The Death of Friendship

UPDATE: Thanks to Frank, who sent in this interesting NYT piece about Eve Tushnet.

What do you call your same-sex, not-related-to-you, not-married-to-you, but liked-by-you housemate?

If you're like most men and women, you call him or her your FRIEND.

"Oh, no, we're just friends," satisfies a hundred nosy enquiries.

I mention this today because there was a major scandal in a Catholic diocese in Canada over a fellow with SSA who simultaneously called his same-sex housemate his "partner" while also claiming to be following Catholic teaching about sexuality. (I would not have cared less, but he went on to drag a whole lot of people, including his bishop, before a tribunal into the bargain.) And having written extensively about the case, I really don't want to be having this conversation again. But someone sent me an interesting article about men and friendship, and the whole issue of friend vs. partner came roaring back to mind.

On the one hand, I think it is lousy when people gossip about same-sex housemates and say "Oh, they must be a gay couple, tee hee hee." On the other hand, if you go around calling your same-sex housemate your "partner", your hearers are going to think there's something more than friendship, even deep SS. Cyril-and-Methodius, womb-to-tomb friendship, going on.

Practising Catholics don't have "partners." We have husbands, wives, and friends. We also have relatives, mentors, teachers, employees, employers, doctors, clients, students, proteges, neighbours, flatmates, colleagues, priests, bishops, parishioners and business partners. Some of us have rulers, and some of us have subjects. All of us had parents, and some of us have children. We have co-religionists, and we have co-nationals.

We have an awful lot of relationships, and very few of them are sexual. Sadly, sexual relationships get the lion's share of people's attention. This cheapens all relationships immeasureably. Is there anything more disgusting than someone sniggering over the loving relationship between an uncle and niece, or someone making crude remarks about a boy who is fond of his sister? And isn't it horribly limiting that great and famous friendships, like that between Cardinal Newman and Fr. Ambrose St. John, get read by strangers with axes to grind as long-term erotic affairs? I certainly think so.

The interesting article I've linked to above starts with the feudal relationship between Frodo and Sam, and I too was enraged when teenage boys sniggered their misunderstandings in the darkness of the cinema we shared. On the one hand, education is such that few contemporary teenagers can get their minds around the idea that once upon a time a man might have acknowledged another man as his lord, and that the lord would have felt a paternal responsibility for his servant. But on the other hand, how stupid and how tooth-grindingly disrespectful for the stupider members of Tolkien's audience to read Frodo and Sam--in their terrible danger--as characters out of Brokeback Mountain.

A friend is not a partner, but friendship is a many-splendoured thing. Friendship is often something great and noble, and many a woman has cried and felt brokenhearted over the death of (or betrayal by) a female friend. I imagine men are the same way, although these days, of course, they would be in great danger of having their platonic love misunderstood by both fans and opponents of the gay revolution. Perhaps women will be fitted for this beloved friend=partner straitjacket, too, one day, but I darn well hope not.

Love your friends boldly, and call them your friends. Friendship is glorious enough without you needing to aggrandize your friend, even your best friend, by calling him or her your "partner." Like it or not, that word no longer means what it did. And neither traditional Catholics nor other traditional Christians are to blame for that.

Update: Read the whole article, seriously. Then the fact that I flee the dinner table when the port goes around might make a little more sense. It's not just that I need a break; it's that the men deserve a chance just to be men friends together. And, man, do I miss my girlfriends back home right now.

But What About the Children?

A kind reader sent along this fascinating link to an article by Naomi Schaeffer Riley about interfaith marriage in the Washington Post. In short, interfaith marriage is a high-minded, tolerant, multicultural, spiritual route to divorce.

Now I do know people who are the fruit of interfaith marriages (usually Catholic mother and Protestant dad), and their mums and dads are still together, alleluia. I also know people whose Protestant dads became Catholic dads eventually, much to the joy of their Catholic mums (and probably resigned indifference of their Protestant grandparents). However, I, Seraphic, had a miserable short marriage with an Anglican, got a divorce and got an annulment within a year of the divorce. That is quick in annulment land, let me tell you. And what did we fight about most, eh? We fought about religion. It was like Belfast on speed. By the end, I was calling the ex a Sassenach, and he was telling me the Irish were all murderers. Really, it was hell.

