Archive for the 'Faith' Category

On motherhood, choice, and the celebration of Agata Mroz

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 7, 2008
in Abortion, Christianity, Faith, Having children and Sports
. 18 Comments

UPDATED Reminder about comments policy:

This comment thread is open to feminists and those who are feminist-friendly only. Thread-derailing to advance an anti-feminist agenda has no place here. I’ve been remiss in enforcing this recently, but am going to be better about it out now.

On the Fourth of July, KJ Lopez at the National Review Online offered up what she calls “A Good Girl Role Model”. (One assumes, after reading the piece and being familiar with K-Lo’s work, that the adjective “good” modifies “girl” rather than “role model”. Lopez is from that school of social conservatives who wish fervently that there were more “good girls” — in the classic sense — running around. Or, better yet in the right-wing world, not running around.)

Lopez tells us the story of Agata Mroz, a former Polish volleyball star who died of leukemia shortly after giving birth.

When Agata was 17, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a collection of disorders that prevent the bone marrow from producing sufficient blood cells. Some forms of MDS progress to leukemia, and Agata’s did. In the prime of her sports career, Agata needed to take a sabbatical in 2007 to fight the disease. The first part of her treatment involved many blood transfusions. When her fans discovered that she needed blood, they formed a queue to be donors, giving 3,170 pints.

Her condition worsened as she was preparing to marry Jacek Olszewski on June 9, 2007, leaving her too ill to go on a honeymoon. Because of her illness, doctors cautioned her against getting pregnant, but she tried anyway. She was realistic about her slim prospects to beat the disease and, if she were going to die, she at least hoped to be able to give life.

She became pregnant soon after marrying. “The news about the child made me feel lucky again,” she said in a February news interview. “I felt happy that I would know what it is to be a mother and that I would give my husband something good of myself.”

A few weeks later, doctors discovered her cancer had progressed. They told her that she urgently needed a bone marrow transplant, but she opted to wait until after delivery to receive the transplant lest she imperil her child’s life. She clearly knew the risk she was taking, but considered the reward worth the danger, putting her child’s life above her own. She gave premature birth to a daughter, Lilliana, on April 4.

Agata died on June 4.

It’s a bittersweet story. Who among us would question Agata’s decision? She did what she wanted to do, making a conscious choice to get pregnant despite the huge risk and to forego lifesaving treatment in order to ensure her daughter’s well-being. I honor that choice as a good and valid one. I was moved reading the account Lopez shares.

But what is so infuriating is the clear sense that Agata’s decision wasn’t a choice, but a spiritual requirement for any woman who might find herself in a similar tragic predicament. For Lopez — and indeed, for many Catholics, a woman is required to put the life of her unborn child ahead of her own. It isn’t so much a “choice” as a divine mandate. Lopez’s piece concludes:

In his homily, the celebrant of the Mass, Bishop Marian Florczyk, said that Agata’s life is a witness of “love of life, motherhood, the desire to give life and the heroic love of an unborn child.”

It is all that. I’m not raining on Agata’s parade, of course. But Lopez doesn’t entitle her piece “A Mother’s Choice”. She calls it “A Good Girl Role Model”, driving home the point that young women ought to aspire to be as radically selfless as Agata to the point of de-valuing their own lives. Continue reading ‘On motherhood, choice, and the celebration of Agata Mroz’

“Only disobedience is free”: my mama’s follow-up on sin, rebellion, and autonomy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 1, 2008
in Christianity, Faith, Family, Favorite Posts 2008 and Youth
. 25 Comments

Last week, I posted about the Calvinist notion of rebelliousness as the gravest of sins, quoting both Richard Mouw and Augustine of Hippo. Mouw and Augustine excoriated themselves for childish destructiveness, not so much because of the damage they did to the objects they attacked but because of their sheer glee in defying authority.

