Leshem Shamayim: “For the sake of heaven.”

As a morally conservative Christian woman, I derived my initial sense of sexual ethics from a Protestant upbringing, which taught me that sex was reserved for the context of heterosexual marriage alone. I was taught that Christian purity was directly reflected in sexual status; to be active sexually, one should be engaged in a heterosexual marriage. Though natural law was not submitted as proof of this, finding natural law in my process of conversion to Roman Catholicism supported my conservative sexual ethic, as well as reinforcing my own idealized standard, celibacy (though natural law considers heterosexual marriage an equally valid fulfillment of human capacities). Having not been taught the doctrine of natural law in my formative belief years, I imagined God to have set an order for the functioning of all things, including sexuality in human persons, and that to act in accordance with the nature God had first created for people was obedience while acting contrarily to that nature was disobedience. I cannot remember a time when I considered homosexuality natural, because in my own reading of scripture I valued themes of male/female coupling as the basis of nations and as demonstrating a picture of divine unity with mankind. While my theological position on homosexual acts is that they are sinful because not only are they unnatural, but also immoral (because they occur outside the context for marriage seen in the prototype of the first humans, Adam and Eve), I advocate a position of ‘equal but different’ in terms of social rights and treatment of both homosexual and heterosexual persons. Emphasizing the reasonable tradition of natural law anthropology derived from biblical themes of sexual complementarity, I hope to offer a reasonable natural law approach advocating the supremacy of human dignity in ethical approaches to homosexual and heterosexual conduct within the Catholic Church.

Beginning by defining homosexuality in light of natural law, one must pose the question, are some people born with biological/psychological homosexual tendencies or not? Having personally vacillated in opinion over this question I deeply appreciate the Catholic Church’s distinction between homosexual acts and tendencies in its moral teaching. Before encountering queer theory, I would have tended to definitively categorize homosexuality in tendency and practice as deceptive forms of persons’ created nature, because, unlike queer theory, I believe that sexuality is natural, created by God not only as an external, biological identity, but an intrinsic factor of our souls. From a complementarian perspective on the sexes, I believe that male and female, in all their biological, emotional, and spiritual attractions to one another are created in the image of God (Genesis 1.27). Referring back the Edenic roots of humanity, I will address a natural law response to Roger’s critique of Gagnon. From these considerations, I will [1] incorporate queer theory into my understanding of natural law (biological sex determining societal gender role) by ending with [2] an analysis of natural law as reinforcing gender imitation (Butler) amongst Catholic laity. I will conclude, however, that [3] human sexuality performed naturally or unnaturally, does not take precedence over the biblical teaching of human dignity in the image of God in social ethics.

Having mentioned my personal tradition of natural law as being derived from scriptural themes, I will contrast the perspectives of Robert Gagnon and Jack Rogers on natural law in Romans 1, responding with my own convictions for complementary sexual union of male and female found in Romans, with additional references to Genesis. Expanding on Rogers’ brief discussion on natural law in chapter five of Jesus, The Bible, and Homosexuality: Exploding the Myths of the Church, Rogers critiques Gagnon and other authors on the oppressive abuse of natural law in his essay, “Natural Law.”[1](1) Critiquing Gagnon’s basis for natural law on portions of Romans 1,2 and 3, Rogers refutes Gagnon’s claim that biology was the basis for Paul’s doctrine of nature.[2](2) Rogers cites this reading of Romans 1.26-27 as an overemphasis of “unnatural sins” over others, though all have the same end, death. Comparing the homosexual plight to that of women and slaves, Rogers rejects church “discrimination,” unjust repression which robs a person identifying as homosexual of the dignity owed to their personhood as made in the image of God. To Rogers, natural law is an inductive reading of a socio-sexual prejudice into the biblical text rather than a deductive understanding of God’s creation, singling out certain people to target as the scapegoats of sin rather than confessing that all people are sinful.

The passage of Romans 1.26-27 has commonly been cited to proof text that all are aware of a natural performance of their innate sexual identity by the image of God within them. While some consider the sexual practices by which Paul identifies the Gentiles as different from the Jews, linking the passage in the context of Romans 1-3 to form Paul’s argument that all are guilty of sin and in need of Christ (not just Gentiles), such context does not discredit a natural law reading of the same text. Through my limited time in biblical studies, I have encountered much equivocation as to the significance of Romans 1.18-32, which I interpret as similar to the prophetic warnings in the Old Testament, showing the Israelite people the consequences of falling into the sexual sins of their neighbors. Paul’s pejorative discussion of same-sex acts as punishment for idolatry in the passage of Romans 1 suggests the possible equation of idolatry and sexual immorality, both of which are acts against nature, if one considers the most natural setting for mankind to be the depiction of Eden before the Fall: According to Genesis 1, man and woman were created in the image of God, thus suggesting, if sexual relations occurred before the Fall, that they were sexually active with partners of opposite sexes. Viewing the Eden scenario and natural, post-Fall the closest replica of created sexual nature we can practice is heterosexual marriage, portraying the complementarity of the sexes as a unified image of God.

While to Rogers there is “no scriptural warrant for monogamous heterosexual marriage as the norm for all people”[3](3) because it denies unmarried and homosexual people the ability to reflect God’s image, I argue that natural law does not exclusively limit the imaging of God to heterosexual marriage, but in terms of human sexuality, this is the only context presented for God-approved sexual expression.[4](4) Natural law is merely the context we humans have been given to understand our sexual identities and to perform them in a way that honors God. Having established my belief that homosexual acts are against the nature which God created in man (to be heterosexually active in a monogamous relationship or to be celibate), I will turn to a comparison of homosexual act vs. homosexual tendency, using as examples the Catholic tradition’s ethical teachings on the admittance of homosexuals into seminaries as well as the administering of the Eucharist to homosexuals.

In Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski addressed the issue of admitting homosexuals to priestly seminaries by distinguishing between homosexual acts, which are considered sinful in Catholic teaching, and homosexual tendencies which are not sexual acts, but desires or attractions that might distract from a holy vocation.[5](5) Thus Grocholewski concluded that “cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture,’” requiring that homosexual acts be forsaken and tendencies be abandoned at least three years before application to a seminary. This teaching suggests that deep-seated homosexual tendencies are a sign of masculine immaturity that would prevent partaking in priestly roles of spiritual spouses and fathers. [6](6) While such a state is considered an “intrinsically disordered” tendency,[7](7) the Catholic Church passes no moral judgment on those might experience same-sex attractions.

