Matthew 25 and Expectations of the End of the World

By the way: I read the strangest report yesterday morning.  Did any of the rest of you happen to see it?

It seems 284,000 empty shoes (all in pairs) were found Sunday morning around the world.  The people wearing them seem just to have . . . vanished.

And, strangely enough, they're concentrated among certain demographics: the homeless and mentally ill; several batches of gay and lesbian folks partying at fin del mundo parties in big cities; a number of transsexuals; quite a few prostitutes, people doing life terms in prison, etc.  Very few of these people belonged to any church or religious group at all, it seems.

Not a single one of these folks lived in D.C.  Or an episcopal palace.  Or the Vatican.

The report said two other down-and-out people also--believe it or not--appeared to be unaccounted for on Sunday morning.  Their families were reporting that they seem to have disappeared.

What on earth can all of this mean?

Joan Chittester on Wisconsin and Middle East: It's about Including Everyone in the Discussion

Joan Chittister, with her accustomed holy insight, talking about the parallels between Wisconsin and the Middle East, and about the collapse of participatory structures in both church and state when anyone is excluded from the conversation that builds those structures:

If something isn't done in all institutions -- in both state and church, church and state -- to include people in the discussion of the questions that affect them, in the real resolution of the issues that touch their own lives, the problem won't be national unrest, it will be global unrest and this time there will be no institution large enough either to suppress it or to survive it. Then what?

And that's precisely why I keep calling for a national dialogue in the U.S. Catholic church, in which everyone will finally have a voice at the table, including the thousands and thousands who have walked away in recent years.  And the gays and lesbians.  And people of color and Latinos.  And women.  And, above all, survivors of clerical sexual abuse.  (And it's why I strongly object to the proposal that if you want to learn what American Catholicism is all about, you need to go to Rome.)

If an institution is tumbling to the ground--and the Catholic church is decidedly doing that--you can't rebuild it without including every voice that should always have been at the table all along.  Not if you want the rebuilding to be effective.

And not if you want to call the church Christ's church.

Laura Miller: Gender Gap in Literature Continues

One more posting following up on themes from the past: back in October 2009, I noted that when Mr. Obama went on vacation in the summer of 2009 and published his vacation reading list, it struck me that every author on the list was male.  And since I happen to think that the world might be a more humane place if leaders of various societies and institutions did more to incorporate the viewpoint of women into their governing perspectives, when Huffington Post then invited its readers to submit suggestions for other works the president might bring along with him, I suggested a number of important literary works by women.

I blogged about this matter again later in October 2009, here.

And because I have not changed my mind since then, I am not surprised, but still saddened, to read Laura Miller's essay at Salon today reporting on a survey the group Vida did recently, which suggests that the gender gap in what publishers publish and in what men and women read remains as strong as ever.  And that men continue to regard literary works written by women as less significant than those written by men--so that men continue stubbornly to overlook and not to read many significant literary works authored by women.

And I continue to propose in my naive, wild-eyed and probably quite ineffectual way that the world might well be a better place if we could redress this imbalance.  And if people like Barack Obama or Tom Monaghan or Clarence Thomas or Timothy Dolan or Pope Benedict or John Boehner spent more time reading novels, poetry, and plays written by women over the centuries, and less time reading what I suspect they read on a daily basis.

Black-Eyed Peas and New Year's Luck: Our Interconnected World

Back home last night after a looong flight from London to Atlanta to Little Rock, a flight made more anxious by the line of severe storms through which we had to fly on the last leg, storms that caused fatalities yesterday in Arkansas and Missouri.  I'm thankful to be home safe and sound, though unhappy to learn that the storms through which we flew caused several deaths.

Safe and sound, if a bit travel-bedraggled, and as always happens when we travel, the gods who watch over safe journeys have exacted their usual toll for bringing us home safe--on this trip, a little bag of homemade candies I carefully selected at an open-air booth at the Covent Garden market, to give to friends on our return, which are now nowhere to be found in our luggage.

And besides unpacking, I have an important task today: to cook our traditional new year's dish of black-eyed peas.  I can think of very few occasions on which I haven't eaten black-eyed peas on new year's day, because, well, one has to do so.  If one hopes to have any luck in the new year.

