A New Awakening, Part 18

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I'm calling a new awakening of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Now that I've finally finished reading Fr. Richard Rohr's excellent book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, I've been racking my brain trying to see how to sell its insights, along with a vaunted "new awakening" of myth-oriented spirituality, to a skeptical younger generation. In the middle of the night recently I awoke with an answer: the hero's journey.

Joseph Campbell cut his academic teeth in the late 1940s with the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a comprehensive study of hero myths throughout the ages. He told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the universal characteristics of the  "journey," actual or metaphorical, taken by the mythic hero. The hero sets out on a perilous quest, often in order to locate someone or something of great importance, such as the Holy Grail, that is lacking/missing/lost in the day-to-day world the hero knows. On his (or possibly her) journey, he undergoes many trials, tests, and ordeals; he may have close brushes with death; and, first with the help of wise mother figures and then of demanding father figures, he ultimately succeeds in his quest. After he wins, despite great adversity, he closes the circle of his journey, returning home with a boon in tow. The boon can be tangible or intangible, yet it must always be something beneficial to the hero's community. The benefit can be internal (spiritual) or external (physical, practical).

The latter sort of boon might be a sign that the hero has "performed a courageous act in battle or saved a life." The former kind is more subtle:

" ... the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message."

The Buddha

The beneficent "message" is like the one related by the Buddha, whose "journey" was partly geographic and partly a metaphorical one. After contemplating the true nature of reality while sitting under the famous Bo tree, he went around teaching others what he had discovered. Basically, the Buddha taught the various paths to a full "awakening" of the human soul.

* * * * *

A general description of the hero that Campbell gives to Moyers is:

"The hero is the one who comes to participate in life courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge."

Another is:

"Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself."

The hero can be a woman. Campbell, for example, tells Moyers:

"Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another."

The boon which the hero-mother carries back from her "journey" into childbirth is, of course, the child itself. The new human infant as a female hero's boon is a tangible reality as well as a spiritual one.

* * * * *

Yet the mythic hero, male or female, is not one who seeks ultimate union with "transcendence," a desideratum which Campbell identifies as the final destination of the human spirit. Rather:

"The hero’s sphere of action is not the transcendent but here, now, in the field of time, of good and evil — of the pairs of opposites."

The pairs of opposites? Why are they important in this discussion? Campbell says:

"Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites. One has eaten of the tree of knowledge, not only of good and evil, but of male and female, of right and wrong, of this and that, and of light and dark. Everything in the field of time is dual: past and future, dead and alive, being and nonbeing."

So the mythic hero operates in the dualistic "field of time," rather than seeking blissful unity with the eternal source of being. He is participating in life's game, says Campbell — a game which Campbell insightfully calls "a wonderful, wonderful opera — except that it hurts."

* * * * *

Joseph Campbell with
his wife, the dancer
Jean Erdman

Parallel with the distinction between, on the one hand, the field of time and its pairs of opposites, and, on the other hand, the eternal source of all that has being, there are two distinct aspects of mythic aware­ness. Campbell says:

"There’s a fine saying in India with respect to ... two orders of myths, the folk idea and the elementary idea. The folk aspect is called desi, which means 'provincial,' having to do with your society. That is for young people. It’s through that that the young person is brought into the society and is taught to go out and kill monsters. 'Okay, here’s a soldier suit, we’ve got the job for you.' But there’s also the elementary idea. The Sanskrit name for that is marga, which means 'path.' It’s the trail back to yourself. The myth comes from the imagination, and it leads back to it. The society teaches you what the myths are, and then it disengages you so that in your meditations you can follow the path right in."

The first aspect, desi — as in "Here’s a soldier suit, now go out and kill monsters ... " — seems to me to match up well with Richard Rohr's first-half-of-life description in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Rohr even calls the transition to true second-half-of-life spirituality "discharging our loyal soldier," by which he means getting clear of that system of "impulse control" which has gotten us safely through the first half of life. Yet I think he misses, in this part of his discussion, the myth-hero aspect of wearing "a soldier suit" and slaying "monsters" which threaten the larger society.

Campbell does not miss it. He sees the value "for young people" of such soldier-suit heroism ... even if he, too, talks to Moyers more of the ultimate "trail back to yourself," or marga, that seems to me to correspond well with Rohr's notion of second-half-of-life spirituality.

* * * * *

My thought is that our churches and religions aren't teaching and supporting the "hero's journey" which our young people need first to set forth on, if they are ever to reach their "discharging their loyal soldier" transition into second-half-of-life spirituality. I believe (or so I suddenly find) that if religions did this, you wouldn't be able to keep the youngsters out of today's places of worship that are pretty much empty, or else filled with gray heads like mine.

Instead, the young are flocking to movie palaces to see the likes of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia, and the "Harry Potter" series. All of these — and, I assume, newer films I have yet to see — are fundamentally about (you guessed it) heroes and their mythic journeys.

Some churches today are quite focused on teaching the (absent/not listening) youth "impulse control." By that I mean the traditional list of sins and taboos, sexual and otherwise. There's a very real place for that, of course, as necessary guidelines to keeping the hero's journey on track, rather than having it run off the rails. But "control" without "mission" is sterile; would-be heroes find it irrelevant to their needs.

