Vulgata XXII Editorial

    The past month or so have had the distinction of being the worst in the lives of the editors here at Vulgata. The details are not especially important; what we wish to discuss is the emotional life.

    Times of emotional disturbance are an inevitable part of human life. There is often the temptation to think that, as Christians, we are somehow going to become exempt from this. Talks are given in which good and well-meaning preachers counsel us that joy is the hallmark of Christianity -- with the implication that if we are not going to manage a perpetual smile and heart always lifted towards Jesus we are somehow failing to have real faith.
Enter King David. David does not white-wash the emotions. He doesn't sing about how happy he is when he's feeling like a well-trampled turd. He doesn't offer pleasant platitudes about his enemies when all he really wants is for their teeth to be shattered and their bones to rot in the grave. David's emotional life is central to many of the Psalms, and it is often not nice.

    Surely, though, that is Old Testament. Now we turn the other cheek. Now we are meek and mild as lambs, patient, kind, understanding, brimming over with instamatic forgiveness. Right? Well, yes and no. The answer rests in the difference between Manicheanism/Stoicism and Christianity. The older forms of paganism tended to seek a mystical escape from the life of the body: all flesh was considered corrupt, the intellect/will were supposed to rule in harmony over the whole of the person and temporal matters were simply to slide across one's field of experience without producing any turbulence. Moderate equanimity was the ideal.

    This is not Christianity. Christianity denies neither the body, nor the emotions. It is a religion that speaks to the whole person, and to the incorporation of that whole person into the greater whole that is Christ -- human and divine. It differs for the same reason from Buddhism, in which a freedom from suffering is sought through freedom from any passion or desire. Suffering in Christianity is a part of life; it is deep, it is real, and it is necessary.

    The difficulty comes when that suffering becomes manifest in the emotional life. When it ceases to be the sort of neat, controlled, rarified suffering that allows us to feel the sublime pleasure of conceiving of ourselves as deeply connected to Christ@Golgotha.net. The messy, bloody, uncontrollable suffering of labour, death, grief, sickness, betrayal, suffering that brings with it anger and despair, this we perceive to be somehow out of bounds. It is not what we were thinking of when, with shining eyes and a heart full of prayer, we knelt before that marble Christ with the expression of perfect patience and the surgical-straight wound pouring forth a tidy fountain of stylized blood from his side.

    The emotions, my spiritual director is fond of pointing out, are not baptized. This is not a theological statement. He means that Christianity is not a religion of feeling the right way, but a religion of making the right choices when we feel like Johnny Cash, Sunday morning coming down. It is not Christian to cherish your anger in your heart, consolling yourself with the thought of a perfect and perpetual martyrdom until your patience snaps, the ghosts of past wrongs stream out of their unburied caskets, your tongue becomes a forked lash in your mouth and you are transformed into a living icon of the mystical body of Satan. It is not Christian to plaster on a smile and bake a tin of cookies with weary determination while desperation eats like a worm at the foundation of your soul.

    Like a river, the emotions will find a way through. They will build up pressure until they break your dams. They will collect in massive floods that overrun your life. They will eat through the limestone of your conscious persona and travel along through the deeps of the subconscious, bubbling up where you least expect them. What is required, if we are going to prevent the emotions from flooding the citidel of the self, is not a dyke but a canal. If negative emotions come, let them be expressed, but let them be expressed in a way that does not damage others: complain to someone who has the wisdom and maturity to be able to recognize the difference between a cry of pain and an accurate description of reality; break things; scream if you need to; pray the Psalms that contain torture imagery, etc. You need to set aside a certain block of time to wallow in self-pity, rage, or whatever. Then let it go. Say a prayer for those that you are angry at. Make an act of trust in God's loving providence.

    If you do this, and you still feel like garbage the next day, do it again. Some emotions take a long time to work through, but over time they will quiet down. The flood will stop, the river will flow, the crisis will be over, and it will possible to repair that damage that was done.