Philosophy: flogging and motivation

My lack of blogging flogging seems to have worked, so I think I should flog myself a bit over my lack of dissertation work. Monday is a deadline for giving it to a friend for analysis – so tomorrow has to be the big day for progress. Bad me. Bad me.

Maybe I’m not into self flogging at the moment.

But I do suddenly remember a film I saw in high school Spanish class, about a Jesuit missionary in the jungles of South America. I think he was basically having his way with a couple young local girls, and then at night we would see the most horrid scenes of him in his candlelit wooden hut, not far from the village, kneeling half naked before an image of Jesus and fiercely flogging himself with leather straps. He was crying, not so much with the pain from his bleeding back, but from self-disgust; and between lashes he would mumble through the tears his pleas to God to help him.

This seemed to go on regularly: lurid sex between the missionary and very young local girls and then a poorly lit scene of sobbing and self-mutilation. It really had an impression on me, obviously if I remember it eight years later. It seemed to confirm my whole condemnation of Catholicism, and no doubt fits in well with all of the sexual abuse scandals of the last decade.

But at the same time there is something profoundly beautiful, almost poetic, in this man’s unhappy consciousness: this being torn asunder by his fleshly impulses on one side and his spiritual aspirations on the other. He could have just as well raped every woman in the village and walked out with a smile, if it hadn’t been for that aspiration, that knowledge of something greater, that faith. But it seems that his faith failed him. Neither God nor the Church did anything to help him, let alone the girls/women who’s lives he was so terribly effecting (again with parallels to contemporary issues).

I feel like him sometimes: caught between fleshy pleasures and spiritual aspirations. The former are always so easy, so near; the latter too often remote, difficult. But… perhaps the man’s failure, like my own at times, is in not realizing the immanence, the immediacy of spiritual aspirations’ achievement. So maybe it is appropriate that I read more often the words I have staring at me from the top of my computer monitor:

it reads: