Finding God in the Erotic
Homily at Most Holy Redeemer Parish, San Francisco.
8^th October 2006.
Donal Godfrey, S.J.

The Pharisees approached and asked, "Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?" They were testing him. He said to them in reply, "What did Moses command you?"  They replied, "Moses permitted him to write a bill of divorce and dismiss her." But Jesus told them, "Because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment.  But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.  For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother (and be joined to his wife), and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh.  Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate."

In the house the disciples again questioned him about this.  He said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."   (Mark 10:2-12)

Jesus, in this morning’s Gospel is caught up in a religious conflict about sexuality and some people who quote scripture at him.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

And so it is interesting to see how Jesus deals with this situation.

Jesus wasn’t a biblical conservative. But he wasn’t a biblical liberal either.  He expected something important from the scriptures, he expected to be challenged and surprised by God and he also expected that when you are challenged and surprised by God some of the details in the sacred scripture will have to go, because they will be revealed as concessions to our hardness of hearts.

In our times, many are quoting scripture in one of the major religious conflicts about sexuality for our time, the issue of gay and lesbian Christians - or should I say the issue of the visibility of gay and lesbian Christians.  Father Bill Countryman addressed an ecumenical conference at the Benedictine community of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland recently and argued there that gay people must either be driven out or the Christian community will come to terms with openly gay Christians, which of course means coming to terms with whatever God is up to in drawing openly gay people to the church in the first place.  Father Bill argues that gays will awaken the Church to the significance of eros for all Christian faith and life; not because gays are more erotic than anyone else but because gay erotic orientation is an aspect of gay public identity. And so to welcome gays means welcoming God’s eros in a new way. The specific sexual forms of eros are merely an important subcategory of eros. Friendship is also part of eros, not because it implies sexual attraction but because it is founded on the desire to draw close and delight in the friend’s presence.

As Catholics we talk of the three kinds of love: eros, philia, and agape. Agape love was traditionally said only to want to give, whereas eros was said only to want to possess.  The implication, perhaps not always intended, was that agape love was pure and eros impure. This model does not work for me anymore. And reading Pope Benedict’s encyclical on love recently I don’t think it is working for him either.

Firstly it seems as if God in the scriptures wants love in return - remembering of course that God always invites and never compels.

And secondly without denying in any way the gift that celibacy can be, I have often seen people who deny eros end up dry and angry. The inquisitor who burns you for your own good or the moralist who represses your gifts and your loves out of a sense of what is good for you. Both care for universal principles and know nothing of real human connection. And so these people often end up creating a hell all around them.

We are finite and rightly long for our love to be returned because this is how as humans we transcend our individual isolation and come into communion. Erotic love, expressed through a sexual union or in friendship is not inherently grasping or selfish. Having said this, I know of course that human eros is not always beautiful or innocent. Just look at the articles this week in The San Francisco Chronicle on the sex trade. But neither is agape love of God always beautiful and innocent either. Both can be mixed up with greed, hatred, and violence.

But without eros would we have an adequate analogy for our relationship with God? The love of the human beloved is our closest analogy for the love of God. Such erotic love is celebrated in scripture in The Song of Songs, by the mystics and poets.

All too often Church suspicion of eros has had tragic consequences. Human eros, as Father Countryman points out, flawed though it always is, is still the brightest treasure God has placed in our makeup.  And it is by this that God calls us home. Eros keeps breaking us open and showing us new worlds outside those narrow ones we construct for ourselves.

As we grasp that our love of God is necessarily worked out in and through our love for all that God made, for the world and the whole human family, we can begin the work of rebuilding and repair. Our life with God then becomes an erotic journey with many surprises.

In and through the erotic we find communion with each other and with our God.