to alienate and disappoint a certain portion of your audience. How is this to be overcome?
I think probably the best approach is to make it as personal as possible, to recognize that I am not Christ, and cannot perfectly address all hearts at once. Mel Gibson’s Passion succeeds precisely because it is Mel Gibson’s. It’s not the Passion as conceived of by anyone else, and it’s not trying to be universal. The same is true of much of the writing of the Saints. There is almost no similarity between Christ as He appears in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, and Christ as He appears in St. Catherine of Sienna, yet it is clear that both are writing about the same God. It’s just that they are writing about Him through the prism of two wildly disparate personalities. (Personally, I find Hildegard’s spirituality compelling and inspiring, and I find Catherine’s alternately dull and neurotic, but I’m sure that there are countless others who have the opposite reaction.) In any case, if it is profoundly personal and honest, the portrayal should succeed.

Fraternal Correction

2011-02-09T13:05:00.002-05:00

Every so often, someone who has read something that I’ve written writes to me and asks advice. For the most part, my correspondents are the family members of people who have come out of the closet as gay or lesbian. Concerned mothers, husbands, sisters, fathers and so forth want to know what they should do to lead their loved ones out of homosexuality.
It raises a difficult point: how exactly does one interact with the sins of others, especially of those who are closest to us – and about whose faults we therefore have the least objectivity. The more that you love someone, the more that they have the capacity to hurt you, and the more that hurt is going to influence and colour any help that you try to provide. On the other hand, it always seems like the love that we have for those close to us places us in a special position of responsibility.
I don’t think that there are any easy answers here, but there is one consideration from St. Thomas Aquinas that I think sheds light on the problem. In his discussion of the obligation of fraternal correction, he makes the particularly valuable and interesting observation that if you have good reason to believe that your correction will only make the person who you are trying to correct worse, you shouldn’t do it. This is an obvious corollary of the virtue of prudence, but one which easily escapes notice when the sins of a family member start to get up your nose.
Generally, the first time that you bring an issue up, you’re not going to know what sort of effect your correction will have, so you ought to have the humility to observe the effects, and to evaluate them honestly. Let’s say that you read Bible passages about the sin of homosexuality to a gay relative; what effect does this have? Does it cause them to seriously reconsider their life, or does it make them more inclined to reject God out of a feeling that God has rejected them? If the latter, it’s probably not a good tack to take. Or if you present them with facts and statistics about the incidence of HIV/AIDS in gay communities, does this have a sobering effect, or does it lead to the sort of moral and personal despair that so often fuels the more compulsive (and therefore dangerous) manifestations of homosexual desire? Does pointing out the effect of their lifestyle on other family members, including yourself, bring them closer to repentance, or closer to closing the door on the family forever?
Obviously, a person decides how they are going to respond to correction, but there’s no use in saying, “Oh, well, if they had more humility/were more reasonable/would only listen, then we would be able to get somewhere.” If someone is not willing or ready to hear something, there’s no point in saying it. Often, if you insist on being heard, you will only convince the other person that you don’t respect them, that you’re priggish, and self-satisfied, and probably hypocritical. We’ve all had this experience: you’re told that something that you’re doing is wrong, and on some level you know that it’s true, but you think that there’s something unfair, unjust, or discompassionate in the way that you are told. Instead of humble self-examination and contrition, you immediately go into high-defensive gear. You start making excuses to justify the behaviour, resort to tu quoque arguments in order to disarm your accuser, and, if things get really out of hand, throw yourself all the more ardently into your sins just to spite the son-of-a-bitch who had the temerity to pass judgement on you.
This is what St. Thomas warns us against, and for good reason. It is the obligation of anyone who corrects their brother to make sure that they’re actually doing good to the other person. It’s very easy to tell ourselves that we’re in the right, and that we’re acting out of love, when in fact our motives are much murkier. Perhaps we are angry at the other person, or feel hurt by their choices. Maybe we’re embarrassed (what will the neighbours think?), or want to establish ourselves in a position of moral superiority. Often these things influence our attempts at correction without us even being aware of them, which is why it’s so important to pay attention to the other person. If you fix your eyes on the person you love, not only will you be able to correct for the sins and failings that you bring to the discussion, you will also be less likely to fall into them. You will see what does good, and what does harm, and you will be able to correct yourself, improve your methods, and, if all goes well, eventually find ways of conducting a dialogue that is genuinely fruitful and edifying.

'Suffering' from SSA

2011-02-02T14:21:00.001-05:00

What do you call someone who is a man and has sexual attractions towards other men, or is a woman and has such attractions for another woman? This is the center of one of those big language-political debates, and most of us can’t even hope to be on the forefront of politically correct usage, even if we wanted to. In the Catholic world, the “correct” term is generally “same-sex attracted,” which is allegedly neutral and which also, to give it some credit, occasionally appears in scientific literature by pro-gay advocates.
Now, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with “same-sex attracted,” or “same-sex attraction” as terms for homosexuals/homosexuality (apart from the fact that they’re clinical and totally non-euphonious.) The problem is that they very often appear in compounds with the verb “suffering from.” Catholics who are trying to appear balanced, sane, compassionate, non-offensive, etc. will say that so-and-so was “suffering from same-sex-attractions.” I myself have been described in this way. The problem is that no one suffers from same-sex attractions unless they are already more or less firmly in the Catholic/Christian camp. People who desperately want to be chaste and/or heterosexual, and who find this difficult, really do suffer. But when you apply that terminology to the LGBTQ community in general, you sound like an idiot – or worse, like a patronizingly nice member of some paternalistic sect.
The problem is that the verb “to suffer” already contains a very specific judgement about the nature of same-sex attraction. Someone who makes racy CGI videos celebrating the Sapphic sisterhood, or who buys a homoerotic casket in which to be buried next to his Eromenoi, doesn’t see her/himself as suffering from anything. The moment that you use that kind of language, you’ve already shot yourself in the foot in terms of dialogue – you’ve revealed a profoundly discordant paradigm, one that conveys that you simply don’t understand, and that you’re probably not willing to.

Review: How to Get to I Do

2011-01-31T09:09:00.002-05:00

How to Get to I Do is a fascinating psychological study of the contemporary Catholic dating scene, but I would hesitate to recommend it as a guide for anyone who wishes to actually find a husband.

Author Amy Bonaccorso is described in the back-of-the-book flavour text as a “veteran of the Christian dating scene,” and so she is. She spent nearly ten years searching for men at Christian college groups, parish social events, and on on-line dating sites. Although numbers are not given, one has the impression that she dated dozens, if not hundreds, of men before settling down with her husband. Her insights are certaintly hard-won, and there is a lot of good advice here, unfortunately what she consistently illustrates through her practical examples and her personal anecdotes soundly contradicts the thesis of her book. She promises to help young Christian women to get down off their high horses, abandon their dreams of Prince Charming, get real, and get married. In practice, however, the horse is only lowered by a couple of millimetres, and one is largely advised to settle for Prince Charming’s slightly-less-charming younger brother.

One of the lines that I found most telling was the claim that “Even the most patient, long-suffering women eventually need to abandon men who say they love Christ but who nevertheless lack good relationship skills." This, for me, sums of the tone of the book. Bonaccorso seems to think that most men are simply not relationship material. They are insufficiently sincere, honest, faithful, chaste, affluent, well-educated, respectful, or well-mannered to function as a life-partner. The majority of her practical advice focuses on recognizing and weeding out unworthy candidates. Although she often says that it is necessary to be compassionate, understanding, patient, and humble, it is difficult to square this with most of the specific behaviours and practices that she recommends. Bonaccorso does eventually find a husband, but this reviewer gets the impression that it is more in spite of her methodology than because of it.

This book seems to take it for granted that the average unmarried Catholic woman is financially independent, has lots of disposable income, lives in a large city, and has a huge amount of free time to spend perusing on-line profiles and going on trial dates. Bonaccorso further assumes that you are desirable, well-educated and self-confident enough to attract a large pool of potential marriage candidates who can be easily discarded if they don’t make the cut.

Needless to say, this is worse than useless advice for the majority of girls who have suffered for a long time in the Catholic dating scene, most of whom are fighting over the relatively small handful of chaste and devout men that haven’t been snapped up by the end of high-school. She does not give advice for the perennially lonely, the socially awkward, the inexperienced, and the chronically shy – yet that probably describes the greater part of her readership. Perhaps Catholic girls who love Jesus but “lack good relationship skills” are to be thrown into the same outer darkness as the similarly afflicted men, permanently unloved and unlovable, even by the most long-suffering of Saints?

I wrote this review for Tiber River, created by Aquinas and More.

You can get the book here.

Hustlers and Condoms and Popes -- Oh My!

2011-01-03T12:01:00.004-05:00

Most people are aware of the current controversy surrounding the Pope's (extremely mild) statement that in the case of a male prostitute with HIV, the use of a prophylactic might be a sign of moral growth. Naturally, this has produced all sorts of outrage and speculation. The secular press has declared that the Pope cares more about male prostitutes than married women. Conservative Catholics are terrified that this is going to cause massive scandal. Liberal Catholics are hailing it as the long-awaited loosening of the Church's position on contraception.
It's interesting, because the problem is one that I've looked at in the past, before it was a major controversy, and I was somewhat scandalized by the fact that Catholic bodies, such as the US Council of Bishops, stubbornly refused to publicly permit Catholic medical authorities to recommend the use of condoms in the case of HIV infected (or potentially HIV infected) gay men who are committed to continuing in a homosexual lifestyle. From a moral point of view, the issue has always seemed to me to be a no-brainer: condoms are not permitted in the case of a normal sexual intercourse because they are contraceptive. In the case of homosexual sex, a condom simply is not a contraceptive device. It's only purpose is to prevent the transmission of a potentially fatal disease, and as such there should be absolutely no moral controversy whatever surrounding its use.
It's interesting to see, however, how this has played out. I, and perhaps Benedict as well, seem to have been unduly optimistic about the world's ability to deal with this sort of issue in a rational and mature way. Instead of saying, "Oh, yes, that is morally consistent, and makes sense, and follows from the rest of Catholic teaching," the world has taken this as an opportunity to fly off into various fits of fanciful speculation.
Granted, the fact that the prophylactic use of condoms is not only justifiable, but is arguably a grave moral obligation in the case of HIV positive persons who are engaging in sexual acts which could not possibly lead to conception, does raise some interesting questions. Naturally, people are going to speculate about these. The problem is what gets overlooked in all of the hubbub, which is the fact that the Pope has made a fairly courageous statement: one that is totally orthodox, and which at the same time demonstrates a fully human and compassionate response to the problem of HIV in gay communities. To me, at least, the desire to prevent putative "scandal" is less important than the desire to save lives. Obviously, as Benedict stresses, condoms are not a solution to the problem of AIDS. The true moral obligation resting on anyone who has HIV, is to curb their sexual desires in order to protect the lives of others. But realistically, people who are facing a long-standing sexual addiction are not likely to succeed in suddenly going cold-turkey the moment they gain the most psychologically devastating news of their lives. Denial, hopelessness, moral despair, anger, and extreme loneliness are all common, normal reactions to an HIV diagnosis. The Pope is absolutely right: for someone in this position, the decision to move from a state of total moral denial and culpable recklessness, to adopt at least some measure of responsibility for their actions and the consequences thereof, is a sign of greater moral and emotional maturity. It's not a complete solution, it's not a full embrace of the moral obligation to respect for life and chastity, but it is a move in the right direction.
And I'm glad that someone in the Church had the courage to say so.

Courtship Books

2010-12-17T18:24:00.002-05:00

I’ve just posted a review of a dating advice book that I’ve read, and I’ve been flipping through a big stack of dating and relationships advice and courtship books that I borrowed from a friend (some Christian, some secular), and I am totally disappointed. Shocked and stunned. Probably I’m going to have to write a courtship book myself. Blech.
In the hopes of staving off the fateful day, here are my thoughts, in a nutshell. Most of the books that are put out seem to assume that what you’re trying to do is find someone with whom you will be able to have a comfortable, pleasant, conflict-free, affluent lifestyle. In other words, someone with whom you may avoid the “in sickness,” “for poorer,” “for worse” parts of the marriage vows. This, to me, is totally absurd. The point at which I decided that I was almost certainly going to marry my husband was when I returned to Kingston after visiting him in Waterloo. I was thinking, “This man is possibly crazy. He is totally bizarre. He looks like just he climbed out of an ancient Byzantine grave and hasn’t had a chance to brush his hair yet. He’s probably going to fail all of his courses, and never get a university degree, and live in poverty for the rest of his life. And I love him. Enough that I think that I could go on loving him and be happy with him, in crazyville, without any money, for the next fifty years of my life!” The possibility of this sort of love, this sort of mad, count-no-costs, permanent, based-in-the-will, reckless, until-death kind of love made me absolutely giddy. The idea of a love that reflected that relationship between Christ and His Church in the sense that Christ was whipped and beaten and groaned in Gethsemene, and climbed to Cavalry, and was Crucified for the Church, and in which the Church has been ridiculed, and persecuted, and has suffered poverty, and has been martyred for Christ – what an absolutely awesome and incredible thing. Practically magic.
Now, I will admit that at the time I had just finished reading a whamo-combo of Fear and Trembling, Crime and Punishment, Seven Story Mountain, and, just to make things really surreal, The Master and Marguerita. Still, I stuck to my belief and to my resolution even after I had come down from the literary hallucinogenic mind-warp, and have now been married for nearly ten years, with a sixth child on the way. I am, to the best of my knowledge, happier in my marriage than almost anyone else that I know. I have a wonderful life full of beautiful paradoxes and seeming contradictions, like the fact that I’m simultaneously fabulously wealthy and penniless, or that my lifestyle is both absolutely lunatic and yet “heroically sane” (as David Foster Wallace says of Kafka’s humour.)
It has not been a perpetual martyrdom, or a constant self-sacrifice. Most of the really terrifying long-brooding darkness that I signed up for hasn’t actually manifested, and the blessings have been manifold and totally unpredictable. God, in His usual wisdom, has not asked of me more than He has given me the grace to do. For every three hours of Crucifixion, there have been countless days of joy and wonder. I can’t imagine a better or more fitting husband than the one that I have; we complement each other in ways that I could never have predicted, and if I had married someone more 'sensible', I never could have become any of the things that I really wanted to be.
This is why I hate dating advice books. They solemnly recommend the most dreary kind of false prudence. They recommend that you hedge your bets, consider your options, and gamble with pennies. Sure, most of the time, following their advice will eventually result in you getting married. And most of the time, the marriage will be a manageable construct of human making, lacking the wild and reckless genius of a God who founded the world on the suffering Body and Blood of His only begotten Son.

St. Frodo Baggins Pray for Us?

