Attention & ambiguity

...It involves what we have accepted, or reacted against, from our personal history, our childhood and young adulthood...

...The knowledge we can know apart from this can be experienced only in prayer and in waiting...

...In addition, there is an inadequacy to the simply utilitarian approach to sexuality -- that it exists solely for the reproduction of the species is not quite disproved, but almost is, by the existence of female orgasm, which is not at all necessary to conception...

...At the same time we must be "as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves," people who know the Mammon of Iniquity and can tell a con when they see one...

...Nothing he had received from mainstream religion had brought the message across to him...

...It isn't easy, but it is necessary, to be critical of what needs criticizing in evangelical movements, and at the same time to see that our own embarrassment when we meet their members is sometimes an unwillingness, influenced more than anything else by what other people might think, to be as excited as we should be about what we claim to believe...

...If we are really waiting for the return of Christ, whatever that may be like -- and it isn't up to us to know -- we should be like people who are capable of attending to any sign...

...We, however, believe what we do because we are clear-sighted and read the facts right...

...One of them involves contraception, a subject on which almost everyone seems to have an opinion which closes out all others...

...The opponent is the one who believes what he does because of motives which are base or unenlightened or shallow and trendy...

...To see another human being as a kind of conversion-fodder is wrong, and many of the people who ask if we are saved (maddeningly sure that they themselves are) seem to be trying to convince themselves by their earnestness even more than they try to convince us...

...There are other areas, obviously, where the same thing can be said...

...Because of my background and my friends, these battles seem more important to me than the quarrels between liberal Protestants and their more evangelical fellows, or the disagreements between those evangelicals who are fundamentalist and those who are not...

...I am tempted to locate this battle close to home: Orthodox Christians sometimes accuse one another of rationalism on the one hand or unthinking traditionalism on the other, and American Catholics have a quarrel going on between pro-choice and pro-life Catholics, and a much more important dispute between the Vatican and Charles Curran...

...T HIS UNKNOWING should lead to an attentiveness to those who disagree with us...

...I have enough elements of each side in me, and enough irritation with some aspects.of those elements, to sympathize with a lot of what both sides want to get across to a larger public, and to distrust the whole enterprise of persuasion...

...There is something scandalous about the .intensity and sincerity of both the conservative and liberal visions...

...But something more needs to be said about contraception, and religious conservatives are saying it...

...He and his wife, who was also involved in the same group, had gone through some rough times in their marriage, and he had been the sort of man who seems afraid of affection or tenderness...

...To see contraception as something which may be necessary but which has a built-in darkness is not easy...

...John the Evangelist said, "we do not know what we shall be...

...we have not taken the radical implications of this to heart...

...A failure to appreciate this inevitably reduces our expectation of redemption to our own set of dreams...

...To allow both of these sets of ideas to inform us as fully as they should means that we live with an ambiguity which does not make us happy...

...The convenience of contraception leads us to think that our lives are a kind of real estate to be developed, a story we write ourselves, and if we focus exclusively on this idea, if it becomes completely convincing to us, some essential mystery and openness disappears...

...But is that all that embarrasses us...

...Such obviously historical phenomena as the early ecumenical councils, however much historical struggle may have been entangled in their debates, have enough of the Holy Spirit in them that we can see them as revealing God's will for the church...

...The truth is finally something we experience, not an idea or abstraction, and the Christian parallel to the scientist is the person whose life is turned in the direction of God in prayer, not through the exploration of ideas about God -- which are a little like ideas about planets circling other stars, since we can have no idea of God which is not false or fanciful...

...This is my own limitation, though: something very important is being neglected in all of these fights...

...We find it very difficult to admit that much of what we think of as true and certain comes to us through a complex inheritance which has only partially to do with rationality...

...Even granting all of the above, which a lot of people would not, something new and potentially terrible was introduced into our thinking about sexuality and reproduction by contraceptive technology...

...One of them involves the style of some evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants and some charismatic Catholics...

...It embarrasses the rest of us...

...It is fairly common to assume the stupidity of an opponent...

...Let me add another to it: if there is any truth at all to this, it should make us very tentative about the absolute truth of our own position, and it should make us eager to find a vision which is broader and less confined to the feeding of ego.., because it is less a concern for truth than the protection of our sense of the self that leads us to certainty...

...Without this we are less than human...

