Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

it is often argued that psychological and relational health requires clear and appropriate boundaries between self and other. These boundaries create a space for self-care and emotional restoration: we disengage from others to care for the self.

our notions of selfhood become intertwined and fused with the other to the point where the well-being of the other is how I define my selfhood! Anyone who loves understands this. What is radical about the call of Jesus is that he extends this love not just to children and family but to the entire world, friends and enemies alike.

Very often these relational dysfunctions are produced by a morbid self-concept.

it seems clear that the psychotherapeutic concern over healthy boundaries has little to do with love as I have described it. Rather, the establishment of boundaries here signals the failure of love. Specifically, “healthy boundaries” are encouraged when the mutuality of love has been lost. The other (e.g., an abusive spouse) is actively hurting the individual. And the morbid self-concept of the person in therapy is allowing this abuse (in its many manifestations) to continue.

the modern notion of selfhood became introverted and individualistic, the self as isolated and distinct (“buffered”) from the world. The notion of a self-determined, isolated, autonomous ego is a ubiquitous feature within modernity. The buffered self is a critical feature in how we moderns view our social contract, politically and economically.

I think it important to note that the worry over “boundaries” is taking place within this context and, as a consequence, may be doubling down on modern values that Christian psychotherapists might want to revisit or, at the very least, sharply criticize.

I would worry if the focus upon boundaries becomes fetishized to the point where a distorted view of selfhood—the buffered self—becomes enshrined within Christian psychotherapy as the ideal for human selfhood, relationship, and love.

How does the psychotherapeutic concern over “healthy boundaries” fit into Acts 4? This is not to say that therapeutic concerns about self-care are illegitimate. It is simply the recognition that modernity cannot meaningfully speak about love.

Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger argues that notions of purity are intimately associated with the process of categorization. That is, human communities impose order and structure upon a chaotic and messy reality in order to coordinate and regulate their social life.

Douglas writes, “Where there is no differentiation there is no defilement.”6 The system of differentiation creates the attribution of dirt: “Where there is dirt there is a system.”

Jesus’ ministry of table fellowship, by blurring the purity boundaries, was introducing a normative dirt into the life of the community. Things (people in particular) were not in their proper places. Illicit and transgressive mixing was occurring.

Should we extend hospitality to monsters? And if we do, are we not courting the danger inherent in the monstrous, the blurring and failure of normative distinctions that define and protect the moral integrity of the group? Phrased differently, a community that embraces everything fails to be any community at all. As Douglas helps us see, dirt defines community.

To welcome the demon, in whatever form the demon takes, is all but impossible. But through our trying to show hospitality to the demon at our door, the demon may well be transformed by the grace that is shown. Or, we may come to realize that it was not really a demon at all, but just a broken, damaged person like ourselves.

Despite the vision of radical hospitality in Matthew 9, we must squarely confront the fact that expulsive elements continued to be a feature in the early church. And, not surprisingly, these expulsive dynamics were involved in protecting the spiritual and moral integrity of the faith community.

Specifically, as I’ve argued, a root tension between mercy and sacrifice is inherently psychological in nature. More specifically, we’ve discovered that the deep worry in expulsive practices concerns their dehumanizing potential, how sociomoral disgust corrupts the heart. That is, it seems clear that church communities must protect their spiritual and moral integrity. There will be boundaries.

light of this, the critical issue, given our analysis of disgust, becomes how those practices are affecting how we emotionally experience otherness. Specifically, have the practices of church discipline begun to affect, at the psychological level, the dynamics of love, mercy, and hospitality?

The call to hospitality is not simply a call to charity but is, rather, a call to remake the heart, my emotional stance toward otherness.

It seems clear that church discipline is needed to preserve the integrity of the community. But there is no way to faithfully implement Paul’s directives until the matters of the heart are confronted. Acts of charity can be dehumanizing. Church discipline can be dehumanizing. Calls for holiness can be dehumanizing. The outcome of these actions pivot off the status of the heart.

the only way forward for people of hospitality will be the assumption that they are psychologically compromised in various ways even when they don’t feel compromised!

Embrace must be deep. Further, it must be prior to any judgments, moral or otherwise, we make of persons. Only then will the fundamental humanity of the person be protected from the psychology of disgust and dehumanization.

That is the root lesson of Matthew 9: No conversation about sin, purity, or holiness can begin until human dignity has been secured beyond all question or doubt. Discussions of purity and sin cannot be primary discussions. For when the “will to purity” trumps the “will to embrace” (when sacrifice precedes mercy), the gears of sociomoral disgust begin to turn, poisoning the well of hospitality by activating the emotions of otherness.

Hospitality is, as Christine Pohl writes, fundamentally about making room. But this room, following Volf, is a space opened within the self. Hospitality is, at root, an emotional and psychological activity. It is a will to embrace. A will that actively seeks to overcome the emotions of otherness.

existential psychologists have suggested that the body is disgusting because we experience it as an existential predicament. Although we relish in the body, we know that it will, one day, fail us.

