On Hospitality and Unstructured Time

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I’m a little late to this party, but Meredith Schultz has a good piece over at Fare Forward on hospitality for and among millennials. At the end she offers a few suggestions for habits and postures that will help with the practice of hospitality. I was particularly struck by her remarks on leaving some unstructured time in our schedules:

The accelerated pace of modern life means time is one of the most significant obstacles to practicing hospitality. “‘Being busy’ has become a status symbol,” says Henri Nouwen, “and most people keep encouraging each other to keep their body and mind in constant motion.” If we fill every spare moment of our lives, we will not be free to welcome unexpected guests or have the energy to care for them. Leaving unstructured time in our schedules is a countercultural act, which faithfully anticipates divine encounters. A late-night conversation. Another plate at dinner. Three strangers by the Oaks of Mamre.

In my experience, this is especially hard for single people to do. One of my single friends at my church in England (whom I’ve mentioned before) and I once talked—“What! You do that too?!”—about our tendency to fill our calendars with social events, more than we really needed or wanted, because we knew if we didn’t, chances were we’d be spending the unfilled time alone. Living with family or roommates, you at least know other people will be physically present if you happen to have an evening or weekend free of planned events. But if you’re single and live alone, unstructured time often means time spent by yourself.

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The Line Dividing Good and Evil

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In the midst of all the last minute shopping, holiday parties, Christmas music, Santa Clause, and so forth, it’s easy to forget why Jesus came in the first place: to save us from our sin.

In the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

If evil were something done by evil people to good people, then God would only need to destroy the evil people. But since “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” God had to use a different plan to save us.

I worry that few far too many American Christians have forgotten that this Christmas. Over at Part of a Plan, Zachary Perkins writes:

About a week ago, Phil Robertson was suspended from his family’s show Duck Dynasty for comments he made regarding homosexuality. The fury poured forth from social media like none other. Many Christian are even now organizing boycotts against A&E.

About two to three days later, Uganda passes a bill through it’s legislative body that is now waiting a signature from the President which would imprison homosexuals for life, give 14 years imprisonment to Ugandan citizens that help gays and potentially put some gays to death. Update: The death penalty provision has been shelved, but the long prison terms remain.

It’s been three days since the news from Uganda broke out. I’ve searched through ChristianityToday.com, ChristianPost.com, and CBN.com, but there is still not one mention of the story that Uganda has passed a bill which could put to death gays and lesbians. I even searched ReligionToday.com and instead of finding stories about Uganda’s growing violence towards gays and lesbian people in their community, I saw one story titled “Ugandan Church’s Remarkable Growth”.  Phil Robertson’s story is still plastered all over the front pages of these outlets.

“For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” In either our loud crusades or in our silent complicity, is that the message the world is hearing from Christians this Christmas?

Homosexuality and the Resurrection of Disability

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The Catechism teaches that, while all people are equal in dignity, God also makes differences among people. “These differences belong to God’s plan, who wills that each receive what he needs from others, and that those endowed with particular ‘talents’ share the benefits with those who need them. These differences encourage and often oblige persons to practice generosity, kindness, and sharing of goods.”

I have not always appreciated the ways in which God has made me different. For a long time, I used to pray that God would make me stop being gay. It gave me particular struggles. It made discernment difficult. It was painful. All I could see was a disordered and broken part of myself that I’d rather do away with. I had failed to grasp the truth that, as C. S. Lewis once put it, “every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’”

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Friendship and Erotophobia

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Josh Gonnerman has already written a fine response to Austin Ruse’s Crisis Magazine article. There is one point that I wanted to address that I didn’t think he covered, which is the belief within a lot of conservative Catholic circles that any kind of intimate friendship between men and women is “playing with fire.”

I suppose that I should begin by pointing out that I am a convert—that’s true of most of the people here on Spiritual Friendship, but many of my friends and colleagues here are converts from Protestant churches that share this kind of suspicion when it comes to mixed-sex friendship. I’m a convert from liberal Anglicanism via atheism so I was never raised with any of these ideas. It was always just normal for me to have male friends, and it was normal for my male friends to have female friends.

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Jesus, John, and the Intimacy of Physical Touch

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Crisis Magazine recently covered several writers at Spiritual Friendship with some caution at the notion of chaste friendship. Austin Ruse’s skepticism shines through when he writes:

“Their ideal is that you can draw close to someone of the same-sex, love them intimately and intensely, yet never cross the line into sexual activity. They point to the relationship between Jesus and young John as a model. Recall John was the “one whom Jesus loved” and who laid his head on Jesus’ chest, something if done today would clearly be considered gay.”

This, if anything, should be a lesson to us from history. It’s a well-documented fact that previous generations were far more comfortable with people of the same gender sharing physical affection. The Art of Manliness had a terrific post on this earlier this summer, with the photographic evidence to prove it.

Bros being bros.

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A scattered “reader’s response” from a “New Homophile”

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Austin Ruse has published  a piece on us in Crisis Magazine. While he has critiques, the main point of the piece is to just say, “Here, look at this strange phenomenon! Check out the eccentric and often brilliant Eve Tushnet, progenitor of the whole crew! [Eve, the Mother of All…?] Check out the Momma Bear, Elizabeth Scalia! Here’s a kinda weird, kinda wonderful bunch of people to look at!”

