The Tie That Binds

 

Detail, Bernini, The Ecstacy of St. Teresa

Religion.

The very term is toxic for many who've survived a history of homophobic spiritual abuse. 

The brutal sundering of flesh from spirit that poisons so much Christian teaching and piety has taken its toll on queer people for centuries. (And make no mistake--Christianity is far from alone in this among the world's major religious traditions.) For many, walking away from religion has been the healthiest, most life-giving choice available, the mark of hard-won ego strength and integrity. The search for an authentic spirituality on terms one can live with then becomes the task of years or decades.

There is enormous irony in this. The origin of the word "religion" is the "binding back together" of things that have been put asunder: a re-ligation of what has come apart. (OK, there's some debate about where the Latin word first came from. But recent scholars, as well as St Augustine, have my back.) It's an enormous irony that Christianity in particular has been responsibile for so much hostility toward the flesh. How did so many adherents of a religion that begins with the assertion, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," come to fear the body, the body's desires, and the body's inborn capacities for pleasure, so vehemently?

It hasn't always and everywhere been thus. It's not always  and everywhere thus today. A different thread of erotic spirituality runs quietly through the long history of Christian thought--stretching from the Song of Songs, through the nature-embracing vision of early Celtic Christianity, through medieval rites for the binding of same-sex couples, through the eroticized devotion of Simeon the New Theologian, Aelred of Rievalux, Catherine of Siena, St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and beyond. 

Two weeks ago, just a few days into Lent, I posted here the painting created by Salustiano García Cruz for Seville's official poster marking Holy Week of 2024. With it I included a link that covered the offense taken by local conservative Catholics. For them, this Jesus is too young, too beautiful, perhaps too androgynous, certainly too shamelessly at home in his flesh--in his resurrected flesh: with a hand bearing the healed yet visible mark of a nail, he points to the healed yet visible wound in his side. 

There is of course a further issue: that this Jesus is a pale-skinned European in a world where most people are not pale-skinned Europeans.  (At the same time that that needs to be acknowledged and taken seriously, it's hardly what occasioned the right-wing backlash.)

That said, García Cruz's Jesus offers me an affirmation that queer spirit belongs together with queer flesh, queer desire, and the possibility of queer sex. A binding back together, a religio, of what homophobia and hatred of the flesh have put asunder.  His painting, in my book, is as authentically religious as you can get.

If the core purpose of Lent is preparation for the observance of Easter, this Jesus is the image I choose this year for my meditations over the weeks to come.