The Mary Letters. Part 1

It’s strange, having converted from a feminist/pagan worldview, one would think I would have no problem with Mary.  In fact it was the Catholic reverence for Mary that made me realize that the Church’s supposed “sexism” wasn’t as clear cut as people on the left made it out to be.  Yet, for some reason, following my conversion Mary troubled me.   Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand what being “sinless” actually meant, and who could understand “sinlessness” anyway?  The whole “Immaculate” idea still seemed like a stick to beat women into submission, to neuter them emotionally and sexually.  This started to change after I read Simcha Fisher’s excellent article on the subject.    which really put Mary into perspective for me.   During one of my sleepless pregnancy nights, I started to reflect on what Mary’s sinlessness really looked like and how much power it had, in particular, how the powers of hell are terrified of her.  I started to imagine a “Screwtape” scenario in which, prior to the Annunciation, the demons would be utterly bewildered by this mysterious girl, a nobody from some jerkwater town in the Middle East, who would be so impervious to their influences.    I hope to keep working on this in whatever snippets of free time are available, but here is what I’ve written so far.  Just a note, since time flows differently in heaven and hell, and because I’m too busy and lazy and pregnant to research contemporary first century insults for a sense of realism, the demons in question make a lot of anachronistic references (“toilet brush” etc.)  I’m calling it a “Time warp” defense…so sue me.

Dear Foulbreath

Your letter came across my desk this morning and your infantile writing skills have left me with the worst case of indigestion since the last time that clown you call a supervisor Snagglewraith thought to ingratiate himself to me by throwing a spaghetti and Carthaginian supper.   Frankly, I´m disappointed that that toilet brush has fallen so far behind in his duties that he hasn´t even bothered to bring you up to speed on the work I´ve been doing in the Women´s Department before encouraging you to commit your pusillanimous whining to me on paper and ruin a perfectly good morning.

Are you not aware that the very reason I was made the head of the Women´s Department was because of the definitive work I wrote on the subject of female temptation?  The sheer, unalloyed genius of my book led Our Father Below to declare me the leading expert in the subject.  I have been feted by the curdled cream of the crop of the underrealms, those who accompanied our father on that Great Rebellion against The Enemy.  Belial, Mammon, Moloch, all the top demons have had me over for the sole purpose of hanging on my every word over glasses of dine cordial distilled from the finest Roman Tax Collectors humanity could produce.

Let me tell you something, in confidence, about all of those demons.  They are idiots, every single last one of them, utter morons.  They are idiots of the worst kind, possessing enough firepower to blow half the universe to croutons and yet lacking a neuron´s worth of intelligence between them.  Even after personally having witnessed the fabulous coup pulled off by Our Father against the Enemy in which he used a woman to corrupt the entire race of humans and dash to pieces The Enemy´s hopes for a relationship with those simian half-breeds He created, (a nauseating proposition in itself) these idiot demons still cling to the idea that our best hopes to harvest the entire crop of souls is by tempting and corrupting the men!  By creating ruthless War Generals, Imperators and Slave-Lords, philanderers and murderers.  Even Asmodeus, who always seemed like the classy one, who actually lived in a woman and wreaked glorious havock, slaughtering dozens of bridegrooms as they came to the nuptial chamber all awkward and wistful, until that gelded fool Raphael spoiled his fun,  Even he looked at me like I had six eyes instead of three when I suggested that corrupting the females of the species could lead to even more widespread chaos and more bounty for our cupboards.

The thing is, some of my novices will tell you it´s because women are more gullible or sensual, or stupid and temptable than men, but that´s not true.  That, rather is a convenient tale we like to tell human beings in order to serve for our purposes.  After all, as tempters our philosophy has always been two-fold…keep the focus of the patients off of themselves and onto the other, and keep them enslaved to their feelings.  If the patients ever come to recognize themselves as the loci of their appetites, their desires and their corrupt feelings, if they learn they can attain dominion over such things they´re one step closer to The Enemy and much harder to control.  No, my halitosic friend.   Women and men are both vulnerable to temptation in equal measure.  What makes a woman such a juicy target for corruption is that women are social. They bind societies together.  The Enemy designed the female of the species to communicate and to create communities.  She is the one who commits a significant amount of her adult life to the care and rearing of those mewling offspring of her womb.  She is the one who maintains family and kinship bonds.  She remembers birthdays, anniversaries and details of other people´s lives.  She designs rituals under whose framework the diverse members of family and community come together.  She imparts to her children rules of conduct and behavior, and to the men she imparts the ability to communicate across a wider spectrum of people.  She is the force that civilizes human beings, allowing them to live in groups and thus to thrive.  She is also the pole that orients male behavior towards ends that serve The Enemy or us.  A society of virtuous women orients men towards heroism.  A society of domineering women creates a society of flaccid and infantile men-children while a society of artificially weak women creates a society of brutes and fanatics.

Thus women are the best means to corrupt a large group of people at once, saving time, energy and manpower.  Those idiots in the inner-circle would prefer to focus on individual men, going at one at a time, eventually procuring a fulsome harvest, but not before we´ve starved ourselves into wraiths.  My theory is that by corrupting female souls first, male souls will corrupt themselves.  It´s far more efficient to destroy a building by dissolving the mortar than by pulling out bricks.  One prostitute can spread a venereal disease to a thousand men before the first even gets itchy.  The great thing about women is not that their sins are large or small, but that they are bacterial, communicable.

Now, you and that steaming bucket of feces Snagglewraith write me because you appear to have found a woman immune to temptation, some thirteen year old chit from the Naza-wherever whom you can´t even get to pinch a sweet or lie to her parents.  I find that hard to believe.  What is more likely, my smelly friend, is that you are merely an idiot, an amateur who doesn´t understand the nuance involved in tempting women, the finesse it takes to play upon her sensibilities until she produces the glorious bitter notes which make your innards sing with anticipatory hunger for the moment when you will consume her spirit in its entirety.  Therefore because I am generous and because your utter mental incapacity fills me with the sort of pity a human feels for a toddler who pees himself in a sandbox. I am sending you a copy of my book.  Study it.  It will help you.  And don´t bother me again.

