Getting to the Point: marriage

Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Why People Are Nervous

Today it seems as though language had been robbed of its forgetfulness: every word is present somewhere in the general noise of words around us. In the general noise of words everything emerges for a moment, only to disappear again. Everything is there at the same time and yet not there at all.

There is no longer any present immediacy of the word and therefore no forgetting. Forgetting is no longer done by man directly but proceeds outside his control in the general noise of words jostling one with another.

But that is not a forgetting at all, but merely a disappearing. And so there is no forgiving either in the world today; since now one can never get rid of a word or a thing, it is always bound to turn up again somewhere. And it is also a fact that one never really has a word or a thing today—and that is why people are so nervous.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection - I have been working my way through this wonderful book, and periodically have shared some of its nuggets on this blog. This one in particular seems almost eerily prophetic—Max Picard invents the Internet! There are so many choice phrases here that almost exactly describe the world of information today: ‘Everything is there at the same time and yet not there at all… the general noise of words jostling one with another... now one can never get rid of a word or a thing, it is always bound to turn up again somewhere… that is why people are so nervous.’

Well, yes. And almost cliché to say these things nowadays, but this book was written in 1948. To be both constantly engulfed in words and yet at the same time never have them, to be both incapable of forgetting (and hence forgiving) since the Internet is forever, and yet at the same time incapable of remembering, since the rush of words continually races past us (not forgotten, but disappearing)—this is Internet culture, 2015.

And it is unacceptable. Inhuman, and hence incapable of aiding us to be made divine by God’s grace. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us—language is meant to serve its divine purpose always in the end of communion of persons, always towards becoming ‘flesh’ and making our flesh, our concrete experience of life, a communion of love.

Language as a ceaseless flow of binary information across a flat screen is the anti-Incarnation. Language as a roar of verbiage, a clamor and clash of agendas, a fighting for a slight fleeting flicker of attention from the mob, ultimately language as click-bait in the service of generating advertising revenue—this is a perversion of what it is to be. Language is degraded from a quest for truth and understanding ordered towards communion and love to being, essentially, a sales pitch.

In this time of the Synod on the Family, I am concerned to see that roar of language, that clamor and clash and base sophistry of marketing and sales being used to ‘talk about’ (well, sort of) that which is truly a sacred matter, a holy thing. Both the realities of sex, marriage, and family life, but also the reality of the human person made in God’s image, broken by sin but redeemed in Christ—this is the true subject matter of the Synod.

There is a real profanation of the holy, a desecration of God’s image, when the inchoate howl of Internet chatter and punditry engulfs these conversations. I am not talking about the Synod itself—the Pope has decided we need a synod to talk about these things, and I am praying for that synod and doing my best to follow its actual deliberations.

It is the constant blah-blah-blah, the hand wringing, the claxon sounding, the sounding of the alarum against ‘those horrible modernists’ or ‘those horrible traditionalists’, against Kasper or Erdo, Marx or Sarah, the calls to action, the ‘deep concerns and confusion’ of this writer or that writer, the apocalyptic fears on that website or the triumphalist yells on another—all of this is more than divisive and distasteful.

It is sacrilegious. Yes, strong language and so forth. I don’t care. Language is debased and in that debasing of language, actual human beings are damaged, the path of salvation in Christ is obscured, the way of truth and love in the world is made hard to find and ultimately souls beloved of God are made to stumble and fall from that way. And that is scandal, in the exact sense of the word.

So there is a Synod going on. Let us pray for it. Let us address ourselves to our own call to live faithfully the mysteries of family, love, and human sexuality according to our own vocations. And let us otherwise be still and silent. I will not be blogging about the Synod, for the reasons given in this blog post, nor will I be taking any interest in the commentary on same in the media, social or otherwise. And I encourage you to do the same.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Sexual Healing

Wednesdays on the blog I am presenting the various chapters of my book Idol Thoughts, on the traditional doctrine of the eight thoughts that take us away from God and how to pray with Scripture to overcome them.

We have reached the second of the thoughts, which is the thought of lust. Now, because there is everlasting confusion on this point, I need to clarify that what the Church means by lust is not simply sexual desire. God made us sexual beings with that strong drive towards sexual union—this is not something that in itself takes us away from God. The lie that the Church ‘hates sex’ is so commonplace that we have to keep clarifying this.

Sex is good; sex is God’s creation; sex is how God in His infinite wisdom ordained living creatures should reproduce; sex in our human creation is both an expression of that generativity and a faithful committed union in love. In this it becomes a most profound expression of our being made in God’s image and likeness, of the God who created the heavens and the earth and each of us in it out of love.

So what is lust, then? Lust is the thought that happiness is the body of the other. In other words, lust takes one aspect of sexuality—that it is intensely pleasurable—isolates and elevates that aspect to be the whole of it. Lust is the thought of using another person in his or her physicality to bring pleasure to oneself, apart from the God-imaged, God-designed purpose of sex as a fruitful union in love.

