The Hair Shirt

In my sophomore year at the University of Kentucky, I took a seminar where among other things we read Thomas More's Utopia. I've written my thoughts on Utopia elsewhere, although unfortunately the text has been lost to history due to a dispute with a certain social media corporation there's no need to name here. Anyway, I'm sure I'll revisit More's book and its ambiguities in the future. There's a sense in which Utopia foreshadows the whole of modern history, so it's no wonder the work has a tendency to fascinate us.

So setting out from the shadow of Utopia, let's attack today's concern: pain.

I wasn't alone in the seminar. My best friend (the one I've called Tyler in some past posts on this blog and might as well continue to do so now) also took the class.

Tyler was my roommate that year, and even though we had an intellectual affinity for one another we differed considerably in our basic attitudes. He was a tall man, for one thing. Six foot three and possessing the calm assuredness of his place in the world that comes with height. Sanguine in his temperament, practical in his outlook, and enjoying the pleasures of the body with a clean conscience. It wasn't unusual for him to emerge from the toilet, standing particularly upright, only to proclaim with profound satisfaction, "What a glorious shit that was!"

I felt some embarrassment at hearing this, at least until I got used to it and dismissed it smilingly as my friend's way. It had never occurred to me that it was permitted to take pleasure in bodily functions in that way.

Pleasure was for me something suspect. A terrible attracting force that portended doom.

(And anyway it always seemed so undignified!)

You could say Tyler had a basically healthy-minded attitude. Trusted life, trusted himself, felt secure in the certainty that he belonged in the world. Not that he was at all naive or blind to the darker sides of life, but they didn't fascinate him the way they did me.

Good genes, maybe. A happy childhood. An inborn or learned certainty of the basic validity of his own existence.

Not that I envied him. I thought he was blissfully blind to the stark reality of the human being's need to find a meaning to justify the basic misery of an existence where one could no longer believe in God. The overwhelming need to impose oneself on the world, to prove oneself strong enough to not only bear the burden of life, but to inflict one's dominating vision on the universe.

(And I was proud of myself for it, tottering on the stilts of my own self-assured profundity. Watch out you don't fall and make an ass of yourself, Geof!)

Tyler's family had been Protestant–Baptist, I think–but only in the laissez-faire sort of way you'll find in people who really only go to church on Christmas and Easter. Did he believe in God? Meh. The question didn't interest him much. Differential equations and pedagogical methodology held a much stronger attraction for him.

My family, on the other hand, was profoundly Catholic. Parents sang in the choir, Mom worked for the Church, we were always there multiple times a week. I was an altar boy for years–including the years after I'd stopped believing in God but was too afraid to even mention the possibility of doubt to my parents.

Friends have told me I must have been traumatized by my religious upbringing. I don't know anything about that. The years of hypocrisy, playing the happy altar boy while believing none of it–that might have undermined my self-respect a little. Made me fall in love with ambiguity and suspect that at bottom I'm basically a liar and a coward.

But how we fall in love with the little tortures we inflict on ourselves… don't we, now?

Anyway, Tyler the indifferent Baptist and Geofrey the guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic became roommates. And apparently Catholicism has some bizarre mystique among Protestants–strikes them as full of pageantry, exotic rituals, whispered secrets, and hints of scandalous obscenities. They either love it for some sensuous richness that's absent in Protestantism or hate it for what they consider an unacceptably pagan element. (Assuming they're not the bloodless sort who goes around singing kumbaya and saying, "All religions are true!" till it makes you puke.) And of course there are historical and doctrinal reasons Protestants would have that attitude. Complex stuff, no reason to go into it here.

Tyler wasn't religiously inclined enough to care about those issues. Catholicism, however, he found both amusing and a little exotic. He'd grown up in rural Kentucky, after all, which is a pretty culturally homogenous place. He once told me there was one black guy in his high school's graduating class, and I have to imagine Catholics weren't much more common in his experience.

Anyway, nothing serious. Just some good-natured jokes now and then at my expense. And to be fair I cut a ridiculous enough figure at the time, almost as ridiculous as I do now. Always asking what was the good of merely living in a world without God. Always getting drunk or high and spending the whole time agonizing over, "What if there really is a God and I'm going to go to hell eternally?"

Tyler was basically a grounded guy. No wonder he found it funny. Probably the high point of his fun came on the day he made a little song about me, to the tune of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer":

Geofrey the filthy papist

had a very furrowed brow,

and if you ever saw it,

it would put the fear of God in you.

All of the other papists

used to laugh and call him names.

They never let poor Geofrey

join in any papist games.

Then one foggy Ash Wednesday,

St. Giles came to say,

"Geofrey with your brow so tight,

would you lead the mass tonight?"

Then how the papists loved him

as they shouted out with glee,

"Geofrey the filthy papist,

you'll go down in history!"

