Amoris laetitia: Celibacy

Amoris laetitia is a document on the family, but it also has something to say about the celibate vocation in the Church. For example:

Whereas virginity is an “eschatological” sign of the risen Christ, marriage is a “historical” sign for us living in this world, a sign of the earthly Christ who chose to become one with us and gave himself up for us even to shedding his blood. (161)

This is true, so long as we don't push it too far. Christian married people, of course, like all Christians, participate in the eschatological character of the Church, and those consecrated to celibacy still have a foot in history.

Begotten in the Only Begotten

I always appreciate when St. Irenaeus's Against Heresies comes up in the Office of Readings; it's one of a handful of books given me to read in theology that I think improved my understanding of Christianity in a basic way. The passage given for Pentecost begins this way:

When the Lord told his disciples to go and teach all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, he conferred on them the power of giving men new life in God.

Reflecting on that, I found myself, as I do sometimes, praying for all of those who have been my spiritual parents along the way.

Idea For A New Religious Community

One of the things that makes religious life in common a rich adventure is that we all tend to play out our family of origin issues in community. Since religious life is a highly idealistic enterprise and bears--for better or for worse--the idea of the 'pursuit of perfection', but since we all come from families made up of imperfect people, ourselves included, it can get a little messy. Nonetheless--and I think this is what God wills--it can be redemptive; inner children are re-born of the Holy Spirit and souls re-parent themselves into flourishing and fruitful celibates. Sometimes, though, it doesn't work so well. Most of us, of course, end up somewhere in the middle, blessed messes of wheat and weeds. As my first priest once said to me, one of the hardest things about our life is finding ourselves neither remarkably holy nor remarkable sinners. Nevertheless, our hope is in a God who promised to burn the weeds and harvest the wheat for eternal life.

Vocation and Pathology

From time to time I'll see something ranting against celibacy, saying that it's a pathological choice or at least can't be healthy, etc. It seems to me that these usually fall into the kind of black and white thinking that doesn't take seriously the work of grace.

Sure, some people take up the celibacy of religious life or the priesthood for imperfect reasons, and even from pathology. And, of course, some celibacies end in disaster and suffering not only for the would-be celibate, but also for others, as we know all too well in our time. In religious life one has the joy of seeing old celibates for whom the charism has worked as advertised, having broken them open to a chaste and non-exclusive love for the world which reflects the love of God in its own particular way. But one also gets to see the celibacies that have gone wrong, leaving celibates dried up in an affective dead-end.

One can say the same things, mutatis mutandis, of marriage, or of any vocation we enter into with every good intention, but as the wheat and weeds of our blessed and broken selves.

The danger is to think that reasons and motivations are all good or all bad. We are mysterious messes, made of the goodness in whose image we are created together with the festering and rotten injuries left by the effects of sin. Can God call us to the vocation he gives us for our salvation--and for our chance to participate in his salvation of the world--as this total person? In other words, can God call us to our vocation with both our good reasons and bad for our attraction to the choice, with both our sanctity and our pathology at work? Yes. It's called redemption.

When it works, when someone succeeds in surrendering to this work of salvation, it's a truly blessed and amazing thing. Pathologies are flipped, turned inside-out--pick your metaphor--by the opportunities for grace and growth that the vocation brings and become gifts given for the encouragement of others and their salvation. Just because it sometimes doesn't work when we don't succeed in surrendering to grace, just because sometimes pathology swallows up what would have been sanctity and uses it for its own rotten and meaningless ends, that doesn't make it the fault of the vocation.

Midian, Jerusalem, Hypothetical Wives, Death

Yesterday morning some brothers came to collect me from Garbatella and bring me, at last, here to the General Curia. I'm not quite landed yet, though. The room which is to be mine isn't ready, so I'm in a guest room for the weekend.

I spent the rest of yesterday exploring and just taking it all in. I wandered over to the Collegio Internazionale and found again the English-speaking hang-out room, to which I had been introduced one night back in May when I first arrived in Italy. I wandered outside and found the long, sketchy, lizard-crossed path that leads to the bus stop. I can already tell that this will be a rich environment for 'overheard' posts, which I have always been told are favorites. Here are some from yesterday, and one from this morning:

Wandering around the Collegio, I met some students. In the course of meeting them, one asked how old I was. I told him that I was forty.

"As Moses fled to Midian when he was forty, so you have come to us."


At supper, one of the brothers was--I think--accusing another of feigning ignorance of certain significances of the recently concluded general chapter.

"Are you the only foreigner in Jerusalem who does not know about the things that have happened here in these days?"