* * * * *

Frodo Baggins

The mythic hero of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is a Hobbit named Frodo Baggins. The Wizard Gandalf tells the diminutive Frodo that the land of Middle Earth is doomed to serve a power-mad, bodiless master of evil, Sauron, unless a certain golden ring is carried out of the Shire where the Hobbits have blissfully lived since time immemorial. The task falls to Frodo, who begins the story totally ignorant of any imminent danger. The danger now arises because Frodo's Uncle Bilbo had brought the One Ring back with him from his own youthful hero's journey.

The now-aged Bilbo knows full well he needs to relinquish the ring to his nephew, now that Bilbo is about to leave the Shire for the second time, to go off to Rivendell, elsewhere in Middle Earth, to write his memoirs. But somehow the ring keeps finding its way back into Bilbo's vest pocket — he hesitates to put it on his finger, because doing so renders him invisible to all but the maleficent Eye of Sauron. Gandalf has to remind Bilbo repeatedly to leave the ring behind.

The ring is a metaphor. It symbolizes, among other things, the psychological inertia that can keep us from crossing each necessary threshold into a new phase of life. Bilbo is about to enter the phase associated with old age, which, like all the successive stages of life, requires of him a new mindset. He will cultivate that mindset as he writes There and Back Again, recounting the tale of his first threshold-crossing when he as a young Hobbit set out on the hero's quest that Tolkien told of in his earlier book titled The Hobbit.

The One Ring
in Lord of the Rings

Once Frodo takes the ring, his own adventure begins. Accompanied by fellow Hobbit Samwise Gamgee, whom Gandalf adjures to keep watch over Frodo, and by two other Hobbits, Merry and Pippin, Frodo treks out of the Shire and soon has a near brush with death at the hands of the soulless Ring-Wraiths, who at Sauron's bidding seek to restore the One Ring to its evil master. To ward off his momentary demise, Frodo hastily puts the One Ring on his finger and disappears.This act, however, is the one thing Gandalf has told him he must never do, since it alone renders him visible to the archenemy.

This or any other use of the power of the ring, however well motivated, constitutes the equivalent of a sin; on this particular hero's journey, it is Frodo's taboo. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and although there is no reference to religion in Lord of the Rings, it is not hard to discern religious motifs just under the surface.

One such motif has to do with the self-sacrifice entered into willingly by Frodo, once it has become clear to him that he alone can carry the ring to the destroying fires of the Cracks of Doom, in Sauron's home realm of Mordor. Frodo ultimately succeeds in his arduous quest, but at the cost of losing his psychological ability to return to his home in the Shire and take up ordinary life there ever again. Instead, he goes off with the immortal Elven-folk as they retire from Middle Earth to the Undying Lands of the Valar.

The parallel in Christian belief is Christ's ascension into heaven. When Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the canonical adventure of the mythic hero, as found in all the world's mythologies, he includes Christ's birth, sojourn in the desert for 40 days, being thrice tempted by the devil, return to society with a message, death on a cross, resurrection, descent into hell to retrieve lost souls, and eventual ascension into heaven as an example of a mythic hero's journey.

Frodo can destroy the One Ring and save his Shire and all the other lands in Middle Earth only with the help of an extended band of heroes that include the four Hobbits; the Wizard Gandalf; Aragorn, the self-exiled King of Gondor; his steward Boromir and Boromir's brother Faramir; the Elf Legolas; and the Dwarf Gimli. This is the Fellowship of the Ring. Each member brings both weaknesses and strengths to what amounts to a mutually enabling "ring" of heroes who work together to destroy the physical One Ring, it's immaterial master Sauron, and Sauron's henchman, the turncoat Wizard Saruman.

The Eye of Sauron

So we have a symbolic contrast. The One Ring works to impede what might be called the soul's natural itinerary across life's thresholds toward ever greater consciousness, as Frodo finds when he learns one hard-to-accept truth after another over the course of his hero's adventure. His Fellowship of the Ring, by supporting him in his quest, nevertheless works to "unbind" all Middle Earth from the "One Ring to rule them all/And in the darkness bind them." Two "rings," as it were, exist: the first is a demonic parody of the life-affirming second.

The lesson here is that the greater conscious awareness each new life-stage brings — Campbell refers to it as an increased "experience" of being alive, and in the Bible we find the notion of attaining a greater "abundance" of life — is always paid for by some heroic sacrifice. Symbolically, when Aragorn's resumed reign at the end of the Lord of the Rings tale brings renewed joy to him and all his kingdom of Gondor, and when Sam Gamgee returns to the Shire to marry the true love who awaits him, it is due to Frodo's heroic self-sacrifice on behalf of all Middle Earth. The seeming distinction here between the hero and the beneficiary is, however, an arbitrary one. In actuality, just as we are all said to possess a "Christ within," we can likewise be said to possess a "Frodo within." Something old within us has to "die and go to heaven" each time something new is born.

