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A handwritten anonymous letter from an older person disillusioned with faith criticizes the idea of a loving God given human bodily functions. The article reflects on Irish religious history, noting the 20th century Christian theology that viewed the body and its functions as sinful and a threat to the soul, contrasting this with WB Yeats more nuanced perspective in Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.
In this line of work you do get some interesting correspondence, some of it anonymous. Usually that means abuse.
However, it may also be because the writer has to protect his/her identity for work, personal or family reasons. I’m not sure which category one such letter I received recently belongs to, but it clearly was from an older person as it was handwritten and posted. Just as clearly, it was from someone person disillusioned with faith.
My anonymous correspondent concluded the letter with a somewhat startling statement, that “there couldn’t possibly be a loving god if he can allow something as disgusting as human toilet functions. Nuff said! ” Somehow I cannot imagine a woman writing that.
Not that the fairer sex is more virtuous in such matters, so much as that their very physiology means they, generally, have greater respect for the body, not least their own, which has so many other functions to deal with also. What do Irish experts think about controversial ADHD claims? My anonymous correspondent is not alone in his attitude to human bodily functions.
In his poem Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop, WB Yeats reminds us that “Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement. ” He, however, was not expressing revulsion at the body so much as warning us all, with our highfalutin’ notions of love and the spiritual, against hubris. He is reminding us where we came from and how we come into being.
Sadly, for so many generations in Ireland, particularly in the 20th century, the theology of our Christianity was dominated by unalloyed disgust with the body and its functions, so much so that the greatest sins surrounded sex. The body, with its many needs, functions and temptations, was seen as the greatest threat to our eternal soul, inviting us along a primrose path to eternal damnation.
A consequence was that we treated the body badly, as separate from us, as a mere vehicle to an end without any great merit in itself, an affront to “a loving God”. In more recent times we have learned to love and cherish it for the life and pleasure it gives us, realising that its very health is at the root of all our wellbeing, spiritual as well as material.
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