RESPONSES TO “ROMOEROTICISM”: Post #1, anonyreader. (this is a repost–accidentally posted it in a messed-up form earlier, which I hope nobody noticed! And it’s actually about my Commonweal piece, but I thought it was apropos.)

I have just read your essay or reflections on Homosexuality & the Church in Commonweal. I liked your voice – but I ended up feeling confused…

I remembered once, many years ago, I had my little niece visiting me – she was only three, four or five years old – don’t remember exactly and I was out of the church at that time, and we were talking about God and I think I said Where is God? – and she pointed her finger towards the heaven – and I smiled and said No, she is down there pointing towards the ground. She looked at me bewildered first and then giggling….

I think I did it because I had just discovered how different it would have felt for me If our creed had been talking about the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit – very estranging….

I know what Fatherly love is and I know the thrust in the Father – but the metaphor of relationship is not gendered? Being a son is not different from being a daughter? I hope not! To love God with all my heart – is loving a You/ a Thou –

Relating to the Word, the Son, The Christ, Jesus – and loving Jesus – How is that for a man and a woman? Is it a gendered face or is it Compassion, Lovingkindness in eyes – in a bodylanguage which still is not a masculine body? Just Human? Or is it not? Like when we don’t differentiate between he and she in our prose and let he be both? – because for me there is a difference reading he and/or she….

I am a man who is longing for another man – a thou embodied in a male body – still my love is for a thou. Some men and women fall in love with another man or woman with the same personality profile – some fall in love with someone who has another personality profile then their own – no matter if they are hetero- or homosexual…

But then there is the question of energy – that prototypes of Man and Woman even though they conceal all differences in those categories – they help molding the feeling of wholeness – for most gendered people – and this is based on the man longing for a woman and a woman longing for a man… maybe… and that’s why children have to protect those bounded categories. We have all kinds of labels for lesbians and gays – and people identify with those roles, even though they might know that they are more than that identity. Some of those roles seems to me to be somewhat not autentic to the self…

I think there is a problem with the dicotomy of Man and Woman – if we don’t ask what kind of man and what kind of woman – and I don’t mean a real man and not a real man/ a real woman and not a real woman – or a good woman or a bad woman. I think polytheistic religions may have more opportunities for personal fullfillment through prototypes than we have through Jesus and Mary….

These are just some impulsive reflections… I would like very much to read what you think about these things.

Eve says: I do think our longings are often, though not always, very strongly gendered. That’s where I was going with the “Beatrice” passage in the IC piece. This doesn’t require rigid gender roles, but a more subtle sense that Woman and Man have some iconic reality. There’s a very lovely thing in Thomas a Kempis’s Reflections on the Passion of Christ where he reworks the Song of Songs as a hymn to the Christ crucified, which is deeply attentive to the body, very much attuned to the sublime aspect of the flesh; you might appreciate that. I’ve found praying the Anima Christi is also very striking.