petard.us

If everyone in every age decries this present age as a declining from the past in the present age, perhaps it is declension that is to be doubted.

In group the other week we were talking about society pushing in and my pushing back. The group leader drew a diagram of a persona in a circle surrounded by scads of arrows pointing in forcing him or her to be who the others say they should be. We also had a woman in the group whose life had been virtually destroyed by others’ judgments of her for her lesbianism. I suddenly saw the image of St Sebastian. This image may have that kind of depth. And no wonder that it is adopted by gay people.

Also, Sebastian was a war resister.

I also said in group that I had always been in accepting places since becoming an adult. Then I realized that I was one of the people making those places accepting.

Underwear is no longer necessary to protect outer clothes that cannot be easily cleaned. Today we have cottons and other easily-washed fabrics and the machines to wash them.

Modern Roman Catholicism yielded and then stiffened, yielded at the Council and then stiffened after. A kind of failure of nerve maybe? After the windows were opened, they could never be fully shut, so there is still movement. The previous movement had been against Modernism, a part of enlightenment rationalism, and the Council opened to it. The reaction afterwards set some limits, and some limits were probably needed.

The question that needs to be asked now is how to speak to a new generation when the ethos, the mores, the very mythos, of the enlightenment are being challenged. I wish I could have paid more attention to that class at Harvard, “Magic, Science, Religion, and the Question of Rationality,” or at least had saved the notes and syllabus.

I have been reading The Theocons by Damon Linker, former editor of First Things, conservative journal of Fr Richard Neuhaus. The book is a history of the theoconservatives, the intellectual leaders of the religious right., such at Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and Michael Novak. It deals with how the ideology and ideologs of the Christian right have developed. Linker demonstrates how the base of their ideas is conservative Roman Catholic thinking. He connects the ideas with the current pope as well as the previous one. Linker also shows how this ideology is opposed to the separation of church and state and in favor of a Catholic Christian commonwealth.

Anyway, what strikes me is the conversion of Neuhaus from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism and the priesthood. By so doing, Neuhaus clothes himself in the magisterium of Holy Mother Church and so puts on the official teaching authority of the Church, and so he teaches magisterially and officially. Good career move.

What’s so important to the theocons about the Catholic commonwealth is that there is a set and certain order. There’s no room for dissent; you can win every argument satisfactorily just by knowing the “party line.” What powers the party line is logic, well, reason and rationality, and a kind of blind, and blinding, trust in rationality alone that seems to me almost fanatical. But then, I don’t trust in rationality, and certainly not in rationality alone. It strikes me that within the limits of its system it could have been rational for Hitler and his ilk to have done the Holocaust. It followed from their premises. But that’s ridiculous. The premises were thoroughly immoral.

The theocons talk about moral reasoning, and having been trained by Jesuits in moral reasoning, it can be tempting to just have a line of reasoning to follow. But we also need to have a sense of, well, the ridiculous. I remember the business of the punctured condom. It’s how you collect a sperm sample for fertility analysis without imposing a barrier to conception. So when we came to our study of the birth control encyclical, I made the argument that since no form of birth control is 100% effective, and none of the methods are a barrier to conception, but only render it highly unlikely, so all methods of birth control are licit. It’s that sense of the ridiculous that we need to bring to all of reason and rationality. Reason is not sufficient. It often seems cold and inhuman.

I’m glad I’m an Anglican. For Hooker, reason is less that systematic Enlightenment rationality, and more the everyday sense of life as it is lived and reflected on, everyday understanding of everyday events.

I guess we have to find the limits to reason.

I have started rereading Hooker’s Lawes.

Rooted in many experiences of cognitive dissonance from early childhood onward, before I knew anything about sexuality, I knew I didn’t fit in. As I look back, I think I felt I was a performer, that I was there for the entertainment of my family etc but was not who they seemed to think I was.I early learned there was no Santa Claus because of my mother’s demand for gratitude that she had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to get me the presents. I kept pretending to believe in Santa Claus because that’s what they wanted, but I knew I was faking it. I also always knew that the me they wanted and thought they had was not me, not the real me behind the curtain.

