The Enclosed Garden

Our principal lesson for the Sunday Liturgy consists of eight, short verses. It is rare when the time allotted to cense the Evangel, to hold it aloft, and to open its pages exceeds the time required to proclaim it. Yet, this is the case today as a crowd on the shore awaits the Lord of Life. They have brought a paralytic to Him.

The point, I think, is that this Sunday's Gospel lesson, which follows directly Jesus' departure from the Tribe of Gad — He is only now getting out of the boat — comments on that lost land, from which He has just returned. Do we not hear echoes from an entire Creation that had also become lost:

The remedy for these evil thoughts, encountered everywhere, was to begin again, drowning the first Creation in many waters.

The story of the Lost Tribe of Gad, driving the Son of God out of their desolated world is a parallel situation. For not just a few Gadarenes have rejected God, but rather the entire tribe

Each new life born into the world sets the Creation scene all over again — a pristine garden becoming, if marriage is to follow, a fertile place, free from infection, holy and good. Here a new family blooms, founded in God and communing with God, after the pattern of the proto-family in Eden. Often, in these sacred groves, appears the greatest miracle commonly seen among humans: the creation of new life bearing God's Image. What mother or father does not see in their newborn child ineffable holiness?

So what is it that could possibly bring people to a point where they would imperil that goodness .... individually, as a tribe, or as an entire lifeworld? Whatever it might be, we must surmise that it must be something powerful, overwhelming .... or perhaps a beauty that beguiles and charms, for which they are willing to sacrifice everything.

Dante pondered this question (in the thirteenth century) calling the siren song of error bella menzogne, "beautiful lies." In our time, a most powerful song dominates our culture, even our entire lifeworld. It is the song of sexuality.

Created by God to seal holy marriage in a permanent bond of profound intimacy and to engender ever deeper love with the birth of children, we do not hesitate to call this expression of love holy.

Yet, the holy can quickly devolve into the demonic. This does not surprise us. We know that the holier anything might be, the more surely it will come under demonic attack. And which example could be more compelling — in one state, the very expression of most holy beauty; in another state, the scene of the demonic and the grotesque — than human sexuality?

It is a sign of our times that the mere mention of the word sex brings to mind profane things. not holy ones. Yet, even in its debased form, people are willing to sacrifice anything for sex: their reputations, their careers, their livelihoods, their health, even their family and children.

Who can dispute that sex has become the master subject of the past American half-century, whether it be homo-sex, trans-sex, bi-sex, pan-sex, questioning-sex, or the pervasive illicit sex in which our culture is soaked through to its core?

In the United States, the Anglican/Episcopal Church, producing more than one-fourth of all U.S. presidents, has been reduced in size nearly to the point of ruin over homosexuality. The Roman Catholic Church has been perilously hobbled by the same issues. The Orthodox Catholic Church in the West presently struggles with these questions. A recent study by the Pew Research Center attests this, measuring acceptance of homosexuality among Orthodox Christians by country:

An influential report, "Eastern Orthodoxy and Sexual Diversity" (eds. Brandon Gordon, Exeter University, and Gregory Tucker, Fordham University), argues that the Fathers of the Six Ecumenical Councils and the Fathers who have guided these bishops, have no bearing on this debate today:

.... all of which is "tendentious in the extreme," I add as an editorial comment.

So what are the beautiful lies that have caused such views to become widely accepted, even authoritative? What are the beguiling siren songs that have charmed the bees and mesmerized the human heart? Let us spend the remainder of this morning's reflection pondering this paramount question.

We have just heard Beautiful Lie #1: We are different from our ancestors where sex is concerned. Yet, first-century men and women practiced every sex act that people in the twenty-first do: attested in our Ancient Greek lexicons, where the words describing these acts appear, and in the various artworks of Antiquity, which depict these acts. They struggled with the same sexual desires that modern people wrestle with. They were admonished for the same sins (attested in the Pauline Correspondence). Yet, this first lie argues that God has granted a special dispensation for us, unheard in salvation history, for us in the twenty-first century. "Behold I do a new thing!" (Isa 43:19), we hear from the pulpits of the Episcopal Church and elsewhere.