As for those of disparate cults, I dated a Muslim guy and Jewish guys from time to time in my tender youth, and post-Protestants quite often in my overly exciting twenties. It took me until the ripe old age of 32 or so to realize that I would only ever be happy with a Catholic guy. I felt a bit ashamed about that, as if it proved an embarrassing inner bigotry. But I grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood, and I understood that it was important to my neighbours that their kids marry other Jews. And it occured to me that the idea that marriage is at the heart of religion (or religion at the heart of marriage) was true and good.

(Interfaith dialogue note: The Jews and Muslims taught me the importance of preserving your sacred language, too.)

When I heard, as a college student, that if you married a Ukrainian Catholic guy, you'd have to become a Ukrainian Catholic, too, I decided that was okay. (No idea if you really do, by the way.) The important thing was being in communion with Rome. So it was not really hard to give up going to the Novus Ordo every week and just pin a black mantilla to my head and become a Triddie like Benedict Ambrose. I do draw the line at anything that carries a whiff of Anglicanism, though, except (huge concession) the Anglican version of the Psalms, sung loudly, often (by B.A.) in the shower.

Anyway, I think in general, and with the Catholic Church before 1963, that interfaith marriages are risky and to be avoided. However, if one party is not so enamoured of their childhood faith, it might work out okay.

And sometimes accepting that you can't (or shouldn't) marry into another faith is a way of RESPECTING that faith. I had a lot of respect for a very talented Jewish friend named Y--. (Ah, Y--! He was a cantor at a conservative synagogue. Last I heard, he was a successful opera singer.) And so I called it off before it became serious. He had a Slavic soul, and so he complained bitterly to our mutual Catholic friend. He too had a Slavic soul, and so upbraided me for my hard heart. But it all worked out. Well, it all worked out for me. I hope Y-- found someone nice, too.

Auntie Seraphic and ARRGH!

(Letter heavily changed and messed around with to protect the innocent.)

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

Are there any men out there who DON'T look at women as a mere sexual object?? Recently I have encountered a few supposedly "practicing" Christians whose conversation and outlook on relationships in general and women in particular have thrown me into a pit of relational despair.

I'm not afraid of the sexual side of married life, and I like men. But these supposedly Nice Christian Boys have taken the wind out of my sails. I try to tell myself that they must come from dysfunctional families where there are "mother issues." But it's discouraging to hear them speak so disrespectfully of women nonetheless. And if I object, I'm labeled a femi-nazi and that I just need to accept that this is how men are.

Any advice? Words of hope? A Catholic guy in my circle said something so nastily hateful about women to me recently, that I just don't know how to deal.

ARRGH!

Dear ARRGH!

Suddenly I remembered the good old days when I was a teenage pro-life activist, and these two teenage pro-life guys wrestled away from me my student ID (which I needed for the train) and howled at my photograph because it was so ugly. Another teenage pro-life guy, furious at a friend of mine for some reason, told her that women wear jewellery to give themselves worth. And more recently, I heard of a young guy in a conservative Christian think-tank who said something really nasty to a shy young girl who works there.

Ah, the Nice Catholic Girl's big secret: some Nice Catholic Boys sound like sexist bastards at least some of the time, just like anti-Catholics allege.

Yes, ARRGH!, some (not all, not most, but SOME) young Christian men--Catholic, Protestant and, for all I know, East Orthodox--do have severe issues about women. Why, I do not know. It probably changes from man to man. My hunch is that these issues are usually about (A) sexual frustration, (B) struggles with sexual sin, (C) confusion over what is expected of men today, (D) envy, (E) this girl who hurt them, (F) Teacher, (G) Mother.

But, in my experience, most Catholic men (and most men in general) are not sexist jerks. Of course, most men I know these days are over 25. But even thinking back to my university days, I remember a dozen or so young men whom any girl would be proud to know and introduce to her granny. The rest have probably grown up a lot since then.

When any woman is totally fed up with men-in-general, I recommend the blessing exercise. The blessing exercise is to say silently, every time you see a man, "Bless his little heart." That's it. You do it for at least a day (but try three), and your attitude towards men improves amazingly.

