The Rules

Years ago a couple of sharp New York Jewish women wrote a dating book famously entitled "The Rules". Interestingly, both of them were divorced.

Tonight I read an article by Santiago Ramos, a Catholic columnist in Kansas City who writes pretty darn well. He was commenting on the tragedy-comedy of the saga of Tiger Woods and the nation's pathetic obsession with following it.

I thought this paragraph was the best part - and indeed, it was dead at the center of his essay:

"Money is a sort of Ring of Gyges, which makes us invisible while we engage in the naked pursuit of certain ambitions. But when the Ring falls off, we have to face up to the “rules” that were broken. The problem is not that, since everyone is a sinner, no one is in a position to judge—if this were the case, then any sort of moral judgment would be impossible. Rather, the problem is that few among us can articulate just where those “rules” that Woods refers to come from, and why we should follow them, and what, if any, relationship they bear with human fulfillment. Janis Joplin once sang that “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” but we are trending towards a sadder definition (cribbing from Andy Warhol): Freedom as another word for what we can get away with. But once you get caught—once the Ring slips off—you must grovel before the rest of us."

I can attest to the truth of this in an even more tragic way. Once upon a time I studied under a philosophy professor in a Catholic college. In addition to teaching a Catholic Catechism and morality course, his most infamous rite of passage for his Ancient Greek Philosophy seminar was the "Ring of Gyges" challenge. He would go around the circle of 12 students and spar with us one by one, picking us off with a rhetorical shotgun, to see if we could force him to admit that breaking the rules while wearing the Ring of Gyges was not only morally wrong but not worth it either. I got very close to winning, but my confidence faltered at the end and he capriciously declared me toast and went on to the next student.

Four years later he blew us all out of the water when we heard that he had annulled his 30-year marriage and married the wife of his best friend, the most beloved professor in our program. Our shock and despair was beyond telling, and then the stories began trickling out of this sick man's brazen shenanigans with his colleague's wife over the years.

It didn't even take money to get him to do these things. He just coveted his neighbor's wife, and coveted the family and community adoration that went with them as the extraordinary people that they all were.

But, as Ramos writes, when the Ring falls off and you're exposed, you're forced to grovel before the rest of us if you want to be let back in to the club. This professor has refused to grovel, refused to admit any wrongdoing, refused to apologize to the legion of wounded alumni and friends who long for some sort of reconciliation. And therefore, as my priest told me when I went to him in agony over how to deal with the man, he has made himself an outcast. He got none of the adoration, family or community he craved. He is welcome nowhere that matters. His idiosyncrasies and crass jokes, once tolerated with a laugh, are now intolerable. And the man even dared to continue publicly teaching classes on Catholic morality. Is that with or without the Ring of Gyges?

Them's the rules. And if you're a Christian, you know exactly where they come from.