Closure

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CLOSURE AND SOCIAL CONTRACT:

How You're Never Alone

Victor Excelsius

Keywords: closure, solitude, subjectivity, commitment

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Goals

We can think of the prison and the convent as cloisters. What makes a person go to the convent? They could be group options, that is, what seems like a need to be alone is a need to live in community, but to live detached from this world.ing, the world of the media and the street. Thus, the levels of obedience are also verified in different ways: while in the convent there certain rules, in prison there are another, the criminal law, in the streets there is a law of its own, vaguely accepted by all. But even so, both in the convents and prisons (and we do not mean that some are equivalent to others in the ethical sense), there are channels of communication; a prison is not isolated from the world any more than a convent is.

Development 1. THE DESERT OF BEING

Without love is not possible a commitment to life. But... what is love? And do we need compromises with life? It is not the idea of finitude, of death, of the subject's completion that guides our more or less structured options, both our will and our need for a contract? I come out of my mother's womb and immediately make a contract with the society in which I live and develop my Being. Nobody is an island. So, what is the reason for the closure? Why do you look for the Living God in the place where you least expect him? Charles de Foucauld, for example, went, out of respect for religion, into the desert, perhaps more to find himself by way of a lifetime. Trappist selfless… What, then, are the real reasons for a man or a woman to embark on life? A religious journey, is it an escape from a social, sexual life, full of commitment, of contract? Will it be through detachment from possessions or through an option for the intrinsic value of religious, monastic life, to embrace and pursuit an ideal that can have no place other than there, in the sacred place of the convent and in the sacred place of your Christ-oriented heart? I have defended the thesis that religious life is a return to a state of primitivism, of naivety, in the face of a complex world, of gratuitous violence and contamination. That is, in the context of the 2

city, most of them drop arguments, as in rap style, to argue in favor of your house, but theological hermeneutics is less elaborate than the philosophical, we all know that and, in a sense, somewhere, philosophy mixes with theology, which came to focus on different items from the traditional ones, either of itself or of the former. Because, first of all, the convent is a place of poetry, given to God, the Being is in dasein mystic contemplation, delivered to the transcendent and even on flesh, of the place, there prostrates itself, loaded with the fatigue of the excess of noise and more or less troublesome relationship, I would even say psychotic, of the city, of the urban context. I would even say more: the village is an open-air convent. But there is a strange element to all this, to all these considerations, if the contemplative life exists by itself, in the convent, what is the reason for a strange element that intrudes on the peace that we want to achieve in life, in its asceticism and silence of the soul ? What can disturb an intimate relationship with God? Perhaps a tiny relationship and, as usual, the flesh, the desire, the senses, this is every man's dilemma, every woman's dilemma, the flesh-spirit dilemma. But what is the philosophical root of such conflict? Or why is it obligatorily planted in religious life? Everything has to do with life choices, with the diversity of lives that religious life adopts… All because the subject has an analysis grid prior to the life he lives in the present, and that is why who lives the life of the present, the way of the moment, therefore also has a crack through which his Being drains, when, in Sartrean terms, he needs to escape, to make his desire disappear into an alley, into the immensity of a unmade bed… Still, the man, whether in Portuguese or French, lives on obscenity, on a background in the panorama of the body, on studies of the body, and that is how it survives, because the obsessed with desire, even in the context of contemplation. Therefore, religion it is not an act, that is, it is not a function of the body and holiness is the denial of immanence, of desire, and emptying of Being and intention, to another place, to other instances, even so, to the Other. If I don't want it, you want it, you can say about life in the convent, I despise my body and my senses for a proper function, reproductive or "jouissance”, because he belongs to God, therefore to everyone... But not everyone is God and, in fact, who is this God?!... Therefore, a religion is required to go beyond desire, beyond excess, a God like that of Camus, in the middle of the Algerian desert, who gives an answer to man beyond his bewilderment, with Moses, beyond even your doubt life, from your debt... 3

