An Afternoon of Quad Golf

by Rob Goodale

They say that golf has too much walking to be a good game, and just enough of a game to spoil a good walk. I suppose They (whoever They are) may be right, but only in the same way that an illiterate person staring at a library would be right in saying it’s a mammoth waste of paper and space, which is to say that They don’t know enough to know that They are wrong.

I used to hate playing golf. Sometimes, when I forget what it’s for, I still do.

There is an ever-present complaint about most athletic endeavors: from the outside, nothing makes sense. The critiques of the outsiders are not totally without merit, either—baseball is boring, and football is barbaric, and hockey is absolutely ridiculous. ¹

But, to boldly paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin, nothing is ridiculous if you know how to see. I find that the pageantry and ceremony surrounding sporting events, especially when money is involved, serve as a colossal distraction from the beauty of the game itself. Strip away all the bells and whistles, and you discover the truly magical elements of sport. Church league basketball played in dusty gyms is more interesting to me than the NBA Finals. A family tossing a football around in the backyard is more momentous than Notre Dame-USC. The British Open is not nearly as wondrous as an afternoon of quad golf.

I do not know who invented quad golf, but I have spent nearly a decade as a student of the game. Best played on a college campus with ample green space, the necessary equipment for quad golf is a single golf club and a tennis ball. Holes are improvised one-at-a-time, usually with a great deal of debate, at once earnest and tongue-in-cheek, about whether that fire hydrant or this rock or the light pole over there presents the best target.

Keeping score is illegal in quad golf, but nobody really enforces this rule. Contestants often spend the first hole or two meticulously counting their strokes, and I have even been known on one occasion to dare to write scores down, but before long the spirit of the game takes over, and it becomes evident to all parties that there are more important aspects of the game than keeping tally of the number of times you swing the club.

Country-club golfers are confined to groups of four, in the interest of keeping the pace of play—as though all these grown men swatting a plastic ball around the yard were in a hurry to be somewhere else after they are finished. There are no such concerns with quad golf, which allows for the size of the group to ebb and flow. I once was party to a round of quad golf played with a crowd nearing a dozen; as you may expect, this was an especially boisterous and joy-filled afternoon.

First-time quad golfers often experience a rush of rebellious elation, I suppose due to the strange sensation of waiting on the tee box for a family of five and their dog to clear out of the fairway. This is similar to the surge of panicked guilt when a swiftly struck tennis ball rolls gently past an old lady and her doddering husband, certain that they will be deeply offended. Yet they never are; in fact, it is always the unassuming spectators who seem to enjoy quad golf the most. Many will offer words of encouragement, and every now and then a middle-aged dad will offer a strategic tip or two, because that’s what middle-aged dads do.

An afternoon of quad golf yields an unexpected symphony: the peculiar thwop of a golf club hitting a tennis ball and the insatiable giggling and the mock sincerity with which contestants debate the best strategy for avoiding that pesky copse of trees and the merry whistling (there’s always someone inexplicably whistling during a round of quad golf). In the words of the brilliant Brian Doyle, everything’s music, so long as you hear it right.

Quad golf, despite its frivolity, is in fact a reacquaintance with the beauty of golf. People who know things will tell you that golf isn’t a competition between players. The thing I have always gotten wrong about golf is that it isn’t a competition with the course, either. When it’s done well, golf is a cooperation with the course, an exercise in paying attention to the forces of nature—the slope of terrain, the arrangement of trees, the wind whispering through branches—and discovering what the course wants you to do, hidden in plain view.²

The secret of golf, which I think is the secret of sport, and maybe also of human life, is that the key to flourishing is to take yourself less seriously and play. Chasing a tennis ball around the yard is, of course, best done with rampant and unbridled childlike joy, and is therefore very good training for “real life,” which is in the end not all that different from quad golf. The essentials are the same: improvise well, refuse to keep score, never be in a hurry, welcome many companions, and listen to the music.

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1 Full grown people attach knife blades to their shoes, slide around on ice and swing sticks to try to knock a rubber disc into a cage. And yeah, you could make such reductive claims about anything, but to me, hockey seems particularly silly.^↩

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2 Actually being able to do what the course tells you is another thing entirely, but it’s easier than you would expect if you’re paying attention. ^↩

Staying Home

by Dan Masterton

The you’re-going-to-have-a-baby books tell you to start talking about and planning child-care months before the baby is expected to arrive. They warn that the good places fill up fast, that pricing is tricky, and that logistics can get complicated. We knew we had paternity leave to help bridge the gap from our daughter’s birth back into work life, and we took time to weigh all the options.

