Vanity of Vanities

May 22, 2012 By Max Lindenman 2 Comments

Some days, you just wake up to a big, wet kiss from life. This morning, when I logged on Facebook, I found a surprise waiting for me. A friend of mine, whom I will identify by his initial, T., had posted a message on my wall. It read:

Max, Haha just saw some funny pictures of you so sexy lol you have to see them its here

A link to a Twitter page followed.

There was nothing implausible about T. posting such a message, or having such a video. In the first place, that’s a fair sample of T’s diction. Here’s a good rule of thumb for sorting out my Facebook friends: if someone posts clips of Daniil Trifonov playing Chopin’s Études, then I can guaran-damn-tee you he wouldn’t recognize me if he ran me down in his Prius. If, on the other hand, he prefers to go commando where the rules of punctuation and grammar are concerned, chances are he’s a tried and true companion, and we share many fond memories of drinking Tecate ’04 and listening to Kid Rock’s Adagio in G minor.

As for the video — well, I was sure I knew which one he meant. Right after 9/11, in a sort of adult game of cops and robbers meant to soothe the shame we felt over our non-combatant status, my friend Rick and I went skydiving. Rick paid extra to have some guy with a video camera bolted to his helmet follow him on the 11,500-foot trip down. Most of the footage, then, consists of Rick spinning in midair wearing a rictus grin and a stoical jumpmaster. But for a few minutes at the beginning, Rick and I appear together. In one 30-second sequence, we’re standing side-by-side in the hangar, listening as the jumpmaster explains the meaning of the words auxiliary chute. We look like any two guys would look struggling to recall their high school physics lessons in order to form a realistic picture of how a two-mile cliff-dive into a lagoon of sand and scrub might affect their weekend.

T. is also a friend of Rick’s. I know for a fact he has been made to watch that very video at least half a dozen times. In this context, his use of the word “sexy” would surely have been facetious.

Or rather, it would have been facetious for him. For me, it would have contained a statement of fact. Two years before my airborne adventure with Rick, I had decided to grow my hair out. Don’t ask me why; flowing manes on men hadn’t been cool since a plane crash halved Lynyrd Skynyrd, when I was five. Nevertheless, like I do most of my inexplicable, lemming-like instincts, I followed this one with a whole heart. By the time I jumped, my hair was down past my shoulders. In my humble opinion, I did look sexy. When a Lakota co-worker told me that my scalp would have brought as much cachet to one of her ancestors as the Heisman Trophy brings to its winners, I hugged myself over a successful fashion statement.

Since I am unable to keep a camera for more than three weeks without losing or breaking the thing, this video represented the sole surviving evidence of my Merovingian phase. But I didn’t want it only for my personal use; if I may say so, I’m much more generous than that. Two months ago, when I announced I was embarking on a campaign of physical re-generation, my readers — many of them Facebook friends — offered their huzzahs. Touched, I made sure to post evidence of progress: the details of a workout routine one day, a friend’s Blackberry shot of myself in sporting wear the next. Finding and re-posting the video of the Hair Days would serve as one more reminder that they were backing a firm with a respectable history, one whose recent Chapter 11 filing counted for nothing but an embarassing fluke. Like I said, I pride myself on my generosity.

Excited for myself and my stakeholders, I clicked the link on the Twitter page. It led to a Facebook login page. This seemed strange, since I was already logged into Facebook, but I wrote it off as more Zuckerbergian prudery, like the rules against bullying and the “promotion of cutting, eating disorders and drug use.” Logging in as directed took me to a page with a video viewing screen. Blocking the screen was a very unwelcome message bearing the YouTube logo: “PLAYING THIS VIDEO REQUIRES THE LATEST MEDIA PLAYER UPDATE.”

There was, thank God, a download button. But when I clicked it, one of those windows with a red X in the corner flashed on my screen, accompanied by a clanking sound. The gist of the message was that something had gone wrong, and my computer would have to shut down and restart itself. Fine, thinks I. Patience is another of my virtues. When Windows rebooted, I logged straight back into Facbook and followed the steps faithfully, only to hear the same horrid clank and read the same grim announcement.

