I know I'm moving and not supposed to be doing another post for a couple of weeks (don't tell Connie) but the recent news about Gene Robinson's being excluded from Lambeth next year requires some comment (and I'm far from being the first).
Let's see: a gay bishop equals an illegally consecrated bishop equals (maybe) an archbishop associated with human rights violations equals.....
This grouping of the excluded simply supports what I've said before: we are seeing the church associate itself with the criminalization of gay identity. That's the slippery slope.
The Presiding Bishop has been speaking out on all the right issues, in my opinion: the war, immigration, etc. I am delighted that she is going public on social justice matters that we care about. But her initial response to Williams--let's not get excited--is simply institutional cowardice.
When you are in a bad marriage--TEC and the Anglican Communion, for example--and you have had counseling and have promised to do better and STILL are unfaithful to one another, continue to violate commitments, it is time for a separation. This latest outrage, even if in the end it gets worked out (ok for Gene to come as something else--maybe a goat?), is something KJS and the church needs to reject. Either Gene goes as himself or none of us goes.
Ok, I haven't been invited either, but that's because I'm a deacon. We never get invited to go anywhere. Well, except to leave town. Westward, ho!
Friday, May 25, 2007
Monday, May 21, 2007
Talking about the Body, 4
Augustine, the fourth-century bishop, enjoyed sleeping with women. He liked sex. His monogamous relationship with a woman who bore his child was not a marriage. The arrangement between the two of them was sexual. Their one child was probably a mistake; clearly, Augustine and his concubine used birth control. He put aside his concubine, who became a voluntary widow, so that he might marry properly and enter the governing class. The girl chosen for him by his mother, Monica, was Catholic and she, his mother, hoped Augustine might himself become a baptized Catholic as a result of the union.
Taking up with a mistress after his concubine departed, Augustine realized that he had a compulsive need for sex, the obvious basis for any further relationships with women, even a wife. He chose not to marry, becoming instead ordained to the priesthood.
The mystical joy of communion with the spirit had intervened: "limbs asking to receive the body's embrace" were disturbingly similar to the touch of God. Christ's embrace of the soul was superior to even Catholic marriage: the direct encounter with God's Wisdom in "an utterly untroubled gaze, a most clean embrace; to see and to cling to Her naked, with no veil of bodily sensation in between."
The discipline of continence allowed him to embrace Christ more fully: "O, my late joy!"
But Augustine did not take up an ascetic life alone. His male friends joined him in "a holy plan of life, . . . truly chaste because [of the] untarnished joining" of like souls. In Hippo, five years later (391) Augustine founded a little monastic community that became for him serenity at the center of his hectic episcopal life.
What troubled Augustine was the urge to act out sexually (the urge not in itself a sin), and he felt it deeply. Even married couples had to fight against this urge. In the act of marital intercourse, even for the production of children, the body enacts Adam's fall. Augustine taught that we all feel sexual shame. Baptism and incorporation into the church freed men and women from the shame of Adam--and that only at the end of time. This is the power of what has come to be known as "original sin," which, according to Augustine, is transmitted to children at conception.
For Augustine, clearly, the way out of the sexual trap--the body created to embrace the material, the requirement that the body be loved and cherished, as Augustine believed--was not easy. He regretted having engaged in sexual intercourse because, having done so, he knew what he was relinquishing: sadness attends the act, always, because of its coming between the human and God.
How does this brief review of Augustine's struggle with sexuality relate to today's disputes over homosexuality and the church (and, as I argue, women in the church)? Male society, for Augustine, was the only safe society allowed to the Christian who wished to know God outside of the pleasures of the flesh. With Augustine the church learns shame and her children are conceived in shame. Parents are taught the the act of sexual intercourse is in itself a submission to concupiscence, the urge to pleasure. When males in the church engage in sexual acts, they do so only for pleasure and they violate the last refuge of the celibate male: the company of other celibate males. If the purity of the church cannot be upheld in the company of men, then its society as a mirror of God's purity is doomed. Bad enough that women have entered the sacred garden of male continence and discourse, tempting them with conpupiscence; for the male to do the same, to imitate the female, is intolerable.
Augustine was not gay. He loved the flesh of women. He retreated to the company of celibate men to protect himself and to remain open to the embrace of Christ. He subjugated the flesh to his and God's will. And expected others to do the same, insofar as they were able. The modern conservative objection to the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church is one with Augustine's rejection of the embrace of flesh: God's will is that the body be held in purity for the embrace of Christ. The male body is the vessel of that purity. Once again, the model is the body of Christ, the male whose penis is forever that of an infant.
