RonRolheiser,OMI

The Taste of Banter and Wine

June 12, 2023

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Elizabeth Poreba ends a poem, No Good Company, with these words:

I’ve got no banter,

I’m all judgement and edges, an edgy white lady

Wondering what to do, what to do next

As in Jesus is coming, look busy. 

At the wedding feast in Cana, Mary tells Jesus, they have no wine, asking him to create some.What do wine and banter have in common? Both bring a needed extra into our lives.

Let’s start with wine. Wine is not a protein, something the body needs to be nourished and kept alive, part of an essential diet. It’s an extra that provides something special for one’s health. Taken with the right spirit and in moderation, wine can help lift the mood, lighten the heart, and warm the conversation, even as it helps (at least for the moment) lessen some of the tensions among us. It’s a grease that can help make a conversation, a family dinner, or a social gathering flow more pleasantly.

Banter? Well, like wine, if taken with the right spirit and in moderation, it can also lift the mood, lighten the heart, warm a conversation, and lessen tensions at a gathering. Classical Greek thought suggested that love has six components: Eros – emotional and sexual attraction; mania – emotional obsession; asteismos – playfulness and banter; storge – care and solicitousness; pragma – practical arrangement and accommodation; philia – friendship; and agape – altruism.

Normally, when we think of love, we think of each of these components, except the aspect of banter and playfulness. Our romantic selves identify love very much with emotional obsession and sexual attraction. Our religious and moral selves identify love with care, friendship, and altruism, and our pragmatic selves identify it with practical arrangement. Few speak of the place and importance of banter, or playfulness, of healthy teasing, of humor, but these are often the grease that keeps the others flowing more smoothly.

Here’s an example: For all my adult life, I’ve lived in various religious houses, in community with other vowed religious (in my case, men). We don’t get to pick with whom we live, but are assigned to a community, along with everyone else who lives there. And we come together with our different backgrounds, different personalities, and different eccentricities. This can be a formula for tension and yet, for the most part, it works, is pleasant, and provides life-giving support and fellowship. What makes it work? Why don’t we end up killing each other? How do we live (for the most part) pleasantly together beyond our differences, immaturities, and egos?

Well, there’s a common mission that keeps us working together and, most importantly, there’s regular common prayer that helps us see each other in a better light. But, very importantly, there is banter, playfulness, healthy teasing, and humor which, like wine at a table, help take the edge off things and ease the tension inherent in our differences. A community that doesn’t stay light-hearted through banter, playfulness, and healthy teasing will eventually become everything that light-hearted is not, namely, heavy, drab, full of tension, and pompous. In every healthy community I’ve lived in, one of the things that made it healthy (and pleasant to come home to) was banter, playfulness, loving teasing, and humor. These are rich wines that can enliven the table of any family and any community.

This, of course, like drinking wine, can be overdone and be a way of avoiding harder conversations that need to be had. As well, banter can keep us relating to each other in ways that actually hinder genuine community. Humor, banter, the jokester, and the prankster need to know when enough is enough and when serious conversation needs to happen. The risk of overdoing banter is real, though perhaps the greater risk lies in trying to live together in its absence.

Banter, playfulness, loving teasing, and humor don’t just help us relate to each other beyond our differences, they also help deflate the pomposity that is invariably the child of over-seriousness. They help keep our families and communities grounded and pleasant.

I grew up in a large family, with each of us having strong personalities and plenty of faults; yet, save for very few occasions, our house, which was physically too small for so large a family, was pleasant to be in because it was perennially filled with banter, playfulness, humor, and healthy teasing. We seldom had wine, but we had banter! When I look back on what my family gave me, I am deeply grateful for many gifts: faith, love, safety, trust, support, education, moderation, and moral sensitivity. But it also taught me banter, playfulness, healthy teasing, and humor. No small gift.

At the wedding feast in Cana, Jesus’ mother noticed that, even though a wedding celebration was happening, something wasn’t right. Was it a heaviness? An over-seriousness? Was it an unhealthy pomposity? Was there a noticeable tension in the room? Whatever. Something was missing, so she goes to Jesus and says: “Son, they have no banter!”

Blessing Others as the Endgame of Sexuality

June 5, 2023

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Although not too many people might recognize this, the #MeToo movement is, in essence, a strong advocate for chastity. If chastity can be defined as standing before another with reverence, respect, and patience, then most everything about the #MeToo movement speaks explicitly of the non-negotiable importance of chastity and implicitly for what our sexuality is ultimately meant to do, namely, to bless others rather than to exploit them.

What #MeToo has helped expose is how sex is often used as power, power to force sexual consent, power to either allow or block someone from advancement in her life and career, and power to make someone’s workplace a place of comfort and safety or a place of discomfort and fear. This has been going on since the beginning of time and remains the sexual tool today of many people in positions of power and prestige: Hollywood directors, television personalities, university professors, famous athletes, employers, spiritual leaders, and persons of every kind who wield power and prestige. Too often, persons with power and prestige let themselves (however unconsciously) be taken over by the ancient archetype of the king, where the belief was that all the women in the land belonged to the king, and he had sexual privilege by divine right. The #MeToo movement is saying that this time in history is over and something else is being asked from persons in power, authority, and prestige. What’s being asked?

In a word, blessing. What God and nature ask of power is that it bless rather than exploit, use privilege to enhance rather than harass, and create a space of security rather than a place of fear. Imagine, for example, if in every one of those high profile instances where a Hollywood producer, a television personality, a star athlete, or a spiritual leader was indicted for harassing, exploiting, and assaulting women, those men, instead of wielding power and prestige, had used that power instead to help those women gain more access to security and success rather than (pardon the terminology) hitting on them. Imagine if they had used their power to bless those women, to simply admire their beauty and energy, make them feel safer, and help them in their careers. How different things would be today both for those women and for those men. Both would be happier, healthier, and have a deeper appreciation of sex. Why? What’s the connection between blessing and sex?

To bless a person is to do two things: First, it is to give that person the gaze of non-exploitive admiration, to admire him or her without any angle of self-interest. Next, to bless someone is to use your own power and prestige to help make that other person’s life safer and secure and help that person flourish in his or her dreams and endeavors. To bless another person is to say to him or her: I delight in your beauty and energy. Now, what can I do for you that helps you (and isn’t in my self-interest)?  To bless another in this way is the highest expression of sexuality and of chastity.  How so?

Sexuality is more than having sex and chastity is more than abstinence. Sexuality is the drive inside us for community, friendship, wholeness, family, creativity, play, transpersonal meaning, altruism, enjoyment, delight, sexual fulfilment, being immortal, and everything that takes us beyond our aloneness. But this has developmental stages. Its earlier stages focus on having sex, on emotional intimacy, and on generativity, on giving birth and nurturing. Its later stages focus on blessing, on admiration, and on giving away so that others might have more.

Dare I say this? The most mature expression of sexuality on this planet is not a couple making perfect love, wonderful and sacred though that is. Rather, it is a grandparent looking at a grandchild with a love that is purer and more selfless than any love he or she has ever experienced before, a love without any self-interest, which is only admiration, selflessness, and delight. In that moment, this person is mirroring God looking at the initial creation and exclaiming: It is good; it is very good! What follows then is that this person, like God, will try to open paths, even at the cost of death, so that another’s life may flourish.

God and nature intended sex for many purposes – intimacy, delight, generativity, community, and pleasure – but this has many modalities. Perhaps its ultimate expression is that of admiration, of someone looking at another person or at the world with the sheer gaze of admiration, with everything inside of that person somehow saying: Wow! I delight in you! Your energy enriches this world! How can I help you?  The higher integrates and cauterizes the lower. There are no temptations to violate the beauty and dignity of the other when we can give her or him the sheer gaze of admiration.

Admiration and blessing are the endgame of sexuality. Would that those in power indicted by #MeToo had admired rather than exploited.

Wonder Has Left the Building

May 29, 2023

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In a poem entitled, Is/Not, Margaret Atwood suggests that when a love grows numb, this is where we find ourselves:

We’re stuck here
on this side of the border
in this country of thumbed streets and stale buildings

where there is nothing spectacular to see
and the weather is ordinary

where love occurs in its pure form only
on the cheaper of the souvenirs

Love can grow numb between two people, just as it can within a whole culture. And that has happened in our culture, at least to a large part. The excitement that once guided our eyes has given way to a certain numbness and resignation. We no longer stand before life with much freshness. We have seen what it has to offer and have succumbed to a certain resignation: That’s all there is, and it’s not that great!  All we can try for now is more of the same, with the misguided hope that if we keep increasing the dosage the payoff will be better.

They talk of old souls, but old souls are actually young at heart. We’re the opposite, young souls no longer young at heart. Wonder has left the building.

What’s at the root of this? What has deprived us of wonder? Familiarity and its children: sophistication, intellectual pride, disappointment, boredom, and contempt. Familiarity does breed contempt, and contempt is the antithesis of the two things needed to stand before the world in wonder: reverence and respect.

G.K. Chesterton once suggested that familiarity is the greatest of all illusions. Elizabeth Barrett Browning gives poetic expression to this: Earth’s crammed with heaven. And every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries and daub their natural faces unaware. That aptly describes the illusion of familiarity, plucking berries while carelessly stroking our faces, unaware that we are in the presence of the holy. Familiarity renders all things common.

What’s the answer? How do we recover our sense of wonder? How do we begin again to see divine fire inside ordinary life?  Chesterton suggests that the secret to recovering wonder and seeing divine fire in the ordinary is to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. Biblically, that’s what God asks of Moses when Moses sees a burning bush in the desert and approaches its fire out of curiosity. God says to him, take off your shoes, the ground you are standing on is holy ground.

That single line, that singular invitation, is the deep secret to recover our sense of wonder whenever we find ourselves, as Atwood describes, stuck on this side of the border, in thumbed streets and stale buildings, with nothing spectacular to see, ordinary weather, and love seemingly cheapened everywhere.

One of my professors in graduate school occasionally offered us this little counsel: If you ask a naïve child, do you believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny, he will say yes. If you ask a bright child the same question, he will say no. But if you ask yet still a brighter child that question, he will smile and say yes.

Our sense of wonder is predicated initially on the naivete of being a child, of not yet being unhealthily familiar with the world. 0ur eyes then are still open to marvel at the newness of things. That changes of course as we grow, experience things, and learn. Soon enough we learn the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny and with that, all too easily, comes the death of wonder and the familiarity that breeds contempt. This is a disillusionment which, while a normal transitional phase in life, is not meant to be a place in which we stay. The task of adulthood is to regain our sense of wonder and begin again, for very different reasons, to believe in the reality of Santa and the Easter Bunny. We need to bring wonder back into the building.

I once heard a wise man share this vignette: Imagine a two-year-old child who asks you, “where does the sun go at night?” For a child that young, don’t pull out a globe or a book and try to explain how the solar system works. Just tell the child the sun is tired and is taking a sleep behind the barn. However, when the child is six or seven years old, don’t try that anymore. Then, it’s time to pull out books and explain the solar system. After that, when the child is in high school or college, it’s time to pull out Steven Hawking, Brian Swimme, and astrophysicists, and talk about the origins and make-up of the universe. Finally, when the person is eighty years old, it’s enough again to say, “the sun is tired and is taking a sleep behind the barn.”

We have grown too familiar with sunsets! Wonder can make the familiar unfamiliar again.

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