Of Wild Things and Women's Vocations

Earlier, in Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions, I mused over "the unique dignity and vocation of women," a phrase used by the conservative Catholic moralist George Weigel. The phrase came up in Weigel's Catholic Review article "How a nun built global TV empire," available online here under a different title. The column was mostly about the personal strengths of Mother Angelica, founder of an improbable TV empire, but it was also about how that woman's life story upbraids (in Weigel's words) "'Catholic feminism' as it is usually defined."

Not long after, I spoke up in The New Chastity in favor of "teaching our kids not just abstinence but good old-fashioned chastity." In so saying, I felt chastity, not heterosexuality, to be the prime directive from God, when it comes to sex — that gay partners-for-life can, once married, express their sexual orientation physically in ways that satisfy the mandate of chastity.

But in those prior posts, as well as in Color Me Confused ..., I also indicated that I'm subject to a great deal of personal confusion and inner turmoil about what I, as a serious Catholic Christian, ought to believe about sex and all the aspects of life that orbit around it.

Now I'd like to begin an informal series of posts to this blog in which I try to confront my confusion.


In this and coming posts I expect to take as a point of reference a book I found at Barnes & Noble yesterday, 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 author's earlier Theology of the Body Explained, a 500-page reference work on theology that is probably way over my head.

The topic before the house in West's book is John Paul II's elaborately worked out "theology of the body," wherein "the [late] Pope's vision of sexual love" will surely (in words the author borrows from Weigel; see p. 1) "compel a dramatic development of thinking about every major theme in the Creed" — the Nicene Creed, that is, whose list of shared religious beliefs ("I believe in One God, the Father ... ," etc.) we Catholics affirm at every Mass.

"Through the lens of marriage and the 'one flesh' union of spouses, the Pope says." writes West (p. 2), "we rediscover 'the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life'." It's not just about sex, in other words, not just about marriage, or procreation. It's fully about discovering the hidden nature of cosmic history.

"The union of the sexes," West continues (p. 3), "is a 'great mystery' that takes us ... into the heart of God's plan for the cosmos." West at this point refers the reader to the New Testament, to Ephesians 5:31-32: "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh' [writes the Apostle Paul]. This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church ... ."


I take that "mystery" to encompass the whole broad range of marital symbolism carried out through both biblical Testaments, Old and New. It all culminates in the Bible's final book, Revelation, in which the returned Christ is depicted as the "bridegroom" and the restored world as his "bride." I am, as it happens, already familiar with ways in which this symbolism can be taken to unify the entire Bible, almost as if it is a single work of literature with a single subtle theme.

For example, the late literary critic Northrop Frye wrote of this theme in Words with Power, in Chapter 6, "Second Variation: The Garden" (pp. 188-228). The chapter deals with sexual imagery in the Book of Genesis and its story of the Garden of Eden, imagery extended and worked out in the subsequent books of the Bible. Frye (who was a Christian but not a Catholic) says the overarching metaphor is one of hierogamy — sacred marriage — taking place between God and what God has created and saved: "The real New Testament hierogamy," writes Frye, "... is one in which the risen Christ is the Bridegroom and his redeemed people the Bride" (p. 224).

Frye insists that such "spiritual love expands from the erotic and does not run away from it. Here the union symbolized by the one flesh of the married state (Genesis 2:24) has expanded into the interpenetration of spirit" (p. 224). The use of the expression "expanded into" is intended to chastise traditional Bible interpreters who instead displace spiritual love from the erotic center Frye insists it has.


I'm not sure John Paul II and Northrop Frye agreed about the centrality of the erotic to the bridal and marital themes twining through the whole biblical "story" of creation and redemption. I expect to get into that subject in later posts; for now, the key thing is this: both of these thinkers would have it that you can't take the Bible and Christianity seriously and at the same time assume that what religion "says" about how we ought to conduct our sex lives is of, at most, marginal relevance.

I find that to be both good news and bad news.

It's good news in that it confirms something that resonates with me, deep, deep down: sexuality is real important. Sex is not a toy.

It's bad in that that's exactly what I'll tamely call the Wild Thing within me wants sex to be: a toy.

What a source of unending pleasure it is, for instance, to flirt with this pretty woman or that one, in the supermarket or a bookstore ... to imagine what it would be like to be with her ... maybe even to find out. Or not to find out, but to relish the notion that, as she might let me know with just a glance, she might be imagining me in just the same way.