I’ll have everyone know I am not a cut-and-run man. Whenever anything really important is at stake, I refuse to appease failure. I stay the course and gut it out, like a Clemenceau or a Cheney. After three or four more restarts, I decided to find this mysterious media player on my own. I went to Java’s homepage and downloaded their latest. Then I clicked over to RealPlayer’s homepage and downloaded their latest. Both times, I logged back into Facebook expecting to find the video viewable, perhaps a still of me in my ponytail covering the screen. Both times, my designs were frustrated.

So I decided to beat a strategic retreat. Changing gears, I, wrote some press releases for my friend’s SEO firm, read a few articles where Salon readers confronted their childhood bullies, and told myself new downloads took a while to work their way into an operating system, like charcoal heat into a steak. Just as I was starting to read something about Greece’s new far-right Smegma Party, or whatever it’s called, I glanced up at my tool bar and noticed a pending Facbeook event.

It was a friend’s “Like.” Apparently, I — or something pretending to be me — had posted on his wall a message along the lines of: “OMG! I just got a free i-pad! This is the best day of my life!!! Don’t you wish you were me?” I recognized it right away for a forgery. I never had an old i-pad; it would have gone the way of my cameras and, come to that, my cell phones. This imposter must have had quite a work ethic, for within seconds, I found myself facing a small flood of messages from friends who sounded both happy for me and curious to know what I’d been smoking.

Long story short: one computer-savvy lady explained that T. had never posted the message in the first place. Some hacker had posted it in his name. As soon as I logged in to the page behind the link, I, too, suffered a hacking. “Your computer needs a full scrubbing,” she told me, in tones halfway between those of a mechanic and a colon specialist.

I changed my password, and I suppose I’ll have to reboot my whole hard drive using my startup disk. There must be a lesson in here somewhere, raw material for a life-changing homily. But I’ll leave someone else to pan for it. I’m no preachypants, and besides, I’m due at the gym. A hard drive can be rebooted; hard delts and traps have to be earned.

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Fr. Williams and the Grind of Celibacy

May 19, 2012 By Max Lindenman 7 Comments

They say you know you’re getting old when cops start looking like kids. I say you catch your first whiff of your own grave-dirt when priests start looking like kids.

This first occurred to me two years ago, when I attended an ordination ceremony for three new priests of the Diocese of Phoenix. One, whom I’ll call Fr. D, I knew slightly though Communion and Liberation. (Since CL doesn’t ask its members to whistle, or screech, or boil over, or whatever adorable term Opus Dei uses for a formal declaration of commitment, I suppose I’m still a member, even if my last meeting was over a year ago.) Fr. D was about ten years younger than me, and it showed. He smiled constantly, and bounced through his duties with shining eyes, like a sacerdotal Tigger. He revered our bishop — whose head was then being sought by a large section of the public, including many Catholics — as a son reveres his father, and not the father in Sling Blade, either.

One night, I thought I saw Fr. D.’s laddish high spirits assert themselves in an unexpected way. He and I were having drinks with another CL member, a young Italian woman I’ll call Bettina. Bettina was a memora domini, and I rate her decision to consecrate her virginity a sadistic prank on my entire gender. In her person, she combined the fawnlike grace of Audrey Hepburn with the dark smolder of Irene Pappas, and — oh, never mind. You get the idea. Anyway, emboldened by the beer, Father and I started practicing our Italian. Both of us, it quickly emerged, would have had to spend a year under the Tuscan sun before we could speak the language like Tonto spoke English. I myself have exactly 50 phrases to my name, every one of them incorporating some dysphemism for “penis” or “testicles.” Given the nature of the company, that left me all but mute.

But on at least one point of usage, I was ahead of Father. He addressed Bettina as Doña. “That’s Spanish,” I told him, taking no pain to sound like anything but a big, pedantic jerk. Just then, for the briefest of moments, Fr. D shot me a look of profound irritation and profound contempt. “What a weenie you are,” it said. As it disappeared, it took with it one of my childish illusions. Just because a man has formally sworn off sex, doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy basking in the good opinion of women. Even if Father barred the vestibule of his mind to the slightest thought of jumping Bettina’s lovely bones, being corrected in front of her could still bruise his masculine amour-propre.