2010-12-09T14:06:00.004-05:00

Come Advent, for some reason, I always end up deeply absorbed in some sort of fantasy world. In this case, it's the world for a young adult horror novel that I'm working on, and as usual I'm confronted with the question of what, exactly, the status of sub-created persons is.
It's a problem that theologians don't tend to bother with, probably largely because they're not artists, and are therefore not especially aware of some of the stranger things that are true of the people who live in the world of fiction. The most notorious example of this is the fact that fictional people appear, at some point, to come to possess free will -- and even some semblance of moral free will. You'll have a lovely little hero, or heroine, who is supposed to be perfectly good and virtuous, or a villain who is supposed to behave perfectly abominably, and all of a sudden they'll make the decision to do something totally unexpected, even "out of character," if you conceive of "in character" in a really narrow sense. In fact, it is these decisions, often more than the plotting decisions of the author, that make the character "come to life," that give shape, definition, breadth and meaning to the narrative. Often these decisions are small things, like Sarah Woodruff's decision to stop at a dairy and have some milk in The French Lieutenant's Woman, but sometimes they're drastic decisions that pull the plot in an entirely unexpected direction. In some cases, all you can do is give up on having any sort of control and let the character go in a sort of creative free-fall, trusting that they will make choices that will produce good narrative -- which always turns out to be true.
Now, the question is, if you have a character, and you pull back and give them their freedom, what is the moral status of those decisions? The simple answer is to say that it may be "edifying" or "disedifying" when transcribed into a work of art, and so is, in a sense, moral or immoral. This leaves the moral responsibility in the hands of the author, but that sidesteps the problematic experience, which is the apparent freedom of the sub-created agent. The problem is further complicated by the fact that for every moral decision that makes itself onto the paper in the form of text, there is a whole subtext of moral struggle, wrestling with dragons and demons, quiet despair and silent determination, a whole human battlefield on which the passions and hopes and virtues and weaknesses of the character are being played out, totally out of view of the reading public, but exposed to the author (who usually doesn't have the space or word-count or audience attention span necessary to transcribe the entire matter), and often reawakened in the mind of any reader who is particularly drawn in by the world (Who hasn't spent time contemplating a favorite story, reliving and drawing out the full experience that lurks within a metaphor, a symbol, a couple lines of spare and terrifying text?).
Is there some sense in which God gives real freedom, or life, to the creatures of the human imagination -- the way that Iluvatar gave real life to the Dwarves who were created by one of his Valar in the Simarillion? Does the experience of the artist reflect an actual spiritual fact, or is it simply an ontological illusion of the subconscious mind?

Sign Value

2010-11-23T12:42:00.003-05:00

I just finished writing a series on poverty for the National Catholic Register, and I found that some of my favourite ideas just didn't make it into the text. So I'm going to talk about one of them here.

Basically, I was trying to cover all of the major gospel quotes about money, and to give a brief summary of Church social teaching, a brief apercu on gift exchange, and some hard-hitting practical advice on how to be poor and love it, but I just didn't have the space to talk about the idea of sign value.

This is a concept that arose out of neo-Marxist thought in the late 20th Century (no, I'm not about to go Commie-pinko on everyone – it's an observation not a manifesto), basically in an attempt to account for the fact that in a modern commodity based market you can find almost identical goods being sold for radically different prices. To give an obvious example, there are the endless designer look-alike looks touted in every fashion magazine. They show you a dress, handbag and shoe ensemble that was worn by some millionaire celebrity, they quote you the jaw-dropping price that was paid for the outfit, and then they cheerily inform you that you can get almost the same thing at the local mall for a 'mere' $300.

An even more extreme example is the phenomenon of crushed or broken packaging. If you have two items that are literally identical – same brand, same product, same factory of origin, etc. -- and one of them has a box that has become ripped or discoloured or otherwise marred in transport, the one with the pristine box will be "worth" at least 25% more in the marketplace. Sign value is a theory that accounts for this by dividing the value of goods into two components: the use value, which is the actual functional value that will be derived by the user or purchaser; and the sign value, which is the value that is conveyed by the good functioning as a sign – of prestige, of affluence, of strength, of beauty, etc. In the case of the crushed box, buying something that is in less-than-perfect condition (even if the product itself is not effected) is seen as "cheap," it signifies poverty and a willingness to "settle for less." Thus the damaged package has a negative sign-value that reduces the commercial value of the product. In the case of the $300 look-alike ensemble, there are two different levels on which sign-value is functioning: it is functioning, in the first place, to massively inflate the value of the original celebrity outfit, which may literally have thousands of dollars added to the value by the presence, for example, of a designer label or a particularly trendy kind of cut crystal. In this case, the celebrity purchaser is looking for something that will carry with it the sign-value of designer prestige, uniqueness, and cutting-edge fashionable novelty. The buyer of the look-alike, however, is not actually buying the same outfit with its value scaled back to reflect its actual usefulness: they too are paying a mark-up for sign-value, in this case the sign-value of looking like the celebrity.

Anyway, I was going to discuss how sign-value functions within gift economies, where value is not measured in objectivized monetary terms. Within modern commercial economies, there is a strong impetus to imbue products with sign-value in order to increase profit margins. This generally involves artificially assigning a sign-value and reinforcing it through advertising media. In gift exchange, however, the gift has a natural sign-value. It signifies the relationship in which it is given, the love and sacrifice that went into making or providing it, and the occasion on which it was given. In many cases, the gift has literally no use-value; it is only a sign – as in Oscar Wilde's famous quip that all art is quite useless. The interesting difference here is that the sign-value of gifts increases as the gift is given and given again. In traditional cultures, many gift items would become the purveyors of a story or legend, they would take on magical traits, conveying new and amplified meanings as they moved through traditional cycles of giving. Much the same thing happens with family heirlooms, which perpetuate and accumulate meaning as they are passed from generation to generation. With market commodities, generally, the opposite happens: what carries the sign-value of prestige, novelty, wealth, and status today will carry the stigma of poverty, grubbiness, out-of-dateness, and fashion-cluelessness tomorrow.

The God of Sinners

2010-11-01T13:58:00.000-04:00

One of the strange things about our faith is Christ’s declaration that there will be more rejoicing in Heaven over one repentant sinner than over 100 righteous men. Now you can wash this over some way or other by saying, “Oh, well, everyone is a repentant sinner if they’re in Heaven,” which is true, but I don’t think that it really gets at what Christ is saying here. The implication, the pretty clear and strong implication, is that the person who humbly makes his way through his life, tending the fathers fields, doing what the father says, never even asking for a goat so that he can have a party with his friends, doesn’t cause as much rejoicing as the one who goes off, squanders his inheritance on street boys and gypsy dancers, sits around in gambling houses laughing his head off at raunchy jokes, and then, through a sea of pig-shit and suffering, finally makes his way back to the father’s house.
Why? From a literary perspective the answer is pretty obvious. Try sitting down one day with those first long, drawn out, tedious chapters of Les Miserables, where Hugo is just going through and recounting all the good deeds and charity of the Bishop of Digne. Yawn. No one is interested until the wild-eyed theif shows up and yoinks the poor Bishop’s silverware in the middle of the night. Or leaf through a book of the lives of the Saints. There are literally hundreds of Saints whose lives read something like, “She lived in obedience to her parents throughout her childhood, and wanted to enter the convent at the age of thirteen, but she had to stay home and look after a sick sister, so out of filial piety she put aside her dreams and stayed home until she was 22. Then she entered the Order of X, and founded 700 orphanages, and cared for the sick and dying until she died at the age of 45 holding a crucifix and smiling on a picture of the baby Jesus.” I’m sure that there’s more to the stories of these women: I’m sure that there are fabulous interior exploits, and struggles with sin, and all sorts of juicy literary grist that was hidden from the world. I’m sure they’re not actually boring. But let’s be realistic here, the average reader, if they’re going to bother with the lives of the Saints at all, wants the ones with sin and blood. The ones where the heroine was the most horrible sinner in the world, and then went out and blackened her skin for fifty years in the Egyptian desert, doing penance and fighting with demons. We want the descent into darkness, and the miraculous conversion, the soul rising up out of the depths of Hell to seize the light with all its strength.
Does Heaven want this as well? Apparently. Why? My best guess is that God has a finely tuned sense of narrative, and sees the wonderful symmetry in having the entire salvation history of the race acted out, like a fractal equation, writ small, writ large, writ in blood and in tears, in the individual lives of each of His human creatures.

21 Icons of Mystery

2010-10-26T15:39:00.000-04:00

I’m trying to write short stories featuring the Saints as part of a new project that I’m working on that pairs fictional vignettes with spiritual exercises, wrapped up in the slightly dark, solitary aesthetic that used to be so popular in Medieval Christianity, but which has fallen by the wayside in recent years. It’s a somewhat daunting task, because I’m horribly scrupulous and apprehensive. Generally, when I write fiction I stick to the “speculative” genres: mostly fantasy and horror. In those genres, you get to make up your own world, which follows rules that you establish yourself, and you don’t ever have to be afraid about getting in “right” -- except in so far as it has to ring true and follow the inspiration.
Writing with Saints is a different matter, because there’s some sense in which I’m always worried that I’m maligning them by making the portrayals insufficiently rich, unique, beautiful, etc. It’s also a difficult task in general: most of the time, when people try to insert Mary, or the Saints, or Jesus into fiction it comes out horribly maudlin, sappy, sentimental, trite, and flat. It is, however, possible to do it well. Probably the best examples that I know of are Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony, and his short story, “Julian the Hospitator.” Bulgakov’s Master and Marguerita is interesting because it provides, simultaneously, one of literature’s best portrayals of Pontius Pilate, and one of it’s weakest and most banal images of Christ (probably this was at least in part necessitated by the desire to be publishable in the Soviet Union.) Dostoyevski’s “Grand Inquisitor,” from the Brother’s Karamazov, is the best literary depiction of Christ that I know of, though he pulls it off largely by having Christ remain silent while the Grand Inquisitor rants.
Anyway, that’s the task. Prayers are appreciated. I could also use leads on good female Saints to include the project. What I’m looking for are women with interesting lives that will provide good fodder for the imaginative mill. They should be Saints that aren’t already well-known to most Catholics. Ideally there should be some good source material available in English, though older Saints whose lives have been almost entirely reduced to legend can work as well. Seven spots remain.

A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey

2010-10-19T10:59:00.000-04:00

I’ve recently moved from the city to the country – about two and a half weeks ago, I think. The expectations that one has moving into a new home are interesting; my real estate agent noted, wisely I think, that when people buy a new house they’re not really looking for a house, but for peace. And you really do feel that way on some level: you will move, and you will have a new life, and somehow all of the difficulties of the past will evaporate like frost in the morning.

Naturally, intellectually you know that this isn’t true, but on some deep archetypal level, the feeling remains. It is, I think, a pointer towards the desire for heaven. The Jewish people, when they were wandering around Sinai searching for the promised land, seemed to have that sort of experience. It was going to be a land flowing with milk and honey, where they would live in peace with their children, blessed by God, a people no longer homeless and enslaved.

Of course the actual promised land was a land teeming with Canaanites and other undesirables. No sooner had they taken possession than they were plunged into an endless series of wars, conquests, persecutions. When things went well, they became bloated and proud and turned away from God, which in turn occasioned more chastisements, more wars, more conquests...

Yet the image of the promised land remains compelling. No one, except perhaps for the extremely dry and cynical atheist, reads the accounts of the pilgrim people in search of a home and thinks, “Yeah, sure. Milk and honey. Just you wait and see, bubba...” There is some level on which we can all sympathize, on which we know that yes, the land will not actually be a perpetual stream of uninterrupted earthly joy, but it is still worth hoping for on those terms. The unfulfillable promise is not actually a lie, it’s just a sign of a higher reality.

Besides which, there is usually a certain amount of milk and honey to go with the Canaanites. My new farm has not caused my children to cease from fighting amongst one another or sulking disgracefully when they lose at games. It has not rid my husband of his choleric temperament, or me of my melancholic one. Rain occasionally falls, and I worry about money, and feel insecure about my writing, and all of the usual trials. Yet out my window, there are trees stretching as far as I can see, and down around the corner and I can go and sit by a pond framed with a blazing fringe of autumn sumac. Flocks of birds descend to sing in the branches of the massive pine in my front pasture, and even on rainy days, there is more light pouring in through my windows than there ever was on a clear day in Toronto.

Not heaven, obviously, but I’m still happy to give it a nine out of ten on the milk and honey scale.

Lunatics in Heaven

2010-10-12T16:42:00.002-04:00

One of my favorite Saints is a little known woman named Christina the Astonishing. She was a mystic schizophrenic who flew up into the rafters during her own funeral, then ran around hiding in bizarre places in order to escape from the smell of human sin. She tends to get dismissed as a madwoman.

I like her because she broadens the definition of a Saint. The purpose of canonization is not to present the faithful with a small group of uniformly pious, bland, safe personalities in order that we may all become cookie-cutter images of saccharine devotion. There are madmen and women singing the perpetual Holy Holy Holy before the throne of God. It would be totally unrealistic, not to mention unfair, if there weren’t. The canonization of a crazy person doesn’t suggest that in order to become holy, we ought to be crazy – and I don’t think that anyone reading St. Christina’s life is likely to be inspired to climb into ovens to escape the stink of human corruption. It’s clear that the woman is totally insane; what she offers is not an image of piety that the ordinary, sane Catholic can imitate, but an image of sanctity that expands and demolishes our prejudices.

There is a widespread tendency for Catholics, and all Christians really, to believe that sanctity and sanity are somehow co-extensive. You can have any sort of physical ailment in the world and still be a Saint – it is simply considered a legitimate cross. Mental illness is a different matter. Amongst the ultra-conservative, it is liable to be seen as a manifestation of demonic possession, or at least interference, whilst the liberal are more likely to take a kindly, but ultimately condescending view of persons with mental illness, as poor, suffering souls who ought to be treated with compassion and led up the ladder to the higher levels of self-integration and fulfillment.

The truth is, a lot of Saints suffered mentally as well as physically. Some were crippled with anxieties. Others were plagued with a guilt that was more pathological than theological. Some suffered from severe sexual hang-ups. Some were obviously obsessive compulsive. But so what? Heaven is not the in-club for the high-fliers on Maslow’s pyramid. It’s a place where the crippled, the lame, the leprous, the crucified, the tormented and the mad are lifted up, their sufferings redeemed, and their earthly trials transformed into a sublime and inconceivable beauty.

St. Christina the Astonishing, pray for us.

