I like Rod Dreher, the celebrated creator of the so-called “Crunchy Con” phenomenon and author of a blog and book by that name. (“Crunchy con” = social conservatives interested in communitarian values and possessed of a mild environmentalist streak.) Dreher is usually wrong, but he’s wrong in interesting and provocative ways, and he proves a useful thorn in the side of both religious liberals (like me) and the doctrinaire conservatives who are more in love with the free market than with Jesus.
Dreher, like several of the more thoughtful types on the right, has drifted towards the smells and bells and other-worldy pieties of Eastern Orthodoxy. In a seemingly superficial world, some find new opportunities for profundity by immersing themselves in ancient rituals and liturgies. One doesn’t want to begrudge anyone a chance to taste the transcendence that comes with chants and incense. But Dreher’s latest column at USA Today is both a great challenge and a great disappointment; it’s about Lent and the need for the church to preach more commandments and fewer affirmations.
Dreher contrasts the writings of St. Andrew of Crete, who emphasized sin and the need for repentance, with the words of contemporary mega-church pastors like Joel Osteen, who emphasizes the good news that you are loved and doing just fine. Dreher laments the pervasiveness of an easy message where a comfortable middle-class priest in our comfortable middle-class parish instructed the congregation that the Lenten season is all about — no kidding — learning to love ourselves more.
If Andrew of Crete could see us today, would he conclude that the problem with Americans is they don’t love themselves enough? To the contrary, our problems consist chiefly in that we love ourselves and our pleasures entirely too much.
It’s been a while since I’ve written about faith, and since it is Lent, let me have a crack at what Rod is saying here.
First off, he’s right that churches across the ideological spectrum tend to peddle what Dietrich Bonhoeffer so famously called “cheap grace.” Too many churches don’t challenge their congregants to do the hard work of looking inward, but instead encourage a kind of self-satisfaction of the saved. Liberal churches sometimes define salvation as being saved from the ignorance and moral rigidities of the right; conservative churches too often define salvation as the state of being somewhere where those decadent liberals won’t get to go. It’s very tiresome and it’s not very Christian. And it’s true, too, that churches need to do more than repeat the message “Jesus loves you.” I mean, that’s great — Jesus’ love is the Great Fact of my life — but at some point, I need to hear how it is that I am supposed to live now that I have this awareness that I (along with everyone else) am God’s favorite.
Rod makes a mistake, however, when he writes that our problem is that “we love ourselves and our pleasures entirely too much.” It sounds good, but he misses some key points. First off, a great many people who spend a great deal of time pursuing material things do so not because they love themselves too much, but because they don’t love themselves enough. Much of the reckless consumption that characterizes the modern middle-class lifestyle is rooted in a profound anxiety and unease rather than in genuine self-satisfaction. We consume and consume in order to distract ourselves from ourselves, eating when we’re not really hungry and buying what we don’t really need. Folks in that situation don’t need happy little affirmations that everything is fine, but neither do they need stern admonitions about their own sinfulness; heck, deep down they already suspect they’re plenty sinful enough.
Dreher, like most conservatives, makes snide remarks about “therepeutic” spirituality:
We middle-class Americans are so accustomed to a therapeutic approach to religion that we’ve lost touch with the reality of sin and the need for a strong ethical guide to life. We need commandments, not suggestions.
Our boy Rod misunderstands therapy. Having spent many years in analysis and then in cognitive/behavioral work (worth the hefty portion of my inheritance I paid for it all), I know a thing or two about therapy. (Have I mentioned that the one thing all four of my wives had in common was a major in psychology? In my last ex-wife’s case, she’s now a professor of the subject and a well-regarded clinician.) And the goal of therapy is the same as the goal of the church: transformation. Dr. Levine, my brilliant and kind analyst, didn’t want Hugo merely to find a way to affirm himself; he wanted to lead me on a journey into the depths of my psyche so that I could find the tools with which to become a fundamentally different, fundamentally better man. He believed that analysis had the power not only to give self-understanding, but to give something much more valuable, something predicated on that understanding: the capacity to change.