Yours

Fatpants

 

 

 

Morality Vs. Taboo

Yesterday in the National Catholic Register Mark Shea posted a nice noodling of the issue of religious taboo and moral law in regards to the current debate in the States over the Obama Administration’s attempt to force religious organizations to provide insurance that covers contraception and sterilization procedures.  In it he addresses the argument that supporters of the Obama mandate frequently make comparing the Catholic position on contraception to the Jehovah Witness taboo against blood transfusions.  Here are some of Mark’s thoughts:

Non-Catholics (and even most Catholics) don’t really seem to grasp that this is not a matter of ritual impurity, like a Jew being forced to eat pork, or a Muslim being compelled to touch a dog—or a Jehovah Witness refusing a blood transfusion.  Rather, it is that the Church teaches (and has always taught) that contraception is contrary, not to the ceremonial law of the Old Testament (which has been fulfilled and therefore retired in Christ), but to the moral law (which has been preserved and elevated to the law of love in Christ).  Because of this, the Church teaches that artificial contraception is harmful, not just to Catholics, but to all human persons.  So though she is not trying to legislate what dissenting Catholics and others choose to do in the civil sphere, she does draw the line at being forced to help facilitate what she insists is gravely evil for both spouses and their children

Mark makes a distinction here which I think has been all but lost in secular culture.  One of the effects of moral relativism has been to conflate moral law and religious taboo as the same, especially in the area of human sexuality and reproduction.   Indeed, this is why orthodox Catholics and secular people always seem to be speaking past each other on these issues.  Orthodox Catholics are appealing to universal moral laws, which the secularists interpret as the unfair imposition of religious taboos.  The abortion advocate who trots out the meme “Don’t like abortion? don’t have one” is arguing against the imposition of religious taboo, while the pro-lifer who says “stop killing the unborn” is opposing the violation of a moral law.  The gay-marriage supporter who points to the prohibition on shrimp-eating and mixed fabrics in Leviticus is trying to demonstrate the irrelevance of a religious taboo.  However, the traditional marriage supporter is not even considering Leviticus in the debate. He is looking at marriage’s place in Natural Law, its relationship to the family and the protection and well-being of children.

Such a conflation of moral law and  ritual taboo is, in part, due to some of the thought trends circling through the culture since the 1960′s.  Some feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray planted the idea that the subjugation of woman was based on the belief in her “impurity” not only because she bled, lactated and  gave birth, making her more earthly, less spiritual, but also because she provoked sexual desire in the male.   More recently, Paul Rozin’s “Disgust theory” has become all the rage in academic circles,  suggesting that religious rules around sexuality were part of a larger schema of  ritualized “purifying behaviours” which evolved in conjunction with the “disgust” reaction humans experience in response to bodily fluids and corpses.

Thus, in these two theories the notion of sexual transgression is linked to ritual taboo and purification.  The existence of laws around sexuality are categorized as taboos, not as moral laws.

And yet, there are several very good reasons why Catholicism places sexual ethics under the category of moral law rather than taboo.  Firstly, moral law is essentially designed to maximize the thriving of life and  minimize that which damages or threatens it.   All moral laws have at their heart the protection of life, be they laws against murder, theft, vice or deception.  Vices, that is pleasures that have become swollen to the point of obsessions or addictions, are destructive not only to the individual who practices them but also to those surrounding the individual.   Sins of vice, similarly, tend to attract other sins in a way that ritual taboos do not.   No Muslim who touches a dog is going to become so obsessed with dog-touching that it will lead him to steal dogs from the neighbours.  No Jew who eats a strip bacon is going to start lying to his wife and kids in order to procure his salty, smoked deliciousness with impunity.

Yet true vices do draw their victims into other types of sin.  The person who looks at pornography becomes progressively disconnected from real love, eventually seeking to emulate what he sees on the screen.  The alcoholic starts to steal, lie and manipulate to get his next drink.  The fornicator often practices deception in order to seduce his next conquest.   The story of Don Juan is not, as in the Hollywood version, the silly tale of a loveable yet randy gentleman who can’t keep his hands to himself.   It’s the story of a man whose sins become progressively worse the deeper he goes, from seduction,  to rape, to murder, until he is buried alive.

Secondly, because sexuality is teleologically linked to life as the vehicle of its generation, because children are immeasurably vulnerable, sexual morality exists to ensure that their lives are protected, that they are given the full benefits contingent upon being conceived in a loving marriage and being raised by a family.  Treating sex as entertainment has historically lead to illegitimacy and poverty, as women were left with the fruits of the union after the paramours had gone.   Nowadays,  rather the path leads straight to the abortion clinic, divorce court or the psychiatrists office rather than the orphanage or the poor-house.   Either way there is a price to be paid.

In the end, the conflation between morality and taboo has been a social disaster.  We have to reclaim the language of morality as something common to all people, not just those of a particular religious group.

Dear Feminism

I hope you enjoyed International Women’s Day yesterday.  I’m sure you had a wonderful time with your friends holding up your fisty-venus signs at your rallies and shouting about how oppressed we are because Rush Limbaugh says stuff and because Republicans are still allowed to exist.  Since yesterday was your Christmas and all, I thought it would be a courtesy to wait until today to write you this letter.    I have some bad news.

You’re fired.

I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve decided to call off our working relationship of so many years.  ”Don’t you remember the good times?” You ask.  ”Those teen-years spent marching in “Take Back the Night” rallies? Those drum circles where we’d totally stick our thumbs up the patriarchy’s arse by worshipping goddesses? Those millions and millions of poems we wrote about how we were going to kick down the brick walls of our biological prisons. Heck, one of them was even published.”

I know you’re thinking “Hey man!  I gave you everything.  How many A+ papers did you write as an undergrad after I showed you how much a particular author sucked because of the way women were portrayed in his work? Or because a female artist “challenged” the patriarchy?”  I rocked your G.P.A.  You got into Grad School because of me.  Is this how you play me after all of these years?”

