Thoughts and prayers for the hurricane's dispossessed

The McCormick Tribune Foundation is matching donations to Katrina relief by half, for those of you who have thought about giving. The irrepressible hope and faith in a better future expressed by hurricane victims in all media is humbling, and deserves a long memory. For all, please say strong and long-lasting prayers for the dispossessed of the hurricane. Their need will likely outweigh our country's attention to it.

Those of us not directly affected by the storm, once we've done everything we can to help those who are, have the luxury of taking a moment to watch how America responds in crisis. By and large, we will deserve our self-given reputation as a generous people, shelling out money, supplies, and time and opening our homes and schools to those in need. The real test of our moral mettle will come after the cleanup, as the South struggles to support a refugee class unlike anything, I think, since freed slaves migrated north during Reconstruction. Thousands of people with nothing all crowding cities at once, straining social services and demanding their human birthright of care and sustenance--this will be a struggle for host states, who will have less of an incentive to magnanimous gestures once the media spotlight is elsewhere. Will we be strong enough, as a country, to gain and sustain compassion for a crowd of people who look like us, talk like us, and have had everything, perhaps even loved ones, ripped away from them? Or will that be too much for us, and will the dispossessed suffer even more through our benign neglect?

It takes courage to look suffering in the face. I've always thought that some people's compulsion to talk about tragedy, or to over-consume the news, stems from a kind of survivor guilt. The impetus to witness to the pain of others is natural and holy, but in a case where the pain is already known to the entire nation, the constant redux of witnessing can give us a false sense of having done something, perhaps allowing us to excuse ourselves from being truly changed by what we have seen. It's all right to stand around and say "Yes, isn't it terrible?": it's part of the way we deal. But let's go beyond that to asking ourselves how we can provide for those whose need will outweigh their media attention, how we can work toward building a society ready to welcome the stranger, how we should live in a world in which goods, loves or life itself can suddenly be snatched.

Mysterious and ever-present God,
You desire life and safety for your children, and grieve when they suffer.
You do not will destruction, but you are present even in its midst.
You are with us in our loss and need and fear and helpless pity.
You call us insistently to turn to you,
enfolding us in arms of love.
Though our fears cling like a passing dream, you comfort us still.
Gentle and ever-giving God,
Break through in this moment as never before.
Raise us from our knees to stand taller in your eyes,
with broken hearts readier to love,
with emptied hands readier to give,
who have known helplessness, ready to trust.
May your Spirit show our fears vicarious and real for what they are,
nothing beside your presence, your realness, your continuity.
In union with you is freedom from fear and existence beyond death.
Draw us into that union that we may bless ourselves and others.
We pray for those who are lost to us but not to you, for you know all your children's souls and welcome them to you.
Grant us these things as we turn to you in our need.
Amen.

Selling Safer Sex, Selling Celibacy

Two Catholic reform groups, Condoms4Life and World Youth Day for All, presented a series of ads at World Youth Day that drew attention around the world. My favorite of these ads are the ones that show loving couples with the words "We believe in God. We believe that sex is sacred. We believe in caring for each other. We believe in using condoms." These ads link faith with respectful dissent, bring respect for sexuality to the public square and promote the core pro-condom message, a lovely hat trick that Catholics for a Free Choice, the sponsoring organization, should be proud of. Social conservatives called these ads tasteless.

I had a similarly negative reaction to the ad at right, which is currently being used in the Indianapolis diocese to promote vocations to the priesthood (see Catholic Online: "A La Matrix, Vocations Recruitment Poster Shows Priest As Hero." It's skilled marketing, for sure: it's generated buzz and suggests that the product--priesthood--will make you look cool. Something about the whole idea of selling what should be a sacred call from God seems off to me, but sometimes in this society it's necessary to counter-sell just to treat water in public opinion, and the three-tiered cakewalk of married life and the rakish joys of singlehood are pitched pretty strongly by pop culture. Fine. Given, though, that we have to sell vocations, why produce something that looks like the poster for a movie where the priest defeats demons with his magical rosary, and then uses his cross to fend off all the pretty girls who fall in love with him . . . ? In a church sadly cognizant of clergy sex abuse, never mind a church which theoretically values the Vatican II model of servant leadership, why does the promo priest have a halo?

Please share your opinions--take a look around the Condoms4Life site, as I had more ambivalent reactions to some of their other ads. Which of these ad campaigns--condom users vs. Father Nemo--do you think is more effective, and which promotes a better image of your idea of Catholicism?