Why, I don't know.  Like the rule that cornbread must be made with white corn meal and must never contain sugar, it just is.  It just is this way and not that way.  The distinguished African-American food historian Jessica Harris, author of The Welcome Table, had a wonderful article about this a few days ago in the New York Times, in which she notes that black-eyed peas are one of many African contributions to the cuisine and culture of the Southern U.S.  As she notes, no one knows precisely how this legume came to be associated with new year's day and with good luck, but the association is venerable, and is found throughout the Southern states.

In coastal South Carolina and coastal Georgia, the peas are usually eaten in combination with rice, an important crop of that part of the South in the early period of American history, though now Arkansas grows more rice than any other state in the nation.  The dish of black-eyed peas and rice is called Hoppin' John in the areas in which it is customary.  Despite our rice-growing local culture (which is fairly recent, however, having begun when German farmers from the Midwest discovered that the rich but heavy soil of the Grand Prairie region of Arkansas could be cultivated to rice), we in Arkansas have long tended to eat our black-eyed peas with cornbread instead of rice.  

And usually with greens and/or cabbage, to which no luck customs have been attached of which I'm aware, though in my years in New Orleans, I found that New Orleanians recommend eating some greens or cabbage on new year's day, to keep money in one's pocket during the coming year.  And on one of the new year's days when I didn't eat black-eyed peas, I encountered a similar custom halfway around the world.

This was in northern Germany, where we spent new year's day with friends in Hamburg at their cabin by  the Baltic Sea in Öhe.  They cooked for us a traditional good luck dinner from their part of Germany--a savory pork roast (a kassler rippchen) with kale (grünkohl) and dumplings (in Steve's honor, they called these knödeln, the traditional name in Steve's Bavarian and Bohemian family branches, and not  klösse, the traditional north German term). According to our friends in Hamburg, the combination of pork and greens on new year's day is also associated with luck in their region--an interesting association, since Jessica Harris points out that the trinity of black-eyed peas, greens, and pork is also traditional in African-American cooking, particularly as a good-luck meal at new year's time.

I suppose it's not impossible to imagine that the African diaspora could have had an effect on the culture of a Hanseatic trading city as far north as Hamburg, since Hamburg has long been a melting-pot port city that has brought together cultures from many places in the world.  As a Hanseatic mercantile city, it also had its fingers in the slave trade, even if tenuously, and it had strong market ties to west Africa, from which many of the African slaves sent to the colonies came.  As a result, the city has long had a significant population of people of color, whose culture may well have influenced some aspects of the culture of Hamburg.

And so today, as we eat our black-eyed peas, greens, cornbread, and a bit of pork (hog jowl is traditional in my family, but I don't like its pasty greasiness at all, and so I substitute a bit of ham to cook with the pork), I'll be thinking of two happy new year's days spent with our friends in Hamburg, of our years in New Orleans, of the significant and often overlooked influence of African signatures on my own traditional Southern culture, and of Russian poet Yevgeny Vinokurov, who writes, 

Some time, I’d like to write a book  

A book all about time 

About how it doesn’t exist,   

How the past and the future    

Are one continuous present.    

I think that all people—those living, those who have lived 

And those who are still to live—are alive now.   

I should like to take that subject to pieces 

Like a soldier dismantling his rifle (as cited in John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos [NY: Vintage, 1984], p. 21).

And so as we eat our black-eyed peas, pork, greens, and cornbread today, I'll think about the interconnectedness of all people in the world, past, present, and future; about how none of is dispensable; about how we need each other to be whole; about how I am incomplete without you; about how who I am today depends radically on those who have gone before; about how my life will be continuous with that of those whose birth I don't live to see, insofar as I build towards the future here and now; about how immeasurably richer our world is due to cultural interchange; about the damage we do to ourselves and our world when we imagine that we can take the contributions of others for granted and when we assume that our culture and its perspective are normative and superior.

And about Maya Angelou, who writes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (NY: Random House, 1997) of the value of learning how and what other people eat and why they eat what they eat: “Through food we learned that there were other people in the world” (p. 207).

