A really rambling post.<\/p>\n
Now that my book is out I\u2019ve been doing a lot of interviews, and in many of them I\u2019ve been asked to tell my conversion story. A huge part of my conversion involved realizing that the Catholic Church wasn\u2019t what I\u2019d thought it was. For example, I had this image that the Church opposed and rejected the human body\u2013the beauty of the body, the joy of the senses\u2013and denigrated all sensual beauty and pleasure, from the beauty of a Japanese maple to the ecstasy of sex. (I\u2019m not sure how I reconciled this belief with my love of a lot of Catholic artwork and religious\/liturgical items, like reliquaries, but hey, I was a teenager, coherence is overrated etc etc.) Friends of mine pointed out that this isn\u2019t what the Church is. God is the Creator; His creation is not only begun, but sustained in every moment, solely through His love. The beauty of our bodies and the world around us is His fingerprints.<\/p>\n
But when I said this stuff in interviews, some of the interviewers rightly pushed back on it. If the body is so great, how come you\u2019ve accepted celibacy?<\/em>, they asked. I tended to get pretty defensive about this, which is a sign that the interviewers were picking up on a real thing I was grappling with but hadn\u2019t fully acknowledged.<\/p>\n A couple things I\u2019ve read recently have helped me tease out some elements of the way I approach these questions. One is that beautiful piece, \u201cHow Should Secular People Approach Sacred Art?<\/a>\u201d Pelagia Horgan\u2019s descriptions of Fra Angelico\u2019s artwork\u2013and the luminous reproductions of the work itself\u2013show so clearly how a celibate monk can enter completely into the beauty and meaning of the physical world and the human body. The painter\u2019s attention kisses the world into color: the rippling wings of the angel, the deep soaking blues and fairy-tale forest greens, the golden flesh of the blessed. There\u2019s a kind of mercy in his work, an acceptance.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always loved these painters who heighten our experience of the body and the sensual world: de Zurbaran\u2019s scraped and glowing saints; Sanchez de Cotan\u2019s sacramental vegetables<\/a>. These artworks clear away the clutter of our ideas and projections, and show us the world a little closer to how it looks to God. Still grimy, still bruised and bloodied, but utterly loved and understood.<\/p>\n So then is sex simply irrelevant to the meaning and beauty of the body and the world? Can I just say, \u201cWhy do you guys think celibacy has anything to do with the beauty of the body?\u201d and leave it at that? I mean, nobody\u2019s gonna have sex with a cardoon (\u2026please don\u2019t tell me otherwise) and yet when I look at Sanchez de Cotan\u2019s work it\u2019s visceral, electric, feverish. You feel the rough, callused hand of the Creator God.<\/p>\n But no, sex is\u2013can be\u2013one way we enter into this beauty of the body and the physical world. That \u201cBroom People<\/a>\u201d mindset, sex as ecstatic contact with the truth of our nature as created beings, sex as prayer of thanksgiving: That\u2019s something I think I\u2019ve experienced to a very limited extent, and long for.<\/p>\n (It\u2019s easy for this ecstatic view of sex to become wishful thinking. There\u2019s a reason the characters in \u201cBroom People\u201d are adolescents\u2013and, I think, a reason the narrator is a straight guy. Straight women get a lot of painful lessons in the less theological aspects of sex. I\u2019ve been in a few conversations where some well-meaning celibate gay person is like, \u201cI love<\/em> the theology of the body! It\u2019s so beautiful!\u201d, and actual married Catholics are all, \u201c\u2026Yeah uh, it\u2019s great I guess, marriage isn\u2019t really like that though. Or married sex. No offense, honey.\u201d)<\/p>\n I think David Foster Wallace is onto something with this list: \u201cDrugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties\u2014all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name\u2019s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion\u2014these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.\u201d (which I found here<\/a>, so no clue if he really said it, research is for losers)<\/p>\n If what you want is to live in your skin, to live in and love the world rather than just \u201ccoping with\u201d it, then yeah, there are things which art, (some kinds of) sex, and prayer have in common. I don\u2019t get to do one of those things, due to factors outside my control<\/a>. That\u2019s true of plenty of people (let\u2019s all shed exactly no tears for men who whine about being \u201cinvoluntarily celibate\u201d like women owe them something) but it\u2019s okay to say that it is a loss.<\/p>\n In a certain way realizing that sex can be analogous to prayer helps me better understand and accept celibacy. Sometimes when I pray I am able to experience in some way God as Creator. In the book I describe this as \u201csee[ing] the Crucifixion shining through the apparent world,\u201d but it isn\u2019t always quite that<\/em> flamboyantly Spanish. Sometimes it\u2019s more like the merciful light which flows through Fra Angelico\u2019s work. These moments are examples of what Catholics call \u201cconsolations.\u201d They\u2019re gifts of God, dispensed by Him seemingly at random. Infrequent, for me, but memorable. They aren\u2019t the point of prayer, and you pray whether or not you receive these consolations; you accept that God will give you these experiences or not and it\u2019s up to Him.<\/p>\n