What is an “attachment”? What are “disordered” attachments?

Q: Dear Father John, I would like to learn more about the idea of attachments. What is a disordered attachment and what is the difference, say, between a normal need for food and a disordered attachment for it? How can I tell the difference? Also, this is kind of a related point but is there a point at which indulgence in over-eating moves from a venial sin to a mortal sin?

A: A disordered attachment is an emotional dependence on some person, object, or activity.  We say emotional dependence, but we could also say psychological dependence. The point here is that my dependence on the object in question is more than what reason would dictate. Reason, for human beings, gives us access to the proper measure of things – the measure in accordance with God’s design.

“Ordered” Means “Reasonable”

For example, it is reasonable, for adults, to sleep seven hours a night on a regular basis. It’s reasonable because that’s more or less the amount of sleep that most people need in order to function in a healthy, normal way. If someone habitually sleeps twelve hours a night, something is probably wrong – that’s a disordered sleep pattern. There may be a physiological issue, or there may be an emotional issue, and sleeping too much is an escape from reality in some way or another. And if that escape is a symptom of some unresolved violation of conscience that has made life unbearable, or simply a well-developed habit of laziness and indulgence, then it could very well be a disordered attachment: I am overly dependent on sleep, using it as a shield to avoid facing the normal demands of life.

In any case, however, the standard for healthy dependence vs. unhealthy (disordered) dependence has to do with what is reasonable. And what is reasonable is always related to – ordered to – what is the God-given purpose of the object in question. Sleep is meant to help a person recover energy, not to help a person escape from responsibility.

It is reasonable, to take another example, to enjoy movies or sports as a form of recreation. We need relaxation and recreation to keep a healthy psychological and emotional balance. But when my football team’s loss throws my life into disarray for an entire week, or when I can never miss watching a game, no matter what duties it may require me to neglect, I may have a disordered attachment to that form of recreation. If I spend twenty hours a week playing online video games and only three hours a week playing with my kids or enjoying time with my wife, it is safe to say that I am attached in an unreasonable – or disordered – way to video games.

Eating with Reason

To move on to your example of food. The purpose of food is nourishment. We are dependent on food for life, and life is a good thing, because we are created in God’s image. The goodness of life is actually reflected, in God’s plan, in the pleasure that we get from eating good food. The pleasure is not evil or sinful; it is part of the nourishing experience; it is part of God’s plan for life. We give glory to God by enjoying the good things of his creation! And so, it is reasonable to eat amounts and types of food necessary to stay well-nourished, and to enjoy eating them.

Now the actual reasonable amount will vary depending on the needs of individuals. A seven-foot lumberjack who fells trees nine hours a day will probably not have the same diet as a petite copy-editor.

We can know that we are deviating from the reasonable use of food if we habitually eat in such a way as to cause damage to our health. Over-eating, or only indulging in the kinds of foods that give us the most pleasure, will interfere with the healthy functioning of our minds and bodies, instead of contributing to it. And that is unreasonable – or disordered. An unhealthy (disordered) attachment to food shows itself when eating is no longer ordered to enjoyable nourishment.

As in the case of sleep disorders, eating disorders can be symptoms of sinful self-indulgence (a manifestation of the root sin of sensuality), but they can also be symptoms of deeper problems. Habitual sins, for example, can lead to the disintegration of healthy self-respect, and cause vanity or pride to show itself in making food or physical appearance into a kind of idol. On the other hand, emotional or psychological wounds, when unhealed by God’s grace and his unconditional love, can fester in a person’s soul and eventually manifest themselves in these types of disorders.

Can Over-Eating Be a Mortal Sin?

As regards your specific question of whether over-eating can ever become a mortal sin, I think it could if it were habitual and serious to the point where someone is putting their very life in immediate danger. Remember that for a sin to be mortal – in other words, for a sin to sever our friendship with Christ – three conditions are necessary. First, the person has to be fully aware of the gravity of the sin. Second, the person has to choose the sin with completely consent – not under any compulsion. Third, the matter of the sin has to be grave and serious in itself (stealing $5 is not the same as stealing $5 million).

In the area of over-eating, I would hesitate to say that the matter itself is grave, unless the amount is a direct and immediate threat to one’s life. In related areas, however, the abuse of alcohol or drugs, for example, the matter is indeed grave. First of all, because abusing those substances puts your life (and others’) in immediate danger, and secondly, when someone purposely gets drunk or high, they knowingly forfeit or impair the use of their reason – they make themselves less than human, in a sense, defacing the image of God.

