On Not Being A Mumpsimus

July 4th, 2013  |   

Definition of Mumpsimus

(1) A view stubbornly held in spite of clear evidence that it is wrong.

(2) A person who holds such a view.

It has been said that a priest erroneously used a nonsense word, mumpsimus, in the Mass, in place of the word sumpsimus. Even after being told that the word was incorrect, he insisted on saying it because he’d done that for 40 years and was not about to change.

It’s not always easy to make changes. Habits die hard, and patterns of life and ways of thinking and acting tend to ossify as we age. We gather an identity around our beliefs, one that may, like a snake’s skin, need to be shed if we have any hope of growing into new understandings about ourselves, and the larger world we encounter.

It might serve us well if we were able to just plain forget all the outdated data, misguided information, phony myths, and downright lies we learned years ago about a whole variety of subjects. You know, those crusty, musty, niggardly nasty beliefs about a variety of subjects. Wouldn’t it lift a burden from us if we could delete all those virus-saturated files we depended upon, or residually still rely on, to function as men and women?

Men and women—that might be a good place to start this issue of Notes.

My Choice: Buy A Cemetery Plot Or Study Female Desires

Last week, the New York Times arrived on my doorstep with a review of a new book by Daniel Bergner, “What Do Women Want: Adventures in the Science of Female Desires.”

Before I had a chance to read the review, lo and behold, along came the mail with an advertisement for a grave subject, a cemetery plot. A local merchant wanted to sell me a space where I could be planted.

Ah, love and death, a choice right there in that pile of collected reading material.

The decision was easy. Into the trashcan, unread, went the offer to buy a cemetery plot. As for the book review, hey, I devoured it, line-by-line, word-by-word.

“All men by nature desire knowledge,” according to Aristotle. I might add to that, especially knowledge about a woman’s desires.

So what does science now say that’s new about female desires? Isn’t all the data in on women, without having to resort to more questionnaires, studies and books? Or does data change as culture changes, and as the human brain makes itself available to an evolving consciousness that marks the very essence of human nature. 

New research, according to Bergner, does not substantiate the old shibboleth, “the notion that women are naturally less libidinous than men, ‘hard-wired’ to want babies and emotional connection but not necessarily sex itself.” He goes on to say, “Since then scientific scrutiny has focused overwhelmingly on women’s reproductive rather than sexual function; at times the existence of female desire and arousal and orgasm has been outright denied.”

Outside the Garden of Eden, the conversation began. “You Eve, me Adam. Now what?”   God may have created us male and female, but an instruction manual wasn’t included, one that would stand the test of time without changing the rules. Count that as good news. Thanks to the influence of feminism—part of a sexual revolution—men and women have come to understand one another in an ever-expanding way. 

Henry Higgins, in the movie My Fair Lady—based on George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion—bellows, “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man?” Eliza, the woman he’s trying to change, interestingly enough, ends up being who she wants to be and not a man in the image of Higgins. I am told that feminists love Shaw.

On Making Love And War

In 1947, at the tender age of twelve, on the brink of the great awakening associated with the tumultuous teenage years, I saw the movie, The Paleface. Bob Hope made me laugh, and Jane Russell made me anticipate other things. Well, I’m sure you know what I mean.

I can still recall the words from the song, “Buttons and Bows,” sung by Jane Russell. Lamenting her prairie-rough, buckskin-clad identity, she longed for “eastern trimmin’ where women are women, in high silk hose and peek-a-boo clothes.” Ah, big city living “where cement grows” and there are plenty of “frills and flowers and buttons and bows.”

Where women are women? This side of the Garden of Eden, what are the ever-changing personal and cultural expectations that have defined women—the limitations and the boundaries, as well as an inevitable expansion of those limitations and boundaries?

I think of how women were defined when I was a kid during the WW II 1940s.  Women raised money for war bonds, grew Victory Gardens, aided in civil defense, rolled bandages, collected blood, served as USO hostesses, and dealt with wartime stress by tending to children whose fathers had marched off to war.

Women went marching off to their own jobs, always in support of the war effort. They became “Government Girls” in an expanding federal government in Washington. They became Rosie the Riveter in “ defense plants” that made weapons. As close as they were able to get to the “front lines” was by joining the nurse corps.

In wartime, women made bullets for frontline combat troops, but they didn’t fire them. Women weren’t expected to kill people. The killing was left to the men. But pretty soon that’s about to change.

