Happy Passover …

to all my Jewish readers.

Next year in Jerusalem!

Theology of the Body 2013/03/21

I've let too much time go since my last post, so here's just a quick refresher. In the previous post, John Paul was reminding his hearers (the content was originally a series of talks at his weekly General Audiences) of how he began, with the Pharisees' question about divorce and Jesus' reply invoking the beginning — God's intent for sexuality as evidenced in Genesis. I ended with John Paul's point that to answer contemporary questions about sexuality, Jesus would similarly point us to how it was in the beginning. Now we resume.

"To answer specific questions about marriage, sex, and the family, we first need a 'total vision of man.' This is why we turn to Genesis. In our scientific age, knowledge has become so specialized that it is easy to lose sight of the whole. The vision of man found i Genesis doesn't require us to renounce science or ignore its findings. Instead it gives us a solid foundation — a way of understanding what the sciences tell us about man in light of 'the image of God.'

"Genesis is the starting point for the theology of the body. The word 'theology' usually refers to the study of God. What can [it] have to do with the … body? For Christians, the center of our faith is the Incarnation. When God became flesh — willingly took on a human body — the body entered the halls of theology through the front door.

"The Incarnation, together with the redemption won for us by Christ, also raised marriage to the level of a sacrament, a means of receiving God's grace. Christian marriage is far more than a contract or social arrangement. It is a vocation, a path to holiness and salvation. And a solid, biblical understanding of the body, male and female, is crucial to this vocation.

"Because of sin, it is difficult to see the body as a gift, not an object. But for married couples, awareness and acceptance of the gift-giving and life-giving meanings of the body is essential. That is why we need to concentrate on purity of heart in our next series of reflections. [*]

"It is so significant that, in answering a question about marriage, Christ directs us back to the time of man's innocence. If, by the beginning, Jesus referred only to our [condition of] lost innocence, his words would be of little relevance to his questioners and to us. But he is not just pointing back — he is also pointing forward to our redemption.

" The promise of redemption bridges the gap between our present sinfulness and our original innocence. A theology of the body is of little use unless we live in hope of the redemption of the body. In Christ and through Christ, what once was lost can yet be regained."


*I began this series with that "next series" he's referring to, on "Love and Lust." I thought it might seem more immediately applicable to my readers, most of whom I suppose are gay, because we are all tempted to lust, regardless of our orientation. I suggested that we should all strive to act out of love toward one another, rather than lust. The series, on "Love and Lust" began with my post of  March 6, 2010, and ended with the one on November 30, 2011. You can find them under the keyword "Theology of the Body." After that, I went to the beginning of the book. The posts from December 18, 2011, through today's cover the series of talks on what Genesis tells us about original innocence and the implications of our being created male and female in the image of God. Next, in order to be complete about it, I'll give excerpts from the final section of the book. It covers the resurrection and its implications for our earthly life (including the meaning of celibacy.) As with everything I post, I hope you'll find it interesting and worthwhile.

Some Thoughts about Pope Francis

When I heard Cardinal Tauran announce that the new Pope was "Georgium S.R.E. Cardinalem Bergoglio," my first thought, before he got to the last name, was, "What Cardinal is named George?" I couldn't think of any. I did recognize the last name, but I couldn't have told you anything about him. Since then, of course, I've read and learned a fair amount.

My impression is that he will change things more than any Pope since John XXIII and Paul VI. Pope Paul VI made some significant changes in the trappings of the papacy, doing away with the portable throne in which popes had been carried at public events, doing away with the triple crown with which popes had been crowned, and traveling outside Italy — the first pope in ages to do so voluntarily. John Paul I, in his month as Pope gave an image of a papacy that was approachable. His successors followed suit in this scaled back version of Renaissance monarchy.

Of course, what John XXIII did was to summon the Second Vatican Council, which, in turn, gave the Church a new way of understanding itself and its work. George Weigel has suggested that with Vatican II the Counter-Reformation was over. Conventional wisdom is that it takes decades for the Church to assimilate the work of a council, and John Paul II and Benedict XVI did a lot to further that assimilation with their teaching.

Now comes Pope Francis. It's obvious from his actions of the past couple of days — ditching the red shoes in favor of black, popping into the hotel to pay his bill, placing his own call to the Superior General of the Jesuits — that the monarchical trappings are going to be much further reduced. But I think that the direction the actual work of the Church will take under his papacy is far more significant. Here he'll bring the most change since John XXIII and the Council.

