Soul Meets Body

I cannot guess what we'll discover

When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels

But I know our filthy hands can wash one another's

And not one speck will remain.

-Death Cab for Cutie, Soul Meets Body

So the Romans Catholics are having a rough go of it this week, and they absolutely deserve it, but they don't need this Protestant sinner throwing any more stones from my glass house, so I'm going to just say that hierarchy is like a lot of other human systems: it's good until it goes horribly wrong.  Funny thing, the Pope finally gets definitively on the right side of the issue of capital punishment, which is ineffective, unjust and often amounts to state sponsored murder; then immediately on the heels of that statement it is discovered that the Roman Catholic church systemically buried the sexual abuse of children by priests, which kind of makes even staunch opponents of the death penalty want to re-think that stance.  But at the philosophical core of the capital punishment debate is the issue of whether or not justice and our society are better served by punitive/retributive practices or rehabilitation and restoration of criminals.  To seriously move towards rehabilitation and restoration, one would need to challenge much more than just the death penalty, it would require re-thinking our massive industrial incarceration systems and ways in which our "justice" system seems more intent on "breaking" the lawless than on encouraging them to abide by the law.

So what does restorative justice look like for the Catholic Church, or any church that finds itself embroiled in such a systemic breakdown, where power was abused, where "little ones" were harmed (in this case quite literally) and not only did the system not protect them, but actively sought to suppress their witness against it? That's where, in the spirit of the Body of Christ, I think the Protestant tradition can offer some healing to the Mother Church (although if the RC's really took the whole mother thing a little more to heart they probably wouldn't be in this pickle). I'm going to try not to be sexist here, but probably I'm going to fail so forgive me.  Women care about kids rather differently than men do.  After centuries of being run by (supposedly) celibate males, the Roman Catholic hierarchy seriously needs a woman's touch.  The patriarchy is out of touch with the nature of the church as the Bride of Christ.  The divine feminine is terribly important and has been woefully neglected, Dan Brown made a whole conspiracy out of this very real feature of the Roman church and sold billions of copies of the DaVinci Code.  His fiction was an overstatement, but the root of it was absolutely true: the Church has denied the female her place as a co-equal in the Kingdom of Heaven.  Evangelicals do it, even some brands of Presbyterians do it, but that doesn't make it right.

I don't want to go into all the twaddle about Eve ate the apple and wives being submissive to their husbands, it's quite frankly not worth the effort and no one who believes it has probably even read this far.

So what I would like to do is reach out to anyone who has ears to hear about a flaw even more fundamental than the patriarchy or the hierarchy of the church, the separation of the flesh and the spirit. The thing about following Jesus is that it is a practice of incarnation, which shares a root with the word carnal.  In Greek, there are two words for body: Sarx and Soma, the latter is generally used in a more positive sense than the former, Sarx is often translated as flesh, where Soma is a more integrated vision of the person.  But Jesus uses the word Sarx in John 6 (the lectionary reading for this coming Sunday) to refer to his flesh and he talks in deliberately incendiary language about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  The disciples don't know what to do with that, and it's not because they don't get metaphors, it's because already, in the very earliest iteration of the church, people were largely caught in an assumption that the flesh was bad and the soul or spirit was good.

This assumption troubled Christianity in many ways in the first several centuries.  They were constantly having to deal with Gnostic variations on a theme from within their own ranks and on top of that they had charges of being cannibals for their own eucharistic language being cast as pearls before swine. Jesus of Nazareth demonstrated that the dualism of flesh versus spirit was a false distinction that had no ground in the divine creation. Body and soul are part of the good creation, sin can afflict both of them, but one is not more vulnerable than the other. This is why, even after the resurrection, Jesus still had his beat up body with the wounds and the ability to eat, because the flesh is part of the plan, as they say it's not a flaw, it's a feature.

Jesus demonstrated that flesh and spirit were not at odds with one another, but were together a holy unity, which mirrored the unity of the Trinity itself.  Love, sex, intimacy, relationships, are all part of the plan, it's what we're made for. It took centuries for the church to sort this out, but by the time they did the social and political forces of the world had already gotten hold of the Body of Christ and were busily crucifying it all over again.  Of course priests should be men, God always picks men (except for all those women who hold some pretty crucial positions, not least of which being Mary, Jesus' mother).  Of course priests should be celibate, except for the fact that many of them weren't in the early years, and things seemed to work okay then, and speaking from experience I think being married to another person actually makes for a better minister.

None of the assumptions we make about our bodies, our sexuality, and their relationship to God are handed down on stone tablets (except for the thing about not committing adultery and coveting your neighbor's wife, both of which are solid moral benchmarks).  We need to heal some of our assumptions about God's creation on a very deep level.  Shame is not the root cause of all sexual misbehavior, but it's a big part, and it is an even bigger part of the decisions that we make as individuals and institutions to try and cover up bad things.

I am not a Catholic Priest, but I am a member of the clergy, and as such I feel at least some bond of collegiality with the priesthood.  To some extent, when I put my Calvinist "I told you so" attitude to the side, I can feel saddened and ashamed that my brothers have been so tarnished by this rising tide of wickedness.  However, I am much more saddened and ashamed for all those victims whose lives were violated by men they were supposed to be able to trust.  I wonder now, if the hierarchy of celibate men will put aside some of their control in order to allow their Savior to wash them (see John 13: 1-11 for a rather pointed example of how this played out with the first Bishop of Rome). There is a lot of dirt to be cleaned up for sure, and I'm no expert on Roman Catholicism, but if I might recommend two very basic steps:

1. Ordain women as Priests, and let them permeate your hierarchy, let them be leaven to your apparently corrupt system. There is nothing superhuman about women, but they are a much needed balance to all that maleness you have going on there.
2. Stop with the celibacy requirement. It is apparently not working very well anyway.  If someone (male or female) truly feels called to a life of celibacy, great, but you're turning away a lot of gifted ministers of the Gospel by making that a deal-breaker.  Apparently, on top of that, you have inadvertently given a fair number of very sick men a good place to hide and allowed them access to your children.

Martin Luther had 99 suggestions, I just have the two, but I suspect you probably won't listen to me either.  At least you can't send the inquisition after me.