Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your ministry is?

Leah: I am married to Marc, and we have a daughter, Robyn, who is just about four and a son, Eliot, who is six months old.  We have made our home in Saskatoon, close to family and under great big prairie skies.  I work for the Diocese of Saskatoon as the director of pastoral services.  I have a Master’s of Arts in Pastoral Theology from St. Michael’s College in Toronto.

Brett:  My wife Flannery and I live in downtown Toronto in Student Family Housing with out two little guys, Toby and Oscar.  We’re expecting number 3 in March.  I am currently working on my doctoral dissertation in Theology and hope to find work in the near future as a university professor in Theology.

Leah: Our speaking and writing ministry began when we were undergraduates at Campion College the University of Regina.  As young adults, we found that most discussions among our friends and colleagues eventually led to relationships and sexuality.  Conversations led to invitations to speak to youth groups, young adults, classrooms.  Over time, we have expanded our repertoire, but the sex, dating and marriage talks remain very popular, especially since the publication of the book.  Our website, howfarcanwego.com provides more details about our speaking on other subjects. These days we are both doing a lot of custom speaking work, tailored to the needs and interests of the school, church or group who contacts us.

   How did this project get started?

Brett:  I think there are at least three factors that led to us writing a book.  The first is that almost every time we gave a talk someone would come up to us afterwards and say something like, “My daughter had badminton tonight and she couldn’t be here, but she would have really loved this.  Do you have something I can take home for her?”  Other people asked if they could video tape us for their friends who couldn’t make it.  So one big impetus for the book was simply to have something available for those who couldn’t make it to the talks.

A second reason we ended up writing a book is that people are very careful with bringing in speakers about sex and dating.  Sometimes we would end up in 3 hour phone interviews before giving a 1 hour talk.  Some people want to know exactly what you’re going to say before they let you in.  In a way this is understandable given the difficulty of cleaning up a mess if a speaker really misses the target.  On the other hand it could get frustrating.  Sometimes you’re thinking, “If you already know everything, why don’t you give the talk?”  Having a book makes this process much easier.  We can tell people, if you like the book, you’ll probably like the presentation.  If you don’t like the book, we’re probably not the ones you want for your youth group.

The last factor is that we would never have thought ourselves capable of writing a book until we were enrolled in our Master’s degrees and came to realize that our theses were basically like writing a book.  Once it became clear that we would essentially be writing books for school, writing a book didn’t seem so intimidating.  (In fact, the American publisher (Paulist Press) that picked up How Far Can We Go? has also published my Master’s thesis.  It’s called Can Catholics and Evangelicals Agree about Purgatory and the Last Judgment.)

Once it became clear to us that it would be good to have a book, and that it wasn’t unreasonable to try to write one, we put in a proposal to Novalis, the Canadian Catholic publisher.  They were very interested and supportive right away.

What resources influenced your model for dating?

Brett:   We are part of the John Paul II generation, so when we had questions about this stuff in early undergrad, we went looking through his stuff and other things in the tradition.  Of course, there is very little explicitly written about dating in the Catholic tradition.  Essentially what our model does is take a Catholic theology of marriage and work backwards from it.  If sex belongs in marriage because it is the physical manifestation of a full gift of self, as John Paul II says, what should people who are in a serious relationship, but have not yet made that full self gift in marriage be doing?  What should their relationships look like?

When we were working out a model to answer these questions, we assumed that dating was done for the purpose of discerning your future.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun too, but Catholic dating has marriage as at least a remote possibility.

One big key for our model came when Flannery, who is now my wife, and I went to see a priest we were close with when we started dating.  We knew we shouldn’t have sex, but we had very different ideas about appropriate physical intimacy at that stage in our relationship.  When we asked Father Peter for advice, he didn’t give us any specific lines, but instead starting asking us questions about our relationship in general.  He made it clear that physical intimacy has to correspond to the other ways of self-giving in your relationships.  And this is true for everyone, whether dating, married, friends, family members, whatever.  Physical intimacy is an important way that human persons communicate with one another, but it needs to say what the rest of the relationship is saying or it can really hurt people.

Leah: We were young adults ourselves when we developed the model.  We were trying to figure out how to date in a way that would prepare us for whatever vocation God had in mind for us.  We wanted dating to be fun but also respectful of our own and others’ dignity.  We were frustrated with the predominant models for faithful dating that had been offered to us: either don’t touch each other at all or draw arbitrary lines based on someone else’s advice and then try not to cross them.