My wife, Katherine, is a nurse. This means her earning power is much better, and her three 12-hour shifts each week leave four days that she could be home with our daughter, Lucy. I could then work full-time, and we would only need childcare one, two, or three days a week depending on her shift assignments. Alternatively, I floated the idea of trying to peel my ministry work back to part-time so that I could cover that slice of child-care while she was at work and thus avoid child-care altogether. We did the math, and even with basic child-care costs, we’d come out ahead if we had two full incomes. I felt drawn to the idea of being a partial stay-at-home dad, but was wrestling with my still-strong passion for campus ministry (and the stronger bottom line it could bring).

I suggested to my wife that I look around for full-time jobs, given the uncertain nature of my current job and school, and that perhaps the nature of what was out there could guide our decision. I submitted a few applications and did a few interviews, ¹ while also keeping an open line with my current employer. Whether through the competition and oversaturated market of ministry/theology types or the providence of discernment, ² none of those leads panned out. Meanwhile, my current supervisor remained wonderfully supportive, encouraging my creativity in figuring out a return plan that could work for my family and the school, as Katherine felt more and more like she’d prefer to avoid child-care and keep Lucy home with us, if possible.

With juniors and seniors returning to finish out the last two years of our school, the administration had to be creative in assembling a staff it could afford while also sustaining continuity and quality for these last high school students. Seeking to continue solid liturgy and strong service and especially to have an excellent last Kairos ever,³ it made sense for them and for me to come back. My greatest reservation with my work was with teaching -- from lesson plans to gradebooks to parents and conferences to academic policies -- and that could be taken off my plate by scaling back to a part-time role. I could focus on retreats, service, and liturgy; I could come in two days a week plus odd extra times; I could leave teaching to the teachers; I could be a source of continuity for our students. Done deal. I am grateful for the match.

As always, discernment and vocation necessitate constant attention and reflection. I know I am called to fatherhood and love being a dad; I know I am called to ministry and love being a campus minister. This is a tension I invite, and one I named candidly in my interviews that perhaps dropped me behind candidates who could throw themselves more deeply in the jobs. I know that I always take a proactive approach to life, both to the hours and days and to the months and years. I always try to actively keep priorities straight and plan well, to find time for myself and self-care while making quality time for others. While this can be a huge asset in my work, I knew that it would also help me excel at being home with my daughter and being a good homemaker for my family.

I know I’ll be able to find small ways to retain a sense of productivity and accomplishment for myself, this blog chief among them, as well as provide for and take care of my family -- not by bringing in a hefty paycheck but by cooking, cleaning, shopping, and being patient and present to my two girls. I know that my gifts and passions and energies can find a new positive object in the calls of fatherhood and homemaking and the greater time I’m committing to them. And I know that the desire I have to be a exceptional father and exceptional husband can flourish if I use this increased space well. I want to approach it “professionally” -- not with excessive formalism or stuffiness but with full force of enthusiasm and creativity that one would pour into a job that one loves.

The whole equation of working just two days a week and enlarging my focus on being a father and husband is wonderfully liberating, humbling, and simplifying. To put it simply, it clears the deck of flimsy diversions that I allow to cloud my focus. The vainer, more arrogant part of me too easily panders to the allure of dangerous questions: Does my ministry have a sufficiently high profile and positive image? Does my school and the attention is draws bring prestige to me and my work? Does my writing and my speaking make a quantity impact in the Church world? Am I difference-maker who can make a name for myself in ministry?

In reality -- a reality I know but for which I need constant, thorough reminders -- none of those ministry things are meant to be like that, and parenthood purifies that stubborn impulse in me. Parenthood comes with no awards, no image, no profile. It’s just me, my daughter, and my wife, and the love I give and receive. Realigning the priorities of my life to fit the calls of my career and family gives me a new way to fundamentally become myself. It invites me to evolve beyond grasping toward what I erroneously try or have tried to be.

My hope, too, is that more moms and dads can have the chance to this for themselves, for their families, and for the Kingdom.⁴ I am blessed that the stability of my family and my wife’s family set us up to become adults smoothly, and that our sense of responsibility and fidelity pointed us toward our vocations in our new family well. It’s amazing to be in a position to freely choose to work less and be home more and to be able to make the finances work stably for our family.

Liberation theology teaches that we must reform our social systems to erase the unjustly imposed material poverty that prevents people from realizing their fullness in Christ as sons and daughters of God. I am grateful for the blessing to have the socioeconomic stability⁵ to consider this as an option, and for the corresponding joy and passion that drives me and my family to choose to do it.

Too many kisses, dad.

