c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)
UNDATED _ Suppose that, instead of Barbara Walters in front of 70 million, Monica had met Jesus by the well with nobody looking?
What would she have said? And what would he have said in return?
Monica, of course, would claim that she was miscast. She apparently thinks that she is one of the New Testament virgins instead of the woman taken in adultery. She did turn 18 _ note that I do not say”grew up”_ in Beverly Hills so her view of the Bible is that of Hollywood where Conversion means call Re-Write or get a Make-Over.
Monica is presently starring in the movie playing at every Multiplex. We’re all in the crowd scenes. It’s yet another sequel to”Frankenstein,”in which the hapless creature, wearing life-threatening layers of make-up, wanders loose, destroying her makers.
Monica is, therefore, more our Marilyn than our Magdalen, the daughter and prisoner of”Spin.”For her, life resembles a one car automobile accident more than a moral narrative. She is the prototype child of the Pro-Choice Age in which what you choose is irrelevant because making a choice is the value above all other values.
Monica is a revelation in her own life of the pervasive spiritual numbness that characterizes a Pro-Choice culture. What she chooses _ to seduce a president, get her nails done, have an abortion, lie as easily as tell the truth _ are equally morally vacuous. The culture ignores these concrete choices because it invests all morality in making the choice, irrespective of its nature or its effects. That leads to such pseudo-moral statements as Monica’s proud assertion that she is”in charge of her own sexuality.” What that gets you is Monica multiplied in thousands of sad stories all around us. She is the poster child for the countless young women alone behind lighted windows across the land, girls with weight and complexion problems, bedeviled by uncertainty, looking for clues in Cosmo for a happier existence. Their honest longings for the fullness of love are first corrupted, then manipulated by the Advertising/ Public Relations Complex that invented the phrase”Pro-Choice”to obscure permanently the moral tension in the underlying transaction.
Their touching stories of disappointment and difficulty of life in the morally free Pro-Choice zone are the heart of the recent nationwide study of the frustrations and unhappiness that are associated with sex separated from love. These women are more Rachel than Monica, weeping with nobody to hear them, that most painful of side-effects of their success at getting lovers and their failure at finding love.”Tut, tut, child,”says the duchess in”Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,”everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.”That is the problem bouquet Monica has tossed to us as she steps through the Looking Glass into the next stage of notoriety. That, of course, is the problem.
Monica is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the Gatsbys,”careless,”so morally unformed that she leaves neither foot nor finger prints behind her. That is why it is already hard to remember anything she said.
Suppose Monica had encountered Jesus, by a well, perhaps, instead of Barbara Walters in a hotel suite before television cameras. How would she have responded to an adult who remained an adult in her presence instead of becoming a child along with her?
Would she have blurted out her woes to perhaps the first man she couldn’t manipulate in her whole life? And what would Jesus have done as he looked past the chaotic incidents, the details of her hysterical passage through life, into her heart, as he did with the woman at the well in the Gospel of John?
Jesus would gaze with gentle understanding at this child-woman and perhaps moisten his fingers and gently touch her eyes, as he did with the blind, so she could open them and see deeper truths than she has yet known about herself and the world around her. He would shield her from rather than expose her to the gathering crowd, murmuring and curious about their conversation.
And before he saw her off, Jesus would tell her that she is not really a sinner, that she is only a celebrity and, although there are no commandments against that, it isn’t a state of grace either. You are not yet grown up enough to commit sin, nor yet adult enough to author virtue.
There is time for growth, he would say, as he did so often, speaking of patient waiting for harvests, hauling in the fisherman’s breaking net, and that people could come to his Kingdom at the last minute and receive the same reward as those who had worked through the heat of the day.
The kingdom is within you, not on a book tour. And it is the truth, not public relations, that makes you free.
DEA END KENNEDY
