The following is a dialogue with persons who shall remain anonymous. It involves primarily what it is to have the will to love and be love. There is a section that may seem to repeat my last theological post about the message found in sexual desires. However that is not precisely the case, it makes several new points that relate to the previous ‘letter’ and several pertinent point relating to a section called ‘part two’ which addresses another dialogue in which the other participant made conclusions that by simply following a regimented set of rule and regulations supposedly upheld by the religious frame work most of us find ourselves in that this solves the strenuousness to an almost total degree in our unions, even going so far as to say, if his particular friend has waited for marriage, she would have had an almost guaranteed more positive sexual experience, and not be reduced to a place of despair where she inevitably took her own life the second section contests this view of ‘order’ ‘regimentation’ those ‘Guarauntees’ and the total reality that Love is nearly a complete and total blind gamble, sometimes a leap a booby trap and sometimes even an ambush. Section two, I have included the conditions, anonymously of almost all the results of friends I have and their relationships over the last four years to reiterate the realities of relationships even for Christians which the other participant seems to ignore or have little experience with. I am slightly harsh with them only because their naivity should clearly keep them from asserting their own severely utested theory as sound advice to others. And it is offensive given the varied results of all the relationships given brief or extended detail. I feel not that I have answers to the issues faced only to make a point to the impossible idea of knowing how to make a relationship work a certain way and believe given the varied results, and that living with many as their relationships began, or in very intimate proximity, feel I know something about the systems or lack of uniformity that went into their beginnings- few if any played by the norms of the rules, and many of those non normative results have yielded a lasting result and many of the normative ones have not. Once again I have not answers as how to succeed, only observations and the very real and adamant assertion that it is not the success of the relationship, but the success of love and humanity in the persons involved, even in negativity and failure that is the point.
Section one begins by contesting an example which heavily focused on an example involving sexual practice as seen through the identity of a chocolate cake, and that the notion is we want good food, not a diet of chocolate cake, which in the end amounted to the attitude we should stop eating chocolate cake in our relationships [in this case the cake also represented all forms of sexual negativity, porn, for this person masturbation, lust, promiscuity, fornication and overly tactile flirting.] I have tried to convey the fact that this idea is not sturdy, because , remaining within the metaphor, as I have come to observe, sex is actually the chocolate cake or potato chips we experience between one another. The healthy food is not to be a metaphor for good sex, but all the things besides sex that sustain the relationship as long as that can be done. Still remaining in the metaphor, it is really faulty to make this association, because now we are only to feel good about eating healthy instead of feeling well about pleasurable things in their right quantity and generally this is the way which religious dogmatism and social taboo approach ironically give the image, even weight gain. ‘No chocolate cake for me, I might feel ashamed.’
And then we proceed to slap others writst who could eat a whole cake and be the better for it and well in conscience. I do believe those are the fundamental fillers of context and should allow people to best connect what would have seemed ambiguous imperceptions in the reading.
Section two is highly poetic.
Section One: The Will to Love
The Chocolate cake doesn’t need to leave how we eat it does. None of these ideas are fundamentally going to work for one very simple reason: it’s always being approached from the same principal, that the idea is sound and good, the method needs work. But the method fails because the principal is not sound and good. The problem is not a primal desire but a relational deficiency, which in the fact the primal desire puts in stark and acute reality. We crave sex because we are isolated, in need of a simple hug, because we are supposed to emulate God with creation- whether that comes by painting, fucking or through sports, they all come from the same place- the human desire to expand beyond ourselves and to contribute to the cosmos- it is a fundamental human madness that when not met, and when needing to be met by certain formations becomes the craving ‘sex manifest’.
As Christians we have this blemished idea regarding relationship and interpersonal relationships. In fact when it comes to most of our relationships we have blemished view. We tell people who are desperate for friendship or romance that they need to know how to self sooth, that they need to derive their identity more from God than from their relationships. But in all my short life, I have never known anyone who can live up to this stoicism of relationship. In fact what I have encountered is that those who have even gotten the fancy for the idea of God’s love, and worse with those who have experienced it and derive their identity most from God is the insane and intense madness to have the unbridled as deep as possible touching as closely as tightly where no secrets can be kept or held or left unclutched by the nearness without seams, to have that bliss and anguish.
It is those who are unfeeling and indifferent whom I have experienced, who have a lack of being deep inside, or a place of being they do not have the courage to face who confound themselves with the idea they need to be ‘self met’ more than met by or to meet others.
