Sex, Sacrament, and Civil Society

            In a world so flooded with sexual images and energies that it has reached a Brave New Level of boredom, it seems only the eccentricities retain any possibility to excite.  Hence our current seeming fascination with such matters as “same-sex marriage.”  In the last few years, some have insisted that we should ban same-sex marriage by legislative fiat.  Most recently, this country’s highest court has taken the opposite approach by banning any and all such bans by its own judicial fiat

            But, as usual, they are all wrong.  Or at least, that is not the whole story.

            That cannot be the whole story because to presume that it is such is to hold to the fallacious belief that marriage is a mere human creation of positive law: the Supreme Court decision treated the issuing of marriage licenses as if it were merely another service, to be provided to all equally.  It was also ruled that all states must recognize such marriages equally, as they would recognize any contract entered into in another state.

            The decision was, from one perspective, quite logical.  But to see marriage as merely a contact or service is to recognize only its most narrow dimensions.  In its broader theological dimensions, marriage is not a contact, but a covenant, and even a sacrament.  These are facts, and they must be emphasized, lest the reductionist tendencies of a society overly enamored of purely legal solutions lull us into too flat a view of civil society itself, and of what was once referred to with no hint of irony as “holy matrimony.”

            Marriage is not a mere service, to be offered to all indiscriminately; it is not a creation of law or government, to be defined or redefined as each generation sees fit.  Ultimately, marriage is a natural thing, and the laws we make concerning it only reflect the nature of the thing and put the force of government behind its enablement and preservation—much as a law forbidding murder only reflects the naturally-intuited reality that killing another human being is wrong (although certain mitigating circumstances might make it justified).  The institution of marriage, the crime of murder, and—to add a third, even clearer example—the law of gravity: three examples of natural law, where our written laws about them are more descriptive than prescriptive.  The first is as old as Eve, the second as old as Adam and the image of God he bore, and the last is as old as the universe.  Some things cannot be changed.

            Legally, one can create a phenomenon called “same-sex marriage” and require that it be recognized as a valid contact, but such actions would not grant that relationship the fuller dimensions of natural and sacramental marriage.  You can grant a tree a degree in mathematics, but it still won’t be able to do sums.  You can call a “ménage a deux” of two men a “marriage” if you wish, but it still won’t be able to produce children, or the “one flesh” union of which they are the common natural result.  Naturally and sacramentally speaking, a marriage that produces no children is still a marriage, but a coupling which cannot do so even in principle is not.

            Theologically speaking, therefore, it is pointless to speak of banning or requiring same-sex marriage, as it is pointless to speak of banning antigravity rocks that fall upward.   In both cases, you cannot ban the thing because it does not exist (although I could be wrong about the rocks: there are more things in Heaven and on Earth…). 

            So here is where we must make a distinction.  Along with unification (realizing that two apparently different things share a common nature or origin), making distinctions is one of our most powerful tools for intellectual progress.  The ancients, for example, understood the concept of weight to be the tendency of heavier objects to fall towards the center (read them.  They are quite clear on this).  What they did not understand was that this meant “the local center of gravitational attraction” (in our case, Earth) and not “the center of the Universe.”  They were unaware that these were two separate things.  Once they distinguished between the two (and it was probably difficult to do this before Newton’s work on universal gravitation), they were able to make much more sense of the universe Copernicus had shown them: one where Earth was the center of local gravitational attraction (i.e. the place dropped stuff falls towards), but not the center of all.

            Perhaps it is time for us likewise to make some distinctions.  The Supreme Court’s decision was founded at least partly on an act of unification: if all are equal, then one cannot grant a contract to couple A and deny it to couple B.  This is all well and good, so long as it extends only to the logic of contracts.  However, we must distinguish such purely legal “marriages” from marriage as a natural and even a sacramental thing. How, I wonder, would—or should—such legal “marriages” differ from the previous idea of “civil unions”?  I do not know, as I suspect many others do not (do the courts?).  There is much to discuss here, and it is far too important to be short-circuited by rash legal action or the foolish assumption that we are all already on the same page; here civil society has a crucial role to play, I suspect, if we have the courage for it.

             Freedom of religion is an American right than which none can be more fundamental—unless it be the right to life.  The recent Supreme Court ruling must not be used to force religious persons or organizations to violate their consciences, canons, or creeds.  Secular democracy is a balancing act, and rarely is that act more difficult than when we are trying to manage the relationship between church and state.

