Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 55

Religions are hardly united on how to regard the self. Jesus commanded his disciples both to love and deny self. Jesus himself once went without food for forty days. He urged his followers to take up a cross. St. Paul wrote: “I keep my body under control and make it my slave.”42

Some religions lean to the left, majoring in self-actualization and love of neighbor; some lean to the right, advocating mortification of the flesh.

The season of Lent is a time of denial and sacrifice for many Christians; a time to discipline self by giving up Twitter, nail-biting, bottled water, The Bachelor, vanilla-spice latte, or something.

Pope John Paul II occasionally flagellated himself with a belt and slept on bare floors to draw himself closer to the sufferings of Christ. For Shiites in Iraq, Muharram is the month of the year to cut themselves with knives and flog themselves with whips made of knotted cords as they mourn the seventh-century death of Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Imam Hussein. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, slept in a thin shirt on the floor of an unheated room, stood barefoot in the snow, and for meals took only a handful of nuts, a piece of bread, and a cup of water.

I am personally all for self-control, disciplining desires, and eliminating impediments on our way to higher ground. What raises a red flag for me is what Gautama Buddha, in his search for enlightenment, learned from his extreme austerity measures. He lived on fruit, roots, and leaves for six years until only skin and bone remained.43 Excessive self-mortification, he concluded, merely wore out his body and brought a pride and self-righteousness that poisoned any gain he might have got from it.

St. Paul, who disciplined his body, wrote: “What if I gave away all that I owned and let myself be burned alive? I would gain nothing, unless I loved others.”44