A New Awakening, Part 17

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I'm calling a hoped-for "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Fr. Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life tells of a spiritual maturity that we gain only in, loosely speaking, the "second half" of our life. It is a fundamental change that sets how we act and think and what we are like apart from how we once acted and thought, and even who we once were. Yet first-half-of-life religion and second-half-of-life spirituality, however different they may seem on their face, are both absolutely valid and both equally needed.

That it is possible for us to shift gears spiritually, and that until we do so we never finally learn to do our own "sacred dance," is something of a riddle. In our early years — including much of our young-to-middle adulthood — we are, Rohr somewhat wryly says, understandably fixed on "externals, formulas, superficial emotions, flags and badges, correct rituals, Bible quotes, and special clothing, all of which largely substitute for actual spirituality." Only in our later years, if we have done our first-half task aright, does "this burning, this inner experience of God" become possible for us.

Richard Rohr

"Early-stage religion is largely preparing you," Rohr writes, "for the immense gift of this burning, this inner experience of God, as though creating a proper stable into which the Christ can be born." Put another way, "The first task is to build a strong 'container' or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold."

Yet, oddly enough, says Rohr, "Most of us are never told that we can set out from the known and the familiar to take a further journey. Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life."

That phrase, "further journey" crops up again and again in Rohr's text. It might well have been the author's alternate choice for the book's title. And here's a key thing: Before we can embark on our "further journey," we have to experience "some kind of falling," says Rohr. There has to be some sort of "necessary suffering." Accordingly: "In legends and literature, sacrifice of something to achieve something else is almost the only pattern. ... In Scripture, we see that the wrestling and wounding of Jacob are necessary for Jacob to become Israel ... and the death and resurrection of Jesus are necessary to create Christianity."

In his sadly now-out-of-print book Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, Jesuit father Thomas M. King writes of a "second baptism," not by water but by "fire and spirit." It typically follows, he says, a parlous "night of the soul" in which old verities collapse and crumble around us. This "dark night" comes only after the bright day of our original devotion to God on High ... or to whatever other "enchantment" we have aligned ourselves with or been captured by. Our baptism by fire and spirit accordingly comes only after we have first undergone an intermediate time of questioning and disenchantment.

This is a paradox. First must come an "enchantment" — our original fealty to a religion, cult, or philosophy — after which our continued growth toward full spiritual maturity demands that we undergo a "disenchantment": we must leave behind all that originally brought us certainty, comfort, and security. Here we undergo the proverbial hero's journey. We need to journey far out of our original comfort zone, and then find that the problem we are actually called to solve in life isn't the one we initially confronted. Or, rather, we may find that it is the same problem, but that it is now somehow transformed.

This hero's journey, with a problem that we are called on to solve — and actually do solve — has a twofold outcome. The internal, spiritual result is that we finally learn to do our own "sacred dance." The external outcome is that we return from the journey with a boon to offer our community, our society, our land. Our compatriots — in Jesus's term, our "neighbors" — can now live life more abundantly in an everyday sense because we are now capable of living life more abundantly in an inner, spiritual sense.

Lord of the Rings author
J.R.R. Tolkien

I consider this the import of what happens to Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy tale The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is introduced as "Strider," a quasi-lowlife gifted in hunting, tracking, and living rough. It gradually becomes apparent that his present identity represents his fallen, "dark night" —or "dark knight"? — state, as he was born to be a king. He has for various reasons been dodging his destiny, but the quest of the Fellowship of the Ring to defeat the evil Sauron, along with his power-mad henchman Saruman, entangles Aragorn and elicits from him unstinting leadership and heroism. At the end of the narrative, he resumes his true identity and once more sits upon his rightful throne to rule his subjects in justice, abundance, and peace.

Aragorn's original "life problem" — whether and how to rule — can't be solved until he takes his hero's journey. When he comes home in triumph, the reality of his boon betokens that his original problem now has a solution, where it didn't before. Now he can reign over a peaceable kingdom that is no longer under dire threat from the forces of evil, personified by Sauron and Saruman.

All this sounds abstruse, stated baldly and without the candy-coating of mythical narrative. The mythical "hero's journey" — which Joseph Campbell ably documented in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces — is, after all, but a metaphor. It symbolizes in narrative form the transition from first-half to second-half spirituality, from baptism by water to baptism by fire and spirit, inevitably by way of a dark night of the soul.

* * * * *

Clearly, Rohr considers his book to be mainly about second-half-of-life spirituality and the transition to it from the first half's distinctive preoccupations. Yet he does not short-shrift the first half of life. While we are young, he says, we must learn to "value law, tradition, custom, authority, boundaries, and morality of some clear sort. These containers give us the necessary security, continuity, predictability, impulse control, and ego structure that we need, before the chaos of real life shows up."

Put simply, our inner needs in the first half of life revolve around lawfulness. Rohr states, "Here is my conviction: without law in some form, and also without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily and naturally ... we have to have something hard and half good to rebel against."

This notion is indeed a subtle one. There has to be an authority figure who sets limits and boundaries for us, a set of rules, and a moral tradition that we take up in a respectful way. But we also must come to rebel against our society's "hard and half good" rules at some point.