This week, the world got a much more compelling reminder of just how unnatural it is for a fully-equipped man to make himself into a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven. Scholar, TV commentator and Legionary of Christ Fr. Thomas Williams confessed to fathering a love-child, and announced he is leaving public ministry for a year. Though Williams says the child’s mother was neither a student of his nor under his spiritual direction, a report made to the Vatican by a former Legion priest alleges Williams did carry on affairs with students at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum University, where Williams served as an instructor.

Though Williams has comported himself as a model of contrition — no histrionics, no conspiracy theorizing or cries of “Help, help! I’m being repressed!” — it’s still stomach-turning news. Many among the faithful are embittered. After reading some of the posts in Deacon Greg Kandra’s combox, a priest felt moved to plead for understanding on Williams’ behalf. He writes: “[Williams] is human – weak – vulnerable – and I bet lonely; and to that, I can personally relate.” Without trivializing Williams’ offenses, or the pain and embarassment they’ve inflicted on countless people, this man can guess all too easily at some of the reasons he committed them.

“To the average person,” writes sociologist and former Benedictine priest A.W. Richard Sipe, the “perfect and perpetual continence” required of priests by Canon 277 “poses a seemingly impossible task.” He adds: “No researcher so far has assessed that more than 50 percent of Roman Catholic clergy at any one time are in fact practicing celibacy.” If these studies are accurate, and unless anyone wants do away with mandatory clerical celibacy, then the time seems ripe to accept a paradox. For many priests, the “daily dying to himself…for the love of Christ and His Kingdom” prescribed in Sacerdotalis Caelibatus is an on-again, off-again thing in practice. At some point since his ordination, the guy presiding over Mass in your parish may have slept with someone. He may even have fallen in love.

For some people the implications of such a thought are as stark as they are obvious: Father is nothing but a hypocrite and a son of a bitch. In some cases, this judgment could be fair enough. Even if Canon 277 didn’t exist, using priestly clout to talk someone into the sack would be as unethical as a doctor’s seduction of a patient. It might also signal a predatory turn of mind. But status within the Church doesn’t always translate to power within a relationship. When Milwaukee archbishop Rembert Weakland began an affair with theology student Paul Marcoux, he found his hierarch’s prestige no match for Marcoux’s ruthlessness. Very quickly, Marcoux began squeezing him for money; in writing to refuse, and to end the relationship, Weakland was reduced to pleading.

Weakland’s subsequent use of archdiocesan funds to pay off Marcoux when Marcoux threatened a a lawsuit was shameful. I am not among those who would dignify him as a tragic hero, especially not if he allowed his experience with Marcoux to prejudice him against minors who alleged sexual abuse on the part of Milwaukee priests. But in his sign-off letter to Marcoux, Weakland spoke of his celibate vocation as one who’d gained a deeper understanding of it:

During the last months I have come to know how strained I was … I just did not seem to be honest with God. I felt I was fleeing from Him, from facing Him. I know what the trouble was: I was letting your conscience take over for me and I couldn’t live with it. I felt like the world’s worst hypocrite. So gradually I came back to the importance of celibacy in my life … I knew I would have to face up to it and take seriously that commitment I first made thirty-four years ago.

It’s tempting to read this cynically — as the desperate words of a man trying to wiggle out of an uncomfortable situation. But in his renewed appreciation for the exclusivity God demands, Weakland sounds very much like the nun quoted by Sally Cline in Women, Passion and Celibacy. Referring to her “romantic” involvement with another nun, the woman said: that the worst thing “(though at times it seemed the best) [was] the intense focus on each other.” She sounds like she knows what it means to farm out the work of her conscience.

I found that quote from Cline’s book in another book, Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk. Norris interviews Benedictine sisters extensively on celibacy, and most agree that falling in love represents an irreplacable part of their formation as celibates. “The worst sin against celibacy,” one prioress said, “is to pretend not to have any affections at all, To fall in love is celibacy at work.” She concludes, “Celibacy is a vow to put up all our feelings, acceptable or not, up to our hearts and put them into consciousness through prayer.”

