I spent many vacations on the Oregon Coast growing up. Cannon Beach and Lincoln City were the favored Miller destinations. While the Oregon water is chilly for swimming, the soothing waves, green cliffsides, and sandy coastlines make for a rejuvenating place to spend a long weekend or spring break.
The ocean has been on my mind this week as I sort through the seminal issues of our world and the Catholic Church's response. Recently a synod to discuss the family brought together the Catholic bishops, and a multitude of responses arose from media outlets and millions of interested individuals from inside and outside the Church. Some looked closely at the language of the bishops' statement regarding same-sex partners. Some looked at how the bishops described mixed families, second marriages, annulments, and divorce. Some looked at the statements issued and dismissed them as old-fashioned or unprogressive. Some looked at the subtle shift in tone and interpreted it as a seismic shift.
I looked at the statements, heard some conversation from friends, and recalled what I knew of Catholic teaching on the family. I thought of the ocean.
Follow me for a moment. The ocean is massive. When I go to the Oregon Coast, I see but a couple miles of a vast expanse, most of which is too deep for me to ever encounter. Yet if I dip my feet in the surf or venture into the cresting waves just off shore, I am experiencing the ocean in some small part. No matter how deep and far away it extends, there is no denying my experience of the ocean at my feet. For that matter, my experience of the ocean in Southern California this summer is just as valid, and quite different, than my experience along the chillier shores of Oregon. Getting tossed about on a body board feels exhilarating. Letting the cool salty surf spill over my toes is healing. Ultimately, though these experiences, while legitimate and relevant to me, are small splashes in an endless sea. The ocean contains so much more than the limited view I see and know.
The Roman Catholic Church is an ocean of history, theology, revelation, and tradition--2000 years, untold billions of unrepeatable human lives, missteps that have shaken but never crumbled a foundation of Tradition and Scripture. The Church is towering, magnificent cathedrals and humble, run-down soup kitchens. The Church is a pope illuminating the news with acts of humility and a movement toward dialogue, and it is a pope emeritus writing eloquent prose to clarify Christ to a wounded world. The Church is starving Ugandans, Chinese martyrs, charismatics in Brazil, and customs-driven indigenous Mexicans. The Church is vast in so many ways, and it is an ocean to our specialized concerns in the United States at this moment in history.
I don't intend to trivialize the conversation surrounding the family. The synod affirmed the importance of the family in all cultures and contexts even in the introduction to Instrumentum Laboris: "The family is an inexhaustible resource and font of life in the Church’s pastoral activity." I see often in the lives of teens that homosexuality is a pivotal issue. Wherever we stand on the issue, it is in our newspapers, schools, families, and society.
Yet the legal implications surrounding homosexual partnerships is largely an issue contained in the Western world of the United States and Europe. There are far different headlines in Africa, in South America, in Asia, and the places where the majority of worldwide Catholics reside. In Nigeria and many other African countries where Catholic populations are booming, the challenge regarding the family is not with homosexuality but with polygamy. As Westerners, it would be easy to scoff and dismiss this topic. Such a reaction would be offensive to many Africans. Furthermore, I would venture that Africans might scoff at the pettiness of homosexual unions being protected under law when so many in impoverished countries receive no protection of any kind from their governments.
Is either side right? Or is it possible both issues are just as legitimate to the people in the firestorms of polygamy and gay marriage as the waves were to me despite the immensity of the overall ocean?
We overestimate our existence sometimes. One thing I loved about being Catholic is taking part in something so infinitely greater than myself. I am a 29-year-old American white male with a limited worldview. Each person has similar constraints in understanding, no matter how experienced. Together we are strong. With a 2000-year history of people trying to understand and follow God, we are even stronger. With the guarantee of Jesus that the gates of hell will never prevail, we are iron-clad.
The Church moves slowly in making statements. Its teachings are not swayed by the modern movements but are shaped by the wisdom of millennia past. So many brilliant minds, from Augustine to Aquinas to John Paul II, have formed the Church's thinking, and Christ himself told Peter that, "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." There is great wisdom and freedom in studying and living the teachings of the Church.
The synod on the family was significant. The bishops worked to find ways to reach the traditional and increasingly untraditional families of today throughout the world. They looked at the waves sweeping over the feet of their given countries and dioceses, but they also had to ponder the expansive depths of the whole world in their approach. As we digest their findings and statements, I hope we can see and respond in ways that stretch beyond the surf visible to us because there is so much more to our Church and our world.