Yeah, the thing is,  I don’t want to be associated with you anymore. Frankly, you do not represent me, or many women, although you claim to represent us all.  You do not defend my interests.  You have no idea what they really are.

You are immature, hypocritical and full of contradictions which any adult, with half a brain and a meter of human experience can immediately recognize.

For example:

Through one side of your mouth you oppose the sexualization of the culture and the objectification of female bodies.  You rail against beer commercials with women in bikinis, playboy bunnies and Barbie dolls.  You produce reams of paper and pixels on the negative impact of exposing young girls to explicit media-images, problems such as eating disorders and premature sexual experimentation.  All of this is very good.

But then, out of the other side of your mouth, you aid and abet the same oversexed culture by promoting “Sex-positivity” on university campuses, by inviting prostitutes, madams and polyamorists to give talks on how wonderful their lifestyles are, by demanding free, unlimited access to contraception paid for by taxpayers and by giving the green-light to any artist  or performer who exposes their bodies or their sex-lives on television as “risque”, “daring” or “pushing the envelope”.

You claim to be a defender of the weak and vulnerable.  You love socialism, or at least the idea of socialism, though you’ve never spent a day in a socialist country in your life…except for that trip you took to a resort in Cuba with your friends last Spring Break in which you did a day tour of Havana and raved about free health-care and Studebakers.  You believe that the State and Society has a responsibility to care for the poor, the disadvantaged and any vulnerable member.   You consider yourself a tender-hearted humanitarian who wants everyone to be wrapped in the warm arms of the collective.   “We’re all in this together”  you say.

Except, of course, when the responsibility for caring for those in need falls on your shoulders, or more to the point, your uterus.  When you find yourself unexpectedly pregnant and the fragile being you have created from the baby-making act has no-choice but to rely on your body for survival.   Then,  the warm-hearted, socialist turns into a stone-cold libertarian.   “No way!” you say “I will not love you, or care one whit about your well-being …Yes, you may be small, you may be weak, you may mean me absolutely no harm,  you may even long for me and love me in your own way, but I don’t owe you a thing.  I have the right to live my life as I wish, and if I don’t wish to experience the inconvenience and discomfort of a pregnancy, then I have the right to take your life in the most brutal fashion, and no one can say anything about it.”

You praise the strong independent woman, the ones who become presidents and heads of companies.  However if such a woman were to, you know, fall in love and get married, and discover that competitiveness and high social status could lead to a cold and lonely existence, you would consider her something of a traitor, one of those woman who “needs a man to make her happy”.   Yet at the same time you, in your embrace of socialist ideals, rail against the consumerist system claiming that success, acquisition of goods and high social status are anti-humanistic and spiritually degrading.  You praise the woman who “throws it all away” to go travelling to India on an ultimately self-serving “spiritual” quest to stare into her navel and find herself, but condemn the woman who “throws it all away” to care for her children.

Finally, you believe that religions create a false view of reality, based on a story invented by men which can’t be proven true,  but you have created an equally false view of reality which is as unproveable as the Virgin Birth.  Your entire philosophy is based on a constructed meta-narrative.  You tell a story about how for thousands of years, women were treated as property to be bought and sold, how the whole of Western Culture, and pretty much every other civilization was structured on woman’s abasement.  In your mind this thing called a “patriarchy” explicitly demanded women be enslaved to men in every way, shape and form.  It determined how women would be represented in art, how health care would treat women’s issues, how husbands would treat wives, fathers, daughters, priests, nuns etc.  ”The Patriarchy”, this shadowy cabal, held a tight-fisted control over every aspect of life and women had to eventually recognize it and stand up for their rights.

Except there was never a “Patriarchy”,

There were socially accepted gender-roles, yes,  and there were prevalent ideas about how men and women should conduct themselves in relation to one another, and in public.  These ideas extended to both men and women by the way.  Women had certain duties to men, and men had certain duties to women. There were also horrible men who did and said horrible things, and horrible women who did and said horrible things.  There were individual men who did wonderful things and individual women who did wonderful things.  But for every example you can find of a “prevalent patriarchal attitude towards women” there are an equal amount of exceptions.  For every misogynist cleric or bishop, there was a Sor Juana, for every screed in condemnation of the female sex, there was one in its defence.   History is a wide, deep and broad thing, and most people fall just a little bit outside of the meta-narrative.

Thus I simply can’t stand you anymore.  You think like a teenager who feeds off drama and it shows.  It shows in your ability to take a small thing like a braying talk-show host or a cop using the word “slut” and turn it into a barrage of histrionic tweets, blog-posts and protests.  It shows in your  willingness to use a cancer charity cutting off its negligible donations to an abortion provider as an excuse for a witch-burning, introspection rundown bullying psych0fest.   It shows in your inability to be self-critical, to examine the unintended consequences of your own ideas and re-evaluate them.  If you did, you would not be so quick to defend abortion access after seeing it used to support racism, extermination of the poor, eugenics and female feticide.  Even seeing an ultrasound at 10 weeks ought to get you to re-think your unquestioning fidelity to baby-killing.  If you were honest.

You do not make me free.  I don’t need to artificially sterilize my fertile body, or to put myself before others in order to prove I’m not enslaved or oppressed.  I’m free because I am a child of God.   I’m free because I love, and because I give.

Yours

B.

What is the Culture of Death?

It’s easy to consider the term “Culture of Death” as mere hyperbole and polemicizing by orthodox Catholics, akin to the cries of “statism/socialism” thrown out by talk-radio.  Indeed, social discourse in both directions has become stained with hyperbole, with everyone trying to out-Hitler one another such that we’ve lost the art of separating ideas from people, of friendly intellectual scrums between opposing debaters whose final resolution lies at bottom of a pint of scotch ale.  The term “Culture of Death,” however blustery and talk-radio it might appear, is a philosophically sound and prophetic concept put forward by John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

The Church has always stood a half step apart from the spirit of the age, able to examine it with the objectivity of a grandmother who has seen all nature of things circulate in and out of the world.  There is nothing new under the sun, she says, and when she gives a warning, the wise one ought to turn up his ears rather than his nose.  For all the talk about “ivory tower intellectuals in Rome” and “Celibate old men who don’t know how the world works” a Church that has spent 2012 years staring down the human condition has a better idea of where things lead, how one thing gives way to another, than someone caught in the slipstream of the culture, moving where it moves.