While those with deep-seated homosexual tendencies are prevented from Catholic seminaries, the Church interprets Scripture to indicate that not “all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.”[8](8) Pope Benedix XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, supported Catholic rejection of homosexuality as intrinsically disordered, because it is viewed as a “strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.”[9](9) Cardinal Ratzinger appealed to natural law to support the thesis that while homosexual inclinations are not sinful, they are tendencies “ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil”[10](10) because same-sex “activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living.”[11](11) In spite of considering homosexuality as a disorder, the Catholic Church maintains that the human will, a testimony to the image of God, remains in a homosexual person. Therefore, participation in homosexual acts renders one culpable of sexual sin before God, the reason for which the Eucharist, the celebration central to Catholic liturgy, is withheld from practicing homosexuals.

One might contest, is it fair to withhold the Sacrament from individuals who feel impulsively drawn towards homosexual acts? Is it wrong to deny individuals who feel deep-seated homosexual tendencies gratification for desires for loving relationship? Yet if sexuality in the image of God according to the natural law demonstrated in Adam and Eve in their pre-Fall Edenic states, homosexuality is by no means natural and intrinsic to human beings, thus does not offer the fulfilling sort of love intended to be shared among humans by their creator.[12](12) Catholic teaching is not stigmatizing homosexual individuals as distinctly sinful, nor robbing them of ability to manifest the image of God. Human dignity is never absent from persons, regardless of whether they are in a state of sin or strongly tempted to sin, including sexual sins. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states in statement # 2352, “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.”[13](13) Thus homosexual acts are no more sinful than heterosexual acts of fornication, prostitution, or adultery. However, is it right to deny homosexuals the moral freedom to perform their same-sex identities forcing the performance of a heterosexual identity?

While Butler suggests that “the very categories of sex, of sexual identity, of gender are produced or maintained in the effects of compulsory performance,”[14](14) natural law teaching of an essential subject within each person responds that the only performed sexual identity is one that is false to one’s nature. While gender roles may be performed, I agree with Catholic sexual ethics that sexual identity does not exist because of gender performance, but rather that this sexual nature produces inculterated gender expression. According to Catholic teaching, homosexually gendered expression is a confused understanding of natural human sexual expression, though a homosexual has as much human dignity as any other person. Sin does not make a person less human. The valuable emphasis I gleaned from Rogers was that too often homosexuality is made the scapegoat, not only of all sexual sins, but of all sin in general. In the eyes of God, I am just as in need of Jesus’ redemption as a practicing homosexual, there should be no social distinction between my rights and those allotted to a homosexual. The degree to which my sin may be “natural” as opposed to homosexuality as “unnatural” in Catholic teaching, allowing me to receive Eucharist when a homosexual cannot, is a deeper question of difference between mortal and venial sin, a distinction which I do not believe God draws, but which may affect people to different degrees in their journeys towards holy union with God.

Reading 1- focus on this one!!!
Is 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7

You, LORD, are our father,
our redeemer you are named forever.
Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways,
and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?
Return for the sake of your servants,
the tribes of your heritage.
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
with the mountains quaking before you,
while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for,
such as they had not heard of from of old.
No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you
doing such deeds for those who wait for him.
Would that you might meet us doing right,
that we were mindful of you in our ways!
Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful;
all of us have become like unclean people,
all our good deeds are like polluted rags;
we have all withered like leaves,
and our guilt carries us away like the wind.
There is none who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to cling to you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and have delivered us up to our guilt.
Yet, O LORD, you are our father;
we are the clay and you the potter:
we are all the work of your hands.

Responsorial Psalm
Ps 80:2-3, 15-16, 18-19

R. (4) Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.
O shepherd of Israel, hearken,
from your throne upon the cherubim, shine forth.
Rouse your power,
and come to save us.
R. Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.
Once again, O LORD of hosts,
look down from heaven, and see;
take care of this vine,
and protect what your right hand has planted
the son of man whom you yourself made strong.
R. Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.
May your help be with the man of your right hand,
with the son of man whom you yourself made strong.
Then we will no more withdraw from you;
give us new life, and we will call upon your name.
R. Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.

Reading II
1 Cor 1:3-9

Brothers and sisters:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always on your account
for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus,
that in him you were enriched in every way,
with all discourse and all knowledge,
as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you,
so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift
as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He will keep you firm to the end,
irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is faithful,
and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Gospel
Mk 13:33-37

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Be watchful! Be alert!
You do not know when the time will come.
It is like a man traveling abroad.
He leaves home and places his servants in charge,
each with his own work,
and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch.
Watch, therefore;
you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming,
whether in the evening, or at midnight,
or at cockcrow, or in the morning.
May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping.
What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’”

(Taken from: http://www.usccb.org/nab/113008.shtml)

The reading that really struck me, and why I have pasted them here to share was Isaiah. Fr. Thomas as Incarnation Monastery, among the Camaldolese Benedictine monks, gave the homily today, but it was the words of the scripture that really struck me. His mentioning of the mystics, and the knowledge of God as all-present in the 3rd person, but the very real need for Him in the first person especially drew me in. I often, while knowing God is fully with me long for the very personal presence of Jesus. I think the manifold mystery of the Trinity itself makes plenty of space for human fulfillment through the Trinity. The Father being Spirit and all present, we can be constantly comforted and secure in knowing He is always with us even when He feels farthest away and we question His presence. I have a special devotion to Jesus, because Jesus convinces me that God is and that He came to redeem my flesh and blood. I miss Jesus deeply, that 2nd person aspect of God ( I think) because I am human… and the Kingdom is present but not at the same time. God is here and God is absent. Maybe because I am not fully one with God? A hard question to probe. Something about my existential being and putting my hands into those of Jesus misses Him. Then the Spirit. The Holy Ghost confirms in me, by dwelling in my spirit that God is enthroned now and will be moreso. While Jesus is my hope, Abba is my faith, the Ghost is with me in present tying all into a very real now.

