crones, wise old men, and calvin klein padded bikinis for infants

as many of you know, i am intrigued by the character of merlin.  in one of his many insightful essays, r. j. stewart, who seems merlin as a prefigurement of christ in many ways, reminds us that to think of merlin only as a wise old man is to miss the real importance of what his story has to tell us.  before merlink became the wise elder, he was a bright youth and a mad prophet.  (there are limits of course to merlin-christ parallels.  before moses was, jesus says, i am; but he was crucified as the beginning of his career as a mad prophet.)

but in most times and most places, it is expected that life will be a sort of on-going initiation, with each phase of our lives contributing it's own gift.  (for women, the phases are often described as maiden, mother, and crone.)  we often say of some one that he or see is "just going through a phase," but we seldom recognize the importance, indeed, the necessity of those phases.  and because sexuality is such a power in our lives, the phases are often described sexually.  often i am reminded of their necessity when some friend or another "comes out" as a lesbian or a homosexual.  my half-uncle frank told me wisely many years ago that when this happens, one must first relive one's teen-aged years.  painful, and foolish looking, but true.  also, it is important to remember that the wisest of us can be caught up in yearnings to skip the earlier phases, or to return to them.  the story of merlin and nenue is perhaps part of that temptation.

we seem to live in a time when the sexual part of the phases is the only one we really value.  if you doubt this, go to the grocery store and read the magazines in the check-out lane.  watch cable news as the story of something important to the lives of thousands of people, such as the earthquake in japan recently, has a footer about some movie star who has a new boy friend.

another part of our time's discontinuance with history is that we seem to value not only the sexual part of the phases of life, but only the mature first phase, the time when one is still a maiden or a bright youth, but has reached puberty and is in the full grasp of sexual desire.  as many writers have noted over the years, although because it is lent and it is the book i am reading right now, st. john climacus' book of the ladder, i tend to think about he has to say about the ability of appetite for good to open sexual appetite which opens us to other appetites.  advertisers well understand this, and make a lot of money from keeping us thinking we are still 19.  and, they put those sexually seductive magazines in grocery stores.

this leads us to all sorts of traps.  as moore and gillette noted in the king within, we tend to elect boy kings as presidents.  and it seems that we have far more boy bishops now than we ever had in the middle ages.   and we think that sexuality has benefits, that being proud of our desires is like having an american express gold card.

so we hear of people claiming that homosexuals have the right to be preists, or bishops.  one of the arguments is that they have always been  ordained "gay" people, so we should continue the practice.  but there is an important difference between our attitudes and the way we live and that of say, sixteenth century britain, and how they lived.  william laud was a bishop, and a man who had a fondness for men.  indeed it is reported that he had a particular fondness for the duke of buckingham, james (vith and ist)' "favourite."  but no one claimed that laud had a right to be bishop because of his sexual appetites.  it was not then the defining part of one's life.  sometimes i wish it might have been more important:  charles was sexually about as pure as any english monarch known, but it didn't save him his head.

now, laud was not a perfect bishop.  i and many others find his goals for the british church to be correct and congruent with truth.  but laud never became a wise old man.  he remained a mad prophet, and that would cost him his effectiveness, and perhaps also his head, although of course the puritans were taking heads like wild men of borneo are accused of doing.

it therefore seems to me, given the general flavour, shall we say, of contemporary society--or "the economy"--that we should not be the least bit surprised when the lords advertisorial not only want grandma to have her wrinkles removed but baby girls to have fake breasts. 

of course, there is an easy solution, although not a popular one.  don't buy it.  what is "it?"  well, most nearly everything.  it's very rare for me to buy anything i really need.  perhaps you're a better"consumer."  and recognize that desires do not necessarily need to be immediately or even eventually satisfied.  of course there is not a lot of support for such an attitude.  am i foolish to think that the church might consider it?