Two good pieces on faith and politics

Catholic News Service addresses the attention that's been paid to John Roberts' Catholic faith by both those who want him in and who want him out. It makes me absolutely crazy when folks use "Catholic" to flag wrong thinking. (Practice your baleful stares in case the Roberts controversy makes this resurface.) Even if the supposed wrong thinking that exists in Roberts' case is shared by numerous other Catholics, the politics can preceed the faith or at least any real affinity to the faith, as often happens. It's a good, balanced article, and makes a good point about the relative P.C.-ness of Catholicism as a target.

And the Rockefeller Institute's Roundtable on Religion and Social Policy recently published a scrutiny of how the Democrats are ratcheting up their outreach to people of faith. (Every candidate will now be permitted to use TWO Biblical references in a speech, in addition to the extant majestic concession "God bless" as a closure. But seriously folks . . . ) I'd hate to see the religious left become a glorified PAC as labor and the religious right have done. (This article states that "hundreds of churches" watched a simulcast message of President Bush's support for John Roberts. Preachers giving up their pulpits for TV? Who'll hang on to the Good Book when the firemen come?) But on the other hand, I wouldn't mind seeing the Dems paying serious attention to the faithful in their own camp, instead of wasting time on fires started by the religious right. My church buddies, let's just make sure we're on the right end of the leash.

Men finally set to get the respect they deserve, says the Times

A friend sent along an article from the Times Online about gender wars. I hope you don't mind if I quote it at length: it's so riddled with faulty assumptions that I want to show you I'm not overstating it position in a paraphrase. I know I'm getting pretty worked up about a work of pop psychology here, but really, there's no point in getting worked up over serious science, which no one but Gina Kolata will ever hear about. Pop psych is the new religion, the thing people are going to take to their hearts and change their perceptions to conform to, and, unlike religion, it changes frequently and so stays in the news. And can be easily explained away by one like me.


"WHO’D be one of you, eh chaps? Let’s be honest, your CV these days is hardly enviable. Outperformed by girls at school, emasculated by women at home and at work, shockingly dislocated from your emotions and the hapless joke figure in endless TV commercials and sitcoms whose message is that females rule and men are fools."

Oh those nasty working women, snatching up all the CEO jobs, demanding maternity leave and flextime, insisting on equal pay for equal work. Wow, I never realized how painful it must be to be a man in the workplace today. Ms. Midgely, we have not come far enough for nice journalists like you to go retrograde. And excuse me, the message of TV sitcoms is that women are shrieking harridans, can't-deal ditzes, or bitchy sluts, and men are fools. Women given more nuance than men? Maybe on Lifetime.

"“What has happened to men over the past 30 or so years is that they have moved from defining the world . . . to having their world defined by women,” says Salzman, 45. “Men have been the butt of the joke for too long. TV is the snapshot of our everyday lives . . . there are men making jokes about men, women making jokes about men but not men making jokes about women because that would be politically incorrect."

Fallacy. Being the butt of a joke is a marker of power. Think about it: people makes jokes about the CEO, not about the underlings. You joke about what you fear. When weak people makes jokes at their own expense, it just makes you cringe, but when powerful people do it it's funny. It's almost taboo in our culture to laugh at a self-referential joke from a woman, which I think reflects a history of women's powerlessness. (I think it's fair to classify sitcom male jokes as self-referential, even if they're not quite the same as a Woody Allen stand-up: they're performed by men and probably written by men.)

"Salzman’s point is that you can have M-ness whether you are a happily married house-husband or a 45-year-old serial dater, a physician or a soccer coach. You must do whatever makes you happy, gives you self-respect and makes you feel whole while respecting the other gender’s right to the same. But you must be multidimensional. You must love your family, have male friends to whom you are not afraid to show affection, have one or two hobbies."

M-ness, by the way, is the mystical quality invented by the author of the book discussed in this article and slated to help all men lead better lives in this female-dominated world. I just want to point out how a minute ago the victimized man in the picture was Ray Romano, the shlubby butt of jokes; now, apparently, he's some hidebound, non-relating Willy Loman.

Here's the quote that made me think this article especially relevant to this blog. From Jim Frank, a magazine publisher:

“Until there are significant changes in the concept and biology of childbearing, women, unfortunately, will never quite reach equality across all people. Individual cases, absolutely; across ‘mankind’? No.”

Even with men who've evolved to the radically extreme point of sensitivity where they "love their families" and have a few friends, it's still going to take artificial wombs and human cloning for us to achieve equality. Got that, ladies? You heard it here first.

How in the heck do you change the "concept" of childbearing?

Why would men want to adopt "M-ness" if it's going to foster female equality? I mean, if they wanted women equal, they'd already be . . . uh . . . "M", no?

How do we know they don't like shlubby-husband jokes? Someone's got to be watching all those worthless sitcoms.

Can Political Assassination Be Justified?

