Religion

Ch.4.pdf

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FOUR When It Hurts

Too Much to Feel

I CAN imagine a world which is a mirror image of our world, identical but opposite, like the negative of a photo- graph or like a landscape reflected in a lake. What is high in our world is low in that other world; what is open here is closed there. There would be a sage in that world, a wise man like Ecclesiastes, but his opposite. He too would tell us the story of his frustrating quest for meaning in life's second act. But where our Ecclesiastes searched for the meaning of life in wealth, pleasure, and knowledge, his twin in the other world will have sought it in poverty, pain, and rejection of the intellect.

The Ecclesiastes of our world tried to make his life mean something by striving for wealth and power. He was disappointed because the quest for wealth and power iso- lated him from his fellow human beings, teaching him to see them as competitors and obstacles to success. Might one not be tempted to follow the exact opposite path, to base one's search for the meaningful life on learning to do without material things, on the renunciation of wealth and power?

Some people have in fact suggested that. Christian and

WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

B ddhist monastic orders have asked their members u--;t themselves to lives of voluntary poverty and hto co,w,u . d f , u.

mility, to escape the corruption an rustratton that the quest for wealth entails. Almost a cen~ury a~~• the great American philosopher and psychologist Wt!Itam Jam saw self-denial as a path to human happiness and se: fulfillment. He believed that wars wer7 fough t not so much for military reasons as fo r psychological ones, because in every generation men felt the need to test their courage and manhood, In his essay "The Moral Equivalent of War," James suggested that people could achieve the same goal less destructively by voluntarily practicing self. denial, getting into contests to see who could do without more creature comforts, who could endure more hardship than the next man.

Probably the greatest modern advocate of finding the true path of life by doing without worldly pleasures was Mahatma Gandhi, the spiritual fa ther of modem India. When Gandhi became involved in his people's struggle for independence, he put aside the fancy clothes he had worn as a lawyer, wore a garment of plain white cloth, and lived and ate simply. (He once said that anyone who ate more than he needed to live was stealing food from someone else, and anyone who owned more clothing than he needed to cover himself was forcing someone else to do without.)

But in the century since William James wrote, there have been more wars and more people killed in wars than ever before. Demonstrating manly courage by doing with· out mat~rial comforts does not seem to have caught on as a substitute for fi hf E d

g mg. ven the young people who rapped out of good n · . . . I 960s co eges and fa mily businesses m the

h to protest their parents' emphasis on material suc- cess ave moStly fou nd their way back to a modified "rat 68

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e " Mortgages and family responsibilities will do that ;~ca 'person. The only remaining symbol of their rejection f their parents' comfortab le lifestyle would seem to be a

0 reference for stick shifts in their cars instead of automatic p . . transmissions.

Monastic orders in the Western world are finding fewe r people called to that life, and in India, few have chosen to follow the path of Gandhi. (And that may be just as well. To read Erik Erikson's psychological biography of Gandhi is to encounter the spiritual greatness of the man but at the same time to discover the sense of guilt and unworthiness which continually tormented him, causing him to afflict himself with hunger and other discomforts and to accuse people around him of terrible wishes which he must have found first in himself. Great people, I sup- pose, are entitled to quirks worthy of their stature, and we can admire Gandhi for his achievements and spiritual depths without having to accept his attitudes about food, sex, and comfort as a guide for our own personal quest. )

The Ecclesiastes of ou r world, finding himself free to do anything he wan ted, pursued pleasure. Thousands of years later, Freud would suggest that the search fo r pleasure was indeed the guiding principle of a healthy person's life. He taught that much human behavior, like the behavior of other living creatures, is determined by the effort to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. We act differently from animals only because our understanding of what is pleasurable and what is painful differs from theirs. So Ecclesiastes lost himself in wine, women, and entertain- ment, until he realized how empty and futile such a life was. Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course. It can be a very welcome change of pace from the

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things we do every day, but should it ever become wh we do every day, we will find it too frivolous a base to bui: a life on.

