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The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

Certainty

11/03/2006 13:31:54

"Do I want to say, then, that certainty resides in the nature of the language-game?" Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #457.

This morning I am in the mood for realizations.

And conveniently I get an email from my mother saying that Ted Haggard has resigned over a homosexual sex scandal. Of course, I didn't need to look very far. It is all over the news. Even Bartholomew has a post about it, and his interests are hardly ever the front-page story.

It is amazing. Through the whole Catholic priest abuse stuff, which exploded while I was deciding to become a Catholic, and everything else that is constantly happening like it, I managed to remain ambivalent. That is to say, I have maintained this position that there can be some sympathy with religious resistance to homosexuality. After all, don't we all really know that sex is for a man and woman? Wouldn't we prefer that? Admit it.

Pastor Ted shows us that we have been living in heresy. You would think he was a priest: in his blatant humanness he manifests the miracle of the incarnation, the madness of authority in human form. When the highest of the high takes human form, he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. That's just how it is. I think he should not have resigned. He should continue to lead his congregation, lead them out from the heresy he led them in, sort out affairs with his wife, and show us as we need to be shown the leadership of Christ on the cross. There, we do not persecute but we are persecuted. Our eating habits do not separate us from our neighbors but keep us alive so that we can serve them.

It is time to stop with the talk of uncleanness, it has been time for a long time. As Francis and Catherine licked the wounds of lepers (and Julian of Norwich revealed their glory), no part of us will be unclean anymore. We will make no judgment because clearly we haven't understood a thing. Repenting with all the feelings we need to feel, repenting with joy, repenting with sadness, repenting with hope, repenting with contrition, repenting with even lust: we will love each other and let that love cover everything, covering even ourselves until what we are is only that love. (SK, Works of Love.)

I mean, shouldn't we all have known it? Heard it in his whiny voice and effeminate manner, which is one of the ways that we decide who to hate because of characteristics? His hypocrisy may be a judgment on ours.

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re:Certainty - 11/03/2006 15:48:21
Posted by nathan

What is certainty made of? There is still some uncertainty about the truth of the allegations against Ted. We are on the edge of our seat. As for my certainty, it can take or leave Ted. I depend only on the plausibility of the idea.

Jeff Shartlet has some useful remarks and also an excellent older article on the evangelical manliness movement:

"The gay man" is the new seductress sent by Satan to tempt the men of Christendom. He takes what he wants and loves whom he will and his life, in the imagination of Christian men's groups, is an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie. The gay man promises a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve. He is thought to exist in the purest state of "manhood," which is boyhood, before there were girls.
...
They love the gay man because he is a siren, and his song is alluring; and because they believe that the siren is nonetheless stranded at sea, singing in desperation from a slippery perch on a jagged outcrop of stone. The gay man, they imagine, is calling to them; and they believe they are calling back — as if all of human sexuality was a grand and tragic game of Marco Polo.

I had an encounter with this recently, reading a brochure on homosexuality that I picked up at Saddleback mega church in Orange County. It almost had me believing that any and every deviation of mine from the persona of John Wayne is direct evidence of needs-to-be-eradicated homosexuality. I like John Wayne movies, but mainly because he is such an absurd cariacature.

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re:Certainty - 11/05/2006 13:55:49
Posted by nathan

"The Law appoints high priests who are men subject to weakness; but the promise on oath, which came after the Law, appointed the Son who is made perfect for ever." Hebrews 7:28.

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certain dishonesty - 11/06/2006 22:56:46
Posted by BT

For me the issue with Haggard isn't one of certainty at all, but one of honesty (and, thus, of hypocrisy). I seriously doubt he would be repenting publicly right now if his "masseur" hadn't gone public; the fact that "everyone's a sinner" didn't seem to inspire him to get honest any earlier about the disconnect between his own life and rhetoric, nor change any of his opinions about same-sex relations. In fact, what he seems to really be apologizing for, when you read his language, is simply keeping a secret. The whole issue of lust vs. love is presented as just an undercurrent within the larger "scandal" of the homosexual "dark demonic shadow" (paraphrase) he succumbed to, as if there's no such thing as a loving, committed same-sex coupling -- perhaps, yes, even a celibate one! -- by definition. If everyone were to give as much attention to the fact that he had had an affair with a woman then I'd be proven wrong I suppose (one would like to think, to their credit, that perhaps many in his congregation would be just as upset if he had had a straight affair?).

I'd even go so far as to say that the sexual affair is completely secondary to the fact that his simplistic theology encouraged him to develop a split personalty of sorts (at least in pragmatic terms; I'm not claiming to clinically diagnose the guy). "Sin" is just never truly overcome by repression, only by the work or grace of transcending it, whatever form of lust (gay or straight), or any other vice, happens to be involved. What takes the cake for me is the gradual expansion of the scope of the admission: just drugs, just massages, oh heck some sex of some sort too, etc., as if he's really just saying, "Oh drat I can't keep any secrets anymore!" Yet if one's a hypocritical public religious leader that's just the script for that sort of thing I guess . . . in that sense I probably agree with you, since his resignation is beside the point.

Everyone's a sinner, but not everyone lies their way through positions of power and influence, judging everyone's else life but their own. ("God can forgive everything except hypocrisy." --M. B.)

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