Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I

A snippet from the latest Adam Dalgliesh mystery by P.D. James, The Lighthouse, in which Commander Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard is questioning a witness in a murder investigation, Jo Stavely, about Adrian, an ex-priest and a possible suspect whom Stavely has nursed for a time while he was drying out:

"Was it the alcoholism [Dalgliesh asked Stavely] that made him [Adrian] leave the church? Did he confide in you about that?"

"Yes, as far as we could communicate at that level. I don't understand religion. Partly it was the alcoholism, but mainly because he'd lost faith in some of the dogma. I can't understand why that worried him. I thought that that was the thing about the dear old C of E [Church of England]: you can believe more or less what you like. Anyway, he came to believe that God couldn't be both good and all-powerful; life's a struggle between the two forces — good and evil, God and the devil. That's some kind of heresy — a long word beginning with M."

Dalgliesh said, "Manichaeanism."

"That sounds like it. It seems sensible to me. At least it explains the suffering of the innocent, which otherwise takes some sophistry to make sense of. It I had a religion, that's what I'd choose. I suppose I became a Manichaean — if that's the word — without knowing it the first time I watched a child dying of cancer. But apparently you're not supposed to believe it if you're a Christian, and particularly not if you're a priest. Adrian is a good man. I may not be good myself, but I can recognise it. Oliver [the murder victim] was evil; Adrian is good."

Dalgliesh said, "If it were as simple as that, my job would be easy. Thank you for telling me."

When I read that passage, I felt a surge of recognition: I, too, seem to have become a Manichaean without quite knowing it.

I, too, increasingly feel that life in our world is an ongoing struggle between a God who is all-good but not all-powerful and an Enemy who is evil through and through. The Dark Enemy — call him Satan or the Devil — is likewise unable to claim victory, once and for all, in the battle with his luminous adversary.


For over ten years I have been a practicing Roman Catholic, and before my conversion to that faith I was a high-church Episcopalian: an "Anglo-Catholic" adherent of that branch of the worldwide Church of England which we encounter here in the U.S. Before that, going back almost twenty years now, religiously speaking I was not much of anything.

During the past two decades, I have investigated the history and theology of my adoptive church enough to know that Manichaeanism was a heresy, one of several that came to be denounced by the early Church Fathers in the first centuries of Christianity. I recall even having read what the M-word originally meant to its adherents at some time in the distant past, but it was a scholarly definition that I admit went in one ear and out the other.

I now suddenly find that the M-word, or rather what I consider its updated meaning, resonates in my soul.


The resonance is set up for me by the fact that for several years, until just a year or two ago, in fact, I was absorbed in an attempt to write a book. It was to be a book about how the new sciences of complexity chime with my personal understanding of Christianity.

Complexity study is a fledgling branch of science which finds that "chaos" — another long-used common noun recently folded into the empirical scientist's lexicon, now in a mathematical way — can be found cheek-by-jowl with "order" at a conceptual location dubbed "the edge of chaos." I have written in another of my blogs, Beyond Darwin, of how the edge of chaos is the favored location for the fountainhead for all Darwinian evolutionary change. See, for example, my post The Edge of Chaos, Chaos, and Heroism.

As the regime where surprising innovations can burst forth in dynamical systems and then proceed to evolve gracefully, à la Darwin, the edge of chaos has been documented by theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman in his book At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Kauffman calls self-organization the "handmaid" of natural selection, Darwin's primary principle, and says the two together better explain the world's evolutionary history than does natural selection alone.

That idea has fascinated me since I first heard of it some ten-plus years ago. At first I thought I could reconcile it fairly easily with my religion.

I thought that especially, inasmuch as self-organization makes evolution very, very likely to produce a species like us; Kauffman accordingly calls us "we the expected." Straight Darwinism, by itself, seems to make the odds 0f our advent highly improbable.

When self-organization is added in, Kauffman shows, the broad outlines of the earth's evolutionary history become anything but happenstance. Rather, there seem to be laws of nature, the laws which Kauffman seeks to find, which predispose this planet to advancing biological complexity over the course of evolutionary time, leading to brains, leading to us.


As I tried to dovetail that theory of self-organized complexity with my understanding of Christainity, "the gripping hand" of the argument seemed to me to concern a new understanding of the nature of the opposition between order and chaos.

That metaphor, "the gripping hand," comes from (according to this Wikipedia article) "the science fiction novels The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, [in which] the gripping hand is literally the strongest of the three asymmetrical arms of the aliens called 'Moties.' Some species of Motie have two weaker arms with better fine control on one side, and a single much stronger arm on the other side."

The Wikipedia article goes on:

Figuratively, [the term "gripping hand"] was typically used when presenting a third choice or fact after two others, usually after the second had been presented with the phrase "on the other hand...". Thus, a discussion of choices could follow the typical pattern of saying "We could do this, but on the other hand we could do that," followed by what would in conventional English be a non sequitur, "but on the gripping hand, there's another alternative." In keeping with the idea that this represents the strongest arm, the last fact is often one that is most unpleasant or difficult to deal with, in some way, although sometimes it is merely a third alternative. An alternate method uses "On the gripping hand" to present a stronger or more compelling option, point, or fact than the previous two.

I thought my view of the edge of chaos to be one of those "gripping hands": a third alternative between the customary identification of God with order — order being thoroughly "good" — and Satan with chaos, the latter being thoroughly "evil." If there is an edge of chaos from which all evolutionary novelty wells forth, I reasoned, it could not exist without order and chaos existing as well, both of them together, creating the necessary borderland.

I spent countless hours — days, weeks, months — trying to write about how this insight fits with traditional Christian understandings of the world. In the end, I ran dry: I hated to admit it: by such lights, the sheer cruelty of evoultionary history "takes some sophistry to make sense of."

Too, I failed to come to grips with the fact that so does the cruelty of our own history, and the pain and suffering of our human experience in general. Stuart Kauffman shows that our historical, cultural, economic, and technological trajectories are very likely guided by the very same laws of self-organization and complexity as is biological evolution — with the edge of chaos and all that implies.

The sophistry I chose to fall back on revolved for the most part around the longstanding notion of free will: what we do is truly not determined by any external force, personal or impersonal, divine or satanic. Nor is what nature does. Neither we nor the natural world are puppets of a supernatural will or an overarching determinism.

Except ... except that Christians typically believe that an all-good, all-powerful God takes charge when we ask him, in heartfelt prayer, to change things.


I've lost my faith in that. I no longer feel God answers prayers — at least not reliably.

For quite a while, I rationalized unanswered prayers this way: they are the necessary concomitants of free will. Whenever God intervenes in the world, freedom takes a hit. How can God bring about the outcomes we pray so earnestly for without forestalling all other possible outcomes, thereby robbing the world of the freedom to do its own thing?

That kind of thinking inevitably shades itself into the longstanding philosopher's conundrum the problem of evil, also called the problem of pain. If God has some subtle way of intervening in this world to bring about that which he wills on our behalf — a way that somehow does not abridge the world's intrinsic freedom — why doesn't the all-good, all-powerful deity use it to banish evil and woe altogether?

Oh, I know very well what Christian dogma holds: that evil and woe have been vanquished by Christ's redeeming death on the cross, a salvific act initiated by God the Father, carried out in history in the person of God the Son, but foreordained from the beginning of time. Theologians are apt to say, in reconciling an all-good, all-powerful God with the human experience of ongoing woe, that despite present appearances God's defeat of Satan was "always already" guaranteed, from before day one.


But from our point of view, evil and woe persist. Chaos continues as part and parcel of this world. Evolution continues, orienting itself to the edge of chaos where the separateness of order and good from chaos and evil is called into question from one moment to the next.

It now occurs to me that a simpler explanation than the one I have, admittedly, just barely begun to sketch in the words I essayed above, is that God is all-good, but not all-powerful.


Another traditional explanation for worldly woe is original sin. The rebellion of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden stains all our souls to this day and necessitates the saving cross of Christ.

The doctrine of original sin, or something much like it, impresses me as being absolutely necessary, as long as God is said to be both all-powerful and all-good. But if God is perfectly good, yet less than omnipotent, the explanation for woe becomes much simpler: God and Satan create good worldly outcomes (evolutionary advance) and bad ones (death, destruction, extinction) as a spinoff of their cosmic ongoing struggle.

That idea appeals to me quite deeply. It furnishes me with a reason to side ever more strongly with good while recognizing crucially that real-world problems are rarely cut and dried, black and white. It justifies, for me, being both an idealist and a realist at one and the same time.

In subsequent posts, I'll explore those thoughts further.

The Heart Wants What It Wants...

"The heart wants what it wants," Woody Allen said when asked to justify his leaving Mia Farrow to be with her adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn. It seems to be a good way to characterize his latest film, Match Point, and indeed his entire oeuvre, once you get past the irrepressible zaniness of his early work.