Contextual Sound-bites

2010-08-31T17:56:00.005-04:00

I've had a rather odd response to a piece I wrote for the National Catholic Register. A large proportion of the comments seem to be based on a basic misunderstanding of what I'm trying to say -- which is in a lot of ways neither here nor there, except that it points towards a larger problem with the ways in which we contextualize, or fail to contextualize, things that we hear or read.
To put things in context: I'm the sort of person who despises sound-bites. I rarely read anything as short as a magazine article, or a single blog entry for that matter, because I'm always very much aware of the fact that in any brief piece of writing -- particularly one that has been edited down to fit a publication's word-count limits -- you're looking at a truncated snap-shot of the author's thought. Anything that can be said in less than 1200 words is an oversimplification.
Anything that can be said in a single book is also an oversimplification. Even Marx's Kapital is probably an oversimplification, though I'll admit that I never had the scholastic fortitude to tackle it. I'm generally pretty uncomfortable saying "so and so says such and such" if I've only read one of their works -- I like the maximum possible range of contextual information in order to make coherent sense out of a writer's words.
Yet, you can't get away from it. A lot of readers read and think in single sentences or phrases that are taken literally, for their surface value.
Probably it's a matter of different neurologies: brains that are designed to process information in different ways. A form of legitimate human diversity -- but one that makes communication fraught with frustration. To me, it is simply impossible to write or communicate at all unless you can assume a certain amount of context: if you're writing a Catholic article, for a Catholic audience, you don't need to go over the obvious (i.e. "same sex marriage is not the same as opposite sex marriage" or "scripture is inerrant.") These are axiomatic-type statements, givens, things that are generally assumed as part of the discourse. Obviously, if you were writing the same article for Secular Humanist Monthly, you couldn't assume those things. You probably couldn't even argue in their favour, but that's beside the point.
Having the givens given means that you don't have to write yet another version of that tedious "The Natural Law Argument against Gay Sex" article that we've all read seven thousand times. It means that you can go a little further afield. It saves our publications from all becoming like Women's World (I have conducted an informal study and have come to the conclusion that only seven articles have ever appeared in Women's World. Ever. The only thing that changes is the superficial hook -- e.g. the same "how to lose weight by eating less food, less sugar, less fat, but still having a small desert on Sunday" article might be called "The University of Texas Miracle Diet" or "Eat Cake and Still Lose Weight" or "Joli-Rhian's Super Diet Secret." Also, the models' hairdos wax and wane with the fashion seasons.) It means that you can assume a common foundation and build from there.
But it only works if you can assume the common foundation. This is my problem with the Catholic sound-bite folks. They seem to be like heresy sharks swimming about the internet, looking for isolated statements that aren't sufficiently complete in their orthodoxy. "Hey! This writer seems to have said, earlier in the article, that she believes in the Catholic position on homosexuality. But here she is quoting a gay source without using scare quotes or words like "putatively" or "allegedly" or referring to the sinister "gay agenda." Surely it means that she is actually arguing in favour of homosexual "marriages." Better correct the error before someone is scandalized."
The problem becomes worse -- exponentially worse -- if you use literary devices. Humour. Sarcasm. Irony. Tongue-in-cheek pseudo-quotation. Storytelling. Example. Parable...
Sigh. Where's Derrida when you need him?

Boys Not Wanted on the Voyage

2010-08-30T11:55:00.004-04:00

Does a child need to have two parents, male and female, or suffer dire psychological consequences? This is the question at the heart of the same-sex parenting debate, and as usual the studies go both ways, largely depending on who funds them.
The big difficulty, though, is with the diagnostic tools available: how do you go about measuring psychological development? What do you count as important? What is a good trait in an adult child, and what is a fault that suggests a lack in the parenting style?
For example, a study by Stacey and Biblarz compared different studies of lesbian parents and found that there was no significant difference in development, achievement, happiness, success, etc. however, there was a difference in the sexual development of children raised by lesbian parents. Girls were more likely to pursue same-sex experimentation, and to have a more promiscuous lifestyle, whereas boys raised by two mommies were more likely to be sexually reserved than their opposite-sex parented peers.
Other studies have come to different conclusions. Most notably, Gartrell and Bos's recent study which suggested that lesbian parents actually raised children who were more psychologically well adjusted than opposite-sex parents. The methodological problems with the study are significant, but one of the difficulties that doesn't get noticed is with the highly reputable diagnostic tool used in the study. According to this particular diagnostic standard, not only lesbian parents, but also single mothers, raise more adjusted children than traditional families. What this strongly suggests is that the diagnostic criterion for psychological health, at least according to this standard, are basically a measure of feminine influence. In other words, the more feminized a child is, the more "healthy" they will appear to be, whereas masculine traits are seen as a form of dysfunction.
This is not surprising. Ours is a culture that essentially values docility, even-temper, sensitivity, and obedience. This is particularly true when you consider that any psychological evaluation of adolescents will tend to rely on the school as an "objective" reporting vector. Yet what is it that a school environment demands of its pupils? Certainly not the masculine virtues: courage, honour, strength of resolve, justified resistance, and the impulse to protect the things that one cares for, are likely to appear in a school setting as "risky behaviour" "rebelliousness" "sullenness" and so forth. It is no surprise that boys are more likely to be diagnosed with behavioural problems and put on drugs by the school system: masculinity is not wanted here.
Anyways, the point is that "scientific" studies of parenting styles are anything but. They are necessarily political. They depend on someone's ideas of what an ideal parenting outcome is -- of what a "well adjusted" human being looks like.

Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner?

2010-08-23T14:56:00.003-04:00

One of the commenters on a post below mentioned the "hate the sin, love the sinner" approach. I'm not sure if I've addressed this directly before, so here we go:
I don't think that this is a good way to look at gay/Catholic relations, for the following reason. The word sinner has two meanings:
1. Any human being who is not the Blessed Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ.
2. A person who commits some conspicuous sin, and who is definitely more sinful than me.
The problem is that in the "hate the sin, love the sinner," distinction, the second meaning is almost invariably meant, or at least implied. Most Catholics don't go around saying "Hate the sin, love the sinner" about any other group -- and it leads to a kind of behaviour that singles out homosexuals. There's also the fact that the emphasis is generally on "hate the sin."
I think that there was a point when this was an important development in gay/Christian relations -- when it represented a sort of awakening of the Christian conscience, and was a positive move away from the "turn or burn" approach, but at this point it's largely receded into right-wing waters, where it's used to justify a pretty chilly attitude towards actual gay and lesbian people. The sort of "Oh yes, of course I love the sinner. But it's because I love the sinner that I hate the sin so much..." preamble to a diatribe against the evils of gay sex.
So I would say that "hate the sin, love the sinner" is probably not a great formula. Something more like, "Love your (homosexual) neighbour as yourself." Of course this includes the fact that self love, at least for a Catholic, includes trying to avoid sin and grow and in virtue -- but it also includes the fact that a gentle, realistic and understanding approach is usually the most helpful in overcoming sin, whether in ourselves or in others.

Mixed Media Emotions

2010-08-20T01:01:00.006-04:00

I've just finished watching an episode of Cold Case. I don't like Cold Case -- I was watching it because the crime/detective dramas that I actually like weren't on, and I'm a total mystery junkie. Anyways, this particular episode featured an autistic child whose parents were murdered, and it ends with a particularly sappy, over-blown scene of the autistic boy getting to move in with his big sister to a room decorated with the kind of fish that he likes, and this kid (who can't act very well -- but then, the general poor quality of the acting on the show leads me to suspect that the director may be partially responsible, or that hamming is a deliberate marketing choice) is trying to do an imitation of that wide, blissful, smile that autistic children have when something in their inaccessible world is going just right for them. (Usually, you have no idea what this something might be. Sometimes you can tell -- he just really, really likes the pigs that live in the elephant grass in Planet Earth, or finds Women's Olympic Hockey hilarious.) Overlaying this beautiful cathartic moment is some sort of dreadful rock music in the alternative-goes-easy-listening genre. And I'm angry. I actually went and got a drink of water in the other room to escape this situation, because there's this complicated and absurd set of emotional reactions that I have, and I don't know quite what to do with them, or how to interpret them.
(What does this have to do with homosexuality? Not much -- But with evangelism in this particular culture...we'll get to that.)
The emotional feedback loop generated by a bad, kitschy piece of television:
1. A real emotion is evoked. A positive, personal, beautiful emotion -- the way that I feel about my son.
2. A fake positive emotion is thickly laid overtop. A sappy, clappy, emo-porn sentimentality: a programmed emotional reaction designed to create a certain kind of pseudo-experience in people who haven't had the actual experience.
3. I'm having a Baudrillard moment. I have an emotional reaction, but I can't tell how much of it is my real emotional reaction and how much is the simulacrum. The map is consuming the kingdom. The simulation is effacing the real. (If this doesn't make much sense, and probably it doesn't, read Simulation and Simulacra. That won't make much sense either, but the reference will be clarified.)
4. An intellectual reaction: I recognize that what I'm reacting to is the kitschification of something that is important to me.
5. I want to rebel. I don't want to have the feeling now. The original feeling is mine and it doesn't belong to the realm of kitsch, or to televisual manipulation. This is a usurpation, and I want to be impassive as a form of interior resistance.
6. Although I am capable of suppressing the real feeling if I want to, the combination of visual effects, swelling music, and other media tricks is now forcing me to have the fake feeling.
7. I'm really, really angry. Angry with myself for being manipulable in this way, angry at the show for manipulating me. Just mad.

Now, the thing is that I don't think everyone is familiar with this kind of internal conflict when faced with the cultural artefacts of the media age. Conservative Christians, (if TV programming is anything to go by) generally seem to be willing to put up with unbelievable quantities of sap without feeling that their existential guts are being dredged through razor-sharp saccharine. Liberals, too, seem to be able to handle this -- provided that the sap is properly liberal.
But there are a lot of people of my generation who just won't put up with it at all. Who have been cheated by the emotional pop-corn machine too many times, and who are constantly on guard. Who will react negatively to the portrayal of any strong positive emotion, for something resembling the reasons that I give above. (Oh, here's a glbt tie in: there are a lot of these people in the gay and lesbian sub-culture -- cf. the difference between something campy, like Queen's "It's a Miracle", and something bubble-gummy like John's Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance.")
The point is that the Christian message in its honey-sweet form is repulsive to people who have this sort of ironic defence system. It produces a very short-lived interior glow that is almost immediately replaced with a creeped-out feeling, rejection, and anger. Worth keeping in mind when you go evangelizing in the information age.

Gay Wedding Receptions

2010-08-18T18:15:00.003-04:00

Okay, first of all, news-reel:
In about 6 weeks I will have a house. At the moment, I'm living in my mom's house/cottage, going back and forth between the two, and I only have internet access at the house (hence my recent lack of blog-posts). My new house is the most beautiful place in the world; a century farmhouse near Tweed Ontario that used to be run as a Bed and Breakfast/Alpaca farm. In any case, come September I should be back on-line and blogging again properly.
My book, A Crisis of Passion should be coming out soon from Circle Books, I'll keep people posted on that. It's technically about the relationship between art, postmodernism and the Catholic Church, but it tends to slide in all directions, covering a lot of issues that have to do with the way that culture is shaped in the postmodern world, and how Christians/Catholics can bring the gospel to people in this crazy, media-saturated, Culture of Death/Threshold of Hope period in history.
I've had an interesting response to an article that appeared in a recent issue of Faith and Family magazine . I suggested that one way of negotiating the tricky issue of what to do if you're invited to a homosexual marriage ceremony/celebration of a homosexual union. I pointed out that you shouldn't actually go to the ceremony, because being at a marriage means standing witness for it and so that would contradict Church teaching, but that you might ask if your friend/relative would still like you to attend the reception, as a way of showing your desire to continue to be involved in their life and support them. It sparked a certain amount of debate, mostly based on the idea that by attending the reception you are celebrating a sin, implying your support therefore, and potentially causing scandal.
Here's the trouble: there are two potential ways of scandalizing people, i.e. leading them into sin/confirming them in their sins. The first is by setting a bad example -- and this is what those who disagreed with me argued a Catholic would be doing by going to a gay wedding reception. The second is by making a good example in such a disagreeable way that people are repulsed. To me, when you respectfully explain why you can't attend the marriage ceremony, you've made your point. You've stood up for truth. There's no ambiguity here. (Obviously if you did something absurd, like skip the ceremony but show up for the reception without discussing it in advance, that would be different, but it would also be socially awkward and rude.) What you're trying to do, however, is find a way of negotiating that situation so that the truth is tempered by love; so that your doctrinal position does not come across either as a contemptuous snub, or as raw homophobia, or as personal rejection. One commenter actually brought up the objection that there would probably be multiple gay/lesbian couples at the reception, and that you might see them being physically intimate with one another. At risk of offending the squeamish, I'm inclined to suggest that when Christ went into the den of the prostitutes and tax collectors, it probably wasn't a real nice clean discreet joint. In fact, the Pharisee's main objection is that reputable types didn't go into places like that. This was in an outpost of Ancient Rome, shortly before the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula. The brothels would certainly have serviced the Roman soldiers posted to the Judean backwaters, and most of the prostitutes were probably on drugs. Yet Christ went. Why?
He went to show that our God is not the kind of stand-offish, snobbish, reputable God who is not willing to go into places like that. He was not afraid of the rumours that might circulate -- and which did circulate. (St. Thomas has a lovely little argument about how the Pharisees, in such circumstances, were not scandalized by the actions of Christ, but that they scandalized themselves.)
Now, I'm not saying that if you don't go to a gay reception, it means that you're a Pharisee. But I do think that if you're in a relationship with a homosexual such that it would be appropriate, supportive, and charitable for you to do so, that it can certainly be an expression of Christian love and not a cause of scandal.

p.s. I've been taken to task for using "marriage" and "wedding" without scare quotes to refer to homosexual ceremonies. The reason for this is simple: everyone knows what I mean. It's pretty obvious that I'm an orthodox Catholic, and that I don't think that homosexuals can be validly married. Scare quotes, to me, are just childish.

Scapegoating Gays?

2010-06-01T13:56:00.003-04:00

The UK's Pink News writes today that the Catholic Church is scapegoating homosexual candidates for the priesthood in the new guidelines that have emerged for screening priests in the wake of the recent child sex-abuse scandals.
This really isn't a new issue. The Vatican's 2005 directions basically exclude "gay" men from the priesthood -- a decision that has caused significant controversy, and which remains controversial. The controversy is not merely political, but also practical: the precise meaning of the Vatican's directive has been given widely different interpretations by different groups within the Catholic Church. In some dioceses, the directive has been interpreted very strictly, so that any applicant to the priesthood who admits to same-sex attractions is immediately given the boot. In others, a more liberal approach is taken.
The interpretive dilemma rests on the exact meaning of the term "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," which is sort of the lynch-pin of the discernment process. A candidate who has had homosexual experiences or feelings, but has overcome them, is allowed to receive Holy Orders: "such tendencies must be clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate." So the question is, what are deep-seated homosexual tendencies?
Courage seems to take the interpretation that this is related to a compulsive tendency towards homosexual sex -- that "those responsible to discern candidates for admission to seminaries and eventually to priesthood should consider that there will be some persons with ssa [same sex attractions] who are chaste and lacking in deeply rooted homosexual tendencies." In other words, a man may experience homosexual attractions but have the sort of affective maturity required to fully live the life of chastity to which priests are called.
This, to me, makes a great deal of sense -- but I'm not sure that it's the obvious interpretation of the directive, or that it is the way that it is interpreted in most places.

Where has all the vitriol gone?