Taking up with a mistress after his concubine departed, Augustine realized that he had a compulsive need for sex, the obvious basis for any further relationships with women, even a wife. He chose not to marry, becoming instead ordained to the priesthood.
The mystical joy of communion with the spirit had intervened: "limbs asking to receive the body's embrace" were disturbingly similar to the touch of God. Christ's embrace of the soul was superior to even Catholic marriage: the direct encounter with God's Wisdom in "an utterly untroubled gaze, a most clean embrace; to see and to cling to Her naked, with no veil of bodily sensation in between."
The discipline of continence allowed him to embrace Christ more fully: "O, my late joy!"
But Augustine did not take up an ascetic life alone. His male friends joined him in "a holy plan of life, . . . truly chaste because [of the] untarnished joining" of like souls. In Hippo, five years later (391) Augustine founded a little monastic community that became for him serenity at the center of his hectic episcopal life.
What troubled Augustine was the urge to act out sexually (the urge not in itself a sin), and he felt it deeply. Even married couples had to fight against this urge. In the act of marital intercourse, even for the production of children, the body enacts Adam's fall. Augustine taught that we all feel sexual shame. Baptism and incorporation into the church freed men and women from the shame of Adam--and that only at the end of time. This is the power of what has come to be known as "original sin," which, according to Augustine, is transmitted to children at conception.
For Augustine, clearly, the way out of the sexual trap--the body created to embrace the material, the requirement that the body be loved and cherished, as Augustine believed--was not easy. He regretted having engaged in sexual intercourse because, having done so, he knew what he was relinquishing: sadness attends the act, always, because of its coming between the human and God.
How does this brief review of Augustine's struggle with sexuality relate to today's disputes over homosexuality and the church (and, as I argue, women in the church)? Male society, for Augustine, was the only safe society allowed to the Christian who wished to know God outside of the pleasures of the flesh. With Augustine the church learns shame and her children are conceived in shame. Parents are taught the the act of sexual intercourse is in itself a submission to concupiscence, the urge to pleasure. When males in the church engage in sexual acts, they do so only for pleasure and they violate the last refuge of the celibate male: the company of other celibate males. If the purity of the church cannot be upheld in the company of men, then its society as a mirror of God's purity is doomed. Bad enough that women have entered the sacred garden of male continence and discourse, tempting them with conpupiscence; for the male to do the same, to imitate the female, is intolerable.
Augustine was not gay. He loved the flesh of women. He retreated to the company of celibate men to protect himself and to remain open to the embrace of Christ. He subjugated the flesh to his and God's will. And expected others to do the same, insofar as they were able. The modern conservative objection to the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church is one with Augustine's rejection of the embrace of flesh: God's will is that the body be held in purity for the embrace of Christ. The male body is the vessel of that purity. Once again, the model is the body of Christ, the male whose penis is forever that of an infant.
Monday, May 14, 2007
The Church of St. Jamestown
I had planned to continue my reflections on the body today, but the Episcopal Church advertisement in the Saturday New York Times, on the OpEd page, derailed that intention. The ad, which commemorates the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, represents in almost every respect the problem with the Episcopal Church today.
The ad is wordy, dense, backward-looking.
The headline, "Marking a Milestone, Moving Forward," is about as dull and institutional as a headline can be.
The content begins with history, buildings, and, finally, in paragraph 7, The Boook of Common Prayer.
It appears that the people in the Episcopal Church have differing points of view but it isn't clear about what.
And then there is a reiteration of our English heritage as a church (the word English outnumbers the word Jesus three to one), as if that is a big selling point.
The ad says we struggle over how to interpret faith for today, how to maintain tradition, how to disagree. Some people leave us, some come back. But: TO WHAT? WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?
We are moving forward in mission all over the world--a world we are committed to transforming to one of justice, peace, wholeness, holy living (as Jesus taught). We get around to that message in paragraph twelve. Is that the core of our belief?
It is apparent in a couple of other references that the church has been in the right place at the right time (for gays and lesbians, for example), but the overwhelming impression created by this unfortunate ad is that the Episcopal Church is the First Church of St. Jamestown: stuck in the past, unaware of its own mission and message for the world of today, inordinately proud of its buildings (especially the big ones), and unable to articulate a vision for the future that might mean something in the twenty-first century. Historically, Jamestown is significant for this country and the church, but it was also a slave-owning settlement and the first step toward the extermination of native culture. It is not the shining icon of the church of today.
