The mystery of suffering hides the seed of loveA guest post by THE WIFE OF BATH

Written in response to Thursday's post "Theology of the bawdy."

I've decided that this is a good time to begin a new book. I'm going to title it: "Just Go Home." No more therapy, retreats, enrichment clases, encounters, or lectures; no more galavanting off to the romantic beaches of Cancun -- "Just Go Home." The civilization of Love can be home-grown, but not by so much talking about it, which trivializes without clarifying.

I've got a few insights to throw into this discussion. But I want to begin with the last and go to the first. My husband's long and debilitating cancer led us to a theology of the body of a very different sort than the usual TOB stuff.

For 12 years, but especially for the final three years of his life, he suffered greatly, and I suffered with him. Yet, life went on around this suffering, this exchange of love. Our whole family was refined through it; the grandchildren would come home and go see him, even though he had tubes and stuff in his nose. He took comfort from our company and touch -- our stories, jokes, and exchange. I bathed him and changed his ostomy, every day. That was a wife's exclusive and intimate privilege like nothing else, for it made him feel better and have more dignity so that he could then visit with the family and friends who came by. He died at home, in my arms, and his last audible word was "Love." He was fortified by family, the sacraments and all the gifts of Church as Mother could give;. The sacrament of marriage, and our faith, at this extreme moment was intimate and very holy, yet hardly the symbol of the bridegroom and bride in the unitive act.

This final marital intimacy and the union with God and with each other in that moment -- a very agonizing moment -- was one of the most profound mysteries of my life. And one for which I am unspeakably grateful. But I won't talk nonsense about the actual dying process and the attendant physical symptoms—not even the sybolism of his death on the night of Pentecost and the wound in his side—that were part of our daily life. Everyone who loves will suffer; in the intimacy of marriage, this suffering and this love can be intensely united—but there has never been anything to equal the intimacy of giving the man that I love to the arms of Jesus. To speak about it as freely as the TOB guys talk about sex is to cheapen and to even blaspheme a great, great gift.

To suffer is to love; to love is to suffer -- but we don't have to go out looking for occasions to suffer in order to make a point! The opportunities will come, bidden or unbidden! And this brings me to the TOB, which seems to me to have become -- even if it didn't begin this way -- a shockingly low sort of sex-ed, which is getting more banal all the time. Way away from the nuptial meaning of the body that JPII began in "Love and Responsibility" and the very simple message at the heart of the TOB: the body is made to express love according to the appropriateness of the relationship -- chaste embrace between friends, warm handshake with strangers, loving care of the sick, bearing and nursing of infants, sexual union with spouse -- according to the Church's teachings on sexuality. Much of the current talk about the TOB is confusing and complicated, unnecessarily.

Dawn highlighted an article by a priest who, in claiming to discuss Theology of the Body, takes liberties that Pope John Paul II never intended. It made me wonder: What is the effect of this? All of this open-as-apple-pie talk, talk, talk about great Catholic sex may be creating a really big problem: dissatisfaction, doubt, and discontent. What is to stop the secret doubt of "what's wrong with me/spouse" if we have no "religious experience" in marital relations? Why, spouses are bound to wonder, is it so ordinary, so companionably comforting, but—by all means, let's get some much-needed sleep!

What I'm concerned about with regard to the article in question is the bad theology and the very bad vulgarity. The disgusting comparisons (and it is a gross misrepresentation of the symbolic) are, in fact, pornographic and will be very hard to get out of the memory banks of the women, or men, who heard such talk.

Whatever happened to the laughter (not ridicule) that attends many acts -- or attempted acts of married love? Children have been known to curb amorous moments by arriving just in time to throw up on their parents! But it is an act of love, too, to help that poor, sick child who will not receive comfort if there were no "loving parents" -- and to laugh later with your spouse about the event, before you both go to sleep, exhausted but comforted, in the other's trusted/trusting presence.

The marital act is like any other exchange between husband and wife -- a covenant of trust and in the name of God; it is always a very delicate balance b/n domination and dismissal. The very ordinariness of marital relations is what is comforting to married folk -- Nothing to prove. No posh hotels. Intimacy with God and intimacy with each other. That's what it's all about.

For a truer account of the Theology of the Body and Church teachings on sexuality in general, here are some recommendations:

• Fulton J. Sheen's Three to Get Married is still timely, despite its 1950s landscape.
  
  
• Genevieve Kineke's The Authentic Catholic Woman is very good and a good place to start thinking about TOB. Christopher West wrote the introduction.
  