            So here we are again, at the place where church and state, law and liturgy, meet.  For some time, the question of church-state relations has repeatedly been answered by the Church’s retreat from one area of life after another, as the state expands into the vacuums thus created.  The same thing has happened with other aspects of civil society, even the family itself.  Jefferson was right: governments tend to grow larger, and rarely shrink.  Civil society has given up much space to government, but if government demands that the Church yield marriage up to government monopoly, it will have demanded what the Church can never yield. 

            And yet, such demands are not necessary, if we can only learn to make some important distinctions.  We must distinguish among the different dimensions of what we call “marriage”: legal, natural, sacramental.  Bearing those in mind, we can continue the discussing of such things as “same-sex marriages” and “civil unions,” and hopefully, we can do so in a civil manner and at a civil level.  Let us hope so.  A healthy democracy requires skillful shaping, like a sculpture; but judges wield gavels, and when hammers get involved, sculptures tend to go to pieces.

On the New Doctor: You Should Have Seen This Coming

If you didn’t see this coming, you should  have: it has been announced that the next person to play the Doctor in the BBC series Doctor Who will be a woman.  As the show’s makers have insisted, the cries of outrage probably have been greatly exaggerated, since narrow-mindedness is not a thing whovians are known for.  More importantly, this turn of events should not have surprised fans of the show at all.  Indeed, the show seems to have been preparing us for this eventuality for quite some time.

            It all begins, oddly enough, not with a chair (that was Juno), but with Matt Smith’s hair.  When (in “The End of Time”) David Tennant regenerates into Matt Smith, the Doctor immediately begins inspecting his new body.  When he gets to his hair, this is his reaction:

      “Hair.  [feels his hair, which is slightly long]  I’m a girl!  No!  No!  [feels his Adam’s

      apple] I’m not a girl.  No.  [looks at his hair] And still not ginger!”

This very quick bit of dialogue not only looks back to the previous Doctor’s lament in his own first appearance that he was not now, nor had he ever been, ginger; it also seems to suggest that the Doctor considers a regeneration from one sex to the other a real possibility. 

            The later episode “The Doctor’s Wife” picks up this hint and expands on it slightly.  When the Doctor receives a psychic message box with the mark of the Corsair—another Time Lord—on it, he shows it to his companions Amy & Rory:

 "See that snake?  The mark of the Corsair.  Fantastic bloke.  He had that tattoo in every regeneration.  Didn't feel like himself unless he had the tattoo.  Or herself, a couple of times.  Ooh, she was a bad girl!"

 Here the Doctor seems to say that Time Lords can, and sometimes do, regenerate from one sex to the other—more than once, in the Corsair’s case—and that this is not any sort of terribly exceptional thing.

            Then, there is Missy: the Master, regenerated as a woman.  This was the first instance of a regeneration across the sexes being shown, rather than just mentioned in passing.  But the audience took it in stride.  This was so much the case that speculation to the effect that Missy=Mistress=Master began literally as soon as Missy’s first scene had finished airing.  When she finally revealed who she really was, there was really nothing to reveal, and you could almost hear the entire audience say at once (all together now):

Yes, we know who you are.

And she didn’t even have to flash her I.D.

            So, with this theme hinted at in the Matt Smith years, and clearly established in the case of Missy,  no one was surprised—or at least, they should not have been—when Missy, in the Series Nine opener “The Magician’s Apprentice,” said that she has cared about the Doctor ”Since always.  Since the Cloister Wars.  Since the night he stole the moon and the President’s wife.  Since he was a little girl.”  We know that last one was a lie (she said one of the three was), because we see the Doctor as a little boy in the barn on Gallifrey in Series Eight, while the last episode of Series Nine seems to confirm the other two.  Still, it is yet another occurrence of the theme of a Time Lord changing sexes. 

            We see this again at the end of Series Nine, when the General and self-described “commander of the armed forces of Gallifrey” regenerates, after the Doctor shoots him, from a man into a woman.  Her first words upon regeneration are, “Back to normal, am I?  The only time I’ve been a man, that last body.  Dear, Lord, how do you cope with all that ego?”

            Yes, yes, men are egomaniacs.  In women it’s called “vanity.” Let’s move on, shall we?

            Still, we see here that regeneration from one sex to the other seems to be normal for Time Lords, although in each case one sex tends to dominate (female for the General, male for the Doctor and the Master, etc.)

            Finally, there is Clara Oswald.  Born November 23, the same day as Doctor Who (although 23 years later), she bears the last name of the man who had assassinated the American president the day before (“Fate, it seems,” said Morpheus in the Matrix “is not without a sense of irony”).  Before her departure, she had been the only major companion for the Doctor since he lost the Ponds, and she has come closer than any companion other than River Song to being something like his equal.  She was even able to hold off a group of Cybermen by pretending to be (ah, you knew the theme had to be in this paragraph somewhere) a 5-foot-1 female regeneration of the Doctor.