When Theologienne finds common ground with reactionary uber-crank Pat Robertson, may God help us all, right? So I thought. But I had a momentary flash of sympathy when I read that the reverend blusterer-cum-diet shake hawker had called for the assassination of President Hugo Chavez as an alternative to (apparently the only other conceivable course) war with Venezuela.

Now, unlike Robertson, I like to see critics of the Bush administration on the major networks, not in the crosshairs. But I confess I have wondered before why, if an empire-minded government like our own dislikes a particular ruler, they don't resort to direct attack instead of, say, bombing the slums and farms and mountains of the country under that leader's sway. I think I remember learning in middle school that assassination was generally considered unfair, but that never made sense to me. It's better to kill many more people who have much less to do with the problem, without touching a hair on the theoretically guilty one's head?

So I turned to just-war guru Michael Walzer. "Mike", I said--no, just kidding. Here's what I found in his classic Just and Unjust Wars:

"The war convention and the political convention are structurally similar, and the distinction between officials and citizens parallels that between soldiers and civilians, (though the two are not the same). What lies behind them both, I think, and lends them plausibility, is the moral difference between aiming and not aiming--or, more accurately, between aiming at particular people because of things they have done or are doing, and aiming at whole groups of people, indiscriminately, because of who they are. The first kind of aiming is appropriate to a limited struggle directed against regimes and policies. The second [which is terrorism] reaches beyond all limits . . . [However,] the threatening character of the soldier's activities is a matter of fact; the unjust or oppressive character of the official's activities is a matter of political judgment. For this reason, the political code has never attained to the same status as the war convention. Nor can assassins claim any rights, even on the basis of the strictest adherence to its principles. In the eyes of those of us whose judgments of oppression and injustice differ from their own, political assassins are simply murderers . . . [t]he case is not the same with soldiers, who are not judged politically at all and who are called murderers only when they kill noncombatants." (200-201)

So assassination can be justified in the eyes of just-war theory; only don't expect that to hold any water with the international community or the cronies of your target. News that comes too late for Rev. Robertson, but good to know anyway. Walzer later elaborates: "Assuming that the regime is in fact oppressive, one should look for agents of oppression and not merely for government agents" (204), so if you would stay on the right side of both ethics and history, choose your targets wisely.

Questions for a future day: When, for the love of Pete, did you last hear anyone expressing concerns about noncombatants in war zones? When Walzer says soldiers who kill noncombatants are "called" murderers, he means by ethicists--not, we know, the media, the President or the people.

Did GNC drop Pat Robertson's shake in response to this latest and greatest verbal outrage? Google says GNC carried him, but when you follow the link, nothing!

And did the Washington Post really mean to call the history of U.S. assassination policy "hit-or-miss"? Oh, well done.

Faith vs. science: Still news!

So the New York Times, in its wisdom (you have to cite it that way or things get nasty) has discovered that there are scientists willing to admit to belief in God! ("Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science", today.) Even more incredibly, there seem to be other scientists who don't believe in God and who can be induced to give fairly vitriolic statements to that effect to the Times. Nothing like covering a reality in all its baffling complexity. I bet the Wall Street Journal's just sick after that recent editorial, "Every Single Last Scientist is a Godless Heathen."

Some of the potential questions this article buries were addressed more compellingly in a series of interviews done by online publication The Edge and which appeared in the Times and several other media around the new year. The Edge, gracefully schooling print media as is the wont of those who publish online (cough, preen), asked more than 100 scientists and thinkers to answer the question "What do you believe, but cannot prove?" Though the question is open-ended--and some respondents did apply it to their own fields of inquiry--a surprising number took the opportunity to express views on some aspect of religious belief. In fact, the question was suggested by a psychologist whose answer described religious belief as a human deception fostered by natural selection. Robert Sapolsky, Scott Atran, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris, and Clifford Pickover are among those who gave thoughtful, bite-size reflections having to do with concepts like God, belief, and free will.

What weirds me out is that Edge's slate of respondents includes nearly the entire faculty of my own college department. I guess my education was more complete than I knew. Without realizing it, I've already been exposed to a hefty fraction of those the Edge calls "the pre-eminent intellectuals of our time", of whom, I should note, a disproportionately small number are women, and a disproportionately large number of these women child psychologists. (One thing I believe and can't prove without tiresome and didactic investigation is that those who claim under-representation of perspectives or identities in panels, syllabi, etc. "reflects what's out there" are at best too lazy to correct their misperception.)

No, what really weirds me out is that, as I'm coming to finish the C.S. Lewis space trilogy, the news media exhibits signs of a serious Hideous Strength moment. Yesterday, disembodied heads. Today, scientists advocating religion's demise. Tomorrow, icky gender generalizations and a likeable protagonist's disintegration into an heroic cipher--whoops, tipped my hand, I finished the books. Anybody up for a more in-depth discussion? Perhaps, indeed, tomorrow . . .