J think of all the people I knew (and envied) in high school whose lives seemed to be so much more full of fu than mine-the athletes, the good-looking, smooth-talk~ ing students, the first ones to have serious boyfriends or girlfriends. We all envied them back then, because their lives seemed to be one long party, one fu n experience after another. Neither they nor we could have known back then that a life of constant pleasure during those teenage years almost inevitably sets one up for a li fe of frustration after- ward. There arc skills not acquired, habits not formed, and lessons about the real world not learned during those yean of having everything go smoothly for you.

Have you ever noticed how an illness early in life, if not too severe, can teach a person to take sensible care of his health ever after? Or how growing up with fin ancial limi- tations gives one a realistic notion of what it means to earn or spend a dollar? Or how the frus trations of adolescence can teach a person compassion and sensitivity? In the spirit of Jung's observation that "only the wounded doctor can heal," how can a young person to whom things have always come easily learn the lessons of patience, hard work, and tolerance for fail ure in others? Perh aps that is why the most naturall y talented ball players often tum out to be poor coaches. They don't know how to teach others to achieve what came so effortlessly to them. Wi ll someone t~ ~h~m things came effortlessly in you th ever learn the disciplines of patience and postponing gratification or will that person be un ed , ' . prepar ,or the day when the music stops and people start saying no?

How sad to have y h' h our 18 school years be the high 70

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•nt of your life, and have everything run downhill from pOh \e. Irwin Shaw has written a short story called "The 1 e " h ' h I d Eighty-YardRun, w 1c rea many years ago and have ever fo rgotten. A college freshman, at his first football

n ractice, breaks loose for an eighty-yard touchdown run. ~is teammates look at him with awe. His coach says, "You're going to have quite a future around here." His blond girlfriend picks him up after practice and kisses him warmly. He has the feeling that life is completely satisfy- ing, But nothing in the rest of his life ever lives up to that day again. His football experiences never rise above the level of mediocrity. His business career is equally disap- poin ting, his marriage sours, and the pain of fa il ure is even greater because he remembers thinking on a perfect day many years before that life would always be that pleasant.

I think of a woman in my congregation who, some years ago, found her way out of a disastrous marriage. She was young, attractive, had a good job, and was so emotionally scarred that she was in no hurry to enter into a new relationship. For some years, she has been part of the "swinging singles" scene. Today she looks at me over her third cup of morning coffee and an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and says, "I know people envy me-the parties, the vacations, the freedom from responsibility. I wish I could make them understand how much I envy them. I wis h I could tell them how soon it all gets to be dull and repeti- tious, un til you fin d yourself doing things you really don 't want to do, just not to be doing the same thing all over again, and how quickly I would trade all of this for the sound of a car door closi ng and fa miliar steps coming up the stairs at night."

If Ecclesiastes' pursuit of pleasure was unsatisfying, like a snowflake that looks so beautiful as it floats to earth but

r WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

disap~ the instant you try to take hold of it, what Path might the sage of our imaginary mirror-image univers pursue? Is there a way in which he might try to find hi: life's meaning in the deliberate taking on of pain? It sounds strange, but some people do just that. _Their cry, like Faust's, is, "I want to know that I have hved," and the answer that comes back to them is, "The only worth- while life is the life of suffering and self-sacrifice. Living for yourself never brings satisfaction. Only living for oth- ers does."

I have known people who chose to play the role of martyr (or arranged to have that role assigned to them) in a family or work setting, taking all the pain and all the blame on themselves. They seemed to have no wishes of their own except to carry out other people's wishes. They seemed comfortable only when they wen; being exploited or taken advantage of by others. Some were wives of al- coholics, drug addicts, or compulsive gamblers. Some were men or women whose spouses abused them physi- cally or psychologically, beating them with fists or words. (I remember once calling on a woman in the congregation who had told me that she needed to discuss her marital problems. She offered me what was probably the worst cup of coffee I have ever tasted, a spoonful of instant coffee mixed with warm tap water, and proceeded to tell me of her conflicts with her husband while I pretended to sip it. "He's always putting me down. Nothing I ever do is any good in his eyes. He's constantly criticizing me. I can't stand it anymore. I think if I hear another word of criti- cism, I'll kill myself. How is your coffee, Rabbi? Would you like another cup?")

