Monthly Archives: December 2007

Charles Thomas Chumrau Jr., 1944-2007

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My father-in law, Charles “Chuck” Chumrau, died at 2:00AM today at Sherman Oaks Hospital following a brief illness.

Chuck was a kind, funny, warm-hearted man, and his passing is mourned by his three surviving children, his stepchildren, and his large extended family. He and I spoke last on Christmas day; we argued politics good-naturedly. Two days later, he suffered the heart attack that would eventually take his life. My wife, her brother, and her sister were all at his bedside at the end.

My wife and I have each lost our fathers in the space of eighteen months. Both dear men died much too young, but they died in the certainty that they were deeply loved. That is a comfort in this difficult time. We’ll be busy with funeral arrangements the next few days, so posting will not resume until later in the week.

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My father-in-law…

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… is in hospital, in very grave condition. His name is Charles, and your prayers and good thoughts for him — and for my wife’s family — are very much appreciated.

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A very long post on how to rebuild trust

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I insisted on inflicting my Top Ten posts of 2007 on my readers. Not everyone is so unkind; many bloggers have managed to provide only their single best post of the year for public consideration. Jon Swift has compiled an excellent list, having invited his entire blogroll to send him a link to what each writer considered his or her finest offering from these past twelve months. Warning: it’s a time-suck, as the kids say these days.

A regular reader asks:

I do have a question for you that you may be able to answer. I am wondering if it is possible to reconcile with a person where trust has been broken and be able to rebuild the trust back again. Have you any personal experience in this area that you can shed wisdom on?

I’m not a relationship expert: three divorces by age 35 are proof of that. That doesn’t stop me from offering advice and reflections, and it doesn’t stop people from asking. So with the standard caveat that my opinion is only that, an opinion, here goes.

I’m going to assume my reader is writing about reconciling with a romantic partner. When trust is shattered in a sexual relationship, it’s usually qualitatively different than it is in other friendships or among family members. But I’d like to touch on the loss — and the restoration — of trust in a variety of relationships, because I’ve got a considerable amount of hard-earned experience in this area.

I had my first major mental breakdown in April 1987, shortly before I turned 20. I had my last (God willing) in the summer of 1998, shortly after turning 31. Over that eleven-year period, I was hospitalized more than half a dozen times. I also struggled very publicly with a host of addictions. And I know full well that addicts break the hearts of those who love them, over and over again. My mother, father, brother, and sisters suffered more than anyone. None of my friends, lovers, or wives were part of my life for that entire period; I very successfully chased everyone who wasn’t bound to me by blood out of my life.

My lies were the standard ones: “I’m sober”, I would say — when I wasn’t. “I’m seeing a great therapist” — when I cancelled all my appointments. “The meds are helping” — when they weren’t. Above all, my most consistent lie was “I’m fine.” Anglo-Saxon reticence, and the concomitant dissembling it requires, were part of my family culture. I spent many years on the stage as a child, and my acting skills came in handy when it came time to cover up the pain, the despair, and the appalling acting-out behavior that characterized my life in my late teens and twenties. Continue reading →

Against “end of the year” retrospectives coming too early

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Every morning, after my all-too-brief prayer time, I turn on CNN. This morning, when I saw the coverage of the Benazir Bhutto assassination, I watched for only a few minutes before going online. The American television news agencies have cut back so much on their coverage of world events that they no longer have the power they once did to bring multiple reporters on to a story instantly. I’ll still check in on the television throughout the day, but will stream BBC news on the radio and spend more time online, visiting my “usual sources”.

This is a tragedy, of course, but it’s another reminder as well that news-gathering organizations really ought to refrain from doing their “top stories of the year” in mid-December. When you look back over the past few years (the tsunami, the Hussein execution, this assassination), it’s evident lots of newsworthy events can happen after Christmas and before New Year’s Day.

On the “Yes Means Yes!” project

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Nearly three weeks ago, Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti announced a call for submissions for their new anthology project: Yes Means Yes. The blurb:

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of “Yes Means Yes”.

“Yes Means Yes!” will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.

Even in the midst of the holiday frenzy, the by-now customary brouhaha erupted across the feminist and progressive blogosphere. Busy as I was with family and tree obligations, I didn’t catch up on most of the controversy until yesterday. Theriomorph’s post has some of the most cogent criticisms of the YMY project, and includes links to other bloggers who have taken issue it.

The criticisms are many, but seem to fall into a couple of clear categories:

1. Yes Means Yes! defines “rape culture” too narrowly. It takes the “acquaintance rape” scenario and expands it to include every other aspect of sexual assault. How, the critics wonder, can “empowering female sexual pleasure” do anything about the guy with a knife lurking in the bushes, or about the international trafficking of women? Theriomorph got off the best zinger in this regard: An upper middle class 18-30 year old white woman’s screaming orgasm is not going to end rape.

2. The YMY call for submissions is unnecessarily divisive. To some, promising to “fly in the face of conventional feminist wisdom” sounds like a thinly-disguised effort to stir up the old “anti-sex Second Wave vs. pro-sex Third Wave” argument. Given that in 2007, it’s difficult to label anything as “conventional feminist wisdom” (given the breadth and diversity of the movement), it suggests to some that the editors of YMY are erecting a straw-woman to knock down.

