We've Taken "White Space" For Granted

I start work in twenty minutes, so this is going to be a short post.

There is a kind of secular parable I have thought about from time to time, as it has stayed with me:

"An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.” The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?” To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican. The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!” “Millions – then what?” The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”"

I read a lot of personal finance blogs, most of the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) authors came of age during the Great Recession and so are all about monetizing every last moment for financial gain. We know many families (or at least used to) who have their schedules at 98% capacity with sports, activities, work, and other things. If time is currency, they are living lean. Not faulting, just mentioning.

And our jobs, for most Americans, are structured to have no fat, maximum efficiency. I suppose this is part of Capitalism and the Protestant work ethic. Not faulting, just mentioning.

I have also read studies that most Americans do not have $1,000 cash on hand to cover an emergency should emerge. Many are one job loss from missing a mortgage payment. Many are simply living to paycheck to paycheck. Not faulting, just mentioning.

The reality of this Coronavirus pandemic is starting to set in. Everything is shut down. We are moving into recession territory. And we realize just how little margin we have given ourselves in the quest for maximum efficiency.

I am a big proponent of the idea of 'white space' that is often seen as "useless." God gave us the Sabbath to rest, because He rested on the 7th day of creation. He was strict about it--Sabbath is for rest and worship. What many families are realizing--on both a positive and negative note--is being quarantined is forcing us into that "useless" space of time. Time is a commodity many people don't have because leisure is oftentimes equated with laziness in a hyper-efficient culture that doesn't naturally build such buffers in. I'm a proponent of hard work, the value of work, Capitalism as an economic system, and making good use of time for what is important. As devastating as the fallout from this illness is going to be on all fronts, if anything maybe we can be grateful for the gift of time--for family, for self-reflection, for spiritual renewal--and not take it for granted for those of us in quarantine. Make good use of it, and always try to look at the good in even the worst situations.

"The Spirit of God Left Him:" When Mental Illness and Demonic Obsession Meet

Last night as I was helping my son prepare for his first Confession, and we were going through an examination of conscience in his St. Joseph First Communion book, I realized I have been a little sloppy in my own EOCs. I have a bad memory, and yet I don't write my sins down typically. I go through a general Examination of Conscience in my head, but not in fine detail. When I do go to Confession, I don't withhold anything intentionally, but cover myself with "for all these sins and those sins I can't remember, I humbly beg pardon, penance, and absolution" on account of my forgetfulness.

But last night I decided to join my son in writing down my sins, and using a more thorough Examination of Conscience. I said we would burn the papers in the outdoor fireplace together after we finished making our Confessions and received absolution (which we did). There is something about writing down sins, and confessing them with the lips, that makes it real in a way, something I think many Protestants miss out on without the benefit of the Sacrament. The taste of holy shame on our lips as the words are spoken, like a burning crimson ember, turns to sweetness when the Lord extinguishes it with a breath in absolution. Then we are filled with the Holy Spirit to begin our lives anew, white robes and all, ready to die and ready to live.

In digging deeper last night than I normally might, I unearthed some sins that I may have confessed and been forgiven of, but which still haunted me because I did not perhaps lay them out in as much detail as was warranted, given how shameful they were (I should mention that I do not struggle with scrupulosity, OCD, or feeling unforgiven).

Of course, those sins are for the Lord's eyes only, and I do not plan to go into detail about them. But it was from a chapter in my life in which, I believe, I actually went through a mild form of demonic obsession that coincided with a period of acute diagnosed mental illness. In fact, I speculate that it was not being in a state of grace that opened up a spiritual wound which got infected, and my mind was leveraged against me during this period by demonic forces.

I am very careful in sharing my own testimonies of God's grace and redemption, my particular struggles, and trying to do so for the glory of God. Not because I am afraid to share some personal things, but because I don't want to generalize what I have experienced as a proscription for others. My situation is unique in some ways and ordinary in others; I would hope relatable on some fronts, and maybe particular to my circumstances on others.

This can be a very difficult area in which to tread because of symptomatic overlap. It needs to be stated that mental illness is usually in its own diagnostic category (psychiatric) and that spiritual issues should be dealt with spiritually (via the sacraments, confession, consultation with clergy and spiritual directors, etc).

It is when spiritual malaise and mental malaise intersect in a kind of Venn diagram of illness that it can be very difficult to discern root causes and treatments. Some fundamentalists will put forth that mental illness is a sin problem, not a mind problem; Psychiatric professionals would purport that there is no spiritual element to strictly neurological or psychiatric conditions. I think both are not entirely accurate. There are spiritual elements at play, as well as biological/neurological/psychiatric. The intersection is where it gets muddy.

