Well, I stepped into it this time.
Within the Catholic lay movement known as Cursillo, we do something called grouping. You form a group of a couple of other men or women, depending on your sex, and each week you meet to discuss what you did over the last 7 days to be a better Christian. There's more to it than that, but that's a decent summary. Over time, you grow very close to your groupies as the sharing can be pretty personal. It's a beautiful thing and has made a huge difference in my life.
This week, I managed to metaphorically shoot one of my groupies in the head, one in the chest and one in the shoulder. It was all good, innocent fun until it wasn't and the wasn't was my fault. I thought I could control myself and I couldn't.
One of my groupies, we'll call him Sam, a bit older than me, is the kind of guy who never has a bad word to say about anyone. He is the very incarnation of a Teletubby Catholic. Everything is sweetness and kindness and love. If he had met with a group of ANTIFA rioters after they had burned down half of San Diego, he would tell you, while chuckling innocently, "Golly, those young people have so much energy! They spent the whole night shattering windows, looting stores and setting things on fire. I couldn't do that. I wouldn't last 20 minutes carrying a crowbar and smashing things. It's wonderful to see all that enthusiasm!"
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| Sometimes, Sam drives me bonkers with that Teletubby act. |
Sam may indeed drive me bonkers, but in many ways he is an exemplar of the Christian ideal a great deal more than I am. While he is the embodiment of love and gentleness, I'm sitting there pulling logic threads in my head, trying to figure out what it all means in terms of God's telos for the world. A group made up of grumpy theoretical mathematicians, all channeling their inner Jordan Petersons would be pretty sterile and unhappy.
This week, however, Sam managed to trigger me, as the blue-haired, feminist crazies would say. I took the bait and in no time at all, the grouping session consisted of me metaphorically drawing a Chandelier in our poker game, pulling out my Colt revolver and shooting everyone at the table.
Sam volunteers on the RCIA team at his parish. RCIA is where people who want to convert to Catholicism are taught about the faith and learn just how much we hate everyone else and how to properly light a fire underneath someone tied to a stake. As a part of it, he was talking about LGBT for some reason. I think one of his current crop is gay or trans or something. He told us how he doesn't judge and how they're all wonderful people and he doesn't judge them and how he accepts their moral choices being different than his own and how, did I say this already? - he doesn't judge.
Well, that was like waving a raw steak at a small, fat chihuahua. I took the bait, in my mind thinking that I wouldn't engage in a debate, but just ask some questions to understand his internal logic. Farther back in my mind, there was the tiny voice of my guardian angel howling at me to stop because we both knew Sam didn't have any logic at all and the only thing that was going to happen was the Chandelier incident. I went ahead anyway because poking around in people's logic, theology and behavior is disastrously fun for me.
My guardian angel gave up on me at that point.
Sam's thinking was, as I had suspected, completely incoherent. I kept pulling at the threads he gave me and in no time at all, everyone in our group could see it was incoherent. I kept pulling anyway. BANG! BANG! BANG!
I started by asking if we had thrown out all the sexual sins now. He replied with the moral relativist answer that since he can't judge, what is wrong for him might be right for someone else. He, after all, can't judge. I pointed out that he was effectively editing the Bible by deleting all of the passages dealing with sexual morality. He said that it wasn't a big deal, there weren't that many. I didn't press that point, but kept asking my questions. While we were discarding the sections of Scripture that dealt with sexual sins, maybe we could throw out the ones dealing with my particular weaknesses. Like drunkenness, for example.
I've always thought that if we were going to give blessings to same-sex couples, why can't we give a blessing to me as I hold a highball glass filled with a particularly potent Alabama Slammer?
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| Maybe I could get the Pope's homeboy, Father James Martin, SJ, LGBTQWERTY, to do it. |
When you're done with that pen, Sam, scratching out one Bible passage after another, hand it to me and I'll really get to work on that stupid book.
Things went off the rails pretty severely at that point and my guardian angel walked out of my body, headed for the local bar. I should have gone with him, but instead it was all BANG BANG BANG.
Since then, I've spent time working through the logical flaws in his arguments and those of my other groupies, not to prove I'm superior, but because I can't help but work to further clarify my own thinking. I might as well get something out of the affair as the bodies are carried away. Pulling logic threads is just what I do.
And yes, I can see that such behavior can be sinful if it's done in the service of pride. I hope I'm doing it in the service of being a better witness to the Truth on this blog and elsewhere, but it's entirely possible that I'm doing it for my own glory. I do try to watch out for that.
Getting back to the idea of judging, which is the topic of this particular post, note that judging and punishing are separable. Dig this from John 8: 3-11.
Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.
Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. "So what do you say?”
They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.
But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Again he bent down and wrote on the ground.
And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him.
Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
Lots and lots of Catholics have taken that passage and blown it up into a complete and impenetrable theology. For them, all of Catholic thought can be condensed into "God is love and don't judge." More on that in future posts.
For now, however, consider the story for what it is. Jesus tells the men to not throw rocks at the girl. He doesn't tell them that adultery might be OK for some and a sin for others. He is clearly saying that adultery is always and everywhere a sin. It is part of God's universal, objective moral law.
Think about the men in the story. Do you think any of them left thinking, "You know, sexuality is a wonderful mosaic of diversity and love. Whatever gets your rocks off is fine with me. Jesus said don't judge so I don't judge any more. Adultery, threesomes, goats and amphetamines, it's all fine with me now."
You can have a universal, objective moral code without stoning people to death. My groupies were conflating judging with punishing.
As Andrew Klavan likes to say, the English language is a crude tool for expressing ideas and feelings. In this case, some of us have taken the wrong connotation from "do not judge" and turned it into a commandment that subsequently dissolves any concept of a universal, objective, moral Truth.