My mother, a retired professor of philosophy, now in her seventies and an atheist since her teens, wrote to me with a different insight about the meaning of rebellion:

I don’t know if I ever told you this story. It is my earliest clear memory; I was only two and a half years old. It was Christmas Eve 1939, and I was in the backseat of the car. We were driving to Grandfather Roeding’s for dinner. I think I had a slight cold. For some reason I had no shoes on but I did have socks and I started to take my socks off. My mother told me not to, but as I continued to remove them, I had this sudden enormous sense of myself as a self. I could take my socks off If I wanted to! I was a separate person. I was genuinely — if only briefly — aware of my own separate consciousness. I’ve certainly never thought of it as a sin. I disobeyed in the revelation that I could disobey: A deliberate act of free will. I’m sure I had done quite a few naughty things before that but this was an act of independence rather than of malice.

Do you know the medieval theory that there can be no true love in marriage? True love involved giving freely and nothing in marriage can be giving freely since everything, according to medieval doctrine, is already owed. Similarly, in our childhood there is a sense that everything good and well behaved is already required of us. We disobey not because we are depraved but because in the tiny sphere of our capacities, only disobedience is free, only disobedience is an expression of our autonomy. I have never forgotten that moment of realization that I could choose not to obey.

The bold emphases are mine.

I am truly, in so many ways, my mother’s son! And though my mother and I disagree about a great many things, I think she’s absolutely right about the essentially healthy, life-affirming function of the kind of childish disobedience she describes here. I am not a philosopher like my parents or Richard Mouw (though I did suffer through a lot of graduate work on medieval English scholasticism). What I do believe is that we must distinguish healthy rebellion from wanton destructiveness. My mother’s defiant removal of her socks, in the face of her own mother’s stated warnings, is evidence of a desire for healthy autonomy; Mouw’s smashing of his grandparents’ plants is less positive because it is the expression of autonomy through the willfull destruction of life (however feeble and unsentient that life may have been). Rebellion for the sake of establishing independence is, in other words, only sinful when it involves deliberate harm to that which is created, good, and valuable. There are different kinds of rebellion. Continue reading ‘“Only disobedience is free”: my mama’s follow-up on sin, rebellion, and autonomy’

Ten years

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 25, 2008
in Addiction and mental illness and Faith
. 21 Comments

It is June 25, 2008. Ten years ago this Friday, on June 27, 1998, I took my last drink of alcohol and my last illicit drug. Ten years ago this Friday, I tried to take my life by turning on the gas in my apartment building and blowing out the pilot lights; I very nearly took quite a few people with me. Ten years ago this Friday, I came to what we in recovery call a “bottom.”

The gas did not kill me; sheriff’s deputies kicked in the door and pulled me to safety before any serious harm could be done. After a few hours in ICU getting my stomach pumped (for the umpteenth time), I was dispatched to a locked psychiatric ward. I date my sobriety from the day I was released from the hospital: July 1, 1998. The drugs I took on the night of the 27th took several days to leave my system, and so I wasn’t clear-headed until the 1st.

It scarcely seems possible that I have been clean and sober for a decade. I have written often on this blog about what I was like “before” and “after”. And of course, my story is a common one. There are plenty of “once was lost, now am found” narratives out there; the very root of autobiography in the Western world is the trope of conversion and transformation. The familiarity of the story doesn’t make it any less interesting to those caught up in it, of course, and it doesn’t mean that the story isn’t worth telling over and over again. After all, the primary purpose of relating these stories is not to gratify the ego but instead to remind others that recovery is possible, miracles do happen, change is real.

When people ask me what helped me get and stay sober, what helped me in my recovery from diagnosed mental illness, what helped me give up the “deathstyle” I lived for so long, I cite three things. The three-legged stool of my recovery: intense psychotherapy; rigorous participation in a Twelve-Step program, and a rediscovered faith in Christ. That doesn’t mean that everyone who seeks recovery must have each of these components, but they were, each in their own way, indispensable to the transformation that happened in my life in the summer of 1998 and beyond. I am not sure I would be where I am today had I not had each of those tools at my disposal, had I not had my nightly meetings, my thrice-weekly sessions with Dr. Levine, and a growing sense of God’s plan for my life.

