The Anchoress My brother S
In the middle ages an Anchoress was a woman who lived in a small, sealed room inside a church;she would have visual access to the Sanctuary and to Holy Communion. Usually there was also a small side window at which she could converse with visitors, receive foods, etc. As a shy sort of person who prefers to hang in the background, the persona suits.
Consider this my window. Instead of passing me food, comments will do! I ask only that you be civil, because I do believe that decent people can disagree and still be decent people.
All posts are copyrighted, 2007 The Anchoress. Blog administrator is not responsible for content of comments. Note: All emails are considered fair game for publication, unless you specifically tell me not to quote you or use your name, in which case I am happy to comply.
Since then, ACT UP - France has .
The president of Act Up Paris, Jerome Martin - who participated in Sunday s demonstration - told AFP by telephone
So, ACT-UP did not feel that coming into a church with a banner and performing a mock wedding was aggressive.
I think one of evil s greatest triumph s has been to take people s understanding of sex outside of the realm of the spirit and keep it solidly in the camp of the physical.
to reduce it to a few soundbites of personal empowerment, some adolescent giggles and a few sharp grunts.
To mischaracterise sex as dirty was a failing of the Christian church. In doing so it opened itself up for the sort of mindless, reactionary silliness we have witnessed since the sexual revolution decided that sex was not dirty but good clean fun.
I have lost a beloved brother because of it. He thought he was having a good time, some harmless fun. He instead was killing himself, devaluing and ultimately destroying himself and his essence as a created Creature who had been loved into being.
And yes, I m angry about it. I miss him every day. He bought into the program, and pursued the empty, meaningless and fleeting pleasures that are dangled before the eyes of young gay men as something fine and ecstatic to chase and gain.
And it killed him.
Evil wants to keep us mindless and distracted. Our society has been distracted for 40 years by the non-stop promotion of sex, and by the over-emphasis on the big O.
And many smart, beautiful-but-immature-and-reckless people have died for that O. In fact, in the past 40 years - since the birth of the sexual revolution - many more have died for the Orgasm than have died for the faith.
I did not intend to write all of this.
But, I miss my brother, S. He is gone 18 months and the pain does not go away. We are not a noble family because we lost our beloved S to AIDS.
And he was not noble because he died of AIDS. He was noble because he was as generous and forgiving and loving and sincerely warm a human being as I ve ever known. The KINDEST guy I have ever known.
And he is gone to us, now.
Grace did come, finally, stunningly, very late in the ballgame. It was a sort of .
But I am so grateful that it finally came.
UPDATE: The pope - simply doing his job - has declared that . For some reason the press is acting like this is something no one has ever said before.
Meanwhile, Bob Geldof is , because even though Abstinence education works and condoms don t blah, blah, blah, the pope is a bad guy, etc, etc.
About six weeks or so ago, I wrote that a family member, my sister s husband whom I ve known my entire life, had been diagnosed with cancer.
We re having one of those rather quick situations.
Today, this good man - never sick a day in his life - has decided he is done. He s asked for treatment to end and hospice to begin. This time it will be in-home.
Again we walk this road. It will be a faster one, I think, than my brother S s. Please pray for my sister and her kids, who are - thankfully - all grown up and settled.
I wrote for my brother, back then. It seems to pretty much sum it up, now, as well.
O God, You Are the Wayside Resting Place
Likewise, the spirit also comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
Romans 8:26
Inexpressible groanings seem to be the stuff of my life these days .
My groans mingle with tears at the bedside of my brother as he slowly, slowly retreats into himself in these last days.
I watch my brother, now in hospice as we have reached that point, and I realize how small our lives are, and how a prolonged death makes them ever smaller.
A few months ago it became clear that S could no longer drive, and so the car became meaningless to him, and the world began to shrink. Then he couldn t go out, and so his clothes were irrelevant, and the world became four rooms and a bath. Then he could no longer cook and his staggeringly well-equipped kitchen became so-much excess.
(When one is only eating soup or soft-boiled eggs, a simple hotplate will do; when you re mostly drinking Ensure, all you need is a cooler.)
And meds. Bottles and bottles of meds.
You need them, and they begin to take over. The world is smaller, but the nightstands are not large enough. The object d arts are put away and replaced with bottles of multi-colored pills, retractable needles with pre-measured doses, large bottles of pasty yellow stuff that is supposedly liquid the world becomes your bedroom and your bathroom, your tv and your meds.
You pop opium-based painkillers while watching Emeril cook with your Kitchen Aid mixer and wonder how he got into your stuff. Then, when your brother hurts his back lifting you because you are literally too weak to move, your world shrinks again, until it is only your bedroom, and then only your bed. Emeril is silent.
The burners are turned low. The whole large world, which you had launched yourself into recklessly, with abandon, the world you had yourself enlarged with your art and your playfulness and your noise has become compressed and concentrated and hushed.
This is not merely a matter of space and proportion, of physical layout.
When you are admitted to hospice, you land in an open, airy, colorful room with a lovely view of the autumn leaves, and the heartening, kind and cheerful chatter of nurses and nuns, but you are still inward and small. Your physical space has expanded but your body and mind have moved further away. My brother s world now is reduced to an hourly hit of pain meds and an occasional lucid moment.
I watch him move to a fetal position, and wonder if the process of dying is taking him not only inward but backward. He converses, but his conversations are interior. His lips move but he says nothing.
His agitation is soothed by the merest touch. He opens his eyes and announces he is going. I ask him where he is going and he replies that he is going to Florida.
I bid him a safe journey and Godspeed, and he closes his eyes and fades back out.
But he is still here, lingering. S has his things about him, his own quilts and pictures and tshochkes, and he is suspended between two worlds, half in and half out of heaven.
I lean in and tell him he s got his boarding pass and is cleared for take-off whenever he s ready to leave and he stays, and he groans and we groan and pray. Evening comes and morning follows. The next day.
