THE FINE MISMATING OF A HIM AND HER...: Something I've been thinking about without much coherence or resolution. I have a couple footnotes which I may post later, but for now I figured I'd let my readers whack at this pinata for a while!

As you know, Bob, I got a lot out of Christopher C. Roberts's Creation and Covenant. Nestled among its more central claims and arguments, it makes a very strong theological case for something I’ve already thought about, w/o much resolution, when considering the "theology of the body": Women and men are made for one another, and yet celibacy is in some way a witness to that fact just as much as marriage is. So how does that actually work?

It’s an especially weird or fraught question for me because so much of my conscious development of a spirituality which supports my celibacy has been devoted to finding chaste, Catholic ways to honor and express my love of women. So I'm very aware of ways in which my prayer life, my volunteer work, my friendships, and my writing are ways in which I can serve and love women. And I stand by that as a necessary and fruitful lens through which to focus my spiritual life. But I'm a lot more vague on how I relate, in my spirituality, to men or Man or Adam (?) or whatever I should be picturing here!

However, when I was thinking about this question, I realized that the one prayer I return to most insistently (I don't count the rosary as one prayer) is the Anima Christi. And this is such an enfleshed, almost lurid prayer, very visceral--you become inebriated by Christ’s blood and hide in His wounds. I wonder if perhaps this prayer is so powerful for me, or calls to me so much when I'm in need, in part because it does offer such a strong spiritual connection to Christ-as-Man?

I am really not able to express myself very well on this subject or form any interesting conclusions, so I suppose I'll just throw this out there and ask whether people have any reactions. And for a) the celibate, especially those celibate by vocation rather than circumstance, and b) the gay/same-sex-attracted/your-term-here among us, do you all perceive, in your own lives, a need for some kind of spiritual practice which "brings together the two halves of humanity"? Have you found ways of living as woman for man, or man for woman, outside of marriage?

HE WALKED DOWN PICCADILLY/WITH A POPPY AND A LILY: Lovely photo of Wilde's grave. (Scroll down.) Santo subito!

Via Rattus.

"'KISS'? WHAT IS 'KISS'?": So today, for the second time in a couple weeks, I came across that definition of postmodernism (Lyotard's?) where it's defined as the rejection of metanarratives. Here's why I think that's unhelpful. These thoughts are even more fragmentary than usual, which I suppose is appropriate....

I'm no more interested in a "definition" of postmodernism than I am in a definition of conservatism; both terms seem to imply more a tradition of discourse than an orthodoxy.

And within that tradition of discourse there are authors whose work relies heavily on certain highly-charged terms--words "surcharg'd with wine," as they say--and if you single out these words as especially important, that implies a metanarrative. This is still true even if the author doesn't attempt to discern or dictate much about the content of that metanarrative. The example I think of is Derrida's use of "the other" and "the avenir," both of which imply, I think, a sort of skeletal Jewish-or-maybe-Christian narrative. (And not, for example, a Platonist one, because of the emphasis on the avenir. Some narratives are excluded, which I'm pretty sure you can't do unless you do have a metanarrative, however parsimonious or covert.)

There are likely other elements of Derrida's thought which would conflict with the narrative implied by the other-avenir stuff; but it seems to me that you then end up either discerning conflict between narratives, or reconciling them somehow (either of which implies a metanarrative about what constitutes conflict and what constitutes reconciliation). Or, you know, just saying one thing and then saying something else, but at that point you're just giving up on the self, like when you put your nose right up to a pointillist painting and all the people turn out to be cacophonies of dots; that is certainly one way to do postmodernism, but not the only one within this tradition of discourse. And in fact, to my mind it's the least interesting response to conflicting implied narratives, because it's the only one where you don't ever have to change anything at all about yourself. You can just keep "holding Yes and No together in one hand," in Anne Carson's terrific phrase, which is the same thing as standing still. No choices are required and therefore no sacrifices and no personal transformation. What is the point of a life like that? I mean, I suppose you could be happy. If that's what you really want.

Back to Derrida and implied narratives, which in turn imply metanarratives. Now, I admit that I'm an extremist here: I think words like "vulture" and "sparrow" imply a metanarrative. But I don't think you have to go that far (although I wish you would! Didn't Wilde teach us that we must "go as far as possible"?) to accept the point that some words which were crucial to actual existing postmodernists do imply metanarratives.