In the area of eating disorders, I would hesitate to say that a person’s actions are performed with full consent. Almost always, these are compulsive behaviors. Other factors are subconsciously pushing someone to over eat, or under eat, or induce vomiting after eating. These root factors may be symptoms of sinful behavior that have wreaked havoc in a person’s soul, in which case repentance will be needed to break the cycle. But they may also be the result of having suffered some sort of serious neglect or abuse, in which case the person is not culpable for the eating disorder, and healing will come through discovering the merciful and transforming love of God, which can repair any damage done by the sins of others.

A Note on Fasting

It is worth noting in this context that the Church has always encouraged voluntary fasting as a spiritual discipline. We are only required to fast every Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but all spiritual writers recommend including this spiritual discipline as a regular part of our lives. Making a small sacrifice at every meal, for example, or avoiding snacks between meals, or abstaining from meat on Fridays throughout the year (not only during Lent) is a healthy way to keep this area of life ordered. Fasting is also a fruitful way of offering up sacrifices in union with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. For more on that point, you can read this post.  This is a good topic to bring up in spiritual direction!

Pope John Paul II and self-mortification

STUNNER! Pope Practiced Self-Mortification by Jimmy Akin

So various circles have been atwitter about news reports that Pope John Paul II practiced certain forms of self-mortification or, in the immortal words of the Associated Press, “John Paul II used belt to whip himself.”

It is not surprising that our pleasure-obsessed culture would find this unusual, nor is it surprising that latent anti-Catholic tendencies in the culture would cause people to read it in a negative light—as something shocking or repulsive.

So what can we say to those who have this kind of reaction?

Let’s start with what we can say to fellow Christians (Catholic or not) who find themselves thinking this way: While not every person is called to the kind of self-mortification that John Paul II practiced, self-mortification is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition with roots going all the way back to the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.

We read in the Old Testament, for example, of people fasting, wearing sackcloth (which abrades the skin; the Old Testament equivalent of a hairshirt), putting ashes on their heads, and lying tied-up in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time (Ezekiel 4:4-8).

In the New Testament we also read of such practices, and of particular note are Jesus’ own remarks about (and personal practice of) fasting. If Our Lord himself practiced fasting, then self-mortification could scarcely fail to find a place in Christian spirituality. Note also that in the Sermon on the Mount he doesn’t say “if” you fast but “when” you fast—implying an expectation of his followers.

Once we have recognized this, the issue of self-mortification becomes one of degree and occasion, for the fundamental principle has been established. If a particular Christian’s faith tradition (or personal view) hasn’t made room for self-mortification then he needs to conduct an open-minded re-examination of the issue.

He might be helped in that re-examination by what we can say to a non-believer, which goes beyond establishing that self-mortification is biblical and deals with the underlying principles.

The first thing to point out is that this isn’t masochism. It’s not the case of wanting the pain out of some sick craving. While there are masochists, anything they do along these lines is not a genuine spiritual exercise. The whole point of self-mortification is that you don’t find the pain attractive but are willing to submit to it anyway for a higher goal.

And the non-believer, unless he is a unthinking hedonist, should be able to acknowledge that it can be legitimate to endure pain for a higher goal (i.e., that there can be higher goals in life than just avoiding pain). For example, the pain that soldiers undergo to defend their country, the pain that parents undergo to help their children, and the pain that absolutely all of us must shoulder in order to achieve important goals.

So what goal was John Paul II, and other practitioners of self-mortification, striving for?

Holiness.

Specifically, virtues like humility, compassion, self-control, the ability to say no to your body in the pursuit of a spiritual goal.

A close analogy is the athletic saying, “No pain, no gain.” In order to get your body in shape, you must be willing to endure some hardship, and the same is true of your soul (or your personality if the person doesn’t believe in souls).

Self-mortification teaches humility by making us recognize that there are things more important than our own pleasure. It teaches compassion by giving us a window into the sufferings of others—who don’t have a choice in whether they’re suffering. And it strengthens self-control.

As well as (here’s the big one I’ve saved for last) encouraging us to follow the example of Our Lord, who made the central act of the Christian religion one of self-denial and (in his case) literal mortification to bring salvation to all mankind.

Even if a non-believer doesn’t buy the religious premises involved, he should be able to see the nobility of the principle of shouldering hardship for the sake of others and for the sake of learning virtues like humility and compassion rather than focusing exclusively on one’s own pleasure.

Hopefully he can see why a pope, as the vicar of Christ and as the leader of the Christian world, would be called to personal mortification in a way that goes beyond what most people are.

NOTE: Any form of significant self-mortification must be done under the guidance of a competent spiritual director. Do not try this at home on your own.

Published with permission of Jimmy Akin and the National Catholic Register

What is mortification?