"The heart wants what it wants until it doesn’t want it anymore," amends Danny Miller at this blog, in an entry which embodies Miller's somewhat tortured personal response to Allen's film. The film shows us Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, as tennis pro Chris Wilton, in a marital-sexual tangle with wife Chloe Hewitt Wilton (Emily Mortimer) and mistress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson). Chloe and her well-to-do British family originally seemed just the ticket for Chris to segue from a dead-end lifestyle as a has-been tennis player to the career of a successful business- and family man. Only problem is, his heart wants Nola, not Chloe.

Until, that is, Nola (a) gets pregnant and (b) pressures Chris to devastate Chloe by telling her what's been going on behind her back.

Allen, who wrote and directed the film but does not appear on screen, breathes life into this stock situation by deftly showing us exactly what possesses Chris, Nola, and Chloe to act as they do, aware as they are at every moment that none of their motives could withstand the closest moral scrutiny.

(WARNING: Spoiler ahead!)

As luck would have it, Chloe's family estate provides Chris, or so he thinks, with the means — a shotgun of a type used by English gentlemen to hunt birds — to carry out what he intends to be a perfect double-murder. The pregnant Nola will be its apparently impromptu second victim, the first being Nola's next door neighbor, a widow who will be found shot after nominally interrupting a burglar (actually Chris, intent on misdirecting the police). Nola ostensibly (from the police perspective) has been killed, too, simply because she happened on the scene at just the wrong moment. Of course, Chris thinks he has removed luck from what he hopes is his carefully scripted outcome by staging the crime at the time just when he expects Nola to come home to meet him. Hence, it's hard for the police to imagine Nola as the primary, intended victim.

Even so, a canny detective, who has read Nola's secret diary and knows Chris was involved with her, literally dreams the truth one night ... but is talked out of pursuing the investigation because of, yes, a stroke of pure luck. In order to furnish evidence of robbery, Chris had taken the first victim's valuables, including the wedding ring off her finger, and tossed them off the embankment into the Thames. All smug, he had nearly walked away, then dug in his pocket and discovered the ring still tucked there. So he'd pitched the ring back toward the river, turned to leave ... and (as the camera shows us, but not him) the ring had caromed off a railing back into plain view on the embankment.

The stroke of luck which saves Chris from detection, pursuant to that accident of fate which at first seems like it will ruin Chris's game, is that a known felon turns up dead with the ring in his possession, which he obviously had stumbled on fortuitously.

Case closed. Chris gets off scot free.

The universe has given Chris the break he needed to score what is, in effect, his personal "match point" in the game of life; it has taken charge of the fate of the ring. What turns out to be the pivotal moment in the entire story is, if the viewer recollects, basically a reprise of a shot at the film's outset of a tennis ball striking the top of the net and falling, unreachable by the opponent, just on the other side.

(End of spolier.)


Match Point implies that the universe can turn a benignant eye on the moral wrongs perpetrated by a person who lives, however stupidly or clumsily, by the maxim "The heart wants what it wants ... until it doesn’t want it anymore."

That's a profound moral assertion — "moral" in the sense that, in Woody Allen's worldview, the heart's inscrutable urges trump conventional morality even (or especially) at some cosmic level. The cosmos can give those who follow the dictates of the heart a bye, where conventional morality would punish them.

I agree with that worldview. How tough, though, it is to say so. For it would seem to cut my religious views off at the knees.

Put another way, there seems to be an unfathomable logic to how things work out — for the best, I'd say (Woody Allen might not agree). There is an impenetrable governor of events which all our morality is blind to. It's as the Geoffrey Rush character, Henslowe, says in the movie Shakespeare in Love: "Strangely enough, it all turns out well" (see this post in another blog for more on that topic). Henslowe doesn't know how to prove it; it simply proves itself.


I use the phrases "turns out well" and "for the best" to indicate, not the outcome we think is morally "right" or the one we imagine we "want," but the outcome to which our heart, at the very last, gives its assent. The heart knows, where the head doesn't, that it wants Chris Wilton's fate to turn on what amounts to a coin flip. Chris is a protagonist we have come to like and identify with, who has done something terrible for reasons we don't quite understand and yet perversely sympathize with. Because of the awfulness of his deed, we don't want him to get away with it. Yet because he is a carefully calibrated stand-in for each one of us — thanks to Allen's scripting and direction and Rhys-Meyers's acting — we do want him to escape detection. So the "right" thing — what "has to happen" to make our hearts happy — is that the film's outcome must hinge on which side of a razor-sharp knife's edge the finely honed plot just happens to topple over on.

That's what I mean when I say that Match Point turns out well and for the best. It pleases our hearts, even as it confounds our heads.

But my religion doesn't really want to hear that. My religion has it that things turn out badly unless we toe a strict and absolute moral line. There is no gray area wherein the heart can overrule the head.


Million Dollar Baby is a film which makes a similar point.

(Sorry, here comes another spoiler:)

If you haven't seen this masterpiece directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, see it before reading the following.

Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, an aging trainer of prizefighters who against his better judgment instructs a "girly" boxer, white-trash Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank, in an Oscar-winning female lead). Maggie's career takes off under Frankie's tutelage, until finally, as a title challenger, she comes up against the dirtiest fighter ever, a taut bundle of pure malevolence nicknamed the "Blue Bear."

Maggie's opponent, being outfought, slugs Maggie hard from behind well after a round-ending bell, as Maggie is heading for her corner ... and the plot of the movie veers off in a totally unexpected direction. Maggie winds up in a hospital bed, paralyzed irreparably from the neck down.

It gets worse. Skin ulcers from her enforced immobility turn gangrenous, and she loses her leg.

But she doesn't lose Frankie, the only person on earth (other than Frankie's longtime protégé, Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris [Morgan Freeman], who serves as the film's narrator) who actually cares about Maggie.

Finally — she can talk — she requests that Frankie, a practicing if theologically confused Catholic, turn off her respirator while she is still able to remember her glory and success in the boxing ring. At first he says he can't and won't. His pastor at church even tells him he'll lose himself forever if he accedes.

But then he does it. Plus, he injects her with enough adrenaline to flatline her monitor instantly and keep her from any agony as she dies.

And the heart of the viewer, whose head has been rooting for some kind of impossible miracle to occur, thereby reversing everything bad that has happened, assents. It's what had to happen. It's for the best. Things have turned out right in the end — however tragically.

(End of spoiler.)

So, again, the movie gives the heart, not necessarily the head, what it wants.

I think there's a profound lesson here. The thing is, the lesson resists being put into words and thereby made property of the head. Here's the best I can do: what the heart "wants" is also what the universe "wants." The head, with all its moral intentions and religious precepts, sometimes just has to take a back seat to the heart, which wants what it wants.

And that's fine.

Yesterday, a Religious Experience . . .

An odd feeling came over me yesterday evening as I set out from my home to drive to the liquor store for a sixpack of Fuller's London Pride and then to Ledo's for takeout pizza. I had just been napping and I felt a certain post-sleep detachment from everything around me. It occurred to me that all the things I was seeing — the other cars, the stores, the traffic signals, the people — were sort of like on-screen objects in an elaborate computer game.

I don't know if you have played any of the massively multiplayer online computer games like EverQuest or World of Warcraft, but they have become so sophisticated that what you see on the screen is very much like a slice of life. Items that really have nothing to do with the game itself, such as flocks of birds and sunsets, just appear. So when I saw a flock of birds winging against a stunning sunset, and especially when a low-flying helicopter vectored out of the sunset toward my position on U.S. Rte. 40 W., I thought, "These are like things in a computer game. They don't absolutely have to be here ... but they're here!"

And then I thought, "Just as the on-screen details of World of Warcraft are there only because the author of the game put them there, the 'on-screen details' of real life are there only because God put them there. None of this rich panoply of highly improbable stuff that I'm noticing right now, right at this minute, could possibly be here without a Creator God."

"Couldn't my friends who don't believe in God see that?" I asked myself. "Couldn't they see the whole marvelous world as not having to exist at all? As irreducibly contingent, and not in any way necessary?"

The word "thrownness" came to my mind. It seemed to me as if I had been thrown into a world which itself had been thrown into existence for the sheer love of the game.

Which suggested that God is not at heart as judgmental as he is often cracked up to be. The helicopter I saw was probably a police unit looking for an evildoer who had run away into Patapsco State Park, as often happens in these parts of Baltimore County. But the suspect, the police, the 'copter, and I were all part of the same vast tapestry, the same marvelous milieu, the same sublime scenario.

I thought, "My intuition that God is not all that judgmental would astound my friends who know me as a good Catholic." But I thought, "We humans don't know everything. We try to form a coherent picture of God ... but at the end of the day that picture pales in the face of the pure 'thrownness' of creation."

