To make an end is to make a beginning.

For years I have found the Church's liturgical calendar more helpful than the secularized Gregorian calendar in reckoning my place in the temporal order. The liturgical seasons have an effect on me that may be slightly more subtle than the effect of the earth's four seasons, but which nevertheless works at a deeper level.

This being the case -- and with considerable thanks to the way the liturgical cycle resonates in the monastic liturgies at St. Joseph's Abbey -- I'm keenly aware of the transition now underway from Ordinary Time to Advent, today being the last day of Ordinary Time and tomorrow being the first Sunday of Advent.

The theme of the last weeks of Ordinary Time is the Apocalypse, the end time, Christ's Second Coming, the Final Judgment. Both the scriptures and the prayer life of the Church often speak of this end time in terms at the same time ominous and expectant. Christ, we are repeatedly assured, will "come in glory," revealing the grandeur that was hidden from all but a few (at the Transfiguration, for instance) when he lived among us.

I have a slightly different take on this theme. For I imagine that the "glory" revealed by the Second Coming will not be the worldly glory that comes easily to mind when we hear references to it in the scriptures and liturgy. As I think of it, if anything Christ will come in an even more humble state; the difference between his earthly life and his second coming will be that at his second coming what will be revealed is precisely the glory inherent in his humility. The judgment that will fall upon all who behold him will be to fully realize that the first will be last and the last first, that humility and glory are one and the same thing.

The last Sunday in Ordinary Time in the Roman lectionary is the Feast of Christ the King, at which it is important to remember that His kingdom is "not of this world," not only because it is eschatological, but because it is the inverse of worldly kingdoms.

Thus it is that the apocalyptic theme on which the Church's "Ordinary Time" concludes is an appropriate prelude to the Advent theme, which is so magnificently expressed in the Lucan infancy narrative with its contrast between Caesar ("the divine") Augustus arrayed at the center of his luxurious Empire with the pomp and worldly glory of his powerful office, on one hand, and the helpless infant born in a cow-shed in the remote and culturally inferior (by Roman assessment) backwater of the Empire, on the other. This is the beginning of the first coming, but it is harbinger of the Second Coming as well.

In East Coker, T. S. Eliot wrote:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Happy Advent.

"You did not choose me, I chose you."

Henri de Lubac:

The mind was seeking in some way to penetrate faith; it was exploring the dimensions of it, defining its contours, examining its presuppositions, bringing to light its consequences; now it is faith that penetrates the soul; and the more it penetrates, the more simplified it grows, until it become inexpressible.

The resulting simplicity, argues de Lubac, is not achieved at the expense of theological complexities and doctrinal subtleties, rather "it unifies them by interiorizing them."

The Christian Faith, p. 254

Another Reminder

We will be sending out a Cornerstone Forum email newsletter soon. If you have not yet signed up to receive our occasional newsletter, I hope you will do so. The sign-up form is at the top of the column to the right.

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Thanks so much.

The Feast of St. Andrew

On the feast of St. Andrew, the apostle to Byzantium, an update on his legacy.

Hagia Sophia

"Converted" if you'll pardon the expression into a Mosque in 1453
Today the Ayasofya Museum

Another excerpt from Joshua Trevino's report from Istanbul:

At night, the Hagia Sophia is invested by wild dogs. You walk about the expanse between it and the Blue Mosque, and you pull your coat tight against the early winter chill. The dogs are everywhere. They are in the streets, lolling contentedly as the odd taksi veers about. They are on the concrete, rummaging through strewn trash. They are on the grass, rooting about in the flowers, and gnawing upon disgusting chunks of rancid flesh. They ignore you. One of them barks, and at once they are all on their feet and yelping. They lope toward a solitary taksi driver who performs a small charity of sharing some meat.

