As far as the state is concerned, the statutory respect for the seal of confession is intended to protect the penitent, not the confessor (although an unscrupulous confessor could certainly take advantage of the privilege in order to protect himself, if he did something wrong in the confessional). As far as I can tell, the same is true as far as Canon Law is concerned: the seal of confession is there to protect the penitent, not the confessor.
However, a penitent may give a priest permission to talk about what was confessed. The penitent may release him from the seal. And this is why the recent legal case in Louisiana doesn’t quite make sense to me.
Don’t be a sex sponge.
Most women bloggers have a loyal reader and commenter who can be described as “Issues Guy.” Like a dog has fleas, he’s got issues with women — and man, do they bite.
My Issues Guy put himself right in the middle of this post on idolatry, in a tangential combox conversation which turned out to be far more interesting than the post itself (even though the post itself had “foreskin” in the title!). Issues Guy described his perfect potential wife and marriage thus:
The Plan
Find a woman who:
•wants to/is willing to have sex all the time
•wants to be 100% submissive in a way that feels natural
•wants to/is willing to have all the kids I can give herIt’s a simple three-point plan. Not sure how hard it would be to execute.
In return I will:
•treat her like a middle school girl (which women seem to like no matter what they may say) alternating with treating her like an adult which they admittedly also seem to like.
•work till I black out if necessary
•let her read to meIt’s a perfect plan.
Ouchie, the issues! A married man tried to correct him, saying,
Your description of marriage as a contract with its focus on sexual gratification of the man exposes a deep seated fear of intimacy and completely misses the root of our Church Tradition … So you will be physically faithful to one woman. Big shit. So was Hitler.
[…]
As a sacramental vocation, I have experienced that marriage helps me to be a better person ONLY when I am actively engaged in all aspects of our lives. When I slack off and choose to only live my vows by “working until I blackout” it is a sham. And when in such denial, my heart has been clouded from receiving love from any source.
Issues Man responded:
Sex as the foundation of marriage isn’t an error, it’s natural law. That’s why sex is considered the consummation of the sacrament and why people of the same sex can’t marry each other.
Really this whole controversy boils down to a wife’s duty to have sex with her husband.
A few people tried to respond to him, but here is the reply that really lit up my female brain:
The expectation that someone should be available “all the time” speaks to little to no understanding of how important sex really is.
Ding ding! Issues Guy thought that, because he wants and needs sex all the time, he alone understands how important it is; but in fact, it shows how unimportant he imagines sex to be. It shows how little he understands it.
Imagine if someone said, “Most people settle for three-minute pop songs, but I am different. I appreciate the beauty of Beethoven. Therefore, I will put the fourth movement of his ninth symphony on repeat, and will listen to it over and over again at top volume for the rest of my life.”
That would be weird, right? Someone who wants that is someone who maybe started out actually loving music, but his natural desire for its beauty and depth has turned into . . . something else. Something that ruins Beethoven.
Or imagine a child who is presented with a chocolate cake for his first birthday. He’s so excited that, while he does manage to get some of it into his mouth, he also smears it in his hair, squishes it between his fingers, slathers it all over his skin and clothes.
PIC baby massacring cake
You wouldn’t look at a kid like this and say, “Wow, here is a true gourmet! Unlike the rest of us, who eat three meals a day, he truly understands how important food is.” No, you’d say, “Ha, he doesn’t know any better. Someone get a towel.”
Why is this? Well, when something is profound, we don’t enjoy it best when we wallow in it. We’re not sponges, just an undifferentiated blob of strung-together holes designed for soaking. Someone who soaks, someone who wallows — this is not someone who understands. This is someone who has traded understanding for consumption.
It is the same with sex. The “want/need/have-to-have/gimme-more-now-now-now” model of sexuality is a sad and poor and foolish one. Yes, we have needs — but we are more than the sum of our needs. We are not made to wallow. When we understand that something is important, we use some discernment, some restraint, or at very least some careful timing.
Now, these analogies — music, food — are useful to explain what is grotesque about the “want/need/must-not-be-denied” attitude . . . but only up to a point. It is true that there is such a thing as too much Beethoven or too much chocolate cake, and that people who yearn for nonstop saturation don’t truly love what they say they love.
But that’s not the only problem, when we’re talking about sex. It’s not just that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. It’s that sex doesn’t mean anything at all when it’s not an expression of a relationship.
Food and music have some element of this need for relationships. It’s nicer when we enoy music together, and it’s a happier day when we can share a feast with someone else. But if we do enjoy these things alone — if we are carried out of ourselves, out and away from the crowded concert hall on a solitary musical wave, or if we close our eyes in bliss as we taste a spoonful of something exquisite, something we do not have to share?
PIC woman tasting spoon
This is fine. This is great. This is normal, and nice, and good.
But sex is different. Sex is only meaningful because it is part of a relationship. This is true of sex every single time, no matter who you are, what your circumstances, what your needs, what your wants, what your desires, what your issues. Sex is about two people, always. “You give it to me” is not a relationship. If you’re thinking of sex as something that you do and the other person must let you do, then you are not really thinking about sex. You’re thinking about holes that need filling. You are being a hole that needs filling. You are being a sponge.
PIC flabby sponge
The comments I quoted above came about as a tangent to the central conversation — but come to think about it, they’re right on target. I said that idolatry is when we
replace God with something smaller and easier to manage — and devote your life to serving that, instead.
And there we are. Sex is not small, and it is not easy to manage. It is a vast ocean. One way that we can make it manageable is, paradoxically, to wallow in it — to become an undifferentiated, undifferentiating mass of saturated holes. It is easier this way. Sponges don’t care about tides, or storms, or seasons, or night or day. Some of them don’t even need another sponge to reproduce. They just witlessly bud, and add to themselves more holes to be filled.
Do not, o thou man, be a sponge. Be better. Struggle, suffer, give yourself over to a world of thirst and desire, conflict and deep joy.
Struggle, learn, suffer, love, and be better than a sponge.
******
You know that Extraordinary Bishops’ Synod on the Family coming up in October? The Patheos Catholic Channel will be posting a rolling symposium covering all sorts of topics relevant to the Synod. I’m tagging this post #synod and #symposium because it’s about sex, and sex is relevant to everything! Right? Yes?
Anyway, many of my fellow bloggers, many of whom are capable of thinking of things other than sex, are posting clear, insightful, entertaining posts. The Catholic Patheos Synod Symposium Landing Page is already full of great posts, and is being updated regularly. You may not be familiar with some of the fine writers who contribute to the Patheos Catholic Channel. Browse around! We’re an amazingly varied bunch.
Seven Quick Takes: In Which Benny Meets Her Match
And we’re home from camping! Or, “camping.” Whatever, you tent-loving masochists. It was rustic enough for me. Nobody fell in the fire, nobody got permanently lost, nobody drowned, nobody got carried off by wildlife, we didn’t need to test whether our insurance covered out-of-state ER visits, and nobody even pulled anybody’s hair until we were – get this – two minutes away from reaching home. We managed to stretch a three-hour road trip into five hours, but we made it.
And guess what? I didn’t take a single photo! My husband took a few, but I haven’t seen them yet. There was just too much water and sand and dirt and moving around to mess with cameras much.
Here’s my seven wordy takes on our trip:
–1–
The happiest memories of my childhood are memories of the ocean, so I was absolutely ravenous for my kids to have the same experience. And they did! Miles and miles of sparkling blue ocean with waves big enough to toss you around; a buffeting breeze, thieving seagulls that made off with a whole bag of chips, the tugging of the sand away from your feet as the waves withdraw. They played and played and played, and the ocean played back, until our skin was glowing, our mouths and scalps were full of sand, our legs were like jelly, our fingers were salty and puckered, and our ears were full of the sound of the wind and the water. We staggered home completely sated.
Then, on another day, we tried another beach, closer to our campsite. I told the kids it was the same ocean, but it really wasn’t. This was the beach that made you realize why Poseidon was called “Earthshaker.” It was stifling hot, but the air was full of steam, so you could see past a few waves, and then . . . the abyss. There could have been anything out there, or nothing. The waves slammed on the beach with a cracking sound, and every wave threw pale, scrabbling crustaceans onto the sand. There were no shells to collect — they had all been pulverized into bits by the pounding sea. The water was purplish, and it hissed. We stayed for a few hours until we were defeated, and then went home to rinse off at the campground, where the fresh pond water felt as gentle and mild as a giant cup of lukewarm tea. Whew!
So, kids, that was the ocean! Now they know.
–2–
At one point, at the nice beach, the PA system announced that a lost child was looking for his family, and I thought, “Huh, did they say ‘Eliza’ or ‘Elijah”? Oh, well.”
Then they announced that it was Elijah, and he was ten, and still unclaimed. And I thought, “Wow, I also have a son who is ten and who is named Elijah. What a coincidence! Well, it was a popular name that year.” I felt sorry for the mom whose son was missing.
Then I wondered where my son was. Yarr.
–3–
There is staring at a TV screen and thinking about nothing for an hour, and there is staring at a campfire and thinking about nothing for an hour. Not the same kind of staring, and not the same kind of nothing.
PIC campfire
–4–
If you are living with nine children in what is essentially Dirtville, and are taking sojourns into Sweat-and-Gritsville, with a sidetrip into World of Soot, with occasional sorties into the Land of Grime and Itch, you may find that you want to take a shower. You may discover that the state park charges you $1.25 for five minutes of hot water. PAY IT.
–5–
We visited the Mystic Aquarium, where a “family membership” price doesn’t mean “two adults and as many as two children, if you are so gauche as to have as many as two children.” They also let you go out for lunch and come back in without paying again. And they had great fish and whatnot to look at! We got to pet sharks, and one of their three Beluga whales did something no one else could manage over the course of the whole trip: it made Benny stop shrieking for a minute. This whale was drifting back and forth in front of the glass where the dear child was having tantrum #897,932, and it was clearly watching her very closely. She didn’t like the look in its eye, and whacked the glass. It stopped right in front of her, and it tried to eat her. Or at least it popped its toothy mouth open right in front of her face.
PIC beluga mouth
And lo, there was quiet! Good one, whale.
I’ve been to aquarium shows where the creatures are impeccably trained and the trainers are unflappable, and clearly in charge. This was not one of those shows, and it was utterly charming. The sea lions mostly did what they were told, but sometimes they acted like big dumb stubborn dogs who were confident that their trainers loved them anyway. Then there was one sea lion who just refused to participate at all, because it’s mating season, and he had better things to do. That’s what I liked about this aquarium in general: they had really neat stuff to show us, but they didn’t take themselves too seriously.
They also had something I’ve never seen before: three “mermaid purses” in special display cases, so you could see the developing embryo inside. They were about an inch across, and you could see the tail waving back and forth like a metronome, and that little shark waited and waited, just biding its time and growing. If you looked closely, you could make out one skate’s beating heart.
–6–
We saw an ice cream parlor called “Gelato Fiasco.” We did not stop there.
GIF nope nope nope octopus
–7–
I love sheets.
***
Happy Fourth of July to all my American friends! We’re rained out here, which means we get an extra day to unpack and desandify ourselves before our family cookout and explodyfest tomorrow. Don’t forget to check out the other Seven Quick Takes at Conversion Diary.
Robin’s Soap is now for sale on Etsy!
What with all the camping and decamping, I almost forgot to let you know . . .
Robin’s Soap Shoppe is now open on Etsy!
So many of you generous folks made this possible. (For any new readers, I introduced Robin here, sweetened (?) the deal here, and covered myself with glory on YouTubehere.) Take a look at her first offerings, including this Super Gardener’s Soap:
This is a soap for the gardener or the gardener wanna be. If you enjoy getting your hands dirty, this is your new favorite soap. Layers of lavender buds, rose clay, kelp, coffee grounds, calendula – an amazing soap that smells pretty darn good, too. Scented with rosehips and jasmine. 100% naturally colored. This is one of my personal all time soaps!
Please include Robin in your prayers as she begins this new chapter of her life. Thanks!
Hooray for the African Queen!
Along with Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which I only put into our Netflix queue to see if my husband really loved me, The African Queen has been languishing in the “saved” category for over a year, waiting until the movie should be released on DVD.
We finally got to see it last week, and it was such a treat – all the more so now that I have 12 years of marriage under my belt, and can see that this is a movie about more than leeches after all (but still: brrrrrrr).
I am a little frustrated by condescending reviewers who sigh that the dramatic shift in the relationship between Miss Rose and Mr. Allnut strains their credulity. Here’s something I would expect movie reviewers to understand: The African Queen is a movie. As such, it tells things in a movieish way– that is, it moves at its own discrete pace and choses scenes selectively, so that the viewer can understand what has happened without anyone actually running a camera over every breath the characters take. It’s not that I can wink at what is obviously a phony but entertaining story; it’s that it’s a true kind of story being told, but at adventure pace.
The precipitousness of their newfound love is really the point of the movie: here are two people who have so far only half-lived their lives. If they fall together quickly, it’s because they’ve been waiting so long. At the opening scenes, we see that Miss Rose has taken herself out of the stream of life, and Mr. Allnut travels up and down the river, but only to deliver other people’s mail. It’s time for both of them to go somewhere, and the river is waiting. What an artful and deceptively simple portrait of a marriage the movie is, from start to finish — and it’s all done in gestures. Every time Katharine Hepburn touches her hair, it means something; and every time Humphry Bogart scratches his chin, you know what he’s thinking, and whether or not he’s relishing that thought.
The characters fall together because, like most well-matched couples, they need each other. First they discover each other’s strengths (she turns out to be brave and passionate; he turns out to be clever and strong); and then, through the other, they discover their own, previously unchallenged weaknesses (she’s selfish, making him sleep in the rain; he’s not a coward, exactly, but his solution is to sit in a backwater and wait out the war).
Then they show their vulnerable points to each other (she panics and is useless when the flies swarm; he, over and over again, is much too ready to give up), and readily forgive each other for them. Then they are angry at each other for those weakness (he thinks she just can’t understand how foolish their plan is; she thinks he is craven and all talk). Then they accept their weakness, their own, and each other’s. He really, really doesn’t want to go back into that leechy water, and she really, really doesn’t want to send him there. But it has to be done.
They relinquish their claim on what they thought they wanted out of the adventure, and of life in general. She prays for God to be mericful to them both, and they lie down to die. Then comes a flood, they almost get hanged, and the boat explodes, and they swim away! Oh man, what a great movie! In the course of a few days, they go from being strangers to courting, to love, to surrender — right down the river they go.
I love this story because, even though there are irresistable symbols to be found, (like the river that looks so different, once you fight past a certain point, that it changes name, but it’s really the same river . . . ) it’s not a metaphor about a relationship — it’s just a great portrait of one. It understands exactly what movies are for: to show us things we already know, but in a new way. With crocodiles!
________
This post originally ran in Crisis in April of 2009
What Lies Beneath
I had a fleeting desire to see the movie Watchmen, until I heard that it was yet another in the genre of “let’s peel off the facade of the world and get down to the truthiest truth underneath, which is, of course, stench and corruption.”
This must be an awfully old theme. Older even than The Matrix, I imagine. In that movie, the hero is invited to take a blue pill if he wants to persist in the pleasant and elaborate illusion that is human life — or a red pill if he wants to wipe it away forever. If he chooses the latter, he will be doomed to live henceforth in a brutal and dangerous reality — but it’s the right thing to do, because it’s the Truth, you see.
In any age that prides itself (justly or not) on intellectual rigor and sophistication, this must be one of the chief temptations: to imagine that freshness and innocence are always the illusion, and corruption is always the reality, the core. (This theme is brilliantly dissected in John C. Wright’s journal here.)
But it’s a temptation. Not one perspective on life, not a valid point of view, not an interesting theme to explore. A temptation, also known as a lie.
Ransom, in C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra, battles directly with this lie when the Un-man, pursuing him on shattered limbs through the pitch-black caves of Venus, courts him horribly with the myth of life as a thin crust, an outer rind. The tempter says:
Picture the universe as an infinite globe with this very thin crust on the outside . . . . We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe –He’s outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn’t follow us in. . .
All the things you like to dwell on are outsides. A planet like our own . . . Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink.
It took me many years to realize that I believed this myth, emotionally if not intellectually, and had done so since I was little. I am sure that many young people do. Happily, in my late 20s, I gradually got an easy reprieve: God saw fit to shower me with so many hints and breaths of eternal happiness that only a willful, intentional twisting away from the light would confuse me for long.
But there have been some times of confusion. Recently I suffered a spell of crushing misery. Things that I never even questioned had turned out to be shaky. Where I turned for consolation, there was perversion and malice. It didn’t even feel like a trial, because I didn’t know that the verdict was yet to come: It felt like the end had come, and there I was in the dark cave, and that was it. I had found the truth at last.But (O Lord, thou pluckest me) I came out. The darkness was answered with a spell of otherworldly happiness. The world was shining all the time. Angels leaped and rejoiced from every surface, basking and frolicking like otters in the glory of God-in-the-world. You will have to take my word for it, if this has never happened to you. I’d never seen anything like it, before or since. It lasted about three weeks.
The super-rational joy, the passionate interest I felt in the world didn’t last, but it was too real to forget or deny. One day, I was driving home from adoration. Now, I’m a typical crummy catholic who unwillingly drags herself there twice a month, so this day was unusual in that I had truly enjoyed my hour. I felt God’s presence in the chapel as substantially as I feel my husband’s presence when he walks in the door in the evening. We were there together, Christ and I, and it was fun.
So after my hour was over, I was headed home, hauling the car around the roundabout, idly watching out for clueless pedestrians. Tired snowbanks, blackened with exhaust, leaned into the road, and no birds sang. “Echhh,” I thought. “Well, that was very nice for an hour . . . but now back to the real world.”Then I thought, “Just a damn minute.” (At this point I think I actually put one finger up into the air like a stern lecturer.)
“That was the real world. Back in there, in the chapel. The gold. The almost audible affection and consolation. The unmistakable Presence. That was the real world. And I hereby repudiate that stupid other idea!” And, thanks be to God, the stupid idea slunk away.
Let’s just say it: Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are real. Everything else is not.Now, driving home and feeling better that particular afternoon is one thing. But repudiating this stupid idea every day in every way — rejecting utterly, without reservation, the temptation of the Matrix sensibility — is a matter of life and death.Why? Because we are still waiting for the truth to take up arms and vanquish the enemy once and for all. Yes, we know and believe that it will happen at the Second Coming — that then there will be no temptation, no mistake. Whichever pill we take, Christ the Warrior will be standing in front of us: good, beautiful, victorious, and unmistakably true.But right now?
The Beautiful is an anencephalic baby who somehow lives for three weeks and longer. The Good is a Host desecrated on You Tube. The True is the voice of a chubby DRE who preaches chastity to a handful of hardened, sarcastic teenagers.
In other words, for some reason, God is vulnerable. He has made Himself vulnerable in this world. I don’t know why.
The one thing we can do about it is to remember that this weakness, this darkness, this tired, dried up, worn out world — this is the illusion. This is the temporary state; this is the crust. Underneath it all is not darkness, heat, and stench.
Underneath it all, deep down, is the living water.
We must drink of it again and again, and we must offer it to each other, and remind each other that it is there. It will keep our heads clear until there can be no more confusion, once and for all.
A New Idolatry: Foreskin Restoration
PIC man worshiping obelisk
[I’m not really here! I’m stealing WiFi at Dunkin’ Donuts to post this on our way to beach. This seemed like the perfect post for a day when I’m not really here.]
Today, a horrible new planet swam into my ken: foreskin reconstruction.
It’s a thing. It’s a thing among a small number of men who suffer from rare disorder called “phimoses,” where the foreskin won’t retract fully, and it’s a thing among a small number of men who had botched circumcisions, and experience pain and bleeding.
