On Easter, my guilt rises. I regret praising only now, now that I’ve been amazed by a love that surpasses righteousness. I hurry to get everything back in order (knead the traditional dough, type the traditional email), surprised that he is alive again. But my hot cross buns plump so slowly, and my words won’t flow. I won’t be ready in time.

With oils and incense, they all came too late after the Sabbath. He was no longer there. They wept.

Will I ever be ready in time? I had finally grown accustomed to Lent, grown comfortable with bearing crosses and thorns. But now the millstone is rolled away, and it is too late to love dismal Lent. Everything has changed! Life flies again, drenched in all the colors; we are called up.

At Emmaus, they were late to catch his meaning. He vanished. Their hearts burned all the more.

God, You know our lateness, You expect it, and leave just before we can arrive, just as we were learning to love. What a flirt! But what joy it is to chase, late, late into life. Late, Lord, still we love you. Don’t be too fast. Come back, again. We want to visit; we’d like to stay so late.

This redemptive equation’s simplicity makes Good Friday readily understood. Here in DC, the heavily Hispanic congregation of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church publicly walks the stations of the cross on Good Friday night. Police block the traffic of a few main avenues in Columbia Heights, and many people watch and comment. The hymns and readings are entirely en Espanol, yet passersby feel knowledgeable enough of Good Friday’s serious proceedings to make remarks like, “This is the world’s most depressing parade.”

The procession has many levels of participation. There are the aforementioned passersby, who think they pretty much know what’s going on. There are curious observers, standing along the streets, watching. There are children with candles or light-up toys. There are perimeter marchers, mostly included, partly apart. There is the large, singing cluster tight around the cross. There is an inner mass almost entirely shielded from the outside. These are, if you can see, very happy.

Their happiness is different from that of the playful kids delighting in the chance to frolic with glowing gadgets in closed-off streets, although perhaps not that different. It’s certainly different from that of the snide commenters and their ironic judgment. The happiness of the inner mass is the relief of the old farmhand removing his boots before dinner.

At a dinner not long before his death, Jesus was met by a woman who dumped on him a life’s worth of perfume. Judas, righteous treasurer, condemned her, lamenting how the value of the liquid could have deeply helped the poor. He was right, of course; anyone can see the merit in such a charitable donation. Doing what is good is very simple.

Jesus was interested less in goodness than in greatness. Or rather, he preferred holiness to righteousness. Righteousness is the Pharisees precisely upholding their 613 laws to every jotted letter. Pretty good, no? Holiness is healing a hurting man even on the Sabbath. Pretty great.

The cross was a very great burden. Even the man I see carrying it along 14th St. looks weary, slumped a bit, his spine twisted by the unwieldy wood. Imagine it: the weight of the world’s wickedness. Only a truly holy man could touch it, embrace it, hold onto it for dear life. So Jesus did. So no one else has to. Justice simply completed.

Is this, then, why those in the inner mass near the cross are so relieved? That they are free from the sentences of their crimes? Perhaps. But there’s a holier reason, too. They know that they are already on the cross. They confess it, lamenting that they, like sheep, have gone astray, and have invited the cross upon their backs. They will not deny it. They will suffer it, nobly, holy.

Their relief comes in the form of a visitor taking their form, joining their plight. Jesus, too, presses his back into the planks and walks along with them, wincing with them at the weight, weeping with them at the splinters, suffering alike. They see him, with them. He is there. They are not alone.

This is more than good. Righteousness is a man dying for the salvation of others. Holiness is joining the others in their suffering. This is a great day.

What I mean is, Jesus, called rabbi, certainly knew all the messianic visions that spangle the prophetic books. I wonder if, upon recognizing his vocation, he thought about using some of them to his advantage and happiness. Like riding a donkey into Jerusalem, knowing that Zechariah had foretold such a triumphal entry, knowing that most of the people knew of the foretelling, knowing that the crowds would savor the sight. What if he was just putting on a show?

The oddity is that Jesus patently refused to put on shows. Implored for one in his hometown, he refused to give a sign, pointing instead to his predecessors. Nothing changes. We ask for signs all the time. We rarely get them.

Once, a man got leprosy, but he heard of a prophet who wielded great, godly power. The man went to the prophet for healing. The prophet told the man a silly ritual, and the man refused to do it. The man’s advisor pointed out that the man probably would have run a gauntlet to be healed, so why not do the silly ritual? The man did with reluctance, and still God’s power was revealed.

