Catholic Absolutism as the Middle Ground

I love to identify extremes and discover morally, virtuously rich middle grounds. This can be a hard exercise today when so many voices, personalities, bloggers, and op-ed'ers are yelling so loud that you start to block it out or else mistake moderation for extremism because of the exhaustion.

In attempting to teach ethics and morality to teenagers, and in conversing regularly with friends and family in the same realm, I find the trends of relativism that Benedict XVI sought so fiercely to articulate and discredit are strong and real.

Here's an attempt to describe the apparent extremes I've seen, even if they're not the technical, philosophical endpoints. On the one hand, there are rigid absolutists, seeking to describe universal moral principles and militaristically hold all people to certain behavioral expectations. Conversely, there are relativists who believe that every one can make their own morality to govern behavior, which ought to be subject to little or no accountability from any one or any thing.

What's the middle ground? I would posit that true Catholic morality - absolutism coupled with Christian compassion - sets the standard.

Using a bit of extremism myself, I walked students through the example of honor killings in SE Asia. If a woman commits adultery with a man and thus brings dishonor to her family and the only way the family believes honor can be restored is by killing her, shouldn't they be allowed to do it? Obviously not. The students rightly identified that regardless of their culture, they can't murder someone, except maybe for a capital crime. They can have some unique cultural practices, but they can't murder.

I tried to show them that relativism doesn't hold because even relativists usually admit some basic universal moral standards; in this case, murder is always wrong. I think they tend to want moral requirements to be minimal and for us to be patient, slow to act upon holding others to the standard, or even stand aside altogether. They also don't want to be judged when in reality, the best teachers, parents, and even friends are the ones who hold you, me, and them accountable.

Ultimately, they know deep within that there are behavioral rules that everyone should follow; that certain things are just plain wrong; for example, most people would acknowledge the truth of the 10 Commandments.

Where's the disconnect then? They don't like how expansive the rules apparently are, and they don't like the idea of having to tell someone they're wrong or to be told by another that they themselves are wrong. Amid ESPN's coverage of Ryan Braun, Rick Sutcliffe said Braun lied to his face in an interview, adding, "If he was guilty, he could just say so, and I'd look the other way."

As our yearlong course unfolded, I aimed to show them that, yes, the Church can and often will respond to just about any ethical, moral, social issue, but that the Church doesn't necessarily have explicit, flowerly-languaged teachings printed on gilded parchment for each of the issues. We are simply responding to the example of Christ as we understand it through our Scripture and Tradition. Our faith provides us a thorough, consistent, and coherent message that can and does respond readily to our moral dilemmas.

And most importantly, the example of Christ - loaded as it is with serious moral demands and a strong call to choose good - is one of compassion. The best morality is one that is both absolute and compassionate. We must follow Augustine's call to love the sinner and hate their sin. This requires us to identify selfish, hurtful, loveless actions when others do them, yet to do so in a way that is caring and oriented toward love, toward, Heaven, toward the Kingdom.

The temptation many of us face in an attempt to be loving is to let sin and evil occur unchecked. That is easier but wrong. We have to engage a person for their goodness and dignity as a created child of God and call out how they've ignored or damaged this quality about them. At the same time, we must scrutinize ourselves in the same way, including allowing others to point us toward God and good.

The way forward may be to acknowledge the pairing of right and righter within our behavior, to recognize the vestiges of goodness within our intentions and actions that is coopted by evil and darkness.

Maybe my temptations toward pornography vaguely represent my recognition of the beauty of people and my sexual desire to marry and procreate, but it is being perverted by self-serving tendencies and my propensity to objectify people.

Maybe our temptations toward heavy drinking and drugs indicate our desire to enjoy our lives and world and creation and build community with others, but those pursuits are clouded and diluted by self-mutilation and failure to treat our bodies as the temples-of-the-spirit that they are.

Maybe our temptations toward lying express our desire to reach our full potential and be the best versions of ourselves but get wrongly detoured into deception, fueled by hidden insecurities, or encouraged by laziness.

The best morality corrects relativism's contradictions with recognition of universal morality and tempers the rigidity of absolutism with loving compassion. We cannot lapse into an anarchic live-and-let-live attitude or become robotically itinerant and detach from humanity by obsessing over a certain code.

We must enflesh the call to goodness and God by holding ourselves and one another to a standard of choosing right through the love modeled by Christ.

Summer Buffet (Love, SBNR, DOMA, and the Kingdom)

Chalk it up to summer vacation, but I have plenty of time to write and not enough to write about. Or maybe I have plenty to write about and too little focus to synthesize it. Let me try to offer a few nuggets from the summer sandbox of life...
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As indicated in my last post, I love to see authentic examples of people helping each other, giving love in seemingly ordinary ways and affirming the full dignity of people. Though I don't go for the cheesy background music and corny staging, I think Liberty Mutual got it right - these little actions give us small reminders that people are good at heart, that we do have generosity and good will within us. And seeing it in action can reenergize us to choose good and God over evil.

As my flight from Ontario, CA, began its descent into Seattle, WA, it was confirmed that our delayed takeoff had made our arrival late as well. This posed a problem for people on connecting flights, as we were to land around 8:30pm and they were connecting to the last flights for the day. Our flight attendants announced the connecting flights' info, told us the flight to Portland would be held for those 13 passengers, and that a bus would be waiting to zip them over to their gate.

