I AM, I am: A Rare Reflection on a Homily

In general, I tend to be slightly frustrated with homilies, even fairly good ones. The composition teacher in me wants to ask, "where is your thesis?"; to comment, "you introduce too many ideas in that paragraph" and "your composition lacks focus," "you repeat your point rather than elaborating" or "did you exceed the maximum word limit?" I generally prefer compositions that are too long to too short, as long as they remain on-topic with no unexplainable digressions. I do think there is some value in critiquing homilies, even in this manner, because it requires the ability to summarize or restate what the point or points were, with the possible result that we review and analyze the points of the homilies themselves, not just the possible structural imperfections! (Yes, we are paying attention to substance, too!--perhaps more than when I grade papers...)

This evening, the homily was given by a deacon who endeavors to stick close to and explain the readings, sometimes a bit too literally or pedantically, but I generally appreciate the effort to connect the readings to each other, to the particular feast day or liturgical season, or to the theology that they inform. He focused primarily on the first reading, from Exodus, in which Moses encounters the Burning Bush (a scene of Ten Commandments fame, and it's hard not to picture Charlton Heston--or, secondarily, Michelangelo's Moses). Particularly, he addressed the name by which Moses would call God as proof of his truth to the Israelites: I AM. In contrast the the great I AM, he recounted occasions on which no one answered "I am," occasions on which someone was asked to take personal responsibility for one's actions: "Who is responsible for the underwear up the flagpole?" "Who is responsible for moving the teacher's Volkswagon onto the sidewalk?" "Who is responsible for the mess in the kitchen?" He pointed out that society doesn't particularly like for us to answer the question, "Who is responsible?" with the response, "I am," particularly in the case of sins, which are increasingly explained as being something other than sin.

What he did not say was, I think, the most interesting point of the homily, the one which I would have tried to coax from the student writing an essay on the subject (in another life, when I have the occasion to grade a composition on a religious theme--my students would willingly write them, but I could not, in my current setting, fairly grade them because of the hogwash that they would offer for religious justification; in order to have an intelligent composition on religion, you likely have to have the ability to discuss religion openly in class as a valid topic, and to stress that religion and logic are compatible). The Deacon did not say, but I believe implied on some level, that by taking responsibility for our actions, by saying "I am" to the question, "Who is responsible?" we are able to participate in the Divine purpose in our lives, and in the Divine presence in the universe--by being the "I am"--the motivating force in our own lives, the moral agent that takes responsibility for our own actions--and doing so in accordance to our understanding of God's will, we are reaching for the "I AM." This can apply to any number of instances, and it has to do, at times, with participating in (or facilitating) the good that may come from evil and sin. Here, I clearly diverge from the homily, and I am thinking of two things--the "doing evil to undo evil" arguments for legalization of abortion, as a default argument, of sorts, and an extreme example to explain the point, and the co- or sub-creation within Creation that Tolkien portrays in The Silmarillion.

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien creates the Valar as sub-creators, whom Ilúvatar created in order to participate with him in Creation. Each of the Valar sings a part in the beginning melody, a song which brings about the actual substance of the universe. Melkor, the greatest of the Valar, seeks to challenge Ilúvatar (sorry for the oversimplification), and weaves discordant sounds into the melody in an attempt to take control of it himself, but each time, Ilúvatar is able to create still greater music and harmony out of the discord. This idea of creating beauty out of discord is extremely significant for Tolkien, and is a profound reflection on the Doctrine of Original Sin and the Incarnation. I understand the Great I AM, the underlying responsibility for the universe, in these or similar terms.

It is in reference to the personal "I am" that I invoke the problem of abortion. I invoke above, reluctantly, but because they are the most visible and dramatic example of the theology I am trying to invoke, the arguments that abortion should be permitted in the cases of rape and incest. The justification is typically seen by those who oppose abortion in all cases, on moral grounds, as seeking to "fix" an evil situation by acting in a manner that is intrinsically evil. In my terms, when asked, "Who is willing to take responsibility for this new life?" it is the refusal (or inability, in the face of the evil situation) to answer, "I am." The "I am" is not the answer, in these cases, to the question, "Who is responsible for creating this new life?" (The answer to that would be "I AM.") In this situation, the personal "I am" is having the strength (admittedly, such an act of responsibility would take considerable strength, and there is no way of knowing if any one of us would be equal to the task) to be responsible for transcending the evil, and participate in the Divine task of turning discord into beauty.