The ad also reinforces the old image of the Episcopal Church as the conservative party (the people with money and power) at prayer. Its very placement on the OpEd page of the Times speaks of power, the establishment, and immobility. It is addressed pre-eminently to the demographic that now rules the church, people of my age (over 50--I'm 63). No one under forty will "get" it or even see it.
The ad invites the reader (assuming he/she gets through all of the type to the bottom of the ad) to "come and grow" and offers a website link to both the main church website and a come and grow site. Click on www.comeandgrow.org and tell me you're excited about the mission and message of the church. Tell me what it is. Tell me what Episcopalians believe and why anyone should move a muscle to come into one of our churches.
A pdf of this ad is available on the church's website, presumably for parishes to download and perhaps run in local media. I think it's a very bad idea. Anyway, you can read it at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/newYorkTimes_opAd.pdf
The Episcopal Church, and indeed all of the mainline churches, are terrible at marketing themselves. (Please see http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com --the blog to "frustrate, educate, and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ"--for some helpful information on how to do what the Episcopal Church, as this ad definitively establishes, does not know how to do.)
Come and grow? I don't think so. Sit there and stagnate is more like it.
Here's an alternative idea: Go into the world and give people in despair the Good News. Tell them what that Good News is and why they should care. Give them some hope. And maybe show some faces of real people.
They can get the history and the architectural details later.
The ad is wordy, dense, backward-looking.
The headline, "Marking a Milestone, Moving Forward," is about as dull and institutional as a headline can be.
The content begins with history, buildings, and, finally, in paragraph 7, The Boook of Common Prayer.
It appears that the people in the Episcopal Church have differing points of view but it isn't clear about what.
And then there is a reiteration of our English heritage as a church (the word English outnumbers the word Jesus three to one), as if that is a big selling point.
The ad says we struggle over how to interpret faith for today, how to maintain tradition, how to disagree. Some people leave us, some come back. But: TO WHAT? WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?
We are moving forward in mission all over the world--a world we are committed to transforming to one of justice, peace, wholeness, holy living (as Jesus taught). We get around to that message in paragraph twelve. Is that the core of our belief?
It is apparent in a couple of other references that the church has been in the right place at the right time (for gays and lesbians, for example), but the overwhelming impression created by this unfortunate ad is that the Episcopal Church is the First Church of St. Jamestown: stuck in the past, unaware of its own mission and message for the world of today, inordinately proud of its buildings (especially the big ones), and unable to articulate a vision for the future that might mean something in the twenty-first century. Historically, Jamestown is significant for this country and the church, but it was also a slave-owning settlement and the first step toward the extermination of native culture. It is not the shining icon of the church of today.
The ad also reinforces the old image of the Episcopal Church as the conservative party (the people with money and power) at prayer. Its very placement on the OpEd page of the Times speaks of power, the establishment, and immobility. It is addressed pre-eminently to the demographic that now rules the church, people of my age (over 50--I'm 63). No one under forty will "get" it or even see it.
The ad invites the reader (assuming he/she gets through all of the type to the bottom of the ad) to "come and grow" and offers a website link to both the main church website and a come and grow site. Click on www.comeandgrow.org and tell me you're excited about the mission and message of the church. Tell me what it is. Tell me what Episcopalians believe and why anyone should move a muscle to come into one of our churches.
A pdf of this ad is available on the church's website, presumably for parishes to download and perhaps run in local media. I think it's a very bad idea. Anyway, you can read it at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/newYorkTimes_opAd.pdf
The Episcopal Church, and indeed all of the mainline churches, are terrible at marketing themselves. (Please see http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com --the blog to "frustrate, educate, and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ"--for some helpful information on how to do what the Episcopal Church, as this ad definitively establishes, does not know how to do.)
Come and grow? I don't think so. Sit there and stagnate is more like it.
Here's an alternative idea: Go into the world and give people in despair the Good News. Tell them what that Good News is and why they should care. Give them some hope. And maybe show some faces of real people.
They can get the history and the architectural details later.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Talking about the Body, 3
Our difficulty with the body of Jesus--how he could have been both human and God--translated to the same issue for our own bodies: how we can have in us an eternal soul and yet live in a material realm. If the body misbehaves, then the soul is soiled. As children of the sexual act, we are inevitably defiled. We are born of women. In part, the problem of Jesus' body is solved by making Mary innocent of sexual defilement: she is perpetually virgin and is not impregnated by a human. Jesus is born free of sin: he has the same human body, which in itself is a source of sin, but he is sinless because of his origin in spirit not in flesh.