The spiritual, elevated, and “higher” aspects of experience are intertwined with our “lower” animal nature. Given that disgust regulates and monitors the movements of elevation and degradation on the divinity dimension, it is not surprising that reminders of our animal nature are often seen as vulgar, inappropriate, illicit, and revolting.

The body is holding us back, spiritually speaking. It seems pornographic to drag our feces, sweat, and urine into the Holy of Holies.

issues of propriety, hygiene, and dress are important affairs in many churches. Generally, the rationale offered for this fussiness and fastidiousness is that we are to offer God our “best,” in dress, hygiene, and decorum. But our existential analysis suggests that something more might be rumbling beneath the surface. Behind the impulse to “clean up” there may be an attempt to refuse our animal nature access to the sacred space.

The church is pulled away from life rather than toward a deeper participation. Shockingly, and contrary to human expectation, God was born as a human being, covered in sweat, blood, and amniotic fluid.

To follow God into the scandal of the Incarnation, the church will have to squarely confront its experience of disgust.

we should not follow disgust blindly. Our emotional reactions concerning degradation are complicated and require careful discernment. Many of our reactions regarding the profane and the vulgar are forms of denial, fear, and delusion, an effort to pretend that we are angels—to deny that bodies and privies exist.

In his famous essay The Pornography of Death, Geoffrey Gorer compares sexual pornography with the modern horror genre (film, graphic novels, and books):

The dual nature of sex implies that some aspects of sex are elevating while others are degrading and disgusting. Sex is existentially complicated.

sex can be existentially worrisome. Sex can remind us of our bodies and their associated needs and vulnerabilities. Sex isn’t just “wrong”: there is something “unclean” and often disgusting about the activity. Sex isn’t just “naughty,” it can also be “dirty.”

This is the f-word’s power. It strips sex of its spiritual significance, reducing the act to physical manipulations. It short, the f-word functions, literally, as a profanity: something that is considered to be sacred and high on the divinity dimension is stripped of its spiritual content and rendered profane.

Existentially motivated disgust is causing the Christian community to evacuate the world in the pursuit of “spirituality,” “holiness,” and “purity.”

In contrast to this fear-based escape from the physical world, the Incarnation itself becomes the model of missionality.

Many Christians throughout history have resisted the notion of the Incarnation, that Jesus was physically vulnerable, experienced erections, vomited when ill, or experienced diarrhea. Connecting Jesus with the body has always seemed blasphemous and degrading.

Wanting to protect the absolute Otherness of God, a worthy goal, Arius and his followers insisted that any physical, created (“begotten”) thing could not, by definition, fully partake of the divine nature.

The problem with Arius’ view of God, according to Athanasius, is that Arius’ self-contained and perfect God is sterile. Arius’ God needs nothing. Consequently, Arius’ God cannot love. Love, according to McGill, presupposes need. The Son needs the Father and the Father, to be love, needs the Son. By placing need and dependency (the Son) within the Godhead, the dynamic, mutual, and self-giving nature of love is now found to characterize the life of God.

“Love and not transcendence, giving and not being superior, are the qualities that mark God’s divinity.”

What we find in Matthew 12 is less a conflict over hospitality than a debate over the recognition of human biological need. Human need and biological vulnerability fill Matthew 12. The issues swirl around hunger, an animal in a ditch, and a deformed hand. Each of these, as we have seen here in Part 4, is a disgust trigger. Animals, metabolic functions, and physical malformation are all disgust stimuli. And we are also now positioned to note that these stimuli are often disgusting because they remind us of human need, vulnerability, and, ultimately, death.

For Jesus, mercy is implicated in the recognition of human neediness.

The Pharisees could not see how needy they were, how vulnerable they were as biological creatures. And by denying this about themselves the Pharisees could not see need in others, damning the hungry disciples when they fed themselves or refusing healing to a man with a useless hand.

The real reason the church must fight against death repression is the reason we observed in Matthew 12: honestly embracing need is critical for a life of mercy. As we observed with the Pharisees, blindness to our need also blinds us to the need in others.

Christian love cannot be from our excess. Love is not letting go of the leftovers, the margin left behind after we have taken care of our material needs and secured our creature comforts.

The issue does begin with empathy, seeing my need reflected in the lives of others. But it doesn’t stop there. Mercy is costly. True love moves me into need. Which is, admittedly, a scary prospect. It is an act of faith and it requires a community, a “fellowship of neediness” to use McGill’s phrase.

the church should consciously and intentionally confront disgust psychology to eliminate the worst of its effects.

disgust might prompt a discussion about what is acceptable or unacceptable, but additional criteria are often needed if we are to make any headway.

and a movement into the “fellowship of neediness”? What is needed is a regulating ritual in the life of the church that pushes against the purity collapse, a ritual that keeps purity in tension with hospitality and an awareness of our biological vulnerability.