Let me say that I do intend to submit an essay for possible inclusion in the Yes Means Yes! anthology. I intend to re-work and expand my “Not just consent, but enthusiasm” post. I’ll focus on how those of us who work with young people can design and implement workshops and programs that focus on the “enthusiasm” and “joy” model. I’ll be writing most of the piece in February, just before the March 1 deadline for submissions. So I’m posting now as a potential contributor, which no doubt partly colors what I have to say.

That said, I have never met Jessica Valenti. We’ve spoken on the phone and exchanged e-mails, but that’s it. (I look forward to meeting her — and a lot of other good folks — at WAM 2008). But I’m convinced that at least some of the outrage directed at Yes Means Yes! is rooted in a knee-jerk antipathy towards her. Indeed, many of the harsh words about the YMY project are directed towards her and not towards her co-editor, Jaclyn Friedman. The resentment Jessica inspires in one corner of the blogosphere is stunning. And while some of the criticisms of her various projects may be fair, it seems clear that much of what is being said about her current anthology is rooted as much in envy and personal animus as it is in legitimate qualms about her approach.

Jessica has, it seems, ceased to be a person and become a symbol. Her writing at Feministing and in her books have given her a high profile, and through no intent or design of her own, she has become representative of what a great many people dislike about a certain kind of contemporary feminism. In the eyes of some of her most bilious critics, Valenti is the embodiment of superficial, orgasm-obsessed, clueless, vapid, white feminist privilege. The lengthy, painful discussions of Full Frontal Feminism that raged in both May and November mixed legitimate criticisms of the popular — and as my students will attest, deeply important and useful — book with ugly personal invective. And the hangover from those arguments seems to have colored the conversation about an anthology that hasn’t even been put together yet.

At the same time, I too have some problems with the call for submissions. Rape, after all, isn’t only a huge problem — it’s a multi-faceted one. Some men rape without being cognizant that they are raping, just as some women have sexual experiences that they have trouble labeling as rape. Other men rape with the clear intent of degrading women. Some women are raped as punishment for the transgressions of their relatives, or raped because they were on the losing side in war. Clearly, “empowering female sexual pleasure” isn’t a viable universal strategy for ending all forms of rape. It’s a very powerful strategy, however, for ending one particularly insidious kind of rape that is widespread in our own culture. The small mistake in the call for submissions lay in not clearly distinguishing which aspect of rape culture the book was intended to address.

And yeah, I’m not crazy about the “fly in the face of conventional feminist wisdom” line either. Sometimes rape is about sex, and sometimes it isn’t, and almost anyone who does anti-violence work knows that. Very few contemporary feminists (I can’t think of any, actually) argue that rape is never, ever about sex. Yes Means Yes! has the potential to make a major contribution to the discussion about consent, pleasure, and agency; it doesn’t have to position itself as radically revisionist in order to do so.

If this anthology emerges as I hope it will (with or without a Hugo Schwyzer contribution within its pages), it’s going to be less a theoretical compilation than a practical tool. I’d love to have a book I could give to high-school and college-aged men and women, a book that helped them navigate through the sea of confusing messages about what sex is and what it isn’t, a book that honestly addressed what it means to say “Yes”, “No”, and “Not Yet.” More importantly, I’m hoping that this book will, in some small way, help inspire (and yes, empower) young men and women to say both “Yes!” and “No!” with greater certainty and conviction. I can’t know yet if the YMY anthology will prove to be such a tool. The project has promise, however, and I hope that the current debate will only serve to generate a greater number of submissions.

Thursday Short Poem: an excerpt from Auden’s “For the Time Being”

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Christmas, for most of us in the Western World, ends almost immediately after the 25th of December. The “twelve days” live on only in song. Advent 2007, for the vast majority of Americans and Europeans, was a forgotten season. After all, few if any of us restricted our singing of Christmas carols by, say, the day after Thanksgiving.

And now, the Great Day having passed, fewer still are ready to embrace the tradition that Christmastide still has ten days to run. In that somewhat melancholy spirit comes this famed excerpt from W.H. Auden’s greatest long poem, For the Time Being. Continue reading →

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A note on Blair’s conversion, and on missing Rome

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Like most who have followed the life and career of Tony Blair, I was not surprised in the least by his decision to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, a decision made formal in a private ceremony last week. Long-affiliated with the fine old Christian Socialist Movement, his theology seemed to have been moving towards Rome for some time. (When Blair’s son Leo was born in 2000, a number of years younger than his other children with his wife, Cherie, there were very public rumors that the couple did not practice any form of artificial birth control, in keeping with Catholic teaching.)

I’ve had mixed feelings about Tony Blair for years now. But I wish him well, of course, as he moves forward on his spiritual journey. A great many Englishmen and women before him have “returned to Rome” before him, and he goes in fine company.

