The Gospel that Jesus preached was much more demanding than ‘love one another’, but ‘love under will’, a life of intentional love in all things. “Repent [‘Metanoia’], meaning turn around, for the Kingdom of God is at hand”.
From his parables, we know that this kingdom was like a culture of love that is radically self-giving, radically accepting and forgiving, the supreme treasure that we sell all for, like a new wine, a spirit that bursts open the old ‘wine skins’ of the former way of living.
“Thy Will be done on earth as in heaven.”
We are to incarnate divine love, the loving spirit of heaven made present here on earth, a love ‘beyond the bounds of space and time’, the gift of eternal life.
“Take up your cross and follow me.”
The Kingdom of God is not passive love but a courageous love, the courage to ‘walk the talk’ of a culture of transparently pure, joyful and all inclusive love - at the risk of losing one’s life, of being crucified by the sanctimonious and the powers of the State that are both profoundly threatened by the Spirit.
In traditional Christianity, we see this oppression at work in Church and State in the
patriarchal concept of holy matrimony. In this repressive culture of love that is its creation, half of humanity, woman, obeys the other half, men (and woe betide any one that is not clearly one or the other, the sin of butch woman or effeminate male). Its cardinal rule is that the half that have female genitals give over to the half with male genitals, their names, their property and their children (the source of the crisis of an inter-sexed child). Woman is to give sex on demand (a form of rape, the acquiescing to her own violation), and is intended to renounce sexual pleasure outside of ‘making babies’; and until recently to express disgust at masturbation as a perversion of sex, or risk being called a whore. Her hidden sexuality, the cycle of the menses was viewed as unclean or taboo, the emotional roller coaster accompanying it a matter of her humiliation, hysteria (sickness of the womb) or bitchiness, the powers of a witch. Despite her life being threatened in the carrying of a child, for the proudly conservative Christian, she has no rights over her womb to abortion or to
contraception, which in the bizarre view of the Catholic Church, is viewed as a sin against nature (despite nature naturally aborting fertilised eggs, zygotes, and the ensuing foetus - a distinction that Catholics cannot make). Idolised beauty is that of the Virgin. Once the virgin is crowned in marriage, her domain is now the home and if the bible is followed, she is silent in church and wears a hat or veil to signify that she exists to the glory of the male.
The original source of her sufferings is Eve’s archetypical role as temptress that resulted in the curse of the Garden of Eden. In this myth, she is an after thought of God, made from the rib of Adam to give Adam company, despite the obvious truth that her womb is the universal source of our origin (that should make sex and the womb holy ground rather than the source of Original Sin!). Patriarchal marriage binds woman by an oath, a vow that turns her into a virtual slave and the precondition of ‘a man’s world’. If physically beaten in marriage, until recently (and many still hold to it, as in rape) the sympathy is with the man, and if innocent, the Catholic Church teaches woman to bear the burden (just as Christ carried his cross), as a holy model of redemption.
To cap it all, the ideal female, the submissive virgin, once a mother of a male child, is expected to offer him up as a sacrifice on the altar of war, human carnage sanctified by sage men, the stories that define his-story - supposed civilised culture! Fundamentalist Christians, whether Catholic or Evangelical, call this love, its adherence chaste love and, under a cloak of biblicism and tradition, like wolves in sheep's clothing, attack queer marriage.
Queer marriage, however, is an expression of what apocalyptic and prophetic literature of
the Bible means by a true faithful marriage as opposed to an adulterous marriage, as in
adulterating wine with water, the kind of marriage that acts as a cover for the idolatrous lust for money, power and status. Queer love is love for its own sake, sacred loving sexuality where both partners irrespective of gender, open themselves to the depths of human emotion in their Godgiven sexual biology and chemistry. Their sexual joy unashamedly flows with the energy that ‘turns the world around’, the cycles of earth, moon, and sun, the love that connects us deeply and blissfully (sometimes painfully) to all of nature and creation.
Queer culture celebrates love that is love in the deepest ‘knowing’, that which comes from intimate sexual relationships. Masturbation is an act of loving oneself and treasuring another. In this pouring out of themselves in the fluids of love and in cupping of the other, the genitals are not viewed as shameful objects but their personal selves, vulnerable and beautiful. Queer sexuality is about mutual giving and receiving in the fullness of our multi-gendered humanity. Queer marriage is consecrated and focused in creating a family not defined by biology, but a family founded in an all inclusive love. It is a marriage in which are incarnated the dreams of bonded love, a journey of love that begins and ends in faith.
Here is queer chaste love, love under the will of God, pure, modest, decent, neither
lewd nor salacious, obedient to the Word of God, the incarnate Spirit!
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