Love Is Love

 

It’s “Pride Month,” and this week’s flyer from WalMart features a “family pride” section with items for children: Mickey or Minnie Mouse with rainbow colours on their trousers or hair bow. “Rainbow Brite” and “Rainbow High” dolls. Pillows that say “Love is Love.”

Nothing that explicit. But “Love is Love” of course goes without saying. The reason for the slogan is that here “love” is a code word for “sex”: the message to children is “sex is love.” 

This by itself amounts to grooming.

It says something about our society that we have a month dedicated to two of the seven deadly sins, pride and lust. And it is becoming a bigger deal every year, big like Easter, say, with parades and gift-giving and special events.

Naked and Afraid

 

Illustration for Song of Songs: Jesus and the individual soul.

My gauche chum Xerxes has decided there is not enough sex in the culture. Why don’t we speak more of sex in church? 

“Is this a taboo from Victorian times, when even piano legs had to be covered lest they excite irrepressible lust?”

Victorian times ended in 1901.

“Face it – we are both sensual and sexual beings. Four of our five senses are in our heads. When we reject sexuality/sensuality, we deny the largest sense organ of our bodies -- our skins.”

The comment suggests we are already giving too much importance to sex. It implies that our sense of touch, and our physical body from the neck down, is entirely concerned with sex.

I wrote back:

“I disagree with you that our society needs to be more concerned with sex. We are already more concerned with sex than any other culture in history.

When I taught in China, students listed to me their traditional five necessities of life, and pointed out that sex was not one of them. It was meant as an implicit criticism of the West and its obsessions. We foreign experts were required to sign a declaration that we would respect the purity of Chinese womanhood.

My Pakistani acquaintances used to refer to “the wicked West.” Which I was then supposed to justify to them. They were thinking of sexual libertinage.

Cambodians and Filipinas have complained to me about how “casual” Westerners are about sex.

I think we got this way initially because of the strong tradition of Medieval romance, which, like the Song of Songs, used sexual love as a metaphor for our relationship with God. These passages are stunningly beautiful, but many people took and take them literally, and decide that sex is love and even somehow sacred. More recently, the whole thing has been exacerbated by Freud and psychology, which proposed a century and more ago that all mental illness was caused by frustrated sexual urges. It began in Victorian times with the pervasive theory that mental illness was caused by masturbation, and Freud and the rest ran with it from there.

Is sex central to life? No; reproduction is. Interestingly, the more interested we become in sex, the less interested we become in reproduction.”

It is perhaps significant that he then declared he would never again print any of my responses to his columns. 

The reader responses he did print all agreed with him.

“Xerxes, you need to get laid!”

“Why such beauty, of the most potent & lively drive, would be denigrated to the shadows is beyond me. I wish it weren’t so. I feel impoverished as a result.”

“It is our White Anglo Saxon heritage that evolved and came to this country and this continent.”

This one flies in the face of reality. Has she never heard of the hijab? Of honour killings? But it might explain the current hatred towards anything “white” or “Anglo-Saxon.” It is seen as killing a fun evening.

“Creation is a wonderful act and expression of our love and sexuality.  It needs to be celebrated.”

If sex is so wonderful, why the euphemism? Why does he say “creation,” instead of coitus?

We all know this is a load of cattle manure. 

It is a fine example of deliberate delusion, of the sort narcissists are always guilty of. It is telling each other alibis, as one sees in a dysfunctional culture or a dysfunctional family. Like most delusions, it allows us to think we can get away with something we know is wrong. 

And like any delusion, it is inevitably going to demand to be celebrated in church. The sense of guilt demands it. Just as children must be forced to affirm drag queens.

There is nothing wrong with sex. It is nature’s way to encourage propagation, and God’s little reward for passing on the human project to a new generation. It is a natural instinct, like hunger or thirst. When used for other purposes, it is lust. Compare food and gluttony, or thirst and alcoholism.

All is created for good. All evil comes from placing too much value on a thing.

“The sins which cause most souls to go to hell are the sins of the flesh.” – Jacinta of Fatima.

