Last week at my meeting with my confessor I told him that the previous day I had gotten a new tattoo. I had wanted this tattoo since about 2018, and that’s the case with most of the ones I have; they are all the result of a lot of meditation and research into good artists. But to my confessor, it seemed like an impulsive and rash decision, because I hadn’t told him anything about it, and I tell him about everything. I thought he’d be sort of happy or at least humored by it: he likes my other tattoos. Instead, when I told him, a look of concern swept over his face. “I don’t want you to get any more tattoos, Joan,” he said.
“You don’t like them?” I said, a little taken aback and, frankly, injured.
“No, it’s not that I don’t like them,” he said. “I do. I have one myself.” (This was news to me.) “But you seem to get them just whenever, and I don’t want you to fall into the trap of getting tattoos as a way of sort of pursuing meaning in your life.”
Like I said, his impression of how and why I get tattoos isn’t entirely accurate; it’s just that I have inferior communication skills and it doesn’t occur to me to tell people sort of important things sometimes, especially when I think they only affect me. I said as much to him.
“Okay,” he said, after thinking for a moment. “Can you ask my permission next time, before you get another one?”
“Sure,” I said. “I can do that.”
It occurred to me walking out of our meeting that day—and perhaps this should have been obvious—that in a very concrete and I think intentional way, my confessor has assumed the role of both father and husband in my life. I suffer without a steady male figurehead in my day-to-day world to help me see what I can’t. Over the course of my fairly short period of time receiving counsel from him, he has become that man for me, and he knows that; otherwise he would not have invoked his authority. Permission is a sacred thing; you only lend someone the power to give it to you if you trust that they love you. For me, my confessor is one of, I think, two men to whom I’ve given that trust.
Well, he’s leaving. In fact, he’s more or less leaving tomorrow. He’ll be gone for at least a year but maybe more than that, and maybe forever. I happened to meet him when he was coming to the end of his work in my city, and even though I sort of knew that all along, I needed what he gave me so badly that I took out a sort of spiritual and emotional loan that has now gone to collections, so to speak, and it’s time for me to pay it in full. There is a small and childish part of me that’s very angry and upset, wishing unrealistically that he could stay with me and my delight in him forever—but more than that I am simply mourning the circumstance that I had already been latently mourning, that although I am related to and a part of his work as a priest, I do not constitute the entirety of his vocation, the way I would for a true husband. Rather, he serves the Church by way of helping me.
And this is how it should be! He’s up to king sh*t, as all good men are. Each man is called to reign over his life, to be the head of a simulacrum of the Kingdom of Heaven, usually as a priest or as a husband and father. And, of course, these roles are in many ways all adaptations of the same ultimate purpose: to bring the kingdom down, and to aid in the salvation of souls.
Of course, this will happen at the level of the family, which is why, I think, my confessor came to my aid when he saw that I lacked a reliable husband/father figure. These needs are urgent. We the hip know that the family is under attack. This comes in the form of so many things: the entire LGBTQ+ agenda, especially in the way it is currently poisoning children’s minds in the public school system; the ridiculous idea that women’s bodies are their true oppressors that need to be bound up by contraceptives; a kind of masculinity that glorifies a bachelor’s life and a slef-serving career without claim to a family of his own. The narratives that drive these cultural movements aim for the obsolescence of the family; this social model outsources what we should get from our families (fulfillment, a value system, wisdom, and material security) and has it manufactured and sold to us by, essentially, a government which does not have our best interest at heart. The modern man should be working doggedly against these forces (as should the modern woman, but in a different way, and this is a men’s post, so).
It’s not that this is new; I don’t know enough about it to say that “marriage and family has always been the object of social and political attack,” but I wish I did so I could. Regardless, marriage and family has frequently, throughout history, been the object of social and political attack. In the Ancient Roman Empire, for instance, young men were not allowed to receive the sacrament of matrimony. St. Valentine got his reputation as fierce defender of the lovebug because, against the law, he married young couples in secret. Why was the Roman government so adamantly against Christian marriage? The shortest answer is that they felt threatened by it. As an empire they relied on a robust military presence to maintain their standing as leader of the civilized world after the Pax Romana. By extension, they needed young men to understand themselves foremost as proponents of the commonwealth. Men had to see themselves as stewards of Rome above all else.
