Protecting the family: fight, flight, and the Christian distinction (full essay)

Maybe that’s what it means to be in love: to be in a state of perpetual help.

1. The Tradition

There was really only room for two people on the sidewalk. So I walked just behind them. A year before, we would have been alongside each other. I had that space. The world had that space. For me, for him, for us. But things were different now.

This wasn’t like the past, visiting his parents’ home in the summer, sharing a bed after everyone else had gone to sleep, everything free, and the primary torments being the ones we carried within ourselves or being driven by those whose care for us was packaged in the methods of control. It wasn’t just me now. It was a future and a hope and a dream and woman who could walk alongside him in the daytime, traversing the spaces we only traveled under the cover of night.

I was visiting him. But so was she. And the momentum of the world shoved me to the back of a line of pairs. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t ready to accept how much I hated it.

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This essay was originally intended as part of a larger project challenging a common cultural consensus about what constitutes marriage in the Catholic tradition. This was a challenge not for those rejecting certain Catholic doctrines, especially those on marriage and sexuality, but for those seeking to defend and promote a magisterial understanding of Catholic marriage in theological debates, political controversies, and personal conflicts.

At the outset, this challenge may seem unnecessary and perhaps impossible. These issues seem to have been settled in both theology and practice for two millennia. What distinguishes marriage today from marriage in the larger Western Christian tradition, many argue, is the elimination of gendered differentiation between the partners. But marriage historian Stephanie Coontz challenges this assumption, at least culturally and historically, in her 2006 book Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Coontz argues that what distinguishes contemporary marriage from “traditional marriage” in Western society is that in the eighteenth century “people began to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners on the basis of love.”¹ She writes that in traditional societies marriage was much more concerned with establishing ties with other families and increasing the family’s labor force than it was about love and romance. She notes that people did fall in love:

“[S]ometimes even with their spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love.” 

But this has changed, she argues, and romantic love is now seen as the foundation of marriage.

At the same time, a cultural consensus has arisen that love is primarily about marriage, at least love in its deepest form. Pope Francis even calls marriage the “greatest form of friendship.” (Notably, this is a misquote of Aquinas that no one seems to have noticed.) In a 2006 essay for The New York Times, Coontz suggests that the rise of marriage as the height of love and commitment has at the same time contributed to the breakdown of non-marital social ties. This breakdown may have continued into the twenty-first century, as suggested by a 2006 study Coontz references on social isolation. In the study, the number of people saying they had no one to discuss important matters with tripled between 1985 and 2004. The discussion of important matters decreased with co-workers and other associates. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than 1985 was marriage. Coontz identifies benefits associated with these changes in marriage. She says that “many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did.” But she also says that we have “neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.”

For those who will marry, this may not seem particularly distressing. But for those who will not marry, perhaps for religious reasons, these trends are troubling. And for religious traditions which argue that not all people can or should marry, religious leaders face an uphill battle in arguing that the unmarried life is not a life condemned to loneliness or, at its best, a life which can only aspire to temporary, conditional, and noncommittal personal relationships.

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I thought we would conquer the world together. I thought we would discover the secrets that would finally make sense of it all. I thought maybe we wouldn’t have to choose.

He and I called ourselves “friends.” We saw no tension between the women we dated and the beds we shared. What were the messages that made it all make sense?

There is no such thing as a homosexual.

God will forgive everything in confession.

The erotic love of Plato was the love between teacher and student.

John Henry Newman wrote, “As far as this world was concerned, I was his first and last.”

All love is to be transformed. The carnal is to be purified into the spiritual.

There is no such thing as two men “dating.”

We are not defined by our desires. We are defined by the createdness of our bodies.

We were making it up as we went, and we had no other context for this. We were growing. We were changing. We were learning a new kind of honesty, a new kind of openness, a new kind of passion and exhilaration for the goodness of the world. When we had sex, it was simply a passion that had gone too far, something which would be ironed out with time and prayer. Lots of prayer. I had never prayed with another person so much, prayed for a person so much. If the Church was a boat on a rough sea, he was the sailor with the life saver, throwing it out to me when I fell off the side and pulling me back in. At times, I did the same for him.

