Thoughts on Moral Discernment

Since reading my sister's article, I have come to the conclusion that this is just as good a time as any to post some of my thoughts on the subject of homosexuality. Since the page on which J's article appears also included a poll and a few links on homosexuality, I couldn't help making the connection between her article and the thorny subject we all seem to be talking about these days. I expect that J wrote her article in an attempt to deal with the problem of accepted sin in general, so what I'm saying is not at all a criticism of her argument; but I'm fairly sure that some can and do apply her argument against acquiescing in sin to homosexuality.

And why not? Given a premise that homosexual behavior is always and in every case sin, and given also that the power of one's orientation is great -- perhaps irresistible -- such a scenario is inevitable: the individual continuing to trust in the strength and grace of God while also continuing to resist and repent one's inclinations and actions. It is, after all, what we do in the case of temper, or alcoholism, or any other incontrollable impulse or addiction.

But there are two things wrong with that conclusion, as I see it. One is that such frailties as temper, alcoholism, and addictions of all types are part of a psychological deterioration -- that is, they all lead us on a downward spiral. Nobody who is an alcoholic remains an alcoholic without feeling its destructive effects, little by little, throughout his or her life. Alcoholism, or uncontrollable temper, or whatever addiction, is metastatic -- it spreads from system to system and makes the human progressively sick and liable to commit even more sins that would never have happened without its influence. By the grace of God such a situation can lead to brokenness -- the painful awareness of one's failure to overcome -- and thence to the grace and power to heal, to sin less, to cut out the tumor and fight back. But is homosexuality a sin of this type?

Sexual addiction certainly is. Even the attitude of embraced promiscuity can be argued to be of this type, leading to spiritual, if not physical and psychological, deterioration. But addiction and promiscuity do not comprehend the entirety of homosexual feelings, actions, and relationships. In fact, the only thing keeping some homosexual individuals from living spiritually deep, refreshed, and grace-full lives is the fact that the Church's position is one of abhorrence and condemnation -- forcing them to take their health somewhere else. It is the same with heterosexual people who do not choose to marry, except that in the case of homosexuality there is the added stigma of being an "unnatural" creature. If monogamous homosexual relationships are of the same sinful cloth of addiction and promiscuity, then clearly we should be able to see that, like the slippery slope described in Romans 1, such a lifestyle leads to a progressive coarsening of the fibers and a spiritual death. But salient examples (I'm thinking in particular of the integrity and spiritual depth of Gene Robinson, here) show that this is not at all the case, that there seems to be a level of spiritual and emotional health native to homosexual relationships of the same type as their monogamous heterosexual counterparts.

Which leads to my other problem with using my sister's argument in terms of homosexuality. To assume that dealing with homosexual "brokenness" takes this form of resisting sin while trusting God, is to assume a priori that homosexual behavior, and the impulse that engenders it, is sin. I won't dwell here on the seven texts in the Bible that deal with homosexuality one by one, but I will say that its prohibition in the Torah is accompanied by all sorts of prohibitions we take no notice of today -- prohibitions just as punishable by death like working on Saturday or cooking a young goat in its mother's milk. Many of these prohibitions were given, if not solely, at least primarily to set Israel apart from its pagan neighbors, and most modern Jews just don't live by them, or if they do it is in a very modified form.

But I won't betray my relative ignorance of Judaism further by going on in that vein. Suffice it to say that the identification of homosexuality with sin is dependent on one very particular hermeneutic which, in such inflamed times, is applied so stringently on this issue but not on others that appear to get even greater billing in the Bible.

I don't have a settled opinion on the matter. I don't think it is easy or simple to chuck away all the accretion of tradition which says that homosexuality of any variety cannot possibly be healthy, natural, or pleasing to God. But neither do I think that liberal (I will not say "new", as such opinions have been held by individuals and even churches in the distant past) hermeneutics that allow for homosexuals' existence-as-such and activity within boundaries as reasonable as those allowed for heterosexuals, is mere casuistry. And since I'm not directly affected by the issue, I feel content to pursue the policy I set for myself since making the acquaintance of gay people in college: justice and charity toward everyone, and a fight against any hint of judgmental attitude. Such a policy can be pursued by anyone whether they believe homosexuality is sin or whether they don't.

In any case, it can be agreed that we are dealing with people who are, while not more than human, are certainly not less.