2010-05-31T18:33:00.002-04:00

The Vatican is planning to open a "Court of the Gentiles" ministry to reach out to atheists -- but not, apparently, to atheists of the Dawkins/Hitchins stripe. (See article here)
The question that this raises, why are polemical atheists being excluded from the dialogue?
On the one hand, this makes a great deal of sense: there is the caution against casting your pearls before swine to consider, and Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, has good reasons for refusing to give a platform to atheists who don't argue so much as sling abuse. (See the Intelligence Squared debate for an example of what happens when you put a polite, mild-mannered Churchman of good will up against Hitchins...we're talking a pretty literal "lambs to the slaughter" type scenario.) Basically what happens is that the nice Archbishop, or Monsignor, or other Vatican representative gets up and makes a pleasant speech in civilized Vaticanese, and Hitchins steps on their face. So far as the "Court of the Gentiles" idea goes, I assume that the Vatican is excluding the polemicists in order that their dialogue will remain a dialogue, and not turn into a three-ring mud-slinging tournament.
Yet there is undoubtedly a need for men like Dawkins and Hitchins to be addressed -- and to be addressed in terms that are appropriate to the way that they debate. The Vatican can't do it, because the Vatican must always be civil and rational in her discourse. The Church, however, has not generally lacked polemicists of its own. From St. Jerome roaring at Helvidius, to G. K. Chesterton's finely tuned lambasting of George Bernard Shaw, we have a strong record of high-class vitriol. And it is certainly high-class vitriol that is needed against the polemical atheists. The problem is that, for some reason, our apologists argue either with kid-gloves or with protractors. Straight, boring, rational apologetics are worse than useless against buck-shot polemics and false analogies. The logician will always lose against the rhetorician -- not because his arguments are worse, but because they take too long to deliver, and they are relatively dry and uninteresting.

Of Billboards and Alpacas

2010-05-27T19:30:00.002-04:00

Hello. It's been a while that I've been away -- while I was finishing the Crisis of Passion manuscript, we decided that we were going to move, so I've spent the past three weeks running around trying to paint my entire house and get it ready to show to potential buyers. Moving is the pits, but what can you do?
This has nothing to do with homosexuality, but does have to do with the broader "culture wars" issue, so I'm going to talk about my decision to leave Toronto.
You see, I've written about the fact that Catholic people who are actually living the Catholic faith can't afford to be insular: if you form a sort of righteous archipelago and isolate yourself from mainstream culture and live in a sort of Catholic la la land where all of your friends are Catholic, and all of your children's contacts are Catholic, and you are too pure and holy to associate with the folks on Church St. (the centre of TOs "village," for those who aren't familiar with my local geography), then that's no good. My new book has, as one of its major premises, the idea that we should not be afraid to interact deeply and meaningfully with postmodern culture. Yet here I am, at the first possible opportunity, packing up my homeschooling family to run away from the big city and live in some small town with a well, and a septic tank, and (hopefully) some chickens. A town with a homeschool community, where I can grow organic tomatoes and engage in black market barter with local farmers.
Is this hypocritical? I don't think it is. I might be self-deluding -- there's always a risk of that -- but I don't think so. You see, the issue is not where you live, but what you fear. Am I afraid of the city? Well, admittedly, I'm afraid of city driving, and I don't like the pollution, and I'm going to be frank here, I am motivated, at least in part, by the desire to raise my children in a place without ubiquitous advertising. Fear, and particularly a fear of the culture, is not, however, a primary motivation. I'm going out into the country because I really, really, really want to raise goats. I want my kids to be able to go out everyday and play in their elfland forts. I want to be able to go down and sit by the water on my own land and see the stars in the sky at night. I want to tend heirloom tomato plants, and watch all of those wonderfully ugly, malformed calabashes ripening in the sun. These are the things that I dream of, and I think that's valid.
The difficulty, at least in my opinion, is when Catholics go out and do these things, either because they are afraid that their children will be contaminated by Britney Spears and Queer As Folk, or because they yearn in their hearts to nurture baby alpacas, and then think that everyone needs to live this way. That Catholicism/Christianity and rural life are somehow synonymous, that the true Christian eschews the worldly and evil city and rejects the culture utterly, shunning it as the Pharisees shunned the lepers.

2010-04-01T12:31:00.003-04:00

Happy Holy Week, all.
I've been away for a bit, and will probably continue to be away, largely, until the end of April. I have a May 1 deadline for finishing the manuscript of "Crisis of Passion," which is my book on post-modernism and art.
I wish everyone the best over the coming days. May your meditations on the Passion and Resurrection be particularly fruitful this Easter season...

Catholic schools and kids with two mommies

2010-03-10T18:28:00.004-05:00

I've just been reading Jimmy Aikin's blog at the Register about a controversy that has arisen with regards to the admission of children with same-sex parents to Catholic schools.
Reading through the comments, you get a pretty clear lay of the land: there are those who accept the Church's teaching on same-sex relationships, and who think that the Archbishop's decision was completely justified, and there are those who obviously do not accept the Church's teaching, and who think that it's cruel and evil discrimination. So I'm going to weigh in as a Catholic who accepts the Church's teaching on same-sex relationships/marriage/sexuality/etc. but who thinks that the decision to bar these children from Catholic schools is a little...well, Pharisaical.
If the school also kicked kids out because their parents were divorced, or cohabiting, or whatnot, then it would at least be consistent -- but the Archbishop is clear that this is not the case: "Many of our schools also accept students of other faiths and no faith, and from single parent and divorced parent families." The reality is that any opposite-sex couple, no matter how far they deviate from the Church's teachings about marriage, is given the glance-over by mainstream Catholic culture, and any same-sex couple is lambasted -- even if they are actually closer to the ideal of Catholic marriage than their opposite-sex counterparts.
That last clause might sound counter-intuitive, but lets examine this issue: let's say that you've got, on the one hand, a lesbian couple -- we'll name them Barb and Di, just for fun. Barb IDs as bi, she had a male partner before she and Di got together, and she got pregnant. She's Catholic, and she doesn't believe in abortion, so she has a child. Now she and Di have decided that they are going to get married, in accord with the laws of their state. They are monogamous and fully committed to a life-long relationship, and they are trying to raise their child, to the best of their ability, in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church. They attend Mass, and apart from their sexuality, they are faithful, practicing Catholics. (Yes, such people really do exist.) On the other hand, you have a couple -- Sue and Ted -- who got divorced three years ago. Sue has put her kid into Catholic school to please the grandparents. Neither she nor Ted believes in the Catholic faith. They don't go to Mass. Sue has had several live-in boyfriends since she and Ted split up.
Now, as far as admission to Catholic schools are concerned, Sue's kid is in, and Barb's kid is out. There's something seriously wrong with this picture. It's called a double standard.
The argument that Barb and Di are causing scandal simply doesn't wash. Anyone who is a friend of Sue's child will know about the divorce. They will know that every couple of months, Sue has a different man living in the house. There will be scandal. Every bit as much scandal as the lesbian couple is causing. But no one will say anything, because Sue's situation will be considered "private" "delicate" "none of our business," whereas Barb and Di's will make good copy for the week-end edition.

I'd really like to be your friend...but I think you're going to hell...?

2010-03-01T13:04:00.003-05:00

The most interesting question that I had from a conservative Catholic at Notre Dame came after the talk was over (the LGBT people dominated the actual question period, which I was very glad off -- they had declined to participate in the panel discussion that followed my talk, which I understand, so I was glad that they had a chance to ask their questions and put their voices into the dialogue as well.) It also came to my husband, not me; basically, someone wanted to know how you could go about forming a relationship with someone who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc. How do you start a conversation or even begin to like one another if they know from the outset that you disapprove of something that they hold to be so fundamental to who they are? It would seem like a death blow to a fledgling relationship.
And so it is. You can't start a friendship by saying, "look, I really disapprove of the way that you live your life, and I think it's sinful, and I'm really lovingly concerned that you are going to perish in eternal fire. I don't mean that in a mean way." You start a friendship with something that you can agree on. Most of the gay and lesbian friends that I have made were somewhat surprised when they realized that my Catholicism was actually orthodox. They assumed that it was cultural, or whatever, until we were already friends. Which is not dishonest, or tricksy, or whatever: think about it, when you make a friend with someone, anyone, how do you start off? No one, or at least no one with even remotely functional social skills, starts a friendship by trying to argue about the other person's personal life. That's just disfunctional. Later, if it becomes appropriate within the relationship, you can bring these issues up respectfully. But you have to start with the things that you agree about, the things that you like about one another, the bases for a relationship and for a genuine, concrete, personal love.

Queer Protest

2010-02-19T23:58:00.002-05:00

I promised that I would talk about the problem of protests. At the Edith Stein Conference, the LGBT group on campus organized a protest in the form of a reading of queer poetry. The poetry was, from what I heard of it, embarrassingly bad -- but that is more or less the standard for political poetry and spoken word "political actions". Okay, I was about to start ranting about political action as a form of post-modern art, and the problems therewith, but I'll try to stay on topic. The point is not that the poetry lacked literary merit, but that it was "scandalous" -- not in the strict St. Thomas Aquinas sense, where something is scandalous because it leads others into sin, but in the colloquial sense in which something is scandalous because it produces that strange sensation, a combination of discomfort/embarrassment/contempt, which most of us describe as being "scandalized" by the behaviour of another. It was quite a surreal scene: a Catholic college, a Catholic conference, a cadre of nuns, several small children running about in the JPII-Theology-of-the-Body generation style, and a group of queer identified students reading vulgar poetry about how often they masturbate. Obviously, it had exactly the effect that you would expect: most of the Catholics present thought that the poetry was obscene, and it helped to cement the idea that gay culture is totally obsessed with vapid, meaningless and self-indulgent sex.
So why have such a protest? The LGBT community generally goes out of its way to insist that it is not obsessed with sex, that it's about all sorts of more important things, like family, and love, and so forth. Isn't this kind of thing intensely counter-productive?
Well, yes and no. It's sort of the mirror image of the right-wing Christian holding up a sign at the Gay Pride parade that reads "Leviticus 18:22." It's a kind of protest that is absolutely guaranteed to fail as a means of convincing anyone of anything -- but it's not really about that. I suspect that a great deal of what is called "protest" is largely concerned with the formation and galvanization of identities. The audience for the protest is not the person or group being lobbied/protested, but the group of protesters who are learning and forming their identities through the conflict that protest always suggests. War is a fabulous tool for cementing patriotism and national identity, and anything that smacks of confrontation always has this effect as well. It's the same throughout the political spectrum: when we used to go down to the local porn shop to scream "Porn is the theory, Rape is the practice" during the "Take Back the Night Rally," it wasn't really in the expectation that we would stop the selling or buying of pornography in Brampton. It had to do with who we were as feminists, with teaching ourselves what we thought and felt about demeaning sexual portrayals of women. When Pro-Lifers gather faithfully at the "March for Life" every year, it's not because there is any worldly chance that doing so will actually cause Parliament (in Canada) to make abortion illegal. It's because it's a chance for the Pro-Life community to network, to declare our identity to the wider community, to re-affirm our dedication to the protection of the unborn/unwanted in society. It doesn't do anything in the strict sense of changing other people, but no one cares, because that's not actually the point.

The Edith Stein Conference

2010-02-18T12:26:00.001-05:00

I’m just getting back into the saddle after the Notre Dame gig – I spoke last Saturday at the Edith Stein Conference. I have too much to say about the experience to put it in one post, so I’ll be blogging about it over the next couple of days. I’ll begin with a basic run-down of what happened, and later give some reflections on different aspects of the affair.

Basically, I drove (or rather, my husband drove and I entertained Barbara, who is just short of nine months old, in the back-seat) down to South Bend on Friday. We were stopped at the US Border, and we were terrified that they wouldn’t let us through because my husband’s passport expired last September. As it turned out, they didn’t care about (didn’t notice?) the expired passport, but they were worried that I might be getting paid by Notre Dame and that the IRS might not be getting their cut. I refrained from quoting Canada/US tax treaty law at them (never be snarky to a US Border guard) and assured them that I was not being compensated for more than my travel expenses. Eventually, they let us through.

We arrived at the conference Saturday morning around lunch-time and I wandered around feeling profoundly stressed out and terrified. I had written about four different versions of the talk, and I wasn’t happy with any of them, most of them were half-finished and they were on all of these scattered sheets of paper that were in a totally disorganized jumble in a notebook. That wasn’t why I was terrified though; I was terrified because speaking in front of a group of people inevitably means contact with other human beings who I don’t know, and I am painfully shy and socially awkward. The last time I gave a talk at a University I literally ran away afterwards, as quickly as possible, in the hopes that no one would chase me down and try to converse with me.

In spite of the fact that my stomach was tying itself into the sort of elaborate knots that will earn you a girl-scouts badge, I managed to eat a small bowl of chili, and then headed over to the auditorium where I was going to speak. In the front hall of said building, there was a demonstration, a “reading of queer poetry” to protest my appearance. The poetry was embarrassingly bad, and thoroughly scandalized the mostly-traditional-Catholic audience who repeatedly described it as “obscene.” (I will return to the matter of ill-thought-out protest actions later.) Anyways, the point was that they were handing out little bits of paper that said why they were there, and what they thought I was going to say that they were so upset about. To me, it was a God-send, because I immediately realized that I could use their protest leaflet as a superior outline for my presentation.

I went to a back room and started restructuring while the organizers fluttered around apologizing for the protest and wondering whether they should call security. I tried to explain that having the protest removed would be very bad for queer-Catholic relations on campus, that no harm was being done, and that I wasn’t frightened of the protesters, which is true. Protesters I can understand. I’ve been a protester. It’s the Catholic audience that scares me. I’ll explain that later.

So I gave my talk. The focus was on how Catholics can/can’t reach out to homosexual people. The basic premise of the talk was “I don’t love gay people, I love...” fill in the names of individuals who happen to be gay identified or same-sex attracted. Basically the whole “you can’t hate the sin vociferously from every mountain top, and only love the sinner in the theological abstract” schtick. It seemed to go down well with the LGBT crowd – several of the protest organizers came up after the talk and thanked me for having come, which I think is as good as could be hoped for.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably blog about the protest thing.

Glad To Be Your Effigy

2010-02-03T22:22:00.006-05:00

Well, today I showed up as a controversial blip on the gay-rights radar. It's a strange experience, to be hailed as a new and emerging threat, one of those sinister "ex-gay" speakers that the LGBT folks like to get hysterical about. Strictly speaking, I have had a sort of analogous experience in the past: I once had the opportunity to be portrayed as a loopy post-electric shock conversion therapy victim in a made for TV movie after I spoke at a local school-board during one of those "can a gay kid bring his gay date to that Catholic prom" scandals that periodically crop up. Anyways, apparently I am sounding the death knell of Notre Dame's academic credibility by going to speak at the St. Edith Stein Conference coming up Feburary 12th. It's nice to know that I have that kind of power... Mwa ha ha.
On a more serious note, it highlights another element of the culture wars that I think is particularly seductive and therefore, in many ways, particularly dangerous. It's nice to be hated. That's a very counter-intuitive statement, but there is a sense in which it is true; it's somehow exciting to feel that one is part of an epic conflict of some sort, that I really am the kind of person who could reasonably be vilified in a gay-rights hit piece. The feeling that now I'm making waves, that the enemy feels threatened, and all of that nonsense. Of course it's nonsense, but it's attractive, and I think that it's a lot of what keeps the culture-war home-fires burning. It adds a nice soupcon of adversity and confrontation to the day, provides a bit of an edge, but in a way that is ultimately safe. Or rather, in a way that is ultimately destructive because it undermines genuine dialogue and prevents healthy communication on the cultural level, while being perfectly safe for the front-line combatants.

