The ShaxCath meme

The Internet has been watching the new TNT show "Will" so I don't have to--and pretty much everyone has remarked on how committed the creators are to the idea that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic in an age when it was dangerous to be so. This is a theory that has been around for a long time, but until recently it wasn't an idea that the average Shakespeare reader had encountered. Now, though, it's the kind of thing I get asked occasionally: is it true that Shakespeare was Catholic?

I have some theories about why.

The obvious explanation is that a dozen years ago two pop-Shakespeare books made this claim: Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World (2004) and Clare Asquith's Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (2005). They're very different books, but the evidence both present is pretty thin. Still, their interest in religion doesn't come out of nowhere; literary scholarship as a whole is much more interested in religion now than it was even in the 1990s.

But not every scholarly trend makes it into the pop-culture mainstream, nor does every idea in a Shakespeare biography strike a chord, and this one has.

So here's my theory: the Shakespeare-as-Catholic meme appeals to a whole bunch of different American constituencies (I have no idea how well it plays in Britain, or if it's even a thing there). It has some of the same conspiracy-theory appeal as the "authorship controversy," but it also figures Shakespeare as an outsider, as somehow marginal, and there's nothing Americans love more than that story. Those who feel ambivalent about the category of dead white male can build a case for a Shakespeare who's naturally sympathetic to other outsiders (women, Jews, racial and sexual minorities), while all readers can see in him a version of our collective immigrant ancestors: torn between old world and new, needing to assimilate while still hanging on to their faith or culture at home.

And among those immigrant ancestors, let's not forget just how many of them were ethnic Catholics who left Catholic or culturally-Catholic descendants. Some of those descendants are already invested in a persecutory narrative ("Don't you know the Irish in America were like slaves??"), while others are simply nostalgic for the separate tribal identity of their parents' and grandparents' days. I imagine, though, that a version of this appeal might work for non-Catholic Christians (again, whether because of a persecutory fantasy or a more benign nostalgia), as well as for elite, well-educated conservatives of that peculiar Ivy-League type, drawn to Catholicism, at least intellectually and aesthetically, as a symbol of reactionary traditionalism.

In other words, ShaxCath has something for everyone: left and right, populist and elite.

*

I don't have a problem with the ShaxCath meme, particularly, though I'm not deeply interested in it. This might seem odd, since I work on religion and literature and I've written about Shakespeare (and I'm Catholic), but biography isn't really what most literary scholars do. Nor is religion on a yes/no binary model how the field thinks about the subject these days: I'm a lot more interested in religion as cultural practice and lived experience. It's pretty clear that in the Early Modern period religious identity was a vexed and unstable thing, formed of many component parts; there's what you call yourself, and there's how others see you, and then there's what you actually do in the world.

That's likewise true to the American experience. So if I were trying to sell America on a Shakespeare-and-religion story, it'd be that one.

Distraction is the devil's work

On my drive home from work the other week I heard an interview with the author of Deep Work, which makes the case for work environments that allow us sustained time to focus solely on one task--periods where no one can interrupt and where we eliminate all distractions and temptations, especially electronic ones.

Now, those of us who write and think for (a portion of) our living know that it's important to have periods of immersion, but I confess that in recent years I haven't considered all distractions as equally harmful. If I set aside three or four hours to write, what's the harm, when I'm stuck on a sentence, in clicking over to Facebook for two minutes now and again? Surely that's not the same as being called away to a meeting! But the book's author, Cal Newport, claims that even brief distractions leave a "residue" that it takes 20 minutes to fully wipe away. Accordingly, he argues that 90 minutes, distraction-free, is the minimum required for "deep work."

I'm not sure that I'm convinced by those exact figures, but hearing Newport did inspire me to address my distraction-creep. I always intend to get X amount of work done (read a book of Paradise Lost, grade three papers) before a break to check my phone or the internet, but even though I'm pretty good at not allowing myself to get sucked into serious distraction, over the past year I've definitely felt my hands to be increasingly itchy for quick hits of email or social media.

So the week after hearing Newport, I challenged myself, when I had writing time set aside, to write for 90 or 120 uninterrupted minutes with no distractors (other than cats, or hunger, or the bathroom). It was blissful. Once or twice I went way past the mark because I just wasn't ready to stop.

And since I'm teaching a senior seminar on Early Modern ideas about the afterlife, I somehow also found myself thinking about the rhetoric of demonic temptation and whether it might bring anything useful to the way we talk about distraction. Now, I'm comfortable using the discourse of "sin" for the variety of ways that we fail or harm other people, and seeing our shortcoming as a result of our fallen condition has likewise always resonated for me--but the devil most emphatically has not. I'm not interested in the devil, just as I'm not interested in fairies or vampires or zombies. To the extent that I've thought about the psychological work that believing in a devil does, I guess I've always assumed it to be purely fear-mongery: stay vigilant! Because the devil wants your sooooouul.

But what with the class and my attempts to resist distracting urges, I wondered what it would feel like to reframe the desire to check my phone in the middle of a grading or writing session as a temptation sent by the devil. Presumably, there are people all over the world who see things in this light, just as there were in ages past. So when I was tempted to reach for my phone, instead of thinking, "aw, what's the harm? it's just for a minute or two," I told myself, "nothing new has happened in the past 20 minutes. You don't even want to do this. This is the devil trying to distract you."

