Tuesday, February 14, 2012

A Valentine Reflection on Romantic Love--and Some Lessons for Current Events

One of the picture books in my daughter's closet recounts the story of St. Valentine. According to the story, in ancient Rome there was a Christian priest named Valentine who married Christian couples in defiance of an imperial decree that young men remain single (on the grounds that single men made better soldiers). Valentine was subsequently arrested and martyred, but not before curing the blindness of his jailer's daughter...through the miraculous power of a letter he sent her, signed "From your Valentine."

So little is known about the actual Valentine that one would be hard pressed to claim that any part of this story book is factual. From what I can tell, the bit about marrying Christian couples in defiance of Roman law was a later addition to the legend. In the version that appears in Legenda Aurea in the 13th Century, this piece is not present. There, the story focuses on Emperor Claudius II taking a personal interest in Valentine and trying to convince him to save his life by disavowing his Christian faith in favor of the official religion of Rome. Valentine not only refused but tried to convert the emperor to Christianity, and so was put to death.

At some point, however, Valentine's Day became linked to romantic love, and so elaborations were added to the Valentine legend to justify this link. A quick glance at internet sources suggests that the jailer's daughter is more usually presented as deaf rather than blind, and that the miraculous letter is a pretty recent development (invented by greeting card companies, perhaps?).

But however tenuous the link between romantic love and the saint --actually more than one saint--for whom Valentine's Day is named, the rise of a holiday dedicated to romantic love tells us something about ourselves.

Part of what it tells us is surely about dominant culture. Not every human society has connected sexual desire, long-term partnership, and the cultivation of romantic feelings in the ways that we do.

Even so, culture elaborates on possibilities and dispositions that are part of human nature. Sexual appetite needn't be connected with that complex cluster of feelings we call romantic love. But it often is. And while culture can strengthen this connected or attenuate it, the roots of the connection are tangled up in our biological natures. That intimate bonding that expresses itself in cries of eternal devotion, that surging desire to melt wholly into another person, that addictive longing in which the mere presence of the beloved can bring a heady rush of feeling, and absence is an unbearable ache--all of this is the raw material for romantic love as we know it.

And as far as I can tell, this raw material manifests itself to greater or lesser degrees in essentially every culture and every human heart...whether or not romantic love is lifted up, whether or not it is cultivated, nurtured, and celebrated in the ways that we see in our culture.

And it's no wonder that our culture cultivates, nurtures, and celebrates this cluster of feelings and desires and attendant practices. Because wherever it flowers, it's wonderful. Our love lives can and do enrich us profoundly, even as they make possible heartbreak, jealousy, volatile waves of emotion, and the anguish of unrequited longing. The heights of romantic love, when attained, make all the attendant risks seem worth it. The mere memory of such heights can keep couples doggedly together through extended periods of alienation.

The peaks of volatile passion that hit early in a relationship cannot, of course, be maintained forever. It would be exhausting, and it would distract us from the business of living. But those peaks can set the stage for something else, something at times tender, at times comfortably intimate, at times (of course) frustrating and disappointing, and at times echoing and even reclaiming those early summits of intensity. At their best, those early peaks can help to forge the conditions for a lifelong partnership in which our capacity to love is explored in all its many forms, and deepened.

A few months ago my father passed away. My parents had been married 49 years. What they had in those years was a complex mix of shared experiences, early passion, comfortable closeness, mutual support--and, of course, all of the frustrations and conflicts that inevitable accompany human relationships. My father died as my mother held him, stroking his head. When she reflects on the loss, she says she had the privilege of spending 49 years with one of the best human beings she's ever known. Romantic intimacy served as a foundation for the creation of something beautiful--a lifelong love story that enriched both of the people who shared in it, as well as spilling over onto countless others.

Our bodies are intimately involved in this, of course. But romantic love cannot be reduced to the mechanics of sex. Romantic love isn't about putting this body part into that one. No one who has been in love would engage in such reductionism. What romantic love does is the opposite of reduction: It contextualizes and hence lift up the physical acts of sex, making it more than it would otherwise be. The kind of partnership my parents had likewise contextualizes romantic love itself--making it an integral piece of something greater.

Romantic love at its best is a very great good. It is a gift that can sometimes become an integral dimension of one of the greatest blessings of a person's life. This doesn't mean that a life can't be rich and rewarding without it, that there aren't a great multitude of ways that a human being can discover meaning and learn to flourish, even in the absence of such love. But our human longing for romantic love is not a trivial thing. The opportunities for real joy in this life are finite, and romantic love provides one important place where human beings can drink from the well of joy, where they can come to know depths and heights of value and meaning they might not otherwise have known.