He loved singing that one, especially after a few drinks.

"Fuck you," I'd say. "You're just what the ancient gnostics would have called a hylic individual. No sense of anything higher than your material concerns."

"Papistsayswhat."

"What…?"

All in good fun, though. But we entered the seminar and we both read Utopia. The professor, a sailor and mountain of a man by the name of Doctor Force (really), mostly spent the lectures sounding our reactions to the work and giving background and context.

When it came to Thomas More (Saint Thomas More if you happen to be Catholic), much of the background had to do with his involvement in the court of Henry VIII. The rise of Protestantism on the continent and More's unsuccessful attempts to prevent the schism in which Henry founded the Church of England. And of course his eventual execution (martyrdom, if you happen to be Catholic).

Of course, all this necessarily involved some mention of More's eccentric (some would say saintly) habits. The usual kinds of things you see with exceptionally religious people. Extensive prayer, fasting, and the mortification of the flesh. More was a man of the world and of politics, but he was a sincere believer–as we see by his willingness to go to his death for his beliefs.

"He wore a hair shirt under his clothes all the time," Doctor Force told us once. "So it would irritate his skin. Just itchy, mostly, not outright painful. But enough to make sure he would never be entirely comfortable when he went about his day."

(A common enough practice among religious orders, by the way.)

Tyler found this ridiculous. What could be crazier than intentionally making yourself a little bit uncomfortable all the time?

Me, though? I could only think of the genius of it.

Perfect. Elegant. Clean.

Genius.

I've already mentioned we're attacking the subject of pain today.

Pain has always been one of the profound mysteries. In the book of Job, by some accounts the oldest book of the Bible, we find the problem of pain laid out with crystalline elegance.

Job is a rich man who righteously worships God. Satan visits God one day (they're on remarkably good terms) and God notes what a righteous and upright man Job is.

Satan's not buying it. "Job only worships you because he has it so well. Take that away, give him pain, and he'll turn away from you. He'll curse you for it."

God takes Satan up on this bet. He gives Satan permission to take away Job's fortune.

It's worth noting God's ambiguous or outright malevolent role in the story. What's the meaning of Job's suffering? To strengthen him? To punish him for wrongdoing? To teach some unfathomable lesson?

No. To satisfy a bet between God and Satan. Just so God can say, "Hey look, I was right about that Job guy!"

Job's crops die. His herds are killed in freak accidents. Bandits murder his sons and a fire burns his daughters to death in the night.

Job gets visited by his three friends, who all tell him in their various ways, "You should repent. God is obviously punishing you for some evil you've done."

But Job says, "No, I've been a righteous man and I don't deserve to suffer like this."

And this goes on for a long time. Job gets struck down with boils, loses all his money, has a fever, and gets quite generally wrecked. All the while protesting his innocence.

At the end of the book God comes down out of a whirlwind and says, "Look at this universe. You think you could have made it? Let me know how you make the stars shine, if you're so smart. You must know. Oh, right, you don't. Because I'm God and I made this world. So just accept what happened to you and move on."

Which appears to satisfy Job, who goes on to start a new family and become ten times as wealthy and prosperous as he was before. It's framed as a happy ending, but you can't help but wonder if Job's dead sons and daughters are really satisfied. If they feel their deaths were justified.

All by God's capricious whim.

It's easy for the modern reader to miss just how radical this concept of God is. We're all familiar with the idea of a man in the clouds who dispenses punishments to the wicked and rewards for the virtuous. But this is God the Master of Nature–quite capable of inflicting meaningless pain.

Pain.

We repress the reality of pain in our culture. Have a headache? Take a pill. Need surgery? Here's an anaesthetic. Feeling anxious? Here's a TV, a social event, a phone to distract you from yourself.

Pain.

You should be comfortable. You should feel good all the time. You should at the very least not feel bad all the time.

Escape the pain and it's a release. But, oh that damned human sensitivity, wouldn't you know it? Now you're more sensitive to subtler types of pain.

Escape that pain. Feels good man. But wait, there it is again…

And again.

And again.

And…

… you think maybe we took a wrong turn somewhere?

The hair shirt.

I'm not here to talk about theological questions. Not today, at least. I've brought up a good many of them and resolved none.

But I am here to talk about pain. And from that standpoint you could say the book of Job presents us with pain as a fundamental human reality. Inescapable. Indiscriminate. Baked into the pie.

The hair shirt. The mortification of the flesh.

These things seem excessive to a modern who thinks nothing of putting in a few miles on the treadmill every day. They seemed excessive to Tyler. Why voluntarily make yourself suffer when you don't have to? Why not be comfortable if you can be comfortable?

(If you can be comfortable…)

Religious disciplines are a kind of technology. Technology concerns itself with solving a problem.

And if the problem at hand is a tendency to seek comfort…

Perfect. Elegant. Clean.