There is a new idolatry in our pop-psychology, post-Freudian epoch, an idolatry which is simultaneously a cross cultural form of extremely rude elitism.
This idolatry is the worship of Relationships with a capital R.
It has, paradoxically, been adopted by Christian religionists, with the smug twist that God is somehow more intensely present, more therapeutically manifest, more at home in the world, when captured in the cage of a Relationship between two persons (the prison of intimacy) than He is manifest elsewhere in the world, uncomfortable and awkward outside of the Sacred Dyad.
An Epicurean bonus to the notion of God as the Genie in the Lamp of Relationship is the proposition that God is somehow most sweetly and exquisitely Himself in the presence of the sexual intimacy of Relationship.
Of course, this smugness excludes about a third of the world, who, for some reason or other, are not skillful at intimacy, sexual or otherwise, and therefore must seek their emotional food from many persons in small portions rather than from one person in a perpetual banquet.
Persons of the past who fall into this third of the world include Emily Dickinson, A. E. Housman, Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder (a Yale man).
Must we assume that the new idolators would somehow find those persons’ lives to have been sadly remote from the Divine since they had no magic lamp of Relationship to rub in order to summon up the idolators’ God?
The truth of the matter is that God will not be so caged or summoned. And the new post-Freudians’ blasphemy will not be so easily swallowed in our egalitarian land which recoils as the very odor of elitism.
As a Biblical test to excuse this rudeness, the idolators appeal to Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man . . . shall cleave unto his wife and they shall become one flesh.”
In other words, the sum of one and one is One!
This idolatry is the worship of Relationships with a capital R.
It has, paradoxically, been adopted by Christian religionists, with the smug twist that God is somehow more intensely present, more therapeutically manifest, more at home in the world, when captured in the cage of a Relationship between two persons (the prison of intimacy) than He is manifest elsewhere in the world, uncomfortable and awkward outside of the Sacred Dyad.
An Epicurean bonus to the notion of God as the Genie in the Lamp of Relationship is the proposition that God is somehow most sweetly and exquisitely Himself in the presence of the sexual intimacy of Relationship.
Of course, this smugness excludes about a third of the world, who, for some reason or other, are not skillful at intimacy, sexual or otherwise, and therefore must seek their emotional food from many persons in small portions rather than from one person in a perpetual banquet.
Persons of the past who fall into this third of the world include Emily Dickinson, A. E. Housman, Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder (a Yale man).
Must we assume that the new idolators would somehow find those persons’ lives to have been sadly remote from the Divine since they had no magic lamp of Relationship to rub in order to summon up the idolators’ God?
The truth of the matter is that God will not be so caged or summoned. And the new post-Freudians’ blasphemy will not be so easily swallowed in our egalitarian land which recoils as the very odor of elitism.
As a Biblical test to excuse this rudeness, the idolators appeal to Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man . . . shall cleave unto his wife and they shall become one flesh.”
In other words, the sum of one and one is One!
1+1 =1!
Very interesting indeed: Another attempt of the religionists to make man or woman feel that somehow he or she is less than whole, less than independent, less than self.
How rude. How enormously rude.
This idolatry permeates even the Christian caucus chambers of a great university, in this case Yale, where the religionists, in seeking to write a religious reply to the Yale medical community’s booklet Sex at Yale, propose that sex is somehow most pure, most meaningful, most Godly, when it occurs in the context of Relationship.
Fleeing in terror and repugnance from the realities of our animal nature as Christianity has always done, the religionists at Yale hope to disguise sex by loading it down with the junk jewelry and perfume of the “Language of Intimacy”, intimacy being the couture the post-Freudians assert is most alluring to Deity.
Regrettably this caucus is not confined to Christianity.
Jewish religionists –the traditional foes of elitism since they have been the victims of the elitist of elitisms for 2000 years (the proposition that Christ sits at the right hand of God and no one can approach the Father except through the Son ---rendering all of the prophets of the First Testament null and void), yes Jewish religionists, are regrettably also members of this committee toying with the idolatrous language of Relationship.
What rude rubbish.
We hope that before this little religious treatise on sex gets to the printer this idolatrous self-indulgence will be purged from its prose.
Submitted to the Chaplain and his committee after reading an advance copy of their proposed pamphlet responding to the Yale medical community’s pamphlet, Sex at Yale, 1984/85.
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