And of course, I had something else: a fierce desire to live. I’ve lost friends and lovers to the “disease” of addiction, to mental illness, who didn’t have that same willingness to do absolutely anything to get better. And this morning, that’s what I’m contemplating: why it is that some of us are blessed with that will, that hunger, that longing to survive while others are not. Ten years after my last drink, ten years after my last illicit drug, I still have no idea why some “get it” and others don’t. Was it luck? Was it “divine election”, as my Calvinist friends might say? Was it sheer stubborness on my part? Was it privilege, the sort that pays for psychiatric care three times a week? Was it a constellation of all of these?

I don’t know. What I do know is that June 1998 saw me very close to ending my life and taking others with me. What I do know is that something happened, something marvelous and soul-stirring and, so far, apparently permanent. And I am grateful beyond words that it did happen as it did. Let me embrace the cliche: every day is indeed a gift, because I willingly forfeited my life a decade ago and received it back, undeserved and unexpected. And Christ almighty, I try to remember to be worthy of that gift I was given.

“Enter through the narrow gate”: culture, tradition, and the Christian paradox of other-centered individualism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2008
in Christianity, Faith and Favorite Posts 2008
. 3 Comments

At the end of a long post about changing her views on abortion, Mermade asks:

…sometimes I do worry about whether or not I am indeed deviating from the narrow path (see Matthew 7:13), but no longer view the “narrow path” as being politically conservative in a secular culture. I am still trying to figure out what Jesus meant when he said to enter through the narrow path. Any interpretations you guys have of that are very much welcome.

Well, lots of folks can give interesting lectures about the various gates into the city of Jerusalem that existed in Jesus’ time. The number of treatises and dissertations that have been written about the physical location and theological significance of those entryways is mind-boggling. But since we tend to use the idea of the “narrow” and “wide” gates metaphorically in contemporary Christian culture, I’ll roll with that, and offer a reflection that doesn’t cling too narrowly to traditional interpretation.

“Wide” gates are those that many people can fit through at once. “Narrow” gates are those that, perhaps, only one person can get through at a time. A simple and reasonable reading of the passage is that Jesus is doing what he does throughout Matthew: turning conventional wisdom on its head and suggesting a radically different interpretation of what it means to live a righteous life. Matthew, of all the Gospels, is the one most concerned with reaching the Jewish listener. Jesus challenges the parochialism and ethnocentrism (these are not anachronistic terms to use here) of his followers, suggesting throughout Matthew that active commitment to loving the entire world (rather than just one “people”) is the central component of his message. Continue reading ‘“Enter through the narrow gate”: culture, tradition, and the Christian paradox of other-centered individualism’

Irony-free in SB

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 6, 2008
in Faith and Music
. 7 Comments

We spent the day back up in Santa Barbara; it was the first time my brother, sisters, and I had all been together since before our father died nearly two years ago.

This morning, my ten-month old nephew Matthew Hubert was honored in a “naming” ceremony at the Santa Barbara Unitarian Society. I’m fairly accustomed to being around earnest, sweet, doctrinally vague, and unfailingly left-leaning Unitarians. But my wife and I couldn’t hold it together, when, after a service filled with virtually every cliche in the Book of Progressive Religion, the minister asked us to — yes, you know it — join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” My beloved and I did quarter-turns away from each other as we clutched hands, knowing that if our eyes met we would both lose it completely.

How often does the phrase “we’re not going to hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’” make its way into our discourse? And yet, in all my church-going experience, I’d never actually been asked to do it. Oh, I’ve held hands with my fellow worshippers; I’ve sung Kumbaya a time or two. But I’ve never had these two activities combined into the great archetypal experience of well-meaning liberalism.

The Santa Barbara Unitarian Society, bless ‘em all, is an irony-free zone.

Running alone on Palm Sunday

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2008
in Christianity and Faith
. 14 Comments

It’s Holy Week, and we’re heading towards the earliest Easter (in the Roman Calendar) since 1913. Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and for the first time in a decade, I wasn’t in church to mark the memorial of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.

Lately, I’ve taken to telling people I’m “between churches.” It sounds like “between jobs” or “between relationships”, and honestly, sometimes, that’s how I feel. In the decade since I came back to Christ, I’ve been in senior leadership in two churches, and twice ended up resigning that leadership as a result of butting heads with staff. When I left All Saints Pasadena last summer, I pledged I wouldn’t seek out any leadership post in my new church (whichever one that was to be.) And I went to a few churches (especially the Warehouse community), where against all of my ENFP instincts, I sat quietly in the back.

