Getting to the Point: love

Showing posts with label love. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Let's Talk About Chastity

Last week in this column on ‘gnarly questions’ I wrote about the basic Catholic theological understanding of the sexual act and its meaning – an embodied reflection of God’s love for creation and for humanity, hence an act occurring in a context of irrevocable commitment (marriage) and ordered towards creativity and life (pro-creative).

I am always amused at the commenters on such blog posts who feel it is necessary to inform me that Not! Everyone! Agrees! With! This! Ummm… yes, dear. I am aware that there are actually people in the world and even in the pews who do not quite agree with what the Catholic Church teaches about sex and marriage. This is not a well kept secret.

I ended last week’s blog post by asking ‘what about all the people who, under this understanding of sex, cannot morally engage in sexual intercourse?’ The unmarried, the gay—what about them? Does the Church then condemn them to a life of misery and loneliness? How can we be so cruel as to say to people that they must live their lives alone, alone, alone, forever alone, without love, without companionship, without anyone who cares for them or for whom they care.

Because of course the only possible way to have someone in your life who you care for and who cares for you, the only possible way to have ‘love’ in your life, is to go to bed with someone, right?

Actually, that’s not the Church who says that; that is our world and our culture that says that.

It is not the Church who condemns people to live lonely lives if they cannot find a sexual partner; it is the world that does that by deciding that the only possible way a person can have a close and loving relationship in this life is by sexual pairings. There is a problem here, but the problem is not what the Church teaches—it is that our society has lost the very concept of friendship and real social networks of care and concern, treats people as economic cogs in a giant wheel who can only find respite from the cold isolation of modern urban-industrial life by clutching on to one another in either long-term (but by no means life-long) sexually intimate relationships or (more and more frequently) short-term casual hookups.

So let’s talk about chastity. If it just happens to be true that sexual intercourse bears a divine meaning that can only be faithfully expressed in marital sex oriented towards life, then what about the reality that all of us have a sexual drive, have sexual desire, but a considerable percentage of the population are not able to ethically have sex? Even if this number is currently inflated beyond what is normal for humanity, due to economic and sociological pressures that make it difficult for people to get married (again, a situation that is not the Church’s fault, but society’s), nonetheless it is a simple fact that even in a healthy functioning society there will always be a large number of people who should not be sexually active, according to Catholic moral teaching.

This is not a situation of misery and endless desolation! Our sexuality, our capacity for generativity in love, that aspect of our humanity that is both a matter of intense pleasure and desire, but which far transcends the merely physical to reach the level of spirit and life, identity and personhood—there is much more to it, actually, than its seeming completion in the act of sexual intercourse.

The simple fact is, our existence as sexual beings means that our whole personhood is in its raw physicality ordered towards the ‘other’. We are not sufficient unto ourselves. As our bodies require food for life, so our bodies require another person for love. But as our bodies’ physical hunger for food points to that deeper hunger, that deeper life that comes to us from the life of The Other, so our bodies’ hunger for love and union points us to a deeper Love and a Communion that is far beyond what sexual union can bring us.

Both these basic physical drives—food and sex—essentially serve in their well-ordered expression to pull the person out of the fortress of the autonomous independent self into a position of inter-subjectivity, relationship, need. But as food in the vice of gluttony becomes food at the service of the ego, at the service of the untethered will, so sex in the vice of lust becomes mere use of the other to satisfy the appetite.

Chastity—well-ordered sexuality either in its lawful use in marriage or in celibate continence outside of marriage—is the virtue whereby our sexuality is held in this deeper context and meaning, and prevented from its terrible tragic degradation into lust and use.

And the answer to this terrible fear that sexual continence will deliver us to loneliness and misery lies, not in abandoning God’s moral order about sex and marriage, but in a spiritual revolution whereby all of us—married or single—come to know and believe that we are made ultimately not for the other, but for The Other, for God, and that the answer to loneliness, isolation, and the sadness of our human condition lies not in flesh and blood but in our entry into the Communion of the Holy Trinity, our divine destiny in which all the desires of our souls and bodies will be at last satisfied.