In particular, the report pronounces an axiom that lies at the heart of most gender theory and LGBQT studies: that we have discovered something new in our era, which is sexual identity. Are we to believe that men and women in all historical eras have not had preferences, which have affected their formation and claimed identity? Ancient and early literature will attest that they have. As one example, the word lesbian is derived from the seventh-century B.C. poet Sappho, whose preferences for homosexuality became linked to a geography — the Isle of Lesbos, where she lived. This identification did not come about merely through "sexual acts" as gender theorists today hypothesize. It came about through personal / social / cultural identity.

When I was a chaplain at the University of New Hampshire (serving an Episcopal Church in Durham, NH), I knew the famous "gay bishop" Gene Robinson, who, it later came out, did not believe in God. I recall one annual diocesan convention in which he asked for a show of hands: "Who is opposed to racism awareness training?" When the course materials were rolled out, we discovered that the primary "race" under consideration were people professing homosexual preferences.

Here we have Beautiful Lie #2: Homosexuality is a distinct race like African-Americans. We may well ask if men preferring blondes over redheads are also a distinct race or whether women preferring tall men are also an ethnos, or nation. Yet, dissenting from this opinion could very well lead to our arrest for having committed a hate crime. We are told that we just don't "get it": these identities constitute a "new thing" transcending past categories; they are taking us to a "deeper place" than we have ever been before. These premises are not offered for debate. They are declared axiomatically. They must be accepted prima facie. Certainly, no clergyman in the Diocese of New Hampshire would dare to dissent .... upon pain of ending his livelihood.

Nearly all my adult life I have lived in and around so-called "gay culture." As a doctoral student in literature, as a resident in the West Village of Manhattan, as an Episcopal priest, as pastor of a church in a so-called "gay" resort town, as a priest serving the Roman Catholic Church, my immersion has been extensive (though I have never participated).

Living in Manhattan in the 1980s and walking into public rest rooms on university campuses, I learned first-hand that a primary feature of male homosexuality is group sex and sex with strangers. The Adonis Theater in Manhattan was raided by police to break up an enormous orgy acted out before a big screen on which a porn film was projected. Medical doctors I knew treating STD victims at that time told me that men professing homosexuality typically reported more than three-hundred different partners per year. Later, in an article in the most-respected New England Journal of Medicine, the number was reported to be more than one-hundred per year. These are national averages revealing norms, which belie the premise of the "devoted gay couple."

And I wonder how many married women, who profess themselves to be supporters of "the gay community" would tolerate 300 other women in their husband's life (or hotel room) every year.

Here, then, is Beautiful Lie #3: couples professing homosexuality are no different from any other married couples deserving to inculcate their values in children. How many times have parishioners told me about the "wonderful" gay couple they know, believing that this couple turns aside all the other data. In this lie, two others are told: #4, personal experience decides all cases, and #5, minorities, whatever they might be, ought to be protected from majority opinions. I have told these well-meaning people that personal experience is unreliable: no one knows what happens behind closed doors. What is more, anecdotal evidence ipso facto is discarded in any serious research. As far as minority protections go, we must ask if the values and dangerous practices of all minority groups deserve legal protection simply on the grounds that they are minorities. Do pederasts deserve legal protections? Should the Ku Klux Klan be protected by special civil-rights legislation?

All students of the natural world must also study statistics. Every year across the nation freshmen ask, "But what does math have to do with chemistry or biology? Why do I have to study math?" Because all study of natural phenomena is governed by an axiom: what is mostly true is what is true. Whatever scientific truth we isolate in the natural world, we will also discover that it is never true 100% of the time. Never! These exceptions are known as "outliers." That is, humans did not invent the bell curve. The bell curve is seen spontaneously in any collection of data reporting natural phenomena, with clusters of data points densely gathered in the middle and sparse outliers on either side. This is the bell curve. Exceptions are the one thing in any study we may be sure of. Needless to say, the idea that an exception should overturn the general rule is absurd.

