Recognition

Since it's National Coming Out Day, I thought it would be nice to write down some "then vs. now" thoughts about my perspective on coming out of the closet. I've only really been out for a year, and I'm still working through a lot of this stuff, so this is going to be just one man's half-formed reckoning on the subject.

I'm not sure when I first became aware of the existence of a "National Coming Out Day". Probably sometime in high school in the mid 00s. At that point I would have scrupulously avoided all mention of being gay. Being gay was a bad thing, and definitely not something I wanted for myself. Since I was the sort of person who would definitely have been labeled "gay" if people knew my thoughts and feelings, it was important for me to stay away from the topic, and when it came up to address it in a disapproving way (but not too disapprovingly).

Later on, in my days as a super-catholic, I would have more openly disdained something like National Coming Out Day. In 2015 I wrote down some notes on the "future of American sexuality" that included the following:

In the past twenty years, an inordinate portion of American cultural and political life has been devoted to the discovery and disclosure of authentic sexual identities.  "I am trans." "I am bi." "I am gay." etc.  Up to this point the mainstream discourse about sexuality in particular has been about what Michel Foucault would refer to as the confession of a hidden truth.  We are all invited (like penitents kneeling before the priest of public opinion) to search deep within ourselves for the truth of our own sexuality, and, once we have discovered it, to announce it, exercise it, and strive to fulfill it. 

Critiquing the gay rights movement as a sort of emergent social phenomenon of identity invention would have been pretty satisfying to me at the time. Leave aside the irony that I was confessing my own homosexual desires to a priest on a weekly basis when I wrote this. I didn't want to be gay. I knew my inclinations, but I still had such profound shame over them that I couldn't imagine "accepting" them, and the idea of forming some sort of identity on the basis of them was totally repellant.

The roots of that resistance were various. First, my Christian upbringing. This is the main thing. But on top of that was the portrait of gays that I'd grown up with in in mass media. The gay men I knew about from TV and movies were all queens, all more or less embodied the old stereotypes—sibilance, limp wrists, high drama, flamboyance. I did not want to be that. I've always been a quiet, reserved sort of person who likes dark blues and earth tones. I was told men become like that when they become gay. I didn't want to become like that, why on earth would I want to become gay?

When my roommate in college started coming out, I noticed his personality and personal style subtly change. He became more assertive and flamboyant. He seemed to get out of his shell more. I projected onto him the notion that he was becoming like that, and held onto this idea as a confirmation of my preconceptions about gay identity formation for years.  What didn't occur to me until recently was that my roommate was doing something totally normal in embracing his gayness—in part by developing his own personal style, in part by adopting tropes from the gay community. The desire to be recognized as gay is very natural when one finally comes out, and the practice (which I believe is not uncommon) of becoming more flamboyant once one starts admitting one's sexual orientation to people, makes sense. Why?

Let's go back to the experience of shame. When I was a kid, "gay" was synonymous among the schoolboys with everything bad. It meant you were a wuss, it meant you were an outcast, not one of the guys. It meant you were a creep or a weirdo or a pervert. Even at their most politically correct, the typical male sentiment was "I'm fine with gays as long as they stay away from me." It was something strenuously avoided. There were rules about leaving the middle urinal empty, there was endless ribbing and teasing accusations. It was basically the worst thing.

Coming out is not something that happens all of a sudden for most people. It's something you build up to, and without any real sense of inevitability. Depending on your social circumstances and disposition you might feel the need to build a financial or social life raft. You have to steel yourself against the possibility of hostility and rejection, people haranguing you or preaching at you, thinking of you automatically as a pervert or a predator, telling you that you need psychological help.  There are innumerable reasons not to come out—fear, shame, religion, social pressure—that have to be considered before one does it. And the buildup to coming out is not a one-way linear process. It can ebb and flow over the course of years. When I was 16 one of my good friends (who later came out as gay himself) asked me if I was gay. In that moment, I could have said yes. It's one of only a handful of times the question was ever posed to me. I chose not to. In college, when my roommate came out to me, I was at my least religious. I could have told him "me too." I'm sure I considered it, toyed with the idea, but backed away. 

My point here is that the forces that keep people in the closet are not inevitably overcome. The experience of homosexuality (or sexual queerness generally) is not something that occurs to one some day, and gradually grows like a sort of addiction or fixation, until finally it dominates one's personality and one announces it to the world.  Instead it's something that's there for years, usually as a persistent inclination or sexual experience in adolescence, one ignored or denied or rationalized away, hidden and wrestled with and silently renounced, often for decades, sometimes for an entire lifetime without any external acknowledgement. This matters because when one does finally come out, it is often against the background of years of fears and fantasies about exposure or admission. Years in which one has been party to innumerable disparaging conversations about people like oneself, heard countless derogatory theories, nasty stereotypes, and expressions of outright revulsion. It's like standing behind a paper screen watching tigers pace back and forth for decades, knowing that at any point you could break through, terrified of being devoured, and then finally making the utterly foolish decision to tear down the barrier and confront them.

