celibacy and friendship
Apologies for the light posting lately. I’ve been out of town and haven’t given much time to collecting interesting content for this tumblelog.
I’m breaking the silence now to recommend a book which I’ve nearly finished reading. It’s called Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must be Reinvented in Today’s Church by Christine A. Colón and Bonnie E. Field. Aside from an excess of pop-culture references in the first several chapters (which is really more of an annoyance than something to seriously criticize), this book is fabulous at every level. I wish I’d written it. The authors’ aim is to hold up celibacy, and not simply a temporary period of singleness that one “endures” while looking for a spouse, as a real, viable, life-enhancing possibility for Christians who live in the cultural mainstream and haven’t necessarily entered into anything like an “intentional Christian community.”
The section on friendship, which I just read, is one of the parts I found most stimulating. The authors draw on Ronald Rolheiser’s book Forgotten Among the Lilies, and I thought I’d post a couple of the quotes from Rolheiser they include:
[Celibate friendships] can be an important way to keep alive, visible and in the flesh, that part of the incarnation which tells us that when one is speaking of love, the human heart is the central organ.
…
[I]n our culture’s view, a view we have generally interiorized and made our own, to love means to make love, to be a lover. Platonic heterosexual friendship is seen as too incomplete, too empty, or as simple unrealistic… When to love someone means to make love to that someone, then it becomes hard to trust that simple friendship might be more life-giving than having sex.
I may post more thoughts on this book over the next several days, but for now I’ll simply say, get a copy and read it. It’s one of the best treatments of contemporary Christian celibacy that I’ve come across (and I’ve read a few).
You were sewn together
with a tapestry of molecules
a billion baby galaxies
and wide open spaces
My older brother is presently in Uganda and urged me to air a grievance against America’s postal system, which has made little effort to revive itself in this advanced age. I had even heard rumors of a potential cut in mail service on Saturdays to save money. Africa offers these letters that provide paper, envelope, and stamp, all in one. And they look awesome, to boot. Things need to be done to stimulate our postal system.
Oh Tommy. I miss you.
I remember a conversation I had with one of my subscribers, who had a kind of high-energy, inside-the-Beltway job. And she said, “I really was interested in that interview with so-and-so, but I needed the bullet points; I needed to know what were the action items.” And I said the best action item would be to emulate Mary and ponder these things in your heart. I said I have no idea what you ought to do about it, but I think if you meditate on it long enough, if you try to acquire an understanding of it over time, it will be useful.
We tend to think we learn things so that we can take control, so we can step out and do something, rather than learning it and just living with it. But the people I know who behave really wisely are not that calculating. I think they’re kind of intuitive; they make decisions more from a kind of grounding in thoughtfulness.
Once a friend and I settled in on a cramped patch of grass to see Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals. While we waited for the act to start, a high-school-age girl leaned across a couple of other people, pointed to her boyfriend, and said to me, “He wants to take your picture. Is that OK?” I am not typically accosted by the paparazzi, and she must have detected my puzzlement. “He wants to be like you when he grows up,” she said.
Then I remembered I was a 50ish guy in a sea of younger people, a gray-haired “aging hipster,” as my daughter calls me, in a Johnny Cash T-shirt amid bronzed prime-of-life kids. It was a rock festival, after all. I awkwardly but happily posed for the commemoration of the moment.
About halfway through the set, Harper and his band were cooking red hot. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the boyfriend. “This is real, man!” he yelled over the pounding music and raucous applause. “We are really here!” I gave him a thumbs-up. The girl beamed.
When the show was over, we gathered our backpacks and water bottles. I told the teenagers, “Thanks for helping to make this a fun evening.”
The girl nodded, but the boy vigorously shook his head and sputtered, “No, man! Thank you for being alive!”
I chose to take it as the compliment it was intended to be. In summer, with good music, good friends and sweet strangers, just being alive is joy enough. And you know what Barth said about that: “Joy is really the simplest form of gratitude.”
The believer is not set at the high noon of life, but at the dawn of a new day, at the point where night and day, things passing and things to come, grapple with each other.
Jürgen Moltmann
Li-Young Lee, "The Gift"
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
*Metal that will bury me*,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
*Death visited here!*
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
[Thanks, Bill]
Reformed Protestants generally adopt only one physical posture in worship — sitting to listen to a sermon — and therefore we are trained in only one spiritual posture. We are trained to accept as a matter of course that it is possible to *think* our way through life, all of life.
[Augustine’s] anti-elitism is most visible in his theology of grace, which is, in R. A. Markus’s felicitous phrase, a “defense of Christian mediocrity” against monastic virtuosi elites of various sorts, most notably the Pelagians. On the one hand, no real perfection is available in this life, so the highest aims of the most rigorous Pelagians are impossible, and reflect a delusionary and sinful self-understanding. On the other hand, he thinks asceticism is not something pursued exclusively in the monastery; ordinary *rudes* — the unlettered “great unwashed” of his congregations — need be no further from the life of struggle than the most rigorous monks, and when presented with the opportunity Augustine expected them to treat their suffering in properly ascetic ways. Asceticism was for him not something some select group undertook for the rest of us; it formed the shape of the Christian life in general…. This anti-elitist “popularizing” of asceticism was far from Luther’s “priesthood of all believers,” of course; but it does stand in some affiliation with it, however distant.
Ajax and Hector fight to a standoff on the windy plains of Troy and then remove their armor and exchange gifts to formalize a friendship. Plutarch’s treatise “How to Profit by One’s Enemy” breathes a similar spirit, though in more philosophical idiom. Classical enmity is functional, strategic, temporary, and superficial. For ancient heroes, enmity always plays out under a canopy of basic agreement; battles are fought under the egis of a code of honor to which both sides adhere, but there is no battle over the code. The Bible teaches an enmity that goes to the bone. For the Christian there can be no compromise with the enemy, but only battle until victory. Can one imagine Moses combating Pharaoh through nine plagues and then calling it all off and moving back into Pharaoh’s palace? Can anyone imagine David and Goliath fighting to a draw and then going off to share a pint? We might as well imagine Jesus dining with the devil after his temptations in the wilderness. Pagans are happy to incorporate any new god into the pantheon, including Jesus; but Paul asks, What harmony has Christ with Belial? Far from deleting enmity from history, Christianity immeasurably and fundamentally deepens it.