It is exactly the acknowledgement of that craving of total daring and vulnerable intimacy that springs from having known God or from wanting to know him, or knowing him, and to these that ideas or practices of ‘only so often’ or ‘only on the surface of a relationship’ is never enough. We deride these people that they are too desperate or out of control, or sorrowfully incomplete, or ‘just not competent’ interpersonally. We tell them the longings of their heart are sinful and their lust for company is not human but foreign to it [because there they are with all their innards hanging out, messy honest and true, and brave, and it either makes us frightened or jealous]. But they are the courageous ones who know what they need and that other people, and conversation and to suck all the marrow out of life and to drink up immortality and to experience the nimbus of relationship in the most intense fashion imaginable. Junkies of Love becoming Love itself, so that they are love in their inner most and demonstrate love at their outer most at the very least.
However our response to this craving both sexually cosmically and relationally is not to let them drink the cure and remedy to this itching persistance to get to the heart of things, like the Master in Doctor Who, with his insessant drums of war spurring him insatiably on inside his mind; we encourage these people to spend their time practicing and preparing to live, brewing jam that can never be tasted, while all the while the truth is, they are alive let them live damnit, as Cat Stevens says ‘Learned of love and abcs, skinned our hearts and skinned our knees’ we are so afraid of having a thing we don’t even want others to have it. We as a church ask them to know God as their foundation, by constantly requesting that these people not only desist from their craving of all things human, but that they attain such a house by not gorging on all things Christ. By not knowing the communion in the sensations of sex, by not knowing the touch of grass the smells of trees and dew, the sound of birds, the taste of bear, the sound of Stairway to Heaven, or the kerplunking of jazz, the smell of tobacco, the awareness of drugs used responsibly, by ignoring the glory of a shirt woven from two cloths, by making words more devilish than than polite curses strung together, avoiding magic, and refaining from sex in all forms but allowing violence, even regailing fantasy as a dangerousness against God and his word. Insisting on becoming human by making all human things foreign to us, ignoring Ghandi because he’s not from our camp. To know God by becoming ordered in the sense that we refrain from a break neck and frantic pursuit of his face. To the people who are haunted in the night we say stop being haunted, and ignore the dream and to the people who have seen his face and panic in a tazmanian panic across the earth seeking everything that can show it to them, we say stop searching and calm down. How insulting and how impossible unless you beat them to pieces with a weapon like sexual shame.
The fact that we experience sexual lust in a way we cannot deal with it and seek out porn to make it easily go away is that when the sex manifest rears up inside of us to say, ‘we are not getting that total intimacy, and vulnerably daring connection with all things, ‘Go NOW! and seek God where ever he is how ever you can.’ It’s easier to masturbate than to see that our body is telling us something so much more intrinsic and at the moment so much more a priority than that gripping insanity which is the only way the body knows how to speak with our intense need, with the deepest characteristic we have, the longing to be like our father and create! It is easier to look at porn than put time and effort into blessing another human being with the same love and closeness we ourselves want. It’s easier to watch porn stars moaning ‘for us’ than to actually ask if God is stirring the primordial furnace of our body to search and seek for him- it’s easier to stifle cosmic waves by reducing them to simple and ill gotten sex than to have them completely up heave and usurp our lives to pursue God with that intensity. It’s easier to keep my job and my lifestyle than sit and contemplate how the irritation of my life giving loins is more in tune to the will of God than the way we generally live from day to conveniently modernised day.
My friend has this crass saying that ‘his balls pulse with the power of a thousand moons’. But I don’t think he is that far off from the truth when it comes to God calling out to us when you consider that the creative is linked to everything we do, from art to sex to farming, everything though ‘our sexuality pulses with the power of a thousand loves.’ we may feel it sexually but it is only the tip of a warm and vibrant Iceberg, only the point of an entire sword, the power of those loves grips us there because it is the most maddening place and the most recognisable place to know we wish to grow and need to grow out from ourselves, and connect and sew. Once we start learning from our bodies exactly where the sexual creative energy of God is really trying to say and point us to, then we will begin to harness our desires and succeed in them and we will be willing to do the difficult thing of lay all aside to find God as those who do not simply wish to love him wonderfully but only go to church on Sunday or only soup kitchens when our schedules let us volunteer.
Our Bodies are an expression of God, the expression of God on this earth, the most sacred and must spiritual thing we have. We cannot know ourselves, nor receive God without a body. There is nothing but material- even what is spiritual, that which differentiates from matter is but another kind of material. All things are renditions from God of himself, as I care for it I care for a portion of God a note in the song of himself, I therefore make love to an expression of love.