2. THE FOUNTAIN OF BEING

We equate, then, secular, mundane life, although the laity may well be sacred, and consecrated, contemplative life, an offering to God. One of the other dilemmas of religious life is love of God. In family life, no man likes to be left behind; that is, if the woman says she likes God more than her husband, this hurts the man's masculinity and hurts his human respect. Can't you love Man through God? Or will it be God through Man? Is religion not a more or less complete answer to the human gusts? And yet, that does not invalidate the ontology of religious, consecrated life, its metaphysical, tactical, practical value... In Braga, I met two saints, one of whom spoke little, Frei Marinho, who had a reputation as a saint in Braga, the other, Frei Guimarães, expansive, emotional communicator, spontaneous, both helpful. Yes, I could have continued, I could have stayed there, it was God who was with me and, in that place, he stopped being for me and became for the Others… Then? What for course to the man? Not everyone seeks submission to an order that the Church confers, many develop a critical spirit about things, we will all be sick in search of a crutch to shiverway? Now, God cannot be a crutch, He is our interior, it is You and Me, in the scope not so much of Being, because Being does not leave the place and when it leaves it only causes the most diverse scholastic damage, but Belonging, being together, which has to be progressive, to be mediated , measured, articulated in everyday life. When you can't belong, you go to the convent. Many think you've given up on life society, favors and corruption attitudes that more or less facilitate a more or less stable, albeit tensional, social life. you leave everything because you want to be free, you leave everything because you want to live, among three registers, that of common sense, that of speculative solitude and that of monastic solidarity…

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3. BELONGING

More, we will say, instead of Being, Belonging. And there can be a social contract with god? Everything leads to utilitarianism, man's life is made up of that, practicality, concretions, the struggle for food and women, dowry, good economic condition, the struggle for status. If you don't have that, what do you have? A randomly vague god that gives you as much comfort as philosophy? What if we were all philosophers? It would be chaos... In a way, we have a God who is stressed, depressed, who can no longer with this globalization that is reaffirming the world as a place of conflict, while rereading them. Others undo their intention and actions and end up lying down a work of decades, of centuries, as is happening in Ukraine and the USA on the subject of abortion… Beyond fundamentalism, while some struggle for autonomy for a certain utilitarian reason, others emphasize goodness of heart, sometimes because they have problems, sometimes because they are also stressed, because you have never seen a rich man, a millionaire, ask God for help and even the Church needs money to continue to spread your message, is the law of the civil market… So, why continue to bet on Being? Why not bet on Belonging? Because many people have too many ghosts and prefer to be alone because they are driven by a revolt, a thirst for revenge against the Other, the Being. These people are unresolved, petty, in a social universe of “chicosmartism” that leads nowhere, cause its pure ignorance. Let us say on the other hand: is reason the enemy of faith? Did Teillard de Chardin ask himself this question? Not here is a certain sense of matreirice, in portuguese culture, in the realm of faith, of radical adherence to God? Of course, there is an opportunity, a situationism, which philosophers place within the scope of causality and determinism and anthropologists within the scope of relativism, of the social role that I need to fulfill in order to feel good, to conquer and guarantee my place in the sun… Isn't this question a more or less subliminal form of social opportunism, we would even say, of evolutionism? America lives on it, breathes that feeling 5

through its cinematography, its his art, his yearning for individual freedom au-dela a certain social anthropology that is merely British… So why insist in Belonging, when everyone wants to be? be in dasein, be for the Other, for God, to assert himself in terms of not only a desideratum, but the applicability of a desire, of an emotion, of a time and moment that is yet to come? In this sense, can happiness not be what it already is, instead of being what it is not?

4. THE ALLEGORY OF THE SENSES

If there is a certain delirium in the senses and satisfaction, there is also in its negation. See Santa Teresa of Avila, As Moradas, she, by denying the passions, reaffirmed them, sublimated them in favor of both a God and a biography, a way of being, of belonging. What surprises you most about social life is that there is always an aspect of tenacity (Ten-a-City) in the subject, that is, man is beyond a social, sociable being, a utilitarian, economic man, which has to do with his survival as a social being. Of course, many religious vocations have to do with tired people and even unfit for social, secular, profane life. The transcendent is pure defense cause you want to be alone, like the Count of Monte Cristo in his prison, plotting his revenge... Therefore, there is a certain calculation both in the libidinal, as well as in the lower scopetic, supernatural, such is innate to man, to calculate his energies (energeia) depending on a result you want to obtain, an objective, a challenge... So, faced with the sublimation of Being, we have the sublimation of the senses, as if they, like a tattoo, sign us to a place here, of identity, of belonging, of nationality, as if being Portuguese were a form of affirmation of the Being, in relation to the Spanish Being, the French Being... A sublimation of meaning and, in the convent, a negation of the senses, at least by rule, for there are many who escape all this and make use of the rule to confirm your paraphilias, your illness and teaching of human habitation, beyond the simple desire of Being, in consonance, in relativity… So we have: the senses/denial of senses. So the pleasures of the monastic life? A good wine, or liqueur, as for example from Singeverga, the conventual candy, in a dislocation of the desire of 6