I do realize that there is so much more to be said on all of this—a blog post can only be so long, and say so much. But that is what I have to say on the matter, at least in this context.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Let's Talk About Sex

So why does the Church hate gay people? Why does the Church hate sex, generally? Women? The human body? Pleasure? Why is the Church so darned hateful, hateful, hateful? Why can’t it just get with the program like everyone else has?

Ah, gnarly questions, my new blog series! It had to come around to sex eventually, didn’t it? I want to talk in the blog post about the basic teaching of the Church regarding human sexuality—not this issue or that, but the fundamental teaching without which all the ‘rules and regs’ just seem arbitrary, bizarre, and frankly just plain mean.

Now I realize full well that at least some people read the blog who just ain’t buying what the Church is selling on this matter. I ask those people to at the very least try to understand what the Church is saying and why. At least know what it is you’re rejecting.

And of course most people reading this blog are Catholic and do accept what the Church teaches, maybe with struggles at times, but nonetheless. For all of you folks, I suggest that the basic teaching is simple enough, but there are heights and depths in it that need to be explored and that have implications far beyond the ‘rules and regs’ of what we can and cannot do in our sexual behavior.

So what is the fundamental thing at stake here, in this whole messy business of sex? The essential positive teaching, the teaching about what sex is that determines all of the negative teachings about what sex is not (and therefore what we should not do, sexually), is that sexual intercourse has an inherent meaning.

Furthermore, the meaning of sexual intercourse, the sexual act, is not something human beings have devised, which can thus be changed at will. It is not something private or individualistic—you decide what having sex means for you, and I will decide what it has for me. No, the sexual act has a meaning, and that meaning is created by God. And our whole sexuality is important—it is not some trivial afterthought of our humanity, but is a central and vital part of what it means to be human (finally, something on which the Catholic Church and the most dedicated progressive libertine can agree!).

And the meaning of the act of sexual intercourse is fundamentally a simple one. It is meant to be a physical, bodily expression of the love of God for his creation, the love of God for the human person, you and me, and specifically the love of Christ for redeemed humanity, the Church. Sex has a sacramental essence—it is meant to be a visible sign of the invisible reality of God and His passionate love for all He has made. It points beyond itself to something else

To be a faithful representation of God’s love made flesh in Jesus Christ, reflected and imaged in the actions of the body in our sexual being, means that we cannot just engage in sexual acts any old way. The way human beings have sex has to correspond to the way God loves the world, or it falsifies the reality it signifies.

And so God’s love is covenantal, faithful. God does not love us one day and turn away from us the next. God is not on again, off again. God does not use us. He is not a ‘friend with benefits’. God commits himself to loving his creation so much that when it is broken and wounded He becomes a man so as to be broken and wounded with it, and when it dies, He becomes a man so as to die with it. ‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health…’

So sex must occur within a committed relationship, and commitment does not just mean ‘until either one of us decides we’re not happy.’ That is… not what the word commitment means, right? Commitment means for life. Commitment means marriage. Sex outside of marriage is wrong because there is no commitment of the one to the other, and so it in no way, shape, or form corresponds to how God loves us.

And God’s love for us gives life, brings life. God is the creator. His love is fruitful. This time of year the whole of creation here in the Northern Hemisphere is exploding with new life. God’s fecundity, expressed through the natural cycles of the earth, is obvious. But His love in the human person is equally fruitful. Where God is present in a person’s life, that person’s life increases, there is growth, there is newness, there is fruit. Always and at all times.

So sex that is either inherently sterile (i.e. sex between two people of the same gender) or sex that has been deliberately made sterile (by an act of contraception) simply does not communicate the nature of God’s love. The two people involved may genuinely care for one another, but nothing can come from this love—no life, no newness, no fruitfulness.

People counter that the Church has no problem with an older married couple engaging in sexual intercourse, nor with couples having sex during the times of the month when the woman is not fertile. This is because they have done nothing themselves to sterilize themselves, and the act itself is still ordered towards generativity even though the natural process of aging or the natural rhythms of the woman’s body have made it non-procreative.

