the screening of deprivation as sensation (positive vs negative) psychology

 
When you look at doing things for pleasure - make sure it pleases only your higher power.

Ramon Llull

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He was writing a love poem when it happened.

Ramon Llull was born in Majorca around 1232 into a wealthy family. He became a court page, then a seneschal to the king of Majorca. He wrote troubadour poetry. He was married with children and simultaneously pursuing other women with the focused energy of a man who had made desire the organizing principle of his life.

He was sitting at his desk one evening working on a particularly involved love poem for a married woman he had been pursuing when he looked up from the parchment.

Christ was there. Crucified. Looking at him.

He went back to the poem.

The vision came again. And again. Five times over several days — the same image of the crucified Christ appearing when he was at his desk, at his table, going about his ordinary life. The fifth time he stopped arguing with it.

He went to confession. He began to reorganise his life completely. He provided for his wife and children. He gave the rest of his considerable wealth away.

Then he did something that distinguished him from almost every other medieval Christian mystic.

He didn't retreat from the world. He went toward it.

He spent nine years learning Arabic — because he had decided his mission was to convert Muslims and he would not do it without speaking their language and understanding their theology. He studied Islamic philosophy with a depth that made his later Christian writing extraordinarily sophisticated — he engaged Muslim thinkers on their own terms rather than dismissing them.

He wrote 265 books. In Catalan, Latin and Arabic.

He founded a school for the study of Oriental languages — the first institution in European history dedicated to training missionaries in the languages of the people they would serve.

And he went to North Africa. Three times. Preaching publicly in a culture where that was an act of extraordinary courage. The third time he went he was 83 years old.

He was stoned by a crowd in Tunisia in 1316.

He died on the ship taking him home.

"For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain." — Philippians 1:21