Historical Setting: The Great Skellig, 924 C.E.
Content warning rated for adults.
When all have gone into the morning darkness, I stay an extra moment in the church to look at the bible. I know what it says. I don’t need to light this candle to find this place in the scriptures — a book of poetry in the Hebrew bible — the Song of Songs. I just want to read again, these ancient verses of the earthly metaphor of love.
“a garden fountain, a well of living water,
a flowing stream from Lebanon… “[Song of Songs 4:15]
The place this poetry keeps in the scriptures has been argued for eons, and the commonly accepted “excuse” for keeping this relentlessly beautiful, but also, erotic love poem is that it is said to be a metaphor for the human-God relationship. Indeed, it is that. But even without the poetry, the human to human, sexual act is an earthly metaphor for holy love.
As sure as Jesus turned water to wine, or the multitudes were fed five fish and two loaves to be signs on earth to show abundance as it is in heaven, our human, carnal love on earth is a nature sign to show a heavenly truth.
Creation, and all the ways we experience it are God’s own poetry — the metaphor on earth as the experience, the awe of heaven — “heaven,” here, meaning the awareness of the embrace of God’s all-encompassing love, not simply a post-death alternative to Hell.
If the sexual act is a sign of all love, original sin could not be the simple equation Augustine draws and Romans 5 [Footnote], repeats — that sin came into the world through Adam (one man) by the disobedience to God’s rule not to eat of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil — i.e. human judgment of goodness and badness. And with that human so-called knowledge of good and evil so much of the nature of Creation gets the evil stamp, so that by the sex act all of humankind is thus, born in sin.
But basking as I do in God’s love, I can perceive that the sexual act is, rather, a sacred sign and symbol of love, given through the Creation by the Creator, on earth as it is in heaven. So, to deny the beauty of this becomes a rejection or a grave misunderstanding of the source of all Creation. The sin in sex is when it is used, not as love, but for theft of power. That is rape.
And I still grieve for Ana, as I long for love of all varieties.
[Footnote], Biblically, Roman 5:12-21, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin (retrieved 3-6-26)
(Continues tomorrow)