More on Jesus's Rejection of the Club of Manly Men: Dominance and Submission as the Hierarchical Skeleton of Patriarchy

And another selection from a journal entry of mine from the past.  This one, written 25 Aug. 1994, offers a counterpoint to what I posted yesterday about the DADT debate and Jesus and the club of manly men:

The structures of submission and dominance that form the skeleton of patriarchal societies, including the military, church, academy, and business elites--and the rituals that enact and legitimize these structures--protect hierarchy.  They do so by assuring that males being trained to wield power learn to endure humiliation, both so that they may in turn wield power via subordinating the weak, and so that they will unflinchingly obey the command of their superior.

By its very nature, such systems foster conformity and resistance to change.  Church and academy delude themselves if they believe that the top-down hierarchical system that is their skeleton does anything else.

The most fundamental gesture of defiance one can make to such a system is to pretend that it is beside the point, for oneself and those one admires.  Such systems of dominance and submission must make these gestures of defiance unthinkable, by wooing the defiant one into their structures and therefore nullifying his or her alternative worldview, or by simply murdering the defiant one.

Murder can take many forms.  It can be literal, as in shooting the defiant one.  Or it can be non-literal, as when the defiant one is made to appear immoral, defective, or malicious.  The very expulsion the defiant one undergoes is designed to make him or her appear all these things.  Particularly if the one expelled is a man, the rituals of expulsion are designed to show that he is weak enough to deserve expulsion.  After all, this wouldn't be able to happen to him if he didn't in some way deserve it, would it?--and anyone weak enough to be ritually abused and have no power to stop the abuse ipso facto deserves this abuse, in such hierarchical structures.

Jesus courted murder by his gestures of defiance to such systems.  In his wandering-about life with friends, in his breathtakingly insolent rituals of inclusion of public sinners, such as his table fellowship with sinners, in his "feminine" celebration of flowers, grass, rain, bread, wine--in all these ways, he said that the structures of dominance-submission were, quite simply, beside the point for him and his friends.  Such statements make it possible for people to think that the structures of dominance-submission are changeable.  If all those who are kept in their place by such structures see this man and his friends engaging in such gestures of defiance, then what might they do?

And so Jesus had to be murdered.  It's not difficult for me to understand that.  What's difficult for me to understand is what Christians claim happened after this, as its divine overturning.  Resurrection.  What's that?  Who?  Where?  How?  What does it mean, in a world that acts, over and over again, like the world that put Jesus to death, that crucifies him again every day, in the lives of street people, black people, gay and lesbian people, women?

And in a church altogether indistinguishable from the world that put Jesus to death.

Alan Jones on Learning to Tell Stories That Include Everyone: Advent Meditation

Another excerpt from one of my journals of the past—a passage I copied in November 1995 from Alan Jones's book The Soul’s Journey: Exploring the Spiritual Life with Dante as Guide (San Francisco: Harper, 1995).  This strikes me as a valuable meditation piece for Advent, with its uncomfortable questions about whom we're willing to make room for in the inns of our lives and hearts.  

I have the strong impression, as I read what Catholic military chaplain Archbishop Broglio has said about gay men and our place in the world (and in the military) (on this, see my posting yesterday), that this archbishop and many of his brother bishops have no room in their Catholic inns for me.  Or for my kind.  

And I wonder what that says about the meaning of Catholicism for such men today—and what it says about the meaning of Catholicism for many of us today, when a Catholic pastoral official can make the kind of statements Archbishop Broglio has made, and Catholics who must know better and want better for their church continue to keep silence.

Here's what Jones says:

We need storytellers and mythmakers who can show us the way by finding a story that sees the planet as a holy place and includes everybody.  The crucial question for the storyteller today is, What about the stranger, the alien, the poor, the weak—the other?  What about the rage and pain of those who say No! to every attempt to tell a common story?

Our own reality depends on our being able and willing to include others.  Thomas Merton wrote, "The more I am able to affirm others, to say yes to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am.  I am fully real if my heart says yes to everyone."  This, in fact, is precisely Dante’s vision of heaven—the celebration of mutuality in a place where everyone is his unique self.  I am reminded of James Joyce’s famous definition of the Catholic Church as "Here comes everybody!" . . . Denying the stories and presence of others is to be on the road to hell.

