Catholicism and Natural Law: Christ, Love and Mary Magdalene

The alternate ending brims with hugs, peace signs, and Volkswagen buses. Jesus was, in the purest sense of the early common era way, a Nazarean hippie. His sexual revolution, however, was less revolutionary than revolting. I don’t say this, you understand. You do.

As the conversation came full circle, I was sitting in church today appreciating the “Reconciling in Christ” agenda professed in a firmly punctuated homily. Looking up at the stain glass window of Jesus, I played with the notion of complete trust in God’s will. Feeling as I felt He would want me to feel (freely), I momentarily gave up my preconceived notions of what I should hope for in a relationship. My friends are always saying that I deserve “better,” so I let the feeling take hold. Oh my good Lord, what I felt was both sacrilegious and beautiful.

Can you dig it? Relishing the moment of release (and trust in feeling), I remembered a paper a Jesuit friend of mine wrote once as part of a course in Christology/theology. It was bluntly titled, “Faggot God: The Imaging Imager and His Creation.” Now who wouldn’t want to take a second look at that? As the title more or less indicates, he was working on the notion of homosexuality as the Creator’s design and not a human deviance. It made me wonder, and feelâÂ?¦aroused.

Sit down for this. I imagined myself being in the place of the historical Mary Magdalene. No, I don’t mean the prostitute Mary Magdalene (although I have envisioned a life of this sort before). I mean Mary Magdalene the disciple and hypothesized lover of Christ. Yes indeed, I pictured myself as Jesus’ lover. Are you with me still?

Ok, I will grant you that it is different. But what I felt was freeing. Well, it was conflictual; I suppose it was both. First, I felt tremendous fulfillment in embracing the feeling that I could (and perhaps should?) be with someone as eminently good as Jesus Christ. Ordinarily, I would dismiss the notion out of hand, except that we (that is, human beings) have already toyed with the idea that a human made love to God’s son. Is my making love to Him that radical? Indeed, I felt such amazing satisfaction and love at this proposition it would be hard to articulate. That, to me, is a sign that love has taken hold. Does this mean I harbor a wish to be alive in 20 CE so I could meet Christ at a local coffee shop, fall in love, take Him to dinner, eat some loaves and fishes, and gradually develop an intimate relationship? No.

While this fantasy/fiction is shocking and provocative at the same time, it also stirred me to asceticism. Who am I, after all, to be Christ’s lover? Even if He had embraced sexual freedom in the greatest sense (the physical follows from emotion – no matter the gender), would I be worthy of being Christ’s intimate, His confidante? Only He could truly say, but I was overwhelming compelled to flagellate myself down to the proper human rung of service. There are grace-filled deeds I may accomplish in and through Christ, but I greatly doubt any possible romantic mutuality between us. If He were still physically around, that is.

So what do I do with this? First of all, I don’t really think I can expect to find Christ (that is, the second coming), fall in love with Him, and have Him reciprocate the feeling such that we might carry through with the triumphant end of the world. Ludicrous. But maybe that’s the mind taking over from feeling. The mind has always been rooted too much in this world, and not in His. Trust him, the gospel said today. Trust healed the hemorrhaging woman. What can’t it do for me?

Second of all, if my feelings were as God directed, what should I be hoping for? What is this “better” I deserve? Because of what I have been taught, I look for the great in the meek, the wise in the apparently unlearned, and every good thing which, at first glance, is its opposite. Am I looking in the right places? Should I just stop looking and trust? Have I just gone crazy?

Or is this whole exposition of my scary self an attempt at being closer to God than I have yet been able to? And what of my belief, my unfaltering conviction, that I might find intimacy that sacred and amazing in another person created by Him? As I have often written and have always believed, He is in all of us. It is only a matter of trusting, and letting such divinity be revealed in gift, word, and deed. And, of course, in other people.

Have I lost you yet? If you think this to be totally inane, I don’t really blame you. But if you would just humor me, put on my warped shoes. How would you feel in my situation? Would you entertain these ideas? Would the Creator be beyond such flagrant human intimacy?

Or would we both pray, praise, and leave the Sunday coffee hour with a good many prayers left at the altar? And as we proceed to live, would those prayers stay at the foot of that altar?

God only knows.