Once you're on the other side, you face the tigers. Some of them are transient—the people who can't stomach it, who no longer really have an interest in knowing you and vanish or drift away—these stop eventually, and they may not return. Others struggles endure—worries over the consequence of being out at work, familial tensions that may never be fully resolved, and so on.

One of the biggest enduring struggles is confronting the memory of all the homophobia and hidden humiliation that you carried around inside yourself all those years. It tends to live on in your attitudes toward other gays, in your understanding of your own behavior, in the unwarranted moralization of or disdain for certain behaviors or personality types, in how you think about your own sexuality, or talk about it, or hide it around other people. The afterlife of the trauma of being closeted and the scars left by years of silent humiliation and shame is what people mean when they speak of "internalized homophobia".  In a way fighting that battle is the hardest and most satisfying, because it basically amounts to killing off your own inner bully and liberating yourself from all the dumb hangups and phobias that came along with struggling not to be seen as gay.  One way people do this is by destroying the fear of stylistic queerness or deviancy and being willfully deviant and visibly queer. Of course, in many cases to the outsider this can look like "queer conformism", or ostentatious non-conformism. Really it's just a way of saying "screw you" to that inner voice of disdain or hatred, and all the real voices that helped form it, and a way of asserting your own self-acceptance and sense of worthiness specifically with reference to the aspect of yourself  you tried so hard to keep hidden. The impulse to identify publicly as gay, the desire for recognition is one of the psychological drivers behind the entire phenomenon of Gay Pride.

So, to conclude, why is National Coming Out Day a thing? Why is coming out a thing generally? Why is recognition so important to people? I think it's important because for most people the experience of having grown up up gay is still predominately an experience of internalized shame and fear. Coming out is the first step to fighting back against the voices—internal and external—telling us to feel fear and shame, telling us that we are unworthy or loathsome. It's the first step to realizing that the romantic attraction you have toward other people is OK, and can be beautiful just like all the straight romances in literature and film. Coming out is also a way to increase representation, so that other people like you might know that there's someone else like them out there, someone with the same sensibilities and interests and quirks, and that being gay is just as little a monolithic stereotype as it is a form of degeneracy or perversion. This way, maybe your visibility will make it easier for someone else growing up today to think "I'm not such a freak or a weirdo. There are other people out there like me, and maybe that means I'm OK."

History

The first Latin mass I ever attended was in 2009. It was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and the homily focused on the traditional story about St. Helena going to Jerusalem and discovering the three crosses, the nails, and the holy sepulcher, which had been buried or covered up in the intervening centuries. It's an old story, dating back to the 4th century, and in that regard has pretty decent historical provenance. On the other hand, it's obviously ridiculous to suppose that, from 33 A.D. to the fourth century the exact three crosses used by Jesus and his two companions in execution were left onsite by the Romans, and the exact nails were still there, all easily identifiable. The priest delivering the homily compared the exaltation of the cross to the renewal of the traditional liturgy made possible by the (then still recent) motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. In a final nod to the absurdity of the St. Helena legend, he said "and if it didn't happen that way, it should have" as if the meaningfulness of the legend trumped the value of historical fact. He left the matter there.

One of the difficulties I ran up against as a teenager, and then later on in graduate school and after, was navigating the contradictions between what should have happened from a Christian perspective and what the consensus of the historians suggests actually did. Probably the most memorable instance of this was the survey course I took in graduate school on the first thousand years of Christianity. The professor teaching the course was a Franciscan who came from a recently-closed graduate program in medieval studies. He was more interested in the academic history of his subject than in catering to the preconceptions or factual needs of Catholic orthodoxy. Unfortunately for him, his students were sensitive young men who were blazing with the religious zeal of the newly professed, and totally uninterested in sitting by while a presumed heretic instructed them in the history of the early church in Jerusalem (presided over by "James, the brother of the Lord"), the probable impact of the dispersion under Titus on Christianity, the apparent (lack of) role of Peter in all this, and so on. The first few weeks of the course were contentious and tense, until we moved to less consequential matters.

The crux of the matter is that for a certain kind of Catholic orthodoxy to be viable, certain things need to have happened. That the donation of Constantine was fake, Pseudo-Denys's works of late composition, the Crusades a mix of foolishness and savagery, and the Inquisition cruel—these are all acceptable propositions to a typical committed catholic. But if Moses didn't exist, if the Pentateuch was of uniformly late composition, if the Exodus never happened, or Jesus had biological siblings—these possibilities are more disturbing. There's also a whole class of propositions somewhere in the middle—the existence of certain saints, the provenance of certain relics, the historical truth of certain miracle accounts and apparitions. To an extent that should be obvious, which historical items matter to Catholics depends on which version of Catholicism they subscribe to. For some, the tilma of Guadalupe is most important. For others it might be the healing stories from Lourdes, or the divine authorship of the Bible, or the authenticity of the pieces of the true cross, or of Padre Pio's stigmata.