...the thought that someone reasonable could disagree with us is a challenge to our certainty and raises the disturbing possibility that we might not have a franchise on the truth...

...A lot of these arguments will seem convincing to some people and repellent to others...

...But we should at least recognize that reason and knowing must be compassionate to be fully what they are meant to be, and we have to cultivate a humble willingness not to know, where we really cannot...

...What counts most here is attentiveness, alertness, care for all the small signals as well as the most obvious ones...

...The idea of looking forward to what redemption is supposed to mean, in a cosmic as well as a personal sense, is an important and neglected part of the Christian art of knowing...

...I am still uncomfortable with their religious jargon, but there is something genuine and transforming about their faith...

...It is scandalous because in a fundamental way it discredits the Christian message toward which both sides claim to point...

...I began to wonder about this when someone I know pretty well got involved in an evangelical movement and went through a peri'od in which he tried to convert all his friends...

...The quarrel is a distraction which impedes the mission Christ gave us: we are supposed to get the message out to others...

...People on the left tend to regard those on the right with disdain, or at the very least they regard their ideas scornfully and in a reductionist way, and those on the right do the same thing to people on the left...

...I am one of those who finds them convincing...

...The good scientist, to make a limited but maybe helpful comparison, is not as interested in holding on to a model of the truth as he or she is in allowing that model, in particular, to lead to a deeper and more accurate picture...

...The major difference between Catholic, Orthodox, and some Anglican views of the church on the one hand, and most of Protestantism on the other, is the belief that the Holy Spirit really is present within this history...

...What happened was that his experience led him to take prayer seriously as a transforming possibility...

...Something real happened there, and a discomfort with a style of hymn, a jargon, and an off-putting enthusiasm almost kept me from seeing it...

...Even this belief, the one I have just advanced, is an example of a relativism which is fairly common in modern Western circles...

...Perhaps that can be blamed on the churches he had attended, or maybe not -- but what cannot be denied is that his evangelical involvement came as a grace...

...My point here, anyway, is that people on both sides of the issue have something important to teach one another...

...Whatever we know, including the belief in creation from nothing, we know first from a revelation which includes Scripture and the experience of the Jews and the church...

...JOHN GARVEY 25 April 1986:231...

...Those who believe that contraception is a wonderful thing point to some truths which should be attended to by those who believe that it is clearly evil...

...For example, the belief that the pursuit of personal happiness is all-important, and that happiness is the result of the satisfaction of desire is, in fact, a cultural artifact as limited as any similar array of beliefs from any tribe in any period of human history...

...I find their biblical-fundamentalism intellectually, religiously, and morally untenable...

...Both of them have moved through the initial convert-enthusiasm to something quieter and deeper...

...There really is a population problem, and there are people who are too poor to care adequately for children, and there are women who should, for various physical and sometimes mental reasons, not have children, and there are people for whom methods depending on natural cycles don't work well, and it is easier to give attention to a few children rather than to a great number...

...Perhaps a society with a cultural sense of the tragic could deal with it better than we do...

...It was the belief that a child must be a conscious decision, which has a dreadful corollary: an unplanned child is a mistake...

...At another level -- one we should be more concerned about -- it distracts those of us who think of ourselves as convinced Christians from an understanding of our own darkness and limitations...

...Both the believer and the scientist must learn to wait and watch, sometimes with no very clear evidence or hope...

...Where this comparison is limited, plainly, is that the scientist is dealing with describable and quantifiable truths, while the believer is dealing with the unknowable, with some One known only through the transformation and grace shown in creation, which was drawn forth from nothing by God's compassion...

...We can't, as a result of the openness recommended above (one which may fall away the next time a tract-pusher interrupts me in the middle of an enjoyable meal), refuse to take any position, or to disagree with those whose ideas we find wrong...

...Part of what is being neglected is the fact that both sides in virtually any debate between reasonable people have points worth noting...

...There are a few arguments which ought to be mentioned here...

...We are often right to be embarrassed...

...I think they illustrate the point...

...Alertness, wari(.'.ommonweal: 230ness, attention, a testing of the spirits, and careful listening are all part of what we have to bring to our work as Christians...

...Once the use of natural cycles to limit the number of children was allowed by the church, the argument against forms of contraception which are not abortifacient 'collapses, because a contraceptive intention is allowed...

...He is a friendlier, more joyful man now...

...It involves the place in which we find ourselves within a culture full of truths we think of as self-evident...