Readings in Post-modernism

2010-01-26T12:33:00.004-05:00

I've just started the drafting for my new book, "A Crisis of Passion," which is about post-modernism, art and the Catholic church. It's strange, because when I started to do my research I thought "I like post-modernity, but I don't like the post-modernists." Now, after several months with my nose in various books, my position is almost precisely the opposite: "I like the post-modernists, but I don't like post-modernity." (The basic difference? Post-modernity is the state of the world as it is, in so far as it is "post modern" or "after modern." It's this sort of being-in-epistemological-and-cultural-limbo feeling that permeates current society. The post-modernists, on the other hand, are philosophers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, etc.)
That may sound like heresy, but it comes from a particular way of reading -- one that I picked up while I was working on Sexual Authenticity. The way I used to read -- and I get the impression that a lot of Catholics read this way -- was to accept more or less anything in a book that had some sort of real or implied doctrinal sign of approval, and to scrutinize, with the greatest possible care, any book that had a questionable status, trying to root out heresies, implied errors, wrong ways of thinking, etc. In short, the book had already been judged before it was understood.
When I was researching Sexual Authenticity, however, I had made a promise in my proposal: this was going to be the first Catholic book on homosexuality that relied as much on writings from within the gay world as on Catholic sources. This meant that I had to read a lot of books about homosexuality written by people who identified as gay, and I had to read them with an eye to understanding, so that I would be able to explain and not merely condemn. What emerged from the project was a way of reading books for their truth instead of for their errors.
I've carried that over into this new project, so now when I'm reading Foucault, it's not a matter of trying to work out how to refute the great heresies of the great post-modernists, but rather of trying to see what is true in his work, how that truth appeals to people, and how it can be used by Catholics who are trying to interface with culture.

Jesus Camp

2010-01-19T01:30:00.004-05:00

I just finished watching a documentary called "Jesus Camp," which is, as might be guessed, about an evangelical/pentacostal camp for children in the United States. I feel largely ambivalent about the film for a number of reasons. It's a strange beast: the content of it is the way that children are raised/educated/indoctrinated/(whatever word you want to use depending on your paradigm) in the evangelical movement, the bias of the film-makers is obviously liberal, and the whole thing sort of functions as a snap-shot of the culture wars with all of the sloppy thinking, hypocrisy, and general weirdness that accompanies that part of American cultural life.
On the one hand, my natural sympathies do largely lie with the film-makers. I am inclined to see the Jesus camp in much the same way as they do, to perceive this over-emotional, speaking-in-tongues, altar call, public-confessional, intensely Republican spirituality as weird as slightly disturbing. On the other hand, I think that the way in which the film was made is fundamentally disrespectful: no liberal film-maker would ever go into a tribe in another country that had different beliefs, different methods of child-rearing, different ceremonials, different values, etc. and film it in such a way as to induce mockery/horror/disdain/prejudice for the people of that faith and culture. I understand that because the Bible belt is in the States, and the people making the film therefore feel politically threatened by it, that the psychology of the thing is fundamentally different, but at the same time there is a deep hypocrisy here that is profoundly disedifying. The people who they are interviewing and filming are incredibly sincere, and they are trying to hand on their culture, such as it is, to their children, and the experiences that the children are having of faith are genuine experiences, etc. On the other hand, there is something embarrassing about the footage, a feeling that the people who are being filmed should have more audience awareness, that because they do live in post-modern America they should at least be aware that the film crew that has shown up to film them is going to be showing the footage to an audience with liberal biases, that the things that they are saying are going to be cast in a specific light. But then, on the other hand, can I fault people for failing to be ironic? For lacking a sufficient cynicism? For doing their best to convey the Gospel in a way that is sincere? Is it just because I am jaded and post-modern that I think that their way of doing it is inexcusably cheesy and slightly creepy?
It's strange, because it raises questions about the way that we feel about these things. On the one hand, when I see a film of people on the other side of the planet dressing up in strange white garments and spinning in circles in order to get euphorically dizzy and thereby to attain some sort of other-consciousness that they feel brings them closer to God, it has some sort of aesthetic appeal based on the exotic. Yet, on the other hand, if it's too closely related to my own religion -- if it's a form of Christianity and not a form of Islam -- it seems uncomfortable and embarrassing.

2010-01-08T16:09:00.002-05:00

I just made one of those unfortunate encounters with google search where, in the process of looking up some entirely innocent query you stumble upon a piece of urban slang describing a sexual perversion that would never even have occurred to you might exist -- the sort of acts that you like to think only appear in de Sade's "100 Days of Sodom."
Now, I have not read all of the "100 Days." I think I made it about as far as day thirty, and then I couldn't stomach it any more. I read it in high-school, guided by a sort of morbid curiosity. "Hmmm," I thought, "I wonder if that's really as bad as it's supposed to be." After all, there's a movie that presents the Marquis as a courageous humanist, and his less obviously depraved works get quoted as profound and revolutionary social thinking in History of Western Civ. type text-books. One could almost get the impression that it's not all that bad, and there's a lot of smoke from very little fire -- an impression that is complemented by the fact that other "risque" works from the period (Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Salambo come to mind) are not scandalous at all to a modern audience. With de Sade, however, this is not even remotely the case.
Reading de Sade as a teen-ager was disturbing not merely on a superficial level -- it was not merely a matter of what he wrote about being obscene -- but also on a philosophical level. I was an extreme sexual liberal: whatever you chose to do in the privacy of your own bedroom was your business and not anyone else's, ever, for any reason, unless it caused direct harm to another person. So, for example, incest would be allowed if it were undertaken by a sterile woman and a family member, or by two same-sex family members, but not if offspring might be born to carry the genetic consequences. De Sade, however, put forward sexual perversions that somehow went beyond the pale; my feminist sensibilities were absolutely outraged, and I didn't care if he had somehow managed to get women to agree with the things that he wanted to do to them, because the acts were fundamentally degrading. There seemed to be a line there at which it was clear that the acts themselves meant something, regardless of consent, and that that meaning was inadmissible, that they were signs that signified a particular attitude towards women (or, alternately, towards the passive male partner in a gay relationship) that simply could not be countenanced. It suggested that there really was a need for boundaries, that sexual morality wasn't simply a matter of arbitrary control over the body, or fear of sex, or religious repression. It also suggested that the road of sexual perversion would, over time, depart more and more from anything that could possibly be construed as alluring, seductive, desirable or even human -- that it was a path that ended not in a universal love-without-limits, but in a sort of bestial hatred for the object of sexual attraction, an intense need to master or be mastered, to conceive of sexuality as a kind of conflict in which all of the rituals by which the conquered enemy is humiliated become somehow appropriate.

Queer Fish

2009-12-09T16:49:00.004-05:00

I just sent off a query for my fantasy novel, so I'm asking for prayers that I'll be able to find an agent to represent it.
I also wanted to respond to a couple of things that people have posted, so I'll run through that quickly. I have to say that I like Canada. It's funny, Americans think that the totalitarian things that we have to deal with are terrifying, and we think that the police-state post-9/11 terror watch shtick is worse. Probably it's just a matter of the devil you know vs. the devil you don't. I am familiar with the Home School Defense people -- I discovered them when I was worried that we were going to have to go to court to keep the CAS out of our house (my daughter's godfather is a criminal lawyer and was willing to write letters for us, but if we'd gone to court we'd have needed someone who knew family law.) I also know about Michael O'Brien. I might have met him -- if not, everyone that I know, including my husband, has. It's a small world up here in icy Ontario.
With regards to homeschool, I go back and forth on whether or not I would put my kids into Catholic school if I could. The basic problem is that we're all eccentric, and none of us deal very will with large groups of people. I want my kids to grow up knowing that they can afford to be unique, that they don't need to fall in with the crowd. I love Catholics, but at the same time another young Catholic mother that I know has had difficulty with the culture in a really great Catholic school, simply because she's strange, and wild, and flighty, and doesn't fit in with the slightly mousy, pious, reasonably respectable types that people the majority of arch-orthodox Catholic establishments. It's hard, because if you're odd, you're odd wherever you go -- and I am undoubtedly odd.
I think that's part of why I ended up being attracted to the gay/lesbian community, because it was a place where you could afford to be "queer," and particularly where you could afford to be queer in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Eccentricity was a bonus, not a liability. Even to this day, when I got dumped into a group of 103 randomly selected people (long story), I gravitated towards the lesbian-identified neo-pagan. I wasn't "attracted" to her sexually, but we could talk comfortably with one another, whereas with "normal" people I'm completely at a loss. Either I put my personality in a box and behave like some sort of absurd cardboard cut-out "good mother" type, or I quickly find that I am out of place. Fortunately, I've discovered the Catholic eccentrics of the world, so I'm able to be happy in my little pond, swimming about with all the other odd ducks.

The Eye of Sauron has Turned Away!

2009-12-02T13:01:00.002-05:00

Okay. I've made allusion in the past to some sort of looming crisis perched on my shoulder like a bird of doom, and now it is over. The basic story is that an estranged relative on my husband's side decided to report us to the Children's Aid Society (that's the Canadian equivalent of Child and Family Services in the States) for "neglect" which is one of those terms that is so ill-defined that it can be used as a catch-all for "we don't like the way you parent." Anyways, we're not sure what the motivation was but we suspect that her disagreement with our decision to homeschool is a large part of the issue, and that she hoped that the CAS would come in and force us to send our children to school. This is not entirely unlikely -- my sister works at an Oxford Learning Centre and she informs me that there are a number of children registered there who are homeschooled but whose parents have been forced to put them into some sort of external program as a result of interference from the Children's Aid. Talking to other homeschool families, I've learned that this is not an uncommon situation and that, more often than not, our legal right to homeschool can more or less be canceled at any time by any relative who is willing to complain to the authorities.
Or, rather, it can canceled if we let the Children's Aid in. As I said above, the term "neglect" is exceedingly ill-defined, and reading over the CAS guidelines it immediately becomes clear that it really is almost entirely up to the "discretion of the worker," in other words, if the worker doesn't like the way you homeschool (and they generally do not like homeschoolers -- they think that homeschooled children are endangered because it's impossible to interview homeschooled kids without the parents' knowledge while they're at school), then they will be able to find enough evidence to make your life hell for months/years. At least this is the situation that other homeschool families have described to us.
My advice: don't let them in. You have a legal right to say no when they ask to come into your house, and to refuse to allow them to interview your children. If they call or come to the door simply say, "I'm sorry, I'll have to talk to my lawyer," then go and find yourself a good pro-life lawyer. In most cases the reports are spurious; because there is no actual abuse or neglect going on, there is no convincing evidence of abuse or neglect included in the report to the Children's Aid. They will make threats, and tell you that they can come and take your kids into custody in order to question them, or that they're going to get a supervision order to come in and invade your house on a weekly basis for three to twelve months, etc. etc. but the fact is that unless they have enough evidence against you to obtain a warrant, the threats are empty.
It involves a tremendous amount of stress, of course, but at least it's only stress.
(This is, of course, the reason that I've been particularly focusing on questions of legality -- why sodomy laws and other intrusive anti-gay legislation are totally ineffectual, not to mention exceedingly uncharitable.)

The Trouble With Talk

2009-11-19T01:31:00.002-05:00

I was on talk radio today -- the Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio. It's not the first time that I've done talk radio, but it is the first time that I've had to take calls and it's quite difficult. You see, you get people calling in and some of them seem to be advice junkies -- people who have read all of the books and articles and could probably tell you more than you could tell them, but who haven't found what they're looking for so they keep searching -- and then you get people who are genuinely hurt and confused and want you to say something that will help them...and you're on talk radio, so you have to do this before the next ad break. In this case, it was a man whose wife had left him for a lesbian relationship and he sounded so vulnerable that my heart broke (cheesy phrase -- I avoid cheesy phrases because I am jaded and post-modern, so if I use them it means I'm breaking down and giving in to sentiment. i.e. I have had an emotion, and I am admitting it in public...very dangerous.) In any case, parenthetical asides aside, I didn't know what to say. It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's that I don't have anything to say that makes good radio -- because any real answer would have involved asking all sorts of questions that are intensely personal, questions that you couldn't possibly ask on the air in front of listeners. Not to mention the fact that a good answer would take hours, probably spread out over several days/weeks.
Obviously not possible; as Marshal McLuhan tells us, "the medium is the message." Talk radio is fast, it's supposed to be controversial and engaging (no bonus points for me here -- I'll never make a good right-wing pundit, though perhaps with some work I could make a decent radio guest). So the question is, how do you give a fast, engaging, controversial answer that will actually do the caller some good?
I don't know. I'll mull it over in my mind, and perhaps I'll come up with something -- if not an answer that would work on talk radio, at least one short and sweet enough to function in the blogsphere.

Something Left to Save

2009-11-13T12:52:00.004-05:00

I've been away this week -- I was down in Alabama shooting an interview with EWTN for The Abundant Life. An unexpected fringe benefit of the trip was a better understanding of the culture war. From a Generation Y Canadian perspective, it always looks like the culture warriors are something akin to a mother who continues trying to breast-feed her dead infant. It's like, unless Christ appears and tells the Culture of Death to get out of bed and walk, it's best to just bury it. But then you get to Alabama, and you're in the airport, and people are dressed in real clothing, and having real conversations, and the security guards are making jokes about officiousness and you think, "My God, there is still culture here. Civil society. Something worth fighting for and saving." That's when all of those angry right-wing pundits on talk radio start to sound sane. And then you wonder what you're supposed to say to that audience, because my entire perspective on the culture wars comes from a Canadian triage mentality. It's a different place to be, and I think that it could be seen as being defeatist or fatalistic, but I don't think that's true. It's a different kind of hope that we need to have here, sitting in cosmopolitan Toronto -- the decadent world city perched on the frontiers of the wilderness. It's the kind of hope that must of sustained Our Lady after Christ was put into tomb, the sort of grim, "Okay, it's over now, but we go on believing anyways," resignation. Not a hopeless resignation, but a submission to the facts combined with that strange thrill, the feeling that somewhere, in secret, beneath the corpse of the present culture the Holy Spirit is moving through the dark earth breathing life into hidden seeds.

