Sunday, December 29, 2019
Lust Isn't Bodily
An Icon (in my home) of The Transfiguration
"Beauty evokes desire. It precedes and elicits desire, it supplicates and commands it, and it gives shape to the soul that receives it." - David Bentley Hart
Yesterday, in reference to a woman's compulsion to be with a man, a friend of mine said, "That's not love." My friend looked up and out towards heaven and then down at their arm, pinched their skin as though in reference to their body, and said, "That is lust." As I try to work through this myself in my discipleship, this statement by my friend really got me to thinking.
The difference between lust and love is not the difference between body and spirit but between faithfulness and transience, caring and carousing, dignifying and degrading, worthiness and temptation, treasure and buried, significance and void, partnering and alienating, creating and wasting away.
Notably both love and lust not only involve but require the gift of beauty. The evoking of desire is not foreign to beauty; that's the whole point. The difference is ordering and disorienting, directing and chaos, living and dying.
Also, I've heard it said more times than I can count that (romantic) relationships are held together only by God. But what does that even mean? When I've heard this in the past, it usually only amounted to saying it, as though merely affirming the correct doctrinal creed in our heads. More concretely, the difference between love and lust is also the difference between owning someone and being on the same path together, between idolatrously identifying by our union with the other and walking upright together before the face of God in worship.
This really applies to any relationship whatsoever, but, because we're talking about lust, we're talking about relationships belonging to the ordering of sexuality in marriage. In other relationships, we could replace "lust" with compulsion and discuss "true friendship" or "fellowship."
For us to enact those in our discipleship and our lives is to love and embody Jesus and his way rather than the way of death. This, of course, means that following Jesus and enacting love rather than lust does not mean reaching for disembodied spiritual realities. For me, in my life and history, I found that such a gnostic quest turned out to itself be lustful and to thus have extremely destructive consequences (including on my sexual life).
Of course, then, all of this is meaningless if Jesus is not Jesus Incarnate, and if Jesus is not beautiful, if seeing and knowing Jesus is not seeing and knowing beauty that evokes bodily desire to know him and his love. The to this point unstated reality here is that Jesus is life, he cares and nurtures, he orders and directs all things, he empowers and grants an inheritance of dignity in himself, and that he is faithful. Jesus Incarnate, rather than an imagined disembodied spirituality, is our peace and our strength.
*Note, I originally wrote this on Dec. 15, 2019 on Facebook after the above noted conversation with said friend.
Yesterday, in reference to a woman's compulsion to be with a man, a friend of mine said, "That's not love." My friend looked up and out towards heaven and then down at their arm, pinched their skin as though in reference to their body, and said, "That is lust." As I try to work through this myself in my discipleship, this statement by my friend really got me to thinking.
The difference between lust and love is not the difference between body and spirit but between faithfulness and transience, caring and carousing, dignifying and degrading, worthiness and temptation, treasure and buried, significance and void, partnering and alienating, creating and wasting away.
Notably both love and lust not only involve but require the gift of beauty. The evoking of desire is not foreign to beauty; that's the whole point. The difference is ordering and disorienting, directing and chaos, living and dying.
Also, I've heard it said more times than I can count that (romantic) relationships are held together only by God. But what does that even mean? When I've heard this in the past, it usually only amounted to saying it, as though merely affirming the correct doctrinal creed in our heads. More concretely, the difference between love and lust is also the difference between owning someone and being on the same path together, between idolatrously identifying by our union with the other and walking upright together before the face of God in worship.
This really applies to any relationship whatsoever, but, because we're talking about lust, we're talking about relationships belonging to the ordering of sexuality in marriage. In other relationships, we could replace "lust" with compulsion and discuss "true friendship" or "fellowship."
For us to enact those in our discipleship and our lives is to love and embody Jesus and his way rather than the way of death. This, of course, means that following Jesus and enacting love rather than lust does not mean reaching for disembodied spiritual realities. For me, in my life and history, I found that such a gnostic quest turned out to itself be lustful and to thus have extremely destructive consequences (including on my sexual life).
Of course, then, all of this is meaningless if Jesus is not Jesus Incarnate, and if Jesus is not beautiful, if seeing and knowing Jesus is not seeing and knowing beauty that evokes bodily desire to know him and his love. The to this point unstated reality here is that Jesus is life, he cares and nurtures, he orders and directs all things, he empowers and grants an inheritance of dignity in himself, and that he is faithful. Jesus Incarnate, rather than an imagined disembodied spirituality, is our peace and our strength.
*Note, I originally wrote this on Dec. 15, 2019 on Facebook after the above noted conversation with said friend.
"Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; though Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen." - Lectionary prayer for the Week, beginning Sunday, Dec. 29th.
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