What happened was predictable: when I sit quietly in the back anywhere, I end up losing interest. My mind wanders. The only way I can honor a commitment to show up is if I’m placed in a position of trust. If I know other people expect me and are relying on me, I’m there. If it’s just little ol’ me sitting in a chair in the midst of a large group, I instantly find excuses not to go. My faith is too fragile and too individual to get me to church as a “worshipper among worshippers”; being a leader is usually the only thing that will guarantee my appearance. Continue reading ‘Running alone on Palm Sunday’

“God Writes Straight With Crooked Lines”: more on Spitzer, sin, redemption

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 11, 2008
in Faith, Men and Masculinity and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 11 Comments

As we await what must be the inevitable resignation announcement from Eliot Spitzer, it occurs to me I’ve posted a few times on the all-too-well-known theme of a fall from grace on the part of an admired — invariably male — public figure. Here’s a selection:

Private virtue, public justice: some very long thoughts on men, leadership, and the lie of “compartmentalism”

“There Never Was a War that Was Not Inward”: a long reflection on Ted Haggard

“The inner darkness of the redeemed”: in defense of Mel Gibson

Lengthy musings about Clinton, feminism, erotic justice

The titles of these posts are sufficiently descriptive as to require no further explanation. What I’ve said about Bill Clinton, Antonio Villaraigosa, Ted Haggard and Mel Gibson (an odd quartet indeed) more or less applies to Eliot Spitzer. And the bookers from the major chat shows have already called up the legion of pop psychologists who appear at times like this, all proffering an answer to the timeless question: “Why would a man like X, in his position, with so much going for him, do something so monumentally stupid?” By now we know all the answers: sexual addiction; deep-seated shame and the desire to be punished; self-destructiveness; mid-life crises; good, old-fashioned hubris. And because falls from grace are often breathtaking in their suddenness, we are fascinated as the ancients were fascinated. These are, as everyone points out, very old stories. Continue reading ‘“God Writes Straight With Crooked Lines”: more on Spitzer, sin, redemption’

The obligatory “Yes, Virginia, you can be a feminist and a Christian without compromising the core tenets of either” post

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2008
in Christianity, Faith and Feminism
. 16 Comments

Just in time for International Women’s Day last week, the religious right launched a pair of angry broadsides at the feminist movement. Kurk Gayle let me know about this positively bizarre op-ed by Alice Lindsey: The Paradox of Feminism. A day earlier, an only slightly-less strange piece by Colleen Caroll Campbell ran at the National Review: Faith of the Feminine.

Both essays make the same point: feminism is profoundly hostile to faith, particularly Christianity. Feminists, however, are misguided; according to both Campbell (a former speechwriter for the current president and a robust defender of a narrow understanding of orthodoxy) and Lindsey (a former Episcopal priest who has renounced her ordination and joined a church that doesn’t affirm women in the priesthood), Christianity is the great liberator of women. Lindsey writes:

History shows that wherever Christianity has spread, the treatment of women has improved. Allow me to cite but one example. My great grandfather was a pioneer missionary in India. He established a seminary there, but after time it became apparent that Christian men could not evangelize Indian women who lived sequestered lives. Therefore, my great grandfather decided to train women converts to be midwives and nurses so that they could minister to Indian women at a critical time. So he established a nurse training center and even today the majority of nurses in India are Christian females.

We’re often reminded that the plural of anecdote is not evidence. Lindsey, bless her, doesn’t even bother with getting to the plural. Continue reading ‘The obligatory “Yes, Virginia, you can be a feminist and a Christian without compromising the core tenets of either” post’

Lifting the cloud of self-involvement: on Lent 2008

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 13, 2008
in Faith
. 5 Comments

It’s Lent. This will be the earliest Easter of my lifetime (March 23), and indeed the earliest Easter since 1913; we’re already a week into the Christian season of discipline and reflection.

