PLAYING THE VIOLIN AND DOUBLE BASS WHILE WEARING BOXING GLOVES MIGHT POSE A BIT OF A PROBLEM

Dear The Curmudgeon's Agony Aunt

I used to be a great blog writer but for a while now I'm running out of inspiration and the stamina to write. Gone are the days when i could just 'bang one out' for the hell of it or craft intelligent and informative treatises on music with a moral for readers.

I now go for days without posting and, when I do post tend to 'parallel universe' borrowing interesting themes, images and even entire blocks of writing from my fellow, more accomplished bloggers.

Is it time for me to 'hang my boots up' as it were?

- An old guy who used to run an original blog

Dear old guy who used to run an original blog

It sounds like you've been "banging one out" a bit much on your own there thus sapping your creative energy. You know that there was a saint who reminds me of you. He was Alphonsus Maria de Liguori or Saint Alphonsus Liguori, an Italian Catholic bishop, spiritual writer, composer, musician, artist, poet, lawyer, scholastic philosopher, and theologian.

Unlike you though he suffered from scruples much of his adult life and felt guilty about the most minor issues relating to sin. Moreover, Liguori viewed scruples as a blessing at times and wrote: "Scruples are useful in the beginning of conversion.... they cleanse the soul, and at the same time make it careful". I believe that your brother Robert would buy into this.

Liguori had poor eyesight and chronic asthma which his father attributed to chronic masturbation and made him wear boxing gloves in bed. He also had him educated in the legal profession believing that dry old law would take his mind off anything of prurience. Liguori followed his father's direction for a while but then drifted to the Catholic Church which was more to his liking. His greatest contribution to the Catholic Church was in the area of moral theology, his masterpiece being The Moral Theology (1748), which was approved by the Pope himself. He opposed sterile legalism and strict rigourism. According to him, those were paths closed to the Gospel because "such rigour has never been taught nor practised by the Church". His system of moral theology is noted for its prudence, avoiding both laxism and excessive rigour. He is credited with the position of Aequiprobabilism, which avoided Jansenist rigorism as well as laxism and simple probabilism. It's easy to see from this why his fellow theologians called him a wanker, a slight that was unfortunately to prove true when, in 1731, while he was ministering to earthquake victims in the town of Foggia, Alphonsus said he had a vision of the Virgin Mother in the appearance of a young girl of 13 or 14, wearing a white veil.

He took to his bed, sans boxing gloves and wasn't seen for quite some time, his 'ministrations' rendering him an emaciated wreck.

Death of San Alfonso María de Ligorio, at the Basilica in Pagani, Italy

By May 1775, Alphonus was "deaf, blind, and laden with so many infirmities, that he has no longer even the appearance of a man", and his resignation was accepted by the recently crowned Pope Pius VI. He continued to live with the Redemptorist community in Pagani Italy where he died on 1 August 1787.

- Wikipedia

I trust that this anecdote is seen by you as informative and can serve as a warning. It's not too late you know.

Yours in the spirit of helpfulness and sexual hygiene.

The Curmudgeon's Agony Aunt