Or is that a case of "lust in my heart"? For Jesus has told us: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-28).

I don't know if a bookstore flirtation constitutes adultery in my heart, for, quite frankly, I don't understand quite what Jesus is getting at by that turn of phrase. Or, let me put it this way: how is it possible not to look at a desirable woman without thoughts of, shall we say, a lustful nature? Are such thoughts adultery? How can they be when they pop up unbidden, before I even have time to censor them?

As I proceed with these posts, I hope to find out the answer to such riddles. But, riddles aside, I admit that I don't usually censor such thoughts, even after I've had time to. Instead, I toy with the entrancing idea that they might, just might, come to glorious fruition.

That is, I use such flirtations betokening mutual attraction as an instrument of pleasure, a jolt of erogenous caffeine to the sex centers of my brain.

If I then say sex ought not be a toy, that admission alone would seem to make a liar of me. For that's exactly what my flirtations (not to mention other transgressions) involve: treating sex as a toy.


But I also have an entirely different reason for questioning the Pope's teaching on sexuality: I resist the notion that women have a unique dignity and vocation.

It's not the dignity part that bothers me, nor the vocation part. It's the part which says that what imparts special dignity to women is their calling, distinct from men's own.

An apt portion (n. 2333) of the Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of "physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity" that keynote the two sexes. "Difference and complementarity": that sounds to gender relations what "separate but equal" once was to race relations.

"Difference and complementarity" sounds like a reason for men to put women on a pedestal: the "you complete me" kind of thing. "Unique dignity and vocation" sounds like a way to turn back the clock on feminist gains: "Stay home, honey. Give our babies what they most need in life, a mother's nurture."


And yet, and yet ... something deep down within me says a woman's dignity is unique.

Something at the core of my being says that the interpenetrating complementarity which can make of two persons "one flesh" is the name of the game, interpersonally, culturally and cosmically.

And there's this voice that won't shut up and keeps whispering in my ear, "The Pope is right about this stuff, and, Eric, you know it."

That voice is going to be the subject of plenty of posts yet to come. Stay tuned.

Standards of Conduct

An article on the front page of yesterday's Baltimore Sun is headlined "NBA suited for new image: Players are told to cross over from hip-hop to business attire." It says the nation's main pro basketball league will be insisting from now on that its players wear "no T-shirts, no baggy jeans, no retro jerseys, no hats, no chains and no athletic shoes at team or league events." Instead, they will be fined and possibly suspended if they don't wear "a sport coat and dress shoes" at games (when not suited up) and "business casual" attire at other professional functions.

To which I can only say, hooray!

I don't care that the new policy can be read as a slap at African-Americans, in that the now-banned styles of attire are supposedly out of "hip-hop culture." I don't think there's any racial bias here. I think there's a bias in favor of something we've all lost as Americans: standards of conduct.

Sadly, of late, we Americans — black, white, or any other hue — seem to have deep-sixed any vestige of our erstwhile standards of comportment. I'd like to know how it happened ... or, actually, why, since I think I can answer the how question myself.


When I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s, I have to admit, people of my age did quite a number on society's mostly unwritten standards of personal comportment. I remember lighting up cigarettes with my buddies in the backs of public buses, for instance. I would do anything to avoid wearing a coat and tie. It just didn't seem important to retain the standards of a bygone age.

Or, for that matter, any standards of conduct. It was my generation that coined the phrase, "Do your own thing." (Though I wouldn't be surprised if that shibboleth originated with black Americans; most "edgy" stuff did, and still does. Amen to that. I'm not against bending the rules; I'm against tossing the rule book out entirely.)

When I traveled with my parents on a pleasure trip to London as a 24-year-old in 1971, I refused to pack "dress-up" wear ... and had to knuckle under when the famous restaurant Simpson's on the Strand insisted I don a tie. I was in a huff about that, I can tell you.

Now I look back and say, how wrongheaded, how immature I was.


For I now recognize that standards of conduct, far from being foolish and arbitrary, unite us. They serve as a nexus for community solidarity. They are quintessentially democratic, in that they apply to the lowest and the highest of us equally. They say we care about the integrity of the social fabric: all of it, from hip-hop culture to the nerdiest of the nerds, from people who are just making it to the Donald Trumps of this world.

