I recently read a book for a seminary- and graduate-level Old Testament class. It was devoted to explaining the importance of a literary genre called ring composition in the history of literature. A technical, informative read, not exactly titillating.1
But in the author’s exploration of how modern styles of writing compare to ancient ring composition, she chose to use the novel Tristram Shandy as an (admittedly colorful) illustration. A couple of chapters were devoted to it, including a description of its innuendo-packed, male-anatomy-themed, often crass allusions to sexual attraction, impotence and virility. Even given how unattracted (no pun intended) I was to the story, I hardly blinked at its use here. After all, we’re graduate-level adults who presumably have the capacity to process mature content in an appropriate context. Which this was.
Or at least that’s what I thought.
Until I received an email from our class professor. In it, she apologized because some of my fellow students took offense at the novel’s spotlight in the book. She went so far as to suggest that, if someone could provide an alternative, she would replace it with a less, er, offensive2 title.
Ah, seminarians. There ain’t none like us.
Now, I have never read, nor do I find myself with a particular desire to read, this classic novel. Its moral aesthetic — and honestly genre — leaves me frankly unenthused. But the moral (or stylistic) merits or demerits of a novel narrated by a man of the unfortunate name of Tristram are really not the point here.
The point is our astounding inability (especially those of us who fancy ourselves called to ministry) to tolerate the reality of a broken world, or even a messy one. Worse still is the illusion that Expurgation of the Person is the way God wishes his children to respond to that world.
Can you imagine if this were the iconography Jesus left behind him as the Way to Life?
In the case of the Tristram Shandy incident, I cannot shake the suspicion that the offense sprang not from the moral problems it depicted but from the unabashed, even embarrassingly undignified, depiction of the reality of human anatomy and sexuality. How could any decent person dwell on a story themed around that? (I imagine a lovely little old lady with wrinkled hands to blushing face, scurrying hurriedly out of the room in mortification.)
And perhaps this is what bothered me more than anything else. Discomfort, embarrassment, was being represented as justified moral offense. If the story had been themed around a vice of any other sort, the choice of the author to include it might not have received criticism. But because it was an embarrassing kind of vice that was depicted, it was offensive. It seemed to me that the Gospel was being called to the defense of, quite frankly, prudery.
And that very prudery is seriously problematic (but unfortunately, it seems to me, prevalent) in the context of people specifically seeking out training for ministry. Still more problematic is the impression that such prudishness is evidence of moral high ground. That such a reaction is a godly reaction. Intolerance for the embarrassing, undignified side of human nature is seen as moral superiority.
Let me assure you, it is not. Human? Very. Perhaps, if kept to the realm of personal preference and sensitivities, even understandable. But certainly not virtuous. And definitely not the heart of the Gospel we are called to represent to the world.
God is not a cosmic Mr. Clean. His world does not offend him. He did, after all, make even unfallen man from dust. The humanity — heck, the whole creation — he made and is now saving has always been earthy and a little bit wild, however gloriously in his image and likeness. The fall did not make this true; it simply distorted it.
Even in redeeming a fallen world, he does not expurgate; he always remakes. He takes the raw, bloody pulp of humanity and makes it his raw, bloody pulp. Only then do we encounter resurrection. And although that resurrection is glorious and complete, it is not something that fits all our aesthetic preferences.
He is certainly not embarrassed or offended by human sexuality — nor is he obsessed with it, either positively or negatively. That we are is simply evidence that we are deeply marred in the area that physically embodies his image in us. And for us to confuse either our prudery or prurience with God’s will is only evidence of how far our sensibilities have fallen from his image. (Marc Barnes has, in fact, written a lovely piece explaining just this irony from a Catholic viewpoint. I highly recommend it.)
The point is that we need to let the Gospel bring us down to earth, and until it can we will not be able to reach the world as Christ’s instruments. The solution our God in Heaven chose was not to cross his Cosmic Fingers against us (what a relief) but to come down to us, con-descend. That’s the original meaning of the word condescension. It only became negative when it came to represent that action mixed with arrogance. But to truly come down to be with, that’s the Gospel. Only condescension can glorify the lowly without despising it. He was not too proud — or too prudish — to come down to us. That’s because he loved us. Sometimes I think the simplicity of that truth escapes our darkened and convoluted minds.
And yet that is what we as the Church are called to. We are called to a love that condescends: that is not too proud to be lowly. There is no hint of superiority in that call. It completely subverts our distorted understanding of holiness and unholiness. We learn not to be afraid of the world Christ came to save, because suddenly we see that he is everywhere.
There is the Gospel. There is the image of Christ the Church is called to bear to the world. And this is what I pray for myself and for all of us. Perfect love casts out fear: and the one that has been perfected in love has no place for prudery because he knows that this Love transforms all that he touches.
- Unless you have a weird fetish for literary anthropology. Hey, some academics really might, I don’t know. My apologies to anyone who hoped for an arousing treatment of ring composition here: I fear I am not your man. Or woman, as it may be. ↩
- The lecherous culprit, for anyone so perverted as to wish to read it. God forbid an academic work by a cultural anthropologist on historic literary styles should reference such worldly themes. ↩
Musings of a Catholic Protestant 