A couple of weeks ago, my brother Norm informed me that the last time he had taken our father to mass our dad had gotten up out their pew during the offertory and proceeded to the tabernacle where he began putting items away while the mass was still going on. Apparently this sort of behavior is to be expected from people suffering from cognitive impairment/mild dementia, but it was upsetting to Norm, who had to fetch him and bring him back to their pew, and it is upsetting enough to me that I am now going to have to attend mass with him on a weekly basis to keep an eye on him on weeks where Norm is otherwise occupied, which will likely amount to at least three Saturdays a month. This would not be a significant problem for me relative to my work routine. On Saturday nights, when my dad goes to mass, the store where I work is normally closed for cleaning, and my coworkers are more than capable of finishing up our weekly clean up without me. They have been very gracious to me in allowing me to slip out for a few minutes every week to give my dad a ride to the church (he no longer drives himself), and I'm sure that it isn't going to be that much more of an inconvenience to lose me for the rest of clean up. Departing from work twenty minutes early really isn't the heart of the problem.
Emphatically, I've reached a point in my relationship with my family where I just don't talk about politics or religion for largely the same reasons. A real dissonance exists relative to my views and those of my father, my siblings, and most of our relatives to the point that I've just accepted the fact that will wear the moniker of the black sheep, even if I do my best to be inconspicuous. My family is extremely Catholic and, for all intents and purposes, mildly conservative, politically speaking. When I say "extremely Catholic," I mean that, up until about a year ago, my father attended mass daily and, I suspect, sought reconciliation at least once a month. I have at least one brother who is a member of the Knights of Columbus, who partakes of volunteer opportunities to conduct ministerial duties to groups otherwise unable to partake of weekly mass or other liturgical services for Catholics (I specifically remember him telling me about helping out Catholic veterans with weekly mass at the Holyoke Soldiers Home). Moreover, to my knowledge, I have a sister-in-law and at least a few nieces who have taken part in pilgrimages and Catholic youth festivals. Among our wider family, to the exclusion of one aunt, who I remember openly questioning the virtues of the sacrament of reconciliation, and perhaps a handful of cousins, I truthfully do not think that anyone diverges from the level of strict adherence to the Catholic faith demonstrated among my immediate family. In this regard, the only impression that I can offer is one of appreciation to the rigorous degree of adherence to the worldly practice of a particular faith tradition, whatever anyone has to say about the relative asceticism of Catholicism in relation to other Christian and non-Christian faith traditions (i.e. I will hand it to observant Muslims for their practices of fast during the month of Ramadan, but that is an entirely different subject!).
Emphatically, I've reached a point in my relationship with my family where I just don't talk about politics or religion for largely the same reasons. A real dissonance exists relative to my views and those of my father, my siblings, and most of our relatives to the point that I've just accepted the fact that will wear the moniker of the black sheep, even if I do my best to be inconspicuous. My family is extremely Catholic and, for all intents and purposes, mildly conservative, politically speaking. When I say "extremely Catholic," I mean that, up until about a year ago, my father attended mass daily and, I suspect, sought reconciliation at least once a month. I have at least one brother who is a member of the Knights of Columbus, who partakes of volunteer opportunities to conduct ministerial duties to groups otherwise unable to partake of weekly mass or other liturgical services for Catholics (I specifically remember him telling me about helping out Catholic veterans with weekly mass at the Holyoke Soldiers Home). Moreover, to my knowledge, I have a sister-in-law and at least a few nieces who have taken part in pilgrimages and Catholic youth festivals. Among our wider family, to the exclusion of one aunt, who I remember openly questioning the virtues of the sacrament of reconciliation, and perhaps a handful of cousins, I truthfully do not think that anyone diverges from the level of strict adherence to the Catholic faith demonstrated among my immediate family. In this regard, the only impression that I can offer is one of appreciation to the rigorous degree of adherence to the worldly practice of a particular faith tradition, whatever anyone has to say about the relative asceticism of Catholicism in relation to other Christian and non-Christian faith traditions (i.e. I will hand it to observant Muslims for their practices of fast during the month of Ramadan, but that is an entirely different subject!).