More thoughts later…

As a morally conservative Christian woman, I derived my initial sense of sexual ethics from a Protestant upbringing, which taught me that sex was reserved for the context of heterosexual marriage alone. I was taught that Christian purity was directly reflected in sexual status; to be active sexually, one should be engaged in a heterosexual marriage. Finding natural law in my process of conversion to Roman Catholicism supported my conservative sexual ethic, as well as reinforcing my own idealized standard, celibacy. Having not been taught the doctrine of natural law in my formative belief years, I imagined God to have set an order for the functioning of all things, including sexuality in human persons, and that to act in accordance with the nature God had first created for people was obedience while acting contrarily to that nature was disobedience. I cannot remember a time when I considered homosexuality natural, because in my own reading of scripture I valued themes of male/female coupling as the basis of nations and as demonstrating a picture of divine unity with mankind.

While my theological position on homosexual acts is that they are sinful because not only are they unnatural, but also immoral (because they occur outside the context for marriage seen in the prototype of the first humans, Adam and Eve), I advocate a position of ‘equal but different’ in terms of social rights and treatment of both homosexual and heterosexual persons. I believe that in the secular government we live under, people with any sort of romantic partner, homosexual or heterosexual, should be able to have equal medical opportunities and legal benefits allotted them by their partner. Since marriage is a religious institution, while supporting the Catholic natural law perspective of marriage, I see no compulsion for American society to base legal ethics on the Christian standard of marriage. Catholic teaching affirms my belief in the respect of personal dignity in light of social issues in Pope Benedict XVI’s (the Cardinal Ratzinger) teaching, “The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.” (1) Emphasizing the reasonable tradition of natural law anthropology derived from biblical themes of sexual complementarity , I hope to offer a reasonable Catholic approach advocating the supremacy of human dignity in ethical approaches to homosexual and heterosexual conduct within the Catholic Church.

Beginning by defining homosexuality in light of natural law, one must pose the question, are some people born with homosexual tendencies or not? Having personally vacillated back and forth between these two opinions, I deeply appreciate the Catholic Church’s distinction between homosexual acts and tendencies in its moral teaching. Before encountering queer theory, I would have tended to definitively categorize homosexuality in tendency and practice as deceptive forms of persons’ created nature, because, unlike queer theory, I believe that sexuality is natural, created by God not only as an external, biological identity, but an intrinsic factor of our souls. From a complementarian perspective on the sexes, I believe that male and female, in all their biological, emotional, and spiritual attractions to one another are created in the image of God (Genesis 1.27). Referring back the Edenic roots of humanity, I will address a natural law response to Roger’s critique of Gagnon. From these considerations, I will incorporate queer theory into my understanding of natural law (biological sex determining societal gender role) by ending with an analysis of natural law as reinforcing gender imitation (Butler) amongst Catholic laity. I will conclude, however, that human sexuality performed naturally or unnaturally, does not take precedence over the biblical teaching of human dignity in the image of God in social ethics.

Having mentioned my personal tradition of natural law as being derived from scriptural themes, I will contrast the perspectives of Robert Gagnon and Jack Rogers on natural law in Romans 1. Considering a full inerrancy of scripture, where the intent has been communicated in spite of human error, I respond with my own convictions for complementary sexual union of male and female found in Romans, with additional references to Genesis. Expanding on Rogers’ brief discussion on natural law in chapter five of Jesus, The Bible, and Homosexuality: Exploding the Myths of the Church, Rogers critiques Gagnon and other authors on the oppressive abuse of natural law in his essay, “Natural Law.” (2)  Critiquing Gagnon’s basis for natural law on portions of Romans 1,2 and 3, Rogers refutes Gagnon’s claim that biology was the basis for Paul’s doctrine of nature.(3)  Rogers cites this reading of Romans 1.26-27 as an overemphasis of “unnatural sins” over others, though all have the same end, death. Comparing the homosexual plight to that of women and slaves, Rogers rejects church “discrimination,” unjust repression which robs a person identifying as homosexual of the dignity owed to their personhood as made in the image of God. To Rogers, natural law is an inductive reading of the Biblical text rather than a deductive understanding of God’s creation, singling out certain people to target as the scapegoats of sin rather than confessing that all people are sinful.

The passage of Romans 1.26-27 has commonly been cited to proof text that all are aware of a natural performance of their innate sexual identity by the image of God within them. While some consider the sexual practices by which Paul identifies the Gentiles as different from the Jews, linking the passage in the context of Romans 1-3 to form Paul’s argument that all are guilty of sin and in need of Christ (not just Gentiles), such context does not discredit a natural law reading of the same text. Through my limited time in biblical studies, I have encountered much equivocation as to the significance of Romans 1.18-32, which I interpret as similar to the prophetic warnings in the Old Testament, showing the Israelite people the consequences of falling into the sexual sins of their neighbors. Paul’s pejorative discussion of same-sex acts as punishment for idolatry in the passage of Romans 1 suggests the possible equation of idolatry and sexual immorality, both of which are acts against nature, if one considers the most natural setting for mankind to be the depiction of Eden before the Fall: According to Genesis 1, man and woman were created in the image of God, thus suggesting, if sexual relations occurred before the Fall, that they were sexually active with partners of opposite sexes. Viewing the Eden scenario and natural, post-Fall the closest replica of created sexual nature we can practice is heterosexual marriage.

While to Rogers there is “no scriptural warrant for monogamous heterosexual marriage as the norm for all people”(4)  because it denies unmarried and homosexual people the ability to reflect God’s image, I argue that natural law does not exclusively limit the imaging of God to heterosexual marriage, but in terms of human sexuality, this is the only context presented for God-approved sexual expression. Natural law is merely the context we humans have been given to understand our sexual identities and to perform them in a way that honors God. Having established my belief that homosexual acts are against the nature which God created in man (to heterosexually active in a monogamous relationship or to be celibate), I will turn to a comparison of homosexual act vs. homosexual tendency in conversation with Catholic tradition’s ethical teachings on the admittance of homosexuals into seminaries as well as the administering of the Eucharist to homosexuals.

In Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski addressed the issue of admitting homosexuals to priestly seminaries by distinguishing between homosexual acts, which are considered sinful in Catholic teaching, and homosexual tendencies which are not sexual acts, but desires or attractions that might distract from a holy vocation. (5)  Thus Grocholewski concluded that “cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture,’” requiring that homosexual acts be forsaken and tendencies be abandoned at least three years before application to a seminary. This teaching suggests that deep-seated homosexual tendencies are not only a sign of immaturity, but so unnatural that even a vow of celibacy cannot contain such as an “intrinsically disordered” tendency.(6)

While those with deep-seated homosexual tendencies are prevented from Catholic seminaries, the Church interprets Scripture to indicate that not “all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.”(7) Cardinal Ratzinger, supported Catholic rejection of homosexual opinion as intrinsically disordered, because it is viewed as a “strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.”(8)  Cardinal Ratzinger appealed to natural law to support the thesis that homosexual tendencies came from a moral evil because same-sex “activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living.”(9)  In spite of considering homosexuality as a disorder, the Catholic Church maintains that the human will, a testimony to the image of God, remains in a homosexual person. Therefore, participation in homosexual acts renders one culpable of sexual sin before God, the reason for which the Eucharist, the celebration central to Catholic liturgy, is withheld from practicing homosexuals.

One might argue, is it fair to withhold the Sacrament from individuals who feel impulsively drawn towards homosexual acts? Is it wrong to deny individuals who feel deep-seated homosexual tendencies gratification for desires for loving relationship? Yet if sexuality in the image of God according to the natural law demonstrated in Adam and Eve in their pre-Fall Edenic states, homosexuality is by no means natural and intrinsic to human beings. Catholic teaching is not stigmatizing homosexual individuals as distinctly sinful, nor robbing them of ability to manifest the image of God. Human dignity is never absent from persons, regardless of whether they are in a state of sin or strongly tempted to sin, including sexual sins. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states in statement # 2352, “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.”(10)  Thus homosexual acts are no more sinful than heterosexual acts of fornication, prostitution, or adultery. However, is it right to deny homosexuals the moral freedom to perform their same-sex identities forcing the performance of a heterosexual identity?

While Butler suggests that “the very categories of sex, of sexual identity, of gender are produced or maintained in the effects of compulsory performance,”(11)  natural law in a belief in an essential subject within each person responds that the only performed sexual identity is one that is false to one’s nature. While gender roles may be performed, my belief in line agreement with Catholic sexual ethics is that sexual nature does not exist because of gender performance, but sexual identity results in some sort of gendered expression. According to Catholic teaching, homosexually gendered expression is a confused understanding of natural human sexual expression. I agree with this teaching, though my perspective of individual persons is first colored by a value of human dignity without consideration as to whether they are in a state of sin or not. The valuable emphasis I gleaned from Roger’s book was that too often homosexuality is made the scapegoat, not only of all sexual sins, but of all sin in general. In the eyes of God, my sin is in just as much need of Jesus as my redeemer as a practicing homosexual, there should be no social distinction between my rights and those allotted to a homosexual. The degree to which my sin may be “natural” as opposed to homosexuality as “unnatural” in Catholic teaching, allowing me to receive Eucharist when a homosexual cannot, is a deeper question of difference between mortal and venial sin, a distinction which I do not believe God draws, but which may affect people to different degrees in their journeys towards holy union with God.

(1) Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons, n.4, 10. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect. 3 June 2003. 27 November 2008. <http://www.zenit.org/article-7906?l=english>.

(2) Rogers, Jack. “Natural Law.” 28 November 2008. <http://www.covenantnetwork.org/bible/JBR-Nat%20Law.pdf>.
(3)  Gagnon, Robert. The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 2000). 142.
(4) Rogers, Jack. Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explore the Myths, Heal the Church. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. 85.
(5) Congregation for Catholic Eductation. “Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders,” n. 2, 5. Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, Prefect. 4 November 2005. 25 November 2008. <http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_20051104_istruzione_en.html>.
(6) Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Persona Humana: Doctrine on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics,” n. 8, 4. Franjo Cardinal Seper, Prefect. 29 December 1975. 26 November 2008. <http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19751229_persona-humana_en.html>.
(7) Persona Humana, n. 8, 4.
(8) Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” n. 3, 2. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect. 1 October 1986. 26 November 2008. <http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19861001_homosexual-persons_en.html>.
(9) Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, n.7, 2.
(10) Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. Part 3, Section 2, Chptr. 2, Art. 2, # 2352. 28 November 2008. <http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a6.htm>.
(11) Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Henry Abelove, Ed. Routledge, 1993. 318.

We women and our dualism, how we sickly relish in it sometimes. Have you ever defeated yourself, known it was really awful for you, but chosen to do so anyways? Now when one was martyred it began as a thing between fear, horror, and awe, wonder. But why did we ever start craving death, start inviting it upon us. My life is different then that of Christ’s… it is to live that I am here. But the tales of so many of these virgin martyrs are quite compelling… and moving, and beautiful:

'See how your name's written on me, O Lord.
How it delights me these letters to read,
Which are the mark of your victories, O Christ!
And to speak your holy name for itself
Here is the red of my blood that's been drawn'. (140) 

These words, with never a tear or a groan,
Joyful and all unafraid did she sing;
Torment so dreadful did not reach her soul.
Coloured by fresh flow of blood too, her limbs
Bathed her fair skin in its warm-running stream. (145) 

Final refinement of torture came now.
No longer wounds for the tearing of flesh,
Nor skin that's ploughed to the depth of the ribs,
But there is flame from the lampstands all round
Raging against her at stomach and flanks. (150) 

Sweet-smelling tresses all over her neck
Fell to her shoulders as light as a veil,
So that her modesty, bashful and shy,
Might be concealed with her maidenhood's grace
Under the cover of screen from her poll. (155) 

Flame with a roar made a rush for her face
And, brought to life by her hair, to her head
Transferred its hold, rearing over its top.
Maid, in her wish for a swift end to life,
Swallowed and drank from the fire with her mouth. (160) 

Thereupon suddenly flashed forth a dove
Whiter than snow, from the martyred girl's mouth
Seen to depart and to make for for the stars:
This was the spirit of Eulalia,
Milky-white swift-darting, quite without sin. (165) 

Drooped was her neck as her soul sped away;
Down died the fiery blaze of the pyre.
Peace was imparted to those lifeless limbs,
While in the sky flapped triumphant applause
Soul, as it winged to the regions on high. (170) 

Even the minion himself saw the bird
Openly pass from the mouth of the girl;
Thoroughly stunned and amazed at the sight,
He leaped and fled from the deeds he had done.

So such women become immortalizes in their being as virgins, victims, and something more to marvel at. It is the beauty of the martyred virgins… they have remained these sorts of living icons to wonder with, hopefully not just ogle at. Hm… objectification is the next stream of thought.