Baseball guru Bob Costas writes in Fair Ball, a book about what Major League Baseball is doing wrong to squander its legacy as America's pastime, that we have "few areas of common ground left in an increasingly splintered society" (p. 42). Baseball ought to be one of them again, he says; I say so should our regained common standards of behavior and comportment.

A few years back, I went with a friend, a season ticket holder, to a performance of the Baltimore Symphony. It was the first concert of the year, and as is customary the orchestra led off the season with the National Anthem. Everybody in the audience rose ... except, that is, a group of about four women in the front row opposite us across the stage-side balcony. They remained seated, and later on it became clear it was not due to age, infirmity, or physical handicap. Nor was it apparently a political statement. They just couldn't be bothered.

That kind of stuff ought to stop ... if only because we desperately need to cease being so "splintered" as a society.

And, yes, NBA players ought to be required to "dress nice" when they are in the public eye.

Levees of Isolation

Post-Katrina, all America is wallowing in a septic overflow of guilt, a toxic effluvium of recrimination for how we could have let a mere storm — a bad one, to be sure — expose in this land an entrenched poverty whose face, in the case of the City of New Orleans, is over two-thirds black.

David Remnick's New Yorker article "High Water: How Presidents and citizens react to disaster" (Oct. 3, 2005) puts an exclamation point on the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing. In 1965, Remnick reminds us, Hurricane Betsy breached New Orleans' levees, "causing much of the city to flood overnight, especially the neighborhoods of Bywater, Pontchartrain Park, and the largely black and impoverished Ninth Ward." President Lyndon B. Johnson, with just a little prodding by Lousiana Senator Russell Long, took the bull by the horns right away. The day after the hurricane struck, LBJ was on the ground in the Ninth Ward, yelling to frightened victims, "This is your President! I'm here to help you!" And the following day, back in the White House, Johnson sent New Orleans Mayor Victor Hugo Schiro "a sixteen-page telegram outlining plans for aid and the revival of New Orleans."

Would that our current President had been so prompt, so emphatic ... and so compassionate.


"Compassion is the basis of truth," Albert Nolan writes in Jesus before Christianity (p. 152). "The experience of compassion is the experience of suffering or feeling with someone. To suffer or feel with humanity, nature and God is to be in tune with the rhythms and impluses of life. This is also the experience of solidarity, solidarity with humanity, nature and God. It excludes every form of alienation and falsehood. It makes a person at one with reality and therefore true and authentic in himself."

Jesus derived his "authority" — his power over evil spirits, etc. — from his compassion, says Nolan. To be more accurate, Jesus spurned any and every external source of "authority." He derived his unerring convictions about the truth of faith in a compassionate God directly from his own compassion for and with those who suffer. "He did not make authority his truth, he made truth his authority" (p. 151). "The secret of Jesus' infallible insight and unshakable convictions was his unfailing experience of solidarity with God, which revealed itself as an experience of solidarity with humanity and nature. This made of him a uniquely liberated man, uniquely courageous, fearless, independent, hopeful and truthful" (p. 152).

Can we say the same for George W. Bush, post-Katrina?


For President Bush has not spoken promptly, emphatically, authoritatively, and compassionately about the invisible levees of isolation which cut off New Orleans' Ninth Ward and other poor, black areas from the better-to-do, not-so-black parts of the city.

As Remnick relates in his article, a disproportionate number of evacuees who are black believe they have nothing to go home to. A lot of them believe they will never go home. Many of these displaced folks are "not only furious—furious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for days—but inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act."

This sort of alienation has roots in history. After Betsy, in 1965, "in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the 'higher powers' of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was 'the silver-lining scenario'.”

It didn't help that "Betsy was followed within days by widespread rumors that Mayor Schiro had ordered floodwater pumped out of his own well-to-do subdivision, Lake Vista, and into the Ninth Ward. ... There were also stories that he had ordered the levees breached."

In those days, we had quite a race problem, quite a poverty problem, quite a trust problem.


We have a race problem still. We have a poverty problem still. But most of all, we have an alienation problem still. Huge numbers of New Orleans evacuees don't believe the rest of us want them in our world.

We have spiritual egg all over our supposedly Christian faces because Katrina revealed in us a lack of compassionate solidarity with all our neighbors. True, we scrambled to make it all better, giving a billion dollars and counting in private donations for hurricane relief, and promising untiold billions in federal aid. We deserve credit for that.