The Other Side of the Coin

2009-10-28T14:49:00.003-04:00

I'm going to do something here that Catholics do all too seldom: I am going to speak out condemning a piece of legislation that opposes the practice of homosexuality.
The bill probably doesn't directly concern you and I but it highlights the need for Catholics to uphold both sides of the Church's teaching on homosexuality.
The proposed bill would provide increased penalties for homosexual behaviour in Uganda (gay sex is already illegal in Uganda) including the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" (i.e. homosexual relations with a person under eighteen, homosexual relations with a disabled person, any homosexual relations if the accused is HIV positive, and "serial" offenses.) It also provides substantial penalties for any group or organization that promotes homosexuality, and for any authority who fails to report known violations of the act.
It is an interesting piece of legislation, because it is one in which the spirit is -- in many respects -- quite laudable, but the letter is dangerous and unjust. The goals, outlined in the early portion of the bill, are to safeguard the traditional family, to protect the culture and values of Uganda, and to safeguard people (particularly children) from pro-gay propaganda flowing in alongside Western aid. So far, so good. Another obvious, but not explicitly outlined goal is clearly the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS through homosexual relations -- this is a particular concern in Africa because same-sex attracted people do not generally gay-identify or live a gay lifestyle; most same-sex attracted Africans are married, which means that if they contract HIV homosexually, they may infect their wife/children.
The moral difficulties, from a Catholic perspective, lie with the application of the death penalty, and the idea of a penalty for people who fail to inform on others whom they know to be guilty. It is here that we arrive at the other side of Catholic teaching on homosexuality: the teaching that while homosexual sex is intrinsically immoral, homosexual persons "must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided." (CCC 2358)
It is important, if Catholics are going to bring the Gospel into the lives of homosexuals, that this second part of our teaching be upheld and proclaimed just as vociferously as the condemnation of homosexual relations. It is because we too often fail in this respect that we are painted as homophobic. The proposed Ugandan legislation not only represents unjust discrimination, it would also -- by virtue of its provision that authorities must report or face fines and imprisonment -- make it even more difficult for Ugandans dealing with same-sex attractions to seek out spiritual advice and counsel from their priests and pastors. Increased fear of persecution isolates those who are most in need of support, it drives homosexuality underground and prevents people with homosexual desires from being able to deal with their temptations within the context of a supportive, moral, Christian community.

Daughterhood

2009-10-26T17:57:00.002-04:00

My little sister had a tattoo. It was in elvish, as conceptualized by J.R.R. Tolkien, and it read "daughter." It referred to two things: the importance of her family in her life (Kristen was one of six daughters in the Robinson clan) and her relationship to God.
I have been thinking a lot about my daughterhood in the past month -- what it means to be God's daughter, and what it means for Him to be my father. I have, as anyone who follows this blog will know, been out of communication for the past month and a half. This is on account of a family crisis, which I am not going to describe in any detail right now (maybe later -- the fog of paranoia is still a little too thick for me to say anything of substance in a public forum). The point is that it has been very difficult, and that a lot of family relationships have shifted: those that were already weakened have become more strained, those that were already strong have become stronger. There is something in trial that separates these things out clearly; suddenly you know exactly who you really trust -- not just because those whom you can't trust abandon you, but because you start looking around for the clearest steps forward, the firm ground where you know you will be able to find footing, and you can see exactly where it is.
Strangely enough, God comes under this heading as well. Not that God is not firm ground, or that He is not trustworthy, but there is something in the human heart that doesn't quite trust. When things are going well, good enough. We can raise up our hands and sing out hallelujahs and cry "Praise to the Lord of Hosts!" Amen. It is easy to speak casually about God the Father in such times, because you are thinking of a father as someone that you see on Sunday for dinner, someone to whom you tell jokes as worn-out and comfortable as old socks, someone that you can build a shed with on a lazy autumn afternoon. When things are bad it is a different matter, because suddenly God must be not merely a father, but a Father who simultaneously has the power to rescue you from whatever is happening, and a Magus who has made the decision to pose you a very difficult and painful riddle. This is when it becomes necessary not merely to love, but to love with faith, to trust, which is much more difficult. To say, "Lord, you have allowed all of this to happen, and I don't understand why, and now I want you to get me out of it." But at the back of your head you're always thinking, "But if you let it happen in the first place, then why should I think you're going to help me now..." Which is why we return to daughterhood, to a trust that has to sink deeper than just the belief in some sort of magician who will rescue you, deus ex machina style, from all your woes, to a trust that God is not merely going to save us in the future, but is saving us now. That it is all an expression of his Fatherly love for us.

Sodomy laws and billy clubs

2009-10-15T11:56:00.004-04:00

I'm in the middle of working on a book about post-modernism, and one of the ideas that I'm necessarily dealing with in the process is the notion of pluralism. Those who have read Sexual Authenticity will know that I'm not a big fan of state interference in the private lives of citizens -- my belief in Catholic sexual morality does not lead me to believe in sodomy laws, for example. I think that there is an on-going tendency for people to believe that somehow public legislation will be able to cure private vice, that you will be able to help people to shake off the shackles of sin by throwing them into prison, torturing, interrogating, intimidating, etc. This kind of love wears a uniform and carries a billy-club (or, in contemporary society, a taser). This is not to say that I don't believe in the rule of law, but rather that I don't believe that the rule of law has any right to intervene in private life. I think it makes sense to illegalize drug trafficking, for the same reason that it makes sense to legally control or prevent the sale of any dangerous substance, but that it does not make sense to criminalize drug addiction. That it makes sense to prosecute pimps, but not to prosecute prostitutes (nor, for that matter, to prosecute men who resort to prostitutes.) That producing and marketing pornography should be illegal, but that using it should not be.
The difference has to do with the kinds of offenses being committed, and the purposes for legislation. If someone is committing a sin because he/she is hoping to make money off the deal, then legislation makes sense: provided you impose stiff enough penalties that a cost-benefit analysis will lead people to choose a more productive lifestyle, you will probably convince at least the more rational members of society to behave themselves. Sins of weakness, on the other hand, are a completely different matter. People do not, for the most part, frequent prostitutes, view pornography, have gay sex or abuse drugs because they have sat down and made a utilitarian calculation, and have come to the conclusion that when all is said and done the pain-pleasure balance comes down in favour or their addiction. Stiffer penalties, jail-time, fines, crack-downs and so forth will not change people's behaviours in these cases, on the contrary, I think that usually they will end up having the opposite effect: a person who is using some sort of addictive behaviour in order to deal with stress, loneliness, fear, etc. will find that the ever penetrating eye of big-brotherly social concern produces greater paranoia, greater fear, greater loneliness, greater stress -- and the vicious circle will tighten itself predictably around their throat. Real methods of helping people in these situations involve much more delicate instruments than those available to the state (even in its most paternalistic, soft-pedaled, compassionate-society forms). Real relationships, trust, support, understanding, genuine personal compassion, and the deep humility necessary for us to understand that we are not helping from a position of superiority, but as fellow sinners; these are required in order to lead people out of private vice. They are necessary to penetrate the barriers of secrecy without violating the sanctity of personal privacy. They are the responsibility of every Christian, and it is a responsibility that cannot be fobbed off on police and government.

The Gift

2009-09-11T19:37:00.003-04:00

I'm reading an absolutely fabulous books at the moment, Lewis Hyde's The Gift which is not some sort of cheesy sixth-sense schlock about people with two sights and three eyes, (the sub-title is "Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" which does about as little as it possibly could to clear up any confusions that might be arise about the content, and the picture of golden apples on the cover also doesn't reveal any secrets until you come to understand that it's an anonymous Shaker painting which illustrates some of the points that you will only get to in later chapters.) Okay, so the title and cover design are not necessarily grabbers, but as they say "You can't judge a book, ladeedadeeda, etc. etc." What the book is about is the idea of gift exchange, gift economies, the nature of gifts and the sorts of social structures that they create and imply, the relationship between gifts and commodities/gift economies and market economies, and how all of these things relate to the realm of art and the imagination: the idea of artistic talent as a "gift" and of an inspiration as something given to an artist, and of the work of art given as a gift to the public.
The relationship of such ideas to the idea of the "gift of self," the human person, and especially the body, as gift in the Theology of the Body is obvious. Hyde has the advantage over JPII of writing prose that is much more easily penetrated (JPII has the advantage of being the Pope, with all of the attendant theological acumen and authority, but for those who have tried to slog through TOB and have ended up scratching their heads in frank confusion, this book is not nearly so dense, nor so repetitive.) What I find especially interesting is that both works have had a similar effect on me, in terms of the subjective experience of reading -- the super-textual communication that is effected by any truly beautiful of human genius. There is a particular kind of awe, an enlivening of the intellect, a host of connections and insights that are not explicitly laid out in the text, but which a really living work sparks in the mind, so that, in a sense, the work could be said to be different for every reader, without losing its ability to communicate really profound meanings. I suppose one might say that it is the increase in worth that comes when the gift of the book is communicated between the author and the reader...
Anyway, highly recommended reading.
I should also put in a plug for Fr. John Waiss' "Born to Love II," which is a series of dialogues about homosexuality. I don't recall the name of the publisher, and my computer is being particularly obtuse at the moment (it doesn't want to open multiple windows, or really do anything. I'm seriously taxing it's resources by making it accept this blog entry. I think it has become prematurely old and cantankerous. Fortunately, it is going to soon be replaced by a shiny new computer. But then, perhaps it realizes that it is about to be put out to pasture and that is why it is being so curmudgeonly. One never knows.) The point is, I'll try to give the publisher, etc. the next time I blog.

Sisters

2009-08-12T18:54:00.000-04:00

I'm going to return to the theme of my conversion, and my meditation on the people who played a part in it.
My father I already dealt with, albeit obliquely, in part I. I want to devote this meditation to my sisters, as a group. Kristen I will deal with separately, tomorrow or the next time that I'm able to write.
I had five sisters: Laura, Jamie, Kristen, Alicia, Brianna. All are younger than me. Laura is married, Jamie is the Executive Director of an NGO out in Africa, Alicia is studying to be a midwife and Brianna is just now going into University. Kristen was killed in a car accident several years back, which is why she is going to get her own, special, separate blog entry.
At the time when I was I still an atheist, most of my sisters were too young to enter into any serious philosophical disagreement with me. Laura was old enough, and she was Christian (non-denominational with strong evangelical tendencies), Jamie was old enough and she, like me, had fallen away from Christianity. The others were small.
Laura and I used to argue about God, and morality, and so forth. She once quipped that although she could never beat me in an argument, this didn't especially perturb me: she would just wait a couple of months and then I would give her the counter-arguments to whatever I had been preaching the last time we argued. She did, however, have the honour of being the first to show me the difference between homophobia and Christian orthodoxy. I had recently come out of the closet, and inevitably, some time having passed, I prodded Laura to see what she had to say about the matter. She said something to the effect of, "I think that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong, but I don't think that should change my relationship with you." Now I had always been told that this was essentially unacceptable, that not to accept a gay person's gayness was not to accept the person, that it "is who I am" and if you don't affirm it, you don't love me. The problem was that I was not stupid, and although I'd always been inclined to toe the party line on this point, now that I was faced with this allegedly homophobic "hate the sin/love the sinner" (or, perhaps more accurately, "believe that the sin is a sin/love the sinner") position, I found that I couldn't offer any sort of emotional, or rational objection to it. If her religion said that my sexuality was sinful, then how on earth could I say that she had to change her religion or she didn't love me? It was just such a monumentally obvious hypocrisy: she wasn't saying that I had to change my beliefs and lifestyle if I really loved her, how could I demand the reverse? So that particular bit of liberal cultural detritus went out the window with Laura. She was Christian, she believed in Christianity, she loved me, we were sisters. I felt I was mature enough that I could handle her polite, charitable, unforceful, yet clear disagreement with my sexuality.
The others have been a part of my life in more ways than I could possibly name. Jamie is always there to pull me back from the edge of narrow-bandwidth Christian Conservativism, to make sure that I don't wander off into the delightful, but insular world of Chestertonians in plaid jumpers. She has always helped me to see the beauty in the modern world, and the honour and dignity in the struggle of humanity to stay human in the midst of the Culture of Death. In terms of writing my book, I had her in mind a lot of the time. I kept thinking, "how can I say this? If I were writing this as a personal letter to Jamie, what would I put in?" It helped, I think, to keep me from wandering off too much into vain and contemptuous rants, or from jumping to uncharitable conclusions, because Jamie really does represent the other side of the debate at its absolute best: she is a chaste woman, a believing Christian (a recent development, but it was always sure to happen sooner or later), and a deeply compassionate person. Her support for homosexuality is not superficial or ill-informed; she has worked in AIDS hospice and has had a number of exceedingly close relationships with gay men. Anything that I couldn't say about Jamie, I could not say about people who support homosexuality in general, because she would be the disproof.
Alicia and Brianna are my little sisters. This is not to belittle their part in my lives, but it means that they were not so much involved during the period before my conversion. What I can say of all of my sisters is that having so many of them, and having had, at every stage of my life, the experience of being in a large family, or being loved by people who were at the same time so similar and yet so different from me, has completely shaped my personality and my beliefs. It was because of them that I knew, as soon as I had my first child, that I was going to have to have more. Because the relationship that I've had with sisters is one of the great treasures of my life, it is something which no amount of extra baubles or new clothes could possibly have compared with. I have heard of children who have been asked "Would you rather have a new baby, or a trip to DisneyLand in the fall?" (What parent involves their kids in a decision to abort, I don't know. Creepy.) I can tell you, I've had sisters, and I've been to DisneyLand. Family is a joy that continues throughout life, and which is utterly irreplaceable. DisneyLand is an overcrowded theme park, and ultimately neither life-shaping, magical, or unforgetable. So I'll take the new baby over the new car, the new hedge, the new TV, and the family vacation. It's the better deal, every time. I know. My sisters showed me.

on Autism

2009-08-11T17:07:00.003-04:00

Okay, I've been away for a while. I have, as my spiritual director often says, all the good excuses. In this case the good excuses are that my two-year old was just diagnosed with autism, and that I am a total Luddite and haven't been able to figure out how log into my blog (my husband logs in for me, so if I sit down at the computer, and I'm not already logged in, and he is not around to do it for me, then I can't blog. He's taught me how to do it several times, but so far it's not sticking.) Obviously the former is the more interesting of the two, so I'm going to blog briefly about that, and then I'll try to get back on track with the conversion/reflection on how I came to be where I am.
A diagnosis of autism sounds like something terrible. The general picture is of a totally withdrawn child, rocking to himself, occasionally uttering pitiable sounds, who will one day grow up into a weird, silent adult who can recite the phone book and do jigsaw puzzles with amazing alacrity. Now I'm not going to deny that this, or something like this, is part of the reality for some people with autism, but the fact is that autism (or, rather, the autism spectrum conditions) extend to cover a lot of people who are much "higher functioning" than the child in that picture. (I actually dislike the turn "high functioning," just like I dislike the term "developing world," and the term "persons of aboriginal descent" because it falls into that category of weird terms that are going out of their way to be political correct -- to such a degree that they necessarily embody a wealth of self-important condescension. However, it is, to the best of my knowledge, the only term going, and coining an even more self-important neologism so that I can be better than the self-important politically-correct faction would only compound the problem...) So, my little Ulysses is two, and he has a number of strange repetitive behaviours, and he is very ritualistic (we went to the forest to go hiking; it was his second time out -- the first time he was very upset about being there and it took him a long time to get his bearings because it was a new situation. This time, it was familiar, so it was okay. But when we got to the washrooms, and I walked past them, he got confused and he kept trying to pull me back -- he wouldn't go the rest of the way down the path. Until we had gone into the washrooms, he wouldn't go on, because the first time that we came we went into the washrooms, so that's part of the routine. After we went into the washrooms, he followed me down to the river and threw stones in, no problem.) Also, he does not talk. Occasionally, single words, like this morning he pressed my nose and said "beep," and every so often he points to his little sister and says "baby," but he's not so much one for verbalization. He's a funny little guy, but I can't really fall in step with all of the mothers who feel that they have "lost" their child when they get an autism diagnosis. I can understand why they feel that way -- what is lost is the desire to have a particular kind of child, and the dream that one's own particular son or daughter will turn out to be everything that one has hoped for. It is difficult, and I imagine that it is much more difficult for people who intend only to have one or two children (especially if the vasectomy has already been plied by the time that the diagnosis is made.) For me, well, I'm not going for one perfect little girl and one perfect little boy. I can afford to broaden the field and have one perfect little Valkyrie, and one perfect little Princess, and one perfect little Magus, and one perfect little autistic boy, and so on. (I can't give Barbara an archetype yet, because she's only two months.) It's not just that having five children means that I can spread out all my hopes and dreams for my kids across the five of them, it's that seeing how different they all are, and how unique and unrepeatable, makes me realize how silly and shallow all of my hopes and dreams were in the first place. It makes me realize that God has a character concept for each of these little people, and that His ideas are much better than mine would have been. So I'm not inclined to go about grooming them into my ideal. Better to try to figure out what God intended with this particular person, and then help that to emerge and take shape. Education and formation instead of programming.
So Ulysses is not going to be a "normal" little boy. Now I just have to go about figuring out which beautiful variation of the human theme God intends to play through this particular instrument.