And instead of feeling paranoid about my vulnerability to malign influences, I felt how true it was that this was a stupid distraction and one that I could resist--because it wasn't, after all, coming from me! I had a better self, one who was actually happier not checking Facebook every 15 minutes!

So there you have it: how the devil made me a better writer, no soul-selling required.

Singing the hours

I spent two days last week on a silent retreat at a Trappist monastery. I didn't have a reason for this, particularly; I'd been mildly curious about about the place since meeting one of the monks--and now that I'm working on a portion of Book Two that involves monasticism's afterlife in Protestant England, it seemed like the right time to check it out.

It was an interesting experience on a lot of levels. I hadn't expected any direct scholarly benefits, but there were several. Not only did I find a number of books I needed at the abbey bookstore, but wandering around in silence for a couple of days and trying to keep my mind blank caused some new and unexpected ideas to surface.

But there were more oblique benefits, too. I've always believed that being in certain places or making your body do certain things can make the past more present, and walking 3/4 of a mile back and forth through the fields to the abbey or getting up in the middle of the night to attend prayers did render more real the experiences of early modern worshipers. And it's one thing to "know" what a chantry is, and another to see one in action.

Because yes: on the spur of the moment I decided to forego some of my earlier plans and commit myself to attending the full cycle of the liturgy of the hours--meaning that at 2.25, 6, and 11.15 in the morning, and at 4.30 and 6.40 in the evening, I was at the abbey. Each service we sang a portion of the book of psalms. Over the course of a week, the monks get through all 150 psalms. Then they start over again.

I could say a lot more about that experience, but for the purposes of this blog what interests me is the routinizing of the transcendent--that is, the bringing down to earth, and making a part of everyday life, an experience that might otherwise get aestheticized or mystified into something inapproachable, something too perfect and beautiful for normal people to share. That strikes me as something we wrestle with as academics, too, especially those of us who teach and write about Great Works of Literary Genius.

Because on the one hand, the psalms are terrific poetry, sung in a melancholy and evocative plainsong chant (and the idea of a group of people interrupting their workday at regular intervals to sing poems together is bound to warm the heart of any literature professor). But on the other hand, the liturgy of the hours isn't a performance or a commodity. Though lay-people were present at the services I attended, the liturgy isn't done for an audience. Perfection isn't the goal. Sometimes a monk with a terrible voice led the singing, because it was his turn. Sometimes one would get up and leave in the middle of the service. And always they were there in their everyday clothes and ugly, sensible shoes, rustling their psalters and prayerbooks, clearing their throats, sneezing.

The message that I take away is the importance of letting the sublime into the everyday; the psalms become a part of the round of work and rest until by repetition they're absorbed and almost embodied in each monk. The liturgy of the hours, despite its odd, old-fashioned formality, is the opposite of what happens in most churches for the major solemnities, when the goal seems to be great seriousness and high drama: professional musicians, fancy vestments, elaborate floral arrangements, signs that This Is a Big Deal--but a Big Deal that takes place in an aesthetic and spiritual realm alien to ordinary experience.

I'm as susceptible to aesthetics as anyone, and prone to wanting everything to be just so. But participating in the liturgy of the hours as just another sleepy, ill-dressed layperson reminded me of what happens in our classrooms or alone in our studies. Though we write and think about literature for a living, our lives are mostly not about glorious aesthetic or intellectual triumphs or transcendent moments of illumination. Our lives involve worrying over one little bit of one little poem; writing and rewriting a single paragraph; teaching the same text over and over again. Now and then we do have a true, original insight; craft a perfect sentence; teach an amazing class. But in between there's a lot of plugging away, a lot of days when the spirit is most definitely not with us.

Except that it is, then, too.

Like a refiner's fire

It's been a strange advent season. Handel's Messiah gets a lot of airplay in our household, and hearing those lyrics taken from Isaiah and Malachi and Job while obsessively reading coverage of the non-indictments in Ferguson and Staten Island; the release of the CIA torture reports; the exoneration of Mubarek; and the executions, massacres, and rapes perpetrated by ISIS has brought home to me why people in every age have been prone to fantasies of divine intervention and restituiton.

Sometimes that intervention is imagined as compassionate healing and sometimes as wrathful purgation, but our broken world seems to need more than what ordinary human beings can provide. Of course, all the believers I admire--like all the atheists I admire--know that sitting around waiting for a solution from the outside is an abdication of our responsibility to our fellow creatures. Peace and justice don't descend from on high; they're entrusted to us.

It's Christmas, and we all deserve a few days off (speaking for myself, I'll be eating tamales and drinking margaritas). But I hope that all who celebrate it--whether we believe in a literal messiah or not--remember that his work is everyone's work.

Queer Catholics

In my continuing efforts to blog about things that none of my readers care about, today I bring you my thoughts on a 75-page document recently issued by the Vatican, The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization

Wait, come back! It's all about gender and sexuality and stuff!

Last fall, Pope Francis announced that he was convening an extraordinary meeting of the synod of bishops to consider the state of marriage and family life. Francis asked every diocese in the world to study the issue, survey the laity, and weigh in on where Catholics stand on various issues affecting family life. (I participated in my diocese's survey, which I'll say more about below.) The resulting document, known as an "instrumentum laboris," or "working instrument," contains a preliminary report on those findings, and it's meant to be the starting point for the work of the synod, whose first meeting will be in October.

