11.25.09
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I have heard people theorize that homosexuality is a decadent love of onesself. I have heard other theories that it is a compensation for a lack in the parent of the same sex. I’ve thought that it can be a result of a bad relationship or experience with the parent or others of the opposite sex. I also think there’s other warping factors that make people exchange the natural function of our bodies for that which is unnatural.
In going with the idea that we intensely like ourselves, and want more of the same, I think this also applies to other choices we make. We choose friends with whom we have a lot in common. Things are less segregated now, but community lines can also be drawn according to who is like us. Religious and even Jurisdictional lines are drawn the same way. There is a place where lines belong, and without advocating doing away with all distinctions, rules and boundaries, I think it is healthy to be open to other ways of being. Ironically, this seems to entail finding commonality with those who are different. All are made in God’s image, all sin, all have some amount of blindness to their sin, all find a way to justify their sin, and perhaps all have more justification for their sin than I do.
Anastasia Theodoridis said,
November 25, 2009 at 3:22 pm
This is good to remember.
My mom, who’s coming tomorrow for Thanksgiving, called this morning and said, “I’ve invited somebody else to come with us.”
What could I say but “Fine”? And it is. I suppose.
It’s her former (Presbyterian) pastor, who was defrocked when discovered with his male lover.
He has been a very good and very loyal friend to her (and to my Dad), always there when they needed him. And, his lover having died of AIDS (yes, he is also HIV positive), he’s very much alone in the world.
Anyway, I’m going to keep your wise words firmly in mind, hopefully always, but especially tomorrow. Thanks!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Andrea Elizabeth said,
November 25, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Anastasia,
Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving to you, yours, and your surprise guest.
Margaret said,
November 26, 2009 at 3:19 pm
I’m not sure one has to particularly love oneself to have a horror of the other. Homosexuality, in its way, is as complex as heterosexuality. It has to be – it involves the human mind and the human soul. Heterosexual people, those not governed by love of Christ, can fall in love with A yet sleep with B, marry C because he’s a good provider but still lust after D. Homosexuality is the same, complicated by the fact that very, very few people are 100% homosexual. Imagine the oddness of falling in love with one sex but being sexually attracted to the other? It happens.
Margaret said,
November 26, 2009 at 4:47 pm
I meant to say, good for your mom and you Anastasia, alone in this world is not good, no matter what one’s sin. I know I shouldn’t quote theology from ‘Anne of Avonlea’ but Anne’s feeling that people couldn’t understand God’s love except through the medium of human love has always been with me. This man’s love for your mom and dad shows much – your love and acceptance of him may yet show even more.
Andrea Elizabeth said,
November 26, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Margaret,
It seems to me that if one has a horror of the other sex that one has been traumatized somehow.
I agree that being in love and being attracted are sometimes different things, but to me they are things that should be subordinated to other considerations. One’s feelings can change through time and with maturity, so they aren’t enough of a basis for an intimate relationship which to me should only be with someone it is right to marry. Otherwise the feelings are inappropriate and a lustful passion.
I also think that things are more complicated than just marrying someone for the practical purpose of being a good provider. I bet they are getting more out of it than just dug gold and maybe even giving something to boot, but that’s how people are vilified in stories. I just watched Sense and Sensibility on this Thanksgiving where there is a caricatured gold digger or two and a youthful passion and a more steady, less exciting love.
I really like what you said in the article you shared on your blog about how people categorize love and I would say attraction as only erotic. People can keep their distance to keep from being pegged that way about the wrong person, or they go ahead and make the mistake of becoming sexually intimate when it could have been a different kind of relationship. Possibly even a deeper one.
Margaret said,
November 27, 2009 at 9:56 am
Perhaps horror was the wrong word. I meant the revulsion that people feel when thinking about something unnatural to them.
I started thinking about definitions of love – and, as you say, the possibility of deeper relationships without sexual intimacy – when Cardinal Newman was being disinterred for beatification purposes and the gay lobby were campaigning against it saying that Newman had wanted to be buried with his gay lover (or at least the man he was in love with). I think it’s a depressing fact that sexual ‘liberation’ has narrowed love while still making love unnecessary for sex and it very definitely seems to be a product of the sexual revolution of the 60s too when one looks back to normal female friendships of the 40s and 50s. What was normal then would undoubtedly be suspected of lesbianism today.
Andrea Elizabeth said,
November 27, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I still think that revulsion for the “right” way God made us to be with one another is a problem and not natural. There are many things that seem natural that are really that way by conditioning. People can develop unhealthy habits. Sin is an unhealthy habit. I haven’t interviewed gay people about their childhoods, and maybe if I did they wouldn’t even remember something that happened in their infancy or even understand some of the complex factors involved. Speaking of gay Catholics (I didn’t know Cardinal Newman was one, practicing or not), I have heard of victims of homosexual pedophilia that later became homosexual themselves, which seems “natural” to me.
In thinking about sexual attraction as distinct from being in love, it seems to me that the former is a baser type temporal thing (not that it is not redeemable), and that the latter is often clouded by a fallen notion as well. When I think of Cardinal Newman being in love with another man, or anyone who is in love with someone besides their spouse, that it can involve a certain felt neediness or be a compensation or comfort from some sort of long-standing feeling of deprivation. It doesn’t seem a mature way for a monastic to feel. Monasticism is more singularly devoted to God than that, as you also bring out in your article. I’ve written here a lot about romanticism in the past and I think it is a sort of self-endulgent escapism. The goal shouldn’t be to be cut off from their feelings, though that may be necessary initially, but that these feelings need to be elevated and redirected, as the Orthodox instruct regarding passions,
All you need is love « Words said,
November 27, 2009 at 12:35 pm
[...] a most excellent article on love here. We’ve been talking about some of her points in the comments to my last [...]
Margaret said,
November 27, 2009 at 5:02 pm
I don’t believe that Cardinal Newman was homosexual. He was morally fastidious and I think the very idea would have been appalling to him but he had a very deep and abiding friendship with Fr Ambrose St John and asked to be buried in the same grave. This, as far as the gay activists are concerned, is sufficient proof that Newman was one of them. As someone asked, what does that say about C S Lewis who asked to be buried with his brother? What it says, of course, to those without an axe to grind, is that both Newman and Lewis were capable of loving intensely without a physical component but as society moves further from Christ, further from the light and becomes darker and coarser it can’t define love without crudity. Love becomes essentially genital. I believe people are being encouraged to abandon the intellectual and spiritual aspects of love, even ordinary, natural heterosexual love, and to concentrate on the physical and emotional, on bump ‘n’ grind and kiss ‘n’ tell. It’s par for the course when people no longer believe in souls that they become gruesomely obsessed with bodies.
Andrea Elizabeth said,
November 27, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Thanks for that clarification. Good points.