Beautifully put. I relate to this all very well. I would note that truth-telling and lying are not the only two possibilities in language. There is a third: the attempt at truth-telling which errs. But the great danger is sexual lying, to go along with your metaphor. And it is so very easy to lie in this way without the constraint of marriage and all the norms that safeguard and build up marriage. Of not marriage then some other mode of ensuring a degree of loyalty and devotion. Honest reflection on my own past reveals that while I *wanted* always to believe that sex was sacred, the transmission of life just as you say (I have always felt that that is what it is, I know exactly what you mean and am grateful to see you put it this way), I most definitely have not treated all my lovers as though I really believed that. And if that is true for me, a person who had this very high and intense ideal of sex even when a youth, how is it for people who never intuit and commit themselves to such an ideal (which is a lot of people, maybe a majority especially today)? They do a lot of sexual lying is what happens. And that is so terribly damaging. It is the death of the soul as surely as sexual truth-telling is the transmission of life. This some of the lustiest seasons of my life have been some of the most moribund, though not understood that way at the time.
I think the closest any culture has ever come to expressing in its art the reality of erotic life as you’ve outlined it here was the Western European medieval culture which gave us the chivalric perfection of the romance, the Troubadours and the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, the cult of the Virgin. Those modes of religious devotion and art also show us models for healthy erotic relation other than marriage.
I think you will be interested in this. Even read some of what sketchy New Age writers like Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner have said about this. A lot of their content in fact references Christianity in a roundabout way, although they claim to be Pagan.
Oh yes, yes indeed. I was never a Thelemite but Crowley loomed large early on, and I have hung out in neopagan and Heathen (reconstructionist) environments quite a bit
It is indeed sad how the big religions, including Christianity, all became so suspicious of living, and of eros and sex. At best, Christianity seems to barely admit that sex might be necessary for families, so it must be tolerated. But as you say... how much of civilization owes to men longing for a simple smile; obsessing, yearning, imagining -- by the irreplaceable thrill of the possible connection? How, too, are men to ever find a wife if they do not lust? The lusty knight is the good knight. The lusty artist is the good artist. The celibrate may gain a certain power, but he gives up another.
Compelling and challenging and beautifully written, as is so often the case. But what of gay erotic love, then? And specifically, what of gay erotic love which is constrained by Christian obedience? Are those people, attempting to live in obedience, living diminished lives?
I think it is worthy of deep reflection. I don’t think our apriori moral or aesthetic or even spiritual sensibilities need apply to the inquiry, of course. But it is a bit like “insult to injury”. It also implicates sacrifice in the more negatively-valenced sense that you distinguish in the essay. Another question arises: Is God “obliged” in some sense to “compensate” such obedient self-sacrifice, if it does not bear fruit in the vein of the more vital life you describe here? Indeed, does He not explicitly promise that such sacrifice will yield such fruit (“I am come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly…”)? Or is there something missing in the analysis?
The Scriptures do express such a promise. Whether it is relevant to this specific renunciation demanded by the tradition... that seems to be another question.
It seems clear that the sort of vitality you describe here would also be diminished in the monastic life, or by ascesis generally. Which, I suppose, is to say that the tradition seems to assert that there are other graces or gifts (or what have you) granted in the sacrifice (which, upon reflection, implicates both the "making holy" and the "giving up" senses of the word, of course). "Give blood, receive the Spirit...".
I don't want to extinguish the beautiful inquiry, however, by a rush to the authorities, as it were. Because I think there is something there.
It's rather an indefinable problem, or discordance, in the idea of same-sex sexual love and "willing the eternal life and eternal joy of the beloved...for their spirit contemplated in the light of eternity". At least as contemplated in the Catholic Tradition, East and West. But that yearning love, that joyful desire for the joy of the beloved, that does indeed seem to intrinsic to any kind of sexual love, irrespective of the sex of the partners, at least in the best cases.
But there is no question that eros is the flame, at all, from any perspective on the question, at least to me.