The more I studied philosophy and theology, especially in the medieval Church, the more I was able to make sense of what we were. The more I studied traditional Catholicism, the more I found grounding for the love we shared.

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Catholicism, as it is frequently presented today by many of its own defenders, seems to reject the full flourishing of those whom it excludes from the possibility of marriage. Cultural consensus seems set on the idea that access to marriage is essential for full communion with others and the fulfillment of the heart’s deepest longings. Catholic teachings themselves tend towards this conclusion. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “God did not create man as a solitary being.” At the same time, it seems that the only institution sanctioned and promoted by the Church in which man rises out of his solitariness into deep, indissoluble, and sacred communion with another is marriage. Christians upholding the “traditional teachings” on sexuality frequently feel, for example, that their views condemn those who identify as gay or lesbian to, at the worst, lifelong loneliness, and, at best, second-class status in terms of interpersonal relations, and that they are powerless to do anything about this. This is the disposition which makes Church teaching appear not only difficult but also degrading.

The Catholic tradition finds itself in an uphill battle. Setting aside those who disagree outright with the Church’s teachings, many dispositions from popular culture which challenge “traditional” Christian practices have seeped into these practices and make it difficult to sift through what is proper and truly “traditional” to Christian teaching and what is not. Many Catholics want to present the Church and its teachings with integrity. But in order to do so, the Church must take careful inventory of what aspects of contemporary love and marriage truly come from its tradition.

These aspects must be distinguished from those aspects we take for granted as part of marriage but which are actually accidental features of the particular form of marriage practiced in modernity. We must discern those aspects of marriage that have seeped into common understandings of marriage from the catechesis of contemporary culture. This is not at all to say that Christian marriage has nothing to learn from the contemporary practices of marriage, but I would argue that the cultural consensus that same-sex marriage is not only conceivable but also a basic human right arises not only due to the rejection of particular tenets of the Catholic doctrine on marriage, such as its procreative conjugality, but also due to more ephemeral aspects of the contemporary orientation of marriage that are accepted and championed by many defenders of “traditional marriage.”

This essay will explore one of those “ephemeral” aspects, that of what I’d call the “paradisiacal” treatment of the marital bond, working to point out significant differences between contemporary relationships and the bonds of communion proposed in the Catholic tradition. Focusing especially on Homer’s Odyssey, Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, and Robert Sokolowski’s The God of Faith and Reason, it will consider various aspects of human and divine love and relationships and how they are considered under marriage and friendship. These aspects, though conceptually distinct, are deeply interrelated, and a proper orientation regarding one aspect will implicate the others as well. Though they will build on each other in many ways, this essay will not follow these aspects on a linear trajectory headed towards a final conclusion. Rather, this essay will offer these aspects as conceptually independent—even if practically inseparable—areas which are put before the reader for consideration.

This essay will contrast Homeric understandings of pastoral paradise with those understandings brought forth by the Christian faith. As an institution which seeks a kind of self-sufficient and closed harmony, contemporary marriage is in many ways marked by the walls it sets up as a protective barrier, whether against children who may challenge an easy and stable family life, intimate non-marital relationships which may require time and energy of one or both spouses, or the needs of those outside the nuclear family in the broader society. In the following parts of this essay, I will outline a vision of marriage as essentially competitive. I will focus on how the Christian understanding of God transforms the “competition” presented by these challenges between a loving family life and relationships with rest of the world. And I will undermine myself throughout.

2. Foundations

More than ten years later, the smell of Jack lingers faintly in my memory. Sweet like freshly cut grass, a smell that leaves you cool like spearmint but invites you in like chamomile tea. He was a bad kisser, but all kisses are good when you are in love. Sex was this exploration of all these things that we didn’t know about ourselves, that we could only discover through each other.

He was my best friend. Sarah, too, was among my closest friends. They didn’t even like each other at first. They found each other completely annoying.

