I’ve tried to illustrate the point, before, and had a sense that it makes people uncomfortable:
God takes pity on human limitations and tries another way of teaching and reaching, a better way to know the transcendence. He says, in essence:
For your sake, I will become broken, too, but in a way meant to render you more Whole, and Holy, so that our love may be mutual, complete, constantly renewed, and alive. I love you so much that I will Incarnate, and surrender myself to you. I will enter into you (stubborn, faulty, incomplete you, adored you, the you that can never fully know me or love me back) and I will give you my whole body. I will give you all of myself, unto my very blood, and then it will finally be consummated between us, and you will understand that I have been not just your God, but your lover, your espoused, your bridegroom. Come to me, and let me love you. Be my bride; accept your bridegroom and let the scent and sense of our love course over and through the whole world through the church I beget to you. I am your God; you are my people. I am your bridegroom; you are my bride. This is the great love story, the great intercourse, the great espousal, and you cannot imagine where I mean to take you, if you will only be faithful . . . as I am always faithful.
So I tried a less overt example, while interviewing Father Robert Barron:
What I took from this book was something very warm and joyful—a continual gathering, or drawing in; a continual invitation that confers meaning on all people, all things, all events and leads us to one joyful and ecstatic moment of affirmation. Catholicism, then, is a giant and echoing “Yes,” reverberating from the moment of creation, described in Genesis, and relayed from Mary’s fiat?
Yes! Catholicism is about God’s “yes” and it presents humanity at the fullest realization of who God intends for us to be when our response to God’s yes is “fiat.” Let your “yes” be accomplished in me, in the Church, in the culture! This is why the Mother of God is the paradigmatic expression of the Christian life.
But Heather King fearlessly puts it all together:
Catholicism is not counter-cultural in that the world is liberal and Catholicism is conservative. It’s counter-cultural in that it is explosively, wildly, anarchically radical. Catholicism is our hearts, our bowels, our erotic energy, our lives! Catholicism is not some timid, rigid, dead set of rules. The whole purpose of the rules is to allow us to explode within them. To follow Christ, to be Catholic (or catholic-in-spirit) is to hover on the edge of metaphorical orgasm and to consent to continue to hover, indefinitely, in almost unbearable tension…which paradoxically allows us to break out in all kinds of other sublimely interesting, glorious directions and ways.
Look at the stories of Flannery O’Connor, the life and work of Emily Dickinson, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “Pied Beauty.” That–“Praise him” at the end is an ejaculation, with the beat, the silence, the lacuna, the gathering in before ejaculation (preceded, no less, by the generative thrust of “fathers forth”!), and it is all the more sublime for having been written by a gay man–a Jesuit priest and a severe depressive who stayed faithful to his vows and offered his suffering, his loneliness, his love, his failure as a teacher, his body, blood, genius and soul to Christ.
[. . .]
Because this is how sensual, how erotic Christ is—one of the manifestations of waiting is that pleasure is sharpened. Waiting brings pleasure and joy to their highest possible point, and to bring things to their highest possible point is explode with love. We will suffer, of course, we will undergo the agony—for that is the very highest point of love; the point that Christ reached on the Cross. Consummatum est. To consummate our love in every sense is to give our whole selves to the world.And that is the opposite of no, no, no. That is one cataclysmic, self-giving, aching, life-affirming yes.
Read the whole thing; it’s not a long piece, but it says a great deal!
“Yes, yes, yes” is the great secret within the mystery of faith. It gets missed amid the noise.
UPDATE: From Marc Barnes at Bad Catholic, whose The Terrible Weakness of God is on the same track:
. . .our conversation centered around the idea of Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God. The baby lamb is meek and mild, yes, but far more important is this fact: The lamb is ready to die. Other animals struggle as they are being led to the slaughter, but the Sisters spoke of how the baby lamb offers the slaughterer its neck, how it nuzzles the hand of its killer. I watched a few videos of these lamb slaughterings, and they are remarkably heartbreaking affairs.
And yet, this is how God interacts with mankind. He kisses our hands and offers us his neck. He makes himself vulnerable to us. The idea of God that pervades our culture — God as a scary, old man and a monstrous rule-maker — becomes ridiculous when we realize that God came to us as a baby. He asks that we let him love us . . .
You’ll want to read the whole thing
RELATED: Read an interview with Heather King where she discusses her latest book, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux
[...] The Orgasmic “Yes” of Catholic Faith « The Anchoress. [...]