When she talks about the culture of death, she is observing over the course of a century not only the degradation of societies’ moral foundations but the increasing number of ways in which the life and dignity of the human person is being compromised.  She is seeing the recirculation of actions against life which had once been thought eradicated.  She sees the gaps in the social framework where Moloch slips in and all of the ornate and perfumed disguises he covers himself with,

So what is meant by the “Culture of Death”? Quite simply it is one in which violations against human dignity have become commonplace.  The pope identifies the Culture of Death as one in which the powerful turn against the weak, treating them as means to an end or as obstructions to be done away with.  In this he points out the various forms of oppression that human beings visit on one another such as human trafficking and prostitution, forced labor, subhuman living conditions, ideologically motivated mass-killings, mutilation and torture.  Next to these he places examples of how violations of human dignity have surreptitiously crept into the culture, becoming socially acceptable, entering medical practice and human discourse and wrapping death in the guise of compassion or autonomy: particularly abortion and euthanasia.

Indeed, “death” in this culture doesn’t merely appear as a soldier with a machine gun mowing down student protesters, or a concentration camp guard shoveling corpses into an oven.  It also appears as a doctor with a lethal shot of morphine and a compassionate smile, an abortion clinic worker kindly and non-judgmentally assuring the frightened pregnant woman that what is inside her is mere tissue.  Death thus becomes fused to ideas of compassion, healing and mercy.  It is not, as in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, treated with a certain combination of dread respect…that respect you would give to a lion about to tear you to bits.  It is upheld as a form of pain relief, a way to relieve suffering, indeed something to be preferred if one’s own life, or the life of someone in your care, would be burdensome or difficult.

With the legalization of abortion, the practice of medicine became radically altered.  Prior to this, the notion of doctors killing was seen as the worst type of abomination, hence the strong language the bible uses against “poisoners” (sometimes interpreted as “witches”) or those who used knowledge of herb-lore and medicine to kill rather than to heal.  Indeed, the Hippocratic Oath drew a solid and unbreakable line against using knowledge of the body to do harm to it.  Of course there were always doctors and midwives who performed death-bringing procedures, but these were exceptions, often excluded and ostracized from the practice of medicine. Within one generation, this millennial boundary so carefully drawn to keep Doctors on the side of healing, was destroyed.   Doing harm via abortion has become such an intrinsic part of obstetrics that most doctors will ask a recently diagnosed pregnant woman if her child is “wanted.” Along with all of the requisitions for lab-work handed to her on her first obstetrical visit is automatically placed the “genetic screening forms.”  Genetic screening is only done for one reason, in order to pre-determine if the unborn child carries any abnormalities so that, upon a positive diagnosis, it can be aborted in a timely fashion.

Just as it was with abortion, so now it is becoming with euthanasia.  Although euthanasia is yet to be legalized on the mass-level that abortion is, little by little the culture is spinning it as something positive.  Death is now being pushed as a remedy for pain, as a means to attain peace in the midst of a grave illness.  Images of happy suicides, of people ending their own lives in order to spare others the “bother” of taking care of them, or in order to die in a peaceful, painless manner are repeating themselves throughout the mass media, playing on people’s emotions and drawing on their love for their family members and friends who are suffering.  More and more, death is putting itself forward as the only compassionate alternative.

In this sense, the Culture of Death turns quality of life into a weapon against life itself.  Promoting the avoidance of suffering via the avoidance of life, especially the lives of those whom according to the Pope most need protection and love, those who are vulnerable and weak.  Beyond the creep of death into the realms of human activity once consecrated to life such as childbearing and medicine, there is an equivalent degradation of respect for life, such that, in the pope’s words, “A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated.” Thus children are better aborted than handicapped or born into poverty, elderly people better euthanized than taking up a bed in a hospital.   The mask of compassion, which made it look attractive to people afraid of suffering, begins to slip off.   Eventually it becomes, not an issue of rare and tragic cases, but a practice so common its practically expected.   Hence those women who carry a Downs child to term are heaped with scorn.  Children with genetic defects are denied life-saving organ transplants, even if their own relatives offer to be donors.  The elderly and terminally ill are coaxed by medical personnel  and their own families to “end their suffering once and for all” and individuals internalize the death mandate such that upon a terminal diagnosis they fear more “becoming a burden to loved ones” than suffering itself.

This is the Culture of Death.

Death, Catholic Style: In Verse

The ferry is passing through a bank of fog on the Straight of Georgia wrapping both land and sea in a milky darkness.  I feel like I’m crossing the Styx

Which is appropriate considering the fascinating discussion about the Catholic view of death in the comments section of my post on the New-Age:  A discussion which really needs to be taken to the realm of poetry to be truly appreciated.  Thus, while crossing the Styx of Georgia, allow me to post one of my favourite poems of all time (translated by me for your reading pleasure), Courtesy of Juana de Ibarbourou:

Rebelde

Caronte: yo seré un escándalo en tu barca.

Mientras las otras sombras recen, giman o lloren,

y bajo tus miradas de siniestro patriarca

las tímidas y tristes, en bajo acento, oren,

 

Caronte: I will be a scandal on your boat

While the other shades pray, moan and weep

And under your gaze of sinister patriarch

The timid and sad pray in low voices

 

Yo iré como una alondra cantando por el río

y llevaré a tu barca mi perfume salvaje,

e irradiaré en las ondas del arroyo sombrío

como una azul linterna que alumbrara en el viaje.

 

I will go like a swallow singing along the river

And I will carry on your boat my wild fragrance

And I will radiate among the waves of the shadowy stream

Like a blue lantern lighting the journey

 

Por más que tú no quieras, por más guiños siniestros

que me hagan tus dos ojos, en el terror maestros,

Caronte, yo en tu barca seré como un escándalo.

