Holy Eros, or, “Only God can sleep with everyone”…
Other folks in the Christian blogosphere are worked up over a Michigan Assembly of God pastor’s decision to post a lengthy quote on his blog from Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic theologian who ponders the erotic dimension of life in Christ (not in a salacious or profligate manner, but certainly in an honest and candid way). One of these days, I hope that the average Christian will stop being afraid of the power of our God-given sexuality. I suppose it should not surprise me that this day has not yet arrived.
Here is the quotation in question, from Pastor Chris Hooton’s blog:
Janis Joplin was once asked what it was like being a rock star. She replied: “It’s pretty hard sometimes. You go on stage, make love to fifteen thousand people, then you go home and sleep alone.”
Jesus was once asked, as a test: If a woman marries seven times and all her husbands die before she dies, whose wife will she be after the resurrection? He answered that, after the resurrection, we will no longer marry or be given in marriage.
These two answers, Janis Joplin’s and Jesus’, are not unconnected. Each, in its own way, says something about the all embracing intent of our sexuality. What Janis Joplin is saying is that, in our sexuality and our creativity, we are ultimately trying to make love to everyone. What Jesus is saying is not that we will be celibate in heaven, but rather that, in heaven, everyone will make love to everyone else and, already now, we hunger for that within every cell of our being. Sexually our hungers are very wide. We are built to ultimately embrace the universe and everything in it.
To understand our sexuality and to live with its unfulfilled tensions, it can be most helpful simply to understand this. In loving, the ultimate wound is not to be able to marry everyone. The greatest human hunger, felt in every cell in our being, is that we cannot be completely united with everyone and everything….
It is important to understand this, but it is also important not to misunderstand it. Because our sexuality is ultimately geared to embrace everyone does not mean that we can be promiscuous and, already here in this life, try to live that out. In fact, paradoxically, it means the opposite. Only God can sleep with everyone, and thus, only in god can we sleep with everyone. In this life, even though our sexuality has geared up for universal embrace, we only have two options that are life-giving: Either we embrace the many through the one (by sleeping with one person within a monogamous marriage) or we embrace the one through the many (be sleeping with no one, in celibacy). Both of these are ways that will eventually open our sexuality up so as to embrace everyone. If we go the route of promiscuity, eventually, we will embrace no one.
— Richard Rolheiser, The Holy Longing
Random Saturday afternoon thoughts about the existence of angels
When William Blake was a little boy, he saw an angel in a tree. On his deathbed, he sang songs with all the angels that were surrounding him.
Like most people, I don’t have angel-vision anywhere near what Blake enjoyed. I’m the kind of person who occasionally sees someone or something out of the corner of my eye, and then I turn and whatever it was is gone. If it was ever there at all.
This most vividly happened a few years back when I visited a holy well near Clonmel in Ireland. I saw a woman dressed in white standing by my car. But then I looked again and no one was there. I was parked in an open space along an empty street. Was it just my imagination, playing tricks with me? Or did some sort of incorporeal being momentarily break through my psychic defenses?
I’m rather skeptical by nature and I tend to be suspicious of people who get all sorts of psychic messages or marching orders from God (or the gods, or the angels, or Mary, or whomever). I translate our solid legal principle “innocent until proven guilty” into a scientific way of approaching preternatural phenomena: I assume such things have a perfectly reasonable and down-to-earth explanation. So I guess I’m saying I consider nature to be innocent of rogue metaphysics (unless proven guilty).
But I’m not an atheist. I believe in God. I believe that it’s simply arrogant to assume that evolution pretty much topped out with humans and whales. But the question, of course, is where will the dance of evolution take us, from here? Will we transcend our bodies, like the Organian race on Star Trek? Which is another way of wondering: are angels just the next rung up on the evolutionary ladder? In the absence of any kind of evidence, this can only be a matter for speculation. But as Ken Wilber points out, validity is measured in matters of consciousness not by how representationally true something can be shown to be (because we simply can’t measure any consciousness, not even our own). Instead, validity is found in truthfulness.
Angels, spirit beings, heavenly messengers: they appear in cultures the world over. Sure, there are plenty of cranks and attention-seekers who tell stories of their angelic encounters. But there are also seem to be plenty of humble, ordinary people, who have keen minds and are willing to question themselves, who nevertheless have experiences that they interpret as angelic in nature.
So maybe the existence of angels is only a matter of speculation. But I think it’s worth the speculating. And just perhaps, the more open we are to doing the speculating, the more likely we will get to walk with the likes of William Blake: and sing the celestial song.
