Saturday, December 21, 2013

Virgin Birth : Is Sexuality impure?

Our concept of the virgin birth has been infiltrated by a piety which, cannot accord sexuality to the holy.The Christian tradition wants to emphasize what kind of heart and soul is needed to create the space wherein something divine can be born

VIRGIN BIRTH

Ron Rolheiser
Christian tradition has always emphasized that Jesus was born of a virgin. The Messiah could only come forth from a virgin's womb. The main reason for this emphasis of course is to highlight that Jesus did not have a human father and that his conception was from the Holy Spirit.

But there is often a secondary emphasis as well, less-founded in scripture.  Too common within that notion is the idea that Jesus was born from a virgin because somehow sexuality is impure, that it is too base and earthy to have a connection to such a sacred event. The holy must be kept separate from what is base. Jesus wasn't just born of a virgin because he did not have a human father; he was also born of a virgin because his birth demanded a purity that, by definition, rules out sex. Our concept of the virgin birth has been infiltrated by a piety which, for all kinds of reasons, cannot accord sexuality to the holy.

What's wrong with this? Beyond denigrating the God-given goodness of sexuality, it misses one of the major aspects of revelation within the virgin birth. There is a moral challenge within the virgin birth, something which invites imitation rather than admiration.

Christian tradition emphasizes a virgin birth (just as it emphasizes a virgin burial, a virgin tomb to parallel the virgin womb) not because it judges that sexuality is too impure and earthy to produce something holy. Rather, beyond wanting to emphasize that Jesus had no human father, the Christian tradition wants to emphasize what kind of heart and soul is needed to create the space wherein something divine can be born.  What is at issue is not celibacy rather than sex, but patience rather than impatience, reverence rather than irreverence, respect rather than disrespect, and accepting to live in tension rather than capitulating and compensating in the face of unrequited desire. A virgin's heart lets love unfold according to its own dictates rather than manipulating it. A virgin's heart lets gift be gift rather than somehow, however subtly, raping it.  A virgin's heart accepts the pain of inconsummation rather than sleeping with the bride before the wedding. That, in the end, is what constitutes virginal space, the space within which God can be born.

Thirty years ago, trying to express this, I wrote poem entitled, Virgin Birth. Today I blush at the youthful idealism in that poem; but, on my better days, I take counsel from the young man who wrote those lines:

Virgin Birth

The perennial paradox, peculiar to this Father and Son

Specialists in confounding human wisdom withdrawn from wonder.
A virgin gives birth, not to sterility, but to a Messiah.

What has virginity to do with giving birth? Nothing!

When wisdom wastes words wandering towards a truth that will not set us free.

Virginity and inconsummation: Incomplete heart and flesh,

wrestle with a God who has no flesh

who won't let flesh meet flesh

ache, awaiting completeness

to stave off sterility, truly the unforgivable sin against the spirit of life.

But sterility becomes pregnant with yearning for the spirit that sleeps with God at night and       

     impregnates with messianic spirit those patient enough to yearn and sweat lonely tears

rather than ruin gift

with impatience.

Only virgins' wombs bring forth messiahs because they alone live in advent

waiting a delaying bridegroom

late, hopelessly beyond the eleventh hour.

Still the virgin's womb waits

Refusing all counterfeit lovers and impatience

which demand flesh on flesh and

a divine Kingdom on human terms.

Messiahs are only born

     in virginity's space

     within virginity's patience

     which let God be God and
     love be gift.


Why a virgin's womb for a Messiah's birth? Why an obsession with purity within the Christian tradition? Because, as we all know only too well, our lives are full of most everything that is not virginal or pure: impatience, disrespect, irreverence, manipulation, cynicism, grandiosity; and, as we all know too, within this matrix no messiah can be gestated.

Discernment

Discernment: Consolation and Desolation

TV game shows require contestants to make quick decisions that have “significant” consequences—get it right and win a million dollars; get it wrong and go home empty-handed. In real life, few of our decisions carry that same kind of drama; however, many of them are indeed very significant. Luckily, we usually have more than a few seconds to make most of our significant decisions in life. One of the things we can do with the time we have before making a decision is to practice discernment. In the Ignatian tradition, discernment involves two key words: consolation and desolation. In her book, The Inner Compass, Margaret Silf provides an excellent description of the role these two words play in our process of discernment.
What do we mean when we talk of consolation and desolation? We are really only talking about our orientation, and the bottom line is this: which direction is our life taking us—toward God [consolation] or away from him [desolation]?
Here are some of the main symptoms of desolation and the most commonly experienced blessings of consolation.
Desolation
  • turns us in on ourselves
  • drives us down the spiral ever deeper into our own negative feelings
  • cuts us off from community
  • makes us want to give up on things that used to be important to us
  • takes over our whole consciousness and crowds out our distant vision
  • covers up all our landmarks
  • drains us of energy
Consolation
  • directs our focus outside and beyond ourselves
  • lifts our hearts so that we can see the joys and sorrows of other people
  • bonds us more closely to our human community
  • generates new inspiration and ideas
  • restores balance and refreshes our inner vision
  • shows us where God is active in our lives and where he is leading us
  • releases new energy in us

What to do…
In Desolation:
  1. Tell God how you feel and ask for help.
  2. Seek out companionship.
  3. Don't go back on decisions you made in consolation.
  4. Stand still and remember your inner map.
  5. Recall a time of consolation, and go back to it imagination.
  6. Look for someone who needs your help, and turn your attention toward them.
  7. Go back to 1.
In Consolation:
  1. Tell God how you feel and thank him.
  2. Store this moment in your memory to return to when things get tough.
  3. Add this experience to your life map.
  4. Use the energy you feel to further your deepest desires.
  5. Let the surplus energy fuel the things you don't like doing, and do them.
  6. Go back to 1.

excerpts from The Inner Compass by Margaret Silf


God's wife