My theory on Catholicism is that when you strip away everything else — the old and ornate churches, the dogma written down after centuries of discussions by learned and reasonable men and women, the heirarchy, and all the rest of the edifice, Catholicism is at its heart a folk religion. It grows out of the people themselves, which is why you have all of the devotions and practices and why, no matter how corrupt or the silly the priests and hierarchy becom, the people keep the faith alive.
The idea of Christ as a bridegroom is something that will probably remain a mystery to most men, because to realize it is to put each man in the awkward position of having to imagine himself as the bride, and from there it’s natural to imagine oneself in the bride’s position on her wedding night. It comes very close to imaginings we discourage among men, imaginings that would be sinful to act on. Thus, we men find ourselves faced with a metaphor where the divine is all-good but the earthly is forbidden. This isn’t how most Christian metaphors work: there’s nothing wrong with being a sheep, a fruit, a faithful servant, and so on.
Abstracted, it does make sense. However, in the New Testament the metaphor always seems to stop at the wedding feast and not go on to the wedding night. The Song of Solomon goes much further, but it’s also a book that is acknowledged as making people, especially men, uncomfortable.
[Funnily enough, the first time I heard a religious vocation referred to as a "spousal" relationship, it was from a priest's homily. He spoke with wonder about the mystery at its core -- that we are unfathomable creatures of the spirit, hindered from understanding God by the gift of our own biology. Perhaps you'd like this piece, better -admin]
[...] The Anchoress has a post pointing to several articles that remind us that the heart of our faith is a relationship. Here’s just one quote to give you the flavour – please read the rest. God says, in essence: “For your sake, I will become broken, too, but in a way meant to render you more Whole, and Holy, so that our love may be mutual, complete, constantly renewed, and alive. I love you so much that I will Incarnate, and surrender myself to you. I will enter into you (stubborn, faulty, incomplete you, adored you, the you that can never fully know me or love me back) and I will give you my whole body. I will give you all of myself, unto my very blood, and then it will finally be consummated between us, and you will understand that I have been not just your God, but your lover, your espoused, your bridegroom. Come to me, and let me love you. Be my bride; accept your bridegroom and let the scent and sense of our love course over and through the whole world through the church I beget to you. I am your God; you are my people. I am your bridegroom; you are my bride. This is the great love story, the great intercourse, the great espousal, and you cannot imagine where I mean to take you, if you will only be faithful . . . as I am always faithful.“ [...]
In our hypersexualized, “pornified” culture, I question whether it is a good idea to encourage people to contemplate the mysteries of our faith through contemplating sexual ecstasy. “Consummation” meant a different thing to the Fathers than it does to us in an era where the culture has reduced the marital act to merely “sex,” and “sex” to merely the physical pleasure of the climactic release.
On that note, here are some quotes from John Paul II for your consideration:
“[The] need to give oneself to another person has profounder origins than the sexual instinct” (Love and Responsibility, 253).
““Marriage and procreation in itself do not determine definitively the original and fundamental meaning of being a body or of being, as a body, male and female. Marriage and procreation merely give a concrete reality to that meaning in the dimensions of history” (Wednesday audience, January 13, 1982)
““The reciprocal gift of oneself to God—a gift in which man will concentrate and express all the energies of his own personal and at the same time psychosomatic subjectivity—will be the response to God’s gift of himself to man. In this mutual gift of himself by man, a gift which will become completely and definitively beatifying, as a response worthy of a personal subject to God’s gift of Himself, virginity, or rather the virginal state of the body, will be totally manifested as the eschatological fulfillment of the nuptial meaning of the body, as the specific sign and the authentic expression of all personal subjectivity. In this way, therefore, that eschatological situation in which ‘They neither marry nor are given in marriage’ has its solid foundation in the future state of the personal subject. This will happen when, as a result of the vision of God face to face, there will be born in him a love of such depth and power of concentration on God himself, as to completely absorb his whole psychosomatic subjectivity.” (Wednesday audience, December 16, 1981)
When John Paul describes the ecstasy of the beatific vision, he never describes it as “body to body.” He always describes it, per Scripture, as “face to face.” Every animal has a body, but only human beings have faces. If we draw analogies to bodily pleasures, the contemplation draws us into narcissism and self-absorption, we risk losing the ability to appreciate what it means to be in a communion of persons, as those in heaven will be with God.
