Dwight Longenecker's Blog, page 358

Standing Up Against Sexism

I have been challenged by a commenter to 'stand up against sexism'.



I have to admit I'm not really sure just what 'sexism' is. If it means men being nasty to women just because they're women, (or women being nasty to men just because they're men) well I'm against that for sure, but then that would be because I'm opposed to people being nasty to others straight across the board.



Men should behave like gentlemen--treating women with honor and respect as the gentler and superior sex, and women should behave like ladies--treating men with honor and respect as the stronger and superior sex.



Maybe 'sexism' means excluding women from certain jobs that are traditionally associated with men. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think it's a very nice thing to expect women to take on nasty and disagreeable jobs like being soldiers or policemen or fire fighters or septic tank cleaners or butchers or slaughterhouse workers or politicians or trash collectors or bankers or stockbrokers. These are dirty, filthy, and demeaning professions. Women are better than that.



I think a woman's place is in the home. But then, I think the man's place is in the home too. A woman was made to be a mother and a man was made to be a father. Everything they do should revolve around that vocation, and if a man has to go out into the world and provide for his family by doing some filthy, dangerous and difficult job like being a miner or a salesman or a truck driver or a telephone engineer or a college professor or a professional wrestler or a company vice president, then he should regard that job as a hardship he has to endure in order to support his wife and family.



One of the great lies of our age is that a 'career' is most important and that men and women must both pursue their 'career' above all else. This lie has been put about in order to get men and women to work harder and longer for less pay doing things they don't really like to please people they don't really like. It's the saddest thing in the world when a person wakes up in their forties to realize they have been slogging away for twenty years to succeed in a 'career' that they never really liked in the first place.



Maybe 'sexism' is the assumption that certain jobs are 'for women' and other jobs are 'for men'. It's pretty hard to escape this altogether. I mean, a ballerina really should be a girl because they're prettier and easier to lift up and twirl around. I think you really should have a woman sing the part of Gilda in Rigoletto for instance, and I think Romeo and Hamlet should be played by actors rather than actresses. I think men make better waiters and women make better nurses, and I wouldn't like to see a man win the Miss America contest nor would it be a very nice thing if a girl became a prize fighter.



Men really are better at some things and women are better at others. They should do what they do best, but in the workplace there is plenty of room for flexibility and men and women should be given a fair chance to try any job, and should be paid equally for an equal job.



But then there are other 'jobs' which aren't jobs at all. They are vocations. A vocation really is linked to a person's gender. We can't get around that. A man really can't be a mother and a woman can't really be a father. A man can be a monk, but he can't be a nun. A woman can't be a priest. It just can't happen because a priest not only stands in for Christ, but he represents the 'father' in the faith community. A woman being a priest is like a man getting pregnant.



I am called on to stand up against sexism, and I admit to being confused about what exactly 'sexism' is. However, I suspect that what sexism really is, is a lie from the devil himself in order to further confuse human beings about the proper and beautifully complementary and loving roles of men and women. Satan wants Adam and Eve to be at war. He wants men to be confused about what it means to be men and he wants women to be confused about what it means to be women. He wants to blur the distinctions and make women masculine and men feminine. He wants the procreative functions of sex to be obliterated with artificial contraception and abortion so that women are no longer primarily mothers and men are no longer primarily fathers. He wants the masculine women to become lesbians and the feminine men to become homosexualists, then he wants the feminine women to 'fall in love' with the masculine women and for the masculine men to 'fall in love' with the feminine men-which is another way of saying they are really falling in love with themselves. All of this is part of the culture of death, and 'sexism' is one of his key concepts and stratagems.



In that respect, I can assure you that I am most heartily and firmly opposed to sexism.

Of Anchorites and Stylites in Lent

I have never understood the aversion most Christians have to fasting. Say the word 'fasting' and you get distasteful and alarmed expressions, as if to say, "Good heavens! That's rather unnecessarily extremist isn't it?" One suspects that they think you go in for 'physical mortifications' of other kinds like flagellation or living in a cave or wearing a hair shirt or rolling naked in the briar patch or becoming a stylite.



I should add as a parenthesis that I think our modern society could use a few more troglodytes, hermits, stylites, anchorites and so forth. The sort of crazy religious nuts we have are usually terrorists of some sort--whether it is the loonies from the Westboro Baptist Church or Muslims who get teenaged girls to blow themselves up in order to kill a few other folk. Just musing--maybe if we had more properly holy religious extremists it would provide an outlet for those folks who want to do something crazy for Jesus, and maybe the reason we have crazy murderous religious loonies is because nobody gave them the opportunity to be an anchorite and be immured in the wall of a church, or become a stylite and spend thirty eight years on top of a pillar in the desert the way St Simeon Stylities did.



