In memory of Bobby Glen Wilcher, Katie Bell Moore, and Velma Odell Noblin

After 24 years of sitting on Mississippi’s death row, Bobby Glen Wilcher was finally executed on Wednesday evening by lethal injection. In 1982, he brutally murdered two women (Katie Bell Moore and Velma Odell Noblin) he met in Forest, MS (an act which he admitted to). But what good is this really? The families of the two victims may have been happy when he was finally put to death. But what about the victims themselves? Are they happy now?

Probably the most used Biblical quote in fighting capital punishment is the fifth commandment. But I offer instead the words of Christ himself. In the fifth chapter of Mathew, we find the Sermon on the Mount. In these 8 verses, Christ offers multiple occasions in which life on earth is blessed.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” We have two opportunities to mourn here. First, we can mourn for the victims. Second, we can mourn for Wilcher himself, who became a victim on Wednesday. Mourn, but do not become angered.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” We repeat this every time we pray the Our Father, saying, “forgive us of our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” If we don’t forgive, why should we be forgiven?

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” What more could you want? Is killing someone peaceful? Would a son of God, who is love, take the life of another?

God is constantly calling us to forgiveness of our sins. After all, “God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him” (1 John 4:16b). How can we show someone the love of God if we do not give him a chance to repent and ask forgiveness?

Now you must ask the reason for having a penal system. Is it to keep the bad guys out of society? Or is it to ‘rehabilitate’ them so that they will no longer be a threat to society? If the latter holds to be true, then what good is the death penalty to the cause?

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Blessed are those who embrace their own spiritual poverty, their own need of God and others. No one person is worth more than another. All people are created by God, as he is the only one with that ability. Thus, all people are created in his image and likeness. Every time you refuse to love someone with the love of God (agape), you refuse to love God himself.

1 + 1 = 1?

In his March 5, 1980 general audience, John Paul II said, In Genesis 4:1, “becoming one flesh, the man and the woman experience in a particular way the meaning of their body.” His translation of Gn 4:1-2 says, “Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have begotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again she bore his brother Abel.” The New American translation, however, says, “The man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain.” I find this contrast interesting. But at any rate, the act of conjugal union is one of knowing as well as one of relations.

In the conjugal act, the man and the woman become one in mind and body. John Paul says, “In this way, together they become almost the one subject of that act and that experience, while remaining, in this unity, two really different subjects.” Thus, out of their love for each other, they come together and participate in creation, conceiving children with the help of the Lord. They become on in body and flesh, but stay separate as persons.

I am reminded here of the love that holds together the Holy Trinity. What is love if it is not communicated? Thus (as I understand it), the Father communicates his love to the Son, who in turn communicates his love back to the Father. And out of that great love, the Holy Spirit comes to be. Well in a similar manner, a strong way that a man and a woman communicate their love for each other is through the conjugal act, the act of sexual self-donation. And through that great love, they produce a child. This, I think, justifies John Paul II when he refers to the body as being a manifestation of the love of God. Of this, he said, “By means of [its] corporality [Humanity] becomes a visible sign of the economy of truth and love, which has its source in God himself” (General Audience of February 20, 1980).

How, I now ask, is this great love shown when two people have relations outside of marriage? I also ask, how can this great love be made manifest when a form of birth control is used? And, finally, how can this great love be shown when two people of the same gender come together, contradicting nature and creation?

We are but a speck of dust in the universe. Why are we so fortunate to understand what we do about creation and our participation in it? And why must we constantly belittle this great privilege of ours?

Sex, taboo, and my two tests today...

So, I have two tests today... So here is an article that I think is really good. It's old, but I like it!

...In other news, tomorrow is exactly one month from the opening of the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale!! YAY!!!

Happy reading!

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Making the Taboo a Holy Place

January 22, 2006

There are no places where God isn't present, though we rarely believe that. Like the people of old, we still have certain taboo areas, places that for us are far from God.

In the gospels we see Jesus going into those places that are considered godless and taboo and dispelling old fears and superstitions by taking God's presence into them.

Thus we see Jesus entering into the lives of the sick, touching lepers, curing a woman struggling with menstruation, dining with prostitutes, and ultimately dying on a cross. All of these were considered unholy, unclean, taboo places, especially death by crucifixion - "Cursed is the one who dies on a tree!" There were powerful fears and taboos surrounding these things.

Yet Jesus entered those places without false fear and superstition. But he didn't enter into them the way we, the adult children of the Enlightenment, do. For us, the dispelling of superstition, unhealthy taboo, and false fear is generally seen as a triumph of personal maturity, a growing-up, a liberation from false, phantom ghosts that we're too smart to believe in. For us, it's a question of false fear and unhealthy timidity, suffered in the name of religion, being exposed. Good riddance.

Some of this, in fact, is good. We've always lived with too much fear. True religion is meant to free us from this. That's why virtually every time God appears in Scripture the first words are: "Do not be afraid!"

But our problem today is that, while we have entered old taboo areas and exposed false fears and superstitions, we haven't, like Jesus, baptized those areas and made them holy. We haven't taken God into them. Instead we have mostly emptied them, de-enchanted them, flattened them out, taken the mystique and soul out of them and left nothing but the biological, the social, the natural. We've cleared away a lot of false fear and superstition, but one wonders how much we've really gained.

Take just one example, sex: For most of history there has been, for all peoples, a great many taboos around sex. All the great religions of the world have deemed sex as sacred and surrounded it with every kind of prohibition and taboo, as indeed has virtually every culture until recently. In Jesus' time, for example, adultery was punishable by death and the simple biological fact of menstruation was seen to render you unclean.

We've come a long way since then and now live in a culture that has essentially no religious, moral, or psychological taboos around sex and has little, if any, fear of it. The good news in this is that we have emptied sex of superstition, false fear, and false taboo. The bad news is that we have also robbed it of most of its sacredness, mystique, depth, and soul. We've been able to exorcise its demons, but have been unable to baptize it. We've removed its stigma, but without being able to infuse it with the sacred.

And we're the poorer for it: So now we have lovers instead of spouses and soul mates because when sex is emptied of the sacred it can be casual and schizophrenic. We talk of someone as "hot" rather than as beautiful because once there are no longer any divine angels inside sex, there is mostly only biology left. And we go home after having sex because we haven't found a home in it, despite the fact that anthropologically and religiously sex is meant to bring us home and be, itself, the most intimate of all homes. Unlike Jesus, we haven't been able to take God into the place of taboo.

So today there's a lot of sex, but a growing loneliness. We have no fear of sex, but our souls aren't healed by it either. We're liberated, but not whole or happy.

Perhaps our grandparents lived in too much fear of sex, but at least for them it held the sacred. We have little fear, but we also have a dumbed-down reality. Free of angels and demons, we experience precious little in the way of mystery and all too soon know the truth of William Auden's comment: "We all know the few things that man, as a mammal, can do."

In truth, there is a certain moral victory in our demystifying of sex from false taboo, but, until we re-enchant it (by taking the sacred into that former-taboo space) that victory will be a hollow one.

Jesus went into places that were considered taboo, unclean, and outside of God's grace and cast out false fear and superstition there. But he did this not to claim some personal maturity. He did it to take God's presence into those places. He came to free us from fear, even as he taught us that "fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

And that's the challenge: We are to fear nothing, even as we are to have a holy, reverential fear of everything. One, without the other, is not good.

http://www.ronrolheiser.com/arc012206.html