A Protestant friend of mine decided to tweak me publicly on
Facebook. “I was
reading Tony Layne’s blog the other day and it reminded me of this bit from The Meaning of Life which Tony took me
to in the theaters.” (Yes, yes, I
did. Mea
culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)
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| © 1983 Handmade Films |
The bit in question? The musical number, “Every Sperm is Sacred”.[1] Two minutes later, he
added, “I would be remiss in not posting the proper response to my last post,”
to which he appended the
sketch that follows the song, in which a Protestant
man (the late Graham Chapman) waxes rhapsodical over the Reformation and
condoms, unaware that he’s arousing his seemingly proper wife (Eric Idle).
My favorite exchange comes near the
end: Chapman says that Martin Luther may
not have been aware of the full implications of his ninety-five theses in 1517,
“but because of him, my dear, I can put anything I want on my John
Thomas.” To which Idle replies
pantingly, “Well, then, why don’t you?”
But alas, Thomas Cranmer is too wrapped up in thundering self-righteously
against the hidebound Catholic morality to pick up on her hint. Protestants, the message seems to be, can do
whatever they want … but they don’t.
Of course “Every Sperm is Sacred” is a hideous exaggeration
of Catholic teaching about sex; it wouldn’t be satire if it weren’t. Catholic teaching places great emphasis on
the sacramentality of the marital act; in its proper context, sex is man’s
participation in God’s act of creation.
And the Pythons unwittingly tell us precisely what’s wrong not only with
contraception but with the Protestant Reformation: the inordinate, isolating
emphasis on the individual will. But you
neither expect nor even necessarily want nuance from a comedy film … even one
made by a very erudite British comedy troupe.
Did I say all that?
No.
The fact is, sometimes when I’m writing about sex,
contraception, abortion and all that, I find myself starting to hum: “Ev’ry
sperm is sacred; ev’ry sperm is great; if a sperm is wasted, God gets quite
irate ….” It’s a kind of built-in
reminder of the Last Law — “You have taken yourself too seriously.”
According to the Wikipedia
article, pro-aborts sing the song outside clinics to bait pro-life
protesters; it must fall a little flat when there are pro-life non-Catholics at
the barricades. Legal scholars say it “[exposes]
the absurdity of the anti-choice argument when taken to its extreme,”[2] while Richard Dawkins says it demonstrates
the “surreal idiocy” of some pro-religion, pro-life arguments.[3] I say that, since the song attacks a
jumbo-sized straw man,
it really shows off the danger of argument by sneer.
They’ve taken the song too seriously. Largely because they’ve taken themselves too
seriously.
It’s a fine line to walk.
On the one hand, we’re taking a very visible side in a war for the soul
of our country. Therefore, the fight
should be taken seriously. On the other
hand, perhaps precisely because it is a war, usually what’s supposed to pass
for humor is bitter, agonistic and snotty, the posturing of the self-absorbed
and the self-righteous who are no longer interested in converting the enemy but
rather subduing him, nay! bludgeoning him into surrender.
Why should there be any laughter, anyway? Is fifty million plus dead children a source
of humor? Are human rights a joke?
No, but human folly is.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “I laugh because I must not
cry.” Anger, given enough time and fuel,
twists the soul out of shape; pondering the Western tragedy in its fullness can
lead to despair. Laughter is a function
of hope; levitas prevents us from
being crushed under the weight of gravitas. It’s one of those human paradoxes that a
sense of the ridiculous helps us retain our dignity. People with healthy psyches can both make and
take jokes about themselves because they’re not overly concerned with
themselves. The sociopath, the
narcissist and the fanatic can’t stand any slight to their dignity.
Scripture tells us that the wisdom of this world is folly in
the eyes of the Lord; by contrast, God’s wisdom appears as foolishness to sight
made crooked by sin. I laugh at things
like “Every Sperm is Sacred” because I laugh at people who laugh at things they
don’t really understand … like the presumably intelligent woman who wrote, in
all seriousness, “Who says sex has anything to do with reproduction?” Or the morons who compare God with Santa
Claus and the Easter Bunny, which is sort of like comparing the USS Nimitz to a rubber ducky.
A satire is not an argument.
It derives its humor from concurrence in a particular worldview, a given
set of values, not from logic or evidence.
Had the West been still possessed of the proper, historical Christian
cosmology, which views God as radically present in all places and specially
present in some, the humor of the song would have been greatly attenuated if
not lost on a people that still viewed the marital act as something sacred.
Why sacred? Because
we can choose to love, to bond with each other for the rest of our lives, to
raise children. Other animals have no
such choice; their reproductive behavior is hard-wired in a way and to a degree
that ours isn’t. Our participation in
God’s creative act is dignified when we make it an active choice rather than
depend on technology and chemicals to prevent our bodies from doing what they’re
designed to do.
Contraception is the real joke.
[1]
Music by André
Jacquemin and David Howman; lyrics by Michael Palin and Terry Jones.
[2]
Emily Martin. “Body Narratives, Body Boundaries”. In
Grossberg, Lawrence; Cary Nelson, Paula A.
Treichler (1992). Cultural Studies. Routledge. pp. 409–23.
[3]
Dawkins, Richard (2006). The God Delusion. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, p. 300.