I realized I was having a religious experience. It was one of awe, and it brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes which I'd not like to have to explain to my not-so-spiritual friends. And it was one that I hope to capture and memorialize through the "thrownness" of this particular blog post!

The Second Baptism and the "Absurdity of Our Own History"

Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, by Thomas M. King, S.J., makes the case that there are in the Gospels two Christian baptisms, one of water and one of fire. The latter is also a baptism into the Holy Spirit, as distinct from the Word of God (see my earlier post Enchantments and Disenchantments for more on this).

King points to Christ's passion and resurrection — his "glory" — as turning a corner away from the exclusively verbal teaching of Jesus's earlier ministry. Jesus had originally been preaching to a "'closed circle' of listeners, those who [because they were Jewish, like Jesus] shared a common book." But then, "hearing of the interest of the Gentiles [i.e., Greeks who reportedly wanted to see him] he knew that the time of preaching was over; it was time for crucifixion and silence" (p. 143).

"I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself," Jesus accordingly said at John 12:23. "His [Jesus's] glory would be manifest on the cross," amplifies King, "where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated" (p. 144).

That is, the cross of Christ might be seen as akin to, in another cultural setting, Zen Buddhist koans: "paradoxes which [are intended to] take the disciples beyond words" (p. 144). In effect, finally leaving Jewish words, texts, and meanings behind, Jesus surely knew that now "the phenomena itself would be the revelation. ... By meditating on such a koan, even the Gentiles would be drawn to him."

Yet Christianity, in the earliest centuries following the resurrection, began an organized resistance to any form of spirituality which did not center around "a word that would deliver [us] out of the world" (p. 145). That resistance is carried forward today by Christian fundamentalists who insist absolutely on a literal reading of the Bible. But in the early church, it was the province of "various gnostic and docetist claims." These theologies "included a strong strain of Orphism" (p. 144).

The Gnostics and Docetists, right in line with the traditional Greek (pagan) followers of Orpheus,

... emphasized the saving power of divine truth and generally despised the present world as the work or an "evil creator" who used it to keep humanity in ignorance; the revealed word was from God, but the physical world was from Satan. ... [T]hey believed that divine Truth was calling them apart from their body-tomb and into a world of pure form. (p. 144)

But, King contends, Christ

... did not come to draw his listeners out of their body-tombs. By the events of his Glory (passion and resurrection), the body itself would rise: his own body and the bodies of all who share in it by eating his flesh. ...

And here is the key thing:

The resurrection of the body would prove a stumbling block to all who are seeking a pure teaching, a word that would deliver them out of this world. But the followers of Jesus would not be delivered from history, as the Gnostics, Docetists, and Orphics had claimed, but through history. The world itself would come to deliverance. God had created matter by his word, and in matter the divine storyteller is saying something. If one were to meditate on the koan Jesus offered humanity (the crucifixion), one would be baffled into setting aside the accretions of meaning [found in holy scripture and other verbal texts]. Then perhaps one could have eyes that see and ears that hear; then one might become aware that God is speaking to us apart from the sacred text; he is speaking in the absurdity of history. And that means that the absurdity of our own history is the basis of our response. (p. 145)


The strongest possible refutation of "conservative" or "fundamentalist" Christian views, I would call the passage above. Let me try to say why.

First of all, let me refer to my earlier posts, Is Self-Love OK for Catholics? and More on Self-Acceptance, in which I laid out my own personal experience as being "stunted" and "immature" in my psychosexual development, and in which I suggested that (though I am not myself gay) my situation parallels that of men who, under recent Vatican rules, can no longer be admitted to Catholic seminaries to train for the priesthood, simply because they "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies."

In other words, I find my own "history," particularly as it bears upon my personal psychosexual development, to be "absurd." Little wonder that I likewise imagine the situation of gayness to be a fine absurdity, whatever else it may be practically, personally, morally, or religiously.

For one thing, there is something extra-rational about any sexual attraction, in the sense that it simply happens or it doesn't. At least, though, heterosexual leanings can be rationalized post facto; they ensure the propagation of the species, after all. Homosexual leanings admit of no such rationale.

I don't claim to be an authority on gay culture, but I see gays depicted in movies and on TV as having a sharp sense of the absurd. It is as if the basis of their response to life is already a keen awareness of "the absurdity of their own history." Extending that thought, I'd say gays may even have a leg up into the very type of spirituality Thomas King associates with the second Christian baptism, that of fire and Spirit.

True, their orientation violates the "pure teaching," the holy "word which would deliver them out of this world." The word of God in the Holy Bible, as everybody knows, calls gay sex an abomination.

But baptism — christening by water — remains sacramentally effective for gays. There is nothing about being gay (or being similarly psychosexually twisted) that blocks it from joining the individual soul to the Body of Christ.

So, I would argue, there is nothing about being gay per se — nothing about "presenting deep-seated homosexual tendencies" — which deserves the animus that conservative and fundamentalist Christians have attached to it.


Exhibit "B" in my case that Father King hits the nail squarely on the head, in differentiating second-baptism Christian spirituality from fundamentalism, is that there is no notion more "absurd," from the fundamentalist point of view, than that our species arose out of the blind forces of Darwinian evolution. King's idea that God speaks to us "in the absurdity of history," and not "from the sacred text" — i.e., not just from the Book of Genesis — is as delightful to theological liberals as it is anathema to religious fundamentalists.

Evolution à la Darwin is indeed a modern context in which "the physical world had to manifest some meaning of its own" — where "the revealed word and the phenomenal world [do] not seem to fit" (pp. 139-140). If, as so confounded the Pharisees in Jesus's day, "the visible world could no longer be dismissed as outer Darkness, [since] it too contained a message from God," — specifically, the Word made Flesh in Jesus — then that same perplexity can be said to go doubly for fundamentalists in our day.

"[W]hat if what God says in events does not ... readily coincide with what God says in his Word?" asks King, at one point. "Then, like Job, one must struggle with the apparent ... difference." Or, alternatively, one can simply say, with today's fundamentalists, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." As Christians we have two spiritualities from which to choose. One is based on the first baptism, the other on the second.


Despite how liberal I may sound above, I personally struggle with my own second-baptism spirituality. For me, hell is getting stuck in the puritanism of the first-baptism mindset. It is a mindset to which, sadly, I find my way at regular intervals.

Something in me desperately wants my life to be without surprise or absurdity, without spontaneity and uncertainty.

Something in me wants to take each ane every verbal formula for goodness and happiness which inveigles me at any givenmoment and slap it onto all of the rest of my life, forever and aye.

Not just my life, either. Everyone else's life, too.

So when I read and am enchanted by a book such as Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution (see my earlier posts, culminating in Theology of the Body, Part 6: The Riddle of the Third Way), I want to impose its charming ideas on my (and everyone else's) world.

But at some point, such dutiful, faithful adherence unfailingly starts to make me feel "thin and stretched," as Tolkien said of his character, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo was locked in thrall to the One Ring, which remained corrosively in his possession.

At that point in my own personal quest, the only possible antidote is to rejoin "the absurdity of [my] own history" — to stop living by a supposedly "pure teaching" and to recognize (yet again) the limits of all verbal formulas, no matter how enchanting, or holy, or sacred.

Enchantments and Disenchantments

Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, a now-hard-to-find 1989 book by Thomas M. King, S.J., offers rare insight into how it is that fundamentalist and liberal Christians differ so radically in their spiritualities.

King is a Jesuit priest who teaches theology at Georgetown University (or did at the time this book came out; I don't know if he still does). He is considered an expert on the thought of the French Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but this book has little to say about Teilhard. It focuses instead on how texts of all kinds — scripture, literature, drama — can raise us up out of this messy phenomenal world into "a vivid world that enchants us with its own compelling truth" (p. vii).

Such a world is the one written of as the Bible's Kingdom of God. Fr. King likens it to, among higher worlds spoken of in other stories and texts, Don Quixote's ineffable "Golden Age" (an "impossible dream," according to the musical Man of La Mancha) and Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms. In such ethereal heavens, people live exclusively by "the word," or, as capitalized in the Gospel of John, "the Word."

That is, words can be used as incantations to extract a single, set order of affairs from the chaotic whirligig of possibilities that could otherwise arise in the world of material phenomena. Those who live by such enchanting words of law and order are, in biblical terms, said to be righteous souls. Those who decline to succumb to the enchantment of such righteous verbal formulas are said to be lost to evil.

Thus, the first baptism spoken of in the gospels: the baptism "with water for repentance" for which John the Baptist was famous.

But there is also a second baptism mentioned in the gospels: a baptism of fire, which is also a baptism of Spirit.