[Fair enough, Dawn. But contrariwise, in our hypersexualized, hyperpornified world, there is also the possibility that the only way to smack people back to reality about the intrinsic sacredness of sex -- the need for it to be respected and sanctified, is to get them to re-associate it with something greater than themselves; to root it in heaven. The Holy Spirit uses all the tools at his disposal, and will speak to each in the way they can best be reached, I think. -admin]
Elizabeth I admire your ability (and courage) to write on such a both beautiful and deep theology. Having been a student of the John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, I have to agree with Dawn. It’s not that you are “wrong” per se (or at the least, wrong for a culture that truly can’t grasp it correctly), but if you remember, Christopher West got himself into a lot of trouble a few years ago for something similar. While his intentions are of true goodness and humilty (at least IMO), the secular world simply could not handle it (he used Hugh Hefner as an example and if I remember correctly, he was aired on Nightline), but of course blew the teaching so out of the water based on the only thing the secular world knows about sex, that some major theologicans weighed in, arguing that West had to some extent debased the teaching and made it more “sexual” than Mother Church interprets it.
I read everything I could on the theologicans who critized West, and to be honest,they convinced me that as Dawn said, the teaching really isn’t meant to be so “physical”, which in essence, is what West had done with it to some extent.
There is no question that the more sexualized our culture becomes, it parallels the distance we have separated ourselves from God. That said, as ectastic as the beautiful vision will be, (and I’m anything but prudish on this), I really have become convinced that we need to be careful as to how “physically sexual” we make that connection.
If heaven is something that we’ve never even imagined, as Isiah and Paul tell us, then it’s not like sex. I’m uncomfortable with the analogy in part because it’s not something that is useful in conversation. The whole thing would be crashed in the ditch before you could make your point. Or maybe I only know impossibly immature people. Or maybe I’m one of them.
Thanks for the link for dudes, though I still prefer the orgasmic experience to slaughtering sheep
If and when I ever become a saint, I hope I’m one of those lucky ones favored with rounds of esctatic union. But it seems, from my limited knowledge, only the women saints get those. Then again, judging from the poetry of St. John of the Cross, maybe I’m wrong.
Peter in Mpls wrote:
” If and when I ever become a saint, I hope I’m one of those lucky ones favored with rounds of esctatic union.”
Are we talking about Catholic heaven or Muslim heaven? With all these efforts to conflate sexual ecstasy with the beatific vision, it’s getting hard to tell them apart.
Beautiful blog. It was a pleasure to read, both your thoughts and those you cite.
Peter,
John of the Cross’ poetry can’t really have “ecstasy” in terms of sexual ecstasy. For him, it wasn’t “pleasure” that union with Christ provided, but rather a complete superseding of the senses. In short, complete and total peace with the beloved. Being blunt, seeking such “ecstatic union” John of the Cross would be highly critical of.
Dawn,
I just now read through your post here and I thank you for it. I do confess that I am still working my way out of the perspective that the orgasmic experience is the be all and end all of human existence. Indeed, we should not make an idol it. I guess my question is, what kind of bodily experience does the beatific vision inspire?
I tend to agree with Elizabeth’s response to Dawn Eden’s comment. If there’s a danger to using sexual metaphors, there’s also a danger in over-reacting to them and letting the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. If we completely censor all sexual imagery, then what hope is there for those that only know sex as ‘animal rutting’ as Bishop Dolan recently called it in a homily?
Sex is part of God’s creation, and it’s just as capable of being a ladder to God as the sky or the stars in the heavens. And of course, it was St. Paul that said that sexual union is a symbol of the mystery of the Church. And Pope Benedict wrote that the human sexual domain is a theological domain.
So it’s not farfetched to think that the prudent use of sexual imagery could throw a lifeline of ascending analogy to those who only know sex in a debased way, and maybe give them a new perspective on what love is about. Sex was made for love, and there’s a reason that Scripture uses that as a symbol. That people accidentally take love out of sex is no excuse for us to deliberately take sex away from love.
BTW, Bernini’s sculpture of St. Theresa in ecstasy seems to use female sexual orgasm as a metaphor of spiritual ecstasy quite artfully. As in all metaphor when done correctly, the literal-sexual tends to drop out of sight as it passes over into it’s symbolic meaning.
Shark meet ski jump. It was fun and interesting reading this blog for a long time but this is the end.