Just things I am wondering Jesus, sitting here in the library, when I should be diligently plodding away at homework. Well, I did a lot with a presentation today, so its ok to take a bit of a break.
So much I wonder, Jesus, so much I would ask if You were standing right here. All the things that run through my mind, that run through me… all my running after religiousities… what am I seekin in it, what is the remaining tension between the devotional practice and the people.  Do humans have religious tendencies, because we are angled towards a desire for cohesion. How is religion cohesive? If we didn’t believe in God, then we would only have to worry about cohesion with evil and not concerned with the ultimate lover of our lives? Does Paul convict us of sin with or without knowledge of God or is it merely absence of doing good?

Would I consider fear a factor great enough to diminish my ability to make good, free choices. Is it a damper to a possibility I know I have for good in constricting my freedom? All my life in the bad I’ve done, I have known when making bad choices, in spite of fear. Sure, not all options may have been present, but I have been intelligible in my conscience of the good I could have done. So is sin really something I must freely and knowingly do? I might have to argue, if yes, then I have had a greater freedom, a grace. Fundamental option is fascinating right now… innate to our human nature, and dependent upon grace. If formed over time, I am still forming my fundamental option, or actually, I feel mine is established and I am obtaining consciousness. My fundamental option seems tied in with religiousity. O spiritualism… Jesus when does our spirit-seeking divorce from you? Sin… que qui es sin…

If we sin out of our strengths, and actual sin is hard to do, then we often sin out of omission. Keenan. Fundamental option… if all my life is patterned after loving You, Jesus, loving others, nature, and self should be natural. So if my mode of living consistently shows an attempt to love others and abandon self, what is the fundamental option and what needs to be fixed?

There are going to be several sections to this post, because while the ideas occurred in academics, I want to personalize them and bring them into the most intimate context of being that I know, a closeness with Jesus that uses up. So the theme of this segment is dualism… body and spirit… people and Jesus… solitude and community. So I will begin with some of the “academic” thoughts and segway into the personal side of things.

A Reasonable Faith? How Orthodox Catholic Doctrine Fostered Dualism in Women

All too familiar with “be holy as I am holy,” Christian women in the developing hierarchy of the Catholic church found themselves in a fundamentally different place in the order of creation than their fellow human beings, men. Considered inferior to men in ancient society for numerous reasons, among those the facts of monthly menstruation and Eve’s part in acquiring original sin, women were denied the basic human right of being considered created in the image of God. Relegated to such a sub-human state, holiness was unimaginable in the womanly state and body. Thus, in order to transcend the womanly state to attain male virtue, women found themselves consigned to a sort of spirit-flesh dualism, even though theologically the Church condemned dualism at the Council of Trent via Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. Caught in a paradoxical state between condemnation of dualism and degradation of femaleness (spirit and body), one can easily see the appeal of heretical movements to marginalized women: faced with the fact of dualism to achieve holiness, would a woman rather be considered male or legitimized in her femininity in that state of holiness? When prohibited from leadership positions within the church, women obtained a further motivation to practice faith in “heretical” traditions, which permitted equal authority between men and women.

Towards and Equality of Difference: I am a devout laywoman in a modern Catholic Church; You are the Vatican Council of Bishops, assembled to hear my plea: Why is it that what qualifies me to teach the children of the church discredits me from teaching men? Flash back: I am a dedicated virgin in the early 4th century, you are a collection of bishops gathered over the controversy I have stirred: why is it that what permits me to give and nurture life within my home prohibits me from extending a similar spirit of life in public? My trans-centennial woman-selves are presenting the Church with the same case: why is my sexuality lesser than a man’s? Why am I judged in light of my sexual status and function, while men are never qualified sexually? Of course it doesn’t take rocket science or metaphysics to evidence difference between me and a man. But maybe there’s more to both of us than meet’s the eye. I am neither advocating that we women be divorced from our sexual possibilities not that we be fatalistically confined to them: where is the equality of Christ for women and our bodies in the Catholic Church?

Such is the state I as an individual encounter my loosely knit religious community here in Berkeley, California. In this quest, the closer community is one of significantly more interaction and influence, and yet when reaching this point of perspective with my general community, the deeper dualism is revealed: Jesus and persons. I think that this may be a miscalculation on my part, because Jesus and people are not mutually exclusive.

I have been wondering this past week, interacting with friends and wondering things that may be very abstract in the social world including more than me, but feel very fundamentally part of my concrete being: the mysteries of speaking with God and knowing God. It is definately a dualism when one equates speaking about God to speaking with God. Jesus is not merely present in other persons, though perhaps one cannot know Him in His richest sense apart from other persons, but Jesus is, I think, certainly more than just others. I discussed with a friend this mystery of loving an unseen God: I think Jesus gives us the capacity to love Him by first reaching out towards us in love. Giving us the ability to grasp this love, we have the choice to love back and so fully recieve His love because we interact with it or passively recieve the love and never share it with others. Jesus and I (I say I am married to Him) have been working towards the sort of relationship where every day I am in love. Everything is beautiful and joyful and bright because my pleasure is coming from doing what is revealing to me my Jesus. A lot of this has to do with loving others, I think… is it too mystical to wonder we can love Jesus apart or beyond all this? This too taunts with a dualism.

I whole-heartedly believe Jesus is beyond people and not fully other to people, because Jesus is a person, but in so much as Jesus is a person, His personhood is not lost in its dispersion to others. I think I can love each person I meet so much better for Jesus loving me and chooising to accept His love. Not that I always do, it is a dualistic struggle: can one have a human lover and divine at once? To me that goes beyond paradox in the way I conceptualize the world. So where does the experience of Jesus overlap with people and when is it apart? I think this phenomenon of knowing Jesus apart and in others allows for a richness in the type of conversation one can have with Him. I do mean with and not just about. There was a silly point yesterday, walking with a friend and talking about football, when out loud, I asked Jesus, quite seriously, though of course, I have rarely heard Him answer in an audible voice… it is that of a person if He does. Someone I know and love in Jesus, who can be Jesus, but who is not in essence Jesus. But wait, is that how it works?

This rides a fine line, I think… because if I say Jesus is outside of others, I am isolating myself to books alone, and Jesus is more than a written Word, He is a living word. But if Jesus is only in others… how will the second coming happen at all? So much more to be flushed out and explored here. I think Holiness is other to us until we are given capability and act upon it by God. So much more to explore.

