Valson Thampu

At the point of writing this, the verdict on Bishop Franko Mulakkal is still awaited. In less than three days from now, we shall know if the arraigned Bishop is innocent or guilty. As the fateful day of reckoning approaches, my mind fills with sadness; strangely, sadness for him, even as my solidarity with the violated victim too intensifies. This is a duality that I have to struggle with and unravel.
I have expressed myself sharply and vehemently against the degradation inflicted on the victim-nun in this case. I have also denounced the system that keeps thousands of nuns, as Pope Francis said, in a state of enforced silence regarding their on-going spiritual degradation and physical exploitation. I have been, however, mostly circumspect in condemning the Bishop: the presumed predator in this case.
I am double-minded, unlike a host of others that constitute our Christian moral police, about the many instances of sexual deviance among the clergy that continue to come to light. The sense of pathos I feel in this regard stems from an awareness that all of them were eminently avoidable. But, they happened, and many more will continue to happen, because the system for which they exist entertains assumptions and enforces norms that are at variance with the essence of humanity.
Priestly celibacy –whatever else its other justifications – implies a distrust, a stigmatisation, of man-woman love. This love is the terrestrial heart of love itself. God ordained it to be so. Nothing in the world can justify the denial of it. In biblical thought, life and love are inseparable. It is necessary for us to have a modicum of clarity in this regard to be fair in judging the priestly ‘sex-crimes’ reported from time to time. Who is responsible for them? Only the erring priests or nuns? Or, is it also the system that forces them, willy-nilly, to resort to unnatural means to meet their natural needs?
What every human being –including every Christian lay person and priest- shares is life. For human beings, love is the seed of life. Life exists, because love is. It is from love that life springs up. That is why ‘God is love’. God is love, because God is the fountain-spring of life. In the animal world, love has a limited function. As far as we know, it is biological and has little spiritual resonance. Not so, in the case of human beings. For us, love is the light of the spiritual; for God is love. God is also light. God is the light of love. It is when God, the light of love, falls on the human that new life wakes up. In that sense, every birth results from Immaculate Conception; the human medium serving as an accessory to the divine intent. There is no holiness that excludes love.
What is love? Love is the craving to transcend the self; whereas lust is the thirst to draw everything into the self, as the grist to the mill of self-centred craving. Lust makes self the hell on earth, or the black hole of life into which everything disappears, and from which nothing emerges. The end-product of lust is sterility or fruitlessness, which is the ultimate condemnation in spirituality. It is a serious matter if thousands of human beings are condemned to a living hell under celibacy, as seems to be the case as of now.
Jesus projects ‘fullness of life’ as the spiritual goal. But this is not an end in itself, but the stepping stone to oneness with God. God being love, it is only through love that we can attain oneness with him. Love makes one grow; for in love one goes out of oneself and attains selfless solidarity with the non-self. This is the measure of personal growth. There is no other way to spiritual wholeness. The spiritually under-developed are incapable of this blissfully positive state. Far from attaining ‘life in its fullness’, they are trapped in a famine of life. The life of a bankrupt cannot be a banquet for others.
The more one develops spiritually, the greater grows the need to give oneself in love. The seed of that love is man-woman love. No attempt to deny this by spiritualising it, will work. In this regard, there are only three possibilities. (a) To claim for oneself the freedom to love, which entails the need to know what love is by loving and being loved selflessly, (b) To live resentfully in a state of unnatural deprivation, and (c) To live in hypocrisy, degrading the natural instinct into an unnatural indulgence, exchanging love for lust. The fact that one preaches eloquently about love does not mean that one knows love. To know love is to be in love, selflessly.
There is a spiritual side to this lamentable human condition. It is purblind to presume celibacy as a state from which the taint of sexuality is excluded in order to keep individuals as blemish-less offerings to God. This assumption stands on a humanly warped, as against spiritually valid, idea of purity. Purity is not a matter of abstemiousness alone. Purity stands on the positive ground of Godly love which issues into fullness of life. No one can relate to God in spirit and truth merely by abstaining from sexual relationships. Sex is the exhaling of love; with love of God as its inhaling. It is what one inhales from God that one breathes on a fellow human being –man, or woman- as love. The profound truth is that only the spiritually awakened know what love is. This explains why the world is a sphere of organized loveless-ness, which explains the famine of love that rages today. The contradiction in celibacy is that it divorces knowing love from living love.
What can the God-ordained instinct to love do when it is dammed up, except take to the man-ordained path of unnatural love, riddled with guilt and crime? Erring priests and nuns can be punished; but vulnerability to crime and aberrations cannot be addressed justly, so long as the institution of celibacy remains.