The support is heartening. The family is rallying, even the cousins are coming to help, to take a shift, to give S a manicure or a back rub or a flower. But with all of that, I think to myself so often, where would we be without prayer?
And I thank God for those inexpressible groans which have the effect of enlarging our view, and giving our spirits some room to breath, of giving our souls some respose. As the world becomes the road to and from hospice and the room and the bed, prayer expands our breath, keeps us from suffocating. It brings balance.
I praise you for you are my God. I thank you, for you have heard my plea.
I now walk with you
And each step is illuminated, made new, for
You are the Path of Light.
You are the Wayside Resting Place.
You are the Glory of the City of God.
In your greatness and your compassion have mercy on me in my smallness, and my humanity.
Bless me as I bless your Holy Name, and keep me in your sight as I rest a while in you. Amen.
On this day, last year, - still thinking of Advent and what it means, but under very different circumstances.
It is amazing how fast time goes by, how our days pass almost in a blur unless we stop to take stock. And it s also amazing how much my mutton-chopped, exceedingly loud 16 year old has taught me. And how much my brother is teaching me, still.
Some of my Evangelical friends have wondered to me, via email, what the purpose is, of the Liturgical Year - why we Catholics, and others, put so much stock in ritualistic sorts of things, like Advent, and its trappings - the purple vestments, the Advent wreaths and such. Jesus came once for all, he doesn t keep coming, one lady wrote to me - Christmas is a wonderful remembrance, but why do you need a whole Advent season?
I can only answer by saying look at what I wrote last year, and what I have written this year Christ is constant, but our lives are not.
We can get so caught up in things, in working, paying bills, making deadlines, tending to our families. I ll stipulate that perhaps I am a particularly needy sort of person, but I have a strong feeling that - knowing myself pretty well - if I had not the Advent season, and all the church s wonderful tools for teaching, prayer and worship during this time, I might not have been able to stop, at some point in each day, to consider what Christmas really means, to think long and hard, or slumbery/prayerful about what exactly has transpired, here. Because it is monumental, this Coming - it is the Coming of Love in a way never before (or since) encountered.
And yes, it happened. But if God is outside of Time, and we know He is, then it is happening right now. And when I pray, each day, come, Lord Jesus I pray for that Coming of Love, I pray for that moment when heaven reached down in song and succor and cradled earth, albeit in the guise of One needing a cradle.
When I pray come, Lord Jesus it is also maranatha, Come again. Come, still. Come, everyday, to needy, weak and helpless me.
Advent is the Coming. The season helps us to make ourselves ready - make straight the paths in the wilderness of our fickle, changable, distracted, all-too-human hearts.
I think this year I have been so cued into the Incarnation perhaps because it has been a year in which death has played a large part, both my brother s passing, the passing of the loved ones of my friends (do take a second to check in on and wish him will in his first Christmas without his brother, Ed).
And then the health problems of my in-laws, and even my own it s been such a year of clenched teeth and held breaths finally, in Advent, I feel like I ve been able to exhale and look up in wonder rather than in supplication. Like a shepherd tired from the day s rounding and believing that tomorrow brings nothing new, I look up and - gasp! - The Incarnation - the Creator come down to us - I haven t been able to stop thinking of it, and marvelling at it, all Advent.
A pal who goes by an unusual handle of Shiloh emailed this meditation:
Can you imagine the mind shattering glory of Heaven s angels singing their joy, devotion and love at the birth of the baby Jesus?
Having let Him go from their midst, and disappearing from their close contact while He made himself into that form which could be born human, then as He promised them, He is born of the Holy Mother of God in the lowliest circumstances, and His Blessed Holy angels find Him right where he surely told them He would be.
Can you even imagine their shouts of Joy?
Could a human heart withstand the stupendous majesty of their chorus?
Indeed. God kisses the earth, and nothing has been the same since.
We should be trembling to know it, trembling - not in fear - but in awe and humility and thanksgiving. But no, maybe that s not quite it, maybe God doesn t just kiss the earth, for a kiss cannot last.
Rather, God comes, as bridegroom - the real bridegroom who weds himself to us, divinity to humanity -and shares with us that most intimate privilige of marriage, the joining of two into one, the mutual dependence, the mutual committment.
What God has brought together, no man may separate. We are One. But every marriage, even the best, needs constant attention, constant giving constancy.
Call the repetitious seasons of Advent, then, year after year, a renewal of our wedding vows, complete with honeymoon
This is how I ended my post from last year. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed.
What is Eternal and outside of time is Still. As it was in the beginning, is now and evermore shall be:
I cannot help - in these final days of Advent - to think about what God did, in a lonely cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem, when He condescended to enter into the pain and fear, the tumult and whirlwind of the world…when he “set his tent among us,” not merely “dwelling” among us as lofty king, but literally “with” us, with hunger, the capacity for injury and doubt…
God entered in, not with a cacophany of noise and a display of raw power, but as the humblest and most dependent of creatures: a baby, lying in a manger, a place for the feeding of animals. He, who became Food for the World, entered with silence, as though he had put his finger to the quivering mouth of a troubled, sobbing world and said…”ssshhhh…it is alright, I’ll keep you company…”
It will be alright.
In the final week of Advent, the week before Christmas, the prayers and readings at Vespers are particularly beautiful, in no small part because of the ancient and traditional “O” Antiphons which precede the recitation of The Canticle of Mary, the Magnificat: My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my being proclaims the greatness of my savior.
For tonight, the O Antiphon reads: O King of all the nations, the only joy of every human heart; O Keystone of the mighty arch of man, come and save the creature you fashioned from the dust…
Be patient, my brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer awaits the precious yield of the soil.
He looks forward to it patiently while the soil receives the winter and the spring rains. you, too, must be patient. Steady your hearts, because the coming of the Lord is at hand.
Do not grumble against one another, my brothers, lest you be condemned. See! The judge stands at the gate.
