Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 187

Where Are All The Catholic Marriages? Ctd

A number of readers shared their stories that might help explain the decline of Catholic marriages. One suspects “the rise of interfaith marriages” has played a role:

I’m Catholic, and my wife is Hindu. Since we were both active duty military officers, I had to apply for dispensation for disparity of cult (to marry a non-Christian) from the Archdiocese of the Military. We also had to get permission from the diocese where the wedding was to be held, since the original plan was to have both a Catholic and a Hindu ceremony.

The local diocese flatly refused to grant permission for my father, a Catholic deacon, to perform the ceremony outside of a church. This had nothing to do with Church policy writ large; it was just the local bishop’s personal hangup. Permission for similar situations is granted routinely in our home diocese. Since we were unwilling to relocate the ceremony, we were formally married by the Hindu priest and my father did a short Catholic blessing afterward. My marriage is still valid according to the Church, since I obtained dispensation, but I was unable to have a Catholic wedding without relocating the ceremony.

If this all sounds bitter, it’s not intentional. I think having the ceremony in a neutral setting was the right choice, allowing both families to feel comfortable. Still, I don’t think it’s an uncommon story. Since interfaith marriages are on the rise, it’s often easier for the couple to default to the non-Catholic’s tradition for the ceremony, since the Catholic Church requires you to navigate a lot of wickets to deviate from the standard.

Another reader claims that the Church is “completely out of step with the meanings that couples seek to create in their wedding ceremonies, as well as current social trends (e.g., couples living together before marriage)”:

When my wife and I got married in 1991, we chose a younger priest because he was supposedly in tune with young couples who believed in the social justice emphasis of the church. Instead, we got a curmudgeon who was suspicious that we dated for just five months before getting engaged — never mind that we scored in the 95th percentile on the compatibility test he used, and weren’t getting married for a full year after our engagement date. He was obsessed with finding out if we were living together (technically, we were, but we still had separate apartments to keep up appearances — what a waste of money for a young couple). He forced us to go through the full weekend-long pre-cana, where we slept in separate beds (of course) and wwhich was a complete waste of our time. (It also happened to be the first weekend of the Gulf War, and we were told to not worry about the news — the leaders would keep us posted. A bunch of us snuck down at midnight to watch the news.)

We weren’t allowed to use a Peter Gabriel song during the ceremony because it’s not part of the canon. He phoned in a generic homily instead of using anything that he learned about our goals, dreams, and interests over a year of meeting. And so on.

For a young couple who led an Amnesty International chapter and who were (and still are) dedicated to working for social justice, it was the last straw for us. We left the Catholic church after our marriage and have never looked back.

As a sociologist, I know to look for patterns, and yes, this is a data point of one. But I also know from talking to dozens of friends, students, and work colleagues over the years that our experience is not the exception to the rule.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the time that a priest wouldn’t let a bagpiper inside the church during a funeral, which was my dying father-in-law’s last wish. Instead, he had to play outside of the church after the official end of the mass, in a downpour.

Screw those guys.

The View From Your Window

Montreal, Quebec, 2.33 pm

“Metaphor Is Our Only Hope”

Drew Calvert explores the idea of the angelic in Rilke’s poetry:

What kind of metaphor are Rilke’s angels? At first, they sound like a Christian believer’s answer to modernity, and it’s true that Rilke was on a quest for an antidote to his anxious times. He sought out Russian spiritualism, the prophecies of Islam, the legacy of Orpheus, and various modes of aestheticism, but nothing satisfied him completely. … Rilke’s angels aren’t reducible to those flitting through the Christian tradition. In 1921, he wrote in a letter that he was becoming anti-Christian—in fact, he was studying the Koran:

Surely the best alternative was Muhammad, breaking like a river through prehistoric mountains toward the one god with whom one may communicate so magnificently each morning without this telephone we call “Christ” into which people repeatedly call “Hello, who’s there?” although there is no answer.

Are Rilke’s angels Islamic, then? Maybe, but that’s obscuring the point. They seem instead to stand for a higher order of reality, and they offer Rilke a chance to imagine the world from beyond the ranks of humans. W. H. Auden saw this clearly: “While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human, of what he calls Things (Dinge).” Language, of course, is a human thing we use to express the more-than-human. Metaphor is our only hope. As Stephen Mitchell puts it, Rilke’s angels are “embodied in the invisible elements of words.”

