world without end

[saeculorum-amen]

Halloween, Weltanschauung, Birthright.

I find myself this week once again embroiled in this cycle of thinking about worldview, of how it shapes our experience of the world, our knowledge of ourselves.  This week, in the context of a strange confluence of the Indigenous research methods of Shawn Wilson ("Research Is Ceremony") and returning once again to the topic of the eschatological setting of Orthodox liturgy, to its occurrence in the presence of the Kingdom of God, realized for a moment on Earth, so that we cannot stay in, but may catch a fleeting glimpse of, our home.

It’s hard to write in the West without a presumption of dualism peeking over your shoulder.  As though somehow to talk about the liturgy like that is to deny the presence of God in all things, or the imperfect realization of the Kingdom in the day-to-day.  As though when consciousness is brought to one thing, is drawn to a focus, everything else ceases to be.  As though there could only be one thing at a time.

The liturgy draws us into an experience of something much more real than what appears to be real.  Then, we might go out into the world prepared to see, and be, this extraordinary thing that too long has been hidden.  This is the heart of Christianity, at every level; consider how we are drawn to see the weakness in power, the futility of violence, and the transitory nature of death.  The material illusion is to make you believe the opposite of each of those true things, and we are all of us formed by the material.  The eschatological and heavenly reality of liturgical space-time must infect the quotidian, the mundane, and the material.

Into the woods.

When I was a kid, there was a very real sense of the woods being a spooky place.  I mentioned that to someone this week, who repeated it back to me as that I had said the woods were scary.  I’m not sure.

The spooky is somewhere in the vicinity of, I dunno: haunted, enchanted, mysterious, powerful, wild, unpredictable, irrational, dark.  The spooky has its own ways and purposes, which are not entirely knowable.  The spooky has influence on us, and can be thrilling, but you also do not want to get lost in its grip.  The spooky exists in boundary places, or is encountered by crossing thresholds.

This, to me, sounds a lot like the unconscious.  This thing which influences us, and is just outside of the bounds of consciousness, which is vast and expansive and has its own logic.  It requires ritual preparation, something like ceremony to make the boundary a little more porous and to enter into it.  There are rules for how you comport yourself in relation to it.  It’s like the depths of the ocean that way, that other great avatar of what lies beneath what consciousness can perceive.  You descend and ascend with intention, and there is much that you cannot bring with you from one realm to the other.  You will never fully know the depths.

We pass down stories, folktales and fables which tell us something about the realm of the spooky, about its charms, its treasures, its temptations, and its tendency to be the home of the trickster.  These stories tell us real things.

The Western impulse is to figure out how they are real.  “Ah, yes, it’s easy to get disoriented in the woods.”  No, it’s easy to get disoriented in your own mind.  “Sometimes trees fall.”  No, sometimes everything falls.  “The mind can play tricks on you.”  No.

The truths are analogical, and they are also more than that.  They speak to things that cannot be named, and to the vast potential that exists.  These stories contain material morals and they tell us something about the reality that consciousness simply does not have category for.  It’s not just a matter of reframing it.  It’s a matter of understanding how broad real is.

Out of the woods.

The reductive, material, positivist impulse is to decide one way or the other about things.  The woods contain danger, and that danger can be managed.  Perhaps the danger cannot be managed, and so the woods should be torn down.  Perhaps the woods are beautiful, and we should traipse through them.

No.  Sometimes it is the time to venture into the woods.  Sometimes we can go there to be fed, or to encounter something more than we can name, and sometimes there are things going on in the woods that do not need our presence.  We are not welcome when the spooky needs to stretch its legs, or when the understory needs a chance to regenerate without our footsteps.  We need seasons and rhythms that draw us to encounter what consciousness leaves out, and also that lets everything else have a break from the intrusion of consciousness from time-to-time.

The goal is not to illuminate everything, or to make it all the same.  It is not to have a flattened Earth with an infinite horizon, which consciousness can scan at its leisure and observe whatever it imagines it will find.  Do not raise up the ocean floor and flatten out the mountains, do not dissolve the universe into an undifferentiated blob of mediocrity.  Value the particular nature of hidden things.  You exist in relation to the unknown, and it helps to hold up the fabric of existence itself.  It is not good for consciousness to be alone.

The contour of reality.

I call myself a sacramental realist, because I believe and experience that the character of reality which is pointed to by the sacraments is the essential character of reality.  The sacraments are not an overlay or a conceptual framework for conveying moral teachings, but draw our attention to something which otherwise hides just beyond our peripheral vision.  That is my reality, along with so many other realities I live with.

When I was a teenager, desperately alienated and lost, feeling untethered from any kind of ground of my being, and having had a lifetime of formation to doubt my own reality, I found comfort in what I read in the Bhagavad-Gita, what formed for me a model of existence in which all things are connected, and one thing exists in relationship to another.  I don’t know if I would find that in that text as an adult, but it helped to dislodge me from my anxious attachment to a precarious reality, and to start me towards recognizing that I exist in relation to all others, and will not be lost or cast aside.

I have transformed a childhood need to find someone to fuse with, for safety and survival and to know who I was, into a curiosity about the intersubjective experience that emerges through deep encounter with another.  I love to just talk, and talk, and talk, and to let my perceptions be changed, to let a new reality emerge for me through the experiential sharing of another.  I cannot experience their reality directly, but God, how I love to create some space between us in which something real is shared.

None of this is a denial of material realities, but the material’s primacy is not absolute.  The material has primacy in material matters, but not everything is a material matter.  Vaccines and viruses address material realities, and material methods matter much more than anything more subjective than that.  The subjective may draw our attention to what is left out by attending only to the material, but it does not deny the reality of the material.  We may be aware how our distortions and ignorance causes us to misread even the material, and how imperfect our efforts will always be, but this does not make it utterly futile.

So I find myself with a dual consciousness, or perhaps even a little more multifaceted than dual, and perhaps not consciousness alone.  I can believe in science and spooky forests, and sometimes the two have something to say to each other.  I think of Chesterton in “Orthodoxy” talking about how water moves not because of gravity, but because it is bewitched.  This does not have to be a reactionary anti-intellectualism, but can help us to recover awe and wonder as we learn about gravity and hydrostatic pressure and the contour of terrain and watersheds, and also draw us towards the mystery of why rather than the relatively knowable how of how reality is held together.

Maps and ownership.

I find so much that resonates, in structure if not always in content, in the work of magic realism to reunite the splitting of reality in Latin America by these competing ways of knowing and experiencing.  So much, too, of the model of qualitative research that Wilson talks about as Ceremony, embedded in an Indigenous model of relational accountability, and relational reality.

Those things are not mine.  When white folks try to appropriate magic realism, I sometimes see a response that magic realism arises out of having to exist in the colonial world, while also remaining embedded in something other than the colonial world, and finding a way to make both of those things real.  The suggestion, then, is that white people exist only in the colonial, and should not try to steal from culture, again, as they have so often stolen in the material, as part of the colonial endeavour.

Whiteness is undeniably a construct of colonialism, and one of the defining characteristics of both whiteness and colonialism is the ways in which they exclude other possibilities.  Vancouver Island becomes a colony, and so it can no longer be what it was before it was a colony.  That’s not necessarily true, but it is the view colonialism espouses: an atomistic, commodity-oriented model of ownership.

To identify with whiteness is to be willing to give up everything else that whiteness might leave out.  It is like being identified with consciousness alone, and cutting down all the forests.  Colonialism makes mountains low.

The thing about whiteness and colonialism is that they are, though, so fundamentally incomplete.  They are like a trade jargon: they may be adequate for some kinds of communication, but they are not fit for other purposes, and it would take a true artist to find a way to make them do something creative.

Appropriation and emptiness.

I imagine a white person saying that they want to situate themselves in the model of “Research Is Ceremony”, and I suspect they don’t mean they want relational accountability and to be expected to defer to Elders (and ancestors) and to follow protocol.  They mean that they feel something missing, and want to find a way to accrete something beautiful that they see in another context.

I think if one really appreciates the work Wilson did to recover research methods which honoured his ways of knowing and being, the calling is to take up that same task with one’s own ways of knowing and being.  Everyone has a birthright that is more than the consensus reality of global capitalism, and the trade jargon of mercantile consciousness.  Those things cannot nourish a whole person, and all of us are whole people.

The mercantile lie, the model of colonial scholasticism, and all its scientific reductivity, is to believe that we can identify the good parts of a thing, and then only have those good parts.  You can figure out what makes something work, and then simplify it down to just those things.  Moreover, the emptiness of individualism creates an inflated, unsatisfied narcissism in which we might be fooled into thinking that the good is synonymous with what we like.

So we might think we see something good in Indigenous methodologies, and want to find a way to graft it onto ourselves, but that intensity?  That is our own emptiness, much as when I was a teenager I fell so profoundly in love with people that it threatened to destroy me, because I felt like I could not exist without someone to be merged with.  The intensity is telling us not that we need to harvest and feed, but that we need to create something within ourselves.

For a white, colonial, settler sort of person who finds themselves so bewitched, there is a need to engage in our own work along the lines of what Wilson did.  To deepen our connection with our ancestral and innate ways of knowing.  It may end up looking a lot like what he has produced, but probably not entirely, and this is good.  It may end up looking entirely different, and that is good, too, because perhaps that is what is real.

Maps and ownership 2.

The first lie of colonialism is “this is how things have to be.”  Land must be owned by someone.  We must settle here.  This must be ours.  That’s how it begins, but it continues into a limiting of imagination.  Of course we can’t give the land back.  Of course we can’t govern differently.  Of course we can’t live differently.  Everyone is formed to believe this lie.  To believe that bread can only ever be bread.  To believe that we are all so radically divided from one another.

There is a second lie that I have only recently become able to name, although it still requires some circumambulation to really pin down.  I think it is an important lie, however.  It is something like “this is our way of life.”  Perhaps even “this is our culture.”

This lie suggests that the way things are in the colonized lands is simply the extension of one cultural way of being into a new place.  In a very materialist way, this also maintains the status quo and creates the need for racism and for the commoditization of culture, because it insidiously asks: and how can you prove if one culture is better than another?  How can you say it is wrong for me to practice my culture?

