Dan J. Brennan

Something to Think About

"The relative lack of discussion about virginity, monasticism, widowhood, and the like in contemporary culture, especially when compared with the burgeoning literature, think tanks, and focus groups devoted to promoting successful marriages, only serves to put these states of life in greater relief.  They appear distant from each other; too distant almost to be considered even subset states of life within the state of life called Christian discipleship...It is time to consider the problem is more intently, especially at this time when marriage intoxicates cultural imagination on a number of levels.  Is it any surprise, indeed, that people who are single might be pining for a relationship, any relationship however problematic, in an oversexed and overmarried culture?"

Water Is Thicker Than Blood

 

Something to Think About

At the beginning of the twentieth century, psychologists and sexologists started to interpret unconscious sexual motives to affection and close intimacy in friendships--including same-sex friendships.  This utterly changed the emotional and relational culture of all friendship intimacy in the Western world.  Younger women were so fearful of being perceived too close to other women that a young woman wrote in 1920, "In my city some business women are hesitating to take apartments together for fear of the interpretation that may be put on it."

Another Self, Linda Rosenzweig

Something to Think About

Here is a "mainstream" quote taken from a Christian author in 1891. This is towards the end of the Victorian era.  More and more marriages during the latter half of the nineteenth century are becoming romantic when a mainstream author makes this comment in his book on friendship about the inferority of marriage and the superiority of friendship:

"One need not go outside of the Bible for proof that friendship's love has a place above all other loves; although the concurrent testimony of the ages , earlier and later than that record, is to the same effect....It can hardly be supposed that it is of carelessness, or without intention, that in both the Old Testament and the New a distinction is repeatedly marked between the mere marriage tie and the highest attainment of friendship, whereby the former is counted of the flesh--the life here in the flesh; while the later (sic) is counted of the soul--the very life itself."

Trumbull

Something to Think About

I love this observation by Simon Chan in Spiritual Theology:

"Our world glamorizes personal intimacy.  But intimacy is more talked about than experienced because it is a painful process.  It involves risks, possible misunderstandings, vulnerability, perhaps even losing something of oneself to the other person.  Relating to the other as person means giving him or her free space to be truly a person.  It means foregoing the temptation to impose our own will on the other.  There is joy in personal relationship, but the joy comes by way of death to self.  Giving, listening, and personal intimacy are painful processes, but they are also renewing processes that form our communal character."

The dance to enter into a friendship, marriage, relationship with the openness to lose something of oneself while simultaneously not imposing your will on the other is another description of what we would call love--as inefficient and as messy as that is.

Something to Think About

Think about this:

Something to Think About

"Who is there, for instance, in our times, who can devote himself with an easy mind to music, friendship, games, or happiness?

Surely not the 'ethical' man but only the Christian."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Something to Think About: Elizabeth Dreyer on Passion

When passion has its rightful place in human life, one is better able to serve others with compassion, authenticity, and spontaneity.  Since the wholeness and truth of God can only be achieved in a shared life, the intimate community of love that passion establishes between God and the soul must bear fruit in the wider community…There is no reason not to look for and find God in the passionate dimensions of our existence—wherever that passion expresses itself…Passion fires the heart to love in many ways…Moral passion does more than enhance the practice of virtues.  It is at the heart of an ethical life, making judgments, propelling us to duty and responsibility, endowing action with spontaneity, freedom, and commitment…Fear and cowardice close doors to intensity and commitment…But the price of refusing genuine passion is high.  It can cost us our lives, condemning us to superficiality, mediocrity, and what Walter Brueggemann calls ‘under-living.

A Passionate Spirituality

Something to Think About

"In my book, Standing Again at Sinai, I discussed some of the complicated history of Jewish perspectives on sexuality as they affect women.  The rabbis, I argued, were deeply ambivalent about sexual desire.  They called it yetzer hara, the evil inclination, and saw it as both necessary to the existence of the world and potentially disruptive and destructive.  As an essential component of human personality, sexuality needed to be carefully channeled and controlled.  But what were the mechanisms of that control and at whom was control aimed?  On the one hand, men were perceived as more able to control themselves and were, therefore, responsible for reigning in their urgent sexuality and avoiding occasions that might trigger inappropriate thoughts and uncontrollable passion.  On the other hand, simply by virtue of existing, women were the ubiquitous temptations, the sources and symbols of illicit desire.  To speak of control was necessarily to speak of women—of the need to cover women, to avoid women, and to contain women in proper families where their threat was minimized if it could not be entirely overcome. "

Judith Plaskow, Rethinking Jewish Sexual Ethics

God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life

Something to Think About

L. William Countryman muses over the fact that, “Christians have a long and complicated relationship with love, sexuality, and friendship.”  He adds, “Some Christian thinkers have used the multiplicity of Greek terms as an opportunity to define several different and even mutually exclusive types of love…Others (I count myself among them) think this multiplication of loves overinterprets the linguistic differences."

Love Human and Divine: Reflections on Love, Sexuality, and Friendship

Something to Think About

"And the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene.  But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth.  The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed their disapproval.  They said to him, Why do you love her more than all of us?  The Savior answered and said to them, Why do I not love you like her?"

The Gospel According to Philip