My sacrifice “for me” this Lent is the usual one: no desserts or sweets (other than plain fruit) until after sundown Easter Eve. That’s easy enough for me to do; I oscillate easily between indulgence and self-denial. Of course, as Christians, our sacrifices ought to be more than simple acts of restriction that primarily benefit ourselves. (No one around me is helped in any notable way by my temporary abstinence from sugar.) And though in the past I’ve made commitments to do more volunteering or give more money, I wanted to do something different for Lent 2008.

On our recent South America trip, I spent a bit of time thinking about what it was I wanted my “extra Lenten discipline” to be. Read more Scripture? Attempt — for the 937th time — to integrate meditation into my morning rituals? Those all seemed too familiar, too tried (though no less true for having been tried). As it turned out, I got my inspiration for what to do from one of the many novels we brought along for our three week journey. (I find that I do most of my reading when I’m away from my normal routines; during the regular semester, there’s never much time for pleasure reading.) I can’t remember which novel it was (though it might have been something by Nadine Gordimer), but the chief character in the book was a middle-aged woman who felt keenly the pain of “becoming invisible.”

Last August, I wrote a little bit about the “slide into invisibility“. But as I read my book, it struck me that one of my most glaring character defects is that I really don’t “see” the people around me as well as I should. This isn’t about a failure to see older women as sexual creatures (which was the point made in the book); it’s bigger and broader than that. What I realize is that all too often, my own self-absorption keeps me from really connecting with most people as they really are. As I sat on the plane from Santiago to Ushuaia, I thought of how many people I talk to, speak with, write to every day. And it hit me, as it hasn’t hit me in a very long time, how poor a job I often do of truly “seeing” them. Continue reading ‘Lifting the cloud of self-involvement: on Lent 2008′

A note on Blair’s conversion, and on missing Rome

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 26, 2007
in Christianity, Divorce, Faith and People
. 10 Comments

Like most who have followed the life and career of Tony Blair, I was not surprised in the least by his decision to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, a decision made formal in a private ceremony last week. Long-affiliated with the fine old Christian Socialist Movement, his theology seemed to have been moving towards Rome for some time. (When Blair’s son Leo was born in 2000, a number of years younger than his other children with his wife, Cherie, there were very public rumors that the couple did not practice any form of artificial birth control, in keeping with Catholic teaching.)

I’ve had mixed feelings about Tony Blair for years now. But I wish him well, of course, as he moves forward on his spiritual journey. A great many Englishmen and women before him have “returned to Rome” before him, and he goes in fine company.

A little bit of me — just a little — is envious. My own religious peregrination has been fitful and dramatic, but it started with a late adolescent conversion from the atheism of my parents to Roman Catholicism. I was baptized and confirmed at the 1988 Easter Vigil, where I took the confirmation name Thomas. For a brief time, I seriously considered the priesthood — so great was my enthusiasm for the Church. My first marriage was solemnized with a full mass at St Paul the Apostle in Westwood, one of the larger Catholic parishes in West Los Angeles. During the first year of that marriage, I was a regular and enthusiastic communicant.

It was the end of my first marriage that, for me, made staying a Catholic untenable. Though we agreed on little else during the divorce process, my first wife and I were committed to not seeking an annulment, despite pressure from some of her Catholic relatives to get one. What had been done might now be undone, but we weren’t going to deny it had been done in the first place! And with the divorce came the bar from the eucharist. No more wafer and wine made into bread and blood for me, at least not in the Roman style.

I drifted away from Christ for the next few years after that 1992 divorce. When I came back, it was as a Protestant of one kind or another: an Anabaptist, a non-denominational charismatic, an Episcopalian. But here’s the rub: often, whether I’m at a Mennonite, Episcopal, or evangelical worship service, I find myself feeling as if what I’m participating in is somehow incomplete. There are churches, and then there is The Church. And while all the churches are somehow part of the Body of Christ, there is still for me a sense that the truest Church is Roman. Though I very rarely attend Mass any more, I admit that I feel something when I do that I have not felt anywhere else — and I have worshipped in more than my share of elsewheres.