Now, in the case of the guy who was gratuitously horrible to you, I recommend asking him WHY he doesn't like women--or, better, why he doesn't like you. Here is the conversation I am hearing in my Mind's Ear:

You: So why don't you like me?

Mr Horrible: What?

You: Why don't you like me?

Mr Horrible: What are you taking about? I like you. Sure, I like you.

You: Then why did you make that horrible remark about women to me?

Mr. Horrible: Aw, lighten up.

You: No, seriously. I'm curious. You seem like a nice man, you're Catholic, you must love Our Lady, but you make remarks like that. So I'm assuming that you don't like me, or you have a problem with women-in-general. And since you're a Catholic, and Catholicism stresses the Dignity of Women, my guess is there's something going on with you.

Mr Horrible: You know what I don't like....?

And then Mr Horrible pours out his wounded masculine soul because most young men with a grievance can't help talking about it when given half a chance.

There is also, of course, the chance that Mr Horrible's anger goggles are so firmly glued to his head that he will just call you a "crazy bitch" instead of explaining himself or apologizing. In this event, I suggest you avoid him at all costs, and if others in your set ask why, you tell them, word for word.

Another thing I recommend is to read Mulieris Dignitatem by John Paul II. John Paul II totally loved us women. And you can find it on vatican.va.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Two Other Books of Note

As I was browsing Waterstone's yesterday, I found on a clearance table The Complete Book of Aunts by Rupert Christiansen for a mere £3.99. It cost less than the fashion mag I was going to wastefully spend my money on and is much more salubrious. It was first published in 2006, so we need not feel sorry for Mr. Christiansen that his book is on the clearance table. Instead, any Single woman in Britain should rush out and by it, for it is immensely cheering.

So far I have read only Christiansen's first two chapters, plus his etymological discussion of aunts, plus an amusing poem about aunts by Virginia Graham. But I am convinced that the whole work is chicken soup for the auntly soul, equally attractive to both Serious and Searching Single women.

The second book I discovered by way of Yahoo News, which (like MSN) reprinted a Maclean's article about Whom Not To Marry: Time-Tested Advice from a Higher Authority. The Higher Authority is 81-year-old Father Pat Connor of New Jersey, but speaking as an author, I think we can charitably assume the subtitle was not his choice. The phrase "Time-Tested" was ripped straight from the subtitle of The Rules.

The media seems to love books written about sex and/or marriage by priests: such a fuss last year over a Polish priest who wrote a sex manual. I suppose they still think priests know squat about marriage, despite most of them preparing hundreds of couples for marriage and then listening to our subsequent complaints for years. But I have to say that I am a wee bit annoyed that Fr. Connor has scooped the topic of my next book. How vexing. Fortunately, the market is big enough to handle several simultaneous books about whom-not-to-marry. Persuasion, for example, still sells very well.

But I am longing to read what Father Connor has to say, so I am going to get his book, and I bet all you Searching Singles would find it interesting, too.

A Cumbria Single

"Why," ask both telly and radio. "Why? Why? Why?"

"But we may never know," they say next. "Let's talk about our gun laws."

"No," I say from the pillow. "Back up. There are non-terrorist killing sprees in Britain only once every ten years or so. Guns do not jump out of the cupboard and start shooting randomly. Let's go back to 'why'--or would that be too scary for you?"

And lo, this morning I check the Telegraph and discover that the Cumbria shooter was not actually a "nice, quiet" pillar of the community. He was involved in a family feud over his mother's will, he never married the mother of his children, and he apparently broke up with her because she wouldn't abort their second child. Okay, this was a man who wanted to wipe out his own unborn son, a son he had begotten on his long-term partner. Hmm.

Here follows what I found most interesting in the article, only with the killer's name removed. I have a policy that I will never name serial killers. Sometimes fame is their motive. If newspapers had a policy of calling all serial killers "X", there might not be so many of them.

X’s younger son Jamie, 16, still lives at home in nearby Lamplugh with his mother Linda Mills, 48, who has long been separated from X. They never married.

Miss Mills left X and moved to Lamplugh with Graeme in early 1994, around the time she gave birth to Jamie.

A neighbour described Miss Mills, who works as a house keeper at Center Parcs in Penrith, as ''a lovely lass’’.