I Am Surrounded by Brilliance

My sister has done it again. Read her article, "Human Clay: Thoughts on Spiritual Poverty" at the webzine Boundless.org. Send her feedback, I'm sure she'd love it -- or just comment here. She is one of my faithful readers.

Yay! It's time to do the Dance of Joy!

Chapter 21

*dances away*

Have decided that Harold Bloom is this generation's Robert Southey.

A Mixed Bag

Yesterday I marched into the house at Bethlehem for Chapter meeting and announced, "I'm in love."

I don't think the Rivendell people have seen me buoyant and manic before. Virginia said, "Oh, really?" like it was the kind of good news that was always going to happen, she just didn't know it was going to be today. Donna raised her eyebrows, which would be the natural thing to do.

Her name is Anne Lamott and she is a writer. I came to Bethlehem for Chapter meeting after a day of running all over town hitting libraries to check out her books, because I am too smart and too moral to shoplift them out of Borders, which I wouldn't have to do if I didn't only have enough money to pay my credit card bill this month. 24 hours later, having consumed Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Traveling Mercies, and half of Bird by Bird, I am fundamentally changed merely by staying the same, only not being alone about it anymore. I said a few weeks (months?) ago that I wanted a Virgil for my writerly Dante, and she both is and isn't. She is, because now I feel like there are words crowding at my elbows begging to be sent into the trenches; and she isn't because like any wise writer she tells me that when all is said and done I have to be my own Virgil, though with lots of help from more than one person.

We discovered her by accident flipping past and then stopping on the Book Talk segment of C-SPAN, where she was giving a televised writing workshop. It's how she earns her bread and butter, and clearly she knows what she is talking about, about writing or about life, because there is no BS about her anywhere.

Also my worrying about money has finally translated itself into the incipient anxiety/panic attack that it usually does in a (probably measurably predictable) certain period of time. My eyes were oily yesterday and I washed my face, which helped. Today I ate three square meals and stayed away from too much oppressive unnatural light, which also helped. On the other hand I am very bad at keeping the Companions Rule. This should not be news to me. I love Compline but avoid praying it, I think because it's so good for unraveling the knotted string of care and what on earth will I do if some night I pray it and it doesn't work? So then I say to myself, it's talking to God, it's not like it's magic, you boob.

And speaking of magic, I don't think Giles will ever convert Elisabeth/me to thinking of it with anything other than the deepest skepticism. While I was at Borders yesterday fighting the good fight against shoplifting temptations (save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil), I also picked up Llewelyn's Magic Calendar 2004 and flipped through it. It's a little spiral notebook calendar that has each week of the year on every two-page spread, along with some attractive woodcut illustrations and recipes and herbs and deities and spells. Every day you can look up the phases of the moon and what sign it's in, and discover what holidays (holy days) are what -- a mixed bag of the Christian, Jewish, and pagan -- along with little occasional instructions in italics like, "put a piece of apple in --" um, I can't remember what, so it will bring you, I can't remember what. The spells are usually quatrains of bad poetry. Joss Whedon is really not making that up. I don't like bad poetry in a religion. Having barely recently jettisoned the burden of pretending that the poem on my beloved sunflower woven throw ("Jesus is the only light/That reaches to a soul/He can dispel the darkness/And make it bright and whole...") is uplifting, I don't understand why one would go out of one's way to invent bad poetry for liturgical purposes. Not even for the beautiful delicious love goddesses of nature -- I mean, I would think that if you really liked these deities you would make them better liturgy. And doubly so if you were going to take the trouble of rebelling against the mainstream whitebread American Christian culture and risk finding burning crosses in your yard in order to worship your deities. If I did something like that, I'd sure as hell do it with decent poetry. I think Dante would agree with me, but then again maybe I'm just being a snarkypants. Whatever you do, just please don't paint me with the same tarry brush as Harold Bloom. I mean, I still sleep with my beloved bad-poem sunflower throw blanket. Whereas I don't know what stuffed animal from hell Harold Bloom takes to bed with him.

Not ending a post with Bloom.