I’m blissful in my fourth marriage. The chances of reconciling with my first wife are zero. I would never dream of raising our future children in a church community that didn’t see their parents’ marriage as being as licit and good as any other. As I understand it, the price of being allowed to become a regular communicant in the Catholic church would mean leaving my wife — or enduring a chaste marriage for the rest of our lives. I’ve checked this out with a few of my friends who know their canon law: without an annulment of my first marriage, or without a commitment to chastity within my current one, I’m going to have a hard time gettin’ to the communion rail. That price is much too high to pay.

It’s odd — I was a Mass-going Catholic for less than five years. That’s not even an eighth of my life. And yet Rome has a hold on me that nothing else has. And when I see the once-married Tony Blair received into the Church, my happiness for him is not untinged with envy.

GOP pundit: we want poor social conservatives, just as long as they know their place

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 14, 2007
in Faith and Politics
. 8 Comments

Rich Lowry in today’s National Review Online, expressing the anxiety that the right-wing punditocracy has about Mike Huckabee, and the damage he’s doing to the conservative elite’s golden boy, Mitt Romney:

The GOP’s social conservatism inarguably has been an enormous benefit to the party throughout the past 30 years, winning over conservative Democrats and lower-income voters who otherwise might not find the Republican limited-government message appealing. That said, nominating a Southern Baptist pastor running on his religiosity would be rather overdoing it. Social conservatism has to be part of the Republican message, but it can’t be the message in its entirety.

Bold emphasis mine.

Well, that’s more candor than I expect from GOP strategists: “we like poor uneducated social conservatives, but only as long as they know their place, which is to provide votes so we can do the important stuff.” It’s a bald admission of what the left has known for a long time: the GOP uses the “God, gays, and guns” issues to bring in voters whose economic needs are utterly incongruent with the Republican message.

Lowry continues:

Huckabee has declared that he doesn’t believe in evolution. Even if there are many people in America who agree with him, his position would play into the image of Republicans as the anti-science party. This would tend to push away independents and upper-income Republicans. In short, Huckabee would take a strength of the GOP and, through overplaying it, make it a weakness.

In other words: social conservatism, once you scratch the surface, is embarrassing.

Right-wing evangelicals are to the GOP what African-Americans have traditionally been to the Democrats: a group that is heavily courted come election time, but whose deepest concerns are routinely dismissed by the party elite. I’m an evangelical whose views on most issues are very different from Mike Huckabee’s. But on behalf of my “fellow believers”, I’m a bit stunned by the dismissive, patronizing tone Lowry strikes in his message.

Shorter Lowry: “Conservative evangelicals to the back of the bus, because you scare folks.”

In praise of cacophony: rejecting Romney’s “symphony of faith”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 6, 2007
in Christianity, Faith and Politics
. 44 Comments

I left home for the office this morning just before Mitt Romney started his speech about faith. I couldn’t find it on the radio (I was a bit surprised that NPR didn’t pick it up, and I mean that seriously rather than facetiously), and couldn’t get it to stream online. So I’ll have to content myself, for now, with reading excerpts from the speech that the Romney campaign released in advance.

I’m an evangelical who has spent almost his entire life in the secular academy. There are few other serious Christians in my department; most of the colleagues to whom I am closest are firm atheists. Indeed, I note that more and more folks I run into these days seem willing to call themselves atheists rather than agnostics. There seems to be more openness about unbelief, and I appreciate that we live in a climate where those who are genuinely convinced that there is no God at all don’t feel pressured to use the safer language of uncertainty and doubt.

Romney said this morning:

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

Mitt’s got it right when he suggests that it is unreasonable to ask anyone to divorce their spiritual convictions from their politics. The post immediately below this one is a brief polemic against compartmentalization, albeit a very different kind of compartmentalization. But to a serious believer, a Sunday morning (or Saturday morning) faith is poor beer indeed. If the relationship I have with God is the transcendent Fact of my life, it’s absurd to suggest that that Fact shouldn’t inform and guide everything I do — including how I teach and how I vote.

