Confessions of a Theophiliac Or Why I May Have An Unhealthy Affection for Doctrine

Disclaimer: This is a post of personal explanation. It is most definitely not meant to criticize or demean anyone else's relationship with God, just describe my own. Warning: It is entirely possible after reading this that you might need to poke out your eyes. This might be considered a response to Nate's post here . But many of the good points Nate raises are ones I encounter at least once every Sunday, sometimes more often. But, most of all, I really hope that this post serves as a transition from the GC2006 postmortem, which is being very admirably performed elsewhere, to further explorations of the Articles of Religion.

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great
commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments
hang all the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 22:37-40

If you hear something enough as a child, you may believe it for the rest of your life. Or as Robertson Davies might say, "What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh." And I heard the above any given Sunday for the first ten years of my life. Love God, love your neighbor. This is all we need to know. Simple, right?

Ah, no. It was with some strange pang of regret that I realized today that my most intimate relationship always has been with God. First, let us consider the degree of emotional intimacy. I can tell God anything. After all, it's impossible to keep anything from Him. It's very hard to me to talk about physical intimacy in this context, because there is a continual assumption in our culture that all physical intimacy is ultimately sexual. But it doesn't have to be. There is an odd subsumption of being when one is snuggling with another person, as if you are more than united but rather within one another. And that's about all I want to say on the Web. But I'll point out one more interesting tidbit. I have a great prejudice against penetration in general, but yet I earnestly am willing to eat the Body and Blood of Christ, earnestly believing in its nature without having any idea why like a good Anglican (of some sort). So far (perhaps fortunately), the elements have not spoken to me (there are stories in the hagiography about this), but I am willing to let Someone come within me, as long as it is the Christ. And because it is precisely not sexual, my intimacy with God does not participate in the primal shame and so never occasions regret.

But let not my intimacy confuse you. I am a very poor lover of God. I am frankly a poor lover of anyone. I'm emotionally needy, oblivious to the needs of the Other, have trouble separating public and private life, and can have serious issues with lust when that is an issue. I'm so glad that my parents love me, because I often have trouble figuring out why anyone else would. That's just the emotional neediness talking. And what's funny is that my weaknesses with God and my weaknesses romantically are pretty much the same list. Indeed, I once treated both God and a very good friend in exactly the same way with fairly disastrous results. Kyrie eleison , but the rest of us aren't so merciful.

The reason for this carload of Too Much Information is that the similarity of my relationship with God to my romantic relationships has made me have certain anxieties about my relationship with God. First, I am exceptionally bad at remembering people's names. If you know me in real life, please be aware that I probably have forgotten your name at some point while we've known one another. Thus, it is entirely possible that I may have an unhealthy obsession with what we call God. The most nightmarish scene of the modern cinema for me does not involve torture or giant chainsaws, but the scene where a man wakes up to company in bed and starts searching for clues to company's identity. Of course, it's fairly hard to go that wrong with God. But everyone has something which they like to be called, especially by intimates, so that they feel most safe, most true, and most beloved. In the feminist blogosphere, there have been debates recently about whether "the feminist credentials" of women who take their husband's surname should be revoked. My mother kept her surname. Tongues probably still wagged. But it was her choice. It plays havoc with telemarketers, but it fits her as a person. Its use in personal and professional settings makes her comfortable in her own skin. But if a woman feels more comfortable in her own skin to be Mrs. Schwyzer (for sake of example), that is good, too. And though it is odd to think of a being without body, parts, and passions having such preferences, I wonder if there are forms of address that make feel God most beloved. And I think the tradition of the Church might bear that out.

For I am not the only lover of God, and indeed I am one of a low order. There have been many before me, and most of higher order. And they have had a variety of names for God, including one to which +(+)Katharine recently alluded. After Karen's recent post at Kinesis , I have never felt so comfortable singing "Lead Us Heavenly Mother, Lead Us," knowing that the maternal character of God is so well attested by Scripture and Tradition. But likewise I must respect the works of other lovers such as the catholic creeds, which show an admiration for the personhood and acts of God more than the teachings of Jesus, as Nate and others point out to me. God (and I do not mean this in a universalist way) has many aspects. If I am obsessed with names, it is because I fear that we may be emphasizing some aspects of God over others to our peril. God is indeed a loving, reconciling, and far more inclusive God than we are. But God also can be a vengeful God, punishing the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation (well, not any more, perhaps). But I read in the Daily Office readings today about God's response to Israel's ingratitude and cowardice in the desert. It's fairly harsh. God is indeed loving and as reconciling as possible in these stories, not killing wantonly but instead pedagogically. Fortunately, I believe God through Jesus Christ takes a different approach to relationship with us now, always seeking to love us more dearly, but He remains a dangerous God. He is very much like C.S. Lewis describes Aslan, not a tame lion. And let's not forget the Gospel from the Daily Office in which the Lord Jesus bewails the slow progress of his mission and seems to be responding to various unwarranted forms of optimism about the coming of the Kingdom, "I did not come to bring peace but a sword."