Well, I don’t need to (and certainly don’t want to) go on any kind of intemperate rant to show that lust is rampant in our society. The so-called ‘adult entertainment’ industry is multi-billion dollar one, and the use of on-line videos and images to fuel lust is pandemic (I am avoiding the ‘p’ word so as not to get blocked in your spam filters!).

Meanwhile hook-up culture, the complete sundering of sexual encounters from any kind of relationship whatsoever, fueled by social media sites and mobile apps, is the norm for many young adults. The whole idea is to take what is one thing—sexual intercourse, openness to fertility, and committed union in love—and sunder it into its component parts so that none of those things are related to the other.

All of this is, strictly speaking, demonic. Strong language, but I mean it and stand by it. When that which is the most precious and extraordinary creature in God’s world—the human person, the one ‘thing’ about which we say ‘image and likeness of God’, is reduced to an assemblage of body parts for the pleasure and gratification of the other, this is a triumph of the demonic in the world.

The abuse of food in the thought of gluttony is at least an abuse of something that is in fact meant to be used. Food is for eating, after all, even if in our broken humanity we eat too much of it or make more of it than we should. But another human being is not meant as an object of use for my pleasure. We are meant to regard each person, every man and woman, with such reverence, such awareness that this person is a reflection of God’s glory, infinitely beloved of Him and destined and desired by Him for eternal life.

Lust utterly destroys that reverence and does incalculable damage to the person who is its object. It is such an assault on the human person, and in that such a rebellion against God’s whole plan of creation and redemption, that it is essentially a descent to the demonic sphere of reality.

Now in my book I do talk about the Scriptures that might help purify our minds from the false beliefs that underlie that struggle with lust in our world. I won’t go into that now (hey, why don’t you buy my book if you want to see what I say there!). I also talk about the need for discipline, especially what used to be called the ‘custody of the eyes’, the careful choice around what images we allow to wash into our minds and hearts in our lust-saturated media culture.

What I only mention in passing in the book, though, is that the whole of the Church’s sexual moral doctrine, which we believe is a faithful presentation of God’s will and God’s truth, is also the path to healing the deep wound of lust in the human person, a wound that does go to the very core of our broken humanity.

In other words, sexual intercourse is held within the covenant of marriage, a life-long commitment of fidelity and love, and held to be open to the generation of new life, and in this integration of sexual activity into fruitful committed love there is a perpetual healing of the dis-integration of lust. The traditional language spoke of marriage as a remedy of concupiscence, and that’s what it means.

By placing sex where God intended sex to be placed—within the indissoluble bonds of matrimony, open to children—the tendency to use and abuse the other, to reduce the other to an object of my ‘happiness’, is so situated that it at least can be healed (human freedom is such that it is of course not a given that it will be).

I have much more to say on this subject and all subjects, but will leave you to explore the rest of it for yourself.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

It's All About Wine

I had the great joy yesterday of officiating at a wedding of two of my directees. They are an older couple, both previously married, and so with all their adult children in attendance. My homily was well received by all in attendance, and someone suggested it would be good for my blog. The Gospel was the wedding feast at Cana, and I essentially meditated upon that story for a few minutes.

I will change the names of the couple, for their own privacy. But here it is, after the break: a few thoughts about wine and weddings, banquets and what it all means.

Are Catholics H8rz?

The blog is back, writing now from Bruno Saskatchewan on the great Canadian prairies. As mentioned earlier, I am here, doing this.

I have wanted to weigh in for some time on some of the explosive issues surrounding religious freedom, civil rights, wedding cakes and pizza (!) that have been generally blowing up social media over the past weeks, particularly in the USA where most of my readers are. As usual I have an aversion to the pack mentality where we all have to write about the same topic on the same week (I cannot stand that aspect of social media, truly). Unfortunately this means I’m usually weighing in with whatever I have to say after everyone else has grown bored with the subject and moved on to something quite different. Nonetheless, here are a few of my thoughts.

First, it is good to reflect that we live in a world where in some countries gay people are thrown off of high buildings or jailed, and where in some of those same countries or others Christians are hunted and gunned down on university campuses or shopping malls. I don’t provide links for these claims; if you don’t know that’s what is actually happening in the world in the year 2015, you really should inform yourself.

While questions of civil liberties and religious freedom are important in any context, it is good to get some perspective. Nobody is killing anybody over these matters in this country, barring the occasional random act of violence that can happen anywhere for any reason. I’m not trying to minimize the facts of the situation, but to situate them, perhaps.

Second, it is odd, isn’t it, that the corporations that are fuming and threatening about not doing business with Indiana or Arkansas don’t seem to have any problem doing business with China, Saudi Arabia, and the whole host of other countries where actual violence is being perpetuated, with the full force of the state, on LGBTQ men and women? Is that not hypocritical? Isn’t it a problem that corporations are using their vast wealth and power to subvert the political processes in these states, and doing so with a great deal of duplicity and cynical moral posturing? I realize I have readers of this blog who differ from me quite a bit on LGBTQ issues—that’s fine, but don’t be taken in by these corporations, and do be alarmed at the degree of political power they have displayed in these events.