Having said this, I would argue that, like Paul the Apostle, I fought the good fight with Roman Catholicism, in particular, and with Christianity, in general. I tried very hard to be as observant as my fellow family members. When I attended UMASS as an undergrad, I even went through a prolonged stretch of attending mass daily at the Newman Center on campus and trying to be more frequent in seeking absolution for my sinful behavior. I joined a parish community in Northampton after I moved away from my parents in 1999. I sought to be helpful as a lay Catholic parishioner in liturgical duties, even taking on a role in my parish within a ministry to lapsed Catholics who wanted to return to the faith ("Catholics Returning Home"). All things considered, I may not have been the ideal practitioner of Roman Catholicism (at least a few times before the end, I would show up with a few beers on my breath to Lord's Day mass on Sunday afternoon, especially during football season when the Patriots had an early game), but I reflected at least some of the disciplined spiritual vision embodied by the remainder of my family. Around age thirty, in 2004 or 2005, however, I stopped. Moreover, while I held for some time to the notion that my stopping was a "phase" and that I had effectively taken on the trappings of a run-of-the-mill lapsed Catholic, it has eventually become evident that the manner in which I stopped really does not afford me a way back in that reconciles my beliefs and my grasp of spirituality with those of Roman Catholicism.
Being the sort of Althusserian Marxist that I am, it would be easiest and most truthful to argue that my reasons for leaving Catholicism were overdetermined (that is, complexly determined by the conjunction of an infinitely large set of different determinants). I had a lot of reasons for leaving when I did, not all of them entirely good or, succinctly, meaningful to the articulation of some alternative reflection on spirituality. I could start by acknowledging that I had a lot of acquaintances in my life who were either ambivalent or entirely hostile to organized religion. This might have been a major source of my changing attitude toward Catholicism but for the fact that I have a tendency to keep some level of precautionary distance between myself and others. I just don't have any relationships where I fully invest myself without holding a lot of autonomous space back. Inside of my space, I'm too cerebral to allow any unvarnished influences reshape my life without some deeper self reflection. Any reflections on the nature of the universe, transcendence, eternity, and the presence of God, by any definition, must demand some more profound consideration than that afforded from someone who is spending his Saturday night getting drunk and trying to hookup with some atheist hippy chick for whom Catholicism just isn't cool in any way, shape, or form. Invariably, my departure from Catholicism was the product of deep self reflection on my part, not of whimsical inspiration from the atheistic or agnostic acquaintances in my life.
While we are at it, I can strike down a few other potential exogenous influences. Notably, I definitely did not leave the Catholic Church, at the beginning of the Twenty-first century, because, at the close of the Twentieth, there was a problem with priests sexually molesting children entrusted in their care. The Catholic clergy abuse scandal in North America and Europe certainly deserves some attention by the Church, inclusive of its organizational hierarchy and the laity, if only because it presents a very strong argument for more inclusive oversight by lay parish communities over the activities of the clergy and commends the laity to a more expansive vocation in redefining their roles within the Church as a whole. That is to say, as I have argued previously on this blog, I think the Catholic lay community is long overdue in its duty to institute a reformation from within, to transform their own responsibilities for defining the Church's purpose in their lives. Such a radical and democratic reconsideration of the Church, of the ordained hierarchy, and of the role of the latter in the everyday lives of the laity, presently stands beyond my own sphere of responsibility, but, as a point of compassionate, humanistic advice, the laity needs to recognize that, to the extent that the institution of sacramental Holy Orders attracts at least some individuals with serious psychological problems in negotiating the development and sublimation of their sexual instincts, something needs to be done to reconfigure the liturgical duties of ordained clergy and lay ministerial assistants (e.g. the permanent diaconate) in order to effectively marginalize the offices of professional theological thinkers/higher-level policy makers and executioners (i.e. of the Holy See) and lifelong reclusive ascetics/monastics from the broader community of lay parishioners and their everyday liturgical/spiritual advisers and supporters at the parish and/or the diocesan levels. It won't do to browbeat thousands of priests who might have known better not to sexually abuse children if their own lives had assumed a more realistic and humane approach to sexuality than that afforded by existing Church doctrine on the ascetic responsibilities of the cloth. To the extent that penalties from criminal prosecution can apply, the Church needs to leave abusive priests to the discretion of the criminal justice system and, as a matter of Christian virtue, accept their guilt and remorse and offer forgiveness for their sinful actions, if for no other reason than because human beings are innately imperfect. On the other hand, the laity needs to demand organizational changes to ensure that this never happens again.