But the parallel to teaching is important. My faith makes me, I’m certain, a better teacher. That doesn’t mean that folks who don’t share my faith can’t be good teachers (better than I in many cases). It doesn’t mean that folks who have no faith at all can’t be wonderful instructors and mentors. It is simply true that in my case, my faith has made me an infinitely kinder, more patient, and less self-absorbed person. (Whatever notable tendencies I still have towards self-absorption, are, of course, attributable to the obvious reality that I, like all converts, am still very much a work in progress.) If someone asks me, “Hugo, why do you do what you do the way you do it?”, faith is going to be part of my answer. But the fact that my teaching rests on a spiritual foundation doesn’t mean that I am entitled to inject my spiritual beliefs into the classroom. If I can be a fairly religious person, and work day in and day out without talking incessantly about how my faith undergirds everything I’m doing, then I’m quite confident that others can do the same. That’s not compartmentalization, because I’m not living at odds with my faith or hiding my faith. I’m just choosing not to bludgeon folks with the cross. I’d like it if my fellow believers in public life felt the same way.

(And for the record, the notion of a “religion of secularism” is silly. But suppose someone did want to start such a religion, committed to the notion that the Divine Being is Absent, Never Was, and Never Will Be? The America I want is an America where that “religion” would be able to take its place in the public square too.)

But I’m particularly troubled by the (admittedly eloquent) concluding lines of Romney’s speech, sure to be remembered longest:

In such a world, we can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty, joined against the evils and dangers of the day. And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion — rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.

Bold emphasis mine.

Yikes. I hit my knees a lot, Mitt, and I worship the same Almighty you do. I’m heartened to hear you will be my friend and ally. Tell me, will you also be a friend and ally to my mother, who does not believe in God? (For that matter, will you be a friend and ally to many of my Anabaptist friends, who believe in God but don’t kneel?)

And I wince at the notion that faith is a symphony. Symphonies, as we understand them, are innovations of the Christian west. The image that pops into my head is of the Catholics in the string section, the Baptists blowin’ their horns, the Eastern Orthodox on their woodwinds and the Pentecostals on percussion. Perhaps they’ll play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and it will sound very pretty. But will there be Muslims? Will there be atheists? Will there be Buddhists and Hindus? Will there be animists and Wiccans?

Real diversity is not harmonious. Real diversity is African and Japanese drums, the throbbing of synthesized beats, the rich, challenging melodies of an Indonesian gamelan — and French horns. Put that all together, and it isn’t going to be a beautiful symphony. It’ll be beautiful yes, but it will be the beauty of a great big messy cacophony, like what happens when you put plastic musical instruments into the hands of second-graders on a sugar high. And that great big messy cacophany is my America, Mitt. It’s the rancheras I hear blasting as I drive through Highland Park, it’s the hip-hop bumping from the car stereos as I walk on Crenshaw. It’s the ululating of Sephardic Jewish women at a Kabbalistic wedding, and it’s the speaking in tongues of Pentecostals at a late night prayer meetin’. It’s noisy and it’s difficult to understand and it doesn’t all fit together.

Religion has a place in the public square. But it doesn’t get to define the boundaries of the public square. Public displays of faith have their place, indeed — but so too do public displays of humanistic secularism. The right to pray as one chooses is inextricably linked to the equally important right to scoff at those who pray. Real ecumenism, real diversity, is not simply making the case for common ground between Mormons and evangelical Protestants, arguing that each has a part to play in the grand symphony of faith. A real commitment to diversity is embracing not only all believers, but embracing all those who are in varying states of unbelief. I say this as a Christian who loves Jesus, and I say it on behalf of those whom I love who share my convictions — and those whom I love who don’t.

UPDATE: I wish I could say that the way I originally spelled “cacophony” was deliberate. When dealing with Greek suffixes, I’m better on manifestations than sounds, so “phany” always “looks right” to me. I’ve changed it to the right spelling now.

“Fixin’ to make a fire in the dark and the cold”: some notes on loving “No Country for Old Men”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 3, 2007
in Faith and Movies
. 20 Comments

Though I haven’t been to see many films lately, the best thing I’ve seen this fall — hands down — is No Country For Old Men. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald, and Woody Harrelson, it’s a rich, engrossing, and for me, deeply satisfying picture.