In fact, I'd argue that the term "postmodernity" itself, while obviously insufficient and kind of hilariously woozy with indeterminacy, implies a fairly obvious narrative, in which modernity is a thing which it's important that we're post-. So by the time you're pretending to define it, you're already accepting and/or creating a metanarrative. (I'm guessing Lyotard, or whoever, knew this and addressed it somehow or decided not to care, so I'm really not addressing him but more his popularizers.)

And this brings me to John Paul II, whom I consider the greatest postmodernist of the past century, and whose wine-charged word was so often "nuptial" or "gift" or some similar insufficiently-hardcore way of saying "kiss." Not only in his writings on the "theology of the body" but also in his writings on faith and reason, and on philosophical practice, he tapped into and further explicated a narrative in which the primary metaphor for our lives is the kiss: both otherness and reconciliation, with neither term conquering the other. So much of his writing is pretty obviously a translation of basic Biblical rhetoric into the new language/slang/pidgin of postmodernity.

My bitter-little-lady thought for the day is to wonder whether existentialist postmodernism is simply Christianity reconceived as intellectual promiscuity: kissing everything in sight in an attempt at self-expression.

So... yeah, this was obviously much more of a blog post than a treatise! But then, I reject treatises utterly--if you must write philosophy, write dialogues. My main problem with JPII, on a philosophical level, is that he shoulda just kept writing plays.

MIXING MEMORY AND DESIRE: NOTES FROM MY THEOLOGY ON TAP THING. This isn't going to be an outline of my presentation, because a) it was ridiculously scattershot (hey man, I could barely speak! Don't expect brilliance from a petrie dish!) and b) a lot of it was stuff I'd said before, most notably here and in my essay in Faith on the Edge. (So if you liked it, read that piece and buy the book!)

So instead, these are notes about what I said, and what I was asked. I'll try to say things I've never said before. In order from least to most interesting, I think.

1. "Do you believe gay sex is a sin?" The TOTNYC people collected questions on paper during and after the talk, so I could answer them, and this was one of the more frequent ones.

I think this speaks to a problem on my part: I find it, in fact, humiliating to say that I do. I'm okay with saying, "I believe all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches"; c'mon, I said this at my baptism. But to say, "Hey, I'm the chick who doesn't get to git wit' it," seems a bit more humiliating!

There are more defensible reasons I got this question several times over: I truly believe it's important to focus on sublimation as the opposite of repression, and on how I can express my lesbian desires while not merely respecting but even strengthening chastity. Possibly that focus can make me sound like chastity isn't crucial to me, when in fact the need for chastity is precisely what's pushing me to develop this understanding of sublimation as expression of eros.

But I need to keep in mind that the fact that a statement is humiliating is never a reason to avoid making it. I need to practice more humility and honesty--I know this--and I think these virtues would have helped my talk be more clear. As well as being good for, you know, my life.

The other thing, though, is that it's worth keeping in mind that I am pretty up-front about where I stand on Catholic sex stuff, and yet it's still very difficult for me to say some of these things. I think just as it's very easy for gay people to underestimate the tragedies and humiliations inherent in heterosexuality, it's easy for straight people to underestimate the ditto inherent in homosexuality. I don't in any way mean to say, oh my life is so hard!--not at all, more just that I was startled by how difficult this particular thing turned out to be. It reminded me that there will always be difficulties I don't choose, no matter how trivial.

2. Gay marriage. This is one of the other questions I got on several different slips of paper. (The third was some variation of, "How do I talk to my gay friends without being horrible?", which is a real question, but which depends so much on your own persona, your friend's persona/self-conception, and your relationship, that I don't feel comfortable answering it on the blog, where I can't get into the nuances of circumstance.)

First, and most importantly, I want to separate this question from the question of what Catholics who find themselves erotically drawn to the same sex should do. They are somewhat related questions, because both turn on the nature and meaning of human sexuality, but the differences are at least as important as the similarities. And so I focused, at TOTNYC, on drawing this line of separation, because I thought it might give people some degree of emotional space in which to work out their beliefs about the personal question--what should I do?--before moving on to what the laws should be.

But I think also that people asked me this question because they were grappling for a language with which to address marriage. Marriage, as a pre- and non-liberal institution, is exceptionally hard to talk about. Eros in general is pre- and non-liberal, and extraordinarily hard to talk about--this may be why feminism is both so attractive, and so convoluted and self-opposed--because eros is not really about happiness or choice, and those two categories are the only ones in which we've been taught to think.

So, while I want to re-emphasize that I do not think this question is the same as, or even follows obviously from, the question of Catholic chastity--I do want to give people some sense of how I talk about gay marriage. This post rounds up several other articles/posts I've written on the subject.