When I met Marc’s fabulous French family for the first time, he walked into the house and kissed everyone on the lips.  By the time I came a second time, his dad and other male relatives were giving me quick greeting kisses on the lips.  While it took a little while to get used to that, it gave me an insight that we’ve been relying on for a long time.  In healthy relationship with our families, friendships and even strangers, we navigate physical intimacy based on the whole context of the relationship.  As we get to know people, our whole lives become more familiar to one another.  Touch progresses along a continuum, according to the time we spend with someone, the commitment we have and with reference to social norms.  Hormones often make this natural process rushed and a bit urgent when people are attracted to one another, and secular society’s norms around sex and dating aren’t helping young people to heed the Church’s wisdom to save sex for marriage.  We needed a dating model which would help young people navigate growth in physical intimacy, develop skills to discern God’s plan for them, and develop a reverence for the mystery of the person they love.  All of these skills are highly transferable to marriage, friendship and the rest of life, no matter where the relationship goes.

Can you give a brief synopsis of the dating “model” you propose?

Brett:  The model grew out of our attempt to answer the title question of the book “How Far Can We Go?”  Young people were asking us this question, as they ask almost anyone who works with them.  They mean, primarily, “How far can we go in terms of physical intimacy?” or “Which physical acts are OK and which aren’t?”  This is driven by a natural inclination towards physical intimacy, and that’s a good thing, but we thought it would be important to channel that natural desire into a way for discerning healthy relationships in general.  While it is important to point out a few things that young people striving for chaste relationships should not be doing (e.g. engaging in acts that simulate sex or getting themselves into situations where avoiding sex becomes a real challenge), it is also important to teach young people how to be self-aware enough about their relationships to be able to answer this question for themselves.

In order to do this, we came up with a way for people to picture their relationships.  There are actually graphs in the book! The basic structure is something like this:  the person you will someday marry, started out as a stranger.  You have to navigate the journey from stranger to spouse.  That means you have to navigate from zero intimacy to full intimacy and from zero commitment to full commitment.  But intimacy and commitment aren’t merely physical realities.  They are social, spiritual, intellectual and emotional.  To grow in intimacy in a healthy way is to grow across all the areas of human relationships.  The best way to judge if your physical intimacy is healthy is to ask questions about the rest of your relationship.  “Do I feel like he listens to me?”  “What do my friends and family think about her?”  “Am I able to pray with this person?”  Our model teaches people how to ask questions about their relationships in order to gauge what a healthy progression of physical intimacy should look like.  It helps them to keep all areas of their relationship in mind when they consider questions about physical intimacy.

And, if young people date in this way, they can use that natural desire for physical intimacy as a tool for discernment.  It is very easy to a relationship’s physical aspect to take over so that people become blind to what else is going on in the relationship.  Many young people are hurt when they get trapped into bad relationships that seem so intense when physical intimacy that has gotten out of hand.  When physical intimacy is always gauged with reference to the broader relationship, it is easier to recognize and get out of an unhealthy relationship and it is easier to protect and nurture a good and healthy relationship.

Finally, physical intimacy itself comes to mean more, even if it is less intense for a time, when it is consciously linked with more than animal attraction.  People can tell the difference between a kiss that says, “I care about you deeply,” and a kiss that says “I’m having trouble controlling myself right now.”

    You say that the book is written for teens, but you have a short chapter which functions as a note to parents, teachers, and pastors.

Leah: We discovered very early in our speaking career that most adults are ill-equipped to support young people as they move through their dating years.  Some didn’t follow the Church’s teaching themselves and feel a knowledge gap or hypocrisy, even though they hope young people will make wise choices.  Others want to prevent their kids from heartache and hurt by making the decisions for the young people in their lives.  And these reasons are usually coupled with a general discomfort with talking about the subject!

We also discovered that speaking to youth with their parents, teachers and pastors in the same room increased the likelihood that both young people and the adults in their lives would talk to one another about sexuality and relationships.  When mom and dad drove the family home from the presentation, their teenage sons and daughters would initiate conversations with their parents about the presentation material – often for the first time.  Parents came back to us with gratitude and a measure of awe.  We think this is preferable to that awkward meeting after a presentation when young people walk into the kitchen to the dreaded, “So, what did they have to say about sex?”

And finally, our model assumes that relationships are not private.  They are part of the social nature of our humanity.   This means that my dating affects my friendships, family, work, school, church and service in the community.  All of these people can help to support those who are dating to make wise and healthy choice in and about the relationship.  If I am called to marry someone, my relationship should make most of these other relationships even richer.

