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J.M.J.
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Why ROMAnce?
Chapter 1
“Guy God”
Still hazy on how Catholics[2] should view God’s gender? Drift no longer.
by J. P. F. McGuire
a| Scott hahn[3] in, his book First Comes Love[4], irrefutably proclaimed himself fully human[5] by painting himself into a corner when he portrayed the Holy Spirit as feminine.[6] Oops! It looks like he’s made it a habit to project earthly paradigms of family onto God rather than transcend them and try to understand them in light of God. That’s one[7] big boo-boo! But let us follow Scott all the way from alpha to omega as we further scrutinize the esoteric causes and ugly effects of such a train of thought. But first I am going to set my thesis on some very specific tracks on which rests the whole discourse. For this was never a discussion on whether God has any attributes in common with woman—God possesses in their perfection all attributes that may be called “good”—but whether God is essentially Protagonist or Recipient, Active or Passive, Creator[8] or Creature, God or Goddess, i.e. He or She[9]. To doubt God’s gender is to toy with the idea that maybe Christianity is simply latent Neopaganism and not something profoundly soul-altering after all.[10]
b| The idea of a she-god may be absurdist, on the outermost hem of Yin-Yang-go-Gnostic, to a well-informed[11] Catholic. But given today’s streamlined revamping by the élite, we must also be sensitive to how, to a majority, misleading it is as well. Hahn ostensibly needs so badly to view the Trinity as Family[12], I fear to do so he projects the earthly family onto God rather than to transcend and refine his understanding of Family in God as a good theologian always ought! To attempt to subject the highest thing to the second-highest thing (a theme interwoven in the present work) is a breach of hierarchy perhaps comparable to Lucifer’s “I shall not serve.” That we may avoid this and all such fleshy pitfalls we are to think as God thinks and not as man, which is why true theology[13] is always the product of a fair amount of humility[14] and humility’s daughter mysticism. In one sense, mystical theology[15] is a contrived category because all true theology had darned-well better be mystical lest it be merely the Latin Rite reveling in the tin sound of its own voice, vainly linking trends and alienating the rest of the Church. Spiritual autism if you will. True theology requires humility, which means not ostentatious self-depreciation but actually something much more difficult, receptivity, all of which constitutes a derivative or byproduct or overflow of childlike—that is, blunt, stark and abrupt—admission of one’s dismal unknowing.[16] Until man confesses his fogginess he judges all to be foggy. As the Precious Master put it, “ ‘If, then, the light inside you is darkness, what darkness that will be!’ ”[17] This is the chart for steering modern theology[18] back onto the charted course of Truth.
c| Precisely being so human—and therefore lovable—Hahn emphasizes covenant not as contract[19] only but as family bond[20]. But let logic enter stage right. The Professor, I deem, has not considered that man knows of no covenant between God and God. This puts a damper on the notion of calling the Trinity “Father, Son and Mother.” This is just one page from the saga of integrating emotion with intellect.
d| Disclaimer #1. Divine Family. Yes, the Trinity is “Family”[21]. Yet what are we to make of God’s “very strange” decision to so conspicuously require[22] Mary the Woman to re-familiarize[23] Himself with alienated humans by physically wedding Her thus physically begetting[24] Jesus. As to Mary, I don’t think even the angels have Her figured out, but for all that She seems to be doing quite well in heaven by all reports. Some even say her Queenship, whose foreknowledge tipped the scales of Lucifer’s rebellion. But I hardly need tell you that having one of us as heaven’s queen can only be good for us mortal men doomed to die. This Incarnation, which let me assure you is the Mystery of Mysteries, is the center of Christianity, Catholicism, orthodoxy and the Only Faith! So this is hyperepic, much broader than the common sense point that Jesus cannot have “two mommies.” If the reality we are dealing with transcends our words that is because it is love. You and I may have been conditioned to fear all that is not clear and distinct, but this fear, if you ever take a moment gaze upon our streets, is exactly what is tearing man limb from limb. So do not take the bait.
e| The Trinity is indeed a “Community” and a “Family”—above and beyond our shallow physical experiences of these. Still God is He[25], El (אל), Author, Protagonist, YHWH (יהוה), “I Am who I Am”[26], so male it’s unbelievable. Of the two sexes only male subsists independent of any other being even as it longs for a creature on which to bestow his love, woman. This is how the New Testament is hidden in the Old. I say this aware both of recent Church patriarchs declining to define the Holy Spirit’s gender and of a thousand Masonic[27] elements that swarm like so many flies around the Second Vatican Council[28] blocking out any light this may or may not emit.
