The Courtship of the Lamb

Not A Theology of Eros, But An Erotic Theology

May these words come from an un-armored heart. May they carry the free flow of awen. May they blow where they wish. May they be as unstudied and as bright as the flight of a hawk. May they be a river, may they be a song. May they shine like the moon, dance like the sun in the stream.

Constriction and Openness, Suffocation and Breath

Among Christians there is so much closure and constriction, so little free movement of life: everything is tightly hemmed in. Thought and action must be strictly controlled. We’re not to let our minds wander; this is serious business down here; the prospect of eternal torment looms; there is no laughter, there is no free play; delights are to be shunned, whether of the body or of the mind. This is an askesis that never reaches its conclusion in the joy of a game being played — but after all, isn’t askesis an athletic training? And what athletic training has athletic training as its own goal? Isn’t the goal to have the capability and skill of playing the game? And what is the point of a game, except the joy of free, spontaneous, and playful exertion?

Thought and action must be strictly controlled. Let’s dwell on the “thought” for a moment. Is it any wonder that the world has turned from a Church and a discipline that saw the free flow of thought and feeling as a terrifying danger? There is a current movement of reactionaries, mostly young men, but some young women too, into the Church — but it strikes me that they are reacting not against a skillful freedom, but merely against the contrary slavery of modernism, liberalism, futurism (whatever you want to call it), against another flavor of social and ideological conformity. Their solution, guided by tragic masters such as Jordan Peterson (whose reaction seems not to have set him at liberty within himself in any way whatsoever), is to retreat into the slaveries and constrictions of the past. I listen to their serious discussions of orthodoxy and heresy and my skin crawls. I want to give them a glass of wine and tell them to spend a week in a nudist colony.

I don’t just have this response to the new warriors of orthodoxy (whichever orthodoxy they’ve seized on in their desperate attempt to escape uncertainty and suffering). I have the same response to a lot of the old exemplars as well, including most of the canonical structure of the Church. The Pedalion should be used as a door-stop and never opened. (If you don’t know what it is, consider yourself blessed — but Catholics and Protestants, you have your own editions of this monstrosity.) Indeed, not just the canonical structures — often the spiritual structures as well. Did the Lord descend into the tomb so that you could spend your whole earthly life resolutely lying in a tomb? Or did He descend there so that He could raise you up into the air and light? If we’re not to give a thought to the morrow, as He tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, why do you locate your salvation in an unknown future? Why would you suppose He didn’t come to bring you deliverance now?

Jesus’ Aramaic name — Yeshua — means “God saves” (“Jah saves,” perhaps, in a nod to my Rasta friends). What does this mean, “saves”? He sets captives free, he sets us in an open space, he takes us out of the dungeon into the air, he brings us where we can breathe. In the very root of His name is yāšaʿ — to save, deliver, liberate. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, this liberation has the sense of rāwaḥ — spaciousness, relief, freedom to breathe and expand, deliverance from a condition of ṣārāh — narrowness, constriction, anguish, and, we might say, suffocation. Surely there is a resonance with rûaḥ — wind, breath, “spirit” in the most elemental sense.

How many Christians — let alone anyone else — know this joy of free breathing in their hearts and bodies? How many even conceive of the spiritual life as a way of grasping the promise of this liberation?

Hebrews specifies the existential depths: Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. Freud avant Freud! (And infinitely better theology, of course.) Our bondage, our constriction, our suffocation, comes from fear — and in the end, all fear is the fear of death.

This is why Christ is Risen! is not a rational proposition. It’s a hand held out to lead us out of prison and up from the grave. A hand offered to us that invites us to dance.

Yes, I just posted a piece of Mormon art.

The explicit content of a spiritual writer’s theological or dogmatic position is far less important to me than the spirit that animates it, which is something I smell and feel more than something I cognize and analyze. Is the writer’s heart armored, in the terminology of Wilhelm Reich? What is the point of even entering into a consideration of a “theology of eros” from a place where we are afraid to think, afraid to feel, afraid to move, afraid really even to breathe — where we doubt and second-guess and constrain every impulse of the mind and heart and body? It’s all just drawing on the walls of the cave. It reminds me of the clergyman in Lewis’ Great Divorce who declines an invitation to leave Hell because he’s running a really interesting book discussion group down there.

I have a radical proposal for how to consider, feel, enter into this life. A radical proposal for an erotic theology and an erotic spirituality.

Scripture and tradition speak of the soul’s union with God in nuptial symbolism. Well — before the nuptials, there is a courtship. That is what incarnate life on earth is.