The trouble is that colonialism is a company culture and whiteness is a commodity way of being.  Nobody is white, but they bought their way into it.  Colonial culture is what happens if you raise generations of children in an extractive, highly structured workplace, with a prohibition on encounter with the outside world.  Sure, some come and go, but the collective reality is constructed in a way which leaves out all other possibilities.

Maybe it is easier to simply prove the existence of this lie than to name it.  Colonial culture could never exist or be accepted in the places from which it ostensibly came.

I think about how if I went to Scotland, I would have the right to travel over land, over anyone’s land, in the paths where my handful of Scottish ancestors walked.  Those traditional rights have been maintained.  Every European culture has some kind of notions of places and ways of life that are such important cultural traditions that they belong to everyone, that they cannot be restricted.

This is not how things are in colonies.  You can identify who owns what, and ownership is nearly absolute.  Indigenous people have to clear impossible hurdles to regain access to traditional fisheries, travel routes, and the woods that yearn to feed them, if they are granted those rights at all.  Nor is it something that even white settlers expect for themselves, by and large, although some feel a right to personal enrichment through extraction of common wealth so unbridled that we call it poaching.

Colonialism and whiteness set up more rigid and comprehensive boundaries than the cultures and governments that gave birth to them.  Colonialism and whiteness are tricksters, who will entice you into a bargain with them in which you forget who you ever were.  They draw you into the woods and then change the terrain so that even if you had a map it would do you no good.

The rules cloak themselves in rationality, so that their irrationality lies hidden, where you cannot access it or challenge it.  You are denied access to any ways of knowing which might destabilize this precarious arrangement of power.

Hopes.

To talk about these things may give rise to the illusion that there are neatly separable categories, around the illnesses which have diminished us, and the ways in which we have been diminished.  There is a temptation to find technical fixes, to find limited interventions which target deficiencies and so bolster the status quo.  I find no hope in that.

We must shatter the illusion that these structures which exist to serve a certain kind of extractive wealth-building were ever for us, or about us.  We must let ourselves see more broadly and more deeply, and court our awareness that some things are not for us, or about us, or even at all accessible to us.  We must live at the edge of darkness, and let ourselves be enchanted by it from time-to-time.

I find hope in a spookier world, which is neither scary and to be destroyed, nor love and light which is freely accessible.  I find hope in ancient wisdom which is not subservient to individual will.  I find hope in the good work others are doing to recover who they really are, that I might do so, also.  I find hope in the destabilizing of cultural binaries and norms which we are so enmeshed in we cannot even name.  I find hope in recovering my ability to see the world is, as an icon and a sacrament, which is filled with good things I can glimpse, and powerful things I will never know.  I find hope in moments where the veil thins, and something more can be glimpsed.  I find hope in the many ways of being, and knowing, as a person.  I find hope in the depths of the oceans and the woods.  I find hope in existing alongside things I do not understand, and in the joy of getting to create a little reality that can, imperfectly, be shared.  I find hope in experiencing all of these things and more I cannot, or will not, name.

May we dwell in love and spookiness and hope, and other things that go bump in the night.

[saeculorum-amen]

Gaslighting, Otherness, and Gospel

Experiential literature.

The Gospels are not persuasive. Although Matthew may in places attempt to fit Christ into Jewish prophecy in order to place him into the context of the messiah long-awaited, that is at most something necessary, a foundation for the actual argument, and an argument which does not appear explicitly. There is no recounting of facts, there is no framing of what exactly one should do in response to reading them. It feels to me less like they are trying to persuade you about something, and more that they are inviting you into something.

I feel that most acutely in the Gospel of Mark, with its immediacy, and in the Gospel of John, with its intensity of emotion. These are works of experiential writing which try to bring you into the experience that the apostles shared. They cannot name how this will transform you, but they hope that it might, by the experience of it, do so nonetheless, as it transformed each of them in their individual ways. If we imagine the foundation of the synoptic gospels being records of the sayings of Jesus, this is all the more clear: not statements of fact to be absorbed, but the experience of listening at the feet of Jesus, and feeling flashes of insight, glimpses of the Kingdom, as he spoke.

Perhaps the religious as a whole is of that nature, an experiential reality which can be glimpsed, but not measured and recorded — but which can, perhaps, be shared.

I find that in the letters of Paul, certainly, as I enter into his struggle to lead Christian communities, and feel the sense of responsibility that he felt, by virtue of the love that he felt for each and every person. I hear not only what he said to them, and how he told them to live, but what it felt like to say those things, to implore them. What his hopes were, so much more so than his teachings. What he taught is only sometimes relevant to my life, and the lives of those with whom I preach and teach, but the posture of love and hope and concern, of steadiness and urgency, of patience and frustration: that is always relevant. So, too, to imagine what it felt like to be in those communities, and to hear Paul’s letters written to us and our fellow-travellers in this strange and difficult way.

Much of the religious record, indeed, is concerned with the efforts to convey the experience of something which may be universal, or may be profoundly rare, but which nonetheless cannot be collapsed down into a set of facts and figures. The bush which burns and is not consumed. The flood. Ezekiel’s calling. John’s revelation. The experience of being Jonah. The experience of being the crowd which calls for the execution of Christ. We enter into and share of these things, however familiar or foreign they may be. We gain a facility with inhabiting them, whether to find our way to awe, or to gain the conviction required to decide to live differently.

Enlightenment and disappointment.

I am very much a child of the enlightenment, although I am at an age where it feels increasingly preposterous to call myself a child of anything. I was, though: I grew up surrounded by personal computers, in a household led by a deeply gifted engineer who had worked on the Apollo program. My family talk about how I was programming using the macro language of an early text editor before I had even entered school. I tell that story, too, as part of the foundational mythos by which I continually recreate my own life. It captures something very real about who I was raised to be, and perhaps hints at some more elusive things about who I deeply am.

I am no great and gifted historian or philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it seems a meaningful referent for that upbringing. I was taught to see the world in an exacting and scientific way, and to reject things which were mere superstition, or otherwise irrational. I was formed to master language, not as a way to communicate with other people, but as a way to be precise about ideas and facts. If something was true, there would be some evidence for it which could be clearly described, and provably measured — and if it was true, it would be true always and everywhere.

That is a very narrow world, more narrow than the world of Hume or Locke or Spinoza — a kind of fundamentalism of objectivity, in which there was very little room for a person to live, for a person to exist as a subject, rather than an object. The ideal human being was a data logger, not even a flawed individual striving after objectivity.

It grated at me that I could not determine whether other people experienced colours as having the same perceptual quality as I did. I was acutely sensitized to the ways in which adults seemed to be arbitrary and capricious, and to engage in proof by assertion of the legitimacy of all their rules. There was no rigour, no structure which really captured the rough edges I continually ran up against in the course of living. Indeed, I had my own experiences rejected as fabrications and lies, even experiences that would have been readily measurable, like allergies that were present from my early life, and instantly recognized once I sought diagnosis as an adult.

This created all kinds of inward and outward problems. I doubted my own reality, to the point of living with debilitating panic attacks in which my own perspective seemed to fight for control with some other realm of possibilities. I could not trust the ground beneath me, because what if some hidden law, some unknown variable, were to govern it to give way instead. I felt swallowed up in the ocean-like waters of the universe itself, as though there was no way for me to get to dry land, to real life, to the right plane of existence. I had to work hard to learn that the world, and I, would continue to exist as I went from one point to another, rather than disappearing in a kind of unstable variation of Zeno’s paradox transposed into the cosmology of simulation theory.

This introjected doubt was projected onto the world around me, too. How could I know whether what someone else said was true? How could I trust anything which happened outside of my view? Hell, how could anyone know anything?

The politics of doubt.

This pervasive hermeneutic of suspicion was not unique to my objective fundamentalist upbringing. The authority of measurement is almost unquestionable in our society, which prefers technocracy to anything more sentimental. While public debate may take on the rhetorical character of aesthetics, we find a way to turn our rules for action into something you can quantify. You will always be able to know whether or not you can cut down a tree, or dump waste into a waterway, by using a published table of figures. You don’t have to stop and think about whether you should or not, which might be unsettling and subjective, only whether you’re allowed to, which is knowable.

In the grip of my epistemological wounds, I found as a teenager that a certain kind of defiant libertarianism held enormous appeal. Political correctness was a favourite topic in the discourse I was exposed to at home and at school, which is perhaps the ideal target for this politics of sneering contempt and doubt. How was anyone supposed to know what they could or couldn’t say? Who got to decide, who got to make the list? How could someone else tell you not to say a word when they couldn’t give you criteria for deciding so? Where was the proof that words did harm?

You could prove to someone that words were meaningless by shouting the words you weren’t supposed to say, over and over. It’s just a sound, after all. It only signifies something if you let it, and it’s only dangerous if someone does something real and measurable while they happen to be saying the word, at which point the word doesn’t much seem to matter, does it? So you make the sound again and again, while behaving in an upright and respectable manner in all other respects, so that you are above reproach. Whoever hears it and feels pain has inflicted the harm upon themselves.

It’s one of those things that’s true as far as it goes, but doesn’t actually lay claim to as much as it thinks it does. It’s like treating science and religion as overlapping magisteria, as though their claims and methods existed within the same realm and spoke to the same things at all times and in all places. We recognize that doing that does violence equally to religion and to science, because the tools of one are not the right tools for the other. God exists beyond measure, but if God is calling us to build an ark, we had better use tools and measures to guide its construction, and not our ecstasy and wonder. Science sinks in the deep water of religion and vice versa.

This doubting suspicion loves not only to attack what seems arbitrary to it, but to mistake subjectivity for a compromise of objectivity. Hume thought that art was not entirely objective, but that an art critic could, with sufficient dedication, strive for objectivity in how they engaged with their work. You can use your subjective experience to serve something other than your personal biases, albeit imperfectly.