Instead we cultivate a nice, cosy, middle class shopping mall kind of religion in which we all shine our shoes and comb our hair (if we are blessed with such) and troop off to church on Sunday (unless of course there is something more important to do) and think about being good for an hour and then go home and live as we wish for the rest of the week. In doing so we believe ourselves to be very good, forgetting that it was the 'very good' people who were the wicked ones who killed Jesus.



Alas, here is the perennial paradox of the gospel--in today's Mass reading it says that the 'just one' has come to confront the evil doers, and in the gospel Jesus is seen confronting the Scribes and Pharisees which reminds us that the 'evil doers' were good people. They were the establishment; the priests, the scholars, the teachers, the board members, the bankers, the well to do, the well connected, the well off, the well, well, well--we'll all go to hell people.



And this is where a little bit of extremism (if that is not a contradiction in terms) could do us some good. If were were more radical in our love for Jesus it would be impossible to be one of the good people who are actually evil doers. Perhaps we need to do more Catholic things that are embarrassing. I have been tempted for some time to go to downtown Greenville on a Friday evening and do some street preaching. When the Franciscan Friars of the renewal are in town with their beards and bald heads and rough robes and a fire in their belly I want to run off and join them, but when I asked they said that they couldn't really be doing with the wife and children.



So I try to fast and pray more--but I'm not supposed to tell you that--and I wish to do something radical for God again. Like the time when I was first an Anglican curate and suddenly had a pay check. I had lived by faith for four years as a student really and truly not knowing where the money would come from to pay my school bills, and then I had a pay check which was rather boring. So my brother Daryl (who is still more of a radical than I am) said I should give half the pay check away. So I did and we saw miracles happen.



Well, this is a rambling post, but it is my way to encourage myself and encourage you to keep up with your Lenten fast--whatever it is--and when you get a chance do something radical for God. Fast totally one day. Really try it! Write a check for $100.00 or $1,000.00; or if you are very wealthy anyway for ten times that amount and give it to the poor. Get up off your Laodicean backside and go do the Stations of the Cross or pray the rosary more of just spend time on your knees before the Blessed Sacrament.



You'll be glad you did, and who knows, next Lent might be your opportunity to spend forty days on top of a pillar.

Chust for Nice

Holy Name, Columbus OH

Slubgrip Instructs - 13

Here is the latest installment of Slubgrip Instructs..in which his Lowliness describes how to weave utilitarianism into pop culture.

Six Famous Converts to Catholicism

Go here for a fascinating article on famous converts. The combox includes much more. Meantime, here's a blog written by a former neopagan witch who was received into the church last Easter.

What I Tell My Altar Servers

Here is my latest piece for Inside Catholic--in which I recount what I say to my altar servers...

Crunchy Catholicism

There are so many variations of Catholicism that have 'C' words for adjectives.



I'm thinking of Conservative Catholicism which is right wing politically and liturgically, and then there's Cafeteria Catholicism in which the devotee picks and chooses which parts of the Catholic faith he think he likes and rejects the bits he finds unpalatable. Cultural Catholicism means "I'm Irish so I'm Catholic--and don't forget: it's 'Irish' first. Catholic second." Then there is Campfire Catholicism--where the liturgy is folksy with singalong songs and a warm cozy homilly. Don't forget Coca Cola Catholicism--in which the religion is sweet and fizzy and exciting (but it rots your spiritual teeth) I guess you could add 'Crazy Catholicism' which is made up of extreme right wing fundamentalist kooks. 'Conspiracy Catholicism' is obsessed with end times, Fatima prophecies, the lack of a proper dedication of Russia to the Blessed Virgin and the three dark days.



You pays your money and you takes your pick. I'm opting for Crunchy Catholicism. Crunchy Catholicism is like my crunchy cereal in the morning. It has, well, 'crunch.' It's conservative, but not crazy (but maybe I am crazy and don't know it) It revels in the irrelevant and delights in the dubious. Crunchy Catholicism is all for relics of saints and incorrupt bodies and those holy water bottles shaped like the blessed Mother with the crown for a cap. It is happy about saints that are stigmatics, who levitate and bi locate and fall into streams and make wisecracks to the Almighty. It's for exorcists and eucharistic miracles and friars with long beards and full habits who have given up millions of dollars to serve crackheads in the Bronx. It's for leper priests and little nuns who wash sores of dying people in the gutters of Calcutta. It's for first holy communion girls in white dresses and little boys with with coat and tie and their hair combed. It's for nuns. The ones in habits in convents. It's for lace and incense and birettas at Mass.