Why should he get to see God when we don’t? Perhaps because he expected to see God; his disbelief came only because access to God appeared to be easy.

I don’t mean that faith is or should be facile. The difficulty is based upon the seeker; how differently we all seek! That leper wanted to do the hard work of belief; indeed, he already believed and was willing to labor to prove it. But most calls for signs or powers these days are looking for a handout. They want to see, then believe; the leper believed, then/thus he saw.

The coat-tossing jubilants who watched a(nother) There were many messiahs in that day; most of them made a little noise, then died. They are nameless now. messiah enter Jerusalem — they saw; did they believe? Or did they see it all as a show? Considering how few of them stuck around at the week’s end, it seems clear that seeing is not believing. I bet most of them went back after he had passed by, picked up their coats, and wore them like usual. It had been a fun ride.

When Matthew notes the fulfillment of the donkey-rodeo prophecy, he seems scared and uses a detached passive voice: “This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet.” Why won’t he admit that Jesus did it on purpose?

Would you be bothered I wanted to dwell more on this — the labor of faith and the frailty of our ideas of Jesus, but that’s for another essay, it seems. Nonetheless, the notion that Jesus was completely devoid of human desires and performances strikes me as very dangerous if not heretical. Why would we not ask these possibly painful questions about just what Jesus really was rather than accept sterilized concepts of a petite, tranquil, and slightly dumb savior? if you knew Jesus knew the prophecies and went out of his way to fulfill them? What did you think a messiah did?

Zechariah gives a reason for the ass-inine entry: humility. Kings ride horses; boys ride donkeys. Anyone who’s reading this probably already knows my views on the contemporary misperception of humility, but here it goes again. Humility is not acting as though you are nothing; humility is simply knowing who you are and not pretending otherwise.

Jesus knew he was the messiah; failing to fulfill prophecies would have been a denial of his self. Also, it would have missed out on great fun like rampaging with a whip through church or riding amidst an adulatory crowd. Jesus also knew he was attracting the attention of people who knew exactly what he was suggesting and didn’t much like it. They ordered him to put a stop to it. He, humble to his calling, declined. And then they killed him.

I’m quite sure no one foretold my coming, quite sure no prophecies look for my existence. Still, I have a calling. I have a life. I enjoy mocking myself in all ways, but that’s a mis-humility. Truth is, I think I’m a good man. I think I’m a good runner. I think I’m a fine lover. I think I’m an excellent writer. I think the problem is that if I were more earnest about these things, I’d be labeled boastful and arrogant.

I wish each of us got a triumphal entry before entering his/her personal Passion. I had a nice one this past week, being mostly praised for a few thousand words I placed onto pages That, too, is mis-humility — trying to minimize the amount of effort I put into the poem and story to which I refer. . It felt ecstatic, and although I’m sure my classmates picked up their coats after their kind words, I basked a bit longer.

I wish each of us knew the consequences of a triumphal entry. To declare, unfiltered, your vocation is a bold enough step, inviting disdain from the masses that dislike a hero (they feel ashamed at settling for standard). To know they, even if they praise, are watching for the Institution to bring you down is harrowing. To do the work anyway is saintly.

I wish each of us had the bold humility to make a triumphal entry, to say, I believe I will be this though I have not seen it. Fulfillment can’t happen any other way than faith. Faith can’t happen any other way than humility. And humility is a bit of a show-off, sometimes, and it might get you killed. It’s not about making a spectacle; it’s about making a life even if the spectacle cannot be avoided. Besides, sometimes the spectacle is all anyone else might see, their only sign. Seeing might not be believing, but it can lead to it.

It’s also painful because we remember past candies/meats/beers, and we recognize the deprivation, and we think we have learned our lessons, so why finish out what is essentially an arbitrarily defined time span? We get it; we have a right to indulge now. But someone wiser than us long ago prescribed this lengthy period. Assuming completion is a folly of pride; the humble man always has more to learn, always has more to heal.

Once, I broke my ankle. It was ill-timed, but I thought that, if I hurried, I could recover from it quickly and get into shape to have a triumphant track season. Weeks after the ankle was uncasted, I took a run. I tried the loops around my high school, thinking the soft grass and woodchip trails would be appropriately gentle on my weakened joint. Rather, their knotty surfaces roiled my unready muscles and tendons. I limped for days, and my physical therapist tsked at my setback.