In the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus undergoes three temptations by Satan in the desert after being baptized by water by John and hearing the voice of his Father emanate from heaven: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." As the Son of God referred to in traditional Hebrew scripture, Jesus knew he was henceforth to identify with and live by a text — specifically, by the Law and the Prophets of his Jewish people, which we Christians now call the Old Testament.

But the Evil One's voice came to Jesus, as he fasted for forty days in the desert, and offered him three temptations which collectively amounted to his, Jesus's, baptism of fire.

The first blandishment which Jesus confronted during his desert ordeal was the temptation to turn stones into loaves of bread — which, had Jesus acquiesced, would right then and there have put paid to the heavenly ideal Jesus now upheld as the supposed Son of God.

The second temptation was yet more problematic, since Satan turned Jesus's ideal itself into a form of temptation. Jesus was asked to renounce his material body by stepping out from the pinnacle of the Temple and walking successfully across the sky (pp. 118-119).

By rejecting that second temptation (see p. 120), Jesus rejected the purely verbal — just as by rejecting the first temptation, he had rejected the purely experiential. The combination of the two rejections left him prey, then, to the third temptation: to seize pure power. The Tempter offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world as his personal dominion, as if to say, "Since you reject both the purely verbal and the demands of the flesh as limitations on your actions, that seemingly leaves you wholly unconstrained. Why not, then, simply rule the whole world, as my viceroy?"

But Jesus did not fall into this trap of seeming bifurcation, instead finding a happy medium: per King, "[H]e would give first place to the word of God; he would [also] understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything); and, finally, he would never worship the powers of this world" (p. 120).

The part about understanding the weakness of human flesh is the key one. Those who undergo the first baptism alone, the baptism of righteousness and repentance, often lack "an ongoing experience of the world and their own sensibilities" (p. 120). This is no wonder: such believers are prone, after all, to using only "set phrases with no surprises" (p. 121) to convey the truth, "for surprises are found in experience — not in the inevitablity of a text."

These, then, are today's fundamentalists — as well as the Pharisees and religious authorities of Jesus's time. Both today's Biblical literalists and the contemporaries of Jesus who upheld the Law by condemning Jesus for healing on the sabbath are in righteous thrall to a text which purports to be God's word. Neither outlook is wrong — it just lacks the second baptism, the baptism of fire which (the Gospel of John tells us) also is a baptism of Spirit.

"Something fundamental about Spirit" is, King tells us (p. 140), that "it cannot be captured in words." This is because "it blows where it will and it lacks both measure and form." Spirit is "what God says in events" — that is, in phenomenal occurrences taking place here in the material world.

"But what if what God says in events does not coincide, or readily coincide, with what God says in his Word? Then, like Job, one must struggle with the apparent — or more than apparent — difference" (p. 140). This amounts to the Dark Night of the Soul. This is what the mystics tell us accompanies the temptation — as in "Lead us not into temptation" — that necessarily precedes our baptism of fire and Spirit.

After the second baptism, the baptism of fire and Spirit, we cease to be funadamentalists/Pharisees. No longer in thrall to the Word of God as distinct from the Spirit, we are apt to become theological "liberals." No longer blinded to the weaknesses of human flesh, we develop true compassion.

Yet we are in danger of swinging too far to the opposite extreme: some Christians, so very "liberal," "have felt so deeply their Baptism of Fire, their baptism back into humanity, that all they can recognize is the extent of human ambiguity. They find all talk of Kingdoms and heavenly identities to be a puzzling rhetoric without meaning. These too [like the fundamentalists] would reduce Christianity to a single baptism, [in this case] that of fire, and see Jesus only as a human ideal" (p. 123).

More on Self-Acceptance

At this point, I am tempted to do any one of several things as I pursue the topic of self-love/self-acceptance even further (see Is Self-Love OK for Catholics? for my first post on the subject). I don't know exactly in which direction to proceed next, so let me try this one:

My intuition tells me that the gory details of my own "cracked pot" (see the parable I quoted in the previous post) are idiosyncratic to myself; they may be of little interest (or even repulsive) to others. Or, to the Howard Sterns of this world, they may be diverting to hear about, but really no big deal. Yet I feel the need to allude to them to make a general point: things that happen to us early in life can twist us irrevocably for the rest of our lives.

In that previous post I revealed that I, at 58, am still an unmarried male virgin (technically speaking) with a decidedly unnatural (or "disordered") interest in such grossly immature, voyeuristic pursuits as — dare I say it right out loud — viewing women going to the potty.

It's been that way for me all my life. I can remember being as a young child stimulated in ways I was too small to understand when a female playmate abruptly dropped pants and did her business before me on one of those potties parents use to toilet-train their toddlers. Both of us were a bit too old for that sort of thing by then ... and both of us knew it. It was one of several acts of provocation I remember by this little girl who would grow up to be, if I recall aright, quite a flirt. Another was when she had me remain in her room while she changed from pajamas to clothes, and I found out for the first time exactly how boys and girls, anatomically speaking, differ.


But my point is that, if I have a sexual quirk, it was already with me at a tender age, and I simply never grew out of it.

I was a thumb-sucker till I was 12, a bed-wetter till 16. In my early 40s I had to retire early due to burnout and stress. And I'm something of a confirmed hypochondriac. In an earlier, Freudian age, I would have been called a neurotic from the word go. I have to believe that my neuroses and my sexual quirks are somehow related.

My neuroses are, in that old-fashioned parlance associated with Sigmund Freud, well-compensated. And I don't let my sexual quirks actually express themselves, in terms of my outward behavior. So I've managed to live something which looks very much like a normal life ... for a never-married bachelor of 58, that is.

And I'm a pretty good Christian to boot ... don't commit a lot of sins, do my share of good works, live a fairly clean life, try to care a lot more about others and a lot less about myself.

But in terms of my personal spiritual growth I think I've hit a sort of glass ceiling. I started to notice it as I was reading about and blogging about the "theology of the body," as I did most recently in Theology of the Body, Part 6: The Riddle of the Third Way and in preceding posts. The book which I have been reading on the subject, Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution by Christopher West, talks about our ability to confirm that conjugal or celibate chastity is uniquely blessed by God; we can do this by means of our own inner experience. Supposedly, we can convince ourselves that God's plan for human sexuality allows for either faithful, man-woman, married sex (conjugal chastity) or no sex at all (celibacy "for the kingdom"), depending on our specific calling.

But that, admittedly, assumes our psycho-sexual maturity. If we are not sufficiently mature in our psycho-sexual development, all bets are off.


Take, for example, the issue of homosexuality. The Catholic Church has recently promulgated a new set of guidelines which bar men who "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from entering seminaries and becoming priests (see the official document On Priesthood and Those With Homosexual Tendencies: Instruction From Congregation for Catholic Education).

Such men lack "affective maturity" and cannot relate properly — in a constructive, priestly way, that is — to either men or women, it is said. According to Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons in the supporting document "The Psychology Behind Homosexual Tendencies": "These individuals in the priesthood have a significant affective immaturity with excessive anger and jealousy toward males who are not homosexual, insecurity that leads them to avoid close friendships with such males and an inordinate need for attention."

Though I'm not gay, I can surely relate to that — though in my experience it is possible to learn to counterbalance such immaturities of affect, insofar as how one actually lives one's life. (Affect is psychologists' lingo for "the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion."). I no longer get angry, or at least not very often. I no longer let my "inordinate" need for attention run away with me. I don't follow women into rest rooms.

But although on the surface I seem mature and tranquil enough, down deep there's trauma. I don't know what caused it, possibly when I was a babe in arms ... but it's there, and it's not going away. It's ultimately responsible for the "cracked pot" aspects of this particular person whom God loves at this particular moment in time.

I'm never going to grow any further spiritually until I can accept that basic fact about myself, and love myself because of my flaws.


Specifically, then, I've got to find a term to complete the analogy cracked pot:waters flowers::psycho-sexual immaturity:does X. X, in terms of the parable told by Father Joe Breighner as cited in the previous post, has to be some way to redeem the psycho-sexual immaturity which is the biggest stumbling block to my own self-love and self-acceptance.

The best candidate I cam come up with for X leverages the idea which I mentioned above, that deep-seated homosexual tendencies are also psycho-sexual immaturities with their roots in earliest childhood.

Confirmed gays are no more able to change whatever malformation exists deep, deep down than am I ... though mine expresses itself in a different, more oddball (and some would say yet more odious) way.

I feel that my inner, early malformation blocks me from attaining the transcendent redemption of sexual self spoken of by Christopher West in Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution. I assume confirmed gays with deep-seated homosexual tendencies are blocked in the same way.

But neither of us is blocked from the kind of redemption spoken of in Fr. Joe Breighner's somewhat surprising-to-me Spirituality piece entitled "Love yourself because of your flaws." Rather, Father Joe's type of redemption is especially appropriate to the "cracked pots" in the world ... and, when you come right down to it, who among us is anything but a cracked pot, in one way or another?