So someday I am going to study the biology of mysticism and study the chemistry of mental functions. Somewhere in all this wonder of running that I am incorporating into my daily spiritual practice, Jesus’ Spirit, I guess I should just call her my dear friend Sophia… touches the things stewing in my mind and completes some of those ideas in a mysterious contemplation. The fusion this evening run occurred between discussion of lay spirituality, and the current trends towards monasticism (of which I see two types) and an additional topic of dualism creating a sense of objectification of the body. I will begin with the latter rather than the former, because to me it is the most unformed of the ideas and may evolve into a natural transition to lay-monastic spiritual practices today.

In my previous note, I discussed asceticism as a type of legitimized dualism: reduction of the body to this thing to be transcended and discarded for some other image… in this context, imago Christi. I think it is rational to say that this dualism is an objectification of one’s own body, as I noted a thing, to be gotten rid of and shed really (all this floats through my mind because I have been reading Sartre on objectification and feminists on Sartre). Besides considering how this affected both ascetic men and women in antiquity, the thought of such dualism creating a bad theology of the body in today’s laity struck me in considering some discussion from Themes in Christian Antiquity history class. Our professor observed that monasticism has been a modern trend in lay spirituality, just as I guess it was a lay practice in antiquity, since members were rarely ordained and skeptical of clergy.

The two types of asceticism I see within possibility for modern practice are: antiquity’s attempts to transcend the body and medievalist worship of the body. It occurred to me that the diversity in asceticism might still be something similar to opinions of the body in the Church currently. We have works such as John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, but are we still caught between body worship and abandonment? Where is the room to simply be enfleshed and living that out as we seek to be nearer to our Savior in the footsteps He left here? I tend towards the physical degradation end of the bodily spectrum because I value spirit and Gnostic-like grasp of God so much. Thus I tend to objectify… and in my readings, I wonder if I was taught to objectify myself. How then do we abandon ourselves as vessels to Christ if we became an other-than-self tool for the use of Spirit? So much for Spirit’s living temple.

Back to alterity and women and men regarding each other as too other and too same.

Today was a compelling day of classes.. so I am going to wonder a lot of what I shared with my Rabbi out here… and then add and change things as Jesus and I talk through these ‘bodily’ issues. We are such embodied spirits, and so afraid of it… at least I am. Alas, the allure of askesis.

We talked about sin in moral theology; mortal and venial sin… and I guess I mention that because all sexual sins are considered mortal sins. And my topic is something of sexuality and the bodies, sin and controversy over sin and the acceptable. Spirituality and sexuality, good heavens.

All sorts of interesting things in history, from how spirituality changed from attempts to change bodies in antiquity were converted to a sort of body worship and emphasis on relics and holiness of bodies in Middle Ages; to how some Medieval saints have “incorruptible” bodies (making me think not just of ‘holy’ things like John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” to that horrible Body Works exhibit which glories some sort of dismembered depiction of bodies). My favorite fact out of class was that asceticism is a type of dualism that was sanctioned within the church because ascetics didn’t reject clerical authority unlike the Arians and Manicheans… etc. Great stuff, all political. Struck me how women in any ‘holy’ practice like askesis, or something close to holy orders would always be politically threatening to men! Next week I am teaching for a third of class… all the things I have been studying on women and all… 30 full minutes and then 20 minutes for questions!

The sexual ethics class… at Pacific School of Religion, challenges my soul day in and out… and now we are writing papers for the next few weeks on our perspective, interacting with that of our church, on addressing LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) issues: oh my. I am going to represent the Catholic teaching, because there is where I am right now… though this class has given me such an immersion-like feel for the humanity of LGBT people. I have friends now who claim these identities… though I still see the context of sexuality through an extremely conservative lens according to most. Catholic teaching concerning LGBT people is that if celibate, one can enter the priesthood, but not attend seminary. That’s not right, but I understand kinda. One cannot receive communion if practicing… but do we refuse eucharist to heterosexual people fornicating? No. Not right either. I am going to invoke the issue of women’s equality as humans with that of homosexual rights as humans… arguing for an equal dignity of human beings. I am going to suggest revisions in the Church, but uphold the belief of unethicalness of sexual relations under such claimed identities. I have felt very compromising in this class, Rabbi, and now am finally getting myself together, and can stick to the image of God for equal rights as humans… I don’t think I can argue for “equal” rights to sexual relations because I believe in natural law, God’s created order.

This is such a tricky issue, heterosexuality and homosexuality… I have read so many books and articles this semester that have been changing and challenging my fundamental thinking. And no, sex is not just for procreation… it is a picture of unity. One of my friends reminds me that there is something striving in us all for unity with God. I think we look for that in people we are attracted too… and if one is not gifted with celibacy, I believe our sexuality is naturally involved with the most intimate of those connections … in the Christian context, I would say that is marriage. Why is marriage such a limit to sexuality in most people’s eyes. We really do live in an over-sexed society… I will address the issue of objectification of sex and ourselves (men of women and women of men) later in a post on Sartre and Levinas, but I think we have confined sexuality to such base categories as people. Sexuality doesn’t have to imply sex acts, I don’t think, but can be definitive of a part of that metaphysical quality of our distinctiveness as man-person or woman-person. In my very Catholic belief, sex is the seal and renewal of that sacred marital covenant between a man and woman imaging their Creator… any other sex is fornication or some other sort of victimizing unholy.

Different but equal has to be the name of the game… not separate but equal. And here’s my argument for this position: separating people into categories merely fosters a sense of hierarchy that really does injustice to the dignity of human beings all created with God’s image inside of us, regardless of what sexual identity we claim. To look at human anatomy confirms differences: my body is not like a man’s, and so in some ways that differentiates me as woman from man. I like that Levinas argued for metaphysical differences beyond biological and all. I am struggling to work out the equality in these differences as seriality of gender… not category. While I as woman am serialized in my womanhood (ie., share common aspects of ‘woman’ with other women while retaining individuality in my expression of gender, sexuality… all colored by my own capabilties as an individual human person that are not sexually specific), I am not only a person in terms of my womanhood, but share abilities with men that are common to humanity, according to my individuality. I think here I might be able to touch on Ricoeur’s theory of self… the two axis of self and other… the self of me is woman, and has particular individualities, that it shares with other, other being both inside me and outside me. I was to synthesize Ricoeur with Levinas, who says other is outside me… and make both true, so that I still need to form a concept of self in terms of interacting with other.