What's interesting about the necessity of these various facts for the viability of faith, is that while Catholics sometimes talk in abstract about factual evidence suggestive of the truth of their religion (historical praeambula fidei, as it were), the flow of "evidence" usually goes the other way, from invisible faith to historical assertion. One learns as a Catholic to doubt most secular historians' bona fides, simply because secular academics do not see with eyes of faith. One adopts a series of historical commitments based on the desire to maintain a favorable picture of the Church, or to sustain some theological conviction or pious devotion, or to defend against certain attacks. (Thus the surprisingly large number of people interested in defending the conviction of Galileo by the Roman Inquisition.) When presented with historical evidence, one assesses it through its compatibility with faith, and not primarily its intrinsic credibility. To some extent, the Catholic picture of history is constructed on the basis of the question "Is that what should have happened?"

The phenomenon I'm describing here is not uniquely Catholic, but more or less universal. We form convictions about the world, we form narratives, often simplistic ones, about the past, about good and evil, patterns of behavior, progress and decline. We fill out our narratives with facts and anecdotes. We are skeptical of items that contradict our preconceived notions, we discount things that contradict our metaphysical commitments. Such is the intellectual life of the human race.  If any general conclusion should be drawn from the relationship of Catholicism to history, it is that dogmatism and truth seem to make poor bedfellows. 

It all looks especially odd, though, when one considers how many bad meta-claims the Catholic faith makes about its own epistemic status. It claims to be a religion grounded in history. It claims that its moral code is inscribed in human nature. It claims that the existence of the particular God it worships can be known by mere reason. It is a religion obsessed with the ideas of truth, knowledge, and illumination. In the long run none of these epistemic claims seem to quite hold up. Instead, one finds oneself squinting in order to make history look like it should for Catholicism to be correct. The natural law ends up being only really available to Catholics, and only "knowable" through faith, bespoke philosophical machinery, and the Church's ever-evolving moral decrees. As for the existence of God, the traditional arguments seem to have lost their luster in recent centuries, and do not (without prior conviction) prove nearly as much as they're supposed to.

But despite all this, the epistemic claims about history and the rest provide a bolstering effect to many embattled catholics, who not only believe what they are taught, but believe that they believe it on the basis of self-evidence, universal reason, and historical fact, and believe that everyone who rejects their faith does so out of malice, moral turpitude, or some "invincible ignorance". 

Thus a net of suspicion is cast over the rest of humanity, which provides a protective barrier against any suggestion that things really may not have happened the way they should have.

Fifteen Films

Withnail and I (1987) — A dark comedy featuring Richard E. Grant and Richard Griffiths in which two unsuccessful young actors escape London to the highlands cottage of a gay relative by pretending to be lovers. It's a brilliant and delightful movie from beginning to end. Genius.

Weekend (2011) — A very thoughtful romantic drama that takes place over three days in the life of Russell, a swimming instructor who meets Glen, an art student, at a local club. The film is dedicated to their conversations about the experience of being gay, the nature of coming out, and the tender unfolding of the romance between the two. It's an extremely real feeling movie, very beautifully shot, wonderfully written, and extremely well cast. 

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) — Here Gordon Warnecke and Daniel Day Lewis costar with half the cast of Gandhi in a very niche light drama about the social position of Indian expats in England and the tension between illicit (gay) romantic bonds and the need to conform to a capitalist life-pattern. Odd, fringe, fascinating, worth seeing.

God's Own Country (2017) — The bitter lone son of a struggling English farming family resorts to alcoholism and bathroom hookups to cope with his homosexuality and the total lack of possibility in his life. A Romanian farmhand arrives to help birth the year's lambs, and a tense romantic liaison develops.  The film is beautifully shot against the dramatic backdrop of rural Yorkshire and includes extremely sparse dialogue. The actors manage to communicate a huge amount psychologically simply through body language. It's lovely and worth seeing.

Maurice (1987) — James Wilby and Hugh Grant are best friends and lovers throughout their school years and early adulthood. The attachment is the centerpiece of Wilby's life, until a prominent nobleman is tried and ruined over his secret homosexual lifestyle. After this, Grant cuts off their relationship and marries, urging Wilby to do the same. Wilby is devastated and never overcomes the attachment, eventually eloping to the tropics with a young man he has formed a new attachment with. The movie is slow-moving and somewhat depressing, but nonetheless classic.

Mapplethorpe (2018) — Matt Smith plays the famously obscene photographer in this biopic. It's not a hugely sympathetic portrait, though it is historically interesting and does a good job addressing some of the problematic aspects of Mapplethorpe's work. Not much else to be said.

Behind the Candelabra (2013) — Michael Douglas and Matt Damon play Liberace and his latest boytoy in this partial biopic about the famously gay superstar. The film starts out well, and then drags horribly. The sets and costumes are enjoyable, but everything else is a huge bore.

A Single Man (2009) — Colin Firth is an English Professor at UCLA who is contemplating suicide after the death of his partner of 16 years. The film follows him through the course of a single day. I won't say anything else, so as not to spoil it, but it's artfully written and well-acted.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) — This is a rough adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, though in a way the fact that it's an adaptation is just the icing on the cake. The film focuses on two young men (Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix) who get by as male prostitutes roaming around the Pacific Northwest. Phoenix is gay and has narcolepsy and a troubled family background; Reeves is straight and the son of a prominent mayor. The two are best friends. Absolutely worth seeing.