Not fighting evil, but fearing death

When Austin Powers had himself frozen solid so he could go back in time to defeat Dr. Evil, nobody seemed to question that choice on grounds of bioethics. We understood. We even sympathized. The global community demands that the insights of international people of mystery be available, in the flesh, to other generations.

How about the 765 folks the Chicago Tribune says have made arrangements to have their bodies--or more ghoulishly, just their heads--cryonically frozen at their death to be potentially reinvigorated when science shall allow? What's their rationale? I don't see hordes of disco fans chasing these would-be immortals down the street, and haven't noticed their endorsement on any bizarre household appliances.

I doubt we'll have to seriously confront the ethical implications of this technology succeeding for awhile yet. Frozen brain tissue cracks "like when you drop an ice cube into a glass of Coke", apparently, suggesting that a few technical bugs might need to be resolved before the scientists of tomorrow will be able to do anything with these bizarrely treated human shells. But future developments aside, we have among us now nearly a thousand folks so afraid of the infinite they're signing over thousands to have their bodies gruesomely pickled. Forget the future, where sitcoms full of anachronistically cultured walking heads will practically write themselves. What about this current fear?

People who choose to freeze accept, apparently, that death will come. You have to assume that heaven or any afterlife doesn't mean that much to them if they're prepared to leave it at the whim of some ninetieth-century lab coat. (Unless they believe themselves headed for the full-out Dante hell and like the image of being whisked back to earth and life, thumbing their nose at the other poor sinners who didn't finish up in a cold chamber in an office park.) Apparently, these folks are just so dedicated to life that they're zombifying themselves to spin the wheel for another slice of it--life without loved ones, almost certainly beyond any famliarity of current culture. Life, perhaps, in an unfamiliar body, for those banking that "future scientists will be able to grow a new body for [them] or else extract the personality and memories from the brain". Hey Krang, ever think of leaving, say, a memoir for future generations, or a nice photo album? Just a lot less, you know, horrific.

Do you suppose it occurs to them that science tends to lose a few subjects before coming up with the right protocol? Wouldn't you just know you'd be the one who ends up in a Hazardous Waste bin while all the other 'sicles are running around going "Cool! Flying cars!"

And suppose they do reanimate someone, what then? You live again, and begin again . . . the process of dying. Is the idea to bounce back only when they've eliminated the little problem of eventual death? (Do they stamp that on your cooler: "This Better Be Good?!") The Brothers Grimm wrote horror stories about people condemned to wander the earth forever. Simone de Beauvoir's envisioning of such a life will chill your blood. Geez, didn't they read Tuck Everlasting back in the day? Even children's authors warn against the dream of eternal earthly life. One practical objection, to people who obviously believe their own stories to be of some transcendental importance, is the surety that in a world with no turnover one would inevitably, and but quick, become lost, forgotten and irrelevant. Really, if you'll never lose anyone, you have no need to remember them.

Catholic teaching opposed cremation for a long time, and I think its current position--that human ashes may be buried but not scattered--is reasonable. Certainly when you see horrors like this being executed by scrupleless scientists on scared and gullible people, you can understand where the Church came from all those years. The reality of a body in a grave with a marker is a sign to respect the life that occurred and ended. Respect for a corpse shows respect for the life that inhabited it and, more globally, demonstrates the omnipresent human wonder at being in a body and yet more than a body. I won't insist--not today--that anyone believe as I do about our prospects after death. But I implore them to hope for better than existence as a human tissue sample, a brain in a body it was not given, a soul uprooted from its country and with no way to die.

Taize founder Brother Roger murdered

90-year-old founder of Taize religious community murdered

The Church mourns the senseless and horrible loss of one of her saints who stands with Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa in founding a movement that will long outlast his own century. Brother Roger's Taize
community epitomizes the combination of contemplation and action, adoration and responsibility. Anyone who's ever struggled to create an ecumenical worship experience knows of the risks involved in cobbling together established forms: Brother Roger's community birthed a new and yet familiar way for all Christian to be together in the presence of God. Taize worship forces you out of yourself into a purer place where God is, as you touch the early Christians through their words and the future of Christianity through your own thoughts.

I know so little about Taize, and yet I feel the loss of Brother Roger very close to my heart. In anything of his I've ever read he perfectly combines personal humility with unafraid celebration of God's greatness. (Read his most recent yearly meditation here.) He believed in the promise of young people and knew that Christians of different traditions who worship together move beyond dialogue to a place of true communion. The fact that he was still serving as leader of his community at age 90 testifies to the energy and joy of a life lived for God. To honor his life of generous service, ended so unnaturally, try only to imagine the legacy he leaves in the millions moved by Taize, a continuation of his energy which no attack can stop. May God, who surely already rejoices in Brother Roger's company, expand and multiply the energy of his followers for work, for contemplation, and for good.

