Several months ago I had to buy a new phone case. I do not have a car and the store was thirty minutes away. Walking there, on an August afternoon, I had to stop several times as I felt light-headed. It was about 97 degrees out. I was ruminating that afternoon about a problem I have, a humiliating problem I cannot fix despite years of trying and forcing and pleading for deliverance. By the time I got to the store, I felt like I was going to pass out. A girl approached me and asked me if I needed assistance. As I described the item I was looking for, I noticed that she had many dozens of white scars all over her forearm. She was making no effort to hide them, and the short sleeve of her uniform stopped just above her elbow, leaving the rest of her arm exposed to any customer, any passerby. I tried to converse with her while surreptitiously sneaking mesmerized glances at her arm. I thought the scars were so beautiful. They were completely white, as finely drawn as an etching, and there must have been at least fifty of them in neat rows overlapping each other. It seemed clear that they had been a part of her body for a long time. In her kindness she pointed the way to the water fountain downstairs when I expressed my oppression from the heat, and as I descended the staircase I felt moved by this woman’s ability to lay bare her pain, flaws, and defects for all to see. As I drank from the fountain I felt that she had given me some of that Living Water I seek so desperately — the water of life that Christ speaks about to the Samaritan woman at the well. There was something of the stigmata about the scars I had seen, and they were a reminder that holy people and the Holy Spirit can be found anywhere, even at the Apple Store.
It is evident in studying the lives of the saints that many aspects of their experiences and practices would be pathologized today. Rose of Lima, a young woman who lived at the turn of the 17th century in Peru, desired to enter a convent but instead became a Third Order Dominican — someone striving for perfection in secular life. She set up a hut in the backyard of her parents’ house, and there she tended to the sick and grew flowers which she sold at the market. As she sold her flowers, people approached her and sought her counsel, perceiving that she was holy in some mysterious way. She did not wish to marry and disfigured her face with black pepper so that men would not pursue her for her beauty. She ate little, slept little, and at times wore a crown of thorns. She died at 31.
Reading about her life, drawn in by the beauty of her calling and sense of purpose, all I can hear in my mind’s ear is the phantasmal voice of some 21st-century therapist shouting accusations, diagnoses, and platitudes. “SELF-HARM!” He shrieks as I read about the crown of thorns. “EATING DISORDER!” He exclaims when I think about her ascetic practices. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he coos when I look into how little she slept. And so many saints are the same. Did Saint Francis have oppositional defiant disorder when he stripped himself of his clothing in court and disavowed his father, before wandering into the woods and determining to only follow Christ? Is anyone who has ever felt called to the life of a sacred hermit just “isolating” in an uNhEaLtHy way? How sick I am of every holy impulse being seen through this darkened lens!
Ronda De Sola Chervin writes in her profile of Saint Rose that her mother enlisted a member of the clergy in order to “force her daughter to become normal again.” He instead replied that her daughter was pleasing to God, and would bring blessings upon many other people.
What must have drawn Rose to take on a life of such severity, and to exist in the world only to the extent that it was absolutely necessary? When we are desiring God, it is because He is simultaneously desiring us. In “Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology,” Episcopal priest Mark McIntosh writes that “there is a desirous (erotic) aspect of love which is God’s … That is in the end what gives love its ability to enrapture the believer into the divine life. What can raise the mind most of all is this divine eros, which is able through prayer to reach the mind and give it wings to fly towards God.” The contemplative life, often marked by renunciation, makes one capable of “receiving divine impressions. This is certainly no dissolution of the mind,” McIntosh states, “but rather its utter delight in the divine being.” He recalls the spiritual writings of Hadewijch, a woman from a 13th century religious community, who shared with her sisters that “the most sublime life and the most rapid growth lie in dying away and wasting away in the pain of Love.” In the essay collection “Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality” McIntosh writes that “just as the soul enters into knowledge of God by the way of darkness or unknowing, so the soul embraces God by an endless eros that is never satiated but rather draws the soul beyond itself.”
A beautiful example of a soul being drawn beyond itself is this black ink drawing by Decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley. Depicting the ascension of Rose of Lima into Heaven, it shows the saint resting in the arms of the Blessed Mother, her eyes closed to the world. Like Rose, Beardsley died young, succumbing to tuberculosis at only 25 years old.
It was good for me to be afflicted. Psalm 119:71
There is freedom in self-denial, and relief in dependence. Exposure is alleviating. An antiseptic philosophy of how to remedy the soul’s ills benefits no one. Much of the pain I have experienced makes sense only when viewed from a radically Christian perspective, fleeing as far as possible from empty ideals of self-empowerment. People heal in mysterious ways.