The Sublime Poet within Chris Daughtry

Continuing stride from the previous post, I thought a short comment on the lyrical brilliance of Chris Daughtry was in proper order. It is not certain, from my brief investigation, what Daughtry's current religious sensibilities are. I am not sure if he is religious or irreligious. I am not sure it matters. Though by my guess, he is at least somewhat religious. The only definite statement I found from the horse's mouth was: "I'm not out to force my political or religious beliefs on anyone. If I can influence people, I hope it's to follow their own hearts... [I] had a very conservative, Christian upbringing. As you get older, different things develop that can maybe contradict what you grew up believing in. You get a more worldly view of how the world works" (USA Today). 

A screen-capture from Daughtry's music video, Waiting for Superman.

Whatever the state of his religiosity, Daughtry professes a rare insight into the nature of God and Grace in his song, Baptized, a track on the album, also given the name Baptized. His lyrics are often sprinkled with the sensibility of faith and spirituality. About the song, Daughtry has said, "The song 'Baptized' isn't a spiritual or gospel song in the traditional sense, but I wanted it to have that 'O Brother Where Art Thou' type gospel feel to it, complete with a chanting section... Lyrically, it's really about me and my wife Deanna, but it's also very powerful in the way of analogy for this rebirth in my career" (Songwriter Universe). The lyrics read:

It's safe to say I'm lost,

Without you in my arms,

So I call your name and I pray you might,

Come and wash over me like the pale moonlight,

Until the sun comes back around.

Take me down, take me down by the water, water,

Pull me in until I see the light,

Let me drown, let me drown, in you honey, honey,

In your love I wanna be baptized.

Take me down, take me down by the water, water,

I wanna be baptized.

And the days and nights are cold,

Without your body to hold,

So I close my eyes hoping you'll appear,

Cause it feels like grace every time you're near, yeah,

Don't leave, until the sun comes back around.

Daughtry masterfully crafted a lyrical poem in which the Love for, and of, his wife becomes a baptism. Baptism is a sacrament in which our old self is drowned in the waters—for water in the rite represents death—and our new self rises again to new life. Without the sexual (physical) presence of his wife, Daughtry is forsaken and broken. It is only with her sexual presence near, "in my arms", that new life exists within him—that he can be brought to the fullness of life. 

Yet, many people bicker about the real intention of this song. One side insists that the song is a metaphor about Christ (or God). Daughtry is a Christian, so this song is obviously a belabored metaphor for the close relationship between him and Christ—their logic contends. The other side places attention on the sexual language in the lyrics, and therefore insists that it is a metaphor for the beautiful relationship Daughtry has with his wife. Daughtry uses sexual/bodily imagery, so this song is obviously not about God—their logic contends (see image below).  

I pasted together Youtube comments using GIMP to artificially create this image
 and give it some coherence.

The trick to understand this is to abandon the either/or logic with which these commenters comprehend the topic at hand. We need to embrace a logic of both/and. Notice that Daughtry writes, "Cause it feels like grace every time you're near". Perhaps I am doing violence to the song by reading my own theological/philosophical predilections into the song, but it appears to me that the song tells us that God's Grace (God's Godself) permeates throughout the Love Daughtry and his wife have for each other. Sexual Love is truly dying and rising again, because it is the very space where the God is immanent. It is not merely an earthly event, but a heavenly-transcendent process, this falling in love. It is God's essence which permeates the entire sexual event between Daughtry and his wife. The movement of their Love is the movement of God's Grace. If this were not the case, the identification with baptism would be a mere similitude. Yet, I think the sublime poet within Chris Daughtry is trying to tells us something more. His song is not mere poetry. It is poetry-plus. It is a poetry which seeks to reveal the Divine immanence in the very act of sexual love. 

Chris Daughry sings about the Love he shares with his wife, and in doing so, he equally sings about God, and his relationship with Him.

Christ Has No Body But Yours

Something clicked in my head while I was praying in the mystical union of the Mass last week. The night before I had read the poem by St. Teresa of Ávila through the visual benediction on Work of the People. And the words penned by the most blessed saint remained stuck in my mind. The words are august and haunting: 

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks.

