Enabled for the kingdom
Yaghjian, Lucretia B.
ENABLED FOR THE KINGDOM A REFLECTION ON CELIBACY LUCRETIA B. YAGHJIAN Praise the lives you did not choose. They will heal you, tell your story, fight for you. Marge Piercy, "The Sabbath of...
...but no more so, I argue, than the evidence we will always have with us of marital immaturity, instability, and infidelity and the tragic "disabilities" accruing upon the children of such marriages...
...For some, celibacy is a life's condition rather than an actively chosen "given...
...Nevertheless, those who choose this "disability" do so not only for institutional reasons, but for intuitive reasons that reason itself does not know...
...Where is our ability to see celibacy and marriage not in competition, but as complementary ways of being for the Kingdom...
...The scandals and the perversions of some of those who have made the choice for celibacy we will always have with us, but marriages made in heaven are no less vulnerable to sins of the flesh...
...For those who accept celibacy as a prerequisite to a religious vocation, there are as many who accept marriage as a condition of living with the person one loves, and for the sake of that loved one, "forsaking all others...
...Marge Piercy, "The Sabbath of Mutual Respect," from Circles on the Water: Selected Poems lthough the Reverend Paul E. Dinter's article, "Disabled for the Kingdom: Celibacy, Scripture, and Tradition" (Commonweal, October 12, ! 990), must be commended for its prophetic critique of the "heroic" model of clerical celibacy, his alternative model of the celibate as one "disabled for the Kingdom" is problematic...
...People choose marriage and celibacy for a multitude of reasons, but marriage is confirmed and rewarded in our society in ways that celibacy no longer is...
...hen I ask again in the light of all this, "What models of celibacy do we have, and what models do we need...
...For others (and indeed for most) marriage means progeny, and a continuation of one's heritage which is often, for the celibate, the most difficult sacrifice of all...
...The choice for ecclesiastical celibacy, on the other hand, is compulsory, and requires repudiations which one might not otherwise have chosen...
...I do not have children of my own, but if I did, I would want them to know that there are choices in life open to them that Bud Anderson whose "father knew best" and the Simpsons have not dreamed of...
...That some of those reasons may signal emotional limitation and immaturity, we have had ample evidence in the recent press...
...This is a difficult question to ask when so many in the church--both celibate and lay--are asking whether we need celibacy at all...
...Does that mean, however, that we tell our daughters and sons not to choose marriage...
...Growing up female and Protestant in the fifties was tantamount to being taught that the only fate worse than being an old maid was that of being a nun, and I learned that cultural lesson very well...
...When I was a sophomore in college, my first professor-mentor encouraged me not to model myself after a distinguished, but unmarried, woman professor in the same department...
...I remember my own Protestant upbringing, which offered me no models of celibacy beyond those terrifying pre-Vatican II nuns who inhabitated a mysterious, habit-swathed world so far from my own as to be on another planet...
...And are there not times in our lives when an inexplicable longing for the road we have not taken takes us by surprise, whether we are surrounded by spouses, children and grandchildren, or grieving our lack of them...
...on the contrary, I suspected every nun I saw of being the wicked witch of the West in disguise, and I thanked God often that I wasn't one of their pupils...
...but I disagree with his too-easy equation of marriage with the psychosexual model of mature adult choice...
...Where is the purity of heart to will one thing in marriage or in celibacy...
...However we may struggle politically for the end of compulsory celibacy or for the institution of a married clergy, the poetry of our life choices is written in another key...
...it limited my imagination of vocation, and it denied me a cultural dream which "cradle Catholics" take for granted, whether or not they embrace it...
...For others, celibacy is mandated by a prior call to will one thing...
...We don't want that life for you," he said emphatically--and there the matter ended...
...Many years earlier, in awe of Martine's purity and ashamed of his passion, the young officer Loewenhielm had fled her father's pious flock, married a woman befitting his ambitions in life, and devoted himself to a military career...
...Auden's Gabriel, I would still assure them that ...it lies Within your power of choosing to Conceive the Child who chooses you...
...The speaker of this profound prophecy admittedly trembled before personal choices which were free of ecclesiastical or political mandates...
