#6: anonyreader:

I’d like to offer this meditation-response on your article, “Sublimity Now!”, with some [relevance to “Romoeroticism”]. I am sorry that this is entirely too long and completely out of season. So feel free to edit as needed. …

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Eve Tushnet’s description of the bonfire scene at the beginning of the article “Sublimity Now!” reminded me of the great hymn of Pentecost, Veni Sancte Spiritus. “Come Holy Spirit and supernaturally send forth a ray of your light.”* Tushnet observes that the sublimity of the bonfire implies danger and perhaps a tantalizing lack of control. Beauty, in the quotation she provides from Edmund Burke, implies that the awesome and fearsome nature of the sublime often turns people towards the beauty that is within their reach and control. Perhaps the sublimity of the bonfire represents the tongues of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The call of discipleship that flows from the burning, uncompromising tongues of Confirmation and Pentecost lasts well beyond the bishop’s blessing of the last confirmand and the Ite of Pentecost Sunday Mass.

The concept of sublimity and the sacred resonates with my own experiences. So many times I will turn my face from the searing bonfire of the Holy Spirit and follow after the five watt bulb of flirting with some hottie. Yet even he will eventually wrinkle and lose his “beauty” and quick wit. And so will I, sans wit. And so will we all. The tungsten filaments of human light fizzle out quickly but the intense bonfire of of the Holy Spirit climbs even brighter. Brighter it glows, despite the times I have desperately wanted to reject sanctification for a few desperate minutes of screwing.

The Veni Sancte Spiritus petitions the Holy Spirit to correct the faults of Christians. “Bend what is rigid, warm what is chilled, [and] set straight what has gone astray.”* Like our first parents who took the quince and ran with it, we paint masks to protect our faces from the heavenly rays that search the entire body and leave no lust, no desire unturned. It is a war between the choir loft and the pew: the words of the cleansing Spirit unmistakably flow over the congregation on Pentecost morning. But many in the pews deflect the searing and uncompromising Flame with crudely shaped Attic masks that protrude frozen lips shaped for shouting. “Teh gays!” these dramatists often cry outside Mass, as their masks slip slightly to reflect the loneliness we all partake of time after time. We queers know pain. Yet we busily paint our masks as well. We desperately deflect the cleansing Fire, and curse those who salt our wounds and bathe us with pity rather than compassion.

The Veni Sancte Spiritus ends with the following stanza: “Give us a virtuous reward, give us a graceful death. Give us joy everlasting.”* It would be so nice to dance around the bonfire with a chaste lover, trampling our masks underfoot. The Flame tans our faces with Spiritual rays; the Flames occasionally leap to show the inadequacies of the beloved. We bruise our bare toes with misplaced dance steps.
Fumbled words trip up our intellectual pretensions. The tongues of fire protect us against settling for sex to mask our inadequacies. Discipleship is only a degree higher.

As Tushnet states in “Sublimity Now!”, “an encounter with the sublime can teach us the white-hot passion of submission.”

Shouldn’t we queers search a lifetime for the fascination of the Flame living within another person, and reciprocating that Flame with mind and emotion transformed?