Throwing Out the Baby With the Bath Water

Hi Nort,


I read you last email with a great deal of frustration! Are all our pleasures, addictions and all our desires, temptations? You let the music and poetry seduce you into an idyllic repose but then catch youself up and return to the shadow of your cave! Has God made some cruel joke giving us bodies to feel and a beautiful world to delight in, but then saying, "no touching?" The Christian message is love and yet all sorts of constraints are constructed on how that love is to be felt such that we can't feel it at all! What is love if it does not affect our God-given, in-God's-own-image, to-be-resurrected bodies. Can we not feel love sensually the way Teresa of Avila did or Gerard Manley Hopkins desired? Are our bodies not vehicles for God's love, or am I spouting blasphemy? Heloise became a saintly abbess and yet never forget or repented her affair with Abelard. Where does one draw the line between love and pleasure, love and desire? Does God not love us through others? What is the Christian promise?


Tad