I am a strong believer in personal responsibility, and it is easy enough to recognize in perhaps the majority of elective abortions, the refusal, supported by numerous discourses, to take responsibility for one's own actions. But in the case of the usual exceptions, rape and incest, it is more difficult. The obvious answer is, "you can't answer evil with evil," but that answer is only partly satisfactory, and has always left me wondering whether there might be another way to answer this to address the injustice of making someone who is not, through an act of her own will, responsible for the situation take responsibility for the actions of another. (Notice I do not seek to answer the anticipated objection, "Well, is the Church going to support this child for her?"--The question is not relevant.) This is not where this post was meant to go, but it is, as I said, the most obvious example of being the remedy to a sin that is not one's own. Taking responsibility for one's own sins, the actual subject of the homily, is more straightforward. Furthermore, when one's personal sin yields a good result, it is not an excuse for the sin, but evidence of the turning of discord into beauty, and hence, a revelation of Divine goodness--the "I AM" behind the "I am."

It was a Lenten homily, and also a Spring Break homily, perhaps intended to save the priests time in the confessional before Easter listening to tales of Galveston. For me, it made sense of a puzzling passage--why "I AM," anyway? Was it just a Hebrew thing that didn't translate well?--and some puzzling moral issues, and provided a much longed-for excuse to blog about Tolkien. All in all, a successful homily!

P.S.--Part of the curse of teaching composition is that abortion is the ready-made example for EVERYTHING!

Blog Evolution, Genesis, and Science Fiction

One of the wonders of blogging is the ways that various streams of discourse merge and branch off again, merging, converging, flowing and continuing in other forms. Perhaps its a new version of the immortality that Shakespeare noted with the advent of print--then, the writer was immortal, but preserved in presumably changeless form (unless you consider the horrendous mistakes, printing and editorial liberties, rewriting, etc. that ran rampant in early printing history). In the blogosphere, the evolution of thought--how one influences another, how it continues in new form--creates that kind of monument to the original author, but in a less sterile manner, as the thought inspires creativity rather than existing for itself and the original author alone.

This rather circuitous late-night theorizing is occasioned by my decision to post in response to some thought I gleaned from DarwinCatholic's post on Coulter, Evolution, and Catholicism, which, in fact, I requested because of a post on Roman Catholic Blog.

In the course of explaining the compatibility of evolutionary theory and Catholicism, answering the question that I found most interesting, Darwin explores some of the oddity of Genesis--the items that complicate the traditional children's storybook version of Creation, namely, the presence of humanoid creatures and the question of who Adam's & Eve's offspring married. Darwin writes:

The idea of there being other human-ish creatures wandering the Earth at the same time as Adam and Eve doesn't fit well with the standard Sunday school version of the story, but the Bible itself is slightly odder than the children's version. Recall that at several point in the early chapters of Genesis people are mentioned as going off and interbreeding with other creatures (giants, 'the sons of heaven', etc.) Indeed, after the initial description of the time in the garden itself, one doesn't necessarily get the impression that Adam and Eve are alone in the world. (Why, for instance, does Cain fear that when he is banished people will kill him? He's just killed one of the four named people in the world up to that point, and the other two are his parents.) Rather, Adam and Eve seem to be described tribally: as the tribe of true humans, but not necessarily the only creatures on Earth. Now, the idea of early (ensouled) humans interbreeding with (soul-less) human-ish creatures is unappealing. But then, the idea of Adam and Eve's children having no options other than incest isn't exactly appealing either.

