We require an extraordinary courage and hope to speak of a blooming flower in the heat of summer. In the moments of pain and fear we often use the categories of danger and death. People can easily identify that it is their own story, but what they need is a cause that they can look beyond. Some periods in history are times of crisis. They can be of natural calamities, crisis in values and culture, or deadly sickness. At times they may be repeated, long lasting, or devastating. The worst thing is that often people have no explanation for what is happening.
People who hold on to retributive theology are most likely to conclude that the world has become very sinful and God has sent punishments. They often develop a crisis mentality. Since it is urgent that we need to be saved from the crisis what is important is to repent, and to withdraw from the world. Gradually it becomes a negative spirituality of detachment that promotes a total disengagement with the world. It's devotional intensity promotes depriving the body of its needs calling it 'desire' with a negative connotation. The opposite is understood to be spiritual and really 'desirable.' Thus we live a Platonic spirituality than a christian life.
A good example is how Europe responded spiritually to the situation after Black death. In our own lives, how happy and excited we are to condemn and hate the body and the world! Are they too bad to be treated so? Why do we keep a kind of unbearable feeling regarding the body? We cannot think of body and soul separately. The inferior status given to the body is a wrong christian anthropology. As it was done earlier we too repeat the same art forms to show that the body is the cause for temptation and sin. Good and evil fight for the human soul, and the evil tempts to yield to the 'pleasures' of the body. These perspectives have made us to feel the body and our natural surrounding as some unbearable burden and made our life and devotions with a melancholic orientation. It can lead us to form a guilt culture that accuses ourselves constantly, and longs to be accused though we may not be consciously aware of it. We may begin to see 'sin possibilities' everywhere ans in ourselves. We can also think of the Puritanism among the Protestants and Jansenism among the Catholics.
Another focus during such times of crisis is on the imaginations of hell and judgement. What we see as the worst things are given to the imaginations of hell; rotting dump with worms and dead bodies was a good image to think of the worst. In the context of war, columns of fire and smoke would fill our hell. Coming ages our imaginations of hell might include the torturing machine monsters.
A vision that is integral with the beauty and goodness of nature and our own body can help us to stand with our own limitations even in the moments of crisis. We do seek interpretations and explanations, but the denial of the world is not an appropriate approach. We must rise above the moments of crisis, but we cannot hold the world responsible for it. The negative things we blame on the world actually proceed from our own ill-spirit or improperly formed 'soul', and not from the body. They may be giving an explanation that offers a solution in dilemma. But the life that we live must be worth lived, and we need 'true' stories for it. We cannot live a true life on 'convenient' stories, whether it be about our body, our world or anything that weaves our life story.
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