As long as we view the spiritual, and it’s calling as some sort of ‘higher’ wafty spiritual vapour we should follow even with sex we’re never going to succeed. The spiritual is primal deep down in the core of us and the earth, it’s not polite or gentle, though it can behave that way, it’s not quaint- it is violent and the violent take hold of it, because it seizes them and when the sexual desire grips if we think that it’s only expression is to be satisfied by a monstrous ejaculation, or mass copulation, it’s we who are underscoring sex and what it means. Our bodies were made for the gospel because we were and as far as a God who cares about resurrection is concerned, there’s something about humanity that just cannot go without matter. You want to cast sex and spirit up in the clouds be my guest, you want to separate it from parts of the animal spirit God gave us, which we do possess as a godly trait, be my guest, but it will fail and it will come crashing down to where it belongs- on earth testifying to the glory of God.
Part two, the relationship perplexity, and its incomprehensible behaviour, that still requires the will to love: [this is once again a dialogue, it is not addressed personally to anyone tagged here]
I don’t think you should be telling any body else what they know about sex and sin and human beings, since you yourself known about squat, and I don’t mean the be rude, but you don’t know or have not experienced enough about it. My experience with myself and my closest friends is a much sordid perplexing issue. Of three relationships, including mine, all with believing Christians involved- they have failed, this I can say from a grouping of about eight of my male friends and their relationships with their girl friends and spouses [myself included in that number] four relationships of which failed, two from Marriage, one after sustained periods of intercourse and my perspective, that in having intercourse we made a marital commitment, sacred and unbreakable. Two of my friends, who were not only married but called to leadership and ministry are either divorced or been left, or been the one to do the leaving. One I attended the wedding of, the other I was the best man at. My relationship failed and likely will remain so despite any desire wish or action to the contrary. Another relationship failed when one of my friends girlfriends cheated on him, after they had had sex, they are no longer together. Three of my friends relationships took the same ‘preregistered’ sexual step, as mine did, sexually committing to a sacred concept through the submission of their bodies, and then they proceeded to registere the nature of their relationship. One relationship has sustained itself by cohabitation and it has gone through utter hell on both ends that I have observed, and without the bonds of registration, they have persevered. Another, involving likely my only friend in full time official ministry as a youth pastor is persevering- even though more than once this friend has expressed the serious possibility of divorce, I don’t know who might have suggested it, maybe both at different times, but it was seriously discussed multiple times. This isn’t even including that many speakers and professors of mine at bible colleges come out from starkly failed relationships some mutiply so. So, with this immersion in avid experience within the Christian circle of relationships, there is no working system, and no chance of being able to eternally determine another persons actions and decisions. The very act of love is gambling- and not a one of us gave our bodies lightly or temporarily. So respectfully, shove your concepts and ideas up your ass. Some of us have failed at our relationships but none of us have failed as human beings and that’s the factor, not whether you have premarital sex or register the supposed nature of your relationship, but what kind of person you want to be.
Marriage and waiting would not have protected your friend from her suicide- because marriage, by which you really mean a registration of a a relationship with a certain nature about it, does nothing to retain a human being to another human being. Only who you want to be can do that, and sometimes the cost of marriage however unfortunate cannot allow you to be who you are, at which case, spiritual suicide is no more acceptable than ending a marriage. God is not powerless in any of these situations, but at the same time, love does not insist it’s own way and some people decide they prefer evil actions or evil things. At the end of the day, the decision to sustain the marriage and the decision to not fail at being human are not always the same.
I would also like to point out that another relationship involving two friends of the same circle also flopped after about eight months, without any intercourse in the least, both believing marriage was their intended goal and life long task together. One party called the other out on a point of integrity, so they felt and the person being challenged ended the relationship- Crushing my other friend to smitherines, they literally cried themselves senseless while they were asleep, they didn’t just cry themselves to sleep they cried as they slept for three months afterwards [or so it was explained to me]. It was total wracking defeat and spiritual disembowelment for this person, and they were not and are not a light or flighty person, this person lived through alot and this destroyed them for a time, no sex at all, having the courage to challenge the person they loved and the other betrayed them- so I do believe, that you’re wet and green and don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, except to simplify a very complex and poignant issue that is not so simple and cannot be regimented into a proper format- Reason and love have nothing to do with each other- you can construct the syllogism, but it is not universal- for it must start with the existential, the nonsensical encounter which becomes love, ‘I meet you, I love you, I see God in you like no one else, and this lets me see you like no one else can be seen.’ Sometimes I find myself speculating on the extent that for a man when he loves a woman it means for him to say ‘no other human being is actually a woman’ and for a woman ‘no other human being is actually a man’. It also shows the total sin in not working something out- it is to say that there is no God, because you are saying that either he is not compelling in another person- or that he was never there in the first place. And yet in all relationships people can exhibit the godliness that throws them brightly out into the world to be seen and loved and they can exhibit the fracture. The problem is that people can sometimes have divergent glories so extreme and callings and purposes so severe that it actually drives them apart. We also live in a reality that honours our mistakes or lack of wisdom and when that happens, we must determine if we want to honour them and see them through, or sever our mistakes where they stand. Sometimes two people make divergent decisions at the revelation of a mistake. I do believe God desires that even foolish mistakes be made into wise successes- because he is faithful and whole and capable- but at some point I also think he understands, and the end of a mistake can be mercy.