She’s talking about love in general, not about sex specifically. It’s unclear just how many priests in that 50-plus percent actually love the people they’re breaking their vows with. Nevertheless, just as many nuns Norris interviewed learned the true meaning of celibacy only after they’d fallen in love (usually at a distance, and with a priest), it seems to have taken a sexual relationship to teach Weakland the same lesson. Or, to put it in more negative, AA-type terms, some may need to hit rock bottom before they can begin the climb up.

For Weakland, that lesson came at a very steep price to many people. If Williams decides to remain in the priesthood, the same will be said for him. Forgiving them may be possible only through gritted teeth. But while we’re gritting, let’s spare some sympathetic and admiring thoughts for all those priests whose falls have been less expensive (and, if it needs saying, with persons over the age of consent). According to the bulk of the evidence, answering the call to lifelong contienence is exhausting and enormously difficult — as difficult as Fr. D must have found resisting the call to deck me.

The Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington bears the inscription: “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” Given the Church’s general preference for secrecy, I’d like to build a monument to the unknown, imperfect celibate. It would, of course, be an obelisk, and it would stand next to the entrance of some popular basilica. Incised in the base would be these words:

“AT SPOTS LIKE THESE HAVE STOOD IN TARNISHED GLORY MANY SINNERS, KNOWN BUT TO GOD, TO WHOMEVER THEY WERE CANOODLING, AND IN SOME CASES, TO WHOEVER HAS ACCESS TO THE FILES IN THE CHANCERY. THEY DID THEIR BEST.”

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Fair Play for the Girl Scouts!

May 17, 2012 By Max Lindenman 7 Comments

A friend of mine, actually one of my old parish’s most accomplished busybodies, once talked her way into the hotel room of a 1950′s rock guitarist when he was performing in the Phoenix area. Her goal — her sole goal — was to get the legend’s autograph for a friend of hers.

After sizing my friend up, the man smiled. Cocking his head toward another man, who was holding a camera, he asked her, “Do you object to pictures?” When my friend looked puzzled, he asked again, “Do you object to pictures?” Finally, it dawned on her that he was really asking, “Is it okay with you if my friend here photographs us while we’re having sex?”

My friend bridled, took umbrage, flew into a state of the highest dudgeon imaginable. With finger wagging, she addressed the aging satyr: “Mister _____, I’ll have you know I was a Girl Scout. I’m no groupie! All I want is for you to put your signature on this piece of paper, for my friend, who idolizes you, though I can’t imagine why. He saw you play at _______.” She named a ballroom in Connecticut.

By this point in his career, this performer had made the transition to nostalgia act without downsizing his headliner’s ego. Even Keith Richards, who considered himself deep in the man’s artistic debt (and who had managed to get along, more or less, with Mick Jagger for over two decades) found him hard to take. He had also been convicted of a sex crime. But something about my friend’s straight-backed rebuke brought out the rake’s gallant side. Picking up her reference, he asked, “That place is closed now, right?” My friend nodded, and the two fell into a pleasant conversation. After about half an hour, he signed her paper, and she left triumphant.

Extracting the Girl Scout training from this friend of mine would have been impossible. Easier to deprogram a Moonie. In tandem with the Catholic Church, the GSUSA had poured the concrete that held her value structure together. “Always leave a place looking better than when you found it,” she’d lecture me, and had no sympathy for my argument that cigarette butts add reverse chic to picnic spots. Once, while catering a retreat — one of her chief charismata — she discovered she’d overestimated the amount of milk required by half. Me? I’d have yelled, “MILK FIGHT!” and it would have been on. This goody-goody-friend of mine insisted on hauling the overage down to Maggie’s Place, a local house of hospitality for expectant mothers.

Not only did this woman follow a neurotic compulsion to do the right thing, she insisted on doing it for the right reasons. If I rouse myself to throw someone’s discarded Coke bottle into the recycle bin, I expect to be inducted into the Orde Pour le Mérite. My friend, on the other hand, would warn, “Don’t do anything for the badges,” meaning merit badges. In her book, virtue rewarded hardly counted as virtue at all.