As your models in suffering hardships and in patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Those who have endured, we call blessed. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and have seen what the Lord, who is compassionate and merciful, did in the end.
His first act as president was to strengthen abortion rights.
Now he is chastising Christians for to ease the health care burden.
In making a point about the importance of having a living will, ex-President Bill Clinton remarked that religious Americans are apparently hypocrites for not wishing to go quietly into that goodnight.
It s interesting to me that we always proclaim – especially certain numbers of us – that we re the most religious big country in the world, said Clinton. It may be true, but we also seem to be the most reluctant to get to heaven.
Look, I only halfway mean that in the sense that I think that everyone has a moral obligation to live as long and as well as he or she can, Clinton continued.
But I do think the living will will help to deal with the health-care crisis.
I don t know for a guy who is supposed to be so brilliant, whenever he talks I feel like words are missing from sentences.
Just so you don t misunderstand.
Clinton was making a snarky remark that the Christians, especially some people talk about faith, but they just won t lay down and die, dammit, when costs start to climb.
This is the terrifying mindset of the complete bureaucrat. Love, transcendence and humanity are completely taken out of the picture, for the bottom line, for efficiency.
For utilitarianism.
It is also the mindset of a Deatheater. Deatheaters, for those who do not read JK Rowlings Harry Potter books, are the minions of the Dark Lord, Voldemort ( World Death ) who is all about acquiring power, destroying all that is good and killing as many non-followers as possible or even just the too-human and frail followers.
Some might feel that Clinton was only making a poor joke but I don t think so. I think for some the whole concept of life being completely entwined with love has somehow been corrupted. The same mindset that shrugs over an abortion as a practical choice are more and more frequently espousing euthanasia as something practical, with the whole begotten by love part obscured.
I ll give you an example. Last year, after reading one of Maureen Dowd s terrifically unhappy columns, this time about Christmas, I wrote what I thought was the that could be written in response. In it, I suggested to Dowd that by scorning Christmas she was leaving those who loved her with very little to work with, should she find herself, one day, in the circumstances being then-endured by my brother, S, who was in hospice and dying.
The post generated many comments, none of which were saved when I moved from Blogger, but one comment I remember distinctly: Fie on you (for being mean to Maureen) If your brother is so brave, why hasn t he died yet? Doesn t he want to go to heaven?
The sneer was unmistakable, and I felt bad for the person who communicated it, because she (I believe it was a she) was betraying a real break with her own humanity with that question.
But she is not alone. There is a creeping mindset out there that says, and that goes against the whole idea of life being a precious gift to be fully experienced, rather than a throw-away. Oh, get out of my way you old thing, you useless thing, you burdensome thing, just die already, so .
Die and ease the public coffers.
That is the way of the Deatheater. Abort more babies, especially if they are .
Speed death along, and call it a win for personal autonomy.
Here is an equation that is anathema to Deatheaters: God is Love. Love is expressed in our lives, through our living.
Thus, to snuff out life is to snuff out avenues of Love. Since God is Love, the snuffing out of avenues of Love is the closing of Ways tof God.
At the very least, it a muddying and disrupting of the Path.
I learned these things sitting by my brother as he slowly took his leave. He taught them to me. It was the great gift he gave to me before his passing - that our helping each other to die - on God s timetable, not ours - is not a burden, or an inconvenience.
It is not impractical. It is rather, a chance to learn about all the depths and fullness and riches of love, and therein to find ourselves, and each other, and God. To feel, as one never feels in an ordinary day, to love with an intensity that could never be sustained in an ordinary time.
To trust as no one ever can trust on an ordinary journey.
It is extraordinary; both mortal and immortal, both natural and supernatural.
Is a living will practical?
Sure, as far as it goes, but that s the problem - it never goes far enough for every circumstance. But the remark Bill Clinton made, like the remark my commenter made, is not about practicality - it is about dying, already! It is about overtaking and subduing mystery and substituting it with routine.
I picked this article on Clinton up via who had actually posted an excerpt from . I had forgotten I d written it, but it s actually a decent quote.
Before S, I would have said, “just let me go - no life support of any kind -
Now, I am not so certain.
Now, I think…why deprive my family of the opportunity to love? Why deprive myself of the chance to be loved and to love them back? I am too grateful for those extra weeks with S, that no one, not the doctors, not the nurses, not the chaplains believed we would have.
Those weeks were so precious, and I learned so much - so very much - about love, and about how as long as love exists, as long as someone is being loved and trying to love back, no matter how feebly…you are in the midst of a Holy Mystery.
In everything I read, lately, on every front, it seems like we are not witnessing battles of ideas or between people, but something more essential. Perhaps we really do wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world
But when I listen deep inside,/I feel you best of all/Like a moon that’s glowing white, and I listen for your call/And I know you will guide me, I feel you’re like the tide/You move the ocean of my heart, that’s open wide.
/O, Mystery, you are alive, I feel you all around/You are the fire in my heart, you are the holy sound/You are all of life, it is to you that I sing/Grant that I may feel you, always in everything.
I have been corresponding with a friend who is enduring the loss of a beloved family member - his grief is still very new. My grief for my brother S is a little older.
It was just a bare week or so ago that I noted the passing of one year since he entered hospice. It is older, but not much easier.
I have lost birth-mother, birth-father, one brother from my birth family, one brother from my new family (my husband s family are my family in a way my birth family never could be ) in every case, it has been very hard - sometimes surprisingly hard - no matter what sort of relationships we had.
With S, of course, there was great closeness, and so the pain of losing him has been exquisite. But two Novembers ago I lost my brother D. He was 13 years older than I, and had been in bad shape, physically, for 30 years, owing to a massive stroke at age 20, one which had enormous impact on my whole childhood and adolescence.
He was there but not there and could never be cared for at home. You d think after 30 years, I d simply be relieved that his long torment was over, but no I grieved for the life he had and the one he didn t have and cried for weeks and weeks, until my husband finally took his pictures down and hid them from me.