3. Ars longa, vita brevis. One of the best things about being Catholic is that there has been a lot of Catholicism already. This is also one of the most difficult things about being Catholic!--viz. my posts on the mintiness of the Pope. But for gay Catholics, specifically, the Church's age is important in at least three ways:

a. We are not sola Scriptura, in part because that doesn't make sense. Every text needs interpretation; every interpretation requires tradition (language is itself a tradition); every tradition requires a beloved or Beloved, real or imagined, Who gives content to its abstract nouns.

It is easy to pick apart the references to homosexual acts in Scripture. It is much, much harder to argue against the entire orthodox interpretive tradition (i.e. what the Church has for two millennia taken those curt phrases to mean) or the overall symbolic pattern of Scripture (i.e. the fact that marriage is treated as a mirror of the divine love affair with humankind, and so is same-sex friendship, but the latter is never conflated with the former).

Let me unpack that parenthesis a bit. There are many metaphors for God's love in Scripture, covering just about all of our human loves: filial love, friendship, eros, even the love of the stranger, even the love of the enemy. And yet these metaphors are all different facets of the crystal broken at the Fall. If we are going to be excruciatingly precise about the translation of arsenokoitai , shouldn't we be equally clear on the fact that the Bible can portray many different kinds of love without ever suggesting they are the same love, or that they should be expressed in the same way? And that sacred Tradition might have something to say about that?

b. Keats and Yeats Are on Your Side, While Wilde.... The second important point about the Church's age is that She is rich in resources for contemporary gay people--because She is rich in resources for just about anybody. You have incredible models of sublimation, people who poured out their friendships or their eros as oil across the feet of the Crucified. (The Roden book here is the book I mentioned at the talk, btw.) Why aspire to be liberated when you could aspire to be Teresa?

c. Fra Angelico cats come out tonight! The last, and perhaps most controversial, way in which the Church's age is important is that She has provided images of vocation even outside of those officially recognized.

The most obvious of these is the artistic vocation. Who will stand up to say that Flannery O'Connor was a bad Catholic? Perhaps soon the same will be said of Oscar Wilde, or even Morrissey. (I'm of the belief that if the Messiah tarries, Wilde will be canonized sometime in the next few centuries.)

I don't have any problem with the privileging of the vocations of marriage and vowed religious life. But I do think the Catholic Church, with its eccentrics, its holy fools, its uncanny and astonishing saints, offers a whole bestiary of forms of love for God; and the diversity of that bestiary is the freedom of Catholics.

4. What is the point of you? The previous points blend into this final one. I think one of the most pressing questions for gay Catholics--and maybe for anyone, but there is only one thing that I know how to do well etc--is, "What is the point of me?" Why am I the way that I am, with my besetting weaknesses, my strange silences, my crimson joys?

A guy wrote to me at one point to ask, among other things, whether he would still be gay in Heaven. I wrote back a bunch of things, but one thing I said is that we know from Scripture that there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage in Heaven. Whatever marriage is here, it is a foretaste of and preparation for what we will experience if we end up in Heaven. And similarly, St. Aelred delineates how friendship can be our means of seeing the face of Christ, and presenting His holy face to those we love.

And so where there is love in homosexual relationships, that love too, I think, is a preparation for something in Heaven, as all love is. It likely reflects a different aspect of our love of God. Marriage, for example, plays on the eros of difference, the thrill of la difference. But anywhere there is love, be it capable of chaste sexual expression or requiring complete sublimation of sexual expression or completely absent of any desire for sexual expression--anywhere, that love is preparing us for Heaven. Maybe by bringing us to the Cross; maybe by teaching us how to sacrifice with joy; maybe by teaching us to sacrifice while expecting nothing in return; maybe by pushing us outside the bourgeois world of society and family, the world that makes things work, and exposing us instead as fools for Christ.

What love does to you will depend--like drinks at Philip Larkin's party!--"on where you are; or who." But there is a point to you, and to your love. Christ is Lord of Time, and He has brought you into this world in this time and place and culture for some purpose; you have been given some unique way of manifesting His love to the world.

SUBTEXTUAL CRITICISM: Helen contributes to the porn/adultery/norms discussion (which is also ongoing if you scroll around Ladyblog), asking, "Instead of 'negotiating' or being all American and sincerist about your relationship, couldn't you be doing something more exciting with your mouth?"

She adds, "Like pedagogy?"

More on that second link's subject--eros and education--soon.

ETA: She also offers her intro-to-decadence reading here.