The Trouble With Talk

I was on talk radio today -- the Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio. It's not the first time that I've done talk radio, but it is the first time that I've had to take calls and it's quite difficult. You see, you get people calling in and some of them seem to be advice junkies -- people who have read all of the books and articles and could probably tell you more than you could tell them, but who haven't found what they're looking for so they keep searching -- and then you get people who are genuinely hurt and confused and want you to say something that will help them...and you're on talk radio, so you have to do this before the next ad break. In this case, it was a man whose wife had left him for a lesbian relationship and he sounded so vulnerable that my heart broke (cheesy phrase -- I avoid cheesy phrases because I am jaded and post-modern, so if I use them it means I'm breaking down and giving in to sentiment. i.e. I have had an emotion, and I am admitting it in public...very dangerous.) In any case, parenthetical asides aside, I didn't know what to say. It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's that I don't have anything to say that makes good radio -- because any real answer would have involved asking all sorts of questions that are intensely personal, questions that you couldn't possibly ask on the air in front of listeners. Not to mention the fact that a good answer would take hours, probably spread out over several days/weeks.
Obviously not possible; as Marshal McLuhan tells us, "the medium is the message." Talk radio is fast, it's supposed to be controversial and engaging (no bonus points for me here -- I'll never make a good right-wing pundit, though perhaps with some work I could make a decent radio guest). So the question is, how do you give a fast, engaging, controversial answer that will actually do the caller some good?
I don't know. I'll mull it over in my mind, and perhaps I'll come up with something -- if not an answer that would work on talk radio, at least one short and sweet enough to function in the blogsphere.

Something Left to Save

I've been away this week -- I was down in Alabama shooting an interview with EWTN for The Abundant Life. An unexpected fringe benefit of the trip was a better understanding of the culture war. From a Generation Y Canadian perspective, it always looks like the culture warriors are something akin to a mother who continues trying to breast-feed her dead infant. It's like, unless Christ appears and tells the Culture of Death to get out of bed and walk, it's best to just bury it. But then you get to Alabama, and you're in the airport, and people are dressed in real clothing, and having real conversations, and the security guards are making jokes about officiousness and you think, "My God, there is still culture here. Civil society. Something worth fighting for and saving." That's when all of those angry right-wing pundits on talk radio start to sound sane. And then you wonder what you're supposed to say to that audience, because my entire perspective on the culture wars comes from a Canadian triage mentality. It's a different place to be, and I think that it could be seen as being defeatist or fatalistic, but I don't think that's true. It's a different kind of hope that we need to have here, sitting in cosmopolitan Toronto -- the decadent world city perched on the frontiers of the wilderness. It's the kind of hope that must of sustained Our Lady after Christ was put into tomb, the sort of grim, "Okay, it's over now, but we go on believing anyways," resignation. Not a hopeless resignation, but a submission to the facts combined with that strange thrill, the feeling that somewhere, in secret, beneath the corpse of the present culture the Holy Spirit is moving through the dark earth breathing life into hidden seeds.

The Other Side of the Coin

I'm going to do something here that Catholics do all too seldom: I am going to speak out condemning a piece of legislation that opposes the practice of homosexuality.
The bill probably doesn't directly concern you and I but it highlights the need for Catholics to uphold both sides of the Church's teaching on homosexuality.
The proposed bill would provide increased penalties for homosexual behaviour in Uganda (gay sex is already illegal in Uganda) including the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" (i.e. homosexual relations with a person under eighteen, homosexual relations with a disabled person, any homosexual relations if the accused is HIV positive, and "serial" offenses.) It also provides substantial penalties for any group or organization that promotes homosexuality, and for any authority who fails to report known violations of the act.
It is an interesting piece of legislation, because it is one in which the spirit is -- in many respects -- quite laudable, but the letter is dangerous and unjust. The goals, outlined in the early portion of the bill, are to safeguard the traditional family, to protect the culture and values of Uganda, and to safeguard people (particularly children) from pro-gay propaganda flowing in alongside Western aid. So far, so good. Another obvious, but not explicitly outlined goal is clearly the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS through homosexual relations -- this is a particular concern in Africa because same-sex attracted people do not generally gay-identify or live a gay lifestyle; most same-sex attracted Africans are married, which means that if they contract HIV homosexually, they may infect their wife/children.
The moral difficulties, from a Catholic perspective, lie with the application of the death penalty, and the idea of a penalty for people who fail to inform on others whom they know to be guilty. It is here that we arrive at the other side of Catholic teaching on homosexuality: the teaching that while homosexual sex is intrinsically immoral, homosexual persons "must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided." (CCC 2358)
It is important, if Catholics are going to bring the Gospel into the lives of homosexuals, that this second part of our teaching be upheld and proclaimed just as vociferously as the condemnation of homosexual relations. It is because we too often fail in this respect that we are painted as homophobic. The proposed Ugandan legislation not only represents unjust discrimination, it would also -- by virtue of its provision that authorities must report or face fines and imprisonment -- make it even more difficult for Ugandans dealing with same-sex attractions to seek out spiritual advice and counsel from their priests and pastors. Increased fear of persecution isolates those who are most in need of support, it drives homosexuality underground and prevents people with homosexual desires from being able to deal with their temptations within the context of a supportive, moral, Christian community.