My friend wrote that he was trying not to be angry at God, whom he loves, but that he was finding it difficult, as were other family members.
But anger at God is normal. And God has big shoulders, He can take with it.
I have found that when it is too much to think of God, it s easier to think of Mary, who never did anything to deserve it, who spent her whole life only saying yes to Him, and in service to His biggest project, ever but who still had to stay at the foot of her son s cross and watch him die a most horrible death, after having endured terrible cruelty.
Even she didn t know what was going to happen next. A mother grieves the unbearable loss of her son, through Passover, and then goes to anoint his body only to find it gone!
What sort of torment is this?
Then he is back - but he is no longer hers alone, if he had ever been - and for the rest of her life, as she watches His church take shape and form, and helps where she can, she still has all of those memories - the memories a mother cherishes - of an infant tugging at the collar of her gown, looking to nurse, of her son and his loving six-year-old hugs, the scraped knees, the scampish days, the meals they shared none of this could have been easy for Mary to remember or to reconcile with her human self, or her maternity. He is God. But he was her son, and always will be.
He is her son. Her little lad. Her God.
And this is why we call Mary the Help of Christians. When it gets very hard, when we feel a little disconnected from God, whether we want to be disconnected or not, when we feel we have been given an unjust burden we can look at Mary and realize that yes, she kept the faith, but she knew everything we know about how hard life can be. She s lived through it, and if we ask her to, she ll pray for us in our suffering.
The cross. The Mother. The Son.
Nothing in the Gospels is extraneous, or there without purpose. It is all meant for us, for our understanding and our consolation, too.
People often ask me why Catholics find it necessary to keep the Crucifix before them.
The victory was in the resurrection, not the death Catholics focus on the wrong thing - the cross should be empty
Well, yes. The victory is the resurrection, but its gotten to through the rest of it.
While the empty cross brings us hope and promise, we are still humans living human lives with all of the pain and frailty and questions and hurt that implies and when one looks at the Crucifix, one finds not a morbid and bloody corpse, but The God Who Knows, not because he is conveniently all-knowing, but because He actually submitted to life, lived it, endured it, went through it all, just as we do.
Jesus lost his own beloved step-father, Joseph, he knows what we know. When we look at the Crucifix we see that there is no human situation that Jesus did not come to know. Feel betrayed?
Feel humiliated? Feel abandoned? Feel unjustly hurt?
Feel loss? There, on that crucifix is the God who has known every one of those feelings, and has submitted to them - in order to save us, but also in order to draw us near, to gather us into a consolation, a consoling embrace that says I know what you re feeling I know what you re thinking we are actually all in this together, and quite outside of time.
It s hard to remember all that.
The Crucifix is the reminder.
Update: Both on and off the same topic, sort of, from .
At this time, last year, we were trying very hard to come to grips with the fact that my brother, having struggled with AIDS for over 20 years, - that he was in the corner, and too weak to answer the bell for one more round.
We began to become intimate with the daily, sometimes hourly revelations of truth, beauty, misery and the miraculous that accompany a long goodbye - how the world as mobility and energy wane - how strangers who will only be part of your journey at the end .
In all of it, an awareness of the Transcendent seems to make the difference between whether or not one can find sweetness - and even the first part of healing - within the ordeal, itself.
Kobayashi Maru is revealing that his brother Ed is dying, and in the flurry of emotion that is attending his last weeks, Koba writes of that Transcendence - the little glimpses of Grace that lie just beyond the horizons of our searing pain and confused, jumbled minds.
This is a terrible and wonderful thing. A most terrible beauty, a daily dance between darkness and light. Please pray for Ed and for his wife, his little daughter, his family.
Nothing can console like the knowledge that other - even those you do not know - are holding you in the Light of Love.
CaNN :: We started it. pinged back with
There are only a handful of reporters at the NY Times I really respect, and Laurie Goodstein, who covers religion, has been one of them.
She is generally very balanced in her reporting, very careful to make sure she is presenting all sides.
She doesn t do it in , though. This piece, while taking the time to quote folks in the pew, spends a great deal of time fomenting sympathy for gay priests and seminarians while skipping over the whys of the current witch hunt.
Full disclosure: Without going into detail, I do have a dog in this fight. I know gay priests who are terrific, and celibate and joyful and I support them in their vocations and love and trust them. And I know all of this is hurtful to them.
My personal feeling is that ordination should have less to do with sexuality than with holiness and an ability to keep it in the pants, whether gay or straight. BUT
Having said that, and meant it, what the gay priests quoted in Ms. Goodstein s article do not want to address - what Goodstein herself does not wish to address - is that this witch hunt is happening for a reason, and that gay priests and seminarians are being hurt right now and focused on for a reason - the reason being that too many gay priests (and the bishops who shielded them) have by their actions hurt quite a lot of adolescent boys and ALL of their brother priests, both gay and straight, who have lived faithfully to their vows of celibacy.
Now, it s true that SOME of the sexual abuse discovered to have been going on in the 60 s, 70 and 80 s (much less so in the 90 s and beyond) was heterosexual abuse but the truth is that something like 90% of the abuse was male/male. The gay community doesn t want to look at that fact, they don t want to examine it, or they want to explain it away and say that such abuse is predominantly male not because the priests are gay, but because their sexual developement is immature due to celibacy. Uh-huh.
Ms. Goodstein s story is framed: Mean, homophobic, intolerant Catholic church is bearing down cruelly on gay priests and seminarians, because it is hateful.
It should perhaps have been framed: Tolerant Catholic church, betrayed and reeling from dishonorable priestly behavior, forced to re-examine its policies.
Gay priests say they are being scapegoated for crimes committed by pedophiles and covered up by bishops who never faced any discipline. The interviews made clear that they now had the strong sense of being persecuted by their own church.