However if someone claims a subjective experience which is outside of the sort of teenage libertarian I was, someone steeped in suspicion and anxiously desperate for the objective, then perhaps it simply does not exist. If a Black person describes their systemic oppression, that seems like a fanciful and implausible explanation for the material facts of their existence. If an Indigenous person describes being shot at by strangers, that seems to border on the fantastic or the farcical. I think of the oft-repeated anecdote about Freud deciding that if all of the daughters of upstanding men claimed to have been sexually abused, this was a sign of rampant gendered delusion, and not rampant sexual abuse by upstanding men. That seemed more likely.

It always seems more likely, to the person who is troubled by the great divide between their own subjective experiences and the subjective experiences of others, that the other is at best confused, but perhaps more likely is lying and being manipulative. It stirs up a cognitive dissonance about the limitations of our own reality, when in fact it is not a threat to the objective reality of our existence, but merely to our omniscience.

So it is that the suspicious person rejects the subjective accounts of others as being inherently untrustworthy. They might engage in what has been called “sealioning”, in which they ask repeatedly for proof, they state their willingness to be convinced, and simply demand that the other person gain legitimacy by finding a way to do so. If their claims were real, after all, they would be able to find some way to do so. The fact that they cannot is not recognized as the game itself being rigged, but as proof that the suspicion was warranted.

To lie and to illumine.

We talk in the information age about information warfare, about the ability of governments to sow doubts about basic facts and to generate confusion about what is true, to the point that coördinated action becomes impossible, and the whole is weakened. We know full well the danger of conspiracy theories, for individuals and for our collective health and well-being, whether it takes the form of anti-vaccine agitation, or paranoid collective fantasies which lead to people ending their own lives, or others’, to stem the tide of global corruption. To someone committed to a politics of doubt steeped in their own epistemological wounds, even this may be a challenging statement: who is to decide who is allowed to make facts, and how? How can you know whether something is a conspiracy theory? How is a conspiracy theory any different to claims of systemic racism? Either they’re all fantastic and unfalsifiable, or none of them are.

The most deeply wounded will not settle for simply resisting belief of others’ subjective accounts, but in fact feel a deep pressure to convince others to lose their faith, too. Governments and market manipulators may know the value of lying, but the wounded make lying itself their weapon. Their goal is not to convince someone of a different truth, but that no one is to be trusted.

They do this by lying, by being disingenuous, to the point of gaslighting, i.e. of trying to get people to doubt their own sanity. They talk about this among themselves as a kind of clownishness, as though they were jesters for the masses, who could bring out uncomfortable truths by defying convention and expectation. It is a chaotic clownishness, however, with no principles and unspeakable truth. There is a reverie in disruption itself.

Some of them end up promoting a kind of sadistic nihilism, but equally common seems to be falling back on an anti-intellectual faith in the status quo. The former seems obvious, but the latter is more surprising. In essence, since there is no grounds on which to make the fuzzy decisions about society, those things should not be changed. There’s no way to engage in creation from a blank slate of how a society should be ordered, but we happen to have a society nonetheless. Therefore there is no position from which action to change society can be taken, except by objective and rational means.

If someone advocates, then, for deviance from the status quo for subjective reasons, it is useful not only to demand that they prove themselves (which they cannot), but to remind them and everyone around them that people are unreliable. They will lie brazenly, even openly, like the teenage libertarian saying a swear word or a slur repeatedly. They want to show you how effortless it is, that anyone can do it, that anyone can make themselves do it. They want to show you that mere words are meaningless, and other people are not to be trusted.

The demands of empathy.

I do experience these people (and I have had more dealings with them than I would like) as wounded, rather than as master manipulators. I think that they are telling the truth, albeit perhaps not intentionally, when they say that they would like to be convinced. They would like to be surprised by an argument, to find out that there is something they have been missing. They do so feel like something is missing, but nothing seems to be able to make it appear.

They watch videos of people suffering, even dying, wondering how it can be that it has ceased to stir up emotion. They read with delight accounts of the stalking of people who don’t seem entirely real to them. In a way, they have fallen into the perennial trap of the gnostic heresy: the belief, perhaps, that there is a divine spark in them, but the suspicion that it is not present in everyone.

Their rhetoric talks about non-player characters, people either not enlightened enough to be fully alive, or who are perhaps not actually people at all. This language comes from the world of role-playing games, in which some characters are directed by the dungeon master or the game itself in order to provide a backdrop for the hero’s life, and to create the difficulties that impede their progress. The non-player character is an explanation both for the seeming absence of the divine spark in others, and also for the frustrations and failures of the individual’s life, for which no other explanation can be accepted.

There is something so innocently wounded at the core of this, like the teenager who discovers at their first kiss that the music does not swell, the lighting does not change, and their perspective does not shift as the camera pans in or out. There is an intensity which is missing from life itself that we know must exist because we see it in movies. Where has it gone, and who has taken it? This leads either to a solipsistic nihilism, or to a politics not only of doubt but of resentment. Someone else is programming the game to be against me, which I know because by every objective measure I should be winning.

The trouble is that the experience of other people’s subjective realities, the thing that lets you glimpse the divine spark in them, is to be open to the experience of them. You have to move beyond the world of ideas and wishes. You have to stop watching from afar. This seems pointless or even destructive, though, when you expect only another disappointment. Empathy comes slowly, and starts with the leap of faith of seeing the other person as a subject like you, too. There is a self-reinforcing structure to these things, and their reality is purely relational. It is not the case that if it were real you’d be able to directly apprehend it against your will.

The pain.

I spent several hours recently dealing with someone engaging in sealioning who was being openly dishonest, with the goal of displacing outpourings of empathy for a marginalized community, and creating a landscape of doubt instead. I thought that that was the end of the story, but as I digested the experience and let myself think about what was going on in the interaction, I found something truly unpleasant come over me. For the rest of that day, I became enraged at interactions which felt emotionally insubstantial, or in which another person seemed to be acting by rote. This caught me by surprise, as although those things might annoy me normally, the intensity of my reaction was wildly out of proportion. Indeed, I found a part of myself almost felt compelled to show that I could act out of proportion.

There were two forces at work there. In the one instance, I had simply spent time exploring a pattern of mind that I then found myself inhabiting a little bit. After all, it wasn’t a world of ungrounded fantasy, but an outlook which has a few kernels of truth that have been massively distorted, and that massively distort the experience of the world in turn. In fact, it was a world view I had known very well, and had worked hard to leave behind, through developing relationships with other people, through my theological development, and through lots, and lots, of psychotherapy.

I have probably even been primed by the pandemic to return to that experience of the world. I don’t leave the house much, I don’t see friends, and I spend too much time in front of computer screens. People exist as ideas, as abstract things I think about. My own feelings feel very far away when my life starts to fall back into that shape, and I normally work hard to keep it from being that way. And yet.

So those old disappointments were present to me, and brought their emotional weight back up to the surface. They were accompanied by a double urgency, however, in the form of a second force: reality testing.

I wanted desperately to remember what it was to feel, to feel empathy, to experience the subjective reality of another person’s life. I urgently needed to remember that the wounded worldview was wrong, and I lashed out in hopes of finding something that would make me feel something. I did — I felt bad. That repeated a few times, until it started to feel almost absurd. I knew better, but it all felt less substantial than I wanted it to.

That was very hard at the time, and it’s very hard to share. It’s still a little challenging, no doubt worsened by the limitations of pandemic life as I have experienced it, but I know what the path back looks like. I’ve let myself talk with friends to remember what other people are like, and I’ve got plans to see some friends for a connection that will be more substantial. Something where my attention isn’t split between a dozen open tabs, or with all the work tasks hanging over my head, or with the task of driving, or thinking about how to respond to a violent troll on social media.

The hermeneutic of curiosity.

It is a core religious value for me that other people exist, and that they have an interior life like mine, and a subjective reality that is every bit as full and real as mine. Jung talks about psychic reality, i.e. subjective reality, as being the most real thing there is, because it is the very thing we apprehend and experience most directly, entirely unmediated. I find that powerfully compelling, and as a religious person I find it enticing.

The religious task, after all, involves that sharing of experiential reality which cannot be reduced to facts. Gregory of Nyssa talks about the inability of the mind to grasp things which are beyond spatial metaphors and reasoning. So it is that I find other people a holy thing: filled with otherness, but enticingly close. But if you engage with another person as an object, you will not find those secret and elusive things: their interiority, their soul. You can glimpse, though, and how glorious it is to glimpse, something of the inner life and the spirit by opening yourself to them, by listening deeply to them, and by engaging in substantive conversation and exploration together. This is the religious task itself.

We might think of the religious task as contemplation of the divine, and looking for something of the divine subject to reveal something of themselves to us, but as the First Letter of John reminds us, we can see one another, and we cannot see God. If we are going to learn how to experience the intersubjective reality of union with the divine, we surely start by being open to doing so with the other person. After all, if you will not experience the interior reality of the other person, who is so like you in every respect, how can you expect to experience the interior offering of the divine, who is utterly unknowable in every respect?

Perhaps it’s easier with God because there’s no material distractions, no illusion that the other person exists primarily to be beautiful, or primarily to frustrate us. There is no possibility that God is a non-player character. A non-player character has substance but no essence, while God is pure essence. God is the energies which make the game go, and is not programmed by anything, as we, ourselves, are at least a little programmed, by language, by culture, by society.

We have rightful yearnings for the other, but they ought to be mutually reinforcing. We are captivated by the beauty, by the difference, or something else enticing about the other, but we are not to mistake them for an object to be possessed, a way to access beauty or something we lack within ourselves. We are called to relationship, to the interpenetration of mind and spirit, by our yearning, and to let ourselves yearn for the transcendent beauty the same way we are enticed by material beauty. The transcendent other, too, loves and made each and every living being, and fills them with breath, so if we are curious about God, we ought to be curious also about God’s people.

This hermeneutic of curiosity has to not only be open to the subjective, but has to not count the cost. Paul talks about this as foolishness, as something which is wise in God’s sight, but which the world will look at and think is absolutely reckless. This is being willing to try to help someone even if it might not work. This is giving of your own resources even if you might get nothing in return. This is being willing to risk believing someone, even though you know that people lie.

Yes, Christ sent the disciples out, and sends all of us out, with an admonition to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. You can wonder about the motives of others. You should be curious about your own suspicion, even, because it might be telling you something valuable. The question is if you are willing to be transformed for the Kingdom of God: if you would rather believe something which causes you to act more kindly than is required, or if you would rather avoid taking any material risk, even if it causes you to disbelieve someone whose suffering you could have alleviated.