 

For all you might hate it, for all the sinister looks

Your two eyes, masters of terror, give me

Caronte, in your boat I will be a scandal!

 

Y extenuada de sombra, de valor y de frío,

cuando quieras dejarme a la orilla del río

me bajarán tus brazos cual conquista de vándalo.

 

And exhausted by shadow, by courage and cold

When you want to leave me on the shore of the river

Your arms will lower me like a Vandal’s conquest

 

Juana’s poem also calls to mind another by Dylan Thomas:

 

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

 

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

 

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Death in Catholicism is a subject which I think is best approached in poetry, since it is essentially poetic in nature.  The Catholic response to death is both submission and rage, and these two live side-by-side in chemical purity never mixing nor diluting each other. Death is unnatural to us because God created us for eternity, yet it is an eternal reminder of our absolute need of Him.  ”Dust you are and to dust you will return.”  Catholics neither run from death nor welcome it.  We throw ourselves in death’s lap saying “bring it a**hole!.”  We love life with tiger-fierceness, grabbing it with both hands and pushing our faces in it, and yet we refuse to believe ourselves as merely temporarily-incarnate spirit-beings untouched by death’s material reality.  We hate death, and yet we refuse to whitewash it or hide from it.   From the one side we are accused of being morose in our obsession with verisimilar crucifixes, bloody pietas and saint’s body parts, with our requiem masses and black veils and weeping, from the other we are called “delusional” because we believe in a material and spiritual resurrection.  It’s strange poetry.  Every Lent we walk through the physicality and pain of Good Friday, the bruises, the blood, the tears, and yet nothing is more profoundly spiritual to us than to share in His bodily suffering.  At the same time, we know that Easter Sunday comes, that the blood will be cleaned away, the wounds salved, and the dead will walk again, eat fish, see the sun, and give thanks.  We are neither morose nor polyanna about death, but somehow contain the best of both qualities.

It is poetry:  So I wrote a poem about it.  Forgive me if it sounds like it belongs in a 15 year-old girl’s journal after listening to too much Korn.

Mourn Me

When I die: mourn me

Lay me out of the sun,

In a shadowed chapel stained with years of candles

With the moisture of rosaries and tears

 

Look on me, cool and unnaturally still

Smelling of a face-powder I never used

My chest fixed in a black dress worn

Once to your nephew’s wedding, and once

When we saw Don Giovanni.

These breasts that fed our girls

are not even stone,

But something uglier, human meat.

 

If you loved me it will hurt

It’s supposed to.  Love floods us with light and thirst.

Smudges us with fingerprints of eternity

 

Do not “celebrate my life” mourn me!

I’ve not gone on a cruise,

do not stand on the dock waving handkerchiefs like seagulls.

You can’t gentrify it with euphemisms

Exchange crucifixes for sunsets

No Pygmalion, the devourer

will not be made over to a pretty quietus

 

Death offends, take offense.

Because even He went through this, His mother

felt the cooling of his chest, received

His stiff body, his 3-day old blood

 

Look to Him, who shoved Himself

down its throat in a rage of submission

and cry! “Death! Thou shalt die!”

On Dialectical Masturbation

I love blogs, especially Catholic ones.  I started reading them in 2008 shortly after being confirmed in the Church and they have been a vital part of my post-conversion formation, helping to negotiate my way through Catholic teachings.  What I love most about them is how articulate so many of the blog-writers are, combining passion for their faith with an engaging view of the culture and a deep love of literature and the written word.  Indeed Elizabeth Duffy, writing on The Anchoress distinguishes Catholic mommy blogs from many of their secular counterparts precisely because of this sophistication:

Most Catholic married women expect to be mothers, so there’s no need to fetishize their choices or even to identify with them overmuch. They are mothers, who by and large enjoy being mothers and who make great investment in their children, but “Mommy” is not their persona.

Rather, they’re talking about Brahms, they’re reading the complete works of Shakespeare, they’re writing novels, reviewing books, and blogging the Wasteland. Some love fashion, but I suspect most would have scruples with becoming a fashionista, or an anything-ista. Almost all of them reference Christ, or aspects of their faith with regularity, or if they don’t talk openly about Christ, he is the hidden center of their thought.

 

For me, reading Catholic blogs was like stumbling  by-accident into an awesome dinner party full of people with whom I had an instant rapport.  These writers, men and women, were so much like myself and through them I was able to see how joyful it is to be both a Catholic and an intellectual, to love the beauty of human creation and see it as a reflection of the divine.

Invariably, because of the Church´s stance on certain issues, Catholic blogs attract both people who love the faith and people who don´t.  Of those who don´t, it seems there are three types.  There are some who come merely to troll, leaving one-line, badly spelled insults and disappearing.  There are others who are able to respectfully disagree with the blogger and state their reasons for doing so, all the while listening and discussing the blogger´s points.  And then there are those who engage in dialectical masturbation.

The difference between dialectical masturbation and trolling is not all that obvious, in fact most assume they are one and the same.  Trolling, however, is usually done just to stir people up.  A troll pops into a blog or news article, leaves an insult or inflammatory comment and then vanishes.  Occasionally they return and repeat the process, and might even actually start to engage in a discussion, but these moments are rare.  Usually a troll´s job is done once the comment is posted, wherein they sit back and watch the fireworks.

A dialectical masturbator however, is altogether different.  The dialectical masturbator frequents blogs, usually more than one, with diametrically opposed political or social views to their own.  The purpose of visiting these blogs is, not, as they tell themselves, to engage in a debate with someone whose political views are different from theirs, or even to get people to think about things differently, their purpose is to stir themselves up into a state of pleasurable indignation and repeatedly post about how the views of the blogger and other commenters are, how such bloggers are motivated purely by hatred and prejudice, and how his own views are superior.

Indignation might be seen as the one form of anger which is pleasurable to experience.  To be indignant is to be confirmed in one´s own superiority, to raise oneself up a few inches, point a strident finger at an offender and say “How dare you!”.  Immediately the offender is reduced while the indignant is elevated.  There is no parity between them in which the offender can be equal to or identified with the indignant.   The indignant says “You are vile! I am not like you!.”  The brain is flooded with a tiny hit of adrenaline, conscious thought is pushed aside and all energies are focused into this moment of accusation.  It makes the indignant feel important, erases any self-doubts he might have and allows him to forget his own life for awhile.