Finished today by going to a glass shop downtown, where the proprietor was making winged-pig paperweights out of molten glass, and explaining to us what he was doing with the quiet delight of the showman. There were three ovens, the oven in which the glass was kept molten ready for use, the glory hole in which the glassblower freshened the shapening blob on his rod, and the cooling oven which was set to only 900 degrees. The maw of the first oven when it opened was orange and hot breath coming at us, and the smell was like hot sand and smoke. He gives classes. What I'd do with $200 to blow.

Songs That Have Been Stuck in My Head This Week

Because I'm evil like that, bwahahahahaaaa.

"The Humpty Dance" by Digital Underground, thanks to the construction workers remodeling the library where I work. (Flashbacks to my stint as the only girl on my high-school academic bowl team, aagh! My We Are Not Amused Eyebrow Look got a lot of workout, as I recall.)
"California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas, thanks to A&E Biography of Cass Elliott.
An Indigo Girls song I don't know the name of.

I give thanks that I don't remember the other ones, just that I've been particularly -- um, can't think of a good English word -- sobrecogida with whatever the Spanish is for "songs", this week.

Oh, and a little tip for those struggling to put songs out of their head -- hum the Daria theme. It works!

So okay, I got a LiveJournal now, thanks to Natasha. I haven't made any icons yet, nor do I expect to be updating the LJ more than I update here; but now I can post non-anonymous comments, hurray!

Have You Read a Dangerous Book Lately?

If not, then what are you waiting for?

Next week, September 20-27, is Banned Books Week. This event is celebrated every September, and the ALA publishes a list of the 100 most-challenged books, as well as promotional material celebrating our freedom to read.

The thing about freedom from censorship is that is guarantees the right of people to write and to read all things, even things we hate. Today at work I've been going through the 2001 Banned Books Resource Guide by Robert P. Doyle, just to see what books have been challenged, banned, or restricted over the years. The great majority of the "dangerous" titles were found objectionable because of their portrayal of sexual themes, or their use of swear words, or their "promotion," "indoctrination," or "celebration" of themes inimical to conservative Christianity. I'd laugh at this if it weren't so sad and possibly -- well -- dangerous. "This book portrays Christians as stupid," one protester was quoted. Well, some Christians are stupid -- it's just a natural occurrence in a large demographic. We're a big house, and we take everybody in. Stupid Christians are parodied and honestly portrayed not because authors have a yen to destroy our religion, but because this kind of honesty mitigates the threat that stupid people pose to other humans. It all goes back to what I've said before about people enforcing and policing our beliefs -- those people feel it necessary to enforce and police only because they feel those beliefs to be weak and unable to stand on their own. They furthermore believe that children cannot think unless they are told how; that children do not understand human nature; and that children are so impressionable that the least breath of sexual immorality, profane language, or the occult is enough to puff their light little bodies onto the road to perdition.

The thing is, children can be taught to parrot opinions that are not necessarily theirs. I remember doing it myself. In fact, even now many of the opinions I so fondly suppose to be my own are more often than not the direct result of my company and my reading. It doesn't, however, stop the truth from being the truth, just as Ku Klux Klan demonstrations do not magically erase the existence of black people, Jews, and Catholics.

Which brings me to what I really wanted to say about censorship. I suspect -- in fact I strongly suspect -- that the urge to censor comes not from a desire to guide our young people seamlessly into truth (a fruitless expectation if I ever saw one), but from a simple feeling that one just doesn't want to hear it. The urge to censor is an urge to control, to reach out a hand and put it over the mouth of the objectionable person, to put an end to the frustration and the fear by putting an end to the other person's speech. I've felt the urge myself, many a time, and I recognize it as a cowardly urge. And cowardice and freedom do not go well together.

Which is why I speak out against censorship whether it is from motives I sympathize with (such as the reading of To Kill a Mockingbird because it depicts black people in demoralizing situations, or The Merchant of Venice because its villain is a villain by dint of being Jewish) -- or from motives I do not sympathize with (those misguided pyre-pilers against Harry Potter for example).

So go read a banned book today, and "celebrate", "indoctrinate", and "promote" yourself, you wicked, rebellious person you.

Drama and Phlegm

Thank you to everyone who inquired after my health; it's improving slowly but surely, although I haven't put away the box of kleenex and the brandy bottle just yet. And I'm still sitting at the computer going [snirk -- snork -- sknxx -- koff], but I expect that will clear off in time as well.

Something from the I Want That Job Category: did you know that the Cheetos people have a core group of testers whose sole job is to determine that each batch that comes out has the proper cheesy taste?