f| So to see God as being of the “weaker sex” is to blaspheme, to mistake God for a subject of God’s. God is He, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. No other position is any more tenable than it is tasteful.
g| Disclaimer #2. Earthy family[29]. As earthly paradigms go the family[30] is indeed not the worst thing to obsess over. The family is the real society. The family is the domestic Church. Church and family show one another what they ought to be. The man imitates Jesus[31]. Only thus is the lover truly a lover[32] and the revered father plausibly father. The Faith shows fatherhood its striking holiness. The woman imitates Mary[33]. Only thus is the beloved truly loved and the exalted mother plausibly mother. The family is sacred as a reflection[34] of God, of the Trinity, of the Holy Family. Saint Joseph is patron of fathers, of the family and of the Universal (Catholic) Church.
h| We have all been told[35] that the Holy Spirit is really the love between the Father and the Son, a love that creates a Tertiary Person. What seems to render such embellishment redundant is knowing that God is Love. I should be one to stick to the Creed[36] of Saint Athanasius. The Nicæne Creed even tells us the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son,” and yet a mother could hardly be said to proceed from her husband and child(ren).
i| How can I do justice to this theme? Though Trinitarian theology is fraught with mystery we can say the Holy Trinity is not Papa, Mama and Baby Bear. We can proclaim that God is not a Yin-Yang as Scott Hahn’s words quite suggest[37]. God is no androgynous Zen. God is no “equilibrium” or “happy medium[38].” Unless you want to foolishly test the strength of your sanity I would have to say do not be lectured about Christianity’s richness by men who could not speak to Hinduism’s poorness.
j| God is the Center of the Universe, the Star, the King, the Source, the Personal Lover of your soul and mine by means of the Church. So God cannot be the balance of Protagonist and Recipient, Active and Passive, Creator and Creature, He and She, Good and Evil any more than Catholicism is simply the Occult. How do the two differ? Catholicism to the sound mind makes universal sense right away, and when one is received into it it falls together[39] and clicks into place, becoming over time more thoroughly personal, human, incarnational as one delves deeper into its rightness, into how uncannily it integrates nature and supernature by placing supernature first. The Occult, on the other hand, the sound mind instinctively rejects for it is “ooky” (a term by which I denote élitist, cultish, cliquish, opaque, cryptic, ugly, creepy, and esoteric all in one), reliant on darkness[40] and tightly-knit enclaves, and over time it becomes more thoroughly mechanical, inhuman, fragmented. And what does history show us? Kabala Jews have always mixed in with the larger Jewish population, and Gnostic Christians have always mixed in with the larger Christian population. This is a literal example of the parabolic “darnel growing with wheat”[41]. For the Occultist God can be whatever his whim may concoct from mixing and matching obscure traditions and literalizing[42] words stolen forth from high mysticism because for such Unhappy men God always evolving anyways: the meologian thinks nothing of conforming Church patrimony to suit his legacy (especially as without such expert misquoting he will soon be dressed down as the compulsive liar he is) because he has made his heart too crusty for it to be of any spiritual benefit to him. These apparently unrelated dilemmas are all reducible to purpose. All esotericists have an appeal to reason—a cold, dead, alien sort of reason—but conspicuously never to purpose, to common sense or to the God Who Is Love. Jesus told the woman[43] at the well, “God is Spirit”[44]. Any linguist of note will quickly point out that, while spirit may be variously neuter or feminine, that doesn’t mean that the word spirit means neuter or feminine[45]. Spirit does not mean timid, nebulous or even passive[46] but the opposite. Spirit is the realest thing there is! Spirit is rock-solid. Spirit definite, sharp and cutting to the extreme. The way of the Gnostics leads to death. In this age of cults and psychoanalysis many of the wanna-be élites are hog-wild for matriarchy, sexual license and “finding my feminine side” (a thoroughly esoteric sentiment).
k| Our Faith is build around this: the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary; Mary humbled herself before the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit embraced Mary in a way that marital relations do not even approach. This means the marriage bed is just a glimpse at this Divine Breath That Is Fire! What the Holy Spirit and Mary share eternally can only be fully known in the Apocalypse[47] as we return once again to the Divine, the Universal, the Catholic Life. This is too intimate and holy for us to understand now. Meanwhile suffice it to say that this was how our Precious Savior came into the world. The Holy Spirit is in no way, shape or form feminine but in every way, shape and form masculine. This is not some meologian’s Catholicism. You can keep that bunk. This is you and my Catholicism.
l| - Israel[48] is Beloved of God the Father[49], Who is Lover.
- The Church[50] is Beloved of God the Son[51], Who is Lover.