Francis's initial announcement of the synod got some coverage in the mainstream press--in part because of the short timeline and in part because of the sweeping scope of the project: this is the first time that ordinary Catholics have been asked for their feedback. There has been speculation, at least in the American press, that the conference might be the occasion for major changes in the church's positions on such things as divorce, birth control, and same-sex marriage. But despite that initial coverage, as far as I can tell, last week's release of the instrumentum has received zero attention outside of Catholic circles (that last link is to Rocco Palmo, always the best source for news on the global church).

I'm not an expert Vatican-watcher and there are a lot of basic things I don't know about the synod or its mandate. And though I've read the instrumentum, at times I have trouble deciphering its "voice"--that is, whether a statement is merely descriptive (this is what the church has said on this subject in recent decades) or prescriptive (this is the church's teaching, which is not up for debate). Nevertheless, some things are pretty obvious. Issues surrounding divorce and remarriage get more attention in the document than any of the other subjects that preoccupy American and European Catholics, which leads me to suspect that there could be some real changes there. I also believe that changes around the edges of birth-control policies are likely, and though I'd be surprised to see major changes on same-sex marriage, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of some conciliatory gestures (for example, the document spends some time discussing how to welcome same-sex couples who wish to raise their children Catholic).

But really, what will strike any Western reader of the document is all the other problems facing families that the bishops are interested in--and the global perspective that those concerns reflect. Serious attention is given to domestic violence, incest, human trafficking, polygamy, poverty, and families separated by political unrest or forced migration. The other thing that will strike readers is how generous and compassionate the document can be toward both families and individuals. It waxes indignant about the ostracism and shame some people (single mothers, victims of abuse) are subjected to, and it's critical of clerics who don't fulfill their pastoral duties. The influence of Francis is clear in such moments.

There are less generous moments sprinkled throughout, though, and while I imagine that some of the oscillation between more compassionate and more condemnatory language reflects the conflicts and compromises inherent in a preliminary document written by a 15-person team, it's still a little disappointing. I'm also disappointed, though not surprised, that the instrumentum's discussion of the laity's attitudes is mostly couched in terms of what they "understand" about the church's teachings. Although each diocese apparently had some leeway in how it surveyed its laity, the form I got was focused on its respondents' level of engagement in Catholic life and familiarity with church teachings. And, dudes: I understand, with great clarity, the intricacies of the church's teachings on homosexuality. I've heard the best and most compelling arguments for natural family planning. That's not the same thing as agreeing with those teachings. What I wanted and did not get was a chance to say, "yes, I'm a Catholic who has received all the sacraments, who attends mass weekly and volunteers at her parish, and I don't agree with you on X or Y."

Most surprising to me is the document's near obsession with what it calls "the ideology of gender theory" (12)--a term that comes up at least half a dozen times. Although the bishops barely define it (and it's not clear that their familiarity with gender theory is at anything closer than third or fourth hand), they're plainly troubled by the idea that gender might be disconnected from biological sexuality. Throughout, there's an essentialist attitude toward gender and sexuality, and a suspicion of anything that might be considered non-normative.

And. . . it's at this point that I say, OH, COME ON! The Catholic Church has been celebrating non-normative sexualities for centuries. We're talking about an institution that has a celibate priesthood and celibate male and female religious. We're talking about a religious tradition that involves ecstatic, eroticized mysticism, that uses sexualized language to talk about everything from the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist to prayer and the operations of the Holy Spirit. I mean, I'm not calling the church freaky, but its attitudes toward sexuality are rich, interesting, and go beyond either the procreative or the ascetic.

Cosimo has remarked that female religious (whom he knew from childhood, thanks to his beloved aunt, a Sister of St. Joseph) were his first introduction to queer women: not because of anything he knew or presumed about their sexual orientation, but because of the palpable otherness of a community of women who lived entirely outside of the imperatives of heterosexuality. Indeed, celibacy is about as counter-cultural as you can get in the modern age.

I understand that the mandate of the synod is to deal with the changing shape of the family, not with vowed celibates or those leading a single life; I also have no desire to return to the centuries in which the church valorized celibacy and slighted marriage and procreation. But there's something exasperating about the refusal to consider love, marriage, and family life within the larger and more radical context of the church's history and teachings. As many people before me have pointed out, Jesus himself shows no interest in the traditional family. Not only was his own family nontraditional (and non-procreative), he himself never married and repeatedly tells his followers that to proclaim his kingdom they need to leave their families behind--not even pausing to bury their dead.

According to the instrumentum laboris, many bishops are calling for "theological study in dialogue with the human sciences" to better understand sexual orientation, homosexuality, and the differences between the sexes (52). I'm glad of that, and I think it's a hopeful sign. But I'd like for them also to wrestle with--or simply acknowledge!--the non-normative and non-procreative forms of gender, sexuality, and eroticism that have always been central to the Catholic tradition.

Going My Way?

The parish that Cosimo and I have been attending in Punchline Rustbelt City feels like a bizarro throwback to the kind of American Catholicism I know only from books and movies. It's not the church itself, though it's a handsome structure with an interior reminiscent of a Gilded Age train station. (Google tells me this is because it's actually built from the pieces of a bunch of nineteenth-century banks and hotels.) Neither is it the congregation, though a big, multigenerational crowd packs the pews every Sunday.

