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It is a great pity that some of them used their imagination to degrade this beautiful image of the feminine, thereby degrading women in general. This has resulted in a Christianity without real women; there are only virgins, mothers, or whores. And because it is women who create men, the logical consequence is that there are no real men either; there are only boys, good fathers, and sexually obsessed males.
Love is the only God which cannot become an idol, for it can be had only in the giving of it. As soon as we think we possess it, it is lost. It is love that maintains in openness not only the human heart, but also the human body.
It is precisely because the other is unique that an individual can be faithful to him or her. Miriam, who had previously been so ready to move from one man to another as soon as she had exhausted her interest in him, finally discovers the angel of fidelity.c From this point on, the other is no longer an object, interchangeable with other objects, a fruit to be eaten, discarded, and replaced by another fruit. Now the other has a face, one that looks at us as no other face can, not because its gaze is superior or more intelligent, but because “there can never be another you.”
Sexuality cannot be reduced to a means for the propagation of life, for it is a condition of our enjoyment of or loathing of life.
He needs to address evolution here. Sexual desire can emerge in the psyche through natural selection. Clearly individuals without desire are unlikely to reproduce and this trait will disappear. Those with high sexual desire will produce more offspring and the trait will proliferate. Even if this is not the whole story, it must be considered as part of the story.
“That which is carnal is carnal even in the works of the spirit; and that which is spiritual is spiritual even in the works of the flesh,”
the spirit of the One who became “fully human, so that the human can become God,” as the desert Fathers said.
Why has Christianity so often taught that sexuality is a vile, degrading thing, the “mother of all sins”? Why has it so rarely seen sexuality as a source of life and creativity, as a doorway to the divine and a participation in the image and semblance of the living, creating God?
I don't think that this is a great mystery. Fear and the desire to control others.
In Greek there are at least a dozen different terms for love. Traditionally, philosophers have distinguished a hierarchy of types of love, ranging from those that originate in pathos, a passion-based love (this root even reaches to pathology, which can enslave us), all the way to agape, an unconditional love that asks nothing in return.
Agape is the fullfilment of the journey towards love.
Love is felt by the individual, it exists only within the individual even when it is evoked by something external. When shared it may (or may not) evoke a similar feeling in the other, which may enhance the experience of the giver. But all of this shows that the uncondtional love of agape that is given freely is the true fulfillment of love, the fulfillment of a human life.
To be capax Dei, to be “capable of God,” means to be able to meet the Other, to fully encounter Otherness. As psychologist Jacques Lacan said, “Reality is the Other.”
we human beings pass from a What to a Who, from object to subject, when we realize the man-woman complementarity in an encounter with the Other. We become ourselves through this encounter. We cannot be whole alone, but only through this relation, which makes us a Who, a subject, in the image and likeness of the subject who is the first principle.2
We can imagine many kinds of love relationships—between parent and child, between friends, and so on—but is it not in love between man and woman that this relationship reaches its greatest depth and complexity?
Eros, the young god, is desire with wings. Eros, the degree of love named after this god, infuses those mystics who speak of seeing God in woman. It is also the true meaning of platonic love,c which begins with appreciation of a beautiful body, and then discovers the idea that formed that body, and then pure beauty itself. Thus the path of eros has a contemplative aspect; but eros is also the son of penia, “lack” in Greek. It is thus always a love imbued with lack, a continual thirst for the water of life, a vase that forever seeks to be filled.
Agape accepts that this Other who is our enemy does not like us. Agape is another way of speaking of inner freedom; this freedom is love as simply as an emerald is green.
When I reflect upon Jesus, I see that he loved all beings, yet he still had preferences. To me, this is a sure sign that he was truly human. Human love, by its very nature, is based on preferences. But this does not mean that Jesus loved John more than he loved Judas. It simply means that he preferred John: preference brings together two beings who are on the same wavelength. Likewise, Jesus loved Martha as much as Mary Magdalene, but he shared a more intimate understanding with Mary.
If I try to claim that I love everyone, the hidden implication is that I love no one. This one-sided universality has no true engagement, and fidelity is impossible.
In love for one woman, I can discover all women.
Did the Christ really become human, or was he only pretending to be a man?
Did he only pretend to be divine? Was he deluded? Were he and his followers suffering from shared delusional disorder?
