I heard a speaker on the radio this morning, an eloquent Muslim chaplain, talking about Ramadan, and what it means, in spiritual terms, to practice taming one’s desire by fasting. He was decrying the modern consumerist culture of pleasure: if it feels good, do it as often as possible.

There is a great deal to learn by following spiritual traditions, and fasting is an almost universal practice in world religion. In many ways, the lessons are relatively uncontroversial: hunger is the best sauce, and often clears and focusses the mind, eliminating sluggishness. On a more esoteric, symbolic level, by consciously sitting with our emptiness, the hollowness inside, and not giving in to it, we gain something ineffable, that may be called grace: abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, too. By recognising that we all carry around this unfillable void inside, we can come to a new acceptance of our limitations, our humanity, which is calming and life-affirming.
This approach works contrary to the hedonism of the world today, where we act on our freedom to do what we like, seeing it as a mark of our independence and individuality that we repeatedly exercise this choice to pleasure ourselves, to achieve satisfaction. Often in an effort to conceal evidence that we don’t feel as powerful as we would like to think we are, we showily exercise this right by eating and drinking and having sex as often as we can, and in as much variety as we can - stimulation, activity, a search for constant arousal.
It is not surprising in the West that there is an enormous increase in children being “diagnosed” with ADD, or variants on a theme. The food that kids eat nowadays is literally driving them crazy. Someone was telling me recently about a residential school for kids with ADD - by Friday, with a proper diet, the kids are calm again, but after a weekend at home with crisps and sugary processed starchy foods, they are antichrists again by Monday. It’s not only food; everything they are given is guaranteed to provoke the opposite of quiet reflection and self-awareness: increasingly addictive mind-blowing electronic wizardry and marketing-driven television programmes stimulating the desire for new toys, teaching them that buying things puts a smile on your face. It is the “canned loneliness” of consumerism and popular culture that Mark Simpson attributes to the generosity of Americans. Their increasing obesity is the sign of things to come for the rest of us; it is the natural conclusion to the untrammelled pleasure principle.
The symbolism of fasting, of taming the desire to eat, is relatively easy to appreciate and can be applied to a non-religious life without much oppressive baggage. But applying the same principle to sexual desire, (when there is no committed monogamous relationship to respect), and I hit the shadowy underbelly of religion. Every time I hear words of wisdom coming from a Christian or Muslim person, I remember how beyond the pale I am in their worldview as a sexually active gay man, and know the hate that is expressed on the issue, and I feel a little sad.
I’ve wondered recently about this, in Marxist terms - would I be a member of a club that would accept me as a member? My refusal to abstain from sexual stimulation and variety is something that naturally tweaks my Irish sense of guilt, although increasingly rarely now. To stop it and to avoid the rollercoaster of stimulation seems curiously depressing and pointless to me - and I am aware of a school of Freudian thought which is looking at this phenomenon among gay men in a new, non-pathologising way. Perhaps I am constantly restless, my spirit won’t be calmed, I won’t conform or give up what feels like a pagan unorthodox quest, in mythic terms. It’s relentless and not exactly conducive to an orthodox religious experience, and flies in the face of traditional notions of sitting with emptiness. The part of me that yearns for such transcendence, such sublimation, sees the tools used by the sophisticated manipulators and politicians that run religious institutions to suppress sexuality as reprehensible, inculcating a corrosive shame and self-loathing. So I do not use them on principle. Shame is not healthy.
There are, perhaps, reasons why unashamed sexually active single gay men are incompatible with mainstream religion. What would happen if the anarchists took over, and the hypocrisy of the many, many closeted priests was exposed?
Camille Paglia would have it that gay men are at the vanguard of this Apollonian drive for self-expression and creativity, that Western gay male hedonistic culture epitomises humanity’s drive to escape the moribund stagnation of Eastern, chthonic, compliant existence, to push the boundaries of what is acceptable in culture and style. She praises those who have died in pursuit of pleasure as heroes.
I’m no hero. But I’m not at peace either. There must be a middle way.