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1 I always imagine that ministry interviews just must be so different from business-y interviews -- there’s a conversational tone and authenticity that I imagine isn’t there in other sectors -- and in that vein, I shared openly about my discernment of full-time work versus becoming more of a stay-at-home dad.^↩

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2 Among the odd details, my paternity leave benefit came with the caveat that I must return to work for 60 days following my leave or else I may be required to pay back the leave salary. Working at a school that was phasing out its high school (and the majority of my responsibilities) and with an eight-months pregnant wife, I secured oral confirmation that the post-leave return wouldn’t apply to me, but when I asked for written confirmation, I never got it. That in-between reality also hung over all of this and perhaps greased the skids of providence to help things resolve themselves.^↩

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3 Plus, we only have one Kairos a year, due to our small class size -- so a best last Kairos ever and the only last Kairos ever, not a set of three of four.^↩

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4 Not trying to be highfalutin, but I feel strongly that loving, strong marriage and raising children in faith and love is one of the, if not the most, concrete thing we can do to build God’s Kingdom. To God’s will is to glimpse heaven, so by answering the call to fatherhood and family, I glimpse heaven when I give and receive love well.^↩

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5 The opportunity for paid parental leave is integral to that. ^↩

Confessions from Undergrad

by Jenny Klejeski

I have a confession to make:
I did not love my college experience.

Let me go further to say that I believe my college experience, in many ways, was destructive to me as a human being. For much of it, I was quite unhappy, unhealthy, and anxious.

Before I say more, let me clarify what I don’t mean. I don’t mean that I’m not immensely grateful for the opportunities afforded me by my education (and grateful for the chance to even have an education in the first place). I don’t mean that I don’t value the friendships I made, the things I learned, the professors I had, and many of the things I experienced. I’m not even bitter about the tremendous amount of debt that I accrued (honestly).

So, what was it that made me so discontented those four years? And why do I think it’s worth mentioning now?

To put it simply, I was seeking an experience rather than an education. And in some ways, I missed out on both. I didn’t really understand what I was at college to do, and that lack of purpose and the places where I (wrongly) looked for that purpose led me to some deep unhappiness. The reason I’m writing about it now is not simply because it was my experience, but because I believe it belies a deeper crisis in higher education that needs to be brought to light.

In order to better understand this problem, allow me to paint a picture of my high school self. I was your average over-achiever (is that an oxymoron?), taking college classes at our local community college, participating in extracurriculars, volunteering at my Church, etc. And for the most part, I was doing these things for the right reasons; I did them because I was interested and I wanted to.

As high school went on, ambition began to creep in. Perfectly innocent ambition, too. What did I want to do after high school? Go to the University of Notre Dame, of course!

So, what did I need to do in order to apply for my very competitive dream school? Guard my 4.0 a little more closely. Tally up my various extracurriculars, awards, and service experiences. Try to add a few more into my schedule to pad my transcript. Write essays about my passions and aspirations. Actually study for standardized tests.

I needed to define myself in terms of my accomplishments. Now, this is not a bad thing in and of itself; this is just part of interacting with the world. But let me say this: in the process of receiving two letters of rejection from Notre Dame, I learned very well how to define myself by my accomplishments. How to guard my GPA much more zealously. How to make time for yet another extracurricular to prove how well-rounded I am. How to write eloquent, convincing essays about how much I really wanted a more rigorous education.

By the time I was actually accepted as a student at Notre Dame halfway through sophomore year, I didn’t know how to do anything other than achieve at a high level all. the. time. I felt as though I had spent the past several years trying to convince people that I could achieve this thing and now that I had been given the opportunity, I needed to work doubly hard to prove it. Besides having the “transfer student inferiority complex” (i.e. thinking that basically everyone here was smarter than me because they got in the first try), I fed into the cultural narrative that these were supposed to be some of the best years of my life—that I needed to try (ALL THE) new things—that I needed to figure out definitively my passion in life.

As the rigor of my academics increased, as I took on more and more leadership roles, as I looked for opportunities to figure out what I wanted to do in life, I slept less, ate less, and had less of a social life. By my senior year I was president of the Liturgical Choir, secretary of The Children of Mary club, on the planning committee for a the Edith Stein Conference, had an internship at Ave Maria Press, had two work study jobs (one at the Law School and another in Campus Ministry), and was finishing up a double major in English and theology. While none of these things was bad of itself, It’s no wonder that off the top of my head I can count at least a dozen distinct locations that I pulled all-nighters. I was anxious and stressed out constantly. I had embraced the persona of the frazzled, exhausted intellectual—a martyr to my studies and activities.

Thankfully, through God’s grace and the help of friends, I stayed close to the Sacraments during undergrad—attending Mass every day, making Chapel visits, going to Confession—and was eventually able to emerge from that darkness. But many do not have the positive support I had. It’s unsurprising to me that we see such high rates of anxiety, depression, casual sex, drug and alcohol use, and suicide in college-age people when we, as a culture, have demanded an unsustainable lifestyle.¹

My purpose in writing this is not to elicit sympathy or air grievances. I write this to point out that we have a major problem in our educational system. We have lost a sense of education as being an activity of leisure. Not leisure as a “time off” or a “break,” but leisure as the state in which contemplation of higher things is made possible. In Leisure, The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper remarks that the “‘liberality’ or ‘freedom’ of the liberal arts consists in their not being disposable for purposes, that they do not need to be legitimated by a social function, by being ‘work.’” In other words, the real purpose of a liberal arts education is not a utilitarian one. The liberal arts are meant to be an end in and of themselves. Our problem is that we have fed into the lie that the only things worth doing are things that can be commodified. The liberal arts have become a victim of the transactionally-minded meritocracy we live in.