I still commend my audacity; such fervent diligence was rare in those days Those = these , but it was foolish in misestimating healing. My perspective was all wrong: I looked at the ankle from without. Unbruised and unswollen, it appeared whole; fancy pictures agreed that the crack had been fused. But mere bones do not an ankle make; the long-dormant ligaments and muscles had fallen into a weakness that very small bumps unsettled deeply.

We tend to complexly mess up our lives. My ankle was cracked by a trauma, then healed by immobilization, but that healing process caused frailties that were essentially secondary injuries. It’s like the alcoholic who, in order to fix his addiction, chains himself inside on weekends, refuses to go to bars, and subsequently becomes alienated from all his friends. It’s a Hydra: the problem decapitated grows new heads.
Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre

Lenten resolutions often turn into that sort of blind chop at a problem rather than embracing the slow healing of asceticism. When the focus turns into holding on (or off) to some things for these longs weeks, we ignore the real therapeutic exercises that bring functional strength. The whole purpose, after all, is to focus on God rather than the earth.

There’s a story about a woman accused of adultery by her town. She mounted (pardon the pun) no defense, and therefore was going to die. But a good man came along and leveled the field in very significant ways Including but not limited to issues of earthly justice (especially capital punishment), as well as notions of atonement with regard to human involvement. . He said, If you’ve done nothing, then take a stab at her. (Because someone else already did, ba-dum-pshing!) Which was a nice thing to do, and the judgers felt bad about being not nice, so they all left. Now she was alone with the man, which was the sort of thing that got her in trouble in the first place, and he said, Look, you’re off the hook with them. Same with me, and she was pleased. Before he left, though, he said, So don’t do bad things anymore.

The transformative power of grace is the foundation of Lent’s drawn-out healing. Sounds unfair, really, if we think that that woman got a quick turnaround, but perhaps she struggled with it for months. Sure her crack was fused I don’t mean that anatomically; that’s exactly the sort of misdirected healing I mentioned earlier. , but she also found plenty of limp, neglected tendons dangling around it. Who knows? Maybe she thought she was totally free and went out and sinned plenty more, just avoiding adultery because that was the whole lesson, right?

It’s important that Jesus’s declaration to her was nonspecific. Receiving grace for anything is a reason to heal everything, and a reason to remember that healing is not perfection. There are always scars, always hobbles we don’t outgrow. My ankle pops regularly. Forgiveness is not a reason to forget that we have fallen, not a reason to think we’re all done. It takes awhile: a lifetime, and then some.

We are called away. We change our living for a time. Many things fall away. We find ourselves unutterably alone. We are chilled and sickened by the swinish ways we live. We go home. We party.

Being alone is usually cited as a fear; for every medium, people keep inventing ways to inoculate us against isolation; about forty percent of Americans label themselves lonely; I once told a girl that I was liked being with myself and was good at it — she thought I was making a joke about something done with one’s hand (emphasis on one Well, for lesser men, maybe. ). The notion of solitude is not well understood, and even less well practiced.

Of course, we are right to fear being alone; it’s a dangerous situation, not unlike walking through certain parts of SE DC late at night; you can never tell what might spring out. But the real harrowing part is that whatever springs out has sprung from within (think Alien, but without the alien part). Paradoxically, this auto-ambush is what the self seeks in solitude. Being alone is like tickling a small baby. He giggles at first; he grows uncomfortable; he spits up; he cries; he feels and is much better.

Sometimes, I avoid writing in my journal because I know all too well that those scribblings will convict me simply by showing me what I have done — like Dorian Gray seeing his grotesqued painting after his depravities. The epiphanies of my inner cancers horrify me. I’d rather starve them in silence, bury them alive. It never works, though, and my childish “close my eyes and everything disappears” game only causes the eventual excision to be painful and possibly damaging. Or, worse, the quiet sin spreads, ablating my soul — an erosion due to absence. Such degradation happens in anesthesia; it’s not hard to understand why I choose it rather than the pain of being alone.

