#2, Philomena:

I’ve been a lurking follower of your blog for some time now, and am just emerging from the shadows to comment on the comments on “Romoeroticism” at InsideCatholic (don’t really feeling like fighting it out amongst the commenters at the moment, but wanted to offer a positive review anyhow).

I loved the piece for the same reason I enjoy all your writing: intellectually rigorous without being pedantic, orthodox beliefs which you don’t feel the need to constantly apologize for, lovely prose, and (last but not least, as they say) for the experiences and reflections that I identify with. In this piece particularly, I immediately recognized the feeling you talk about, a yearning which is essentially unfulfilled but which seeks to be fulfilled through God, something which is deeply associated with the body but not reducible to physical urges and desires. Though my own tendencies don’t generally run in the direction of SSA, I find that your writing often touches that chord of recognition in me. Maybe it’s just a function of being young and reared on the same sort of critical/theoretical/philosophical language, like the post-modern tendency to find sexual motivations for everything. It gets silly, but that kind of thing is rooted in a real experience, the thread of eros (the longing, that is) that runs through a lot of everyday life.

But the comments at InsideCatholic puzzle me because so many of them just seem to be missing the point completely. They’re either a) identifying eros with lust and/or , which I’m pretty sure is not theologically sound, or b) wanting the “bottom line” of whether or not you’re saying homosexuality is sinful. Or both. None of the contentious commenters seem to be really engaging with the spiritual reality that you’re describing, and instead are telling you what you’re “really saying” and then going from there (I’m trying really, really hard not to be snarky right now!). I’m forced to think that the problem is a lack of recognition, because surely everyone has felt that formless longing at some point in their lives; they’re just not identifying their experience as being the same as what you’re talking about, since yours is attached to SSA and theirs is presumably attached to something else.

If they did recognize it, then they wouldn’t be gabbing on about how God told them personally to be fruitful and multiply and how if there’s a sexual shading to adult friendship it renders the relationship poisonous and how we all just need to read our Bibles really. Instead, they would actually maybe be able to sympathize with gay people, who currently (and quite understandably) feel frustrated by the amazing unhelpful stuff they’re saying.

Internet comment threads are where the influence of the Tower of Babel really becomes clear. We’re all speaking the same language, even using the same words, but we mean rather different and specific things by them. The only way to define them is with more words, which leads to the same problem. The only way to escape it is to make a leap of understanding and identification not strictly intellectual in nature; my theory is, there used to be a bridge there, so we didn’t have to jump.

Sorry for the long and somewhat rambling email. I should really stop reading comment threads, cause they always make me want to hit something.

Eve says: Well first, thanks for the very kind words! And yeah, I think there is a point at which prudence becomes safety-fetishism… which is not the Catholic way. (Or not the only Catholic way!) I understand why many of the IC commenters thought I was imprudent, but I still disagree with where they draw that line. More on this in a bit.