I wish I knew who painted this august and stylized Pietà.

The Mass, when read through the perspective of St. Teresa, becomes the sacrifice where we bring our bodies to the Altar of God so that in partaking of the Body of Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, our body becomes transformed into the Body of Christ. It is a mystical union of Man and God. One should not forget the classical theology regarding theosis, or divinization, that remained central among the early Church and the Church Father. St. Teresa's insight forces us to take the notion of the Church as the Body of Christ with much more gravity, and to understand the notion of good works as a necessary part of salvation in a whole new light.  

The Mass read through St. Teresa offers us a non-magical understanding of God, Christ and the World that breaks through spiritualist and materialist barriers. The common ontology is that God acts as an external divine magician in the world. A bolt of lightening here, and your illness is cured, a bolt of lightening there and your soul-mate falls in love with you. The alternative ontology of God proposes that Christ/God has a physical Body with which to move and act in the World, and that this Body is composed of the visible and invisible Church. A human being becomes the literal Body of Christ so far as s/he does justice to the Divine Essence in his or her actions. 

A doctor removes a blockage from a patient's artery and God has effected His miracle, here, a person falls totally in love with her significant other, and God has effected His miracle, there. Divinity is no longer conditional on the result of magic, but rather is conditional on the depth and transcendence in human experience and action. It is a solemn notion, but one that appears much more august and profound than magic, because it speaks to the deepest humanity in us. The further we are joined to the Sacred, the more we instantiate God in the World, the more real the Kingdom of God becomes.

This places new justification for the Roman theological emphasis on works as a necessary component of justification. God's effect on the World is not external to humankind, but rather internal to the process of human life itself. The Kingdom of God cannot come except through the internal development of human action in the life of the Church. There is no grand outside source of effectual change outside human praxis. We cannot sit on our hands thinking that God will magically heal the sick. We need to transform our hands into the instruments through which God effects the miracle of healing. There is nothing concrete outside works, for these are the very concretization of the Miracle of God.

John Piper and the Parable of the Sex Trafficker

"God in eternity looked upon me foreseeing my fallenness, my pride, my sin and said, ‘I want that man in my family! I will pay for him to be in my family with my son’s life.’ That’s love folks, that is mega-off the charts love!" — John Piper

If the above comment is abstracted from its context, it is a wonderful quote. I could gleefully digest it as a Roman Catholic. In the concrete totality of Piper's theology, it is a cruel monstrosity. It is a mockery of Christian theology and the notion of Love. In fact, I should think it were the cruel joke of Satan whispering into the ears of the faithful, ridiculing their faith in God. 

In order to demonstrate the sadism of John Piper and his blasphemous joke, I wish to tell a parable about sex trafficking. 

A picture of actress Jamie Chung in the 2012 film, Eden, portraying a Korean-American girl abducted by sex traffickers.

In a small town in Vietnam, there was a foreign man named Godot. One night, as Godot was walking through a slum littered with brothels, his heart was moved with compassion towards the girls he found having unspeakable acts performed upon their bodies. The man screamed to the heavens, "I want those girls to be free! And I will pay for their freedom with all my worldly possessions." The man burst in through one of the doors and announced that he is willing to pay for the bodies of all these kidnapped girls to do with as he pleases. Few questions asked, the traffickers handed over the lot of the girls to Godot. 

The foreign man took the girls to the prosperous city, and payed for their housing, food, clothing and for their education, so that in a certain years time they will be able to find gainful employment. At the end of the week, once he had gotten the girls settled in to their new life, he packed his bags and began to exist the compound. One of the girls he had rescued, Ai, latched onto his leg, kneeling in the dirt, and said, "Oh kind man, who are you that you could have sold all your worldly possessions to save the lot of us who were dying in our misery?" 

Godot turned on his heal to face Ai and brought his eyes down to meet hers that were looking up at him. "Why, my dear," he said with a kind expression on his visage, "I am the sex trafficker who was in charge of bringing all those girls to the network of brothels you were also brought to. I am off to a rural village in south to bring more girls to that terrible place. And after that I am heading to an interview in New York City with Nicholas Kristof to tell the story of how I rescues all of you, for the praise and glory of my name." 

