RonRolheiser,OMI

Celibacy and Marriage Need Each Other

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“Why did early Christianity alight on the ideal of virginity, when an intelligent or even just a suspicious Roman could see that its adoption would undermine the very fabric of ancient society?” That’s a comment from historian Kate Cooper and it poses some questions worth examining.

Does the single state, celibacy, (vowed or otherwise) undermine something inside the fabric of society? Is it somehow a statement against marriage? Does it go against something within nature itself where there is an innate imperative to “increase and multiply”?

The latter question is easier to answer. The human race has now exceeded eight billion. There is much less need to ensure that there are enough people in the world to ensure our biological survival. In former times, indeed in biblical times, there was a strong, quasi-sacred imperative that people marry and have children. Remaining unmarried was looked upon negatively, as an abnormality. Nature is not being honored or fulfilled here. Why is this person not doing his or her duty in terms of having children? That’s one of the reasons why Jesus’ choice of celibacy stands out as something abnormal in his world.

Next, does single life, celibacy, somehow speak against marriage? Does it, simply by definition, undermine the fabric of society? Doesn’t God, at the creation of the human race, pronounce that it is not good for the human person to be alone?

That question deserves more than a hurried answer. God did say this, and God meant it. We are meant to live inside family, in community, and not live alone. Thus, the single life has its dangers. Thomas Merton was once asked by a journalist what it was like to live as a celibate. His answer: It’s hell. You live in a loneliness that God Himself condemned. But, then he quickly added that this was a loneliness that could be very fruitful.

Still the question remains, is the single life, celibacy, somehow a statement against marriage? It can be. Choosing not to be married can be a statement that marriage isn’t the best way to live, that it is a container (a prison) which unhealthily restricts human freedom and human maturity. Single life in that instance (which is then often far from celibate) is a statement against marriage.

Healthy marriage and healthy single life in fact support each other. There’s an axiom which says: If you are here faithfully, you bring us health and support. If you are here unfaithfully, you bring us restlessness and chaos.

Fidelity in either marriage or in celibacy is a marathon with temptations of every kind along the way. It demands the capacity to sweat blood at times to remain faithful to what you have promised and to what is best in you. But it needs the support and witness of others. In neither vocation are you meant to go it alone, to be the lonely, stoic, ascetic hero. You are meant instead to be buoyed up and held by the support and faithful witness of others.

Thus, when a celibate sees fidelity being lived out inside a marriage, it becomes easier for him or her to remain faithful inside celibacy. Conversely, when a celibate sees infidelity inside of a marriage, he or she feels more isolated and alone inside celibacy and lacks a certain grace (which comes through witness) to sweat blood in terms of being faithful inside of celibacy.

The same dynamic holds true for a married person. If he or she sees a celibate faithfully and fruitfully living inside the single life, he or she is graced through that witness to find both some insight and strength to be true to his or her commitment. Conversely, if a married person sees a celibate living unfaithfully, he or she will lack a special grace that comes from witnessing fidelity which can help him or her sweat the blood that is sometimes required in order to remain faithful in a commitment.

As curious as this may sound, Marriage and Celibacy need each other. We need each other’s witness. We need to see, and feed off, each other’s fidelity.

And that’s true beyond just seeing each other being faithful. There’s a deeper reality undergirding this, a mystical one. As Christians, we believe that we are all part of one body, the Body of Christ, and that our unity there is not simply a corporate one (one team). Rather we are an organic unity, all part of one living organism. Hence, what one part does affects all the parts. If we are faithful, we are a healthy part of the immune system inside the Body of Christ. If we are unfaithful, in either marriage or celibacy, we are an unhealthy virus, a cancer cell, inside the body.

For Christians, there is no such a thing as a private act. We are either a healthy enzyme or an unhealthy virus inside a single body, where our fidelity or infidelity affects everyone else.

And so, we need each other’s fidelity – in marriage and in celibacy.

The World Will be Saved by Beauty

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In the movie The English Patient there’s a very heartwarming scene.

A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who’s been badly burned in an air crash, and a young Asian man whose job is to find and defuse landmines. The young man and the nurse become friends and, one day, he announces he has a special surprise for her.

He takes her to an abandoned church in which he has set up a series of ropes and pulleys that will lift her to the ceiling where, hidden in darkness, are beautiful mosaics and wonderful works of art that cannot be seen from the floor. He gives her a torch as a light and pulls her up through a series of ropes so that she swings like an angel with wings, high above the floor and is able with the help of her torch to see beautiful masterpieces hidden in the dark.

For her, the experience is one of exhilaration; she has the sensation of flying and of seeing wonderful beauty all at the same time. When she’s finally lowered back to the floor she’s flushed with excitement and gratitude and covers the young man’s face with kisses, saying over and over again: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for showing this to me!”

And from her expression, you see too that she is expressing a double thanks: “Thank you for showing me something that I could never have come to on my own and thank you for trusting me enough to think that I would understand this, for trusting that I would get it!”

There’s a lesson here?

The Church needs to do for the world exactly what this young man did for his nurse friend; it needs to show the world where to look for a beauty it would not find on its own, a beauty that is hidden in darkness. And it needs to trust that people will “get it,” will appreciate the richness of what they are being shown.

Where might the Church find such hidden beauty? In the deep rich wells of its own history, and in nature, in art, in science, in children, in the energy of the young, and in the wisdom of the old. There are treasures of beauty hidden everywhere. The Church’s task is to point these out to the world. Why?

Because beauty has the power to touch and transform the soul, to instill wonder and gratitude in a way that few things have. Confucius understood this. That’s why he suggested that beauty is the greatest of all teachers and why he based his philosophy of education on beauty. People can doubt almost anything, except beauty.