The culture war is about many things, but on one level, it’s about the question of sin. Those on the conservative side of the barricade, they see sin as something intensely individual. In America, so dominated by a Calvinist understanding of human nature, the conservative view sees humans as nearly totally depraved and in need of a divine grace without which no real good can ever come about. On the left, we believe in sin too, but tend to see sin as something embodied in corporations and institutions (like big business or the military-industrial complex) rather than in our own individual desires. We’re both right, in a sense, and we’re both wrong — sin is both corporate and private. We’re both suspicious of certain kinds of indulgence; the left is more tolerant of what we do with our pelvises, the right is more tolerant of what we do with our pocketbooks, and each side suspects that the other has missed out on an important understanding about the real nature of sin. It’s an old story.
For me, Lent is indeed about repentance. But repentance is not ever the same as self-loathing. Literally, to repent means “to think again”, or to think anew. Repentance doesn’t come through unthinking self-denial, like giving up masturbation or chocolate. Repentance is not a game in which you prove to yourself and to God that you can control one particular urge for the six weeks or so between Ash Wednesday and Easter. God isn’t impressed by the truffle you didn’t eat or the orgasm you didn’t have. Self-denial is only virtuous if it does two things: one, if it connects us to the very real suffering of other living things, and increases both our compassion for and capacity to help them. Two, self-denial is about quieting down our habits of mindless consumption so that we can listen to the real needs of our bodies and our souls. What deep hunger are we masking by overeating? For what sense of inadequacy are we compensating when we consume compulsively? If stopping a familiar coping strategy helps us confront the real source of our pain, then we’re doing the right kind of therapy — uncovering our garbage, naming our problems, so that we can discard them once and for all in the name of love.
The great mistake we make — and I do believe that the right makes this far more often than the left — is that pleasure is the enemy. Pleasure is sinful only when it does one or both of two things: when it comes at the expense of another creature’s happiness or when it serves to hide our own hurts and fears from ourselves. From a Christian standpoint, the questions we must ask ourselves about how we eat and how we have sex and how we spend must always come back to the obligation to understand sin in this way. If we love our pleasures even when they hurt others, then we sin; if we love our pleasures because they serve to numb us to the truth of our own self-loathing, then we sin. But in the end, the greatest commandment is love — love of neighbor yes; love of God, yes. But we cannot give away what we do not possess, and we cannot love God’s creation if we don’t learn how to delight without shame in our createdness.
So this Lent, let’s commit not to self-denial or even greater grim effort, but to true repentance — true “thinking again” — about love, about sin, and about the real meaning of the therapeutic.
Oh, Hugo, I couldn’t disagree more. We are a society that gives altogether too much weight to pleasure, and we deeply need to learn the virtues of fasting. Indeed, I think that Benedict XVI’s meditations on fasting from, I think, last year are profound and compelling. Fasting (from food, sex, or whatever) is a means of restoring the dominance of the spirit over the flesh which was lost at the fall.
FWIW, this Lent I decided to give up sweet foods (so far so good) to donate more to charity (already wrote a check to Catholic Relief Services for disaster relief in Africa) and to do more regular and more in depth Scripture reading and prayer (currently working through the first few chapters of the Revelation to John). I’m ashamed that I didn’t manage to fast through Ash Wedneday, but I will try fasting on Good Friday. Next year I’ll work on something more challenging.
I honor your giving to charity and your scripture work; doing more is always good. But fasting in and of itself is not particularly helpful if all it does is mortify the flesh. The flesh is not bad. The use of the flesh to give us pleasure at the expense of another is.
Hugo, this is a fascinating read, and I agree with you strongly on many of these points. Like you, I’ve been through a great deal of therapy, and, although I’ve made a great deal of positive changes to myself and my life, the majority of them stemmed from the issues of me not trusting myself, not accepting myself, not believing myself. Which, as you say, can easily be wrapped up in “not loving myself” enough. I don’t need to be told how wrong I am; I’ve done that to myself my entire life, with no deeper understanding on how to “re-think” what I need, until I learned better – and more selfishly – how to love.
Well spoken.