A passage from scripture that has always stayed with me because of it's frightful imagery appears in 1 Samuel 16:14

"Now the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord terrorized him." 

And later in 1 Sam 19:9-10:

"But an evil spirit from the Lord came on Saul as he was sitting in his house with his spear in his hand. While David was playing the lyre, Saul tried to pin him to the wall with his spear, but David eluded him as Saul drove the spear into the wall."

We know, that when we commit moral sin, the spirit of God departs from us, as it did to Saul. We are spiritually naked and out in the wind, so to speak, vulnerable and in danger of damnation. I was very much in a state of mortal sin prior to the onset of my first severe psychiatric episode. When the episode itself hit like a tidal wave (acute mania followed by psychosis), the spiritual vulnerability was leveraged in obsessive religiosity.

But it was not the holy kind. In fact, there were unmentionable instances of blatant blasphemy that I was driven to, not unlike Saul being driven by an evil spirit to pin David to the wall with a spear. I cannot use the illness itself to release me from the hook, though it may have mitigated culpability to an extent. But because I was not in a state of grace (my choice, my will, my volition), I had made a home for demons to dwell and force my hand against the Lord God, my Savior himself. Part of me would say today, "I did not know what I was doing." But that was the scary part. Who was moving my will? Who was forcing my hand? Who was throwing the spear? There was no grace in me--I was spiritually dead. And so in that vacuum, a nest was made.

In recounting my past sins of such blasphemy--which I had confessed before but which now seemed so grievous that I'm not sure I confessed them in the amount of detail that should have been warranted--I was able to verbalize in shame, feeling the burn, and rooting out the vestiges of straw and bark from the nest itself. I may not have been in my right mind, but I was not in a right spirit either, and that I had brought on myself through disobedience. The danger was acute. I was driven to the brink of suicide in the ensuing crash following these psychic highs, in which I had visions of "a black man, a shadow figure, a faceless one, wearing a hat and calling me to another side" from which only God's merciful grace (of which I had not merit to) kept me from crossing over to.

Part of "tripping into" this state of moral desolation in which the spirit of God is not living within a person (mortal sin) is so commonplace today, I fear for the vulnerability of the mind of those going through it, including my own. Which is why I am so careful, and so grateful, to have been shown (by grace) what needs to be avoided, and what needs to be embraced, to be in a state of grace. Because I truly believe that a state of grace is what fortifies my mind against unwelcome guests, the same spirits that afflicted Saul and drove him mad. I have had no symptoms of psychiatric malaise, despite a severe and verified clinical diagnosis, in almost ten years, and I attribute this in part due to that indwelling grace that was not killed off by mortal sin.

But I am acutely aware, too, that I need to be vigilant about the scummy buildup of venial sins on my soul that can make me and others more susceptible to mortal sin. Again, this is not a matter of obsession or scrupulosity, but tempered periodic soul scrubbing by the Divine Physician himself every few weeks in the Church's gift of the Sacrament of Confession. As I have stated in past conversations and writings, I still attend to the psychiatric preconditions necessary to stay healthy (medication, exercise, diet, sleep, doctor's visits, etc) to keep that "control group" in check. If I'm psychologically healthy and spiritually in trouble, the one can affect the other. Both are within my power, to a degree, due to the grace of baptism (the will) and knowledge (knowing what I need to do to stay healthy) so we don't have a repeat episode of what happened fifteen years ago. I don't every want to go through that again, while never wanting to forget the abomination of desolation that was my soul when not in a state of grace, and a nest of demons living in my inner being compelling me to act contrary to the virtues by the forcing and misappropriation of my mind and will. It is so very dangerous to give them any footing in the soul, which is why I try to be vigilant in staying close under the mantle of Our Lady and with the Cross every before my eyes. I know what's at stake, and the mind is an existential battleground where war is waged, a war against my very self, which I am not strong enough to withstand on my own. Without grace, I am doomed. If the Spirit of God leaves me, I am indeed a mad man in the making, hunting down the pious servants of God with deranged eyes, seeking to pin them to the wall with jagged spears, to crucify the saints and betray Christ himself. I can't afford that. So, I hope you will forgive me for treating the stakes very high in this battlefield of the mind. May God be praised, may His Holy Name be praised, that He extinguishes the burning ember of shame and we might taste the sweet fragrance of divine forgiveness, and be welcomed back into His friendship, restored to a right spirit, and a sound mind.