Recently the phrase "New Evangelization" has become very common as a way of describing the task before the Church now that we're leaving the Counter-Reformation behind. As I understand it, it consists of an outreach to people around the world, but especially perhaps in lands and cultures which were formerly Christian but are now thoroughly secularized. This outreach, unlike that of earlier times, is seen as the responsibility of all members of the Church, not just priests and nuns. This is a role for which the laity need to be prepared.

In a pre-conclave piece on Cardinal Bergoglio as a possible Pope, John Allen had this to say:

Bergoglio has supported the social justice ethos of Latin American Catholicism, including a robust defense of the poor.

"We live in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least," Bergoglio said during a gathering of Latin American bishops in 2007. "The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers."

and

Bergoglio may be basically conservative on many issues, but he's no defender of clerical privilege, or insensitive to pastoral realities. In September 2012, he delivered a blistering attack on priests who refuse to baptize children born out of wedlock, calling it a form of "rigorous and hypocritical neo-clericalism."

and

He's also seen as a genuinely spiritual soul, and a man of deep prayer.

"Only someone who has encountered mercy, who has been caressed by the tenderness of mercy, is happy and comfortable with the Lord," Bergoglio said in 2001. "I beg the theologians who are present not to turn me in to the Sant'Uffizio or the Inquisition; however, forcing things a bit, I dare to say that the privileged locus of the encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ on my sin."

and, finally

"We have to avoid the spiritual sickness of a self-referential church," Bergoglio said recently. "It's true that when you get out into the street, as happens to every man and woman, there can be accidents. However, if the church remains closed in on itself, self-referential, it gets old. Between a church that suffers accidents in the street, and a church that's sick because it's self-referential, I have no doubts about preferring the former."

Elsewhere, I've read of his visits to the poorer areas of Buenos Aires. What this all sounds like to me is what we read about Jesus: that he went around the villages of Galilee proclaiming the kingdom of God to all. All of which leads me to expect that the face of the New Evangelization will be more like the face of Jesus and less that of an institution recruiting new members than it would have been if Francis were not Pope. I'm hopeful.

Last Week's Snowstorm and Other Stuff

Other Stuff First.  My kid brother is Japanese. He studied Japanese in college (uni to Europeans and antipodeans), spent time there before graduation, and went there to work right after graduation, in 1973. He's lived in Japan as a permanent resident ever since. So last year he finally decided to apply for Japanese citizenship. There was lots of paperwork needed (including stuff like our parents' marriage documents) and two interviews. He was told he'd have a decision sometime between April and September. Possibly the caseload was lighter than average or possibly he really impressed the bureaucrat who interviewed him, because on March 7 he sent us an e-mail with "subject: I'm Japanese!" I have mixed feelings. He's been there so long, and it is really his home, so it makes sense. But in a way it's sad that he's not going to be my fellow citizen.

I have a pound of ground lamb which needs to be cooked fairly soon (two days beyond last sale date) so tonight I'll be making meat sauce as I did for my spaghetti dinner  that I blogged about last fall. I'll add a leek to it and probably use mint and possibly marjoram in the sauce along with the other herbs. But basically it will be the same recipe and it'll give me sauce for three meals. Then for tomorrow I have three chicken thighs to cook. I'll probably use my method for baking chicken in sauce. This time, though, the thighs still have their skin on, and the only condensed soup I have is cheddar cheese. I have some swiss chard, which I'd probs cook separately, but could go nicely with some of the sauce on it. Also I might use a different rice product. But again, the basic idea is the same. The only problem is that it may turn out to be too much for one meal, but scant for two. We'll see how it goes. Right now, I'm thinking pasta tonight, Thursday, and next week some day; chicken tomorrow and Sunday.

Last Week's Snowstorm.  The forecasts said we might get a few inches of snow. The snow began falling Thursday mid-morning. For most of the day, air and ground temperatures were warm enough that I was tempted to tweet that it was "slushing." Although there was white stuff on the grass, it was melting on the roads and sidewalks.  I, the evening it began to stick, and when I woke up in the morning it looked like a real storm — several inches on the ground and coming down moderately heavily. My parish doesn't have weekday Mass when the town schools are closed because of weather. And the schools were closed. So late in the morning, I decided I'd better shovel some of the sidewalk. I did about half of the distance from my driveway, around the corner to the neighbor's property line. That took me about 45 minutes, at a pace which didn't involve heavy exertion.

