“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” – John Stuart Mill.
I’LL SAY: “Our new report finds that relationship management must evolve – and quickly – if asset managers are to meet the demands of their high net worth clients.” – Arthur Andersen’s home-page.
THE CHURCH AND CHILD-ABUSE: It’s not just Boston. Los Angeles’ Cardinal Mahoney has also been implicated in covering up several huge child-abuse cases involving priests in the past few years. No one ever seems to get punished, even though some of these priests and bishops and cardinals seem to have known about this hideous pedophilia for years, and acquiesced in it. Here’s a passage that haunts from a gripping piece by Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times:
“‘After he molested me, he would bless me,’ says the former altar boy, who was an adolescent at the time and now lives in Southern California, having struggled for years with alcohol, drugs, anger and shame. ‘It’s very confusing. I was in the center of my mother’s life, the church, and she thought I was doing constructive things by being with the priest. After we did these things, he’d put his hand on my head and make the sign of the cross.’ The former altar boy said he’d like to write a book, and I asked what exactly it would be about. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘About a happy go-lucky kid that met a priest and learned how to hate himself.'”
It seems to me that those of us in the Church have a real responsibility to ensure that these unspeakable crimes are not only exposed but punished with the full force of the law.
IT’S WORSE IN BRITAIN: Enron Punditgate hasn’t quite hit Britain on the pundit level. (By the way, any bets on whether the New York Times will ever report on this story?) But in some ways, it’s worse in Blighty. The man in charge of the actual Press Complaints Commission – the national press ombudsmen in Britain – has been an Enron director for eight years on a $125,000 annual salary. So even the referee has been bought and paid for over there.
“TREMBLING BEFORE G-D”: I went to see this intense documentary tonight about gay orthodox Jews. I hope it gets wide audiences. In subtle but beautiful ways, it revealed the tenacity of so many gay Orthodox to love their faith and to love themselves. Of course, it resonated with me. The courageous way in which these people endure such pain, such rejection from their families, such unwitting cruelty even from many of the religious people who are trying to understand, is, to me, an inspiration. I understand the reason that some simply feel obliged to choose between God and their inner being and simply leave their faith tradition. But I admire those who refuse to buckle under to this dichotomy, who stay with their faith – and not in some watered-down way, but in a real, living, devoted, passionate way. You can see too – tragically – how these brave souls are not only isolated from their traditional community but also then have to endure hostility, contempt or just indifference from the gay community they try and join. It can be a deeply isolating experience, especially when they believe they are trying to help others, to build bridges, to reform dogmas – and yet some of their own gay brothers and sisters see them as the enemy, a representative of beliefs that have oppressed every homosexual of whatever religion. Some of this hostility, born of pain, is understandable. But it skewers the souls of gay, religious people as much as anyone. The gay movement has come a long, long way toward greater respect for religious people and their faith, but there is still some way to go.
A SAVING REMNANT: This film dramatically shows the experience of living in many worlds, many emotions, at once, and the tenacity it takes to elide or deny none of them. And as I witnessed the joy of these gay Orthodox people and their love of God and then the pain that their world still inflicts upon them, I remembered again those things that I have almost left behind, but can never forget. When you watch a grown woman sob on her partner’s shoulder because her father still cannot treat her fully as his daughter, you remember the reality that still exists out there. You realize again the pain and despair that many young and old gay people are feeling even today, caught between a faith they believe in and a ‘holy’ life they cannot humanly lead, however hard they try. It rips me up, knowing that this is happening now – again and again – to children torn from their families, and to adults removed by their fear and shame from their deepest emotional selves. That is why patience with the pace of acceptance of homosexuality is so hard – because the pain is still so deep and so wide. And the questions and sorrow and self-doubt and lack of self-esteem never fully go away. Each time you encounter yet another condemnation of homosexuality, yet another casual insult to your very emotional integrity, the wounds open again, until you learn to live with them as open wounds, never fully healing, always susceptible to new damage and pain, but manageable like an affliction that can always be hidden but that never goes away. You can be healthy but never completely healed, and you learn somehow to live that way.
TRANSCENDING THE CONTRADICTIONS: How to love one’s faith when it rejects you? That, I believe, is when God comes in and somehow makes it inevitable, when He lifts you up and helps you see things that you didn’t understand before and gives you the task of trying to bear witness to that in your life and your work. That is what this documentary did. It showed how deeply the rejected can still love their faith, how their stigmatization can even intensify that faith, how, paradoxically, they may know God more fully and intensely because of this than many others. This film revealed these dogged people of faith as a saving remnant of our world. It was, if you will pardon the expression, a mitzvah.
The Dish 