Face Of The Day

Miho Aikawa photographs the “private dinner moments” of New Yorkers. In an artist’s statement, she explains what the project means to her:

Growing up, both of my parents had full­time jobs and it was difficult for us to spend time together. They decided that we will try to have dinner together as often as possible to share time among the family. … Having dinner is not just about eating food, and dinner time portrays many aspects of our lives more than lunch or breakfast would, since the term “dinner” refers to the main meal in a day. … My theme is to propose thinking what a dinner should be by objectively seeing different dinner situations. Dinner can be a social activity but for my project I wanted to focus more on private dinner moments which takes place regularly and more often. So I always ask my subject to have dinner in the manner they normally would.

My photo project has a voyeuristic perspective and it’s one of the key elements. Dinner time is usually private and shows a part of the person’s life style. My attempt is to capture such subtle as well as important moments that pass by our daily lives and convey them through the form of photography.

See more pictures from the series here, and check out her other work here.

The Young And The Memory-Less

Annie Sneed highlights the work of neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn that might explain why we can’t remember being babies – “the rapid birth of many new neurons in a young brain blocks access to old memories”:

In a new experiment, the scientists manipulated the rate at which hippocampal neurons grew in young and adult mice. The hippocampus is the region in the brain that records autobiographical events. The young mice with slowed neuron growth had better long-term memory. Conversely, the older mice with increased rates of neuron formation had memory loss.

Based on these results, published in May in the journal Science, Frankland and Josselyn think that rapid neuron growth during early childhood disrupts the brain circuitry that stores old memories, making them inaccessible. Young children also have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, another region of the brain that encodes memories, so infantile amnesia may be a combination of these two factors.

Covering similar ground, Kristin Ohlsen explains why, to form long-term memories, “an array of biological and psychological stars must align, and most children lack the machinery for this alignment”:

The raw material of memory – the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of our life experiences – arrive and register across the cerebral cortex, the seat of cognition. For these to become memory, they must undergo bundling in the hippocampus, a brain structure named for its supposed resemblance to a sea horse, located under the cerebral cortex. The hippocampus not only bundles multiple input from our senses together into a single new memory, it also links these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations to similar ones already stored in the brain. But some parts of the hippocampus aren’t fully developed until we’re adolescents, making it hard for a child’s brain to complete this process.

‘So much has to happen biologically to store a memory,’ the psychologist Patricia Bauer of Emory University told me. There’s ‘a race to get it stabilised and consolidated before you forget it. It’s like making Jell-O: you mix the stuff up, you put it in a mould, and you put it in the refrigerator to set, but your mould has a tiny hole in it. You just hope your Jell-O – your memory – gets set before it leaks out through that tiny hole.’

Raptures Of The Deep

Vaughan Bell recommends the above short film, Narcose, a French documentary about the world-champion diver Guillaume Néry. He praises the movie for portraying, in real time, “a five minute dive from a single breath and the hallucinations [Néry] experiences due to carbon dioxide narcosis”:

Firstly, the film is visually stunning. A masterpiece of composition, light and framing. Secondly, it’s technically brilliant. The director presumably thought ‘what can we do when we have access to a community of free divers, who can hold their breath under water for minutes at a time?’ It turns out, you can create stunning underwater scenes with a cast of apparently water-dwelling humans.

But most importantly it is a sublime depiction of Néry’s enchanted world where the boundaries between inner and outer perception become entirely porous. It is perhaps the greatest depiction of hallucinations I’ve seen on film.

The director, Néry’s partner Julie Gautier, elaborates:

When Guillaume started to tell me about his visions during his deep dives I [immediately] started to picture it in my mind as a beautiful visual experience with a strong artistic potential. 4 years of reflexion, 3 weeks of shooting, 1 month of post production and Narcose is born. …

[The film] draws its inspiration from his physical experience and the narrative of his hallucinations. Alternating between reality and imagination, the film shows how far human abilities can be stretched and it reveals the intimate and primal bond between the athlete’s inner world and his aquatic environment, bringing the understanding of the human relationship with the underwater world to new levels.

It Takes All Kinds To Make A Dungeon

Jennifer Tilly goes to town as a dominatrix in a NSFW clip from Dancing at the Blue Iguana:

Mitsu Mark shares what she learned as a professional dominatrix who worked at three commercial dungeons in NYC. One point she stresses – her clients didn’t fit a “type”:

I’m often nudged to confirm the stereotype of the dungeon client as a high-powered executive, a controlling breadwinner who comes to a dominatrix because it is his only release from the stress of his daily alpha role. I’m sure that does exist. Successful businessmen do make up a good portion of dungeon clientele, but that’s probably a result of the price of entry. However, I never had a typical client demographic that otherwise differed much from that of the greater New York City male population (I rarely had female clients, which is another can of worms).