Overlooking it all is the Hagia Sophia, red stone capped with black metal, topped with the golden crescent of its conquerer. It is massive. Chronicles of the Dark Ages and the Medieval era tell of Western travelers seeing the Queen City for the first time, and being stupefied at its grand church. And so I am, as Sunday slides into Monday in the dead of a Constantinopolitan night. The hulking form overpowers the grace and grandeur of the Blue Mosque, a park's length away. The great mosque apes the great church, except it is white instead of red, its minarets are native instead of alien, and its believers are thriving instead of dying.

The Christians of the Queen City are dying. The Ecumenical Patriarch housed in the Fener district used to be ecumenical – an Orthodox Christian, to be sure, but of no particular nation. No longer. Because the Patriarchs of old lived with the Emperors in their very city, they grew accustomed to the strictures of state power – unlike the Popes, who exercised temporal monarchy of their own. The Sultans of the Ottoman Empire saw fit to continue the relationship, reaping handsome profits from bribe-profferring claimants to the Patriarchate, and forcing the occupant of the seat of St Andrew to answer for their co-religionists. Usually this entailed a conferral of a limited intra-communal civil power upon the Patriarch; but in the Greek War of Independence, the Patriarch was lynched for his rebellious millet's temerity. As with the Sultans, so with their successors: the Turkish state continues to dictate the terms of existence for a Patriarchate that predates the mere existence of Turks in Turkey by at least seven hundred years.

Who could have imagined that this might happen to one of the great centers of Christian life and culture?

Could it happen to St. Peter's in Rome ... to Notre Dame in Paris ... ? If it ever does, it will be due more to the loss of faith in the West than to the ferocity of its external enemies.

Time and Time Again . . .

"By Your light we see light," says the psalmist in Psalm 36.

What's called the "Enlightenment" was a rescinding of this path to lucidity analogous to its first abrogation in the Garden of Eden, albeit one deeply indebted to, and suffused with, the Christian moral and intellectual tradition it disavowed. To see with our own lights only is to see through a glass darkly.

Now that the academy has abandoned Enlightenment rationality for sundry trendy escapades, its last practitioners are to be found the main-stream media. Main-stream journalists have a touchingly childlike faith in the core myths of the Enlightenment. Struggling under this handicap, their offerings are predictable, but not without poignancy for those less encumbered by journalistic prejudices.

The Church is not the kind of thing one can figure out on the first few tries. Viewed through the main-stream media prism, she is an odd sort of thing to be found sitting right in the midst of an age to which she seems both utterly irrelevant and strangely imposing.

The Church is "a sign of contradiction" to the world, time and time again, the guardian of the intellectual, scientific, cultural and spiritual gifts she is routinely accused of obfuscating.

The Church, as a sign of contradiction, is often the voice of one heard crying in the wilderness, and sometimes the voice of Rachael weeping for the lost children.

Joshua Trevino, writing in the Brussels Journal, posts this from Istanbul, the former Constantinople, once the robust center of Eastern Christianity:

Today, there are approximately two thousand native-born Christians, almost entirely Greek, in the Queen City of Christendom. They are mostly old, mostly die-hards, and mostly clerics. As the Turkish state intended all along, the faith is nearly extinct in one of its most ancient lands – and the time will come when no native-born Christian “Turk” will be competent to sit upon the Patriarchal throne. And what then? Will the Ecumenical Patriarchate simply die a quiet death after long centuries? Will its demise be met like so many other tragedies of Christendom, with small regret and apathy? Will the Turkish state be a better, more Turkish state without its Christians?

The Obedience of Faith

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Matthew 6:21

That, it seems to me, is the synoptic analogue for Paul's references to "the obedience of faith" in his Letter to the Romans (1:5; 16:26). As for the Johannine echo: it's at John 1:38. Jesus turns to the approaching disciples of John, catching them off-guard, and asking abruptly: "What do you want?" Everything depends on the answer to that question -- our ethical lives, our attempts at virtue, the plausibility of our hopes, everything. We are desire; the question is only: what is the object of our desire?

Having been the source of consternation to both the theological conservatives (so-called) and the (so-called) ecclesiastical progressives, Henri de Lubac is a steady and reliable theological compass. He has a marvelous passage about the "obedience of faith," which he contends is something entirely different from "the faith of obedience."