. . . Meanwhile, the others are crowding in and talking our space and demanding attention.  The hitherto voiceless are demanding to be heard.  Stories of heaven and hell revolve around our attitudes towards others.  Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous phrase from No Exit is "L’enfer, c’est les autres" (Hell is other people).  But what will God say to us when we go to him without the others? What about the others with whom we share the world?  Hell is other people!  Heaven is other people!  It all depends on the tales we tell—the stories that shape our experience” (pp. 18-19).

And, of course, the preceding passage was made all the more poignant for me as I read and laboriously copied it in 1995, as Steve and I struggled constnatly to contend with the effects of my definitive expulsion from Catholic academic life at Belmont Abbey College in 1993, and as my mother's health took a nose-dive at the same time and we assumed the responsibility of providing care for her in the middle of our own uprooted lives.

What will God say to us when we go to him without the others?  That strikes me as a very important question to ask myself in this Advent season.

Catholic Attrition and the Need for Better Hymns: A Centrist Catholic Discussion at Commonweal Blog

At the Commonweal blog, Grant Gallicho summarizes an article by Peter Steinfels on the crisis of attrition in American Catholicism in the latest issue of that journal.  As I've noted in numerous postings here, Pew Forum data in February 2008 show a third of adults raised Catholic in the U.S. having left the Catholic church.  One in ten American adults is now a former Catholic.


And, of course, this raises questions about why, and about what to do re: the attrition.  I'm intrigued by one strand of the conversation that has developed to discuss Steinfels's article in response to Gallicho's posting.  A regular contributor to the Commonweal blog discussions, Kathy, who's a hymn writer, logs in to say,

Obviously we need better hymns.

And Peter Steinfels logs in to agree.

Plausible analysis, this analysis that sees the U.S. Catholic church devoid of a liturgical beauty it once had, which presumably will draw disaffected Catholics back to the church through the sheer force of the beauty--if we can but recover it from the ravages of post-Vatican II liturgical reform.  Or so the conventional argument seems to go.  It's one that Kathy has made frequently at the Commonweal blog.

Unfortunately, this argument does not appear persuasive to me.  It seems to reframe (and restate) the question of why American Catholics are leaving the Catholic church in droves, rather than to provide a compelling solution to the problem.  As I noted in a posting about this issue back in July, in my view, Catholics can't sing now because we don't have conspicuously much to sing about right now.

People sing--and people will sing--given something worth singing about.  And as the history of song in cultures around the world--including cultures of faith communities--suggests, people will sing when they experience joy, welcome, liberation, sorrow, grief.  People will sing when they are moved by these profound passage-moment and transcendent experiences of human life, and they'll sing in communal settings when those experiences are shared in a communal setting.

Many of us are leaving or distancing ourselves from the Catholic church today for one quite particular reason: we do not find in the Catholic community today any significant or meaningful welcome that leads us to joy and a sense of liberation through the shared religious life offered by that community.  To the contrary, many of us--in particular, many of us who are gay and lesbian--are told quite decisively by our Catholic brothers and sisters that we are not wanted and are not welcome.

And so we leave, having nothing to sing about.  We leave or distance ourselves, having nothing meaningful to sing about, and having found the hymns that supposedly enshrine the experience of the joy Catholics feel within a welcoming community offering us grace and liberation tinny, utterly distant from our real, lived experience as gay Catholics.

Which is largely an experience of exclusion and of unwelcome,  of being singled out as sinners in a unique way that overlooks the shared sinfulness of all members of the Christan community.  Which is largely an experience of being in the room and being treated as if we are not there, when discussions arise of topics like this: why are Catholics leaving, and what should we do about the exodus.

And then, when we do share our experiences of unwelcome and ask for dialogue about them, we are very likely to be told in one way or another by those who profess to be concerned about the exodus of their brother and sister Catholics that we are political activists who have a political agenda, not a Catholic one.  Not a Catholic one like their Catholic agenda, which defines the contours of Catholic identity.

