reciting beautiful poetry by heart.
I discovered the three great secret things
of sex, death, and religion
and with Father Ambrose as my confessor
I was able to be pure and
not have to confess masturbation.
For three years and three months I studied
with the Sulpician Fathers at St. Thomas
Major Seminary near Seattle, Washington.
The Sulpicians were founded in order to
educate men to become secular priests.
Sulpician spirituality centered on the face
of Jesus and seeing his face and showing
his face to all the peoples of the earth.
The Sulpician priests taught me to have
Jesus in my mind and in my heart
and in my hands and on my lips
and to help all see the glory of his love.
The priest would have Jesus in his hands
as he brought the Eucharist to his people.
At ordination he is given the special
sacramental power to transform the bread
and wine into the body and blood of Jesus.
His mind and heart would be centered
on that joyful, sorrowful, glorious Jesus
as he did his spiritual reading and
as he prayed the Mass, his Rosary, and
the eight hours of the Divine Office.
It was his task to speak of Jesus
to others with Jesus always on his lips.
As he went out among people his
black suit and Roman collar would
call those people to be reminded of Jesus.
They could have a range of feeling
for him from empathy and sympathy
even to antipathy, just as they would
toward Jesus, and in our secular society
he would be a reminder of the agape of Jesus.
At St. Thomas each of us could choose
our confessor and I liked Father Gustafson,
my philosophy professor, so much that
I chose him, and each week I would
kneel beside him and confess my sins.
Strangely my impurity returned and he
told me that he just did not understand me.
He said that he never had such problems.
Sex really became a great secret thing
for as I tried to be celibate for nine years
many mysterious things continued to happen.
Perhaps celibacy can develop a kind of
feminine spirituality within the male
and perhaps the feminine became more lovely.
After my ninth year I fell in love with Jane
and experienced the sublimation that Plato
describes in his Phaedrus with the myth
of the charioteer and I came to know of
erotic inspiration, enthusiasm, and divine madness.
Father Gus taught me ten philosophy courses
and I learned all about medieval philosophy
and Augustinian, Thomistic, and Franciscan
varieties of the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love.
In my year and a third of theology
two Scripture scholars introduced me
to biblical studies in the old and new way.
Every three years at daily Mass we had
readings that covered the whole of the Hebrew Bible.
I loved the philosophy and theology that I
learned at St. Thomas so much that I wanted
to do it for the rest of my life and
thank God, I am still doing it even now.
Levinas and Derrida
For many years I had read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
as existentialists but it was Levinas and Derrida
who first taught me the meaning of postmodernity.
Levinas as a Rabbi had a deep understanding
of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish worldview.
For him ethics had to be first philosophy
and he heard from the infinite face of the other
the call to serve widows, orphans, and aliens.
Derrida as a Jewish Philosopher of great knowledge
agreed with Levinas about ethics as first philosophy
but as he wrote on Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity
he showed how Levinas was still using a logic
of exclusive opposites and thus excluded not only
Buber but also Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Derrida showed how the infinite face of the other
implied a metaphysics of excess that in turn
would imply a logic of mixed opposites.
Derrida’s deconstruction of Totality and Infinity
made sense to Levinas and he went on to write
Otherwise Than Being, which agreed with Derrida
but went on to show how the epistemology
of postmodernity had to be a nominalism.
Levinas developed a new model of ethics
as first philosophy with the Suffering Servant.
Levinas went on to the passages in Second Isaiah,
which had the Suffering Servant as suffering
to the point of death out of love for others.
The Gospels also used these images to show
how Jesus fulfilled this Suffering Servant philosophy.
This Suffering Servant as Levinas saw him
already loved his enemy and would suffer for him.
Derrida knows the history of philosophy
very well and especially works with Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche as he develops his own philosophy.
Classical philosophy was based upon the four D’s
of demonstrating a thesis with proper definitions,
key distinctions, and a dialectical answering
of objections to those first three procedures.
As Derrida thought about ethics as first philosophy
he saw with Kierkegaard that we cannot get
objective