The empty tomb.

Martin Buber shares a piece of Hasidic wisdom which suggests that everything that exists, everything that God has created, has some purpose for the person of faith, some religious value, which must be found, even atheism. The value of atheism being that it calls us to act as though we were responsible for the state of the world, rather than God. It can be so tempting to engage in spiritual bypassing by displacing all responsibility off to God, but we are sojourning together on this little piece of rock, and whether we like it or not, this coëxistence is what we have been called to live rightly within. It’s not about whether we would live well together in the Kingdom of God, but whether we are willing to live as we would in the Kingdom even now.

This brings us to the knife’s edge of disappointment once again. What if it doesn’t feel good? What if it doesn’t feel right? What if it isn’t good enough? Perhaps it is better not to try.

That would be foolishness in the wrong realm. That would be expecting things to feel right, here and now, when in fact it might be very uncomfortable to do what God calls us to. This bitterness may, like the scroll Ezekiel eats, come to taste sweet once we let ourselves enter into it, but it may just be difficult. I think of how many of us in adulthood expect that at some point all the grown-up tasks will become easy and effortless, because they looked that way to us as kids, when in fact they remain a slog and a time-sink, and that’s just part of the sad reality of life.

There has to be something we believe in more than gratification, and more than that our success and our feelings of meaning look like the climactic scenes in movies. For me it is the joy of encounter with God and with other people. It is the substantial beauty of seeing what is real and loving it because it is real, and not because it appears as I wish it would. I do not always manage that. Still, I know that is what I want to give my heart to, even if it’s difficult.

If you love something, you can follow where it leads, instead of perpetually being frustrated that it isn’t going down the path you expected. If you really need to go down that path, go down it, but don’t imagine that something else owes it to you to make the way clear. This is the realm of the Holy Spirit, which may lead you to two divergent paths, not to test you, but because that is what is real. Something which is beyond the spatial things the mind can understand, but which may exist in the reality of God. It may be that the paths will merge after a time, and it may be that we could take either path just as well, and that they really do diverge. Perhaps there is more to us than just one thing.

We are invited to experience the reality of what is, not what we expect. This is what the Gospels call us to: to share in the slow revelation by Jesus of some truths about us, about God, and about the world, and the image of a life which awaits us, and a life which is possible for us here and now. Jesus points out again and again that these things are all the out-pouring of a single truth that cannot be named, but that can be gestured at and felt among us all the same. He tells us that love made us and calls to us, and that we can live according to love, too, but that this is not the path of light and life. Love encompasses all that is, and love leaves nothing out.

You cannot tell someone that. There is no fact to be conveyed. There are a set of truths which must constellate in your mind, and which as soon as they seem settled, suddenly become elusive once again. You can feel disappointment and suspicion, that this thing which should have been true always and forever has changed, or you can let yourself be curious, and follow after it down a different path. It may all at last make sense once more, only to yet again appear fragmented and destroyed. It may not make sense at all except in hindsight. It will probably not all fit in our perspective this side of death itself, but this is the journey we are called to.

So it is that the women who came to Christ’s tomb found it empty. The empty tomb had its own reality to reveal, a baffling revelation, an unnameable experience. Some of the other disciples would not believe it until they saw it themselves, but found that the women’s account had been true all along. The empty tomb could be a disappointment. The empty tomb must be the path to life. That is something that we may experience, by the experiences shared by people we have never met, now long dead themselves. It is something we can never, fully, know. Beyond measure and explanation, so foolishly we place our hope in the absence of something, someone we never met while he was alive.

All of this is in God, as Christ is in God. May we meet Christ in one another. May we yearn across the chasm. May we find Christ in the empty tomb. Amen.

[saeculorum-amen]

“For they are quick and ruthless punishers.”

Theology as a rule doesn’t make sense out of context; it’s dangerous, say, to take a statement about God and to translate it into a context where what one means by God isn’t the same.  The way you respond to the problem of evil, to be sure, is going to land differently if you assume that God is in control of everything that happens, or if you assume that everything that happens occurs in God’s sight.  These webs of meaning are especially precarious because they speak to core things we feel, to inward meaning and the secret longings of our hearts.  They are always bound to refer to things no one else can know, and yet to things we deeply treasure.

Theological Accountability

I am the sort of person who tends to have a hard time holding up my way as the only way, or as holding some kind of absolute truth, but I know, somewhere, that it’s important that it be true to me.  As a priest, I spend a lot of time trying to speak across differences in maps of meaning, and to invite others to expand their experiential knowledge of the numinous.  I think about how the theological statements I make are going to land with people with very different assumptions to my own; and even if I’m consciously aware that I’m disturbing the ground around the roots, I endeavour not to do violence to someone else’s beliefs and experiences unthinkingly.

I feel a sense of accountability, too, from a place of integrity.  I move in a fairly secularized world, and have good friends of very different faith traditions, and of no faith tradition.  My own formation took a circuitous path, coming to Christianity finally, but not inevitably.  I don’t think I ever stopped being a secular humanist, say.  There are domains of my life where my religious sense of myself is still actively being shaped by experiences that don’t quite seem to fit.  I feel like I owe it to myself to be able to explain my theological reflections to the 17 year old I once was who spent her summer anxiously reading the Bhagavad-Gita.  That’s the kind of wholeness I try to live with.

Integrity and Image

I bounce around between images of God, and while there are core images I return to again and again, there are also so many areas where I am open to being surprised, to being challenged.  It’s important from time to time, say, to sit with the question of whether God intervenes in the world, if only because so many people in the world have a clear answer to that question that I don’t think I ever could.

The image of God cannot be stable because God leaves nothing out, while our way of knowing is so excruciatingly dichotomous.  We know things by leaving things out, by separating them from one another.  God exists as this indivisible experience somehow just beyond our grasp.  We acknowledge a wholeness, but can speak clearly only about a part — and even then we are approximating, we are amplifying, we are reducing, and otherwise not representing accurately the God we have encountered.

I gloss God sometimes into the universe (panentheism) or the thing in which the universe resides (pantheism), because these images are so readily accessible.  They are stored deep in my mind and have been explored again and again in my soul.  There have been so very many times when I needed to be able to talk about that aspect of God, that glimpse of the greater truth.  That’s the God that I know exists, that must exist.  If we are the universe experiencing itself, then that God is the unknowable quine of our being, the inescapable fixed point of beingness itself.  I find that an easy God to translate to, and a God I’ve intuitively needed to know at many points in my life.

So I ask myself questions about my theology in terms of this God who isn’t quite the God I have faith in, but is perhaps a fragment of the same.  What would the implications be of this reflection or that, if that is the God of which they speak?

Leaving Nothing Out

The nice thing about this image of God is that it draws us back again and again to God as that which leaves nothing out, the God of what is indivisible, and the God of everything.  That’s a God I do believe in, even if the universe isn’t the starting point for my faith.  It’s a God that I have found I can talk about with a lot of people of other faiths and of no faith; it’s a God I hear people talking about when I read their theology, when I listen to their myths.

This is the God of the tree whose roots and branches are knotted into one: where some nutrient makes its way into the roots and rises up through the stem and the branch to emerge into the leaf it was meant to be a part of.  There, it unfolds in the fullness of its strength to experience the shining sun.  Having done the work it was given to do, it becomes beautiful, and at last seems to become separated from the tree.  Upon the ground it decays, with the help of fungus and caterpillar and time, and in the myriad products of its decay, enters the roots once more.

God does not prize one moment over another, calling the moment when the leaf appears to be dead better or worse than the moment in which it has not yet appeared.  God does not leave out the tough bits, as though we could shuttle off inconvenient images to some other universe.  Wholeness and connection seem to permeate everything.

Against Selection Criteria

This image reminds me to resist developing fitness functions, discrete predicates for what can be a part of the Holy and what cannot.  I sometimes catch myself writing sermons that seem to serve some kind of moral therapeutic deism, and I know when that’s happening because I hear the words but what about echoing in response to every too-tidy point I wish to make.  Sometimes we have to make the too-tidy points anyway, because they point to something we have no other way to access, and must access.  (Must is always a word about morality, as here.)

The moment you give in to that particular God, the God who serves the convenient ends only (and even my God-of-the-universe images do, from time-to-time, do exactly that), you have a problem.  Having decided not only that you are eliding something right now, but that something can be elided altogether, you have let go of everything transcendent about God, and everything unknowable, and given up on wholeness as a possibility.

Struggle and Myth

There are, though, things in the world, and forces at work which are part of the whole even if they are not something you’d like to be a part of God.  These things are invariably a part of us, but in a way which can be just as elusive.  If you have any exposure to Social Justice discourse, but particularly that which is situated religiously, you will have met some of these forces, these distributed problems of evil for which we must account.

As I watched insurrectionists storm the US Capitol earlier this month, I felt the immediacy with which they were venturing into a highly symbolic and mythological struggle with these forces.  They were sure they were struggling with forces which were outside of themselves and intruding in on them, and in a very classically fascist sort of way with forces which were outside of the true country, and intruding in on it: things antithetical to the collective identity, and violating the collective will.  Yet with their association with movements which call for violence to meet the unruly, they were courting encounter with a sort of god (lowercase) of their own making, although it did not immediately materialize: the crushing boot of the State, indifferent to mercy.

This was an attack on outsider gods, on powerful forces which are identifier with the Other, in order to maintain or reestablish the integrity of the homeland.  Yet the powerful forces they would themselves constitute eventually and inevitably came to find them, in the form of mass arrests and indictments.  Exactly the thing many of them hoped for, but being visited upon themselves for their own violations of the integrity of the motherland, the household.

The Inevitable Gods

I think a lot about gods like these, too: plural, lowercase.  Like the gods a Jungian might find in mythology (this talk is an excellent starting point), I think of these massive, experiential patterns in us.  Things which we cannot grasp fully or communicate easily, because they are alive and dynamic, much as God, above.  They are a whole force which moves in us and moves in the world.  We seldom act in direct and knowing service to them, but we have our moments where their acting upon us is experienced as fate.