- Mary is Beloved of God the Holy Spirit Who is Lover.
- The Church[50] is Beloved of God the Son[51], Who is Lover.
- Mary is Beloved of God the Holy Spirit Who is Lover.
m| God indeed is Love. This means all you can (in the pure, good and rightly ordered sense) imagine it to mean and way more! From this Love all light and life and love flow. Love is the Law, the Prophets, the Gospel and the Catechism. Love passionately, intensely and with your whole being…then love more! Love God and love neighbor! “Love and be loved”[52]. “Love and do as you will”[53]. Everything eventually telescopes into love so you may as well live like it does. Only love remains. Do you abide in love…or in self? There’s a pretest for the final exam.
n| In closing, dearly beloved, God is either All or Nothing to you. Salvation is romance or it is nothing, and where there is romance there is jealousy. Enlightenment, curiosity and the Occult are dæmoncraft engineered to kill the romance. My advice would be to choose your theologians savvily or not at all. Discern for eternal resonance not trendiness. Any meologian who can do a one-eighty on a dime is not worth the ink he uses and should perhaps enter politics where he can’t do as much lasting harm. The world of theology doesn’t need more pathology at present: it’s full up. And you might ask yourself this: Why is it trendy academics with their minds in the gutter can never grasp this but regular folks have no problem?
o| For an end to all personality cults, for true spiritual freedom as Sons of God. Make this our earnest prayer. Rank and file Catholics, if you aren’t all totally amped, you don’t know what it is we defend or what we face.
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A.M.D.G.
[1] As you read this bear in mind: I actually intended it to be colloquial and not academic since I deem academia’s tendency toward apathy and smugness to be the root of the problem. (I think I have always thought this way but hidden it for the sake of good manners.) I think, upon reflection, that I’d rather make a positive difference than get an honorary degree. But I will try to spruce up the image; I intend on reading it on YouTube with simple imagery and music. That's always been more my bag. As has been suggested I might have started with what rings sound about Hahn’s theology, or at any rate his anthropology, but I mention it and we’re rolling. But note that I do not intend on speaking to the people but merely lending my voice to common sense against tone-deaf academic bullying.
[2] I use the terms “Catholic (Church)” and “Catholicism” in place of the Henry-VIII-coined “Roman Catholic (Church)” and “Roman Catholicism” (to be equated with “Anglican Catholic [Church]” and “Anglican Catholicism”) because Roman (or Latin) refers not to a particular communion but a particular Rite within the one, holy, catholic (universal) and apostolic Church in communion with the Pope who sits in the Chair of Peter which sits in Rome.
[3] I do not call him “doctor” because that means “teacher.” For whose own good I dedicate this article. I am giving Hahn the benefit of the doubt, assuming his mistake is honest, that he is in no way one of the academics (I say “academics” rather than “intellectuals,” lest you think it’s just “liberals”: those who listen to “liberals,” to confess a character flaw, I would have a harder time pitying since they really seem so earnestly barreling toward slavery) practiced in deceit who religiously sugar-coat poison and booby-trap the spiritual truth. Look, Scott Hahn and Christopher West are too high on themselves, and their audience have no idea what the Faith is. Their message fills an emotional void, but we need to realize orthodoxy is romance, and the Church is family, see how tradition expresses this (if we'd stop ignoring it) and how to express it meaningfully and not heretically. Regarding West: I see no reason to refer this lunacy to Rome. Reason could help us see that, yes, the entire Faith is based on conjugal love, heaven itself being a wedding feast where Jesus weds the Church. For my money both sides are being heroically blind—and only publishing their personal issues—and not discussing it. Don’t look to the Pope to police this bunk. Grow up. What you need to do (sooner or later) is stop worshiping men and degrees. Simplify your faith and build on solid ground for a change. Most of this West stuff should be qualified, but you are screwing the laity out of something (potentially) highly edifying when you turn this into an unhelpful political game.
[4] On the “Unam Sanctam Catholicam” Blog Hahn both categorically disowns and passionately defends this view of the Holy Spirit as feminine or androgynous in nature (in essence saying, I don’t believe this, but if I did here are all the citations to support such an esoteric doctrine which I’ve spent the better part of my nights researching and compiling (evidence which cannot be as compelling as I wish you to believe since I started out by disclaiming this position): http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/2009/09/scott-hahns-maternal-spirit-compared-to.html, to which the layman could pithily reply, What is it you’re trying so hard both to say and not to say? To add insult to injury Hahn cites a feminist who doesn’t want the Holy Spirit to be feminine. I hardly know where to go with that cheap-shot. Suffice to say, that’s just the sort of idiots he’s told himself you and I are.