those who you need to state your work and transcendity in terms of negation of genitality, as Iturra would say. Thus, religion appears as a territory, to be defended, of the sacred, obviously, as if from the other world came Crusader knights able to defend a message, an ideal, while others found new churches and know and propagate new ideals, the Church remains firm, even taking the risk, in the face of the public, outdated opinion the face of the maelstrom of the world, when, after all, that is what keeps it intact and credible in the face of things in the world that are develop in groll before our eyes, more or less believable, more or less pagan or even unbelieving, unaware that there is a world in the convent that has to do with happiness.ade, because the convent is not deny of nothing, much less of a social life, that one had or did not one never had, it is for oneself to belong to something, to God, to anything that is under construction, in development, in affirmation. Hence the place of prayer, when others prefer to fight MMA or carry out assassinations in schools with army weapons. even the American films are no longer interested, because the formula is almost always the same and the happy ending is nothing more than a utopian fiction, from illusion to illusion until the end of a world and of a conception of the little man transforming, not very happy, because she plays with desorder of the instincts which is, above all, the aggression of the Other...And that leaves room for a Church that is hardly credible, shrouded in fog and mystery, apologetics of increasingly intricate reasons and solutions, where Being flows through places and existential concatenations. Is that has to do with a despair of living?... So what place is there for the priest these days, a place that is neither an anthropologist nor a social worker? a place of re-affirmation. From where he least expects it,(find, spread), a place where does God appear when man fails, when his desire for victory and selfishness sinks, in the effort to bring food to the table, in the context of a pastoral care of the family? Here is the time to highlight the work of women religious in the most diverse areasof social life, at least in Portugal and the role of the Church in social terms in our social, national and identity context. It's just that, I suspect, after so much time, there are still many, or at least some, who see something bad in the Church, who seewhere there is none, undoubtedly unbalanced and pubescent spirits, undeveloped to understand that social life has both good and bad and if we emphasize our attention in the realm of evil, we are even denying ourselves ,This link has to be positive, because 7

Christ, just having had the worst of deaths, always remained positive, like the saints and such has nothing to do with masochism or any other paraphilia or pathology, He knew what he was doing, for this is eminent practice, affirmatively, his message forever and ever.

5. A PATENT WORLD

The world is there, so we can choose between the monastic, contemplative life and the profane, social life, even if we can go to Mass, every day or at least years, every Sunday, I participate of something important that does not have to do with the spotlight of actors and actresses of various cinematographic genres and that has to do with an intrinsic need trought of peace and respect for ourselves and for what surrounds us, because religion is the rule and with it, above all, respect for the body. Many saints have passed from obscenity to holiness, and in principle religion does not get along well with the instincts. With sexuality, at least the Catholic one, we learn over time to give time to the pleasures of the body and to try, intend, another kind of happiness, that of the spirit, when for Hindus sex is sacred. We will have done something wrong and with that many philosophers, in separating the mind from the body? It seems that we are moving forward, without a doubt that we are walking, like so much progress, money, fame, power, sex, but with our heads turned back and that is typical of a civilizational donkey… It is sad to see how and these things are so divided, as desire blossoms under anguish (Kierkeegard), as the body is separated from the mind, which flees upwards, like the gaze of the ascetic who, by desiring the body, ends up denying it, for transfigure your methodologic absence. Because, after all, desiring is not desiring, it is ignoring, it only has (a body) that denies it in its entirety, who, in fact, does not want it... What secret is there in all this, why do the nuns have no social, sexual life and why is it common place? The everyday citizen cannot be ascetic, a mystic? And why the Church's insistence on asexual relationships, that is, isn't this Catholic, Christian, religious presupposition denying true happiness to man? Yes, true happiness? Because, first of all, we are all different and everything fits more or less well into a certain scope in the sphere of action. Because God, our God, is a demiurge, an ordering intelligence, we must trust that, that is, he makes it happen in the desert, where there is nothing is something, the Nothing, where there was never anything, the 8