Why the need for lawfulness and the need for rebellion, in proper sequence? Rohr says: "You need [to build] a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life. You ironically need a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while. All of this builds the strong self that can positively obey Jesus — and 'die to itself.' "

What a conundrum! If what we ultimately seek, spiritually speaking, is to let go of our ego, how odd it is that we must start by creating a very strong ego in the first place. That clearly means we need to build our egos on something other than quicksand.

Writers on Christian spirituality
Richard Rohr and Thomas King
suggest they are all true,
in proper sequence ...

Yet we also need to, by acts of defiance and rebellion, chip away at the very foundation of our ego structure. That is what happens in our youth after we "butt up against" the norms of tradition that have been laid down for us by earlier generations. If we try to short-circuit the process by skipping over the crucial first stage, we will fail to gain the boon of the second stage.

Rohr states it this way: "In fact, far too many (especially women and disadvantaged people) have lived very warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet."

It seems that the full human "spirituality sequence" — the early preparation for our "hero's journey," the journey itself, and our ultimate return in triumph — is thus composed of a "baptism by water," early obedience to tradition, later rebellion, an inevitable "night of the soul," and then "baptism by fire and spirit" — at which point we have finally learned to do our own "sacred dance"!

Rites of Initiation

Something human culture used to do well, but doesn't do well anymore, are rites of initiation by virtue of which children at about the time of puberty are ushered into adulthood.

Mythology guru Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the need for puberty rites (p. 8):

Moyers: Society has provided [young people] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Campbell: That's exactly it. That's the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don't have your little baby body anymore, you're something else entirely.

(You can read more from the book in this MySpace blog entry; scroll down about halfway for this quote. Or, click here to search inside the book; enter "initiation" in the search field.)

Though I am not Jewish, I am, by Campbell's mention of circumcisions, put in mind of the Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah ceremony at which a 12-year-old girl or 13-year-old boy participates for the first time as an adult in the regular Sabbath service. In today's Judaism it has become a big deal, not unlike a combination of the First Holy Communion and Confirmation sacraments in the Catholic Church, but bigger still.

Jewish boys (but not girls) are ritually circumcised, not at puberty, but within a few days after birth.

Possibly (see this Wikipedia article) male circumcision originated as a rite of passage marking a boy's entrance into adulthood, though other intents have been cited as well. Campbell seems to favor the "rite of passage" interpretation. He also mentions "scarifications," the imposition of scars on the skin to signify the passage into adulthood. Modern civilization toned down the rites of passage such that by the time of Campbell's youth in some 100 years ago, the conferring of the right to wear long pants stood in for circumcisions and scarifications.

Today, in the hip hop generation, we find adult males wearing short pants in situations which would seem to demand trousers.

Campbell further tells Moyers (p. 82):

As a Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you are going to be confirmed by. But instead of scarifying you and knocking your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a smile and a slap on the cheek. It has been reduced to that. Nothing has happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah. Whether it actually works to effect a psychological transformation will depend on the individual case, I suppose. But in those old days there was no problem. The boy came out with a different body, and he had really gone through something.

Also (pp. 81-82):

... we know what the aborigines do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be a little bit ungovernable, one find day the men come in, and they are naked except for stripes of white bird down that they've stuck on their own bodies using their own blood for glue. They are swinging the bull-roarers, which are teh voices of spirits, and the men arrive as spirits.

The boy will try to take refuge with his mother, and she will pretend to try to protect him. But the men just take him away. A mother is no good from then on, you see. You can't go back to Mother, you're in another field.

Then the boys are taken out to the men's sacred ground, and they're really put through an ordeal — circumcision, subincision [a modification of the urethral opening of the penis], the drinking of men's blood, and so forth. Just as they had drunk mother's milk as children, now they drink men's blood. They're being turned into men. While this is going on, they are being shown enactments of mythological episodes from the great myths. They are instructed in the mythology of the tribe. Then, at the end of this, they are brought back to the village, and the girl whom each is to marry has already been selected. The boy has now come back as a man.

He has been removed from his childhood, and his body has been scarified, and circumcision and subincision have been enacted. Now he has a man's body. There's no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that.

Moyers: You don't go back to Mother.

Campbell: No, but in our life we don't have anything like that. You can have a man forty-five years old still trying to be obedient to his father. So he goes to a psychoanalyst, who does the job for him.

This gives us profound understanding as to why there is a "maturity gap" today.

Self-Policing Freedom

Nils Lofgren, Taking Memos From the Boss appears in today's Washington Post. It gives several quotes from that ace guitarist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, Nils Lofgren. In answer to the question, "There's some controversy surrounding the show here. TicketsNow, the Ticketmaster-owned reseller, sold some tickets to the show that it didn't have, leaving some fans in the lurch. Do you follow that sort of news at all?", Mr. Lofgren says:

Not too much. . . . I read what Bruce commented about it, how wrong it was, and I'm obviously in total agreement. Listen, that's why the whole planet's getting run down, because of greed and freedom gone unchecked. Sadly, there's people that aren't burdened with a conscience. Greed is king. We don't police those people well enough as a society, and that obviously has to change or things are just going to keep getting worse. This is just a microcosm of what's wrong with the planet. Look at Bernie Madoff.