Also, something for my readers to nibble on while I work on Chapter 21 -- a plot bunny that started nipping my ankles as soon as Giles confessed to Elisabeth that he'd played chess with Spike during the year of his boredom. So without further ado...

Hospitality

Going to take headache medication now and hit the sack.

I have a cold.

It sucks.

*gathers up armful of used tissues and putters off with the last remnant of dignity*

Some Pleasant Griping (pleasant for me, that is)

Geocities has got me peeved. Three years I've had my website, and I've now lost count of the number of times my stats numbers have slipped gears and regressed -- I don't understand how their stats counters can so routinely forget the page views they were put in to keep track of. So somehow I magically manage to have about 2080 visitors to my pages since 2000, every few months, and now the gears have slipped on the stats for my fic pages. This is untenable: my ego depends on knowing that some random person visited Chapter 10 of "Shadow Though it Be" because they typed in a Google search for "henrietta the hedgehog". Depends on it, I tell you! I don't pay Yahoo! five bucks a month to lose my stats. The buggers.

Am also contemplating getting a LiveJournal not -- I hasten to say -- because I desire to sell out to the clique-ridden allure of LJ fandom but, um, because I desire to sell out to the clique-ridden allure of LJ fandom. In other words, because I want icons. Icons! Icons! Give me icons! *bangs fists with eating implements on the board* Also having a LiveJournal may boost my readership, though that doesn't necessarily mean a payoff in comments. *pouts* So, a LiveJournal consisting mostly of GIP entries to announce all the new Manchild icons I'm planning to make: that's a payoff, at least.

And, speaking of LiveJournals, ever have one of those seasons?

And speaking of acquiring online personal publishing forums, I have very nearly convinced my sister to get a blog. The world will be a better place if she does.

Moving out of griping into book recommendations.

Peter Tremayne. Have rediscovered the Sister Fidelma mysteries. There are still two new ones I haven't yet read, but I've caught up on two of them. They are pretty standard mystery fare, with the flaws of the genre, namely a narratological tendency to overexplain, which gives the story a kind of Ezekiel-and-the-dry-bones kinda feel, but other than that they're quite delightful, and very interesting -- I hadn't known that Irish culture was so brilliantly developed in the seventh century.

Elizabeth Goudge. On the recommendation of some of my Rivendell companions, checked out a Goudge -- not Eileen, mark you -- from the library: The Scent of Water. Devoured it last night after several attempts to put the darned thing down and roll over and go to sleep. Only George Macdonald, as far as I know, has the same capacity for mythmaking and a goodness completely free of didacticism. Plus she has a very simple style that poor Victorian GMD could not have supported without remaking himself.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and read, you clowns.

And by the way...

...I've been forgetting to review the rest of the New Church Teaching Series that I've read so far. Briefly:

Living With History by Fredrica Harris Thompsett -- if I went by the blurb I'd think this book was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to read to find out about the Anglican church, but I am sorry to say that the first chapter bored me so badly I gave up on the book. The bit I read suffered from the same problem I have encountered in other books in this series -- needlessly autobiographical and liable to make the whole subject into a jungle rather than a forest: I don't care to bring a figurative machete to my history books, thank you. I might try it again before I return the books to Cathy, but I certainly won't attempt to sit down and read the whole thing.

Ethics After Easter by Stephen Holmgren -- I haven't really dipped into this book yet, but I think it will be one of the better ones. I'll let you know.

Christian Social Witness by Harold T. Lewis -- very good: packs a punch and gets to the point. Does a good job of balancing history with current philosophy -- that is, it explains what happened and what it has to do with what's going on now in our culture. If you're going to do that, of course, you're much more liable to agenda than if you spend a lot of time hedging everything around with vagaries of interpretation, but in my experience people who unblushingly present an agenda are much more likely to make you think clearly yourself in response than those who waffle. And that is what this book does -- present an agenda and provoke thought. I recommend it not only to Anglicans but to Christians and even non-Christians who want to know what's going on in the church. Its only glaring flaw from an authorial standpoint is that it ends rather tersely, without a conclusion to bring the whole thing together -- but it's a flaw I can forgive as the material is so clearly presented.

