When you finish with a link, return to this website by using back arrow in upper left corner of your link screen. If there is no Back Arrow – click on Red X upper right
RON ROLHEISER, OMI Speaker, Columnist and Author
Guilt Thwarts Celebration
1983-06-13
06/13/83
One of the hardest things to do is to celebrate. We want to, we need to, but we don’t know how to! Celebration does not come naturally to us. What do most of us do when we celebrate? We overdo: we take a lot of things we ordinarily do, drinking, eating, loving, talking, singing, humoring, and so on, and we simply take them to excess. We eat too much, drink too much, sing too loudly, tell one joke too many, simulate love too much, hoping that somehow in the excess we will touch celebration (whatever that means).
We try to attain ecstasy by pushing ourselves beyond our normal senses. But, for all our frenzied attempts, there is precious little genuine enjoyment. Occasionally we do succeed and we genuinely celebrate: we join others, feel ourselves being widened, made larger, in community, in playfulness, in love. But that happens seldom, and never in frenzy. Mostly the party is followed by a hangover, either physical, emotional, or psychological. The reasons for this are complex, deep, and too often hidden from us. I would like to try to flush out one of them.
The main reason why we find it so difficult to truly celebrate is that we lack the capacity to genuinely enjoy, to simply take life, pleasure, love and enjoyment as a gift from God, pure and simple. Perhaps I shouldn’t say we lack this capacity because we have it as a God-given gift in us. More correctly, our capacity to enjoy is too often buried under a mound of what psychologists would call collective neurotic guilt. That is a heavy term but it means simply that too often we cannot enjoy what is legitimate and given us by God to enjoy because somehow, consciously or unconsciously, we sense that all of our pleasures are “stealing from God.” This feeling wounds most of us. Somehow, in the name of God, we deprive ourselves of the right to enjoy.
Whatever the answer, we are stuck with the situation. We go through life deprived of our capacity to enjoy, alternating between rebellious enjoyment (“pleasure we steal from God”) and discipline and duty (which we do without enough love and enjoyment). We never seem to be able to genuinely celebrate. I say genuinely because, paradoxically, our incapacity to enjoy tends to push us into pseudo-celebration, hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure. Put simply, because we cannot enjoy we pursue enjoyment too much. Too often this leads to a dangerous confusion: we begin to confuse pleasure with enjoyment, excess with ecstasy, and the denial of self-consciousness with the heightened awareness that community brings. All the unfulfilling substitutes in the world won’t fill in what’s missing because we haven’t celebrated.
Why do we have such a need to celebrate? What causes that urge in us? We have a deep need to celebrate because certain moments and events of our lives (e.g., a birthday, a wedding, a graduation, a commitment, an achievement) demand that they be celebrated. They demand that we surround them with rituals which heighten and intensify their meaning and that we link ourselves with others as we live through them.
The same is true of many of our deep erotic, playful, and creative feelings. They demand to be celebrated: shared, heightened, widened, linked to others. We have an insatiable need to celebrate and it is good! Ultimately we have a need for ecstasy (EK STASIS, which means standing outside of ourselves in a heightened self-awareness). We go to celebrate in order to do this: to heighten events and feelings, to share them, expand them, link them to others, to be playful, to intensify and bring to ecstasy. But given our inability to do this simply, given our guilt complexes and our inhibitions, we make pseudo-celebration.
We try to find the expanded awareness in excess, the widened community in sex, and the ecstasy of heightened self-awareness in the frenzied denial of our consciousness. Small wonder we trudge home hung over, a bit more empty and a bit more tired and quite a bit more all alone. The hangover is always a sure sign that, somewhere back down the road, we missed a sign-post. But we must continue to try.
Christ came and declared a wedding feast, a celebration, at the very centre of life. They crucified him not for being too ascetical, but because he told us that we might enjoy. He told us that life will give us more goodness and enjoyment than we can stand, if we can learn to receive it without fear. But we are still in exile, without wedding garments, looking for the key to the room of celebration. Perhaps we need to be just a bit more earnest and sincere when we say the words: your kingdom come!