No, it's the fact that there's a whole clubhouse of priests in the rectory. In addition to the white-haired sixty-something pastor (and the two permanent deacons), we have a goofy hipster priest in his early thirties and a jocky twentysomething seminarian. And they have a great rapport with each other and with the congregation. Remember Going My Way? It's like that, but with three Bing Crosbys: warm, personable guys who talk sports and dole out high-fives and fist-bumps to the kids.


(The original Father What-a-Waste)

Last week we were told that the two younger men had concluded their rotations and would be moving to new parishes. . . but that in a couple of months we'd be getting another newly-ordained priest, and another seminarian, and a third young priest from abroad. Oh, and an 18-year-old member of the congregation had just entered the seminary, so we should all pray for him.

Dudes, it's like it's 1950 up in here.

Except, actually, it's not, and thank goodness: the parish, like the neighborhood around it, is thoroughly integrated, including a number of interracial families. There are women and girls in the sanctuary. And though it's dressier than our home parish--it's easy to spot men in suits and the occasional be-hatted woman--people also show up in sweatshirts and sports jerseys. No one bats an eye either way.

If this is a glimpse of the future of the Church, I'm all for it. (Though for my next course, please, I'd love some female ordination.)

The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

--T.S. Eliot

*

The Elizabethan and Jacobean court celebrated the twelve days of Christmas with banquets every day and entertainments every night. Not having quite the same resources at our disposal, Cosimo and I nevertheless wanted to find a meaningful way to celebrate Epiphany and wind down the Christmas season. So last night we lit the advent wreath for the last time and exchanged cards and a small gift apiece; today, we take down the tree and holiday decorations.

But since Epiphany, "the revelation to the nations," is fundamentally about seeing beyond the circle of one's family, friends and immediate community, I wanted to do something in that spirit as well. Since virtually all of my charitable giving is domestic--and most of it is intensely local, focused on my city, county, and state--for Epiphany, I'm starting a tradition of giving to a charity that focuses on the developing world (on the recommendation of Give Well, I went with Give Directly, which puts money in the hands of the extremely poor in Kenya and Uganda).

Here's hoping your day and your year are full of revelations large and small.

The wages of casualization, part 2

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, Slate's L. V. Anderson went to Pittsburgh and learned more about the life and death of Margaret Mary Vojtko.

As some of us speculated in the comments to my post about the original Post-Gazette op-ed, there does indeed turn out to be more to Vojtko's story than made it into that editorial; Vojtko actually had dozens of people who tried to help her, and many of her problems weren't directly related to her employment conditions. But if Duquesne isn't the cartoon villain some readers wished to see, Anderson doesn't back away from holding them and higher education accountable for the end results of academic casualization. It's a thoughtful, compassionate, and balanced piece of journalism, and well worth reading in full.

Vojtko's story wouldn't have gotten covered if Duquesne hadn't appeared uniquely coldhearted and evil, but I never assumed that it was (though as a Catholic, I remain outraged at the institution's claim that labor unions violate its religious identity); I don't think most academics did. The fact that Duquesne isn't an outlier is the real scandal.

Making mystics out of cheeses

The September 16th issue of the The New Yorker contains a wonderful collection of entries from a journal Flannery O'Connor kept in 1946, while at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. They're prayers to God, funny, lovely, and peculiar little things that address an enduring artistic problem: success depends upon ambition, drive, and egotism--but also upon real self-knowledge and humility.

The link requires subscriber log-in, but here's a taste:

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

[. . . .]

[A]ll my requests seem to melt down to one for grace--that supernatural grace that does what ever it does. My mind is in a little box, dear God, down inside other boxes inside other boxes and on and on. There is very little air in my box. Dear God, please give me as much air as it is not presumptuous to ask for. Please let some light shine out of the things around me so that I can. . . .Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel.

[. . . .]

What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that--make a mystic out of cheeses.

I love all of this, but especially the first and last metaphors: an artist needs to be careful not to mistake her own massive shadow for substance, or to let it obscure what she's trying to communicate. But sometimes an artist--like God--can take a piece of cheese and turn it into a mystic.

Going monk

We had a guest presider at Mass today: a wacky and hilarious young Trappist monk. I've known friars, but never monks--and part of the reason for our guest's presence was to talk about what monks do and why it has value: what's the point of living in silence in a cloister? What does that contribute to the world, or even to their lay co-religionists?

I've heard intermittant reports that vocations to religious life have risen slightly in recent years--but whether or not that's true, the contemplative life does seem to be having a minor moment in popular culture: The New York Times keeps turning out articles about urban professionals going on spiritual retreats, or families and individuals declaring digital fasts (or trying to), or what the rest of the world can learn from introverts. For that matter, just ask yourself: how many thoroughly secular people in your life have sung the praises of meditation? How many were doing it ten years ago?

For all the popularity of meditation, mini-retreats, or mini-fasts from one's gadgets and devices, there's still something challenging and counter-cultural, even uncomfortable-making, about those who actually live out the contemplative life in a monastery, convent, or ashram. Who are these people? Narcissists and dilettantes, searching for some kind of nebulous personal fulfillment? Weak souls in thrall to what's more or less a cult? Or asocial wackos who can't get along in the real world?

Those charges are also familiar to academics: why do you get the summers off? What's this "sabbatical"? What good is it to spend ten years writing a book that maybe 300 people in the world will read and understand?