Why do Paul and Barnabas, such good friends fight to fiercely that it drives them apart and they do not talk to one another and go on different journeys? Clearly these men are both Apostles, friends who love Jesus and each other intensely and serve a God of healing communication understanding and reconciliation- and their friendship is dissolves or at least experiences A separated or divorce. Why does my father love farming more than his own family- I am sure in his heart he is confused and hurting, even though he does feel or does genuinely love God- he has made decisions on who he wants to be- and somewhere along the lines everything is broken- and his love in the end insists his way, from people nd from God- so it isn’t very loving. Why does the mother of my Child essentially tell me I have nothing to offer another human being enough to warrant love- because I have nothing to offer her, she believes, that could re-kindle her love for me? I have no idea. She essentially says, there’s not enough God in me for her to love me as a lover- she doesn’t see it that way. But the fact I do see it so may mean we’re looking for different parts of God, or unfortunately the possibility exists we’re looking for different Gods in people and who can determine that one of us is looking for the real God, I cannot not, all I know is that it hurts to the core and might always, but it is lessening of late, but not less perplexing. The issue is too complex and I can myself throw around these truthful ideas, but can come to no conclusions nor equations. All I know is that I choose to be as human as possible, which means to look as much like Jesus as I can, and I am determined never to fail at that- and to love fearlessly to the death, of myself or of my relationships.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, we cannot let that sentiment ‘it’s morally wrong’ to do that get in the way. Ultimately it’s who we are who we will become and sometimes, who we will become in the relationship is just as immoral because of who we will become. God is of course mighty to save- and we are stubborn people- but there is something to be said about changing and being and becoming together- and not every lack of change can be excused through disobedient will, or a lack of God or a resistance to his presence- sometimes he has tasks, as he says even, Son will betray father, not because they’re leaving or don’t love but because they’ve met God- and this sets priorities, and not being those people how can we call their priorities wrong? At the most all we can do about it is be afraid it could happen to us, be hurt when it does, have compassion for those it does happen to, and determine over and over again who we want to be for one will be taken the other left.
We make decisions every day that hurt countless people based on who we want to be, even when we wish to be like Jesus, and be good and be most human. We give all the change in our pocket to the homeless, one man gets change the next man to ask gets none. The difference is that some marriages are sustained not on the sacrifice of self in mutual exchanges of each person being Church and Christ, and their ability to literally be love, but of one person giving up who they are, not what they’re doing, not the sacrificial sewing and investment- but actually killing their own personal glory just to avoid the sin of divorce- then it’s not a case of they can’t see God, but they’re not there to see God, nor to be seen- they’re not, and that is worse than telling someone they can’t see God, because one does not exist, and the other well, what do they really love then? ‘A shadow and a thought’?. And while some have people kill their spirit for the sake of harmony- others don’t let people become and they’re so similar its almost not worth noticing. We know it is a sin, not when we ask God to act for us, but when we ask him not to be himself, or worse ask him to be another god, so how can we ask his image to do the same? He is mighty to save- but he also has a plan that transcends our circumstance- which does reap and sew. Some relationships fail for his purpose- some because of adamant disobedience, and some because the sinful catastrophe of sustaining things is worse than ending them.
And even in this convoluted and sordid reality, the human thing to do is to love past the hilts, all the way to the pommel, to stick out your neck rush in head first, and love without fear- because the issue is not whether we live or die, or remain married, or stay away from sex before we register our marriages, nor even that we love, but that we are love and becoming love and barring death that we can do this all again- not that love succeeds outside of us but that it succeeds in our continuing to be it, pursue it give it, live it, fight for it, even when it means to surrender and lose it.