As grating as I often found this just-canonize-me-now attitude, I hope the bishops find generous traces of it as their Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth investigates GSUSA materials it fears are “problematic.” Exactly what sort of heterodoxy the committee expects to find is unclear; in his announcement, committee chairman Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Ft. Wayne, Indiana doesn’t say. But among culture warriors nationwide, the buzz against Girl Scouts has been building to a roar for some time.

The Huffington Post reports that a Colorado troop became a target for critics by accepting a biological boy who considered himself transgendered. Just this past February, GSUSA spokeswoman Michelle Tompkins issued a letter refuting what she says were false allegations broadcast via EWTN, in a program titled Women of Grace. According to Tompkins, GSUSA has no relationship with Planned Parenthood, and no plans for creating one. Neither did it have any hand in distributing a Planned Parenthood brochure that turned up at a United Nations event. The HuffPo identifies the brochure as “Happy, Healthy and Hot,” and says its purpose is advising HIV-positive young people “how to safely lead active sex lives.”

But for the Girl Scouts’ ciritcs, it may not be necessary that, in Girl Scout usage, the “head” in “head/shoulders/knees and toes/(knees and toes)” refer to the head of Baphomet, once venerated by Templars. The real problem may lie in a general orientation. Mary Rice Hasson, a visiting fellow in Catholic studies at the think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center, calls the GSUSA leadership “reflexively liberal.” Dismissing the generally positive review given the Girl Scouts by National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry executive director Bob McCarty as “whitewashing,” she predicts that the Girl Scouts and the Church are on a “collision course.”

I find myself hoping that this collision will not end too bloodily. It’s true, when it comes to ideology, the Girl Scouts are not the Boy Scouts. The GSUSA may not order its members to become atheists or homosexuals, but unlike the Boy Scouts, they leave room in the ranks for both types. If GSUSA has no formal relationship with Planned Parenthood, it does belong to the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, whose spokespeople have called for “an environment where [girls] can freely and openly discuss issues of sex and sexuality.” It would be very hard for a Catholic Girl Scout to avoid concluding that people who contest Church teachings are worthy objects of fellowship.

That conclusion seems like nothing more than common sense. It’s the opposite conclusion — that one rejected doctrine anathematizes an organization the way one drop of African blood was once thought to make a person black — that looks persnickety. If the Bishops’ Conference wants to cut its own ties to organizations like the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights, which supports same-sex marriage and abortion, that’s one thing. If it wants to prohibit Catholic universities from honoring public figures who buck the Church’s line, it’s at least operating within its jurisdiction. But to reach outside of its own organizational limits to make demands of institutions that include Catholics, but which never claimed to be Catholic, is to reach into strong-arm territory. If this is evangelization, it’s not a style of evangelization I see winning many converts.

Indeed, that may not even be the bishops’ goal. Implicit in their latest move seems to be a fear that no young person could remain an orthodox Catholic if exposed to any opposing point of view — roughly, “How are you’re going to keem ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree”? If I were a young Catholic, I’m sure I’d find that inference unflattering, to say the least. Lately it’s become fashionable among Catholics to claim persecution, Cardinal George’s prediction that his successor would die in jail being only the most melodramatic example. But I cannot find an instance where the GSUSA, acting in odium fidei, shunned, harrassed, or even denied preferment to a Catholic. If the barbarians won’t come to the gates, then, it seems, we’ll drag the gates out to the barbarians.

Among their merit badges, the Girl Scouts offer one called “My Promise, My Faith.” According to the GSUSA home page, “A girl earns the My Promise, My Faith pin by carefully examining the Girl Scout Law and directly tying it to tenets of her faith.” It represents a lesson on living in a pluralistic society; only though a complementary badge with a name like “You Heretic Knuckleheads Are My Cross” could that lesson be more thorough.

Cervantes — whom I’m quoting via Florence King — once defined a lady as someone so determined to be respected that she could make herself so even in an army of soldiers. Change “army of soldiers” to “horny rock has-been,” and you’ll have a fair picture of my Girl Scout friend. Throw in stewardship and (occcasionally) a sanctimoniousness that made me want to garrotte her with her own kerchief, and you’ll have your case that Catholicism and the Girl Scout Promise can go together like milk and Peanut Butter Tagalongs.

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