by Jones McCalister

I was driving home from a birthday party tonight.   I was thinking about women.   

As I continued driving, I got to thinking about St. Jerome. 

How did I get from women to St. Jerome?

Like this.

St. Jerome was the man who translated the Bible into the Latin Vulgate.  When in Rome, perhaps before he converted to Christianity, Jerome saw some very sexy women dancing a very sexy dance. 

Later on, when he was in a monastery, he could not get these women out of his head.  To remedy this, he would spend hours upon hours translating Greek and Hebrew and practicing verb conjugations.

So on my drive home, I thought about St. Jerome, and about how he never wanted to think about women, especially in a sensual way.

Then I thought about myself, who loved to think about women in a sensual way. 

Me and Jerome aren’t that different when you boil the situation down:  we both think about women, probably way too much than is beneficial.

The difference lies in the fact that Jerome went through such linguistic torture to make himself *not* think about women, whereas I simply can’t make myself dislike thinking about women.  If that makes sense. 

Then I thought, why in the world would a Church or religious institution ever discourage a human being’s sexual drive?  Why in the world should Jerome have been encouraged to spend the rest of his celibate life not thinking about women, only to wind up in the end being a master of Greek verb conjugation? 

So I’ve decided, I can never be a fifth century canonized monk. 

Just one more thing to scratch off my list.