Old Folks, a Run-Down Hotel, and the Anglican Church

Dame Judith Dench in "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"

I was hoping to see an independent film, something without all of that Hollywood predictability, so the family and I all went to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - a movie starring some of the finest British film actors, a very minor tale about old folks forced to live in a crummy hotel in India, whose young manager has great aspirations, and whose guests are all trying to make the best of a bad situation. 

And all I kept thinking was, "This is exactly like the Anglican Church - a network of stoic, well-intentioned Brits with a great deal of civility doing their best to carry on amidst the ruins of a formerly great thing, despite an atmosphere of despair and the ongoing drain of moral relativism."

The movie has its quiet charms - lots of funny lines, excellent acting; it's a movie with a heart and an above-average character study, though at its best it's not much more than that.

But at its worst, it's really just The Big Chill for old folks.

If you remember The Big Chill - it was a very popular chick-flick from the early 1980's that was all about narcissistic hippies who were shocked to find themselves aging, but who solved all of their problems by coming up with their own morality - and if you liked it, then you'll like this movie.

But I hated The Big Chill.  Granted, I only saw it once, thirty years ago, but it was one of the first mainstream movies to make light of drug use and to promote "open marriage" as a good thing.  The selfishness of the characters involved was taken for granted, and never examined.  It was a horribly self-indulgent movie with a message - Make Your Own Morals and Be Happy.

SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ONE OUT. 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel carries the same message.  We are force-fed sympathy for a "gay" male character, whose happiest moment in life was an act of sodomy committed at the shore of a lake in India many years prior.  When this character dies in the movie, he is given a Hindu burial ceremony by his gay lover and the gay lover's wife (who's tolerant of the whole thing, naturally) and cremated at this site, a site which "for them" was "holy", we are told by the film's narrator, without a trace of irony.  Anal intercourse has now become the means to make people and places holy.  How advanced we are!

Then there's the very predicable resolution of the unhappily married heterosexual couple, who get caught in a traffic jam on the way to the airport a good fifteen minutes before the end of the film, so that anyone who has seen enough Hollywood movies (and was hoping to avoid another one) can see that the wife will end up getting to the airport and back to England without the henpecked husband, who will naturally get to stay behind and have sex with Judi Dench - which for some reason he thinks is a good idea.  Although the shrewish wife is one of the more interesting characters in the story, she functions in the plot as a witch who is holding back the happiness of her husband of 40 years, who can only be happy with Dame Judith.

Then there's the situation comedy depiction of the fornication of an old man - and fornication can be many things, but it's not a spiritual "mountain top" - which is how the character and the plot sells it to us in this movie.  Naturally, all this old guy needs is one good roll in the hay and his life of loneliness and despair is cured, and his future look bright, despite what must be looming death, judging by how old the poor coot looks.  (Perhaps the extra-marital sex does so much for him in this movie because it's with someone other than Judy Dench.)

And yet in the midst of the film's story, marriage is strangely both elevated and despised. 

On the one hand, the young manager must stand up to his mother to marry the woman he loves (and had been sleeping with).  I find it interesting that his battle to marry this girl is shown as a good thing, and the resolution is not complete until he claims her for his own.  Thus marriage is important.

On the other hand, the end of a 40-year marriage is shown to be a better thing than whatever love and sacrifices held the couple together for so long; the aforementioned sodomy by the lake makes the very spot itself sacramental and a fit place for one of the gay lover's ashes to be spread ("Goody!  I will find eternal rest in the lake where Punjab first performed oral sex on me!") and the cohabitation of fornicating seniors is seen as quite fitting.  Thus, marriage is not important.

All in all, as I say, it's the Anglican Church in microcosm.  For the movie, the run-down exotic hotel in the story, and the Anglican Church itself have the following in common - aesthetic sensibilities, an emphasis on propriety, and utter yet quiet hopelessness. 

The message of our secular age and its decrepit quasi-Christian sects is that our only hope for happiness is in the existential assertion of our own rules to live by, our brave attempt to keep on keeping on despite our depression, and fleeting moments of sexual indulgence, the only thing that resembles a "mountain top" experience any more. 

This is what we are told, both overtly and covertly, by pop culture all around us.  This is what we are told will make us happy.

In American films we are told these things will make us perfectly happy.  In more sophisticated British films, we are told these things will only make us marginally happy at that.  That's because we're more like the young naive hotel manager; the Brits are more like the old folks in the movie, doing their best but vaguely tired and spiritually sad.