[5] Good news for those rare Catholics who didn’t fall prey to the New Clericalism (Laicism?) and don’t hold him as any god or guru.
[6] In his exaggerated/distorted “God as Family” fixation. I won’t go into soul in the present paper but it’s good to bear in mind that, quite apart from the case I here state, generally spirit is understood as masculine, while soul is understood as feminine. There are solid reasons for this based on the connotations of masculine (completeness) and feminine (lacking). (This is not a chauvinistic but rather a common sense objective statement. This does not mean that man may not be said to belong to woman [or God to man] just as woman belongs to man [and man to God].) The soul is feminine in relation to God because God completes her. This is the true nature of salvation and sanctification: it is conjugal love. Our hearts’ destiny is submission to God in the collectively feminine Church, the Body of Christ not in the sense that the Eucharist is Christ’s body (and his whole being both human and divine) but in the sense that the Church is his bride. There is no completion/incompletion among the Persons of the Trinity because they are eternally One Being never having lacked, never having had to seek among themselves. God just is God. No paradox there, no romance as we mostly understand the term. I also point out that gender and relationship are mutually defining and refining. That is why I consider it heresy (which means a truth exaggerated to crowd out other truths) to say the Holy Spirit is essentially or unqualifiedly feminine. Don’t get me wrong: I have experience with windbag theologians, and we get along alright.
[7] Or two, depending who’s counting.
[8] Veni Creator Spiritus!
[9] Ostensibly a reflection of the simplicity of the concepts they describe!
[10] Note well that were this the case “spiritual warfare” would be meaningless hype, a non-issue, and we should be obliged to concede that the dizzyingly unreasoned movements spawned by Darwin and Jung would be just and good because we would have no God but a Goddess.
[11] And perhaps more importantly well-rounded.
[12] A longing on whose emotional roots in Hahn we won’t here speculate.
[13] True theology being the exclusive property of the poor in spirit!
[14] As the reader may suspect, that’s humility rightly understood, not to be confused with neurosis, etc.
[15] I also object to the category “Christology” (“Christian theology?”) since all true theology is Christocentric.
[16] Self-deception is rather fascinating. Contrary to this childlike thinking Jesus and common sense in one accord beg of us, there is solipsism, that bastard child of narcissism (which I guess is what I mean about “spiritual autism”), in which anything I can construct rationally becomes my truth. For instance, taking off of a theme in G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy I can believe everyone else is a reptilian drone conspiring against me, the only surviving human, and have it only be reinforced whenever anyone tries to reassure me, since that’s exactly what they’d do were they conspiring. Or I can believe that everyone else is jealous of me and have it be reinforced whenever anyone disdainfully balks at the idea because that’s exactly what they’d do were they jealous. Or I can believe everyone else is stupider than me and have it be reinforced whenever anyone disagrees with me because that’s exactly what they’d do were they stupider to try and hide their stupidity. Or you could tell yourself that I somehow enjoy laying Hahn’s crackpot theories out flat and only have that reinforced whenever I say “I don’t enjoy it; this is for his own good” because that’s exactly what your father said when he administered discipline. Wait…that might be a more difficult delusion to construct.
[17] Matt. 6:23 (The Jerusalem Bible).
[18] This, notably, is why seasoned Catholics, without being anti-intellectual necessarily, harbor a healthy suspicion of professional theologians. Yet nowadays I find myself trying to convert Catholics back to their own common sense, saying words to the effect of, “Just because you thought you smelled a rat doesn’t mean there isn’t one.” No wonder Hahn (and Catholics in general) has such trouble knowing where to place Mary, what the heck Her role in Salvation was! You can construct Salvation History without taking the Mary’s role fully into account[18] but it will always be grotesque because you’ll be eternally searching for a Cosmic Mother, a role only Mary can fill without any need for hair-brained distortions. I sincerely wish these oppressively obtuse theologians could learn from their mistakes, but it seems that’s just a part of my larger—and also among my fellow-Catholics rarer—wish that His kingdom may really come and also not tarry. “Maranatha!” “Come quickly!” Yet, sure, I’m the idealist of the crowd. Such sophistry and bunk covering festering wounds!
[19] Which it absolutely must be.
[20] Which makes it all the more a contract, but anyhow.
[21] I place “Family” in quotes not because I don’t really mean it but because I mean more than what we mean by “family.” I should probably, for the same reason, place quotes around “He” when I say “God is He.”