I feel like a Jew in Berlin in the 1930 s, said a 48-year-old gay priest who has spent 18 years in a religious order.
He said he was considering donning a pink triangle - the symbol used by the Nazis - and getting heterosexual priests and members of the laity to wear the triangles as a protest.
I imagine this priest would have a more justified sense of feeling like a Jew in Berlin in the 1930 s if - like the Jews - he and his brother priests were being over-scrutinized for no real reason. But this priest wants to conveniently gloss over the fact that MOST of the sexual abuse against minors took place between priests and adolescent males.
If he cannot be intellectually honest about that, well, then he s not going to be able to be intellectually honest about much else.
This article is missing some balance that remembers what started all of this, which is that gay priests were going after the adolescent boys and ruining their lives.
The NY Times wants us to feel sorry for the gay priests well, I DO feel sorry for the good ones, and I know there are good ones but let s first feel sorry for the kids the bad ones did hurt.
THEN lets feel sorry for ALL of the good priests, both gay and straight, who have been hurt by the actions of the few.
The church is undertaking a corrective measure that need not have been taken, had priests and bishops policed their own for the last 3-4 decades, had they not looked the other way when their brother priests were ignoring their own vows. The bishops are greatly to be blamed.
Priests who saw what was happening and did nothing bear some blame, too.
I think this witch hunt idea is a pretty and convenient over-reaction, though. As John Allen points out ,
we don t yet have the document, and as always with church texts, the devil is in the details.
That s particularly true with this instruction, since the Vatican has already twice published documents indicating that homosexuals should not be admitted to the priesthood (a document from the Congregation for Religious in 1961 and another from the Congregation for Divine Worship in May 2002). To what extent the new instruction will mark a change in policy, and what its practical impact may be, therefore remains to be seen.
True enough.
This document, which is causing all of this weeping and gnashing of teeth on the left, may end up being another impotent move. Frankly, I DO believe that God can call gays to the priesthood. I just think if they re not calling out to Him, daily, for the grace to live out their vow of celibacy, then we ve got a problem.
From the Goodstein article: Msgr. Denis Herron, pastor of St. Teresa s Church in Woodside, Queens, said a commitment to celibacy was more important than a seminarian s sexual orientation.
Some people can t make that commitment, and that can be heterosexuals or homosexuals,
I agree with that. But I am saddened to see that Goodstein ended her piece thusly: Monsignor Herron said. I m concerned that this could turn into a witch hunt.
If it DOES turn into a witch hunt, it is important to remember that such an overcorrection is not rooted in nothing all of this is happening for a reason. Let s remember that.
My son Buster recently quit his job at a local rectory, owing to his extra-busy school-and-music schedule for the year.
He loved the job, loved the priests he worked with daily. The older priest from a secular nation, who took his life into his hands to become a Catholic priest in that country, the shy younger priest from India, always at prayer, the late vocation priest who liked to work on cars and always seemed to have a rip here or a tear there, and the discreetly gay one who would occasionally let loose by dancing around the rectory singing show tunes and challenging Buster to movie trivia. They are all such good priests, he would say to me, admiringly, and they re completely dedicated.
And Buster is right, they are.
And every one of them has been wounded, deeply, by the behavior of these bad priests, wounded just as surely as the victims of abuse. The Vatican is trying to figure out how to keep what should never have happened from ever happening again.
In looking at the travesty, they saw a pattern, and they are addressing that pattern. If, for a time, the manner in which they address it seems heavy-handed, well let us remember that what happened involved heavy, heavy crimes.
I have gay family members, and I love them, and I have watched them try to be Catholic and gay, and it is a tough thing.
It is tough, for that matter, to be Christian and gay if you are trying to avoid the narrow gate, if you are trying to be the sort of Christian - or specifically a Catholic - who has no respect for, or sense of duty to chastity - which is a thing to which all are called. Married people are called to chastity within their marriage. Single people (gay and straight) are called to celibacy.
It s really that simple (and that difficult). Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, not theme-park rides meant to be ridden until they are wrecked.
The great Lutheran, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote about cheap grace.
My brother S and I talked, sometimes, about his struggle to be a faithful Catholic, and the allure of the gay lifestyle which eventually killed him. He looked for grace - he wanted it - and he even, . But the cost was very great.
It did not come cheaply. It cannot.
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.
We are fighting today for costly grace.
Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack s wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices.
Grace is represented as the Church s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost!
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods.
Costly grace is the Gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.
It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.
Above all, it is costly because it costs God the life of His Son: ye were bought at a price, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.
Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us.
Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.
Costly grace is the sanctuary of God; it has to be protected from the world, and not thrown to the dogs.
These are not easy times for anyone.
Not for anyone. And the Catholic Church is not the only one struggling with these issues . (Should schools penalize the children of gay couples?
Another hot-button!)
It seems to me that if we are to move ahead into better, less polarized, more peacable times, we will have to begin by facing things we would rather not, and approaching matters with rigorous honesty - and that is true for both sides. But we ll have to face those things with compassion, too, and with the understanding that everything that came before the sexual revolution is not worthless and without value.
Mostly, we re going to have to do it with the recognition that none are perfect, save Christ.
This article in , written by a priest who is gay, has some sound points to it, but it reveals, still - this troubling mindset, which I think really needs to be addressed if anything good is to come of all of this:
blame for that clerical crisis is being placed squarely on the shoulders of celibate gay men in the priesthood rather than on the bishops who moved paedophile priests away from the scene of their assaults to new locations where they struck again, abusing more children.
Actually blame is being placed on the shoulders of NON-CELIBATE GAY MEN in the priesthood, first and foremost which is where it belongs.
Then it belongs to the bishops who moved PEDARAST PRIESTS (pedarasts prey on adolescents and teenagers) to new locations. The priest writing this article is neglecting to make that VERY IMPORTANT distinction and in doing so he is - again - a refusing to acknowledge that what he would like to call a pedophile scandal is actually a pederasty scandal with strong gay overtones.