But Christianity tells men a different narrative: in a matrimonial covenant between a man, a woman, and their Holy God, they are not simply caretakers of another man’s kingdom. Rather, they are the founders and lords of their own kingdoms, imprinting upon the world the image of Heaven itself, the new Jerusalem, the true Bride. The moment you allow a man to marry a woman along these terms, you jeopardize your chances that he will fly to the aid of his country, because it is no longer his true country! Their true nation, the nation of their rebirth, is the one he established at home, and that is what he will defend to the death.
A few weeks ago, I was blessed to attend the First Holy Communion of the son of a friend of mine. Before the Mass, we crowned a sculpture of the Blessed Mother. I feel a special kind of affection for the exchange of register that occurs at these sorts of rituals. Like Christian marriage, these types of ceremonies are memetic of what happens in the presence of the Lord God of Hosts, his ranks of angels seized up in worship of His Most Holy Name, adoring the Queen of Heaven, the Ladder down which Light descends, the Ark of the Covenant, whose yes to the call of the Spirit made it possible for the world to be returned in glory to her Son. And yet, as ecstatic and dazzling as the occasion is, it’s still just people who put it on. So there will always be a kid who starts crying, or some family friend passively scrolling through Venmo, or a mother, upon examination of her son’s suit, saying, “Sweetheart, what happened? How did you get so dirty?”
This time, the inevitable creep of the mundane into the profound happened in the form of the sculpture snagging the dress of the girl whose job it was to crown Our Lady with a wreath of flowers. She had been climbing up a ladder so she could reach Mary’s head and then felt that she was caught, some rough spot of stone having grabbed at the fibers of lace. So she stood there for a few moments while an adult came and helped free her, while we stood around fretting and hoping her dress wouldn’t tear. The forecast said rain, and the clouds were beginning to gather in dark bunches overhead. We were vigilant for the first drop. After a few moments, the girl was untethered, and she went the final step up the rungs of the ladder, and placed the crown on our Mother. And just as the wreath settled on her head, the heavens let out, low and trembling, that first menacing peel of thunder.
Of course, I thought. This is the sound of the Dread of Demons crushing the skull of the snake.
With the exception of our Lord, Mary is the most attentive guardian of the family and the one who calls men to be fierce protectors of it on this earth. It was chiefly her intercession that led to these splinters in Roe versus Wade. I think about a certain symbolic parallel: Mary is said to have crushed the head of the snake; meanwhile, in later-term abortions, one of the most common techniques is crushing the child’s skull in order to deliver him or her through the birth canal. I’ve talked before about God’s beautiful sense of humor, his delightful and miraculous comedic timing; Satan has his laughs, too, and this is, I am certain, one of them—and against that, good men have got to rise to the Lord’s call to be good priests and good fathers.
When God created the world, that’s what He made it do: He made it rise to His call, hailing it into existence from nothingness and chaos. So this is the work of men: both to rise to His call, and call others in such a way that makes them rise up and come to order. My confessor lays hands on me and prays with some frequency. On one such occasion, I told him beforehand that I felt broken, and completely inaccessible to the Spirit, like He would never reach me. My confessor placed his hands firmly but gently on my head and for what felt like a while, didn’t say anything. I wondered if he was angry with me, but when I briefly opened my eyes, he was just breathing steadily. Moments later, he tilted his head back, and then pitched it swiftly forward, so that his forehead smacked mine. I was so surprised I could have leapt from my skin. Then he said, “Joan, you are so stupid.” He proceeded to tell me, in his prayer, that I needed to renounce this feeling of brokenness and isolation, that the Lord loves me and is proud of me. Of course, that felt beautiful, and I needed to hear it, but what struck me is how he delivered this message in a way that was abrupt, and startling, and exactly fitted to who I am: I love to be affectionately told I’m stupid by men who have my ardor. It makes me feel held, and known. And he knows that. And he did it.
He kept his hands in my hair and I could feel waves of peace settling into my mind beneath the warmth of his palms. I reached up and held his wrists and he continued to pray over me for what felt like a long time, until the words ran out, and he began to sing from somewhere deep in his chest, expressing something past the point of language. When his song settled into silence, what had been raging like a sea in my spirit became still and clear, and—though it’s hard to describe the feeling—I felt intelligible again, like his words had reached into the confused darkness of my mind and illuminated it, and put everything in its place.
He has to go, and this fills me with inarticulable grief, but I wouldn’t dream of stopping him from going where he needs to go to do his work, even if that means permanently away from me. This is what good men do: they see, in wild countries, a cradle for their kingdom, and from that wild country draw their kingdom out.