So the does X in my analogical version of Father Joe's parable would seem to be: works to reverse the recent decision by the Catholic Church not to admit men who "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies" to seminaries.

Is Self-Love OK for Catholics?

The Catholic Review for 01/05/2006 has, in Fr. Joseph Breighner's weekly Spirituality slot (see p. 31), a somewhat surprising-to-me piece entitled "Love yourself because of your flaws." I don't always read Father Joe — he can seem a bit of a lightweight — but I did let my eye course over this particular offering. I was glad I did. It turns out to be one of the profoundest things I've ever read.

"When I really love myself," Father Joe writes in this column, "I cannot hurt myself, and I cannot hurt another person. To me, the answer to world peace is unconditional love." It begins with loving oneself. But what is self-love? It most certainly is not, he says, "being vain or conceited. People who are vain or conceited have a lot of self-hatred covered over by a layer of 'I'm better than you.' "

Specifically, though, what is this thing called self-love? "Loving ourselves as we are," Father Joe writes, "is to love the person God loves at this moment in time" (the italics are mine, not Father Joe's). We all need to make a New Year's resolution, adds this good father, to "accept ourselves exactly the way we are."


Well ... at this moment in time I'm a 58-year-old man, still technically a virgin, whose deepest flaw may be that he has never really grown up sexually. Oh, my body is a standard-issue one for the post-middle-age white American male, but my mind is in many ways stuck in the realm of that of a twelve-year-old, when it comes to the things which interest me sexually. No, I don't covet pre-teen girls, or boys of any age, but I'm the kind of guy who, just for kicks, might love to bore a peephole in the wall of a female locker room (or, better still, the ladies' lavatory).

Whatever else that is, perverted or whatever, it's grossly immature. So at this moment in time, I'm basically just as stunted sexually as I was in seventh grade. The person God loves — and who ought, per Father Joe, to accept himself just the way he is — is a bit twisted, deep down inside.


A parable that Father Joe shares strikes home, accordingly:

A water bearer in India had two large pots, each hung on each end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water.

At the end of the long walk from the stream to the master’s house, the cracked pot arrived only half full. For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one-and-a-half pots of water to his master’s house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect to the end for which it was made. But the cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it was made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it apologized to the water bearer.

“I’m ashamed of myself,” said the cracked pot. “For these past two years I have been able to deliver only half of my load to the master’s house.”

The bearer said to the pot, “Did you not notice as we walked along that there were flowers only on your side of the path, not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the stream, you’ve watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate my master’s table. Without you being just the way you are, he would not have this beauty to grace his house.’”

I suppose what is being spoken of here is redemption: taking what is cracked and making the very imperfection of it a source of beauty and grace. Father Joe: "Each of us has our own unique flaws. We’re all cracked pots. But if we will allow it, the Lord with use our flaws to grace his master’s table."

What is being spoken of here is, I imagine, redemption. Or as Father Joe puts it, "Each of us has our own unique flaws. We’re all cracked pots. But if we will allow it, the Lord with use our flaws to grace his master’s table." Turning our most distressing flaws to some higher purpose is, I would say, the essence of redemption.


I have to admit it, though: I don't really get it. Or, rather, I see this as the meaning of redemption vaguely, with one eye half-opened. Extending the analogy, the other eye remains wholly blind to it.

For the most part, I think of the "cracked pot" aspects of who I am as things which would absolutely keep God from loving me. I criticize myself for having them, and I condemn and reject myself for ever being characterized by them, but Father Joe says, "Criticizing ourselves, condemning ourselves, rejecting ourselves only guarantees a future of self-defeating behavior."

Instead, Father Joe says I ought (as should we all) to engage regularly in a meditation which begins this way: "I treat myself as if I am someone who is deeply loved. All kinds of events come and go; yet, through it all, my love for myself is constant ... ". This kind of stuff sounds like exactly what my acupuncturist, Sherry, would tell me.

She is one of the many folks in our world today who is spiritual (albeit in a down-to-earth way) without being religious. She profoundly believes in living in the present and not being slave to either the recriminating past or the fear-filled future. What Father Joe, a Catholic, says in this column about loving the person God loves at this moment could have been a mantra from a course at the institute of New Age (actually, ancient) wisdom which credentialed Sherry as a therapist.

So it would seem that New Age can meet Old Catholic (sorry, Father Joe, for the "old") at the intersection of Self-Love and Living Life in the Present Moment!

Theology of the Body, Part 6: The Riddle of the Third Way

Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution is my continuing object of fascination (see Theology of the Body, Part 5: the Transformation of Lust and preceding posts for more).

One of the trickiest things to understand about the message of this book is that there is a hidden, divinely aided third way beyond the pair of strategies for sex which initially must seem to exhaust all possibilities: repress lust, or indulge it.

A person who is blind to the third way, as so many are, would say that the sexual urge is a given. If it is not to be repressed — thereby doing us immeasuarable harm — it must be indulged to the fullest. Since religion opposes sexual indulgence, religion must go.

That's true, as far as it goes. If religion is basically about the repression of lust, then it's bad for us. But West tells us in his book that Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body" hates the repression of lust as much as it despises lustful indulgence!

Repression represents "the trap of 'holding to the form of religion' while 'denying the power of it'" — that is, the power of God, if we give him our assent, to change the way we feel and the way our minds and hearts operate inside us (p. 48; the quotation is from St. Paul's Second Letter to Timothy 3:5). Christ through his death and resurrection can redeem our sexuality. "In other words," writes West, "the death and resurrection of Christ is effective. It can change our lives, our attitudes, our hearts — yes — our sexual desires" (p. 48).


Practically speaking, how does this work? The key thing is primarily for us to switch from following the false lure of self-gratification to preferring "the love of total self-donation" (see p. 29).

The "right kind" of sexual desire is accordingly that which is found in the best marriages: in the conjugal bed, as in the rest of married life, each partner is mainly interested in "donating" his or her own selfish gratification to the needs of the other, to ensure the other's fulfillment.

Self-donation on a wider, not-necessarily-sexual scale is accordingly the keynote of all Christian life ... just as Christ's death on the cross to save the entire world from the wages of sin was the ultimate act of self-donation.


But self-donation, when emphasized all by itself, is but one of two co-equal aspects of the hidden third way. The other aspect — the other manner of describing this marvelous change of heart which depotentiates lust and sin — is to recognize that it can't happen without supernatural help. For our sexual nature to be "redeemed" requires, if we are Christian, that we accept the redemption spoken of by Christians when they refer to Christ's saving death on the cross.

Likewise, God's gift of redemption can equally be spoken of as allowing the Holy Spirit admission into our hearts. Whether spoken of as the indwelling of the Spirit or the salvation of Christ's cross, it all comes down to this: "... 'in a certain way we [according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church] have already risen with Christ' ... Here and now we can begin to experience the redemption of our sexual desires, the gradual transformation of our hearts. It is a difficult and even arduous journey, but one that can be accomplished" (p. 34).

Christ's saving cross and the entry of the Holy Spirit into our hearts together enable us to choose to be self-donating in our sexual and communal lives, while our opting for self-donation over self-gratification is what allows Christ's redemption and the indwelling of the spirit to be effective. The two aspects of the Riddle of the Third Way go with one another hand in glove to change our lives radically, over time, to ones of total commitment to God's plan and sincere self-donation to others.

Theology of the Body, Part 5: The Transformation of Lust

Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution continues to interest me greatly (see Theology of the Body, Part 4: Faith in Analogies and earlier posts for more). As I make my way through it, I become more and more convinced that its message concerning the body and sex is crucial to understanding and living out the Christian faith, Catholic-style.

The message is, it comes as no surprise, one of chastity and purity. There are two equally chaste vocations, the book says: marriage and celibacy. Perhaps surprisingly to some, conjugal chastity typifies the lives of Christian married couples. It includes a lot of healthy sex ... for sex and the body are good, in the Christian view, not sinful.

Nor is celibate chastity — the vocation I seem to be called to — a rejection of sex. Yes, physical sex is freely given up. Yet celibacy, which amounts to choosing to live one's life as a so-called "eunuch for sake of the kingdom of heaven," as Jesus put it at Matthew 19:12, is a calling that "embraces and anticipates 'the heavenly marriage'" (pp. 66-67). That is, celibacy on the part of some of us points all of us toward the beatific vision we will all share of God when we have arrived in heaven.

In turn, a celibate's life here on earth points out to the non-celibates who far outnumber him/her "the ultimate purpose and meaning of sexuality." This is so because in this world of ours "man and woman become one flesh as a sign or 'sacrament' of Christ's eternal union with the Church (see Eph [Paul's Letter to the Ephesians] 5:31-32)."

