Penance and Possession

My first instinct, when putting together a plan for a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, was to ask myself what I should pack for the journey. My second instinct was to criticize myself for that having been my first instinct, and to take it as a reminder as to why a person like me might need to go on a pilgrimage.

I think penance has gotten comfortable. I remember my first confession, on Holy Thursday before the Easter vigil that would see me confirmed in the Catholic Church. I poured out twenty-five years of sins, and was prescribed a couple minutes of prayer. And while I still consider that experience highly valuable, I sort of wish I had been asked to do something more painful.

In Katherine Lack’s The Cockleshell Pilgrim, Robert Sutton takes off from England with only a bowl, a spoon, and a small coin purse, carrying them all in an animal skin bag. The lightness of his packing was in stark contrast (or perhaps intentional balance) to the weight of his burden; this was not to be a sightseeing tour. The physical strain of the journey would be offered directly toward making satisfaction for his sin.

I lament living in an age that is considers itself beyond physical penance. I feel like it disappeared from Church culture before I got the chance to dread it. Physical penance is a spiritual medicine that’s just too archaic, at least by modern American standards. It’s like bloodletting, or cauterization; it’s been replaced by more efficient and less painful methods. We do our penance as though under anesthesia. And I wonder if maybe something else has been lost in that liquidation, if only the idea that what you do with your body is tied holistically with the rest of your person.

C.S. Lewis once referred to pain as God’s megaphone. Pain reminds us of weakness, of mortality, and of the Fall, all states that turn our questions heavenward. But I think that there is an idea of pain that can, and maybe should, remind us of our own individual Fall. Maybe the saints weren’t crazy for rolling in brambles after a lustful thought, or whipping themselves to expunge pride. Maybe it’s we who are crazy for thinking that what we do with our bodies can be independent of what we do with our minds.

I’m still formulating where to put all of this in my reluctantly postmodern worldview. I know that masochistic excesses certainly existed when physical penance was more prominent, but I also know that lack of repentance flourishes in its absence. When Paul talks about wanting to know Christ in the power of his resurrection, he explicitly connects that knowledge with the sharing of Christ’s sufferings. The Moderns preach the risen Christ, while Paul and the Medievals preached the crucified Christ. I want to know both; or rather, to know that one Christ who could not have risen had he not been crucified.

And so I’m planning on walking with a light load to try and ease a heavy burden. I don’t know how bad it will hurt, or if it will hurt at all, but if it does, I don’t want it to be unredemptive pain. I want to offer it in a specific direction.