The latter, placing the individual in a position of purely external submission to authority, delivers him over, through his fault, to a tyranny from which he can escape only by insubordination or which he can tolerate cheerfully only through indifference. Then, as Fenelon says, “the practice of faith only amounts to not daring to contradict the incomprehensible mysteries, a vague submission to which costs nothing.” Whoever is satisfied with this is caught up in a sterile, parrot-like discourse. He “does not meddle with dogmas,” as he sometimes likes to say, but he does not live by them either. He may be a perfect conformist, but he does not know what it means to be a Christian. Obedience of faith, on the contrary, is interior; obedistis ex corde, says the Apostle. [Romans 6:17]

Only this latter obedience, de Lubac insists, “deserves to be called a theological virtue.”

The Christian Faith, p. 238-9.

The bitter truth ...

Mark Steyn is not famous for his diplomacy or tact. One occasionally winces at his bluntness, while nevertheless (sinfully) sharing his wicked delight in running some fashionable nonsense up the flagpole to show just how silly are the pious ideologues who salute it. He has done it again, and I recommend his latest to any who may not have seen it yet. It has been one of the most widely circulating pieces on the internet since it appeared on Monday in the Chicago Sun-Times: here.

Compared to Steyn, even at my grumpiest I'm sweetness and light.

Jordan Elizabeth Bailie

Jordan Elizabeth Bailie - 6 lbs. 1 oz.

About nine months ago, Jordan Elizabeth Bailie came into the world. But last night around 11:30 she took her first breath, received her name, and opened her little eyes on the parents she is most fortunate to have been given, Hunt and Yuni Bailie. Her grandfather was unable to be present for Jordan Elizabeth's arrival, but he is beside himself with joy.

Jordan with her mother, Yuni

Jordan with her proud father, Hunt

Benedict to Turkey

As Pope Benedict XVI prepares for his perilous and courageous trip to Turkey, he is being slandered there as a former Nazi by the same people who are vilifying him for not joining in the Muslim hatred of Jews. Go figure.

Recently Egyptian-born Nonie Darwish, a convert to Christianity and author of "Now They Call Me Infidel," was recently interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez on National Review Online.

Nonie Darwish:

As Arab children, we were taught about Jews in schools, at home, in the media, at mosque sermons, and by politicians. No one can escape the overwhelming anti-Semitic propaganda and the venomous hatred that my culture of origin advocated against Jews. In Gaza elementary schools I learned hate, vengeance, and retaliation. Peace was never an option; it was considered a sign of defeat and weakness. Those who wanted peace and compromise were called traitors and cowards. When I asked “Why do we hate Jews?,” the answer was “Aren’t you a Muslim?”

The primary reason for Benedict's trip is highlighted by the insults he has received from Turkish officialdom and the mindless effigies with which the Turkish press and the Turkish street characterize him: He is going to show solidarity with the tiny besieged Christian community in Turkey and to show that solidarity especially with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. At stake is something closer to Benedict's heart than easing tensions with Islam, namely working toward the reconciliation of Eastern and Western Christianity. He will be doing so in a society where the choice to be a Christian is courageous, involving real hardships and very real dangers.

He deserves and needs our prayers.

Eschatology

The current issue of First Things has an interesting colloquy between Alyssa Lyra Pitstick and Fr. Edward Oaks, SJ on the subject of Hans Urs von Balthasar's eschatology. Balthasar, Hell and Hersey: An Exchange. For those interested in perhaps the most original and controversial feature of von Balthasar's theological work, I recommend the piece. It is no surprise that, in my opinion at least, Fr. Oaks carries the day. He has long been one of von Balthasar's most insightful and gifted interpreters. Given the fact that Western Christianity has in recent decades (centuries?) allowed the eschatological dimension of the faith to atrophy, a lively conversation of such things is for the better, however one might decide between the Pitstick and Oaks arguments.