On Tattoos

In visiting men in prison and reading the Gospel to them once a month for the past couple years, I have seen a lot of tattoos. It's interesting, actually--almost every man who I greet when they start to file in the chapel, all fifty of them or so...almost all of them have various tattoos on their body. Now, this is not a causation/correlation observation, but just an observation that stands on its own: a lot of these guys in prison have tattoos.

At one point I had briefly thought about a tattoo in my twenties. I was kind of a "go big or go home" guy, so I thought about something like an oak tree across the back. But I could never really decide or commit to something, anything, I wanted on my body for the rest of my life. My tastes and interests change too much and too frequently, and I have also been known to have a regret or two. In fact, I know grace is real because there is no way I could have sustained 20+ years of religious practice and devotion if it weren't for God's grace in it, the reason for my belief in the first place. It never would have sustained itself beyond a passing fad without it. I'm simply too fickle, or maybe just am interested in too many things.

Again, another observation: many of the pious people I know do not have tattoos. Not that a pious person can't have them, but in many cases the tattoos came before a major conversion and so are a fleshly reminder of a past life. I don't know too many people who have come to Christ in a major way and end up getting tatted after the fact. Not to say it can't happen, I just haven't seen it.

I don't know if there are arguments against tattooing from a Christian point of view. I see it is as kind of neutral. I know Leviticus states you shall not put tattoo marks on your body (19:28). Matt Fradd at Catholic Answers writes a little bit and seems to share my view here. I'm not here to write about the morality of tattoos.

What I did want to write about it why, despite that an outsider would call me "pretty religious," I would not consider getting any kind of religious tattoo as a reflection of that faith or piety. This is me speaking personally, not making blanket statements. And as I have been reflecting on it, I think it ties into Romans 7, where Paul speaks about the law and sin:

"What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good." (Rom 7:7-12)

On Ash Wednesday, we Christians are "marked" more of less with the conspicuous sign of the cross in black ash on our foreheads, but for a day. But then we wash it off and get down to business: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We do this in a way that does not let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.

Here's my fear in getting something like a tattoo of our Lord and Savior on the cross, or Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, or our Blessed Mother, tattooed on my arm or back or wherever--that when I would do that, like the law, sin would seize the opportunity afforded by this kind of bodily "oath" to produce in me every kind of impiety. When our Lord says, "Let your yes be yes and your no be no; everything else is from the evil one" (Mt 5:37), for myself I apply this reasoning to any kind of religious tattoo. A tattoo is a kind of oath--its something you commit to having on your body and displaying until you are lying in your coffin. It speaks about you to others, whether you want it to or not, particular to whatever the image is that is being reflected from your skin. People typically get things tattooed on their bodies that are meaningful or important to them--it may be their children's names or images; a loved one; a particular verse of poetry; or a meaningful flower. Whatever it is, unless you have it removed by laser, it is with you for life.

I think about women I have had relations with in my past via fornication--women I tattooed and more or less bound my spirit to--that I am not (obviously) with today. I was so sure I was in love. I was so sure it was ok because we were committed. Of course the Church's prohibitions did not apply to me given these feelings? And yet I live with the tattoos of regret for having sinned against the Lord and made an oath with my body that was obviously broken. The Lord has forgiven my sin and I have done penance--he has used the laser of his precious blood blot out my offense. But knowing what I know about myself, a tattoo is reminiscent of these kinds of poor decisions and rationalizations of a kind of permanence that I cannot commit to.

I have seen some beautiful artwork of our Savior and our Lady in ink. But, personally, I think these are best served on canvas, or paper, or icons, than on bodies. When we sin, when these living icons of holy images are fused onto our skin, and we become visible apostates to the Holy Face. Does a religious tattoos--no matter how committed we are to our faith--make us more holy, more pious? I would have my doubts. And if not, then would be willing to question why it is we would consider making our skin this kind of canvas, were it not to aid in piety or devotion? If you are robbing a liquor store or fornicating with an image of our Lord on your shoulder or arm, are you not bringing shame and scandal to the faith and the holy images of the One who died to forgive the very sins you are committing?

Again, this is not to make judgments. But I know for myself, were I to get such a holy image tattooed on my body, I would feel sin would be right there as the day in which the law was birthed (Rom 7). I would rather have a blank canvas of a body, let my yes mean yes and my no mean no, do charity unnoticed, mortify the senses in secret, and venerate images in churches and private chapels, then be a walking billboard of hypocrisy, given my great sins which bring tears to the Savior's cheeks.