I'm not trying to aggrandize what we do by suggesting either that it's so very radical or that it has a deeper spiritual purpose--and the monastic roots of the scholarly enterprise are well-known. But seeing this self-deprecating, low-voiced monk utterly charm our urban congregation made me hope that, as teachers who are also scholars, we bring our undergraduates a version of what the monk on leave from his abbey brings to a busy and skeptical laity: a sense of what we do with our lives and how it might be relevant to theirs.

Or as our guest said, "there's a little monk in all of us."

Popery and arbitrary government

I was in my campus office grading papers, prepping for my night class, and periodically scanning the internet in the hopes of finding something to do other than grade papers or prep for class when someone tweeted "habemus papam #fumatabianca"--and I gladly abandoned my grading for what I thought would be twenty minutes but turned into more like ninety.

And, whatever. The end of a papal election is a cool enough thing to see "live," and with much the same pleasure as watching the Oscars or a royal wedding: there's lots of pageantry; other people are watching and chatting about it; there's a small chance that actual history might be made. In other words, it's 4 parts diversion to 1 part news. While waiting for the Big Reveal, I hung out on Facebook and Twitter trading jokes with friends about what was taking so long, about the goofy marching band, and about how well the next pontiff might or might not accessorize.

As a Catholic, I care who the next pope is, but a new pope is unlikely to impact me that much (at least compared with a new pastor or bishop or even a new U.S. president). Moreover, I'm not a deeply-informed Vatican-watcher. I'd followed the coverage of Benedict's resignation closely and had read up on some of the papabili, but I didn't know anything about Bergoglio; if I'd heard his name mentioned as the runner-up in 2005, I'd forgotten it as soon as I'd learned it.

All of this is to say that I'm not setting myself up as a vaticanista, nor as someone who takes the papal election unduly seriously. But I still found myself exasperated by all the morons on the internet who took the occasion to leave drive-by comments (often on otherwise funny, smart, irreverent threads) like, "don't you know Bergoglio's VERY AGAINST gay marriage??" or "The fact that a woman can't be pope is OUTRAGEOUS!!! When is the Catholic Church going to get with the program?!"

Uh, yeah. Everyone on planet earth knew that no woman was going to be elected, nor anyone who had ever said anything that might even be misconstrued as supporting gay marriage. Thanks for that trenchant and original critique, Mr. New-Age Hippy, Ms. Ex-Catholic, or Dr. Atheist.

Partly it's the tone-deafness and the bad manners that bug me. When someone you know is enthusiastic about something (even something you think is dumb or evil) you don't barge in and say "OMG THAT'S SO STUUUPID." No. You bite your tongue, you roll your eyes. . . and you talk smack about that person behind her back. Partly, it's the combination of ignorance and arrogance. Not all of those fascinated with the papal election are themselves religious: I have secularist friends who are historians or just political junkies who were posting updates on the conclave several times a day. But those of us who do care, for whatever reason, are probably more informed than those who just want to talk about how bad the Catholic Church (or organized religion, or religion) is.

Few practicing Catholics are unaware that problems exist in the church, and none of us, liberal or conservative, are really that interested in ignorant opining, even when it comes from those with whom we might otherwise make common political cause. As a progressive Catholic, I can assure my liberal, non-Catholic friends that I know the church's problems much better, and have thought about them much more deeply, than you have. I'm completely not interested in your opinion--unless you are, let's say, a religious historian, or otherwise have access to some immediately relevant body of knowledge or area of expertise that you're going to draw upon.

If you're genuinely interested in knowing what (and how) I think, I'll happily have that conversation with you one-on-one. But I'm not going to engage with someone whose own insight is minimal and who isn't interested in listening.

*

As for Francis, I'm reserving judgement. I joked on Facebook that the options were basically "huh! coulda been worse!" and "OH NO"--and we seem to have gotten the former. I'm prepared to be surprised by him, but won't be surprised if I'm not. Popes are like Supreme Court justices: there's stuff we sorta know about them, but it's not always predicative--especially since they serve for life and aren't directly answerable to anyone.

Change will come, sooner or later, either from inside or outside--and when it comes it's going to be dramatic. Increasingly, I think I might be alive to see it. Whether that's a good thing only time will tell.

Benedict XVI

Nothing in his papacy became him like the leaving of it.

Religion that serves you

There are a lot of twenty- and thirtysomethings at the church I attend, which isn't particularly surprising: my parish is a lively and active one, located smack in the middle of an artsy neighborhood popular with college students and recent grads.

Some of the young people are energetically involved in the life of the parish, while a larger number are more or less just passing through: they're living in the area for a few years, they're in the habit of going to mass, and this is the most convenient church. Others really just seem to be passing through: probably once a month we wind up seated near a young couple who seem ill at ease and uncertain about even the basic responses or the order of the mass. My standard assumption is that such couples are church- or faith-shopping, or contemplating marriage: one or both might have been raised Catholic and been away for a while, and they're trying us on to see if we fit.

I've got no problem with that, or with passers-through of any variety; I've tried on churches myself. During one period of my life I was so unable to decide between one extremely conservative and one extremely progressive parish that I just floated back and forth between them for four years. (What attracted me to the one repelled me in the other, and vice versa.)

