A Blip of Reality

...in the Joseph Bottum controversy, from Calah Alexander:

Our society is obviously not properly ordered. It’s so far from being properly ordered, in fact, that I doubt Aquinas or Aristotle would even believe such a society could exist. Nearly half of us were raised in broken homes. More than half of us, if we get married, will get divorced. A single parent home is as common as a dual-parent home. Sex is everywhere, on magazine covers at the grocery store, on the internet, on TV. Nothing is sacred. Furthermore, nature, insofar as it exists in modern city and suburban life, is manicured and transplanted and sprayed with pesticides. Most of us don’t even know what the created Earth looks like. How can we honestly expect anyone, even Christians raised in Christian homes, to really understand natural law and the way it is ordered toward the good when the only “common” that we’ve ever known is such a warped and manipulated image of creation? I’d argue that our understanding of natural law is primarily through the use of speculative reason now. Nature has become unrecognizable, and so it has been relegated to the realm of theory.

All this is not to say that I think we should all immediately go gay and get married. All this is not to say that I actively support the legalization of gay civil marriage. All this is not to say that I reject the teachings of the Church in any way. There is truth in the Church, and wisdom beyond measure. She has been entrusted to safeguard the teachings of God himself. Even the teachings I don’t understand (of which there are plenty), I still submit to. That’s what it means to be a Catholic.

I just also happen to agree with Joseph Bottum, that the fight over gay civil marriage is not the good fight we should be fighting.

This exactly. And the run-up to this excerpt about Aquinas' understanding of natural law is a welcome correction to a common misreckoning. Catholics have an incarnational faith and we're called to robustly live out the truth we encounter in our experience. Discerning the natural law isn't meant to be a process severed from our own or anyone else's lived experience, but you wouldn't know that from typical anti-gay marriage propaganda.

[W]e try as far as possible to impose the burden of the whole onto each individual, to squeeze as much as possible into the narrow confines of the individual. This cannot be done, and as a result the content becomes abstract and theoretical, no longer touching our lives, let alone shaping them. In practice, all we do is taste and try a little of this and a little of that, at random. This explains the increasing evident flatness, the insipid and forced character of the individual Christian life, the worrying preponderance of programs and requirements. There is no longer any participation at the root level; everything has to be done and intended deliberately, everything has to be justified, discussed and decided upon. No wonder that nowadays the pedagogic element--not in the purest sense, but strongly tending toward propaganda--predominates in religious matters, imitating the successful methods of secular advertising, with its gimmicks, slogans and clichés, its mass-distribution from some central office. The individual's personal significance has become tiny. (Ida Gorres)

At the very least there's room in the Church for discussion and debate. I remember reading something from Pope John XXXIII along the lines that it's healthy for the Church to host disagreement. Wish I could find that quote, but it was something along the lines of clashing iron bars making a spark.

This, keeping in mind that Bottum (heh) isn't saying that gay marriage is really A-OK and Catholic understanding of sexuality is lacking. He's just saying that our priorities have long been out of order in the public sphere. And I would add that to focus 99% of our collective voice in opposition to something that is much more complex, intimate, psychologically and spiritually challenging, than the propaganda used against it admits - that's a folly almost as foolish as not talking about the substance of marriage at all.

Make sure to read the rest of Calah's post here.

THE PANTAGRUEL: On Weiner

Hi folks. I'm back, briefly, with a few thoughts on Weinergate.

He's limping in the polls. The fact that's he's still in the race at all is sort of a miracle, and he's gonna have to clamp down pretty hard if he expects to really go the distance. Probably won't be able to stick it out much longer, but he's been squeezing by somehow. (Sort of a slap in the face to Thompson and de Blasio, if you ask me).

He's got his wife working the damage control shtick, but I bet she's pretty tired and wishes he would just withdraw.

With these Carlos Danger tweets, he's got a whole 'nother mess on his hands. It's gonna take more than a few squares of toilet paper to cle- 

OH FINE, ALRIGHT.

Today In Corn: "Beautiful but false in a deadly way"

What is this I don't even.