Lest Crunchy Catholicism seem all traddy and reactionary and folk religion or even (God forbid) superstitious!!, it is also for a faith that has intellectual rigor and a zesty willingness to communicate the truth that faith is an adventure. Faith is a trampoline not an easy chair. It's a risk and an investment in which you give all and receive more than your bargained for in return. Crunchy Catholicism is ready to read Dante and T.S.Eliot and Flannery O'Connor and learn Spanish and Italian and Latin because it's a good idea. Crunchy Catholicism reads the great philosophers and theologians and has Thomas Aquinas on it's iPhone reader and Fides et Ratio by the bedside, and Pope Benedict's latest work along side Evelyn Waugh. Crunchy Catholicism is as rollicking and controversialist as the Chesterbelloc and as tender hearted and compassionate and tough as the Little Flower (who--if she was a little flower--was no shrinking violet)



Crunchy Catholicism dislikes all the other 'C' varieties of Catholicism, but it also loves them because it sees that in each of them there is also something crunchy and good. Crunchy Catholicism defies the pigeon holes, escapes the neat categories and refuses to live in a box.



Unless the box says, "Crunchy Catholicism"

Slubgrip Instructs - 12

Here is the latest installment of Slubgrip Instructs--in which the Master discusses relativity in Art, or 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...'

Englishman Writes his Own Bible

They always said that "God is an English gentleman". Now it seems that an English gentleman is God--at least he's set himself up to write his own Bible. English philosopher A.C.Grayling almost looks the part. He has a lofty expression and long flowing hair. Couldn't he be persuaded to don a white robe and grow a long white beard as well? Lean out over some clouds perhaps, with a look of severe mercy on his face? You can read about A.C.Grayling's big adventure here.





What I find so ludicrous about Grayling and his pals--fellow 'new atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens--is their continued attacks on Christianity on such sadly ignorant terms. They dish out shallow, sophomoric complaints about little bits of the Bible and so rubbish the whole thing. This is combined with flaming red herrings and non sequiturs.





There are too many too enumerate, but here's a corker. Grayling complains that the Bible (which Christians say is there to teach morality) doesn't really teach morality because it supports slavery, child sacrifice, polygamy and genocide. Err. First of all, most Sunday School children who have gone beyond sixth grade should be able to tell Professor Grayling that Christians don't believe the Bible is simply a 'Book of Morality' to start with. What does Grayling think the Bible is--some sort of ancient Ben Franklin's Poor Richard Almanac? Does he really think Christians believe the Bible is essentially a book of aphorisms and rules for a good life?





We don't. We believe it is the record of God's interaction with the human race--particularly through the history of the Hebrew people and culminating in his self revelation through his Son Jesus Christ. It's the record of God's revelation. Not a book of do gooder quotable quotes. It's the record of mankind's horrors, misunderstandings, sin, foolishness, violence and rebellion, so no wonder it has some horrible bits.





So this funny old Englishman first of all totally misunderstands what the Bible is in the first place, then he sets himself up to write the sequel. It would be a bit like believing that Dante's Divine Comedy was really about medieval table manners, and then setting yourself to put together a collection of Dear Abby letters as a sequel. Bless his heart, he'll come up with something more like the Readers' Digest than anything else--and then the 'intelligentsia' will take it all very seriously.





Another glaring mistake these poor fellows make is to believe that Christianity is all about 'being good' and that Christians believe there can be no morality without the Christian religion. Once again, this shows a deep ignorance of Christian theology and ethical theory. From the beginning Christians have agreed that people can know right from wrong without special revelation from God. In the first chapter of Romans St Paul says, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." He goes on to point out that this natural revelation is also linked in with a natural knowledge of what is good and evil.





Why don't these guys stop and listen to even the most basic of Christian theologians? We admit that people can know right from wrong without special revelation. We also admit that they are responsible to live according to the natural light that God has given them. We never said that Christianity was about 'being good' to start with. In fact we've said just the opposite: that nobody can be good enough to please God on their own. All of us need salvation. Even the 'good' people. 





Natural goodness is there not to save us, but to bring us to Christ, for the really good person will become humble and realize he is not good, and is still in need of something else, and that something else is a someone else--God.





I just worry that these guys pretend to be so smart, but they haven't stopped and listened to what Christians really believe before attacking the whole thing? Ah well, let them rage on. It has always been so, and ever shall be world without end.





If you want to see the whole thing clearly and how moral depravity and atheism and the rage against religion all fits together read the whole of Romans chapter 1.





Then write a letter to A.C.Grayling and recommend he read it too.

Laetare Sunday

(click pics to enlarge)

For those of you who like to collect pictures of rose vestments, here is my brand new chasuble worn today. Made by the industrious and creative Mrs Wersinger--a local Catholic seamstress. These pics were taken after our 9:00 Mass at Our Lady of the Rosary. PS: That's our oldest son Benedict on the right.