They are like how I, as a Christian, think about faith and prophecy: as things inevitable.  Emergent patterns and properties which take on a life of their own over a large scale.  The prophet is one who looks out at the dominos lined up in the world and is able to say that the last one will fall, while anyone else would point out that not even the first one has yet fallen.  A prophet’s way of seeing the world does not leave things out even if they wish it were otherwise.  (Ask Jonah how it goes when the world surprises a reluctant prophet.)

These many gods live with us, archetypal patterns in our minds which emerge there through a process not entirely unlike that by which they emerge into the world.  We act, day by day, and we experience the results of our actions.  We watch the people around us, and the ways of the world are slowly revealed.  Over time, the unwitting results of our actions is to create in the world around us a tangible, felt presence of the gods within.

I find this image of the gods is exquisitely present in the song “Pray Your Gods” by Toad the Wet Sprocket.

Pray your Gods who hold you by your fear For they are quick and ruthless punishers

These are those forces which arrest us in our hearts, and also those things which we create in the world who will immediately make their presence upon us known should we challenge them.  This is hubris, which is an affront to the gods, and forces them to make their power known — as opposed to hamartia, which is sin, which is missing the mark (as in archery), or a simple error.

These are the gods who will quickly punish them if we beg them to show us their power, by challenging them.

Pain and Passion

All this swirls in my mind as we begin to contemplate Holy Week, and draw ourselves to that familiar and challenging story of the Passion.

There is, you know, no one, decisive moment in the story of the Passion.  There’s not one bad person, one bad group, one thing which had it gone differently would have been able to derail the whole thing from its trajectory.  It was prophecy.  It was a thing inevitable.  It was how it was always going to go, how it was bound to go, because of these gods in the world.

Pilate, the Crowd; those who pierced Christ’s side, and those who offered him bitter wine; the legs broken, the moment of arrest.  However profound and how acutely we might feel the intensity of these moments, they were individual contributions and individual contributors to the realization in the world of a god which dwelled everywhere.  This is a god which reveres power, which sees power over life as the ultimate security, and which indulges in capricious cruelty so long as there are no consequences.

Nobody had to set out to do that god’s work, and even Pilate, who was in the position by virtue of his life and station to recognize the dynamics of power at work, felt helpless to stop the inevitable.  Maybe he even was.

Christianity points a finger defiantly at that unnamed god at work in the world, and shouts to us: that god can be beaten.

Gods can be Beaten

We tell ourselves that death is not the ultimate power, and that those who love their life will lose it.  We know in our hearts that those who seek victory through violence will find their victory fleeting.  We declare that those who live for the eternal and transcendent, rather than being trapped in the tangles of this unnamed god of scarcity and fear and violence, will not be disappointed.

That god can be beaten, and part of how this resurrection is accomplished is to demand that we situate ourselves in that experience.  The experience of the crowd which shouts crucify him!, not to show us how we would passively go along with a crowd, but to let us inhabit, and overcome, the patterns in our mind which go along with such things.  For our very souls to be immunized against joy in cruelty, and to begin to form a connection between violent power, and the loving innocence of those upon whom it is visited.  The fragility of a life destroyed, and the preciousness of each person.

Becoming Whole

Christianity asks us to look at ourselves and leave nothing out, not because it will immediately be vanquished, but because we live in a world in which these forces still move.  If we will not allow ourselves to see how these dynamics may swirl around us, we will miss out the little and large ways in which we constitute the unnamed god of evil in the world around us.  We do.  We surely do.  None of us is exempt.

We do not declare that it does not exist, nor that any of us are free and pure.  We call, instead, for integrity and wholeness in the face of the certainty that the gods are out there and also in here, and do not deserve our unwitting devotion.

If we can only tolerate the nice things, and the nice images of ourselves, we are missing out on the wholeness of God, and we are bound to passively reproduce the gods that the world has formed in us.  We may be nice enough, but allow our lives to be enlisted in the service of unseen cruelty everywhere in the world, or in our own back yards.  This happens whenever we are sure that the problem is out there, or that it can be cured simply by alienating from us some part we find unsavoury, which is nonetheless contained by the whole.

[saeculorum-amen]

Are we too sacramental?

This is an era too conducive to a dreadful art: the thinkpiece.  I am prone to the impulse to generate them, too, but mostly sate it with adding to a private collection of reflections — grand, uncompletable projects — or epistles to friends who are patient in receiving them.

Of course that is the defining art of the era, though.  For many of us, there are fewer distractions from the underlying process, the thinking, and sharing one’s thoughts, and more than that one’s thought process, is the textual equivalent of an Instagram photo of one’s lunch, or at least the impulse is the same.  In truth, a lot of the actual text is better than that would suggest, and the thinking is very good.  It feels like that’s the kind of thing we should have been writing, and sharing, all along, the kinds of conversations we should always have been having, anyway.

Then there is, of course, the sense of urgency and importance which is imparted to everything which is attached to this pandemic, one way or the other.  Our public health officials have been telling us for months that the matter of how we conduct our daily lives, how we gather, even in the smallest things, the most inconsequential, and certainly in many things that are casually dear to us, can be matters of life and death.  Everything is imbued with this meaning.

The questions we have been asking, though, are not what we would expect in times of crisis.  I am seeing rather less theodicy, rather fewer attempts to ask why bad or difficult things happen, and even fairly little engagement with the question of where God is in the present moment.  Instead, the questions almost exclusively seem to be settling onto matters of ecclesiology and sacramental theology: should we change how we constitute ourselves as the Church; should we change how we mediate our sacramental lives?

What I find striking about these questions is that they are not so particular to our current circumstances as the discourse might suggest, and the solutions that are floated do not seem to be novel responses to a novel situation (which they are typically framed as), but are instead solutions and rhetoric which have been with us for quite some time.  Milton Friedman notes that in times if crisis, change is possible, but the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are already lying around.  These ideas have very much already been lying around.

In my reading and experience of contemporary Anglicanism, at least, it is difficult to find challenges which are not responded to with the suggestions that we must look at how we organize the Church, and that we must look at how we mediate access to the sacraments.  The most profound developments in contemporary Anglicanism, taken by how much we talk about them, would seem in fact to be matters of sacramental access.  The ordination of women, the marriage of couples of the same gender, and the ordering of women and LGBTQ2SIA+ people as bishops at their core are matters of the question of who can have access to which sacraments, and how.

Other examples are abundant, such as the ongoing debate about just how open the practice of communion should be.  These debates are all shaped by ideas that are lying around: advocates of open communion invoke these other matters of sacramental access to use settled matters of justice to frame a call for more justice, and to make clear which side is the right side of history.  Even that framing, in terms of access and justice, is in a larger way an idea that is lying around: a social rhetoric which is abundant in our age, and which we cannot help but have strong feelings about, one way or the other.

Once something is framed in terms of an unjust barrier, then it is obvious that the barrier has to go.

So it is in the realm of ecclesiology: we have recovered a sense that the Church is not analogous with the institutional structure, but with the Body of Christ, the community of all believers.  Along with this, ideas that are lying around about egalitarianism and hierarchy, even the outright distrust of institutions, shape the conversation.  A flatter Church is the answer to many questions, even those which are not obviously ecclesial in nature on their face.

So this present moment comes along, when our buildings are empty, and it seems to suggest to us that perhaps having buildings was not such a good idea in the first place.  This may well be true, but we must acknowledge that it is not a new idea: many of the proponents of using now as the time to eliminate buildings, or dioceses, or any other trapping of institution have been advocates for those same solutions all along.  This does not mean that the ideas are wrong, nor even that the rhetoric of their unique suitability to the present moment is entirely wrong, but the present moment did not generate those solutions.

What is going on here is not that there are charlatans waiting on the sidelines to call for all of their destructive pet policies to be implemented under the banner of crisis (which is the context in which Friedman, quoted above, is often invoked politically to critique neoliberalism and tax-cuts-as-panacea.)  We are all of us feeling squeezed, and are searching within us for ways in which our convictions can respond to the present moment, to respond to acute threats that we perceive.  These convictions are by definition things that were lying around: if they were to appear spontaneously with no connection to anything else, they would not feel meaningful enough to us to matter.

We are all of us good-hearted Christians who are trying to seek the best for us and the best for the Church, but we are necessarily acting out the problems and solutions of the recent history of the Church amplified with the life and death valence that a global pandemic gives everything.  The urgency is in a way very real, because the present moment is always urgent.  Urgency, though, is not the particular character of this moment.  We always have things we have to do for right now, but I suggest that the needs we are responding to now were already there, and are only more easily or readily voiced and named.

Some specific effects are particular to the present moment, but they feel like symptoms of a disease that was already there.  Indeed, this is the point that those who are calling for ecclesial or sacramental change are making obvious.  The solutions are already lying around because the problems were, too.

There is a spectrum of solutions which exists in the cluster I have hinted at here by talking about ecclesial structures and sacramental access, the furthest point of which is: the Church should never have been in a mediating role in the first place, as the sacraments belong to all of God’s people, and therefore everyone should have access to the sacraments, because otherwise their spiritual life is dependent upon the Church’s condescension to them.

Any part of that can be moderated, such as to suggest simply that clergy have an obligation to dispense sacraments through by any means necessary, or for clergy themselves to assert that they have the right so to do, regardless of what ecclesial structures might dictate.  Adjust a few words, and you can eliminate sacraments entirely, or communal worship, or any other thing which has probably long been a source of frustration.

Each clause of that combination complaint and solution has more than a little truth in it in describing the dynamics of the life of faith, and certainly of a sacramental practice of Anglicanism.  You can pick a starting point there and branch out to talking about the entirety of not only piety but Christianity writ large, and the problems of its practice.

So I will admit that there is one part that stands out to me in particular, and which I think is very much a problem which was already lying around.  I have a solution, but I have to confess that it isn’t at all unique to the present moment, and it isn’t just a matter of getting rid of some meddlesome barrier, of eliminating some vestigial and hobbling ecclesial structure.