Then Jack and I had graduated. He had stayed at Notre Dame for grad school, and I moved away. Sarah still had a couple of years before she’d graduate. I went away, and he and she started to spend more time together.

I look back, and I see him as my other half. If he was my other half, she was my other other half.

He kept me grounded. His desk was perfectly organized. He said his prayers most mornings and invited me to join him. I think I made him feel alive.

She forced me to have fun. She taught me drinking games and called me out on my bullshit. I think I made her feel secure… for a time.

When I visited during grad school, I would spend my days with her running around campus and my nights with him “sleeping on the floor” of his apartment.

Then they started dating.

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According to both Homer and Hannah Arendt, societies throughout history have been founded through a “legendary crime,” usually some form of fratricide through which the subjects or children of a ruler overthrow those in power and establish a new regime. (Though Arendt doesn’t reference Renee Gerard in On Revolution, her ideas are quite close to his in this area.) One wonders whether this is the case for the biblical family, which is grounded partly upon leaving one’s father and mother and cleaving to one’s wife. Given the contemporary tendency to establish the family as a self-sufficient and closed community, social structures in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad provide illustrations of the ways that the family can only establish and protect itself from external dangers through violence or flight. Homer’s Odyssey illustrates these two options when Odysseus encounters the land of the Cyclopses, who protect their pastoral paradise through violence, and the Phaeacians, who protect themselves by fleeing from external dangers. In contrast to these options, the Christian life presents a vision in which human relationships do not compete. Rather, through the grace of a God external to the world, Christians in relationship offer themselves up for the sake of reconciling the human family. As their reference point, the Crucifixion orients Christian relationships such that they work to bestow mercy upon others by recognizing that they have been shown mercy. In this way, they perfect both themselves and the world.

In On Revolution, Arendt argues that in both the ancient and the contemporary world, the foundations of civilization always began with an “old legendary crime.” Political life, though itself opposed to violence, requires a beginning connected with violence, and thus both biblical and classical antiquity report “legendary beginnings of our history” marked especially by fratricide: “Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus.” Indeed, “violence was the beginning and, by the same token, no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating… whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime.” In ancient mythology, we can look at Cronus’ overthrow of Uranus and Zeus’ overthrow of Cronus as successive crimes in founding eras for of the gods. In the modern world, Arendt looks at the violence of the French Revolution as the legendary crime of its founding, and in America she looks at slavery.

Maybe this violence is also part of founding Catholic families. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the family “the original cell of social life” in which “[a]uthority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society.” As the basic unit of society, one must wonder whether the family itself is reliant upon a legendary violence for its foundation. In one respect, a kind of violence may be inferred from Genesis 2:24: “a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife.” In one reading of this passage, man abandons his family through a relational patricide, in severing the tie with his parents and establishing a new tie with his wife. This can be seen in other relationships as well. Some of my own friends have marked the loss of friendship with marriage. One friend in particular, thinking about his various relationships, once said: “it feels like marriage is the death of friendship.”

Stephanie Coontz speaks of modern marriage as an institution in which individuals could meet their deepest needs through romantic love. She identifies Freudian influences as establishing a society which viewed “intense same-sex ties with suspicion” and which urges people “to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.” Indeed, contemporary marriage can be seen as a sort of pastoral paradise, in which marriage and parenthood satisfy all human needs in a closed community marked by internal peace and harmony. Marriage stands in sharp contrast to the broader political and social community and even seeks to protect itself from it.

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During college, Jack and I lived together. He and Sarah tended to avoid each other. One night, she came over with a few friends so that I could play my first drinking game. He planned to be somewhere else. I learned how to play flip cup. Afterwards, she held my hand while I laid on the couch and threw up into a trash can. We turned on a movie. I felt horrible. I felt loved. It’s wild how much joy you can pack into vomiting in a garbage can, as long as she’s holding your hand on the couch.

He didn’t love that they let things get that far. I think I was changing. I don’t think he knew what to think about that.

