Rev Dr Nikolai Blaskow - Reflection 1 September 2024
What does it mean to love and to be loved?
My starting point to answer this question comes from a rather unexpected angle. Paul Ham in his The Soul, A History of the Mind in the Prelude, begins his long 764 page reflection on the matter with this observation and the following questions:
… the strange, subjective nature of our minds continues to bewilder neuroscientists and frustrate institutional religions. What differentiates our minds? Why is my truth, your lies? Why is my good your evil? What is the source of those beliefs? And why do people seek to impose their beliefs on others, sometimes lovingly, often violently?
I use that observation and those questions to reframe the perspective, the point of view we might adopt when we reflect on what it means to love and to be loved… the strange subjective nature of our minds about love. Why is my love someone else’s hate? Why my hate someone else’s love?
What informs my/your/their/our interpretation of whether something is love and whether something is hate? Is it the experience of love, the experience of hate and how it has been in Ham’s words ‘interpreted (my underlining) through time – how it has been animated, reincarnated, immortalised, loved, chosen, harvested, conquered, saved, sublimed, inflamed, illuminated, unchained, exterminated, fragmented and hacked,’?
Ham goes on to admit, that for most of his life as a writer he has written about conflict and finds himself haunted by the cries of the traumatised – the ‘whisper of the unknown soldier, the cry of the child … the scream of massacred innocents.’ And contrapuntally, ‘seen people at their most compassionate, ordinary men and women enacting the most beautiful expression of self-sacrifice.’
These are the experiences of human nature in extremis, he concludes.
Rene Girard has a term for it:
“Scandal” [which] means, not one of those ordinary obstacles that we avoid easily after we run into it the first time, but a paradoxical obstacle that is almost impossible to avoid: the more this obstacle, or scandal repels us, the more it attracts us. Scandals are responsible for the false infinity of mimetic rivalry…
On this Father’s Day, I am reminded of the poem read to us at the end of a stinking hot afternoon in early February when our English teacher read out the full version of Matthew Arnold’s poem Sohrab and Rustum the Persian Epic poem of the tragic events which led to father and son unwittingly, finding themselves on opposite sides to have delivered the ‘coup de gras’ in battle – to discover the terrible truth when their hooded protective helmets are removed, to be father and son, and so belatedly effect the reconciliation which should have been consummated years ago.
What is this thing called ‘love’ whereby in some circles we are admonished to love the sinner but not the sin – as if the two were indistinguishably separated from one another.
What is this scandal which Girard speaks of, which is a paradoxical obstacle that is almost impossible to avoid… and that the more we try to avoid it, the more it attracts us and how do we escape the slip stream of this false infinity of what Girard calls “mimetic rivalry.”
On this first day of Spring, comes the beauty and irrepressible emotion of young love in the beautiful short poem dedicated to LOVE which even the ‘abuse’ of the watchkeeper cannot erase.
Let me read it once more as I read it last night to the contemplative Benedictus community:
Song of Songs 2.8-13
8 The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Look, there he stands
behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows,
looking through the lattice.
10 My beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
11 for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
12 The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle-dove
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.
Read so often at weddings. My wedding, Bill and Lesley’s wedding. Whispered on the phone to Susanna and from Susanna to me in our courting days. “Corney,” she remarked last night, “but it worked.”
This poem, the allegory Ruth and the history Esther with no mention of God – as if to say that even when we most palpably feel that God is NOT there God IS there.
Not only is God absent, but none of the characters are named except as TYPES, where the central figure is given the epithet “Shulammite,” bringing peace and pleasure to her lover, her mother’s favourite; this young girl experiencing that wonderful transition from childhood into womanhood, addresses her feelings about love and her lover to a group of young women, the daughters of Jerusalem who serve as a kind of chorus in the poem. Landscape of the body and the awakening rural landscape in Spring become metaphors which crisscross one another suffused with erotic associations, The lovers go out to the vineyard to make love but she herself is a vineyard, her breasts like clusters of grapes and their kisses an intoxicating wine. But this is NOT the wily seductress of Proverbs, whose sexuality is insidious and destructive. But belongs in many ways to that tradition of mystical literature pervasive in many religious traditions of God’s intimacy with human beings (cf. the communion feast – the marriage feast).
E.G. Oneness in the Eucharist the mystic Hadewijech the union of soul with God:[1]
My heart and my veins and all my limbs
trembled and quivered with eager desire,
………………………………….. such madness
and fear beset my mind that it seemed to
me I did not content my Beloved and that
my Beloved did not fulfil my desire…
I desired to have full fruition of my Beloved
and understand and taste him to the
full. I desired that his humanity should to
the fullest extent be one in fruition with my humanity.