Approaching An Angry God

Joan Chittister, the radical, contemplative spiritual teacher, says that in reading Scripture you should look for one notion that might present itself to you, asking yourself why that phrase seems relevant or bothersome to your life. I read Psalm 90 this morning, a psalm that quickly moves through a wide range of emotions and images. I came away with one word sticking in my craw: anger, the anger of God. As I pondered this psalm during the day, I remembered how quickly the notion of God's anger was followed by a request for mercy and joy, and by the psalmist's happy meditation on the fulness and strength of God's favor. This sudden switch from fear to pleasant forecasts reminded me of childlike moods, appropriate to the childlike trust expressed in the last stanza of the psalm. This notion helped me sort out the presence of God's anger in this psalm: I thought of a child crying in her awareness of something she's done wrong. Because of the awesome power her patents seem to hold, she can't imagine anything stronger than the vision of them angry--not even to temper it with the idea that they love her and can be expected to forgive her.

A distraught kid might run for a hug to the parent who just reprimanded her, because only a love equal to the felt displeasure can put her sadness right. In the same way, the psalmist, after confronting God's anger, quickly offers an equal-measure vision of God's compassion: "Make us glad as many days as you have humbled us, for an many years as we have seen trouble."

Looking back at the psalm now, I find much in it to resonate with my image of the guilty child. We begin with an account of the extent of God's power, making clear our relative weakness and need. Then the psalmist says, "We are consumed by your anger," and why? Only because God knows how we have deviated from the divine plan: "You have set our faults before you." The God we see here is so powerful and so good that we are sure the mere knowledge of our wrongdoing will result in terrible anger.

Next, the condition at which the psalmist marveled earlier--the incontrovertibly fleeting nature of human lives--is presented again in a fearful light, as if mortality was God's angry punishment for us. The qualities which seem normal or admirable to us in someone favorable quickly become twisted into oppressions by fear or anger--this might be a bit too subtle for the toddler of my earlier metaphor, but it happens in teenagers struggling for control. However, the psalmist recollects that the source of our guilt in wrongdoing is also the source of healing and rectification: "Teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart." God, when we see your world order as something bad, it's because we know we've fallen short of your desires for us, and your power can make us fearful. Teach us to see the world with your eyes, to find peace, not punishment, in your plan.

Heaven and Elle

While paging through the fall style edition of Elle (one must keep up with those important theological sources), I came upon a couple noteworthy, uh, notifications for you. Item one: Queen of the vampire genre Anne Rice is rolling out a new series based on the life of Jesus. I'd allow you to insert your own resurrection joke here if I weren't so unnerved by the specter (ha ha) of the creator of Lestat trying to make a character out of Jesus. Good news for Ron Howard, though--this ought to make his supposedly controversial Da Vinci Code film look as accurate as PBS's From Jesus to Christ.

Item two: Speaking of media vaguely related to Christianity, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is making its way to theaters this winter. I hate it when they make movies out of books I like (still haven't seen The Passion, and don't plan to) and mention this mainly to introduce the fact that I'm reading C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy for the first time. Look forward to discussing it with you soon!

Item three: Black is back for fall. Good news for some of us:

With This Blog, I Thee Wed

It's true. I can't top this today, so I'm not going to try. However, now might be a good time to announce that I've been working with my liturgist roommates on an ordination-via-blog service that we should be beta testing within the month. You'll be asked to generate a response to your comment to indicate a call from the community, and then to prostrate yourself in front of this text and cover your head. Then you click a button that says "Adsum" . . .

More seriously, though, props to the blog-newlyweds for making it eminently clear that the most important part of marriage is not the wedding. A simple gesture, integrated into their daily lives: I can think of many worse ways to start a lifetime journey.

Misguided Assumption (Message)s

Last year around this time, I was sitting in church with something vaguely bothering me. It crept around in the shadows in the back of my mind, and then suddenly, the light switched on.

"The Assumption of Mary isn't in the Bible!" I told my cousins (once Mass was over).

"No!" they said.

Then we did that thing where you think back over what the readings were . . . and the Psalm was . . . geez, I was paying attention, wasn't I?

"Whoa," my cousins said.

The Feast of the Assumption can be an interestingly ambiguous time in some Catholic circles for precisely that reason. We might feel impelled to lay low until it's all safely over, perhaps shuffling our feet and whistling a bit, not entirely sure that if some Protestant leapt out brandishing the banner of Scripture-alone we might not scream and run rather than stand and engage. I mean, we've been so hip since the sixties. We're studying the Bible. We've got lay involvment (cough, preen). We're phasing out all those statues and incense and things that distract you from the Word. We're so far removed from the indulgence-vending, sign-believing Church of the Middle Ages. And then, every year, they spring this on us: a feast where the Scripture readings, at best, gesture very generally toward the event we're celebrating.

