The Boy Scholastic Tried to Share a Pear

As is, was, and will be his custom, he was taking his lunch under a tree in the park nearby where he lives and today it was a pear, a scone, and some butternut soup kept warm in his thermos. He has a decided order when it comes to eating food, and it goes like this: simple to complicated. First came the soup, because what could be more simple than a liquid (it is like the sea!), then came the scone, because it was a liquid until he put in flour and then placed it in the oven, and finally was to come the pear, for it was as solid and shiny as it had always been, although he was suspicious that there was, hidden in its chew, a good measure of juice. He was just about to take a bite when he saw a girl sitting on a bench. He thought about giving her some of his pear, and a valiant effort was made on his part -- he was able to walk all the way over and held it out. But there was something there which he could not communicate, because she took the pear in its entirety. He tried to gasp, but the breath was gone from him. She did not eat it, though, but put it in the pocket of her jacket. "She thinks that she has me," he said with a grin to himself, "but little does she know I have more at home!" And The Boy Scholastic ran off, leaving the girl alone, and once again completely missing the point.

Each generation of the church has its great struggle, its cause for which it is known. The Apostles were charged with starting the faith, the great authors for writing their Gospels, the early fathers for defending the faith against the pagans, the late fathers for defining our doctrines and writing our creeds. The early Medieval period saw the organizing of the church as the late Medieval struggled under the burden of creating a systematic theology. The Reformation was charged with repairing the damaged church and restoring the individual, the later Protestants with turning doctrine into a debate and not a decision. We found our social causes too, as we have seen the church work to defeat religious discrimination under the law, slavery, racism, class inequality, gender inequality. The theologians of the 19th century gave us Biblical Criticism, and those of the 20th century gave us the reunion of faith and reason. The church has, in so many ways, been the driving force of change in society.

It with a great sadness, then, that I look at the state of the world at present and see how the church has dropped the ball on sexuality and human intimacy. The state of our societal approach to human intimacy is inherently flawed in all directions, and this is ultimately the fault of the church.

Too long has the church looked at human sexuality as a dirty thing, something which we did not permit on many levels for a long time, and at present have what could be called, at best, our own “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Our most progressive of Protestants look at sexuality as a secular term, or something to do with GLBTQ rights – and their numbers are dwarfed by the fundamentals, who instill in their children a fear of sex, and the Catholics, who teach that sex is a base and unfortunate necessity and should only be done to reproduce, and even then not by anyone with an amount of holiness. More and more people everyday realize that these notions are backwards and damaging, and they either abandon the church because of them or torment themselves in a stifling and damaging system. We’ve all been taught that sexual sin is worse than other sin, and that sexual desire and the desire for human intimacy must be guarded lest it make us a whore. We have seen in the last ten years how Catholic priests have been hurt by the church’s requirement that their lives be void of human intimacy, and we see our younger generations leaving in favor of “greener” pastures.

If there has ever been a situation where the old adage about the grass on the other side is true, it is here. If the church’s failed policies have been damaging (and they have), it is due less to what they have done and more to what secular society has done when they picked up the reigns of teaching us about intimacy and sexuality. Secular society decided that it was tired of feeling dirty for having sexual desire and having sex, and so they decided to fight for sexual liberation, which means sex however you want it and with whomever you want it. Unfortunately, they have continued to make sex a huge deal by turning it into a competition -- young, beautiful people have sex, and that's what you want to be -- and this puts the focus of sexuality and intimacy on eros and not agape or philios, and that's hugely problematic and just as bad as anything the church has done or taught, worse in fact. We have people running into sexual relationships when they lack an understanding of intimacy and of love, and we have people using sex and intimacy as tools to get what they want, solely as ways to pleasure and feel pleasured with first seeing it as a way to love and be loved. They’ve turned us into a culture which abuses each others trust in a new way, because sex still has a heightened instance. We’re taught sexually promiscuity and abandon, but we still revolve around words like “slut” and “whore”, where we look at sex as “scoring” and an end unto itself. It is a troubled world that the church faces, and the need for it to regain the position of the progressive agent and the stabilizing force in the realm of human intimacy.

Doing that is a difficult proposition, however, thought the ELCA is making great strides with its new statement “Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust”. What we need to do, most of all, is to stop being ashamed of our desires for sexuality and intimacy. And that’s starts by talking. We need to start talking about it, talking about how we feel, talking about how we want to feel. We need to be honest and open. This also means that we need to stop stigmatizing sexual sin as something worse than all other sins. Making the wrong decision about sex (and that does not necessarily mean sex before marriage; I’m not trying to disguise a hard-line opinion with pretty language) needs to be viewed as a mistake like lying or hating or anything else. A person who has sex before marriage is not dirty, a person who is divorced is not a sinner for life, or even for a moment any more a sinner than the rest of us are. The lie I told this morning, the hate I felt yesterday, the impatience I will have tomorrow is no better a sin than anything I may do wrong sexually – too long have Christians stigmatized sexual sin in order to feel better about the sins they do commit, however subconsciously. I have heard my grandmother say a thousand times when I did something wrong, “Well, at least you didn’t go out and just sleep with some girl.” Christ teaches that to lust is just as bad as to have an inappropriate sexual relationship (adultery, within the context that he is speaking), and we have to reflect that in our church policies and attitudes. It requires a sincere change of heart, but then again, there should be no one more so than Christians who are willing, able, and ready to reform their ways and do the just thing.