Here we have an unabashed honesty, transparency, audacity (‘my beloved did not fulfil my desire’), earthiness and fleshiness, an ardour of unashamed desire. The eroticism that lies at the heart of Hadewijech’s vision is unmistakable (‘I desired to have full fruition of my Beloved/and understand and taste him to the/full’); its ‘madness’ unapologetic (a madness (‘such madness’), which we have seen in previous chapters sometimes parodied, sometimes alluded to, often embodied. All based on the ‘permission’ (‘permissiveness’?) of the Hebrew Song of Songs, which has been appropriated by Christianity and its mystics, to serve as an allegory for Christ’s relationship with the Church, his bride.
Thus, the contemplative experience, erotic love and spiritual union are inextricably inter-twined. From Joseph Chu-Cong’s ‘I am the beloved’ (guest is host), And my beloved is mine’ (host is guest), to ‘Come my beloved let us go to the field’ (resurgence of the divine image), ‘And see whether the grape blooms have opened’ (mutual inter-penetration), to ‘There I will give you my love’ (unity attained).
The whole mystical experience laced with explicit sexual imagery: ‘the beloved one and the beloved dwell in the other, and how they/penetrate each other in such a way that neither of the two/distinguishes themselves from the other’. ‘…mouth in mouth, heart in heart/body in body, and soul in soul/while one sweet divine nature/flows from them both/and they are both one thing through each other’.
Dr Kerry Hide names the experience ‘oneing’ (Love Has Seven Names). Mechtilde of Magdeburg (1282-1294), in Flowing Light, 1.43, 1.44, lifts the veil on other equally explicit disclosures: ‘The narrower the bed of love becomes, /the more intense are the embraces. / The sweeter the kisses of the mouth become, /the more lovingly they gaze at each other.’
Lest we go away thinking this way of thinking is blasphemous – I think the following explanation, from a woman’s point of view will suffice to set for us the CONTEXT in which such language must be understood:
In conclusion, the sexuality enshrined in such mysticism, is best explained by Constance M. Furey.[2] Having laid bare Jacques Lacan’s faintly ridiculous proclamation that Teresa of Avila’s (1515-1582) ‘visceral description’ amounts to the barely comprehensible groans of ‘an orgasmic woman’ (“she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it”) (Lacan: 1972-73: 76), into which the careless reader must fall. No wonder, she opines, those who study mysticism are wary of the pitfalls and so either ‘disavow the topic of sexuality altogether,’ or ‘argue that the longing expressed in mystical texts is erotic rather than sexual’ (2012: 329).
Furey rightly and strongly makes the point that the explicit sexual language is not “merely” metaphorical, not so many ‘hard shells we can crack open to find the sexual experience inside,’ but rather it says what it is—sexual, but not in the far too limited notion that a contemporary understanding brings to it (2012: 330).
The mystics’ understanding, so much more of a nuanced understanding of ‘the desiring body,’ transcends the notion of sexuality as ‘a fixed identity’ (2012: 331). This mystical sexuality (call it for what it is) is also not something that can be ‘plotted along a grid with the dichotomy of heterosexuality or homosexuality on one axis, and abstinence or intercourse on the other.’
Rather it is about ‘the way these encounters dislocate the embodied self, reimagining it in spaces and forms not regularly inhabited’ (2012: 330-31).
Thus, when Teresa of Avila comments on the Song of Songs and its ‘Let Him kiss me with a kiss of His Mouth,’ and ‘Thy breasts are better than wine for they give off fragrance of sweet odours,’ she goes way beyond the purely sexual to ‘the interweaving of bride and nursing child, bridegroom and nursing mother, one who nourishes and one who pleasures,’ exposing, comments Furey, ‘how difficult it is to differentiate between the desire for food and touch, sleep and sex, between arousal and satisfaction’ (2012: 334).
We conclude by listening to some of the presentation in Paolo Sorrentino’s YOUTH beautiful rendered, sung when he encounters his wife a seeming shadow of her former self and remembers their young love. Let it be our reflection on this father’s day and this first day of Spring.
NOTE: refer to TOUCH the Scandinavian film (interestingly only ½ dozen people were in that session with a message so important for the world falling on deaf ears).
[1] Hadewijech, (1220-1260), The Complete Works, Vision VII
[2] In her Chapter on ‘Sexuality’ in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Holywood, Patricia Z. Beckman (2012).