Dangerous Memories

With thanks to my wife Lauri, who posted this brief remembrance today on Facebook, and to Fr. Bill McNichols, who gives birth to images that gently stir our memory, solidarity and hope:

Sixteen years ago today Matthew Shepard was found bludgeoned, left for dead, draped on a barbed wire fence in Wyoming. His crime was his sexual identity. It is sad to see a society act with such vitriol. The wonderful iconographer, Father Bill McNichols created this stunning image, titled, “The Passion of Matthew Shepard” in his honor.

“Where there is hatred, let me sow love.” Saint Francis

Postscript: The Jesuit-run America magazine recently ran a remarkable meditation by Fr. James Alison, “Toward Global Inclusion of LGBT People within Catholic Communities.” As one might expect, the comments thread following the article reflects the contentious pastoral and theological divide in the church over the issue. My own attempt to think and pray through these questions can be found here, as well as in Chapter 8 of Hope Sings.

4 Responses to "Dangerous Memories"

Ron Altman says:

October 7, 2014 at 8:29 pm

I have been following this blog for a while, and, as a Catholic, I find some of your ideas questionable. Having read your NTR article, you clearly favor having openly gay people and their relationships embraced by the church. This, of course, goes against not only the Bible but also thousands of years of church teaching. Homosexual activity is clearly forbidden. Yet you equivocate.

“Yet if God is Love—not a fixed and solitary essence but a way of being-in-relationship—and God remains free and beyond our comprehension, does not the burden lay upon us to make room in our hearts and theological imaginations for the mystery of covenantal love in all its potentially sacramental realizations? Might that mystery not also include homosexual love?” [NTR, 50]

If God is truly beyond our comprehension, then why believe in Him at all? Why read the Scriptures? Also, why does love have to be covenantal? What’s wrong with multiple spouses or merely hooking up? You rightly describe how oversexed our culture has become, what with disgusting rap videos and pornography, yet you want the church to radically alter its views on homosexuality?

I will tell you bluntly your status as a teacher is worrisome. On what other issues do you diverge from Catholic teaching. Hell? Abortion? I would hope to God that at the very least you are pro-life, although it would not surprise me if you weren’t. The Catholic Church needs less moral ambiguity, not more.

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Christopher Pramuk says:

October 7, 2014 at 9:59 pm

Mr. Altman,

Thank you for following the blog, and for your comments and your questions. First, I would defer you – and readers who may be following this conversation – back to my NTR article, linked above, especially the last section, which you do not mention, in which I cite John Henry Newman on the imagination and its constructive role in the development of doctrine. As I gather, you being a Catholic yourself, I don’t think you would want to take the position that Church teaching – or the Catholic Church’s understanding and interpretation of scripture – never changes, develops, or evolves in response to new understandings taken from the realm of science (Galileo, Darwin), cross-cultural contact (Nostra Aetate on the Jews), or social history (slavery).

To say that God is beyond our comprehension is not to say that we have no basis for speaking about God, but as Newman puts it, “all our language about Almighty God, so far as it is affirmative, is analogical and figurative. We can only speak of Him, whom we reason about but have not seen, in terms of our experience.” This endows Catholic theology with a certain open-ended, living and breathing, always-discerning quality (think Aquinas incorporating “pagan” wisdom into his natural law), insofar as we recognize in humility we’re still trying to grasp the full mystery of God and the good news of the Incarnation. In any case, I hope you see in my NTR article a sincere attempt on my part to think and pray “with the Church” and not against it or outside it. And by “Church” I mean all the people of God, inclusive of laity and bishops, and not least the many gay and lesbian Catholic students I have known over the years.

On this point I’d refer you – and readers here – to the James Alison article in America, and the comments thread that follows. Irrespective of whether one is receptive to Fr. Alison’s approach or considers him a heretic, at the very least I don’t see how one can claim the mantle of “Catholic” and loving Christian without listening with an open mind and heart to the experiences of our non-heterosexual brothers and sisters, and why from their experience they might resist the Church’s description of homosexuality as an “objective disorder.” Fr. Alison writes:

“It has become clearer and clearer, until it is now overwhelmingly clear, that what used to seem like a self-evident description of us was in fact mistaken. We were characterized as somehow defective, pathological, or vitiated straight people; intrinsically heterosexual people who were suffering from a bizarre and extreme form of heterosexual concupiscence called ‘same-sex attraction.’ That description, which turned us, in practice, into second-class citizens in God’s house, is quite simply false. It turns out that we are blessed to be bearers of a not particularly remarkable non-pathological minority variant in the human condition. And that our daughterhood and sonship of God comes upon us starting as we are, with this variant being a minor but significant stable characteristic of who we are. One, furthermore, which gives gracious shape to who we are to be.”

I concur with Alison’s description here of homosexuality – and what I understand to be the consensus of science – as a “not particularly remarkable non-pathological minority variant in the human condition.” Of course much hinges on how one gets from “non-pathological” to potentially “sacramental.” To my mind – as I suggest in the article – one can get there from an understanding of covenantal LOVE as the basis and core good news of the scriptural revelation about God and the divine-human relationship. And many have already gotten there from the witness of loving homosexual persons. But I frame the article in terms of an ongoing communal discernment drawing in the Catholic holistic way from scripture, tradition, and experience – and certainly not as an individual conclusion or crusade.

I don’t know if I can allay your concerns about my status as a teacher, but I would ask sincerely for your prayers. I am acutely aware of my responsibilities, imperfections, and limits as a teacher.

Reply
Ron Altman says:

October 8, 2014 at 4:39 am

I appreciate your response, but completely disagree your views. What other sinful behavior can be rationalized as a “not particularly remarkable non-pathological minority variant in the human condition?” What a wonderfully expedient phrase that is. Then again, maybe there is no such thing as sin. Maybe the person I am is precisely the way God wanted me to be.

You also mention the “consensus” of science. Well, science teaches that a man cannot rise from the grave, that there are no such things as miracles. Perhaps the Church should begin teaching that Jesus and the Bible are mere metaphors. Where do you draw the line before your faith is nothing more than humanism or unitarianism?

I will tell you plainly that the day the Church embraces homosexuality is the day I leave it. It is also the day I begin wondering when the next Martin Luther will appear.

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Rosemary Kearney says:

October 13, 2014 at 8:36 pm

S/he that is without sin let them cast the first stone …………

Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God and everyone that loves is born of God and knows God

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