I find it troubling and unsurprising how much it seems to be the case that without access to sacramental worship on a Sunday morning in a beautiful building as part of a community, many are finding that they feel they have no spiritual life at all.  That they are troubled by this is legitimate, and I am troubled, too.  That we ever set anyone up for that kind of experience is a disgrace.

It is not, however, an ancient injustice of the Church which has ever and always been present, and which can be met only by changing those things which always were.  Nor is it an injustice which only exists because of a global pandemic, but it is instead a cruelty which is particular to the moment immediately before it, to the latter half of the 20th Century and the beginning of this one.

The acute sickness here seems to be one of deficient formation, of a Christian practice which has been reduced to at most a once-weekly obligation to take part in a particular rite of the Church.  That is what a spiritual life needs, and that is all a spiritual life needs.

I take no issue with a sacramentally-centred spiritual life, but the sacraments ought to be renewing of life, and transforming of the rest of life.  They cannot do this passively, but only by all who participate in them carrying out into the world whatever scraps of Grace we manage to pick up at the foot of the altar.  How could this not include personal prayer, and robust spiritual practices at home, and a million other things?

I admit, though, that my own spiritual life has at more than a few times felt like it was a matter of showing up for a couple of hours on a Sunday morning and nothing else.  Where I have felt like a loon or a narcissist to think about about how my spiritual life the rest of the time might feel more substantial.

This comes from all sides.  There is, it must be admitted, some awkwardness and even embarrassment in the practice of prayer, and certainly in any kind of home ritual.  Our society tells us that such things are not productive, and thus are a waste of time, an indulgence.  Without a community beside us, every thing that chips away at our resolve gets to ring out unopposed.  Then there’s simply the matter of being self-conscious.  And then there’s just the difficulty of setting a routine, of setting boundaries with the rest of our lives, to say that there are things we must do for our well-being, even if nobody else is making us do them.

These same flavours of distaste can come filtered through other lenses, too.  Why, after all, would you waste your time praying when you could be out working to accomplish acts of social justice, being of service to others, rather than seeking your own spiritual pleasure?  No, you can have a morsel on Sunday morning, and must subsist on that as you give selflessly to the point of depletion.

The catechist then necessarily finds it difficult to encourage people to take up such wastes of time and indulgences, and is certainly not well-equipped to answer those questions when they move from being interior uncertainties to external challenges.  “Why should I bother?”  Perhaps even going all the way to “You can’t make me.”  None of us want to waste our time like that, so we have to feel like it is not a waste of our time.

We should be honest and say that most people in the world would find gathering for the Eucharist on Sunday to be, itself, an indulgence, a waste of time, and an unpleasant imposition, too.  We, though, seem to like it.  If nothing else, we are used to it.

There was a generation, still living, whose experience of the Church would be difficult for most Anglicans today to understand, because it was that Communion was an occasional thing at most, and not always a welcome one.  It made the service longer, you see, and there was work to be done!  Morning Prayer, though, was the appropriate way for a Sunday to begin.

Even in the sacramental practices of eras not very far away at all, some things which seem indispensable to us were not only dispensed-with but inconceivable, such as the Peace.  I suspect we have all heard stories of someone who, when the Peace was first introduced, refused to have any part of shaking hands with anyone (and not because they demanded some more intimate sign.)

So I find it less that in our separation for what we were used to we should be demanding ways we can have what we were used to in all circumstances, but that we should never have been settling for a spiritual life that was so paltry.

I would never have imagined myself as describing the sacramental life as paltry, but it has become apparent that that is exactly what it can be.  So, then: are we too sacramental?  Do these rites keep us from a focus on the development of a satisfying domestic spirituality?

Well, they do not make us do anything.  We do it to ourselves: as a community through poor mutual support and faith formation, and as individuals when we decide what it takes for us to be satisfied.

The sacraments are not superior to other modes of worship, nor even other ways of experiencing God’s presence.  I have experienced more profound moments of religious ecstasy in a quiet corner of a darkened cathedral during Compline in the middle of the night, and in praying at my home prayer desk as I let all of my fears and longings pour out, than I could ever tolerate happening on your average Sunday morning.  I have needed those moments, like I need to stand outside in a cold wind and to remember that God is with me.  I need them like waking up to pray with my partner.  I need them like a prayer before a meal.

I do not always do the things that I need.  It may even be that I neglect them more often than not: they are certainly noticed acutely in their absence, even as it struggles to feel worthwhile as I engage in their mundane repetition.

If we are hurting because our spiritual life is barren without access to the sacraments we experience in body, in community, and with clerical presidency, then we should rightly be outraged.  We should take that rage and offer it to the Church and offer it even more than that to God.  We need more than morsels and scraps, but to feel like God is, as our Muslim brothers and sisters know, closer to us than our jugular vein.

That kind closeness is a need that is always with us, and that cannot be met with one thing (however glorious it is) one day a week (however holy that day.)  We could dispense with the sacraments, or with the discipline in which we practice them, in order to free ourselves from having to experience that kind of pain, but that is like Otto Rank’s description of the neurotic as one who avoids incurring the debt of living in order to avoid the repayment of the debt in death.

I would rather have the pain and the ecstasy than neither.

And I refuse to accept a statement which I have often seen made of late, which is that Christianity does not have a tradition of domestic life and private practice, or that such things are incompatible with sacramental and communal practice, saying that one must choose one or the other.

It is true that the practice of a sacramental and communal faith can come at the expense of the development of a private and domestic spiritual life, but the emphasis there is on can.  It is not the case that it must be so.  When I think of robust practices of home spirituality, I do think of those low-church Anglicans who were prepared by Sunday worship to also be able to lead Morning and Evening Prayer at home, and to feel comfortable and pleased to do so.

I think much more, though, of Christianity before the Great Schism, and as still practiced in many corners of Roman Catholicism, and nearly universal to Christian Orthodoxy.  I think of a practice of the sacramental which is so strongly for the life of the world that the blessing in everything is acutely apparent, is honoured, and is marked.  I think of asking that a priest come and bless one’s home, and also of sitting quietly before a family icon at home.  I think of praying with song (and without embarrassment) before going to bed.  I think of reading Scripture for comfort, and to feel God’s nearness.

I think of that Celtic mode of Christianity which is marked with having prayers for everything one does.  God is, after all, in all of it, and if we can make ourselves aware of that, then our hearts can be opened to something more real than the consumeristic, materialistic view of the world we are constantly inundated with allows us to see.  This is what the sacraments are calling us to.

This is the work of mystagogy in the Church: to help us to see, by entering into these mysteries again and again, that everything is connected, and that God’s presence is with us always.  This is what the sacramental life leads us towards and forms us for.  It does not simply create for us a dependency, a craving, which we must meet again once it becomes too strong to bear.

Still, that last image resonates, too, because life is hard.  We do need our scraps and morsels of Grace, and we should be kind with ourselves for that, and be kind with one another.

We must be fed enough on Sunday for other things to develop, and our communities must foster for us cohorts of practice who can support each other through the strange loneliness that haunts us all the days of our lives, and not just in times of pandemic.  We are always facing life’s hardest moments alone, and we should be equipped to do so, but not have to stay there.  The separation is, after all, an illusion, too: another thing we reject every time we have come together and declared that we are one Body in Christ.

The Easter we have been unable to observe together as we are accustomed to this year is, like every Easter, our bold assertion that nothing which seems to separate us from one another and from God can ever do so, not even death itself, and certainly not the physical distancing of this era in which we find ourselves.

Even if we do not share of the sacraments with one another in their outward signs at present, the mysteries into which they draw us are every bit as present: that we are not divided, that we are not alone, that God is not far from us.  The challenges of this present moment are not new to us — they were always lying around — but if we find them intolerable in the moment, perhaps the problem is not that we are being denied access, because nothing can deny us access to God, but that the solutions we had lying around were inadequate.

Sometimes we really do require new solutions, not because they are novel or bespoke, but because they are untried.  The reasons are many — they may feel silly or ineffective, or we may simply not know how — but they do exist.  They might be waiting for us elsewhere in the practice of Christianity, but just as likely they are already present in our communities.  There may be new modes, new things which are coming to us, too, but they are patterned on old things: the sacramental life, which forms us to see beyond the limitations of a fleeting world, and to the eternal reality of God.

May we all find the robust experience of our faith, and of encounter with the Holy, in this present time: in familiar things, and in unfamiliar things.  May we know that we are God’s own, and that we are not divided, though we may experience only our own frantic wretchedness, and perceive only our separation.  May our dissatisfaction draw us always to go deeper, into the questions, into the mysteries, which lead us to what was always true, and never fails.  May God be with us all, and through God’s own extraordinary Grace, provide us with the peace which the world cannot give, and which cannot fail or ever be taken from us.

[saeculorum-amen]

Marriage & Church Teaching

General Synod 2019.

I was among those watching the livestream of the General Synod 2019 vote on changing the marriage canon in the Anglican Church of Canada.  What General Synod say would be a change in the Church’s doctrine, and so it required two readings: this the second, this this the final.  It failed.

Listening to the testimony was hard: the testimony of those whose faith hinged on the outcome, whose belonging in the Anglican Church of Canada depended on the vote, whose sense of home hung in the balance.  Some of it was very personal, and some of it was very theological; some was both and more, talking about the Church’s encounter with indigenous people, with indigenous culture, and how marriage changed at the hands of the missionaries in that time.

History and the Personal.

History is like that, it shows the arc of the theological, and captures the events, the lives that are impacted by it.  Personal histories, communal experiences, things which were done.  History includes prayer, and it includes all we have done.

The closer we get to the present, the more tightly linked the personal and the historical are.  We receive the world, we receive the past, into ourselves, and it shapes our sense of how things are, of how things must be, and of how things can be.  There is no one history, and this is as true of the distant past as the near past, but it is sometimes more apparent in the near past: some of us remember one period fondly, others recall it as a time of scarcity and suffering; some of us experience changes as liberating, while others of us experience them as painful, or frightening.

The Church’s Teaching on Marriage.

A lot of speakers referred to the Church’s teaching on marriage, and how this canonical change would either contravene it or change it; how extending the Church’s practice of marriage would go against Church teaching, and so either be an impossibility, or a corruption.  I could completely understand their pain, and feel their distress, at that possibility.  “If the Church ceases to live by the Truth, then it ceases to be the Church, it turns away from God; if the Truth changes now, then was it ever really true, and is anything really true; how can people ignore what is right and good, and expect us to do likewise?”