I had to decide whether to go into Boston for the concert that evening. One forecast had been saying that snow would last until late evening. The other kept predicting that it would end by 3:00 p.m. If the former had been accurate, I might have stayed home. But when I went out at about 2:00 to finish the shoveling job, I found that it had stopped snowing. The depth of the snow varied from 12 to 16 inches — not as much as in our "blizzard" of a couple of weeks ago, but enough so that the house looked about the same as I looked at it from the sidewalk. So I decided against taking pictures, as they'd look so much like the ones from the earlier storm — I'm afraid I haven't gotten around to posting any of them, but maybe I will sometime soon. Again the shoveling took about 45 minutes. I'd use my shovel to define a square, then lift and dump the top half of it, followed by two more shovelfuls for the heavier, more compacted snow beneath. With that completed, along with a walkway from the sidewalk to the front door, I enjoyed a cup of hot, malt flavored Ovaltine to restore the calories expended. I'm inordinately pleased with myself for being able to handle it so easily as a 70 year old man.

Then I was ready for my trek in to Boston. Not only did I want to go to the Harvard Musical Association concert, but also I wanted to get to the Symphony Hall Box Office to exchange a couple of my subscription tickets. I can't go to the concert this Thursday because I need to attend a meeting here in town. So I traded that ticket for one to the same show on Friday afternoon. Also, I won't be going to symphony on Holy Thursday: I'll be in church that evening. I exchanged my ticket for one for the following Tuesday (which will include two pieces from the February 28 concert but a different piano piece with a different soloist). I had allowed what I thought was more than enough time for all that, but the trip back from Symphony Hall was slow and I got to the Scollay Square a couple of minutes after my reservation time.

Saturday morning it occurred to me, and a lot of other people, that we got through the storm with a lot less anxiety and a lot less disruption that would have been the case if the forecasters had known how big it would turn out to be. Who knows — a couple more like this and we could be hardy New Englanders again, people who take normal snowfalls and keep on going.

Seth the Waiter …

is now Seth the bartender. I went to the Scollay Square restaurant as usual for dinner before the Harvard Musical Association concert and  to my surprise, as I was putting my bag down and taking my coat off, Seth came over and greeted me cordially. I was surprised to see him because I understand he now works only Mondays and Saturdays, He explained that he was filling in for a friend who was taking the evening off. So we spent a moment "catching up', and he went back to work. I noticed that he was tending bar and later, as I was coming back from the restroom, I asked if that's his regular job now. It is. I'm sure he's very good with the customers since he is so affable.

I was really glad to see him again, and happy that he went out of his way to greet me.

After the concert, instead of the usual baked beans and welsh rarebit we had shrimp cardinale. (You can google it.) It was very tasty.

All in all a pleasant evening.

Explanation for a Friend

A couple of days ago, my good friend @seeker300 tweeted, "Great NY Times article by Frank Bruni titled "Reading God's Mind" nytimes.com/2013/03/05/opi…#samesexmarriage #christianity" I replied, "There is confusion and illogic throughout that article."

That reply was too short, but there wasn't room in a tweet to explain why I thought so. Still, I want to give an explanation; he certainly deserves one. So I'll copy the article and insert my objections in red italics as we go along.

Jeff Chu was married last September, on the lawn of a house on Cape Cod, against the backdrop of an ivy-covered fence. About 80 people came.

Enlarge This Image

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Frank Bruni

Go to Columnist Page »

Frank Bruni's Blog »

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

Readers’ Comments

"Those who judge homosexuals as wrongly created are, in fact, saying God has erred in his creations."

Amy Haible, Harpswell, Maine

• Read Full Comment »

His mother and father weren’t among them.

His mother sent an e-mail just beforehand, to let him know that she was thinking of him. But to be a part of the ceremony? To celebrate the day? That much she couldn’t do, because Jeff was pledging his devotion to another man. And his parents, strict Southern Baptists, have always deemed such a love sinful, and against God’s wishes.

Against God’s wishes. That notion — that argument — is probably the most stubborn barrier to the full acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans, a last bastion and engine of bigotry. It’s what many preachers still thunder. It’s what some politicians still maintain.

It’s what Jeff himself once feared.

“How many nights have I spent sweaty and panicked and drained of tears, because I thought I would go to hell — for being gay, for being me?” he asks.

And how often, he adds, did he pray “that God would take these feelings from me?”