As for von Balthasar himself, in his treatment of this topic, which is deeply indebted to Adrienne von Speyr, he quotes a passage in an eschatological treatise by one W. Kreck that is helpful in approaching this subject:

Both the uncritical notion of a bipolar outcome of human history and the strident protest against it contain the same danger. They both want to draw up an eschatology from the point of view of the spectator, not of the man most intimately involved in it ... In spite of all the compelling negative evidence I may have, it is beyond my abilities and competence to assess to what extent, ultimately, a man is really persisting in, or can persist in, resistance to Christ.

Volume V: Theo-Drama, p. 299.

"We would not have persecuted the prophets..."

The jolly Chestertonian wag who goes by the name Diogenes over the the "Off the Record" blog of the Catholic World News site has a gift for puncturing ideological hot-air balloons. Here's one of his recent offerings:

Part of the syndrome of being a child of one's age is a lack of the historical imagination to recognize oneself in a different setting, endowed with a different array of sentimentalisms. In fact, such people are certain they'd be on the side of the angels in any situation. The personal advantages they have purchased by their social conformity are so enormous and comprehensive that they fail to see it as conformity at all. This was true in 1930s Germany, when the right wing was in the ascendant, and it's true in the West today, when the left wing is. Joseph Sobran once wrote:

[Liberals] want us to believe that their willingness to conform to today's fashions is proof that they would have had the courage to defy yesterday's fashions. Somehow I find it hard to believe that today's coward would have been yesterday's hero, if only he'd had the chance. More likely he would have been, like most people, a timid conformist in any circumstances.

Giving Thanks

Happiness doesn't lead to gratitude; it's gratitude that leads to happiness.

Gratitude is less measured by how pleased we are with the blessings we have received and more by how much we love those from whom we have received them and with whom we share them -- God ultimately being "the One from whom all blessings flow" and to Whom our gratitude must finally be expressed.

I am truly and sincerely grateful to those who visit this weblog and for the opportunity it provides me to touch and be touched by those with whom I share the faith that produced the first Thanksgiving and a determination to pass it on in a robust and uncompromised form.

Red Martyrdom

In a weblog post yesterday, I suggested we might need a category called "green martyrdom." The background to this, of course, is what is traditionally regarded as "red martyrdom" -- dying a violent death for one's faith -- and "white martyrdom" -- consecrating one's life (with vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience) exclusively to Christ and the Church.

Today is the feast of St. Cecilia, who had consecrated her life to the celibate service of Christ and who was martyred for her refusal of a forced marriage. She was hardly the only martyr to have been both a "white" and a "red" martyr, but the nature of her martyrdom certainly links these two together most powerfully.

When Liz and I were in Rome in 2005, preoccupied as we were with the huge scar on Liz's head from the brain surgery she had recently undergone, we were both struck by the stunning sculpture of the martyred Cecilia by Stefano Maderno, showing her body as it was when her tomb was found and opened, the mortal wound to her neck prominent.

A small replica of this life-size marble sits on a bookcase in our living room, a reminder of many important things about the Christian vocation.

"Green Martyrdom"

For some time now, I have suggested that we had better start adding a new category to our catechetical instruction on Christian martyrdom: "Green Martyrdom" was the inadequate name I gave to it. Increasingly, it is likely to be the case that Christians in the course of their professional lives will face the choice between fidelity and professional advancement. This choice will probably have significant economic ramifications. The willingness to lose or forgo income in order to be faithful is something that it would be good for the Church to begin to valorize, providing at least the moral support and, where necessary, the material support for those who put their material interests in jeopardy for the sake of their Christian faith.

A case in point has just been reported by the BBC. Nadia Eweida, a British Airways employee, has just lost her appeal to the airline's determination that she could not wear a small silver cross while at her job. Whatever the details of this particular case, it undoubtedly represents cultural trends that are far larger and weighter than the particular policy of one Western corporation.