You can tell that not everyone is entirely comfortable with this: even the sermons get defensive. I've heard several that basically use this feast to focus on the importance of venerating tradition and believing things that aren't corroborated, talking about how wonderful and unique this feast is for us as Catholics, etc. To me, this is about as useful as leading off Trinity Sunday's preaching with a disclaimer about the dry topic matter--another mistake I've heard more than once and which simply scatters a great teaching opportunity to the winds. First of all, the defensive tack assumes that every parishioner is alert enough to note the discrepancy between pregnant Mary (in the Gospel we hear today) and the end-of-life Mary who rises to join Jesus in heaven. May I gently suggest that this isn't the case? The confusion over who exactly was the result of the Immaculate Conception perseveres for a reason. I bet there's a good cache of people who arrive happily accepting the Assumption and ready to hear a sermon about whatever the preacher chooses having to do with this mystery, perhaps including, but not limited to, the origin of this shared belief.

And for those souls who are clued in to the non-Biblical basis of the feast, will an exhortation to belief in the face of minimal evidence set them right, or just send their antennae up higher? I think it'll feed their doubt, and needlessly, in a protest-too-much kind of way. And Machiavelling the masses (or Masses, ho, ho, ho) aside, sticking to the one theme of unique Catholic tradition misses the many wonderful threads of wisdom that an Assumption sermon could take up. A traditionalist could talk about Mary's unique role as advocate and intercessor, or use the fact that Mary's body was not allowed to decay to teach on the confusing doctrine of the resurrection of the body or Catholic theology of the body in general. (And let this be done, please, without taking female sexual imagery back 100 years and negating John Paul II's worthy statements on woman's whole personhood.) Someone who loves the Biblical Mary could talk about her radical Magnificat view of the world and her involvement with Jesus' ministry. A sympathizer with anthropology or feminist theology might point out that the story of the Assumption invokes parallels between Mary and Jesus, the only two humans whose bodies, as well as souls, have passed to heaven. Almost anything about Mary would be welcome, and probably carry a relatively fresh and useful lesson. Many of the great Marian readings fall in Advent, when preachers may have other sermonical goals in mind, such as the postulate that Christmas materialism is not good. Let's give this feast to Mary, instead of signing it over to apology. If anyone jumps out at us to question its legitimacy, let's whack them with our handbags, and go look in the church basement for those statues. The people who carved them knew that if you focus on one holy thing, your mind will turn to other things of God--not a bad thing to keep in mind, before we dismiss any part of the liturgical year as esoteric.

Rap Music Pro-Life; Asked For Reaction, Christian Right Miserably Confused

Rapper Nick Cannon's managed to conquer both MTV and the pro-life media with a song, affecting video, and forthcoming book about his teenage mother's decision not to abort him. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Planned Parenthood hasn't heard of the song, "Can I Live," and NARAL isn't returning calls. That's funny, because priestsforlife.org has been promoting the online video since June. I think of Planned Parenthood as being pretty plugged in; you'd think they'd be watching more MTV than your average priest.

Organizations that want to help women have better lives are missing a fantastic chance to work with "Can I Live's" people-driven publicity. Instead of "Oh, we haven't heard about it," how about "Yes, this video movingly demonstrates how agonizing it is for women who aren't in a good position to support a child to find themselves pregnant. This is why we need affordable health care, universal child care, comprehensive sex ed and access to birth control--" (although it might be impolitic, given the circumstances, to ask Mr. Cannon to advocate for the latter.) The "Can I Live" video takes us through seeing the ultrasound and holding the cute baby, but doesn't show the sacrifices and bravery that come with bringing that baby up as a very young mother--sacrifices that Cannon, whose mother appears in the video, obviously appreciates. What if NOW or Feminists for Life asked Nick Cannon to use his publicity to help women who choose as his mother did have an easier time? He wouldn't even have to deviate from his recent line of "it's a personal choice, I'm just showing one experience"--an unconvincing line, given the personal relevance of the song and the importance of the political issue. Young women who face unplanned pregnancy deserve all the attention this song can bring to their painful choices. They certainly deserve attention from women's groups, who should be their natural advocates, as well from as single-issue pro-life voters.

I'm gonna church on off to bed in a sec . . .

