Anthropological reflections (at Shantivanam, 1993)

FRI 28 MAY 93

Anthropological reflections: In human beings, love is physical or it does not exist. There is “infused love” — the Holy Spirit in us — but there is no “supernatural” love which floats about disembodied. Even infused love of neighbor, “heroic charity,” is physical; it is love for the neighbor’s embodied person and for our union in the Mystical Body.
    I love my neighbor when my love facilitates the fulfillment of the basic needs of the human person as embodied. These needs can be summed up under four headings: nourishment, repose, creative activity, and sexual activity.
    1. Nourishment: all humans need to eat, but this need is not answered only by filling the belly. Nourishment is best when food is taken in a convivial atmosphere: “How good and how pleasant it is, when people eat [live] together” (Psalm 133); “Thou preparest a table before me” (Psalm 23). This number 1 often precedes and leads to the others, but it may be postponed for the sake of 2 (fasting).
    2. Repose: writers of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages gave great importance to otium, leisure, or what Italians call “the sweet doing nothing, il dolce far niente”, which may become a vice but can also be a virtue. “The Lord gives to His beloved while they sleep” (Psalm 127). “Yoga is not for him who sleeps too little” (Bhagavad-Gita 6:16). Beginning with the Renaissance and especially with the late 16th century, otium began to be despised, the contemplative life was ridiculed, and human existence was ordered to “production” as its ultimate end. The last hundred years or so have seen the rediscovery of the value of not-doing. The first democratic right is the right to strike, to sit down on the job, to protest by not doing anything. The first and highest freedom of the human being is to see with your own eyes, to hear with your ears, and to draw your own conclusions. “Unless I see with my eyes and touch with my finger, I shall not believe” (Thomas, in John 20:25). Contemplation of reality as it really is makes possible number 3, as the creative changing of reality. Activity follows contemplation.
    3. Creative activity: the human body needs to move, to walk, to dance, to run and play, to plant and harvest and build and tear down. This activity is fundamental for experiencing your body as your own and as a member of another, greater Body. Creative activity can also be productive, because it serves number 1, but humans nourished themselves for most of the time since their appearance not by working the soil but by gathering the fruits of the forest, the savanna, and the waters. The activities of number 3 are not to be justified by their productivity. When productivity is the chief or only criterion, these activities lose their human quality, number 2 tends to be reduced to the minimum, and number 1 becomes mere belly-filling. Even sports and the arts are ruined by being reduced to the production of “goods and services” for the “market.”
    4. Sexual activity: this usually comes after the other three, although 4 may end with 2 as sleep or it may be set aside for the sake of 2 as contemplation (monastic celibacy). Sexual activity is good in itself and needs no extrinsic justification, not even its possible fruit in the generation of a new human being. Every human enjoys the right to sexual activity, pleasure, and fulfillment, and has the duty not to impede this in others. Even those who refrain from sexual activity for the right reasons — ultimately, for the sake of love — do not lose this right, and if their renunciation is not repressive or violent, they will continue to experience some degree of sexual pleasure, normally in connection with number 2 (sleeping and dreaming).

SAT 29 MAY 93

Today is the last weekday of Easter time, and the Gospel (John 21) gives us the “other disciple,” the “one who remains,” while Peter is led away bound. The other disciple, the one whom Jesus loves, is a figure of contemplative witness, charismatic and not institutional, or perhaps the sages of India, before and after Jesus — Yajñavalkya, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Anandamoyi Ma…
    Regarding the “four basic needs,” our society and our economy have commercialized and “productivized” everything. Food is “fast,” repose is replaced by voluntary insomnia, work produces without creating, and sexual activity is either repressed or reduced to one more piece of merchandise. Sex in art, the fusion of 3 and 4, has degenerated into pornography. Sports and the arts are “spectacularized” and are turned into multi-million-dollar deals. All nourishment tends to assimilate itself to “fast food,” although I admit I have a soft spot in my heart for the original McDonald’s, next to where I lived through my teens, at Fourteenth and “E” Streets in San Bernardino, California. All told, McDonald’s has offered low-income and marginalized persons a certain possibility for convivium, at modest prices, having become a kind of triclinium pauperum (“banquet hall of the poor”) for advanced capitalism.