A FANTASY OF SALVAGE: My review of Tim Powers's new novel, at Crisis:

Zombie voodoo pirates. Time-traveling Mossad agents. Djinn in the Cold War. The dark fantasy novels of Catholic author Tim Powers can seem like pure high-concept, and his newest book—a sequel to The Stress of Her Regard, a.k.a. What If the Romantic Poets Were Sort of Vampires?–has the same instant audience appeal. Christina Rossetti fights vampires! A hard-luck ex-prostitute who’s too stoic for her own good might finally find happiness with an animal-loving loner! Tough women, sensitive men, London by gaslight, sinister rituals, and even Boadicea back from the dead: Hide Me Among the Graves seems custom-designed for a cold, rainy weekend curled up under a comforter with the cats.

And yet this thrilling, compassionate book is much more than its concept. Powers excels at a fantasy of salvage: a human-scale, kitchen-sink drama in which characters take what seem like small steps into darkness, only to find themselves in far over their heads. The way out requires terrible physical and emotional sacrifice. The great, heroic actions in these novels are often acts of renunciation, earning no glory.

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O TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE: I find that a lot of people, both gay and not, ask me questions which boil down to, "How should I understand gay relationships which are obviously loving?" This can be phrased as, "How do you feel, as a Catholic, about my relationship with my boyfriend?" (although I don't know why my personal feelings should really matter!) or "How should I view my brother's partner?" or, something I addressed in that Commonweal piece, "How should I understand the love which was a part of the gay relationships I had before becoming Catholic?"

The first thing I think of with this question is the quotation I posted last week, in which Jesus, looking at the rich young man, loved him. If we approach our own gay (meaning, here, sexually-active) relationships or those of others with this look of love, a love which is both personal and challenging, what do we find?

What we find will be different for different relationships. But here are some thoughts from my Commonweal piece:

Loving one another can be an echo of the love we receive from God; it can be the child of that love; it can be preparation for our own awestruck love of God. (I would argue that my erotic and romantic love of women has been all three of those things, at different times.)

I went on to say, "But our human experience, including our erotic experience, cannot be a replacement for the divine revelation preserved by the church. We must be careful not to let it become a counternarrative or a counter-Scripture." A chaste love relationship founded on love of Christ, perhaps even adorned with promises like the ones described here and here, is even more beautiful and sublime than the best sexually-active gay relationship. Perhaps you're being called to this other person because he or she is a part of your life's vocation, in which case chastity will exalt your relationship, not diminish it. Perhaps not--perhaps you're being called to hospitality, service, searing devotion to God, a radical vulnerability and availability made possible precisely by your lack of obligations to partner or children. Note that neither of these alternatives is easy! "Exalted" doesn't exactly imply "easier," and sublimity is almost the opposite of satisfaction--accepting one of these alternatives will probably increase most people's sense of difficulty, their sense of struggle or need for surrender to God. But we don't get to choose how God calls us; we only choose how we respond to that call.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?"

...Because the expected answer to this question is always a type of job, it reinforces the idea that the way to find identity and value is through career. Our society is already saturated with messages that the title on your business card is directly connected to your worth as a human being. When kids are bombarded by the questions about which job they’ll eventually hold, it trains them to view adult life through the lens of their place in the workforce.

Similarly, it undermines the concept of vocation. Recently I saw a coloring book where kids could choose to decorate the picture that represented what they wanted to be when they grew up. Among the options were a nurse, a lawyer, a veterinarian, a police officer, a firefighter, and a mom. It was disturbing to see the fruits of a worldview that has no understanding of the difference between a vocation and a job, with motherhood listed alongside ways to get a paycheck. And when a child is constantly encouraged ponder her future career—with the issue posed, as it often is, as one that will define her life—it channels her discernment efforts toward whether she wants to be a musician or a teacher, rather than the more important question of whether she’s called to married life or religious life.

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ETA: I like this comment!

I’m all for abolishing “what do you do?” from the grown-up lexicon. When an adult find themselves unemployed, underemployed or in a dead-end job, or even someone who owns their own business and severely struggling, it’s a very uncomfortable conversation stopper.
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but for kids? Why that would wipe out the beautiful opportunities for children to respond to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with, “An octopus!” or “A dinosaur.”
We can’t have that!

THE HOMILY ON SALIERI. From Amadeus, not in real life, don't email me!

