Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Homosexuality, Marriage, and the Bachelor

So I owe much of this blog to my friend Luke in pointing this out for me. And I am really not making all this up on my own. Rather and I am piecing together what I have already been taught.

Recently there have been many, many, many blogs and articles about homosexuality and marriage. Recently, North Carolina passed a bill preventing the lawful marriage of homosexual couples. This was heralded as a great victory towards protecting the sanctity of marriage.

However, in addition to the bill there was a pastor who came out saying that homosexuals should be confined behind electric fences. You get the impression some Christians really hate the homosexual community.

Yet, always taking a step back from issue and all the anger, what about the larger issue of the sanctity of marriage? Of love? Or even humanity in general? All these questions circulate in this discussion which is often too narrowly approached.

There is a popular TV show called the Bachelor (and its counterpart the Bachelorette) wherein one single bachelor (or bachelorette) is brought 25 single counterparts of the opposite gender to choose a suitable mate. This show is shot on location at some of the most exotic locations around the world where men and women compete openly to attract the attention of the one single person of the opposite gender. Furthermore, for a certain number of weeks a televised audience views petty arguments between the crop of single men or women, confessions of love after a few days, and sweeping romantic gestures financed by the studio.

This being said, the show disregards that emotions are being manipulated on purpose and the featured character gets to play 25 women in full view of the entire world. If the sanctity of marriage involves the courtship between one man and women, what about this wildly successful show?

The Bachelor is not the worst. A few years back there was a show called Married By America. In this gem, six single men and women were matched up by online vote by the American audience. In fact, the first time these couples met were the night they got married on the live season premier. This show merely tries to recreate the popularity of the Bachelor by heightening the shock factor and continually redefining the ability to instrumentalize humans for profit. Furthemore, with all these reality TV shows the rise in Drive through Wedding chapels, the Hollywood Circus Wheel of marriages, and an almost half divorce rate amongst couples in and out of the Church, one begins to wonder weather homosexual marriage is the thing destroying the sanctity of marriage? Or of love? Or of the human person? Maybe its the rest of us.  

And onto another issue of desire/love and the human person. This is the central issue pertaining to the question of homosexuality. And Christians need to find better ways than electric fences to talk about homosexuality.

The means to address the homosexual question is the Eucharist (borrowed from Hauerwas). In this central Church practice, one encounters love (paschal mystery), desire (in the form of eating slaking hunger), and the human person (the re-appropriation of all material reality). Thus, the continual taking of the Eucharist means both a physical training and an ontological shift in the ways Christians view these matters. Furthermore, we learn what desire/love is in the mystery of the Eucharist. There we eat, learning the importance that material substances plays in the natural functioning of the human body but also how those material substances are a gift meant to be cherished.

These gifts enhance the community and enrich the gathering. It enriches by way of giving the community the tools to love/desire in a fallen world. For as we train our appetite at the table, we learn how our love/desire contributes to our Christian life. Furthermore, it means recognizing the quest for virtue in other humans/material beings who struggle like the rest of us. The question is learning how our particular desires contribute to our witness (individually and corporately) and which ones need to be trained in light of the Eucharist.

And this meal only has weight because it has the power of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, and consists of the Trinitarian Drama where the therapy of the Triune dance wears of the edges of our shattered desires and love. Simply put, the Eucharist is a practice of the Trinitarian love.

In this respect, anger towards our fellow human (such as electric fences) needs attention as much as our sexual appetite. However, I do not offer any answers on who is right or wrong on this discussion. I rather challenge a serious look at the Eucharist as a means of recovery of conversation and re-evaluation of all desire under the Triune Economy.

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