As such, being not alone can sound rather nice — this often explains why we seek company even if we don’t really want to be around people. In a group, we are not forced to be with ourselves, we are not forced to be with God. Please, extroverts, don’t erupt in objection; I’m not saying that socializing is a root of evil, but, as with all things, an excess of it carries a high cost: loss of self.

We sometimes like such an internal vanishing act; we can hate our selves, wish they were not ours, try to smother them in car trunks and drive them into swamps. We would rather have a small acquaintance with our selves, a friendship deep enough to enjoy some jokes and common ground, but not deep enough to have to work at building a relationship, not deep enough to see and care for pustules and gloopy sores.

If it sounds impossible for one to have a detached relationship with one’s self, I understand. After all, what am I but myself? Is there a distinction between what I do and who I am? Where is there even space for the divide of/against which I speak?

There are many such spaces: a panoply of interstices lie betwixt the infinite selves we each hold. I have quite a few — writer self, runner self, lover self, self-lover Apparently I can’t ever get away from those jokes. Also, what exactly were you hoping for when you found yourself lured by that link? — and some of them war with each other, e.g. lazy self and runner self. Or writer self. Or any self, really.

And so, each action I take swears an allegiance to one or another self, and not necessarily in a consistent pattern. My resolutionary self might aim for me to play cello every day, but my indulgent self might put up a resistance and decline to do the finger-aching work, not even when I tempt it by pointing out what lovely music might be made. (It always has the quick and widely-supported retort that such music is never made by my hands).

Aloneness is a town hall meeting among these selves, often a chaotic scene. It takes awhile to get everyone settled and sorted out, and expelling the traitors and painmongers from the room is usually a slow process. I don’t blame any person for feeling the need to leave the building from time to time; I greatly admire the monks who wrangle with it continually. But self-rule is like any body of governing. Peaceful anarchy sounds like an ideal, but it never actually works. A power must step in and (re)institute order.

Alone in Lent, we hear an invitation to take that seat of power, and we must refuse it. The greatest temptation is to believe that we can rule all our selves, that we can choose who stays and who must leave. We do get to decide, but the right decision is abdication to a different power. We all deserve a story, it’s true, but — and I speak from quasi-experience here — there is no greater arrogance than thinking we are the ones to compose it. Even a pen can interfere with the splendid tale of solitude, and reading can be better than writing.

Lent doesn’t like this fixed, observational relationship. It would like you to dive in and feel the rush, and be changed by it. Lent is understanding, though. It knows we aren’t monks, and it knows we have lives, so it would be rather content for us just to take dips in it daily, re-feel its swirls, the gritty mud it carries (it’s a swollen, rain-fed, silty river), the hard current. And it asks us to get used to it, and never to get used to it.
(Jenny Downing)

I remember, when I transferred schools in the middle of first gradeI believe the move had something to do with my great humiliation of self-urination at Chuck E Cheese. In defense of my bladder control, I was galloping through Mario Brothers, and I thought the princess would trump my pee. Apparently not. And woolen Catholic uniforms don’t mix well with micturation., being ahead of the class in math lessons. “Ha,” I thought to myself, “these nincompoops can’t do double-digits yet.” And so I ignored most of the lessons, using that time instead to zip ahead in the SRA game (some sort of incremented reading comprehension thing).

There was a lot to learn there, not only in the obvious sign of my ditching numbers for words, but also in the value of practice. Sadly, I didn’t get some comeuppance where my lack of practice led to a great shame or failureBelieve me, I had practiced pissing plenty before the previously sidenoted incident., but I remember well what I was shirking, and I remember feeling that, despite my self-certainty, I was somehow impoverishing myself. I always cast a quick glance to the sum at hand, mostly in case I was called upon, but also to ensure I still knew it.

A wise friend whom I owe an email once posed me these rhetorical questions:

How many times have you seen a flower?
How many times have you looked a flower?

Well?(James Jordan)

The fundamental difference here is agency. I see flowers all the time (although less so in this concrete-coated city), but I rarely choose to look. When I do, usually the flower has reminded me, by its contrast, of the concrete coating that silently depresses us daily. It is as different from the stone as the water is from land, and I do so like to choose to look at it. I wish I did it more.

In my current state of affairs, I’m supposed to write a book. Thus far, I’ve excused myself: I don’t have a genre, I don’t have a theme, I don’t have to do it — it will do itself. I thought of it the way I thought of the Ohio: something that was just there. But, as at my back I hear time’s winged chariot, I have lately begun to look at it, and to go to it. I see its motion; I see its current; I see its true and unsettled shape. I have a lot of work to do, I know, now that I feel what water really is.

