More on Bill Keller, The Eucharist and Marriage

Bill Keller's op-ed piece in the Times on Sunday has drawn criticism for a flippant remark about the Eucharist and its generally condescending tone toward people, in public life particularly, who practice their faith.  I highlighted a line that has gone pretty much overlooked, about religious people looking to limit others' civil rights that I thought was important. I touched on the Eucharist last time, and I want to put a bow on it a bit before moving on to the next point.

I don't know Mr. Keller's story; I don't know if he is a "fallen away" Catholic or thinks of himself as being "progressive," but either way he shows a disturbingly unsophisticated understanding of the Eucharist for someone who feels comfortable commenting about it publicly.  I have many opinions, but few I choose to share in this space because I know my limitations.  Does this mean I that I never over reach? No, I can put my foot in my mouth with the best of them, but generally I try to stick to what I know.  The Eucharist is a mystery.  Not in the Agatha Christie sense of the word, but in the sense that there is subtlety and nuance to the doctrine that can never be fully understood, that demands faith first.  Faith always needs to come first, then understanding follows, along with humility.  Without faith we are left with the sophomoric statement Mr. Keller made Sunday. Without humility we stop trying to go deeper because we think we know it all already.

If there is misunderstanding about the Eucharist out there part of the blame has to be placed on bad catechesis, but there is also the relativist mentality of our contemporary age.  The spirit of our time tells us that we control reality and its meaning in a radical sense.  We write the definitions that fit us, without reference to tradition or precedents.  If we find the True Presence difficult to accept, we go ahead and make the Eucharist mean what we want it to mean, or mean nothing at all.  Scripture, Tradition, what the faith community has believed down the ages is irrelevant.  All that matters is now and my own needs and my own ego. This brings me to the issue of marriage and how it is defined.

Marriage is a public institution with private implications, but we tend to look at it the other way around. Rather than married life and family life being synonymous they are viewed as being distinct.  Sex and procreation have also been cleaved apart in our contraceptive culture.  Sex, family life and all of marriage's constituent parts are now dismembered and set up like a buffet that we can pick and choose from.  Marriage is redefined to fit the needs of the individual exclusively without reference to the community.  We know somewhere in our hearts that the family is the building block of society, so we redefine family to fit our individualistic view of the world.

Mr. Keller commented in his article that he didn't want elected officials limiting his fellow citizen's civil rights because of their religious values.  I don't think it's going out on a limb to conclude he's referencing the gay marriage debate.  Marriage is a human right, but what is marriage?  If you're talking about the union of a man and a women for their own benefit and the good of their children, I'm with you.  If your talking about a vocation of service that grows and nurtures the family, and by extension the society, I'm on board.   Marriage is these things and much more.  Gay relationships simply can never fully encompass what marriage is, and no editorialist, activist or civil law can make it so.

When I was a child growing up in the early 70's our next door neighbors, a middle aged couple whose kids were adults and on their own, moved away and two middle aged men moved in.  I was five or six years old and didn't know what straight was let alone gay.  I know that my father wasn't happy when they built a tall wood fence along the property line to conceal their back yard.  (I understood the objection to be one of esthetics since the unfinished side would be facing our yard).  Otherwise they were good neighbors, and after the initial controversy was settled everybody seemed to get along well.  We moved a few years later, and they lived there together for better than a decade.  One day years later my mother and I got to talking about the old neighborhood, and she told me that she had heard that one of the two had died of AIDS and that his partner had moved away.  I was sad to hear the news.  They were both kind to me, and I only had fond memories of them. I don't doubt the love and devotion the two men had for each other and the pain the surviving partner must have experienced.  But all my sympathy doesn't change my mind that what ever life they shared, what ever name you want to put on it, it simply wasn't a marriage.

Marriage, as I've written, is the building block of society.  It is not primarily a private relationship that allows the couple to fulfill an emotional need. Certainly our individual needs are important, but in marriage they come second, maybe third.  The couple lives now, not for themselves but for each other and the children that are a living testament to their love.  In the family the life of the couple is extended through time.  As individuals they will die eventually, but their children and their children's children keep the memory of their union alive in a tangible way.  The hard work that they do builds up and ensures the continuation of the Church and the society.  A homosexual relationship can, at best, shadow this reality, (and I'm being generous conceding that much) but can never equal it.  Did that gay couple have a right to share a house and a life together in peace?  Yes, I believe that they did.  But what they had was essentially private and passing.  What ever it was, it simply wasn't a marriage in the way the human race has always understood it up to now.  It was a personal arrangement with no public interest, and therefore not needing or meriting governmental sanction.

This debate goes deeper than marriage as a social institution.  At the root of this entire debate is how we  view human sexuality, and no discussion on this topic can be complete without examining that question.  I'll save that for next time.