Furthermore, I did not leave the Church because, at some point in the course of my undergraduate studies, I happened to grab onto a particular strain of Marxian thinking. The Marxian dictum that "religion is the opium of the people" might be wholly true as a matter of casual observation on the role of religious practices in relation to the class processes (e.g. extraction of surplus labor from one group within a population by another group) of capitalism, but it truncates the larger relevance of religious community and of individual faith and spirituality, per se, as social processes supporting a range of human needs beyond the legitimation of exploitative economic processes. To the extent that Marxism, as an approach to theoretic analysis of social processes emanating from an entry point of class, seeks to present meaningful and persuasive arguments about society in order to pursue a more expansive vision of practical humanism, grounded in collective, non-exploitative class processes (i.e. communism), it is unclear to me that Marxism can sensibly avoid questions of spirituality, if only by approaching them as social arguments on the everyday practices of real human communities, without conceiving theories that are starkly ignorant of large practical dimensions of lived human experience. To do otherwise is to court the same sort of self-confident faith in the singularity of truth embodied in one's own theory of the universe evident in every manifestation of the Western Judeo-Christian-Islamic theological tradition. Again, it won't do for atheistic Marxists, as militant revolutionaries and social activists, doctrinaire state bureaucrats, or reclusive philosophical academics, to lecture audiences of the spiritually inclined on the rigorously functionalist nature of their theological fantasies on God, Virgin-birth, the Resurrection, and the impending Apocalypse. Rather, as rigorous materialists, we always have to ask where a particular set of religious ideas and practices fits socially in relation to class and in relation to myriad other social processes, without either validating or diminishing the unapproachable truth or falsehood of such ideas (because, in any case, as materialists, we can never validate transcendental truths). What ends do they serve? How can they be accommodated in order to achieve the broader goals of Marxian politics/activism (i.e. the creation of realizable and sustainable forms of communism)? It may be open to question, for many erstwhile Marxists, whether my way of thinking about Marxism is, in fact, authentically Marxian, but this is a subordinate concern for my current argument and, in any case, I'm not willing to concede that any run-of-the-mill party Stalinist or campus-bound Trotskyist commands enough ideological authority to redraw the boundaries of one of history's broadest and most successful intellectual traditions to tell me that, despite all of my efforts to examine the theoretic works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Lukacs, Althusser, and others to find meaningful arguments about the present world, I'm locked out because I'm not militantly atheistic enough for someone else's liking! Marxism is not a religion, and the adherents of Marxian theory are not duty-bound to adhere strictly to the letter of holy scripture defined by its an erstwhile clergy of party bureaucrats and community activists. In these terms, Marxism was never a stumbling block in my effort to remain a faithful Catholic, and it wasn't a principal motivation for my leaving the Church.