America to me is the greatest country in the world and the greatest experiment in freedom we'll ever have. But our forefathers, I'm sure, expected us to police freedom appropriately. In other words, you shouldn't have freedom to pipe in porn to kids' computers . . . You shouldn't have freedom to murder and pillage and get out on good behavior in seven years. What the hell is that about? That's the great challenge of society, is to police freedom appropriately. It's not happening at the moment.

An important question, policing freedom appropriately. At first, "policing freedom" sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. This blog maintains that the best way to resolve the tension between freedom and policing is self-policing.

In Rededicating This Blog I talked about words such as self-control, maturity, forbearance, and chastity. Self-policing is a good umbrella term for all of those.

To be an adult is to have the ability, ostensibly, to self-police ... which is why Mr. Lofgren bemoans the "freedom to pipe in porn to kids' computers." Adults have the right to look at porn on their computers. They also have the right to forbear looking at porn. In my earlier post, I gave "an abstaining from the enforcement of a right" as a definition of both forbearance and chastity. It could also be given as a definition of the umbrella term, self-policing.

Self-policing is impossible for the immature. For those with just a little bit of maturity, self-policing is a hit-or-miss proposition. For the truly mature, self-policing is a given.

Rededicating This Blog

This blog is being renamed and rededicated! Once named "In Search of Solidarity," it is now called "In Search of Maturity." (It also has a new look.)

The change is fitting for several reasons. One is that this blogger will turn 62 this year. Quite obviously, if he doesn't gain some sort of maturity at this point in his life, he never will.

Second, I have, finally, in fact turned a corner on my own personal maturity. The maturity I am in search of is actually more that of others in the society and culture, particularly younger people.

Third, as a result of that indefinable something finally falling into place for me personally, in the last few months — as if a capstone has at last been dropped into a waiting arch — what has come into focus for me is the idea that our culture presently suffers from a massive "maturity gap." I'd like to do what I can to help close that gap.


To close the gap is hard, in part because defining the gap and demonstrating that it exists is hard. I would like to begin by citing Don't Eat the Marshmallow!, an earlier post to this blog. The thrust of that post was that an article recently in The New Yorker, "Don't!", furnishes evidence about something I consider to be a near-synonym of maturity, self-control.

Specifically, science has found that self-control is a thing that we can develop, but often fail to. We're not stuck with however much or little we are born with.

Scientists have experimented with children as young as four and found wide disparities in their ability to delay eating a marshmallow or Oreo cookie placed before them while their adult supervisor attends to an errand outside the room. When told to ring a bell if they can't wait any longer, some do and some don't speed up the instant of gratification, with those who don't ever ring the bell and who thus duly put off eating the goodie getting the promised reward of an extra goodie, once the adult returns.

And some children not only don't wait, they don't even bother to ring the bell. They just snatch the goodie and consume it. Some even find a way to (seemingly) fool the adult: lick the cream filling out of an Oreo and reassemble it to escape detection.

Experimenters have looked into the later lives of the impatient "low delayers" (these experiments were originally conducted in the late 1960s) and found that some have become "high delayers," and that these lucky individuals have had more successful lives than the perennial snatchers and grabbers who never learned to postpone gratification.


I would argue that the ability to postpone gratification is the essence of maturity, by whatever name you wish to call it: self-control, self-discipline, self-denial, etc.

I would further suggest that another name for the same phenomenon is "chastity." Here is a word, I know, that immediately rings bells and sounds loud buzzers in the culture, for the first thing it brings to mind is sexual forbearance. Isn't that type of forbearance something the culture gratefully laid to rest in the 1960s? Isn't it the general (and proper) understanding today that sex by and between consenting adults is perfectly fine, whatever the circumstances of those adults?

My response:

First of all, chastity, properly understood, is more than sexual forbearance. It is (as is forbearance per se) a word that means "a refraining from something; patient endurance; self-control; an abstaining from the enforcement of a right." To be chaste is to be pure and virtuous, stainless and undefiled. Obviously, abstaining from the wrong sorts of sex is a big part of chastity, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of ways for someone who is totally celibate, sexually speaking, to offend against chastity.

Second, I may as well say this right out loud, right now, rather than tiptoe around the issue: I no longer believe in the Sexual Revolution.


In fact, I have this confession to make: the recent arrival of the capstone in my arch of maturity coincided with my giving up masturbating, a practice which the Sexual Revolution said was as natural and healthful as eating and breathing.

As I indicated in God of Chastity, Part II and earlier posts in my Theology of the Body series about an important theological outlook espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, my church preaches chastity. This past Lenten season, I began practicing it by stopping masturbating.

Specifically, I gave up looking at porn on the Internet and doing what comes naturally when one looks at porn ... a thing one also tends to do many times, as well, when not looking at porn on the Internet.

More specifically yet, the kind of dirty pictures I favored when looking at online porn were not "normal," but oriented toward a particular fetish or perversion. I'm not going to say what it was ... it's a preoccupation that a lot of men have, and not a few women as well, in which something bodily that is not intended to provoke lust does anyway. I now realize that entertaining such preoccupations, though no one is really harmed by it, is nothing if not immature.

And this is now a blog against immaturity!