Because my obligation to love of neighbor and therefore justice is equal and intimately mixed with my obligation to love God, I, in theory, would be willing to compromise my desires for progressive theology to be better grounded in orthodox teaching and progressives to maintain the highest degree of communion possible with moderates and more conservative brothers and sisters in Christ for justice. But I'm not sure such compromises really serve justice. In my opinion, Nate has a good sense of the coming judgment. But so much progressive theology seems to be driven by the idea that not many will come to judgment. Justice often ceases to be something we do in love and obedience to God but as something we struggle to wrest from the hands of an evil Other. Looking at the problems of the world, most of them seem to be my fault (in part). How am I supposed to deal with that unless I have some way of confronting sin? All I am asking for is that the church present a full picture of the Living God.

I was in a meeting today with a lot of angry people. One guess why. I really wouldn't want to be the bishop of Laodicea now, for instance. But it occurred to me that the chief problem here was doctrinal. My Rector has a saying that "faith is what you die for, but dogma is what you are willing to kill for." To which I add, "Doctrine will make you strike your colors." Now there is much doctrine concerning the necessity of mutual love in the Church and about the identity of the church catholic. But the understanding of the justice of GLBT inclusion is fairly novel, and only has been a force in the House of Bishops for a few triennia. So why not prefer the new leading to the old covenant? But if you believe GLBTs always have been essential to the organic unity of the Body and their covenant relationships are ikons of the mystical unity of the Body, you might behave differently.

And that's where we finally get to the meat of it, for to love is to seek the other's good even to the point of death. "There is no greater love than this than to lay down one's life for one's friends." If you talk to a Christian of a certain stripe, he might tell you quite frankly and honestly of his love for gays and lesbians and his belief that their good is deliverance from their "unnatural passions." And why am I not one of those Christians? Because it is beyond belief to me that He through whom all things were made (and made adam male and female) ordained the range of natural behavior among human beings to be so very different from that of the animals, and so I took a different perspective on Scripture and Tradition than is conventional. There is doctrine in there.

There is doctrine in refusing overtures to make out with someone, even if her boyfriend assures you he's cool with it, since God is not a monad and neither should we be. Matthew 25 is quite concrete. It makes no distinction between "God's poor and the devil's," since these are false categories. It makes no distinction between black and white etc., since every tribe, language, and nation shall contribute members to the royal priesthood around the throne. And for me, many of these doctrines that encourage me to support justice and show especial respect to the marginalized derive from the highfalutin philosophical notions and patriarchal prejudices of past lovers of Christ, whose communion with God I long to share.

I am a privileged straight white male, who has been provided with every advantage in civil life and shown every consideration. And yet so many of my companions in privilege find love to be exceptionally difficult. What keeps them going is the love of God, and yet they interpret Scripture and Tradition in far different ways than I and indeed contrary to my sense of justice. What keeps me charitable to them is not just that I may be the deluded one, now or in the future, but that they share with me the same weakness and the same Beloved. It was that same sense of communion that forever shaped my attitude toward gays and lesbians, why would I stop now?

Anyway, my thoughts on doctrine and justice are probably best summarized by J-Tron's song, "Good Doc Trine," whose lyrics are here, though "peace of mind" makes more sense to me than "piece of mind." Or read AKMA. He occasionally discusses this subject far more eloquently than I do.

On a related note, I heard a great story today. A woman came to the Claiming the Blessing booth in the Exhibit Hall at General Convention and asked in a quiet Arkansas voice, "If I have some popcorn, do I have to watch [ Voices of Witness ]?" Fortunately, Claiming the Blessing takes hospitality seriously. The woman at the booth said she was welcome to all the popcorn she wanted and even offered to turn off the film. But the woman demured at the suggestion and ended up watching the entire film while consuming four bags of popcorn. When she didn't have her mouth full and it was therefore polite to exclaim, she was saying, "Oh my Lord etc." Apparently, she hadn't realized the existence of faithful Christian gay and lesbian couples before, especially lay ones. Then after the film was over, she asked, "If I take a DVD of the film, do I have to give you my name?" She was assured that she was quite welcome to take the film, no questions asked. She looked carefully around to see if anyone she knew was about and then quickly secreted a copy in her purse and hurried off. O ruler of the universe, Lord God, great deeds are they that you have done, surpassing human understanding.

Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, so that you may do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the same God who dearly loves you.