Why Bad Christian Art is Anti-Christian

Bad Christian art is not only bad; it's anti-christian.  Let me explain.  This may be a bit of a rant, but let me explain.

You will notice a theme running on my blog and at the Ink Desk - it is the attempt by my fellow writers and me to express and explain the bizarre separation of the Church from the culture that surrounds it - a Western culture that the Church gave birth to, a culture that now rejects both God and man - as it fundamentally rejects the man Who was God.

For instance, I am about to unroll a new website, dedicated to opening the eyes of readers and audiences to the Christian - indeed Catholic - elements in the works of Shakespeare.  With the help of Joseph Pearce, authors and literary critics worldwide, we hope to have a web presence that will counter the bad literary criticism that has been prevalent for quite a while - a view of Shakespeare that makes him and his art a mirror of our own times - in other words, something rather sick. 

But the immediate reaction of most modernists is that Shakespeare could not possibly have been Christian, and certainly not Catholic - his plays are far too well written and far too much fun. 

The idea is that a Christian - even a Catholic - and his art must be judgmental, contrived, shallow and artificial, connected only marginally to real people and the real world.  It is an idea that many of our fellow Catholics endorse.  Examples of which include ...

• Appallingly bad liturgical music that no almost no normal people enjoy, and that leads no one to a God that is real.
• Parishes and Catholic schools that are all about a kind of make-believe, with no sense of concern for the human spirit, much less the Holy Spirit.
• Bad Christian fiction and bad Christian plays and bad Christian movies.

The latter of which I want to take a moment to discuss.

Now, again, as someone in the business of producing Catholic dramatic art, I am fully aware that much of what we do at Theater of the Word Incorporated may perchance be "bad  Christian art" - but it's one thing to be bad accidentally and another thing to be bad on purpose.

When an artist sets out to make his work didactic, to make it propaganda, and a propaganda of an underlying theology which is shallow and contrived; when an artist avoids the reality of life and the depth of conflict inherent in the human soul; when (I am told) Catholic publishers reject works of fiction that include the depiction of sin (not the endorsement of sin, but its mere depiction) and when these publishers say that there's not enough praying or overt religious content in a work; and when instead of Waugh and Chesterton and O'Connor writing masterpieces, we have authors and screen writers producing stories that are a cross between a Romance novel and a Little House on the Prairie episode (as Fr. Bryce Sibley describes the situation in a provocative article in Crisis this week) ... when all this happens, then there's a problem.

The problem on the one hand leads to the Catholic Ghetto, where devout Catholics are self-segregated, accepting whatever crumbs fall their way from the slum lord artists who themselves can't afford to feed them serious art.  The problem on the other hand creates a secular culture that revels in vulgarity and sexuality and the philosophy of nihilism and non-redemption. 

And the twain do not meet.

Notice that with Jesus the twain did indeed meet - even though it killed Him. 

Our Lord descended into the muck and mire ("Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"), calling not the righteous but sinners to repentance.  He reached down into the depth of our troubled and tortured and rebellious hearts, drawing forth the worst of human nature in order to redeem it and remake it and draw it out again as one draws good wine from new wine skins. 

Thus, the Catholic Church - which is the Body of Christ - made a redeemed culture that was the only truly human and humane culture the world has known. 

Now that culture has split. 

The secular side of the split rejects the grace that only can sustain it, and becomes the kind of culture that grows in a Petri dish or that grows on old food in the back of the fridge - a Culture of  Death. 

The Christian side of the split loses touch with reality and becomes a culture that is contrived, artificial and banal - a Culture of Sterility. 

In both cases, art - the signature of man - becomes anti-christian, opposed to Christ; opposed to the One who was both God and man; and thus opposed both to what God really is and to what man really is - or at least to what he was really meant to be.

***

For more reading, see my posts on Bad Catholic Art, the Catholic Ghetto, The Most Dangerous Thing in the Word, and so forth.

His Peace She Gives Us

Dawn Eden with Yours Truly

Dawn Eden is a friend of mine and one of the most intelligent women I've ever met.  She shares with me a love for G. K. Chesterton and an adult conversion that brought her from much suffering and sin into a life of grace.  So we have some things in common, and I admire her greatly.

But Dawn is braver than I am, for in her first book, The Thrill of the Chaste , published a few years back, she quite bluntly confronts the sexual promiscuity of her past and reveals the pain it caused, exposing what we moderns are loath to admit - that such a life never brings us even natural happiness, much less supernatural joy.  It took ample courage to write that book, a courage that would be beyond most men.

