Masturbation 2.0
Masturbation 2.0
Love your neighbor as you love yourself. (Mark 12:31)
What if this wasn’t just an exhortation by Jesus, but a statement of fact? (Actually folks, you can only love your neighbor the same way you love yourself.)
Father Olivier summed it up for us in Latin class: “Nemo dat quod non habet” – “no one gives what he does not have.” No love for yourself? No love for others. OR: Guilt-shackled love for yourself? Guilt-shackled love for others.
No wonder the medieval Church imposed celibacy on Her priests. After spending all those years programming them to feel guilty about sexual pleasure, the Church knew that marriage would be a cruel joke on any priest’s wife. What her husband considered love would at best dribble out as guilt-shackled duty.
And maybe it all started with masturbation.
I know this sounds far-fetched, but think about it. Masturbation is the time when every young future-priest - naïve and innocent before the Church gets hold of him - initially begins, very tentatively, to explore ways to pleasure and love himself. Once that pleasure gets ripped away from him and declared sinful by Mother Church, he is left only with a hollow sense of guilt and a vague memory of something better.
That guilt will be programmed by the institutional Church into self-abnegation and a servile striving-to-please - a “pleasing” that will always entail more striving and less pleasure.
Once imbued, and encumbered, with the elite responsibility of priesthood, our young man will further buy into the Church’s notion that one’s right to personal pleasure is at best a childhood fantasy, at worst a mortal mistake. From there it’s a smooth slide. Alcohol will ease the pain; bureaucratic intrigue will decorate the goalposts. The young priest will obediently serve his apprenticeship under a crusty pastor (who himself once innocently masturbated, before being taught the sinfulness of the act and the hierarchical rewards of its renunciation). Our young ascetic will gradually work his way up through the ranks of those whose character armor (cf. Wilhelm Reich) has insured their loyalty to the institution. Eventually he may even qualify as a bishop, having proven himself predictable, obedient, and emotionally shuttered. He may walk that Episcopal path proudly, buoyed by the thought that he is special, chosen, and incorruptible. He may become a courageous culture-warrior, confronting the weakness of those who profess to believe but are morally weak. He may utter righteous anathemas, withhold sacraments, demand submission. It’s all about tough love, the same kind of love he has always had for himself.
But maybe . . . very occasionally and discretely. . . in the silent space of his isolate rectory . . he may perhaps allow a conveniently-forgettable alter-ego to emerge . . . a separate, though vaguely familiar, self that will transport him back to those innocent childhood nights . . . when he could feel pleasure without guilt. . . and truly love himself without fear.
I hope so.
Note: The young man described above is purely fictitious. Any resemblance to a living, breathing human being is purely coincidental.
Also, I salute all those resilient lads who, shrouded in the black cassock and yoked in the Roman collar, still managed not to succumb to rigor mortis.