The English word “school” comes (through the Latin) from the Greek word for “leisure.” An institution of higher learning ought to be a place in which, born of true leisure, students are given the opportunity to contemplate truth, goodness, and beauty simply because, in itself, it is a worthy pursuit. Many people (myself included) miss out on this precious gift because we prioritize “experiences” over education and fill our lives with so much activity that we have left no room for contemplation. Study must retake its place as the primary vocation of the student.

Schools are producing students who are capable of achieving and doing, but are incapable of being and contemplating. I can’t propose an easy solution to this problem. It’s a complex issue whose roots run deep in the American educational system. But it’s a conversation that we need to be having.

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1 Editor's note from Dan: The casual sex and hookup culture on college campuses is oddly self-perpetuating because of social norms and perceptions. This podcast from NPR's Hidden Brain pulls back the curtain and points out how only a small number of people are actually comfortable with this weird and backwards culture.^↩

Single-Tasking

by Dan Masterton

I am here at my laptop, TV off, no music playing, cell phone locked and idly sitting on the coffee table. I have intentionally decided that for these minutes of drafting this post, I will be focused singularly -- as much as possible, amid the noises from outside my windows and the constant wanderings of a curious mind -- on writing.

The possibility and allure of multi-tasking is suffusive and virtually unavoidable. Most everything about our lives is setup to facilitate our doing multiple things at once, driven largely by our attraction to productivity. We live in a world in which we regularly allow something to be “on in the background,”¹ something that can be ok sometimes but is becoming more of an all-the-time thing.



I think there’s definitely times when mild multi-tasking is reasonable -- listening to the radio while driving, reading on your phone while riding the train or sitting in a waiting room, or maybe even watching a TV show while you cook. I know I do each of these things.

But I worry when the impulse to multi-task becomes uncontrollable and reaches into all areas of my life.

When I am home with a friend who’s visiting and we’re waiting to meet up with other friends for lunch, I need to put my phone down and be invested undividedly as we converse and catch up.

When my baby daughter is having tummy time and learning to scoot and grab and roll, I need to leave my phone on the table and turn the TV off to relish these teaching and learning moments.²

And when I am at Mass to receive the Word and Sacrament, I need to set aside criticisms of music ministry, of liturgical form, of preaching, and more to be fully present to what God is revealing.

When I find myself reaching for my phone or laptop while I’m already watching TV, already talking to someone, or otherwise already engaged, I usually can recognize it. Then I decide whether or not I’m being ridiculous (more often than not, it feels like I am) and can move on fairly decisively. It’s an annoying tendency, but daily life is riddled with these little opportunities for self-awareness and self-improvement.

Most of the time, when I find myself scrolling Twitter while watching a live sporting event, I make myself wait until commercials and only look then; when I realize I’m on my phone while watching a show I specifically put on, I can usually decide to pick one activity or the other and settle down.

I’ve found that typically when I’m doing that, it’s because neither of my multi-tasks is actually engaging me and I’m simply idle and “killing” time, which I really don’t like to do. It’s not too dissimilar to knowing the difference between being hungry and bored -- are you grabbing those potato chips or that candy bar or that can of pop because you’re bored, or because you need a little something something to eat or drink? Likewise, am I grabbing my phone while watching TV because I haven’t reviewed my feeds for fresh news stories, new sports and faith articles, and other humor, or because I’m bored and need some idle activity?

Typically, realizing I’m just filling an idle impulse helps me make a better choice. The best approach I’ve found is to close my phone or laptop, turn off the TV, and start from scratch. The best solution? Have a good book on hand. Whether by seeking recommendations from friends or pouring over the shelves at the library or bookstore, having a book that I actually want to read is usually a great sole object for my idle energy, a way to simplify and single-task.

That day-to-day wrestling isn’t mortally awful but does merit attention. The larger problem to me is when this impulse kicks in during Mass (or similarly, when trying to pray). Unlike the more humdrum ebbs and flows and daily self-awareness, this one weighs on me more heavily. When I can’t focus on the readings or calm myself to take in the Eucharistic Prayer or concentrate my attentions on the Body of Christ gathered in the pews and presented to me in Communion, I get a little more worried.

Yet similar to the challenges of daily life, Mass, too, is a regular opportunity to do better and be better spiritually. I try to find anchor moments that can pull me back from getting spacy or wandering towards criticisms that make an observer rather than a participant.

