I love monks and monasteries, but I have to say that I’ve come to regret and distrust asceticism. All that self-denial
stuff seems to me to be a wrong turn for humans, it seems ungrateful, it is too distrustful of our lives and of our desires.
I believe life is good. I believe our desires are accurate indicators of what life is for. The tricky thing is to meet the
needs our desires alert us to in a way that is healthy and genuinely pleasurable. The problem is not desire or pleasure, but
disordered desire and dysfunctional pleasure. Any addict can tell you (can SHOW you) how pleasure can run amuck and become
a tyrant, an oppressor.
“Self-denial” does not help me to figure out how to live
life in a healthy way. I much prefer a term like “self-fulfillment.” I say “yes” to some forms of
pleasure and “no” to others on the basis of whether the behavior in question will lead me to becoming a true,
full, rich human person. I refuse to deny my Self. I want to become genuine, authentic self. A Mensch.
Christianity and the Christmas Gospel claim that the only thing (the
one thing needful) in this project is love. Selfishness, ironically, diminishes selfhood. It is better to give than to receive
because the pleasure is greater once you understand how love augments Self. (As long as your giving is not a control-freak
kind of a thing—being a fully actualized person also involves the willingness to receive love, to acknowledge my need
for what you give to me.)
When Christian theology asserts that the first article (God as creator)
is necessary theologically, we are saying that God cannot be God until God loves. The Creation is divine self-giving in which
God ceases to be a local deity of the Sinai peninsula and becomes a universal principle that can redeem all humankind. And
at Christmas God becomes finite—and it is not a ruse. He really enters fully into our flesh, our predicament, our pleasure,
our suffering, our lives. In this act of becoming the God who is a homeless child, God becomes a usable God. He is as close
to me as my own breath. (This is why meditation pays so much attention to breath.) She is in my beating heart. She fills my
desires so that they become a longing for a real life.