The bottom line is that God’s love is faithful and committed, an unbreakable bond, and God’s love is creative and fruitful, life-giving. Sex, to be a faithful sacramental sign of God’s love, must be within marriage and open to the generation of life. And I will say more next Wednesday about all the people who, therefore, cannot have sex (at least not in their current situation) and why the Church does not actually hate these people and is not condemning them to a horrible empty life. Next week!

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Works of Mercy: Admonishing the Sinner

This will probably be my last blog post for the week. Later today I will get on a plane to Regina Saskatchewan, on the Canadian prairies. We have a Madonna House there which runs a soup kitchen for the men of the streets; I am going out to give them a three-day retreat. I return Sunday and will be back to normal blogging from then on.

But I thought I would do my ‘work of mercy’ post today, then, before I go off-line for the rest of the week. We are moving right along with these works, and now come to the most difficult, tricky, easy-to-do-wrong, really-hard-to-do-right work of all.

And that work is to admonish sinners. When I wrote the post about visiting the sick, and I was listing some of the genuine nuances of how you can biff that one up and end up being more of a nuisance than anything else, I hastened to say that I wasn’t trying to discourage anyone from actually doing that work of mercy.

With this one, I do fully mean to discourage people from doing this one, if you don’t think you can do it correctly. The damage that can be done to a person’s soul if they are rebuked for their sins badly, harshly, without mercy and with hard judgment is terrible. People can be driven away from God and from the Church, for years, if someone admonished them for their sins in a way that was hurtful, demeaning, loveless.

So don’t do it… unless, that is, you can do it with love, with peace, with compassion, with great care, prudence, and discernment. If you lack any of the above qualities in any situation where you may feel some admonishing is in order, do not move on it until you have them. Ask God for them.

Now, there are situations in life where this work of mercy actually is part of one’s job. Parents simply have to do this, and God bless all you parents reading this for taking on that hard part of the job. You gotta tell your kids when their doing wrong, and it’s no fun. But it has to be done. And others are in similar situations. Religious superiors, spiritual directors (gasp!)—when one person has a responsibility to some extent for the moral and human formation of another person, then there is an obligation to admonish the sinner. But again, always with compassion, mercy, love.

Personally, I am very slow to correct a directee on something, my experience being that they usually know what they are doing wrong, and that there is great delicacy required to tell them so when it that is not the case. Lots of prayer, lots of waiting for the right moment, the season when the word of truth and correction can enter into their mind and heart. It’s tricky!

But in general, we have to be very slow to move with one another in this matter. Internet culture specializes in people shrieking at one another about how much the other person sucks, and I suppose at times in the Catholic blogosphere that kind of intemperate yelping of one another’s supposed sins can be justified by appealing to this work of mercy.

Well, nonsense. If you are going to correct someone for some misdeed of theirs, for one thing you do it in private, in the context of a face to face relationship. Your motivation must be the genuine good of the person you are correcting, and you have to really care about them. There must not be any trace of malice or anger, vengefulness or sarcasm or snarkiness—none of these can be part of any work of mercy we do, and certainly not this most delicate one.

So yes, I am definitely trying to discourage people from doing this work of mercy (odd project for a priest in the Year of Mercy). Unless, that is, you are doing it rightly, not lightly, with much prayer and love and care.

Of course the most profound way to ‘admonish the sinner’ that all of us are supposed to engage in continually is simple enough: it is to live a sinless life. When we respond with love of God and love of neighbor, when we strive daily to conform our acts, words, and thoughts to the demands of justice and charity, when the Law of God, both the negative precepts of the moral law (the shalt nots) and the positive commands of Christ (the Sermon on the Mount, the New Commandment of Love) is continually on our minds and hearts and guides every decision we make—all of this is a great admonishing of both the sinner who we ourselves are and of sinful humanity.

Become a saint, in other words. And then you will know when to speak and when to be silent, when one of your fellow sinners may need to have something said to them, and when the best way of correction is to simply love them and radiate the goodness of God to them through your own choice of the good, the true, and the beautiful in you life.

