The New Asceticism Quotes

“Imagine a stream flowing from a spring and dividing itself off into a number of accidental channels. As long as it proceeds so, it will be useless for any purpose of agriculture, the dissipation of its waters making each particular current small and feeble, and therefore slow. But if one were to mass these wandering and widely dispersed rivulets again into one single channel, he would have a full and collected stream for the supplies which life demands. Just so the human mind … as long as its current spreads itself in all directions over the pleasures of the senses, has no power that is worth the naming of making its way towards the Real Good; but once call it back and collect it upon itself … it will find no obstacle in mounting to higher things, in grasping realities.24”
― Sarah Coakley, The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God

“Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century Greek theologian…, had the (to us) strange insight that desire relates crucially to what might be called the “glue” of society. The erotic desire that initially draws partners together sexually has aIso to last long enough, and to be so refined in God, as to render back to society what originally gave those partners the possibility of mutual joy: that means (beyond the immediate project of child-rearing and family) service to the poor and the outcast, attention to the frail and the orphans, a consideration of the fruit of the earth and its limitations, a vision of the whole in which all play their part, both sacrificially and joyously. It may seem odd now to say that that is where eros should tend; for we have so much individualized and physicalized desire that we assume that sexual enactment somehow exhausts it (and so to run out completely in old age, as bodily strength withers).”
― Sarah Coakley, The New Asceticism