These people seem characterized by an almost total lack of self-worth. They seem to feel that they have no right to

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do anything for th_eir own sakes, but only to submerge h mselvcs in meetmg the needs of others. Perhaps early

in ~ife, someone taught them-their parents, or even their ligious teachers-that they were no good, and they have

:~me to feel that t~e only way they can justify their exis- tence is by becomm~ a_ doo~a.t for others. They seem nhappy about the pam m their hves, but at the same time

~hey seem resigned to it a~d reluctant to do anything to change it. They seem to believe that they deserve to suffer.

Too often, the voice of religion has been heard to justify sufferi ng, to tell people that it is their "cross to bear," the fate that God has wished for them or the fate that they have brought down on themselves by their sinful thoughts and deeds. People have been told to love their afflictions, and they do their best to do that.

These are relatively rare and extreme cases, of course, but they arc the extreme form of a much more common phenomenon, the attitude of the person who says to him- self, "It's not right for me to be this comfortable. I don't deserve it. I have to do something to myself to balance it oft'." What we are dealing with is one of the fund amental conflicts in the American character. On the one hand, we are a terribly self-indulgent people. We squander so much of the world's energy resources to keep ourselves warmer in winter and cooler in summer than most people fi nd necessary. We equip our cars more lavishly than people in other countries furnish their homes, with plush seats, air conditioning, and stereophonic music. We like to eat well, dress well, live well. But at the same time, we are the spiritual children of the Puritans who settled these shores, and that heritage makes us feel guilty when we have en- joyed too much physical comfort. People were not meant

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to li ve so well, a voice whispers inside us, and we had better atone for that.

To the Puritans, life was a grim, serious business, and sin was always lurking to tempt us from the proper path They actually passed laws against laughing on Sunday, th~ Lord's Day. Their idea of entertainment was sitting on 8 hard wooden bench in church listening to a three-hour sermon on the torments of hell. (Someone once defined a Puritan as a person who would abolish bullfighting not because it caused the bull pain but because it gave the spectators pleasure.)

We Americans have inherited these two tendencies, and have never learned how to reconcile them and live com- fonably wi th both. We are cons tantl y getting into cycles of indulging ourselves, feeling guilty, and punishi ng our bodies to make up fo r it. We overeat and then we diet; we drive two blocks to the mailbox, and then drive a mile farther to the gym or swimming pool to work out. It is as if we felt some inner compulsion to punish ourselves for the "sin" of feeling comfortable.

Why does Lorraine, who has been married fo r less than a year to a man she loves very much, have so much trouble relaxing and enjoying making love with her husband? Why does she keep remembering her mother's scoldings and warnings when she would leave on a date or come home from one? Why can't she get over feeling guilty whenever she experiences something pleasant?

Why does Harry, a fo rty-four-year-old businessman, leave the swimming pool of his Florida hotel to call his office twice a day? Why does he fee l he is being irresponsi- ble a~d self-indulgent if he tries to relax and enjoy his vacat10n, and why does his wife always complain about the food at their luxu ry hotel? Why does Max, who was

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t,orn in Europe, brought to this ~untry as a child, and is now 8 successful entrepre~eur, give so generously to any charity wh(ch feat~ res a picture of a hungry child? Do we all bear voices telhng us that _we don 't deserve our good fortune? Do we all secretly beheve that there is somethi ng bad abOUI feeling good, that anything enjoyable can 't pos- sibly last because we don'_t des~rve it?