Celibates who eschew sex and married practitioners of a conjugal chastity which includes a vigorous sex life both "experience the redemption of their sexuality in Christ" (p. 68). In neither case is there repression of lust. Nor is there indulgence in lust. Chastity of either variety is a transformation of lust into something better and purer. Ordained by Christ, chastity, conjugal or otherwise, serves "to restore creation to the purity of its origins" (p. 68). In other words, purity allows us "to experience redemption from the domination of lust" (p. 69).


Therein, a capsule summary of the entire Christian outlook. Broadly speaking , all sin is lust — though, of course, it is not always sexual lust — and lust of any variety is sin. The point of the whole Christian exercise is to break free from sin, which after all is said and done, is always "the domination of lust."

Which makes Pope John Paul II's theology of the body central to Christian spirituality. There is a riddle here not unlike Zen's "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It is this: How can there be a third, entirely constructive way to deal with our lust, in addition to repression and indulgence, both of which are destructive?

How can there be a difference, that is, between repression and the healthy self-denial which even married couples must practice, if lust is to be avoided? How can strong sexual desire manifest itself rightly ... especially in the life of the celibate who has no sexual relations and whose sacrifice is accordingly total?

West spells it out (p. 73): "... [T]he self-denial involved in such a sacrifice [i.e., celibacy] must not be conceived as a repression of sexuality. Celibacy for the kingdom [i.e., heaven, as the kingdom of God] is meant to be a fruitful living out of the redemption of sexual desire, understood as the desire to make of oneself a 'sincere gift' for others."

The same is true for married people. Their mode of redeeming their sexual desire also serves to liberate healthy expressions of sex from lust. It too enables the marrieds' making a "sincere gift" of themselves to others: to the other spouse, to their children, to their larger family, to the community as a whole.

So the "self-donation" which a husband makes to his wife in their bedchamber, and which she of course makes back to him, stands as an archetype for all the "sincere gifts" a person makes to other persons ... which is why the idea of the redemption of lust can be construed as lying at the very heart of Christianity!

Theology of the Body, Part 4: Faith in Analogies

Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution impresses me as a "typically Catholic" book, if only because it glories in analogies.

For example, West draws an analogy between the "one flesh" nuptial union that married couples seek here in this world, and the "divine reality" which we who hope to be saved can expect to enter into: direct, personal communion with God when this life is over and we are in heaven. Jesus accordingly taught, "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage (Matthew 22:30; see pp. 55ff.). Along these lines, West tells us, "the 'primordial sacrament' [of God-ordained marriage here on earth] will give way to the divine reality" in an afterlife in which there is no longer any need for marriage, sex, and procreation as we know it (p. 56).

No sex in heaven, then, alas ... but still, here in this world, marriage and sex are fountains of earthly delight that, viewed aright, direct our gaze heavenward: "They help us set our sights on the union [with God] that alone will satisfy" (p. 57).

At the Bible's end, Christ as Bridegroom weds his church as Bride, and (says West, p. 61) throughout scripture, from Genesis on, "the nuptial imagery is unmistakable." At the same time, though, West makes clear that "when using nuptial union as an image of heaven, it's more important than ever to remember the inadequacy of analogies. Caution is necessary. Heaven is not some eternally magnified experience of sexual union on earth. As John Paul II observes, the union to come 'will be a completely new experience.' Yet 'at the same time,' [the Pope goes on], 'it will not be alienated in any way from the love that man and woman experienced in 'the beginning' and have sought to reclaim throughout history ... ."

Thus, the special value of analogies as images of divine realities. On the one hand, they are indispensible for providing us with some insight into mysteries, such as the nature of heaven, which we ordinarily couldn't fathom. On the other hand, every spiritual analogy has its limits, knowable to reason and common sense. We must be ever on guard against turning an "icon" — say, the God-ordained sexual union of a married couple, taken as an image of the communion of saints in heaven — into an "idol" that is sought after for its own sake, here in life on this earth. (See pp. 56ff. for more on the distinction between "icons" and "idols.")

This is the way we Catholics often look at theological matters: by virtue of conceptual analogies that are to be understood almost intuitively, but are also to be tested by reason and common sense. Notice that there is no assertion in the Catholic outlook concerning the afterlife that heaven will "really" be anything like what we know here and now. Just the opposite: as the late pope says, heaven will be "a completely new experience."


I contrast the profoundly analogical outlook in Catholicism with the worldview expressed by pastor Ted Haggard, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, on a recent TV special, Is Heaven Somewhere out There Beyond the Stars? Barbara Walters Takes Viewers on a Heavenly Journey. Walters interviewed all manner of "experts" on the subject of what heaven is and how we get there. Haggard, as a sort of stand-in for a "pope" of America's conspicuously popeless evangelical Christians, told Walters (among other things) that he personally thinks of heaven as having multiple "neighborhoods," since Jesus tells us right out it has many "mansions."

Presumably, if there are "mansions" in heaven, then there are "neighborhoods" around the mansions, or so Haggard's reasoning goes. In a very concrete sense, then, Hagggard's version of heaven is not a completely new experience. Instead, in many ways it's just like what we've already experienced here on earth ... without any of the bad stuff, of course.

What I detect here is a disinclination on Haggard's part to comprehend analogically. Rather, he seems to be saying that when we read the Bible, the most concrete and literal interpretation that immediately comes to mind is the one that is most assuredly right, since such an interpretation will be in no way "abstract," and therefore highly suspect.


It occurs to me that such an outlook is entirely consistent, may God bless it, with a faith tradition which has no central authority: no pope, no Vatican, no Curia, no magisterium or teaching authority, no hierarchy of priests, and no organized doctrine.

When Christians are called to read scripture and interpret it directly for themselves, as evangelicals are, then (it stands to reason) how do you expect them to agree on stuff? One answer to this conundrum seems to be to favor the strictly literal reading of the words of the Bible. To avoid abstraction, hence, is to skirt disunity.

The traditional Catholic approach is different: the individual Catholic is expected to read the Bible nowadays — yes; that revision to the everyday Catholic's lifestyle began at about the time of Vatican II — but always to interpret it with the help of the traditional magisterium of the church and all those lay explicators, such as Christopher West, who are in tune with it. The church over time accretes a reasoned, internally consistent, unabashedly analogical approach to understanding the whole Gospel message. That carefully worked out outlook informs us everyday Catholics in the pews of, among other things, when "caution is necessary" in order to avoid taking an analogical "icon" (e.g., married sex as a pointer to heavenly bliss) and making it into a concrete "idol" (sex as an end in itself).


This subject fascinates me, because I have to admit that the Catholic, "abstract," analogical approach thrills me to the marrow, spiritually speaking, while the evangelical, "concrete," literal approach leaves me cold. Yet I also have to admit that the deep cleft between Catholics and evangelicals strikes me as wrong. Christians are supposed to exhibit solidarity and brotherhood, not disharmony and discord.

West's book is a case in which I suspect Catholics and evangelicals would have no trouble agreeing on West's (and John Paul II's) conclusions about what is and is not morally right, sexually speaking. But I also suspect that many evangelicals, if they read this book at all, would be put off by West's extremely "Catholic" — i.e., analogical — way of reasoning to arrive at such conclusions. They would no doubt prefer to note the Bible passages which call homosexuality an "abomination," say, and then add, quite simply, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

Their evangelical faith is fully invested in God, Jesus, and the Bible ... and not, it seems, in analogies.

Theology of the Body, Part 3

Now, yet more on Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution. My two earlier installments in this occasional series may be read here and here.

Actually, this amounts to something of a new beginning on the subject for me since open-heart surgery, followed by the outset of several weeks of recuperation, have intervened since the last time I cracked open the book. And I find that I am still massively conflicted with respect to the author's point of view on sexual morality — which is that of the late Pope John Paul II, explained in layman's terms.

According to West (p. 2): "Far from being a footnote in the Christian life, the way we understand the body and the sexual relationship 'concerns the entire Bible' [as the Pope put it in 1982]. It plunges us into 'the perspective of the whole Gospel, of the whole teaching, in fact, of the whole mission of Christ' [the Pope had previously said in 1980]."

These snippets and many others are quoted by West from "a series of 130 fifteen-minute conferences at papal audiences beginning on September 5, 1979 and concluding on November 28, 1984," in the words of this web page. "The conferences were grouped into four clusters: 'The Original Unity of Man and Woman,' 'Blessed Are the Pure of Heart,' 'The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy,' and 'Reflections on Humanae vitae.' These talks were [eventually] brought together [and published as a book] under the title Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan."

