He's my husband. Not my partner.

Something I noticed living in the UK is that people refer to John as my partner.  It's the polite and politically correct thing to do, even though our rings are displayed for everyone to see.  Er, that's the whole point of the rings, actually.  ;)

No jumping on the bandwagon; I won't be an offended American, and I'm really not.  I just know that for me, whenever I refer to John, I will call him my husband.  And for John, he will call me his wife.  That's not a political stance.  It's a fact.

My husband is not my partner.  A partner implies someone you go into business with; in the broader sense, someone who works together with you for a common purpose.  The other performer in a two-person act.  It implies a kind of synchronicity and harmony that, let's be realistic, is missing in many, many marriages--some of the time, if not most of the time.

There were lots of times in our going-on-six years that my husband and I were not in harmony.  We did not work together.  In fact, we were at odds with each other, in very painful ways.  We each had our own interests in mind.  We had different "business plans," and it almost ruined us.

We've worked really hard to come out the other side, and our work is not done.  If we were merely partners, though, we would have parted ways a long time ago.  Cue hackneyed excuses: It's not working out.  We have different visions for the future.  We're two different people.  This arrangement is no longer productive.  Checkmark the carefully contrived phrase "conscious uncoupling."

But, thank God (and some times, in my weakness, I do the opposite), I didn't enter into a partnership.  Marriage isn't a contract, it's a covenant.  More specifically, it's a sacrament.  If my husband were my partner, we wouldn't be partners.  I'm going to take a guess and say that's so for the longest lasting and most successful marriages.  So no, it's not offensive for people to refer to John as my partner.  It's just inaccurate.

In other words,

"Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honor should decline." -- G.K. Chesterton

∆∆∆

Curious about the Catholic stance on divorce and annulments?  Try here, here, and here.

For further reading:

• The Battle that Is Marriage at Better than Eden
• Marriage Is a Kind of Death at Carrots for Michaelmas

Why the Doctor Can't Be a Woman

I've been re-watching episodes of Doctor Who from season 4 onwards while I wait out the plague.  There are things about each Doctor that puts a pleasant little squeeze on my heart: the way Nine says "fantastic" in his Manchester accent, Ten's openmouthed exclamations, and Eleven's arm-flapping and slurring, soulful speeches--Smith is arguably the best NuWho Doctor, his range is amazing and original--and that's one of the things that makes this show immortal.

There's always going to be feet-dragging from the audience in response to change of any kind, but its the flexibility inherent in the character and his casting that allow Doctor Who to go on and on.  When one storyline becomes stale, one version of the Doctor grows unsympathetic, or the themes sway in significance, all that can change.  Doctor Who demonstrates survival of the fittest for television series!

There is one thing, however, I firmly believe will never come to pass in the Whoniverse.  The Doctor cannot be a woman.

David Tennant's sideburn's tumblr, haha.

This is where I'd popularly bemoan the inherent misogynism of All Things and rant about the fact that our civilization could never accept a woman as the Cleverest Person in the Universe.  But I won't, and not because I recoil from the idea of a powerful, intelligent, and commanding female.  I was as put out as the next self-respecting woman when the writers put in that bit about "an enigma squeezed into a mystery squeezed into a skirt that's just a little bit too tight" comment.  (Incidentally, I was really unnerved at Amy Pond's kissing assault on him, so that I never really forgave her or liked her after that.)

The reasons why the Doctor will never be a woman, as long as it is necessary to pique the interest of human nature, is because women are different from men and men are different from women; and men and women are more different from each other than different races, different heights, ethnic groups, or hair colors, etc.  To change the gender of the doctor would be to distort the character of the Doctor beyond recognition.  It would be like making the Doctor an Ood or Sontaran or a dog.  Not gonna happen.

Think about the current controversy surrounding transgenderism.  It's no light thing, no matter from what point-of-view.  Trans-folks will attest to the fact that gender is far from irrelevant but a deeply psychological, soul-defining fact.  Not a trait.  A state of being.  I don't think I speak out of turn here when I say that for trans-people, gender reassignment isn't a mere makeover.  It's a becoming of themselves.

