What are the modern stigmata?, A Human Strategy, Matt Berry, aphorism 246

246
What are the modern stigmata?  Sympathetic suffering ... another’s suffering, or distant suffering, but always safe ... as when at a dinner party we wear our brows heavily over the latest crisis in the news media.  To do away with stigmata ... to do away with the need to prove our sympathetic suffering is the next task.  Our need to exhibit ourselves involves a kind of suffering, albeit quite different from the suffering communicated.  That one privately suffers in the struggle away from suffering is enough to make a Buddha out of the least of us.  How false and unholy do all stigmata appear after we sanctify ourselves with our own crucified presumptions?



A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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