I disagree with one sentence in this. Can you find it? The hint is that I'm still re-reading The Brothers Karamazov....

UNCONVENTIONAL: I couldn't sleep after Black Caesar, so I decided to just throw on The Nun's Story and watch until I decided to go to bed. I ended up watching, totally engrossed, until the entire huge long movie was over.

Audrey Hepburn plays a Belgian girl who enters a religious order, hoping to be sent to the Congo as a nurse. The movie follows her deep spiritual struggles, mostly but not entirely revolving around questions of pride and obedience. The harshness of the religious regime under which she lives isn't prettified, but this story goes far beyond easy "individualism vs. repression" conflicts. This comes out most clearly when World War II breaks out--the nun's obedience is tested even more deeply, but at the same time she's also struggling with vengefulness and refusal to forgive her enemies.

The major flaw of the movie is that the racism of the Belgian Catholics isn't just portrayed, but basically embedded in the movie's narrative. The easiest example is the way in which all of the supporting characters are vivid and memorable except the one Congolese character with a speaking role, who is a pious cartoon. But that example is just the most obvious sign of a problem which really runs throughout the Congo sequence, even though the culture of the people is presented with quite a bit of affection and some respect.

Hepburn is fantastic. Like I said, I'd assumed that I would watch maybe an hour and then hit pause. I just couldn't. I couldn't stop watching her. Many of the supporting actors are as vivid as their characters, but this is really a one-woman show.

HOME AND DRY: Hello and welcome, if you got here via Andrew Sullivan. You want this post. And now the promised follow-up, in which I talk about what I think the most beautiful argument is in favor of gay marriage: It gives gay people a home.

Sullivan's written about this quite a lot, of course. Both he (in Love Undetectable, I'm pretty sure) and Jonathan Rauch (in Gay Marriage) have described, briefly and without self-pity, really intense childhood exchanges with their mothers. I don't recall the exact wording of Rauch's story off the top of my head, but I do remember Sullivan's. From memory, thus possibly a bit off: He asked his mother if God really sees everything, and she said yes, at which point he replied, "Well then there's no hope for me."

I mean... a little kid.

And I've written before about how I experienced some fairly intense childhood alienation of basically exactly that kind. I felt like I had no place in the world and couldn't have one--shouldn't have one, hadn't earned love or self-respect. Becoming Catholic, I should say, was in part about accepting that I could be loved by Someone who genuinely knew everything about me. In order to be really Catholic you have to accept healing and love, and there are times when that's very hard for me, still; it's still somewhat baffling to think that I might be made in the image of God. (I mean, what does that make God?)

I have no real sense of why I associated that sense of alienation with my sexual orientation. One obvious possibility is homophobia; I certainly don't remember ever hearing anything antigay until I was in junior high, and my parents had gay friends etc etc, but it's impossible to prove that I wasn't somehow affected by subtler and pervasive cultural bigotry. Anyway, point being, I've said many times that it was such a relief to come out to myself because it seemed like I could finally explain that alienation in toto; and because being gay wasn't something I thought anyone should be ashamed of, I could finally put all of that unhappiness and sense of homelessness behind me! I don't know that this relief is especially common for gay teens, but I do think a lot of gay people did have that childhood sense of intense separation, of being cast out.

And since virtually all gay people are raised by heterosexuals, the home in which we grew up doesn't provide obvious models for the kind of relationships we want to form. It's hard for us to know how our own love stories can fit in to our family story, the family model we grew up with. (Yes, I realize that a lot of straight people can say the same thing, but walk with me here for a moment.)

Gay marriage promises that, for those of us lucky enough to grow up with parents in a loving/good-enough marriage, we truly can fit our own futures and dreams into the family story we grew up with. We can step into our parents' shoes. You all know that I think this promise is based on some really false beliefs about sex difference and family structure, but believe me, I feel the power and attraction of the promise.

And this longing for home is one reason the Church's silences, clinical language, and general lameness w/r/t speaking to actual gay people is so frustrating. Because the truest and best alternative to the home promised by gay marriage is precisely the home promised by Christ, the loving embrace of the Holy Family. When I say that the cure for alienation is in kneeling at the altar rail, this is not especially believable if the actual Catholics you've known were clueless at best and bullying at worst.

Anyway, I continue to believe all the stuff I've said in prior posts about gay marriage, but I thought it was important to throw this out there as well. The longing for home is even more powerful to me, and even more beautiful, than the longing for honor which also animates the gay-marriage movement.