Nadia Eweida

I have often remarked on how grateful I am to the selfless Sisters of Mercy who did their best to catechize me in my youth. It takes absolutely nothing away from them to say that for the most part they were unprepared for the task they could not have foreseen, namely the task of preparing their students for the upheavals of the 1960s. Perhaps we face a similar situation today; almost certainly we do. There are sufficient signs, however, which suggest that we need to prepare the young for a world that is a good deal less hospitable to Christian faith than was the world into which I was born.

Human all too human ...

When Liz and I were in Rome for a conference just after her first brain surgery, we had a visit with the preacher to the papal household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap., who has an interest in the work of Rene Girard. Fr. Cantalamessa gave Liz a blessing that was truly extraordinary.

The non-scriptural reading for today's Mass in the Magnificat is an excerpt from Fr. Cantalamessa's books. In it he makes the point that, far from making Jesus less human than the rest of us, Jesus' sinlessness was what made him the human epitome. For sin corrupts and cripples our humanity, which is inseparable from our Godlikeness -- made in the image and likeness of God as we are. Fr. Cantalamessa quotes Augustine:

To this point has human perversity arrived, that he whom lust overcomes is regarded as a man, whereas he whom has overcome lust cannot be a man. Those who overcome evil cannot be men, whereas those whom evil overcomes are men indeed!

To which Fr. Cantalamessa adds:

"Human" has come to mean rather what we have in common with the beasts than what distinguishes us from them, such as intelligence, will power, conscience, holiness.

This truth resonates on many levels, but Augustine's use of the vice of lust to illustrate a much wider human perversity brings readily to mind some familiar forms of it. Perhaps, please God, the young are today coming to their senses (the cultural influence that surround them notwithstanding), but in recent times virginity and celibacy were nothing but objects of scorn, while meretriciousness and sexual indulgence of any and every imaginable sort were unofficially regarded as signs of health and vitality. Augustine, as so often, saw the essential features of this in the 5th century.

Monkish Ignorance ...

St. Joseph's Abbey Church

Thomas Jefferson urged his fellow 18th century Enlightenment thinkers to burst the chains of "monkish ignorance."

Every morning I haul myself over to the nearby dispensary of "monkish ignorance" in an ongoing and altogether inconclusive effort to be liberated from the mundane ignorance from which monasticism freed my ancestors and probably yours. Those thus liberated subsequently used their freedom to create a culture so robust that one of its brightest 18th century beneficiaries was able to look down his nose at the spiritual pioneers who laid its foundations.

It has been aptly said that the health of Christian monasticism is the best measure of the vitality of Christianity itself. Meanwhile, the health of Christian monasticism isn't measured according to the usual calculus. The best measure of it is the depth and palpable solemnity of the monastic liturgy. By that measure and many others, it is an enormous privilege to be able to attend daily Lauds and Mass at St. Joseph's Abbey.

The window over the main altar

Florilegium

As some of my older friends know, for several years the work I do now under the auspices of The Cornerstone Forum had another name: The Florilegia Institute. A florilegium is a collection of texts, an anthology of quotations. I used the term in the early days because an old friend of mine, Geoff Wood, and I once long ago did a series of joint presentations, and we called the series a florilegium. Because in those years I was leading explorations in various literary texts, and because my modus operanti was to place the texts in some kind of dialogue with one another, The Florilegia Institute seemed an apt name for what I was doing. For instance, I gave a series of classes in those days comparing the Gospel of Luke with Virgil's Aeneid. The series was called "The Poetry of Truth and the Truth of Poetry," the former a reference to Luke's Gospel and the latter to Virgil's poem. The problem was, of course, hardly anyone knew what the word florilegia meant. It's aptness notwithstanding, it was confusing.

Since then the work has evolved into another phase, and a few years back we changed the name of our mission to The Cornerstone Forum. I mention this because, due to Liz's needs and the limitations it imposes on my usual traveling and speaking, I will be doing my part of the Forum's work from home for the time being. In dealing with increasing time constraints, I may often make posts to this weblog consisting simply of quotations that I think are worth sharing. That's pretty much what a florilegium is.

I may or may not be able to resist the impulse to gild the lily with an observation of my own about the quotation, and I may not have time to indulge that impulse -- as I just have -- in any case.