My knowledge of this part of Genesis derives from C. S. Lewis who, in the Chronicles of Narnia, makes reference to the "first wife" of Adam--Lilith, mother of giants and jinns and other human-like or half human creatures. (While Lilith is from the Kabbalah, my investigation of Lilith led to other discoveries.) Interestingly, in Prince Caspian, one of Lewis's characters states that while humans may be good or evil, human-like creatures, things that should be human, used to be human, but aren't, are always involved with evil. I guess that's why it was O.K. for Adam to divorce Lilith! In Out of the Silent Planet, the race of creatures is not humanoid; in Perelandra, by contrast, he creates a race of green (new? fresh? innocent? untested?) humanoid beings who succeed where Adam and Eve failed, and successfully avoid the Fall. This is not a C. S. Lewis post, but I was reminded of Lewis at several points.

Initially, as I commented on Darwin's blog, the intermarriage of ensouled and soul-less humans reminded me of a plot from Star Trek or perhaps the novels of Robert Heinlein--Methuselah's Children comes to mind, and not because of the Biblical allusion in the title! However, this concept was problematized for me by commenter CMinor, who writes:

Likewise I can see why we might find the thought of souled humans interbreeding with unsouled humans unsettling from our position in time, but I'm not sure it's a rational concern. As souls are not externally discernible, there's no reason to assume that souled and unsouled humans would be any different in any other respects, to include intelligence and behavior. The sole (no pun intended--really) difference could be that souled humans had a point of contact with God not available to unsouled humans.

I believe I was more comfortable with the idea of unsouled and souled humans (or human-like creatures, if humans are defined by the possession of a soul) interbreeding when I imagined the unsouled humans being somehow different--lower on the evolutionary scale, perhaps, to which CMinor also alludes by mentioning the evidence that Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens interbred (intermarried?). Considering the idea of humanoids equally intelligent as ourselves who merely had no "point of contact" with God--or maybe a different point of contact with God?--reminds me hauntingly of the destroyed planet in Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star," which (in the story) provided the light by which the wise men found the Christ child (sorry for the spoiler). The story is profound and beautiful, if in a profoundly beautifully troubling way. With the planet, an advanced humanoid race capable of artistic expression and technological development has been destroyed, presumably to provide the light announcing the Incarnation. The narrator and ship's science officer is a Jesuit priest who must decide, at the end and beyond the borders of the story, whether to reveal this calculation.

I once had a heated debate with a professor and a room full of undergrads over whether or not the story makes an ultimate condemnation of religion. Others maintained that in the context of the story, either God did not exist, or God was evil. I felt certain that there could be a theological answer to this that did not include either of the two aforementioned conclusions. Is this the answer?

Theorizing theological responses to science fiction, albeit theologically reaching science fiction, aside. . . What would be the implications of soul-less and ensouled humans (or humanoids, in the case of the former) marrying or interbreeding? In the Old Testament we already have the history of a people who were chosen by God as special, set apart from other people. In the New Testament, it is revealed that the Incarnation of the Son of Man is for all people (see my post on Epiphany!). So, then, is the ensouling of Adam and Eve the first "choosing" of God from among His creation? First, He chose a very select group, from whom we inherit Original Sin; then, He chose a race, the Hebrews, the Isrealites, from among those who interbred with the soul-less humanoids; finally, in a late stage of our development, He chose to give to all people the opportunity to choose Him (I would have to suggest that we already had the capacity to choose, but without knowledge of religious Truth, our Free Will--on which I am not the expert, see An Examined Life on Free Will--was not, perhaps, as relevant as it later became with reference to our spirituality).

Returning to science fiction, then, the planet in "The Star" is peopled with the non-chosen. By contrast, although his fantasy repudiates the humanoid as anthropomorphic evil, C. S. Lewis's science fiction "other worlds" are populated with ensouled beings--humanoid and non-humanoid alike. For Lewis, all are "chosen."

Does this bring us any closer to theological or evolutionary truth? Not really. But it does demonstrate the ways in which literature is a working out of various theories of the authors, and further demonstrates the beauty of reading, and the ways in which literate activity affects the consciousness, opening the psyche to the possibility of things beyond our narrow experience. Literature invites us to come in without wiping our muddy boots, allows us to muck around a bit, trying out our ideas in new context, or trying its ideas on for size. When we leave, we are invited to take what we want before moving on--or not. Now that's hospitality! (So much for the literacy plug!)

Finally, I agree with CMinor, who says that we must "let God be God."