As society has become steadily more materialistic...our churches have followed suit, giving up on the ascetic and ecstatic aspects of religion and emphasizing only the more worldly expressions of faith. Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnameable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.
Douthat goes on to speculate that it's the fact of having so many choices in how to pursue faith, that ultimately blocks the kind of ascetic bliss that can come from total surrender to one particular, grounded, transcendent reality. In our search amongst all the options to find something that "works best for us", we give up the prospect of being truly surprised by God. Twas not always the case, he writes, and he wonders whether that possibility of transformation can be easily recovered in the modern age.
Douthat's work is eloquent, and it's truly a pleasure to read this kind of rumination on the op-ed page of the Times. I think he's right that transformative spirituality is tougher when you're in front of a smorgasbord. However, I think there's an extent to which Douthat has things backwards; he thinks that faith loses its power to transform because of the smorgasbord, but speaking as a Catholic, maybe the smorgasbord persists because the Church is losing it's power to transform, surrendering the personal Mission to serve in exchange for abstract statements of moral principle.
The District of Columbia's law permitting homosexual marriage went into effect last month. The Catholic Church asked for a number of exemptions so that they didn't have to recognize those marriages as part of their public operations - the District declined. In response, the Church is planning to discontinue its decades-old foster care program, on the grounds that they now won't be able to deny gay parents from fostering needy children. Also, they've decided to discontinue medical benefits for all spouses, gay and straight, that work for Catholic Charities, to avoid having to pay them for newly married gay couples. On balance, I suppose I wish DC had granted the exemption. But they didn't, which forced the Church into a choice between enforcement of the Magisterium's dictates and continuing service to the public and their employees. They chose the former.
Without delving too much into the merits of the Church's decision, I'm left to wonder why, exactly, they never thought to discriminate against couples where one of the parties had been divorced and remarried - a condition about which Church teaching is just as clear. With a supremely bad taste in my mouth, I find myself indulging a suspicion that partisan politics has infected the American Church in a fairly severe manner - which also explains why it's shown itself willing to scuttle universal health care to prevent poor women from accessing non-taxpayer-provided abortion funds, and why it's been virtually silent on the subject of torture (see here for an excellent analysis of why the Church's anti-consequentialist position on abortion should lead to a similar unambiguous and vociferous rejection of torture policy - even though it hasn't). But all of this is somewhat beside the point, which is that to my mind the Church doesn't exist to enshrine any particular set of moral principles. What we should be doing is finding every way we can to continue Jesus Christ's mission on earth. He abhorred ostentatious pronouncements of self-righteousness, and welcomed with open arms even those who the world perceived as sinners. His instructions regarding humility, and unfailing service to the needy, lacked any any all ambiguity. Accordingly, I believe He wouldn't have wanted this.
Mysticism is one way to be transformed by God. Another way - Jesus' way - is the total public surrender of the self, in service to fellow men and women. That's what the Church is supposed to be about, more than anything else. In DC, this cutting ourselves off from the masses because we don't want to be stained with what we perceive as their sins - it is not in keeping with our best traditions of faith and charity. No wonder the smorgasbord looks so enticing to so many.
For my part, I'm a Catholic, for better or for worse. I believe what Jesus said to Peter, and I believe in the value of the sacraments, and the communion of saints. I won't pretend not to partake from the buffet, for my own reasons, but to truly and finally leave the Church would be as disruptive and unthinkable to me as renouncing my American citizenship. Just like America, measuring the Church's fulfillment of its Great Promise requires constant vigilance, reflection, and patience - and that's ok. I'm no better, after all - what is this blog if not an ostentatious pronouncement of self-righteousness. But I don't mind saying I'm disappointed by the behavior in DC - I think we can do better.
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