I bring these personal things up because I believe a lot of the sexual behavior that goes on today without any stigma of illicitness is just the acting out of immaturity and the inability to postpone gratification. It has been so since very early in my life — I was born in 1947 — but the pace picked up with the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. And, as the young people of my Baby Boomer generation threw off the old shackles of sexual repression, they also gave evidence of being notably less mature in other ways.

I witnessed this in my own young life in the form of the cataclysmic violence that erupted in the late 1960s as college and university students tried to "tear down the walls" and summarily enact a political revolution.

I was a junior at Georgetown University in 1968 when opposition to the war in Vietnam turned ugly. Students who were "clean for Gene" early in the year — for Senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran as an antiwar candidate against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson — watched as the hope engendered by his positive early results in the New Hampshire primary and elsewhere were doused by the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. King was the crucial link between the civil rights movement and establishment politics, and Robert Francis Kennedy was the man most likely to translate McCarthy's quixotic crusade into a successful peace Presidency.

With their snuffing out, leaders of the "movement" for civil rights and peace descended on Chicago during the week of the Democratic National Convention bent on goading the police into starting a riot — which is what actually happened. Young self-styled radicals defended what they had wrought in terms of no longer being willing to wait for peace and justice.

No longer being willing to wait ... that, par excellence, is a recipe for the victory in one's soul of the precipitous and the immature.

Did their coming to prevail have anything to do with the Sexual Revolution? The question answers itself when you consider that the old order of sexual propriety was based on the notion that sex before marriage is a sin. When sex before marriage is a sin, sex outside of the duly sanctified bridal chamber is out of the question entirely. Throwing such notions aside, I believe, was manifestly a recipe for the onset of radical immaturity in other avenues of life.

Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. I wish we could have our marshmallow and eat it, too: that we could be faultlessly mature in other areas of life while not reining ourselves in sexually in the least degree. But my experience is that we are not built that way, and the world does not work that way.

I don't plan to say all that much about sex in my rededicated "In Search of Maturity" blog, though. I know of no better way to turn what I would hope to be a reasonable discussion into a food fight than to become a scold about the kind of behavior I know people want to hear nothing negative about.

Besides, there are any number of topics related to maturity and self-control that don't ask people to give up such a mainstay of their present lifestyle as "illicit sexuality" ... until they're ready to do so, that is. Lord knows, that was literally the last thing I myself wanted to give up!

* * *

Before I shut up, a few words about the quotation at the head of my blog. "Use the Force, Luke!" are words that echoed in the thoughts of new-minted Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker as he led the rebels' attack against the Death Star of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars movie in 1977. Luke had learned them from his mentor, old Ben Kenobi, when being trained in the ways of the Force.

Using the Force is, I'd say, a metaphor for the wisdom taught by all our religions, a wisdom that comes down to the values of self-control, discipline, and chastity in the broad sense in which that word is spoken of above. Luke had, or developed, such virtues as a Jedi knight-in-training, in contrast to the gruff dissolution of the lifestyle of Han Solo. Han was by no means evil like Darth Vader; he was good, but as a cynical hothead he was clearly no candidate for Jedi knighthood.

The character of Obi-wan Kenobi made manifest such wisdom and maturity as young Luke was in need of en route to his knighthood. Often, those in the presence of Ben Kenobi would automatically do as the Force would have them do, no matter how much they were customarily in thrall to the Dark Side. That's why I hereby make "Use the Force, Luke!" the epigraph to this blog.

Don't Eat the Marshmallow!

An interesting article in The New Yorker of May 18, 2009: "Don't!" by Jonah Lehrer.

The article is about the scientific investigation of self-control. Decades ago, a psychologist named Walter Mischel experimented to see whether there were meaningful differences among four-year-olds' abilities to postpone gratification. He left them alone in a room with instructions not to eat a marshmallow until he returned from an errand outside the room, at which time they could have two marshmallows, not just one. But if they couldn't wait, they could ring a bell, and he would come back in right away and give them just a single marshmallow.

Some of the kids could delay gratification for as long as fifteen minutes, the outer limit imposed by Mischel; others held out for three minutes or just 30 seconds before the bell got rung, and some stuffed a marshmallow into their mouth right away without even ringing the bell. One lad, tested with Oreo cookies rather than marshmallows, opened a cookie and licked out the cream filling before slyly re-assembling the cookie and returning it to the tray.

In short, some of the kids were "high delayers" at the age of four, while others were "low delayers." One might assume the large differences at such a young age to be genetic, but Mischel believes there is a dance between nature (genes) and nurture (upbringing; environmental factors) such that either/or questions about those two poles of behavior causation are meaningless.


My interest in this has to do with my belief that postponing gratification and the practice of self-control are crucial to traditional religious standards of morality.

We Christians pray, "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil." For a four-year-old, temptation is being left alone in a room with a tray of marshmallows they aren't permitted to touch, and evil is stealthily consuming the filling of an Oreo cookie without letting on what one has done.

Whether it's waiting until Christmas morning to open presents or waiting until marriage to have sex, postponing gratification has always been part and parcel of the Christian experience.

Speaking just for myself as a baby boomer, my personal experience has been one of becoming a consistent "high delayer" only later in life. This seems to have been a result of becoming, in midlife, a Christian in more than name only.