Those words come from a book that he wrote, its title yet another question: “Does Jesus Really Love Me?” It will be published this month, and is largely a travelogue.

For the span of a year, Jeff, who has written for Time magazine and many other publications, roamed the country, visiting Christian churches and groups of diverse theological stripes to explore their attitudes toward homosexuality. He also talked with devout Christians who’d dealt with homosexual feelings in different ways: by repressing them, by embracing them, by trying to divert them.

One man had elected celibacy. Another had married a woman and resolved to appreciate sex with her. He told Jeff: “It’s not like pizza or French fries — it’s more an acquired taste that I’ve come to like even better. It’s like olives.”

In the book Jeff, now 35, also shares his own story, which we discussed further in his Brooklyn town house recently.

His parents came to America from Hong Kong with the conservative beliefs that Baptist missionaries had spread through that area of the world. They reared Jeff in their religion, sending him to a Christian high school in Miami. One of his vivid memories from those years was the sudden banishment of a favorite teacher after the school discovered that he was involved with another man.

Jeff knew even then that he had feelings like the teacher’s, and writes: “This was the lesson that I learned: Nobody could ever, ever find out, because if they did, I would be damned and cast out, just like he was.”

 But the teacher was fired for being "involved with another man," not just for his feelings. Maybe Jeff was right, that in his environment discovery even of the feelings would have led to his expulsion. Still, there is a valid distinction between one's unspoken feelings and one's overt activity. Indeed, there is a valid distinction between one's spoken feelings and one's overt activity.

At Princeton, he dated women. But in London for graduate school, he began to date men, and to wonder how that orientation could be wrong, when God had presumably made him the way he was.

 The presumption that "God had made him the way he was," is, IMO, unfounded. It is true if one believes that everything that happens is the result of God's direct activity. This effectively denies free will (and, coincidentally, miracles since if everything that happens is God's direct doing, then the seemingly miraculous is no more an act of God that the seemingly natural.) I think it is clear that things happen in the world which are caused by natural forces and/or by human activity.

Beyond that, there is a tremendous imprecision in the word "wrong." Does he mean morally wrong, i.e., sinful? If so, I'd just say that many Christians, probably most, including the Catholic Church, do not consider a homosexual orientation sinful. Or does he mean something like what the Catholic Church does when it calls it "disordered," something at the psycho-biological level. If so, there are many sorts of disorders among humans which seem to be innate, but we do not say that they are good because God created the person the way he is.

Although his book doesn’t focus on the scattered references in the Bible to homosexuality, Jeff knows them well. And, yes, a few seem to condemn same-sex intimacy.

But have they been translated correctly? Interpreted the right way? Are they timeless verities or — more logically — reflections of an outmoded culture and obsolete mind-set? And if all of the Bible is to be taken literally, shouldn’t Christians refrain from planting multiple kinds of seed in one field or letting women speak in church or charging interest to the poor? 

“You can twist the Bible any way you want,” Jeff told me, adding, “We overemphasize sexual morality, as if God puts a premium on what we do in the bedroom over what we do at the bank.”

Bringing the Bible into it implies that he thinks the Bible is authoritative. He also acknowledges that there are passages that deal with homosexuality. Then he merely raises questions and uses those questions as a pretext for setting the Bible aside. When there is a relevant authoritative text, that will not do. One must honestly try to answer the questions. The fact that others may twist the Bible doesn't mean that it is meaningless, or that there is no true meaning. What are the answers to the questions he raises?

And the question about what happens if you take everything in the Bible literally is relevant only to prove that you shouldn't take everything literally. It certainly does not prove that you should take nothing literally. It proves that the Bible needs to be interpreted correctly, not ignored if the message is uncomfortable.

It may be that we overemphasize sexual morality. This may be in part because questions of sexual morality are always hot topics. Sex is certainly important. But I agree that we should pay more attention to other areas of morality. For example, Western culture seems totally oblivious to sins of greed.

He’s right. He’s also humble. He doesn’t claim, in his book or in conversation, to have definitive answers. He hasn’t determined beyond any doubt that his life and love are in concert with God’s wishes, because he thinks it arrogant to insist, as the zealots who condemn gay people do, that God’s will is so easily known.

And in light of that, he thinks it wrong for anyone to try to consign gays to the shame that so many of them have endured.

The stories in Jeff’s book made me sad, and they made me angry. How much needless pain have people like him been put through, and in God’s name no less?