What are the challenges of writing a book on sexuality for teens?

Brett:  One very practical challenge is the fact that teens have a very wide diversity of reading capacities.  And reading capacity does not necessarily line up with the seriousness of relationships that people are in.  We had to make it readable to everyone without making it seem childish to more mature young people and/or stronger readers.  Capturing just the right tone was an important goal for us.

On the other hand, a book is very satisfying because when you’re done a talk sometimes you think, “Did I say that the way I wanted?”  “Did I approach that question well?”  With a book you have so much time to write, re-write, read, re-read, double-check with your co-author, send to an editor etc., that by the time it’s in your hand, you can be pretty confident about what you’re putting out there.

I believe you both are aware that “sex talks” given by Catholic youth ministers tend to either glorify sex as something near to an experience of heaven, a tact which some might call “hokey”, or they get so deep into the nuts and bolts that they fail to adequately convey the sacred aspect of the conjugal act, that is, they inadvertently vulgarize it. How did you attempt to avoid falling into either error, finding the balance between a sexual realism and an adequately sacramental view of sex and sexuality?

Leah:  Oddly enough, Brett and I have a lot of comfort talking about a subject that most people find awkward. We have tried to bring humour and reverence to the subject without allowing sex to become disembodied or vulgar.  I am not sure we have always managed to do this perfectly for every group to whom we have spoken – I think our audiences and readers will be the ultimate critics on that front.  That said, we are fairly rooted in our own very real and very blessed marriages.  We have experienced the sacramentality of the whole married and family life, including, but not limited to, sex with our respective spouses.  We find that when sex is situated in the proper place (in a marriage and as only one part of a whole life together), it emerges with a sacramentality that is proper to God’s plan.

For example, I often remind young people that, despite having a wonderful and healthy sex life, I spend much more time in my marriage doing laundry and changing toilet paper rolls than having sex!  Making meals and caring for our children offer us opportunities to love and serve each other, as well as God – not unlike making love.  When we talk about life as the place where we meet God, it is easier to see how sex can be playful, funny, forgiving, challenging, fulfilling and holy, all at the same time.

What did you do with your retreat material to make it book-ready?

Brett: We did a lot of translating work from the more interactive format of the talks into a book.  We couldn’t ask the reader questions and then work from their answers like we do in live talks, so we relied on the questions we have been asked most often to add material to the book.

Leah: The book was also different in that we often give two presentations (Sexuality and Dating and then Sexuality and Marriage), but the book combined these two parts.  The middle of the book contains new material to provide the transition, including a chapter on how you might know if you are called to marriage and a chapter on the spirituality of marriage.

And, mostly, a book is more formal than a presentation, so much of the material that we use to bring in humour and break the awkwardness of the subject didn’t make the book.  [All the more reason to have us come to speak, if you liked the book.]

  Can you explain the importance of having parents, teachers, and pastors read the book “with” their teens?

Brett:  One of the best things we hear from parents after our talks is that they can finally talk to their kids about sex.  It works as a great icebreaker because now you don’t have to say “What do you think about sex?”  but you can say “What do you think about what those other people said about sex?”  It gives kids a little bit of space to talk.  The other thing it does is to provide parents and kids with a common language and some common starting points.  Parents often don’t know where to start.  They know they should talk to their kids about sex, but they have no idea where to begin.  If the book is at all like the talks, it should give people a good starting point and a lot of content for future conversations.

    Do you have any plans to complement the book with additional books, a video series, or anything of the sort?

Brett:  Right now, our only complement is the website: howfarcanwego.com.  It has excerpts from the book, a link to buy the book, some personal info about Leah and I.  We are currently working on a page where teachers can post lesson plans that they used with the book so that other teachers will have a webpage full of ideas for how to put the book to use in the classroom.  This should also be helpful for youth and young adult ministers.

Leah: We frequently get requests for a college edition of the book, as well as for a Protestant edition.  At the moment, there are no formal plans for either, but we have spoken to both university students and non-Catholic audiences.  I am currently writing a new book for Novalis on a similar subject, but not a direct sequel.  Theology of the Body for Every Body will be published by Novalis in the spring of 2012.  It will be the same style and length as How Far Can We Go?  It’s going well, but I am missing my co-author in the writing process!

[All that said, if any publishers, media outlets or wealthy benefactors want to work with us on complementary material, we are certainly interested in conversation…]

    What was your approach to writing the book? Why did you choose to structure the book in the way you did?