Daughterhood

My little sister had a tattoo. It was in elvish, as conceptualized by J.R.R. Tolkien, and it read "daughter." It referred to two things: the importance of her family in her life (Kristen was one of six daughters in the Robinson clan) and her relationship to God.
I have been thinking a lot about my daughterhood in the past month -- what it means to be God's daughter, and what it means for Him to be my father. I have, as anyone who follows this blog will know, been out of communication for the past month and a half. This is on account of a family crisis, which I am not going to describe in any detail right now (maybe later -- the fog of paranoia is still a little too thick for me to say anything of substance in a public forum). The point is that it has been very difficult, and that a lot of family relationships have shifted: those that were already weakened have become more strained, those that were already strong have become stronger. There is something in trial that separates these things out clearly; suddenly you know exactly who you really trust -- not just because those whom you can't trust abandon you, but because you start looking around for the clearest steps forward, the firm ground where you know you will be able to find footing, and you can see exactly where it is.
Strangely enough, God comes under this heading as well. Not that God is not firm ground, or that He is not trustworthy, but there is something in the human heart that doesn't quite trust. When things are going well, good enough. We can raise up our hands and sing out hallelujahs and cry "Praise to the Lord of Hosts!" Amen. It is easy to speak casually about God the Father in such times, because you are thinking of a father as someone that you see on Sunday for dinner, someone to whom you tell jokes as worn-out and comfortable as old socks, someone that you can build a shed with on a lazy autumn afternoon. When things are bad it is a different matter, because suddenly God must be not merely a father, but a Father who simultaneously has the power to rescue you from whatever is happening, and a Magus who has made the decision to pose you a very difficult and painful riddle. This is when it becomes necessary not merely to love, but to love with faith, to trust, which is much more difficult. To say, "Lord, you have allowed all of this to happen, and I don't understand why, and now I want you to get me out of it." But at the back of your head you're always thinking, "But if you let it happen in the first place, then why should I think you're going to help me now..." Which is why we return to daughterhood, to a trust that has to sink deeper than just the belief in some sort of magician who will rescue you, deus ex machina style, from all your woes, to a trust that God is not merely going to save us in the future, but is saving us now. That it is all an expression of his Fatherly love for us.

