What disciple walked on water toward Jesus?

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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: March 17, 2009 at 3:52 pm by Eve Tushnet

2009-03-17T15:52:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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FALLING IN LOVE (IS SO HARD ON THE KNEES): Out of all the responses challenging my half of that Commonweal piece on Scripture and homosexuality, I think Teresa Wymore’s might be the strongest. And not just because she says I’m “articulate, brilliant, and dangerous”!

I’m going to respond to those portions of her post where I think I have something to say. So this isn’t a comprehensive response, should such a thing be possible; and if you want her full argument, you should read her full post, not this selective rebuttal/drum solo….

“self-hating”: If you get that adjective from my essay, it’s possible that reading this would be illuminating, esp. the question about changing one’s orientation–? I don’t know. It’s impossible to convince someone else of your internal mental state. I will say that I’m much, much more ashamed of owning the Daredevil soundtrack than of being queer…!

Righteousness and peace shall kiss each other: Teresa writes:

Like many converts who are drawn to the Church, she seems to be seeking a perpetual engine of moral clarity, as if one’s hard moral choices shouldn’t rely on time, place, or circumstance but come in a handy indexed volume.

So there’s absolutely no way she could know this, but that is a really inaccurate take on my actual conversion! I think she’s using “moral clarity” here to mean, “It’s obvious what you should do in particular situations”; and not only was wanting that moral guidance absent from my motivations (as best I can remember), rules were something I strongly resisted.

(Would it help if I said I was almost an English major? One of the things I find so fruitful about Catholicism is the way it meshes rules and roles [sorry for the cute phrasing]–philosophy and literature, thou-shalt-nots and “follow Me,” commandments and weird saints. I genuinely don’t think Catholicism provides easy or even frequent answers to the moral questions I confront in daily life, even though of course it does rule a lot of things out, like support for torture or for abortion. And to the extent that there is a “rulebook,” that rulebook was basically the opposite of my motives for conversion!)

So what did I want? Morality definitely played a role, though perhaps a more abstract one. I wanted justice and knew I needed mercy. I believe very strongly in justice–in desert. Sometimes I attribute this belief to the left-Jewish tradition in which I was raised. That may be overreading, but anyway, I believed in justice and yet fled from applying that standard to myself. (“Relativism means never having to say you’re sorry.”) The things we do wrong, we can never take back, and never fully make amends for; we simply don’t have that capacity. If there is resolution and reconciliation, it must happen outside time and beyond our own abilities to enact justice. Only God can make justice reconciliation, rather than merely punishment.

So there was that. I also sought an explanation for the meaning I found in the beauty of the created world; more on that in a bit, though.

Don’t tell me what I want to hear: More Teresa:

She begins her argument with her own coming out story. And then, there is this:

Experience is itself a kind of text, and texts need interpreters. How often have we thought that we understood our experiences, only to realize later that we had only the barest understanding of our own motives and impulses?

Yes, she’s an apologist. Do you recognize the first step of any institution seeking control? Don’t trust yourself.

This I think is the key, the best criticism of my piece, even though the first sentence I quoted does give the hint of how I will respond.

It’s my fault that my essay can be read that way–as if I’m making the self-contradictory statement that your core epistemological principle should be self-mistrust. (Who is doing the mistrusting? Why, myself!) I don’t help this misunderstanding by occasionally using “self-mistrust” as a synonym for humility.

What I actually meant can perhaps be discerned by noting that I don’t only begin the Commonweal piece with my coming-out story. I begin it with two parallel love stories: my crush on a high-school girl, and my Catholic conversion. The implicit narrative of the essay is the story of how love of Christ and His Bride the Church became more central to my life than lesbian love (real love, not just crushes!), and how, therefore, I began to interpret the latter kind of love in light of the former.

Both of these loves are things I really experienced my own self. So my argument probably should not have been cast in terms of experience vs. tradition, but in terms of which experiences lead us to reinterpret prior experiences and transform our response to subsequent experiences.

(Was I perhaps hampered in making my case clearly because a) my conversion had a lot of philosophical work on the front end–there were a lot of things I needed to work on through reason, before I could convert, and/or b) I find it very difficult to describe the experiential aspects of my conversion, what it felt like, in ways I think might resonate with others?)

Sure of You: Teresa:

Scripture is a result of personal experience, both produced and interpreted by the personal experiences of a fraction of humanity during ages of class oppression. I do believe it is divinely inspired; I’m just waiting for the divine interpretation. The Tradition that has given us our current understanding of Scripture is based in patriarchal culture, which Tushnet herself seems to acknowledge with a nod early, but now forgets.

OK, I’m boring on this stuff. I don’t get why you’d trust Scripture at all, to the extent of believing it is divinely inspired, if you don’t trust the Tradition which canonized, preserved, and translated it. Why not the Gnostic gospels, or any story you find meaningful? Without the Church, the Bible is simply “one bible among others.”

But more to the point, again, for me it is a question of certainty. I am more sure of the church of Caravaggio, Wilde, Augustine, Anselm, Juan Sánchez Cotán, John Paul II, and Dorothy Day than I am sure that gay sex is a-okay. In my essay I did try to argue for submission to the Church, but of course if you are more certain that prohibiting gay sex is cruel and unjust than you are of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority, that argument will be utterly unpersuasive to you, as it should be.

