Month: November 2017

As a footnote to my last post about the “Me Too” movement (see below), I want to say something about modesty.

Modesty, according to the dictionary, is about measure and moderation. It is a virtue for all of us, men and women equally. These days it mostly refers both to dress and behavior, and typically refers to women’s dress and behavior.

I will leave discussion of women’s modesty to women, perhaps especially to mothers and daughters. I will add only one note from my male perspective. I have come to suspect that many women are somewhat naïve about the effect of their fashions on men. Other women, of course, are quite conscious about that effect and quite deliberate in dressing and acting to manipulate it.

As to modesty for men, I also urge women to speak out. Men mostly are aware of immodesty in their behavior, but need constant reminders. Hopefully this might be one of the ripple effects of the “Me Too” movement. Regarding men’s clothing, I had not thought much about modesty until one day on campus, after I’d complained about the parade of tight fitting shirts and low-cut blouses on female students, a young woman caught me up with comments about similar clothing on many young men.

Yet my primary point in this writing is to recall the idea of “modesty of the eyes.”  It’s a term I first heard during seminary training so many years ago – Catholic seminary training for young men committed to lives of celibacy. The term was new, but not the idea. Anyone, perhaps men especially but also women, who wishes to have a sane sexual life needs to be measured and moderate, even carefully cautious in what they look at, the sights and images that catch and hold their eyes.

If you continue to look with lust (whether at a human body or a bottle of whiskey) you’re already in trouble.

As a life-long admirer of women’s beauty, I would only add that immodest dress is almost always a distraction from real beauty — a fashion-mandated and often desperate call for attention.

That’s it. Nothing new; all obvious. Just my brief contribution to the recovery of an ancient but perennial virtue. Modesty in dress and behavior is not a particularly Christian or religious thing. Just a form of sanity and beauty, measure and moderation.

It remains true, of course, that a there is always also a moderate need for occasionally immoderate excess.

Our news media, thankfully, continue to focus on revelations of sexual abuse (mainly of women) by predators with power (mostly men).  I admire the victims and the vulnerable who keep coming forward in the “Me Too” movement and I hope those who see this as a watershed moment in the struggle against abuse and for women’s dignity are right.  Yet in current commentary, I’ve found little discussion about the role of our “image industries” in the history of recent sexual abuse.

What follows are just a few comments about those industries, mostly things we already know but need to emphasize.   I ask readers to add their reflections below as well as links to related and perhaps more substantial discussion.

The first obvious thing – at least obvious to those of my generation – is the continually increasing sexualization of our media at least since the 1950s.  And by “our media” I mean not only cinema and TV, but advertising and fashion, magazine and news photography, and now the internet.  And by sexualization I mean primarily the sexualization of women’s bodies in both pose and action.  (Who knew that TV’s growing number of women detectives would need not just pretty faces but deep revealing cleavages in order to do their increasingly violent deeds!)

I hope I’m not naïve about the long history of both pornography and the sexual depiction of female beauty.  I remember a male guide in the ruins of Pompei who asked only the men in the group to enter one room decorated with remnants of ancient Roman pornography.  It was the early 1960s when his pseudo-modesty for the women was already becoming laughable.

Yet I also remember, and it is more to my point, a recent visit to Viet Nam with an American Catholic Sister who had grown up near Saigon.  What struck both of us was the omnipresent westernization of the scantily and sexily clad Vietnamese models on billboards and in shop windows.  (It is an ironic victory for the West that even communist economies now make immense profits from media sexualization.  What the military could not do, the market quickly accomplished.)

It’s not surprising that the upsurge of “me too” accusations began primarily in our media – in news (Fox) and entertainment (from Cosby to Weinstein to the latest headline) – and has spread thence to politics and beyond.

As I say, all this is obvious, and perhaps not even much noticed by younger folks raised entirely within this pervasive media regime.  (Here, again, I would invite comment and links about the impact of this sexualization on succeeding “generations” of young adults, adolescents, and children.)