I think there ,s a sense m which many people seek out pain to "balance" the co~o~ and pl~sures of thei r lives. I remember when I was Jogging. Uni!) I strained my knee a few years ago, I would be out there running my three to five miles every other morning, wearing my T-shirt with ISAIAH 40:3 1 printed on the back. (The verse reads "Those who trust in the Lord will have their strength renewed. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not grow weary." It didn 't help.) I would Jook at the other runners on the streets near my home, their bodies glistening with sweat, their eyes gazing in- tently ahead, seeing that same look of determination on their faces that they undoubtedly saw on mine. Our run- ning had none of the spontaneous exuberance of a child at play or the easy grace of a natural athlete. There was a sense of grim, dogged commitment to it, almost an air of religious penance. I can remember how I would urge my protesting body on for another mile by saying to my- self, "I have sinned by being too indulgent with my body. I have driven when I might have walked. I have eaten and dru nk too much, reaching fo r that extra piece of pie when I should have known better. I have sat at my desk too long, Therefore I must atone for that by punishing myself, afflict ing my body with jogging, submitting it to the Nauti- lus machines, un til I hurt so much that I feel satisfied that my body has paid the price fo r its self-indulgence." (No-

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tice the separation in my thinking ~~wee~ the body that sinned and must suffer, and the spmt which judges and punishes it.) So gymnasiums across the country are hun with signs reading "No pain, no gain" and "If it doesn•~ hurt, you're not doing it right." We seem to contradict Freud by welcoming pain and actually taking pleasure in it.

The conflict may go even deeper than that. It may represent one of the fundamental splits in the soul of Western civilization. Our civilization is drawn basically from two roots, the Greek and the Judeo-Christian. The Greeks, like all peoples before the rise of biblical Judaism and the emergence of Christianity, were pagans. Paganism was more than simply worshipping many gods. It was a deification of nature, treating whatever was natural as divine. For the pagans, God was manifested in the rain, the harvest, the cycles of the sun and the seasons, and in the form and fertility of human bodies. At the most crude level, the pagan gods and goddesses were rainmaking and fertility charms. Imagining a parallel between the rain making the field fertile and the male semen making women fertile, pagan people would have wild sexual orgies in the spring to encourage the growth of the crops and the birth of many babies. They would have more orgies in the fall to express gratitude for the harvest, and sometimes orgies at the time of the winter solstice to strengthen the fading winter sun. (I guess that when it comes to having orgies, any excuse will do.) The Bible describes with dis- gust the cult prostitution in the Temples of Baal, the Canaanite rain god.

In i_ts more sophisticated form, as in ancient Greece, pagamsm expressed itself in the worship of beauty and symmetry. It gave us the architecture of the Parthenon,

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the stunning statues of the male and female bodies, and the worldview captured many centuries later in Keats's "Ode 00

a Grecian Urn":

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

But beauty is not necessarily truth. A beautiful person can be vain, selfish, disloyal. A beautiful building may be the site of corruption and dishonesty. The Bible rejected the ideas that nature was divine and beauty was truth , and insisted instead that righteousness was truth. The Book of Proverbs warns us that "grace is deceitful and beauty is vain, but the woman who fears the Lord shall be praised."(31 :30) Nature is not divine. It is part of God's creation and, like the rest of God's handiwork, can be used for good or misused for evil.

The biblical rejection of paganism may go back as far as the scene in the Garden of Eden when Eve sees the forbidden fruit as being "good for eating and a delight to the eyes," and follows her appetite rather than her sense of right and wrong. If I had to summarize the moral thrust of the Bible in one sentence, it would be, "Don't do what you feel like doing; do what the Lord asks of you ." Biblical sexual morality, the dietary laws of the Hebrews, the em• phasis on charity to the poor and justice for the foreigner ~ere all efforts to teach people to override their "natural impulses." To this day, Jews abstain from food, drink, and sex on Yorn Kippur, the Day of Atonement, not in order to punish themselves for their sins and cause God to feel pity for them, but in order to symbolize dramatically the human ability, which no other animal has, of controlling our instincts. Animals will reject spoiled food; they can be

WHEN ALL YOU' VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUG H

restrained physically or by fear of punishment from ca tin or mating. But they cannot abs~n voluntarily. On!~ human beings (and I sometunes thmk not all human be- ings) can do that . Where the pagans saw divinity in the fulfi lling of man's natural instincts (that modern spokes. man for paganism, Ernest Hemingway, once defined "moral [as] what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after"), the Bible found the image of God in the human ability to control instinct.