Let me inaugurate this weblog feature with the following quotation:

"The acquiring of religious knowledge is akin to learning a skill. It involves practices, attitudes, and dispositions and has to do with ordering one's loves. This kind of knowledge, the knowledge one lives by, is gained gradually over time. Just as one does not learn to play the piano in a day, so one does not learn to love God in an exuberant moment of delight."

Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 172

On a Personal Matter ...

The pathology report from Liz's recent surgery was not encouraging. The choices we face are limited but nevertheless perplexing, and, though they may include a respite, they don't likely include a cure. Please keep Liz in your prayers and thoughts. We daily pray for all those praying for us, and I can vouch for the value of Liz's prayers in this regard.

Liz is peaceful and cheerful. She has lived a contemplative life for decades, and her faith is deep and abiding. She is just a little further down the road we all travel. She leads the way, like a good guide, by holding the lantern behind her, thus throwing more light on the path of those coming behind her than on the path she herself is treading.

There was nothing intentional about the fact (remarked upon in an earlier post) that we have just gotten around to framing and hanging the Caravaggio painting entitled The Taking of Christ, but there is surely something providential about the timing, as there have been so many providential aspects to the life Liz and I share. The painting hangs over the fireplace, and sitting before it yesterday as we were absorbing the medical news, Liz remembered the painting that struck us so in Rome, the painting of the Last Supper by the Italian painter, Jacopo Bassano, and she remarked on how similarly Christ is depicted in each painting. In Bassano's painting, the disciples are oblivious of the significance of what is happening in their presence.

In the Caravaggio painting, the long loneliness that Bassano depicts as beginning at the Last Supper intensifies and becomes life-threatening, but Christ remains poised, attentive as He as He was in Bassano's Last Supper to His Father's will.

These were not the idle thoughts of an art critic. They were Liz's insights into the mystery she was experiencing from the inside.

Please keep her in your prayers.

Arresting the Truth

Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ:

Liz and I have finally had our reproduction of this painting framed and hung on the wall. It invites the meditative mind. The clamoring world -- restless to rid itself of Christ, His revelation, and his Church -- coming "with lanterns, torches, and weapons" to arrest Him.

Hans Urs von Balthasar summarizes the Mysterium iniquitatis: "God's heightened love provokes a heightened hatred that is as bottomless as love itself." [Theo-Drama, Vol. V, 285]

T. S. Eliot understood in 1931 that his age (which was an earlier phase of our age) bore an animus against the West's Judeo-Christian patrimony:

The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.

Caravaggio has painted more than just an episode in the Passion; he has captured something about the human drama as such. Inasmuch as Christ in Caravaggio's painting is being "handed over," the hands in the painting tell the story. The left (and symbolically sinister) hand of Judas, manhandling Christ as he betrays him with a kiss. On the upper left, the panic-stricken hands of a fleeing disciple. All of this frantic activity finds it counterpoise in the hands of Christ, folded as though in prayer. But then there is one more prominent hand in the painting. As he has done in other paintings, Caravaggio has placed himself in the upper right of the painting. There the artist holds a lantern, and the hand that holds it is poised like the hand of a painter at work.

This seems to me to be the artist's recognition, not only of his own particular vocation, but of the essential vocation of the Christian faithful: to tell the story.

"Absent thee from felicity a while," dying Hamlet said to his friend Horatio, "And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,/ To tell my story." So must Christians, in season and out, bear witness, "meanwhile redeeming the time..." As Eliot put it in Ash Wednesday:

. . . Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

Reluctantly ...

My interest in partisan politics all but vanished long ago, but by all indications I live in the bluest of the blue states. The victory of the Democrats here was a forgone conclusion, with or without the Iraq debacle. I may be wrong, but that debacle seems to me to have been due to the Bush administration’s rather naïve and residual liberalism, namely, its overestimation of the civilizing power of democracy and the market (absent the cultural and religious foundation which was the secret to the flourishing of these institutions in the West) and a commensurate underestimation of the role of religion in human affairs, for better or worse. It may have been the most generous assumption to make, but it was anthropologically naive. Bill Clinton’s famous “It’s the economy, stupid!” adage was the quintessential expression of the bread-and-circuses liberalism into which classical liberalism has devolved in both major parties and to which both unabashedly resort at election time. It’s not the economy, of course; it’s the culture that matters, and culture without roots in a living religious tradition is like a cut flower in a vase. You’d better enjoy it while you can.