Nothing... thinking, thinking… And why, too, success is the enemy of work, of success itself, of genius, of recognition, because when we obtain this recognition, we think that everything is done, that we have no other way to go, when we know that the path is made by walking, always making anything, being always busy with one task or another like Jesus, who was a carpenter and drafted many theological treatises, many from the patristic, such as Saint Bonaventure, Saint Bernardo do Claraval, Saint Thomas Aquinas… But you want more argument tthan goodness, goodness of heart and reason, between the sometimes difficult relationship between subject, individual, and social body, in organic or mechanical terms, as Émile Durkheim would have said? So the world gives, the world takes away, once we feel happys, being in love sometimes with reality, sometimes with a person in context, sometimes with an environment, a passage from the Bible that makes eminently casuistic sense, sometimes we feel down, depressed, unfulfilled. Glass and water are both transparent, both reflect what is beyond them. That's the Christian life, transparent, full of values, symbols and meanings, while others don't want to know, they go to the beach where they spend dozens of days and go back to filling chorizos every year, in a race and hurry with such a zeal for both pleasure and fulfillment in a certain profane sphere, as if life were a race, a test, a test, as if there could be no room for thinking, because nowadays nobody wants to think, even those who are within universities, as universities have become a business, even in the humanities. Again, to fill chorizos, we mean, small talk. So how are we to live life, following Peter Singer's idea? A convent life or a social life will be better, you knowing us that the conventual is also social, maybe even more intense than life outside, on the street, in the cafe, of the voices that criticize and condemn you, or because you don't do things well sometimes because you don't like everyone, sometimes because people always have something say, especially the less educated. What, in fact, is the meaning of life, beyond or below these two social modalities? How shall we live? Yes, how are we to live, when many do not even care about this, about this issue in their lives, while others spend their lives thinking, writing, talking, within the framework of a western civilization that despises the past and the future and has little respect for reflection and thinking, living in the moment, for testosterone, hormones or even for another thing, by malice and madness. 9

Be that as it may, the dream of philosophers and social scientists cannot come true, that is, their target is in constant movement, the truth, the meaning of life, people, are always changing, adapting, evolving, we can say in Darwinian terms, even the one that Teillard de Chardin gave him. People, in particular, are a moving “target”, i.e. even in Orwell1984there is something unfathomable, something that escapes the scientist, the analyst...above all because God is not with him, because he is for himself, for his university, career and prestige. Only the Columbostyle man can win, outside and inside criminology, the man who goes by himself, perhaps already retired, who has nothing to lose, who goes to the reality of social facts as if what he has to discover is of no use to the world, at least in the present that he also lives intensely... On the other hand, if man is an intrinsically social animal, it is an intrinsically spiritual animal and we all need in one way or another, our gods, our God, monotheistic or not, to survive. Hence we are intrinsically spiritual, as if we needed food. Only those who have never been hungry for God have never realized how important He is in our lives and while some go running to Church, like Mary who „hurriedly left and ran”, others do not set foot there either because they feel too guilty, or because they are careful to feel inferior in the eyes of God, to submit to his good pleasure and his yoke. Even so, God does not submit anyone, does not humiliate anyone and understands everything, especially the afflicted man, because, after all, he helps man to look within himself, in his mystery, in his consecration, in his salvific union. Therefore, God does not make us proud, that is not the case, believing in God is, above all, believing in ourselves, in our dreams, in our desideratums, He helps, even if we do not immediately perceive this action on us, it is so blind that we are with the world of the street, TV, “promenades” and the races, pacing like mad devils looking for Nothing instead of Nothing. So why not embrace, embrace, the Whole. Yes the Spinoza's Whole, Levinas' Totality?

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I gave this writing the title „Of how you're never alone“. Yes, you are never alone and suicide comes as much from crime, aggression, disturbance, as from loneliness. In a world troubled by the faulty evils family ties, only psychologists seem to have a perfect life. Only Ronaldo. However, not everyone, least of all young philosophers, is afraid of Ronaldo or wants to be Ronaldo... Not everyone, therefore, wants to win, because the guy who wins, for the most part, In most cases, he wins for his own, for the group to which he belongs, and then reaps the dividends of that, of that adventure and consecration. I, you may think, belong to God's club, I win for myself, for my group and for God. It is God who makes me win, because, in a certain measure, He is Me and I am He too. So, what to do with loneliness, when you realize that it is absolutely social, overwhelming? Maybe thinking about the transience of life, of your existence, realizing that you won't be around for long. So,you realize that He is with you, that He watches over you, even if it is to give you a good death, if that is what you fear most, because you have done everything in your life to be (special), to belong (to a group, to a society ). Then you start living, one way or another, realizing that hunger is temporary, that thirst is quenched with tap water, that you need to starve in the name of your God, because your life has improved with His assistance and that everything takes effort and self-denial, if you really want to win, live up to your name… Therefore, even if the help of your God is far away, believe that God is Father and a father is concerned about the well-being of his child, even if sometimes he does not need his help because he wants the bird to fly by itself to fora of the niche, even if you like to beunder the mother's skirts and stalls a successful and fulfilling career, of affirmation of your Ego, even and above all in psychoanalytic terms. Yes, because the desert rose is the strongest, it doesn't always take rGrow the plant, it seeks to develop, in its vegetative life, a survival mechanism that you too are getting to know and developing when you are lonely and tired and even if disoriented by the struggle, raised as a superhero, in God. And how are the gods mad, do you ask? With humanity, a lot of humanity, because we are far (or maybe not) from the Greek and Latin gods or the God of the Old Testament, irascible, angry, pretentious and not very tolerant...