Make a good Penitential Rite to begin offering myself. Grab a hymnal or book to follow the text of the readings as I hear them aloud. Remember to bow my head when celebrating Christ’s Incarnation during the Creed. Look earnestly around at the moms and dads and sons and daughters and grandmas and grandpas who all dragged their butts to the pews to receive Christ on a Sunday. Sing all the way through the sending forth hymn to solidify the joy in heart and mind with music.³

It’s hard to fight the urge to busy one’s hands and mind beyond the singular task at hand. I want to keep fighting that fight and counterculturally resist accepting the norm of multi-tasking, especially by letting Mass be a stand-alone “task.” One’s presence to others and to God cannot really include other simultaneous tasks; that is more so a mark of self-absorption, and I don’t need any more of that!

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1 I remember when new episodes of TV shows were self-contained appointment viewing for a designated half hour or hour each week rather than blocs of indefinite binge-watching (which often is part of a multi-tasking equation itself). Back in the days of Blockbuster Video and VCR recording. ^↩

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2 Though I will admit, there are times when the busyness I feel from trying to care for my daughter for long stretches of time leads me to want to have a TV show or news program running alongside our playtime to help me feel like I’m getting some time for myself -- true confessions of a parent!^↩

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3 My friend Tim O’Malley’s most recent book, Bored Again Catholic, is a great primer to help refamiliarize oneself with the beauty and richness of each part of the Mass.^↩

Journey To A Home I’ve Never Seen

by Rob Goodale

Eleven months ago, I struck out on my maiden voyage across the mighty Atlantic, an immigrant in a middle seat with not quite enough leg room (but enough nerves and enthusiasm to make up for it), on a journey to a home I had never seen.

I arrived with my companion in a foreign land where the cars are driven on the left side of the road and the words are spoken with a merry, melodic, mischievous charm and the nature consists of shades of green that computers have yet to be able to replicate.

For eleven months, we lived as strangers in a home we had not yet been, and gradually discovered the really important things about our new habitat: that the cheapest pints actually are the best, that tea is less of a beverage and more of an evergreen instrument of hospitality, and that buses, meetings, shops, and restaurants each operate with their own sporadic sense of time.

There were doors that opened when we expected them to stay closed, and hearts that did the opposite. Landscapes that were more rugged than they initially appeared, and men who were less. Generosity and geniality seem to be in the water, and yet so, too, do skepticism and cynicism. The entire island nation is exactly what one would expect, until, upon further scrutiny, it isn’t at all like what one would expect. In this way, it is intensely human… and perhaps also divine.

We encountered happiness and anger and joy and pettiness and hope and sorrow and patience and despair. There were saints and geniuses and prophets. Maybe once, I discovered that I was not one of them. There were also cowards and liars and thieves. More than once, I discovered that I was indeed one of them. That’s the way for most of us, I think. Were it not for Grace, ours would be an impossible task.

Progress and productivity occurred in strange and mysterious and unexpected places -- He has a way of showing up when and where you least expect Him, doesn’t He? That is, I think, what Irenaeus was getting at when he called the Incarnation a scandal.

I do not understand this place, nor have I begun attempting to understand how living here has shaped me. Yet I have no doubt that the Almighty dwells in these hills and these fields and these pubs and these homes. Many have forgotten, to be sure, but there is Magic in this land. I bow and beam with gratitude for the privilege of having witnessed it.

And now I make a return trip across the sea, again an immigrant with not quite enough leg room, on a journey to a home I have never seen. I imagine I will gradually discover things about my new habitat: where to find the best pints and what hospitality looks like and whether buses and barber shops and board meetings all run on time in Ohio (I sincerely doubt it).

I imagine I will find open hearts and unexpected generosity, and perhaps also closed doors and cynical minds. There are undoubtedly saints and geniuses and cowards and liars; I myself will add to their number. I will set out to show the face of God to young men and women, and will likely find Him in places I do not expect.

I do not understand that place, either. I cannot begin to imagine how I will be shaped by living there. Yet I have no doubt that the Almighty dwells in those hills and those fields and those bars and those homes. I pray I do not forget that there is Magic in that land, too, and I bow and beam with gratitude for the privilege of witnessing it.

Why We Must Oppose the Death Penalty

by Dan Masterton

Do you know what the Church teaches on the death penalty?

As a former high school theology student and current high school theology teacher, I know that high school students will often erroneously connect theological engagement with debate. They look forward with relative eagerness to social justice, morality, and ethics lessons largely as a chance to argue with peers and articulate the certain rightness of their perspective.

First, theology class, where faith ought to be seeking understanding, should be a place of thorough engagement with Catholic teaching and Tradition, such that, as I say it, “You may not agree with it, but you’ll understand it.” In other words, every day should be open to students’ questions, divergent observations, and critical reactions, as long as they come with respect, patience, and a charitable hearing to the content of the course and lesson.