In my neck of these darkening woods, the recent celebration of the referendum on the mismanagement of the Iraq war and the political and moral corruption of those too long in power was cut short by the important business of preventing a referendum on the meaning of marriage, the fear among the professional pols being that the citizens of this state might embarrass themselves by expressing an opinion not in keeping with the enlightened wisdom of their betters sitting in solemn counsel on appellate court benches and in an almost giddy ideological unanimity on Beacon Hill.

The people might be allowed to decide American foreign policy on the other side of the world – or at least to stick their fists in the air over the mess in Iraq – but they must not be allowed to interfere with the dismantling of the central institution of culture, upon which the future happiness and wellbeing of their children depends. That decision, say democracy's warm weather friends, is to be taken out of the hands of the great unwashed and left to the experts. The speaker of the Massachusetts House has gone on record as saying that lawmakers must make sure that the issue of same-sex marriage “never, ever appears as a question on the ballot.”

I’m a small-d democrat, even though I have a good many reservations about democracy. Hitler was elected after all. Whatever my reservations, however, I prefer naïve democrats to scheming ideologues. William Buckley’s famous quip about having more faith in the first hundred people in the New York City phone book than in the faculty of Harvard University is more apropos today than when he first said it, though one can hardly expect Solomonic wisdom in either case. Fundamental alterations in a society’s cultural, moral and anthropological structure should not be imposed by ideologues, which is what is now happening in Massachusetts and elsewhere. So, for what it’s worth, the following reflection, which I post with reluctance.

I don’t really think the push for same-sex marriage is about marriage. The great majority of those suffering from same-sex attraction are males, and the statistics on the male homosexual lifestyle are as irrefutable as they are disturbing. Studies have consistently shown that men suffering from same-sex attraction have, by comparison with heterosexual men, a staggering number of sexual partners. Even those who declare their desire for a permanent union often acknowledge the unlikelihood that it will mean strict fidelity.

People can, to use Pauline language, be “delivered over” to passions which are inordinately compulsive precisely because they are “objectively disordered.” Are these data the result of “homophobia”? Is such rampant promiscuity natural? Do we prefer our ideological hobby horses to social and psychological reality? None of this would make a lot of difference to me were it not for the fact that those driving this revolution are in the process of radically rearranging the social furniture and making a first-class mess of the world our children and grandchildren will inherit.

As to whether or to what extent same-sex attraction and the compulsions typically associated with it especially in male homosexuality are inherited, the scientific evidence is inclusive. Many researchers argue it is not. But even if this disorder is to a degree inherited, that does not make the sexual behavior of those afflicted by it natural. A predisposition for depression or alcoholism or aggressive behavior or chemical dependency or sickle cell anemia does not make these things natural in the sense of being thereby exempt from either moral concern or therapeutic efforts to offset the effects of the inherited predisposition. The etiology of other things that are intrinsically disordered – like bulimia, anorexia and pedophilia – is uncertain as well, but few people think it inappropriate to discourage bulimics, anorexics and pedophiles from trying to satisfy their compulsions.

Today, however, same-sex compulsions are being exempted from any such social, cultural, or moral reservations – to the very great detriment of those who engage in these behaviors. The statistics of psychological and social pathologies and the level of suffering associated with homosexual life-styles will make the eventual day of reckoning for their cheerful apologists a bitter one.

I often feel sorry for those smokers standing in the cold foyer puffing on a cigarette they are not allowed to smoke indoors, aware of how unconvincing is the charade of freedom they often feel obliged to maintain. The truth is that they are enslaved to an addiction, and that they would be much happier if they weren’t. The compulsions which are a statistical probability for males suffering from same-sex attraction are arguably less freely chosen in the first instance, but they are enslaving nonetheless and those enslaved by them would be far better off were they not so enslaved.