What I do have a problem with is those people who act as though whatever it is that they want or expect from a church requires nothing--no effort, no participation, not even a little friendliness and good humor--in return. They want to walk in and feel immediately comfortable, immediately special. Having some tenuous identity as Catholics means they should have RIGHTS! Rights to rites, in fact, for nowhere is this attitude on greater display than in nonpracticing Catholics who want to get married or have their kids baptized in the church.

Today was a baptism. We have a lot of baptisms at my church, sometimes as many as three or four a month, and I generally find them delightful. Babies tend to be cute; their families tend to be happy; and the two priests who serve our parish are warm and genial and extremely well-practiced (rarely does a baptism add five minutes to the usual length of the service). But today was not one of the delightful ones.

I was serving as lector, so I'd heard the parish administrator talking to the presider before mass about the baptismal family. She mentioned that they seemed confused and unfamiliar with the service, so would need more guidance from the priest than usual. Whatever, I thought. New parents are allowed to be flakey and confused, or the baptism might have been the grandparents' idea; who knows.

But I spent all mass staring at this family (they were seated in the first two rows and I was seated up in the sanctuary) and I couldn't figure out whose idea the baptism could possibly have been. They all looked like they'd been dragged there against their will. The parents, the godparents, all four grandparents, and several adult siblings were present, and no one seemed to have any idea what was going on. One set of grandparents made an effort--they sang the songs from the hymnal and used the pew cards to follow the new responses--but no one else did. No one else attempted a response, recited even the Lord's Prayer, or so much as picked up a pew card or opened a hymnal (though they all received communion). The baby's parents nudged each other and whispered during the homily. Throughout, the looks on the faces of the family members ranged from stoic endurance to sour displeasure.

And you know, I'm all for being welcoming. I'm fine with meeting people where they're at, and I understand that lots of cultural Catholics have a sentimental attachment to ritual and fetishize various signifiers of the religion without actually wanting to be a part of a community of faith. I don't love that attitude, but insofar as cultural Catholicism indicates a genuine attachment to the religion of a person's childhood, my position is that it's a net good for those of us who are practicing. Such people often send their kids to Catholic schools. They show up en masse for the baptisms and first communions of their nieces and nephews. They have relatives who go to church regularly--they may even have an aunt or uncle who's a nun or a priest--and many of them think occasionally that they really should start going to church again themselves. They belong to a community, in other words, that supports the community of actual believers.

As I say, I get this. What I do not get is people who think religion--or whatever symbolism or meaning or social benefits they think accrue to religion--comes entirely without participation. Belief may be personal, but religion is relational. It's about community. It depends on community. And being a part of a community means that you have to give at least a little something in return. Like, say, your engaged and interested presence, however infrequently you may show up.

But for some people, even that seems a terribly high bar.

Self-improvement without the "self"

Today is Ash Wednesday and I'm thinking about the provocative series of posts that Anastasia wrote last year about fasting.

Although I've never fasted on days other than Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, I'm considering adding in one fast day per week this Lent; Anastasia makes a compelling argument that fasting is a different discipline than just "giving up" something for six weeks, since the point of Lent isn't merely to sacrifice a few pleasures or to find a little more time to attend to the spiritual.

As she writes:

It's about finitude. It's about death. It's about the limits of a body that is dying. There's nothing that makes a person aware of her limits like fasting. And on top of that, fasting exposes the deficiencies of character that exist when one is stripped of ordinary comforts. It's about stark naked mortality. And unless you need the internet or chocolate to live. . . then you aren't getting it.

This is what I feel, too, when I fast (even in the very modest ways that I do fast): my deficiencies of character. Fasting makes me tired and cranky and low-energy, and that means it's more of an effort to be patient with and pleasant to the people I encounter. However, since fasting is something totally within my control, and since I'm very aware of why I have a shorter fuse, it's easier to be courteous than on days when I've accidentally skipped meals. Ideally this makes me more mindful, on other occasions, of what others deserve from me no matter what my mood, my preoccupations, or my state of health.

But there are problems with fasting, too. Anastasia talks about the misuses that fasting can be put to by those with eating disorders or who otherwise find pleasure in pain, but for most of us the temptation is simply toward satisfaction with our own virtue. We live in a culture that easily converts any form of self-discipline into a commodity, a challenge, or a sign of personal merit: take this 14-day juice fast and feel extra-specially virtuous! know your superiority to those who merely eat sensibly and go to the gym! you, my friend, are winning the self-improvement sweepstakes!

And that's what's hard about Lent, in the end: making it about one's limits while not making it about oneself.

Being a Christian means vaguely feeling some things are wrong

This ad by Rick Perry has been getting a lot of outraged attention and a lot of ridicule:



(For a great round-up of parodies, see here.)

Perry's homophobia--and the fact that he's directing it, specifically, at the men and women who are protecting and sometimes dying for our country--is the obvious and appropriate target for most of the outrage. But I'm equally as offended by his vision of Christianity. Let's take a closer look at what he says: "[Y]ou don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school."

In other words, you don't have to be making any effort to lead a Christian life (going to church, wrestling with what's in the Bible, performing works of mercy) to call yourself one. Proof of your Christianity comes from your vague belief in traditional, religious values--which, ideally, someone else should be responsible for teaching. After all, if the principal of your kids' school leads them in prayer and there's a big crèche in front of City Hall, then you don't have to do any religious instruction of your own, much less model a life of faith for your children; you can just rest secure in your own rightthink.