Beach Rats (2017) — A young man on Long Island confused about his own sexuality toys repeatedly with meeting up with other men via an online hookup app. The film explores the fissures in the protagonist's hyper-bro persona that are being pulled open by his sexual orientation. Somewhat dark and disturbing.

Angels in America (2003) — A magical realist epic of sorts that follows four gay men through a moment of crisis during the AIDS epidemic in 1980s NYC. Two of the men have advanced AIDS, two do not. One is a married Mormon law clerk, one a jewish administrative worker at the court, one is Roy Cohn. The story explodes with bizarre supernatural Mormon flair periodically, sometimes in a tedious way. But the characters are compelling and engaging and the story profoundly moving.

Dallas Buyers Club (2013) —A rig worker who moonlights at the rodeo and is sexually promiscuous finds out he's dying of AIDS. The will to survive drives him to create a collective to buy unapproved drugs and supplements capable of slowing the progression of the disease.  It's a gut-wrenching drama.

The Imitation Game (2014) — Benedict Cumberbatch plays a heavily fictionalized version of Alan Turing, who has been reduced in this film to a mean autistic man-child traumatized by the childhood death of his male love interest.  It's dumb on about twenty different levels. Crap movie.

But I'm a Cheerleader (1999) — Classic movie mocking conversion therapy focuses on a teenage girl whose inclinations are discerned by her troubled parents and is sent to "New Directions", a residential program (featuring RuPaul Charles) that helps kids discover the "root" of their "disordered" affections and become straight. It's campy and heavy-handed, but worth seeing.

Edge of Seventeen (1998) — Working over the summer at a theme park in Sandusky, Ohio, a teenage boy finds out that one of his coworkers is openly gay. The discovery leads to his own first romance and eventual tensions with his female best friend as he comes to terms with the struggles of being gay. It's a heartfelt and realistic picture. Excellent movie, well-written.

Foolishness

One of the cleverest diversionary tactics in the Catholic arsenal is the direct acknowledgment of the scandalous foolishness or arbitrariness of the Catholic faith. One finds this implied in the gospels ("Truly I tell you, anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it."), stated  explicitly in Paul ("God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise."), and perhaps most pithily in the slogan of Tertullian, "Credo quia absurdum." The function of this strategy is to disarm objections based on the absurdities of the faith by transforming them into something numinously intended which we are meant to admire. 

It's something akin (but not identical) to Roland Barthes's "Operation Margarine"—a propaganda strategy that emphasizes the defects of a thing in order to then say "and nonetheless...." and conclude with some romantic, sentimental, or patriotic appeal, thereby implicitly excusing all the mentioned defects without actually addressing them.  Instead of being scandalized by the ridiculous particularity of the god-man being a jewish carpenter born on the fringe of the Empire to a minor ethnic group, we learn to appreciate the pleasing juxtaposition of necessity and contingency, power and weakness, etc., and see this as an impressive and beautiful truth, rather than something ridiculous. After all, "God chose the foolish things of the world", etc.

Similarly, one observes the perennial corruption of the Church, the heresies and moral enormities of its ministers. One presents Alexander VI and John XXII and in extreme cases refers to the institution as "the whore of Babylon" so as to emphasize the sheer wickedness of it all.  And then one trots out the saving inversion: That an institution so riddled with error and corruption could have survived this long despite the best efforts of its ministers to destroy it is a sure sign of its divine origin. At this, one is meant to forget how corrupt the Church is as an institution and instead see all its enormities as paradoxical evidence of its incorruptibility.

The appeal to foolishness or the inversion of expectations is a kind of argument from unfittingness. The real magic happens when these appeals to unfittingness are paired with more classical philosophical arguments from necessity or fittingness. In the Catholic theological tradition one will have long chains of reasoning about the nature of God based on Aristotelian and Platonic thinking about the first cause, the One, its supreme perfections, its providence, its wisdom, its eternity, and then these are paired with long chains of reasoning about how the same God was humiliated, tortured, betrayed, and executed like a common criminal. It is somewhat unexpected in the order of the universe implied by the former conception that the latter would ever take place, much less that it would be the chosen means by which God manifested his will to mankind for all of history. The scandal of the particularity of it is enough in itself, let alone the degradation and so on.

I am not interested in exploring here why people believe in Christianity, but I think it's interesting how this mechanism seems to add to the perceived credibility of the faith. Where possible, classical reasoning is used, arguments from necessity and philosophical principle, etc. When scandal occurs in the doctrinal fabric of Christianity, or actual historical fact introduces something scandalous, the appeal to foolishness is made, or the scandalous event is held up as part of a broader picture—"God chose the foolish things of the world", etc. 