Researcher Mary Jo Anderson cites FBI statistics showing that violent crimes against gays by heterosexuals represent just .0001 percent of all violent crimes and a recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health showing that "39 percent of males with same-sex attraction have been abused by other males with same-sex attraction." How accurate these statistics are I cannot say, but they are undoubtedly a better approximation of the reality of the homosexual lifestyle than are the airbrushed and fog-filtered myths that our investigative journalists fail to investigate. The statistical misery associated with the “gay” lifestyle is copiously documented in respectable sources. Any journalist capable of spelling google could access these documents in seconds. If abstinence or chastity or wedded monogamy involved one one-thousandths of the physical, psychological and social dangers associated with the homosexual lifestyle, especially the male homosexual lifestyle, banner headlines would proclaim the perils.

In the world made tolerant of sexual deviance by earlier victories of the sexual liberationists, the material and social advantages of the married state are minor, while the corresponding obligations and responsibilities, if taken seriously, are not insignificant. No, the push for same-sex marriage is, I think, about respectability. It is about removing the moral onus that has attached to sodomy and the related forms of homosexual “sex” for millennia. More importantly, perhaps, it is about eliminating the lingering sense among sexually active homosexuals themselves of the “transgressive” nature of their sexual behavior.

The hope is that if sodomy is made morally and legally indistinguishable from the nuptial embrace of a married man and woman, then those living sexually active homosexual lifestyles will be relieved of the gnawing sense of illegitimacy and the commensurate feelings of indignity associated with their behavior. Those naïve enough to hold out this hope should remember that the ideologues have predicted this outcome at each and every step in the long march of the sexual revolution, and it hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t. In a variation on an old East Tennessee adage – No matter where you go, there you are – after all the social furniture is broken and marriage has ceased to have any distinctive shape, those living what we today call the homosexual lifestyle will still be haunted by misgivings and the histrionics typically employed to demonstrate the non-existence of these misgivings will ring even more hollow then they do today. The wreckage will have been for naught.

If the North American Man-Boy Love Association has its way and pedophilia is given a respectable place in the erotic repertoire of 21st century culture, or if adult incest is eventually afforded legal protection, does anyone think that the moral discomfort that haunts those who engage in such behaviors will vanish? There isn’t a plebiscite in the world that will remove that moral discomfort. Not a Supreme Court opinion. Not a personal letter from the Pope. Nothing. Except, cessation of the unnatural behavior. Dignity is a moral, not a legal or psychological or sociological, category. The dream of some is that, liberated from moral normativity, both social opprobrium of those offended by certain behaviors and the lingering moral misgivings of those who engage in them will vanish. It is a pipe-dream.

It is inconceivable to many today that those who refuse to repudiate the received wisdom of the ages in favor of the reckless indulgence of this one might be motivated by an empathy for the very people who have come to believe that the repudiation will end their suffering. But one doesn’t show compassion for a pedophile or an anorexic by making pedophilia and self-starvation into sacraments, or by listing them as respectable lifestyle options in public school textbooks. The Christian injunction against judgmentalism is not there to make us moral zombies. (Those who condemn others for “moralizing” are moralizing, even when the moral revolution they advance is normless hedonism.) Still less does the injunction against judging others justify placing several generations of young people in even greater moral and spiritual jeopardy than they are already by telling them, in effect, that the black diamond marker on the steep side of the snowy mountain is just a semiotic suggestion for those who decide they like that interpretation.

In my own way, I heartily agree with the Beacon Hill pol who feels that the issue of same-sex marriage should "never, ever appear on the ballot." The difference is that he doesn't trust what the people would do once they got to the voting booth and I don't think they should put to the trouble of going there in order to protect the single most culturally respected institution in the history of the world from those who have deep-seated ulterior motives for betraying it with a kiss.