Looking forward to this morning, for which the gospel is Jesus' teaching on marriage in Mark 10, one of the brothers quizzed the friar who was scheduled to preach.

"What will you say tomorrow? Are you going to tell us that we may not abandon our wives?"


At breakfast (I missed the context on this one) on the brothers announced:

"We have never been as close to our death as we are right now, this morning."

God Is the Bigger Elvis

In the quiet of a Friday afternoon yesterday, I finally got around to seeing Rebecca Cammisa's God Is the Bigger Elvis, the short film about Dolores Hart which came to everyone's attention when it was nominated for an Academy Award this past year.




I appreciated several aspects of the little documentary. Most simply, as a Connecticutian myself, I had always been curious about the Abbey of Regina Laudis, but had never visited or known much about it.

On a deeper level, though, I was grateful for the way the film treats of the religious vocation in an individual life. In addition to the story of Dolores herself, the vocation stories of a couple of other nuns are touched upon as well. There's a reverence about the treatment, in the sense that a religious vocation is, on the one hand, something for which no apology needs to be made. On the other hand, the film communicates well that the experience of vocation touches upon certain intimacies and mystery that defy being shared with an audience.

I also appreciated how religious life is displayed in all of its unglamorous plainness. I was reminded of the Trappist who told me that his favorite aspect of Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence was that it showed the monks with unsightly nose and ear hair. "Religious life is not so pretty as it usually seems in the movies, brother." (Of course I also loved seeing the Abbey liturgy. The sisters were praying in Latin (according to the spirit of Vatican II)  and were shown receiving Holy Communion by intinction--and I mean the right way, on the tongue and without illicit self-communication.)

Most of all, the film made me reflect on celibacy. In it one meets Dolores's former fiancé, with whom she broke up in order to enter the Abbey. He is even shown making a visit. Almost fifty years later he admits that he isn't over Dolores, and doesn't appear to have ever married. The whole business sits at the awkward intersection of sweet and sad. Anyone in professional ministry will have their boundary buzzers go off during these scenes, but perhaps it reminds us that boundaries are often messier than what our textbooks taught us.

Even though I reflect on it from time, I don't blog on it because I don't have anything solid to say, but the film certainly convinced me even more that female and male celibacy are somewhat different things. Maybe some readers have thoughts on that.

Maybe I missed it, but one thing I was surprised to miss was a mention of Dolores having played St. Clare in Francis of Assisi (1961).

God Is the Bigger Elvis is really worth a look if you have a chance.

On the Married Clergy

There is a front-page article in the New York Times this morning about an evangelical minister who is having trouble finding a job because of discrimination against the unmarried. The article rehearses all the folklore about the merits of the married clergy: how they have to set an example of family life, know how to counsel the married, be a sign of 'family values,' etc.

For a correction to this, we turn to one of my great Protestant teachers, Charles Merrill Smith:

"The real reasons why you should marry are, of course, not at all related to the folklore.

"First, a clergyman who remains unmarried for more than a year after graduation from seminary is suspected of being abnormal, immoral or chicken.

"Second, there will be those who will speculate that he has taken St. Paul on marriage too seriously, and has made a secret vow of celibacy. So far as your parishioners are concerned, you may be as celibate as a Cistercian monk, but they will insist that you practice it within the married state.

"Third, somewhat more than half of your congregation will be women, and all women — single, married or widowed (including grass widows) — resent a male eligible for marriage, who chooses to remain unwed.

"Fourth — and here is the overriding argument in the mind of the congregation — since the church owns a parsonage and already has arrived at a salary figure below which it cannot go and maintain its conviction, however illusory, that it is a humane institution; it is only sensible to get two employees for the price of one. Therefore, it boils down to a business proposition. It would be damaging and vulgar to admit to this, however, so the tradition and the folklore was manufactured to mask it.

"Actually it is very good business from the church's point of view. Most girls are piano players of sorts, and anyone can learn to operate a typewriter or mimeograph. Add to these accomplishments the intellectually-untaxing duties of Sunday School teaching, choir singing, ladies' aid work and a miscellany of other small parish chores all of which your wife will be expected in your first small churches to perform (it's part of the tradition), and you have a job analysis which, were it filled by a salaried employee, would require no small addition to the annual budget. Hence the tradition of a married clergy.

"If you want to be a preacher and a bachelor, be prepared for a dismal future and renounce now — the hope for status, prestige, emolument, luxury and all of the spiritual joys which accompany a plush suburban pastorate. The author does not question the preacher's right to take a vow of chastity, but he'd better darn well understand that a vow of poverty goes along with it."