The result is that everything can be accounted for using this two-pronged approach. Is your bishop a pedophile? Is your pastor a fount of heresies? Ah, well, we must honor them in their priestly office despite their personal defects, since the Church is holy in spite of the corruption of its ministers.  Is your bishop performing his duties with a modicum of integrity and a mediocre level of success? Of course he is, because he is holy and upright and this is given by the grace of his office.  Are you confused by the historical arbitrariness of the Incarnation? Well it was ordained to be so in order to make mighty things low. Notice, however, that when Peter died at Rome it was fitting not because Rome was weak, but because it was the seat of power for the world's greatest empire, and an artery for the dispersal of the new religion.  Does some aspect of the faith bemuse you because it seems arbitrary and historically conditioned? Oh, the scandal of particularity is a great sacred mystery of Catholicism. But if another one does? Ah, here we provide a chain of arguments in its defense. And so on.

None of my observations here constitute a real objection to this strategy. What I intend is to simply observe that the strategy forms a clever mechanism for eliminating a wide range of difficulties paradoxically by highlighting them and sacralizing their absurdity, when some alternate and more reasonable approach to resolving them is unavailable.

Nature

One of the things I used to think about a lot was the Church's relationship to the natural world. More or less alone among the expressions of Christianity, Catholicism is bound up with certain concrete metaphysical claims about the order, intelligiblity, and nature of created things. Most people don't realize this, but if one rejects metaphysical thinking wholesale, one ends up directly contradicting a great deal of the Catholic dogmatic tradition, especially as expressed at various ecumenical councils.  The understanding of nature is important to Catholics. From the first chapter of Genesis onward the discernment of natural order is seen as framing the proper disposition of man toward God, creatures, and fellow men. There is a "great chain of being", celestial hierarchies, degrees of perfection, degrees of excellence among species and genera of living and inanimate things. There is a natural hierarchy of dispositions and ends in human faculties and actions. Order is central to the Catholic conception of things, both in terms of theological doctrine and morals.

As one explores the Catholic picture of the order of the world from Genesis onward, there are certain disturbing problems. How is it, for example, that the revealed cosmology of the Old Testament is so totally wrong? The modern answer, given in Dei Verbum, goes something like this: revelation was authored by both God and man, and is expressed using the limited expressions, ideas, and images of the human author's time and place. This development guarantees to the Catholic biblical scholar the right to employ modern hermeneutical techniques in analyzing and interpreting the text of the bible. But as an explanation for the peculiar errors and misconceptions in scripture, it largely falls flat. 

Scripture is chock full of visions and divine utterances that fall totally outside the expressions, ideas, etc. that were available to the people of the day (unless we accept that these things were all the invention of the authors). If God is going to speak to Moses to disclose to him the destiny of Israel, why not give him a cosmological picture that isn't totally false?  The real picture of the universe, at least so far as we know it today, is not substantially more complex, after all. 

It is odd that the Bible wouldn't get the order of the universe more factually correct, when order is so important to the whole religion. And this fits into a larger point, which is: the Church gets nature wrong more often than it gets it right, and it is historically very bad at recognizing this or reconciling factual discoveries about nature with the basic moral and metaphysical claims it makes.

Consider the case of Darwin. The emergence of species, the existence of indeterminate kinds, the fundamental role of competition and natural selection in the story of life on earth—all of this stuff is basically indisputable. You can show the principles in action in a laboratory, you can observe their consequences in a million phylogenic comparisons or genetic analyses. These things fly in the face of the picture traditionally subscribed to by Christians. God created all the species in Genesis. Adam named them. Noah preserved them in the ark. 

One can scoff today and say "oh but this is all metaphor", but it was not traditionally believed to be pure metaphor. One can read Basil the Great on the Hexaemeron scoffing aggressively at people who do not subscribe to the historical truth of those chapters, or the unequivocal response of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1909 firmly rejecting the view that these stories are part historical, part myth, and designed for instruction and edification.  The Church has, in the main, always believed this picture of the order and origin of the natural world.  It has now adjusted its exegetical framework in order to retreat from that belief, but it has never bothered to cope with the implications of that failure in a systematic way.  

The Church has much more important things to do nowadays than fret over the metaphysical implications of Darwinism (e.g. turning heresies into human rights), so in a way the failure to intellectually integrate the modern scientific world-picture into Catholic theology is less disturbing than the fact that it was so wrong about nature for so long, and wrong on the basis of what were more or less universally believed to be revealed truths.

Much more personally, though, this error about the natural world touches on how wrong the Church has always been about an aspect of human nature: homosexuality and the experience of being gay. Consider as a primary and readily available example the text of the first chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans (ESV):

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Modern biblical exegetes will try to limit the scope of this passage to a specific unmentioned group in the audience of Paul's letter, in order to sweep under the rug the implication of what he is saying here, just as in the other New Testament passages the intent of the Greek will be read so as to conveniently mean "only pederasts" or "only promiscuous homosexuals" instead of simply every man who sexually desires men. However, the intent of the passage as received is abundantly clear. Homosexuality is a perversion that follows as a consequence of the intellectual and moral darkening of the soul when men are proud and reject God.  It is contrary to nature.  It is vile, and merits punishment with death, and begets innumerable other vices.  It is a symptom of idolatry and total social decline. These beliefs are, because of their place in the New Testament and the subsequent development of the patristic moral tradition, fundamental to Christianity, and remain widespread among Christians even today.

