It's a nice abyss. It's fun...
Saint Sebastian's Abyss and other conflicts between truth and love
Welcome, creatures! In this edition, two book notes and a ramble.
First, I read Michael O’Loughlin’s Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear. This book’s style takes some getting used to. It’s written in short, simple sentences, with short chapters. I initially thought you just can’t write that way without sacrificing some nuance, but in the end I think O’Loughlin got a surprising amount of nuance into such an accessible style. I will say that, especially toward the beginning, there is just way too much detail about the process of getting the interviews. Some of that is good, moving, helps build readers’ trust by showing us why O’Loughlin cares about this subject so much. But what is gained by giving us a list of what O’Loughlin packed to go to St. Louis? Not much imho.
After all, the point of the book is really to tell other people’s stories, and this O’Loughlin does well. It’s a book about the many ways you can live in the Catholic Church and love Her, and understand yourself as responsible to Her and to the children of God. Lol none of those ways, in this book, involves treating the Church as even a potentially-serious interlocutor about sexual ethics; the authorial voice just takes for granted that the Catholic sexual ethic can’t have anything to contribute to anybody’s flourishing, and nobody O’Loughlin quotes ever suggests differently. (I know he knows at least one orthodox gay Catholic, because I recognized one of the names in the acknowledgments!)
That isn’t a criticism. Arguably it’s a strength of the book, since it allows a tighter focus on pastoral care for people whose relationship to the Church is necessarily more complex and conflicted than, like, mine. It’s impossible to read Hidden Mercy without understanding how desperately Catholics need to “put morality in its place” when caring for LGBT+ people. Obviously I and others hope that our work will contribute to a future in which there is no perceived conflict between the Church as gentle Friend and refuge, and the Church as Teacher in a school for desire. But this book is about the world we’re working in, not the world we hope we’re working for.
Although O’Loughlin knows that the harrowing stories of others are the heart of the book, his own story is also quite moving, and there’s an especially beautiful passage at the end about how he discovered the communion of the saints.
I also read Mark Haber’s short, weird, sad novel Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. This is a book about two men who both become enraptured with a painting, “Saint Sebastian’s Abyss,” and who build careers, a friendship, and eventually a ferocious enmity around their love of this painting. The painting hold the place of religious faith for them—this is super explicit in the text, I’m not importing my own obsessions here—and so, as religious faith can do, it makes them truculent, self-absorbed, loveless. There’s Borges in here, and also a touch of the tortured homo-anti-eroticism you’d expect from the title, but it’s like if semigay Borges was also all your most bluntly critical ex-Christian friends.
It’s about certain separations of things which (imho!) Christian faith unites: sublimity and morality, or universality and objective truth, for example. It’s an exercise in placing aesthetics in the position usually taken, in contemporary religious discourse, by morality or truth claims. It’s really well-paced, timing its revelations for maximum impact and then yanking you away from them to give them time to sink in. I loved the repetition, as the narrator thumbs the rosary beads of his phrases: the monkey paintings, the holy donkey, the end of the world. It didn’t speak to me, although I would like to read writing by someone it spoke to, since I think for the right reader this could hit hard.
Haber’s novel seems relevant to a thing I was noodling about the other day: Christianity, if it’s an identifiable “thing” at all, is maybe a response to the encounter with Christ; and one way of thinking about that encounter involves the traditional categories of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Lol I always talk about my own faith as the result of “falling in love” with Christ and His Bride, the Church. This is an aesthetic response. Thinking of my own encounter with Christ in primarily aesthetic terms can make me maybe more gentle—it’s easy to understand why others don’t see my Beloved the way I do, that always happens—but maybe also more complacent. When I run up against hard questions, I tend to shrug-emoji and say that I didn’t expect to understand everything, and I’m okay with taking things on trust. And I’ll defend that! You should not expect to understand everything about God, come on! But of course this is also a good way to avoid asking the questions I maybe need to ask, or doing the intellectual exploration that might help others.
What are the responses to an encounter with Christ as Truth, or Christ as Goodness? I think I would say “recognition” for the former, and maybe “liberation” (?) or, less excitingly, “education” for the latter. Probably all of us eventually get to experience all three of these facets of the Lord. I know recognition of God as Creator was huge in my own conversion: The beauty and meaning I perceive in the physical world is not just a personal aesthetic response of, like, neurons firing in pleasurable patterns, but a recognition of the fingerprints of the Creator God. And obviously my sobriety is a good example of relating to Christ primarily as liberator, because He lit the way to a moral change and carried me through it.
I think that’s what I’ve got here really. Maybe it is worth asking which of these three aspects of the Lord we really struggle to experience, and what would open us to that aspect of Him. Or maybe not everything needs to have homework attached!
icymi
I reviewed a whole passel of movies, but the thing I want you to know is how much I loved the compromised, entrancing teen girl love story, Times Square.
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The Pet Shop Boys, “Miracles”
Zurbarán’s Sebastian via Wikimedia Commons.