Beloved brothers and sisters, let us reflect for a moment on the extraordinary magic and significance of something not being us. How wonderful it is that the trees and the lakes and the mountains are not me, and – what is infinitely more important – that they are not God. I rejoice in the fact (the thankfully undeniable fact) that there is a gulf and a chasm that yawns between myself and the world of Nature – personify her as much as you will. And what is more worthy of celebration than the abyss that gapes rudely and triumphantly between Earth and its Creator? Pantheism makes a mistake the precise opposite of that which homosexuality makes: nature-worship ignores a fundamental division between created and creator, while homoeroticism sees an illusory division between lover and lover. I hope to make this somewhat cryptic statement a bit clearer in what follows.
This gap, this chasm, this gulf, this wonderful space of separation, is precisely what adds all the excitement and raw thrilling power to sexual attraction in its purest state. Before Romance rears its lovely head, it is the sheer datum of differentness that makes us gasp as we survey the opposite sex – it generates the electricity that makes us tense with wariness and shyness and a sacred delightful dread. She or he (depending on your sex) is vastly distinct from what you are, even below the cellular level, and most certainly on the spiritual level. She (in my case) is removed by some incalculable charm from my deepest understanding, both bodily and emotionally. She inhabits a different realm in many ways: a magic queendom I may guess at, and gain glimpses of, but may never experience in its glandular roots and fundamentals.
In a very different context I once wrote, in a poem, that it is fruitless for a young maiden to imagine herself sexless, “for the roots of the uterus are in the brain”. And of course the same thought, mutatis mutandis, applies to the male. The chemical bath in the brain, during gestation, that shapes our bodies and feelings and attitudes – it allows us to empathize and sympathize with the opposite sex, but it does not permit us to live in their basement-level lusts and fantasies. And there is where the wild beast lives its most intense and ferocious life, driven mad with desire for What Lives Across the Chasm.
God Himself, when He went about the initial stages of creation, understood the value of otherness. What could be more utterly different from Himself than the water-saturated mud and mire that was His first production? The whole universe is testimony to His love of what is not Him. Narcissism is at the farthest remove from agape, just as eros is. Or should be. If I look in the sometimes placid pool of romance, and simply see my own general features and silhouette, and fail to see something else, something exotic at its core, something that calls with strange music across a stranger valley, then I am missing half the enchantment.
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