Now, everyone sees that certain men and certain women do not fall squarely in the center of their gender categories. Who has not met feminine men or masculine women? The dignity of these living souls is incommensurable, no less than any other person. Nonetheless, we cannot in a wrong-headed compassion turn our social institutions upside down to make a new world in which men choose to become women or women choose to become men .... in order to be compassionate.

A recent study financed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has revealed that men having sex with other men constitute roughly 2% of the general population. Men who identify exclusively with homosexuality constitute 1%. This data lines up approximately with the landmark University of Chicago Study on sexual behavior, which sets male homosexuality at 2.3% and female homosexuality at 1.6%.

Here we come to Beautiful Lie #6: Homosexuality is a primary new way of life. The idea is that each of us must look inside ourselves, and we will discover (if we are honest) that we have homosexual desires, meaning that we are homosexuals. Our children are pressured even in early elementary school to seek out their sexual identities. And few dare to dissent fearing reprisals.

Here we come to Beautiful Lie #7: men professing homosexuality are "born that way." An obvious example, overturning this premise, draws upon twin studies. An identical twin is a clone: he has the same DNA as his brother. Yet a twin claiming homosexual identity will not reliably find that his brother will do the same. Even the liberal National Public Radio has declared: "There is no 'gay gene.'"

No question, some people are born with certain anomalies in very, very small numbers. People are born with challenges that must be overcome. We shrink from the word "disabilities" because we fear being uncompassionate. We declare that everybody is normal. But we cannot repeal the law of gravity. Things are as they are. Compassion lies in patience, understanding, and in helping people overcome their challenges. But shall we tear our society apart, imprisoning objectors, ruining the lives of dissenters, all on account of fractionally tiny anomalies?

This question is vexed by another with which we began. The great majority of gender studies and their related subgroups depend upon a single rule, espoused by Judith Bennet (to pick a most-cited source):

In plain English, gender theorists argue that sexual predilections define gender, not biology. Whatever I desire, this becomes a new way for me to overturn my essential, biologically encoded (I would say) characteristics, such as whether I am a man or a woman. That is, whatever we claim to desire, that is what we are .... ignoring changeable human attitudes and shifting emotions (especially among adolescents) and the famously difficult question of identity.

Now, here we come to the core of the debate. In the end, it all comes down to identity — the idea that whatever we say we desire, that is who and what we are.

But we must stop here to counsel caution. Identity is a notoriously difficult subject. Americans spend many millions of dollars each year in psychotherapy and counseling in search of who they are. Our world is full-to-overflowing with hats, tee-shirts, bumper stickers, and window decals that lay claim to various identities

The idea that desire should equate to identity was proposed by the Latin Father St. Augustine of Hippo — that whatever we think from minute to minute inevitably becomes our identity over time: the one who cannot not stop thinking about drink will become a drunkard; the one who cannot stop thinking about money will become a miser; the one who cannot stop thinking about sex will become a leering lecher. What shall we say about men who are compulsively drawn to the monstrous: even obsessive attraction to the alimentary canal and, therefore, to excrement? Is this point to be argued?

Beyond debate, the quest for identity runs deep in the human soul. It can rise to the level of mania .... or sink to the depths of depression. The Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nyssa wrote that we are the visible image of the invisible God, Who is inscrutable, unknowable, and incomprehensible. As we are unable to know God, so we shall never know ourselves .... at least in terms of our ever-changing identities. Our last and only hope is to be known to God — in our sincere love, in our faithfulness to His commands, and in our prayers. In this we shall discover peace and and stable identity. And the Son of God said in a definitive teaching:

The only peace we shall ever know is loving Him and embracing His kind of life. Here is our only stable identity. It will never tear their families or their world apart. It will never harm their children. And it will open to them an enclosed garden over which He has given His angels charge. surrounded by God's protecting arms and His holy angels.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.