Song of Myself

Some people would say really off ... but never mind.

Here's my latest blog, "Song of Myself," named after a well-known poem by Walt Whitman which begins:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

The line "Creeds and schools in abeyance" is the watchword here. Unlike many of my other blogs, this one does not try to convince the reader to accept any particular creed, school, religion, political viewpoint, or abstract idea.

For this blog is about me. It documents the recent resurgence within me of ... what? Self-assertiveness? Independence? A maverick spirit? "Nature without check with original energy"?


Unlike Whitman, I'm not thirty-seven years old in perfect health; I'm 58, and I'm just recovering from open heart surgery. A little over eleven weeks ago a surgical team repaired an aneurysm in my aorta, replaced my aortic valve, and did a double-bypass operation on my cardiac arteries for good measure.

Though I'd had no heart attack, it was a brush with mortality all the same. The cardiac surgeon told me I had a fifty-fifty chance of remaining alive in a year, if I spurned the operation.

This came at a time when I just happened to be exploring two distinct avenues for becoming a "better" Catholic and Christian — see my Jesus Before Christianity blog (about social-justice Christianity) and posts such as this one concerning the "Theology of the Body" (about sexual chastity and purity) in my In Search of Solidarity blog.

During my post-op recovery the first approach got put on hold, and the second ground to a halt of its own accord as I found my spiritual interests wandering well over into the territory expressed in the title of the post Is Self-Love OK for Catholics?.

In that post I came to the conclusion that self-love is indeed OK. Yet there's still considerable tension: the kind of self-love that's OK for a Christian seems to be one in which the "bad" parts of our psyche are "redeemed" in a way that I, frankly, have not been able to experience.

In Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution, our fallen, lustful sexuality is said to be redeemed in the experience of Christians who "get" it: sex with one's spouse is good; celibacy is good; all other forms of sexual enthusiasm are bad.

Well, it must be the case that I just don't "get" it. My sexual enthusiasms are not so confined. Nor do I ever expect them to become so confined. And, quite frankly, I don't want them to ever be so confined.

Nor do I ever expect to be as concerned for the poor and downtrodden as I'm "supposed" to be, according to Albert Nolan's Jesus Before Christianity.

But it's more than the realization that I'm never going to be a very, shall I say, "advanced" Christian that has me moving in a different spiritual direction. It's that I've suddenly realized how vital it is for me personally to go back to what I once did, when I was much younger. Specifically, to insistently set my own agenda once again.

It has suddenly become impossible for me to be happy and follow someone else's agenda — even God's. More on all that in my next post.