But it’s also a thing among men who have allowed themselves to be persuaded that their lives are significantly impoverished because of a missing flap of skin. They believe that they cannot be happy or fulfilled until they go through a lengthy process of skin grafts or, less risky but somehow more appalling, a years-long regimen of “tugging,” with tapes, weights, and elastic straps. They believe that they can be “restored” to something valuable, dignified, and worthwhile by devoting hours out of every day, perhaps for years, to measuring how much skin covers the end of their penises.
There’s a word for this: “Idolatry.” Elizabeth Scalia nailed it. We imagine idol worship is a thing of the past, just because we haven’t seen wanton wenches polishing a golden calf with their hair, lately. But idol-making has been the constant business of humanity for thousands of years. The idols themselves change, but the impulse is the same: replace God with something smaller and easier to manage — and devote your life to serving that, instead.
This isn’t about whether circumcision is right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy. It’s about who’s in charge: you, or what you think you lack?
Some people speak of the devil tempting us with pleasures and delights, which turn to ashes when we die. More and more, he tempts modern men and women with the idea that we are miserable. He tells us there is no way we can’t be miserable, under our current intolerable circumstances. He teaches us to examine every experience and tease out how unsatisfying it is, compared to some ideal which we’ve never experienced, but which we firmly believe we deserve. He trains us to focus on what we do not have. He constantly reminds us that we’ve been violated in some way, that life itself has robbed us of . . . something.
And the more squalid the locus of our desires, the better. Exorcists often report an overpowering fecal stench in the homes of the possessed. The frantic masturbation scene in The Exorcist was not a fantasy. This is what the devil offers us: everything wretched and small, because he wants us to know in our hearts that we are wretched and small, that we stink, that we’re nothing more than a few square inches of skin.
He doesn’t just want us to lose God. He wants us to degrade ourselves as much as possible in the process. A fall is not good enough: it must be a ridiculous fall.
Foreskin restoration? I don’t care who you are, I can promise you this: there is only one kind of restoration that really means anything, and that is the kind that comes from letting go of that wretched little idol you’ve been clutching. Let Christ take everything from you, and then we’ll see how you can be restored.
At the Register: We Who Are About to Camp Salute You
As I write, I may have nothing packed, nothing purchased, and nothing planned, but I do have a very tidy and detailed list of the things I am sure will go wrong on our trip. They are as follows:
- We will run out of food and we will starve, because obviously we won’t be able to get into the car and drive to a store and buy more food. This is camping, and we are going to have to make do with sand tea and acorn kabobs.
- Sharks. Okay, there are not going to be any sharks, but I’m afraid my kids, who somehow wore us down and got to watch Jaws, are going to be so afraid of sharks that their little brains will actually explode with anxiety. And do you know who is attracted by brain matter in the water? SHARKS.
- We will be surrounded by such awful, noisy, inconsiderate people that we won’t be able to enjoy our awful, noisy, inconsiderate family.
Right Brain Summer Drawing Club – don’t forget!
This week, we’re reading through chapter three and doing the exercise in chapter four of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I’ll put up a picture share link on Monday (not Tuesday, because we’ll be away on our camping trip). I’ll leave the link-up open indefinitely this time, because people are working at different paces.
I really enjoyed looking through the pre-instruction drawings in picture share #1! Thanks for going to the trouble of uploading your pics and linking up. If you don’t have a blog but want to join in, you can start a Tumblr or Flickr or Photobucket (oretc.) account and use that link — or just upload your drawings to the comment section. And of course your’e welcome to work along with us without sharing your pictures! The more, the merrier.
At the Register: SCOTUS: Pro-Lifers Are Citizens, Too
In effect, the law [which was just ruled unconstitutional] created a First and Fourteenth Amendment-Free Zone for a certain class of people. It made it a crime for some citizens to be on a public sidewalk, or to say things in public. Today’s decision reasserts that all citizens have equal protection under the law, and should enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. In short: you can be places and say things and not go to jail for it, even if you’re a pro-lifer.