As an aside: while I much admire and support the media women who initiated the “Me Too” movement, I nonetheless wonder about their active participation in this broader sexualization – by the roles they play, the fashions they sport, the notoriety and popularity (and wealth) they have attained.  I am NOT blaming the victim, but I am asking for women’s reflections about women’s participation in the “sexualization” of our media.

Nor I hope am I being a prude – one of the capital sins of contemporary culture.  Sexual liberation or the sexual revolution has not been some one simple thing.  Many of us (myself included) have benefitted immensely from greater cultural and religious acceptance of the good and beauty of human sexuality, even as most of us (myself included) have had more than a few stumbles and sins along the way to real liberation.

My concern about the sexualization of our media (with its strangely simultaneous trivialization of sex and spread of sexual abuse) is not a call for moral crusades to clean up our media – though such crusades are probably one inevitable consequence of our (hopefully) watershed moment, and may well prove helpful in a variety of ways.  Rather it is above all a call for serious public discussion, spurred by the reports of abuse, to diagnose the deeper imaginative and economic diseases of our media regime.

Clearly the prime movers of the sexualization process have been the commercial masters of our media.  Sex sells, and profits are huge.  Weinstein’s fat ugly face provides (at least for me) an apt image for the economic disease ravaging our media.  (I expect to see many such faces in any update of Dante’s Inferno.)

Yet I am here more concerned with the even deeper imaginative diseases metastasizing through our media.  Which brings me to my second obvious point – that the sexualization of media is but one aspect of the broader and in the end far more destructive process of sensationalizing.  One could also speak of the pervasive “fantasizing” and “infantilizing” of media images and “creative” imaginations.

If sex sells, excitement and intensity and shock are what make it sell.  And the pervasive emphasis on excitement and intensity in all our media — enhanced by technical “improvements” for faster pace, mind-blowing visuals, and spirit-deadening sound – is needed to “re-capture” the diminishing attention and sensibility of audiences, viewers, even readers.  (Years ago, reggae artist Jimmy Cliff lamented: “Poor slave, they took the shackles from your body; poor slave, they put the shackles on your mind.”) The media came to “shock and awe” long before the military, even as militarization has always depended on media fantasy to maintain popular support.

My mentor William Lynch, SJ, analyzed the imaginative diseases of our media in his still important 1959 book The Image Industries.  The book was in part a response to the Catholic Church’s “Legion of Decency” campaign which as early as 1933 sought to counter the sexualization of our media.  That campaign, as I experienced it, attained an apogee of sorts in the 1950s, but Lynch was concerned that, however well-intentioned, it distracted from the larger problem in image industries.  The commercial masters could (and on occasion did) easily “clean up” this or that objectionable scene while leaving untouched the remaining 90 minutes of infantilizing junk that was then becoming standard (and increasingly profitable) fare for the dream factory.  Lynch called for the collaborative work of artists and critics, schools and churches, in the development of a critical public sensibility which would demand better.  A call still much needed.

Many good critical essays and books have been written over the years about the sensationalizing of our media and the infantilizing of our imaginations.  Many good films and TV productions have themselves sought to counter the spread of these diseases.  There have been, to note but one especially relevant example, many good films and programs about romance and sexual experience, some quite “explicit,” yet artistically and humanly so.  And the same for films about war and violence, crime and punishment.  Indeed many good films and programs have deliberately mocked the sensationalizing and infantilizing process, helping us to laugh at our own seductions and hoot the phony and fantastic from the stage of our spirits.

Yet it’s been mostly been band-aids.  Nothing yet has significantly impeded the manic metastasizing of our media diseases, much less led to real healing and transformation.

Enough.  I am simply writing a reminder about what we all know, but has so far gotten too little attention in “Me Too” news and commentary.

Perhaps this “Me Too” moment might provide occasion for real change in our image industries.  I hope, but am not hopeful.  Let me know (below) what you think.