She asked those passengers to hit their call buttons so we could see where they were sitting and boldly asked that we all allow these folks to disembark first. Whoa, I thought. Yeah, right. Maybe she's new. Maybe she hasn't seen people getting off a plane before - everyone for themselves, all-out rush to the plane door. But she made the request and hoped people would acquiesce.

Sure enough, as the "fasten seat belts" light was turned off, most everyone remained seated, and a dozen or so hastily began to move out. I was in delighted disbelief as some anxious Portland-bound travelers hustled out, around rows of still-seated passengers. It was awesome to see the apparent foolhardiness of our flight attendant get redeemed by a crowd of understanding (even if reluctantly) travelers.

Go humanity.
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This Sunday at Mass in Seattle, the priest included in his homily that around half of Washington residents claimed no religion in their census reporting. I reflected on this phenomenon - "the rise of the nones" and the proliferation of being "spiritual but not religious" - at the beginning of my first year in campus ministry in a brief apologetic for religion and Catholicism and what might be missed by those who avoid it.

And now as I correspond with the chaplain who will be my partner in crime as I begin year two at a new school, I wonder how this new spiritual terrain in America can be an advantage for us as we attempt to create a school environment that is fertile for Christian-Catholic faith.

My gut reaction is to view it as a negative, evidence of an entrenching secularism, of people practicing religion poorly and alienating others by their ways. Surely, there are downfalls to the growth of these trends. However, I imagine there must be a way to engage this growing social norm in a way that is compassionate, constructive, and responsive to the Gospel and the Church.

How can the individualism, curiosity, and seeking of SBNR's lead them back to faith? What about organized religion and the Catholic Church can be emphasized to appeal to nones? What experience of faith and spirituality will speak most effectively to SBNR's and nones?

As my brain recombobulates, I hope I can put some of the pieces of that puzzle together.
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The hysteria over the DOMA ruling was quite the firestorm. I almost couldn't go on Facebook for the day in the midst of all the extremism flying both ways, the loudness of voices and capitalization of letters overshadowing the tempered middle.

I find myself in the middle. I believe marriage is the sacrament that unites a man and woman for the procreation and union of a family. I also believe that two homosexuals can have romantic love for each other and can and should commit to one another for the whole of their lives, but I don't think that is a marriage.

I am all for same-sex unions getting legal recognition by governing bodies, access to joint tax filings, reformed inheritance/estate laws, revised hospital visitation rules, and other practical things that allow their union to achieve legal/social equality. However, their commitment, while just as potentially strong as heterosexual marriage (which I think is a redundant phrase), is not a marriage - it cannot procreate or produce intimate union the way that marriage does.

My greatest concern as religion comes under greater and greater siege - abortion laws proliferating or holding steady, new anti-abortion laws coming under fanatical attack in Texas, the ACA and HHS mandating birth-control access for free and Obama's breaking his promise to Notre Dame from commencement - is that the approval of same-sex unions will require churches to host these ceremonies. I don't think this trend is far from insisting that churches allow gay couples to use churches as the venue for their ceremony.

I think there may be a way for my Church to outline the liturgical blessing of a covenant, something more akin to a Holy Orders-esque commitment to a person/partner, but not before we spend serious thought and attention discerning how something like that can be explained and understood. And that needs to be preceded by a serious recommitment to practicing what we preach - compassionate embrace of our homosexual brothers and sisters and a call for chastity from all unmarried people. For now, the state of things scares me because the discourse and discussion is being overcome by a borderline-bandwagon stream of populism that wants change quick and dirty.
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2+ years removed from writing my senior theology thesis, heading into the "junior year of life", I continue to feel grateful for the time I was able to spend researching and synthesizing understandings of the Kingdom of God.

I continue to be most grateful that my primary goal - articulating a practical, spiritually useful, relevant-to-daily-life explanation of the Kingdom - was realized, largely through the wisdom of Pope Benedict XVI. Quick recap:

The Kingdom of God is best understood through some balance of a trinity of senses, which Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, describes well. First, the Kingdom has a “Christological” dimension. Reaching back to Origen, Ratzinger explains that Jesus is the “autobasileia, that is, the Kingdom is person.” This dimension makes the Kingdom into a kind of Christology itself. Next, the Kingdom has an “idealistic or mystical” dimension, which sees “man’s interiority as the essential location of the Kingdom of God.” Finally, the “ecclesiastical” dimension shows the Kingdom of God and the Church as related in some ways and brings them into “more or less close proximity.” -Based on (with quotes from) Jesus of Nazareth (Part I), p. 49-50

The idea is that we should understand the Kingdom as being within us, within our Church, and within Christ.

We can experience the Kingdom when we do the will of God, follow the Gospel call from Christ; as in the Lord's Prayer's sentiment "thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven", we experience Heaven when our will aligns with God's will.

We can experience the Kingdom when we celebrate in prayer and worship with our Christian community, which memorializes what Christ has done for us, thanks Him for what He does, and looks forward to what He will do. When our communal work (liturgy!) happens this way, we glimpse the Kingdom.

We can experience the Kingdom through the person of Christ. Our experiences of Him in our giving and receiving love, in the Word, and in the Sacrament manifest the Kingdom.

All of these moments of clarity are both previews or foreshadows as well as brief temporal experiences of the Kingdom of Heaven. This guiding hand of Benedict toward a real understanding of where the Kingdom is seen and felt led me to a deeper understanding of what Jesus talked so much about.

Keep seeking the Kingdom in yourself, in service with the Church, and in Christ!