Hugo, thank you. This post is part of what prompted me to sit down today and realize that my Lenten fasting was doing the opposite of my intention. Over the past two weeks, I became obsessed with finding loopholes, got self-centred around my inner battle, and lost focus on the really important things. The past couple of days, it’s felt like my entire life revolved around Not Indulging In Forbidden Things. I needed a reminder that Lent is about spiritual practices, not material observances.
Great post, Hugo! I agree wholeheartedly.
Regarding Hector’s comment, as a Jew, I think some of you Christians’ ideas about our holy book are frankly insane. Whatever.
Daisy Bond,
That’s exactly what you _should_ feel, I would think. Were I a Jew, I would probably consider Christianity is nothing more than polytheistic blasphemy.
What a great title for a post, I’ve forwarded it on. Here’s to pleasure and to the God who wants us to feel it. Thanks.
Fair enough, Hector! I don’t go quite that far, but I do indeed seriously question Christianity’s purported monotheism.
“Smells and bells and other-worldy (sic) pieties?
I’ve been reading you for a long time and I respect and agree with many of your views — but I do wish you’d read up more on Eastern Orthodoxy before dismissing it quite so handily and with such a broad brush. Unless I’m reading you incorrectly, in which case, I apologize.
BTW I love your blog!
Sarah, I am very familiar with Eastern Orthodoxy — having considered converting to that particular path many years ago. If you read the Dreher piece, he’s the one who uses “smells and bells”, and I’m riffing on that. I ought perhaps to have made that clearer.
1) Thanks for the accurate characterization of therapy. There might be a lot of really bad therapists out there whose whole repertoire comes from affirming what the patient is right now. But the really good therapists I’ve had have always pushed me to be better, to let go of holding myself responsible for things I can’t control (a stance very much like my Christian commitment to ceding control to God) in order to turn my focus on things for which I *am* responsible.
2) Fasting has a lot of purposes. Solidarity with the poor is one. Solidarity with a religious community who is also fasting is another. We are a community of believers, not just lone individuals. Fasting has weird valences, however, given the first world’s messed up relationship to food, where not eating also is constructed in the popular mind as a way of being more beautiful, more fit. Maybe a better expression of the spirit of fasting in the first world would be fasting from media, from the internet, from unnecessary texting and phoning. These are things that *do* contribute to our lives, and so not doing them has a real material consequence. At the same time, these are things that also leave us unquiet and unable to focus our attention on God.
3) But I’m Catholic. So I fast when the Catholics do, because that’s part of being in a community. Then again, I also gave up facebook for lent, for the reasons I listed above.
Prefer Not to Say,
Good post. Fasting is good, and necessary, for all those reasons. But also (and Hugo won’t like to hear this) to restore the dominance of spirit over the flesh that was lost at the fall. The flesh wasn’t bad in its origin, but it became corrupted, and as St. Paul points out, is now at war with the spirit. Fasting is a way to try and overcome that.
As an Anglican, my church definitely stresses giving things up for Lent, but I wish we added mandatory complete fasts on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, as the Catholics do. The Orthodox are _really_ hardcore, as I understand it- don’t they abstain completely from meat, milk and fish for the whole period except Sundays?
I believe Jesus said, “The Sabbath (spiritual practices) were made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).
I have struggled with an understanding/ appreciation for practices & rituals my entire life as I grew up in a traditionally rigid Episcopal Church but became a Christian through experiences and, more importantly, relationships as a part of Young Life Ministries. I spent some 8 years of my life practicing vocational youth ministry as part of Presbyterian Church & Young Life and studying theology. And then I left to pursue training in Marriage and Family Therapy for a number of reasons, with the intent to come back to ministry. My jouney only got more interesting when I became a part of the “Men Against Sexual Violence” movement and began realizing Feminism IS for everybody, even Christians. I have since become a member of an Emergent Church and have chosen to intentionally live as a relocator in the urban core (“Irrestible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne had a huge influence)– which has brought me, in a sense, full circle with spirtual practices.