In January, Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the plan to remove gender-based standards by January 2016. That means women will be able to serve in combat roles—drop bombs, and kill people on the battlefield.  

Chuck Hagel, who is now the Defense Secretary, puts it this way, “Why shouldn’t women have the same opportunities as men?” Right! Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Why shouldn’t a woman’s newly recognized vigorous desire for sex match an equally passionate desire to make war?

Politicians and patriotic citizens willing to have their boys and girls march off to combat, both liberal and conservative, might relish the thought that women are able to kill in combat situations as well, if not better than men. Under the guise of equal rights for all people, Americans may very well accept both sexes killing people in combat. I am, however, not one of them.

As our nation goes, not from sea to shining sea, but from war to endless war, there must be another way to achieve a peaceful, reconciling relationship between men and women, between nations, rather than with a gun. It will require men and women to bond over a commitment to renounce weapons, and refuse to kill someone our country labels as “the enemy.” The label enemy is fickly transitory, with a short political shelf life.  

Back to Jane Russell’s song from The Paleface.  “But I’ll love ya’ longer, stronger where yer friends don’t tote a gun.” Love you longer and stronger, without the violence?

Yes, because beyond the strictly genital definition of love, it means making peace and not war, in a spiritually physical way with friend and foe alike. But more than one mumpsimus must die if we are to save what’s left of this gorgeous creation God has created and willed to us.

A Different Kind Of “Back To The 60’s Reunion”

In preparation for this year’s Fourth of July, our local newspaper published a special section devoted to veterans from all the wars that have been waged in my lifetime. The pictures of men in uniform reminded me that West Virginia has sent more people off to war, per capita, than any other state. We bleed red, white and blue.  

I notice an article announcing a Herbert Hoover High School Back to the Sixties Reunion. “It’s open to anybody that served,” says the organizer of the event. “They didn’t have to be in ‘nam. It’s for anybody that wore a uniform during that time period; we are recognizing them as a veteran—and they are veterans.”

A question comes to mind as I think about this invitation for “anybody that wore a uniform.” How about those who chose not to put on a uniform, those who resisted going to war in the 60’s? How about a reunion for the men who claimed conscientious objector status, those who fled to Canada or went to jail resisting an undeclared war in Vietnam they felt was immoral, even illegal by international law?

Back in those tumultuous 1960s, the then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, attempted to make a joke about the protestors he saw chanting the words, “Make love, not war.” He said, “Those guys (the protesters) look like they can’t make either or both.” That was his way of saying that protesters were not men enough to wear a uniform, carry a weapon, and kill people. Nor were they men enough to have sex with a woman.

Perhaps Mr. Reagan had in mind an old myth I heard when I was a kid. In those days, the cure for men and women who were called “queer” was a good roll-in-the-hay with someone from the opposite sex. Therapeutic sex, if you will. Maybe all those antiwar boys could get themselves straightened out if they’d only pick up a weapon and go to war in Vietnam, where there were plenty of men to kill on maneuvers, and women to screw in the bars just off base.

The connection between war and sex, military service and manhood, was made pointedly   clear by a drill instructor to a new recruit who mistakenly called his weapon a gun. Rifle in one hand, the other hand pointed below his belt, the lesson was taught. “Listen up! This is my weapon, and this is my gun. This is for shooting, and this is for fun.”

Michael Reagan Is Right About Gay Marriage

We can only guess how Ronald Reagan would have felt about last week’s Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision. The nation, by and large, has changed on this issue over the years, and so might he have changed as well.

Reagan’s son, Michael, is another matter. Legalizing gay marriage, he says, will lead to “polygamy, bestiality and perhaps even murder.” Why not a zombie invasion and Armageddon, Michael? But to his credit, he’s right in saying gay marriage is “ultimately about changing the culture of the entire country.” Yes sir, the culture that killed Matthew Shepherd and has denied gay people civil rights is changing, and well it should.

Legalizing same-sex marriage, he says, “inevitably will lead to teaching our public school kids that gay marriage is a perfectly fine alternative and no different than traditional marriage.” That’s right, Michael, it will also help gay kids stay alive rather than commit suicide, as straight kids understand and accept gay kids rather than bullying them.