  
• Margaret Visser's Geometry of Love is unequalled in talking about the body, the classical understanding of virginity/motherhood, and the structure of a church and its symbolism. There is nothing vulgar about it. Highest recommendation.
  
  
• Dorothy L. Sayers's final novels, Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon have artistically created two characters who are able to come to healing and wholeness and, finally, a healthy, profound, funny, and fruitful marriage.
  
  
• Anne Rice's most recent novel of her trilogy Christ the Lord, The Road to Cana, cannot receive enough praise in the treatment of sexuality. This book is faithful to the Gospels and the teachings of the Church, but it has the most beautiful treatment of human love and marriage that I've read in modern writing. It stands in sharp contrast to Nikos Kazantzakis' Last Temptation of Christ, which was ugly and shocking.
  
  
• Karol Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility, an excellent and noble call/recall to loyalty and friendship in love & marriage.

And, this may sound strange, but I believe that everyone would do well to get a copy of The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and pray it/read it. I cannot say why, but can give testimony to the hope that was awakened in simply reading and repeating, day after day, the paradoxes of the Incarnation: "Thou wast the Mother of Him who made thee and thou remainest a Virgin forever." And "Thou art fair and comely, terrible as an army set in array..." "The young maidens have loved thee exceedingly ..." "Blessed womb that bore the son of the Eternal Father and blessed breasts that nursed Christ the Lord." Similarly, I would recommend the Litany of St. Joseph (and, of course, the Litany of the BVM) because it has such praise of noble manhood.

Catechists' erroneous zonesA guest post by STEVE KELLMEYER

Editor's note: The following commentary by Steve Kellmeyer is in response to yesterday's post "Theology of the bawdy." In that post, I spotlighted an article by Father Thomas J. Loya on Catholic Exchange that I said represented a stream of Theology of the Body catechesis that "goes well beyond what [John Paul II] actually said." Today, I received an e-mail from a Catholic Exchange staffer welcoming a dialogue on this subject and inviting me and others to comment on Father Loya's original article. I responded to him with an invitation to guest-post here. In the meantime, Kellmeyer, who writes and lectures on TOB, offers his thoughts below.
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One of the most telling criticisms I have ever heard of the Theology of the Body was that it could not be a complete teaching since you can't talk about the body without discussing suffering. Pain, suffering, etc. is never mentioned in John Paul's Wednesday audiences delivering his TOB catechesis. He devoted an entire encyclical to it (Salvifici Doloris) and he lived it, but the Wednesday audiences don't mention it. I have included this perfectly correct criticism of the Wednesday audiences into many of my talks.

Another problem I have with the Wednesday audiences is the nearly complete absence of reference to family or children. The Wednesday audiences are almost entirely about the Bridegroom-Bride relationship but without reference to its life-giving ability. Humanae Vitae spoke of family more in a dozen pages than the Wednesday audiences did in five years. Sex divorced from children and the body divorced from suffering ... those audiences are not complete.

I just got off the phone moments ago with a friend in Colorado who teaches FertilityCare. She mentioned that a prominent TOB speaker is now talking about the "erotic ritual" of the Easter Vigil, because the Easter candle is plunged into the baptismal font during the ceremony and the ancient Christians are united in referring to the baptismal font as "the womb of the Church."

Calling liturgy "erotic" is absurd.

We have to understand that everything we know about God we know only via analogy. Thus, marital communion is analogous to the intimate communion we experience with God in heaven, but it isn't the same thing. So calling liturgy "erotic" is looking at it from exactly the wrong perspective. Heaven is not erotic, rather, eros is an analog - and a poor one at that—to describe what heaven is about. The intimate communion between a husband and wife is as dust and ashes when compared to the intimate communion God offers us through the divine liturgy precisely because God's love is not only intimate, but self-sacrificial.

Liturgy lifts us up into heaven, not vice versa. Liturgy is participation in heaven - the Mass, especially, is direct participation in the eternal offering the Son makes of Himself to the Father in the Temple not made with hands (cf. Hebrews). Liturgy is about God's self-sacrifice.

Self-sacrificing love is not eros, i.e., erotic love, it is agape love. Agape is the word the New Testament uses to describe the relationship between Jesus and the beloved disciple. In Scripture, it refers to self-sacrificing love, giving love to all--both friend and enemy. It is used in Matthew 22:39, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and in John 15:12, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you," and in 1 John 4:8, "God is love." It is total commitment or self-sacrificial love for the thing loved. Even the Greek version of the Septuagint uses agape, not eros, to describe the love between the man and the woman. Eros doesn't appear in Scripture at all.