Having stricken the above reasons for abandoning Catholicism, I want to emphasize that I didn't initially stop being Catholic with the intention of never returning. The fact that I am at such a point now is indicative of the fact that I went through a kind of theological transformation, one that was, in part, shaped by my experience with Catholicism and, similarly, by my experience with Marxism, as it was shaped by many other dimensions and experiences in my life. That is to say, being an intellectual, I did a lot of thinking about why it was that I stopped going to mass every weekend and every holy day. The primary axis of this thinking involved a particular field of theological inquiry concerning the relationship between God and humanity, labeled Christology by Christian theologians in reference to the centrality of the figure of Christ (i.e. the mediation of the relationship between God and humanity through the person of Jesus the Nazarene) within their resolution to the fundamental problem of this relationship. In my thinking, I didn't want to contest this label, but, on the contrary, I sought to generalize it, and, in doing so, the figure of Christ as Jesus the Nazarene, in some degree, had to lose its centrality. Accordingly, as an intellectual, I found myself veering theologically from a tradition that accepted a singular, simplistic mediation of the Christological relationship to a place where the relationship became thoroughly blurred by myriad spiritualities and multiple mediations of the transcendent. In good conscience, whether I labeled such thinking Christological, I could not meaningfully identify with Christianity, in general, or Catholicism, in particular. The subsequent posts of this document seek to elaborate some of the ideas I developed about Christology and, in particular, the comprehension I developed between my own generalized perspective on Christology and my approach to Marxism, emphasizing my take on the relationship between (materialist) ontological, epistemological, and theological (i.e. immaterial/non-materialist) reflection.
While we are at it, I can strike down a few other potential exogenous influences. Notably, I definitely did not leave the Catholic Church, at the beginning of the Twenty-first century, because, at the close of the Twentieth, there was a problem with priests sexually molesting children entrusted in their care. The Catholic clergy abuse scandal in North America and Europe certainly deserves some attention by the Church, inclusive of its organizational hierarchy and the laity, if only because it presents a very strong argument for more inclusive oversight by lay parish communities over the activities of the clergy and commends the laity to a more expansive vocation in redefining their roles within the Church as a whole. That is to say, as I have argued previously on this blog, I think the Catholic lay community is long overdue in its duty to institute a reformation from within, to transform their own responsibilities for defining the Church's purpose in their lives. Such a radical and democratic reconsideration of the Church, of the ordained hierarchy, and of the role of the latter in the everyday lives of the laity, presently stands beyond my own sphere of responsibility, but, as a point of compassionate, humanistic advice, the laity needs to recognize that, to the extent that the institution of sacramental Holy Orders attracts at least some individuals with serious psychological problems in negotiating the development and sublimation of their sexual instincts, something needs to be done to reconfigure the liturgical duties of ordained clergy and lay ministerial assistants (e.g. the permanent diaconate) in order to effectively marginalize the offices of professional theological thinkers/higher-level policy makers and executioners (i.e. of the Holy See) and lifelong reclusive ascetics/monastics from the broader community of lay parishioners and their everyday liturgical/spiritual advisers and supporters at the parish and/or the diocesan levels. It won't do to browbeat thousands of priests who might have known better not to sexually abuse children if their own lives had assumed a more realistic and humane approach to sexuality than that afforded by existing Church doctrine on the ascetic responsibilities of the cloth. To the extent that penalties from criminal prosecution can apply, the Church needs to leave abusive priests to the discretion of the criminal justice system and, as a matter of Christian virtue, accept their guilt and remorse and offer forgiveness for their sinful actions, if for no other reason than because human beings are innately imperfect. On the other hand, the laity needs to demand organizational changes to ensure that this never happens again.