To attempt to systematically deny anyone the opportunity for such love and the resources for nurturing it...this is a very grave matter. The legend of Valentine that is found in my daughter's picture book is really about just such an effort, and the heroic response of a saint who refused to bend before the coercive effort to shut down love. Who would do such a thing today?

Rick Santorum would. Numerous people who live in my neighborhood would. Those who push for constitutional amendments to prevent marriage equality are doing it all over the country right now. Because, of course, this is precisely what the categorical condemnation of homosexuality--and the attempt to deny marriage equality for gays and lesbians--amounts to.

Our sexual orientation does not merely determine who we are attracted to sexually. It determined with whom we are capable of experiencing romantic love. Because sexual orientation does not lie within our control, a rule that would prohibit sexual relations between two people of the same sex is a rule which would systematically exclude some people from romantic love.

It is a rule that says, to some people, the following: "You are never to have this very great good in your life. While those around you fall in love, get married, struggle for the heights of passion and the tender comfort of long-term intimacy, you are required to go through life completely cut off from this monumental human good. We permanently exclude you from access to this source of richness and meaning because of factors beyond your control. And if you happen to fall in love, to build an intimate partnership around this love, to nurture and support another person in all the ways that define the best marriages, we will call what you have forged an abomination, and we will treat it as something that ought to be destroyed. If we find that you are drinking from this well of joy, we will think it a good thing if you and your partner are torn away from one another, and the well filled up with concrete."

The part of the Valentine legend which says that Emperor Claudius made marriage illegal may be nothing but myth. But today, there is an Emperor Claudius. His spirit is at work in all those who seek to systematically deprive our gay and lesbian citizens of access to marriage, who seek to promulgate and enforce norms that would ensure that sexual minorities never know the joys of what is celebrated on Valentine's Day.

There are those who seek to justify this, who think there are good reasons for it. But given the enormity of what is being denied some people, the justification would have to be as powerful as the source of joy and meaning that some people are told they can never have access to.

Waving a napkin around the way Rick Santorum does isn't enough to justify such systematic exclusion from a profound human good. Pretending that it's just about sex and perversion doesn't cut it. Other arguments--appeals to a bare smattering of biblical proof texts or to a controversial working-out of a religious moral theory that roots ethical norms in the perceived purposes of biological plumbing--have never struck me as very compelling even within the Christian traditions that espouse them. And these arguments certainly can't be given decisive weight in a secular society that embraces the separation of church and state.

But it isn't my aim here to decisively refute the supposed justifications for the categorical exclusion of some human beings from one of the great joys of human existence. My aim is to highlight just how serious, just how presumptively wrong, such an exclusion is. My aim is to invite an application of the Golden Rule, to ask all of us on this Valentine's Day to think about what romantic love means to us in our lives, and to think about what it would mean for us were our deepest loves to be labeled abomination.

My aim is to invite everyone to imagine growing up being told something like the following: "Better to have never loved at all, or to have loved and lost, than to have found true love and been enriched by it."

My aim is to invite us to think about what we celebrate today, and then to think about living in a world where this good is celebrated by others but denied us. Imagine falling in love with a good soul, a beautiful person, being filled with all those feelings we call romantic love, and then being told, "Don't you dare act on those feelings. That would be an affront to the very creator of the universe. But that's just you, of course. I'm going to go home and drink deeply from the meaning that my marriage gives me. Look on and envy, but don't think of trying to commit such an awful abomination as to love in anything like the way I do.  That is a privilege reserved for people like me, who had the good fortune to be straight."
 
Only if we can appreciate what that is like can we have any claim on fairly assessing the moral status of condemning someone's propensity to love. Justifications for condemning same-sex love that don't begin with deep empathetic reflection on how it would be to have this done to us--justifications which so decisively ignore the Golden Rule--should never be taken seriously.

13 comments:

  1. Thank you, Eric! What a beautiful, thoughtful post. I'll definitely be sharing your link on FB. :) Hugs from an old friend from the Lutedome!

    ReplyDelete
  2. What does the Bible say about homosexuality?
    by Matt Slick


    There are those who like to say that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. Various verses are cited (out of context), and the verses that people use to show that homosexuality is wrong are explained away. The world wants to change God's words and meanings into something more suitable to its sinful desires. Nevertheless, the truth stands: the Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin. Let's look at what it says.