Before I saw the film, several friends who had seen it told me that they had loved the first two-thirds but “hated the ending”. I went into the theater with their warning in mind, but found to my relief and surprise that the ending was one of the best things about the movie. Plot spoilers below the fold, folks, so click at your own risk. Continue reading ‘“Fixin’ to make a fire in the dark and the cold”: some notes on loving “No Country for Old Men”’

Once was lost, but now I still am: some thoughts on conversion and remaining teachable

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 27, 2007
in Christianity, Faith and Relationships
. 5 Comments

I’m still mulling the whole race, sex, and Full Frontal Feminism controversy. More on that soon.

On a different note, my friend “Clive” and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about a mutual buddy of ours, “Keith.” I met Clive and Keith at my old gym a decade ago; we’re all about the same age and we were “lifting partners” and “spinning pals” for several years. Clive and Keith are both evangelicals, both graduates of the same small prestigious Christian liberal-arts college. In different ways, they both played pivotal roles in my return to Christ in 1998. In my early days of sobriety and conversion, I found it difficult to talk easily about what was happening in my life. Working out together was the shared activity that made our masculine intimacy easier, and in different ways, Clive and Keith were able to do some vital “witness work” to bring me home to Jesus once again.

As it turns out, Clive and Keith aren’t speaking much these days. According to Clive, Keith (a very successful self-made entrepeneur) has turned his back on a lot of old friends. Keith has a hard time, apparently, hearing constructive criticism without getting outraged and defensive. The three of us belong to a Christian subculture in which loving confrontation and an insistence on mutual accountability are vital — and yet Keith has grown increasingly certain that he doesn’t need that kind of gentle challenge. Keith’s marriage is increasingly stormy, his relationship with his four children is strained, and his hard-driving business practices have alienated old and new acquaintances alike. We’re worried about him, and Clive and I spent a bit of time chatting about ways to “get through” to him. Continue reading ‘Once was lost, but now I still am: some thoughts on conversion and remaining teachable’

Humility and humiliation, self-loathing and hubris: a long and personal post about addiction and self-awareness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 18, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness and Faith
. 11 Comments

I mentor a wide variety of students in an equally wide variety of ways. I’m fond of all of them, but I will admit I have a keen sense of responsibility to those students whom I know are my fellow addicts. In the various Twelve Step programs with which I have been affiliated, there is a key maxim: if you want to keep something good (like sobriety), you’ve got to give it away. Call it mentoring or sponsoring or advising, it’s vital to my continued recovery that I work with other addicts. And as luck would have it, I’ve struggled with a colorful palate of compulsions, so I can usually identify with what it is that the young man or woman with whom I am working is going through. And even when I can’t always relate to the actions they’re engaged in (though I almost always can), I can connect to their feelings. That spinning cycle that carries them compulsively from ecstasy to despair is very, very familiar.

Though I often tell anecdotes about my students, when it comes to issues of addiction I shy away from blogging about what they tell me in confidence, even if I go to great lengths to disguise their identity. Their pain is not fodder for my writing. But of course, I do get inspired to blog about things that come up in these mentoring sessions, and something came up this week with one young person that brought me instantly back to a younger, not-yet forgotten Hugo.

One characteristic I see in many addicts is one that was a key part of me for many years. From the time I was a child until I was well into my thirties, I had what most addicts have: a strange mix of brutally low self-esteem and extraordinary grandiosity. For years and years my head told me that I was fat, ugly, shallow, selfish, and unloveable. At the same time, my head told me that I was incredibly strong. My strength lay in my capacity to endure what I imagined no one else could endure, because — my ego told me — if anyone else was suffering what I was suffering they would go stark raving mad. Admittedly, I did go temporarily mad on more than one occasion, but also managed to get through college, earn graduate degrees, and hold down a tenure-track job while dealing with both addiction and periodic psychotic episodes. In my grandiosity, I chalked up that success in the midst of my despair to this great strength I had. Continue reading ‘Humility and humiliation, self-loathing and hubris: a long and personal post about addiction and self-awareness’