Secondly, debate -- except for in debate club, speech class, or specifically designed projects -- is not the pursuit of theology class, or that of most good foundational learning. Rather, dialogue and discussion should be the goal. Debate rewards rhetorical excellence, argumentative strategies, and refined eloquence; discussion makes space for all to share their perspectives and listen to others’ points of view in turn.

I remember engaging with the death penalty in Catholic Ethics & Christian Morality during senior year of high school. We’d start and end each unit with a “four corners” exercise, in which every student had to strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with particular statements. When we considered the death penalty, I remember sauntering over to the “disagree” corner, thinking primarily of the likely execution awaiting recently detained Saddam Hussein, the fallen leader of Iraq. A discussion ensued; a hearty unit on Church teaching followed. When we looped back to those four corners, I found myself instead strongly disagreeing. I remember learning of wrongfully executed innocent people, of the expense of death row appeals, and of the mercy of God reaching those serving prison time, but I don’t remember learning the Church teaching specifically, even as my stance evolved.

As I journeyed through undergraduate theology, came into my own as an adult in the Church, and stepped into my first pastoral ministry and teaching roles, I sunk my teeth more deeply into the teaching. At my first job, my colleague and I devised a social justice course grounded in Rerum novarum (dignity of work and workers’ rights), Humanae vitae (marriage, family, and sexual ethics), and Evangelium vitae (life issues). It was in re-reading the words of John Paul II in that latter encyclical that I found the distinction that made the puzzle fall into place.

First, the Church actually allows the death penalty as a just punishment for the gravest crimes, echoed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor” (CCC 2267). So, if guilt is certain in these cases, the penalty may be fitting and would be morally just.

However, John Paul II articulates the crucial nuance: “It is clear that, for these purposes [to redress the disorder caused by the offense] to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society” (Evangelium vitae §56).

Essentially, this is an extension of the teaching on legitimate defense (or, self-defense). If a society has no other way to protect itself from a murderer, then it becomes justifiable to execute that person. Their crime warrants such a punishment, and the gravity of their actions creates a threat to safety and life that must be eliminated. So, when facilities, when resources, when politics and corruption prevent a society from safely and certainly detaining such an absolutely guilty and eminently dangerous person, then execution can be warranted.

On the other hand, when safe and certain incarceration is possible, society is legitimately and sufficiently defended by that detention, which makes execution unjustifiable. John Paul II explicitly says, “as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases [that make executions necessary] are very rare, if not practically non-existent.” JPII adds that life in prison, or “bloodless means” of redress, are preferable, too, because they “better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person" (Evangelium vitae §56).

This is true in most areas of the world in 2017, 22 years after John Paul II felt it was already true, and it’s certainly true in the US, where we have a sophisticated and thorough system of prisons (though their use is certainly another justice issue). Even before engaging the issues of wrongful convictions, the disproportionate racial makeup of death row, and the costs related to the death penalty, the ability of our prison system to imprison dangerous criminals renders the death penalty completely morally untenable in practice, as it’s unnecessary as a means of legitimate defense of American society.

As executions resume in the US -- Arkansas executed multiple men on the same day, and Ohio can use its drugs on hand to resume executions -- Sr. Helen Prejean, of Dead Man Walking fame, has re-upped her social media game. She does an amazing job of communicating the details of what the public should know about the imprisoned people and their cases, about the state and their governors, and challenging followers to spread the word and contact the officials who can intervene.

We’ve talked here about the mixed role of social media, how it’s a tool that can be used well or poorly and how it’s tempting to settle for slacktivism. Sr. Helen is a role model for how we can use this platform to strive for justice well. I’ve been inspired by her ever since hearing her story, first on film and then in person when she visited a school where I worked. She complimented our students as being like tilled soil because of their receptiveness to the message of justice. And I’ve found in teaching and ministry that this is a justice issue on which many young people agree, preferring in large numbers that we abolish the death penalty. I hope you’ll consider following her and tracking her alerts and challenges as a way to direct you in fighting this social injustice.

It’s time to stop this immoral killing, and I pray that our holy martyrs who clung to their faith steadfastly even to execution will hear our prayer and intercede to end the death penalty.

The Erotic Dimension of Christian Spirituality, Part I: The Song of Songs

by Dave Gregory

One alone is (my) sister, having no peer:

more gracious than all other women.

Behold her, like Sothis rising

at the beginning of a good year:

shining, precious, white of skin,

lovely of eyes when gazing.

Sweet her lips (when) speaking:

she has no excess of words.

Long of neck, white of breast,

her hair true lapis lazuli.

Her arms surpass gold,

her fingers are like lotuses.

Full(?) (her) derriere, narrow(?) (her) waist,

her thighs carry on her beauties.

Lovely of (walk) when she strides on the ground,

she has captured my heart in her embrace.

She makes the heads of all (the) men

turn about when seeing her.

Fortunate is whoever embraces her –

he is like the foremost of lovers.

Her coming forth appears

like (that of) her (yonder) – the (Unique) One.¹

Around the 14th century B.C.E., Egyptian artwork and poetry took on new forms and themes: human sexuality became a standard motif in visual artwork, and poets composed love songs for festivals and marriage celebrations. The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton, who reigned between 1367 and 1350 B.C.E., popularized this cultural revolution, commissioning portrayals of his bedroom rompings to adorn royal residences and spaces of religious import. He also introduced heretical monotheistic worship of the sun disk (the Aton), a theology that did not stick during subsequent dynastic rules. However, Akhenaton’s preference for the open display of sexual activity did persist over the centuries.

The above poem is an example of this, an excerpt from a small collection of love poetry composed somewhere around the mid-12th century B.C.E., entitled “The Stroll, the Beginning of the Sayings of the Great Entertainer”, and when it was published in the 1960s along with other such poetry, scholars of the Hebrew Bible began to realize its significance.

Fast forward 800 or 900 years, to the period during which Hellenism exerted itself upon the culture of ancient Israel; in centuries prior, a degree of cross-cultural transmission had occurred between Egypt and the Hebrew peoples. I’ll leave it at that, but if you’re curious for more, I’d be happy to send you my very boring grad school paper on how this process went down. The Hebrew people -- having heard traveling bards and songsters -- apparently copied and adapted Egyptian love songs, making them their own, crafting their own versions. Proof of this lies in the Song of Songs, a veritable anomaly in the Hebrew Bible’s literature.

The Song of Songs’ Weirdness

The bizarrity of the Song of Songs manifests on several levels, and given that it is a mere 8 chapters long, I would highly encourage you to read through it before continuing here.

First, it echoes -- in parts, almost to the point of blatant plagiarism -- Egyptian poetry, and incorporates elements of Greek poetry as well, such as the third person chorus. Taking place in Jerusalem, it jumps between speakers: an unmarried male and an unmarried female, who are apparently covert lovers, and a chorus interjects throughout their dialogue. Second, this stuff is highly sexual, nearing pornographic language. Depending on whose opinion you ask, the Song is either lovely or vulgar. For example, take the language of the young male lover (Song of Songs 4:12-16), who speaks euphemistically about his lover’s “garden” (hint: he ain’t talkin’ ‘bout a literal garden):

A garden enclosed, my sister, my bride,

a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed!

Your branches are a grove of pomegranates,

with fruits of choicest yield:

Henna with spikenard,

spikenard and saffron,

Sweet cane and cinnamon,

with all kinds of frankincense;

Myrrh and aloes,

with all the finest spices;

A garden fountain, a well of living water,

streams flowing from Lebanon.

Awake, north wind!

Come, south wind!

Blow upon my garden

that its perfumes may spread abroad.

And now the female lover speaks soon thereafter, going into great detail about her own bits of genitalia (Song of Songs 5:3-6):

I have taken off my robe,

am I then to put it on?

I have bathed my feet,

am I then to soil them?

My lover put his hand in through the opening:

my innermost being trembled because of him.

I rose to open for my lover,

my hands dripping myrrh:

My fingers, flowing myrrh

upon the handles of the lock.

I opened for my lover—

but my lover had turned and gone!

At his leaving, my soul sank.

I sought him, but I did not find him;

I called out after him, but he did not answer me.

As my freshmen and I read through this, they giggled and made faces of disgust. All this talk of her “opening” and “dripping myrrh” can shock the more mild-mannered amongst us; I mean, let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? She’s talking about masturbation here (be it physical reality, or the fantasy of such), and in the words of one of my fourteen year-olds, “he hit it and quit it”: the young woman cannot find her lover, who covertly departed from her presence after some pleasuring.

Here this stuff sits, smack in the Bible’s middle. Oh, how I wish that Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch had done a biblical version of their Lov-ah’s sketches from SNL based on the Song of Songs.

The third, and last bit of weirdness I’ll mention is the most subtle and the most striking: the Song of Songs never explicitly mentions God. Scholarship remains inconclusive as to whether or not a particular phrase in verse 6 of chapter 8 (“its arrows are arrows of fire, flashes of the divine”) contains a veiled reference to the very name of God. Apart from this brief mention of the supernatural, the Song of Songs remains a thoroughly secular work of beautiful poetry. Indeed, it fluctuates between playfulness and gravitas, as eros tends to do, and does not belong to the Sitz im Leben² of religious ritual or wedding celebration: the characters are clearly not about to get married, nor are there any references to annual religious festivals. No doubt, the Song’s cultural usage would have entered into these contexts over time, but nonetheless it does not originate from either of these real-world settings. All of this raises a singular question: why did this explicitly sexual song make its way into the Bible?