Leah: We wanted the book to be accessible, engaging, short and theologically sound.  So, we set out to write a book that uses every-day language without falling victim to over-simplification.  We have always assumed that young people are smarter and more capable that most of the world acknowledges.

The structure of the book followed the structure of the presentations.  When we gave our very first presentation, we asked the group we were speaking to what they wanted to hear about and over 90 percent of the young people wrote some variation of the question, “How far can we go?”  It was the natural starting place.  The rest of the book flowed from that.  We also added boxes which highlight key ideas and definitions.  In the presentation, these would be asides, tangents we would follow or responses to questions from the audience.  The presentations have also been aimed at youth and young adults with their parents, teachers and pastors in the room.  This has been working well, so we carried the same intended audience into the book.

    Is the book intended to be used in a youth group or “formal” setting or it is aimed more for personal reading by individual teens or in a family setting?

Brett:  We’re hoping it will work well for both individuals and groups.  Many teachers and youth ministers we know are using the book in their classrooms and youth groups.  That’s why we’re providing resources for teachers on our website.

By its nature, a book is made for one person to read it, and individuals seem to be getting a lot out of it.  Still, I think any time you can talk to others who have read the same thing you’re going to benefit more.

Leah: Parents and pastors seem to be getting a lot of mileage by leaving our book out on coffee tables, kitchens and in bathrooms.  The title and cover are pretty irresistible when young people think no one else is looking.  Then all of a sudden a family or young group conversation seems to spring up out of nowhere.

    Can you tell us about the process of writing this book as a team? Were there any parts that were more difficult than others or that one of you felt more comfortable writing than the other?

Brett:  I tell people that when you start out co-authoring a book, you think that you’ll end up doing about half as much work as writing a whole book, but co-authoring is at least twice as much work.  You’re both putting your name to this thing, so each of you has to be comfortable with every sentence the other person writes.  We think the book is much better because we went back and forth on so many things making sure we got it just right, but sometimes the process was exhausting.  I’d write a chapter and send it to Leah, she’d send me her critiques and suggestions and I’d rewrite it with those in mind.  Once we both liked it we’d send it to the editor who would send it back with critiques and suggestions.  Then I’d rewrite again, send it to Leah again, try get it perfect, and then send it back to the editor.

Some of the chapters went pretty smoothly, but there were a couple that looked like they’d never come together.  Sometimes we had each written parts of a chapter and sometimes it was pretty tough to make it all flow.  Those were the toughest ones.

Most of the chapters were written by one or the other of us.  We’d talk to each other about all of them, but the easiest chapters were the ones where you’d write every sentence yourself.

Leah:  Though we now live in two different cities some 3000 miles apart, our speaking ministry began together.  We divided up the chapters based on who usually spoke on the particular section in our presentations.  The most difficult sections to write were the ones where our styles are different.  I am always concerned about pastoral sensitivity and Brett about clarity.  When talking about family planning and sexual ethics in marriage, we wanted to arrive at a clear and pastorally sensitive presentation of the Church`s teaching and we hope we`ve succeeded.

Writing the book together has really been a gift now that we have our families in different cities.  When groups can`t afford to fly us both in to speak, we have to present all the material on our own.  The book keeps us accountable to a shared vision, even if the audiences miss out on having two marriages and both male and female perspectives to draw on.

What kind of feedback have you received on the book so far?

Brett:  Early on there was a feature on the book run in a Canadian Catholic paper and a couple weeks later a letter came in denouncing the book, mostly based on the title.  The letter made it pretty clear he hadn’t read the book.  I wrote in suggesting that he should read the book and get back to us.  A couple weeks later he wrote an apology saying the book was “sheer excellence.”

People seem really happy with it.  We’ve heard some wonderful stories from kids who have found it very helpful.  We’ve had kids tell the people at Novalis that every Catholic teenager needs to read this book.  Over and over we’re hearing that this is finally a book on sex and dating for teens that speaks to them right where they are.

Leah: One (Catholic) young woman bought the book and took with her to a Lutheran bible camp.  Over the week, all eleven girls in her cabin read the book and they talked about it all week.  An Anglican minister in the Saskatoon area has been using it with her youth group for two years now.  The response of our Evangelical friends has also been very positive.