Horizons of Mission by Titus Presler -- only with Roger Ferlo's Opening the Bible have I been so impressed thus far in the series. This is another one I highly recommend to Anglicans, Christians, and non-Christians alike. This is a man who knows how to wield the autobiographical narrative tool of rhetoric: he opens his major sections with anecdotes of his experience as a missionary kid and later a grown missionary, and uses the kernel of each of these experiences to set the philosophical tone for the section that follows. Presler's presentation of Christian concepts of mission -- and the potentially divisive questions that surround them -- taught me quite a lot about Christian mission without prescribing my thoughts for me. Again, highly recommended.

A Theology of Worship by Louis Weil -- I was so looking forward to the contents of a book with this title, and oh, the disappointment! Guy's very full of himself, and talks a lot of fluff. I gave up on this one too.

I get nervous when I find myself saying stuff like this last, because it reminds me so forcibly of my freshman students badmouthing, say, Foucault or Susan Bordo ("what I want to know is, what does this woman look like? I bet that has a lot to do with why she's writing this ["Hunger as Ideology"].") So if anyone knows something about the ones I didn't like and can take me to school, I'd gladly welcome it. There. My Disclaimer of Possible Immaturity.

As for the other volumes -- The Practice of Prayer, Early Christian Traditions, and Mysteries of Faith -- I look forward to getting a hold of these and reading them. I also look forward to finding out what anyone and everyone might have to say about this series as a whole or any of the books in it.

I've been wanting to blog about -- oh, well, just about anything really, but I've been in one of those periods where only occasionally I can think something hard and bright and sharp like a needle; the rest of the time everything has had too much give, like wood that's been made spongy by the tide. You can't make a sampler for your blog with that.

I had dreams about drowning this morning, and woke up gasping. In the indeterminate moment between sleep and wakefulness, I mused on what a horrible death drowning must be, and felt really awful for the people who've had to do that death. It also made me wonder if there was any kind of death that wasn't merely a horrifying suffocation of life and consciousness. "Utter helplessness turned out to utter risk" doesn't begin to cover it.

I wish I didn't wake up thinking things like this.

I'd much rather wake up the way I went to sleep last night. I was lying in bed (the lamp on as it always is), letting my gaze rest on my night-table and the pile of books and CD covers, and it occurred to me: Right now, this instant, I'm not doing anything wrong. You'd think this would be a no-brainer, but it isn't. Occasionally I sort of give this little start and wake up, and realize I'm okay, but for the most part, as I go about my business in this world, I seem to live in this vague sense that whatever I'm choosing to do, whether it's buying a pack of Cheetos from a vending machine or modifying the way I say Morning Prayer (which is supposed to be modified) -- whatever I'm choosing to do is somehow not the right thing, that it doesn't balance, that I missed the mark. And usually when I'm reminded that I think that way, I feel ashamed of thinking that way, because that's just another example of my missing the mark. Occasionally, however, I wake up from all that with a silent snap: in a moment like that, I am not sinning, and I am not Sin. Who knew?

This morning's reading, from the letter to the Hebrews (10:21-23 REB):

We have a great priest set over the household of God; so let us make our approach in sincerity of heart and the full assurance of faith, inwardly cleansed from a guilty conscience, and outwardly washed with pure water. Let us be firm and unswerving in the confession of our hope, for the giver of the promise is to be trusted.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love the Revised English Bible?

It is precisely this reasoning that I have always used to comfort myself about both death and sin. No matter what horrors death shows me, the question I have learned to ask is always, "Who am I trusting?" All convolutions of philosophy aside, that is the question -- not, To Be or Not to Be. And as for sin, the same thing applies: the giver of the promise is to be trusted. Heck, I didn't know that was in the Bible. Cool. So I really can fall asleep not doing anything wrong.

I hope I'm not boring the lot of you with my religious ravings this summer -- but it all just seems to coalesce for me at these points, and I have to talk about it. But to switch briefly to less exalted topics:

I'm actually working on Chapter 21, yes indeed -- Elisabeth and Giles are eating pizza at the moment and have their mouths too full to give me a report. In other fic news, I have a whole post-series story arc that I want to write, which centers on Buffy and Giles's relationship and the hardship they have to be okay again. It's a little bit Folly, a little bit Parent Trap, a little bit Queer Eye and a little bit of a whole lot of other things too. I think I will actually write it.

L'chaim!