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Two passages of Homer’s Odyssey illustrate the ways in which the family might protect itself. In the Odyssey, the protagonist Odysseus is sailing home after victory in the Trojan War, and his travel includes time spent on various islands. On one island, Odysseus finds a pastoral paradise. It has “all good land, fertile for every crop in season: lush well-watered meads along the shore, vines in profusion, prairie, clear for the plow, where grain would grow chin high by harvest time, and rich sub-soil.” This land, however, is home to the monstrous Cyclopses, including the son of Poseidon, Polyphemus. Polyphemus is described as “a shaggy mountain reared in solitude.” He is a brute of “all outward power, a wild man, ignorant of civility.”

Polyphemus has no regard for hospitality or the laws of the gods. Nor does he experience compassion. When hearing about the struggles of Odysseus and his men and how their companions died, “[n]either reply nor pity came from him.” Polyphemus can only respond to strangers by destroying them. After hearing their sad story, Polyphemus dismembers and consumes some of Odysseus’ companions.

But at the same time, he is the caretaker and protector of paradise. He shepherds his sheep and maintains the land in harmony. The Cyclopses “leav[e] the fruitage of the earth in mystery to the immortal gods,” and grain and wine grapes flourish there. They are anti-social, dwelling alone in separate mountain caves, indifferent to each other. Yet Homer ties together their lack of hospitality, their brute characters, and their anti-social living in a way that suggests they together preserve a pastoral paradise.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Our love—his and mine—was tested two years before we met her, the year we fell in love. We lived a few doors down from each other. We both majored in philosophy and classics.

We had both read Phaedrus’s warning, that it’s best not to favor those under the sickness of love, that you should focus on the relations of mutuality rather than desperate wanting. But what if you could have both? That’s what we weren’t prepared for. We had been warned about the wanton homosexuals under the spell of hedonism, lusting after lust and nothing more.

That’s what Father Dorm Rector came to see. Jack was the liturgical commissioner for the dorm chapel. Father wanted him to become a priest. And how did Father see me? Was I a seductor? Was I distraction? Father told me that what we had couldn’t be friendship because of what we had done. He said the only pathway forward was a total separation, at least for a time.

“How long?” I had asked him.

Father didn’t give an answer. I realized that there was no answer. I left that meeting knowing that I would find no help there. That was the first and last time Father and I would meet to discuss the situation. I considered a recent homily he had given about friendship and chastity and the dangers of blurred lines and I realized it was about us.

Later, Father told Jack that one of us would have to leave the dorm, and to let him know which one it would be.

Jack and I talked about it. We decided that he would leave and I would stay, and the love between us would remain. He spoke with Father.

Jack came back to me and said that Father had told him I was the one who would be removed from the dorm.

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Odysseus also visits another land, the land of the Phaeacians. There, he finds an immensely wealthy people also in possession of a kind of pastoral paradise. Their palace is filled with gold, silver, and bronze, and they, too, have some flourishing land. They have an orchard in which fruit “never failed upon these trees.” They are full of fruits, and the orchard has vines with rows of vegetables “that flourish in every season,” all of which are “the gifts of heaven.” The Phaeacians flourish in luxury. The king explains: “all our days we set great store by feasting, harpers, and the grace of dancing choirs, changes of dress, warm baths, and downy beds.”

Unlike the Cyclopses, however, the Phaeacians live together as a community, and they are known for peace rather than anger. Indeed, they are incapable of tolerating the experience of anger or grief, in either themselves or others. Alkinoos, the king, is “not a man for trivial anger.” As he says, “better a sense of measure in everything.” When a minstrel sings of Odysseus’ difficult travels and brings Odysseus to grief, Alkinoos cuts off the song. Alkinoos prefers a “smiling banquet” and says, “Let everyone be easy.”

The paradise is attractive in its own way, but Homer reveals the means by which the Phaeacians preserve it: “In days gone by, these men held Hypereia, a country of wide dancing grounds, but near them were overbearing Kyclopes, whose power could not be turned from pillage. So the Phaiakians migrated thence.” The Phaeacians cannot survive or endure in the face of violence. They once lived near the Cyclopses, but migrated away when faced with their power. In contrast to the Cyclopes who require violence to preserve paradise, the Phaeacians preserve their paradise by flight. Thus they are skilled “not in the boxing ring… but in racing, land or sea.”