What I really want to write about, though, is this whole question of ‘hate’, or ‘H8’ as the current spelling has it. Leaving aside what is actually a thorny question, capable of more than one answer, I believe—can a Christian vendor sell goods to a same-sex wedding service?—we can all agree that it is wrong to hate people and right to love people. Certainly, from a Christian perspective, this is beyond dispute, being the central commandment our Founder gave us, right?

But it is not hatred to say to someone, “I believe you are doing something wrong.” It is not hatred to say, “I believe God has revealed to us that this particular action is always wrong, so you really shouldn’t do that thing.” It is not hatred to say “I don’t think I can help you to do that thing, since I believe it is wrong.” It is not hatred to say, “I disagree with you.”

Hatred is saying, well, “I hate you. You disgust me. I want you to die a painful death and then burn in Hell for all eternity. I will do anything in my power to hurt you.” That is hatred. Personally, I cannot think of any human being on this earth who I hate, to be quite honest. Even people who I believe are doing terribly evil things—people who hurt children, traffic drugs, perform abortions, and so forth—I feel deeply sorry for these people more than anything, since I do believe that whatever harm they do to others, they do incomparably worse damage to themselves.

So I do say to any LGBTQ person who may read this blog that I love you, I wish you well, I want nothing for you but happiness and joy. And I firmly believe that to engage in sex with a person of one’s own gender is always a deeply wrong thing to do, that even though it may not feel like it, it is profoundly damaging to the human person, and that the true way to happiness and joy is the difficult practice of chastity and continence, the mastery of one’s sexual appetite so that it is only expressed in a morally right way. And that the only right way to engage in sexual intercourse is for a man and a woman to first wed each other (forging a bond that cannot be broken by any subsequent legal decree) and then come together in sexual union.

That is my belief, and I express it with love and affection and a great desire for all men and women to be happy and joyous in God who alone can make us happy. I would also say the same thing, then, to anyone else who is engaged in sexual activity outside of marriage. And I would say the same thing to those who are engaged in any other kind of practice that is against the moral law—violence, theft, lying, greed, and so forth.

But that’s quite enough for one blog post, and pretty much what I have to say on the matter. Let us love one another on this Mercy Sunday, and let us know that we are all sinners, all fall short of moral perfection, but that God’s mercy covers us all and calls us to rise from the tomb of our sins and offenses to live with the Risen Christ in truth and in love.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Madonna House Movie III: Family Matters

Thursday is movie day on the blog, and so here we are with part three of the twelve short films on MH we made this past year with the help of a professional film company.

This is one of my favourites of the twelve, for the simple reason that it is largely about Cana Colony, our MH outreach to families, which has operated continuously for over fifty years, and with which I have been involved for almost twenty years. Cana is a place dear to my heart filled with many treasured memories, and I know all of the couples interviewed in this video.

Without further ado, here is the video:

Notable Quotes:
"We’ve come to other family camps, and this one’s different, because it has MH behind it."

"It’s natural that Madonna House, which has such a strong spiritual base, should minister to families."

"Way back in the 1950s, the Pope said to Catherine, don’t forget the families, because they are going to be under attack."

[MH staff] live a poverty, and it makes it OK to realize you can live a poverty as well… there’s a simple way of life that can be lived, and that happiness, that God can be found in that."

"Cana’s no easy experience when you embrace it because you usually have to clear out something that shouldn’t be in there,"

"There’s a peacefulness and a grace that comes from living this life of Nazareth that MH lives, and if we can be that safe haven and be that peace and grace of Nazareth in our families, then they can go out into the world and bring that peace and grace into society and into the world."

It is a genuinely creative decision on the part of the film makers here that, in the context of talking about MH's involvement with marriage and families, they depart from Cana to tell the story of Catherine and Eddie's marriage: the profound love they had for one another, their coming to Combermere together to what they believed would be a quiet life in the country, the beginnings of the MH community and its embrace of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and their subsequent decision to themselves embrace chastity as a sacrifice necessary for the secure foundation of the apostolate.

MH is a family, a spiritual family, and our life is so intimately connected with the kinds of things families are taken up with--small acts of humble service, the daily effort to love one another as we all share the same roof and table, forgiveness, mercy, forebearance, and a host of things that are all summed up in the commandment of Christ, to love one another as he has loved us.

Because of this, there has always been a vibrant connection between the MH vocation and life and the lives of the families who come to Cana or who live in the area. Different vocations, yes, and the differences are important, but our spirit has nurtured and nourished the lives of many hundreds of families over the years through Cana and elsewise.

All of which is to say that the Cana registration season is underway, and if all this looks interesting to you, why don't you check us out? The contact info for registration is at the bottom of the page I link to there. Come on, everybody - let's go to Cana this summer!