With that Godot walked off to continue his job. 

The reason Jesus spoke in parables was because the narrative format has a peculiar power to reach the core of our being and influence our spirit. It allows us to understand at the level of the intellect and the heart simultaneously. Godot in my parable takes the place of God in the Calvinism of John Piper. In the deterministic world of Piper, God is the one who sells us into slavery and then expects a grateful reaction from the slaves, and the others, when he chooses to save a small portion of them, leaving the rest to rot in their misery. How could this monstrous theology be conceived of any less than a cruel joke?

Prostitutes, Liberals and the Satanic Mills

The liberal justification for the legalization of prostitution has been swirling around in my head this past month.^† I had done some research as an undergrad exploring the topic. I enjoy readings on the institutions of prostitution and sex trafficking, such as Melissa Farley and Kathryn Farr. I find it fascinating, since it boggles me on the level of the heart how anybody could be supportive of prostitution, viewing it as a positive social institution, or even as a tolerable social phenomenon. And at the same time, on a philosophical level, I perfectly understand the justifications made for the prostitution phenomenon — even if I disagree with their validity.  

What I want to draw attention to in today's post is the similarity in the philosophic discourse used to justify prostitution and that used to justify the exploitation* of the working class during the Industrial and Progressive eras. The idea came to me while reading Marx's chapter on the working day in Capital Vol. I. Marx dedicated about 100 pages to a prolonged discussion of the fight to reduce the length of the working day in 19th century England. A particular section caught my eye where the capitalist class made the argument that workers should not be limited in the number of hours they can work if they want to improve their lot. In other words, why should not somebody be able to work extra hours in order to earn more income for themselves and their families? Or, why should somebody not be able to work in a toxic factory environment if it earns them extra income? It might be more financially beneficial than working the family farm. 

The Satanic Mills of the Industrial-Age.

I have found a parallel discourse among modern liberals who seek to vindicate prostitution as a legitimate profession. Even if many of those in prostitution have psychological traumas (particularly a history of sexual abuse), who are we to tell them they should not be able to make needed money by selling their sexual body to another person? Sometimes the most economic decision for a girl from a third-world country, who is pretty and has very little education, is to sell her sexual body for money to improve her lot and perhaps the lot of her family. It might be more financially beneficial than working in a rice patty. 

On the face of it, prima facie, this liberal logic appears reasonable. Even if we view this as an evil, prostitution appears to be, sometimes, the lesser of two evils. And yet, it still leaves a horrible aftertaste on the tongue when the words themselves have been spoken in justification. The fault of this thinking is that it does nothing to challenge the systems of oppression in our world, but rather tacitly supports them and gives them validity. It is the last sigh of a politics that has surrendered to monstrosity.

Without working day legislation—based on the hours and conditions of labor—that limit the arbitrary freedom of workers to sell their labor power to the capitalist factories, we surrender to the system of inhumanity. Some workers may make less money for their families if we limit the length of the working day. Requiring companies to pay for the healthcare of employees may cause capitalists not to hire as many workers, or lay off some workers, than they would before the legislation. Yet, I am not convinced that is a valid reason not to pass said legislation, since the alternative is merely to give capital whatever it wants without struggle. It is to wave the white flag. And, historically, it is not what liberals have done. The progressive movements, in the first half of the 20th century, fought virulently for humane working conditions.

From what I understand, this is a real picture of a British prostitute working her territory.

I am not trying to find commonality with the liberal who thinks that sex work is a social positive, and who glorifies the social institution.^‡ I am trying to draw a parallel between the sex work and industrial-age factory work for the liberal-minded who already believes there is something disordered in prostitution. It is the point that the legalization of prostitution comes from a libertarian ideology, where the free market is the idol, rather than the same progressive spirit that sought to place many restrictions on factory owners and factory labor.

A progressive spirit of liberalism should not glorify the institution of prostitution, based on the same logic used in the struggle for the working day. It should work against its proliferation, for if prostitution is seen as an exploitative form of work,  then the next logical step is to work to eliminate it, just as the progressive movement abolished child labor from the factory system. The ideology which seeks to legalize prostitution possess more genetic similarity to libertarianism than with the spirit of the progressive labor movement. The logic contemporary liberals purport, for the legalization of prostitution, is the same logic capitalists used during the progressive era to justify the exploitation of labor.