Pope Francis Downplays Sexual Sin

 

Lust sleeps with Eros

Pope Francis has just caused more confusion over the faith. To reporters on a flight to Greece, he explained that sins of the flesh are not the most serious. Pride and wrath are worse.

One can understand where he is coming from: otherwise good people can easily be tempted into sexual sins. We all are.

But then, the same is true of pride, or wrath.

Francis is sometimes justified as a “pastoral” pope rather than a deep thinker, in order to justify his sometimes theologically dubious comments. But it is precisely on the pastoral side that his comments are a problem. The prime responsibility of a shepherd is to guide the sheep, not to let them wander. Directions must be clear.

Strictly speaking, there are only two kinds of sin: mortal and venial. Put as simply as possible, a venial sin is one that does not in principle turn away from God; a mortal sin is one that does. A sexual sin, like any sin, can be either—it is all in the intent and motive, not in the act itself. Accordingly, one cannot say that a sin against the sixth commandment is more or less serious, in itself, than a sin against another.

However, the traditional listing of the three temptations is “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” Our Lady of Fatima revealed to Saint Jacinta in visions of hell that “The sins which cause most souls to go to hell are the sins of the flesh.”

It is hard to reconcile this with what the Pope just said. Who you gonna believe, the Pope or the Virgin Mary?

I side with Jacinta and Mary. It is precisely because sins of the flesh are so tempting to good people that they are dangerous. Among sins, they are a “gateway drug.” This is why lust is one of the “Seven Deadly Sins”: not because they are worse in themselves than other sins, but because they are addictive. They become a settled vice, and a vice causes us to turn away from God altogether.

Francis’s comments are, to put the best possible face on them, unhelpful. Who does he serve here?

Marianne and the Child

I think it is wrong to pry into the lives of famous people. Celebrities whatever their field are entitled, like the rest of us, to privacy. Interest in their personal affairs is generally the sin of calumny.

I am about to break that rule for Leonard Cohen.

Cohen is too important. He is not just another famous person. He is a spiritual guide, and, in the righteous words of Jennifer Warnes, Canada’s national poet. His soul intersects with Canada’s soul, and contains multitudes.

I was listening recently to the late song “Choices,” off the “Can’t Forget” tour album. And I realized how sad it was.

I've had choices
Since the day that I was born
There were voices
That told me right from wrong
If I had listened
I wouldn't be here today
Livin' and dyin'
With the choices I've made

It is a confession. It is sung in the voice of a hopeless alcoholic. Cohen did not write it, but the fact that he chose to perform it regularly suggests it meant something to him.

I was tempted
At an early age I found
That I liked drinkin'
No, I never turned it down
There were loved ones
But I chased them all away

Cohen did have a problem with drinking; but I fear that is not what he is really talking about. It stands in here for another vice, because he cannot quite speak that truth squarely. It is too painful to admit.

His vice was sex. It was lust.

This was, after all, the title of his first, autobiographical, novel: “The Favourite Game.” The favourite game was recreational sex: the hunt, the conquest. A common and commonly celebrated vice in his young adulthood, the era of Hemingway’s machismo, James Bond, Playboy, and the “sexual revolution.” A blind alley down which too many wandered then, and wander now.

Some girls wander by mistake
Into the mess that scalpels make.

Wrapped up in this is Marianne Ihlen: “So Long Marianne.” You can see her on the back cover of Songs from a Room. I have not seen the movie, “Marianne and Leonard,” but I think the issue is clear enough. It was his first committed relationship. By all the rules and right, that was his marriage, and it should have been for life. There was a child. It is unnatural and inhumane to break such bonds. I gather Cohen walked out on her, gradually, because, starting to become famous, he suddenly had lots more opportunities for casual sex. He was tempted as few of us ever are, and it was a temptation he could never resist.

Ever since he has had to live and die with that choice that he made. A fatal spiritual mistake.

The worst of it is that the child went mad by adulthood. Cohen must have wondered if he was responsible for that.

Cohen never could commit to any permanent relationship. He could never get past the lust; and always had chances to indulge it due to fame. He was an addict.