The Boy Scholastic's Bike De-Chained

He knew that he had left in one too many links, and now he's paying the price. Well, he's also paying the price becaues his bike is a fixed gear with no brakes, which means that, at present, he can neither speed up or slow down. All he can do is not fall of, and things were going fast before he lost control. As he wizzes through stop sign after stop sign, going towards the lake, he is suprisingly calm. And as he and his bike (miraculously?) make it to the water's edge, he says as loudly as he can, "I am everything and nothing!" And at that moment his bike stopped. He would like to believe that it was the sand dune he had just crashed into which brought about his sudden stop, but as he flies effortlessly over the handlebars and into the water, he accepts that fact that there are things in this world far too mysterious and beautiful to understand, the least of which is horizontal motion on a bike or his own existence, let alone the relationship of the one to the other.

"I am everything and nothing." I did say that once, on a roller-coaster, which may seem silly, but those things are like existential joy-rides for me. I'm deathly afraid of them, but yet I ride them at every possible oppertunity, because they cause in me such an interesting dread. I really, trully feel like I'm going to die, but not in a real way, but only semi-real. I can tell myself all I want that it's safe, and deep down I know it is, and yet I get filled up with such an anxiety that, well, the experience is something wholly other. I never know how I'm going to react. Once, at a very unexpected turn in the roller coaster, I yelled, "Why? Why would you do that?" I don't even know why -- it just seemed like the right thing, I guess. I'm not about to question what silly things the mind decides to do under stress, let alone weird, roller-coaster stress. All I will say is that, if you enjoy being entertained, ride a roller-coaster with me sometime. It's mildly rediculous and definitely hilarious.

A few days ago, I had the great fortune to have lunch with Mark Hanson, the Presiding Bishop of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America for those of you who aren't as interested in churches and stuff as I am). It was an amazing oppertunity to hear from him about his job as Presiding Bishop as well as president of the Lutheran World Federation. It was a small group of us present, and we were asked for questions. I immediately asked him about his stance on the ELCA Sexuality Task-Force's statement: Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust[PDF]. I asked in no uncertain terms whether he felt that this issue was a primary or secondary concern for the church at present, and what he saw his role and the role of my generation (represented heavily at this meeting) in this debate. What followed was the most brilliant and profound response that I have ever received regarding the statement on sexuality. I've transcribed the heart of it here -- my quotations are not direct quotes, but the paraphrasing of ideas in direct discouse. Forgive me any errors I may have had in writing them down:

His main point was that this discussion is not about gay or straight, hetero-normative or varied gender-identities or sexual orientations, because looking at the issue in that way divided up the church into those categories: this is a gay pastor, that is a straight paster, this is a transgendered cantor, that is a stay-at-home wife VBS leader. If we treat the debate in those terms, we risk dividing the church. "And as a sixty-year straight, white male, it's tempting to talk about sexuality in terms of GLBT," he said, "because it takes the focus off of me." We are only going to come to a right and just solution if we talk about human sexuality and human intimacy as universal experiences, as a gift and a trust. We as the church have had a long history of making people feel ashamed of their need for intimacy and their desire for sexual relations. We've forced people to bottle them up, to make them unspoken, and that's unhealthy. That's what gives us scandals in the priest hood like in the Catholic church -- they refuse their priests any intimacy, and that hurts people.

At this point, the Bishop told us that he had a therapist with whom he met regularly. "And I look at my therapist exactly as I look at my dentist and my general physician -- they are all people who help keep me healthy. We need to stop being ashamed of needing to talk about these things, because that causes so much hurt to people, and the church is guilty most of all of propegating that. We as the church used to be the instruments of social change and right-thinking, but we've wrongly given that up in American to secular society and the talking-heads on TV, and that's caused a whole different set of problems. It's time we take that banner back."

He said much more than this, most of which added to those points, but the central issue which was what was so beautiful. For the first time, I could truly say that I was proud--damn proud--of being a member of the ELCA. Never before had I met someone with so much earthly power and authority who was so humble. It was remarkable.

What added to this was that, yesterday, I was the assisting minister at chapel services at the ELCA church-wide office, and I was the one who communed the presiding bishop, who was in attendence that day (rare since he travels so much). The humility I felt as the steward of such a cup, especially giving it to someone for whom I have so much respect, nearly brought me to tears. I have meant more the words which I said that day: "Take and drink: cup of life, cup of salvation." And my sending had never been so powerfully spoken: "Go in peace, Christ is with you!"