Again, intellectually dishonest.
This is how the press and the left are framing this issue. And as along as they continue to do so, as long as they want to gloss over the fact that the abuse scandals mostly did not involve 5 year old girls but 12-16 year old boys, this is never going to get cleared up and the strictly conservative side will not be able to see their way to do anything but overcompensate for the lack of honesty.
Understand.
I DO support CELIBATE gay men being in the priesthood. To me, this is all about celibacy - about men keeping their vows. But I think until this scandal is rightly called what it is, rightly identified for what it is, no healing can come.
Celibate gay priests who feel victimized by all of this should be making it clear to their NON-CELIBATE priest brothers just how much harm they have done, not pointing a finger and saying unfair to the Vatican.
We keep waiting for the Muslim community to say to Islamofascist terrorists, knock it off, you re making it hard for ALL of us!
Celibate gay priests need to do the same.
When they do, then perhaps the strictly orthodox conservative church can relax its breath and stop the witch hunt.
This is a mess, for sure. And it will not get cleaned up as long as the debate is rooted in untruth.
UPDATE: have grabbed on to Bonhoeffer s cheap grace idea and run with it, using a baseball metaphor, which of course, means you must go read it! 
I recall reading a column by John Leo - way back in 1989 - wherein he recounted the invasion of St. Patrick s Cathedral by members of ACT-UP. I can t find the piece online but I do recall most of the details.
ACT UP people participated in the Mass until Communion at which time they lay across the aisle to try to prevent worshippers from receiving. Some chained themselves to pews.
Others received the Eucharist in their hand and then brought it outside to the assembled activists, tearing the Host to piece and stomping on it, (and in another case spitting out the Host) to wild cheers.
Outside was the usual political theater, gays dressed as priests simulating sodomy against gays dressed as nuns, signs saying, Get over it, Mary! And Cardinal O Connor is a fat cannible in a dress.
Cardinal O Connor simply asked the worshippers to pray for these people and that no one would get hurt.
ACT UP found they d gone too far with this particular demonstration and they lost a little of their media-lustre, for a while.
Now, ACT UP - France is .
A priest was slightly hurt Sunday at Paris s famed Notre-Dame cathedral when clashes broke out between church security personnel and gay rights activists who performed a mock marriage of two lesbians.
About 20 members of the group Act Up entered the cathedral and proceeded to perform the mock marriage, before baffled tourists and worshippers, according to an AFP correspondent at the scene.
One militant - dressed as a priest - pronounced the two women married, while other Act UP members chanted: Pope Benedict XVI, homophobe, AIDS accomplice.
With security officials in pursuit, the militants fled the cathedral, but clashes broke out outside the Paris landmark, during which Monsignor Patrick Jacquin suffered a minor neck injury.
He was treated at the scene.
Jacquin said he was considering filing charges against what he called barbaric, odious and scandalous acts.
The president of Act Up Paris, Jerome Martin - who participated in Sunday s demonstration - told AFP by telephone that he also had been hit in the melee, but said the priest had exaggerated the actual events.
We did not want to be aggressive with respect to the worshippers the aggressive security detail wanted to rip up our banner, he said.
So, ACT-UP did not feel that coming into a church with a banner and performing a mock wedding was aggressive.
And Benedict XVI is a homophobe and an AIDS accomplice, why?
Partly because he won t embrace the idea that condoms will solve the AIDS problem.
I ve always found it interesting that people who have no intention of following church teaching on chastity will DEMAND that the church change its teaching on condoms. It s not like they re actually paying attention to anything the church is saying, and clearly it is a ruse.
Gay men are not carousing in bath houses or at the meat racks of Fire Island while thinking wait the Catholic church says Condoms are Bad, and I don t want to be separate from the church, so I guess I ll just have to chance it and go bareback, because there is no way I m not partying tonight!!
For that matter, promiscuous heterosexuals, uninterested in monogamy and unconcerned about their souls, are also quite unlikely to worry about what the church thinks about condoms as they pursue their pleasure.
For too many people, the Orgasm is the new Idol. It is the Alpha and Omega of their human experience.
This is not simply the reactionary rant of a conservative.
Way back when I was a liberal, I thought way too much emphasis was being placed on sex, sexuality and the almighty O. I remember nursing my elder son and flipping on the tv to find a women s talk show carrying on about how orgasms brought meaning to their lives, raised their consciousness, made them the equal of men, yadda yaddda
Even then, I thought this over-emphasis on the O was ludicrous. Actually the whole societal emphasis on sex as the be-all-and-end-all of life is ludicrous.
Sex is great. It is also sacred. And holy.
We re not taught that, anymore. and John Paul II s writings on the try to teach it, but it s not information being promoted by the mainstream - if anything it is information being mocked and quickly put away.
I think one of evil s greatest triumph s has been to take people s understanding of sex outside of the realm of the spirit and keep it solidly in the camp of the physical.
to reduce it to a few soundbites of personal empowerment, some adolescent giggles and a few sharp grunts. To mischaracterise sex as dirty was a failing of the Christian church. In doing so it opened itself up for the sort of mindless, reactionary silliness we have witnessed since the sexual revolution decided that sex was not dirty but good clean fun.
Sex outside of marriage is not sinful because it is dirty. It is sinful because the act by which we more closely work with God in creation, the act which takes us into the deepest recesses of our physicality, to our very essences, becomes reduced to nothing more than an end to itself, separated from the energetic and spiritual realm in which it is most fully and functionally realized. It removes emphasis on the spirit and chains you to the Corporeal, assists in the exploitation of other bodies, and keeps your mind, heart and eyes off of God.
That is where the sin comes in.
We are not meant to use our bodies and each other like so much disposable tissue. If a beautiful park is not maintained, if its users are permitted to run amok within it, with no accountability to authority, the park is quickly a shambles of litter, weeds, broken equipment and squalor.
