Repost: 15 Minutes Alone - A Study

Source: Mark Prigg, "Need Some Alone Time? Researchers Find Men Would Rather Administer Electric Shocks to Themselves than Spend Time Alone with Nothing to Do but Think," Mail Online, July 3, 2014, accessed July 22, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2679950/Need-time-Researchers-men-administer-electric-shocks-spent-time-do.html.

---

We've all complained that we would love some time alone - but few people actually enjoy it, researchers have found.

Most volunteers who were asked to spend no more than 15 minutes alone in a room doing nothing but sitting and thinking found the task onerous.

In fact, some of the volunteers, men in particular, preferred to administer mild electrical shocks to themselves rather than sit and do nothing.

'Many people find it difficult to use their own minds to entertain themselves, at least when asked to do it on the spot,' said University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Wilson, who led the study appearing in the journal Science.

'In this modern age, with all the gadgets we have, people seem to fill up every moment with some external activity.'

Nearly 800 people took part in the study.

Some experiments involved only college students.

The researchers then broadened the study to include adults who live in the same area.

They went to a church and farmer's market to recruit people from a variety of backgrounds and ages up to 77.

And they got the same results: most participants regardless of age or gender did not like to be idle and alone with their thoughts.

In some experiments, college volunteers were asked to sit alone in a bare laboratory room and spend six to 15 minutes doing nothing but thinking or daydreaming.

They were not allowed to have a cellphone, music player, reading material or writing implements and were asked to remain in their seats and stay awake.

Most reported they did not enjoy the task and found it hard to concentrate.

Researchers then had adult and college student volunteers do the same thing in their homes, and got the same results.

In addition, a third of volunteers cheated by doing things like using a cellphone or listening to music.

The researchers did an experiment to see if the student volunteers would even do an unpleasant task rather than just sit and think.

They gave them a mild shock of the intensity of static electricity.

Volunteers were asked whether, if given $5, they would spend some of it to avoid getting shocked again.

The ones who said they would be willing to pay to avoid another shock were asked to sit alone and think for 15 minutes but were given the option of giving themselves that same shock by simply pushing a button.

Many did not, especially men: Two-thirds (12 of 18) administered at least one shock.

One did it 190 times. A quarter of the women (six of 24) gave themselves at least one shock.

'I think they just wanted to shock themselves out of the boredom,' Wilson said.

'Sometimes negative stimulation is preferable to no stimulation.'

---

Pascal was right: diversion is both modern man's greatest misery and greatest consolation from misery. We don't know how to sit quietly in our rooms. 

It would be very easy for some of us to see this study and scoff and claim, "They didn't test me. I could have done it easy." In a study of 800 people, surely at least a few of them had a similar idea. But if we were to be totally honest with ourselves and face the stark truth: could we find pleasure in being alone with ourselves, our thoughts, our being? Not distracting ourselves, not reading, not thinking, not fiddling; just being. 

Here's why most can't: 1) a habit of diversion from modern living; 2) a deep aversion to any circumstance that brings us face to face with the truth of ourselves; silence and darkness are two powerful ways of doing this. Prayer is another. Traumatic events are also another. Beauty and child-like simplicity can also do it; see, for example, how Mr. Rogers totally disarms Joan Rivers in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Kp5YeqrlE.

For most of us, the truth of ourselves is quite simple: it is the horrifying pain that we have endured for so long that we will do anything to forget about it. It is the shame and fear that has been instilled in us by our parents, peers, society, and even ourselves. It is our deepest secret and what we always are hiding from. We shun silence as boring; the darkness as full of monsters (fear of the dark, the boogeyman, which is simply a representation of our inner, psychological turmoil that we fear); prayer as going unheard or useless; simplicity as naivety; beauty as trivial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw); trauma as the universe's sadism; and death as the ultimate evil for an individual (YOLO).

The truth is we don't know what to do with ourselves, so we just, in the words of the Joker, "do... things...."

Modernity's Unhappiness and Distractions

Pascal observed the problem in seventeenth-century France when he saw the obsession with entertainment as the offspring of the fallen human desire to be distracted from any thought of mortality. “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room,” he said. And: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

Today the problem is even greater: Entertainment has apparently become many people’s primary purpose of existence. I doubt that it would surprise Pascal that the world has increased the size, scope, and comprehensiveness of distraction. It would not puzzle him that death has been reduced to little more than a comic-book cartoon in countless action movies or into a mere momentary setback in soap operas and sitcoms. Indeed, he would not find it perplexing that the bleak spiritual violence of mortality leaves no lasting mark on the bereaved in the surreal yet seductive world of popular entertainment.

But he might well be taken aback that the churches have so enthusiastically endorsed this project of distraction and diversion. This is what much of modern worship amounts to: distraction and diversion. Praise bands and songs of triumph seem designed in form and content to distract worshipers from life’s more difficult realities.

