THE LADDER OF LOVE: Responses to my post on sublimation.

Fabio Periera takes issue with my post and calls it “shameful.” Unfortunately, I am not sure what I could say that he would not find shameful, short of heresy…. We disagree on several major points, including whether non-sexual love is “forever stunted and incomplete,” whether personal holiness (which for Christians is necessarily defined through relationship to a loving God) is loneliness, whether Christians would counsel “gays, and only gays” to sublimate their desires (no), and whether sublimation is just another word for repression. On the first point,

Sed Contra speaks more eloquently than I could. On the last,

an anonyreader sends something she wrote a while ago and heard echoed in my post: “Desire sublimated is not desire wasted. To sublimate means not to waste but to make sublime. Everyone must crush and bottle up desire sometimes: the most obvious example is when the person you want doesn’t want you. But some people crush and bottle grapes not because they deny the goodness of grapes, but because they believe in the goodness of wine. Desire bottled can become self-knowledge, extraordinary service to others, great art, religious mysticism. Drinking wine can be undeniably headier than eating grapes. Even vinegar has its uses.”