That we are shrill and strident insofar as we speak the truth in these conversations about welcome and unwelcome, about those who stay to sing hymns and those who now sing their songs of joy and liberation outside the church, with other communities that more adequately and honestly enshrine the experience of joy and liberation, of welcome and unwelcome, for those of us who are gay.

I've had a number of dialogues with Kathy at the Commonweal site over the past several years, (e.g., here: the quote below is from this thread), and they inevitably end with precisely this message to me: thanks for sharing.  But you're simply making political points that have nothing to do with me as a Catholic.  I, by contrast belong, and here's my non-political Catholic agenda:

I would prefer it if all of the teachers in Catholic universities, seminaries, and all chancery workers were willing and ready to teach the truth in its fullness and implement programs to help the People of God grow in holiness according to the truth.

I belong.  You don't.  I am with the magisterium.  You are not.

And, of course, Kathy's right.  She's a regular--and a known commodity--at Commonweal.  I'm not.  She is far more likely to be sent gestures of welcome from the Commonweal crowd as a known commodity who also stands in the heart of the church than I am as a marginalized gay Catholic fighting for his life, spiritually speaking, in a community that wants to lay claim to being a welcoming community while it adamantly refuses to entertain the testimony of one gay or lesbian Catholic after another about precisely how we are made unwelcome.

And so after trying once again to engage in meaningful conversation at this centrist blog, and after having failed yet again, I remind myself again of why I tend to avoid these going-nowhere conversations at the center.  Nothing ever really gets resolved, in these discussions--in these discussions that skate across the surface of civil discourse, throwing intellectual pyrotechnics about Evagrius and Jerome here, sprinkling weighty conversations with Aquinas and Augustine there.  In these entirely parochial conversations that want to discuss the most non-parochial issue of all--why are so many of us leaving, and what do they have to say about their reasons for leaving--in an entirely clubby, in-group, parochial way.  As if the club itself is not right at the heart of the problem!

Nothing gets resolved, because there is no intent of resolving anything--particularly when the discussion is who is welcome and who is not, who is visible and who is invisible, whose agenda merits a dismissive political tag and whose doesn't.  Who is Catholic and who is not.

Having engaged in yet another of these self-defeating conversations in which the very people intent on excluding me from communion, and the centrists defending their behavior, try once again to convince me that I am the malefactor and their gestures of cruel unwelcome are golden signs of  tender love, I distance myself again, and decide not to throw my insights away in another going-nowhere conversation of why Catholics are leaving.  I grow weary, indeed, of that soul-gnawing feeling of having to defend myself against charges of special pleading, when I try in vain to convince my brother and sister Catholics of what is as plain as the nose on anyone's face, if they wish to see and talk about noses and not Evagrius: that the Catholic church is one of the least welcoming social spaces in American society right now for those of us who are gay and lesbian.

And that it's impossible to claim that one is acting in love when one constructs such social spaces for some of one's brothers and sisters, simply because those brothers and sisters happen to have been born different from oneself.

Make the hymns and the liturgy as beautiful as possible.  And keep telling yourself, if you wish, that this will bring us back.  It won't.  As Johann Baptist Metz notes in his memoirs about coming of age in a Bavarian Catholic community during the Nazi period. one can gather in church and sing triumphant hymns of joy, and still be entirely on the wrong side of history--and, more importantly, of God and the moral arc of the universe.

Metz says that his deeply Catholic village gathered day after day and Sunday after Sunday to sing hymns in its Catholic church while Jews were being incinerated at concentration camp near the village.  An act of mass murder about which the villagers simply remained silent, which they pretended was not taking place, as they sang the beautiful, rich hymns of their liturgical Catholic tradition.

Hymns alone don't suffice, when we're talking about who counts and who doesn't, about who stays and who walks.

Perhaps in the final analysis the question is not whether people should be singing this hymn or that hymn, but whether what we celebrate through song is worth celebrating or not.  No matter how loud, impressive, and beautiful the hymnody of the restorationist church that my dialogue partner and sister in Christ Kathy the hymn writer promotes, I suspect that many of us who are gay and lesbian are going to keep our distance from the celebrations.

Because it's not our welcome that's being celebrated in these hymns.  Or at centrist Catholic blog sites.  Quite the contrary.