Lent keeps rolling along whether we go to it or not. It seems like a shame not to, just like it seems like a shame that so many front lawns around this city are barely tended, overrun, and never in any real bloom. I understand; people here make themselves so very busy, and a good garden demands a lot of water and a lot of careful watching. But oh, what a thing to look at!

And yet they aren’t. The readings offer a certain amount of ambivalence in appraising the aforementioned miseries — more switches than a nun-run Catholic school. Sometimes, as from Moses, these torments count as reasons to exult: the hard times have melted away. Sometimes, as in Isaiah 58, they count as reasons to mourn: look what you’ve done! It’s a no-win situation for humanity. If there was injustice, and it ends, then hooray God! If there is injustice, however, then boo us. No wonder we get a little snippy toward God sometimes, and toss some blame heavenward.

Which brings us to the ancient, infuriating topic of theodicy. If you look up the etymology — OK, fine, here it isGreek: theos, God; dike, justice — you’ll see that theodicy is not an epic poem attributed to Homer but rather a form of justifying God. The book of Job is theodicy. What Moses said is theodicy. Pretty much every theologian dabbled in theodicy. I’m about to do it.

Theodicy is a bit like criminal defense — God is accused of either not caring or not being able — although the whole thing is a ludicrous Yakov Smirnoff courtroom: in human kingdom, you judge God! But despite the hints of absurdity in the reversal, the trial is serious business (we’re talking eternal sentences here) and probably won’t end (at least not until the defendant tires of it and bangs a bigger gavel). Barring that, the defense lawyers will continue to speak out, and theirs is a tender and beautiful practice.

In this court, no one is guaranteed legal aid. Those who speak up for God do so of their own volition, and with nothing guaranteed to gain. Job, who lost everything but his wife and his life when God decided to have a cosmic bet with an adversary, laments, wails, and defends against prosecutors eager to saddle God (and Job) with wrongdoing. The victim became the advocate.

Back to Moses. Perhaps the Israelites fell into slavery of their own fault, perhaps God got a little tired of saving them and took a quick nap thinking they could handle themselves. Either way, the call was to praise. The tendency, however, was to grumble. After all, it did not take long for the elation of liberation to wear off; soon, the Israelites whined that this wilderness was worse than slavery. They did this a lot, even when they had a nice city with thick walls to themselves. Not the complaining, but the lapse of focus: in Israel’s kingdom, God serves you!

A quiet, lovely function of worshipWhich is not, no matter what your singing church may say, just songs and dance — it is daily action is submission, and this is exactly what a Lenten fast is. The previously noted Isaiah 58 features a litany of Ifsthink Rudyard Kipling, except spiritual rather than trite: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer you food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.” Later, it calls to “refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day” and thereby connects spiritual justice with social justiceI don’t talk much about social justice in here, which is a lapse on my part, but I think that social justice grows best as a fruit of spiritual focus. A true contemplative will be unable not to see the travesties of our society, and will be unable not to act in whatever particular way seems personally appropriate. My particular way? I, like Joel, try to sound the call for a return to God with weeping and fasting — even now!.

Both are forms of realignment. Both call for an abdication of satiation, a fasting from the self. Tonight, I greatly desire a beer, but I will not have one because this Lent, on Sundays, my most tiring days, I am committed to quenching my thirsts spiritually. Which works, actually. Composing this essay is far more peacegiving than even a Rochefort 10, the Trappist ale I presume is on tap behind the pearly gates.

What we discover in these realignments is that, as God thunders in Ezekiel 18, it is not His ways that are unjust, but ours. There’s a real contorted arrogance to acting as the prosecution in a theodicy. I don’t mean glass houses and stones; hypocrisy really isn’t a satisfactory reason not to speak out; if a pederast condemns child pornography, he’s patently a fraud and an asshole, but he’s not wrong. No, I mean it’s pretty cheeky to pretend you know enough to stick your nose into sacred things, things too wonderful for you: the creation of all things, the cultivation of the soul, the salvation of man. Mind your own eye, God says, and serve Me alone; the rest will only be dismal. This is why the tempted Christ did not falter: in spiritual kingdom, you yield only to God.

In this mind, Mardi Gras is a holy practice: a feisty final preparation for the arduous (and, I hope, ardent) fasts of Lent.  This approach never really worked for me.  If anything, a last-minute indulgence served merely as a fresh reminder of the delight I was, as of Ash Wednesday, missing.  One strategy I never tried, though, was true excess: taking the indulgence so far as to be sickening, à la A Clockwork Orange.  Maybe that would be a better propulsion into asceticism.  Let me know.

My approach, in the odd years when I was wise, was to build momentum.  Giving up meat?  Start squeezing out sausage (meant as literal, not as schoolboy euphemism) in late January.  Forgoing sweets?  Cut the candy before Valentine’s Day.

I don’t do any of these anymore.  (OK, I did have a big slab of lamb shoulder on Tuesday, but only because I was hungry).  I don’t think they’re Lenten.

The Lenten season has a much more oblique root than Advent, which is brazen in its Latin import of an impending arrival.  Lent is kinda blah in its earthy literal meaning: the days are getting longer.  No kidding?

Ah, but the call is not to length (this being too reminiscent of so many spam emails I receive).  It’s to depth.

Plumbing toward profundity is the real purpose, the one those antsy-handed schoolboys just don’t get.  Lenten abstinences are practices designed just like those fancy machines in your gym; they make a user stronger.  Although, actually, they’re more like the (far more lovely) iron bars and lumps that don’t beckon you to do anything particular other than work.  You have to decide how you ought to be molded.

Once, I decided that I would be a fast man.  In those days, everything I did was modeled around making my legs a bit more rabbity — even the things I did with my arms.  I lived thusly for a time, and I became a sorta fast man.  I wasn’t an Olympian, but that shortcoming was largely due to my genetics (not that I’m bitter, mom, dad).  Still, the changes that happened from my pursuit were shocking.

A lot can happen when a person decides to change for a long time.  When the body is starved, it is astonishingly adroit at adjusting.  First, it slows down.  Then, it chews the fats that it has wisely stored.  Then, at the very last, it gnaws the muscles it has worked so hard to build.  It’s a smart thing, the body each of us has; it knows how to guard itself.

It’s a stupid thing, too.  If we listen to it all day long, we’ll probably wind up eating a bag of chocolates, copulating repeatedly, lying on a soft bed for a few hours, jumping around aimlessly, then going out for pizza and beer before bed.  It wants a rein.

Lent offers a rein.  The real intention that those teacher-priests have for warning their boys against hands-on funtime is not just to avoid hairy palms but to learn to rule the fragile vessel in which we each live.  And this fragility is exactly why a slow, sustained practice is the manner of change.  Rapidity results in fracture and/or failure.

To stick with something — a commission or an omission — for forty days is to invite an alteration.  It isn’t always what is expected.  Ask the bodybuilder who starved himself before a competition; he might have found himself more lean but also less mean.  Stuff is all mixed up in these skins of ours.  Putting order to flesh is a stupid thing to do; our absurdities can be rather beautiful.  Still, the reason that fireworks are spectacular is because they are constrained and aimed until they have reached the proper place to explode.

(also, if you’re reading this on facebook, know that it looks better here. my words need all the beautification they can get.)

Once a day I am a golden god. Glistening with the salty glory of a run and stretched to muscular ease, I trot my exercised self inside for hydration, carbohydration, and a good long gaze in the mirror. So hot right now.

Yes, it’s true; I enjoy looking at my bodyThere was going to be a lurid description of said body, but in the interest of not ambushing you with a graphically unbearable mental image, I have redacted it.. No, this doesn’t mean pure lust (there are plenty of better visuals out there for that), but rather a satisfaction that things on me are more or less the way they were meant to be, yet without crossing the line into all-out narcissism and thinking that all things are more or less meant to be the way they are on me. It is taking joy in being fearfully made.

Which is not to say flawlessly made. Much of the musculature I see in the looking glass is properly formed and not too thickly layered by lipids. It wasn’t always this way, but since the days of having “man boobs”This was a claim launched against me by a cross country runner whose body type could charitably be called twiggy. Notably, there was another runner who, for the crime of having broad shoulders, earned the nickname Fatty McFattFatt, which earned him a gift of a whole apple pie at Frisch’s upon which the waitress wrote in whipped cream (at our behest), “Eat it, Faty” (misspelling not at our behest). the flab has been mostly incinerated. These are steps toward perfection, but they do not eliminate flaws, like the coast of chest hair that creeps dangerously upward, inching toward forming a follicular supercontinent, some new curly-ferned Pangaea breaching the smooth open sea that God intended for the skin between clavicle and larynx.

By and large I let this forest grow, mostly because razor burn sucks, but also because tending this particular garden has no bearing on practicality (unless I were a barechested seducer, which I am not. yet.) I like the look of my mostly naked corps not for being gorgeous, but for incarnating its potential to do so many things, like run a ways or jump over trash cans or toss large rocks. A wax-like skin around my pectorals gives them no further virility. (Notably, were I a swimmer, I almost certainly would own a lifetime supply of Nad’s, but I am as aquatic as a rooster.)
Click to read “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke, which I cannot paste into this sidenote because I am even more limited with the html language than with English.

But then I also pluck my eyebrows, trim my hair, and occasionally even shave my face, none of which have any symbology or benefit beyond beautification. I don’t morally castigate these particular superficial alterations of appearance, but I will look down at someone who patronizes tanning salons or injects quasi-poisons into a sagging epidermis, although these, too, are similar temporary meddlings with flesh.

There must be a difference, a line. My corporeal conscience has certainly been heavily informed by traditional transfigurations as opposed to more avant garde adjustments. And certainly there are obvious cases that go too far, which tend to inherit their own whirlwind of harm, but, on a rational level, can we say how many hair plugs is too many?

I want to say 1. The rawness of Eden is the ultimate ideal — naked and untamed, stripped and untended — and this is an appealing and easy standardOne of the underrated lures of fundamentalism/extremism — either right-wing or left-wing — is its ease. Sure, a lifestyle of using no animal products whatsoever or of renouncing all material goods or of condemning all other religions has its difficulties (ever known a vegan who isn’t anemic? or how about the first grader who befriends a girl from a family following a different god and thus is disallowed from talking to her?), but moral conundrums simply do not exist for them; everything really is black and white in such a worldview. And maybe things do actually work that way, but my manifold uncertainties pretty clearly indicate that I’m not inclined to such a mentality. Except about golf, which is unequivocally not a sport., but we no longer live there. That nakedness was meet when we were pure enough to be seen, to be beheld (literally?) by God, but now we must modestly cover our shame from Him and us all.

After over a decade of running, I’ve become brazenly comfortable with public near-nudity. My short shorts are purely utilitarian (well, OK, mostly), but they still have caused me to feel no embarrassment at baring rather large portions of thighMy maternal grandmother would constantly, insistently comment on which girls at my junior high orchestra concert or a certain restaurant were “showing some leg.” She also once told me that, since my family was leaving the country for a vacation, I should remember that my commitment to my girlfriend at the time was a purely American obligation. Not sure how she got the notion that international borders imply a partitioning of romantic involvements, but I do believe she had a heavy influence on a young Mark Sanford.. Yet perhaps this is because I have truly seen that thigh so often for what it is — I know the particular lumps of the muscles that compose it, the swaths going longitudinal and diagonal, above and below — and so why should it be so remarkable or reclusive or re-presented: it’s just an organic spring that flings me down 16th street each afternoon. On the other hand (er, face), I’m not quite as intimate with the mutual passion between my left and right eyebrows that eternally draws them together, so I separate those lovers.

How dare I? Because I think that augmenting my public appearance behooves me and pleases people I may see (which behooves me again), and such a shared benefit trumps whatever natural causes keep springing forth so many hairs in certain places. The body has its rank and its authority, but it does not supercede everything. It must be put in its place, which is beneath plenty of mental and social and personal preferences.

Truth is, my initial objection to fake tans is that they look garish, not a concern that the glow-bed-dweller is leaping along the road to melanoma; my initial objection to breast augmentations is that they look unnatural, not that such surgical reformations imply a societally implanted attachment to shapeliness that is running far too deep (admittedly, an alluring (but false) deepness); my initial objection to smoothing facial wrinkles with some sort of flesh iron is that it looks grotesque, not that it denies that we are human mortals by being so obsessed about being a human mortal as to try to appear otherwise (often successfully but not beautifully).