I must admit, I’m a bit amused by the piece. It almost makes us seem like some exotic tribe, with Ruse as the diligent anthropologist setting out to record and explain our practices. Of course, it is old school anthropology, the kind where you didn’t ask the people you were studying what they were on about, but just developed your own explanations, which you relayed to people who were more distant than you, and coined names for them yourself (though “New Homophiles” does roll off the tongue nicely!). As a result, he misses some things, like Ron Belgau and Wesley Hill, the editors of this blog, whose contributions to the First Thoughts blog at First Things are significantly more prolific than my contributions to On the Square over there. He also tends to portray us as much more homogeneous than we are. Still, I appreciate his basic interest in our project, and  look forward with interest to his promised forthcoming piece on our gay critics.

In the mean time, when the anthropologist relays the practices of the indigenous populations, something is invariably lost. Let me speak as one of the natives (and only one of them, not a definitive spokesman for the whole tribe) and try to articulate some of the nuance which, it seems to me, is missing.

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Persons, Not Body Parts

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In my post yesterday, I said nothing about the substance of Phil Robertson’s comments to GQ Magazine. I said only that I did not think his comments about gays were bad enough to deserve suspension (I actually think his comments on race are more disturbing, though as far as I know A&E didn’t make an issue of these comments in announcing his suspension).

I deliberately did not address the substance of his comments, because I didn’t want to seem to be joining the people piling on and calling for his head. However, I then spent a lot of time yesterday moderating comments here and at First Things, and became convinced that I needed to say something more about the substance of Robertson’s remarks.

I have no objection to Robertson paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; I’ve quoted those verses on various occasions myself. However, there is a glaring problem in his comments that none of his defenders seem to see.

In pointing this out, I want to be clear that I am responding to his comments in the GQ interview. I do not watch his show, and I do not know him personally. However, since the interview is the source of controversy, and the interview is what many Christians are defending, I think it worthwhile pointing out that at least part of what he said in the interview should have attracted much more objection from Christians than it has. A blanket defense of Robertson’s words is, from a Christian perspective, indefensible.

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Gay Christians and the Robertson Controversy

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I ended yesterday with yet another viewing of Love Actually. After a day bustling with tweets, posts, and articles stating concerns from both sides of the culture war regarding the Phil Robertson controversy (with both sides making legitimate points), it was good to get in touch with some of the fundamental human questions most gay Christians are concerned about: questions of faithfulness, friendship, love, longing, and belonging.

Whenever there’s an explosion in the culture war, it seems like the real people with genuine human struggles are shelved while we argue about rights and agendas. There are legitimate concerns that need to be addressed: How do we share our views in ways that highlight the value and dignity of people made in the image of God? Is there room for Christians to share their unpopular views freely, as there seems to be for folks who hold different values? When someone is directly asked for their opinions, are we ready to actually hear them? And in hearing them, can we respectfully agree or disagree instead of waging war? Can we consider fighting for the marginalized as passionately as we fight other sides in the debate?

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A Brief Note on Phil Robertson and Double Standards

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I’ll join Wes in making a brief comment on the Phil Robertson fiasco.

First: I agree with Rod Dreher that Robertson’s suspension shows a double standard on the part of A&E, a standard that is much more hostile to criticism of homosexuality than it is to other offensive content.

However, this reminds me of Rod’s gushingly positive response to Joshua Gonnerman’s first post on First Things just 18 months ago. The title of Rod’s post was “One Crazy — Or Very Brave — Gay Catholic,” and he began by saying, “Joshua Gonnerman, a gay, chaste Catholic who is a theology doctoral student at Catholic University, may have blown up his academic career with his short, courageous piece in First Things today.”

Why would it take courage for Joshua to write that post, and why would it potentially blow up his academic career?

Because A&E is not the only operation out there that has double standards when it comes to homosexuality.

Rod recognized that a chaste gay graduate student would not just be at a disadvantage when it came to looking for jobs in conservative Christian circles: he could be at such a serious disadvantage that disclosing his sexuality could amount to “blowing up” his academic career.

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What Phil Robertson Gets Wrong

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One brief remark on the Phil Robertson fiasco.

I understand and share all the concerns about religious liberty, which Rod Dreher, Russell Moore, and Mollie Hemingway have done a good job (as usual) of articulating.

But just because someone quotes 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and is opposed to same-sex marriage doesn’t mean that they’re speaking up for a theologically informed, humane, pastorally sensitive view of what it means to be gay. Not by a long shot. And social conservatives should think twice before linking the concern for religious liberty to a vindication of Robertson.

I won’t quote Robertson’s remarks in full here—they’re easy to look up—but suffice it to say that he implies that if gay men could only open their eyes, it would dawn on them how myopic they’ve been. “I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.” The conclusion to draw from this comment, as Katelyn Beaty noted earlier today on Twitter, is “that gay men should just wake up to how awesome women’s body parts are.”

But, of course, that’s just not how sexuality works.

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