There's a church around here that advertises with a big banner saying "Church is a Verb." I like their theology, or what I guess to be their theology, but their semantics kill me. Okay, they're trying to say that church is something you do, not something you belong to, like a political party, or a building where you go and sit in the air conditioning for an hour. You have to BE church. Okay. I get it. But either of these semantic assumptions will only take you so far when it comes to ecclesiology. There are a lot of things you "do" that aren't verbs, like homework, your eyebrows, and press junkets. Almost nothing that you be, if you'll forgive that Elizabethan construction, is a verb. I can hang out with my friends and we can be snarky or bored, or as we might have done some years ago, we can be movie stars or dinosaurs, none of which are verbs. I'm all for affirming the importance of the laity "being church," but that at best makes church an adjective. It starts to sound like a Mad Lib, or that game Verb My Noun, Baby. "Anybody know a good place to church around here?" "The kids are out churching around behind the tool shed." Honestly, I'm slightly churched by the whole thing.

For a slightly more respectful dissection of the meanings behind the word Church, check out this quiz.

You scored as Sacrament model. Your model of the church is Sacrament. The church is the effective sign of the revelation that is the person of Jesus Christ. Christians are transformed by Christ and then become a beacon of Christ wherever they go. This model has a remarkable capacity for integrating other models of the church. Sacrament model 100% Servant Model 78% Mystical Communion Model 72% Herald Model 33% Institutional Model 11% What is your model of the church? [Dulles] created with QuizFarm.com

For fans of the Da Vinci Code, a prequel by the heroine

Seriously, had you heard that Mary Magdalene's finally gotten a chance to give her side of the story?

Well, sort of. The manuscript of the Gospel of Mary was discovered in 1945, one of several stories of Jesus' life from the first few hundred years after his death, now called the Gnostic Gospels. Funny how archaeology always seems so boring until something like this happens. Funny how the people who immediately built a spiritual practice around the new discovery were based in Los Angeles (true). Most of all, it's mind-boggling to think of how much more manifold the study of Jesus' life could be. It seems a little unfair to me, actually: most of us could readily spend the rest of our lives studying the Bible without achieving mastery or complacency, and continuing to learn. And to add more to the available body of knowledge? Come on!

The Gospel of Mary focuses on Mary Magdalene's leadership in the early Christian community, making it the only noncanonical (or, obviously, canonical) Gospel to deal so much with a female disciple. In a classic seventies-feminist storyline, it shows how Mary's authority was publicly questioned and undermined by Peter and other baddie male disciples, although Levi stood up for her (never mind, Mary, you don't need male affirmation to perform your ministry; you just keep doin' what you're doin'.)

Certain elements of the Gospel of Mary sound familiar, like Peter putting his foot in it: how classic is that? Others, though, are noticeable departures from the style of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For example, Jesus' mystical, nonconcrete quotes in the Gnostic Gospels are far from the grounded, reassuring voice of the familiar parables and teachings. Also, this is a bit more personal, but Mary Magdalene never struck me as the kind of person to cry over a leadership dispute. Neither she nor any female disciple are mentioned as crying at the foot of the cross or outside the tomb: they bravely placed their witnessing before their own feelings.

The Gnostic Gospels have the potential to blow canonical cohesion out of the water. I mean, talk about the Book of Judith and the Apocrypha (whatever, Protestants); no one even cares about those books, but here we have long stories about Jesus' life, containing things he may have said and done that we're not familiar with. Some people do think we should study and pray these books as we do the canonical Gospels, while others prefer to keep them in the historical realm, venerating only the texts with the sheen of long historical veneration.

It's a bit nerve-wracking to think about how easily the Bible could have been different from what we know today. Power struggles in the third century, really--but that doesn't mean I don't believe in it, or that I don't revere it as the word of God. Do I deposit you too often on the doorstep of "Good thing we have what's called faith?" Yup, I know I've seen this house before. But sometimes they give out good candy. And we do have to allow ourselves to come back and back to faith: not to give up on the wrangling of ideas or to pretend that they are not important, but to allow ourselves to know that only the most fundamental answers--the ones that we know so deeply we can't argue them--are the ones that really matter.


Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels is an exciting, thoughtful introduction to these texts, a modern classic. If your reaction, like mine, on reading it or reading this is to want to see the entire Gnostic Gospel texts, there's a comprehensive archive at gnosis.org, run by the L.A. people, actually, whom I didn't mean to diss.

Pics of Blondes: Images of Saint Mary Magdalene

While I was on hiatus, the feast day of Mary Magdalene, my favorite saint, passed us by on July 22. In honor of this friend of Jesus, Apostle to the Apostles and first witness to the Christian mystery, here are some images of Mary in art that I've collected over the years, just for fun. I'm fascinated by older religious images because, for many people, they conveyed the word of God in an accessible, moving way. Their content, even when it doesn't reflect current belief, reverberates in our faith of today because it retains the meaning revered by many of our predecessors in the faith.


A fourteenth-century statue uses Mary to infuse boring religious art with sex appeal. Good thing our artists today--filmmakers and the like--are more interested in giving her three dimensions. Cough.