    •Lev. 18:22, "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination."1
    •Lev. 20:13, "If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltness is upon them"
    •1 Cor. 6:9-10, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, 10nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God."
    •Rom. 1:26-28, "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. 28And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper."
    Homosexuality is clearly condemned by the Bible. It goes against the created order of God who created Adam, a man, and then made Eve, a woman. This is what God has ordained as the normal means by which we carry out his command to fill the earth (Gen. 1:28). What God has set up is what is right -- not what sinful man sets up.

    However, unlike other sins, homosexuality has a severe judgment administered by God Himself. This judgment is simple: they are given over to their passions. That means that their hearts are allowed to be hardened by their sins (Romans 1:24). As a result, they can no longer see the error of what they are doing, and then they go and promote it and condemn others who don't participate in their sin. So, without an awareness of their sinfulness, there will be no repentance and trusting in Jesus. Without Jesus, they will have no forgiveness. Without forgiveness, there is no salvation. Without salvation, there is only damnation in eternal hell.

    What should be the Christian's response to the Homosexual?
    Just because someone is a homosexual does not mean that we cannot love him (or her) or pray for him (her). Homosexuality is a sin, and like any other sin it needs to be dealt with in the only way possible. It needs to be laid at the cross and repented of.

    As a Christian, you should pray for the salvation of the homosexual the same as you would for any other person in sin. The homosexual is still made in the image of God -- even though he is in grave sin. Therefore, you should show him the same dignity as anyone else with whom you come in contact. However, this does not mean that you are to approve of his sin. Don't compromise your witness for a socially acceptable opinion that is void of godliness. Instead, stand firm in the truth that God has revealed, love him/her biblically, and pray for his salvation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What does the Bible say about homosexuality?
    by Matt Slick


    There are those who like to say that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. Various verses are cited (out of context), and the verses that people use to show that homosexuality is wrong are explained away. The world wants to change God's words and meanings into something more suitable to its sinful desires. Nevertheless, the truth stands: the Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin. Let's look at what it says.

    •Lev. 18:22, "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination."1
    •Lev. 20:13, "If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltness is upon them"
    •1 Cor. 6:9-10, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, 10nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God."
    •Rom. 1:26-28, "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. 28And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper."
    Homosexuality is clearly condemned by the Bible. It goes against the created order of God who created Adam, a man, and then made Eve, a woman. This is what God has ordained as the normal means by which we carry out his command to fill the earth (Gen. 1:28). What God has set up is what is right -- not what sinful man sets up.

    However, unlike other sins, homosexuality has a severe judgment administered by God Himself. This judgment is simple: they are given over to their passions. That means that their hearts are allowed to be hardened by their sins (Romans 1:24). As a result, they can no longer see the error of what they are doing, and then they go and promote it and condemn others who don't participate in their sin. So, without an awareness of their sinfulness, there will be no repentance and trusting in Jesus. Without Jesus, they will have no forgiveness. Without forgiveness, there is no salvation. Without salvation, there is only damnation in eternal hell.

    What should be the Christian's response to the Homosexual?
    Just because someone is a homosexual does not mean that we cannot love him (or her) or pray for him (her). Homosexuality is a sin, and like any other sin it needs to be dealt with in the only way possible. It needs to be laid at the cross and repented of.

    As a Christian, you should pray for the salvation of the homosexual the same as you would for any other person in sin. The homosexual is still made in the image of God -- even though he is in grave sin. Therefore, you should show him the same dignity as anyone else with whom you come in contact. However, this does not mean that you are to approve of his sin. Don't compromise your witness for a socially acceptable opinion that is void of godliness. Instead, stand firm in the truth that God has revealed, love him/her biblically, and pray for his salvation.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Comments such as the one left (twice) by Anonymous always leave me a little puzzled about how to proceed. Do I delete them so as to make this a safe place for those who are too often subjected to abuse in the name of God? Do I defuse their abusive potential by systematically shredding them? Do I ignore them utterly?

    I guess, in this case, I'll comment for a moment on the interesting fact that the same remarks were posted twice. This might at first seem odd. But, of course, I've heard exactly the same remarks repeated hundreds of times--remarks that invoke the so-called "clobber passages" (the few passages in the Bible that appear to mention homosexuality, invoked more often than not for the purpose of abusing other human beings, hence "clobber"). And, as with Anonymous's two identical exemplars, these remarks are typically made without displaying any sensitivity to or awareness of the controversial character of the assumptions which underlie them.