This view, taken to its logical extreme, implies that you can't really understand Christ without unerstanding sex in the way God and the Pope want us to. The bliss associated with physical sex, as long as it's in the context of the pure, conjugally chaste union of a married man and woman who are not in any way misusing or defiling it, is a positive foretaste of the noncarnal bliss to be found when we are in God's heaven. Any other kind of sex is, accordingly, a travesty.

Premarital sex. Extramarital sex and adultery. Marital sex when it's not open to conception because artificial birth control is used. Abortion. Gay sex. Masturbation. Pornography. Child abuse. Broken families and divorce. Illegitimacy. The failure of today's social mores any longer to rein in our carnal lusts. All these represent ways in which we have fallen away from the original divine plan for sex and procreation.

Actually, I buy that. Or some of me does, if only with bigtime reservations.


Yes, there's a huge part of me that stands up and cheers when West (after John Paul II) reminds us that the Old and New Testaments, taken as a whole, form what is in effect an extended "spousal analogy" (see pp. 10-11), which I think of also as a "bridal" or "nuptial" motif. At the end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, we are told that the climax of all history will be the marriage of Christ as Bridegroom with his Church as Bride. The Church is, of course, made up of its innumerable members. All of us who have accepted the invitation to the wedding feast will find that we ourselves are, lo and belold, the Bride at this glorious wedding. "Through this lens," writes West, "we learn that God's eternal plan is to 'marry' us ... to live with us in an eternal exchange of love and communion."

Revelation's nuptials must be understood in the light of the call in Genesis 2:24, at the very outset of the Bible, for man and woman, represented in the persons of Adam and Eve, to become "one flesh." In turn, this aspect of the original creation is why Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians 5:31-32 links the selfsame "one flesh" metaphor in Genesis to the "great mystery ... in reference to Christ and the church" (see pp. 8-9).

From such scriptural references — including that item of the Ten Commandments which forbids adultery — may be spun out the entire basis for Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body." Of course, the great body of Catholic teaching, down through the millennia, including the documents of Vatican II which so shaped this particular pope, amplify this theological world view, which is also duly reflected in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that was issued in the 1990s under JPII's aegis. Even so, writes West, even though this is established teaching from way back, "Catholic theologian George Weigel describes John Paul II's theology of the body as 'one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries' — 'a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences'" (p. 1).

I buy that too. Even though JPII made all this theology-of-the-body stuff crystal clear from day one during his 26+ year pontificate, for some reason I personally am just starting to tune it to it. And even though, outwardly speaking, it's not going to make a big difference in my mostly chaste existence — I'm a single man whose worst sexual sin has been looking at Internet porn and occasionally "spanking the monkey," both of which I have given up — I think it may make a huge difference inwardly.

For, as I say, there's a major part of my soul that absolutely relishes the idea of marital purity and sexual chastity. You can't convince that part of me that sex in this world which does not honor our "supreme calling" to "eternal ecstasy; unrivaled rapture; bounteous, beauteous bliss" in the next is anything but a travesty and a tragedy (see p. 64).


But I'm also very conflicted about all this. I've spent 58+ years — nearly 20 of them as a practicing Christian and the last ten of them as a "good" Catholic — in a culture which says "if it feels good, do it."

Our mainstream culture has it that sex between consenting adults, of whatever gender, is simply nobody else's business.

That abortion is a private decision which must be left up to the woman in question and never made illegal by courts and legislatures.

That marriage is optional for lovers, and divorce is an acceptable solution when marriage goes sour.

That entertainment which is not raunchy or violent, or both, is boring.

That theology-based ideas are radioactive and need to be kept strictly clear of the public ethos.

I'm increasingly finding that aspect of the mainstream culture to be "sick," and yet I realize that there are millions of us who with sincere heart and clear conscience would defend the secular status quo to their dying day.

There are many who feel, as I used to, that we are better off not reinstating "old-fashioned" ideas on sexual morality — especially to the extent that they may represent a stalking horse for society's return to the anti-feminist, anti-gay intolerance of yore.


In fact, the theology of the body is downright radical — and that's what gives me the willies. If the call to human sexual purity is inscribed by God in the very fabric of creation, if it is, as West says, a sign of the love the three divine persons of the Holy Trinity bear for one another, there can be no compromise.

Most or all of the other outlooks I've espoused in my various blogs are compromises of moderation, carefully wrought intermediate positions between radically opposing viewpoints. For example, in my Beyond Darwin blog, I have championed a view of evolution which accepts most of what Darwin proposed abou tnatural selection but claims evolutionary history is nonetheless directional — toward better and better "non-zero-sum games" and more and more complexity. That sort of compromise means we can have our intellectual cake and eat it too. Our species (and all others) evolved, rather than being directly created by God. But the planet's biosphere nevertheless gravitates toward producing conscious life "in God's image."

But by accepting the theology of the body of Pope John Paul II, I'd be rejecting (among other things) the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and '70s outright, lock, stock, and barrel, along with all its fruits. There can be no compromise on this point, for this particular baby cannot be split.

And that is, at the end of the day, what gives me the jim-jams. I'm not fond of radical positions that do not admit of compromise.

Theology of the Body, Part 2

Now, more on Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution.

In Part 1 of this series, I worried that Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body" — his doctrine on sexual love — might work, in these sex-saturated times, against compassionate social solidarity, which I consider the prime directive of the faithful Christian. In a world in which millions engage in unencumbered sex and truculently defend their right to do so, religion's calls for chastity and strict marital fidelity can be a turn-off for many.

"[T]he Pope doesn't need to nor does he attempt to force assent to his proposals," responds West (p. 16). (He uses the present tense; John Paul II was still alive when the book appeared.) "Rather, he invites man and women to reflect honestly on their own experience of life to see if it confirms his proposals." For, West has earlier said, the Pope anchors his philosophical stance in human experience, not cut-and-dried, legalistic, my-way-or-the-highway "objective categories" (p. 13).

"Those who have been turned off by judgmental moralizers will find this approach delightfully refreshing," opines West. He continues:

The Pope imposes nothing and wags his finger at no one. He simply reflects lovingly on God's Word and on human experience in order to demonstrate the profound harmony between them. Then, with utmost respect for our freedom, he invites us to embrace our own dignity. It doesn't matter how often we've settled for something less. This is a message of sexual healing and redemption, not condemnation.

With this compassionate approach — the Gospel approach — John Paul shifts the discussion about sexual morality from legalism to liberty. The legalist asks, "How far can I go before I break the law?" Instead, the Pope asks, "What's the truth about sex that sets me free to love?"


Part of that truth about sex and love, says West, quite unfortunately, is a "spiritual battle" in which we are the battlefield, the actual combatants being God and "the enemy."

"The body and sex are meant to proclaim our union with God," writes West (p.12). Specifically, per Genesis 1:27-28, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. And God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply ... '" (see p. 5).

Notice that our male-female gender difference is, on this view, part and parcel of our having been made in God's "own image." This is why right and proper sexual relations on our part "image," in turn, God's interior love as Three Persons of one Holy Trinity; they also image God's exterior love for us, which has prompted Christ's redeeming death on the cross.

"The body, in fact, and it alone ... is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine," West quotes John Paul II as saying (p. 5). The body is itself a sacrament. So, says the Pope, there's a lot riding on our getting sex right.

But given that the foundation-stone for the Pope's theology of the body is our heart's inmost subjective experience, not "objective categories" of truth, it is hard to see why the category whom West calls "the enemy" — a.k.a. the Devil, Satan — needs to be brought immediately into the theological picture, in order to explain why we don't often think of the body and sexual union in this "profound" way:

The enemy is no dummy [writes West]. He knows that the body and sex are meant to proclaim the divine mystery. And from his perspective, this proclamation must be stifled. Men and women must be kept from recognizing the mystery of God in their bodies. ... [T]his is precisely the blindness that original sin introduced at the serpent's prompting. (p. 12)


I am put in mind of a woman friend who I will identify only as "Ms. V. V.", since I met her when we served together as VISTA Volunteers — in Volunteers In Service To America — back in the early 1970s. During that two-year period we were girlfriend and boyfriend, but, beyond that, Ms. V. V. taught me a lot.

Ms. V. V., along with several of her women roommates, introduced me to feminism, or women's liberation, as it was called then. Before their letting me in on what the phrase "male chauvinist pig" suggested, I had no clue that women were being systematically treated as second-class citizens. That was wake-up call number one for me.

Wake-up call number two came when, during a meeting of all of us VISTA volunteers, Ms. V. V. held forth on the need for heterosexual people such as most of us presumably were to respect the rights of gay and lesbian people.

Later, after our VISTA service was over, Ms. V. V. paid me a visit in my hometown of Bethesda. Maryland, with her female lover in tow! That was wake-up call number three.