I saw guys from a huge variety of economic backgrounds, nationalities, and ethnicities, with all sorts of career paths, social group affiliations, political leanings, and religions.

I had older (okay, mostly older—and some way older) clients, and clients who looked like they’d saved up their allowances to see me (we did card those). Some were douchebags; some were sweethearts. Some were shy—and others chatted up every person they encountered on the way in, talked through the entire session to me as well as on their phones, and asked to be paraded down the streets of Manhattan in pink tutus. Some were virgins; some were married with children. Some were out, and some were paranoid about being identified to the point of wearing sunglasses through their sessions—well, one guy did that.

The men I saw walk through the dungeon doors represented all walks of life. Their only common denominator was the dungeon, of all things.

Why Sex Dolls Are So Damn Creepy

Julie Beck explains what especially troubles her about men having sex with synthetic women:

We may not be able to extrapolate much from one person’s motives for buying a sex doll. But the phenomenon as a whole is like a funhouse mirror – it may show a skewed reflection of male-female relationships, but it emphasizes some aspects we’d rather not see. These woman-shaped things, which can be whatever their owners want them to be, represent the far end of a spectrum of social attitudes. Plenty of men would like real women to be a little more like dolls. … This is the doll-lover’s frequent lament: Women are unpredictable and dolls are steadfast; women will leave you and dolls are loyal; women demand things and dolls accept you for who you are. Women are human and dolls are not. …

Owning a sex doll is not a violent act. But as these creations come to look more and more realistic, their lifeless, prone silicone bodies are reminders of unequal gender power dynamics that play out in the real world. And as human women become more empowered, sex dolls offer a way for men to retreat into relationships where they are still in control.

(Photo of Ring a Ring of Roses by John LeKay, 1990-91, with sexual surrogate dolls and masks, via Wikimedia Commons)

Pre-Gaming For Sophisticates

Rosie Schaap enjoys (NYT) aperitifs before dinner:

I’ve had the occasional aperitif by myself, but I think of this as an inherently social drink. The unwieldy word, which always seems one syllable too long, comes from the Latin aperire, “to open.” And that’s what it does: An aperitif puts people at ease and signals that an occasion has begun. It opens the proceedings in a way that’s elegant and faintly formal, but also congenial and serene. …

My first aperitif — and I doubt I’m alone here — was a Campari and soda, to which my reaction was much the same as my initial response to cilantro: I recoiled, and then wanted more. Now, when I have friends over for dinner in the summer, I usually start things off by muddling a basil leaf with a couple hits of citrus bitters in an old-fashioned glass; adding a handful of ice, about a half-ounce of Campari and two ounces of Lillet (blanc or, even better, rosé); and topping it off with club soda. I plonk a thick slice of grapefruit into the drink to be used as a stirrer (and then eaten, if one likes, and one usually does).

Schaap goes on to offer recipes for two aperitif cocktails, called Fort Julep and the Pink Angel.

(Photo by Flickr user gruenelinz)

A Short Story For Saturday

Here are the opening paragraphs of Martin Amis’ 1992 short story, “Career Move“:

When Alistair finished his new screenplay, Offensive from Quasar 13, he submitted it to the LM, and waited. Over the past year, he had had more than a dozen screenplays rejected by the Little Magazine. On the other hand, his most recent submission, a batch of five, had been returned not with the standard rejection slip but with a handwritten note from the screenplay editor, Hugh Sixsmith. The note said:

I was really rather taken with two or three of these, and seriously tempted by Hotwire, which I thought close to being fully achieved. Do please go on sending me your stuff.

Hugh Sixsmith was himself a screenplay writer of considerable, though uncertain, reputation. His note of encouragement was encouraging. It made Alistair brave.

Boldly he prepared Offensive from Quasar 13 for submission. He justified the pages of the typescript with fondly lingering fingertips. Alistair did not address the envelope to the Screenplay Editor. No. He addressed it to Mr. Hugh Sixsmith. Nor, for once, did he enclose his curriculum vitae, which he now contemplated with some discomfort. It told, in a pitiless staccato, of the screenplays he had published in various laptop broadsheets and comically obscure pamphlets; it even told of screenplays published in his university magazine. The truly disgraceful bit came at the end, where it said “Rights Offered: First British Serial only.“

Read the rest here. The story also can be found in Amis’ collection, Heavy Water and Other Stories. Previous SSFSs here.