Brett: One of the big challenges for us when we wrote the book was to not get pigeon-holed.  We love the Church and are disheartened by the polarization in the Church around sex.  We wanted to write something that could speak to the whole Church.  So far, we have received very positive reviews, praising our approachability, orthodoxy and sensitivity from quite different quarters.  This is one of the things we’re proudest about with this book.  We think if you can write a Catholic book on sex that doesn’t pit Catholics against one another, you’ve done something important.

On a more official level, we were very excited to hear that the book won a Catholic Press Award.  We ended up getting third place in the first-time author category.  The CPA blurb said: “An exceptionally practical book for that all-important question of life that is on the mind of every teen and every parent.”

The book has sold well in Canada, selling out the first print-run fairly shortly, and Novalis has partnered with a Polish publisher as well as with Paulist Press in the US to produce Polish and American versions of the book.  When we applied for the Imprimatur from the Archdiocese of Newark (where Paulist is located) the censor called it “the best book I have seen for teaching sexual morality to college students or adults.”  That was very gratifying.

“To devote oneself to others and to act, misereor super turbam, that is the great saying, but how? Intellectual needs, moral needs, social needs, everything cried out for help. Christ is there, but who are we to give him to and where are we to take him? To devote oneself to others is the rule common to all men, just as Christianity is the universal remedy — but how? Is it to be in intellectual conflicts, in the melee of ideas?…Or in hand-to-hand fights, in the political and social fray?…Is it not action alone which defines ideas?…

There are three human ways of serving the supernatural: either my making room for it in the intellectual order, which invades it and seems to force it back, by preparing room for it with hte help of healthy, clearly defined, really scientific ideas in philosophy and in the theory of the human mind; or by making room for it in social and political action, by introducing it by example, by means of discussions and personal influence, into the traditions of the people, the customs of the countryside, through legislation and practical reason; or by calling upon it to reanimate the generosity of feelings, the dry or withering heart, the enthusiasm that is dulled by the abuse of material things, of positive, scientific things…In a word one must restore either the object, or the practice, or the feeling of religion and moral things. It goes without saying that each of these means only supplements the supernatural action upon any Christian, and upon others through the communion of saints. That is the common, impersonal source of the power for good; great thoughts, noble resolutions, striking and influential devotion to others, spring form the inchoate prayer and austerities of the humble and the ignorant.”

- Maurice Blondel, entry in Carnets Intimes for 15 Dec. 1883. Quoted in Introduction to The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, p 37.

There are those that advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged. These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square.

- PBXVI, address at Westminster Hall, 9-17-2010

Reflecting on this, a friend writes:

What should be the role of religion in the public square and how can religions avoid competing in the same public space?  What exactly is “the legitimate role of religion in the public square”?

1 – The more religion is relegated purely to the private sphere the more likely it becomes that persecution will follow. To understand the persecution angle we’d have to discuss some of anti-theist philosophical roots of liberalism, modernism, and post-modernism.  Suffice it to say what we are seeing now is result of deliberate efforts by some and less conscious but still deliberate efforts by others to pursue a certain brand of freedom which rejects God as creator in order to assert the autonomy of man to the extent that man can create himself. Who he is, all that matters, is the personal choice — freedom as license.  God is a threat to this freedom and must be pushed out of the way. Thus, in the short term the relegation of religion to the purely private sphere may in the short term diminish persecution as fewer religious voices are their to persecute.  But by its nature religion is a public and communal phenomenon. People of faith will eventually feel moved to speak up, to witness to their faith in a public way. After becoming accustomed to the silence of the religious, when those who want God pushed out of the way are confronted again by religious voices they will believe they have a “right” to keep the voices silent.  Count on it.

2. It seems at the very least that religions should have the same dialogical role with the government as do other interest groups, interest groups which often, though not always, are motivated by self-serving interests rather than the common good, but we would have to be comfortable with other religions (including distorted forms) having as much dialogue with the government as we would want. This is pretty much what the Church says in VCII’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. The key, as Pope Benny mentioned, is the collaboration of faith and reason: when either is silenced ( faith silenced by govt or reason by fundamentalist groups), bad things result.

3. The Pope sort of answers your questions in the speech from which you quoted, although you probably already know that.  He said,

“the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these [ethical] norms [which prescind from natural law], as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves.”

Finally I would add that in America the practice of Catholicism, generally speaking, is already too privatized. We laity do not witness to Christ eloquently enough to effectively ethe places in which we work and live, and that, after all, is our vocation.  (See Lumen Gentium 31).

What do you all think?

Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away,
Christ stays in the past,
the Gospel is a dead letter,
the Church is simply an organization,
authority a matter of dominion,
mission a matter of propaganda,
the liturgy no more than an evocation,
Christian living a slave morality.

But in the Holy Spirit:
the cosmos is resurrected and groans with birth-pangs of the Kingdom,
the risen Christ is there,
the Gospel is the power of life,
the Church shows forth the life of the Trinity,
authority is a liberating service,
mission is a Pentecost,
the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation,
human action is deified.

Metropolitan Ignatios of Latakia, Main Theme Address in The Uppsala Report 1968. Quoted from Tom Norris, The Trinity: Life of God, Hope for Humanity, p. 41.

On the issue of same-sex marriage itself, it seems to me that its legalization is nigh inevitable and has been so for some time. In his encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI offered prophetic warnings about the consequences of the widespread use of contraceptives.  For example,

. In 1988, Janet E. Smith noted that all the prophecies contained in “Humanae Vitae” had been fulfilled. The encyclical predicted that:

• The widespread use of contraceptives would lead to conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality;

• “The man” will lose respect for “the woman” and “no longer (care) for her physical and psychological equilibrium” and will come to “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion”;

• The widespread acceptance of contraception would place a dangerous weapon in the hands of public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies; and

• It would lead men (and women especially) to think they had absolute and unlimited dominion over their bodies.

Indeed the separation of the unitive and procreative aspects of marriage and the nuptial act has had disastrous consequences. Same-sex marriage can be seen as another one of these consequences. The institution of marriage is no longer understood to be what it actually is. Judge Walker wrote that marriage is

“a couple’s choice to live with each other, to remain committed to one another, and to form a household based on their own feelings about one another, and their agreement to join in an economic partnership and support one another in terms of the material needs of life.”

Jennifer Roback Morse, to whom I have linked above, responds to the above by asking:

How would this definition exclude college roommates? Not only does this definition include nothing about children, it includes nothing even about marriage being a sexual relationship, and certainly nothing about permanence, nothing about sexual exclusivity, nothing about connecting the generations to one another.

After all, marriage is essentially about joining a man and woman together for the sake of their children and for the sake of each other. This requires permanence and fidelity.  Sadly however, the working definition of marriage has long since ceased to be such. And in fact, defenders of “traditional” marriage now have little ground to stand on. If we were serious about fighting same-sex marriage, then we should have been fighting no-fault divorce more seriously. At this point, in the public eye, there is little left for us to defend.

So…what are our options?

Realistically, I think same-sex marriage will be legalized. If that is the case, a clear distinction should be made (legally and otherwise) between civil unions and sacramental marriages. On the Church’s part, parishes should more firmly and uniformly insist that couples being married live as if they recognize the sanctity and dignity of marriage and its sign-value. On the government’s part, tax breaks should be reserved for marriages that produce children and that last, (although I could see certain exceptions). These are the marriages which a government should want to encourage.

Frankly, I don’t like this compromise, but since our society no longer acts in accord with the institution of marriage in which we believe, it is unlikely that said society will respect the integrity of that institution. Judge Walker’s definition of marriage, while incomplete, is probably closer to how many people see marriage; even if they wouldn’t use those words, they act in accord with it.   And on those grounds, there is little or no reason to exclude homosexuals from such unions.

Similarly, many successful athletes have spoken of envisioning their performance prior to the game or a key shot. Jack Nicklaus has said that he has never made a shot which he didn’t first see. Thus it seems that one’s ability to imagine how he will respond in certain situations can be an important indicator of how successfully he will interact with the world.

Unfortunately, many, myself included, seem to have significant difficulties imagining themselves living a holy life. The imagination may be well-developed and powerful or weak and sparsely used, but either way, few seem to have what I would term a Christian imagination. We know what is true and good and beautiful, but we can’t imagine what it would look like to live accordingly. We may have been raised in Catholic families and Catholic schools, but we have been formed largely by the images of society. It is sometimes far easier to imagine committing evil acts, even acts we have no intention of ever commiting, than it is to imagine, in a concrete way, living a saintly life. We have few images for that.

If Christians hope to live a life which witnesses more to Christ than to their political or cultural ideologies their imaginations must be formed by Christ. Our formative texts ought to be the Sacred Scriptures and the Liturgy and hagiographies, even those whose facticity may be questionable can be powerful stimulants for a Christian imagination. They can teach us to respond to the situations of life in a way that images Christ.