Peter, thank you for your thoughtful comment about my post and your question. Here are my thoughts on the subject from a lecture I gave last week at the Pontifical College Josephinum on “Celibacy and Communion in John Paul II’s Catechesis on Human Love.” It starts with a dense quote from John Paul that I used in my comment above–then I break it down a bit with some comments:
Brian-I too thought of Bernini’s sculpture while reading this piece by the Anchoress. Allow me to correct you that the sculpture is of St. Teresa (of Avila) and not St. Theresa (Therese of Liseux) Those of us named after either of these saints are sensitive to the “with an h or without an h”. Both wonderful, holy women, but very different.
I do think that the poetry of St. John of the Cross and the writings of St. Teresa of Avila are some of the best descriptions of the unitive way that we have in our faith tradition. From the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia:
“Souls, however, who have attained to the unitive state have consolations of a purer and higher order than others, and are more often favored by extraordinary graces; and sometimes with the extraordinary phenomena of the mystical state such as ecstasies, raptures, and what is known as the prayer of union.”
We are limited in our humanity to finding words to adequately describe such a state, which cannot fully be described, at least not on this side of the veil. I think the correllation to the orgasmic state is entirely appropriate but I can see how such comparison can make some uncomfortable. But then I think many people, male and female are very uncomfortable with the concept of God as lover. The mystics of our tradition have so much to teach us to help to elevate us to a higher, more mature level of spirituality. It is a shame most in the pews and even most who have gone through years of catholic school education hear so little about them.
It was only after a spiritual crisis of sorts in my early twenties that I was led to the writings of our great Christian mystics. In my 16 years of Catholic education I had not been exposed to them, nor the concept of God as lover. God as father yes, but not God as lover. The words of these wonderful saints, in particular the poetry of St John of the Cross helped to reassure me that the change that had taken place in my relationship with God, indeed with Jesus, was not something for which I should be deemed crazy, but rather the normal course of development within a maturing spiritual life.
Alice Van Hildebrand was one of the big critics of the “method (s)” by which Christopher West taught John Paul II’s TOB. I found this article which has all of the important links to the other theologicans who also had a problem with it.
http://www.thecathoholic.com/the_cathoholic/2009/06/register-article-on-christopher-west.html
Some of the basis for TOB actually came from the work of Alice’s husband’s Dietrich’s book, “In Defense of Purity.”
Indeed the “symbolism” is certainly there, but as another theologian.Fr. Granados pointed out, also upset with West, is this danger:
The Pope’s proposal is not just about sexuality, but about the truth of love as the foundation of the person’s dignity and the meaning of reality; and about the family as the place where the person finds himself and his way towards happiness.
“Moreover, one of the results of the sexual revolution is precisely the pansexualism that surrounds our society. We cannot respond with a different kind of pansexualism, with a sort of ‘Catholic sexual revolution,’ which in the end promotes a similar obsession with sex, even if ‘holy’.”
Bottom line, the “sex and God thing” is all pretty deep and profound. Taking into account concupiscence/original sin, it simply is not only theological incorrect to make a simple “connection”, but also dangerous.
For what its worth, I originally found myself exactly where Fr. Granados warned one might go; to an obcession with “holy” sex. In retrospect, Christopher West getting “secularized”, consequently, having the opportunity to hear the critiques of the theologians, was enough for me to “back off”, what I once though was such an obvious connection. It does all “connect” to a degree but it’s a lot more than sex, even if that sex is holy.
As a married man and someone with a philosophical soul, I have found that the ‘problem’ of sex is something deserving of much reflection. But marriage and married people are pretty much always the context in which I think about it. The Church’s stance on sexuality, it’s positive meaning, is something I think is good for married people to hear, seeing that the ‘problem’ of sex is their problem.
And men in particular, I think, are susceptible to divorcing sex from its human meaning and thus of experiencing shame in connection with it. The theological dimension of sexuality is something that can teach men (husbands) how to engage this aspect of their married life in a real human way–like a real man. Revelation, in so far as it touches human sexuality, is needed to humanize that part of human life, which is properly the life of husbands and wives.
If anyone becomes obsessed with sexuality as a direct result of someone’s pedagogy or doctrine, there’s something wrong there (with the doctrine or pedogogy). The Catholic view of sex should humanize it, not exalt it as some kind of idol. Sex is not the end-all, be-all of life. And love precedes it and must elevate it–it is not itself the essence of love.
As in all things, we need to take what is good, reject what is bad, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater, or go to extremes in any direction. Admittedly that can be hard to do when sexuality is the subject.