But tell the truth, child. Do we really expect our experience of solidarity with God, Jesus, and the disenfranchised and alienated sufferers in Katrina's wake to last through the next mid-term elections in 2006? Through the next Presidential election in 2008? Or will the invisible levees of isolation be rebuilt along with the physical levees that wall in the below-sea-level island of New Orleans?

Walls of Separation

In A Taxonomy of Evolutionary Views, over in my Beyond Darwin blog, I said that when it comes to evolutionary viewpoints, there are the Special Creationists, the Orthodox Darwinists, the Intelligent Design proponents, and also at least two types of Directionalists. The first group believes in a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, the second in an intrinsically directionless and undirected evolutionary process, the third in an internally directionless yet directed-from-above process, and the fourth in an evolution of living kinds that is inherently and intrinsically directional, favoring "non-zero-sum games" and "self-organized complexity."

Out of such intrinsic biases, say the Directionalists, evolution by natural selection nearly inevitably leads to intelligent creatures such as us. Some of them even say the intrinsic directionality toward intelligence and sentience suggests a God behind evolution.

I favor the Directionalist approach, for reasons I'd like to try to lay out in this post.

My takeoff point is the passage in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus lays out "the Greatest Commandment":

"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" [a Pharisee asked Jesus]. He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments." (Matthew 22:36-40, New American Bible)

The Greatest Commandment is actually two commandments. The first is about loving God unstintingly. The second, which Jesus says is "like it," is about loving your neighbor. In other words, Jesus is saying that a spiritual relationship with God is, on some deep level, no different than a proper earthly relationship with our fellow humans.


From that takeoff point I now move unblushingly to note that according to Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity, "Jesus extended one's neighbor to include one's enemies" (p. 75):

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I [Jesus] say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:43-45, NAB)

"But to you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." (Luke 6:27-28, NAB)

Jesus, says Nolan, "wished to include all people in this solidarity of love" (p. 75). It is admittedly a commandment which, per Nolan, is "almost unbearably paradoxical."


I would express it thus: there can be no "walls of separation" between us, if we want to follow Jesus all the way down the line.

So, which viewpoint on evolution most encourages us to love our neighbors and even our enemies? I would say it's the Directionalist one. To show why, however, will take me awhile.

Let me start by noting that the Special Creationist view is distinguished by raising the highest imaginable "wall of separation" between the various species of life on earth. These species are, according to a literal reading of the Genesis creation story, fashioned by God at the very outset of time, on the "sixth day." In this narrative, the creation by God of man, made uniquely "in his image" (Gen. 1:26-27), is set apart from the creation of other living kinds (Gen. 1:24-25), over which man is expressly given "dominion."

The lofty, God-founded "walls of separation" implied by this narrative are only marginally reduced in height by the Intelligent Design outlook. According to the IDers, there are steep thresholds of complexity to be traversed in the evolutionary pathways that lead to the higher animals and man — so steep that only a powerful intelligence beyond this natural world can manage to overcome them.

With such high "walls of separation" in God-created nature, it must be all right for humans to create high walls of separation among themselves, if necessary to preserve order and foster a general atmosphere of righteousness. That is a logical implication often drawn from both the Special Creationist and the Intelligent Design outlooks.


Contrast that with the Orthodox Darwinists. They say that natural processes can rather easily traverse any and all complexity thresholds en route to us ... which amounts to holding that the thresholds aren't all that steep, after all. In fact, there are a number of Darwinists who love to point out that our species is by no means the "crown of creation" we like to think we are. That's right; we're not so hot, say those followers of Darwin who note with evident enthusiasm that most of the animals on the face of the earth are not even mammals: they're insects.

In fact, I'd say that the most atheistic of Darwinists are downright allergic to walls of separation. Perhaps this is what motivates Harvard psychology professor, Darwinist, and outspoken atheist Steven Pinker to say these words in a recent TIME Magazine article, Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Four experts with very different views weigh in on the underlying question: "In practice, religion has given us stonings, inquisitions and 9/11."

Pinker is as much as saying that religion is historically bad because it erects towering walls of separation between us as human beings — thus, "stonings, inquisitions and 9/11" — while evolutionary science is good because it quintessentially fosters "a commitment to treat others as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe."


Only trouble is, the atheistic science which Pinker recommends hasn't brought about that idyllic sort of tolerance, community, and brotherhood Pinker desires.

In fact, I'd say atheistic science has given people who are prone to erecting high walls of separation an excuse to build them even higher!