That is, indeed, a painful place to be in.  It is a very real experience.

I found myself in a different place, and in listening to their testimony, in experiencing the vote, and in sitting with my own experiences and feelings, my sense of the history and of my faith, I have become somewhat comfortable moving around in that place, and now wish to speak out of it.

Sacramental Realism.

I situate myself first in this: I am a sacramental realist.  That is at the core of my religious outlook as an Anglican, and certainly as a priest.  I truly believe that the things we say about the sacraments are real, and not just because we say them.  That the sacraments do convey some inward Grace, and that God does truly work through them, that God is truly present in them, and that we are called (and certainly I am called) to participate in them robustly.  I find the metaphysical reality and the physical reality both utterly credible and indistinguishable.  I love the sacraments, and take a high view of them.

Marriage: Relationship, Law, and Sacrament.

Marriage is a sacrament.  Marriage, however, is also two other things: it is a legal reality, and it is a practical reality.  When I some years ago told a priest and friend that my partner and I were not married, as we were neither legally nor sacramentally married, he was adamant that of course we were, and he was right.  When the State recognized us as married, that did not change the fact that we already had been.  God has always been a part of our relationship, and the practice of Christianity has always at least loitered on the edges, and often been rather central, to who we are together.

The Church makes life far too hard for itself when it talks about marriage as if these three things were one thing, the same thing, and impossible to separate.  Worse, some try to lower our estimation of the Church’s place in marriage, and to suggest that marriage is really, fundamentally, a legal construct, and the Church just blesses relationships, much as we bless backpacks, bicycles, and birettas.  That attends too cheaply to the other two things which marriage is, and cedes far too much ground to the State.

So, look: marriage as a relationship has something to do with the Church, marriage as a sacrament has something to do with the Church, and marriage as a legal matter belongs to the State, and sometimes the Church acts with the State.  I believe that last point is a mistake, but a central one to what I have to say on this subject.  Let us go there now.

A Lifelong Union.

You see, when we talk about the Church’s teaching on marriage, I wonder what is really meant by that.  I mean, I know what the speaker is referring to when they say that: they mean a lifelong union of one man and one woman.  Except that the Church has certainly shifted position on the matter of divorce and remarriage in the last hundred years, and nobody wants to talk about that as a shift, but instead to just accept it as a ground truth, if for no other reason than that so many of our congregants, and certainly also our clergy and our episcopate, are themselves in second or third marriages.  That is not to say that our current position on divorce is suspect, but certainly to say that it is off the table and under the radar, it is not something we talk about, and we kind of like it that way; it’s settled by fact and history, and for pastoral reasons we should not talk about it.  I think it’s probably safer to talk about it than we think, but it is like many things we do not talk about because of the fear that we might have to justify it, and in failing to do so, harm someone.  We certainly should not open people up to such harms.  I am comfortable to name that point, and to talk about it, but I don’t think we need to spend time there.

What the Church Teaches on Marriage.

So when someone talks about the Church’s teaching on marriage, they mean that it is a lifelong union of one man and one woman.  When they say that phrase, though, they mean other things, too: that this has always been the Church’s teaching, and that the fact that the Church teaches it means it is correct and immutable.  They may or may not make an appeal to Scripture in so doing, but often will; and we will deal with that later.  Still, this is a statement about Tradition, about authority, and about consistency.  Those aspects are all apparent, even if they are not always articulated.  The point in referring to this as the Church’s teaching is to say that it is Truth, and thus correct, eternal, and immutable.

I wonder, though, what the Church has really taught about marriage.  After all, for a long period of history in the civilizations where Christianity was present, marriage was not an entirely contentious issue.  Let’s assume that the Church’s teaching was, is, and should be that marriage is a lifelong union between one man and one woman; well, this was the practical reality, the lived experience, the legal and social regime for a very long time.  There was little or no reason to think of it as anything else!  In the absence of conflict, would the Church really have needed to teach this?

I do not find it credible that it would have, that this is some cataphatic teaching of the Church, some positive affirmation that the Church has always made with an awareness of alternatives.  The Church, to put it simply, has not needed to.  There have not been alternatives available.

A More Humane Institution.

The Church’s teachings on marriage, then, would have been not technical ones about marriage as such, but general teachings about how to live, and how to make lives and society more humane.  The Church might have (and did, at least in places) taught about the importance of marriage as a loving institution, and as a place to practice right relationship.  This is, after all, a core of the sacramental reality of marriage, but about that more, later.

Instead, marriage has gotten defined largely as a result of things which have arisen, social and technological changes which have given rise to conflict: women’s liberation, birth control, and modern conceptions of gender and sexuality besides.  We wouldn’t know that marriage could only be between one man and one woman if there weren’t alternatives to run up against; it would simply be taken for granted.  The Church might as well teach that marriages must take place on Earth: we have not taught such, even though it has been our practice, because we have encountered no conflict on the matter.

What Conflict Raises to Consciousness.

I mention conflict intentionally, rather than change, because things change all the time without there being conflict, and we do not view this necessarily as violation of norms.  That is not to say, though, that conflict only arises on matters of essential things, of things which matter; but where conflict arises on things which are adjacent to the Church, the Church often feels compelled to pick a side, and for very good reasons the Church tends to be an essentially conservative institution.  Hot takes, though, even when they are conservative, do not necessarily preserve the essential character of the thing.

I do not think, then, that the Church has a clear and robust and consistent teaching on marriage that we can appeal to except appealing to what we have always known, what we have always felt.  Our statements about the Church’s teaching on marriage, then, have a tendency to be matters of personal history, rather than matters of essential Truth.

Marriage is Specifically a Sacrament.

Still, I have accepted that marriage is a sacrament, that the Church has some right involvement in marriage; what is the essence of marriage?  What does it mean for it to be a sacrament?

First, it has nothing to do with whether our marriages are recognized by the State or not.  The fact that we conflate those two points is, again, an accident of history, and in this case the history of Christianity’s relationship to power: its alignment with empire and colonial forces, and the comfortable (if compromising) position that has entailed.  We have not had to think about whether our marriages have legal force because they do.  If we marry people sacramentally, we do so orthogonally to matters of law: we might sacramentally marry people even if the law would not recognize their marriage, and we might not sacramentally marry people whose marriage is perfectly legal.  This is not a controversial statement, but is an area which is too often unexamined, comfortable as we are to assume the unity of these three aspects of marriage.

The Institution of Marriage.

So, as with any sacrament, we look to Christ for guidance, and we search out the roots of the sacrament in Christ’s life, person, practice, and teaching.  If we have the time, we always invoke the institution of such sacraments in Christ, as for example we recall the institution narrative at the Eucharist, or make reference to Christ’s own healing works when healing someone.  As a professor in seminary noted to us about the marriage liturgy, we have a reading which recalls the institution of marriage, and it is this: Jesus went to a wedding.

That’s kind of it.  You see, Jesus didn’t invent marriage.  It already existed.

Made from Ordinary Things.

This raises a more general point about the sacraments which is utterly essential for the sacramental realist: every single sacrament is overlaid on something which already existed.  We might say the sacraments are the heightening or the perfection of something which already existed, but it would be foolish to suggest otherwise than that the sacraments are built on the foundation of ordinary things.  This is no accident, but precisely the point.

We know what it is to wash ourselves, and baptism is a rite of cleansing and preparation which carries washing to its transcendent edge; it is always renewing and refreshing to enter into water, and baptism is that to the nth degree.

We know what it is to eat, and to eat with loved ones, and to give thanks for being fed, and the Eucharist builds on those things to carry us to a meal in the upper room, to bring us into encounter with Heaven itself, for the divisions between us to be stripped away, and for us to be nourished in the way that food never satisfies.

So it is for all aspects of the sacraments, and for all the sacraments (of which I have no definitive list.)

For the Life of the World.

The sacraments renew us and renew the whole world by stripping away what is mundane and fallen and imperfect in these things, and letting us experience them anew, renewed, transcendent.  All of Creation is made by God and declared good, but there is a thick layer of soot over it all.  The point of the sacraments is to draw us back into our original relationship with God and to lift us up out of the dust, to lift even the bread and wine and water out of the dross of life, and to be able to experience and see and feel and touch and taste and intimately, utterly, profoundly know what is real that the dust cannot cover, that all the problems of life and even death cannot destroy.  The sacraments are alive, and are us fully alive, and not in some symbolic or metaphorical way alone, and not just for some didactic or practical end, but for the transformation of ourselves, our souls, our bodies, and everything.

Marriage was Always a Central Relationship.

That marriage existed before Jesus should not come as a shock.  The Hebrew Bible is filled with memories of our spiritual ancestors and their relationships in particular.  Their commitments to one another, in violation and in fulfillment, are often at the heart of the story of salvation history itself, of God’s covenant and purpose and presence.  These are core relationships, and they have always existed.

So Jesus went to a wedding, and he spoke about marriage elsewhere, and through his incarnation, his enfleshment, his ministry on Earth, he left us with marriage as something more than it had been: as now, for us, a sacrament.

Sacraments do not Displace.

Like the other sacraments, it does not displace the things which came before it, and perhaps it even imbues those things with some shadow of the sacrament’s energies itself.  I know that when I wash my hands at the Eucharist, I am reminded of the renewing, cool waters of baptism; and when I wash my hands in the washroom at the Indian buffet, I am reminded of that washing, also.  And this is not a mere remembering or associating, some recalling of accidental similarity between unrelated things, but it is a reconstituting, in a smaller way, of myself as not just someone who goes through life led by needs and urges and wants and demands, but as someone who is a belovèd child of God, made clean and whole and one with all the Body of Christ.

We do not say that Christians should not wash their hands because they are washed in baptism, although we could justify that from Scripture (one who has been made clean does not need to wash again.)  We know better than that.  Likewise, we eat meals which are not the Eucharist (although we might long for that heavenly city where all meals are at the Table of the Lamb.)  We allow ourselves to eat of worldly things even if they are not what feeds us.