Notwithstanding, Cohen was a good man. He was just fallen like all of us; all of us have our temptations. The sign of his goodness was that he was wracked by guilt, and continued to wrestle with it. And to confess.

What I loved in my old life
I haven’t forgotten
It lives in my spine
Marianne and the child
The days of kindness
It rises in my spine
and it manifests as tears
I pray that loving memory
exists for them too
the precious ones I overthrew
for an education in the world

But Cohen fans and all of us need to realize that his early and sometimes celebrations of sexuality, attractive to so many, are phantoms on the road, demon voices that ruined his own life, the lives of many women, and the lives of many children, and continue to do so.

The First Beatitude

Nirvana

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

This is the first of Jesus’s Beatitudes, in which he identifies those to whom his good news is addressed.

Who are the poor in spirit?

The word “nirvana” the goal of all Buddhists, literally means the snuffing out of a candle. The flame of the candle represents desires. The whole program of Buddhism is to overcome your desires. Your coveting, your lusts.

The Buddhist “Four Noble Truths” are equivalent to the Christian Beatitudes. The proper title is “The Four Truths of the Noble Ones.”

1. Existence is full of suffering.

2. This is caused by desire.

3. Eliminating desire eliminates suffering.

4. There is a path to eliminate desire.

St. Paul uses the same fire image when he says “It is better to marry than to burn.” Fire here = lust, desire.

A bad person is perhaps, at base, someone who cannot control their desires, but must always indulge them. Both we and the Buddhists refer to this as “selfishness”; the “self” is the thing that desires. Self=desires. We use the pseudo-scientific term “narcissism” to express the same thing.

And this, a general inability to control desires, may condemn the narcissist therefore to “the eternal flames.”

It may be an image similar to the classical one of Tantalus, who always sees a banquet just beyond his reach.

The Buddha uses the image of a house on fire.

It is the curse of the bad man, the narcissist, to always have unsatisfied desires, for in the end, the world cannot be enough. And so he surrenders himself to the flames.

Luke’s begin more plainly, “Blessed are the poor.” In speaking of the “poor in spirit,” we cannot therefore drift too far from the image of literal poverty. It cannot simply mean, for example, the humble. That is covered elsewhere—“blessed are the meek.” It cannot mean the sad; that is covered by “blessed are those who mourn.”

Surely it means, to live as though you were poor, regardless of your actual wealth. Which is to say, to restrain and control your desires, as the literally poor are obliged to do.

The literal poor are blessed, perhaps, because they are forced to learn how to do this.

The Ninth Commandment--and the Tenth

A noble knight of God confronts the Seven Deadly Sins.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

This passage is awkwardly split into two commandments in the traditional Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish formulation. This requires a bit of rewriting:

9. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife.

10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s goods.

The argument for this is that otherwise you are classifying spouse as a belonging, which is wrong—not just to us moderns, but to traditional Jewish thought.

On the other hand, this would seem to condemn the same sin, “covetousness,” twice.

But one covets a person in a special way. The Hebrew word here can mean either “covet” or “lust.” One does not lust after Lamborghinis.

So it is two sins, lust and covetousness. You shall not lust after another’s wife or husband; you shall not covet anything that belongs to another.

Most interesting about these two commandments is that they presuppose the ability to control our desires. They are saying the desire is sinful, regardless of the action.

This goes against current received wisdom, which holds that desires and urges are like the weather; we can only control whether we act on them or not.

And the modern teaching, thanks to Freud, is that we should indeed whenever possible act on them. Otherwise we are repressed. And will no doubt over time go mad.

Yet we also know this is not true, if we stop and think for a moment.

Because, after all, we hold people responsible for “hate,” and punish them for it. When we marry, we vow “to love and to cherish.” Obviously, we could not do so if we thought the ability to love or cherish was out of our control.

No doubt it takes discipline to learn not to lust, not to envy. It takes discipline to be moral in general. Emotions can be addictions, and grow worse if we indulge them.

Developing good character is a matter of fighting such addictions.