Now Dawn's second book, My Peace I Give You - Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, is even more personal and even more helpful than her first - and clearly took more courage to write.  In this book, Dawn deals with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.  She shows how, through the wounds of Christ and through the lives of saints who were healed by those wounds, even the most dreadful and darkest parts of our lives can be redeemed.

If this book does nothing more than make clear the Church's teaching that victims of sexual abuse are simply victims - that virgins who are physically violated against their will are still virgins - that chastity is a moral virtue and not just a physical condition - then it will have done much good.  For, enlightened as we are about the sex act and about the horror of abuse - we still harbor that Calvinistic judgmentalism, that insane notion that the victim somehow sinned in his or her being victimized, that the one whose innocence was stolen cooperated in the theft.

Now this is crazy, but it's one of the main things even the abuse victims themselves struggle with. 

I will point you to an illustration of this, and then show how this same illustration can be the key to the central message of Dawn's book.  I warn you that this illustration is disturbing - but no more disturbing than the sin itself.

Somewhere, somehow, in all of my readings, I had read somewhere that it may indeed be possible that Our Lord was sexually assaulted by the Roman centurions before his crucifixion.  Scripture does not make this claim, but Scripture is silent on many things, and we certainly know that the level of cruelty and mockery and violence the Romans were willing to subject Him to - nay, delighted in tormenting Him with - would not on principle have excluded sexual abuse.  Whether He did or did not endure this, the theology is not changed - for He endured all sins for our sake, whether literally during His passion or not.

But look at the response to this hypothetical by a certain Protestant blogger.  He writes, "Furthermore, it must be said that to state that Jesus was sexually abused is tantamount to insulting Christ, for that means that Jesus sinned and thus did not remain sinless till His death." 

What an utter misunderstanding. 

Yes, it is disturbing to think of Our Lord abused in this way, and it adds an element to His passion that we can hardly bear to imagine - but to be victimized in such a way is not to sin; it is to be the victim of sin. 

So even in this enlightened day and age, even after all the Oprahs and Dr. Phils, that basic distinction is still not clear in our minds.

And yet this disturbing image of an additional and almost unspeakable suffering of Our Lord - whether historically true or not - is quite true spiritually.  Jesus Christ suffered everything for us and with us.  And therefore when we suffer, we are suffering everything for Him and with Him.  It is this profound spiritual insight that is the core of this book (see also Col. 1:24 and elsewhere, for St. Paul writes about this at length).

Indeed, in the final chapter, Dawn tells us about Bl. Karolina Kozka, who died defending her chastity during an assault and rape.  But, Dawn writes, "to say that Karolina, or any martyr of chastity, died defending 'her' chastity is misleading.  She was not only defending her own chastity, but also mine and yours.  And she was not only defending physical chastity, but also spiritual chastity - the chastity that Thomas Aquinas linked with charity, which brings us into union with God and one another.  Because she knew what it meant to have Christ within her, she knew that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.  It was in defense of the sanctity of that temple - the sanctity of all our bodies - that she resisted unto death."

This is a profound insight into the nature of the Body of Christ - the Church - of which, Dawn quotes St. Joan of Arc saying, "About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter."  And when we become members of this Body of Christ, (through baptism, repentance, faith, the reception of the Eucharist, and so forth) we "rejoice in our sufferings for his sake" and in our flesh "we complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions, for the sake of His Body, that is, the Church." 

By His wounds we are healed, and by our wounds we participate in Him - and He in our pain.

This is a profound and prayerful book, the fruit of much suffering, much meditation and prayer, and a great willingness on the part of the author to use her own pain to lift others out of theirs.  It is a great act of Charity.

And so in the midst of this sinful world and this crazy time, when even the President of the United States is bullying us to celebrate with the term "marriage" acts that do not express love, that can never be fruitful, and that are often examples of the most hideous things one person can force another person to do - when we call evil good and good evil, darkness light and light darkness - may be say a prayer for the courage of a woman who I'm sure would have been more comfortable keeping her pain secret, but who, in union with Christ and his saints, brings just a glimpse of it to light for His sake and ours; and may we say a prayer for all of those innocent ones now being led to an altar of brutality that only a greater altar can save us from.

As the Globe Turns

Chesterton Academy in Minneapolis recently produced my play As the Globe Turns, a comedy about a traveling troupe of Shakespearian actors. 

Click here to see all the pictures!