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CONCLUSION

So how to choose between religious life and life on the street, in the world? We must not put matters in these terms. Consecrated life is, in its own way, a social contract, like marriage, and everything is concluded between the four walls of convents and Goffman discriminated against this attitude, putting it next to life in prisons and asylums, in my view wrongly. There is a dimension of consecrated life that is highly eschatological, absolutely human. Therefore, at the same time, divine, as if the nun or the monk announced another life, a new life, a promise of the future, of a world to come, as the philosopher affirms metaphysics in its moral sense. And morality has everything to do with the Other and society, it has everything to do with respect and, despite everything, with the way we deal with our body, not making a mechanical use of it in favor of the most violent and crazy, the most sick and schizophrenic drives, just because a freedom has been installed in liberality and liberalism in which everything can be done, constituting itself as a crime the attitude of respect for the Other. Therefore, one is never alone, I say as an anthropologist, everything takes time, the creation of relationships, the fermentation in the absence of meaning, the search, because it is necessary to have confidence in oneself and in the world (Emerson, Socrates), because it is I need to continue, the race, the walk, the game of chess, whatever it is in this brief stay that we don't know if it repeats itself over and over, ever… David Gilbert (The Patience of Being) spoke in these instances of the soul restless, that does not rest until it achieves its objective, more or less metaphysical, of inserting itself in a certain context, of which Geertz and João Pina-Cabral spoke. That is, Being disguises itself (socially, intimately), as non-being, as not-knowing.er, to metamorphose into something that guarantees you ecstatic enjoyment and survival, as if you were a chameleon or a mutant. He needs to disguise himself, in his supernatural instances and in his form of affirmation as a being who shares the divine, the supernatural. It is natural, because God wants it that way, because it is not aggressive, violent and even if it is, God, ironically, can always be with him, by his side, walking on the beach, side by side and holding him when he is not hold the stride longer, for the purposesless diminishing of the existence and of the sorcery of the human.

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So to say, the subject makes an epistemological break with the world, a provisional break, when he embraces religious life, because the social contract is at the same time commitment and detachment, one in on, fixation and alienation, the subject is both here and there. Depending on the personality, he escapes to a world of stress, of beings disheartened with themselves, too attentive to what the other does or does not do, of beings quite disturbed, who come, in turn, the religious life and surrender to God, as a sign of weakness and weakness, when it is exactly the opposite: I am strong because I am with God, I am accompanying and not only that, I am subject to his strength that your turn is my strength. He it is my strength. Thus, the man who believes, who believes in himself by believing in God, has already made a kind of metaphysical graft, and he replaced the regime of the profane doubt by the regime of faith and certainty. And that gives you comfort, more faith to carry on. Not hat doubt is not admitted by faith, indeed, it even strengthens it, p.hey the human, by itself, claudicat various stages of its existence, it is normal to doubt, even the saints doubted. But make doubt a way of life only if it makes you feel real mind alone and while you hear these words, true, you realize that, as in the footsteps on the beach, He is always with you, because it is the character of the God in whom you believe to take care of man, his object of creation, to support him as a father supports the your son without much sentimentality but also without much harshness, because the other work comes from Mary, who wants the good of her son and suffers when he falls by himself, on the road of sin, wrapped in unruly bodies, in economic and financial corruption, in the scandal of a circus where what the people want most is party, more and more party, more and more fun, maybe to forget or at least mask, a life empty of meaning…

Lisbon, July 22, 2022

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