Remembering As Surgery
1984-06-01
There is a fine line between nostalgia and the longing for lost innocence. The latter is healthy; the former is not. Nostalgia is an unhealthy depression, an adolescent sentimentality which leaves us clinging to the past so as to be unable to enter the present with verve and vitality. In the end, it is a mummification, an unnatural embalming of something which is dead. For a Christian there is the challenge to move beyond that, to let go, to not cling, to accept death, loss and corruption in order to be open to accept the new life and new spirit that the present brings.
Unfortunately, nostalgia comes upon us looking like the angel of light, with a power to touch our deepest parts in the same way as we are touched by real love and truth. But, in the final analysis, like masturbation, it merely deals with something which touches depth. Of itself, it is a turning away from reality in favor of fantasy. Not surprisingly, it carries with it the appropriate concomitant depression.
These words are harsh, but they need to stand as a preamble for what follows: We all need, occasionally, to make a recessive journey, to our origins, to our youth, to our innocence, to that place in time and in our hearts, before our sophistication, when we were truly young, simple and happy. Such a journey refocuses us and gives us a renewed sense of what is truest in us. But such a journey is not a sentimental voyage into the past in which we recall our youth, its simplicity and its innocence, and then bring appropriate lessons and guilts to bear upon the present. That would only lead to depression. The recessive journey, rather, is not so much a re-examination of our past as it is an examination of what is truest in us. In the deepest part of our hearts lie our real roots. At the end of that journey we find that our life has not been lost, blown, screwed up beyond hope or irrevocably wounded into melancholy by death, sin and loss. The journey to remember, to recall origins, is not sentimentality, it is a surgery, a cutting away of cancerous overlay to set the heart, in its primal and perennial vitality and innocence, free.
I made some such journeys lately. I did some remembering. Partly it was nostalgia; partly it was surgery. The recall of myself as a child is both humbling and humiliating; more the former. We were poor and many around an old wooden table in that immigrant district of rural Saskatchewan. On a farm too small we struggled, to learn a new language, to become educated, to do more than just make do, but, for years, we struggled just to survive. I am younger than the depression, but I can recall the winter of 1955. We were so poor then. We were always poor. My overriding memory of childhood is that of being hungry, not so much for food, but more for a world beyond that of economic and social poverty, for a world beyond a small isolated farm, for a life and an experience beyond a world in which there was no hot water on tap and in which there was not even the capability of speaking the language properly or dressing properly.
I felt cursed then by the sense that I was poor. And I was, in some ways, moving in my patched, hand-me-down clothes, too often smelling of farmyard and barnyard. The shame of poverty hits hardest in the teen years. To step back into that now can still bring flushes of humiliation. To truly recall it, however, brings a healthy humbling coupled with a strength and a sense of richness that nourishes like Elijah’s jug. We were rich in fact, all of us growing up in poverty on those immigrant farms. Our houses and hearts contained all that is important. Dirty, barefoot, speaking in our multiple accents, we were full of excitement. Our hearts were keen, clear as crystal, eager to learn and full of appreciation. There was enough love and innocence around.
My life has been blessed with various kinds of riches and successes since. Through travel, lecturing, teaching and friendships, I have been given the opportunity to experience in reality most of what I dreamed about when I was a runny nosed, but wide-eyed, child. But with the success and experience has come a crippling pseudo-sophistication, an unfreedom, a lack of innocence, a certain fatigue of the spirit, and a fear that can make a recessive journey to my origins an event of depressive nostalgia. The verve, the happiness, the innocence, why are they too often lacking?
Lately, I’ve had to take to dreaming again. It is time when that happens,to take a recessive journey, to go back to the farm, to recall one’s origins. In remembering there is a surgery. When we were little boys and girls our hearts were so eager to learn, our spirits were so hungry and welcoming. So much was gift.
Lord, let it all be gift again!
SONG – Turn around
New format for Oswald Chambers. Click the link. Find the month. Then the day.