Sodomy laws and billy clubs

I'm in the middle of working on a book about post-modernism, and one of the ideas that I'm necessarily dealing with in the process is the notion of pluralism. Those who have read Sexual Authenticity will know that I'm not a big fan of state interference in the private lives of citizens -- my belief in Catholic sexual morality does not lead me to believe in sodomy laws, for example. I think that there is an on-going tendency for people to believe that somehow public legislation will be able to cure private vice, that you will be able to help people to shake off the shackles of sin by throwing them into prison, torturing, interrogating, intimidating, etc. This kind of love wears a uniform and carries a billy-club (or, in contemporary society, a taser). This is not to say that I don't believe in the rule of law, but rather that I don't believe that the rule of law has any right to intervene in private life. I think it makes sense to illegalize drug trafficking, for the same reason that it makes sense to legally control or prevent the sale of any dangerous substance, but that it does not make sense to criminalize drug addiction. That it makes sense to prosecute pimps, but not to prosecute prostitutes (nor, for that matter, to prosecute men who resort to prostitutes.) That producing and marketing pornography should be illegal, but that using it should not be.
The difference has to do with the kinds of offenses being committed, and the purposes for legislation. If someone is committing a sin because he/she is hoping to make money off the deal, then legislation makes sense: provided you impose stiff enough penalties that a cost-benefit analysis will lead people to choose a more productive lifestyle, you will probably convince at least the more rational members of society to behave themselves. Sins of weakness, on the other hand, are a completely different matter. People do not, for the most part, frequent prostitutes, view pornography, have gay sex or abuse drugs because they have sat down and made a utilitarian calculation, and have come to the conclusion that when all is said and done the pain-pleasure balance comes down in favour or their addiction. Stiffer penalties, jail-time, fines, crack-downs and so forth will not change people's behaviours in these cases, on the contrary, I think that usually they will end up having the opposite effect: a person who is using some sort of addictive behaviour in order to deal with stress, loneliness, fear, etc. will find that the ever penetrating eye of big-brotherly social concern produces greater paranoia, greater fear, greater loneliness, greater stress -- and the vicious circle will tighten itself predictably around their throat. Real methods of helping people in these situations involve much more delicate instruments than those available to the state (even in its most paternalistic, soft-pedaled, compassionate-society forms). Real relationships, trust, support, understanding, genuine personal compassion, and the deep humility necessary for us to understand that we are not helping from a position of superiority, but as fellow sinners; these are required in order to lead people out of private vice. They are necessary to penetrate the barriers of secrecy without violating the sanctity of personal privacy. They are the responsibility of every Christian, and it is a responsibility that cannot be fobbed off on police and government.

The Gift

I'm reading an absolutely fabulous books at the moment, Lewis Hyde's The Gift which is not some sort of cheesy sixth-sense schlock about people with two sights and three eyes, (the sub-title is "Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" which does about as little as it possibly could to clear up any confusions that might be arise about the content, and the picture of golden apples on the cover also doesn't reveal any secrets until you come to understand that it's an anonymous Shaker painting which illustrates some of the points that you will only get to in later chapters.) Okay, so the title and cover design are not necessarily grabbers, but as they say "You can't judge a book, ladeedadeeda, etc. etc." What the book is about is the idea of gift exchange, gift economies, the nature of gifts and the sorts of social structures that they create and imply, the relationship between gifts and commodities/gift economies and market economies, and how all of these things relate to the realm of art and the imagination: the idea of artistic talent as a "gift" and of an inspiration as something given to an artist, and of the work of art given as a gift to the public.
The relationship of such ideas to the idea of the "gift of self," the human person, and especially the body, as gift in the Theology of the Body is obvious. Hyde has the advantage over JPII of writing prose that is much more easily penetrated (JPII has the advantage of being the Pope, with all of the attendant theological acumen and authority, but for those who have tried to slog through TOB and have ended up scratching their heads in frank confusion, this book is not nearly so dense, nor so repetitive.) What I find especially interesting is that both works have had a similar effect on me, in terms of the subjective experience of reading -- the super-textual communication that is effected by any truly beautiful of human genius. There is a particular kind of awe, an enlivening of the intellect, a host of connections and insights that are not explicitly laid out in the text, but which a really living work sparks in the mind, so that, in a sense, the work could be said to be different for every reader, without losing its ability to communicate really profound meanings. I suppose one might say that it is the increase in worth that comes when the gift of the book is communicated between the author and the reader...
Anyway, highly recommended reading.
I should also put in a plug for Fr. John Waiss' "Born to Love II," which is a series of dialogues about homosexuality. I don't recall the name of the publisher, and my computer is being particularly obtuse at the moment (it doesn't want to open multiple windows, or really do anything. I'm seriously taxing it's resources by making it accept this blog entry. I think it has become prematurely old and cantankerous. Fortunately, it is going to soon be replaced by a shiny new computer. But then, perhaps it realizes that it is about to be put out to pasture and that is why it is being so curmudgeonly. One never knows.) The point is, I'll try to give the publisher, etc. the next time I blog.

