One of my Facebook friends can't quite understand why I think this paragraph from the Mission Statement (such as it is) of the so-called Culture Project is drenched with sex (called "chastity" on the Project's impossible to load website) ...
"The experience was the same, though in different forms, textures, and places around the world. It was savoring a glass of red wine under the New York City skyline or trekking through the paths of the Pocono mountains; it was sitting in an old church or walking along the oceanside; it was reciting poetry or crafting a piece of music or falling in love; it was the personal experience of pressing against reality and finding deep questions and longings aroused. Among the raw questions and desires, one thing remained certain – they had fallen in love with something greater than themselves."
Perhaps if I changed some of the phrasing into pick-up lines it might help.
- Hey, beautiful, I'd like to press against your reality.
- I find that you have aroused a deep question within me.
- Let's drink some red wine and hike the Poconos (and I do mean poke - but I don't mean nose)
- Both my questions and my desires are raw, baby. Rawwwwwwrrrr.
Thomas L'anneaux (the worlds only Chesterton fan who is also a psychiatrist living in Hawaii) comments upon this strange projection of sexual desire without sexual fulfillment into all aspects of life ...
You know how the Yogis are always smiling on their bed of nails?It's curious how the very people who talk about transfiguring the instincts, have a very happy-go-lucky way of flattening them.I think you're on to something Kevin, and I'm sure that St. Paul didn't try to turn the "if you burn with passion" into some kind of mysticism. [My note: see 1 Cor. 7:9)"The modern world has a curious way of both encouraging the appetites, and crushing the instincts." - GKC
Thomas admits he's paraphrasing that last quotation, which he drew from memory. The actual quotation is ...
For this is a strange epoch; and while, in some ways, we have quite dangerously encouraged the appetites, we have quite ruthlessly crushed the instincts.
That's because appetite without instinct is a kind of lust without common sense; it's desire without the simple end for which desire was made.
Deny the simple thing that sexual desire is for (which is not just sexual union, but more fully the establishing and supporting of a family, making babies, living out romantic love in very unromantic ways) and that very sexual desire soaks every thing in sex, including your Mission Statement.
***
Meanwhile, I have written a Mission Statement for this blog. Tell me what you think ...
Through the various eclectic experiences of life, a life lived with passion, the passion that wells up deep within us as we gaze heavenward on a starry night and see (glass of sherry in hand) the Milky Way spread like a semen stain across the cosmos, we find (don't we?) the rawness of the longing, the grand climax of human existence, which is - as we are all too well aware on those nights we've Skyped and your eyes glisten with that desire to go beyond the mere platonic embrace of two minds tumbling together in nakedness as one - the deep answers to our rawest interior burning: we find God himself; or something very much like him (don't we?) ... what's your name again?
4 comments:
Yes. Well. I do find in God in marriage, making babies, and living out romantic love in very unromantic ways. The Milky Way seems rather dull by comparison.
Kevin, Kevin, Kevin...sigh, did you not know where priests get their training? The SEMINARY! It is there that they get INSEMINATED! The sexual orgasm is but a pale reflection of the divine orgasm that will Fill These Hearts if we but open up the flower of our erotic yearnings that have been twisted by the devil because they point to our true end: the eternal orgasmic feast. Chastity is orgasm. Orgasm is chastity. At least those who spread their semen across the abyss of their lives have their flowers open, unlike those who repress it. In fact, that's how those people come to be converted: because they are connected to the orgasm that was meant to point to their true ends but which got twisted.
This post nearly made me snort out my coffee with laughter. Once again, you manage to beautifully articulate the thoughts that have been rattling around in my brain for such a long time.
Please keep up the good work--some of my teens are starting to get sucked into some of this TOB nonsense at our local parish, and I'd like to have the older ones read your common sense entries about it.
I cam to your page off of a Rod Dreher link. I was interested because of his comment about your walking out of church. AAlso I am a St. Louisan.
I am also disappointed in your writing. Good ideas at times but you are like the guitar player you refer to. You enjoy your writing too much. You ar not as clever as you think you are and your references to sex are a turnoff. I will not be coming back to your blog.
Dick S.
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