This script of mine, along with many other scripts by many other playwrights, will be featured later this summer on Miracle Plays, a website devoted to offering scripts for school groups, amateur groups and professional theaters - all of which will be written from a Christian perspective. 

More on Miracle Plays when the site premiers!

Meanwhile, it sounds like As the Globe Turns was a big hit.  For more on Chesterton Academy, the best high school in America, click here.

Will We Defend All of Marriage - or Part of It?

Nearly fifteen years ago, when I was Episcopalian, a leader of our local "Journey of Faith" program described to the group how she had made some sort of knitting or crochet or tapestry thing for a friend of hers when the friend had gotten married many years prior.  It was some sort of heart with the names of the couple - let's say Ted & Alice - sewn or crocheted or knitted in (I don't know how this stuff works), all framed and gift wrapped.

At some point, Ted and Alice got divorced and Alice brought the gift back to this woman who had made it for her.  "I've left Ted and I'm getting 'married' to my Lesbian lover, Carol.  Will you please pull out Ted's name and sew in Carol's?"

"And much to my surprise," our leader told us, "I found myself reluctant to do so."  She was an urban liberal who prided herself in her tolerance. 

"But," I interjected, "what if Alice had come to you and said, 'I've dumped Ted and I'm getting married to Bob.  Will you please yank out Ted's name and sew in Bob's?'  Would that have bothered you?"

She looked at me, her eyes sparkling.  "Not at all," she answered, smiling.

***

Last week I was doing battle with a leftist Chestertonian, who was making the case that Chesterton's liberalism - meaning his critique of capitalism and Puritanism - could be useful to the liberal cause.  Of course, Chesterton's defense of the family, his healthy disgust at perversion, and his love for clear thinking and dogma had to be ignored.

Likewise, I have written in the past of how the right wing was doing the same thing, only in reverse.  They were painting a picture of a 300-pound neo-con, a moral conservative, whose Distributism was embarrassingly wrong, and in their eyes, crypto-communist - and thus had to be ignored.

Either way, the whole of Chesterton gets jettisoned. 

When we make of him what we want him to be, we lose the fullness of who he is, and ultimately, over time, we lose any ability to comprehend his writings at all.  For example, the liberals have made both Newman and Shakespeare into mirror images of themselves, and in doing so, have utterly lost the ability to read and understand anything that either of them wrote.

***

This is simply heresy in action - picking out what suits us and ignoring the rest.  Of course "heresy" is not the right word to use when someone does this to an author, though "Cafeteria Chestertonians" are analogous to "Cafeteria Catholics".

But heresy in its original sense - religious heresy - is at its heart a kind of idolatry - it is taking the fullness of Who God is and what He teaches us and cutting it down, shaping it into a false god that suits us. 

False gods are always more fun.  We can offer them a kind of belief and devotion, but if things get too difficult or demanding, we can always pull back because we don't really believe in them anyway.  Since idols are artificial, they are safe.

***

And this brings me back to marriage. 

My last post, Pre-Occupied with the One-Half of One Percent , bothered me in that it implied that the battle to save marriage is lost. 

I did not mean to imply that.

But I do mean to say this.  You can't tell Alice that it's wrong to rip out Ted's name and sew in Carol's, if it's right to rip out Ted's name and sew in Bob's. 

We can't be heretics here.  We can't say, "We defend marriage and we insist that marriage is between one man and one woman" - for in doing so we are selling short, we are, quite literally, selling Christ short.  We must add, "between one man and one woman for life", though this is something that makes everybody uncomfortable - and stands as a witness against modern society in general. 

***

The question becomes is marriage of God or is it of man? 

When Jesus asked this question of the Pharisees concerning the baptism of John, they were caught in a conundrum, "If we say from God, he will say, 'Why, then, did you not believe him?'  But if we say, 'Of man' we fear the people, for they took John for a prophet."  So they copped out and said, "We cannot tell."

If we save not marriage but a parody of it - if we save it for what it has become in the secular world, an arbitrary social construct that serves only the convenience of one or the other party that enters into it - then we will face this problem again again as time goes by.  Because if that's all that marriage is, then the "gay marriage" boosters are right.

We must either defend Marriage or forsake it.  To defend the idol called "marriage", the parody of the sacrament, we are simply doing the devil's work.

Pre-Occupied by the One-Half of One Percent

Occupy Wall Street and related groups were indignant, and rightly so, that the wealthiest one percent of the population seems to control the government.

