{"id":12181,"date":"2019-03-09T15:27:26","date_gmt":"2019-03-09T19:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=12181"},"modified":"2019-03-09T15:27:26","modified_gmt":"2019-03-09T19:27:26","slug":"a-theological-reflection-on-having-mono","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2019\/03\/a-theological-reflection-on-having-mono.html","title":{"rendered":"A Theological Reflection on Having Mono"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

BD McClay writes a terrific, gripping piece:<\/p>\n

In a collection of papers published in 1966, Erwin Straus, a psychiatrist and phenomenologist, examined the ways in which human beings are defined by their ability to stand upright. A person who cannot stand upright, Straus wrote, \u201cdepends, for his survival, completely on the aid of others. Without their help, he is doomed to die.\u201d12<\/a> But the upright posture and the struggle against gravity that it requires also infuse human life with \u201can inescapable ambivalence.\u201d13<\/a><\/p>\n

Standing upright separates us from other human beings, because \u201cthe strict upright posture expresses austerity, inaccessibility, decisiveness, domination, majesty, mercilessness, or unapproachable remoteness.\u201d14<\/a> Companionable activities often involve reclining or literally inclining<\/em> toward each other, breaking the harsh vertical stance. People, in short, aren\u2019t built for one another. They are built to stand upright and alone. If we need each other, it is because in one way or another we are a kind of physical failure. And if we incline toward each other, it is against our own physiology.<\/p>\n

Such an image of the human person\u2014defiantly constructed against the crushing force of gravity, independent and self-sufficient\u2014is immediately and viscerally attractive. As the virus reminds us, however, the sense of integrity that standing up might instill is not entirely trustworthy. Boundaries are real from a distance, but dissolve as we approach them. Things are themselves and nothing else, yet they are also porous in ways that can disturb us and our sense of identity. Even the boundary between what is alive and what is not is trickier than we think.<\/p>\n

One evening, as I took my ibuprofen, I began to choke. I threw up all the water I\u2019d managed to drink, but the pill wouldn\u2019t budge. The audiobook I was trying to listen to, a mediocre memoir, was playing; the author had just discovered that her father\u2019s apparently accidental death was actually a murder. I thought to myself: Well, I refuse to have this<\/em> be the last book I read. This didn\u2019t help. Nor did pointing out to myself that \u201cDo you ever worry about choking to death alone in your apartment?\u201d is actually a joke from the first season of 30 Rock<\/em>. The pill didn\u2019t budge, and I couldn\u2019t breathe, and I realized this was it. I was going to die.<\/p>\n

I stopped joking and began to pray. I did not ask to go on living, but if I was going to die that was how I wanted to go out. Then I finally coughed up the pill. It took me a few minutes before I believed it. And then, because I had thrown up all over my bedding and was too weak to do anything about it, I had to text my roommate and ask her to come back from her evening out to do my laundry.<\/p>\n

Which she did, while I, weak and more than a little hysterical, slumped uselessly on the couch. \u201cHow miserable is the body that depends on a body,\u201d Christ says in The Gospel of Thomas<\/em>, \u201cand how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.\u201d15<\/a> Erwin Straus would no doubt agree.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

more<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BD McClay writes a terrific, gripping piece: In a collection of papers published in 1966, Erwin Straus, a psychiatrist and phenomenologist, examined the ways in which human beings are defined by their ability to stand upright. A person who cannot stand upright, Straus wrote, \u201cdepends, for his survival, completely on the aid of others. Without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1402,34,72,1329],"class_list":["post-12181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-bd-mcclay","tag-humiliation","tag-in-the-flesh","tag-peter-brown"],"yoast_head":"\nA Theological Reflection on Having Mono<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"BD McClay writes a terrific, gripping piece: In a collection of papers published in 1966, Erwin Straus, a psychiatrist and phenomenologist, examined the\" \/>\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\/evetushnet\/2019\/03\/a-theological-reflection-on-having-mono.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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