There is a line, somewhere, be it determined aesthetically or philosophically (and perhaps those disparate approaches rise and converge). It’s probably still a little beyond my trivial trims and tweezes but definitely not so far as rhinoplastyFixing deformations and wounds seems like a — perhaps the only — legitimate practice of plastic surgery, but this, too, is muddled by whether that blotch constitutes an intolerable disfiguration or simply an epidermal quirk.. As hinted in the popup note about easy standards, I’m not one to prescribe thick, uncrossable boundaries, so I’ll simply suggest that the line is self-drawn, and where to draw it most likely takes a long time to learn, perhaps from one too many piercings or a tattooI haven’t even mentioned tattoos, mostly because they are a great example of something that cannot absolutely be waved off or welcomed in, as they come in so many shapes and sizes. I love at least two stories that are very much about tattoos — one by Ray Bradbury, the other by Flannery O’Connor — and think they are utterly fascinating, though not to the extent that I’ve inked myself yet. Not even in jail. But it’s notable that if I do, it will be with the Hebrew phrase (and it will be in Hebrew, not this ghastly transliteration) ani v’dodi v’dodi li that suddenly seems a little too visible. The ruler for drawing that line has an edge defined by how we come to understand what a body is.

Options abound: a temple, a canvas, a slave, a hunk of marble, a toy, a shackle, a trifle. Nor are they mutually exclusive, but they are themselves generated by a general philosophy of what we’re doing around here and how important physical delights are and if picking at seemingly ineradicable hairs in undesirable locations is really worth minutes and motions that could be spent on something astonishingly profound like writing for a website. If these quandaries seem a little too large for such small concerns, well, they aren’t, because it would seem that any particular behavior should be molded by an overall ethos.

Which is something most of us have, pretty much. While almost everyone could stand to fortify said ethos (mine, as you’ve seen, has plenty of self-contradictions between stated beliefs and performed behaviors), I think the vast majority of adults could, with the help of a competent writer, compose a good This I Believe essay. It would have holes and uncertainties, would probably be a little incomplete, but such flaws can be restructured by looking closely — perhaps literally — at the man in the mirror. Such a self-reflection once caused a beautiful young boy to drown (or to starve, depending on the version you read), but fortunately none of us are quite so really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking. That actual navel gazing can bring you closer to a wise way of seeing the body might sound bizarre, and perhaps the study required is more than skin deep (having been around medical types for so long, as in my entire life, I’ve applied plenty of acquired knowledge about various glands, organs, and systems to my fleshy philosophies), but to approach a physical issue through physical perception simply seems proper.

My ultimate claim is that this honest gawking will discover how humble (and, as I’ve previously mused about, fragile) the body human is, especially in its appearance. (The internal world is far more awesome, which I mean both physically and metaphysically.) While corneas are often gorgeous, and certain curves can induce salivary leakage (among other fluids), by and large (or small) we aren’t all that much to look at on a level of pure beauty, certainly no more than the lilies of the field. The level of detail — the grain of a toenail, the texture of a knuckle — is astonishing, but it’s also pedestrian.

St. Francis, admittedly somewhat extreme with his worldview but also pretty extreme with his proximity to holiness, called his body “Brother Ass,” by which he did not mean that he was the most gluteally endowed within the confraternity he founded. Rather, that his head, shoulders, knees, and toes were useful but stubborn, noble but humble, and all in all simply non-adorable (i.e. unworthy of receiving adoration). It was, to put it obviously, merely human. It deserved some attention, but not so much. (NB: St. Francis was said to have received the stigmata, probably the most physical of all spiritual ecstasies.)

As many an alcoholic will tell you, moderation is difficult. Pitching out all the bourbons and beers is far easier than being careful only to pour a manhattan or two. I haven’t done especially well at avoiding being drunk on beauty in my life (among other inebriants), and as a result I don’t have a good appreciation for when the proper buzz arrives and when craving any more is mere gluttony beyond a healthy level, both in the sense of looking for gorgeosity in others and trying to shape it in (or rather, on) myself.

But fear not, beautiful people; I do not shun you. I merely am trying not to overvalue the gilded charms of luminous eyes or lean navels or huge…tracts of land (another oft-overrated appeal). The attraction of/to a person is strongest when linked with an actual person, and interpersonal appeal can outrank basic visuals. Which deserves the investment of two hours each morning?