We want to get this work of mercy right, right? Well, that’s the way to do it, at least as best as this poor sinner can understand it himself. I do ask your prayers for me as I travel today and give the retreat to the good folks in Regina who serve the poor every day in their house, and I will be back on the blogosphere… well, sometime next week.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

The Big Picture

I am writing a commentary on the Mass each Thursday on this blog, looking at how the rites of the liturgy inform our lives as disciples. We have now reached the following part of Eucharistic Prayer I:

Remember, Lord, your servants N. and N. and all gathered here, whose faith and devotion are known to you. For them, we offer you this sacrifice of praise or they offer it for themselves and all who are dear to them, for the redemption of their souls, in hope of health and well-being, and paying their homage to you, the eternal God, living and true.

Now, while all of this is worn familiar by time and repetition to us Catholics, it is nonetheless quite a remarkable thing the Church is doing here. We are, after all, at the very center and reality, at the Great Altar of God, in heaven itself. We are at Calvary, at the empty tomb, at the Throne of God. The liturgy is cosmic, grand, sweeping, all-encompassing.

And we pause here to say, “Oh yeah Lord… remember my Aunt Gertrude? And then there’s Nancy who works at the office… and Frank my dentist’s cousin’s son…” I mean, we don’t quite get that informal—it is still liturgy and there is a formal ritual language and tone we maintain here.

But still… we are at the throne of God, the center and heart of the cosmos, and yet we pause to remember and offer our worship for this one, for that one, for the other one. All of the sudden, in this grand cosmic sweep of liturgy, it all gets very personal and small and particular.

This is very important. This says a great deal about who we believe God to be, and from that, who we believe ourselves to be. The great God we worship, the One before Whom all flesh bows… well, He cares about Gertrude and Nancy and Frank. He really does. And His Grand Offering, the offering into which we enter at the Eucharist, the offering which is for the whole universe and which has power within it to save and transform every atom of creation… well, it is for those three little people, and every other little person (you, me) as well, in a way that is deeply personal and individual and solicitous of our well-being.

This is the God we worship. And as it is with God, so it is with us. This is why Catherine Doherty placed so much emphasis on the person-to-person apostolate, on simply attending to humanity one at a time. Of just getting to know people with great respect and reverence, and only out of that knowing, that friendship (the first name of our apostolate was Friendship House) do we try to meet the person’s needs.

We do not love humanity en masse, because God does not love humanity en masse. Those who are especially engaged in various forms of mass movements, of social justice efforts such as the pro-life movement (to name the one dearest to my heart) have to be vigilant about this. How can we love the unborn baby and care about the sacredness of human life… and ignore callously the actual person who we live with?

How can we be overwrought with emotion and compassion over the plight of the refugees… and then contemptuously treat like dirt someone who, perhaps, is struggling with this issue and is truly concerned about the safety of their children? How can we pretend to care about ‘the poor’, and then be scornful of the human weaknesses and follies, failures and sins of those nearest and dearest to us? How is that loving the poor? Or are the poor just some abstraction to us that we pretend to care about, while we loathe the actual poor people we encounter each day?

God is so personal, so very, very personal. He loves you, He loves me, He loves Tina and Stan and Maria and Evelyn and Mike. Our discipleship always has to be primarily at that personal level, and we need to take that to heart especially if we are inclined to be swept up in big causes and social movements, or get lost in intellectual abstractions of one kind or another.

At the very heart of reality, at the very foot of the Cross, we have time and breath to spare for personal intentions. On His Very Throne of Grace, the Lord has ‘time’, so to speak, for those personal intentions. There is nowhere in this world where our focus and our energy is more taken up into universal and cosmic concerns, and yet it remains personal, intimate, concrete.

A whole theology of love and discipleship, of presence and hospitality and friendship, emerges from this one paragraph of the Eucharistic Prayer. So… let’s try to just love the person in front of us today, whoever they are and no matter what challenges that might pose to us. Because there’s no one else to love, no other time to be loving, and in fact when we make that choice of personal love and friendship, we are indeed touching the cosmic, the universal, the big picture of life and of God, and in fact there is no other way to do that.