Some years after that, Ms. V. V. paid me a visit in Baltimore, during which she told me that she had had a brief, unplanned affair with a man whom she had wanted to console over an emotional loss that he had sustained. She said she was not exclusively lesbian, but bisexual — which didn't shock me, since we two had been sexually intimate, a year or so before. Unfortunately, Ms. V.V.'s sexual encounter had resulted in a pregnancy ... and an abortion. That was wake-up call number four.

As a result of the great respect and liking I had (and still have) for Ms. V. V., I long ago internalized many of her values: pro-women's rights, pro-gay rights, pro-abortion rights. I think it fair to say that she is one of the best people I have ever known, in terms of her caring for and about others. In many ways, though she is not a practicing Christian, Ms. V. V. exemplifies the compassionate outlook which lies at the heart of Christian experience.

Yet, according to the Pope's theology of the body, she would seem to be a "sinner" on at least three counts, engaging in other than purely heterosexual sex, having unmarried sex with a man, and having an abortion ... and possibly morally wrong on a fourth count also, if her brand of feminism doesn't pass muster.

On top of that, West seems to hold, one is to call Ms. V. V.'s "blindness" the upshot of satanic activity!

That's very hard for me to take.


Not only that, but it would seem to make it a slam dunk that Ms. V. V. could never be persuaded of the rightness of John Paul II's theology of the body. I mean, it's hard enough to convince an unbeliever that God exists — much less the Devil. After all, I, a regular churchgoer, can't even remember the last time I heard Satan mentioned from the Catholic pulpit.

When theology is based not on objective notions that are demonstrable to reason, but on subjective human experience, something like satanic machinations would, admittedly, seem to be an explanation for why so many people are blind to the truth of that theology. But saying so takes the button of personal inner experience — confusion, resistance, willfulness — and promptly sews a vest of "objective categories" on it — "the enemy," the wily serpent in the Garden of Eden story.

That's putting the cart well before the horse, and West has no business bringing it up at the very outset of his discussion of John Paul II's theology of the body. It's a stumbling block to belief, not a help.

In "The Body & the Spiritual Battle" (pp. 12-13), the section in which he brings up "the enemy," West alludes to John Paul II's writing that "the union of the sexes 'is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love.'" He should have stuck to just that, and left out the archaic stuff about "the enemy"!

Theology of the Body, Part 1

As I predicted I would be doing in Of Wild Things and Women's Vocations, in this and coming posts I'll be considering a book I picked up at Barnes & Noble recently, Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution. The brief 2004 paperback is a simplification of the same author's earlier Theology of the Body Explained, a 500-page reference work which I fear is way over my head.

The late Pope John Paul II devoted a large part of his early pontificate, says West, to setting forth his "theology of the body." In a series of 129 short talks given before the Pope's "Wednesday audiences" from 1979 to 1984 — see Mr. West's website — the Holy Father presented a discourse on humans, their bodies, their sexual relations, their marriages and families, and their wider communities: a complete doctrine rooted in the flesh, as it were. The Pope's lectures themselves can be found in the book The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan, by John Paul II (which I haven't yet read).

In fact, as I begin reading West's book, it appears that the theology of the body presented by John Paul II can be esteemed as central to all of Christian theology. I take the liberty of using the word "Christian" here, and not just "Catholic," because I can't think of any way in which non-Catholic Christians could seriously object to such a statement, in and of itself. More on that anon.


The body is the basis for the "one flesh" metaphor, from Genesis 2:24, quoted by Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians 5:31-32. Paul's words are: "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church ... ."

West says that the metaphor refers to, or "images," several bedrock things in Christian understanding. For one thing, Paul is saying, the one-flesh metaphor refers to the way in which Jesus would/did come to "give up his body for his Bride (the Church) that we might become 'one flesh' with him" (p. 9).

For another thing, there's the Eucharist, the sacrament of holy communion in which we (Catholic) faithful consume consecrated bread and wine that has become, in Jesus' words, "my body" and "my blood." In partaking of it, we ordinary humans become one flesh with Christ in a very materialistic way.

In both cases, there is mutual giving. We as a community become Christ's spiritual Bride, the Church, by choosing to give up our waywardness before God. Then, at the Mass, the elements that are to become the Blessed Host are brought forth as gifts, along with the worldly treasure we have sacrificed on the donation plates.


The "one flesh" metaphor for human marriage thus betokens all self-donation, all giving in love, all mutual solidarity, writ very large. This idea can be writ no larger than the notion that at the heart of God's deepest inner mystery there exists the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father, and hence the love which these, the First Two Persons of the Holy Trinity, never stop proceeding to share.

"The love they share is the Holy Spirit ... ," writes West (p. 8). So when the Apostle John says in the New Testament, in his First Letter, "He who does not love does not know God; for God is love," he accordingly could be referring to the entire Trinity, or to the Holy Spirit as the Third Person thereof; it's all the same thing.

"In the Pope's language," West notes, "God is an eternal Communion of Persons" (p. 7). The human body in its sexual capacity mirrors this communion. Not only is fleshly marriage a sacrament — a sign of the spiritual reality thus spoken of — the body itself is a sacrament (p. 5).

West shows that the "image of spousal love" is a major way in which Scripture, in its totality, conveys "God's love for humanity." From Genesis through Revelation, the marriage metaphor is never far from the Bible's ken: "The Bible begins in Genesis with the marriage of the first man and woman, and it ends in Revelation with another 'marriage' — the marriage of Christ and the Church" (p. 10).

Along the way, the prophet Hosea (2: 16-20) writes:

"And in that day, says the LORD, you will call me, 'My husband,' and no longer will you call me, 'My Ba'al.' For I will remove the names of the Ba'als from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more. And I will make for you a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground; and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety. And I will betroth you to me for ever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the LORD.

(Ba'al was the god — or the plurality of gods — worshiped by the Israelites' pagan neighbors, a running theme in the Old Testament being how the Lord, the One God, supplanted the polytheistic pagan worship of yore, as it was still practiced by the Israelites' neighbors in the Holy Land.)


So what West calls the "spousal analogy" (see p. 10) is absolutely central to Judeo-Christian understanding. That is a fact which I personally find unsettling; there are several reasons for my discomfiture. Before going into them, though, I also need to say that I find this spousal-analogy view of Judeo-Christian thought compelling, even thrilling.

It is harder to say why I'm thrilled to discover this "secret" of Christian faith which, I need to admit, has long been in plain sight, than to say why I'm discomfited. What does the spousal analogy matter to one such as myself? After all, I'm not married, and at age 58 I think it unlikely that I ever will be. My sex life has never been particularly active. Though I'm personally no choir boy, quite frankly I admit I've always been ambivalent about the sexual revolution. I don't really like the fact that what was once illicit sex has become the norm in our society.

All the same, I've never been inclined to excoriate other people for their "loose" behavior. In fact, I've tended to support the notion that sex between consenting adults is nobody else's business, no matter who are doing it and under what circumstances it is done. And I've labored under the notion that our failures of chastity don't really matter all that much in the eyes of God.

So as I now buy belatedly into a spousal-analogy worldview, I imagine the more prudish of the two sides of me taking charge. That, naturally, discomfits me ... but it also thrills me. To me, it feels like coming home.

It feels like the laissez-faire sexual mask that I put on in the 1960s is coming off, at long last.

It feels like I've turned to the back of the math text, where all the answers have been printed, and found that the answer that I gave first — before foolishly starting to think it over — is the right one after all.


So why does it discomfit me? Well, as I say, I'm no choir boy, and I worry I won't be as chaste as this new-old worldview of mine demands.

I worry that I'm making a liar (and possibly a fool) of myself — or, at least, of the ostensibly permissive self that I've been identifying with for several decades.

I worry that, if I buy into the spousal analogy, I won't be able to maintain my longstanding support for the rights of women and gays. (Well, my support of feminist goals is well-established; my support for gay rights is, shall we say, evolving.)

I worry that my incipient theology-of-the-body Catholicism will degenerate into a connect-the-dots, dogmatic thing which will, at some point, become an idol, a false god. I seriously doubt my own long-term ability not to let fresh insight turn into rancid intolerance.

Perhaps most of all, I worry that my developing theology-of-the-body, spousal-analogy outlook works against social solidarity, which I consider the prime directive of the faithful Christian.


As I'm trying to set forth in my Jesus Before Christianity blog, universal compassion and boundless love are the Christian's Job One. All humankind will sooner or later come to see that we're all branches of a single vine, Jesus taught. There are no specially blessed in-groups in God's eyes. So, do not ostracize; do not sow discord.

As soon as I start talking about the theology of the body, I'm automatically talking chastity ... and I can see people by the millions leaving the room. To which the ones who stay in their seats say, good riddance.

Is that any way not to ostracize? Is that any way to replace intolerance with love?

That's the kind of thing I worry about as I, yes, continue to be thrilled by John Paul II's theology of the body.