And the internet facilitates this “stoking up indignation as entertainment” the same way as it facilitates physical masturbation through the dissemination of pornography.  One can work themselves up about issues and faceless names on  a blog, get the “hit” they are looking for, without having to face a real human person, or real-world implication of their views.   Just like physical masturbation, the dialectical masturbator can seek out this hit again and again, with little cost to himself other than time spent in front of a screen.

Like physical masturbation, there is no sense communion, of reconciling opposites, of coming together.  It is an isolating and addictive practice, merely meant to make the indignant feel good about himself.  And its a plague which one finds on Catholic blogs everywhere, because hating the Church is an enormous source of pleasure for many people.

How the New Age Cheapens Life and Death

Perhaps it’s the ex-smoker Catholic in me, or perhaps it’s the adolescent rebellion I never experienced at 16 now occurring at the age of 33 but I feel a certain aversion, almost revulsion towards the New Age ideas with which I grew up.  Indeed our bookshelves were full of  everything from Buddhism to reincarnation, to astral travel, to mediums and psychic channels:  all the woos in wooville as it were.   When I went to college I added my own books on Wicca, tarot reading and astrology.  I devoured all of Sylvia Browne’s poorly executed writing, repetitive as lentils  (except when it wasn’t self-contradictory).  I knew all of the lingo, could cast a chart with ease and even throw your cards for you if you asked (and usually did for friends and the occasional paying customer.)  The only thing I never got into was Yoga or Hinduism, and that was mostly because I’m too uncoordinated to twist my fat arse into some poetically named position and because I enjoy eating our “animal co-beings” too much.

But I find that New Age ideas are not these pleasant, happy spiritual concepts I drank in so regularly as a child and a young woman.  There’s a sinister side to them I never perceived before, a glossing over of and discarding of reality in the name of pleasant lies.  New Age spirituality draws from many traditions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and pre-Christian paganism, however it disintegrates the religions it claims by ripping strands from them and bleaching out their discomfiting parts.  Indeed, Hinduism, Buddhism, Paganism and Christianity are hardly recognizable under the New Age lens.  Reincarnation, a tenet of Hinduism, is accepted but not as it used to be conceived, as a torturous cycle of repetitions guided by indifferent and impersonal forces, but rather as a kind of “learning process” in which one experiences life after life in order to gain wisdom, guided by a loving deity who receives you at the end of your life when you go back “home” to heaven.  Christianity gets rid of all that uncomfortable “sin and hell” stuff (ya know, the stuff Jesus actually talked about) and becomes about “Christ Consciousness.”   Paganism loses that whole “lets try and appease these capricious and volatile gods so they will stop playing with us the way cats  bat around mice before they eat them” thing and becomes about crystals, five syllable Celtic names,  dancing in a circle at solstice and making essential oils from your own garden.  These “uncomfortable” parts represent human beings´ authentic experience of life as filled with moments of pain, of death as an uncanny contradiction.  They represent human beings´ attempt to account for these experiences in light of our awareness of the eternal, to overcome them when we´re  in them, and to hold them at bay when we´re not.

Indeed, the New Age involves a kind of “Pleasantville” filtering out of the challenges of religious life.   It is Care Bears spirituality, steeped in a euphemistic language that is the spiritual equivalent to “darn” and “heck”.   If the Jesus of the Gospels, says “sin, damn, hell, blood”  the New Agers of the world cover it up with  ”ego, negative energy, undeveloped state of consciousness,  spiritual essence.”  It is an immature spirituality, not in the  sense that it is new and progressing, but rather that it rejects the pain of maturation in the name of a false childhood.  This explains why the New Age is invariably narcissistic.   Every New Age practice is designed to confirm the “wonderful specialness” of the practitioner. The astrologer´s fine conjunction of stars dote him with such an array of positive attributes that he doesn’t have to go through the real work of developing virtue.   Every person who goes into a hypnotic trance to find out about their past lives discovers they were a king or queen, never a laborer or a peon.   Casting their numerological signs reveals each one a Messiah or Magus, without the crucifixion of the former nor the long, lonely apprenticeship of the latter.

But there is one element of the New Age movement which is most insidious, which only became clear to me after becoming Catholic, and that is its status as an agent of the Culture of Death.  John Paul II, in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae describes the Culture of Death as one which “encourages an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency…a war of the powerful against the weak: [in which] a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated.”  

The Culture of Death doesn’t merely manifest itself in genocides and eugenic policies of “weeding out the weak”, it comes, not as soldier with a bloody machete, but as a soft-voiced nurse with a deadly dose of morphine in a syringe.   Its platform is not to purify the human race but to “avoid suffering” by euthanizing the terminally ill and the elderly, by aborting babies who be born into poverty or who have some kind of congenital defect.  It turns “quality of life” into a weapon against life itself, taking on the guise of compassion and tenderness, pushing death as the remedy for pain.

The New Age does spiritual PR work for this culture.  It promotes reincarnation, thus diminishing the relationship between soul and body.  The belief of many in the New Age movement is that the soul pre-exists the body and occupies several bodies over the ages as a means of “advancing” in wisdom.  The soul enters the body at some point during gestation but only becomes “locked in” at birth.  Once the earthly lifetime ends, the body is discarded as an old suit of clothes and the soul returns to it’s real home in heaven.  From that vantage point abortion and euthanasia can’t be really seen as morally problematic.  Heck, even murder becomes little more than having the shirt stolen off your back.  The idea of prolonging a life, of giving birth to and raising a defective child seems absurd and almost cruel.   Better to just “send them home” as it were.