My own hope - and it is not without motive (which is maybe to say nothing at all) - is that our crosses must indeed lead to resurrection, and that the foreshoots of that new life are promised to spring forth this side of the New Jerusalem.
I don’t know if you are familiar with Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Pied Beauty”, “God’s Grandeur”), the Jesuit priest and poet. He wrote so stunningly about the radiance of God and the life in God. And he also wrote so terribly of the struggle and the sacrifice (he was gay and wrestled mightily). Here is his “Carrion Comfort”, which breaks my heart and compels me to protest if that sacrifice is in vain, at least in the sense of a diminished life.
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Although maybe this proves your thesis.
Anyway, I’ll stop clogging up your comments and diverting away from the main and beautiful points. You’ve given me a lot to wrestle with, as you so often do. Thanks for the essay.
Brother, this is one of those “too much to say” moments. My mind goes immediately to Reich, and to the entire mass of human suffering he sums up in “the emotional plague,” and false promises of spiritual consolation for socially imposed torment are certainly part of that plague! This is not to say that the suffering experienced by Fr Gerard is mere fruitlessness! Even within the suffering of the “emotional plague,” human beings can alchemize great beauty from it. If that is from God, it is not from God’s approval of the torment, but from God’s granting of creative grace within it. This is some aspect of my operative theodicy.
Have you read “A War of Loves” by David Bennett? There is no question that he would say that his obedient self-sacrifice has yielded a vital life, and one he would not exchange for any other.
> Marriage does not by itself confer safety and security against the temptation of erotic untruth, however much foolish humans may perennially confound rule with integrity. And of course, likewise, the mere presence of erotic aliveness in a sexual encounter does not confer safety from a self-seeking that fails to recognize the other as a person bearing a gift, and not a thing to be exploited.
Beautifully put. I relate to this all very well. I would note that truth-telling and lying are not the only two possibilities in language. There is a third: the attempt at truth-telling which errs. But the great danger is sexual lying, to go along with your metaphor. And it is so very easy to lie in this way without the constraint of marriage and all the norms that safeguard and build up marriage. Of not marriage then some other mode of ensuring a degree of loyalty and devotion. Honest reflection on my own past reveals that while I *wanted* always to believe that sex was sacred, the transmission of life just as you say (I have always felt that that is what it is, I know exactly what you mean and am grateful to see you put it this way), I most definitely have not treated all my lovers as though I really believed that. And if that is true for me, a person who had this very high and intense ideal of sex even when a youth, how is it for people who never intuit and commit themselves to such an ideal (which is a lot of people, maybe a majority especially today)? They do a lot of sexual lying is what happens. And that is so terribly damaging. It is the death of the soul as surely as sexual truth-telling is the transmission of life. This some of the lustiest seasons of my life have been some of the most moribund, though not understood that way at the time.
I think the closest any culture has ever come to expressing in its art the reality of erotic life as you’ve outlined it here was the Western European medieval culture which gave us the chivalric perfection of the romance, the Troubadours and the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, the cult of the Virgin. Those modes of religious devotion and art also show us models for healthy erotic relation other than marriage.
Thanks for your phenomenological honesty. It is of warm character and provides me with assistance in my own thinking.
❤️
You have nonreligious readers!?
Well -- maybe unconventionally religious LOL.
I think you will be interested in this. Even read some of what sketchy New Age writers like Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner have said about this. A lot of their content in fact references Christianity in a roundabout way, although they claim to be Pagan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_magic
The fact that this article does not include Austin Spare is a travesty
Spare was definitely fascinating, and a lot of modern occultists use his techniques for sex magic.
Oh yes, yes indeed. I was never a Thelemite but Crowley loomed large early on, and I have hung out in neopagan and Heathen (reconstructionist) environments quite a bit
Ok, so you're wise to what I'm talking about.
It is indeed sad how the big religions, including Christianity, all became so suspicious of living, and of eros and sex. At best, Christianity seems to barely admit that sex might be necessary for families, so it must be tolerated. But as you say... how much of civilization owes to men longing for a simple smile; obsessing, yearning, imagining -- by the irreplaceable thrill of the possible connection? How, too, are men to ever find a wife if they do not lust? The lusty knight is the good knight. The lusty artist is the good artist. The celibrate may gain a certain power, but he gives up another.
