Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

I took a 2-day break. Let me re-phrase, a 2-day break took me. I got food poisoning (which was the doctor’s best guess) and with fasting and recovery, should be at less than 100% for a total of a week.

A forced break, lying in a hospital room is a time for rest, for reading, for meditation, and for … renunciation. I read Thomas Merton’s chapter on Renunciation in “New Seeds of Contemplation”.  He emphasizes the point clearly that the best way to be a contemplative (one who is unified in spirit with God) is for one to love poverty. Of course, he did not mean to desire destitution, but instead to renounce worldly comforts. Reading this in a private hospital room dripped like an IV with irony.

I could, however, identify with three examples of renunciation that seemed to fit Merton’s conception. First, I was reminded that fulfilled needs and desires are gift and not earned. I was heavily reliant on my in-laws to bring me to and from the hospital and make certain there was no miscommunications in admittance. They also brought me snacks and took care of my kids. I had to renounce the idea that I could provide everything for myself and my family. I had learned this lesson before.

Second, I had renounce smoking. And that indeed is a two-fold renunciation. On the one hand, it is the acceptance labor and pain of the physical cravings for nicotine. Poverty, too, is an embrace of both labor and pain. To accept this life of poverty is to renounce the false message of this world that we can purchase our salvation, and that there is some external or technological solution to the human condition. On the other hand, it is the renunciation of my authorship in sending signals of success to other people. Ever since I started smoking, I associated the public act of having a cigarette as indicating that the person smoking could both afford the time and money in such a gratuitous act of consumption. If one had both that amount of time and that amount of disposable income, they must have made it. No spiritual progress will be made unless we somehow tame the wild desires that seek gratification. It is a kind of false-self renunciation.

Third, I had to renounce an idea. I thought I could at least write while I was laid up in the hospital. It turns out, I need physical energy to write (which I had considered “mental” energy). I had to embrace that I need my body very much for my mental work. I cannot conceptually separate the two types of energy with any sincerity.

And so I am recovering now.