It's not possible to flippantly change the Doctor's gender, even if the possibility of it is, for all intents and purposes, canon in the Doctor Who universe.

A change like that would be monumental and irrevocable in its reimagining of the beloved character: either the Doctor was a woman in a man's body the whole time or he is a man in a woman's body now.  Problems abound.  And even though that could be used as a very enticing and thought-provoking story premise, there is no room for such a fundamental paradigm shift in the focus of the series without completely unmaking it.  It's not in the nature of Doctor Who to go down that path.  If it did, it would unravel into something much more mature and sinister (which is one of the reasons for the Torchwood spinoff).

The nature of identity in DW has been experimented with before with secondary characters: interspecies relationships between cats-and-humans and lizards-and-humans, for example.  Jack Harkness was immortal and pansexual.  The latest plot with Master/Missy is one step away from a gender-swapping Doctor.  And while it is necessary for the survival of a series for the main character to evolve, to change, to grow, to fall back, to pick himself up again, to fail, and to renew his commitment to Being a Force for Good, it is completely impossible for the main character to cease being himself.

I believe that is what a change of gender for the Doctor will do.  Either the Doctor before the change or the Doctor after the change will be made false.  They can't both be true.  And when the Doctor is false, he is not real to the audience, and there is no Doctor for us to care about.

∆∆∆

This is how I've thought it through so far, but I'm always likely to miss something.  Change my mind!  What do you think?  Can the Doctor ever be a woman without setting up the show for failure?

#normalizebreastfeeding

I've been saving up mentally for this post for a long time. And I'm still not ready.  But I never am.  So let's go before Breastfeeding Awareness Week is over.  Let's talk about #normalizebreastfeeding.

I know it weirds some people out; some good people.  I know they say, "Hey, you can breastfeed your child while covering yourself/remaining modest."  I get it.  I don't want you to be uncomfortable.  In fact, I'm sure it's a moral obligation for me to consider your discomfort.  And I do, really.

However.

This is one of a handful of issues that I will. not. budge on.  I need to know--need, the way I need regular meals and a safe place to sleep at night--that I have the right and the respect to breastfeed my child whenever and however I see fit.  Without scruples, without hesitation, without pausing to consider the environment or the time of day.  It is so, so important to me.  And it's important to my babies, too.

I'm a pretty traditional Catholic and an American and a conservative to boot.*  But this is where I stand in solidarity with all my "liberal" hippie sisters and insist that I and my child deserve to live in a world where feeding him--not in a flashy, look at me kind of way but in a way that is full of dignity--lacks even the tiniest whisper of shame.  And an insistence on covering, without recourse to the feelings of the mother, is a threat to this.  It broadcasts the message that breastfeeding is good BUT.

And no mother doing what is good and natural and God-ordained to nurture a child should ever hear the word BUT even implied when it comes to her mothering.  On such a precarious and important issue, even the smallest unnecessary caveat risks shattering the hard-won confidence of the modern mother.

Whether she nurses or not.  (Whether she cosleeps or not.  Whether she works or not.)  BUT is a sliver in the dam that can bring the whole thing crashing down.  Any kind of condition** placed on parenting is one too many; it is a symbolic stance saying that there is a right way and a wrong way.  

And, in the case of breastfeeding, there can be no wrong way to nurture an infant with his very mother's milk.




*  The more Catholic I become, the more I understand Catholicism cannot be confined into tiny boxes labeled "conservative" and "liberal."  That's how you know you're in the right Church.  ;)
**  I'm not talking about abuse and neglect here but the unsavory tendency to pass off parenting styles as absolute truths.

If religion doesn't matter. . .

Every now and then, I post something that could be controversial.  I thank you kindly for keeping the discussion respectful and retain the right to delete and block any commenters whom I feel are not remaining so.

I was browsing Instagram, one of my favorite pastimes, as it can be done through snatches of seconds at a red light or while waiting for the bacon to sizzle.  The hashtags are so interesting.  But I came upon one I found curious, almost amusing.  It was #religiondoesntmatter.

The sentiment was encouraging.  One would think it the signature hashtag of atheists and agnostics, and that would make sense in that case.  They would say religion doesn't matter because all religion is false.  But it turns out that the hashtag appeared in support of various religions, and that made it all the more confusing.  Why, if religion doesn't matter, are the Instagramers members of any religion at all?

