pat loughery

I write this entry today today as part of a grid-blogging effort on International Women’s Day. I write as a man, married to a strong and lovely woman, and father of a daughter for whom I have grand hopes.

I also write today as a father who yesterday had a sit-down conversation initiated by his 3.5 year old daugher, who started with “Dad, come into the spare bedroom, I want to talk to you about something”, and continued with “Dad, you can’t wear white wocks with jeans and brown hiking boots. Your socks should match your boots.” Sigh. I thought I had 6 or 8 years until my lack of clothing sense began to embarass her, but I guess not. In any case..

I’d like to summarize the chapter I read last night from Kathleen Norris’ EXCELLENT book on Benedictine monastics titled “The Cloister Walk”. The chapter title is “Celibate Passion”, and in it Norris describes her experience as a Protestant, married, lay-woman who is also an oblate at a Benedictine monastery (so, not a nun, but a friend of the monastery with a community commitment there). This chapter focuses on the redemption of sexuality that Benedictine monks and nuns undertake as they battle to remain faithful to their vows of celibacy. What Norris describes is the struggle of younger monastics, especially males, against what one monk describes as “the raging orchestra of my hormones”, and its expression in frustration, anger at the community, and not infrequently, misogyny. She also describes the slow tumbling process that wears off rough edges over time (always more time than is expected) as a community of Christ-followers struggles individually and corporately to break the power of the sexualization of identity in their individual lives.

“I’ve seen the demands of Benedictine hospitality – that they receive all visitors as Christ – convert shy young men who fear women into monks who can enjoy their company”.

– Norris, p. 119

This is important to begin with – to the Benedictines, celibacy isn’t a pursuit of some abstract notion of purity and discipline, it’s just an expression of hospitality.

“One reason I enjoy celibates is that they tend to value friendship very highly. And my friendships with celibate men, both gay and straight, gives me some hope that men and women don’t live in alternate universes. In 1990s America, this sometimes feels like a countercultural perspective. Male ceibacy, in particular, can become radically countercultural if it is perceived as a rejection of the consumerist model of sexuality, a model that reduces women to the sum of her parts. A monk is suppose to give up the idea of possessing anything and, in this culture, that includes women (emphasis mine).
[…]
Ideally, in giving up the sexual pursuit of women (whether as demons or as idealized vessels of purity), the male celibate learns to relate to them as human beings.
[…]
When it works, when men have truly given up the idea of possessing women, healing can occur.
[…]
With someone who is practicing celibacy well, we may sense that we’re being listened to in a refreshingly deep way. And this is the purpose of celibacy, not to attain some impossibly cerebral goal mitakenly conceived as “holiness” but to make oneself available to others, body and soul.”

” – Norris, p. 119 – 121

Before you dismiss this blog entry as hopelessly off-topic for our grid-blog effort, let me see if I can describe how a look at the spiritual lives of Catholic monastics can make the world a better place for my daughter.

In contemporary culture, gender relations and sexuality have been commoditized. You and I are, like it or not, perceived largely by our gender and our sexual orientation. One of my great sorrows in communicating with my friends who are gay is to see them self-identify by sexual preference. The same is true when I communicate with heterosexuals for whom sexuality is conquest. I can certainly see how self-identity contains a powerful element of how we relate to others, but we now live in a time in which I am defined largely by how I choose (or am biologically driven) to express physical intimacy.

Choosing celibacy – in a monastic form, or in any other form, including monogamy and virginity before marriage – is countercultural. It’s an expression that says, “I am not, at my core, defined by sexuality.” And doing that also expresses that my relationships are not used in a way that gives me what I perceive that I need; they are instead expressions of how I may serve others.

Of course, this isn’t easy to do – as a man embedded in a highly sexualized culture, I battle sexual temptation pretty much every day. As a leader in the church, in the workplace, at Starbucks, on the bus. Twice I’ve had serious challenges to my integrity due to sexual attraction; I battled them both by being bluntly honest with my wife, by fasting and prayer, by seeking grace and mercy, and by seeing the women I was drawn to as sisters – literally, trying to treat them as I do my own younger sister – who, while physically and emotionally beautiful, was not an object to be targetted and posessed. I can’t tell you how hard that is, nor can I describe how much joy comes in getting over that mountain with integrity largely intact.

I hope that the women in my life, and the women in the world that I’m able to shape, find themselves listened to, welcomed and received just as I wish to receive Christ. Because I am, and they are.

“I have a dream… that one day, my children will be judged not bt he color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King Jr. (And, I would add, I dream that the women in my life will not be judged by their weight, their physical features, the extent to which they’re willing to play a misogynistic game – but by their identity as childen of God).