Hugo Schwyzer

I’ll try for a more thoughtful post later this morning.

Some assorted Monday morning odds and ends:

My wife and I have started attending the brand-new "family eucharist" at All Saints Pasadena; it’s every Saturday afternoon at 5:00PM (upstairs in the learning center for folks who might consider coming).  It’s targeted to families with young children, but all are welcome.  The service is far more informal than our Sunday morning offerings, and as one with a strongly evangelical low-church streak, I’m over the moon with pleasure to have guitar music and modern praise songs (actual Vineyard tunes!) sung in an Episcopal church!  The homilies are tailored to a child’s attention span, which is excellent news for me — most of what I need to know from the Gospel is comprehensible to a six year-old (though Scripture also offers enough mystery and subtlety to satisfy the most theologically curious adult).  The service lasts only forty-five minutes, and juice and cookies are served afterwards.   I’m a happy camper indeed!  So folks in the Pasadena area looking for something different than the button-down Sunday morning experience, and those wondering whether you can have an inclusive, progressive church but still jump around and clap to guitar chords — come to All Saints Saturdays at 5:00PM.

On an utterly unrelated note, I started my boxing classes this weekend, working one-on-one with a trainer.  I last took boxing classes back in 1998, so I need to relearn everything.  Key goal for the next few weeks: learn to skip rope.  I couldn’t do it when I was a kid, and I can’t do it now.  Something about the hand-eye coordination…  I’ll be practising lots.

Working on the jabs and crosses and other punches was exhilarating, of course.  But at the same time, it reminded me of how complicated my own relationship is to pacifism and violence.  I remain a committed pacifist (even after having left the Mennonites), and my interest in boxing has much more to do with fitness than with self-defense.  But I won’t deny that there’s an extraordinary pleasure that comes with hitting things!  I’ve hit plenty of punching bags before, but yesterday, as I stood in the ring and hacked away at my trainer in his big mitts, I felt a different sensation.  There’s no question that for me, there’s a big distinction between hitting a punching bag and hitting another person, even if there is no chance that I can injure the very man who is trying to teach me to spar.

It reminds me of a long debate that was held at Pasadena Mennonite Church over whether the church ought to offer self-defense classes as an "educational option."  I only heard about the debate after the fact, but remember being told that the largely pacifist congregation was quite torn over the issue.  Some thought that self-defense (learning boxing techniques and other martial arts-related skills) did not compromise one’s pacifist commitments; others felt that even sparring or practising self-defense technique was a violation of Matthew 5’s injunction to always turn the other cheek.  (It was pointed out to me, on a parenthetical note, that the debate split on gender lines — it was mostly men who objected to the classes as incongruent with the peace church tradition, while a number of the women — perhaps in recognition of their greater vulnerability — were more willing to defend the suitability of Mennonites learning to box and punch.  That’s a whole other post, I realize!)

Anyhow, I realize that for me, learning to box is different than my other physical activities.  In the act of hitting — even a bag — I feel a charge inside myself that I don’t feel when I run or bike or swim or do Pilates.   Though it shares with these other activities the happy function of reducing me to eventual exhaustion (and concomitant exhilaration), it also gives me a visceral pleasure that the other forms of exercise do not.  Perhaps it is simply a healthy outlet, or perhaps it is something darker.  Most folks outside of the peace tradition probably don’t worry about the ethics of joining a private boxing gym, but while I’m excited with my new activity, I’m also reflective on what it is within me and within others that takes such delight in hitting things.  I know I’ve got a huge reservoir of aggression in me; I know that I’ve dealt with it for years with exercise.  Perhaps by choosing such an aggressive form of working out, I’ll do an even better job of taming that rough beast within me.