The paganism with which the Hebrew Bible took issue was the crude, blatantly sexual paganism of Canaanite farmers concerned mainly with making war, growing crops, and making babies. But in the centuries between the two Testaments, Israel was conquered by Alexander the Great, and the people encountered paganism in its more sophisticated Greek version. Greek culture was not fertil- ity rites and Baal worship. It was the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles. It was architecture, art, and sculpture. Still, from the biblical point of view, Greek culture was fatally flawed because it continued to regard beauty and pleasure as divine, rather than as two of God's minor creations. The Greeks, for their part, could never understand the Jewish lack of re- gard for physical beauty. Why didn't they exercise more? Why didn't they display their bodies for people to admire? Why did they feel they were obeying God when they defaced the perfection of His creation by circumcising their sons?

In James Michener's novel The Source, there is a classic confrontation scene between Jew and Greek, set in the year 168 B.C., just before the revolt of the Maccabees.

ubabel, leader of the Jewish commun ity, has an ap·

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intment with the local Greek governor Tarpho t pO I . b f n, 0 bring a comp amt a out o?e o the Emperor's new laws. TheY meet at the gymnasium, where Tarphon has been exercising. The governor 1s completely naked, exulting • the exercis.e of his bod~ in the sunlight. The Jewish repr~~ sentative, m contrast, 1s so complete.ly dressed that only his eyes and nose are exposed. Neither one is able to understand why the other is dressed (or undressed) as h is. Each se~s the other's manners as a form of blasphem/

By the ttme of the New Testament, the land of Israel was part of the Roman Empire, which combined Greek culture with Roman military and political skill. The reli- gious leaders of early Christianity were so repelled by the flagran t sensuality of Roman life-its nudity, its homo- sexuality, its excessive eating and drinking-that they found themsel~es condemning almost all bodily pleasures as inherently smful. They taught a distinction between the soul, which was pure, holy, and nonphysical, and the body, which was gross, subject to decay, and the cause of sin. For whatever reason, perhaps to test it, the soul found itself trapped in a body of clay during its stay on earth. But God wanted it to resist the temptations of the flesh and return to Him pure and unsullied. Voices in early Chris- ham ty responded to the excesses of Roman life-the ca- sual.sex, the ostentatious displays of wealth, the gluttony -with extremism of their own, becoming mistrustful of any sexual contact, any wealth, any wine or rich food.

In the early Middle Ages, when violence, lust, and the pursuit of wealth dominated European society and even infected th e highest levels of the Church, the most sensi- tive religious souls turned their backs on the world and founded monastic orders based on the ideals of poverty and chastity. Again there seemed to be no middle ground.

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One either lost oneself in a world of material gOOds and sensual pleasure, or else fled from that world and all of ·ts sinful temptations, and taught one's soul to domin;te one's body.

We are all children of the modern Western world shaped by the influence of the Bible, the Church, and Greek culture. We have inherited both the Greek love of physical pleasure and the biblical ambivalence about il We are torn between finding physical pleasures irresistible and finding them shameful and guilt-producing, We have never really made up our minds about sex, sometimes seeing it as the master key to happiness, sometimes seeing it as the cause of most of the world's misery and perver- sion. We tell jokes about sex because the subject makes us anxious, and humor is one of the ways we deal with our anxiety. "Vice squads" and "morals charges" deal almost exclusively with sexual matters, as if there were no other ways of being vicious or immoral except sexual ones. We watch movies and buy magazines glorifying the nude or nearly nude human body, but we still feel vaguely guilty and uncomfortable as we do so-some of us uncomfort• able with that much sexual freedom, some of us rejecting the exploitation of that which should be revered privately -because spiritually we arc children of both Athens and Jerusalem,