The Biblical Place of the Song of Songs

Rabbis debated into the early years of the first millennium C.E. whether or not this deserved to be a part of canonical Scripture, given its seemingly profane³ nature. Ultimately, biblical redactors included the Song in the third section of the Hebrew Bible, the Ketuvim, or the Writings. While the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) discusses the establishment of the Covenant, and the Prophets (which in Christian editions of the Hebrew Bible, is comprised of the historical books and the Major and Minor Prophets’ writings) focus on the breaking of this Covenant, the Writings encompass⁴ a diverse collection of literatures that hone in on what it means to live the Covenantal relationship in the plain and the seemingly ordinary.

The Song of Songs, simply, had attained such immense popularity at marriage celebrations and religious festivals and had become so firmly engrained in the collective imagination of the Hebrew people that it had to be included in the canon. Of all the secular songs that the covenantal people sang, this piece was the Song to End all Songs: for the Israelites, it proved the most haunting, the most unforgettable, the most essential to understanding the place of sexuality in human experience.

Early rabbinic writings assert that making love on the Sabbath day of rest is nothing short of a mitzvah, a good deed, an experience that makes concrete the love between the human and the Divine. Sadly, I cannot find the reference, but according to one of my professors, one such early rabbi declared that on the Sabbath, cries of lovemaking should be heard streaming forth from homes. Intercourse, in short, helps the human experience the Divine. Sex ought not to be understood as anything less than participation in the creative activity of God, or as mystical union with God through union with another human being.

As creatures, our hearts ache with passion. We long to experience union with people, places, times, et cetera, that are Other. Any even vaguely “spiritual” experience brings us to stand outside of ourselves, in ek-stasis,⁵ ecstasy. The Song’s inclusion within Scripture -- a reality that culminates from a multicultural process that spanned many centuries -- canonizes the most unexplored and most unorthodox facet of Christian spirituality: the erotic. While Christians throughout the centuries have allegorically read the Song as a metaphor for the relationship between Jesus and the Church, or between God and humanity, we cannot ignore the fact that its quintessential nature is that of erotic poetry. The fact that the Bible’s editors included it within our Scriptures teaches us a lesson of supreme import: sex and sexuality are things of utmost sacrality. Not only can we understand God as parent and friend, but we can (and should) understand God as lover as well. Ultimately, there is no real divide between the sacred and the profane, for all that we believe is profane can become portals into or revelations of the sacred, should we only be willing to enter through them.

Dave's actual, real-life arm.

When someone asks what the tattoo on my right forearm is, I selfishly love informing the inquisitor (especially strangers) that it’s ancient Hebrew erotic poetry. When they ask where it’s from, I tell them the Bible.⁶ Basically, this ink is a sacramental reminder that God is the great Lover, and I am God’s Beloved, that God loves no one more than me and no one less than me, that the raison for my être is union with God. Here’s the text in English, an amalgamated translation, from some of the verses of chapter 8:

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

as a seal upon your arm,

For love is as as strong as death,

passion as fierce as the grave.

Its piercings are of fire,

flashings of the Divine.

Mighty waters cannot overcome it,

Nor can rivers drown it. [...]

You, who dwell in the gardens,

my companions listen for the sound of your voice --

let me hear it!

Make haste, my lover.

In my next post, I’ll get into concrete examples of erotic spirituality from the Christian mystical tradition that capitalize on the Song of Songs’ meaning and purpose within the Bible. It involves a nun having sex with God and a monk making out with Jesus. Get excited for some wild stuff.

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1 Fox, Michael V. The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. ^↩

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2 This is a term of form critical biblical scholarship, and is in German because German scholars pioneered the field of form criticism; the phrase translates to “setting in life,” and is used to describe the real-world usage of any given biblical text. For example, the Sitz im Leben of certain psalms were used at various rituals and events surrounding the king, and are thus called “royal psalms”.^↩

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3 I use “profane” here in the classical and formal mode: anything not belonging to the “sacred” is inherently “profane”.^↩

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4 Think of the Psalms, the Proverbs, Wisdom, Job, so on and so forth. These books are not tied to any particular historical events, and are thus the most universally applicable of the Bible’s literatures.^↩

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5 The word literally means “standing outside of”.^↩

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6 In case you were wondering...yes, I researched the oldest extant manuscript of the Song, which is from the Dead Sea Scrolls, based the font off of the Essene scribe’s penmanship, and designed it myself. All this to celebrate finishing my year of Hebrew in graduate school, which remains and probably will forever remain, the single hardest course I’ve ever had. Take that, www.badhebrew.com.^↩