If we are searching for the truth, then all questions are valid. The answer cannot be found within Christianity without resorting to circular reasoning.
The great blasphemy and distortion of the Docetists is this: Christ did not come to save (i.e., heal, transfigure, resurrect) the flesh; he came to save us from the flesh. He incarnated so as to show us how to disincarnate as well as possible.
A great adage of the early desert Fathers is: “God became wholly human so that the human could become wholly God.” For the human to become wholly God means for us to participate fully, in all elements of our being, in the life of uncreated love. Today, this seems to be as difficult for people to hear and understand as it was in ancient times.
The Incarnation is the place of meeting and knowledge of both God and the Other, and it is through the body that we have this access.
How can we accept this astonishing paradox, which grants revelation of the invisible to the visible?
“The Logos is that which links all phenomena with one another as parts of the one Universe, and which links discourse with phenomena. The Logos is a link.”
Space, filled with virtual particles and infinitely transversed with fields throughout the universe from the smallest to the largest scale, fits the description of Logos.
Logos is neither uncreated (agenetos) nor created (genetos).
Like the virtual particles of physics that fill all of space.
God himself can be said to be pure nothingness in the sense that he cannot be an object that exists, for he is the Uncreated. Hence God does not “exist,” for he is beyond the realm of existent things and is “not of the world.”
God does not exist.
In the sense that God is uncreated, atheists are correct.
The Logos is life. Every living being is the “abode of God” and all that lives and breathes is lovable. It is not a vain cliché to say that all life is sacred, for this expresses a recognition of the Logos that animates all things.
To rediscover this is gnosis—a rediscovery of the Holy Spirit, which makes us see the Logos in all beings, the logoi who participate in the unique Logos.
The Logos is made adam, meaning that the uncreated has entered into earth, the eternal has entered into time. But theologians remind us that this implies no modification of the Logos in itself, no transformation, no becoming. It has shaped a body, an earth, a humanity in which it can reveal itself.
When we speak of ideas, we sometimes say that they take form, take root, or are embodied. Here God’s idea of human beingness is embodied, so that the invisible love now has a face in which God recognizes himself and recognizes all the faces of the earth.
Genesis says, YHWH created male and female in his own image. Hence, it is neither man nor woman but the relation between them that is in the image of God.
the Gospel of Philip has Yeshua, with love, kissing Miriam on the mouth. We must emphasize once more that the meaning of this kiss cannot be understood apart from the Judaic and gnostic context of that era.
In using our will to channel sexual energy through these rituals, we then lose ourselves in a maze of mystifying symbols, imaginary projections whose structures gradually stifle our needs for spontaneous fulfillment and for independence. When I project the whole Tantric symbolism of the divine Shiva onto you, I experience you as an object, a phallus imbued with mystical ecstasies, on condition that it cooperate in allowing itself to be initiated . . . and you feel yourself as a prisoner, ignored and manipulated. It then becomes obvious that I have taken a wrong turn in my understanding of
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Sexual spontaneity
What is revealed in a numinous encounter is not just a “me and you,” but that which Graf Dürckheim called the great Third, the self between us, which makes true encounter possible. Love does not just depend on me and you, it needs this Third, where we can recognize ourselves in our differences without feeling separate because of them. The self is that which unites us and distinguishes us in the same movement.
“To love someone is to say to them: ‘You will not die.’ ”
Why is sexuality not a path to the divine in Christianity, as it is in other traditions? Why is it considered as an obstacle or an impediment in the spiritual life? Why this opposition between sexuality and the sacred? Might it have something to do with the sexual life of Jesus himself, or rather with the way it has been interpreted over the centuries?
a sexuality that is fully lived is not only in harmony with the laws of life and of its Creator, but also can become a realm of knowledge and revelation.
“The Christ is at once whole (totus) in his divinity and whole (totus) in his humanity, of one substance in union with the Father concerning his divinity,
The story of Christ is not complete and keeps western culture frozen. Christ dies just after he becomes a fully realized adult male. He does not grow old and complete all the stages of a human life, thus the western psyche is deprived of a role model and remains stuck and obsessed with the stage of life at which Jesus dies. We need to look to other traditions, like Buddhism, for guidance and insight.