For that's what religious fundamentalists do (see Wherefore Religious Fundamentalism? for more on that). Fundamentalists are believers who proudly consider themselves "separate unto Christ" — even to the extent of walling themselves off from other believers who have an even slightly different theological outlook.

Fundamentalists are the elect who, in some interpretations of biblical end-times prophecies, will be "raptured" up into heaven before the final war against the Antichrist takes place here on earth, and God's wrathful judgment of the wicked puts a final wall between sinners and believers.

Fundamentalists are the religious right who rail against the "godless" United Nations and hate anything which suggests that this country ought to trade off any of its precious sovereignty in favor of global arrangements, treaties, and institutions.

Fundamentalists are the folks who say that science, done Pinker-style à la Darwin, is a tool of Satan.


Such people don't want to lower their guards or raze their walls of separation ... not unless all the people outside the walls can be converted to being just like them in thought, word, and deed.

In fact, walls of separation are fundamental to their worldviews. Living species, after all, are so separate from other species that only God can bridge their gaps. Humans are so separate from other life forms that only we are in God's "image" and only we can claim "dominion" over the others. And, extending th eanalogy, other groups of humans are so separate in their belief systems that, failing conversions to our way of belief, the only alternatives are either radical separatism or (per Pinker) "stonings, inquisitions and 9/11."

Can Orthodox Darwinism, all by itself, say anything to such believers who so love their walls of separation?


Actually, yes. Denis Edwards' The God of Evolution: A Trinitarian Theology presents an interpretation of Christian belief in the light of Darwinian evolution theory which is entirely consistent with lowered walls of separation. (See Relationalism and Caritas in my Beyond Darwin blog for more on this book.)

God is, according to traditional Christian theology, actually three persons in one being, Edwards notes. The Holy Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three persons are said to "abide with" one another eternally. The three divine persons are, shall we say, "relatants" whose relationship is said to be one of pure, unadulterated love.

When the divine godhead or Holy Trinity "empties itself" (to use a well-known theological expression alluded to by Edwards) and "makes room" for the physical universe to appear and evolve, the principle of "abiding with in love" carries over to material reality. Edwards theologically unpacks that notion in such a way as to make clear that he's on the side of the wall-tearer-downers. He takes with utmost seriousness Jesus' extension of the "love your neighbor" commandment to apply universally to all humankind.


But Edwards treats of Orthodox Darwinism only. He stops short of taking seriously the evolutionary viewpoint which I'm calling Directionalism. He doesn't take note of, for instance, the science of Stuart Kauffman, as presented in At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Kauffman propounds a concept, "self-organization" — natural selection's "handmaiden," he calls it — which biases evolution toward producing greater and greater complexity. There will accordingly be new, emergent instances of "order for free" that piggyback upon one another in a multi-tiered, evolving arrangement that can produce, eventually, creatures for whom the word "love" has far richer overtones than it ever could have at earlier, lower levels of biological organization.

Nor does Edwards mention the viewpoint of Robert Wright, in his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, that evolution by natural selection favors the playing of "non-zero-sum games" — with the result of a similar bias or directionality toward ever-increasing cooperation among (eventually) intelligent, sentient creatures, and even toward "enduring global concord" (p. 332). Of course, Edwards has a pretty good excuse here: his book came out before Wright's.


Directional evolution is intrinsically relational, I'd say. (Again, see Relationalism and Caritas in my Beyond Darwin blog.) You can't build an aspect of directionality into Darwinian evolution by natural selection without incorporating ideas about something extra-special emerging from the "good" relationships that exist among entities.

Darwinian natural selection chooses between entities. Thus does it decide whether individuals (or species, or genes) will live long and prosper. Thus does it determine which will die off and leave no posterity. It's as simple, and as blind, as that.

But as soon as you add to those "bad" — or at best neutral — entirely zero-sum games the "good," non-zero-sum interactions that can bias evolution "upward," you begin to underwrite two of the primary three Christian virtues: hope and love.

As soon as you amplify that upward, hopeful aspect by noting, with Edwards, that God's very being is loving and relational, you do even more to show that evolution need not contradict your heartfelt faith ... unless your faith happens to be of the ultra-high-walls-of-separation type. In this way, evolution can bolster the third primary virtue listed by St. Paul, faith.

This is so, that is, as long as you don't treat your faith as an excuse for building ever higher walls of separation!