I have greater appreciation now for understandings of “incarnational”, “missional”, “post-modern church”, “ecclesiology” and “monastic” among other ideas, values, and disciplines that I use to pay lip service to as I now live and worship as a part of a community that has covenanted together. That said, I have not practiced Lent in a traditional way or sometimes not at all. For a period of time it was due to a lack of understanding how “my works” would do anything for “my relationship with God”. I believe now that individualism is a major problem in the many varities of American Christendom. Spritual practices, Lent and Sabbath included, are only fully realized and experienced in community — a community that includes those we love and those we don’t (how do we ‘love our enemies’ if we don’t live in community with them?).
Hey, who put the sentence, “BTW I love your blog!” in my comment? I enjoy your blog, Hugo, but I did not write that.
Also, I’m now off to read the Dreher piece. I’m sure that’ll make everything clearer. Thanks and blessings, and some days, I DO love your blog. I just never, ever say “BTW.”
Love the blog post and the title in particular: says it all so well.
I can imagine it becoming a best-seller by that title.
The problem arises as well, of course, when people take hedonistic pleasure in… self-denial and suffering. I think it’s, um, significant that that particular self-indulgence is, well, particularly common in the States.
Also, as Lis points out, self-imposed suffering has utility for spiritual growth only to the extent it clarifies rather than muddies introspection.
Very nice post, Hugo!
figleaf
figleaf
heh. try a total 25-hour fast (no water, either). I don’t know how Muslims make it through Ramadan when it falls in the summer.
I did a 30 hour famine with a youth group once to raise money for hunger … that was difficult, especially considering one of the last things we did was serve dinner at a homeless shelter. That was either poorly planned or somewhat sadistic.
Since then, I’ve done the two week “lemonade” fast once. A week in, you don’t miss food so much as you miss chewing. Anyway, I wouldn’t say it brought about any clarity, just a lot of trips to the bathroom. Oh well.
Great post!! Preaching about grace has to come before preaching about sin. Only when people understand that their core self is loved, cleansed and forgiven by God, can they feel safe enough to examine and change the ego and its cravings, without fearing personal disintegration (“who am I without my sins?”). R.R. Reno had a great post about this at First Things: “Fear of Redemption”
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=354
I’ve been too busy and/or lazy to blog about this myself yet, but I will eventually:
http://princetonprofs.blogspot.com/2009/02/womanist-lessons-resisting-lenten.html
This African-American Christian womanist blog talks about how the language of self-sacrifice is heard differently by women, who have been encouraged by society to sacrifice themselves in unhealthy ways. Self-care can be a Lenten discipline if you’re codependent!
Jendi,
I couldn’t disagree with you more. Preaching about sin needs to come BEFORE preaching about grace. Only people who realize they are sick, can be cured. The age of Law (e.g. the Jewish covenant) came before the age of Grace (the coming of Christ) precisely because it was necessary for men to realize how much God’s justice demanded, and how much they fell short, before they could understand why Christ’s death was necessary.
Personally I think that the modern church in America places much too much emphasis on ‘self-care’, ‘therapy’, and ‘feeling good about yourself’, and not enough emphasis on our base, sinful nature, and the need to overcome it. Self-love is, again, the root of all sin. I wish that my church would adopt the Roman Catholic practice of saying that no one should receive communion without first attending confession.
Hector, many of us Catholics wish the CATHOLICS would get serious about that
Hey, Hugo. I remember making this comment years ago on your site, and was able to find it again: http://hugoschwyzer.net/2007/05/23/a-note-on-why-hugo-hates-getting-massaged/#comment-59928
The short version of my previous comment: There’s an idea in Jewish theology that i’ve always loved (despite my not being Jewish), that when you go before God at the end of your life, he will call you to account — not only for any forbidden or sinful things you did — but for every *permissible* pleasure that you never tried.
I dug it up because of this line: “God isn’t impressed by the truffle you didn’t eat or the orgasm you didn’t have.” It really does seem to be a point that a lot of conservative Christian (and even some conservative Jewish) theology misses entirely.
“God made the world, and He saw that it was good.” If that’s true, how can orgasms, or truffles, or fast cars, or the Internet — or ANYTHING, really — be bad in and of themselves? And how can self-abnegation be anything other than insulting and abusing one of God’s creatures?
Good points, Adrienne — and I appreciate enormously the gentle reminder of my own tendency towards bootless self-abnegation!