More Mere Mores

“Reformation of mores.” I encountered the phrase recently in connection with the novitiate in Maryknoll, a Catholic missionary order. A former postulant explained that the novice year aimed at “reformation of mores.” The writer defined this as “renouncing encumbrances of the old life and practicing the new.”

Reformation, well, no surprises there. But mores? The more is the polite cousin of the taboo. Taboo dates to pre-European culture in the Polynesian islands and refers to what simply is not done - the biggies, the absolute no-no’s. “Reformation of taboos” makes sense. I can understand a spiritual re-education camp where electric shock and punishment push-ups break the bad boy behaviors of overt sin. I can see the rack and thumb-screw for bootlegging dirty magazines into the scriptorium or getting tanked up on the sacramental wine. But who would bother to mess with mores, country club sensibilities that have to do with which fork to use for the salad course and wearing white after Labor Day? Why would those mad monks spend twelve months micromanaging an initiate’s quirks, foibles and pecadillos?

“Though this be madness,” as Shakespeare’s Polonius observed, “yet there is method in’t.”

Taboos don’t take a year to rework. These big slabs of moral beef present a ready target for reformation. God could pretty much dispatch taboos in ten punishing punches. “Thou shalt not” is the body-blow that brings knockout power to a target too big to miss. Idols, murder, stealing, lying - simple to detect with clearly etched boundaries between guilt and innocence.

Much Evangelical preaching operates at the level of taboo. We preachers like to stand in the pulpit and pound the heavy bag. Such proclamation jolts the speaker with a rush of moral clarity and scaffolds the hearer with reinforced satisfaction. I know I’m telling you the right thing, and you know you’re not doing the wrong thing. That great libertarian William F. Buckley writes, “I don’t like rules, but they can be liberating. If the sign says, ‘Smoking Permitted Aft of These Seats,’ then it is only a matter of ascertaining which way is aft before lighting up; and nobody has a legitimate case against you.”

Of course, taboos migrate, but they move at such a glacial pace that we easily keep track. “Don’t smoke or drink” said the churchianity of my youth. “Don’t get an abortion or be homosexual” is the message that currently dominates our billboard pulpits. The old may fade as the new waxes but always with a comfortable period of overlap. Taboo evolves from Neanderthal to Cro Magnon across the chronology of an ecclesiastical ice age and we have no trouble keeping up.

Yes, it is easy to keep our lit cigarettes on the windy side of taboo. The Pharisees in Jesus’ day practiced taboo spirituality. They so savored these moral checkpoints that they festooned the original Ten Uppercuts with numerous jabs. “Remember the Sabbath day” spawned tadpole taboos about flicking fleas and when a licit stroll became a forbidden journey. They stationed pickets and skirmishers on the outskirts of the main batallion in order to make certain no sin invaded the sanctuary of their religion. But if your cigarettes remain aft, the smoke tends to drift forward and send second-hand spiritual carcinogens into the lungs of the innocent.

That may be why Jesus chose to spend so much of his sermonizing on mores. “You have heard that it was said to them of old . . . .But I say unto you.”

Taboo blockaded you from sticking an icepick in someone’s earhole; mores, however, invited character assasination by spiking a third party’s ear with an ice-cold stab of gossip. If taboo restricted murder, Jesus retrained mores to include anger.

Taboo anathematized adultery, but left the eye as a sexual organ free from any legal chastity belt. No prohibition restricted a prescription for visual Viagra that violated the personhood of a woman and reduced her to three-D porn. Jesus worked in the realm of mores and told us to restrain our retinas.

Taboo chained us to the lex talionis and limited the going rate of revenge by the extent of the original offense. Biological (and financial) parity did not aim to encourage mercy but merely to limit vengeance to justice. Jesus called for a remade more which would replace the amputation index for a cheek-for-fist rate of exchange.

Which gets us back to the monastery.

Mores are largely a matter of social conditioning. We conform to them without thinking about them. Once made aware of them, we cannot imagine violating an established one or creating an absent one. As a Texan, I would no more put beans in my chili than some Back Bay Boston esthete would drink red wine with sole. As a Baptist, I never give a second thought (because that would require a first one) to popping the top on a cold brew at the end of a hard day. Conversely, I have a hard time realizing I’m sinning as I sink a shank of sharp-honed gossip into the fleshy part of another’s reputation. I grew up with that behavior. I’ve heard some of the finest Christians I know engage in it. If taboo is the moral heavy-bag in whose wide sides we sink our savage fists, mores are the speedbag whose ball-bearing spin demands nimbleness if we are to strike it twice in the same spot.

The only answer is, indeed, “the reformation of mores.” We must sink ourselves in a new society where these bad habits stand out by being exceptional. Before I became an academic, I never cared about footnote form; preachers have a knightly nonchalance about such matters. Now I can spot a misplaced publication date at a single glance. My new priorities arise not so much from moral improvement as immersion in a different community. Christ calls us to enter a different kingdom, one present though not yet fully born, where mores morph and mold us into a metamorphosis of new life. Which means a couple of important things about the local church.

It means, first of all, that church ceases to be the weekend lounge of the spiritually competent and becomes the bootcamp of the still-civilian soldiers in Christ’s new army. I don’t come to the church as a free agent who chooses to add his value to the franchize. I don’t come as a consumer who samples the wares on offer and purchases only so long as he can’t get the same goods elsewhere at a lower price. I come as a recruit who has seen something desireable in the seasoned soldiers and wants to undergo the training. I submit myself to this community and ask them to reconstruct me as a citizen in the Kingdom of Heaven. And I expect to fail big and often and to receive saving discipline until my mores begin to reform.

It means secondly that I cease to see church as a mechanism for getting what I want out of secular society and start to see it as a way to stop wanting those things. I realize that my “best life now” contorts itself to mores which, as spiritual invertebrates, squish nicely between the big blocks of Christian taboos. I ask the church instead for a spine-stiffening dose of the uncompromised teaching of Christ which, by ending my osteoporosis, forces me to realize that I don’t even negotiate the taboos as well as I once thought. My hands and eyes start to offend me because they don’t fit the new mold, so I re-invoke the lex talionis but turn it inward and hack off my own offending appendages.

“Reformation of mores.” The little jobs are always harder, aren’t they? And more important.

This entry was posted on November 14, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.