{"id":5005,"date":"2016-02-16T14:51:41","date_gmt":"2016-02-16T19:51:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/?p=5005"},"modified":"2016-02-16T15:16:07","modified_gmt":"2016-02-16T20:16:07","slug":"that-good-ol-life-affirming-self-inflicted-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/2016\/02\/that-good-ol-life-affirming-self-inflicted-violence.html","title":{"rendered":"That Good Ol’, Life-Affirming, Self-Inflicted Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"The<\/a>
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel. CC Wikimedia.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

I\u2019ve found that, for all the glories of the Church, there are two which almost universally inspire envy in those outside of her folds: The Sacrament of Penance and the season of Lent. Speak on the life-changing effects of contemplation \u2014 you may get some interest from the Zen kid at the back. Pontificate on the papacy \u2014 you\u2019ll be lucky to piss off a Presbyterian. But tell someone you\u2019re going to confess your sins to a priest, or that, for the next forty days, you\u2019re giving up coffee \u2014 voila<\/em>, you\u2019ve got interest.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to see why this is the case: When the ethical\u00a0status quo<\/i> is the timid mandate to \u201cenjoy yourself without hurting others\u201d Lent\u2019s demand that you \u201cdeny yourself\u201d takes on all the fascination of a forbidden fruit \u2014 a veritable of brothel of austerity and a compelling temptation towards virtue. In a world in which the ethical act par excellence<\/em> is\u00a0to \u201caccept yourself\u201d the ethics of Lent are have all the grand romanticism of a sin. She says, mocking the age: Do not<\/i> accept yourself. There is, after all, something quite wrong<\/em> with your self. She\u00a0explodes the entire artifice of self-acceptance and self-love and musters up from some dark, medieval unconscious \u2014 the Anti-self. It demands from a pacifist people an incomparable inner violence, a civil war \u2014 a rebellion of self against self within the unity of a single person.<\/p>\n

If it sounds gloomy, try telling any post-Christian denizen at any Bed, Bath and Beyond that you are giving up your mattress and taking the floor for the penitential season \u2014 stripping the rotten layers of comfort that have accumulated around your now-pasty, now-sensitive flesh.\u00a0You\u2019ll catch a gleam of longing in back of their retina. We are culturally deprived of any opportunities for mortification. We yearn for it as one yearns for plain bread after a week of sweets or as a man marinating in the warmth of his bed longs for cold air and consuming work. This convincing call to smash ourselves into pieces is present in every man who, stuffed with comfort, living pleasantly in a pleasant housing complex, begins to read books on Arctic explorations; begins to hate waking up; begins to emphasize with Walker Percy\u2019s protagonists:<\/p>\n

There at any rate stands Will Barret on the edge of a gorge in Old Carolina, a talented agreeable wealthy man living in as pleasant an environment as one can imagine and yet who is thinking of putting a bullet in his brain.<\/p>\n

Asceticism \u2014 the voluntary taking on of pain, want, and suffering \u2014 is a natural breath of the human spirit, and the ban on asceticism is a deliberate reduction of life. Lest this devolve into some kind of sermon on\u00a0chest-thumping\u00a0manly-manliness, let me be quite clear: I am a limp and comfort-ridden invertebrate drifting to whatever warmth or pleasure tickles my consciousness. I have all the firmness and willpower of dropped ice-cream. I fear pain. But consider:<\/p>\n

1. Suffering, want, and death are certainties of human existence. To live a life that actively avoids pain, suffering and want is only to make ourselves\u00a0less and less capable of dealing with it when it comes \u2014 for indeed, the Iceman cometh. Far better to begin, even now, an active training in the inevitable vocation of the human race than to gradually neuter our capacity for the heroism that catastrophe and death will most certainly demand of us.<\/p>\n

2. Suffering, want, and death, even when we are momentarily cushioned against them, are occurring, as we speak, to our neighbors. This may only concern those who blush to find themselves fed while others starve and warm while others freeze, but have it anyways: The insulated avoidance\u00a0of suffering removes us from any kind of genuine solidarity with humanity, which, as a family, suffers, moans, labors and dies.<\/p>\n

3. Deliberately comfortable people cannot affirm that God loves them, nor that life is worth living, nor that the universe is good. They are too busy avoiding large swaths of the universe, medicating the miserable parts of life, and thanking God only insofar as \u201cWhat happens to those other people doesn\u2019t happen to me<\/i>.\u201d William James has this to say about that:<\/p>\n

Let a man who, by fortunate health and circumstances, escapes the suffering of any great amount of evil in his own person, also close his eyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside of his private experience, and he will be quit of it altogether. But\u2026it is but for the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and unprovided for by his philosophy\u2026It accepts, in lieu of a real deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape by. It leaves the general world unhelped\u2026The real deliverance\u2026must be of universal application.<\/p>\n

If one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this world\u2019s history fairly into his mind\u2013freezing, drowning, entombment alive, wild beasts, worst men, and hideous diseases\u2013he can with difficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of world prosperity without suspecting that he may all the while not really be inside the game, that he may lack the great initiation.<\/p>\n

Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes the initiation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like children around a chilly pool, we simultaneously long for and fear the great initiation into the totality of life. On the one hand, we see the goodness of self-inflicted suffering. Tell us that Christian Bale starved himself in order to lose enough weight to play the emaciated protagonist of The Machinist, or that Leonardo diCaprio choked down a raw liver for The Revenant, and we\u2019ll go into IMDB-ecstasies \u2014 the sacrifices men make for Art! Tell us the excruciating workout routine of a professional athlete, and we\u2019ll be similarly struck \u2014 what dedication to the Sport! But, tell us that Pope St. John Paul II whipped himself with a belt<\/a> and, yup, there it is \u2014 a nice strong waft of moral disapproval. Self-inflicted suffering for Art \u2014 idyllic. Self-inflicted suffering for sport \u2014 Noble. Self-inflicted suffering for God, solidarity, and human flourishing \u2014 medieval, self-hating and vaguely pornographic.<\/p>\n

But I wonder whether our modern, da-Vinci-Code inspired and titillated horror over fasts, ashes, deprivations, hair-shirts and flagellums is really an honest, healthy rejection of self-mutilation, as much as it is a reaction of a generation incapable of affirming the whole of life. For me, at least, it is the latter. I do not have a particular balanced view of the goodness of the body, or vivacious sense of \u201cthe good life\u201d that the austerity of a St. Francis or the mortifications of the Desert Fathers threaten. The asceticism of the Saints horrifies me because the Saints are capable of giving their life-affirming \u201cyes\u201d even to suffering, saying: This too is good. This too comes from the open hand of the Father. This too should be sought for the sake of human flourishing. The Saints can declare the entire universe and the total humanity good and worthy of participation, while I am left affirming the life insofar as it doesn\u2019t get too<\/i> rough, giving my \u201cyes\u201d to a portion of existence wedged between the smothering constraints of comfort, happily\u00a0absenting myself from\u00a0the total humanity who groans on the outskirts.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve found that, for all the glories of the Church, there are two which almost universally inspire envy in those outside of her folds: The Sacrament of Penance and the season of Lent. Speak on the life-changing effects of contemplation \u2014 you may get some interest from the Zen kid at the back. Pontificate on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThat Good Ol', Life-Affirming, Self-Inflicted Violence<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I\u2019ve found that, for all the glories of the Church, there are two which almost universally inspire envy in those outside of her folds: The Sacrament of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/2016\/02\/that-good-ol-life-affirming-self-inflicted-violence.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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