These characteristics on their face do not seem to imply a flaw in the life of the Phaeacians, but Homer suggests otherwise. The goddess Athena warns Odysseus before he encounters them: “They do not care for strangers in this neighborhood; a foreign man will get no welcome here. The only things they trust are the racing ships Poseidon gave, to sail the deep blue sea like white wings in the sky, or a flashing thought.” Thus the king presents two options for Odysseus. Either marry the king’s daughter, and become part of their paradise, or be sent home. Like the Cyclopes, the Phaeacians lack in true hospitality. Indeed, Homer explicitly ties the Phaeacians to the Cyclopes. In relation to the Gods, says the king, “we are their kin; Gigantes, Kyclopes, rank no nearer gods than we.” The Cyclopes and the Phaeicians are tied together by relation to the gods and, rather than being opposites, may be different expressions of a kind of godlike paradise upon the earth.

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I left the dorm against my will. Over the summer, Father emailed me:

I confirmed your placement in Siegfried Hall with the Housing Office.  I wish you the best in your new community as you begin anew.  The rector is a wonderful priest and much-loved rector.

In light of the lamentable situation in Morrissey last semester and your impending integration into another dorm community, I must ask you to refrain from entrance into the Manor.  There are ample opportunities - on and off-campus - to meet with any friends who enjoy continuing domicile here as well as ample opportunities to attend Holy Mass. While this stipulation is regretful, it is also necessary.

My prayers for you as you continue your journey at Our Lady's University.

I returned in the fall, and everything fell apart. Some of our dorm-mates knew the reason why I was suddenly living somewhere else. But no one knew that I had been banned from what our little community had grown into the year before: going to daily mass in Morrissey, sitting in the basement lounge and joking together late into the evening, gathering in the dorm lobby together before going to dinner. I was relocated to the other side of campus. My friends got engaged and had a betrothal ceremony in Morrissey and they were upset that I didn’t come. That became my life. I couldn’t face anyone. I had dark imaginings that one day it would be over.

Whatever Father had intended, I don’t think he expected that this would strengthen our bond. In lieu of getting a new roommate, Father had given Jack a single room, directly across the hall from Father’s own living space. Jack snuck me in regularly, late at night. Father didn’t know that the thing he had sought to destroy continued to live on, even closer to him than before.

We had no idea what we were doing. I was just trying to survive. I think he was too. We were trying to help each other, to make sense of all this, to somehow grow and change and pray. I struggled that fall.

In the spring, I took a break from Notre Dame with a semester abroad. I gave myself space to breathe. I “came out” voluntarily for the first time. When I returned to Notre Dame for the fall of my senior year, Jack told me that I seemed different. I felt different. We moved into an apartment together off campus.

That was the semester I met Sarah.

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It is my contention that couples who seek to establish themselves as a closed circle in which they find an earthly paradise in each other, set apart from all others, will tend towards a Phaeacian life or a Cyclops life. In the face of life’s difficulties or anxieties brought upon the relationship, such couples will respond with some form of either flight or violence. The closed circle, in order to protect itself, cannot admit of outsiders. Nor can it stand in relation to those not existing within itself. Thus we can see the anxiety when a couple faces an unborn child diagnosed with a mental or physical disability, the poor standing outside the gate of the suburban community, or a non-marital friendship requiring its own intimacy. The response of fear, the closed gate, and the closed heart illustrate at one and the same time the Homeric impulse towards fight and flight.

One should not be surprised by such responses. They are the responses of a couple seeking paradise, while at the same time being aware of their own limitations. The generosity of the open heart presses against the practicalities of maintaining the security of the family. And the response of fight or flight arises from these limitations. The violent founding of the family in a man leaving his parents and cleaving to his spouse likewise represents both a fight and a flight. At the age of maturity, and particularly at the time of a new marriage, parents and children are told to “cut the cord” of the parental relationship so that the child can live his or her “own life.” This is at once both a violent destruction of a previous relationship and a flight from ties that might create tension if brought to bear upon the new marital relationship. Stories abound of difficult in-laws.

3. Perpetual help

I remember that her hands were very soft. I think I was surprised by that. Sarah was such a strong woman.

I met her sitting in a conference room at our student center. I’d returned from my semester abroad for my senior year, feeling that I was a new person, that this was a new beginning. I saw the young woman with the tie-dye shirt and the shaved head and thought, “That’s who got elected to the club’s leadership team???” I suspect that men often underestimated her.

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The fight or flight response to the paradise of the family can find an easy place in the relationship between pagan divinity and the world. In The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology, Robert Sokolowski argues that pagan gods are appreciated as “the most powerful, most independent and self-sufficient, most unchanging beings in the world.” Because both the pagan gods and human beings exist as part of the world, however, they are subject to competition. The world, with its limitations, cannot accommodate two beings in the same space.

Thus Sokolowski argues that the pagan divinities are defined by what distinguishes them from humanity and the rest of the world. The Olympian gods of pagan mythology rule over natural phenomena, over cities and political events, or over certain families. And in their rule they act such that man is merely subjected to their forces and cannot act as a contrary force except insofar as he is able to appease or trick the gods. In the “Greek enlightenment,” however, the gods are withdrawn from the human characteristics which have been projected upon them. They are withdrawn by the philosophers “to those forms of being that were taken to be the independent, ruling substances in the world.” They are moved to “first substances” which, though higher than man, are still part of the universe. “No matter how Aristotle’s god is to be described, as the prime mover or as the self-thinking thought, he is part of the world, and it is obviously necessary that there be other things besides him, whether he is aware of them or not.” Plato makes a similar move.

Speaking about all pagan thinkers on the relationship between the divine and the rest of the world, Sokolowski writes: “in all these cases, the divine, even in its most ultimate form, is never conceived as capable of being without the world. It is divine by being differentiated from what is not divine and by having an influence on what is not divine.” Both the gods and human persons exist in the world and, in a way, compete for their appropriate space within it. There is a kind of cosmological competition in which it is presupposed that the human and divine exist in the world and thus must be placed in their appropriate and distinct places within it.

Sokolowski contrasts this pagan distinction between the human and the divine with what he calls “the Christian distinction.” In contrast to the pagan gods, the Christian God does not exist in the world. Rather, “God is understood as ‘being’ God entirely apart from any relation of otherness to the world or to the whole.” This, Sokolowski argues, is an entirely new distinction, a distinction “between the world understood as possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness.” The pagans have no conception of a creation ex nihilo.² For them all is contained in the world, and nothing can be conceived of outside the world. But unlike the pagan gods, who were defined as a part of the world by their distinction with the mortal world, the Christian God is radically apart from both the world and the mortal beings within it. This distinction is “both most primary and yet capable of being obliterated, because one of the terms of the distinction, the world, does not have to be.”

In Christianity the world does not exist as a necessary emanation of God or as a realm to which God responds through laws outside God’s nature. Rather, the world and all in it exists as “a gift brought about by a generosity that has no parallel in what we experience in the world. The existence of the world now prompts our gratitude, whereas the being of the world prompts our wonder.”

Because of this distinction, God does not compete with the natural world. Nature does not compete with grace. (“The life of grace could not be admitted if it were to be taken as another human achievement in tension with the emotional, psychological, ethical, political, and cognitive activities of human nature.”) Faith does not compete with reason. Christianity does not compete with culture. Sokolowski argues that the pagans could not conceive of anything like the incarnation because, as part of the world, the pagan gods could not unite their natures with any natural thing. Such a union would be “unnatural, because of the otherness that lets one thing be itself only by not being the other.” The Christian distinction, however, demonstrates how the incarnation is neither meaningless nor impossible nor destructive of one nature or the other.