Also, if you're uncomfortable with gay people? That's okay, because it proves you're a Christian! In fact, if you're uncomfortable with anything, that's probably because it's wrong. And wrong in a cosmic, Bible-forbidden kind of way. (Which is why, as I've noted before, so many Christians don't actually read the Bible: they already know that everything they believe is in there.)

According to Rick Perry, being a Christian means being part of a very special and persecuted minority on whom no real demands are ever made.

"And with your spirit"

Today, the first Sunday of Advent, also marks the roll-out of the new English translation of the liturgy--the first since the end of Vatican II.

This new translation has been the subject of controversy for years (so many years that I first wrote about it in 2006, in something like Week Five of this blog's existence), but it boils down to this: the first English translation of the mass was put together relatively hastily, in the wake of Vatican II; it's simple and idiomatic, but there are a number of places where it neglects or misrepresents the substance of the original; a more faithful version had always been intended to replace it, and by the late 1990s "a richer translation that . . . hew[ed] more closely to the Latin without sacrificing clarity" had been completed and approved by every council of English-speaking bishops in the world. However, this translation was rejected by the Vatican. According to Rome, not only the sense of the Latin must be conveyed, but "every Latin word must be accounted for, and vocabulary, syntax, punctuation, and capitalization patterns found in the Latin must be reproduced as much as possible" (quoted text comes from this timeline of the history of English translations of the mass).

So disagreeing as thoroughly as I do with the Vatican's translation theory, I was prepared to hate the new translation. I'd gotten a preview of parts of the new translation in various articles and handouts over the past six months, and though I didn't think it was as awful as some commentators, I was still wary.

But listening and responding at mass today, I decided that it's neither a net gain nor a net loss. I actually like some of the new translation's circumlocutions and five-dollar words: as a literature teacher, I believe there's sometimes both aesthetic and intellectual value in language that draws attention to itself, that doesn't come totally naturally, that requires work to figure out. So while there's surely no meaningful difference between describing the second person of the trinity as "one in being with the Father" and describing him as "consubstantial with the Father," the second rendering is one that draws attention to itself, and hence to the doctrine it's articulating. In general, I like the way the new translation foregrounds a number of theological issues, like the incarnation, and in places its Latinate, archaic syntax does achieve a strange, reverent beauty.

On the other hand, there are at least as many awkwardnesses (Cosimo spent the second half of the service mouthing "oblations," with a look of comic disgust, following a particularly ugly new bit of prose that included the offending word), and lots of things that simply don't seem to matter. I don't know why the liturgy of the Eucharist now has the priest referring to the "chalice" Jesus drank from instead of the "cup" ("chalice" may be more faithful to the Latin, but surely it isn't a more accurate description of the actual drinking vessel), or what essential is being conveyed by having the congregation respond to the priest's "the Lord be with you" with "and with your spirit" instead of "and also with you."

Will the new translation lose congregants? Possibly, though I think not right away; regular church-goers are going to make a game effort to adapt to the new translation, and if it causes some people to feel more alienated from the church and to drift away, that effect will be perceptible only over time. But you know, the liturgy is the least of the reasons that people feel alienated from the church--and much as I enjoy fulminating, any energy I have would probably be better spent addressing those other reasons.

The dignity of work

There are a lot of reasons that I'm (still) a practicing Catholic, and though I don't generally feel it necessary to enumerate, explain, or defend those reasons, here's one, in honor of the day:

Economic life is not meant solely to multiply goods produced and increase profit or power; it is ordered first of all to the service of persons, of the whole person, and of the entire human community. . . . In work, the person exercises and fulfills in part the potential inscribed in his nature.*

The economy must serve people, not the other way around. Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in God's creation. If the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must be respected--the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to organize and join unions, to private property, and to economic initiative.**

Happy Labor Day, all.

----
*From the Catechism of the Catholic Church
**Statement by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Choosing polemic

This weekend I attended an ordination to the priesthood. Somewhat startlingly, it attracted protesters.

The candidate was someone I've mentioned briefly, a local history professor who has been serving as a transitional deacon at my parish. I like him a lot, and I'd never seen an ordination, so it seemed like a cool enough way to spend a couple of hours.

When Cosimo and I approached the cathedral and saw the cluster of people waving signs, I thought that I knew what it was about. The cathedral is the seat of the diocese, and the bishop presides at an ordination, so I supposed that any event with him in attendance was a magnet for those with some beef against the diocese or the church hierarchy. There'd been a lot of coverage about the closing of area churches and parochial schools, so that was my first guess. A distant second was that it was over some social issue.

I was wrong on both counts. These protesters were evangelical Protestants. And to the extent that they had a coherent objective, it seemed to be announcing that THERE IS NO SALVATION OUTSIDE OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, and WE MUST ALL BE BORN AGAIN. These seemed terribly strange declarations to be making to a bunch of random Catholics on a random Saturday morning. Were they always outside the cathedral? I wondered. Out of some generalized zeal?

But then we got into the church and saw the news media and the camera crews, and remembered: this is the ordination, to the Catholic priesthood, of a married man who used to be a Protestant minister. It's a bit of a deal.

And okay: such protests are tacky, rude, and pointless. But as a lover of polemic, I also thrill a little at them. It's especially thrilling to find people who are still fighting the Reformation fight (by which I mean, I suppose, people who actually have some sense of what the Reformation was about; nothing tops the fundy protesters I encountered at a Mormon pageant a few years ago, one of them shouting through a bullhorn about faith versus works).