Somehow while this applies so beautifully to genders, it has to apply to humans in general. Sexuality gets to be a tricker issue when associating it with an essential self. That I will have to work with, considering the duality of thought range: gender as a social construct (thus saith Judith Butler) and sex as intrinsic identity. I will be taking a bold leap by morally opposing homosexual acts. Safe from a clerical Catholic context… but really, amongst laity? Whew… same sort of issue I run into with women’s ordination and rights… should we really be priests/priestesses, and is it only some men who might struggle (I think women might have a harder time with all that then men.). In the middle of all the biases and misogyny that I will be addressing, I need to find some more basis within my picture of Jesus for everything that is considered a social injustice.

Society today has an overwhelming standard of sameness being equality which just is so obviously untrue its comical. A lot of things about us as human people are the same, but not so much that the experience as different sexual beings can be equated as same. We women experience and internalize differently individually from one another as we do from men. What as issue to argue, the embodiment of men and women and our struggles to recognize the differences while maintaining the equality.

“Today’s topic of discussion is that of natural law in Catholic tradition and history. We will begin our evening with a brief history of natural law and its function historically and currently within the Catholic Church, followed by a time of questions and answers before spring-boarding off this topic of natural law to offer a precursor for next week’s topic of modern women in the Catholic Church through feminist critique of natural law tradition.”

a. History and Function of Natural Law in Catholic Tradition:
The concept of natural law in Christian thought is read into Christian tradition by the patristic fathers as early as the writings of the Apostle Paul. Yet this concept of living “according to nature”  is found even earlier in the Greek philosophical writings defining virtuous living as that which is in accordance with reason. Reading the capacity for goodness as innate within each human being who lives rationally in synthesis with St. Paul, Christian tradition in the patristic era developed the theology that all people, being made in God’s image, are able to derive knowledge of the existence of God from things in creation. This knowledge of God is written on the heart of each person  from the very first moment of existence, thus allowing man to structure his own world in a manner like to God, in which all things exist in symbiotic harmony. If “natural law is the divine reason or will of God prescribing the conservation of the natural order and prohibiting any breach of it,”  Augustine saw fit to distinguish between God’s law, ‘eternal law’ and human law, ‘temporal law.’ While Augustine introduced the need for God’s revelatory intercession to expand man’s reason to discern goodness, St. Thomas Aquinas expanded this insight to include room for goodness and virtue in all people, including pagans.
Distinguishing human beings’ likeness to God as this capacity to reason and God’s enlightenment of natural reasoning in explicit Christian revelation, the medieval theologian and scholar St. Thomas Aquinas is most commonly associated with the theology of Natural Law within Catholic teaching. Being involved in the Averroist controversy at the University of Paris, Aquinas defended the necessity of studying philosophical texts such as those of pagan Aristotle to the Catholic Magisterium on the basis through the use of natural law—that truth was not particular to the Catholic faith alone, but present and recognizable in all reason. If, as Catholic theology teaches, God is pure Reason, thus also Truth, and man is made in his image, Aquinas “insisted that the truths of faith and those of sense experience, as presented by Aristotle, are fully compatible and complementary,”  revolutionizing the Christian concept of Truth as something exclusive and limited to Christian teaching alone. From such principles of human capacity to reason, Catholic theology develops a picture of God Who invites all through to know Him through that capacity which is specifically intrinsic to human beings, that of reason. If the natural law is common to all people, then Christian moral norms should be rationally accepted by all people of goodwill, theologians argue.  Yet since the natural law is not always clear in concrete situations, Aquinas taught that divine revelation compensated for the lack in human reasoning.
Thomisitic conception of natural law as the basic construct of morality for free and reasonable creatures, enhanced by the “the grace-revealed theological virtues of faith, home and charity” in the Christian journey towards God  was subordinated to originating in the divine will versus the divine essence in the late Middle Ages. Volunteerism, espoused by Scotus and Ockham, diverged from Thomistic natural law where God was in essence the law and thus subject to it, to God’s position as removed from the law. Beyond Scotus’ assertion that God chose to assign good to man through specific laws (rather than God implanting in man His same essence for order and goodness), Ockham stated that even good and evil were only thus distinguished because God had willed it. Volunteerism laid the basis for Luther’s Protestant movement away from the capability of beings to act reasonably in accordance with natural law due to the corrosion of sin upon human reason. From these initial diversions from the Thomistic natural law theology, ethics and theology continually stripped away the normatively of reason until modern natural law theory had degraded nature to utilitarianism.
Responding to ethical concerns over theological implications, Pope Leo XIII revived Thomistic thought and natural law with his encyclical Aeterni patris in 1879, invoking the philosophy of natural law to support Catholic moral teaching on human dignity.  Neo-Thomistic Catholic ethical writers interpreted natural law as regarding “persons as ends and not merely as objects to be used by the state or the collectivity,”  affirming assumptions about the dignity of human persons: (1) humans are intelligent, (2) reality is understandable, and (3) understanding of natural law calls for action. Moving from theological reasoning to more persuasive ethical engagement of modern culture, Catholic tradition reasserted Thomisitic thought that natural law “can provide a broad basis for the moral consensus needed to unite the diverse citizens of a pluralistic society.”  Since the revitalizing of Thomisitic tradition of natural law, further transition to the application of natural law in moral and theological anthropology continue to impact Catholic thought and teaching today.
Revisionists  (also known as proportionalists) remove the universalizing context of natural law which Aquinas intended, promoting moral ideals and norms with exceptions. Revisionists emphasize human flourishing versus nature, promoting selective judgment about aspects of nature which contribute to human good rather than simply conforming to a natural ordering. Revisionism adds to Catholic tradition a value of human goodness across any social/religious boundaries, fostering ecumenical moral dialogue. New classical natural law theory posits the generation of natural law from practical reasoning of “self-evident human goods rather than by any a priori descriptive claims about human nature.”  Pope reasons this theory to be closest to Thomistic theory in emphasis on individual good and natural law through practical reasoning apart from divine revelation in theology.
Having surveyed the history of natural law’s evolution, the concept of natural law as embraced by the Catholic Church as a justifiable basis for the many social/ethical positions held within the Church. Claiming that “truth is one, and the truths established by rational means cannot conflict with God’s revelation,”  the Catholic Church remains open to the possibility of error in human reason, though referencing long-standing traditions determined as ‘natural’ to support various teachings, both ethical and theological. Recognizing the inconsequentiality of Christian theology to the majority of the world, the Catholic Church claims natural law as the basis on which all of its moral teachings are applicable to people of good will. Specifically to Christians, natural law becomes the basic foundation for moral conscience, upon which revelation constructs what should be a greater care and concern for humanity, through a more-enlightened reason.