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Late one night, during that horrible sophomore year, Jack had brought me in from the cold. I had a continuously falling gazing, a constant desire to fall asleep, a need to simply fade away. But he kept me afloat, my life saver in the ocean.

We stopped just inside. He gave me something. The first gift he ever gave me. It was a prayer card to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It was the most precious thing he would ever give me. I held onto it while we lived together. I held onto it when I was expelled from my dorm and banished across campus. I held onto it when I fled Notre Dame for a semester abroad in Rome.

He had visited me while in Rome, and we walked up the steps of the Chiesa di Sant’Alfonso di Liguori all’Esquillino to see the real image.

That was the thing I needed: perpetual help. And I got it. Maybe that’s what it means to be in love. To be in a state of perpetual help. For one another. And in that state, you can finally rest.

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Sokolowski notes that the Christian distinction is difficult to live. Christians, however, are called precisely to this life. “The Christian distinction between God and the world is there for us now, as something for us to live and as an issue for reflection, because it was brought forward in the life and teaching of Christ.” Indeed, Christians are called to bring this distinction to bear upon the world and, in doing so, to transform it.

Further, after the incarnation, there is a foundational moment in which this distinction discloses its orientation. This distinction finds its foundation in one of the most legendary crimes in history, to which Arendt does not point as she discusses historical beginnings: the crucifixion of the innocent God. This crime is the foundation towards which the Christian family is oriented. But this legendary crime is different from all other beginnings of history in that it marks not a severing of ties, but a fratricide which results in the reconciling and strengthening of ties.

The calculating practicalities of maintaining an earthly paradise are challenged by the new paradise presented in the crucifixion. While still exercising the use of prudence, justice, and wisdom which the God outside the world does not replace, man is called to recognize that his generosity, hospitality, and communion do not admit of limits. Not even death conquers him who lays down his life for his friends.

Thus for the Christian no external realities present a true challenge, something against which one must fight or from which one must flee. In contrast to the pastoral paradise of pagan anthropology, the elevated Christian life is one characterized by apostolate. Pope Paul VI writes in Apostolicam Actuositatem: “For the Christian vocation by its very nature is also a vocation to the apostolate.” Thus the couple is no longer a closed circle which must protect itself, but in the death of Christ is given an apostolic and evangelical mission. This essay will not go into the specifics of this mission, but I will close this section with another brief reflection on the orientation of the Christian life, this time focusing on the virtue of chastity.³

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After we graduated, after I moved away, after he fell in love with Sarah and they got engaged, Jack asked me to be his best man.

The thing I most longed for was to give a speech on his wedding day. To finally have a space where I could say how much I loved him, and where my love for him would be accepted and honored and celebrated. Maybe the only day in my life where I could share such a love and not fear being seen.

But I feared seeing Jack and Sarah. As they grew closer, Sarah and I began to speak less and less. My relationship with Jack began to change. He asked me to not sleep in his bed anymore. It wasn’t something he should be doing, he told me. The inconsistencies that we had held onto were starting to unravel. We were losing the spaciousness for them. Instead, they were being offered to Sarah.

I may have told myself that his love for Sarah was purifying our love. “You taught me how to love,” he had told me. Maybe Sarah was teaching us that as well? As I felt Jack drawing away, I felt myself drawing in. I texted Sarah less and less. When we visited Jack together, I didn’t know where to place my body. On a sidewalk for two, I walked just behind them.

I took a trip to New York City for a class. Jack came. We’d spend a couple of days together. He booked us a room. With a single bed.

He eventually told her, in waves.

First he told her that I had been in love with him.

Then he told her about what we’d done.

Then he clarified for her the timeline.

Then we cried.

Then I sat alone in my car screaming.

Then everything was over. Everything. I would never be the same.

We saw each other at a wedding.

I looked into the end of the world.

The three of us finally spoke.

“The hardest part was losing your friendship,” Sarah told me. “This whole time, I thought you were pulling away because you didn’t approve of me dating him.”