My Mother

2009-07-28T16:35:00.001-04:00

One of the things that Catholics ought to be aware of is that conversion is, in almost all cases, a process. Even when it looks like an instantaneous moment of illumination, there is generally a long series of events that, in retrospect, are obviously recognizable as the hand of God guiding the soul towards conversion. To take, for example, the case of St. Paul: there is a clear moment of conversion, when he falls down on the road to Damascus and has a stunning vision of the risen Lord, but there can be no doubt that the words and the prayers of the martyrs whom he had a hand in bringing to their martyrdom had been quietly falling on his soul, like a secret shower of rain, preparing him for this blinding moment of truth.
In the life of any given Catholic there will probably be relatively few instances where you are actually there for the moment of realization -- where you get to see the work of evangelization springing to new life. It is beautiful to see, but the reality is that we are usually working in the dark, serving our brothers and sisters through word and example without seeing the fruits of our labours.
Yesterday, I set up the conditions of my turning away from God. In the next couple of posts, I am going to try to do my best to repeat a fruitful exercise which I discovered in the writings of Marcus Aurelius. Marcus' Meditations begin with a reflection on those who have led him to his current state of life, concentrating not on the trials and troubles that he has suffered, but rather on the good that has come to him through his relationships. I will begin with my mother.
My mother always insisted that I was going to come back to Christ. She didn't do it in a wild fanatical way -- my mother is nothing if not a practical woman. I would start trying to pick a fight about the Christian world-view, and she, without giving any good arguments at all, would simply insist that I would eventually come back to the church.
At the same time, she observed one of the major tennets of her philosophy of motherhood: "There are two gifts that we must give our children, one is roots, the other is wings." Yes, my mother is a sentimentalist, but that has never prevented her from being a good and wise mother.
Throughout all of the years that I was an atheist and a lesbian, my mother's primary role in my life was to be there, absolutely dependable, offering unconditional love. We faught, of course, as teenagers and parents will fight, but I never had the slightest doubt that I could do anything and she would forgive and continue to love me. She generally didn't argue and try to persuade me of things, because that wasn't what she had to offer, and in any case, I was of that persistent adolescent delusion that I knew better than my elders who were, for the most part, backwards fuddy-duddies (at least in my modern, enlightened, progressive opinion...)
Often parents confronted with a wayward child will take the opposite approach. They will see the problem as something that needs to be dealt with, right now, before the child falls any further into sin and error. They try to micro-manage the conversion back to God that they hope will take place, to force it to happen before any great damage is done.
Unfortunately, this cannot work. The parent is like the prophet in his hometown; they are generally too close to their children to be able to engineer the changes that they would like to bring about. This is especially true during adolescence, when the child is first spreading her wings and trying to get out of the nest. If the parent lets go, sooner or later the child will get her bearings, realize that she doesn't know everything, and start, tentatively, to develop a new, adult respect for her forebears. Through this process, we go from having respect for our parents simply because they are our parents -- the natural respect of dependant children -- to having respect for our parents because we can see their wisdom.
The two preconditions for this are unconditional love: an enduring interest in the good of the child that is not broken or weakened during the difficult period of rebellion and letting go; and trust: the willingness to genuinely let the child make her own mistakes, always believing that sooner or later she will find her way onto the right path. Cheesy and sentimental as the embroidered plaque over my mother's door is, it's absolutely right: roots and wings. If the former is lacking, the child will slowly drift away into her life and will never develop an adult respect. If the latter is lacking, the period of adolescent-style tension will draw itself out indefinitely, until either the parent learns to let go, or the parent dies. The mother who is still telling her forty year old son how to live his life, because she "sees no evidence that he is capable of taking real responsibility for himself" is directly responsible for the fact that he evinces no such evidence. She has not given him permission to grow up.
I want to begin then, by giving thanks to my mother, for giving me the invaluable gift of providing me with a solid foundation to which I could return when I found that my philosophies were crumbling around me, and also for allowing me to go out into the world to seek my fortune.

The Junior Atheist Division

2009-07-27T12:10:00.004-04:00

Someone asked if I could elaborate on my own conversion story, so I'm going to try to do that. It might take a couple of posts, but we'll give it a go.
I was born into a liberal but quite devout Anglican home; I went to Sunday school, was part of the local parish's "apostles club," read abridged stories for children about St. Paul, and so forth. I liked our pastor because he gave sermons where he used Star Trek to elucidate spiritual points, and I never encountered any of the hatred, gay-bashing, etc. that are supposed to abound in Christian congregations. Church was a place full of wonderful old Jamaican women who cooked incredible jerk chicken, and nice middle-class white folks like my parents.
I was about twelve or thirteen when I started to have doubts about Christianity. I think that if I had taken these doubts to someone qualified they could have been put to rest fairly easily, but my mother was never someone with whom I could have debates, and my father and I tended not to talk about anything more complicated than squirrels and science fiction. At one point I did talk to my dad about God -- or rather, he talked to me. He said that the moment when he knew God existed was when he was out in the mountains in Western Canada. It was, I think, one of the only times when I had a sense of that deeper interior life that lurks beneath my dad's ability to recite Monty Python sketches by heart, and his extensive knowledge of the llama glama. It effected me much more than I ever said, but it was not enough to really put my doubts to silence.
The issue came to a head when my mother wanted me to get confirmed. I was of the proper age, and she assumed that I would go ahead and become a full member of the Anglican church. I reacted quite strongly against this, and we ended up fighting about it for several months.
Unfortunately, the only Christians who I really took my concerns to were my aunt's Gospel Hall congregation. We used to get summoned to their baptisms (adult baptism, full immersion) and the preacher would get up and beat the pulpit and admonish us sinners who were there to support our cousins. "Ye must be born again!" pound "Ye must be born again!" It really wasn't that far removed from the charicatures of fundamentalism that one sees in the media. In any case, I was sitting in one of their Sunday-school type sessions and they were expounding on how God would do anything that we asked of Him, and I expressed my reservations on this score. It seemed to me that they were promising a magician God, and I could see little evidence of this divine conjurer in my own life. The poor Sunday-school woman didn't seem to have ever encountered the junior atheist division before, and the conversation was not particularly enlightening. She quoted scripture, I profered exceedingly simplistic rational arguments, and neither of us went away enlightened.
So I became an atheist. Over the years, as I absorbed more and more of the anti-Christian memes that were circulating through the high-school atmosphere, I went from being a straightforward agnostic to a hardened atheist, totally derisive of the Christian faith, and convinced that if there was a God at all, it was not the God of Christianity.

Tomorrow, we'll continue.

The Simple Story

2009-07-27T11:43:00.003-04:00

Sorry for taking so long to respond to all of your wonderful comments -- I've been very busy the past week writing a series for the National Catholic Register about Post-modernism, and canning cucumbers, corn, plums, and anything else that I can find growing about. There is a beautiful fermenting strawberry creature sitting on my table, but that is probably neither here nor there.
I should have been clearer. I don't have a problem with simplicity per se, when there is genuine simplicity, wed to genuine humility, it is exceedingly beautiful, like light flashing out through the clouds, and people react to it accordingly. Our jaded, "Oh, well, it could never be that easy..." reaction falls away, and we stop critiquing according to all of these ideas of sophistication, because it is absolutely real and undeniable. The problem is with the falsification of this. Because simplicity is such a beautiful ideal, and also because the simple version of the story is always easier to tell than the messy one, people who are in fact not simple will put on a simple facade when they are giving their testimonies. This is a particular problem in terms of the gay/lesbian conversion, because the reality is that simple people are not generally drawn to gay culture in the first place. That's not to say that simple people never experience same sex attraction, but that when they do they don't tend to go and hang out with the radical feminists, leather fetishists, Warholesque sophisticates, etc.
False simplicity, like false humility, false sanctity, and other false virtues, is invariably transparent. It sits in the stomach like rotten milk. That's why gays and lesbians have such a strong reaction against the standard ex-gay testimony -- not because they would react against genuine simplicity if they were to encounter it, but because those of us who labour under the disadvantage of complexity must be honest about the complications of our conversions.

Crowing from the Hills

2009-07-08T13:46:00.002-04:00

"Just another Catholic mom" wrote, in her blog, that when she purchased Sexual Authenticity she was worried that it was going to be a "saved" lesbian crying from the hills that all homosexuals can be saved from homosexuality by prayer and the love of Jesus. She was relieved to find that it wasn't.
I was less relieved. We worked quite a bit to get the back-of-the-book text into a form that would suggest that this wasn't the standard sappy-clappy ex-gay conversion testimonial. For some reason, though, this standard keeps cropping up in various places.
For example, the first time that I did a radio interview to promote the book, I was strangely disappointed at the end of it. It took a couple of minutes thinking to figure out why; then I realized that I had been somehow or other guided into giving that standard testimonial. The "I felt God calling to my heart, and then He made me straight. Ain't Jesus wonderful!" story. Blech.
I'm not sure why, but for some reason Catholic publishers, radio hosts, etc. seem to be under the impression that modern Catholics want to hear this kind of rubbish. There's a sense that the streamlined, perfect, all-to-easy, glowing reparative therapy tale is going to be "edifying" to any poor sodomites who happen to tune in.
The reality, of course, is quite different. People with same-sex attractions are never edified by the standard testimonial, because they don't believe it. They don't believe it, because it isn't true. It's too good to be true. It's too clean. Not messy enough. More to the point, it's bad plotting. It's a contrived tale: very predictable. You can tell exactly what is going to happen at every point along the road, the end is implicit in the beginning, and there are no surprises, no twists, no unexpected upsets in the plot. It is a tale told by a Hollywood script-writer, full of cliches and stereotypes, signifying nothing.
Real conversion stories are dramas scripted by God. They're better than Euripedes and Shakespeare. They're weirder than Pinter. They're peppered with strange and bizarre characters. They involve absurd twists like "Saul of Tarsis, on his way to persecute the Christians, sees a vision of Jesus and falls down blind on the road to Damascus."
Only when a tale has this sort of reality does it have any chance of edifying. Because people can tell a forgery when they see one. They can recognize the air-brushing on our autobiographical testimonials. And that never fails to disedify.

Why Beauty?

2009-07-02T10:48:00.002-04:00

Some kind person gave a favourable review of my work on her blog -- this is the first time that I've been able to get an impression from someone who doesn't know me, and I was heartened to find that the thing that came across above everything else was the devotion to beauty.
Perhaps I am a little myopic on this point (Keat's "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," is the sole philosophic statement that has survived in my psyche throughout all of the various shifts and turns of belief over the years), but I think that this is something that goes beyond me.
The age of Reason is over. By that I don't mean that reason is no longer valid, or that it is no longer able to elucidate new truths. I mean that people, on the whole, are no longer able or willing to receive the truth garbed in the robes of reason. She was twisted and mutilated by modernism; "rational self-interest" has led to deeply exploitative and inhuman forms of commerce; "rational" scientific and technological progress has ushered in a Culture of Death; "rational" men may argue rationally that abortion is good and infanticide justifiable. I suspect that it will be some time before Reason has recovered sufficiently that people will be able to rely on her. For the moment, then, truth, if it is going to be communicated beyond the insular circle of people who still believe in St. Thomas Aquinas, must be framed in different terms. The image, not the argument, will win the day.
This, I think, is the meaning behind Dostoyevski's statement that "Beauty will save the world." It is the meaning behind Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize address and it is the current of hope that runs through John Paul II's Letter to Artists.

The Crutch of Mutual Fantasy

2009-07-01T21:56:00.004-04:00

I just finished reading my own book. I never did do the final read-through for errors before it went to print -- that task got farmed out to my husband because I was deep in the throes of pre-publication anxiety and had started to become worried that exposure to my own work would cause me to start gnawing limbs off in the hope that it would forestall the embarrassment of having my imperfect prose revealed to the world.
Such are a writer's anxieties. I was glad to discover that the book reads fairly well, but I found that I hit the end of it without having a clear picture of the lesbian relationship that is supposed to be at the centre of the story. There are two reasons for this: the first is that I can speak as openly as I like about the things that are mine -- my sins, my thoughts, my experiences -- however there is a certain cloak of privacy behind which my ex-girlfriend has to be allowed to hide. It isn't my place to reveal her (which is why her name is changed, in the text, to Michelle). The second reason is that there is a lack of anything to say. The relationship started out with a great deal of real content. We shared the same loves, finished each others sentences, did everything together. By the end, there was nothing except for the crutch of a mutually shared fantasy life. The friendship could literally not survive beyond the end of the sexual relationship, because it had already died, suffocated beneath one make-believe relationship after another. We had stopped interacting, really, with one another long before the end came, it just wasn't apparent.
This is why I am terribly opposed to all of those "how to fix your sex-life" articles that advise married couples to indulge in a little mutual fantasy in order to spice things up. When the person that you are making love in your mind to is not the same person who is actually before you, the real relationship dies. The spice is there, sure, but beneath it the meat of the relationship rots away and eventually decays into dust. Eventually there is nothing at all, nothing to say to one another, and nothing to say about one another, because the person who you allegedly love is no longer someone that you know.