Life As Courtship With the Divine

Let’s step out of the fusty sense of “courtship” that we may have from culture and habit, and imagine something altogether more free and vital and full of tension and delight. Very likely, you have courted a lover, and have been courted by a lover. (Traditionally, men court and women are courted, but it’s obvious that in any courtship, each person fulfills both of these roles, giving and receiving.) I ask you to evoke that experience — which was real perhaps even in spite of surrounding events and contexts in your life that were difficult and painful, even in spite of doubt, uncertainty, anxiety.

Courtship is an awakening — an awakening to ourselves, to the potential for joy deep within ourselves, to the presence of gifts deep within ourselves that before now we have only felt obscurely, but which we suddenly begin to find ourselves capable of bringing out into daylight and holding in our hands as we extend them to our longed-for beloved. Or perhaps to the one whom we merely sense and hope might be our longed-for beloved — but still, what life there is in that sensing and hoping! Courtship is also, of course, and sometimes blindingly so, an awakening to the all-consuming reality of the Other, the radiant value of the Other, drenched, saturated in meaning and beauty. No one courting a lover is asking questions about the meaning of life. They know the meaning of life; the tormenting questions are no longer about meaning, but about exigencies — will I be able to embrace this life? Will I be able to join myself in my depths, in my body and my heart and my soul and my mind, with this shining light?

Courtship does not stop when this movement of lovers together culminates in the sexual embrace. Sex is not the end of courtship; it is one moment in it. If it were an end, we would be like those animals who mate once and go their separate ways. No — we take the same mate again and again, sometimes for a lifetime; the mating reveals itself not merely as a destination (and it is that, a value in its own right — as one moral theologian says, “Sex is a pre-moral good”), but also as a path. To that whole mess of pottage that considers sex as having its “purpose” in procreation, I apply my signal instruction from Jesus: Let the dead bury their dead. Sex, in one vitally important way, is a path to the union of souls — a union that will be, in its consummation, without confusion, and without separation.

However, I want to avoid the danger of spiritualization here. Sex is a path, but not merely a path. The body is a path, but not merely a path. The animal in us is a path, but not merely a path. Paradoxically, the only way we can follow these paths — which I believe are really one path, the creaturely path — is not to regard them as mere paths. Sex, the body, the animal, have value in themselves. Why would the Lord be courting us embodied, sexual animals if He did not desire us?

I am inviting you to feel all the delights and premonitions of blessedness that adorn our life — to feel them with the living heart that beats beneath your fear, your frustration, your grief, your constriction. I am inviting you to take the Resurrection seriously as a promise from One whom we trust and love that despite all apparent empirical evidence to the contrary, death has been met, defeated, and overcome — and thus, salvation in the sense promised by Yeshua’s name — liberation, freedom, expansion, free breath in open air and limitless space — is restored as the root of the world. Thus I am inviting you to feel those delights and premonitions the way you desire a lover and the way you feel your lover’s desire for you. I am inviting you to feel again the joy of courtship, and this life as that joy — and all your joys in this life as manifestations and revelations of that joy. To taste your desire here for your lover not as something to reject in favor of an abstraction — not as something to reject and clench against — not as something to corral and constrain — but as something to embrace with gratitude and abandon and delight.

Of course, courtship is also often tragic. We can recall the great, tragic courtships of literature. The courtship that is the embodied life of each of us, and of the world itself (which is also moving towards union with God), is also tragic, full of impossible stalemates, irretrievable losses, blind catastrophes, and irredeemable failures, weighed down by dumb misfortune and weakness. But the protagonists of this story, both human and divine, are as relentless in the fire of their desire, as relentless in the creative intensity of their determination, as the greatest heroes and heroines of romantic literature. That is what romantic literature is — the rallying cry of and to the human spirit not to flag and not to give in to defeat: to listen to the voice of the beloved and remember our longing for her body and her face.

I am suggesting a view of life that is romantic, passionate, and fully engaged with desire on every level — the desire for experience, for knowledge, for wisdom, for skill, for beauty, for delight; the desire for the sunrise when we’ve climbed a hill before dawn; the desire for the lover we are courting; the desire that sweats and yearns and hungers; the desire that is unquenched in the quenching of desire: Restless in life and seeking no end in death, as the bard Robin Williamson declared. I am suggesting that we situate that desire not as something to be repressed and constrained, but something to be accepted, embraced, and oriented toward what the ancient hymns call “our Orient on high” — the Divine Lover who is courting us with burning desire in the heart of everything that comes to us in this life.

This post was not written using AI.