Notes:
† I am using the word "liberal," here, in terms of social (modern) liberalism. It is the brand of liberalism that has moved beyond classical liberalism and has incorporated social protections against the unbound logic of the capitalist market. 
* The word "exploitation" should be read in a general sense, here in this post, and not in technical Marxian sense. 
‡ Kari Kesler writes in Sexualities: "I believe that some prostitutes, the ones who exercise control and autonomy in their lives and who have both freely chosen and enjoy their work, can be held up as role models."

Cafeteria Catholicism or Loyalist Dissent?

The name "cafeteria catholic" is commonly thrown, by staunch Vatican party-member Catholics, at those of us who remain united with the Roman Catholic Church, but do not doctrinally follow each and every pronouncement of the Magisterium. The adjective "cafeteria" is a belittling and symbolically violent word which tries to trivialize the faith of Catholics, such as myself, who break with the Magisterium on some doctrinal issues. 

"Cafeteria catholicism" implies that the faith and intellectualism of dissenting Catholics is based upon the crass notion of consumerism. Our faith is implied to be one where we shop for what happens to tempt our palate at the moment. In the cafeteria, if we do not like a food (for any whimsical reason) we move on and choose some other food that appears more appealing. The implication is that those of us who dissent from the Vatican party-line are just as arbitrary and capricious in our religion and faith as in the cafeteria searching for something to eat. When a doctrine that the Magisterium has proclaimed does not suit our desire, we simply move on to something else, choosing another notion that better suits our appetite.

The charge of "cafeteria catholicism" glosses over the reality that many of those of us who break with the Magisterium do not do so wantonly or blindly, but that we have very firm reasons from within the tradition. In other words, those of us who consider ourselves loyal dissidents, often dissent precisely for the sake of the tradition. The tradition (auto)deconstructs itself and pushes beyond the limits it has set for itself.

Jacques Derrida insisted that deconstruction is always auto-deconstruction. In other words, deconstruction is an internal process that works from within the discourse under analysis, not an external violence that bastardizes the text. It is the subject/object's own movement which is the process of deconstruction. 

Let me provide a lucent example. In the early centuries of Christian history, the value of sexuality was highly suspect and virulently denounced by giants of the Church. St. Augustine developed the notion, in his theology, that human beings are born into sin, because we are born from a sex act. The sex act is a necessary sin for the propagation of the human race. Pope Gregory the Great proclaimed that the pleasure derived from sexual acts was itself inherently sinful, assenting with the Augustinian theology, and citing as his proof Psalm 51:5, "Behold I was conceived in sins, and in delights my mother bore me." Pope Gregory commanded husbands or wives who had engaged in lawful, marital sexual relations to "abstain (from entering the church at once)."

With the coming of Vatican II, the Roman Church began to adopt a more positive, romantic view of sexual relations (at least as far as marriage is concerned). It could no longer be maintained that sexuality, created by God as a part of our human nature, was wholly aberrant to goodness. The council of Cardinals and advisors at Vatican II reformed the notion of sexuality to place it more in line with what they believed the whole breadth of the Roman tradition demanded—a stark reversal of previous sexual ethics, but one that was true to the spirit of the faith.

A loyalist dissident, such as myself, believes that this is how we are proceeding when we criticize the Vatican's theology of the body, as it applies to contraceptives, homosexuality and pre-marital sex. We believe with firm conviction that we are carrying the insights and spirit of Vatican II forward to its logical conclusions. We criticize the procreationist view of the sex act, because it does violence to the notions of love and intimacy that Vatican II elevated as the blessings of marriage.

And it is for this very reason that we stay Roman Catholic. Protestants and party-member Catholics commonly ask me why I remain Roman if I do not believe everything the "Church" teaches. The previous paragraphs provide the perfect answer: because I believe I am carrying forward the banner of the Spirit of God further within, not outside, the tradition that Christ has bequeathed to us.