We would all agree that in a democratic republic, policy that affects every American should not be set by an elite, particularly if that elite is only one percent of the people.

But what if that elite is only half that size?

The (un-"occupied") Wall Street Journal reports that, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, about five of every one thousand households is a "same sex couple" household - which, apprently means not just "room mates" but sodomites and Lesbians living together as a kind of "family".

And so, even with "gay marriage" legal in many states, and with homosexual cohabitation legal in all states, only about point-five percent of households in this country are "same sex couples". Whence, then, comes this tremendous political push to cater to the whims of one half of one percent of the U.S. population?

The only conclusion that we can draw from this is that "gay marriage" is a contrived issue, politically speaking. It is the "One half of one percent" trying to bully the rest of us.

Philosophically speaking, however, it is an issue that has gripped the hearts of many - and I am tempted to say an issue that has gripped hearts but not minds, as it is an issue for which a rational case can not be made - but that's not exactly true. "Gay marriage" is rationally in-defensible only if you define marriage according to its nature; "gay marriage" is quite defensibe - and in fact, compelling - if you define marriage as having no nature, as being entirely man-made.  "Gay marriage" quite logically follows from the way marriage has been viewed since Henry VIII and especially in modern times. Heterosexuals have been deconstructing marriage for years now, and our presumptions about marriage are finally bearing their rotten fruit.

For example, Rush Limbaugh rightly defends marriage on his radio show, but actions speak louder than words. Now on his fourth marriage, he has made a vow to live with a woman forever after breaking a vow to live with a woman forever after breaking a vow to live with a woman forever after breaking a vow to live with a woman forever. He has been, many times over, "sworn on one altar and forsworn on another" as Chesterton says.  He has no more moral authority on this issue than the Kennedies.

In our culture, marriage has become, de facto, a sham - so why not acknowledge the de facto via de jure? It is not even a social custom any more. It has no purpose, apparently. So why not make of it what we will? - which is the way we approach man himself these days.

So in a way, the "gay marriage" boosters get it right. They simply apply what marriage has become (a purely arbitrary social construct) and extend the logic to what they want it to be - which is an even more arbitrary social construct, something completely severed from its true nature. But then again (they ask) what is nature and what is truth? When we, even we defenders of common sense and reason, live as if there were no nature and there were no truth, we can't really be surprised when our children, convinced of their moral superiority over us, condemn us for our hypocrisy, simply by applying the logic of our actions against us.

And when a debater on Facebook tells me that marriage has no purpose because sex has no purpose - that the only purpose of sex is selfish pleasure - how can you argue with him, when this is the way even most Catholics treat sex, in this era of Contraception? 

When we remove purpose from anything, we kill its nature. 

Contraception turns sex into something inherently pointless.  Divorce and remarriage turns marriage into something just as pointless - a mere temporary convenience, a way of making sex (which is pointless) easier to get, since you don't have to drive home afterwards. 

We must understand that this view of life - the view that nothing has a purpose, most especially our own existence - is what is fueling the Culture of Death all around us.

And we can't argue with the "gay marriage" boosters because - in one very important sense - they are too logical.

And their logic is the witness of our own moral failure.

***

ADDENDUM: It has been pointed out to me that the argument I make above, while quite accurate, might serve to discourage orthodox Catholics and other serious Christians from defending the integrity of marriage.  I make it sound as if the fall of marriage is inevitable, given the way we've treated marriage all these years.  That is not my intention; we must all rally now, when things look most grim.  But we must defend marriage as God made it, not as we would like to remake it.  For more on that, read my latest post - Will We Defend All of Marriage - or Part of It?

Stupidity vs. Pride

Here's why it's impossible to debate so-called "gay marriage".

It's not that those who support it will not admit to metaphysics, to natural law, to purpose, to objective truth.  It's not that marriage has been so degraded in our culture that it means nothing, and that "gay marriage" is just an extension of that nothing.  It's not even that a false compassion gets in the way of clear thinking.

Yes, it's all those things, but it's one thing more.

Pride.

You now have the opportunity, if you're a secular fundamentalist with no higher purpose in life, to latch on to a big one.  All you have to do is applaud those who are demanding that anal intercourse is a virtue and that the state reward them for indulging in it.  All you have to do is claim that opposition to "gay marriage" is bigotry, and BAM!  Magically you're a good person.

You can argue people past many misconceptions, but you can make no headway against a belief that serves as a handy substitute for virtue.

No amount of stupidity is ever as harmful to our souls as one ounce of Pride.