In official Church doctrine this has been the line more or less forever.  The notion that some men and women are born homosexual, while no doubt believed by many people over the centuries, has never to my knowledge been officially entertained until the past few decades. The inclination toward sexual intimacy with members of the same sex is in itself considered execrable, dishonorable, vile, shameless.

Now, leaving aside the question "Why would God make me this way, or implant in me an inescapable desire to commit acts plainly taught to be abominable?", we can ask a more basic question: How is it that the Church, which is ostensibly an infallible authority on human nature and the moral life, could have missed the fact that so many of us are inescapably given this set of inclinations from childhood?

I used to puzzle over this a great deal: What sin had I committed? What hidden pride of my heart was God punishing me for? What hidden defect of character or missed petition was the lynchpin which, when removed, would take away this unspeakably shameful longing?  But the reality is that there is no such thing. I had done nothing especially wrong to merit being gay. It was and is simply a part of my nature, like it is a part of the nature of millions of other men and women, just like it is a surprisingly well-documented phenomenon across many biological species the world over.

What I mean to point out here is not an objection to the Church's "natural law" position on which sorts of sexual acts are licit, but the absurdity and cruelty of its misdiagnosis of the nature of homosexuality, from the time of Paul onward. The Church's radical error of perceiving that people like me have these inclinations because we are extraordinarily wicked or perverse, that our existence is a symptom of idolatry or depravity, that accepting us is an invitation to societal collapse.  

Ultimately, for me, it is impossible to believe both that my inclinations are not gravely evil and debased, and that Christianity is in some way true. The needle is unthreadable. No religion with a falsehood baked so deeply into its moral vision of humanity could possibly be of divine origin.  Whether Paul meant to condemn only Tim and Dismas who'd been sacrificing to Isis, or only had in mind a hypothetical extreme case of pederastic orgies really makes no difference. Christianity has always read the condemnation generically. In this matter as in so many others the Church has shown itself over time to be an untrustworthy guide to both human nature and the nature of the world at large.

Mystery

Some years ago I happened upon a homily given by Abp. Joseph Augustine DiNoia on the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. The subject of his homily was a line from Guillermo de Tocco's biography of Aquinas, in which Thomas is described as "consumed by the holy mysteries" of the eucharist. DiNoia goes on in his delightful voice and typically poignant rhetorical style to give an exposition on the meaning of this phrase, focused on the meaning of "mystery".  To this day I remember that homily when I think about the word.

Mystery comes from the greek word μυστήριον, which means "something hidden" or "secret". It is what the word sacramentum translates in Latin. One thinks of the Bacchic mysteries in Euripides, and other similar cults in ancient Greece. Christianity was, in its inception, a mystery religion, i.e. a religion in which initiates were allowed to participate in certain ritual activities prohibited to outsiders.  One had to be catechized before being baptized, and one had to be baptized before receiving the eucharist. So it is even today.

But aside from admission to the hidden rites, there is something else characteristic of mystery cults that Christianity shares, and this is the belief is a hidden, higher knowledge that is unavailable to non-initiates. In Catholic theology this latent gnosticism is expressed in several ways. First of all in the notion of the "light of faith" by which the articles of the Catholic faith become intelligible and credible to believers. Second in the tiered platonism of theological knowledge, and the notion that spiritual insight is granted to those who have achieved greater holiness through grace.

One of the corollaries of this gnostic aspect to Catholicism is the conviction that those who reject the faith must do so out of either a failure to understand or an intellectual darkening consequent upon bad moral choices. I can't tell you how many times I have myself said or heard other say that so and so fell away from the faith "in order to justify a sinful lifestyle", or lamented along the lines of Fulton Sheen that “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”

Sheen's quote unintentionally accentuates the extent to which Catholicism remains a quasi-gnostic mystery cult to the present day. As a student in catholic schools, as a parishioner in various churches, and then later as a CCD and high school theology teacher, one of the things that was consistently impressed upon me was just how many people within the Church "wrongly perceive what the Catholic Church is"—clergy, laymen, educators, and theologians. In fact, for the typical catholic attending a typical parish, going to parochial school or CCD classes, the "actuality" of Catholic orthodoxy is not generally available except in snatches.

To "find Catholicism" one usually has to engage in extracurricular research, and one has to have enough critical ability and intelligence and luck to find the right resources and dig in deep. Even then there is frequently confusion and disagreement, and not just because of the difficulty of the questions but because of the contradictions offered by various legitimate authorities in the Church (the pope, the cardinals, the bishops, the theologians, the clergy generally). The obvious examples are things like the value of ecumenism, the acceptability of Universalism as a theological position, the permissibility of the death penalty, the possibility of women's ordination (an open question? an infallibly settled question?), the nature of mortal sin, the conditions for the validity of various sacraments, and so on.  

