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Noah -> RE: begging to be punished... (8/12/2006 11:56:53 AM)
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ORIGINAL: songofeire
After a false start, ...
If you say three Hail Marys and a good Act of Contrition, we'll forgive you.
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First off, great question.
Thank you.
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My ability to feel guilt ended in a confessional when, despite my naivete, I became convinced that the priest was deriving pleasure from hearing my tale of sinful masterbation.
It was as if all the lightbulbs went on at once, and I got rid of sexual guilt in that moment, and never went back to confession.
Heavens! And if you had become convinced that the priest had been deriving pleasure from hearing your tale of pressing your puppy under the bathtub water till it stopped quivering would you now be unabashedly--and unrepentantly--posting at MurderYourPet.com?
Maybe it is a good thing that you were squeezing exactly what it was that you were squeezing on that damp night of the soul prior to your last confession.
I've met a number of great priests from various religions but I don't think I've ever let one have such a profound and instantaneous formative effect upon me as you did with this guy. Did you ever send him a thank-you card?
I mean, one seldom hears of a more thoroughgoing absolution than that which you experienced on said fateful day.
According to my understanding of Roman Catholic theology of course the priest asks and deserves no credit. Your liberation from sexual guilt was a Divine Grace which just happened to be administered through the Holy Sacrament of Reconciliation but might instead have happened at Bingo that next Thursday evening. The priest was merely the conduit through which this blessing was poured from the broader divinity into the sacred vessel which is you.
Motherfucker works in mysterious ways, don't He?
Just think what other liberations you might have experienced if only you had returned to kneel weakly in that little closet. It's a pity to think about the lack of it, really.
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I suppose your last guess, about guilt being a phenomenon in which I do not wish to personally engage, would be the closest....at least other-imposed guilt, that is.
Certainly I have enlisted in the general angst that we all share regarding humanity's inhumanities, and have felt bad for various omissions and commisions in my life, but I haven't enlisted in organized guilt since that fateful day in the dark confessional.
I see angst and guilt as words which point to distinct phenomena, but the feeling bad for certain omisions and commisions sounds like good advice for many an unscrupulous insurance salesperson.
"Organized guilt," though, is another term I might ask for clarification of if we were sitting across a table without all these peoplem eavesdropping. I'll bracket that question for now.
The whole business of imposition of guilt seems worth bringing up, though. Those who simplisticly wave their hands and claim that no one can impose feelings upon them are talking dangerously naive talk in my view. There is always more to the issue. No less here where you seem to be continuing to process certain aspects of the way you were brought up.
I don't think guilt is bad, myself. I think it is good. Can be bad. Sometimes is bad. But what the hell; I don't think it is bad overall in the same way that I don't think pain is bad, even before S&M rears its horned and horny head. Pain alerts us that something is amiss. Put your hand on the hot stove: pain.
Then presumably you pull your hand away, unless someone else is guilty of holding it there.
If I behave in a way that is morally weak; if I sin, to use a certain sort of expression which gives some people the screaming heeby jeebies; if I yield to the temptation to do something I have every reason to understand as wrong, I might very well feel guilty.
The system isn't perfect. Just as with pain, some of the damaging things we do to our bodies get in under the pain radar. But that is neither here nor there.
Care for a smoke?
Just as you may not have been paying what I might call "physical" ("kinaesthetic"?) attention to where your hand was ending up (in the stove example, you disgusting little slut), I may not have been paying "moral" attention in the case of my malfeasance. I may have been concentrating on certain things to the exclusion of others, and sadly so. The pain-analogous event of the experience of guilt alerts me to look there, at what I just did.
Once I look I can evaluate. Did I just burn my hand or was it actually that someone had left an ice cube on the stove, the unexpected sensation of which in that context I first read as pain? Having had the sensation of pain (or guilt) I can look in a fresh way, maybe see in a new way, and evaluate. I can accept or reject the advisability of putting my hand--or yours--on the hot stove ... or on a moist muffin.
Your further comments suggest that you didn't fully leave guilt behind in that confessional, maybe not even sexual guilt (another term in your proposition in regard to which I would benefit from explication.) It does seem to me that you oriented yourself differently to guilt, and maybe to your filthy little manual practices too, and that's fine.
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Does this answer your question? And if so, will you please share the rest of your response to my post?
Pretty much, yeah it does. Thank you. I will try to return to put up some of those other ideas had after reading you original post.
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Thanks,
Rosemary, the MarinMaso
You're welcome
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