Teresa summarizes well here (although I think the word “rewards” is vague enough to foster misunderstanding–a cross is a reward, you know?–and I’d replace “replace” with “transform”):

I want to ask why she gave up sexual relationships. Did she surrender that expression through discipline or did one desire replace a stronger one in her? My question, you see, is whether she chose her own sacrifice and finds more rewards when she chooses to support tradition and live in conformity with official teaching on sexuality. And yet, she seems to be telling other lesbians who find greater rewards in personal sexual relationships that they are not listening to God.

Tushnet has chosen to make a sacrifice of her lesbian sexuality, but maybe God wants her to sacrifice her attachment to a patriarchal tradition. I would say only she knows the answer to that. She would say the Church knows better than she does.

But then she says this, to which I hardly know how to respond because it seems to come from such a different sense of what Christianity is:

What would make me more open to Tushnet’s ideas is if she simply made the point that she chooses celibacy because she finds greater rewards in it, not because she’s choosing the moral high ground.

I mean… does this translate to, “It’s okay to be celibate if you feel fluffy about it, but not if you’re doing it just because it’s the right thing to do”? I think even those who believe not all homosexual people are called to celibacy should still reject this claim if they believe in vocation, since vocation is not something you choose. So you may have a celibate vocation even if there are no evident “rewards” for you in that life, and you believe other gay ladies can get busy with their ladyloves as much as they like. This phrasing of “reward” vs. “moral high ground” isn’t how I think about either universal morality or particular vocation, so like I said, I’m kind of baffled as to how to respond; and possibly I’m therefore being too dismissive–? I dun’ get it.

Me, I think the universal morality of “no gay sex” requires of me a personal vocation including but not limited to celibacy. (I think my primary vocation is writing, though that may well be completely self-aggrandizing. But in general I think it’s best to conceive one’s vocation as positive–I have a vocation to pregnancy center counseling, I have a vocation as the friend of those I love–rather than negative.) But I just wouldn’t use the terms Teresa uses here, and I challenge them.

Saint Monica, Rene Girard/preserve me from my past: Then Teresa switches to a discussion of James Alison vs. Rene Girard, which began on this note:

But I find discomfort with any idea of sacrifice. Claiming that Christianity breaks the cycle of escalating sacrificial violence by having us make sacifices of ourselves is seeming less true to me all the time. I’ve never really seen the difference between sacrificing someone else as a scapegoat versus sacrificing ourselves.

At first I found this a bizarre statement. Murder and martyrdom are equivalent! Stealing your wallet and punching you in the face is just like turning the other cheek! Yeah, no.

Besides which, I’ve been on the whole love-requires-sacrifice kick for a long time.

But one of her commenters wrote:

…I guess one question is, does letting someone enact violence reinforce the mechanism of violence or contribute to its end? Thinking about the U.S. civil rights fight, and then thinking about domestic abuse and mob violence, I come up with different answers.

(more)
And this made me see the real challenge here, to which I have no adequate response. When does witness become enabling? When does Adam Smith become right, and mercy to the guilty becomes cruelty to the innocent?

I have no answers; but I would recommend that anyone interested in the questions check out David Adams Richards’s novel Mercy Among the Children. Here’s part of what I said about it in Crisis magazine in February ’02:

Very few authors today believe in human greatness as sincerely as David Adams Richards does.

That may seem like a strange conclusion to draw from a novel set among poor rural Canadians, in which a relentlessly kind couple is ostracized, beaten, abused, poisoned by chemical dumping, and accused of everything from theft to child molestation and murder. A list of the horrors to which Elly and Sydney Henderson are subjected would read almost comically, like the stage directions from Titus Andronicus: “Enter Lavinia, with hands cut off, tongue cut out, and ravished.” But in Richards’s hands, despite the book’s stylistic flaws, both the abuses and the gentle response are believable.

The book’s creed might be: I believe that good and evil are real. I believe that complete pacifism, self-sacrifice, and sainthood are possible. I believe that we can love our enemies. I believe that any man can search for the truth, that any woman can find it. …

But notice, too, what is left out: I believe in God. I believe that it is good to be a saint. Those are two conclusions Richards, within the world of his novel, does not reach.

As a child, Sydney Henderson almost killed another boy while fighting drunk on a snow-covered rooftop. Afterward, he made a pact with God that he would never harm another person. …

But is it even possible to understand the nature of Sydney’s pact? He is Christlike, but there are moments when his life seems as much Stoic as Christian. Sydney sometimes appears to believe not that harming others is wrong but that it will ultimately backfire. He tells Elly, “[N]o one can do an injury to you without doing an injury to themselves. …Those who scorn you taunt only themselves.” This belief doesn’t square with Sydney’s passivity–he won’t even tell others when they are acting wrongly. Sometimes it’s clear that he is silent because he fears his own power to hurt. But if Sydney truly believes that the viciousness inflicted upon him will harm its perpetrators most, why doesn’t he try to stop them, for their own sakes?

(There’s more to the book than that, obviously; I’m just quoting the part of my review which engages with the questions Teresa and her interlocutors raise.)

All for now….

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