Thus Augustine transformed sex into a pollution that excludes us from the temple, instead of a benediction that allows us to enter it. (In the time of Jesus, an unmarried rabbi could not enter the Temple or preach in synagogues.) The sexual act was acceptable only when the inner intention was procreation; nothing else could justify it. In addition, the only utility of woman alongside her husband was to help him in the project of procreation.
Here we already detect the causal chain that leads from contempt for sexuality to contempt for woman.
If the masculine-feminine duality is the root of all war, it may be because it is the root of all fear. What is the original fear if not the fear of the Other? And because the Other is what is real, is it not the fear of reality? To be free of fear of the Other—in this case, the other sex—demands a return to original trust, which is more ancient than original fear. It means a return to Paradise, a return to the real in preference to the ideal and our ideas and representations of the Other.
War between the sexes.
Wonderful line of reasoning.
St. Jerome (347–420), the renowned translator of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate) went so far as to say: “You say that Mary did not remain a virgin? Well, I say that Joseph himself was a virgin, and that the virgin Christ was born from a marriage of virgins.9
Well, they may have both been virgins before consummation of their marriage so it was a marriage of virgins. And aren't we all virgins at birth. So he's not lying.
According to traditional rabbinical interpretation of this language, the shadow of God is matter, the body of light. For a woman, the shadow of God is a man; for a man, the shadow of God is a woman.
Sexuality is not to be repressed, but integrated and transcended, making it subservient to the love of the Holy Spirit. We are being invited not to a life of renunciation, but of transcendence, integration, and transformation.
Even a brilliant thinker like Origen (paradoxically, a master of allegorical interpretation) fell prey to such literalism and had himself castrated. Ironically, this actually made him ineligible for the priesthood, according to the earliest Judeo-Christian tradition, for “He whose testicles are crushed, or whose male member is cut off, shall not enter the assembly of YHWH.”18 In both Jewish and early Christian tradition, no individual could be a priest, rabbi, or spiritual teacher unless he was “whole.”
To become whole, a human being must integrate his or her complementary feminine or masculine polarity. Becoming whole (fully human), is not a realization that gives men any advantage over women. Whatever our sex, our task is to become anthropos, fully human individuals.
This highlights the disease of the trans. Instead of integrating the other they destroy the first in a misguided attempt to become the other
Among the many texts of early Christianity, we might also consider the Pseudo-Clementine Homelies, Theodotus and Asclepius, which identify the Kingdom with the presence of the anthropos in a human individual, whether male or female.22 These texts also speak of the “inner Man” or “essential Man” (ontos Anthropos). For Jacques Ménard, the most relevant example seems to be the passage in the Pistis Sophia in which it is said that Miriam of Magdala feels this inner human in herself, and by identifying with it, understands everything.
Much of this process can be described as undoing the damage done to the individual by a damaged culture lacking wisdom. Our unhealthy attachments were as much foisted upon us as they were a result of unconscious or premature cognitive commitments to falsities. Once rid of falsities we become capable of seeing clearly.
We must reiterate that what has not been embraced and lived cannot be transcended. In order to go beyond our sex, we must embrace it. We must live our own sexuality fully before we can speak of true androgyny.
Jesus must have been a normal, male human being who was at least capable of having a relationship with Miriam of Magdala as a prerequisite for becoming the archetype of synthesis, the Anthropos.
The claim that humanity is redeemed by Christ's full human experience means that Christianity must be considered incomplete. If Christ's sexuality is required, then so must be his experience of growing to an old age, living the full cycle of life. But he was killed midstream and it is a grave error to think that man's development ends at this stage .
Christianity is vain to claim that it can contain the full son of man.
“That which is not lived is not redeemed.”
This implies that humans do not further grow and develop after 33. Jesus was killed just as he enters his productive years. He does not live the experience of later years. Thus by this logic humanity is not fully redeemed because we most certainly do grow and change right through to our final days. The golden years of quiet wisdom are not known to Jesus, along with many other experiences like declining health.
Christianity must be considered incomplete. This should not disturb the seeker, but inspire him. Only one who is closed will be disturbed, and hopefully broken free once again.
Before we can hope to be spiritual, to live in the pneuma, we must first embrace the level of the soul (psyche), and the body (soma). These psychophysical dimensions are traditionally seen as feminine, and they are the very condition for access to the nous, or masculine dimension of our being.
Men's movement and Trans illness
The goal of the anthropos is the wedding of the masculine and feminine, which may begin within us at the neurophysiological level
