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Daniel ThwaitesTHERE REALLY ought to be no surprise that the mass nude wedding has captured people's attention so thoroughly. Yes, it involves sex, the perennial eye-catcher. But it also raises issues of social decadence, of the enforcement of law and its relation to morality, of the extent to which we shall go to make money, and of the ownership and handling-rights of that curiously malleable brand-name, Jamaica.
Some of our more hare-brained commentators have decided that there is a human-rights issue involved in staging the naked weddings. That is going way too far. Even if you believe the weddings should be allowed (or even encouraged), there is no reason to make a jackass of yourself and argue that stopping the wedding would infringe some basic human right. That sort of fanaticism only debases the concept of human rights.
Then there is the profoundly misguided nonsense about the Church (or whoever else) failing to "speak out" about other issues. A version of that argument even made it into the editorial in The Sunday Gleaner. First of all, it is not true, as the Church has things of interest to say on almost every social issue. Secondly, the Church is among the few who not only talks, but takes steps to fix things or at least make them a little better for people.
Take the cruel handling of the street people in Montego Bay. The Church cares for homeless people daily, which itself speaks volumes about the way we ought to behave. The difficulty is that some people don't want the Church to speak out as much as they want it to "bawl out".
Amanuensis
On a slightly different note, the word "AMANUENSIS", meaning a person who writes from dictation or copies manuscripts, popped into the news when bright young Daniel Thomas successfully spelled it and won the Spelling Bee competition. The word always reminds me of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Dominican who joined the then mendicant order against his family's wishes and wrote and taught the most sublime philosophy. Thomas had many amanuenses who trailed behind him taking dictation as he did his daily rounds. In effect, he would be thinking about and dictating different books, sermons and lectures at the same time without difficulty.
Thomas was a teenager when he expressed a desire to join the Dominicans. His family was so perturbed that they captured him and locked him away, hoping he would relent. He spent two years of captivity in the Castle of Rocca-Secca, during which his brothers took steps to excite the manly passions in him. Fr. Alban Butler relates that: "While St. Thomas was in confinement at Rocca-Secca, his brothers endeavoured to entrap him into sin, but the attempt only ended in the triumph of his purity. Snatching from the hearth a burning brand, the Saint drove from his chamber the wretched creature whom they had there concealed". The "wretched creature" was a prostitute his brothers had acquired and sent to Thomas' room to persuade him against a life of celibacy.
And so there you have the definition of a saint: while most other men would have run her through with another hot poker, Thomas ran her out of the room with a hot poker from the fire. I wonder how Thomas would fare in the precincts of Hedonism, or even just around my brothers.
As it happens, Thomas was a very practical ethical thinker, which of course sometimes leads to hilarious results. At one point he addresses the issue of whether watching animals copulate is a mortal or a venial sin. Quite sensibly, Thomas reasons that it depends on the size of the animal, the time spent in observation, and the proximity of the act to the person observing. Needless to say he would have frowned on the elaborate planning and publicity of Hedonism's nude weddings, even apart from the fact that a supposedly sacred institution is getting somewhat profane treatment.
Come to think of it, even the ancient hedonists counselled moderation in all things so that one's pleasure in them would not be diminished by over-exposure. Shakespeare captures this same insight in Henry IV when he notes that "if all the days were playing holidays, to play would be as tedious as to work".
Such is the nature of human attention and desire: it is attracted by the abnormal, by the rip in the fabric, not the fabric. I am told that bored nudists get excited when someone clothed comes among them.
Daniel Thwaites is involved in teaching and writing.