Before I was 40, I was not religious. And in many ways I'd say I was a low delayer, though never one who would grab the marshmallow without ringing the bell. Accordingly, I think Mischel and the other researchers mentioned in the article ought to make a careful distinction between low delayers who nonetheless play by the rules, and those who secretly filch Oreo fillings and look innocent when the adult returns.

Another thing: in my experience there seem to be two classes of evildoing. I was never tempted to become a bully. I have always been appalled at snobbery and intolerance. I have had relatively little trouble getting on board with feminism, inclusiveness, and multiculturalism.

Consuming illicit marshmallows (or other banned substances) was more my style. Being in a big hurry about obtaining gratification was something else again ... something that waxed and waned over the course of my formative years, exactly as Mischel's research shows it might. Mischel believes high and low delayers are determined at least in part by the specific contexts in which the behavior is taking place.

Low delayers can use various tricks to make themselves high delayers in a specific context, says Mischel. For example, he successfully trained kids faced with the task of not eating a marshmallow to imagine it as a picture in a frame, or a fluffy cloud. He found the kids that were already high delayers had their own tricks, such as occupying their minds with other pursuits while they waited.


Mischel's original research has been followed up by himself and other experimenters who are interested in, among other things, how the four-year-olds from the late 1960s fared in adulthood. In general, the high-delay children have done better in several areas of life. This result has been confirmed by other research. For instance, Angela Lee Duckworth has found that "the ability to delay gratification — eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week — was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q."

Of the original "marshmallow subjects," the article says, some "failed the marshmallow task as four-year-olds but ended up becoming high-delaying adults. 'This is the group I’m most interested in,' [Mischel] says. 'They have substantially improved their lives'." For this to happen, ad hoc mental tricks are not enough; "the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice."

It is my belief that religion does precisely that. It starts out giving us tricks to delay gratification in specific circumstances and thus gradually turns waiting and postponing into a way of life.

For instance, Christians have a way of imagining that Jesus walks beside them at all times. Of course, the answer to "What would Jesus do?" is never to steal the filling from an Oreo cookie.

Jesus's counsel would ever be, "Don't eat the marshmallow!" At some point we learn not to partake too soon without always needing to have His voice in our ear, and we have the basis to begin living an "It's not all about you" life.

God of Chastity, Part II

Christopher West's book Theology of the Body for Beginners is an old topic in this blog — see the earlier entries in my Theology of the Body series about the theological outlook espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, as described in West's book — but today I think of it as, for me, new wine in new skin.

John Paul II made it clear that there is nothing profane about combining "theology" with "the body" or "the flesh" ... as in S-E-X. Indeed, the truth is quite the opposite: there is nothing more appropriate to a Christian outlook. There is nothing more important for the Christian to understand than the reason St. Paul could write, in his letter to the Ephesians:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church — for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. (Ephesians 6:25-32)

This makes it sound as if Christ and the church have a "one flesh," i.e., a marital, relationship — as indeed they do! Relationships of the "flesh" — sex — image or reflect the mysterious love of the three persons that make up the Holy Trinity for one another: Father, Son, and Spirit. This is the meaning of sex.

West calls this the "spousal analogy." To Catholics, as I hope to all Christians, analogies are profound tokens of truth. True, God is all spirit, and his three inner persons do not have "sex lives." But God's self-revelation in the Bible, whether Old Testament or New, uses a spousal analogy at just about every turning. Paul, for example, cites one of the earliest verses in the Bible, Genesis 2:24:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

The idea that Christ, as the Lamb of God, is the "bridegroom" and the church is his "bride" comes to fruition in one of the last Bible verses, Revelation 19:7:

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.

All the way through the Bible, the deep, inner nature of the created world, and of us, is shown as being fundamentally nuptial. "Be fruitful and multiply" is not just something that would be nice for us to do. It is our most basic way of being in conformance with the contours God gave his created universe.


So, yes, I've gone over to "the other side" on some very basic things. In modern parlance, I've had a paradigm shift.

The way I know I've had a paradigm shift is that when I saw, on West's p. 14, "Make no mistake: in the final analysis the abortion debate is not about when life begins. It is about the meaning of sex," I finally got it.

The first two times I read the book, that passage did not even merit being highlighted — though I was assiduously highlighting passages all around it. This time, I thought it deserved highlighting not in my customary blue marking pen but in day-glo pink.

"The meaning of sex." Sex has a meaning? A deep, permanent, nature-of-all-things, fundamental significance, as opposed to what two consenting adults happen to be willing to accord to it, at the moment, if not tomorrow, or next week, or next year? The meaning of sex?

It was like the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake (John Belushi) sees the light:

Jake: "The band ... the band ..."
Rev. Cleophus [James Brown]: "DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!"
Jake: "THE BAND!!!"
Rev. Cleophus: "DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!!"
Elwood [Dan Aykroyd]: "What light?!"
Rev. Cleophus: "DO YOU SEEEE THE LIGHT?!"
Jake: "YES!! YES!! JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST ... I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!!!"

I finally got it. I saw the light. Sex has a meaning. You can't be a serious Christian, not really, until you are willing to admit it. For years, I was unwilling to admit it.