We have never really made up our minds about food, Clearly it means more to us than simply nourishment, fuel for our bodies. Food becomes a symbol of love; starting when we were only hours old, someone showed us that she loved us by giving us something to eat. Food represents rcward and reassurance. When we are hurt, angry, lonely, afraid , we calm ourselves with food. But food also repre• scnts temptation (re b E mcm er vc?), the proof that we are 80

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weak-willed, self-indulgent creatures who deserve to be

d in ned for our weakness. con c When the pagan half of our souls has control over us, we indulge ou~ appe~ites too much, too ric~ly, too often, When the Puritan stde takes over, we pumsh ourselves. (I terestingly, the words "pain" and "punish" come from

h n same Latin root.) We diet, we exercise beyond th e

1 e ' h 'd h p0int of pleasure, or we rcJect t e 1 ca t at eating should be a pleasant experience at all. It becomes an inconvenient, unpleasant necessity, like some people's view of sex. We come to tolerate bread that tastes like cotton and vegeta- bles indistinguishable in taste from the plastic they come wrapped in, because caring too much about how food tastes is a form of weakness and gluttony. We inven t fast foods and drive-through restaurants so that we hardly have to cat at all.

It should be eminently clear that we cannot possibly be content if we are constantly at war with ourselves, if our bodies and our consciences are engaged in perpetual strug- gle, one calling the other a pervert and the other respond- ing by shouting back, "Prude!" We ask, How shall I live? and one of the voices inside our heads shouts, "Enjoy yourself!" while another urges us, "Abstain! " We want to have fun but we keep telling ourselves, This is frivolous; why am I doing this? We try to affirm the seriousness of life, only to find ourselves asking, Who am I kidding? Ecclesiastes, who may have been the first biblical author to be both a Jew and a Greek, also heard those two voices, one saying to him, "Life is short. Don't squander it; enjoy it while you can, for who knows how long you will be around?" while the other kept saying, "Life is short; don't Waste it on this here-today-gone-tomorrow vanity." No wonder he was confused .

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Whether this inner conflict stems from our mi ed Greek-Judea-Christian heritage or (as with Gandhi) fr: the Eastern ambivalen~e about the body and materi~ things in general, we will never know rest until we find way out of the cycle of indulgence and guilt and sett denial, sex and shame, binge and diet. How can we even approach inner peace and contentment when one half of us hates and scorns our other halfl

Let me share with you what I think is one of the most profound religious thoughts I know. In the Talmud, the collected wisdom of the rabbis of the first five centuries, it is written, "In the world to come, each . of us will be called to account for all the good things God put on earth which we refused to enjoy." Isn't that a remarkable state- ment for a religious leader to make? No scorn, no disgust for the body and its appetites. Instead, a sense of reverence for the pleasures of life which God put here for our enjoy- ment, a way of seeing God in the world through the expe- rience of pleasant moments. Like all gifts, of course, they can be misused, but then the fault is ours, not God 's. We have all seen people throw themselves into eating or drink- ing or sex or spending money, to such a degree that they no longer enjoy doing these things. The compulsive drinker, the compulsive philanderer soon gets to the point where he can't even enjoy his whiskey or his sexual affairs. He keeps reaching fo r them only to still the pain, to make the need go away. But used properly, all of these appetites c_ome to be seen as God's gifts to us, to add pleasure to our hves . (I recently discovered a similar attitude in a Roman Catholic convent which would accept a candidate for holy orders only if she "ate well, slept well and laughed eas- ily.") '

To view the human body and the whole natural world

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with disgust or mistrust is as much a heresy as to view it . h unqualified reverence. The person who seeks out pain

discomfort ~e<:8u~e she has co~e to believe that she rves it, that 1t 1s sinful to find hfe easy and pleasan t

dCSC misled as the person who mindlessly seeks out plea' m~ . . . as the sole purpose of bemg ahve. Both alike w,·11

sure . , 1 h 1 me to Ecclesiastes me anc o y conclusion, "What have tgained from all this? This too is futile ."