They'd probably say something like, "Because we like it."  And to that I'd say, so?  

It doesn't matter if we like it.  Because it doesn't matter.  And if it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter in any circumstances.  And why do we expend any energy whatsoever on something that doesn't matter?  There are certainly other worthy endeavors we could be lending our precious time to: like writing the next great American novel, traveling the globe, or spending time with family.

(This is not to say that those who struggle or doubt are hypocrites.  It is not hypocrisy to say with the apostles, "Lord, to whom should we go?  You have the words of everlasting life.")

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a religious Sister and a few others.  A person said, "I don't think my religion is better--or more true--than anyone else's."  

I replied, "I hope you do.  I hope you love your faith or religion or beliefs with the fierceness of a mother's love.  Otherwise, what's the point?  Why bother practicing religion?  If there is one you find better, you should belong to it.  Or keep searching until you find your preference."

It's what C.S. Lewis means in his introduction to {Mere Christianity}, when he writes about his book being only the hall in a large house with many doors.  One does not stay in the corridor but "above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling."

At this point, the Sister mumbled something which, to this day, is one of the saddest things I have ever heard.  "I can't leave my religion; I've been Catholic all my life and am too old too become anything else now."

I don't pity her.  She's a good woman and doubtless has done much more pleasing in the eyes of God than my feeble prayers and half-hearted Mass attendance.  To pity someone is God's work, and I am not fit to pity anyone.  Rather, it makes me grateful.  Grateful that I should have been born into, through no virtue of my own, this most beautiful of faiths, and the last living home of truth, goodness, and beauty on this old, tired planet.  And sad that there are some who are not partakers of the banquet at which is served the Eternal Bread from Heaven.

GKC and Me

I guess you could call me a Chestertonian.  One of my most prized possessions is the (so far) Complete Works of G.K. Chesterton published by Ignatius.  I was a regular subscriber to Gilbert Magazine before finances got tight.  So much of my thought on faith and fairy tales is informed by Chesterton's childlike wonder, intelligence, and simplicity.  I'm a bit of a Chesterton quote spammer.

This post is about GKC and me; how I learned of him; what book of his I first picked up; what about his life, writing, and philosophy resonated with me; how I've come to call him a my patron saint and spiritual father.  This post was inevitable, but a few expressed reservations from kindred spirits makes the time ripe for an introduction.

Before we go any further, the caveats:

1 // Chesterton is a polemicist.  

He's not an apologist of the breed of Dinesh D'Souza, C.S. Lewis, and Scott Hahn.  He's certainly not a theologian like Saint Thomas Aquinas or Peter Kreeft.  He's a debater, both verbal and literary; and debate is a unique school.  It requires pithiness; it assumes an ideal listener/reader, and includes an appeal to pathos as well as logos.  There are certain truths, whether timeless or circumstantial, that must be kept in mind when reading Chesterton, and often there are obscure references to current events that would not have been at all obscure at the time of publication.

Chesterton is timeless in the sense that our repeated failures are timeless.  Otherwise, he is very much a man of his time and culture.  That's very important to keep in mind when reading any author, but even more so with GKC because a lot of what he says assumes pre-established facts.  As a debater, he just wouldn't have had time to go into them, and rightly leaves those metaphysical arguments to the experts.  His one-liners are almost never meant to be taken super-literally and, out of context, can appear downright absurd.

2 //  Chesterton is not antisemitic.  

This ridiculous and unfounded rumor has been proliferated and preserved by figures as weighty as T.S. Eliot.  The slander of antisemitism is lifted from quotes taken out of context, a modern day backwards application of political correctness, and super sensitivity that sacrifices necessary honest but respectful dialogue for "not hurting anyone's feelings."  Gilbert Magazine devoted a whole issue to address this claim, which can be downloaded for free.  There's no longer an excuse to accept the malicious accusation.

I hope that wasn't too unpleasant.