    And when these assumptions are challenged, it is not uncommon for the same pronouncements to be made again, without much alteration. And so, in a sense, the double posting here symbolically represents what, all too often, characterizes "dialogue" with those who resort to simple proof- texting, as if that settled difficult moral issues in which real human beings suffer because of the ideas supported by such proof texting.

    Of course, on this very blog I've critically assessed in considerable detail the theory of biblical inerrancy--one human theory among others about the Bible and its relation to divine revelation, a theory that I find (a) indefensible in the light of the actual content and history of the Bible, (b) theologically dangerous in terms of its propensity to inspire idolatry, and (c) morally dangerous in its propensity to motivate people to "plug up their ears with Bible verses" and fail to attend to the neighbors that Christian ethics calls us to love.

    Anyone familiar with my thinking on these matters would know exactly why Anonymous's comment is no more persuasive to me the second time than it was the first.

    Oh well.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The comment was posted twice because the screen asking to type in the letters timed out. It was accidental. No need to read further into it than that. And there is no need to disect the comment and defend it- the Bible is 100% clear on sexual morality of many kinds, and there is no grey areas regarding homosexuality. I posted several verses. If you are able to interperet those verses to support homosexuality, you have more problems than I thought. And the Bible is clear To hate the sin, but love the sinner. I am not saying that homosexuality is any worse than any other sexual sin like adultery, or incest- but to insist that Jesus, God, your creator is accepting of sexual sin is irresponsible. God's plan was and always has been for men and women to populate the earth, leave their parents and establish a marriage. God created Eve te be a helpmate and companion for Adam. God created Adam and Eve in his own image, and to infer that God intended for men to be homosexual is very serious ground you are walking on. Do, say, think as you will. The Bible speaks the truth, it's not written in a way that is hard to interpret or understand. Go back to Genesis. Live as you will, you have free will- although not without consequence in this life and the everafter.

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  6. Anonymous,

    I'm tempted to simply say "QED," but I'm not sure that would mean anything to you. My point is that your argument hinges on a set of convictions about the nature of the Bible and, by implication, how it should be approached in the process of arriving at our beliefs about such matters as the morality of homosexual relationships. My point is that your argument makes certain assumptions about these matters. My point is that I have criticized these assumptions at length elsewhere on this blog (for example, here and here and here and here and here and here), and that your comments do not in any meaningful way engage with any of these criticisms (or seem to be conscious of the fact that such criticisms exist, perhaps because you identify your own theory about the Bible with God's word and so treat your human theories as inerrant).

    My point is that, too often, when biblical literalists are challenged in these terms, all they do is revert to making the same assertions as before--which makes serious critical engagement difficult.

    And what did you do when I made these points? Um...yeah. I was pretty sure the double posting was an accident. But the accident has symbolic resonance.

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  7. TLDR,

    You have heard the truth from your God, who created you and commands you to seek eternal life... You choose to refuse his gift. Your problem, not mine. That is all.

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  8. Hi Eric: Here am I taking sides with a reprobate like yourself who is refusing the clear teaching of the Bible as so eloquently quoted from Matt's double post. What he recognizes, what you seem to be so intent on ignoring to your own doom (and mine) is that God wrote the Bible. Word for word. In English. So when the God (the word for word author of the English language Bible) was writing he was clearly referring to covanental, committed, monogamous same gender relationships, and not talking about some culturally specific thing that was going on in pagan temples back in 1st century Rome.

    The mistake and I are making--if you can even call what we God-haters say a mistake--is that we are trying to understand the Bible using our hearts as well as our heads. I'll speak for me here. 1st John says that God is love and wherever we find love, God is there too. I know a few openly gay people (and certainly more who are too afraid to be open so I don't know) and their relationships are every bit as loving and mutually supportive as any straight marrages I know. So by my hermeutic of love, I pretty much have to think that God approves.

    Shame on me. (I will stop with the saracasm now).

    ReplyDelete
  9. I used to care what the Bible said about homosexuality. I tried to use it to sustain my willpower to reject the pull of romantic love, since I was clearly broken and being pulled in a sinful direction. When I finally realized I'd never break free of that chain, I tried to use the Bible to find hope for some platonic-but-fulfilling David & Jonathon relationship. And then when I despaired, I sought out interpretations that allowed for monogamous homosexual relationships; and I dove through that whole debate hoping at least to find something like objective truth. I still get the feeling one side was oversimplifying while the other was cutting hairs too fine. But that's okay, because these days, I just don't -care- what the Bible says about it.