"Corn survival guide" from Target's Facebook page
h/t Simcha Fisher

Personalist Poetry - Zagajewski and Cairns

The Beauty Created by Others
Adam Zagajewski

Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems. 
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like 
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their 
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams. 
That is why I wonder what 
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he” 
is a betrayal of a certain “you” 
but in return someone else’s poem 
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.

H/T Rosman at Cosmos The In Lost


The Entrance of Sin
Scott Cairns

Yes, there was a tree, and upon it, among the                         The man said, "The
wax leaves, an order of fruit which hung plen-                          woman You put at my
tifully, glazed with dew of a given morning.                               side--she gave me of the
And there had been some talk off and on--                              tree, and I ate."
nothing specific--about forgoing the inclina-                                        --Genesis 3.12
tion to eat of it. But sin had very little to do
with this or with any outright prohibition.

For sin had made its entrance long before the
serpent spoke, long before the woman and the
man had set their teeth to the pale, stringy
flesh, which was, it turns out, also quite with-
out flavor. Rather, sin had come in the midst of
an evening stroll, when the woman had
reached to take the man's hand and he with-
held it.

In this way, the beginning of our trouble came
to the garden almost without notice. And in
later days, as the man and the woman wan-
dered idly about their paradise, as they contin-
ued to enjoy the sensual pleasures of food and
drink and spirited coupling, even as they sat
marveling at the approach of evening and the
more lush approach of sleep, they found within
themselves a developing habit of resistance.

One supposes that, even then, this new taste
for turning away might have been overcome,
but that is assuming the two had found the
result unpleasant. The beginning of loss was
this: every time some manner of beauty was
offered and declined, the subsequent isolation
each conceived was irresistible.

H/T Elizabeth Duffy here and here.

Bone Jam - JEFF the Brotherhood

Things are gettin' kinda dim around here. Time to lighten the moods, dudes.

I wish I could summon pizza.

Man of Steel

Three things.

This:

(source)

this:

from "Crucifixion" by artist Daniel Mitsui
Man of Steel? 

and this:

Signposts in a Strange Dream

"A friend from Yale who hadn’t been in touch since graduation looked him up after envisioning a suicide attempt; the phone in Murphy’s Fargo home rang just as the local retired farmer, hunting enthusiast and poet loaded his double-barreled shotgun. Instead of ending his life, a two-hour conversation led him to relinquish the gun. 

... 

"After his conversion, Murphy still hadn’t completely resolved his past, he said, including sexual abuse by an altar boy at age 6 and by an almost-ordained Jesuit priest he met in college at age 18. He also had lingering questions about his homosexuality and the church. 

But four weeks after he heard the booming voice, he found peace. 

It came by way of a dream about Pope John Paul II, he said. 

“I walked him down to the waterfront, and he said vespers and heard my confession, but mainly he heard me bitching about the Catholic attitude toward gays,” Murphy said. “At the conclusion of the dream, all he said was, ‘Te Dominus amat’… He didn’t say, ‘Ego te absolvo,’ ‘I forgive you,’ but simply, ‘God loves you.’" 

"The next morning, Murphy turned on the radio and heard the bells from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome alerting the world that the pope had died."

Full story here (requires subscription)

H/T Dappled Things

Cross-lashed

A chapel, not a church:
just a clearing in the wood
of aspen, pine and birch,
where a rude altar stood

pegged by a boy's hands;
behind it a birchwood cross
cross-lashed, but neither stands.
They are gone under the moss.

When I quit Wilderness Camp
I rose up from my knees
and left the altar lamp
burning in the trees.

Summits would loom above
the stony trails I trod.
Sex led me to love;
love bound me to God.


Agápē
The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp
to hear confession from an Eagle scout
tortured by forty years of sin and doubt.
You whispered Vespers by a hissing lamp

Handlers, allowing you to hike with me,
followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront
down a firebreak this camper used to hunt.
Through all I said you suffered silently.

I blamed the authors of my unbelief:
St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene,
the Jesuit who raped me as a teen,
the altar boy when I was six, the grief

of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead
by Peter's Church and all the choirs above.
In a thick Polish accent choked with love,
Te Dominus amat was all you said.

--Timothy Murphy