I believe that this is the point of ‘Love Conquering all’, not that it is victorious in all things outside of us, nor in repairing all things, but that it conquers you, and repairs you, even if that leaves you crippled with the pains of life and of others. We have a screwed up perception that love equals happiness and comfort and freedom, and is tame- this is true, it should comfort you, it should make you delighted and it should set you free but it is never tame, the violent seize the kingdom of love and send it forth, the barbarian without laws is the only one of heart who can love without boundaries or taboo, or laws and theories about how it should be done, the raw uncalcuable mystery of an unnamed genous that has gone on persisting just outside of our periffery flourishing as a scion, untouched by all process. This is the thing that grows in the rainforest and doesn’t run even though the foresters might come and it be lost forever- it lives on the edge which forces it to live without pretenses and intrigues, and this is the only kind of worthy love, a wide open heart, usually torn that is willing to accept venom spayed into its very depths- without allusions and chocolates and candles and flowers and vacations and fancy things- but cold blooded love that in the cold leaves us so mysteriously and literally warm, because deep inside it has been conquered by warmth and cannot slumber, for it is a flower of flame that is warmth itself. Loves nature is to fire like a shard and be unbashful, to be no light under a basket, and to bear the risk that it’s very light, the very other purpose of another light and another glory may be the thing that puts it out or makes it burn away all the quicker, ‘The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have shone so very brightly!’ As blade runner would have us know.
Somewhere a large group of people decided it was a good idea to say that love must look a certain way and ignored the fact that love more often than not leads to death on a cross. They prefer it to be a metaphor and if you take this literally then you’re foolish. It might be preferential to examine the opposite, since God dies no metaphorical death, why would our death only be virtual in response- shall we live our faith as a video game only in every respect and what for, all it can amount to is we have never lived and never loved, nothing is real nor worthy of care ad appreciation. Shall God’s people be idols who cannot speak, who cannot hear, who cannot feel or see, or move? Then why is it acceptable for us to never love and never die except in wonderfully percieved ideas? I hate the quote ‘it is better to have loved’ and etc etc and all that bullshit cliche, but it is true, it is better to love and to die and to rise again, than to spend all your life making sure you have the right ideas about God and the universe and making sure that’s the person you will be. It’s better to face men head on because what can they do to me, there is a very real thing that declares ‘I am yours!’ Rather than to sigh relief that ‘What can men do to me?’ I am not in the line of fire, for the right ideas.
There is a reason perfect love drives away all fear- because there are very real things to be afraid of and love doesn’t remove these things, in fact what it does really is make all the risks and mistakes ok, makes all the pain ok, makes the fact that we will be ripped apart, left cold and alone, left in shambles, left under over passes starving but embracing our lovers and friends by the worthiness of it, ok, and obedient and still godly in the more perplexing and serving and faithful and valiant, vulnerable, daring and crucified means, ‘I can walk through utter darkness for lo I will find my lover there, either because he was there before me or shall come after me- and while I may be nervous I will not be timid’ it makes it ok, even when it is unbearable, it makes worth; makes the things we should fear more dull even when it is gone, because for a time they were dulled in the first place and they can never become sharper because of it- it might mean that it will hurt more and more, because scar tissue is harder to injure and dull blades never cut neatly. But bring it on, love can actually endure, it can face the fear, and once it has passed love will still remain- it can endure the fire and grow again as the plant itself is a greater fire, it is the fire of fruit bearing with the flames and tongues of leaves and lusciousness and life. It is not that the tree burns down, but that it’s seeds fall and die and yield, and when they burn down again and more life falls, dies and yields, and in this, that from within the tree comes the seeds, which are not conquered even when failure seems to strike, from inside the tree comes the love which has conquered itself to live and live and live, that with larger fires comes more life and so then larger fires and so then more life. But for this to flourish we must not focus on avoiding the fire that can consume our outward glory, we must foster a love so deep and rich and fruitful inside of us that we are never to really fear the fire, or the rakey hands with which it will pull us down to a worthy death. At the end of the say it is that deep love which will adamantly and with rigorous defiance of the catastrophe regrow the outward glory! Even if our relationships never come back together again, even if our friends fall away from us- all we can do is make sure the person we are is a person who does not drive away, that even in defeat persists their fight to flourishes new life, and to always rise again, that’s a principal worth more than a system or process, more cosmic and more necessary to the human race maintaining its ‘order’ than any morality that can be moralised upon people.
The rule of the Samurai has a proverb, ‘Even in death a Samurai should be able to complete one more task with certainty, even if his head is cut off he should be able to act with one last motion and strike.’ I have paraphrased here, but it is true, from the warrior class of those whose entire purpose is to be of service unto death, that though our heads are cut off and we are certainly dead the one who loves, the very lover themselves should still be able and even executing one last task and that with certainty- to love.