We cried. We reconciled.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

According to the Catholic Catechism, all people are called to chastity, defined as “the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being.” It is a virtue essential for all, both married and celibate. The Catechism further teaches: “Chastity is expressed notably in friendship with one’s neighbor. Whether it develops between persons of the same or opposite sex, friendship represents a great good for all. It leads to spiritual communion. The Catechism emphases the fact that chastity is expressed notably in “friendship with one’s neighbor,” a fact which does not quickly come to mind when one considers the virtue in common parlance. However, this simple statement demonstrates the orientation required for both the exercise and achievement of chastity, as well as the exercise and achievement of the entire Christian life.

Consider how the Catechism directs us not only to friendship generally or in an abstract sense, but to “friendship with one’s neighbor.” This naturally raises the question presented to Jesus in Luke 10: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replies with the parable of the good Samaritan. A man is victim to robbers, who strip and beat him, leaving him half-dead. A priest and a Levite walk by and leave him. A Samaritan traveler, however, is moved by compassion. “He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn and cared for him. The next day he took two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, ‘Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back.’”

In reading this passage, many readers expect that Jesus will identify the robbed man as the neighbor to whom we are called to love and serve. But Jesus does not make this move. Rather, he identifies the neighbor as “the one who treated him with mercy” and then commands, “Go and do likewise.”

The Samaritan, the man showing mercy, is our neighbor. Thus the exercise of chastity expresses itself notably, not simply in demonstrating mercy, but in being one who is shown mercy. Chastity expresses itself notably friendship with him who is mercy, with Christ. We are called to be treated with His mercy and then to “go and do likewise.” In face of the limits of our mortal nature and the anxieties which the Christian calling may put before us, we fail in chastity and friendship if we face these realities with bitterness or approach them begrudgingly. Rather, like God who creates simply out of His generosity and goodness and without any need for Himself, we are called to act with the almost reckless abandonment of one who has been shown the most extreme mercy and can do nothing but substantiate his gratitude for this. God creates the “Christian distinction” out of His extreme love for us.⁴

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

They later broke off speaking with me.

They later broke off the engagement.

He later asked me to not contact him again. He told me not to contact her either.

I wrote this essay. Or, rather, I wrote the parts of this essay that pretended to be a philosophical-theological-literary exploration of the change Christianity brings to the world of love. A future friend and lover would read it and chastise me. “It’s basically a big, ‘Fuck you, Jack!’” he told me. He was right. I mean, it was more than that. But it was that, too.

Sarah and Jack later announced a new date for the wedding. I would not be the best man. I would give no speech. What we shared would never be celebrated. I would fade away.

Late one evening, I browsed their wedding website. I read their story. It mentioned Our Lady of Perpetual Help. How Jack had a devotion to her. How they had cultivated a devotion together. How they’d get married on the weekend closest to her feast day. I’ve lost my prayer card, and I don’t know where to look for it.

1. As will be noted later, the Christian tradition has always included love as an important part of marriage, though this understanding of love is in many ways different from the love that Coontz identifies as the grounding for modern marriage.

2. Similarly, John Zizioulas writes: “Although the ancient Greeks assumed with regard to the ontology of the world that it was something necessary of itself, the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo obliged the Fathers to introduce a radical difference into ontology, to trace the world back to an ontology outside the world, that is, to God. They thus broke the circle of the closed ontology of the Greeks, and at the same time did something much more important, which is of direct interest to us here: they made being—the existence of the world, existent things—a product of freedom” (Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary, 1985. 39).

3. Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and Rene Girard also discuss foundings, pagan relationships, and changes brought about by the introduction of the Christian God. For Ratzinger’s thoughts, see: Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1993. For Girard, see: Girard, René. I See Satan Fall like Lightning. Trans. James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001.

4. Similarly, St. Josemaria Escriva writes: “Being children you will have no cares: children quickly forget what troubles them and return to their games. With abandonment, therefore, you will not have to worry, since you will rest in the Father” (Escrivá De Balaguer, Josemaría. Christ Is Passing By: Homilies. Princeton, NJ: Scepter, 1992. Par. 864).