Why can’t beauty be doubted? Because beauty is an attribute of God. Classical Christian philosophy and theology tell us that God has four transcendental properties, namely, God is “One, True, Good, and Beautiful.” If this is true, then to be touched by beauty is to be touched by God; to admire beauty is to admire God; to be shown beauty in hidden places is to be shown God in hidden places; to be in awe of beauty is to be in awe of God; and to feel that awe is to feel a homesickness for heaven.

 The renowned theologian Hans Urs Von Baltasar highlighted how beauty is a key component in how God speaks to us and how that should color how we speak about God to the world.

However, we shouldn’t be naïve in our understanding of this. Beauty isn’t always pretty in the way that popular culture perceives it. Granted, beauty can be seen in the spectacular colors of a sunset, or in the smile and innocence of a child, or in the perfection of a Michelangelo sculpture, but it can also be seen in the wrinkles of an old woman and in the toothless smile of an old man.

God speaks through beauty and so must we. Moreover, we must believe enough in people’s sensitivity and intelligence to trust that they, like the nurse in The English Patient, will appreciate what they are being shown.

In a famous line (often quoted by Dorothy Day) Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky writes: The world will be saved by beauty. What’s the logic here? How might beauty cure the many ills which beset us?

Here’s Dostoevsky’s algebra: In the face of brutality, what’s needed is tenderness; in the face of hype and ideology, what’s needed is truth; in the face of bitterness and curses, what’s needed are graciousness and blessing; in the face of hatred and murder, what’s needed are love and forgiveness; in the face of the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt, what’s needed are awe and wonder; and in the face the ugliness and vulgarity that pervades our world and our evening news, what’s needed is beauty.

A Tradition of the Heart – Roman Catholic Devotions

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Growing up in a Roman Catholic home, devotions were always a vital part of our religious diet. While our family saw the Eucharist as more important than devotions, we nourished our spiritual lives a lot on devotions, as did many Roman Catholics back then.

Among other things, we prayed the rosary every day, prayed the Angelus daily, prayed special litanies (St. Joseph in March, Mary in May and October, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June), prayed the Stations of the Cross each Friday in Lent, were anxious to attend Eucharist on First Fridays and First Saturdays to obtain special promises from God, and said special prayers to obtain indulgences.

As well, there were pilgrimages to Marian shrines for those who could afford them and most everyone wore medals from Lourdes or Fatima and had a special devotion to those shrines (with a special devotion in my own family and parish to Our Lady of the Cape, at Cap De Madeleine, Quebec). Devotions were a big part of our spiritual lives.

What’s to be said about devotions from a theological view and from the view of a culture that mostly distrusts them?

We might begin with the reaction of Martin Luther and the great Protestant reformers. They were fearful of two things in devotions. First, at that time, some devotions were too unbridled and were simply bad theology (famously, selling indulgences). Second, they saw devotions, not as necessarily bad in themselves, but as often displacing Jesus and God’s Word as our center and main focus. And so, they distanced themselves from basically all Roman Catholic devotions, the unbridled as well as the healthy.

For the most part that Protestant and Evangelical distrust of Roman Catholic devotions has come down right to our own day. While that distrust is breaking down today in some non-Roman churches today, it is still the prevalent attitude inside most Protestant and Evangelical circles. In brief, they distrust most devotions because they are seen not just as deflecting our focus from the centrality of Jesus and the Word, but also as potentially unhealthy contaminates, as junk food in our spiritual diet.

What’s to be said about that?

It’s a fair and needed warning to Roman Catholics (and others) who nourish their spiritual lives with devotions. Bottom line, devotions can easily ground themselves on shaky theology and can be a junk food contaminating our spiritual diet: where devotions replace scripture, Mary replaces Jesus as center, and certain ritual practices make God seem like a puppet on a string.

However, that being admitted, as Goethe once said, the dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Yes, devotions can be a danger, but they can also be a rich healthy supplement in our essential diet of Word and Eucharist.

Here’s how Eric Mascall (the renowned Anglican theologian at Oxford with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Austin Ferrar) spells out both the danger of devotions and the danger of not having devotions as part of your spiritual life: The protestant reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were so afraid of contamination by Roman Catholic devotions, that they put us on a diet of antiseptics. When you’re on a diet of antiseptics, you won’t suffer from food poisoning, but you can suffer from malnutrition.

That’s an equal challenge to both those who practice devotions and those who fear them. The theology undergirding certain devotions admittedly can be sloppy (for example, Mary is not a co-redeemer with Jesus). However, inside many devotions (to Mary, to the saints, to Eucharist adoration, to the Sacred Heart) there can be a rich nutrition which helps nourish the center, namely, God’s Word and the Eucharist.

The late Wendy Wright in her book Sacred Heart: Gateway to God makes a wonderful apologia for Catholic devotional practices, particularly devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For her, Catholic devotional practices are a tradition of the heart. While Jesus remains central and his resurrection remains the real anchor for our faith, devotions can give us something beyond just this raw essential.

Using devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an example, she writes: “In this devotion, we, and Jesus and the saints, exist in some essential way outside the chronology of historical time. The tradition of the heart makes this vividly, even grotesquely, clear. The divine–human correspondence is intimate. It is discovered in the flesh. Our fleshy hearts are fitted for all that is beyond flesh by conforming to the heart of Jesus. That divine–human heart is the passageway between earth and heaven. That heart is the tactile tracings of divine love on the created order. That heart is the widest, wildest longing of humankind’s own love.”The dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Devotions can deflect us from what’s more central and can take their root in some questionable theology, but they can also, in Wendy Wright’s words, be a blessed passageway for the heart between heaven and earth.