I had all the data at my disposal: how my church wanted its members to act in accordance with that fundamental outlook; how the outlook permeates the Bible. I just didn't see it. I just didn't want to accept that such a contentious, divisive — and, to me, seemingly peripheral — facet of modern-day living as our "right to sexual freedom" should be allowed to divide people, both within the church and outside it.

But it's not peripheral. It's central. It's make-or-break. Marital fidelity, chastity outside marriage, the male-female union as "one flesh" never to be sundered by man, the time of the beginning of life as periperal to the abortion debate, the reason homosexual unions are against God's plan, the reason casual sex, pornography, and masturbation are wrong ... all these hot-button topics of the present day look different to me, post paradigm shift, than they did before.

I no longer think Christians who — such as I myself did, prior to the shift — think they are complete Christians even though they differ with their tradition on issues of sex, gender, marriage, reproduction, and family are actually finished.


Paradigm shifts are funny. Not ha-ha-funny or peculiar-funny. They are funny because you can't really argue about them, or with them. You either see the new paradigm, or you don't.

In a way, I have "understood" what is now my new paradigm for a long, long time. I just didn't get it.

I understood that the church saw issues of the flesh and the body as crucial, where I simply didn't.

I understood that the Bible uses what West calls the "spousal analogy" throughout ... but I thought of old-fashioned analogies as disposable and dispensible, in the modern world.

I understood that God's revelation of his own nature and truth to us in scripture was timeless ... while mentally striking out those ideas that didn't accord with my own way of looking at things!

So I didn't immediately snap to attention the first time or two I read West's sentence about the abortion debate and the meaning of sex. His thought went right over my head. If someone had brought it to my attention, I would have rejected it or tried to explain it away.

A paradigm shift feels like something snapping into place, something seating itself, in your mind, in just the way it is meant to be. You just know, once you have had it, that you'll never be the same. And, sure, you want to share it with everybody. At the same time, mature reflection tells you that they, too, likely have all the data at hand, and unless something just snaps into place for them, they just aren't going to agree with you. They still have that old paradigm, the one you used to have. Paradigm shifts do not lend themselves to easy solidarity.

God of Chastity, Part I

This isn't a particularly easy topic to talk about, but here goes anyway...

Let me put it this way: I believe in God. I also believe that sex should be reserved for marriage. Furthermore, I believe that the truth about God and the truth about chastity, as I'll call the latter, are tightly intertwined.

Once upon a time, it was common knowledge that sex outside marriage was a sin against God. That sex without benefit of marriage was of questionable morality was the understanding I was given as a child in the 1950s, even though I wasn't brought up religious. Then came the Sexual Revolution. Though my contemporaries began availing themselves of "carnal knowledge" at every opportunity — and I was no saint — I never got comfortable with the new idea that "anything goes."

In midlife I became religious for the first time. That was about 20 years ago. But somehow, I never particularly came to believe that being religious necessarily implied being chaste.

Instead, I was of the opinion — see many of my earlier entries in this blog — that the old rules about chastity were passé. Or, at least, they were "optional." They grew out of the same Judeo-Christian tradition that kept women from full equality with men, made abortion and homosexual acts sinful, etc., etc., etc.

Recently, though, I have woken up to the fact that, deep down, I still believe that "family values" are the best values. I never really stopped believing that. I just compartmentalized that idea away from my religious beliefs.

This, despite the fact that I am perfectly well aware, and long have been, that there is no theme more characteristic of Judeo-Christian scripture — the Old Testament and the New — than the sanctity of marriage. It is a bit difficult to detect a "through line" to the narrative of the Bible, but one does seem to be there. In the beginning, Adam and Eve's "marriage" in the Garden of Eden is tainted by Original Sin. In the end, in the Book of Revelation, there is a sacred marriage between Christ, who has come back to this world, and his Church, encompassing all people who are saved.

Along the way, between Genesis and Revelation, we keep getting clues that marriage is sacrosanct. When Abraham and his descendants are told to "be fruitful and multiply," it is within the bounds of marriage that this is to take place. The Old Testament strictures against promiscuity, homosexuality, and masturbation make most sense against this backdrop.

Jesus, with his "one flesh" dictum, took marriage to be sacrosanct. In Matthew 19, we read:

Some Pharisees came to him to test him [Jesus]. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

Though the first post-Resurrection Christians were told by Paul to eschew marriage if they could tolerate celibacy, this seems to have been under the assumption that the Second Coming was imminent and there were, meanwhile, more important things to be done, such as evangelizing the heathen world.

Once the Church began to realize Christ's return might be a long way off, it renewed the ancient Israelite emphasis on the sanctity of marriage, and Paul himself was emphatic in his Letter to the Romans that "anything goes" was not a proper way to worship the Lord. (Paul also wrote in one of his epistles of the need for wives to defer to their husbands ... one of the most resented passages of scripture these days!)

I don't personally claim to know with any certainty how to square scripture with modern-day sexuality is all its most controversial aspects. But I do now claim that it makes no sense to call oneself a Christian or a Jew and not take with the utmost seriousness the claims these religions traditionally make on us to be chaste and to hold marriage sacrosanct.