So the phrase "erotic liturgy," at least as that TOB speaker uses it, is simply a contradiction in terms.

It implies that God is intimate with us in liturgy in a way that Christ specifically denies, "In heaven, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven."

Christ is the Bridegroom, He saves us through marrying us into Himself, but the marriage between us and Himself is at best a dim analogue to the marriage between two human persons, male and female. That kind of marriage doesn't happen in heaven or, therefore, in the liturgy.

It seems to me that a basic confusion is present here. The Fathers and Doctors of the Church were faced with a pagan society at least as debauched as ours, but they never descended to the kind of descriptions being used by TOB promoters today. They named the sexual sins, told Christians to avoid them and pretty much left it at that.

TOB promoters fall into these kinds of basic errors because they were never well-formed in the Faith. Either they never read the Fathers and the Scriptures or, if they did, they forgot what they learned. Weigel mistakenly thought JP II's teaching was radically new - because he himself was not well-formed in the Faith, he didn't realize that JP II's teaching was really just a synthesis of everything the Fathers ever taught about Scripture. As a result, all the TOB promoters fall into the trap of asserting that JP II's TOB is radical and new. It is neither.

But because they don't realize this, they don't ground the TOB teaching in the ancient writings as they should, and as JP II did through his footnotes. Instead, they go winging off into space, making stuff up as they go along, and often-times deriding earlier expressions of the same teaching as though these earlier expressions were somehow erroneous because they don't realize that those earlier teachings are actually foundational - the very skeleton and structure of what JP II was trying to say. They follow the hermeneutic of discontinuity which is so often promoted by the "Spirit of Vatican II" crowd, instead of emphasizing the hermeneutic of continuity that both JP II and Benedict XVI insist on.

In short, they are corrupting JP II's teaching, turning it into just one more heretical post-Vatican II attempt to corrupt the Church's eternal teaching. That's the real problem here.

I think we are seeing the errors of insufficient catechesis: men and women completely unfamiliar with the writings of the ancient Christians taking instead Oprah and Dr. Ruth as their models.

John Paul II famously failed to begin his Theology of the Body catechesis with the Trinity, as all the previous generations of great teachers had. Although he approached the discussions from an essentially Trinitarian perspective, his emulators have not.

We end up with misguided interpretations because the interpreters aren't grounded in anything substantive.

The children are pulverizing the teaching because they are children. They aren't spiritually mature, so they have the kind of bathroom discussions that children will have.

And the saddest part is, they really think they are being faithful.

Steve Kellmeyer is the author of Sex and the Sacred City.

UPDATED: Theology of the bawdyThings the Holy Father never taught me

Reading over-the-top attempts by well-intentioned Catholics to use Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body to prove the Church isn't "down on sex"—which go well beyond what the Holy Father actually said—I am tempted to compile them onto a new blog.

It would be called "TMI About TOB."

If I ever do, it will feature Father Thomas J. Loya's Catholic Exchange article in which he calls the blood and water that flowed from Our Lord's side "Christ’s spiritual seminal fluid."

UPDATE: As often, Jeff Miller has gotten to this topic before me.

UPDATE #2, 11/23/08: Reading the latest book by Christopher West, Heaven's Song last night, I discovered the "spiritual seminal fluid" metaphor in a quotation from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who is in turn quoting St. Augustine. The quotation originally appeared in Through the Year with Fulton J. Sheen, a posthumously published collection of selections from the archbishop's homilies; you can see it on Page 60 in the Google Books version of the volume.

If the original Augustine quote is what Archbishop Sheen said it is (and there is no reason to doubt him), the metaphor did originate with one of the Church Fathers. However, there remains the question of whether Augustine, or Sheen for that matter, would have wanted it to be used out of context in an article by a priest writing explicitly about postcoital matters. It is particularly difficult to imagine Sheen or Augustine writing an article with the headline, "Why Men Fall Asleep After Intercourse." I would argue that the Church is the better for their judgment and discretion, and those who share it.

The appropriate context for Augustine's quotation would include an emphasis on the suffering central to Jesus' self-sacrifice, a sacrifice that we are called to bear in our own body. I ran the Augustine quotation by Steve Kellmeyer and he observed that the saint explicitly pointed out the connection of suffering—"Not a marriage bed of pleasure, but of pain"—that is missing from Father Loya's article as well as West's commentary.