b. Questions and Answers:
Q. (From Katherine): Natural law “really makes the whole moral life sound like an exercise in mere rationalism. Like we’re all supposed to aspire to be or to become Mr. Spock or something.”
A. It would be easy to interpret the natural law theory as reducing humans to mere reasoning-machines; just look at what happened leading up to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical in 1879! Natural law was never meant to undermine the complexity of humanity into mere science, hence the shift to language of moral/theological anthropology. Opinion varies as to what defines human nature, whether it is a rational soul or psychological desires, but these are all deviations from the Aristotelian anthropology, which Aquinas embraced “Human beings are animals who can think.”  Natural law is more of a principle than a definitive, scientific rule, by which one is to script one’s moral decisions. Personal application of natural law is crucial to its application, evidenced in both Aristotle and Aquinas’ appeal “to the insight of the person of practical wisdom and emotional balance.”  Emphasis of personal conscience in the application of natural law demonstrates just how complex the Catholic church realizes moral situations to be; there is not always one right answer to every similar situation. So in applying the rule of natural law, reasoning what is good as best as one is able, there is great margin for human error in the teaching of natural law.

c. Conclusion of natural law in light of Cahill’s feminist critique:
The feminist reassessment of natural law rejects the universality with which it applies all laws as oppressive. Cahill identifies feminist objection to natural law, offering a voice for any suppressed peoples or marginalized groups, though attempts to synthesize the feminist cause with the principles of natural law. Scrutinizing natural law through a feminist lens, Cahill focuses on the human rights natural law can on a universally acceptable ethical perspective, rather than interpreting a hierarchy of reason. Nothing that Aquinas was “concerned very centrally and even very visibly with the problem of human historicity and knowledge,”  Cahill exposes room for the intimate dialogue of differences feminists desire to cultivate in order to identify common goods. While in agreement on three matters: human embodiment as an important factor to discerning human goods, the need to integrate bodily and rational human nature, and the active response appropriate to ethical contemplation , disagreement arises concerning the social and political roles “natural” to each gender.
Considering this critique in determining whether natural law is more trouble than it’s worth, Cahill poignantly points to the conflict of values aroused in the experience of the human moral situation in tension between Christ’s crucifixion and promised eschatological return. I agree with Cahill that values are not socially constructed, though of course their application is. Using the model of this feminist critique as a construct from which to interpret natural law in an emphasis of universal human good, I am in favor of a critical application of natural law through individual human conscience in light of changing social situations. Since there is now no moral disparity in the presence of a woman in a public over private sphere, I believe natural law still offers valuable principles though its context is morally temporal.

Notes/Citations:

Pope, Stephen. “Natural law and Christian ethics,” The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics. By Robin Gill. Cambridge University Press: UK, 2001. 77. From a quote attributed to Aristotle.
St. Paul, Letter to the Romans, 2.15
St. Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, quoted in Pope’s “Natural law and Christian ethics.”
Aquinas, St. Thomas. An article from Funk & Wagnalls® New Encyclopedia. © 2006 World Almanac Education Group. A WRC Media Company. 13 November 2008. <http://www.history.com/encyclopedia.do?vendorId=FWNE.fw..aq127200.a#FWNE.fw..aq127200.a>.
Pope, Stephen. “Natural law and Christian ethics,” The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics. By Robin Gill. Cambridge University Press: UK, 2001. 79.
Pope, 81.
Pope, 87.
Pope, 88.
Pope, 88.
Pope, 91.
Hughes, Gerard J. “Natural Law,” Christian Ethics: An Introduction. Bernard Hoose, Ed. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998. 51.
Hughes, 52.
Hughes, 54.
Cahill, Lisa Sowle. “Natural Law: A Feminist Reassessment,” Is There a Human Nature? Leroy S. Rouner, Ed. University of Notre Dame Press: Indiana, 1997. 83.
Cahill, 85-6.

So to simply come, Jesus.
In this moment of studying, I don’t know what I am seeking, show me what part of You.
I have traced our journey from that time when I received Your kiss and knew I was wed in my soul to You up until now. A great labor has been going on internally, and now I have a pregnant soul that wrestles with some child within. I do not understand the struggles yet, but I am listening to what You say in the voices around me that resonate with the whispers of Your spirit in the Logos and within.
A fight, a striving… working with fear and trembling, but this in itself is not enough, because You tell me to fear God and not men. I am so afraid of abandoning You, yet the askesis I commonly choose is one of divorce. Flesh and blood are this tangible reality, this gift from You that You desire me to offer. Something we have talked about Jesus, it this idea of attractiveness, to attract to You.
Help me form my life into something that draws to You. For so long I have wanted to obliterate the self in order to let You be seen. But the beauty of a stained-glass window is not an empty pane—the image is only reflected when colored glass is present for the light to penetrate. And may that image be Christ, but I am to give You flesh and color. I am Your form, thus, I am Your handmaiden. We are too abstract again Jesus, there is more to You and me than the ideas we discuss.
You have challenged me with an idea of an embodied theology, something which threatens and terrifies parts of me that I never really wanted to explore. All sorts of threats to holiness, that internal misogyny, hypocritical tornness of conscience… ambiguity of belief. I am no better than patriarchal monks who rank to the desert in trying to escape the presence of women (equated with lust), but found there was still lust in their souls. Maybe I have to approach whatever my own lust is differently. Even saying that is still passive-aggressive. I am still afraid to open myself and speak.
Learning to come to You, this is a new phenomenon to me… and it is approaching the people in my life. I am told on every turn that my steps are those of one turning away to get to God. I hope I have not erected some idol in my soul which I embrace over You. I think I am kissing the feet of my Savior, but the release the imagination and find dust on my lips. How embodied in this world are You.
Union with God, I see clamouring for union, but have we not divorced You and signed that breaking of covenant? Do you still want us in this world for Your people? The fear and trembling of my salvation brings me to those intense moments when staring another in the eyes is to look into the fears of my own soul as well. Therein lies the desert where my demons shall be exposed. Here I am, bring out My Demons.