 I recently wrote about the death of a longtime friend. I’m writing now, on All Saints Day, because of the death of a young relative who was, as they say, “spiritual but not religious.” Having been asked by the family to speak at the memorial service, I was led to think about how our ways of mourning are changing to be inclusive of the growing diversity of belief in our families and communities. It’s something like what’s happening in our rituals for marriage. I am concerned – as are others – about what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost, and perhaps need to develop, in the language and rituals which might help all of us in times of great loss. So below, as but one example of the effort to find appropriate words, I share (with his family’s permission) words I spoke for the memorial service for Jake – a young husband and father who died after a year-long battle with cancer. It may help to note that the service was held not in a church, but in the outdoors. At the end I’ll ask you to comment about the rituals and language which have helped you, or which you might like to hear and see.

Clearly all of us here, each in different ways, experience the pain of terrible loss at Jake’s passing, probably shock and numbness, perhaps doubt and confusion and even anger. About such pain I say what we know – that it is not only inevitable, but necessary, even right, for it is expresses our love for Jake.

So yes, today we shed tears. We’ll also tell stories and smile, even laugh, as we move around, greeting and touching and hugging in a communal dance far deeper than words.

It may be enough simply to say that this is how we both mourn and begin to heal.

But I want to suggest that our sorrow is, in a very human way, mingled with, grounded on a sense of affirmation, even deep joy.

Mostly because we affirm the goodness of Jake’s life as husband and father, brother and son, friend and companion.

But also because many of us believe, in our different ways, that Jake now lives in the company of his Granny, his Aunt Mary and Uncle Ed, and his brother Peter. It’s why we speak of death as “passing” or “passing on.”

Yet there’s also a more immediate and for most of us more important reason for the affirmation we experience within our pain.

Let me try to explain.

Many know the story of Prince Siddhartha who attained Nirvanna while walking among us. For Buddhists, Nirvanna is not an afterlife, but complete immersion here and now in the river of compassion that flows through everything. It flows most obviously through the lives of saints like the Buddha, but also through many so-called “ordinary” people. And even the rest of us have times when we are held by the flow of that river. The fundamental affirmation and deep joy we may feel today are perhaps such a momentary and also communal immersion in that river. It does not take away pain, but cleanses it with our shared compassion.

Some of you may also know about the Lakota holy man Black Elk. He had survived Wounded Knee and knew the evil that murdered his people. Yet as a boy Black Elk had a vision of Great Power for his people. He saw them and all of us living in harmony with the four directions or powers coming from North and South, East and West. They are the daily power of sunrise freshness and noon warmth, of evening quiet and night sleep. They are the annual powers of spring rebirth and summer growth, fall’s harvest and winter’s blanket of snow. They are also the great powers we experience in childhood energy and maturity’s strength, in elder slowing and in the final passage of death (even when it comes far too soon). These are real powers, here in this world. We know them more in our bodies than in our minds. Black Elk says they are gifts from the Grandfathers. For most of us they are spirit-strengths given by our Mother Earth.

I find much in Black Elk’s teachings that resonate with the teachings of Rabbi Jesus.* Both men believed in an afterlife, but each affirmed that the Spirit’s power is with us “on earth as it is in heaven.”

The pain of Jake’s death is, I say again, rooted in his goodness, his journey to harmony with the Four Directions. And we travel still with him, on streets and slopes and across continents and cultures. We work with him still for a justice rooted in such harmony.

Now a final way to explain this comingling of sorrow and joy: The monk Thomas Merton (a quite Buddhist Christian) tells us about the Great Dance:

“No despair of ours [he says] can alter the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. We are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood whether we want it or not…. We are [he concludes] invited to forget ourselves on purpose…and join that dance.”

The rhythms of that Great Dance move through us now as greet and embrace, cry and laugh. Jake calls us to join him in that Dance, not only today but tomorrow and through all our tomorrows.

I end by repeating my request that you might respond below, not to my remarks for Jake, but to the general issue about how we are finding words and rituals for death.
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*In mid-life, Black Elk became a Catholic lay minister while retaining his Lakota beliefs and practices. He has been nominated for canonization by the Catholic Church in North Dakota.