The Air, Intoxicated With Sedition

I recently discovered the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested by Joseph Stalin for counter-revolutionary activities during the government repression of the 1930s. The poem that finally sent him to prison, where he died, reads: “We live without sensing the country beneath us. At ten paces, our speech has no sound and when there’s the will to have open our mouth, the Kremlin crag dweller bars the way.”

Mandelstam paid the price for opening his mouth about his country. Another line made me think about Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who have opened their mouths about our country. “O this air, intoxicated with sedition…The agitators rock the teetering world. It smells of restless poplars.”

Bradley Manning is presently on trial for leaking intelligence information, part of which confirms our nation’s illegal activities involving the transfer (rendition) of captured people to countries where they were tortured. I am grateful for the leak. We need to know when and where our country is violating international law by engaging in torture.

Edward Snowden is betwixt and between, a man without a country (at least as I write). He is on the run from U.S. officials for having leaked classified National Security Agency materials that reveal our nation’s unconstitutional invasion of the privacy of hundreds of millions of Americans. Official U.S. voices are crying for Russia, and any country that gives him immunity, to send him home for trial and possible execution.  

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers back in 1971, allowing U.S. citizens to get the truth about the lies surrounding the morally bankrupt war in Vietnam, has come to the defense of both of these men. He calls them heroes who have told the world what it needs to know about U.S. clandestine drone attacks, torture, and the lack of transparency President Obama promised in his campaign speeches.

I was appalled to hear former President George W. Bush, in an interview with CNN, say that Snowden had harmed national security by doing what he did. This from the man who, when he occupied the Oval Office, sent our nation off to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have made us less secure and more vulnerable to radical and violent blowback from folks who are now striking back, people we now call terrorists.

Timely Memories Of Daniel Berrigan

In May 1968, Father Daniel Berrigan and 8 Catholic activists poured homemade napalm on 378 draft board files, and then set them on fire. This prophetic action took place in Catonsville, Maryland, near Annapolis where I served as a priest.

In the trial that followed, the nine often referred to a higher law, God’s moral law that compelled them to do this act of civil disobedience. Berrigan fled and went “underground” rather than report to the prison for his incarceration. Eight days later he appeared and spoke at a weekend-long “America Is Hard To Find” event, then went on the run again. He drove J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, embarrassingly crazy when he would pop up periodically to deliver sermons and then disappear.

In August 1970, FBI agents, with binoculars, posing as bird watchers, arrested Berrigan at the home of William Stringfellow, Episcopal lawyer, theologian and social activist. 

What pleases me is the fact that he had four months of freedom, before being carted off to prison to serve two years of his eighteen-year sentence.  He had a grace period of four months to give testimony against an illegal and immoral war that was destroying the people of Vietnam, our troops, and the very soul of our nation.

Edward Snowden has broken federal law and is now eluding not only the FBI but also the entire U.S. national security network. Eventually he will be captured, tried and convicted. In the meantime I suspect the world may get lots more information from him about our surveillance system, a system that has remained hidden for entirely too long. In this Fourth of July season, Benjamin Franklin’s words seem appropriate. “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

A final word on Bill Stringfellow; his antiwar activity inspired many of us, myself included. In 1968, I did not know Bill. He came into my life later when I served on the board of The Witness magazine. As a contributing editor, I had the privilege of joining Bill in calling for the resignation of the then Episcopal Presiding Bishop, John Allin, who was unable to accept women as priests because, as he said, they could no more be priests “than they can become fathers or husbands.”

Interestingly enough, Bill was gay, and in a relationship with the writer Anthony Towne. I smile when I think now of my daughter, who is a priest, and the many women who have been ordained since those turbulent and contentious years. And I wonder what Bishop Allin, were he alive, would say about the gay men who are now fathers and husbands.

When interviewed in 2009 by George Anderson at America Magazine, Fr. Berrigan was asked: “What are you most grateful for as you look back over your long life.” His response: “My Jesuit vocation.” When asked if he had any regrets, he replied, “I could have done sooner the things I did, like Catonsville.”

Amen! In like manner, I am grateful for my 77 years as a Christian, 49 as an ordained Episcopalian. My regrets? Simply this, that I wasn’t the ninth person in Catonsville, with Daniel Berrigan, pouring napalm on those files, and with Bill Stringfellow earlier in my life as a young priest. I regret that I have missed so many opportunities to follow their example of Christian discipleship. I should have done sooner the things they did.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Entry Filed under: A Fig Just Dropped Archives

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