And the fact is, it's hard not to see conversion, and especially the conversion of a clergyman, as anything other than a polemical statement. Those of us not carrying signs can talk a good game about different routes to God, different spiritual journeys, blah blah, but when your faith or your family is losing or gaining someone--especially someone smart and thoughtful and kind--it's hard to keep up that anodyne ecumenicism. It's hard not to see this as a considered judgment for or against your own belief system.

It turns out that not all of Father Deacon's children have converted (they range in age from about seven to about 24), and it's not even clear whether his wife has converted. He teaches at a college with a Protestant identity, and he still has ties to the churches he worked at in his former clerical life. All of his family members participated in the service, and lots of his colleagues and former colleagues were in attendance. And although they were all smiling and congratulatory, some of them also looked a little stunned when they were talking among themselves.

Toleration is a good thing. Ecumenicism is a good thing. But drawing distinctions and caring about distinctions--not just in religion, but also in politics, aesthetics, and so many other areas--means, on some level, making value judgments. Unlike the fundies outside, I'm sure no one inside the cathedral thought that anyone else was going to hell because of his or her religious beliefs. But even to claim that certain doctrines or practices are more useful, more accurate, or more meaningful than others is implicitly to critique the latter and the people who adhere to them.

I don't know how Father Deacon and his family have navigated all the changes in his life and identity, but I know it wasn't by singing "Kumbaya" and pretending that their differences weren't real. Because if polemic is a limited, reductive fantasy, so too is a vague universalism. If forced to choose, I'd choose polemic.

"A richness that we miss out on sometimes as Christians"

There's an article in today's Times about the increasing popularity of various Jewish wedding practices--principally the ketubah, or wedding contract, but also the huppah--among evangelical Christians. To be clear, we're not talking about interfaith marriages, where the two participants are trying to preserve and honor their respective traditions or combine them into a meaningful whole. These are Christians who may or may not know any actual Jews (the featured couple learned about the ketubah at the wedding of the bride's equally evangelical sister), but who are attracted to whatever they vaguely understand the "significance" or "symbolism" of these practices to be.

And I have to admit, my first reaction was to say, "Get your own fucking traditions! Or learn about the ones you have!" (And upon reflection, that's my second and third reaction, too.)

As someone who works on early Protestant literature, it always amuses me how much and how eagerly many contemporary Protestants are trying to undo the Reformation, or at least its most visible outward signs. When I lived in Harlem, I was astonished by how many churches gave out ashes on Ash Wednesday or held Good Friday services that seemed to incorporate something like the stations of the cross, and I always smile a little at those students who talk about Catholic "idolatry" while wearing crosses around their necks or carrying laminated pictures of Jesus in their wallets.

But while those things may be surprising, and some of them do display a questionable knowledge of history or of their own denomination's intellectual and spiritual underpinnings, others can be seen as a genuine effort, on the part of a congregation or denomination, to reclaim parts of their faith heritage.

What gets my goat is people whose religiosity is totally untethered to a coherent intellectual or theological tradition, but who think they can manufacture a tradition out of odds and ends taken from other people's. It's not so different from what pisses me off about those who think they're "creating their own traditions" with their precious, special, unique weddings.

You don't get to have it both ways. Either your spirituality is synthetic and free-floating, based only on whatever speaks to you personally, or it's firmly grounded in a particular tradition (which doesn't mean that it can't incorporate other elements or practices, or that it has to be orthodox in every particular). Both are reasonable ways to approach your spiritual life, but they're not the same thing.

If your Christian marriage doesn't provide you with what the female half of the featured couple calls "a permanent reminder of the covenant we made with God," it's worth asking yourself why. It's worth asking yourself why your own ceremonies don't feel sufficiently sacred--and why you think you're "miss[ing] out" when someone else's faith has traditions you don't share.

And with all due respect to Jenna Weissman Joselit, a historian who works on Jewish popular culture and is quoted in the article, I do not think that incorporating Jewish practices (such as holding their own Passover Seders or eating kosher food) provides Christians with "another level of authenticity or legitimacy."

If you don't already feel that your religion has authenticity or legitimacy, you're not going to be able to co-opt it from someone else's. Sorry.

When I wrote the ninety-five, haters straight up assailed 'em

For the past few months my parish has had a deacon serving alongside our regular priest; he's just here on temporary assignment, learning the ropes as he awaits his ordination to the priesthood in the spring. He seems like a nice guy--smart, a good homilist, and with a gentle, approachable manner--but I couldn't help wondering what his deal was: he's in his late forties, and wears what appears to be a wedding ring. I'd speculated that maybe he was a widower, or possibly a married Episcopalian priest who was converting. However, in my experience, priest-converts from the C of E tend to be a little scary and fanatical (running toward Rome as an escape from teh gays and teh wimmins they believe are taking over the Anglican communion). He definitely didn't fit that profile.

So it was rather wonderful to learn today, on Ninety-Five Theses Day, that our deacon is actually a history professor at a local college and a former Methodist minister--whose conversion to Catholicism twelve years ago coincided with completing his dissertation on Reformation Christianity.

Gotta watch out when you study religious history. It does that shit.

(Yeah, I know: I posted this video two years ago. But I love it so.)