It is the same with our sexuality. It is no playground meant to be exploited and run through by bands of marauding, mindless hoardes, which is pretty much what the sexual revolution promoted and encouraged.
The whole world has paid a price for it, this rampant, thoughtless, ravenous pursuit of the Almighty Orgasm - deemed more delightful, more worthy, more necessary than God or Family or even Self.
I have lost a beloved brother because of it. He thought he was having a good time, some harmless fun. He instead was killing himself, devaluing and ultimately destroying himself and his essence as a created Creature who had been loved into being.
And yes, I m angry about it. I miss him every day. He bought into the program, and pursued the empty, meaningless and fleeting pleasures that are dangled before the eyes of young gay men as something fine and ecstatic to chase and gain.
And it killed him.
It killed his body thankfully, his spirit did manage to find grace and peace before the end. But before that, while he was in mid-party and mid-pursuit, there was no grace, there was no peace, there was only the World, and the Things, and the Party all of which brought laughter, it is true (as well as many tears) but none of which brought joy, or true love, or peace.
But condoms would solve everything, wouldn t they? Except they break. Except they run out.
Except people use poor judgement because they are human, faulty creatures.
Would condoms help contain the heterosexual AIDS crisis in Africa? Everyone acts like there are no condoms in Africa.
There are, of course. They made no difference in the spread of AIDS. ABSINTENCE education, though, .
Absintence works - for obvious reasons.
But the world, and the Prince of the world, don t want abstinence promoted. Abstinence leads to thought and thought, too, too often, leads to things of the Spirit.
And even more often, that leads to God. It makes a Houndog into a Hound of Heaven. And we can t have that.
Evil wants to keep us mindless and distracted. Our society has been distracted for 40 years by the non-stop promotion of sex, and by the over-emphasis on the big O. And many smart, beautiful-but-immature-and-reckless people have died for that O.
In fact, in the past 40 years, many more have died for the Orgasm than have died for the faith.
Too many have died for the false god of the Orgasm. They are not martyrs.
They are not saints. But they are victims of a tinsel mentality that urged them on, every step of the way. And they leave behind countless, countless lives full of pain and sorrow.
I miss my brother. God, I miss him.
I did not intend to write all of this.
But, I miss my brother, S. He is gone nearly 6 months and the pain does not go away. We are not a noble family because we lost our beloved S to AIDS.
And he was not noble because he died of AIDS. He was noble because he was as generous and forgiving and loving and sincerely warm a human being as I ve ever known. The KINDEST guy I have ever known.
And he is gone to us, now.
And all the friends who disappeared when he became sick and lost his pretty looks, they re all continuing on. Some have HIV, some do not.
They re still renting the summer houses and living the reckless, eternally adolescent lifestyle of material things and sexual pre-occupations that are so outsized they cannot be counterbalanced by the love of family or faith, lives that are so raucous they cannot hear the quiet, simple pleading of God to draw near
Now, my brother s house is empty and his things - all those THINGS he loved and had to have, all the THINGS he acquired to try to fill the void in his life, the one he wouldn t let God fill, because to do so would have ended the party they have been disbursed - much of it to strangers.
S was so conflicted. On one hand he wanted God, he wanted faith - he HAD faith, but faith on his own terms, and his own terms simply brought in more conflict.
He could never get settled. I asked him once, if the concept of chastity, of living his life in chastity as all non-married people are called to do, meant anything to him. It was a long and serious conversation, but he got distracted.
He got distracted by the next phone call and the next party, before he could remember to ask for grace.
Grace did come, finally, stunningly, very late in the ballgame. It was a sort of .
But I am so grateful that it finally came.
But I miss him, and it hurts. The grief is slightly - so very slightly - healed over but it doesn t take much to rip the scab and begin to bleed afresh.
I would rather spend the rest of my life tending to his bedside than going to his grave.
But to his grave, I must go.
Jesus came that we might have life, and have it to the full.
These ACT UP people call Benedict XVI (and by extension all of Catholism) an accomplice to death, they have it exactly backwards. Like his predecessor, John Paul II, this pope is trying to save their lives. So that they might have it to the full.
And while some would say that a celibate person has nothing to say to the rest of human sexuality, it seems pretty clear to me, from the example of countless saints from the example of celibates like Mother Theresa and JPII, and yes, the Dalai Lama, that once can live life to the full - very grandly, very completely - without worshipping at the altar of the Almighty O.
UPDATE: The pope - doing his job - has declared that . For some reason the press is acting like this is something no one has ever said before.
Meanwhile, Bob Geldof is , because even though Abstinence education works and condoms don t blah, blah, blah, the pope is a bad guy, etc, etc. (H/T: For Now).
The countries with the worst HIV infection rates in the world turn out to be Swaziland and Botswana, where more than a third of adults have the virus but only 5 per cent are Catholic.
Botswana, incidentally, is pro-condoms, not that it seems to have helped much. In contrast, Uganda, where half the people are Catholic, is the one African country that has slashed its rate of infection from a devastating 15 per cent of all adults to just 5 per cent. And, heavens, it worked this miracle by doing much as the Pope had preached.
You ll want to read it all. Thank you, Mark - the article is a keeper.
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred pinged back with CaNN :: We started it.
pinged back with For new readers: Any moneys realized through the sale of items via my Amazon links are donated in my brother s name to the hospice which helped us to see him through his last months.
Ordering through my Amazon links - not just books, but whatever you are might be picking up through them (one of my readres apparently ordered baby clothes and placemats from Amazon - another bought a camera!) helps to support a wonderful hospital which dedicates itself to making the last days of cancer patients and AIDS patients a bit more comfortable, and allows the patient and family to truly spend some high quality time together, while that time may last.
My Amazon thingie says that there has been a sudden uptick in book-and-stuff-buying from folks entering Amazon thru my bookshelf!