Even funerals, the one religious context where one might have assumed the reality of death would be unavoidable, have become the context for that most ghastly and incoherent of acts: the celebration of a life now ended. The Twenty-Third Psalm and “Abide with Me” were funeral staples for many years but not so much today. References to the valley of the shadow of death and the ebbing out of life’s little day, reminders both of our mortality and of God’s faithfulness even in the darkest of times, have been replaced as funeral favorites by “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “My Way.” The trickledown economics of worship as entertainment has reached even the last rites for the departed. [...]

Perhaps it is ironic, but the church that confronts people with the reality of the shortness of life lived under the shadow of death prepares them for resurrection better than the church that goes straight to resurrection triumphalism without that awkward mortality bit. 

Bonhoeffer once asked, “Why did it come about that the cinema really is often more interesting, more exciting, more human and gripping than the church?” Why, indeed. Maybe the situation is even worse than I have described; perhaps the churches are even more trivial than the entertainment industry. After all, in popular entertainment one does occasionally find the tragic clearly articulated, as in the movies of a Coppola or a Scorsese.

A church with a less realistic view of life than one can find in a movie theater? For some, that might be an amusing, even entertaining, thought; for me, it is a tragedy.

---

Source: Carl R. Trueman, "Tragic Worship, First Things, June 1, 2013, accessed April 18, 2014, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/06/tragic-worship.

Fr. Antonio Royo Marin's Commentary on the Hail Mary, pt. 10: "Now and at the hour of our death"

Now

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now, through this day, through this hour, through our entire lives, in which there are constant temptations and dangers.

Now, when temptation intensifies and we run into further danger, that the Lord may not permit these temptations to become more violent and dangerous. Now when, as ever, souls are besieged by the world, the devil, and the flesh. Now when, without danger, we cannot walk down streets, nor attend spectacles and shows, nor read magazines and books, nor even look out the window, nor be properly educated at schools. Now when, with so many followers of the devil, men and women seem to have as their sole occupation to tempt men to sin and damn them.

And at the Hour of Our Death

We know not how our death shall be, nor when it shall be, nor whether it shall take us by surprise. When we arrive at our death, the devil will bring back to our minds our many sins, the rigor of divine justice, our failure to make sufficient penance, and how we constantly showed contempt for God's many graces. At that hour of our death, when the pain of infirmity will not allow us to come before You [Translator's note: perhaps the author is thinking here of being before the Blessed Sacrament or at a Church or other holy place]: may it not be sudden, but may we know clearly the gravity of the moment and have at our side a priest who may absolve us, administer Viaticum and Extreme Unction, and commend our souls while suggesting holy affections to us, and with such preparation may we breathe forth our final breath pronouncing your holy Name and the Name of your Son Jesus, our Redeemer and Savior. Amen.

Conclusion

Such is the most beautiful prayer of the Hail Mary in its two parts. It is impossible to find a more beautiful and sublime prayer in praise of Mary and in fervent supplication for graces. The Hail Mary ought to be constantly in the hearts and very frequently on the lips of all the sons of Mary. It has a supernatural efficacy to obtain from Her any grace, and above all others as the most important grace, the grace of a holy death. There exists a special devotion dedicated to this thought, called the Three Hail Marys, which was revealed to St. Matilda by God as the most efficacious way to obtain from Him, through the intercession of Mary, the grace of a happy death. The three Hail Marys ought to be recited piously every day in honor of the three great privileges which the Most Holy Trinity granted to Mary, namely: unlimited power, wisdom, and mercy. Clearly in order to obtain this grace from God, it is necessary to be worthy of it; hence we ought to avoid all sin and live an authentically Christian life, to which praying the three Hail Marys will provide a powerful help.

---

Source: Fr. Antonio Royo Marín, La Virgen María, trans. by R. Grablin (Madrid, Spain: BAC, 1996), 458-459. Translation of this commentary is dedicated to V.G.M.S.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Freedom from Fear of Death

14 Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage. 16 For surely it is not with angels that he is concerned but with the descendants of Abraham. 17 Therefore he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people. 18 For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted. (Hebrews 2:14-18)

[...]

Christ assumed a nature without sin, but with the possibility of suffering, because He assumed a flesh similar to the sinner: ‘In the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom. 8:3). Therefore, like the children, He is partaker of flesh and blood, and all in the same way: for it was not imaginary flesh, as the Manicheans say, not was it assumed in the accidental way, as Nestorius said. But true flesh and blood, such as children have, were assumed into the unity of the person.

That Christ is a partaker of flesh and blood is not to be understood as referring to the vices of flesh and blood, because He did not take on sin or commit any; but as referring to the very substance of animated flesh, because He assumed flesh and soul. It also included the possibility of suffering, because He assumed our nature capable of suffering. Therefore, the sense is: Because the children, i.e., the faithful, has a nature capable of suffering, Christ Himself partook of the same, i.e., of flesh and blood. But we partake of them through our person; and Christ in like manner assumed them to His person: ‘The Word was made flesh’ (Jn. 1:14). By flesh and blood can also be understood the flesh and blood of Christ according to the statement: ‘He that eats my flesh and drinks my blood’ (Jn. 6:55), of which the children, i.e., the apostles, partook at the last supper and of which Christ partook: ‘He drank His own blood’, as Chrysostom says.