[22] Analogously to how man deigns to need woman even though she is objectively weaker (something the Holy Spirit is not) and physically lesser (a word that need only mean smaller). The hair-brained superstition that runs away from that women are different from men and that all deviant sexual behavior is deviant sexual behavior underpins all secularist and Pagan appeal as opposed to Catholicism. As such it is high time Catholics stopped avoiding common sense and natural law like they were the plague. If it is time for a purging, delaying it won’t help anyone.
[23] To spiritually beget!
[24] Which He does eternally but also did within time and space at the moment of the Annunciation/Incarnation (literally, Embodiment). I‑n‑c‑a‑r‑n‑a‑t‑i‑o‑n, get it? It means what it says, which also means we don’t need to B.S. (or for that matter D.D.) our way into knowing (personally) God (Persons)! It’s simple, guys. And if I can get it you freaking can! I don’t want a degree or a cult following. I want for you to get this life-transforming truth! It’s far too wonderful to hog for myself. Any theologian who actually knows his stuff knows this to be the case and will be driven to share the intimacy, the romance of it all. If he doesn’t, you can pray for his soul. No true theologian can possibly abide boring people with their nauseating circumlocutions. Theologians who don’t get to the point are like those bad commercials you know are just there to mislead you. You’re a child of God. It’s okay to be finicky. God knows we’re all ape sh¡t fuddy-duddy enough about all the ostensibly pointless things in life, why the he!! not theology? We’re so deathly afraid to be ourselves in this country, to be real. There’s nothing at all to be afraid of: honesty is part of the cure! Is it any wonder, though, why decent theology creeps us out so, why we can’t stomach solid food? Why “redemptive suffering” has become a phrase we repeat over and over and over in hopes of unlocking its “hidden meaning.” There is no hidden meaning! Redemptive suffering is suffering! Let’s face it! Why we torture the soul so the body can be all nice an’ comfy is more than I can fathom, though it would explain the near-manic apathy. Our problem is, we’re a band of spiritual crack addicts—yes, I said it—bad theology may be likened to drug commerce!
[25] El, if you’ll pardon the Hebrew-Spanish pun.
[26] Exodus 3:14b (The Jerusalem Bible).
[27] When I mention Masons (and Khazarian Zionist Judeans [a.k.a. Jews]), please note, I am not “blaming” them for all that’s wrong in civilization. What I am trying to do is to aid you, the reader, in connecting the dots and begin to understand conceptually how seemingly “spontaneous” ideas often go way back. Nothing new under the sun. Enough said. This is light-years away from being some infantile blame-game. Masonry is remnant Egyptology bent on making darkness mainstream and building an Occult empire. The Masons are known Occultists and Satanists who helped Protestantism get its start and coined the term “New Age.” You cannot be a Catholic and a member or sympathizer of Masonry.
[28] Often flippantly abbreviated “Vatican II.” Masonry and the New Age are, for all intents and purposes, what those poor fools mean who tyrannically lecture the orthodox on the “spirit of Vatican II,” a twice-cavalier turn of phrase if you will.
[29] Or, to you and me, just family.
[30] Speaking for normal circumstances here.
[31] Priestly, prophetic and kingly.
[32] I told you it was mushy!
[33] I.e. lowly servanthood coupled with endless exaltation and queenship. Don’t you just viscerally want to praise your mother but never feel you could do it adequately?
[34] Usually a dim one.
[35] Too often for my liking.
[37] Doubtless inadvertently.
[38] Pun intended.
[39] We term this uncanny integration with the divine “grace.”
[40] “ ‘But this is your hour; this is the reign of darkness’ ” (Luke 22:53 [The Jerusalem Bible]).
[41] Cf. Matt. 13:24 ff. (darnel a.k.a. tares, chaff [weeds]).
[42] Or ought I to have said materializing?
[43] Since only women seemed to get Him. You know the men were all, “Duh, what's He talking about?” “Duh, I don't know. Hey, I've got a brilliant idea: let's try settling who’ll be top dog.” “Duh, good idea. Dibs!” Jesus entrusted the Church to men not because they have any sense or special gifts whatsoever—the Church is certainly not called to prize physical strength—but merely because they resemble God.
[44] John 4:24a (The Jerusalem Bible).
[45] I know this because I speak fluent Spanish. There are certain Spanish nouns (like persona) that function as feminine but can just as easily refer to a man as to a woman.
[46] Apologies to all the weak (Weakland?) priests out there.
[47] Rendered in Latin revelation, meaning unveiling.
[48] The Tribe of Jacob.
[49] YHWH.
[50] Which is as visibly united as Israel or an abomination.
[51] Yehoshua/Jeshua.
[52] Saint Francis of Assisi.
[53] Saint Augustine of Hippo.
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