All this leaves aside the fact that most Catholics do not have the luck or the resources to even consider such theological questions, and, I would say from abundant personal experience, tend to get much more fundamental and non-controversial questions quite wrong.  An obvious example here is the very subject of Archbishop DiNoia's homily—the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which the majority of American Catholics reject.  It makes the Sheen quote somewhat comedic, and invites a parody along the lines of "There are not one hundred people in the United States who believe the true Catholic Faith, but there are millions who reject it in favor of what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Faith to be."

There are, of course traditional responses to this. One is to appeal to the idea of a "smaller and holier" church within the Church, the church of the orthodox faithful who receive the sacraments and so on. And then naturally there's the Vincentian Canon ("Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.") which would seem to offer some sort of norm usable together with a lot of historical research to figure out the truth. But what strikes me as most odd about the Church as a gnostic mystery cult, is how much this state of affairs seems to contradict the core theological/historical vision of Christianity. 

The Church teaches that Christ came in order to bear witness to God's saving love for mankind, and that Christianity has always been growing and evangelizing, in order to spread over the face of the whole globe, and communicate the offer of salvation to everyone.  But why would the New Vine or the ark of salvation be allowed to fall victim to such crippling error at every level and for so long? 

And more to the point, why would a loving God seeking to offer salvation to humanity do so by means of a mystery cult, in which the secret knowledge necessary to avoid eternal hellfire is hidden, imperfectly mediated, frequently modified, and in most cases never communicated at all?

One begins to wonder, after all, at the idea of "public" or "general" revelation.  Is there such a thing? Looking around, it seems that Christianity has evolved so far as to make the entire business of finding one's faith a matter of retroactively constructing a tradition in defense of the variant or sect one has chosen today, based on chance and upbringing and psychological dispositions.

And if the latter is the case, and there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, isn't it rather capricious and unfair of God to have set mankind such a conundrum, and laid out such a punishment for failing to solve it?

Petitions

Petitionary prayer is only supposed to be efficacious if it happens to align with divine providence. In other words your prayers don't make any difference in themselves, but sometimes God decides to do something he was going to to anyway "because of" your prayer, so that your prayer becomes in some sense the cause of God's effect. (Thomas touches on this in Summa Theologiae Ia q.23 a.8, among other places). This is the technical response to "why are so many prayers left unanswered" and "what's the point of prayer if God is omnipotent and exists outside of time".

The thing is, in practice no one actually treats prayer this way. People treat prayer like they're the old lady harassing the magistrate that Jesus talks about in Luke 18. Like God is some lazy bureaucrat that they're trying to nag into giving them what they want. Or they have his mother's ear (how many times have you heard that analogy?) and she'll make him do what you want for you.

Or, even more commonly, prayer is treated as a kind of magic that works to transform you or somehow invokes divine power on the things in your life. I've seen innumerable examples of this in popular piety. "I have X problem." "PRAY THIS NOVENA!"

But when you run up against the reality that the novena/rosary/chaplet/etc. you prayed didn't do anything, you're told that prayer isn't magic, that God works in mysterious ways, and that you just need to trust more. And if you push hard enough you'll end up back at the Thomistic account of prayer I gave in the first paragraph above. (Or worse, with some mumbo jumbo along the lines of "Prayer doesn't change God, it changes us.")

It's just kind of crazy, because on one hand you hear everyone saying to say all these prayers because "they work", but on the other hand when you push you get told "prayer isn't magic", i.e. it doesn't actually do anything. And you'll hear the both things from the same people, priests, etc.

But this brings us to another point. I remember being a child and puzzling over

Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.

and likewise over

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

and similar verses:

Again, I tell you truly that if two of you on the earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by My Father in heaven.

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask in prayer.

And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

And I appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will remain--so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give you.

Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.

and we will receive from Him whatever we ask, because we keep His commandments and do what is pleasing in His sight.

These promises are made so many times throughout the new testament. As a kid I was really confused by them, because they all seem to be promising very literal responses to requests in prayer. And to my knowledge no one has ever said "move" to a mountain and had it move. Which I guess means that no one has ever had any faith? Naturally once you start theologizing about this, it gets reconciled into "oh well he's speaking metaphorically" and "God answers prayers in accord with his providence" and "the Lord works in mysterious ways".

But Jesus when making all these promises about answers to prayer doesn't talk about mysterious ways, and it all seems quite literal. In fact the number of times these promises are made, and the number of variations on the promise seem to suggest that they really are meant literally.  But after reconciling all of these passages with the platonic idea of God as an immutable form, and with the experience (easily verified) that they are not literally true, we end up with a restatement of the Catholic position on prayer that runs more or less thus: If you pray, sometimes, providentially, your prayer may be in accord with God's will. In these cases it will be answered. However, no one can know when or whether that will happen, except that the very desire to pray is itself be a manifestation of providence, whether or not it bears any fruit.