Myopic Media

2009-06-25T23:26:00.002-04:00

I thought that I would stop by one of the big gltb news sites to see if I could find something interesting, new, and cutting edge to blog about. No such luck. What I was surprised -- perhaps unreasonably -- by, was the fact that the news site I was surfing reminded me of several single-issue Catholic sites that I've been on. It's a matter, I think, of there being too little news spread over too many articles, or of a need to produce something to say on a specific topic, even if there is nothing to say at all.
In this case, the cutting edge news was that some gay celebrity had called some straight celebrity a "faggot," which of course had produced statements by GLAAD, and a general outcry of utterly ludicrous proportions. But this is not limited to the gay community, or even the politically correct community. The same sort of thing crops up on the right-wing side of the fence when the spotlight is turned on any person or agency that might have said something that could have been construed as being pro-abortion, or because a Catholic organization allowed someone who once voted for a gay-rights bill to speak on an unrelated subject at a dinner, and so on and so forth.
There's a kind of pettiness about this, no matter who does it. It's the culture wars equivalent of sending out the troops to defend a couple square centimetres of squalid, barren, shrapnel covered ground, and it produces an interminable squabble in which the stakes are practically nothing at all. Worse, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who comes across it and is not firmly on-side, and it helps to trivialize the issues.

Transgendering History

2009-06-22T22:11:00.003-04:00

I forgot about Elagabalus. I knew I'd missed one of those Romans, but this one is worth discussing in a little bit more detail, because he points to one of the absurdities that emerges in the entire discussion of same-sex relations. To boot: I was reading through the Wikipedia article on "the history of same-sex unions" and whomever composed the article seemed to be of the opinion that Elagabalus might have been transgendered.
Now, I will grant you this: the man's habit, dress, etc. were extremely effeminate, but the reasons for this are clear, and they are fundamentally religious. Elagabalus was from the orient (Syria, not China), and was interested in the oriental mystery cults, several of which involved the sort of "spiritual marriage" motif that characterizes both ancient and modern gnosticism and some of Jungian psychology. This is the idea that within the individual live both the feminine and the masculine principle, and that it is necessary to bring both of these out in order to achieve internal balance and harmony. It was not uncommon for men within these religions to consent to become eunuchs in order to achieve union with the gods and goddesses that they served. (Salammbo includes a priest of Tanit who is an absolutely wonderful character within this genre -- rendered with Flaubert's typical devotion to historical detail.)
Reading the modern notion of "transgender" into the eunuch-theology of the mystery religions is typical of a kind of anachronistic compression of history, in which myopic contemporary ideologies are pasted pell-mell onto the past, without any respect for context or culture. Post-modern queer theorists have pointed out -- often in award-winning books and theses -- that this is sloppy and absurd.

The Gay-Roman-Emperor Gene

2009-06-15T18:01:00.001-04:00

An odd bit of evidence against the theory that sexual orientation is a fixed variable, more or less constant across populations, with a genetic origin, evenly distributed amongst the various strata and occupations of society:
I was reading Gibbon, and was struck by his wry little footnote where he reflects that of the first fifteen Roman Emperors, "Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct." Even if we assume that Kinsey's inflated "one in ten" statistic is accurate, we should only expect that 1.3 of these men would be homosexual/bisexual in his inclinations. Two would be within normal statistical deviation, three would be a little odd but perhaps explicable if we theorized that the Claudians were carrying a male homosexuality gene, but twelve of thirteen does seem a little improbable.
Perhaps the numbers could be trimmed a little. We could assume the Julius Ceasar's alleged carryings-on with a certain foreign King were just scandal cooked up by his detractors. We might admit that Augustus was subject to similar scurrility. With Tiberius and Caligula, however, their sexual proclivities are well substantiated; Nero married male eunuchs on two occasions; Trajan's male lovers were widely known, and Hadrian had his favourite, Antinous, deified. Even if we go out of our way to doubt the evidence of bisexuality amongst Roman Emperors, it has to be admitted that at least fifty percent of them were involved in same-sex relationships.
Which means that the cause of their same-sex attractions was not inborn. It was not the result of social ostracism during their formative years. It was not caused by the uterine environment. The only possible reasonable hypothesis is to conclude that their same-sex interests were caused by cultural and environmental factors -- by the availability of handsome youths interested in a bit of political prostitution, by the social ideals surrounding homosexuality in high Roman society, by the privileges of imperial power, and so on. Not by DNA.

Culture wars and conflict

2009-06-12T16:04:00.003-04:00

I'm working today on an outline for a book about post-modernism. It's a curious subject, one that I was thinking about quite a bit when I was writing Sexual Authenticity, because there are a lot of places where the gay community and the post-modern culture overlap. The most obvious, of course, is Foucault's homosexuality, but there is also a strong link between modern/post-modern art and homosexuality in general.
In any case, that's not what I wanted to say. There was a point, where I was working on the book, and I was wandering around in conflict about the state of the culture. I had written several times over that I didn't think that the "culture wars" mentality was especially helpful in most ways -- it's fine if by "culture war" you mean "spiritual warfare that takes place within the context of the society at large, and which is really just a reflection of the interior war against powers and principalities that takes place within the soul of the individual." If your idea of "fighting the culture war" is "becoming a Saint," then that's a good thing. But usually it means running around and trying to "win back" the culture by rolling back the clock to 1950, or standing around and waving signs at gay pride parades, or fighting battles against the right of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to use the word "choice" (in a completely non-abortion related way) in some of their advertising.
So I was thinking about the culture, and the culture wars, and I was sitting in a cafe down the street, and leafing through a copy of Toronto Life. There was a story there about a group of young people who were waging a campaign to "reclaim public space." They weren't going to do anything particularly anarchic -- just go down to Yongue St., dance to some relatively lame music, and wave glow-in-the-dark batons around in the air in order to proclaim that community is still alive in Toronto. The word "pomo" appeared in the text, to describe the sort of play-becomes-rebellion mentality that prompted this activity.
My reaction was, perhaps, not the typical right-wing conservative response. I didn't think, "young radicals making trouble," or "what a bunch of lame posers." For a moment I caught a glimmer of something that underlies the entire appeal of post-modernity: it is the reaction of my generation to the fact that we live in a really quite spectacularly insane and dysfunctional environment. It is a reaction against the "Culture of Death" -- a culture so concerned with efficiency that it actually becomes an act of social rebellion to wave around light rods in the street, or sing songs while you wash your windows, or go out "guerilla gardening" (for those who don't know, this means descending on a piece of ugly public space during the middle of the night, armed with spades and flowers, and planting things without going through the proper channels and getting city permission.) It is not the post-modernists who are crazy; it's the people who think you would have to be crazy to do anything in down-town Toronto except shuffle mindlessly down the street and mumble into your cell-phone.

HIV Disclosure

2009-06-04T14:29:00.003-04:00

The newest thing around Toronto is a series of bill-boards running the slogan "If you were turned down every time you disclosed, would you?" The campaign is sponsored by hivstigma.com -- it's not really a new issue from the perspective of the gay community, but Catholics that I know are baffled to find that such an apparently bizarre question is coming into the mainstream.
The issue is whether or not there should be a legal obligation for persons infected with HIV to tell potential sexual partners about their serostatus. From a Catholic point of view this is a total no-brainer: not only is it unjustifiable to knowingly expose someone to the risk of a deadly illness without telling them, it is gravely immoral to expose them to that risk even if you do tell them.
The issue is not, however, that simple. What you are looking at here is a sub-culture of men who have been encouraged to root their identity in their sexuality, who have been told that being "who they are" is synonymous with celebrating a gay lifestyle, and who are accustomed to see any attempt to curtail or moderate their sexual activities as stigmatization or condemnation. On a deeper level, there is the fact that many people involved in homosexuality have an essentially compulsive relationship with their sexuality -- the experience of being wholly unable to give up same-sex activities is genuine, and in many cases habit and psychological dependency really do diminish culpability. Like any compulsive behaviour, the urge to engage is particularly aggravated during times of extreme stress or loneliness -- and there are few things more stressful, or more isolating, than a seropositive result on an HIV test.
Now this does not mean, in my opinion, that laws holding HIV positive individual accountable for their sexual activities should be struck down. According to the HIVstigma web-site, 1 in 4 men who have sex with other men in Toronto are HIV positive. Despite the various sophistic arguments to the contrary, the reality is that disclosure is a very real moral obligation weighing on those who are infected -- not for the sake of the "good, upright," monogamous Christian folk, who really have no personal stake in the issue at all, but for the sake of the 3 in 4 gay men who have not yet felt the sword of Damacles dangling over their beds. It does mean, however, that the issue has to be dealt with compassionately, in a way that helps men in this position to discover that that moral obligations are a means of freedom, and not merely another way of stigmatizing homosexuals.

Babies

2009-05-25T11:22:00.000-04:00

I'm in the early stages of labour and have nothing better to do, so what better time to reflect on the relationship between maternity and femininity?
I remember discussing babies with my girl-friend at some point, and both of us came to the same conclusion: neither of us felt that we had any maternal instincts, so we weren't inclined to go through all of the rigmarole and head-ache involved in trying to become pregnant without the (direct) involvement of a man. It's a common enough meme circulating through the public mind-space of young women today; it is somehow assumed that if I don't have that traditional feminine "Ah! Can I hold it?" reaction to other people's babies, then I'm just not cut out for maternity.
The maternal instinct, however, is something deeper than that. I will be honest, I don't have a great deal of interest in other babies. They're cute, and I try to act suitably impressed when I'm presented with them, but on some level my reaction is still that sort of masculine, "Oh. Yeah, it's a baby. Does it do anything yet?"
My babies are a different matter. I have five now (the smallest one is currently trying to make up her mind about whether she wants to come out or not), and, not entirely surprisingly, I have a tremendous amount of maternal feeling towards them. It was something that surprised me when I had my first. I had always associated maternity with a certain sort of personality: the organized, practical, PTA, Sunday-school-teacher type. My own mother. I think in part that my belief that I had no maternal instincts was really the profound sense that I could never be that kind of mother, and, on the other hand, the feeling that somehow being a mother meant being all of those other things.
Now, of course, the stereotype is different: Mom no longer bakes apple pie and makes quilts to sell at the Church bazaar (my mother does -- but she also wears "Genuine Antique Person" sweaters and proudly encourages her grandchildren to call her "Grandma" in public even though she looks young enough to pass as their mother.) The new Mom is still organized, but instead of going to the PTA she arranges play-dates for the tots, takes them to kinder-gym, and drives them to soccer games in her extra-safety-feature-enhanced mini-van. Naturally, she is more liberated than the old Mom, so she also takes time out for herself from her frazzled day to drink new-age herbal teas.
What both of these images have in common, is that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the profound mystery of femininity, nor with the essence of maternity, nor with the intersection between the dignity and vocation of woman and the individual and irreplicable vocation of each particular woman. What I discovered, to my joy and my surprise, was that there is absolutely no contradiction between my self and my motherhood. Becoming a mother did not mean becoming a soccer mom, or a PTA mom, or an All-American apple-pie mom, or a hyper-efficient liberated business mom. I didn't have to buy into any of the marketypes that advertisers like to use to sell overpriced, trendy mom-friendly products in parenting magazines. I was able to remain myself. In fact, I suspect that I'm a better mother for being myself than if I tried to become the picture-perfect mother in the mini-van ad.

Queer Science

2009-04-04T17:37:00.000-04:00

I sat down, the other day, to watch an old cinema verité film called Titicut Follies. Overall, I am inclined to agree with other reviewers on the movie: it is one of the best documentary films that I've ever seen, and I don't recommend that you view it. It is definitely very good, and it is, equally definitely, extremely disturbing and hard to watch.

It is a documentary about a mental asylum in the late 1960's, and it confirms an apprehension that I have always had about the psychiatric profession: that it contains more than a few men who are, in fact, far more dangerously and pervasively insane than their patients. This is not to say that all, or even most, people in the psychological professions are evil scientists, mad-men, or Nazi doctors, but that there is a definite risk of a certain sort of pathological personality considering itself fit to correct the neuroses that it perceives in others.

What has this to do with homosexuality? Objectively, probably not very much. Subjectively, it connected with several things that were already on my mind. First of all, my viewing of the film happened to coincide with re-reading the sections of Simon LeVay's Queer Science that concern the “treatments” given to homosexual offenders by contemporaries of the doctors portrayed in Titicut, often in similar institutions and under similar conditions. Secondarily, it played into a larger dialogue that I've been carrying on with myself about the problem of reorientation therapies.

Now obviously most modern reorientation therapists would never even consider using aversion therapy, or electroshock, or any of the weird drugs that were invented and tried over the course of twentieth century to “cure” homosexuals of their inclinations. They are careful to belabour the point that the kind of therapy that they offer will be of benefit to the client even if a heterosexual orientation is never achieved, and so on and so forth. Still, I find myself with a sort of uncomfortable misgiving surrounding the topic.

Perhaps it is the emphasis on heterosexuality that raises my shackles – not because I think that some people are fundamentally gay and that it is harmful to try to force them to change their orientation, but because I don't think that anyone is fundamentally gay, so when the emphasis is on “orientation” change, I'm forced to wonder exactly what it is that the clinician and his patient are trying to change? Or perhaps it is that some of the techniques that I know have been used – and some of the techniques that are still in use in some places – seem to have much more to do with achieving heterosexuality than with achieving peace in Christ.

It is not that heterosexuality, or rather, freedom from disordered sexual impulses of any kind (and there are more than enough disordered heterosexual fantasies and inclinations floating about), is not a desirable goal, but that it has to be the fruit of a higher pursuit. It's rather like searching for a husband: most of the people I know who desperately want to get married are wholly unable to form a lasting relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Some of them are unable to form any kind of relationship with the opposite sex at all. The reason in simple: they've put the cart before the horse. Marriage, at least in a culture that doesn't do the arranged marriage thing, is the fruit of a relationship. If you start out trying to figure out whether this person is or is not the “one,” even before there is the slightest scrap of a real relationship from which to make such a determination, you're almost guaranteed to behave in ways that prevent a real relationship from ever forming. If you forget about getting married, and get on with the business of forming human relationships and of doing whatever you're supposed to be doing with yourself in the present, then marriage, if you are called to it, will follow. If you stare myopically into the pool of potential marriage candidates, on the other hand, you will probably end up a spinster.

The same thing is true of chastity. It is something that arises as the fruit of a relationship with God, and it is something that happens in accord with the timing of grace. A therapist might, in some cases, be able to be an instrument of that grace but only, I think, if the purpose of the therapy is to achieve interior freedom, and not to achieve heterosexual functioning, or a heterosexual “orientation.” As in the case of the single person, the homosexual who is trying to achieve chastity needs to put the horse first, and the cart second; to work on relating to Christ and to others in his or her life in a healthy, fulfilling way. If heterosexual attractions are supposed to arise as a result of this, they will. If a call to the married life is in the cards, it will happen. Indeed, I'm inclined to say that if it is supposed to happen, it will happen so easily, so naturally, and so surprisingly that all the hullabaloo about the struggle and difficulty of reorientation will seem like a very bizarre sort of joke.

Melinda's posts are coming soon!

2009-04-02T09:52:00.001-04:00

Check back soon. With the publication of Melinda Selmys's new book, Sexual Authenticity, she'll soon be blogging regularly.