What other cognitive dissidents can I find? Who in the history of thought and writing has been a cognitive dissident. Have they been the ones who moved things forward by opening new paths of thought and understanding?

Were the prophets cognitive dissidents? Are today’s cognitive dissidents our prophets?

Is the idea of the Fall cognitive dissidence for today, in a world in which no one would like to be fallen, in which all have to be perfect, to live up to a perfection put upon them by a society, a church, a profession, an employer?

A cognitive dissident is one who tries to live out of the experience of cognitive dissonance. It is living with ambiguities of looking at something in a multivalent way, of seeing the best reading and the worst reading and every reading in between, trying to take them as a whole. This fits Christian theology well. It fits the eschatological already and not yet.

Who of today are the cognitive dissidents? Are the extremes of right and left seeing a cognitive dissonance between the world they see and the world they would like to see?

God, always more merciful to us than we are to ourselves, hear us when we cry to you out of the captivity of the sin of our society, the kingdom of the Enemy of our Human Nature, forgive us our complicity in that sin, and through that forgiveness, give us the grace to resist that sinful society and by the non-violence of our lives to bring into being the kingdom of righteousness, through the King of Righteousness, Jesus Christ out Lord, who with you and the Holy spirit live and reign forever and ever.

Amen

I live in Gwinnett county, Georgia. This is one of the county that refused to join the Atlanta public transit system, MARTA, known to many as Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta. Gwinnett was one of the places where white flight went.

So it was ironic to read recently that Gwinnett is now a source of white flight to counties farther out. There are now people of many ethnicities in Gwinnett now.

And so it goes.

A work in progress-check back every so often 

I think much of my current depression stems from losses to myself and to others, even to God. That’s almost a truism.

What are these losses

• churchgoing-
• priesthood and ministry

• ministry I was called to not being done because of my isolation
• a loss to the fulfillment of the kingdom of which I am part, part of the Body of Christ in the world
• doing spiritual direction, which always produced growth in me

• creation thelogy-
• not only no contact but no giving of love or receiving of it, when I know my need to give love is greater than my need to receive it.
• It stunts my growth, and that stunting is not only a loss to me but to others, and a loss to God

totally isolated from:

• anti-nuke work
• civil rights
• anti vietnam
• anti contra
• all the social work
• just involvement in social issues
• now no way I can go demonstrate

And all the travel time, four hours a day
a gain, reading time
but a loss, I get constipated from lack of rest rooms on the way
sometimes by the time I get to the office or home, i am about to wet my pants

Grieving for these is not only appropriate, but also necessary

But out of lamentation for my captivity and exile in Egypt ought to come action for liberation.
I’m just not sure how to do this.

Some of the people I pray for as they drive by, I also lust after. Just vaguely, you know, ooh a cutie, or whatever. I like this vague lusting after; it reminds me that I’m alive, that I’m human, that I’m a sexual person, just as God created me to be. That I’m an actual human being, an animal, and neither a machine nor an angel.

Being either a machine or an animal is about perfection. A machine ought to be mechanically perfect, functionally perfect, do it all right, do it the right way every time. An angel is morally and spiritually perfect. To be an angel when one is a human, one has to lie, put forward a front of utter perfection. That’s also true that if one is pretending to be a machine. If you’re not a machine, you can make mistakes. If you’re not an angel, you can be a sinner, but you can be a forgiven one. That may be why we are ‘higher than angels.’ If we have the ability to sin, we have the ability to turn back to God, to repent, and then amend our ways as best we can. This does not mean that we so perfect our lives as to be either machines or angels. We can be just ourselves. ‘Just as I am without one plea….’

Note: Management in business and wherever it has spread seems to be based on learnings from managing machines, so it’s effort is to have us be machines, and not persons, in the work place. Note the old term, factory ‘hands.’