What Would a Perfect Creator Do?

 

Officiating at a sacred ceremony

A few years ago, I had the privilege to be a Virginia-state-sanctioned officiant at the civil wedding of two people who loved each other very much. They were high school classmates fifty years before I pronounced them married. Through my wife’s experience at the same school at the same time, I had known both classmates for many years. But I never imagined the role I would play in their lives beyond the ivy-covered walls of their school.

After their graduation in the late ’60s, each went their separate ways — one rose through the officer ranks of the U.S. Army, the other chose a civilian life. The arcs of their lives soared across many decades, neither one knowing that both were riding arcs of inevitability, arcs that would eventually converge, leading them back to a high school reunion where they would meet again, fall in love, and, with my stumbling attempt at a blessing of their union, become later-in-life partners. A married couple. Happy. Fulfilled. Ready to share together whatever the world would throw at them. I reveled in their love for each other, and I was humbled by their request to join them together.

Under Catholic doctrine, I was party to an illicit ceremony

This past Monday, the Vatican, speaking for God, announced that what I had done three years ago, in a civil ceremony, would not be “licit” in God’s plan had the couple I married been Catholics.

Because what I had done — bonding in matrimony two wonderful, loving, caring, human beings of the same sex — ran counter to the Vatican’s view that same-sex marriages are not part of God’s plan for families and raising children. As reported in a Monday NPR story, “The church says its answer regarding same-sex couples “declares illicit any form of blessing that tends to acknowledge their unions as such.” To quote Steve Martin, “Well, excuuuuuuse me.”

Some questions (Will take Godsplained answers only):

And so, I would like to take a moment to ask these questions, given the assumption that God or the Creator is perfect and therefore infallible:

1. Why would a perfect god or creator imbue its creations with free will — including the free will to love — only to set one category of them up for social ridicule, derision, and inhumane sanctions simply because their free will led them to love another human being of the same sex?
2. Is free will conditional depending on who you love?
3. Is the creator’s perfect love for its creations same-sex-exclusionary by some divine program that defies human logic and emotion? [NB, I could repurpose this same argument with respect to all biases against those who are different in race, age, ability, creed, origin story, etc.]
4. Why would a creator or god, who managed to bring forth an entire universe that is so incredibly balanced in its physical properties that even the tiniest imbalance in the initial conditions of creation would have resulted in our not being here at all, be concerned about same-sex marriage?
5. Why would such a creator decide that certain humans — smaller than grains of sand in the limitless Universe — should be subject to an exception to perfect planning?
6. And what would cause such a god or creator to personally contact just a select few humans to let them in on this exception and then let them pass the word around? This sounds like the ultimate game of telephone.
7. Why would a creator of an entire universe impose such an incongruous injustice on this speck of blue in the vastness of space?
8. How arrogant can any fallible human be to believe that they know the creator’s plan down to the nth degree?

No satisfactory answers

Only more unanswerable questions

The two women I had the honor to marry love each other’s spirits and characters in ways some heterosexual couples will never achieve. And two men I know are the best fathers their adopted little girl will ever have. Adoptions by same sex couples may be the saving grace for a baby or child at risk, a child for whom a stable, loving home represents a portal to a new and better life.

Wouldn’t the marriage of those adopting couples be viewed as loving, stabilizing, and valuable? And, if meeting those criteria, wouldn’t such a marriage and adoption be blessed by a loving god through that god’s church? The Vatican’s own statement includes the phrase, “The presence in such relationships of positive elements which are in themselves valued and appreciated….” And yet those are not sufficient qualities to merit the blessing of marriage?

I would not want to second-guess the Creator’s program

My default mode of thinking is humility. I don’t know what a “perfect plan” looks like; I’m only human. It seems improbable to me — only my opinion here — that a god or creator capable of pulling off a perfect plan can be second-guessed or interpreted perfectly by the fallible human beings they created. Knowing that I don’t know so many things…that my capacity to fully grasp the whos and whys and wherefores of the universe’s exquisite operating system, suggests to me that I am in no position to judge the operations of the human heart…the human mind…the human need to love and be loved, unconditionally.

It just seems to me that when any religion attempts to mansplain God’s unknowable plan in a way that constrains, demoralizes, and demeans the richness of unconditional love — untethered to gender — that that religion has failed in its own plan to be an example of unconditional love.

