Overeating and Spaciousness

A number of things have come together in the reflection that this post represents: a recent post by long-time internet acquaintance The Crescat, the inspiration from retreat to reread Gerald May's Addiction and Grace, and the potential side effects of a new medication.

As I have written before on this old blog, since about third grade I have had a weight problem. It has been with me to one degree or another ever since.

Recently, with the new medication I mentioned, I am trying to find a new energy to address my overeating. I have also become more and more convinced, especially since I have been here in Italy, that it is a kind of spiritual block for me.

Gerald May suggests, more or less, that the answer to addiction is contemplation. In refusing the addicted behavior, one must accept the emptiness--or 'spaciousness,' in his language--that is left. It is into this spaciousness that contemplation is born. This resonates with me; I think I learned to overeat as a strategy to fill a certain emptiness which was unbearable at the time. But now that I am adult--and even more now that God has granted me the grace of baptism--I believe the Holy Spirit wills to make this spaciousness into contemplation, if only I would try to stop filling it with food.

So I pray that the Lord bless this new inspiration he has conceived in me.

inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.
our heart is restless until it rests in you.
(St. Augustine)

Heavy

Sometime around 3rd grade, I started to be a heavy person. Since then I've had lighter times (high school, working at the group home) and heavier times (middle school, now). It's something to which I've paid spiritual or practical attention only sporadically.

One of the things you notice right away about religious life is the prevalence of lifestyle disease: hypertension, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, not to mention an unseemly amount of general malaise and a sense of bourgeois entitlement.

In any case, lately I've been feeling like I've arrived at the age when I might be approaching my last chance to do something about my weight before I set myself on an irrevocable path to one of these ailments.

The new year is the traditional time for such dreams, so why not?

So, who is the right patron saint for such a spiritual ambition? A famous food ascetic like Catherine of Siena? A brother fat friar like Thomas Aquinas?