If there was ever a cliché then this is it. Yes, love is love but what is love? I saw on a comment thread recently a claim by one of the participants that God or Jesus had told him that there was complete moral equivalence between homosexuality and heterosexuality because we are all evolving into a state in which sex (or gender as people say nowadays) will not exist. I've heard this before, that homosexuals represent a kind of enlightened vanguard blazing a trail into the future. It's an old delusion.
The only place that sex, as in masculine and feminine or their initiating equivalents on the spiritual level, cannot exist is the unmanifest state, the one in which spirit and matter are not yet sundered and nothing is. The very act of creation involves a division which, whether you call it consciousness and form or spirit and matter or God and Nature, is the root of the sex difference. That goes right down to the very ground of reality in that for creation to take place, one must become two. If you don't want sex to exist then you don't want life to exist.
A rejoinder to this might be that we will all become androgynous but that is a category error in that it forces a pre-manifested condition into the world of manifestation which word I use here as an equivalent for creation even if they are somewhat different, metaphysically speaking. But if life is to be expressed there must be this duality of subject and object and that, right there, is the sex difference. It cannot be dispensed with if life is to be known and seen and touched and tasted and all the rest.
It may be that as humanity evolves each sex will become more refined in its form and expression, and people might confuse this as each one of them becoming more like the other, but the unique categories of masculine and feminine will remain. In Luke chapter 13 God is compared to a hen who gathers her brood under her wings but that does not make him any less God the Father. Great men can have great compassion but they are no less men. Great women can have high intelligence but they are no less women. One androgynous being can never complement and complete another androgynous being and it is this completing and complementing that makes the love between man and woman what it is. Apart from being a necessity for creation, the sexual division of beings is a great gift from God because it takes love to a new level.
Love is love but what people often mean when they say this is that love is sex. They smuggle in one thing by claiming it is another. My teachers told me that love was indeed love if it was pure and did not degenerate. Most of what is called love by propagandists is degenerated love that arises from and is intended to satisfy the ego not the soul.
4 comments:
Well put, William. I am glad you picked up on that comment thread. I must confess, the absurdity of the position tested my patience.
I thought you responded very well, given the clear wishful thinking involved. As I say in the post, it's an old idea that homosexuality is a kind of evolutionary forerunner and you've got your Leonardos and Michelangelos and many other artists and creative people brought in to support that. But evolution does not contravene nature, it develops and perfects it just as Jesus came to fulfil the law and the prophets not to abolish them. Jesus himself, the perfect man and surely indicative of the summation of human evolution, had many attributes we might regard as feminine but they were all expressed within total and complete masculinity.
I think that this problem of love = "whatever I desire" = sex; has been very difficult to defeat because we have a very deep rooted idea that love is an emotion. And emotions seem to be body-driven, changeable, re-definable...
So, I am pretty sure that Christians need to respond to this, and work on another and more 'objective' conceptualization of love. That's what I am trying to do with the idea that love means something-like harmony with the purposes and methods of God's creation.
Another problem is that strand in Classical Christian theology that sees sexual identity as a temporary thing, a part of earthly mortal life, not a part of Heaven... Some Christians who believe in reincarnation (including Steiner and Barfield) believe that the same spirit is reincarnated as man and woman, giving wider experience.
But all this gets twisted into an idealization of no-sex, androgyny or other intermediate forms.
All this constitutes a weakness due to inconsistency, which is being probed and cracked open at present.
The answer lies, I believe, at a metaphysical level - at re-examining the assumptions; and this, in turn, requires that people understand "Christianity" in a much simpler way, and acknowledge that "being a Christian" is one thing, and how we explain this theologically is another.
Theology is secondary, yet necessary; but it is a somewhat tentative and exploratory matter, about-which there may be considerable differences of opinion and emphasis.
As you know, I do believe in reincarnation though whether it is for everyone or only some I couldn't say. However, the incarnating soul is not sexless or androgynous. It is definitely either masculine or feminine hence the doctrine of twin souls. The spiritual beings who spoke to me were all male except for one who was obviously female. The idea that our heavenly selves have no sex is just an elevation of abstract theorising to truth and a rejection of the beauty of creation for a retreat into an idealised non-being. That being said, I do think it is possible for male souls to be born into female bodies and vice versa but this does not justify any of the current behaviour because if they are so born it is because of particular lessons they need to learn and to avoid those lessons is to waste an opportunity not to mention to put one's own personal will above that of God and force reality to one's own whim.
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