            Indeed, as the show has gone on, she has become so capable, so story-central—in short, so un-companionlike, that at times, the show has seemed dangerously close to being renamed “Clara & the Doctor.” In the end, her words about being the Doctor have proven quite prophetic.  The last we see of her in Series Nine (the farthest this American has been able to watch—nobody says anything!  Spoilers.) She is practically immortal, & flying off with another female immortal in their very own stolen TARDIS.  In a twist, she has even made the Doctor largely forget all about her.

            So to return to my point: if you have been watching Doctor Who recently (and the same patterns almost surely continued into Series Ten) and you are truly surprised by the choice of a woman to play the Doctor’s next regeneration, I say: stop being a pudding brain.  Pay attention.  All the evidence is there: two female companions who evolve into Doctor-like immortal time-travelers themselves, two regenerations of men into women (one of those men the Master himself), and several little humorous hints along the same line (“since he was a little girl”—it may be a lie, but it still tells us something).  All of this has been preparing us for the possibility of a female Doctor.  If it had not happened in this regeneration, it would have happened soon.

            And let us not forget that this change need not change the Doctor any more than the other regenerations.  Regeneration was always a bit of a reset.  Each Doctor has been different, and yet there were underlying qualities that made us believe that all the Doctors were, in a sense, the same man—the same person.  None of these qualities depended on the Doctor being male (did not Madame Vastra say of the Doctor that “you might as well flirt with a mountain”?).  As long as the new Doctor continues this tradition, as long as she convinces us that she is still the same person, as long as they do not insist on reminding us constantly that she is a woman (the way Buffy ruined Willow Rosenberg by never letting us forget that she was a lesbian, and in the end, reduced a nerdy, brilliant, beautiful Jewish ginger to a cipher for radical feminism—there, I said it!); if they can do that, then surely we will all welcome the new Doctor with open arms and hearts.

            And here is how you do it.  To convince us you are the Doctor, convince us that you are the same person who was able to give this speech (from “The Zygon Inversion”):

You just want cruelty to beget cruelty.  You’re not superior to people who were cruel to you.  You’re just a whole bunch of new cruel people.   A whole bunch of new cruel people being cruel to some other people who’ll end up being cruel to you.  The only way anyone can live in peace is if they’re prepared to forgive.  Why don’t you break the cycle?...What is it that you actually want?...when this war is over, when you have a homeland free from humans, what do you think it’s gonna be like?  Do you know?  Have you thought about it?  Have you given it any consideration?  Because you’re very close to getting what you want.  What’s it gonna be like?  Paint me a picture.  Are you gonna live in houses?  Do you want people to go to work?  Will there be holidays?  Oh, will there be music?  Do you think people will be allowed to play violins?  Who’s gonna make the violins?  Well?  Oh, you don’t actually know, do you?  Because like every other tantruming child in history, Bonnie, you don’t actually know what you want.  So let me ask you a question about this brave new world of yours.  When you’ve killed all the bad guys, and when it’s all perfect and just and fair, when you have finally got it exactly the way you want it, What are you gonna do with the people like you?  The troublemakers.  How [are] you gonna protect your glorious revolution from the next one?...Maybe you will win.  But nobody wins for long.  The wheel just keeps turning.  So come on, break the cycle…This is a scale model of war.  Every war ever fought right there in front of you.  Because it’s always the same.  When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who’s going to die!  You don’t know whose children are going to scream and burn.  How many hearts will be broken!  How many lives shattered!  How much blood will spill until everybody does what they were always gonna have to do from the very beginning.  Sit down and talk!...You’re all the same, you screaming kids, you know that?  “Look at me, I’m unforgivable.”  Well, here’s the unforeseeable, I forgive you.  After all you’ve done.  I forgive you…I don’t understand?  Are you kidding?  Me?  Of course I understand.  I mean, you call this a war?  This funny little thing?  This is not a war!  I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know.  I did worse things than you can ever imagine.  When I close my eyes, I hear more screams than anybody could ever be able to count.  And you know what you do with all that pain?  Shall I tell you where you put it?  You hold it tight, till it burns your hand.    And you say this, “No one else will ever have to live like this.  No one else will have to feel this pain.  Not on my watch.”

           

            That is the Doctor.  If Jodie Whittaker can convince us she is the person who could give that speech, then she is the Doctor.

            And we saw her coming, though it took her a while to get here.