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The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God QUOTES

The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God QUOTES

1 " Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century Greek theologian…, had the (to us) strange insight that desire relates crucially to what might be called the “glue” of society. The erotic desire that initially draws partners together sexually has aIso to last long enough, and to be so refined in God, as to render back to society what originally gave those partners the possibility of mutual joy: that means (beyond the immediate project of child-rearing and family) service to the poor and the outcast, attention to the frail and the orphans, a consideration of the fruit of the earth and its limitations, a vision of the whole in which all play their part, both sacrificially and joyously. It may seem odd now to say that that is where eros should tend; for we have so much individualized and physicalized desire that we assume that sexual enactment somehow exhausts it (and so to run out completely in old age, as bodily strength withers). "

― Sarah Coakley , The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God