"BUT EVEN IF HE WILL NOT...":

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar,
“There is no need for us to defend ourselves before you
in this matter.
If our God, whom we serve,
can save us from the white-hot furnace
and from your hands, O king, may he save us!
But even if he will not, know, O king,
that we will not serve your god
or worship the golden statue that you set up.”

--from the readings for yesterday

"SIX IMPERFECT METAPHORS FOR CONVERSION." My latest at Inside Catholic.

"IT IS THE LAST DREAM OF CHILDREN TO BE FOREVER UNTOUCHED." In other news, I finished the draft of the novel. This epigraph brought to you by the Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Foundation, and also the letter Q.

BOUGIE WOOGIE BABY: Additions and corrections to my most recent sincerism post.

Addition #1) I forgot to mention that the Misery essay Camassia links to sounds terrific (haven't had a chance to read it yet) and very much gets at what I'm trying to do when I say that genre fiction can be more realistic than realism if your perspective is not that of the majority.

Addition #2) She's also put up a really smart post exploring a) whether I'm just defending the cool pose, which I do think isn't true though I can see where she's getting that; and b) adding a bit of historical context.

Correction #1: As usual I was carried away by my rhetoric! I think it's wrong to say that "...Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija's language to Peter Sprigg's, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa." I'll defend some degree of Spriggishness because I will always defend the bourgeoisie! I don't want to join them, but I do realize that they are the people who make the world work, and the fact that I don't share that vocation shouldn't lead me to denigrate it. Besides which, my "LaBeijan" formulation suggests that Sophia herself may be found nestled comfortably within one subculture, which of course is not what I believe.

It would be more accurate to say that Christian translation should serve Truth at all times, and thus should introduce new and startling terms to both the Spriggish and LaBeijan dictionaries. And yet it's worth noting that in most cases the minority/subcultural denizen will have a sharper understanding of the majority perspective than vice versa (and will get less credit for it). But yeah, Christ must radically reshape all of our perspectives, and we must accept no existing culture as sufficient.

Correction #2: Because I am a product of all the same cultural forces I decry, I twice used "choose" when I should've said something else. In the parenthetical "(I chose my leadership persona, so doesn't that choice incorporate the persona into my 'self'?)" I think "chose" should be "accepted" or "developed" or some other verb implying both unchosen elements and the work I did to shape those elements. (There are certain styles of leadership I can't pull off, and I had to learn not to try them.)

And in the same paragraph, in the sentence, "It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent," "choose" should be replaced with "embrace." I think that implies a greater degree of recognition rather than maximization of utils.

"WHAT LIFE ASKS OF US": Possibly the only David Brooks column I've ever liked!

THE CHISEL ON THE ROCK: A reader kindly provided the full Italian text of the Michaelangelo poem I cited earlier:

Giunto è già ‘l corso della mia vita,
con tempestoso mar, per fragil barca,
al comun porti, ov’a render si varca
conto e ragion d’ogni opra trista e pia.
Onde l’affattuosa fantasia
Che l’arte mi fece idol e monarca
Conosco or ben com’era d’error carca
E quel c’à mal suo grado ogn’uomo desia.
Gli amorosi pensier, già vani e lieti,
che fen or, s’a duo morte m’avvicino?
D’una so ‘l certo, e l’altra mi minaccia.
Né ginger né scolpir fie più che quieti
L’anima, volta a quell’amor divino
C’aperse, a prender noi, ‘n croce le braccia.

A NEW HAVEN AND A NEW EARTH. So in a conversation about how 1) how it's a total cop-out to praise loyalties only insofar as they're chosen and unzippable, and 2) "vocation" complicates the concept of "choice" anyway--you don't choose what you hear even when you choose how you answer, I mangled Ingmar Bergman to get what I think is my new right-wing bumper sticker:

WE MAKE AN IDOL OF OUR FEAR AND CALL IT CHOICE.

I WILL LET YOU DOWN: The comments to the post linked below reminded me again of my hatred of all things Giving Tree.

You all, the tree is the villain. It spoils the child, gives him no basis for a real life in the world, and then martyrs itself so he can keep being dependent on it forever. There are reasons to martyr oneself... and some of them are awful.

As I said once on a whiskey-soaked evening: "That tree is not fulfilling its tree-los."