Formating love

Elaine, How I Love Thee

Music to accompany this post.

The last few weeks I have been falling in love with my wife all over again. It is like a spiritual awakening. I am seeing her with fresh eyes. I see the wrinkles forming around her eyes and mouth. She is taking on a look of maturity, and it matches her growth spiritually. There is something very sexy about those lines.

I look at my hands, something I often have done while contemplating my own personhood. Coming out of anesthesia after having my wisdom teeth removed, my mom told me I was looking staring at my hands funny, like they weren’t my own. Some how, though looking at them and realizing they are my own has sometimes granted me a heightened self awareness, I am alive, I am separate from the world, the world exists apart from my imagination. Rolhieser suggests that it is this separation that is at the basis of sexuality. To be sexed is to be divided from the rest of humanity based on gender. I see in my hands today knuckles that are growing knobbier, with more creases. They remind me of my father’s hands, rough with work. I have caught myself taking on attitudes and postures so like his as well. I am maturing. I’ll be thirty this year. I am a pastor, a father, in short an adult. How subtly all this snuck up on me. How subtly Elaine grew from a college sweetheart and salacious girl into a woman.

I step back, and realize what has caught up with me. My breath is caught away; she is so beautiful, inside even more than outside. I held her tight the night before she went away to Chicago, attempting to convey through the touch, through the pressing of her body the depth of love I have for her.

I said, “I’m scared you might not make it back to me.”

“Why?” She asked.

“Because,” I said, “in the movies with someone realizes how much they love another, that is when they loose them.”

I thank God for this romance of the Spirit, for it is as much a romance with him as it is with my wife, his gift to me. My heart races even in the writing of this post, and the praying of this prayer.

Spirituality meets pavement

Of all the spiritualities Rolheiser talks about, it is the spirituality of sexuality that has stuck with me most. Through it, I have seen how I can refocus my madness, my eros, into a life giving laser, by offering my relationship with my wife as a true sacrament. Through it I can truly embrace every one, by focusing all my sexual energy on her, I am in a real way focusing it on God. By becoming one with her, I am in a real way becoming one with the cosmos. Crazy stuff! I also like how when I’m not becoming one, when I am feeling acutely the isolation of sleeping alone, even when she’s beside me, I stand in solidarity with the poor and the lonely, the cast offs, and Jesus himself. Though not in the same chapter, Rolheiser talks about taking into oneself the tensions of mystery. I like that.

My spiritual rule would step up my discipline in the contemplative arena. Especially since its fall and I have given up mowing my labyrinth, I need now more than ever to engage in the contemplative. I have greatly enjoyed praying the hours. I need to discipline myself to get back into it. I have always like meditation and contemplation, it fits my personality, but I have been greatly challenged by action. Our forays into social justice have been exciting. I wrote a bit about my environmental goals for blog action day, and I am excited to see where the projects our ministerial have started in the school will go. I also would like to help out a the soup kitchen again regularly.

I always have had a dream of having a coffee-shop while being a spiritual director. I’m not sure God’s dreamt it the same way that I have, but it is interesting that in many ways I’m already doing it. The coffeehouse we’ve started with high school kids has given me many opportunities to interact with them about their spiritual formation. My great goal for taking my masters in Spiritual Formation and Leadership is to learn how to lead people from zero to mystic. What I have already learned is that there is indeed great hope to change people, the church, and the world, and that Hope resides in me as I change myself.

Is there sex in heaven?

Holy Longing talks about a heavenly sexuality. I have been thinking along these lines for a while, so here is a good chunk of what Rolhieser said:

Janis Joplin was once asked what it was like being a rock star. She replied: “It’s pretty hard sometimes. You go on stage, make love to fifteen thousand people, then you go home and sleep alone.”

Jesus was once asked, as a test: If a woman marries seven times and all her husbands die before she dies, whose wife will she be after the resurrection? He answered that, after the resurrection, we will no longer marry or be given in marriage.

These two answers Janis Joplin’s and Jesus’, are not unconnected. Each, in its own way, says something about the all embracing intent of our sexuality. What Janis Joplin is saying is that, in our sexuality and our creativity, we are ultimately trying to make love to everyone. What Jesus is saying is not that we will be celibate in heaven, but rather that, in heaven, everyone will make love to everyone else and, already now, we hunger for that within every cell of our being. Sexually our hungers are very wide. We are built to ultimately embrace the universe and everything in it.

To understand our sexuality and to live with its unfulfilled tensions, it can be most helpful simply to understand this. In loving, the ultimate wound is not to be able to marry everyone. The greatest human hunger, felt in every cell in our being, is that we cannot be completely united with everyone and everything....

It is important to understand this, but it is also important not to misunderstand it. Because our sexuality is ultimately geared to embrace everyone does not mean that we can be promiscuous and, already here in this life, try to live that out. In fact, paradoxically, it means the opposite. Only God can sleep with everyone, and thus, only in god can we sleep with everyone. In this life, even though our sexuality has geared up for universal embrace, we only have two options that are life-giving: Either we embrace the many through the one (by sleeping with one person within a monogamous marriage) or we embrace the one through the many (be sleeping with no one, in celibacy). Both of these are ways that will eventually open our sexuality up so as to embrace everyone. If we go the route of promiscuity, eventually, we will embrace no one.

Look here for what I take from this.