In this case, it's hard to say why it's worthwhile to bother praying for anything at all—the only prayer worth bothering about is simply "thy will be done", and this primarily as an exercise in spiritual submission. And yet in practice, pastorally and in popular piety, there is no question at all that petitionary prayer is treated as something that matters, works, and corresponds to some sort of divine promise to hear and answer us.  After all, Jesus said so.

Which is it?

Epicycles

There's a familiar account of the undoing of the Ptolemaic model of the universe. Early in its history, the geocentric picture of things placed the sun and moon, the planets and the stars in concentric spheres spinning about the center of the earth. In order to account for the retrograde motion of the planets, epicycles were introduced. In order to account for other eccentricities of velocity and position, further epicycles were introduced. As the precision of observation increased, the number of orbits-within-orbits necessary to posit that the whole thing was made of perfect circles increased, until Kepler accounted for it all by means of eccentricity and his three laws.

2. The historical accuracy of the story above is is more or less irrelevant, but it illustrates an idea that I've been interested in for some time.  What we observe in the story is a theory based on two sources: first, a naive observation of the world based on reason and common sense; second, a preference to explain the world by means of constructions thought of as simple and perfect (circles and spheres).  The Ptolemaic model, with its many epicycles and complications did not really cease to describe the motions of the planets, to my knowledge. I assume that, except for some subtle relativistic effects and accidental transformations brought on by axial procession and so on, the apparent motion of the heavenly bodies could still be successfully described by means of circles-in-circles and bodies moving about the earth.

3.  But why would one want to bother doing it this way? Perhaps because the claim that the center of the earth is the center of the universe has some accidental implications for one's metaphysics or world-picture. Perhaps because one is a big fan of circles. Maybe one is a diehard Pythagorean. Who knows. There is a preference to maintain the core modeling principles of the received system and refine them rather than overturning them.  What's interesting to me is how it's this preference, together perhaps with the inability or disinclination to observe things precisely, perpetuates the system of ever-multiplying complications in service of a bad theory.

4. Let's take this idea as a model and use it to describe a relationship rather than an astronomical system. Suppose you have a friend. You have great affection for this friend (let's call him Brad) and his cordiality toward you indicates that the feeling is reciprocated.  Suppose that both reason (i.e. common sense) and fittingness (i.e. reciprocity) together justify this belief.

5. Suppose over time you attempt to reach out to Brad and are occasionally ignored or left hanging. You reason "Brad would love to spend time with me, but he has many obligations and I have to accept that whatever he does is out of friendship". The experience is repeated. You write Brad notes or send messages. They are sometimes answered in brief, but mostly not at all. You continue to reach out.  You reason "he is testing me".  Long periods of silence enter into the relationship, and you interpret these as being further tests, or justified punishments. You offer apologies to Brad, again on the assumption that he has good will toward you and is acting out of affection and good will toward you. You conclude that all of this is part of a great plan to teach you how to be a better friend, or to make you worthier, or is somehow otherwise good and right and fitting.  This goes on indefinitely, eventually leading to a stable situation in which Brad offers you no contact whatsoever. Eventually you reason that he means for you to spend time with him by reflecting on the messages he sent you in the past, which you do. In your mind, this friendship is very rich and fruitful, and you learn to draw much meaning out of the old messages he sent you, and to hear Brad's voice speaking words of friendship to you through his old text messages when you are confused or in need of support.

6. Suppose someone comes to you and says that Brad is not your friend, tells you that Brad hasn't cared for you in years, is a real jerk, and is barely aware of your existence. What do you say? You must continue to believe in your friendship, and so you come up with new justifications. Why has this person devised such lies about Brad? Could it be because they stopped being friends with him and resent your friendship? Maybe they were just hurt by someone else and are misdirecting their bitterness against Brad, who is wonderful and surely did nothing wrong. Or, more likely, they probably just misunderstood something Brad said or did. There are not ten people in the world who really dislike Brad, but tons who dislike what they mistakenly think Brad to be like. What a shame! If only they too were friends, really friends, with Brad, they'd understand.  After all, friendship with Brad is difficult because it is so worthwhile, because the eventual reunion is going to be so great.

7. A sane person would say that your attitude in the scenario described above is disturbing, deluded, even insane.  If Brad wanted to be your friend he would have spent time with you at some point, not conditioned your friendship on unannounced punishments or tests, much less forced you to conduct an imaginary relationship with him via meditations on old text messages.  This is not how people with affection for each other behave.

8. However, note that the insane version of events is still viable inasmuch as it is capable of describing your experience as it has happened. You have reasons for every cryptic snub, every period of silence. You have what you believe to be a well-founded hope for the day when your great friendship with Brad is finally realized in the flesh and you can be bosom pals and hang out.  The preference for the interpretation "Brad is my friend" justifies the increasingly baroque interpretation of facts, and every new development merely invites you to reshuffle your interpretation in order to sustain that core conviction.

9. The next step, obviously, is to observe that an omnipotent personal God has just as much capacity for communication and demonstrations of friendship as your neighbor Brad, and rather more. The delusions in service of a fake relationship, the absurd rationalizations in defense of neglect and abuse may look different in this case, but they are formally the same.