Sacraments and Boundaries.

So, too, marriage is a thing which has a life of its own apart from the Church.  The law could indeed create a legal regime of marriage which was so abhorrent to the Church that we would have nothing to do with it, but that is not what is before us here, and even if it were, it would do us no good to not try to engage with that institution and teach and guide and work to make it more humane.

We should not conflate what the State does with what the Church does.

The Faith does have some boundaries, and though they can be stumbling blocks, we do make those same stumbling blocks our cornerstones, as Christ quite wisely told us we would have to.  It is not inherently wrong or unjust for there to be limits on the practice of our faith, but those boundaries must make some kind of sense, theological and practical both.  We might ask people to wait to receive communion (although I did not, personally) until they have been baptized, so that the experience of the sacrament of belonging will be situated within the sacrament of adoption; but Christ would never tell us to refuse to feed someone who longs to eat.  We must remember that we are stewards of the sacraments, not their owners or their masters, and that the boundaries we place around them are lightly held and permeable.  All such boundaries are relational; look at how long the rubrics for refusing someone communion are as compared to how frequently it actually happens.  We know that we must be accountable for those boundaries, and that they must be enforced only for very, very good reason, and to prevent some demonstrably greater harm.

Marriage and the Missionary.

We know that intuitively, though we practice it imperfectly.  Anglicanism’s history on the matter of marriage as a sacrament is particularly instructive.  In North America, we seem to have consistently defiled and denied the plural marriages of the indigenous peoples here.  In Africa, however, it seems that a variety of approaches were taken: in some places, men who maintained plural marriages could not be baptized, but their wives could; in others, missionaries were advised that while men in plural marriages could not be ordained, no one was to be refused baptism, and that it did more harm to break up a family and leave a mother as a pariah without support than to allow an existing plural marriage to continue, as long as a man did not take more wives.

None of those examples are perfect, but they illustrate the permeable nature of boundaries around sacraments, and indeed they illustrate early instances of Anglicans having to actually think about what marriage was and could be.  I am not sure, however, if they were enforcing an Anglican (or even Christian) ethos of marriage, or simply a social and cultural norm around marriage; certainly in many cases we can say that they were doing one, or the other, or both, on a variety of matters, but particularly on the front of marriage, it is difficult to make a distinction between the two.  (I am worryingly sure that if the Anglican Church ever does embrace plural marriages of one form or another, it will be because people who look like those missionaries and colonizers wish to adopt the practice, and not because of recognizing indigenous practices besides.)

The Sacramental Character of Marriage.

So then, if the purpose of a sacrament is to elevate something into its heavenly form, to a more perfect reflection of God’s intent for us, what is the nature of marriage as a sacramental relationship?

I feel that the answer to that is clear, although I must state also that I cannot speak from experience.  My partner and I, although God has always been a part of our relationship, and is very much so now, and even though we managed to find a way to stomach being married in the eyes of the State, have not been married in the Church.  We cannot participate in that way in a sacrament which exists in such an impaired state within our Church, any more than we could take communion in a Church which refused to feed all who are hungry.  A sacrament which does not expand on what is real, on our relationships, and carry them closer to their perfection, is hard to accept as a sacrament.  Likewise, I have not married anyone.  This is a personal detail of which I do not often speak, and do not like to speak, and it is a source of pain.  I might marry a couple if I were asked, if I felt that the sacrament could be offered in a way which did not feel impaired, which felt like acting in concert with the Church and with God, but that is hard to see from here.  I wonder sometimes if my partner and I should get married in this current imperfect regime that exists within the Anglican Church of Canada, and work to draw it closer to the Kingdom of God by being a part of it, but I’m not sure.  It’s a painful reality.  It’s an impaired church.

Still, it is quite clear that Jesus calls us to make marriage a place of profound union.  Where the Fall divided us from one another, from the rest of Creation, and from God, marriage creates a crucible, a temenos, a sacred vessel in which divisions can cease, and we can truly allow ourselves to be with one another.  We should strive for that in all relationships, and it is sometimes found in most marriages, but the sacramental character of marriage is to make that the defining reality of the relationship.  That is the transformation that occurs before the altar in our faith: that the reality of our non-separation from one another is acute and undeniable.

Not all marriages end up reflecting that very well, as indeed we can leave Communion and go very quickly back to not being at peace with one another, and hoarding wealth, and many other things which cause us to draw away from God, rather than nearer to.  Still, that is the type of marriage, that is the essence of its sacramental character, and that is what Christ instituted for us.

Marriage is the place where we do not have to be in impaired relationship.  It is the place where we can truly be ourselves.  It is the experience of radical union with one another and with God.  No persona and pretense, no need to keep up appearances.

Gender, the Fall, and Relationship.

A strongly constructed sense of what it means to be a man and to be a woman can, indeed, be one of the greatest barriers to marriage as a place where all divisions cease.  I have observed no small number of marriages in which a man and a woman felt that by virtue of gender they had certain roles which must be maintained and expectations which must be met.  A man might expect that his wife must have sex with him, however and whenever he wants; a woman might expect that her husband must provide for her above all else, even to the sacrifice of his health.  Those are stereotypes and caricatures, but that is precisely the point: they are the stereotypes and caricatures which some people are genuinely led by society into experiencing and inhabiting, to the maintenance of an impaired relationship with themselves, with one another, with their partners and with God.  Gender can become something which keeps us from experiencing the reality of the Kingdom, and from experiencing the Grace of the sacrament of marriage.

I think we probably know even less about gender than we do about marriage, theologically.  Though we have spent more time on it across the history of Christianity, I am not sure we have gotten any farther, because we have been situated for so long in societies in which it was not questionable, it was not a moving target, it was not something for which we had alternative visions which could bear fruit enough for us to judge them.

It is a fond thing to look back at the beginning of Genesis and to experience maleness and femaleness as something of God’s intent for us, but that is the most profound kind of anachronism: it projects our knowledge of the world after the Fall into the Garden itself.  That is not tenable in Christian theology.

After the Fall.

After the Fall, we find ourselves in an impaired relationship.  We experience death, or we are in such a broken relationship with ourselves and God and the world that we are terrified and captivated by death.  The question of whether we live or die is a much more fundamental one than the question of gender, and while we accept that question as one which is utterly broken by the Fall (and destroyed in the Resurrection), we seem convinced that gender is what God originally intended for us.

We cannot use appeals to nature to determine God’s intent, because either nature is fallen, too, or we are so broken and distorted in our thinking, experiencing, and knowing after the Fall that we cannot just look at something and accurately see what is going on.  This is the essence of the Fall itself: we really, really want to know good and evil.  We want to know how to distinguish things, to tell them apart, to divide things up (ourselves and the whole world included) in an either-or dichotomous system.

The Fall is what tells us: things are either male or female.  We look at Creation and we see a diversity of sexual morphologies in the animal kingdom and humanity, and we are so wedded to our dichotomy of sex that we dismiss anything outside of that as an outlier or an aberration, which is an extremely weak commitment to observing nature to determine God’s intent.  We like our categories, and we implicitly work to maintain them.  That’s what keeps us in the Fall.  That’s why the Genesis story needs to remind us: male and female, he created them all.  Whatever categories we seek to place things, and particularly people, into, it’s all of God, we’re all of God.

Rejecting Category.

If we should give to death no power and withhold our assent to its claims, how can we treat gender differently?  Why are we so sure that gender as we know it, as we experience it, and as we understand it, are present in the Garden?

That, too, is a matter of personal history overwhelming theology, and taking precedence over salvation history.  If death is destroyed in Christ’s Resurrection, then Paul is surely right that in Christ there is no male or female.  That’s what our restored image in the sight of God, no longer beholden to the soot of this fallen world, is like.  We are present, we are not categorized.  We are loved, we are not divided.  We are God’s own.  That’s all.

To take gender and sexuality as we grew up with them, or as we imagine they were a hundred or two hundred years ago, then, and to imagine that they are part of the essential character of what it is to be human, is an error.  Given that, to imagine that they are an essential part of marriage, which is a sacrament constituted by relationship where all divisions cease, is beyond impairment and into idolatry, into the corruption of a sacrament by the very thing it is supposed to go beyond.

To make marriage into a matter of reproduction is to deny the marriage of Abram and Sarai.  To make it into a matter of role is an essential misunderstanding of our humility and our integrity and our wholeness before God.

We Must not Cede Marriage to Society.

It is our response to a conflict which originated in secular society which has caused us to define marriage, and to define it in terms of that conflict.  And we have attempted to maintain the sacrament in a way which threatens to destroy it: by ceding to secular categories and laws and so many other things what belongs to God, and that is ourselves, and our lives.

If we began with a blank slate, knowing nothing of these culture wars, would we really take the positions we have?  If the Church taught more about marriage, I am confident that we would not.  But the Church has not taught enough about marriage, it has been negligent as a steward of the sacrament, being intent instead to let the sacrament, the relationship, and the legality of marriage be one thing, and to mostly be disinterested in it.

Jesus Calls us to More.

Jesus calls us into radical and new relationship, into a revelation of the sacredness and the holy character of what seem like everyday things: water, bread, and us.  The most important of these things is us.  He does not tell us that the only way to experience the Kingdom is to be married, and indeed some marriages will always have a destructive relationship at their core, and many people are not called to marriage at all.  Jesus laid out an image for us of what marriage looks like in the sight of God, and what relationship looks like in the Kingdom.  He did not mean to displace marriage, or to say that the accidental character of gender was a defining feature, any more than he meant to confine any of the parables to the details of the particular people and situations within them.

Jesus gave us a sacrament, another way for us to be called into deeper relationship with him, built on what already existed.  The fact that the Church and State worked together for so long assuming they were doing the same thing does not mean that that was how it should be, and does not mean that our unexamined assumptions, our comfortable personal recollections of the recent history of that arrangement, reflects anything of God’s plan for us, or Christ’s calling to us.  Indeed, we must let ourselves look beyond the soot which surrounds us, and set aside our assumptions derived from how things have always been, and look instead to that Heavenly Kingdom where there is neither death nor gender nor any kind of suffering or limitation, and try to make the world look a little more like that, and to live our lives as though we believed it were already real.