c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It’s time to thank God for being healthy.

No, I don’t mean just being physically healthy, although that is a great blessing that is not federally funded or something that we can claim as a right. I am referring to what we may term personal health, the state of being as fully human as we can.

That is difficult in a culture in which eccentricities and downright nuttiness are sometimes advertised as triumphs of “performance art” and progress. Your common sense reaction to the bizarre and the lurid _ to what may be called sick in our culture _ is a measure of your general personal health.

You can tell that you are healthy if you are at least slightly intimidated by the pressures you feel from supposed cultural gurus who want you to feel old-fashioned or “out of it” if you do not accept and endorse such strange things as the “performance art” recently scheduled for the rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

Your healthiness asserts itself when you take exception to a newspaper running a virtual endorsement in its Arts and Leisure section of Marina Abramovic, who “really had her heart set on being crucified,” while on its editorial page it condemns the torture of prisoners and the pathetic psychopathology of Abu Ghraib.

You can thank God this Thanksgiving for having healthy reactions to unhealthy activities if you feel out of step with the straight-faced, not to say solemn, description of “seven nights of often harrowing performance art.” In this art, Abramovic had hoped to reproduce a 1973 event in which “artist Chris Burden had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen (the `people’s car’) and then had the car rolled out … into the daylight while the engine screamed.”

This is the same Chris Burden who, we are told, “in his prime was almost drowned and once shot in the arm for the sake of art.”

Ms. Abromovic did not, the interviewer tells us, “convey a sense of being someone willing to carve a star in her stomach with a razor blade,” although that is one of the features that sounds more like exhibitionism than an exhibit.

The “artist” had wanted to repeat an event in which she stood “in a gallery for six hours while anyone who came in could choose any of 72 objects around her _ including knives, scissors, a needle, a loaded gun _ and do anything they wanted with her.”

This was scratched after “long discussions” with Guggenheim contemporary arts curator Nancy Spector, who said: “It really came down to legal questions. We just couldn’t find a way to have a loaded gun in the museum.”

Nonetheless, Ms. Abromovic was ready “to cover her head in honey and gold leaf, cradling a dead rabbit and whispering to it about pictures on the wall.” Repeating another performance artist’s work, she was to “stalk around a stage with a large fake gun, wearing pants with the crotch removed.” And, in another re-creation, “She will be concealed beneath the stage, masturbating and speaking suggestively through a microphone to the visitors walking near her.”

You are healthy if you shake your head at the curator’s explanation that “The whole thing is about asking questions … I think it’s starting a discussion that a lot of us really need to have.”

Somebody needs to have a discussion, but it is not ordinary people who feel diminished and condescended to by such rationalizations of what might well be considered psychopathology.

This Thanksgiving, healthy people can be grateful for being whole even if they are not perfect. They can trust their instincts just as, in a traditional rule of thumb about deciding on the morality of anything, they can follow what “the healthier and larger part” of people feel about the matter. That is the “sense of the community” that is the authentic definition of “common sense,” and it is the most trustworthy measure in existence.

It also helps if healthy people look around at the landscape in our culture and repeat as often as needed, “I’m not the one who is crazy here.”

MO/RB END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Eugene Cullen Kennedy, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

Editors: Material some may find objectionable, including reference to masturbation three grafs above second optional trim.