    After all that worry, here's what it boils down to: caring what the Bible said on this matter made me miserable; it encouraged me to be dishonest with myself and others; and it gave me the "unethical despair" that God's love, if it exists, is antithetical to my own existence. I've still got that corner of my brain which continually tells me I should just kill myself and make the world a simpler place for everyone; but ever since I've /stopped/ caring what the Bible says about what my romantic attractions say about my self-worth, it's been easier to confront that self-destructive voice with hope for the future. I still worry that maybe I'm already too damaged for the sort of relationship that would lead to a healthy marriage and a thriving family ... but what I've got now is the notion that it's worth -trying-.

    So if arguments like what Eric and others here have been making have doomed me, then it's been a curiously beneficial sort of doom so far.

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  10. Hi Jarod: I appreciate your willingness to respond here with your personal story. I only have a couple of things to say (besides "sorry for what a lot of Christians have done to you over your life").

    1. My take on the Bible? As a matter of faith I believe the Bible was inspired by God. This doesn't mean God took over the human hands that wrote it. It means that I believe the authors of the Bible were for the most part writing stuff because of deep and authentic encounters with God's spirit. I believe the Bible was inspired by God, but this inspiration was filtered through the limited world views and moral limitations of the human authors. Therefore...

    2. I don't assume the Bible is the inerrant word of God. My approach to Bible reading is something like this. I try to prayerfully consider the stuff I read. Sometimes the stuff rings true to me--I find myself believing that stuff is legit. Sometimes I find myself not believing (or even disbelieving). When that happens, I assume that either (a) that was one of the Bible's errors or (b) I am misinterpreting what that passage means.

    3. But because I believe that God *is* love--not just happens to love but love is God's essential nature. I read the Bible through that lens, through a hermeneutic of love.

    4. I don't see the Bible as being my source for knowing right from wrong, like a reference book or moral manual. I refer to my conscience to answer those questions. I *hope* God is guiding me through my conscience, inasmuch as my conscience is consistent with love then I believe God is doing just that. So wrt the Bible and homosexuality, I totally understand (and even agree with) your approach. From my experience it seems clear to me that there are many homosexual unions that are blessed by God, just like there are many heterosexual unions so blessed. But for *me* I have to care what the Bible says about it. I don't have to wonder if the bigots are right about God and gays, but I do have to wonder what if anything God is trying to tell me through those gay passages. That's back burner for me right now though.

    Anyway, i hope I haven't been too ignorant in this post.

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  11. Jarod,

    Thanks for sharing this personal testimony here. Your story is one I've heard in different variations over and over from gay Christian friends and acquaintances: Internalizing the biblical "clobber passages" worked like a kind of spiritual poison. Healing--and a deepened relationship with God--came when the conservative teaching about same-sex love was rejected as human prejudice.

    Christians who really attempt to give their loving attention to their gay and lesbian neighbors cannot help but hear this message again and again. It seems to be a clear case of a teaching bearing bad fruit, and as such cannot help but challenge the way of thinking about the Bible that gives rise to this teaching.

    In other words, really living out the clear and unambiguous message of Jesus--that we should love our neighbors as ourselves--in relation to sexual minorities cannot help but lead one to question the proof-texting approach to Scripture that is used to categorically condemn all same-sex romantic intimacy.

    To those who say "love the sinner but hate the sin," I say: Loving the sinner means really honestly seeking to empathetically put oneself in their shoes, understanding their perspective and experience. It means listening without prejudicial filters to their stories. It means an openness to being moved by the anguished cries of the neighbor in need. Those who claim to love their gay and lesbian neighbors, but who haven't listened widely to their personal stories, their spiritual journeys and the effect that conservative teachings have had on those journeys...well, their claim to love is just a claim.

    Sometimes (often?) it seems to me that their resistance to really engaging in such loving attention is motivated by an instinctive awareness that doing so would challenge the allegiance to biblical inerrancy to which they are attached. In other words, such allegiance operates as an impediment to love. There is no surer sign of false teachings--no clearer case of "bad fruit," in my judgment--than the truncation of love.

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  12. Santorum was glittered in a protest where I live. We do not like him in this part of the nation. A few days later he requested more security. Santorum is the freakiest of all the Republican candidates, although the entire crew of them sure make us both cringe and laugh. All of Europe and Canada wonders what is wrong with America. Well, that would take ages to explain.

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