On an altarpiece, Mary patiently attends the Pieta, distinguished by her alabaster jar. The connotations of sin that cling to Mary Magdalene come from her conflation with the biblical woman who anointed Jesus' feet--most scholars today distinguish between them. Although as a professor of mine once pointed out (a Lutheran art history prof in a suddenly philosophical moment,) who knows whom it might help to believe that a sinful woman ascended to a place of such high regard among Jesus' disciples? I think this is one of those instances where popular belief might have elements to teach us about the mystery of God that dry verifiable fact can't achieve. Good thing it's belief, after all.

A dusty Mary greets Jesus at the moment of the Resurrection.

Painted in her chapel in Notre Dame, Mary again kneels to Jesus. Look at the centurions: too busy gossiping about this woman to notice the miracle happening.

Love this rendition of the women surrounding Jesus on the cross; they look like nuns. Mary Magdalene was one of the women who stayed with the crucified Jesus when everyone else had run away.

Here, Mary waits outside the tomb in her Victorian dress; a lovely period imagining.


Seems odd to anyone who's seen a Christmas-card image of the Madonna lately, but blonde hair's been associated with sin in European art much longer than it has with purity. (Don't worry, girls, they're just jealous.) Mary's rich dress and regal posture in this image remind us that the biblical Mary is believed to have been a woman of means, since she could afford to travel with Jesus and support his ministry.


Mary Magdalene, be for us an example of love for Jesus that remains steadfast when hope seems gone. Be for us an example of the courage to proclaim the impossible truth. Pray for us, that we fallible humans may like you become dear to Christ through our great love, fierce loyalty, and brave witness. Amen.

Voices of the faithful

Look what I found: discipleswithmicrophones.org, a Catholic podcasting site! You can download their original content to your computer, or whatever you play MP3s on, to hear weekly sermons (by a real priest, although I don't know what the alternative might be, with a parish in Illinois), daily readings, and lay commentary.

Since I know none of my Faithful Readers would ever (admit to) miss (ing) Mass, we can gloss right over the most obvious utility of this site and check out some of the more unusual content, like the True Knights series. The intro could make a gender studies thesis, but in the cast I listened to, "True Knight Trainer" Kent Henderson delivered a deeply felt exhortation on the use of sacramentals, avoiding the didactic tone that comes pretty easily in front of a microphone. Mr. Henderson jarred my sensibilities by linking "sexual addiction and sexual temptation" as if they were the same thing, but the juxtaposition got me thinking. Talking about fighting temptation makes you sound no fun, but speak about combating addiction in a spiritual setting and you're brave and progressive. Perhaps good spin, not misunderstanding, inspired Mr. Henderson's phrasing.

Some of the casters have blogs for feedback, but if you can't stand a one-sided dialogue, why then, get your own podcast here.

Enlightenment: full steam ahead!

I had a spiritual epiphany the other day while I was ironing napkins. No, I'm not going to tell you what it was - you have to be careful sharing things like that; it might turn out an anticlimax. Just wanted to note that it reminded me again of how useful repetitive household tasks can be for contemplation, and how easy it is to forget that in our automated days. In her lovely new Treasury, Lynne Truss - author of the grammatical laugh riot Eats, Shoots and Leaves - describes the British Polite Society, who believe greater reliance on machines is responsible for ills from rudeness to marital breakdown. (Apparently she-washes-he-dries was an invaluable opportunity for couples conversation, blown to smithereens by the dishwasher's advent.) While I appreciate what the PS is truing to do, I think they're a bit off the mark. Household chores in the presence of another tend to highlight how much more fun you could be having if you didn't have chores to get done, or, alternately, what a mess your partner makes of the simplest tasks. (Not that any of you would ever react that way to a discrepancy in household practices, I'm sure.) Anyway, I think that a repetitice task that keeps you in one place for any length of time can be a great opportunity to fix your mind on the eternal: your thoughts aren't too busy, because your actions are automatic, and you're not tempted to go distract yourself, because you know you have to stand there until that ironing's finished. Mowing the lawn, I think, is even better: it's like the practice of walking the labyrinth. The entire path is in view: you go back and forth over familiar terrain, each time looking at it from a slightly different perspective. It's a wonderful metaphor for, and a concrete path to, thinking through problems or questions that follow you.

For another story of a good Catholic girl ironing napkins for spiritual practice - with rather a more dramatic outcome than my own, at least so far - check out Household Saints, by Francine Prose. Not too taxing, but funny and thought-provoking: the best summer reading that could be hoped for. Thank you all so much for holding during the silence as I relocated and took care of some other things. Now that I'm back, I plan to be back with a vengeance - or should that be back with the other cheek turned?