I consider Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton to be My Big 3.  My love for Tolkien led me to Lewis.  My love for Lewis led me to Chesterton.  Each one shaped who I am today, each person tapped into a part of my personality and soul and nourished it; and, if all did it using different techniques and strengths  from different perspectives and at different angles, that part of me that they shaped is the same and oriented toward the same ultimate good.

Toward the end of my first year of college, I had devoured 19 books by C.S. Lewis, a staggering accomplishment for the world's slowest-reading bibliophile.  Still I wanted more.  Much like I did with Tolkien when I "discovered" Lewis, I frequented articles and forums online, gleaned little bits of information and anecdotes.  I had read Surprised by Joy, of course, and once again saw the name Chesterton popping up with reference to Lewis.  Somehow, I ascertained that this guy was a Catholic.  Naturally, my interest piqued.

I read Orthodoxy and was not disappointed.  Now I'll attempt to describe something that is very hard to communicate in prose.  It's more naturally expressed by art and poetry.

A sentence of Chesterton's is a microcosm of any book; a book, of his entire body of work.  When I read Chesterton, his sentences slapped me in the face, like getting a cold shock of water first thing in the morning.  They literally struck me as truth.  This isn't because his thought is so original that I'd never heard of it before and was astounded to realize him right about it.  Rather, he presents what-is in clarity, distilled in purity, like snow melted mountain water.  Here was a man who unlocked all the tightly raveled God-knowledge of my nascent soul and presented it to me: not as a bride, like Tolkien, in beauty and mystery; not as a mother, like Lewis had, in comforting familiarity and profound love and awe and devotion; but as my own child, an impish joyful thing, astoundingly complete in itself, innocent yet immortal, infinitely familiar to me, utterly surprising and unpredictable.

So, in a parodox (of which Chesteroton is a great advocate), I was knocked off of my feet by this unflinching sense, what we call common sense; only it's not so common anymore.  Since the Fall there's been this dichotomy between good human instinct and an idolatry of human thought.  Some people reason themselves into madness; some into a sanitized, inoffensive creed (Luther, for instance, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment).  Since the Catholic Church lost her queenship in the west, sense has dwindled to a rumor, dismissed as prosaic, found altogether inconvenient.  So there's this strange effect of hearing from Chesterton something both new and familiar.

I've heard people more or less chalk up the popularity of Chesterton to bias confirmation.  And to that I would answer: yes, absolutely.  In the sense that siding with the truth, the kind of truth that can't be tested with the scientific method, is bias confirmation.  Chesterton affirms our instincts.

I can see how someone wouldn't like Chesterton.  His word-play and hyperbole is only one taste out of many.  He's easy to mistake for cocky because of his confidence, though his confidence is like that of a saint: completely unfocused on himself but rather on truth, indeed the Truth, out of pure love and devotion to it.  As he says in The Catholic Church and Conversion, "It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong," and he demonstrates that true humility to a T.  Still others consider him chauvinistic.  To that, I point insistently to caveat #1.  As to the rest of it, I can only say: even Tolstoy didn't like Shakespeare.  There's no accounting for taste!

One final thing.  Chesterton is also my teacher in poetry.  Although that wasn't his thing (Tolkien put his perfectionist frown on The Ballad of the White Horse), his worldview is that of the poet.  He said something profound and simple and alarmingly obvious when he said, "The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say.  The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say."  He gets it.

Much of Chesterton's revelations come to him because he sees the wide world the way a poet does.  Not as something familiar and taken for granted, but as an astounding and strange thing, like a fairy tale.  Why, he asks in Orthodoxy, do we assume that because a tree grows apples that it couldn't very well have grown tigers hanging by their tails?  And what will it take for us to notice, gooseflesh and tiny hairs rising, that apples grow on trees?  That the sun rises every day, without having to be wound up?  That breathing is a miracle, and babies laugh, and wine is so, so warm and good?  How can we make ourselves smell and hear and taste, and be shocked out of complacency?

What is the job of a poet if not to bring forth those delightful shivers?  To dare to inspire a soul to prayer or a call to action?  To look at things-that-are in a way that makes us tremble with fear and wonder and walk away changed; either like the man who went away sadly when Jesus told him what he must do to obtain the Kingdom of Heaven, or like the healed one who went out and proclaimed, "I was blind, but now I see."