Sisters

I'm going to return to the theme of my conversion, and my meditation on the people who played a part in it.
My father I already dealt with, albeit obliquely, in part I. I want to devote this meditation to my sisters, as a group. Kristen I will deal with separately, tomorrow or the next time that I'm able to write.
I had five sisters: Laura, Jamie, Kristen, Alicia, Brianna. All are younger than me. Laura is married, Jamie is the Executive Director of an NGO out in Africa, Alicia is studying to be a midwife and Brianna is just now going into University. Kristen was killed in a car accident several years back, which is why she is going to get her own, special, separate blog entry.
At the time when I was I still an atheist, most of my sisters were too young to enter into any serious philosophical disagreement with me. Laura was old enough, and she was Christian (non-denominational with strong evangelical tendencies), Jamie was old enough and she, like me, had fallen away from Christianity. The others were small.
Laura and I used to argue about God, and morality, and so forth. She once quipped that although she could never beat me in an argument, this didn't especially perturb me: she would just wait a couple of months and then I would give her the counter-arguments to whatever I had been preaching the last time we argued. She did, however, have the honour of being the first to show me the difference between homophobia and Christian orthodoxy. I had recently come out of the closet, and inevitably, some time having passed, I prodded Laura to see what she had to say about the matter. She said something to the effect of, "I think that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong, but I don't think that should change my relationship with you." Now I had always been told that this was essentially unacceptable, that not to accept a gay person's gayness was not to accept the person, that it "is who I am" and if you don't affirm it, you don't love me. The problem was that I was not stupid, and although I'd always been inclined to toe the party line on this point, now that I was faced with this allegedly homophobic "hate the sin/love the sinner" (or, perhaps more accurately, "believe that the sin is a sin/love the sinner") position, I found that I couldn't offer any sort of emotional, or rational objection to it. If her religion said that my sexuality was sinful, then how on earth could I say that she had to change her religion or she didn't love me? It was just such a monumentally obvious hypocrisy: she wasn't saying that I had to change my beliefs and lifestyle if I really loved her, how could I demand the reverse? So that particular bit of liberal cultural detritus went out the window with Laura. She was Christian, she believed in Christianity, she loved me, we were sisters. I felt I was mature enough that I could handle her polite, charitable, unforceful, yet clear disagreement with my sexuality.
The others have been a part of my life in more ways than I could possibly name. Jamie is always there to pull me back from the edge of narrow-bandwidth Christian Conservativism, to make sure that I don't wander off into the delightful, but insular world of Chestertonians in plaid jumpers. She has always helped me to see the beauty in the modern world, and the honour and dignity in the struggle of humanity to stay human in the midst of the Culture of Death. In terms of writing my book, I had her in mind a lot of the time. I kept thinking, "how can I say this? If I were writing this as a personal letter to Jamie, what would I put in?" It helped, I think, to keep me from wandering off too much into vain and contemptuous rants, or from jumping to uncharitable conclusions, because Jamie really does represent the other side of the debate at its absolute best: she is a chaste woman, a believing Christian (a recent development, but it was always sure to happen sooner or later), and a deeply compassionate person. Her support for homosexuality is not superficial or ill-informed; she has worked in AIDS hospice and has had a number of exceedingly close relationships with gay men. Anything that I couldn't say about Jamie, I could not say about people who support homosexuality in general, because she would be the disproof.
Alicia and Brianna are my little sisters. This is not to belittle their part in my lives, but it means that they were not so much involved during the period before my conversion. What I can say of all of my sisters is that having so many of them, and having had, at every stage of my life, the experience of being in a large family, or being loved by people who were at the same time so similar and yet so different from me, has completely shaped my personality and my beliefs. It was because of them that I knew, as soon as I had my first child, that I was going to have to have more. Because the relationship that I've had with sisters is one of the great treasures of my life, it is something which no amount of extra baubles or new clothes could possibly have compared with. I have heard of children who have been asked "Would you rather have a new baby, or a trip to DisneyLand in the fall?" (What parent involves their kids in a decision to abort, I don't know. Creepy.) I can tell you, I've had sisters, and I've been to DisneyLand. Family is a joy that continues throughout life, and which is utterly irreplaceable. DisneyLand is an overcrowded theme park, and ultimately neither life-shaping, magical, or unforgetable. So I'll take the new baby over the new car, the new hedge, the new TV, and the family vacation. It's the better deal, every time. I know. My sisters showed me.