Our bodies encase our souls, which through Jesus the Christ may be released into eternal bliss--BUT, wonder of wonders, a bliss enjoyed nonetheless in a body. The resurrected Jesus is in a body too but now one that mirrors for us what we can become if we live in him and follow his way. Jesus was human but not sexual. (The Renaissance paintings that show witnesses pointing to the infant's genitals are not acknowledging his sexuality but his human[male]ness.) He is sinless in part because he does not act sexually. Like mother like son.
The early church endorsed this perspective in suggesting that the body was superfluous; the sooner we get out of it, the better. On his way to a welcome martyrdom, Ignatius writes: "Let me be fodder for wild beasts--that is how I can get to God. . . .I shall be a real disciple of Jesus Christ when the world sees my body no more. . . .It is a fine thing to cut oneself off from the lusts that are in the world, for 'every passion of the flesh wages war against the Spirit,' and 'neither fornicators nor the effeminate nor homosexuals will inherit the Kingdom of God.' . . . Therefore we should guard the flesh as God's temple. For just as you were called in the flesh, you will come in the flesh."
Note that homosexuals and the effeminate are equally damned for their fleshly acts along with fornicators of all sorts. They sin by their actions, by their behaviors, by their very embodiment. This perspective is relevant to the present dispute in the church over the role of gays. It is ok for someone to be gay so long as he/she does not engage in sex with others who are gay. The celibate gay is acceptible, just as the man who might want to engage in sex outside of marriage with a woman is acceptible so long as he doesn't act on his desire. A man who acts and looks effeminate is also violating the order of things and causes others to lose control.
The early church urged celibacy on everyone, male and female, married and unmarried, in order to purify the soul. Tertullian described the body as a "unified organism." As Peter Brown writes in his book, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Tertullian's "insistence on the control of the body was so rigorous precisely because he believed that it was directly through the body and its sensations that the soul was tuned to the high pitch required for it to vibrate to the Spirit of God. The soul was a subtle, invisible, but concrete 'body,' 'set in the mould' of the outer body." Temptation in the form of woman was the biggest problem: baptism did nothing to alter the fact of woman's seductiveness. As with present-day Islam, women were to be veiled to reduce the danger of their inherent seductiveness. (Hence, the problem with male effeminacy.)
Christ, in fact, came to earth, according to Clement, "to deliver us from error and from this use of the generative organs. . . . They say that the Saviour himself said: 'I come to undo the works of women,' meaning by this 'female,' sexual desire, and by 'work,' birth and the corruption of death."
The virginal will have less trouble at the last days than the sexually active; those who have been active and then renounce sexual acts can also be saved. Their souls may be purified and worthy of the new body of the society of God.
In our religion, modern Christianity, we have taken this to mean that we shall have eternal life, meet our friends, look the way we now look, etc. We don't have to renounce sexual acts of pleasure (it was rare for early Christians to have sex for pleasure; sex was for procreation and it was therefore likely that a couple with three children may have had intercourse precisely three times), but we do have to be washed clean in baptism and repent of our sins, the fleshly acts, for the most part, that are deeply feared in the faith. (This is the essential difference between the conservative and the liberal churches, between a barrier to full membership rooted in repentence and purity and the open door of full inclusion--although the desire of a convicted pedophile to be a member of a congregation has troubled the faithful on both sides.)
Gays, of course, are in permanent danger because for them to repent requires complete renunciation (celibacy), as it did for heterosexuals in the early church. The "conservatives" of today--Martin Minns and Peter Akinola, for example--partake of that early mentality that demands renunciation of the flesh as a matter of sexual purity and practice, except in the performance of one's duty as a married man and woman. The acts of the flesh, all of them, endanger the immortal soul. And only a man ordained according to the Catholic faith can protect us. (The necessity that the priest/bishop be pure is, of course, an ancient heresy.)
To return for a moment to Ignatius: "The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world. . . . The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures; so too the world hates Christians, even though it suffers no wrong as their hands, because they range themselves against its pleasures. . . . The soul, which is immortal, is housed in a mortal dwelling; while Christians are settled among corruptible things, to wait for the incorruptibility that will be theirs in heaven."
Next time, I will talk about Augustine, as one must in thinking about this subject. A look ahead: Augustine writes in Book 6 of the Confessions: "I was bound by this need of the flesh, and dragged with me the chain of its poisonous delight, fearing to be set free."