In a society of individualism and relativism in which words no longer effectively signify, a life lived in radical witness to Christ is absolutely essential to living out the mandates of the Gospel, to living an evangelical Catholicism. A Christian imagination is equally essential to completing this task faithfully.

But we have trashed language, not merely by speaking vulgarities and banalities, for we live in an age in which words have lost their sign value. They no longer actually refer to any objective reality in our minds. When one sees smoke, that signifies fire, but words no longer offer a direct link to concrete realities. They don’t really mean anything. We don’t stand by our words, thus language has become impotent – unable to communicate the truth of ourselves.

Indeed many of us have become abstracted from ourselves. We know a certain thing to be true, good, beautiful, but because the words no longer effectively signify, we have diffuclty reconciling our lives, our actions, with these truths. For our words to have authority we must be willing to defend them with our blood, our lives. We cannot determine whether we will ever be asked to stand by our words at such a price, but like the WORD, we must choose to do so. Only then can we hope to effectively communicate love to others.

However, this is difficult. Not only because we are to varying degrees formed by a society of deceit and half-truths, but also because this idea itself often fails to meaningly signify, to take root in us.

In a world which features the dis-integration of persons how can one overcome self-abstraction to stand by his words? How is one to live according to Truth when she so often recognizes it without standing by it, without living in accord with it? How is one to help others, family members, friends, students, etc., to stand by their words, to hear his words, or the words of the Gospel, as integrated persons, such that they are moved to communion and to a reciprocal and authentic communication?

How can I experience metanoia if the words which point to the WORD have been made impotent?

Referencing 1 Sam 15, fellow EC blogger Kyle Cupp, posted his view that moral reason and Christian conception of God deny the possibility of God having commanded genocide. Nevertheless he wished to maintain the inerrancy of the Bible. He explains:

“I am not saying is that Bible is a perverse book or that we worship a perverse God. I’m not saying that God didn’t have a reason for having the statement in the Bible or that he didn’t have a reason for having the imperative attributed to him. I’m not saying that the author of Samuel is acting perversely or in error in his task as a sacred writer. Nor am I saying that God is acting perversely or in error by having perverse statements in the Sacred Scriptures. I am not denying or undermining the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, though, of course, what I say speaks to how I understand inerrancy. I affirm that “the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,” but my affirmation doesn’t preclude me from recognizing cultural and even barbaric cultural influences upon those same scriptures. The Bible chronicles salvation history, and there’s not a little perversity in that story.”

Others responding to him seemed intent on protect the inerrancy of the literal sense of the Bible. God did indeed command genocide, but that’s okay he alone has authority over life and death. There is little or no moral difference between God allowing countless deaths via miscarriage and his commanding Israel to commit genocide against the Amalekites, especially considering this was done to preserve the spiritual purity of the Jews and enable God to eventually bring forth Christ from their community.

Nathan O’ Halloran offered another perspective:

The so-called “Historical Books” from Joshua – 2 Kings are more commonly known to scholars as the “Former Prophets.”  The reason they are called prophetic books is because they are basically an unpacking of the book of Deuteronomy and its main message: “Hear oh Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord alone.”  In other words, the Deuteronomistic author wrote them in order to explain to the Israel of his time what happens when God is disobeyed.  They are prophetic more than they are historical.  1 Samuel 15 is not about telling a story from the past, but speaking a word to the present, using a well-known story from the past. These books “speak God’s word” through a series of historical tidbits, legends, stories, tales, etc.  Some might be historical, others are clearly legends, and others morality tales.

In this sense, the “literal” meaning of a story like 1 Samuel 15 would be the prophetic message that it embodies.  Who knows whether or not this event actually happened.  However, whether or not it did, the message is clear: Amalek must be destroyed.  Now, according to the legends of ancient Israel, Amalek had taken on a meaning far great than that of a particular nation.  Amalek represented evil, and the enemies of God’s people.  This goes back to the story in Exodus 17.  Amalek opposes Israel’s journey when God is leading them out of slavery.

… Amalek is a symbol in a prophetic history of Israel.  And we must read the intention of the author to be to use Amalek as a symbolic character in order to make a point.

This is the interpretation that I prefer, and I belief it is faithful to a proper literal reading of Scripture.  If the true literal meaning according to a proper identification of the genre of 1 Samuel 15 is as “symbolic prophetic history,” then the intention of the author is simply to use the nation of Amalek as a symbol of God’s incompatibility with evil.  Israel also cannot now (at the time of the author) go about making alliances with Egypt and Babylon and still think it is being faithful to the plan of God.

