Tag: shame

Sins of impure thought

My grandsons stayed overnight during the past couple of
days.  At bath time – a bath time
of sorts, a puddle of water in the base of the bath on which the two paddled mechanized
ducks – I noticed how reluctant the older boy was to take off his clothes.  This compared to his younger brother of
two years, who has no shame or modesty.
 
I put those words together effortlessly, shame and
modesty.
 
Why be ashamed of your body?  What drives my grandson as a six-year-old, and not even into
the hormonal stirrings of pre-adolescence, to want to hide his penis from
others?
I remember the sensation as a thirteen-year-old; my
mortification when my older sister insisted I should not try to change my
clothes in private.  My desperation
when all the cubicles at the swimming pool change rooms were occupied and I was
forced to change out of my bathers in public.
Others did not mind. 
Others were okay with standing there naked to towel themselves dry.  Others bent over to pick up clothes,
unabashed by their nakedness, but I had decided early on that it was shameful,
my body was shameful and needed to be kept hidden.
There are those who might suggest my shame comes out of
some sort of desire frustrated, to use a technical term, out of ‘repressed
libido’.  The excitement of looking
at naked bodies,  as I did so
often in those days when I was a child .
 
I scanned the pages of my father’s art books under cover,
hidden beneath layers of blankets so that no one else, none of my siblings,
might see what I was up to.
 
What was I up to? 
Looking at naked men and women in old fashioned settings with bits of
material draped over strategic bits, the occasional fig leaf, but enough
nakedness revealed to send shivers of excitement through me. 
I did not understand my excited pleasure but I recognised
it as wrong. 
By the time I was my older grandson’s age I had begun
preparations for my first confession and first communion.  The nuns took us to the priest who
taught us about the nature of sin. 
Sins like stealing and telling lies.
 
Such tame and obvious sins did not trouble me, but the
priest gave a name to my excitement under the blankets with my father’s
borrowed art books.  
He called mine
the sin of impure thoughts.  And impure
thoughts were worse even than stealing ten pounds.  They were worse even than even the biggest of lies.
 
Whether it is true or not, in terms of Catholic doctrine,
in my mind it became true: impure thoughts constituted mortal sins, and mortal
sins were dangerous indeed.  
Die
with a mortal sin on your soul and you will be banished to hell forever.  Die with a mortal sin and you can never
enter the kingdom of heaven. 
By the time I was eight years old I agonized over these
incessant sins to the point where I imagined God’s pointed finger burning red
at the tip in my direction, but I could not bring myself to tell the priest
about my impure thoughts in the confessional. 
I could not bear to tell the priest things that I feared
might not only cause him to despise me, but might also stir him up. 
Somehow, I knew about that strange contagion of desire; the
way looking and being seen, listening and telling could evoke powerful
responses in the others. 
What could I do?  My sins of impure thought weighed me down as if I were carrying lead,
like the silver grey lump that rested on a bench in my father’s workshop; a
lump of lead, poisonous my brothers told me, and too heavy for us to
carry.
 
How could I be rid of this sin? 
Then I heard about novenas, and relief from sin, of all
kinds and degrees of severity, when a person goes to mass on the first Friday
of every month for nine months. 
How I managed to get to the first Friday of every month Mass
as a ten year old, I cannot fathom, but in my memory I managed it.  I most likely went along with my
sister. She was busy getting up early most mornings by then to avoid our
father’s visits in the night. 
She and I went to early Mass together. In those days daily
seven o’clock Mass was commonplace. 
She and I walked together to mass to cleanse our souls; she for what was
done to her, and me, for what I might do to others.  

Have you no shame?

Yesterday afternoon one of my daughters dragged inside a potted olive tree from the back yard. We brushed it down to release the spiders and their cobwebs, and then rested the tree on a tray in the living room. This way we can keep watering it during the tree’s enforced imprisonment inside over the next few weeks.

My daughter has since decorated it with a few Christmas baubles, not too many or the tree begins to look ugly, at least in my daughter’s view.

A minimalist olive tree to represent the flavour of Christmas.

Is it a feature of aging that I become more and more jaded each year by the demands of Christmas, the demands to celebrate, the demands to buy, the demands to close up the year with good will, when my emotional bucket is almost full?

I could see the same exhaustion in my mother’s eyes when I was young, whenever Christmas came around, that same sense of ‘how will I ever keep up with the demands?’ And yet my mother relished Christmas more than me, I suspect. She still does.

I must be stressed. The rash has come back, not as vehemently as last time during my holiday in the Grampians in September this year but I can see the raised bumps under the surface of my skin and I am beginning to itch again.

At least this time I have a solution in the form of a quick hit with cortisone and then slowly wean myself off the stuff, but if this rash should come back a third time then I suspect a visit to another doctor might be in order.

The trouble with writing autobiographically, one of the troubles at least, is that it can evoke shame. I start with a thought, but all too soon the inner voices say: Now hold on, wait a bit, what will so and so think about that? How will your daughters read this? And what about those others in your life who might reflect differently on what you write here.

Have you no shame?

I wrote a few words for an online colloquium on psychotherapy recently. ‘I hate to be abandoned,’ the words popped into my head and down onto the page. I qualified them with more thoughtful and erudite comments about the nature of our universal fears of abandonment from infancy onwards and then sent them off.

All night long I cursed myself. I tossed and turned. I could not sleep for shame, for fear that certain of my colleagues, most of whom I do not know and will never know – it’s an international colloquium, rather like the blogosphere but seemingly with more at stake, professional reputations and the like – for fear of what others might think of this clearly dysfunctional human being.

Even as I believe others feel this way too.

Why do you do it? I asked myself and then answered my question. To stir things up. All those stuffy voices spouting theory.

Why can’t we write as human beings? Why can’t we write life as we experience it? Why must we always cover up our insecurities in abstract words that protect us and others from the rawness of it all?

‘You can’t say that,’ someone will say. ‘You can’t write that.’ Recently I read a review in which Andrew Reimer talked about Joan Didion’s book, Blue Nights , a memoir on the death of her daughter.

I’ve yet to read Didion’s book but it’s next on my agenda. I look forward to it, especially after reading her gut wrenching The Year of Magical Thinking.

I want my gut to be wrenched apart by such honest and breathtaking writing, but Reimer reckons that such writing should not happen. He has ethical misgivings. ‘The thought of her buffing and polishing these self-conscious works of literary art for public consumption, for us the readers or perhaps voyeurs, troubles me,’ Reimer writes.

I do not share the man’s reasoning. Why ever not write about our grief?
Or does it make him feel ashamed on Didion’s behalf. The way our children might feel when we embarrass them in public or vice versa, when they embarrass us.

At the same time I suspect the tension inside between the wish to write and the fear that our imagined audience will disapprove might facilitate the writing. It’s rather like the way in which our optimal anxiety before giving a talk enables us to present our talk in a lively and engaging way.

Oh, but it makes me feel sick in my stomach every time I worry about my imagined audience when the fog of shame descends.

All I want to do is to run away and hide, and a Christmas olive tree is too spindly and light of leaves to offer much by way of camouflage.