(From How to Become a Bishop Without Being Religious, chapter 2, "Selecting the Clerical Wife.")

Overheard: Clerical Celibacies

Roman cleric 1: So this flamboyant and very gay seeming Orthodox priest is telling me about his wife and kids, and then he starts bad-mouthing priestly celibacy.

Roman cleric 2: Did you ask him if his wife was in favor of it?

The Original Blessing

Yesterday I spent some time with a couple of friends whom I've known since elementary school. Both have families now. The one whose home we were visiting has two children: the older one is a rambunctious toddler and the younger is only five months old. Almost every space in their home is overtaken with child related stuff and the atmosphere is generally chaotic. They are very happy. It's interesting to see people with whom you grew up, both friends and family, as parents themselves. They are the same people, of course, but are somehow transformed. They are renovated by the original blessing God pronounced on our first parents: "Be fruitful." The original blessing is on all of us, because we all derive from the compound marriage of the will of God and the bodies of Adam and Eve.

Perhaps it's when we forget about all this that we celibates get ourselves into trouble. Marriage is an option, but generativity is not. If we do not care for our spiritual lives and cultivate our own re-creation in God, we will be sterile, unable to conceive spiritual children. If we lose our missionary edge, the command of the Lord to make disciples of all nations, we can easily turn in on ourselves in eccentricity, comfort-seeking, and entitlement. All of these are disaster for the celibate soul, which is why we always need to remember that our vocations are not given to us for ourselves, but for the sake of those to whom God wishes to give us as spiritual mothers and fathers. Here the chaotic house filled with toys and childcare equipment is a good reflection for the celibate. Am I willing to surrender every space in my life to God, or do I hold back certain areas for myself?

Sundays and Celibacy

Today was one of those Sundays when I both open the church in the morning and close it in the afternoon.

At six this morning I went to the church to set up for the first Mass. Once I had everything set up, there was almost enough light to offer Morning Prayer, so I made my meditation first and then opened my breviary. All this before turning on the lights or opening the church. (As anyone learns fast, you can't open the church too early in the morning, because no matter how early it is, someone will start coming at that time and then resent you when it's locked.) It's such a privileged solitude to sit, locked in and alone with the Blessed Sacrament and the paschal candle in the dim, early morning natural light. I am unworthy of the privilege of being able to pray this way.

Then I open up and everything gears up. I offer two Masses in a row, have a break, and then have four babies to baptize. In the course of the day I probably greet a couple hundred people. I promise to pray for all kinds of intentions, sign bulletins for children and sponsor forms for adults. I bless a couple of rosaries, and hear reports from retreats.

Then, at about four in the afternoon, having wrapped up the baptismal paperwork and some other random stuff to get ahead on the week, I go back to the church and find it empty once again. I grab the arcane set of keys that open the poor boxes and the vigil candle donations. I collect all of the crumpled money and put in the right bags. All quiet. I check the holy water bucket and decide that it can get through the week. (I don't know what people do with it, and maybe I don't want to know. We go through several gallons a week.) Then I put off the lights, lock up, and sit down again in the solitude to offer Evening Prayer. I'm back where I started, there in the dark with my breviary and my Lord. Before the Our Father I try to remember all of the intentions I was given today; a complicated pregnancy, a blood test tomorrow, another young man who said, "Please pray for my attitude."

I know I repeat myself and write about this over and over, but it continues to strike me at deeper levels: the starkness of the shift from intense social-ness to total solitude in the life of priestly ministry. The day begins and ends with solitary prayer in the sacred space of this church, but in between the same space is filled with people and noise and music and prayers.

It speaks to me of celibacy. It isn't a life of separation from people. On the contrary, I feel very embedded in the fabric of this community and its neighborhoods. But what I offer in all those relationships begins and ends with the God I meet in my solitude. Whatever I have to offer emerges from this mysterious and exclusive intimacy that I clumsily call prayer. It is an exclusive Relationship, for sure, but an exclusivity that wants to become fruitful, if that makes any sense. Maybe I'm not saying it right. I'm pretty tired.

Unclehood

In becoming an uncle, I realize that I have entered into a new moment in my religious life and priesthood.

For several weeks now I have telling my Latin gag about how though an uncle I have no obligation to be avuncular. When one woman I know got it and laughed out loud, I wanted to quote one of the great anti-heroes of my youth, Henry Rollins, and say, 'I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow,' but that, of course, would have been inappropriate. The sentiments were there, though, in a chaste way.