One friend laid blame for the break-up squarely with X. “When Linda fell pregnant with Jamie, he wanted her to have an abortion and she refused,” the friend said.

“It put a big strain on the relationship and they broke up soon after.

“X and Linda didn’t speak at all afterwards. But Jamie spent a lot of time with his dad.”
...
One of Miss Mills’s friends alleged that while typically being unassuming, X showed darker moods to those close to him.

“If you saw him in the street he would say hello to you but he was always down and moody,” she said.

“He was really tight with his money, too. He would even charge his own family the taxi fare.”

Now here is the only motive being given out yesterday:

A fellow cab driver said they thought that X may have been upset after recently being teased by colleagues about his lack of success with women.
“
They used to wind him up because he was a really quiet lad and kept himself to himself,” the driver said.

“They would tease him about lasses and say they have had better runs than him. It’s just friendly banter, but somebody has said something to him and he has taken it to heart.”

....
My borrowed computer just lost everything I had to say subquent to the above. It was very brilliant, IMHO, so I am very miffed.

In short, Cumbria Single seems to have been an enormously self-absorbed, selfish and bitter man. He was also quite the foot-soldier for the Culture of Death. He got his girlfriend pregnant twice without, apparently, even asking for her hand in marriage. He put pressure on this lady to kill their second child. He fought over his mum's will before his mum was even dead. He killed his own twin brother, a 60-year-old solicitor and then his friends. Then some innocent strangers. Then himself.

Why did he do all this? Was it because of some loophole in Britain's stringent gun laws? No. It was because he was a bad man.

Are we allowed to say that? Absolutely no one on telly last night said that. But I say it. I have no problem saying this serial killer was a bad man, and that very likely the Cumbria killer is in hell, whatever hell turns out to be. Maybe if he had thought a little more about hell, he would not have killed twelve people and himself.

I know perfectly well that none of my regular Single readers are going to haul off and shoot anybody. The reason I bring all this up (other than to come up with a better explanation than Our Gun Laws Are To Blame) is that Cumbria Single is a very bad model of how to live the Single Life. He seems to have exhibited the bad qualities that I discovered firsthand are the perennial temptations of the Single Life: self-absorption, selfishness and bitterness. So, my dear little Singles, I say to you, look out.

I also encourage you to keep on fighting the Culture of Death. Mother Teresa pointed out the direct relationship between the mental capacity to have one's own unborn child killed and the mental capacity to kill, or have killed, complete strangers.** I can understand why a woman, in a blind panic, might wish to do away with her unborn baby, but why a man would... Ugh! What an utter failure of manhood.

Manhood lies precisely in this: that a man wishes to protect and sustain women, children and weaker elderly folk. (You don't have to be married to do this, boys. Every time you give up your seat on the bus, you are behaving like a real man. Every time you send a cheque to a charity, you are behaving like a real man. Every time you take your nephew or niece to the park to give your sister a break, you are behaving like a real man.) Christ was THE man, incidentally.

The Culture of Death, though, is not just the big things like abortion, suicide and murder. It is also enjoyment of violence and becoming a slave to the glamour of evil. It is one thing to fire off a gun because you enjoy target shooting. It is quite another thing to play violent video games because you think blowing off heads (with gruesome graphics) is so cool. Given the widespread popularity of such games, I find it significant that the Cumbria killer shot so many people in the head.

(How sad I am I lost my much better end to this post.)

Update: To those wondering, I now have no regular access to facebook. Sorry! It's because my computer died, and BA's computer is a work-controlled one.

**Update 2: Mother Teresa said this over and over again, including in her acceptance of the Nobel Peace prize. Here is one version--and remember, I do sympathise with women who are in an utter panic: most of the world is not kind to pregnant women in distress, even if that distress is only feeling sick on the bus and no-one will give them seats--If we can accept that a woman can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill each other? Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.

And that's my last word, my dears. Although I am pro-life, this is not "a pro-life blog" per se. And this is not a post about abortion: it about a man on the island where I live who yesterday killed twelve people and wounded 25 others. I seek to cut through the "He was the nicest man; he just snapped" crap.

