Thursday, December 8, 2011

Feast of the Immaculate Conception

I'm going to make a muddle of this - I can already tell. Because all I can think about this evening is how angry the Cult of Virginity makes me. How angry I am about St. Jerome and his doctrine that Status of Hymen determines which room a woman gets to be in once she reaches heaven (third closest "room" to God: married women without children, second closest: mothers, first: virgins - apparently no exceptions). How angry it makes me that we place such a high priority on this. How angry I am that I can't seem to find a Reason This is Wrong in all of the multiplicity of writings about sexuality - at least, one that doesn't make me want to punch something.

Don't get me wrong - I've been thinking about it for quite awhile and come up with a few thoughts of my own. I also hate the opposite impulse that says that sex and bodies don't matter the way that heart, mind and intention matter because that can turn out just as gross as the social control of women (and it is mostly about women's "purity") often becomes. It's a nasty attempt to give ourselves a pass on our actions because we aren't - deep down in our hearts - "bad people."

Because in our culture's recent attempts to dethrone Beauty as the supreme virtue, we have no affirmed all bodies' inherent worth but turned worth away from bodies to an inner heart and mind - which isn't bad except that it leads to the thought that therefore bodies don't matter (when as Catholics we know just how much they do) and from there the next step is that our actions don't matter the way that our intentions do - which is valid in a measure of your character but doesn't discount the actual harm you have done. So only from a self-centered point of view is the whole intentions/consequences distinction true.

Then you get into the current thing a lot of public figures (and private, I imagine, I can think of one or two in particular that I know) of excusing even bad intentions because you are, in general, a good person. And the nebulous phrase "in general" is chronically in denial of the fact that our character is not composed of our intellectual View or our Moral Judgments of Others and Situations (that don't involve us) but our character is composed of thousands of small, moment to moment actions and interactions with other people.

I don't usually like "slippery slope" arguments, but I have been thinking a lot about the impulses behind the positions people espouse and I can't help linking "Sexuality isn't a big deal" with "What we do doesn't matter, who we are matters!" The same way I identify "It is sinful to have sex. Just don't do it." with "Then you will be a good person, because you will operating within a controlled system - and this makes you a good person. Conform."

So, I'm basically struggling with this: if both of these opposing impulses have nastiness under their skin, which has beauty at its core and how do I get through to it? Where do I find a proper explanation of what God does not like about non-marital sexuality (within an otherwise healthy relationship, assuming no other objection)?

And this is really complicating my relationship with the Virgin Mary. Because I do realize that the virgin/mother thing is Very Different than the virgin/whore thing that our culture seems to be trying to achieve - but, well, why was there a massive protest against the movie Dogma (not because it was insulting to religion on a host of levels not least of all angels, prophets and I think even God Herself saying Yay Abortion at some point) because it suggested that after Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph might have had a normal married sex life? Why did my religion teacher leap to explain that "Jesus's brothers" would have just meant "cousins, etc." in that translation.

If there's one thing to learn from the Immaculate Conception it's the importance of bodies in the scheme of our service to God and overall health. That our souls don't rest safely somewhere inside the body (or are trapped in a temporary prison of the body if you take the negative view) but are larger things that include the body and are therefore influenced by it. Because Mary was a beautiful soul, but in order to carry Jesus, her body had to be free of original sin. In order to be impregnated by the Holy Spirit, her body had to be fully open to an entirely spiritual conception process.

But is that precisely why it seems so threatening that Mary - who was born without sin - could, after the Incarnation, the miracle for which she was born, have a healthy sex life with her lawful husband? Why can't we conceive of a without-sin body that is not also eternally without-sex? It's not like Mary would have been unchaste if she had sex with Joseph. The Bible said it didn't happen until after the birth (because otherwise that rather throws a wrench in things). But Joseph was a stand-up guy who seems to genuine love Mary and Jesus and be okay with the not-the-baby-daddy thing. Mary was going to marry Joseph before God told her He had new plans. In fact, "How can this be, since I do not know man?" might have been her way of asking if Joseph was going to be the father of a more "adopted" Son of God. If this was more a Hannah "dedicating her firstborn son to the service of God" than a literal Son of God situation.

I remember another religion teacher making a point of saying, "So, they were engaged, but they had already agreed that even when they were married they weren't going to...[insert awkward euphemism]." I haven't found any Biblical reference to this. If it really came from somewhere, I will back WAY off this point. I'm not even saying I refuse to believe this was the situation - what I'm wondering is WHY we feel the need to do this. Why it is so important for us to say, "NO, Mary NEVER EVER had sex, okay?"

Is it because we have attached so much importance to the sanctity of her body - her immaculately conceived body, which I once heard referred to (love it!) as the first monstrance - that we can't reconcile even holy matrimony sex with the image of her body? Really?

I can't shake the idea that the answer to my dilemma lies here somewhere if I could find it. Because the Immaculate Conception teaches us nothing so much as that our bodies are important - that we are responsible for them and that taking care of them and take care what they do is vitally important to how close to God we can be. But, well, Mary was a mother and a wife. She lived. She was active. She travelled alone - while pregnant! - and she served others and she told Jesus to stop drinking with His friends and start His public ministry here at the wedding to save everyone embarrassment and she stood at the foot of the cross as her Son died. She kept herself pure without locking herself away.

And that's what I've always hated about the idea of purity, I suppose (I feel like I should link to the entry I wrote about how much I've always disliked that "Katherine" means "purity") - the idea that you have to lock something that precious away. That it's a virtue you can't actively seek - that you can only maintain or lose. And trying to be too precious with your "innocence" or your "purity" can keep you from doing a lot of good. From living.

Shutting yourself away so the world can't touch you - can't take away your purity.

We are meant to be in the world but not of the world. We are meant to live. And we are still meant to be pure of heart and mind and body. Because that does matter in how close we can be to God.

Perhaps that's why it's so hard. It's supposed to be. And it's just much too easy a way out of a very important question to say: as long as you are a virgin, as long as you haven't done THIS particular thing, you can live but still stay "pure" and "untouched by the world."