We haven't been made privy to those stories, so a direct comment is impossible. But it is clear that there is needless pain inflicted on gay people just because they are gay. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, says that gay people must be accepted with "respect, compassion, and sensitivity," and in some quarters those qualities are in very short supply.

But Jeff’s own story makes me hopeful. It’s one of grace. He still attends church, though not a Southern Baptist one. He’s patient with his parents; they’re struggling, too.

His mother actually plans to visit, and stay with, him and his husband this summer.

Yay!

“I pull her along and she pulls me along, and we grow,” Jeff said, describing a dynamic and a tension not unlike America’s. “It’s uncomfortable for both of us. But it’s the path we have to take.”

This is good. Parents should not reject their gay children. At some point, they need to realize that love can coexist with moral disagreement, and that moral disagreement does not require avoidance or separation.

I hope this clarifies what I meant in my tweet.

Pope Benedict XVI

In the aftermath of Pope Benedict's resignation, there has been a lot of commentary. People have tried to evaluate his accomplishments and shortcomings and the significance of his papacy. Beyond that, there has been discussion of whether he should have resigned or not.

My friend and fellow blogger MartininBroda made a post which expresses disappointment at Benedict's decision. Others have suggested that the papacy is a lifetime calling (even though Church law allows for resignations), so that a resignation is a dereliction of duty. As some have put it, one cannot stop being a father. Others have noted the contrast between this resignation and Bl. John Paul II's continuing to death even as he became increasingly debilitated by his illness. Martin quoted me a famous line from the legend about St. Peter. The legend says the as persecution was raging in Rome, Peter decided to leave the city for his own safety. As he was walking south on the Appian Way, he encountered (had a vision of) Jesus walking in the opposite direction — into the city. Peter asked him, "Quo vadis, Domine?" ("Where are you going, Lord?") and Jesus replied, "I am going to be crucified in your place." At that, Peter turned around and went back into the city, where he was martyred.

One can also discuss the resignation on the basis of whether it will prove to be a beneficial precedent or a harmful one. On that point, I'll just say that I'm not really sure. There is the danger that people with an axe to grind will put pressure on a pope to resign because they are unhappy with his decisions on one question or another. There is the possibility that a good man will feel freer to accept election if he realizes that he can resign when he becomes physically unable to carry on. By indicating that the pope must be vigorous the resignation tends to reinforce focus on the papacy alone, to the possible retirement of appreciation of the role of the bishop in his diocese. On the other hand, the fact the a pope can resign may tend to diminish the "mystique" of the papacy and clarify that he is also a bishop: the head of the college of bishops.

But to me, the central question is whether Benedict XVI is abandoning his duty. Has he run away? My opinion is that this is not a failure to live up to his obligations. When I saw the video of his announcement and read the translation of what he said, it seemed to me that he was giving a valid reason for resigning: that he was unable to perform the duties of the office adequately. He was resigning, in other words, not for his own comfort, but for the good of the Church: because he believes that at this juncture the Church needs a more vigorous man as pope. In this respect, his leaving of the papacy is the opposite of St. Peter's leaving Rome to save his life.

Similarly, it seems to me that the argument that one does not stop being a father is not valid. In the first place, bishops are fathers of their local churches, but they are required to offer their resignation when they reach age 75. Furthermore, Benedict has made it clear that his resignation is not an abandonment of the Church, since he will continue to live, in seclusion, at the Vatican, undertaking a life of prayer — which is also service to the Church.

I'd also note that this "retirement" is very different from other retirements in that Benedict will not go off and enjoy the normal life of a retiree — traveling, enjoying concerts, operas, dinner parties, and socializing in whatever ways appeal to one. He's not going to be enjoying "the good life" in the way we normally understand the phrase. It would be different if he were retiring to a family home in Bavaria, or taking an apartment in Rome.

As for the example of John Paul II, I think he gave a very valuable witness to the world of the sacredness of human life at all stages. When people advocate for assisted suicide as "death with dignity," John Paul II shows, rather, the dignity of life. But Benedict had to consider the needs of the Church. He was able to take into account not only the very public side of John Paul's endurance to the end, but also the effect it had on the workings of the Vatican. He also could take into account how his debilitation might progress differently from that of his predecessor. So I don't think the example of John Paul II invalidates the decision of Benedict XVI.

I am grateful to Benedict XVI for his life in service to the Church and the Gospel, and I respect his decision to serve them by resigning the papacy.