Decency Makes A Difference

Yesterday I had coffee with Cath, and I brought up (once again) the subject of The Girl Who Spat On My Hair. Really, I still can barely believe it happened. There I was on the bus, not saying a word in any accent whatsoever, not wearing anything particularly noticeable, and a girl in her teens, sitting directly behind me, spat in my hair.

Now this was, of course, the Rough Bus, and the girl did, of course, get out in a neighbourhood notorious for povertycrimedrugabuseteenpregnancy. But--how do I put this--she was Scottish. Since when do Scottish teenagers spit on adult women, eh? When half-Scottish I was her age, I could barely SEE older women on the bus, unless they were pregnant, and then I gave up my seat.

So I go about asking Scottish people how this incident might have come about. First I asked my husband, who suggested that I previously had a romantic view of poor Scottish girls. Then I asked the son of a labour organiser, who suggested that it was a result of the collapse of heavy industry. And then I consulted Cath, suggesting that it might have come as a result of the loss of religion, and Cath agreed. And whatever the reason, we decided, moral degredation was the result.

The problem with private behaviour is that it so rarely is, or remains, private. Unless you're a hermit, what you do affects everyone else. If you snigger and sneer at chastity as a bourgeois value, then simple people, those who have the most to lose by unchastity, are going to start devaluing chastity, too. And apparently the girls who are most likely to submit to underage sex are girls whose friends have already submitted to underage sex.

Yesterday the story of a poor Scottish child appeared in the Daily Mail. She got pregnant at the age of 11, after a booze-fuelled consensual romp with a boy. She gave birth at 12, and both she and her infant were taken into care.

Authorities decided that the baby would be better off with a married adult couple, and now, age 16, the child-mother would like access to the baby. She swears she's off booze and drugs--well, drugs, anyway. Still a bit of booze. No mention if she's off romps with boys. Pardon me if, having read her interview, I suspect that she is still not a particularly fit influence for a four year old girl. The one thing I can say for her is at least she had the moral gumption not to have the baby killed before she was born. And having an adoptive mum and dad means baby is likely to have a better childhood than the birth mother did.

This is where my husband would observe that this story could very well have been the story of a poor Scottish girl in any decade going back to 1790. But before 1960 (the collapse of heavy industry, the breaking of the Scottish Sabbath), most girls in Scotland were taught that premarital sex, drug-taking and boozing would make them unhappy. These activities were not held out to them as glamorous pursuits. They were described as sure routes to hell, both literally and figuratively. A self-protecting society frowned.

Now society smiles indulgently but finds its hospital wards packed with dangerous people out of their minds on drink and drugs every Friday and Saturday night. In some communities, more babies are born out of wedlock than in, which means that increasing numbers of children never know the absolute security of going to sleep as their father and mother companionably watch telly together. And increasing numbers of teens and adults have their hearts broken because they think A) sex is a just a bit of a laugh or B) "a piece of paper won't make us love each other more than we do." No wonder so many turn to drink and drugs.

So I am feeling particularly fond today of Single people who do not get drunk or drug or have sex. Drinking, drugging and having sex are all fun things, but legions of decent people eschew these pleasures for the greater values of sobriety and chastity, values that nourish society. In addition, I am also feeling fond of people who sit up straight, who dress with dignity, who keep their voices down on the bus so as not to disturb others, who do not spit in public and who watch their children like hawks, to make sure that they will grow up as decent people.

Cath and I were giggling over some American neo-Calvinist who is trying to promote Calvinism as cool.

"Cool is the problem," I said. "Christians should be against cool. We should be decent, dull and buttoned-up to the neck."

Death to cool. Long live decency!

Money For Singles?

I do not know what to say about this article about Singles, other than it does not exactly work within the Catholic worldview.

Whatever else we can say about the gifts of Singles (and there are many), keeping down the numbers of new babies is not one of them. Chastity among Singles does, of course, prevent children from being conceived in the less-than-ideal circumstances of Single parenthood. But babies are good. Having babies is good. Not having babies should not be rewarded with cash handouts. In fact, how much nicer to have a Baby Bonus (as my mother used to get) than a No-Baby Bonus. If I got a No-Baby Bonus, I would save it up and use the money to adopt a Baby, just to spite the social engineers.

Single people have just as much interest in the next generation being happy, healthy and plentiful as parents do.