A little bit of me — just a little — is envious. My own religious peregrination has been fitful and dramatic, but it started with a late adolescent conversion from the atheism of my parents to Roman Catholicism. I was baptized and confirmed at the 1988 Easter Vigil, where I took the confirmation name Thomas. For a brief time, I seriously considered the priesthood — so great was my enthusiasm for the Church. My first marriage was solemnized with a full mass at St Paul the Apostle in Westwood, one of the larger Catholic parishes in West Los Angeles. During the first year of that marriage, I was a regular and enthusiastic communicant.

It was the end of my first marriage that, for me, made staying a Catholic untenable. Though we agreed on little else during the divorce process, my first wife and I were committed to not seeking an annulment, despite pressure from some of her Catholic relatives to get one. What had been done might now be undone, but we weren’t going to deny it had been done in the first place! And with the divorce came the bar from the eucharist. No more wafer and wine made into bread and blood for me, at least not in the Roman style.

I drifted away from Christ for the next few years after that 1992 divorce. When I came back, it was as a Protestant of one kind or another: an Anabaptist, a non-denominational charismatic, an Episcopalian. But here’s the rub: often, whether I’m at a Mennonite, Episcopal, or evangelical worship service, I find myself feeling as if what I’m participating in is somehow incomplete. There are churches, and then there is The Church. And while all the churches are somehow part of the Body of Christ, there is still for me a sense that the truest Church is Roman. Though I very rarely attend Mass any more, I admit that I feel something when I do that I have not felt anywhere else — and I have worshipped in more than my share of elsewheres.

I’m blissful in my fourth marriage. The chances of reconciling with my first wife are zero. I would never dream of raising our future children in a church community that didn’t see their parents’ marriage as being as licit and good as any other. As I understand it, the price of being allowed to become a regular communicant in the Catholic church would mean leaving my wife — or enduring a chaste marriage for the rest of our lives. I’ve checked this out with a few of my friends who know their canon law: without an annulment of my first marriage, or without a commitment to chastity within my current one, I’m going to have a hard time gettin’ to the communion rail. That price is much too high to pay.

It’s odd — I was a Mass-going Catholic for less than five years. That’s not even an eighth of my life. And yet Rome has a hold on me that nothing else has. And when I see the once-married Tony Blair received into the Church, my happiness for him is not untinged with envy.

Christianity and Kabbalah lectures

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It’s the day after Christmas (or, for purists, the second day of Christmas), and I’m getting into a routine that will occupy me for the next ten days or so.

I taught 20 classes at Pasadena City College in 2007: three in winter, seven in the spring, three in the summer, seven in the fall. I’m taking the winter intersession of ’08 off to take a couple of trips, the first of which will be for both business and pleasure.

On January 8 and 9, I’ll be giving lectures on Christianity and Kabbalah in the Philippines. More details are available by clicking here. The first lecture will focus on Kabbalah’s interpretation of the life and ministry of Jesus; the second will discuss the compatibility of Christian and kabbalistic practice. If you live near Manila, come and hear.

I’ve got a fairly good idea of what I’ll be covering in these two talks, but I need to bang out an outline over the next few days. I’ll share details — both of the trip and of the content of the lectures — after we get back from the Philippines. Blogging will be light but regular over the next ten days or so until we leave.

Off for eight days, and an anecdote about wrinkles: UPDATED

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For my last post before Christmas (I’ll return to blogging December 26 or 27), a little anecdote:

Students say the darndest things.

A woman came into my office last week to talk about her final. After we’d finished talking about her strategy for the exam, she said: “I hope you won’t mind my saying so, but I notice you have a lot of wrinkles for your age. My Dad’s a cosmetic surgeon, and he does great work, and we can get you a really good package. Your wife will love the change, though I’m sure she already loves how you look!”

Now, mind you, this was the second time this year someone had randomly suggested plastic surgery to me. But from a student in my office hours, it was a bit stunning. I thanked her politely, and told her that I loved each and every one of the well-earned, well-deserved lines that cross my face. She smiled and said, “Well, talk to your wife about it!” I assured her I would do so.

I suppose the little dear meant well. And I’ll admit, it stung a bit. I’ve had a couple of moments recently where I’ve looked in the mirror and been taken aback — just for a moment — by how old I look. But that’s more a reaction of surprise than of dejection; it’s akin to being surprised that Christmas is upon us once again, and that it seems to come faster each year.

But barring — God forbid — some sort of horrific disfiguring accident, I’m not going to have any sort of work done to improve my appearance. I have no desire to appear one day younger than my forty years. But of course, I’m a man. Even here, in deliciously vapid Los Angeles, I know that my success as a teacher, mentor, blogger or public speaker has little to do with my perceived youth or looks. I understand that the pressures are much greater upon women, and so I am careful not to condemn those who do choose cosmetic surgery. What I don’t do is give any credibility to the suggestion that the decision to go under the knife is inherently feminist, but that’s a different discussion.

I notice that just this autumn, I’ve picked up some more wrinkles on my forehead and around the eyes. They make me look just a bit more like my father, and that makes me very happy indeed.

A happy holiday to all.

UPDATE: the wonderful Jenell Paris — fellow academic, and with me, one of the founders of the North American Evangelical Gender Studies Association, offers this suggested grading scale. Suggesting plastic surgery is definitely a minus on the Paris Plan.