Apparently, someone bought placemats! Who knew you could buy placemats thru Amazon!
They re a pretty seaside-tea-party scene, too! And someone bought an iPod cover! I never think to buy that stuff thru Amazon.
I note, also, that someone of a Benedictine bent bought the Benedictine Daily Prayer and the Rule. You ll have to email me and tell me who you are, so we can talk Benedictine together!
And someone bought the Catholic Women s Devotional Bible (which I bought, too, and I m happy to report I like it very much - which surprises me because generally I don t like any of the newer translations - also the reflections are pretty good).
And someone bought C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters, and Hugh Hewitt s BLOG, and Mark Levin s Men in Black.
Very kewl!
All of which tells me what I have always known about my readers - they are a discriminating and well-read bunch!
Amazon cuts a check every time the Associates plan reaches $100.
00 in revenue. We re halfway there, and as I have said over and over, any monies coming from the Amazon link will be donated to , of which I wrote a while back:
God bless all nurses. The woman of this hospice are, to a one, impressive people with seemingly bottomless reserves of compassion, kindness, humor and faith.
Yes, I did say faith. Each one has, at one point or another dropped everything to pray with anyone who wants prayer, or to share their own understanding of the process of dying as it is informed by their faith, and yes it has helped; it has inspired. One nurse in particular starts her shift off by coming in to S and singing a spiritual for him, and her tremendous willingness to walk a hard road with people she does not know - will not know again once the road has ended - leaves all of us awestruck and humbled.
Her name is Valerie and we are convinced that there must be special rooms in heaven waiting for her and for the women and orderlies with whom she works. They are each magnificent specimens of human heart, generosity and fortitude. Breathtakingly good people.
We wonder amongst ourselves how we will ever repay them for their exceedingly kind gifts of themselves. A luncheon? Gift Certificates?
It all sounds so lame, so trite, compared to what they have shared.
So, bless you for going through Amazon. We have, since S s death, visited the hospice again, bringing gifts and sharing tears but I like doing this thing through Amazon, too.
It s one more small way I can keep saying thank you to them!
It s curious to find my first post today to be about health, since I have succumbed to some raggedy-assed virus of a sort. I haven t exactly as in the past, but it s been a logey and cruddy sort of day. But enough about me.
Ann Althouse has an on a . Althouse herself, crediting the Vat with having a made a good point, says: Perhaps as an ethical matter, anyone contemplating something like cosmetic surgery, ought to think again and contribute the money he or she would have spent on the surgery to a charity that provides basic health care to the poor.
I concur!
What a grown-up sort of thing to say! It gives me goose-bumples!
The truth does that to me!
She gives due consideration to another part of the statement, too, wherein the Vat asserts that richer countries have developed a sort of Religion of Health.
Vatican officials held out Pope John Paul II s stoic suffering with Parkinson s disease as an antidote to the mentality that modern medicine MUST [emphasis mine] cure all, calling this a religion of health that is taking hold in affluent countries.
Althouse gets their point, and asks a question: People often say, without any sense that they are saying something offensive (and idiotic): If you don t have your health, you don t have anything.
To make health one s central value is exceedingly shallow. Is health becoming a religion? Some people make it the central value around which they order their lives.
Health is worshipped.
This is such a good and necessary discussion to be having today, in an age where, increasingly, illness and suffering are looked upon as so purposeless, so unredemptive, that for many alternative.
Yes, you read that correctly, I did write ALTERNATIVE.
I think the Vatican s remark on the pope s condition is an excellent one. The man is suffering with an illness that has substantially limited the workings of his body, but not of his mind. Because of those corporeal limitations, we hear more and more that he should retire, but why, exactly?
Should he retire because his appearance makes us uncomfortable? Because we d rather hear an Eternal Truth delivered from the mouth of a handsome and vigorous, athletic 54 year old than from a bent-over man of slurred speech and trembling hand? Is the Truth, so delivered, more true if the messenger is pretty?
Has our elevation of the human body so overtaken our regard for our minds or spirits that the body s capabilities are to be weighed as more valuable than the other two?
If this is how we are thinking, then the problem is not with the weak and sickly people, but with us.
If that is how we are thinking, we staggeringly out of balance.
I d rather have ten people in wheelchairs thinking clearly and giving us living examples of the wisdom to be gained, and the heroism to be found, in embracing their limitations, then a hundred gorgeous beings who open their yaps to deliver vapid, empty pronouncements on whatever trendy thought is popular that week.
This is a very big issue, and those who read me regularly know that I seem to write about it with - not because , but because the issue keeps coming up. In some ways I begin to think that there is no issue more pressing - with regards to our common humanity and our understanding of the value of the human being - than this question of illness and suffering, life and death.
When my brother was dying, during those long months, occasionally a well-meaning person would ask me if I didn t think it would be better - more compassionate - if we couldn t simply give him a needle or something that would end his ordeal a few weeks earlier. All I could do was relate as best I could what a terrible loss it would be to all of us if a single moment of our time with S - and his time with us - was hurried away. When one s time has come, one s time has come, of course but until that time, we wanted S with us, and he wanted to be with us, too, which is why even the doctors and nurses stood in wonder at his lingering, and his life-force.
Some disagreed with me. One friend in particular thought there was something heartless in my arrogant certainty that S s suffering (and ours) could have any sort of genuine purpose. Look at what your poor mother is going through!
She said.
I did. Oh, I did.
Even now, remembering what this dear, tireless woman endured at her son s deathbed, I cannot stop the tears.
But ask my mother what she would have preferred and she will tell you - having S, in any condition, is so much better than the world without him, a world she s endured for a month, now, with a pain that seems gargantuan compared to any pain she might have felt before.
Keywords: Grace Without, Catholic Church, John Paul, Paul Ii, Benedict Xvi, John Paul Ii, Wayside Resting Place, Lord Jesus, Ny Times, Non Celibate
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