Q: Dear Father John, What is “mortification” and how does it relate to Lent? What does Saint Paul mean in 1 Corinthians 9 where he says, “I pummel my body and subdue it…” Is he talking about mortification?

A: The root word for “mortification” comes from the Latin, mors and mortis, and it translates as “death.” In the spiritual life, therefore, mortification refers to voluntary actions by which we gradually “put to death” all of our vices, sinful habits, and the self-centered tendencies that lurk beneath them. Spiritual writers use terms like abnegation, sacrifice, self-sacrifice, and self-denial to refer to the same thing.

Jesus spoke about mortification as an absolute necessity for growth into Christian maturity. Here are some of the better known passages:

“If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

“In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest” (John 12:24).

“Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:35).

St Paul regularly emphasized this “best practice” of the spiritual life. Besides the passage you mention in your question, here are some other favorites:

“…[Y]ou must see yourselves as being dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11).

“You were to put aside [we could say "put to death] your old self, which belongs to your old way of life and is corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind was to be renewed in spirit so that you could put on the New Man that has been created on God’s principles, in the uprightness and holiness of the truth”(Ephesians 4:22-24).

“…[W]e too, then, should throw off everything that weighs us down and the sin that clings so closely, and with perseverance keep running in the race which lies ahead of us” (Hebrews 12:1 – NB: many scholars are convinced that the book of Hebrews was not written by St Paul, but I include this quotation here anyway, for convenience).

It may seem like overkill to list so many quotations (and there are a lot more), but I do so because this is a hard concept for us to accept. A secular culture by definition seeks heaven on earth. According to that mindset, suffering of any kind is valueless and to be avoided – a far cry from the Christian pattern of death to sin (through voluntary self-denial) as a path to true life.

In Pope Benedict’s recent message for Lent, he explains the reason behind this pillar of Christian spirituality: “Freely chosen detachment from the pleasure of food and other material goods helps the disciple of Christ to control the appetites of nature, weakened by original sin, whose negative effects impact the entire human person.”

In other words, because God has chosen to redeem our fallen human nature, and not just replace it, his grace enters into our wounded, self-centered, sin-tending souls, and gradually transforms them (think of Jesus’ parable of the leaven in the dough). But since we are free, spiritual creatures (not just instinct-driven squirrels), we have to freely cooperate with his grace in order for this process to fully develop. One of the ways we do this is through freely denying ourselves certain pleasures that are not in themselves sinful, e.g. not listening to the radio for the first three minutes of a half-hour commute, offering the silence as an act of mortification, and maybe using it to pray. When we do that, we learn to govern our tendencies to pleasure and self-seeking (which are always waiting for opportunities to run wild); we tame them so that they are fruitful and not destructive, like a tamed stallion as opposed to a wild stallion. This self-governance helps creates interior order and peace, so that we can better hear and respond to God’s action in our lives. The mortification is never an end in itself, but a means by which we become better followers of Christ.

Spiritual writers have used many images to explain the value of mortification. Picture a jar full of very sour vinegar. You want to fill it up with sweet honey. First you have to empty out the vinegar, and then scrub the inside of the jar, and only then can you put in the honey. Just so, to receive the many gifts of grace God wants to give us, we have to empty out and scrub clean every corner of our heart and mind, otherwise the grace can’t get in. Think of a garden (as in Jesus’ parable of the sower). The soil is our fallen human nature, riddled and overgrown with poisonous weeds (vices, selfish tendencies, psychological and emotional wounds…). God comes and plants the seed of grace, the seeds of all the Christian virtues. We water those seeds through prayer and the sacraments. But we also need to pull up the weeds (and some of them have very deep roots), otherwise they will choke the growth of grace, and our virtues will end up looking like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.

OK, now let’s get practical. What does this have to do with Lent? The Church is a wise mother. She knows that we like to feast more than we like to fast, which is perfectly normal. But she also knows that if we don’t fast (practice mortification), we will get spiritually out of shape pretty quickly. So she has built into the liturgical year certain seasons when we focus a little bit more than usual on this aspect of our spiritual life – penitential days and seasons, like Lent. So, fasting (some form of mortification, voluntary self-denial) is a normal part of every Catholic’s Lenten journey; it gets us in shape for the holiest days of the year – Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday.

Each of us should choose some form of mortification (something that we notice, but not something that distracts us or overburdens us – balance and realism are important for a healthy spiritual life). In this way, we can unite our increased spiritual efforts to those of our Catholic brothers and sisters throughout the world, making this season a real family affair. Together we go with Jesus into the desert, where he spent 40 days practicing mortification, as a preparation for his public mission.

In another post on this blog, we have made some suggestions about what you can “give up for Lent.” Hopefully this current entry has helped you understand more deeply the value of giving up something.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC