The Eternal Wedgie: On the Angst of the Christian Life

I know you’ve been there, standing in front of a group of people, delivering an important presentation, all eyes fixed on your gesturing hands, when it suddenly begins to happen-that slow, uncomfortable invasion of the gluteal cleft better known as a wedgie. You try to ignore the assault of cotton but before long it’s no use. You can’t take it anymore. It’s pick or die. And so you succumb, endeavoring in vain to shield the scandalous affair with a quick diversion. But you know that not everyone will be fooled. Some people will see what you did. Some people will now know the horrid truth:

You wear underwear.

It’s a bit silly in my opinion, this game we play with the most common human functions, as if we don’t wear underwear or pass gas or eat the greenery that gets stuck in our teeth. We try to pretend as if somehow we have superior biological systems to those of our neighbors. If it wasn’t for that beloved children’s book, “Everyone Poops,” well gosh, I might be ashamed every time my bowels moved!

What is this constant need that we have to put forward a highly tailored version of ourselves? We see this in social media, with filters, with the need to have every single thing we are doing validated by people whose opinions we may or may not actually care about. This is how we are judging the ethics of our actions? By the length and breadth of our piles of upwardly turned thumbs? (That’s the signal to now please pause and like this post)

And really, what’s the worst that can happen if someone sees how boring your life really is or that you actually have underwear lines or that you maybe don’t like kombucha (*gasp*)? Well, if one end of this vicious spectrum is to make your life more sensational, then the alternative might be submitting to feelings of disgust for the monotony of life. This brings to mind that ancient topic of acedia, also commonly called the vice of sloth.

[But first let’s pause and reflect on a brief history of the thong:

The thong’s first appearance was in ancient times when it was worn by hunter-gatherers and was usually made from the skin of their prey. It became a functional garment in Japanese culture around 200 B.C. amongst swimmers and sumo wrestlers. It wasn’t until 1939 that the modern thong was debuted at the World’s Fair after the mayor of NYC demanded that nude dancers must “cover up.” It was then popularized as a bikini, a Sisqo song, and is now used more as a seductive than functional tool.

What I fail to understand is how seeing underwear lines “under the pants” is somehow considered ridiculous but a whale tail “above the pants” is fashionable. Anyway, I give up on trying to make sense of this. Really it’s not the thong’s fault. After all, it’s only a highly overpriced piece of fabric and quite frankly, probably a really great penance. Duly noted for Lent next year.

Further side note: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has a great quote about “the throng,” but it might also be aptly applied to our friend, the thong.

“Not in the shouts and plaudits of the “thong,” but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.” HWL

Now you can return to your regularly scheduled (though equally disjointed) post on the Christian life.]

Acedia comes from a Greek word meaning “lack of care.” Cardinal Schonborn called it the “deepest crisis in the Church today” and a “torpor of mind and spirit.” It is often called the “Noonday Devil” striking in the sixth hour and is especially serious because it stands at the intersection between two series of vices, affecting body and soul simultaneously.

It is characterized by an interior instability or discouragement and often manifests as an inability to sit still. Pascal said, “I have discovered that all human misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to remains quietly in one room.” Jean-Charles Nault who literally wrote the book on acedia says, “We are witnessing a frenzy of novelty and, ipso facto, a horror of anything lasting, of everything that stays in one place

…We experience a gloominess for the present like Sisyphus, rolling a boulder that will never become a cathedral.”

The woman at the well is often used as the chief archetype of acedia because she visits the well in the “sixth hour” which is the hottest part of the day and the time when she will be least likely to be seen by others. She is ashamed of her life. But we quickly see in scripture that Jesus goes to encounter her there. The Incarnation is the definitive remedy of acedia because it restores to us the joy of being saved.

It doesn’t take long to see, just by looking around, that we live in a world of paradoxes. One that has always struck me is that mankind on the one hand never seems to be satisfied, while on the other is far too easily satisfied. I’ve heard that Keith Richards, upon waking one morning, noticed that his cassette player had been used overnight. He rewound it and pushed play only to discover that he had apparently woken up that night and recorded a guitar riff of three chords with a refrain, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” before falling back into a deep slumber. Besides being a great example of why getting a good night’s sleep is important, it’s significant to note that his song became famous for a reason; people are aware of their angst. We often attempt to fill our voided hearts with meaningless things, but even for those who are striving for all virtue and modesty and decorum there is something that we must come to terms with.

We must be content to not be content.

The poet, John Keats, says it better (I may have mentioned this in a previous post) when he notes that we should all have a “negative capability,” that is, an ability to rest in a sense of mystery.

This may seem like a stretch (#punintended), but I feel like this idea of an uncomfortable wedgie is a good, if not great, metaphor for the angst of the Christian longing for Heaven. C.S. Lewis says, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Find the angst, my friends, and lean into it, because its presence means that you are made for something greater. Life may seem like one never-ending wedgie, but remember, wedgies came only after the fall. At the end of our lives we will only have one cleft to worry about, the cleft that exists between Heaven and Earth. And I’ll tell you a secret:

There are no wedgies in Heaven.

Ave crux, spes unica.

The Soul of Wit