Compelling and challenging and beautifully written, as is so often the case. But what of gay erotic love, then? And specifically, what of gay erotic love which is constrained by Christian obedience? Are those people, attempting to live in obedience, living diminished lives?
I'll just shoot from the hip and say "yes." But this is worthy of deep reflection!
I think it is worthy of deep reflection. I don’t think our apriori moral or aesthetic or even spiritual sensibilities need apply to the inquiry, of course. But it is a bit like “insult to injury”. It also implicates sacrifice in the more negatively-valenced sense that you distinguish in the essay. Another question arises: Is God “obliged” in some sense to “compensate” such obedient self-sacrifice, if it does not bear fruit in the vein of the more vital life you describe here? Indeed, does He not explicitly promise that such sacrifice will yield such fruit (“I am come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly…”)? Or is there something missing in the analysis?
The Scriptures do express such a promise. Whether it is relevant to this specific renunciation demanded by the tradition... that seems to be another question.
It seems clear that the sort of vitality you describe here would also be diminished in the monastic life, or by ascesis generally. Which, I suppose, is to say that the tradition seems to assert that there are other graces or gifts (or what have you) granted in the sacrifice (which, upon reflection, implicates both the "making holy" and the "giving up" senses of the word, of course). "Give blood, receive the Spirit...".
I don't want to extinguish the beautiful inquiry, however, by a rush to the authorities, as it were. Because I think there is something there.
It's rather an indefinable problem, or discordance, in the idea of same-sex sexual love and "willing the eternal life and eternal joy of the beloved...for their spirit contemplated in the light of eternity". At least as contemplated in the Catholic Tradition, East and West. But that yearning love, that joyful desire for the joy of the beloved, that does indeed seem to intrinsic to any kind of sexual love, irrespective of the sex of the partners, at least in the best cases.
But there is no question that eros is the flame, at all, from any perspective on the question, at least to me.
My own hope - and it is not without motive (which is maybe to say nothing at all) - is that our crosses must indeed lead to resurrection, and that the foreshoots of that new life are promised to spring forth this side of the New Jerusalem.
I don’t know if you are familiar with Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Pied Beauty”, “God’s Grandeur”), the Jesuit priest and poet. He wrote so stunningly about the radiance of God and the life in God. And he also wrote so terribly of the struggle and the sacrifice (he was gay and wrestled mightily). Here is his “Carrion Comfort”, which breaks my heart and compels me to protest if that sacrifice is in vain, at least in the sense of a diminished life.
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Although maybe this proves your thesis.
Anyway, I’ll stop clogging up your comments and diverting away from the main and beautiful points. You’ve given me a lot to wrestle with, as you so often do. Thanks for the essay.
Brother, this is one of those “too much to say” moments. My mind goes immediately to Reich, and to the entire mass of human suffering he sums up in “the emotional plague,” and false promises of spiritual consolation for socially imposed torment are certainly part of that plague! This is not to say that the suffering experienced by Fr Gerard is mere fruitlessness! Even within the suffering of the “emotional plague,” human beings can alchemize great beauty from it. If that is from God, it is not from God’s approval of the torment, but from God’s granting of creative grace within it. This is some aspect of my operative theodicy.
Have you read “A War of Loves” by David Bennett? There is no question that he would say that his obedient self-sacrifice has yielded a vital life, and one he would not exchange for any other.
This is consistent with my thought and experience. Thank you very much for the revealing piece. I'm likely to return to it.
> Marriage does not by itself confer safety and security against the temptation of erotic untruth, however much foolish humans may perennially confound rule with integrity. And of course, likewise, the mere presence of erotic aliveness in a sexual encounter does not confer safety from a self-seeking that fails to recognize the other as a person bearing a gift, and not a thing to be exploited.
Well summed up!