When I first came into the culture of religious life, I was surprised by several aspects of how religious related to their families of origin. First, I was relieved to discover that it was entirely normal to have family members who were hostile to the religious vocation; in fact, it was often the ones from Catholic families who were given the most trouble! Second, I was surprised to see sets of siblings in religious life. I guess I had thought that a religious vocation was such an odd thing that there would never be more than one from a single family. My intuition about this was entirely wrong. I have met several sets of brothers in the Order and have known many who had sisters in religious life. Just the other day I met a young diocesan seminarian with a twin brother who is a cloistered Carmelite.

But most of all, I noticed the way religious and priests talked about their nieces and nephews. It was sort of like how other people talked about their grandchildren, rejoicing in the milestones of their lives and providing a curious, extra-parental connection to the preceding generation. When I ever had a spare moment to have a thought during the three days of obsequies for Fr. Bernard last week, I would reflect also upon his unclehood. His nephews formed a kind of inner circle of family as it related to him, and their griefs and gratitudes were so strong. One of my prayers for his passing has been to ask his prayers to obtain the grace of good friar-uncleness for me.

Celibacy and Redemption

Celibacy is a kind of loneliness. In religious life we sometimes try to deny this--even to the point of using our denial as a selling point in our pastoral care of vocations: 'Community life is there to fulfill our needs for intimacy, for human relationship.' Perhaps it's true to some degree on the natural level--if you live in a good house--but in the end it won't get you there. Anyone who comes to religious life with the hope that it will supply his emotional needs is going to be sorely disappointed.

Celibates need to get lonely; it is the way into the Heart of the vocation. I remember when I first entered religious life at the age of twenty-two, full of the zeal of the convert and without a clue. In those days I looked upon my celibacy as something I was doing. It was this heroic privation and agonistic struggle I was accepting for the glory of God.

Some years later I now realize what a tremendous vainglory and immaturity it all was. Seeing more clearly, and perhaps a little more attuned to the subtleties of the Spirit and the Providence of God, I realize that my celibacy has not been my doing at all. It is a relationship into which God has been inviting and drawing me for a long time. Even before I could even consent to my desire for baptism, God was drawing me--in spite of myself--into this exclusive relationship.

In fact, it has required me to know well my own life as a lonely person, for in my own vow of chastity I have found the redemption of my loneliness. That's the thing: if you want to be celibate you have to consent to that searing and disorienting feeling of being terribly lonely. You have to sit in it and let in sit in you. You have to resist all of the ways that would-be celibates medicate themselves against the loneliness with alcohol, anonymous sex, pornography, mania for control, overwork, eccentric and pointless hobbies, and even the internet.

You have to refuse to medicate yourself, but instead feel the pain and find in it a path into the Wounded Heart of Christ Crucified. It is the only way that loneliness gets turned into the solitude where God speaks to the heart and gives you anything you might have to say the suffering world.

Via non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem crucifixi, said St. Bonaventure. There is no other way but through the burning love of the Crucified.

This whole dynamic strikes me sometimes on nights when I lock up the church. The parish priesthood is a very social job; in the course of a weekend I might interact with a few hundred people. But at the end of day there is nobody left, and in the big church in which you have experienced so much light and sound and humanity, it is only dark and quiet and lonely. But the loneliness of it is quickly transformed by a realization that this moment is your truest identity, as you stand in the obscurity of the Presence of the One who--in his inscrutable mercy--has always been so jealous for you.

Happy Fathers' Day, Father

I guess I just feel funny receiving Fathers' Day wishes. It goes against something inside me, but I can't quite articulate it yet.

Certainly there is a lot of spiritual fatherhood and motherhood in the order of grace. In any devout life we are given many mothers and fathers along the way, helping to conceive us as the new creations Christ calls us to be. Priests are supposed to be ministers of this spiritual fatherhood in a particular and intense way.

But for any ministering celibate--not just priests--this call to parenthood in the order of grace is always bound up with the darkness and obscurity of the renunciation of ordinary generativity. Done well, this emptiness and obscurity becomes a mystical contact with the Source of all, a kind of superfecund coincidence of opposites. Done poorly, well we know what disasters come from that.

Like any experience of true prayer, the intersection of spiritual parenthood and celibate chastity is a place both terrifying and sublime, and an experience of the Light Who is so bright that our minds and hearts can only see It as darkness.

I guess none of this explains why I feel funny when someone wishes me a happy Fathers' Day, but it's a start.

So go ahead, I guess, and wish your priest a happy Fathers' Day. But don't forget your mothers in the spiritual order on Mothers' Day either.