Our bodies encase our souls, which through Jesus the Christ may be released into eternal bliss--BUT, wonder of wonders, a bliss enjoyed nonetheless in a body. The resurrected Jesus is in a body too but now one that mirrors for us what we can become if we live in him and follow his way. Jesus was human but not sexual. (The Renaissance paintings that show witnesses pointing to the infant's genitals are not acknowledging his sexuality but his human[male]ness.) He is sinless in part because he does not act sexually. Like mother like son.
The early church endorsed this perspective in suggesting that the body was superfluous; the sooner we get out of it, the better. On his way to a welcome martyrdom, Ignatius writes: "Let me be fodder for wild beasts--that is how I can get to God. . . .I shall be a real disciple of Jesus Christ when the world sees my body no more. . . .It is a fine thing to cut oneself off from the lusts that are in the world, for 'every passion of the flesh wages war against the Spirit,' and 'neither fornicators nor the effeminate nor homosexuals will inherit the Kingdom of God.' . . . Therefore we should guard the flesh as God's temple. For just as you were called in the flesh, you will come in the flesh."
Note that homosexuals and the effeminate are equally damned for their fleshly acts along with fornicators of all sorts. They sin by their actions, by their behaviors, by their very embodiment. This perspective is relevant to the present dispute in the church over the role of gays. It is ok for someone to be gay so long as he/she does not engage in sex with others who are gay. The celibate gay is acceptible, just as the man who might want to engage in sex outside of marriage with a woman is acceptible so long as he doesn't act on his desire. A man who acts and looks effeminate is also violating the order of things and causes others to lose control.
The early church urged celibacy on everyone, male and female, married and unmarried, in order to purify the soul. Tertullian described the body as a "unified organism." As Peter Brown writes in his book, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Tertullian's "insistence on the control of the body was so rigorous precisely because he believed that it was directly through the body and its sensations that the soul was tuned to the high pitch required for it to vibrate to the Spirit of God. The soul was a subtle, invisible, but concrete 'body,' 'set in the mould' of the outer body." Temptation in the form of woman was the biggest problem: baptism did nothing to alter the fact of woman's seductiveness. As with present-day Islam, women were to be veiled to reduce the danger of their inherent seductiveness. (Hence, the problem with male effeminacy.)
Christ, in fact, came to earth, according to Clement, "to deliver us from error and from this use of the generative organs. . . . They say that the Saviour himself said: 'I come to undo the works of women,' meaning by this 'female,' sexual desire, and by 'work,' birth and the corruption of death."
The virginal will have less trouble at the last days than the sexually active; those who have been active and then renounce sexual acts can also be saved. Their souls may be purified and worthy of the new body of the society of God.
In our religion, modern Christianity, we have taken this to mean that we shall have eternal life, meet our friends, look the way we now look, etc. We don't have to renounce sexual acts of pleasure (it was rare for early Christians to have sex for pleasure; sex was for procreation and it was therefore likely that a couple with three children may have had intercourse precisely three times), but we do have to be washed clean in baptism and repent of our sins, the fleshly acts, for the most part, that are deeply feared in the faith. (This is the essential difference between the conservative and the liberal churches, between a barrier to full membership rooted in repentence and purity and the open door of full inclusion--although the desire of a convicted pedophile to be a member of a congregation has troubled the faithful on both sides.)
Gays, of course, are in permanent danger because for them to repent requires complete renunciation (celibacy), as it did for heterosexuals in the early church. The "conservatives" of today--Martin Minns and Peter Akinola, for example--partake of that early mentality that demands renunciation of the flesh as a matter of sexual purity and practice, except in the performance of one's duty as a married man and woman. The acts of the flesh, all of them, endanger the immortal soul. And only a man ordained according to the Catholic faith can protect us. (The necessity that the priest/bishop be pure is, of course, an ancient heresy.)
To return for a moment to Ignatius: "The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world. . . . The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures; so too the world hates Christians, even though it suffers no wrong as their hands, because they range themselves against its pleasures. . . . The soul, which is immortal, is housed in a mortal dwelling; while Christians are settled among corruptible things, to wait for the incorruptibility that will be theirs in heaven."
Next time, I will talk about Augustine, as one must in thinking about this subject. A look ahead: Augustine writes in Book 6 of the Confessions: "I was bound by this need of the flesh, and dragged with me the chain of its poisonous delight, fearing to be set free."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)