Relatedly, the New Age promotes its own version of “Universalism”, the belief that everyone goes to heaven.  A favourite meme of New Agers is “You’re not a human being having a spiritual experience, you’re a spiritual being having a human experience”, interpreted to mean that you are an eternal being from heaven temporarily inhabiting a physical body and you will return to heaven when you die.  Some New Age writers such as Sylvia Browne go into great detail about what this “other side” looks like and how life transpires in such a place.  All paint it as, of course, paradise, although Browne makes it sound like a celestial retirement community with book clubs and tennis tournaments.  This image of heaven as both origin and guaranteed destination, without the problematic ideas of Judgement or any type of purgation contributes to the overall “cheapening” of life lived on Earth.   If heaven is such a great place which you are guaranteed to go no matter how you live or die, than dispatching a baby or an ill or elderly person becomes like sending them on a cruise.  In fact, when I was neck deep in the New Age I used to long for death, not because I was depressed or suicidal, but because such a vision was so enticing, I wanted to go there.

What are the implications of such a conjunction of beliefs?   That taking a life through murder, euthanasia, abortion or suicide is not the moral violation the soul feels it is, but rather just another part of the cycle of life, a form of liberation or a “learning experience.”  Similarly, grief, that terrible country where one encounters the cold unnaturalness of death, is minimized in an offensive manner.  The reason we experience grief is because life matters, because the “person, body and soul” who was with us is now gone.  We feel this as a terrible injustice, as a deep “wrongness” in the universe.  But the New Age would try to fill it full of tranquillizers, making it “pleasant” and “nice,” so that we would befriend it, even as it eats us and our loved ones.

Questioning?

I love my family, but post-conversion some conversations with them too easily drift into the “stomach churning, want to sink into a deep hole, please-can-we-not-talk-about-this-now” category.  This is particularly true with my Dad who became an ordained Anglican priest around the same time that I became a Catholic.  Because faith is his vocation, and because his formation involved a four-year stint in an a highly left-wing Theology college in Vancouver, most religion based conversations end up where I really don’t want them to go.

The reason is my style of communication is Narrative based.  I talk to talk, and I talk to connect emotionally with people.  For me the idea of heaven is a dinner party with close friends, lots of wine, and talking until the alcohol makes speech difficult.  Arguing diametrically opposed views doesn’t invite connection, it shatters it.  Even if I believe very strongly that my Dad is wrong on very important issues, that his theological stance is too colored by the leftist ideology of his instructors and he needs to give orthodoxy a fair hearing, and that he reminds me so much of the Bishop Ghost in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce that I fear for his eternal salvation, I can’t imagine myself actually telling him that since  I still want him to love me.

In one of these uncomfortable conversations he brought up the issue of how supposedly “The Catholic Church prohibits people from asking questions”.  My response was to argue that point by bringing up Thomas Aquinas who pretty much asked every single question and debated every objection against it, and is considered a saint and a doctor of the Church.  That seemed to give him food for thought.    But it did get me thinking about this accusation, which I’ve heard from others as well.

I’ve come to realize that there are two directions one can take when one “questions” something.  ”Questioning” can involve a search for knowledge, for a satisfying answer that increases one’s understanding.  This is typified by the childlike and immense “why?”.  When the answer is found,  the questioner is elevated, his wisdom increases.    The other type of questioning, however, is the search for a loophole, for a reason not to do something.  This is typified by  ”why should I?” “Who says?”.   Both forms of questioning involve a kind of wrestling with the faith.  In the former, like Jacob and like Job one wrestles with it in order to enter it more deeply and find a resolution to the challenges it presents.  In the latter, one wrestles in order to escape the faith, to avoid those difficulties and take the easy way out.

In addition, I always find it curious when people on the left, be they atheists or some “progressive Christians” exhort more orthodox believers to “question” their belief. Really, they mean one should question “conservative” ideas only. Questioning which might confirm the believer’s orthodoxy, might lead an atheist to reconsider the question of faith and might lead a leftist to conclude that the left is wrong, are never taken into account.   Indeed, the left has its own orthodoxy, so confirmed in the absolute goodness of its maxims that the thought that one might question *their* ideas and assumptions is rarely considered.

It’s hard for the embattled leftist to accept that one can be both intellectually honest and still conclude that some “conservative” ideas are correct and their “liberal” counterparts are not.  Questioning is not unidirectional.  I was a leftist and I reasoned my way to orthodoxy by questioning my own assumptions, particularly the leftist maxims I had taken as facts.  I actually concluded in my questioning that the Catholic Church was correct in its position on a lot of issues, and that its positions were grounded in both reason and compassion. , The Church is logically consistent in its views while leaving ample room for human freedom.

The truth is, a mature faith always asks questions and wrestles with issues.  We live in a fallen world and our vision is darkened.  Questioning applies the intellect and the reasoning with which God blessed humankind.  The apostle Paul encourages questioning when he exhorts us to “test everything, hold fast to what is good”, but I think it´s that second part of the phrase that bothers those of the “Why should I?” approach to questioning.  ”what is good” doesn´t always mean “what feels good.” Good is not necessarily nice, sometimes it´s downright bracing and uncomfortable.

 

Merry Christmas

A beautiful song about history’s most profound event, if it had happened in Canada…

Tom Jackson’s version is the greatest.

Baby Names Part 2: Considerations

When Isabel was born I was sure I was having a boy, so I had five boy names and only 2 girls names:  Leticia and Isabel.  Leticia was because of an ESL student from Spain who told me her name referred to the joys of the Blessed Virgin.  (From Latin, “Laetitia”).  As pretty as that sounded, when they put my daughter in my arms for the first time the name “Isabel” just fit.  It was there, at the tip of my tongue.  “Isabel” was who she was.  “Blanca”, Mauricio’s mother’s name, was his suggestion, another beautiful name which means “white” in Spanish.  Both fit the general concept I have of a good name, they were beautiful, simple, meaningful, common enough to be comprehensible but not too common as to be trendy.  I have three criteria in mind for a good name, although I’m flexible as its hard to find a name that meets all 3.