Furthermore, I did not leave the Church because, at some point in the course of my undergraduate studies, I happened to grab onto a particular strain of Marxian thinking. The Marxian dictum that "religion is the opium of the people" might be wholly true as a matter of casual observation on the role of religious practices in relation to the class processes (e.g. extraction of surplus labor from one group within a population by another group) of capitalism, but it truncates the larger relevance of religious community and of individual faith and spirituality, per se, as social processes supporting a range of human needs beyond the legitimation of exploitative economic processes. To the extent that Marxism, as an approach to theoretic analysis of social processes emanating from an entry point of class, seeks to present meaningful and persuasive arguments about society in order to pursue a more expansive vision of practical humanism, grounded in collective, non-exploitative class processes (i.e. communism), it is unclear to me that Marxism can sensibly avoid questions of spirituality, if only by approaching them as social arguments on the everyday practices of real human communities, without conceiving theories that are starkly ignorant of large practical dimensions of lived human experience. To do otherwise is to court the same sort of self-confident faith in the singularity of truth embodied in one's own theory of the universe evident in every manifestation of the Western Judeo-Christian-Islamic theological tradition. Again, it won't do for atheistic Marxists, as militant revolutionaries and social activists, doctrinaire state bureaucrats, or reclusive philosophical academics, to lecture audiences of the spiritually inclined on the rigorously functionalist nature of their theological fantasies on God, Virgin-birth, the Resurrection, and the impending Apocalypse. Rather, as rigorous materialists, we always have to ask where a particular set of religious ideas and practices fits socially in relation to class and in relation to myriad other social processes, without either validating or diminishing the unapproachable truth or falsehood of such ideas (because, in any case, as materialists, we can never validate transcendental truths). What ends do they serve? How can they be accommodated in order to achieve the broader goals of Marxian politics/activism (i.e. the creation of realizable and sustainable forms of communism)? It may be open to question, for many erstwhile Marxists, whether my way of thinking about Marxism is, in fact, authentically Marxian, but this is a subordinate concern for my current argument and, in any case, I'm not willing to concede that any run-of-the-mill party Stalinist or campus-bound Trotskyist commands enough ideological authority to redraw the boundaries of one of history's broadest and most successful intellectual traditions to tell me that, despite all of my efforts to examine the theoretic works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Lukacs, Althusser, and others to find meaningful arguments about the present world, I'm locked out because I'm not militantly atheistic enough for someone else's liking! Marxism is not a religion, and the adherents of Marxian theory are not duty-bound to adhere strictly to the letter of holy scripture defined by its an erstwhile clergy of party bureaucrats and community activists. In these terms, Marxism was never a stumbling block in my effort to remain a faithful Catholic, and it wasn't a principal motivation for my leaving the Church.
Having stricken the above reasons for abandoning Catholicism, I want to emphasize that I didn't initially stop being Catholic with the intention of never returning. The fact that I am at such a point now is indicative of the fact that I went through a kind of theological transformation, one that was, in part, shaped by my experience with Catholicism and, similarly, by my experience with Marxism, as it was shaped by many other dimensions and experiences in my life. That is to say, being an intellectual, I did a lot of thinking about why it was that I stopped going to mass every weekend and every holy day. The primary axis of this thinking involved a particular field of theological inquiry concerning the relationship between God and humanity, labeled Christology by Christian theologians in reference to the centrality of the figure of Christ (i.e. the mediation of the relationship between God and humanity through the person of Jesus the Nazarene) within their resolution to the fundamental problem of this relationship. In my thinking, I didn't want to contest this label, but, on the contrary, I sought to generalize it, and, in doing so, the figure of Christ as Jesus the Nazarene, in some degree, had to lose its centrality. Accordingly, as an intellectual, I found myself veering theologically from a tradition that accepted a singular, simplistic mediation of the Christological relationship to a place where the relationship became thoroughly blurred by myriad spiritualities and multiple mediations of the transcendent. In good conscience, whether I labeled such thinking Christological, I could not meaningfully identify with Christianity, in general, or Catholicism, in particular. The subsequent posts of this document seek to elaborate some of the ideas I developed about Christology and, in particular, the comprehension I developed between my own generalized perspective on Christology and my approach to Marxism, emphasizing my take on the relationship between (materialist) ontological, epistemological, and theological (i.e. immaterial/non-materialist) reflection.
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