...I would hope that Mother Theresa and Oscar Romero would be among their heroes, and that women and men choosing religious life and priesthood at the brink of the twenty-first century would be among their friends...
...On the one occasion that the local parish priest offered a friend and me a ride home from a late commuter train, I was scolded severely for trusting anyone "just because he wears his collar backward...
...that people still take vows of celibacy for the love of God and neighbor, and not merely to meet the Vatican's requirements or to mask neuroses...
...but I must also praise the lives I did not choose, for they have--as Marge Piercy wrote, "healed me, told my story, fought for me...
...For the sake of their father and the ascetic Scandinavian sect for whom he was founder and minister, she and her sister had never married...
...Moreover, the inexaustible repertoire of "nun's stories" with which those schoolmates regaled me did nothing to get me to a nunnery...
...It is the celibate woman or man today who chooses "the road less traveled by," and in this climate that choice must resonate beyond the entrance requirements of an authoritarian or anachroLUCRETIA B. YAGHJIAN teaches writing at the Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...A wedding band is not an infallible sign of psychosexual maturity, any more than a clerical collar or a religious vow is an incontrovertible sign of "disability...
...In the rosy flush of the Veuve Cliquot 1860 reserved especially for him by Babette, he sees his life not as a culmination of choices made and refused, but as a continuum of choices granted----even those which were refused...
...Finding himself seated across the table from her so many years later, the general contemplates his road not taken in a vision which he shares with the gathered company...
...For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another...
...While my Catholic schoolmates were learning about Saint Theresa and Elizabeth of Hungary, I was reading The Nun's Story and I Leapt Over the Wall with a morbid fascination...
...There are as many reasons to remain celibate as there are to be married, and many of those reasons do not eventuate in priesthood or religious community...
...Where is the diversity of human personality and vocation...
...Yet is there not at the heart of marriage a profound commitment to conjugal fidelity, as there is at the center of celibate life a comparable commitment to the community one has chosen...
...Yet this prejudice against celibacy was not peculiar to my family history...
...She is a fine teacher and scholar, but she might as well be a nun...
...As he says: We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong...
...The struggle for models of celibacy that are freely chosen rather than compelled must continue, and I praise those who articulate that struggle and commit themselves to it...
...Perhaps he knew more about me than I then knew about myself, for I did not dream of celibacy or the convent as a young woman...
...that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us...
...What is most troubling, however, is the propensity in the current conversation to identify psychosexual maturity with marriage and family, and the corresponding tendency to name celibacy a less mature, compensatory, and inferior life choice...
...that the nuclear family is not the only community worth living and loving for...
...While Catholic priests fared better in my private mythology, my family distrusted their celibacy as well...
...Yet to grow up with no affirming models of celibacy was an impoverishment for me...
...12Ju~ 1991:431...
...I would not exchange that dream for my reality today, but it took Vatican II and my own Roman Catholic conversion to unfold the paradoxical seduction of celibacy for one whose heart aches for God...
...After seventeen years of living that dream, I understand what Babette's general meant...
...Should they be led to embrace such a vocation themselves, I would indeed wish that its embodiment in celibacy or marriage could be freely chosen rather than mandated from on high...
...nistic church...
...Such is the suggestion in the film Babette's Feast, adapted 430: Commonweal from the original story by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), wherein a prominent Danish general, Lorens Loewenhielm, meets a former sweetheart, Martine--now an elderly spinster--at a dinner party provided and prepared by her French maid Babette in honor of Martine's deceased father's birthday...
...So much for the heroic model of celibacy in my household...
...As Paul Dinter wisely pointed out, such maturity does not come naturally to the married or the celibate person...
...but with W.H...
...But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite . . . . See...
...While I do not deny the serious problems confronting a church committed to mandatory clerical celibacy at this time in our history, Dinter's analysis of those problems and his paradoxical appeal to disability as a means of grace prompted me to ask, "What are the models of celibacy we have, and what are the models we need...
...I dreamed of marriage and a husband, and in time that dream came true...
...Both what I chose and what I refused was given to me in a husband, lover, and best friend, and "that has made all the difference...
...and in the light of that poetry, the Kingdom of God is larger than the choices we make and the choices that are made for us...
Vol. 118 • July 1991 • No. 13
