The following is an insightful comment from Dave on Stand Firm's latest on the recent furor over the Rev'd Elizabeth Kaeton's grotesque fantasies:
What this whole episode has driven home to me on a visceral level is that we’re not in a debate over abstractions. We’re in a struggle where ideas have immediate and direct consequences for the soul. Our Worthy Opponents’ demand for absolute autonomy and freedom to pursue desires and to define themselves by those desires leads to a deep revulsion at the institution that most attenuates desire and freedom in the name of something higher: the family.
This is NOT just a case of one side rallying around a banner, or “cheering for the laundry.” It shows in distinct terms the practical consequences of ideas, in this case the effect of liberal “Christianity” on one’s feeling and sensitivity towards families and the intrinsic good of children. There is, of course, a connection between Kaeton’s lifestyle, her willingness to threaten Anne Kennedy, and her belief in the absolute good of abortion.
I read this essay a couple of years ago and I think I was just as repulsed by it as I was by her cruel “dream” about Anne’s children. In it she recounts the yearly ritual of a woman who has been haunted and eaten away with guilt over an abortion she had 30 years ago. But rather than pastorally guide this poor soul into the freedom of repentance and the path of healing that only Christ can provide, she affirms this woman’s actions, and constructs a grotesque new ritual (dare I say “liturgy") in which the child is memorialized and grieved over, while at the same time the action that took the child’s life is also affirmed as “sacred.” Even in the face of 30 years of grief and guilt as the result of an abortion, Kaeton couldn’t bring herself to question the absolute and intrinsic good—indeed the “sacredness” of a woman’s “right to choose.”
As if it needed saying: a basic spiritual insensitivity to life is present in both episodes, and are not just a case of one unhinged lesbian priest’s unguarded tirade. In both cases, the root moral cause is a demand for absolute freedom without qualification, and the abstract idea that animates this demand is the rejection of the propositional moral authority of Christianity proper.
Both cases demonstrate once again what’s at stake in the current debates: not just ideas, but whether or not we can build a Church and a community that cultivates a feeling for the sacredness of life, instead of a pseudo-Church that memorializes atrocities and cultivates a fixation on death.
What this whole episode has driven home to me on a visceral level is that we’re not in a debate over abstractions. We’re in a struggle where ideas have immediate and direct consequences for the soul. Our Worthy Opponents’ demand for absolute autonomy and freedom to pursue desires and to define themselves by those desires leads to a deep revulsion at the institution that most attenuates desire and freedom in the name of something higher: the family.
This is NOT just a case of one side rallying around a banner, or “cheering for the laundry.” It shows in distinct terms the practical consequences of ideas, in this case the effect of liberal “Christianity” on one’s feeling and sensitivity towards families and the intrinsic good of children. There is, of course, a connection between Kaeton’s lifestyle, her willingness to threaten Anne Kennedy, and her belief in the absolute good of abortion.
I read this essay a couple of years ago and I think I was just as repulsed by it as I was by her cruel “dream” about Anne’s children. In it she recounts the yearly ritual of a woman who has been haunted and eaten away with guilt over an abortion she had 30 years ago. But rather than pastorally guide this poor soul into the freedom of repentance and the path of healing that only Christ can provide, she affirms this woman’s actions, and constructs a grotesque new ritual (dare I say “liturgy") in which the child is memorialized and grieved over, while at the same time the action that took the child’s life is also affirmed as “sacred.” Even in the face of 30 years of grief and guilt as the result of an abortion, Kaeton couldn’t bring herself to question the absolute and intrinsic good—indeed the “sacredness” of a woman’s “right to choose.”
As if it needed saying: a basic spiritual insensitivity to life is present in both episodes, and are not just a case of one unhinged lesbian priest’s unguarded tirade. In both cases, the root moral cause is a demand for absolute freedom without qualification, and the abstract idea that animates this demand is the rejection of the propositional moral authority of Christianity proper.
Both cases demonstrate once again what’s at stake in the current debates: not just ideas, but whether or not we can build a Church and a community that cultivates a feeling for the sacredness of life, instead of a pseudo-Church that memorializes atrocities and cultivates a fixation on death.
2 comments:
(Rambling thoughts) Not only a "fixation on death" but a defiant prescription for "the ways of death" as proper theology - stealing the property of those who resist and destroying the denomination as the American expression of Anglican theology and tradition.
History affirms the inevitability that human collectives reflect the nature and character of the true object of worship. (Warlike people - warlike gods. Lustful promiscuous people - lustful promiscuous gods, etc.)
Their defiance and perversion of language and behavior indicates to me a change of deities has occurred.(!)
If so, the new one is not the Good Shepherd who "gives life more abundantly" but the thief who "comes but to steal, kill and destroy" as reflected by the new modus operandi of The Episcopal Church USA.
The trains been hijacked and is heading over a cliff. The engineer's mask has slipped enough now to see who's driving it. Is it wiser to stay on board hoping to regain control or jump now?
What kind of logic does it take to portray the right to abortion as a "sacred, holy gift of life"?
Now we know.
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