Abused by Trump? Sorry, No Tears for You

Over the past four years, we have watched more than just a presidency implode; we have watched an almost endless stream of men and women bend over, exposing their moral and ethical backsides to Trump, and take his abuse over and over and over, with nary an expression of discomfort at the assault on their humanity (or whatever shreds of it remain).

I remain totally baffled by the eagerness with which those men and women—many of them once-respected members of university faculty, corporate leaders, long-time public servants—refuse to walk away from such untenable positions having, in my opinion, made the terrible error to take their appointed shovels with the sole duty of mucking out the Trumpian stables.

What we witnessed in four years is unfathomable degrees of willing desire to take on such abuse as would, in any domestic situation, ring alarm bells triggered by inhumane emotional destruction and torment. I truly believe that. And yet, time after time, Tweet after Tweet, Trump assaults his appointees, his political party faithful, his judges, his country and our Constitution with the vilest of lies, the darkest of innuendoes, the wickedest of gaslight, and the heaviest of greasy conspiratorial chains. And he keeps on with his Torquemada reign of terror despite (or perhaps because of) the dwindling time left to him to extract the last ounce of vengeance against his known and unknown enemies.

And yet…and yet…no hand of reason or justice has yet to reach out to him and stay his irrational, destructive, insane behavior. Not one hand among all those who have had the power to do so. Not one. Instead, those who might have had any chance of turning Trump’s headlong rush toward national impalement on spears of lies, deceit, and calumny have done nothing. No…they have done worse than nothing: they have taking up his fiery rakes of racist rhetoric and political division and spread his Augean manure over every social norm they could find.

What I don’t get in all of this is how…is why…any man or woman who once stood outside the system in their otherwise normal roles as citizens dealing with all the day-to--day routines that occupy most of us would, for a moment, allow themselves to become slavering, servile, sycophants to a clearly deranged, totally unhinged man like Trump?

Is holding on to a Senate seat that important? No. Is a White House title more impressive than any other form of meaningful work? No. Is Washington DC the be-all-end-all? No. It’s just a placeholder, a lovely town when you’re not beholden to any one ideal or any one abuser.

So what if Trump throws a tantrum, or threatens, or blackmails? So what? Take a walk and let the chips fall where they may in your life.

Speaking only for myself (though I hope many of my friends and colleagues are with me on this), if any employer, no matter how elevated in title, verbally abused me, socially embarrassed me, or otherwise hung me out to dry in full public view, I would be out of that building as soon as I could collect my thoughts and take my family photos off my desk. I also like to think I never would have taken a job for such a boss in the first place.

I know that last paragraph to be true because I left government service for just such a reason—under similar circumstances. In all my 35 years as a federal employee—on the Hill and in the Executive Branch—I had only three employers who either openly mistreated their staff or privately sought to undermine certain employees.

One was a U.S Representative from Florida whose insensitivity to the personal crises of his staff made my choice to leave a very easy and sensible one.

The second was a Cabinet secretary whose personal desire to embarrass me in public was so effective I had to be hospitalized.

The third was a special assistant to a Cabinet secretary who, by dint of his need to prove his superior position, not only caused me substantial legal debts in order to fend off his attacks, but, in the end, with a single insult spread across the office email, caused me to stop what I was doing and type out my resignation from that Department and the federal government. I never looked back, and never felt I’d made the wrong decision.

Abuse is abuse is abuse. And if you stand for it once, you will stand for it over and over and over. Until your moral and ethical bones are picked clean by your tormentors. And the skeletal remains that were once you will find it most difficult to re-flesh yourself in any sort of skin of pride or dignity.

So it will be for those below ground creatures who chose to stick with Trump until the bitter end. From Mitch McConnell to Lindsey Graham to Kayleigh McEnany to the 126 Members of Congress who chose a despot over democracy, they will eventually discover that their choices to endure abuse and wreak abuse upon others will consign them to the boneyard of lost souls. Many were the times they were shown the exit signs but chose to stay; many were the times they went home scalded by their dear leader, but rose again the next morning, ready to put their hands in the boiling pot once more; many were the times they faced their demons and decided to live with them…consort with them…rather than cast them out.

The push broom of history will soon sweep away their names and the motes of dust that remain will settle underfoot of the ceaseless and unblinking parade of time.