Then (v. 14b) he shows the benefits His death brought. In regard to this he does two things: first, he shows its usefulness on the part of the devil, who had the power; secondly, on our part who were held (v. 15).

He says, therefore: He partook of flesh and blood, i.e., He assumed a nature in which He could suffer and die, which he could not do in the divine nature, that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death, i.e., the devil. But how does the devil have the power of death? For this is God’s prerogative: ‘The Lord kills and makes alive’ (1 Sam. 2:6); ‘I will kill and I will make to live’ (Dt. 32:39). I answer that a judge has the power of death in one way, because he inflicts death, when he punishes with death; but a thief has it another way in the sense of deserving death because of demerit. God has the power of death in the first way: For in what day you shall eat of it, you shall die the death’ (Gen. 2:17). But the devil in the second way, because by persuading men to sin, he yielded him over to death: ‘by the envy of the devil, death came into the world’ (Wis. 2:24). But he says, that he might destroy him, not as to his substance, which is indestructible, nor as to his malice, so that the devil would become good at some time, but as to his power: ‘Despoiling the principalities and powers’ (Col. 2:15).

This was accomplished by the death of Christ in three ways: first, on the part of Christ, for the true nature of justice is that the victor subject the vanquished to himself [major premise]: ‘For by whom a man is overcome, of the same is he the slave’ (2 Pt. 2:19) [Scriptural justification for premise here and as follows]. But Christ overcame the devil [minor premise]: ‘The Lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed’ (Rev. 5:5). Therefore, it is just that the devil be subject to Him [conclusion]: ‘When a strong man armed keeps his court, those things are in peace which he possesses (Lk. 11:21). Secondly, on the part of the devil: for justice requires that a person who unjustly uses power granted him should lose it. But the devil has been given power over the sinners he seduced, but not over the good. Therefore, because he presumed to extend this power even to Christ, Who did not sin: ‘The prince of this world comes, and in me he has nothing’ (Jn. 14:30), he deserved to lose it. The third reason is on our part: for it is just that the vanquished be the servants of the victor. But man by sin was the servant of the devil: ‘Whoever commits sin is the servant of sin’ (Jn. 8:34); consequently, he was subject to the devil and liable to sin. But Christ paid the price for our sin: ‘Then did I pay that which I took not away’ (Ps. 68:5). Therefore, when the cause of servitude was taken away, man was set free by Christ.

But it should be noted that another satisfaction was suitable. For man was in debt; but one man can satisfy for another out of charity, although no one can satisfy for the entire human race, because he does not have power over it, nor could the entire human race satisfy sufficiently, because it was entirely subject to sin; nor could an angel, because this satisfaction was unto glory, which exceeds the power of an angel. Therefore, it was necessary that the one who satisfied be man and God, Who alone has power over the whole human race. By the death of God and man, therefore, He destroyed him who had the empire of death.

Then (v. 15) another advantage on our part is mentioned. In regard to this it should be noted that a man is a servant of sin to the extent that he is induced to sin. But the most effective inducements to sin are the love of transitory goods and the fear of present punishments: ‘Things set on fire, as to the first and dug down as to the second, shall perish at the rebuke of your countenance’ (Ps. 79:17). But these two amount to the same thing, because the more a person loves something, the more he fears its evil contrary. Hence, we see that savage beasts are kept from the greatest pleasures through fear of punishment; thus fear makes cowards of us all. Hence, if a man overcomes his fears, he overcomes everything; and when fear is overcome, all disordered love of the world is overcome. Thus Christ by His death broke this fear, because He removed the fear of death, and, consequently the love of the present life. For when a person considers that the Son of God, the Lord of death, willed to die, he no longer fears death. That is why before the death of Christ, it was said: ‘O death, how bitter is the remembrance of you’ (Sir. 41:1); but after Christ’s death the Apostle expresses a desire to be dissolved and be with Christ: Hence, we are told: ‘Fear not them that kill the body’ (Mt. 10:28). He says, therefore, and deliver all those who through the fear of death were subject to lifelong service, namely, the servitude of sin.

But Christ freed us from a double servitude, namely, that of the Law and that of sin, since the law is called a yoke which neither we not our fathers were able to bear (Ac. 15:10). Now the difference between the Old and the New Law is fear and love. In the New there is love: ‘If you love me, keep my commandments’ (Jn. 14:15). But the Old was the law of fear: ‘You have not received the spirit of servitude again in fear’ (Rom. 8:15). Therefore, he sways, and deliver them who through the fear of bodily death, which the Law inflicted, were all subject to lifelong servitude.

---

Source: St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Hebraeos Lectura), trans. by Fabian R. Larcher, DHS Priory website, accessed March 12, 2014, 2.4.138-145.