I tend to lean more toward Kyle and Nathan’s approach, but I am still wrestling with this. However, I would like to offer a few thoughts in reflection.

We can’t merely place this on their ancient context. “Genocide was just the way things were done back then, etc.” Christians were involved in both the NAzi’s attempted genocide of the Jews and settlers’ attempted genocide of the Native Americans. We (our time and culture) are no better in this regard than that of ancient Israel.

Reading passages like this as mere allegory seem to require a, perhaps unconscious, but nevertheless real suppression of the literal sense of the text.

This particular passage, 1 Sam 15, is not generally where scholars go to address questions of Genocide, those happen in Joshua, this text seems to be generally seen as an account which revelatory about Saul rather than about God. It attempts to show that Saul, because he is disobedient and willing to kill innocents (1 Sam 21-22), is unworthy to be king, and is therefore a nod toward the Davidic kingdom.

I think we need to be careful about discussing inerrancy, which has an important place in magisterial texts prior to VCII, but is curiously absent from Dei Verbum. DV says that ”he books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,” but it does not teach that the texts are inerrant in faith and morals. Furthermore, verification of error generally requires some sort of empirical fact check. This simply cannot be done in regard to the Bible. There is a Truth which is taught without error in the Scriptures, but what that is precisely is left unanswered by the Council. This does not seem to support to semi-fundamentalist understanding of inerrancy which is often put forth. For example, in 1 Sam 15:11 God tells Samuel, “I regret that I made Saul king,” but in verse 29, Samuel says to Saul “The Glory of Israel will not recant or change his mind; for he is not a mortal that he should change his mind.” In Hebrew, the words for “regret” and “change his mind” are the same word. Clearly we must be cautious in how understand inerrancy and in how we draw grand theological ideas from these complex texts.

In conclusion, it seems to me we, myself included, need to be much more humble when approaching the Sacred Page. We ought not assume to know have God and the Scriptures fit comfortably within out theological system. I cannot completely or accurately place my wife, son, or best of friends, or random strangers into any given system. Why should I suspect God to fit into any of theological boxes? . It is so much easier to conceive of a tame and domesticated God that fits neatly into our lives and moral values. We can thus read the Bible according to this understanding of God and the Scriptures, and find ourselves and our understanding reaffirmed. But I do not think there is any such God, or that Scripture can be read this way. Hebrews tells us that it “sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow” (Heb 4:12). We must approach it prayerfully and with great humility, with an open mind willing to allow the God of all creation to some about us to ourselves and something about Himself to us.

Pax.

Kim at Faith, Fiction, and Flannery writes about Dorothy Day’s approach as an alternative to the partisan hate party that surrounded the health care bill.  I think she is probably right. That is all.  What do you think?

We’ve heard Catholics on both sides of the current legislation for health care reform weigh in: the CHA, and a few nuns, along with those who agree with them say we need this legislation; that Christ compels us as a society to take care of our brethren. This legislation will help us do that, they say. They have a point. The bishops, on the other hand, agree with some of the legislation, but are very wary about abortion provisions. Some bishops have said we cannot support such legislation the life of the unborn is not adequately protected. They have their point as well, yet something seems to be missing in both of these positions.

I believe there is a third way.

Dorothy Day walked the path of that third way. The essence of the Catholic Worker movement that she and Peter Maurin founded in 1933 is a personalism founded in Christ. Day of course is most noted for her anti-war activities, but the underpinning of her pacifism was always Christ and the value and dignity of the human person.

That value, that dignity, has been all but obscured in the debate on health care reform, or rather health care insurance reform. Insurance is what the debate and it’s subsequent bill, have been about. The actual care of the person has been thrown to wayside.

Recently, a friend relayed a story of a visit to the doctors office with her daughter. I think it gets to the heart of the problem of health care today. My friend, Suzanne, took her daughter in for a check-up and while she was there, Suzanne asked the doctor to take a quick look at something on her arm. She was sure it was nothing, but asked anyway. The doctor told her to make an appointment with his secretary. He did not even look at Suzanne’s arm. This is what health care has come to in the US: a doctor won’t look at someone without an appointment. The appropriate paperwork needs to be filled out. The proper billing needs to be completed. The person in front of the doctor, is tossed away, either by necessity of paperwork and legalities or by the doctor’s choice not to deal with the issue at hand.

This is the kind of systematic dismissal of humanity Dorothy Day warned against. It is the kind of dismissal Christ asks us to let go