Spanish/English transferability:  The name should exist in both languages and be pronounced relatively similarly in both.  My own name is an excellent example of this.  It’s even the name of the badass hacienda owner in Venezuelan author Rómulo Gallegos’ novel and the telenovela based on it.  As we are a bilingual/bicultural family it’s important that the child’s name not be a stumbling block while moving between the two sides of her identity. Transferable names might include “Claudia,” “Laura” “Paula”, “Samuel” “Sara” “Maria” and “Ana”.  Some names exist in both but undergo a radical change in pronunciation or spelling: “Steven” becomes “Esteban” and  “Henry” becomes “Enrique”.  Also there are cultural differences in how certain names are used in both.  Ariel in Spanish is a boy’s name while in English it’s a girl’s (Thank you Disney), and while “Jesús” is a very common Spanish name, in English it sounds odd (and a bit presumptuous).

Faith connection:  For Catholics, naming a child after a saint or a figure from the Bible is a very long-held and honorable tradition.  It connects the child vertically with the faith of her family and provides a patron Saint to intercede and pray for that child throughout her life.  Isabel is named for Saint Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist.  Saint Elizabeth was chosen because of my husband becoming a father in his old age, and because I always imagine her as helping Mary, who was very young and newly pregnant, understand what childbirth was.  There was something remarkably practical about the angel sending Mary to visit her cousin who was in her sixth month of pregnancy.  Mary was an only child and a consecrated virgin who had no expectation of motherhood.  Visiting Elizabeth was a way to prepare herself in a kind of apprenticeship.   When I found out I was pregnant with Isabel I was completely clueless and blindsided by the news, I could relate to the need for guidance.

Family Connection.  I think it’s good to have a name that connects you to your family history.  Latinos have done this for centuries, hence the gordian knot of multi generational names in Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Isabel shares her first name with both an aunt in El Salvador and with her grandmother.  It’s a way to create bonds between members and between generations, and to reinforce the roots that every child has which help to define who she is.

These are some of the names I have in mind…of course this list is bound to change as I get closer to my due date.

Boys

Samuel

Pros’:  These days I’ve been reading the stories of King David and I’m drawn to a lot of the male personalities.  Samuel, the prophet of the lord, chosen from childhood to anoint the King of Israel, first Saul, then David.  I also like Jonathan, Nathan and David as possibilities. It’s also the name of my favorite Sci-fi character of all time, the Christlike Samuel Beckett from  Quantum Leap.

Cons:  No family connection, and also the nickname “Sammy” is just…urgh!  On the other hand…it does sound good in the sentence “Your neurosurgeon will be Dr. Samuel Valencia.  He comes highly recommended.”

Leonardo

Pros:    Hispanicization of my Dad’s first name.  Won’t be mispronounced or misspelled, could go by “Leo” which still sounds cool.  Also a saint, and a DaVinci.

Cons:   Also a DiCaprio…

Gabriel

Pros:  The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.  I love archangel names.  Michael and Raphael are also possibilities here.

Cons:  Playground factor “Gay-briel? Are you a gay Gabriel?”

Magno

Pros:  This is actually the name of one of my husband’s childhood friends, and while there is no family connection, I secretly love this name because it’s so very badass!  “Magno” is the Spanish version of “Magnus” which in English means “The Great”  (Alexander the Great = Alejandro Magno)  I can see my strapping 6 foot 10 son “Magno” strolling into the kitchen with his broadsword kissing his 5’11’’ mother on her forehead saying “hey mom, guess what? This afternoon I conquered five cities and changed the balance of power in the region.” “That’s good sweetie, now go wash up, I made fish-tacos for dinner”  “Awesome.  Fish tacos are the shit!”  Of course, even if he’s only 5’6 and his conquests are all on “World of Warcraft,” he still has a badass name.

Cons:  Badass or not, the name is very likely to end up on “Baby’s named a bad, bad thing” along with the woman who names her son “Emperor”.

Pablo

Pros:  Spanish version of Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, the razor-sharp intellect who defined the Christian faith.   My due date is July 7^th, if the baby is born on July 12^th he will also share a birthday with Pablo Neruda, one of my favourite poets, thus it would be cool to give him that name.

Cons:  Pablo Neruda was a great poet, but also a womanizing douchebag and an unrepentant Stalinist who would trash other poets in public.  Probably not the best example.

Girls

Maria or any variation:  

Pros: Latinos are so fond of the Blessed Mother that they overwhelmingly choose it for a girl’s name.  Rather than having 25,000,000 Marias (sounds like a great title for the next Santana + pop flavor of the month collaboration) they use Mary’s many titles.  Thus you have Carmen (Maria del Carmen), Tránsito (Maria del Tránsito), Lourdes, Rosario, Guadalupe, Dolores and Socorro.  Anything that honors the Blessed Mother is good.

Cons:  My husband already has a daughter named Maria.  The rest of those names sound odd in English, especially Tránsito.  The only exception is “Carmen”, and I don’t feel comfortable with my daughter sharing her name with an opera whose titular character is murdered by her jealous lover—no matter how good the music is.  Call it a touch of superstition.

 Cecilia

Pros:  Patron Saint of music.  We love music in my house, my husband classical, I pop.

Cons:  Playground factor “Sissy, Sissy, Sissy”

Clara

Pros:  Means both “bright” and “transparent” in Spanish.  Also St. Clara was the beloved friend of Francis of Assisi and started one of the first orders of religious sisters which encouraged the nuns to go out on the streets and interact with the poor rather than remain in the cloister.

Cons:  Two names from The House of the Spirits makes me sound obsessed.  Truthfully I can no longer relate to or stomach Isabel Allende’s anger.

Catherine/Catalina

Pros: Two of my favourite saints in one name: Catherine of Siena and Catherine of Alexandria, also the hard-done by first wife of Henry VIII (and the daughter of Isabel of Aragon), who should be a saint in her own right.

Cons:  Don’t really like the Spanish version, sounds like salad dressing.  (Playground Factor)

Juana

Pros:  There are so many great “Juanas” out there, from Juana de Arco to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.  It’s a name so rich in history and associated with strong, intelligent, faithful women.

Cons:  Playground factor “Wanna” “Wanna”

I will keep adding to this list as more ideas come up.  But for now, there it is.  I’m open to suggestions.