Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God by Carter Heyward (Harper & Row, 1989, 195 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
The Journal of the British Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement recently carried a review of one of my monographs. The reviewer, a seminarian, called it “informative and persuasive”, “a level-headed defence of lesbian and gay rights”, noting that its “strength lies however in Blair’s own expertise, people-based psychotherapy”. Yet he then failed to see how my clinical experience led to my observations about the irrationality of non-monogamous relationship and “recreational” genitalizing. He faulted my not giving “support for other forms of relationships. This misses out on the discoveries” he claimed “lesbians and gay men have made concerning depths of generosity and honestly [sic] found in non-monogamous lifestyles which may have something to contribute to society as a whole”. Last year, a newly-ordained, openly gay Episcopal priest became an overnight celebrity in the gay press when he ridiculed monogamy as “unnatural”. Where do students and young clergy get such ideas? They’ve been taught by TV, movies, pop-psychology, etc. But also, unfortunately, they get baptized versions of these ideas in seminary classrooms, including those of this lesbian teacher at the Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts. Such was the case of the aforementioned priest whom Heyward features as saying that Gay Pride is “the way of salvation … the overcoming of sin”. Though she allows monogamy as a “sexual option” for some, Heyward calls it “a blatantly sexist and possessive sexual institution” and concludes in italics: “Fidelity to our primary relational commitments does not require monogamy.”
Heyward writes that, “at its core, this book is about nurturing and cultivating the goodness in our lives”. By the time one has passed through almost 200 pages of vaporins to reach what are called “Foundations for Sexual Ethics”, no more realistic than that on monogamy, for example, it’s past time to look elsewhere for guidance. She had rightly cautioned that “we must be careful to whom we turn for … spiritual mentoring”. Anyone would do well to heed her warning when turning to her for such. “Writing to serve the interests of lesbians and gaymen” is a good intention but it doesn’t guard against the unintended bad effects of psychosocial naivete.
Heyward laments the obvious (“the pernicious dualism between sex and God”) as well as the overstated (“classical christianity’s [sic] sacred contempt for women”). She rightly calls us to “sexual justice” but rationalizes “sex play” in irrationally advocated “erotic friendships” to be a form of “justicemaking”. She rightly notes that, “force serves always to diminish”, but then urges “feminist and gay/lesbian demand (not request).” While dogmatizing her way through the book, she objects that, “Only a patriarchal deity … would be so arrogant as to assume that his Word is the Word”. Little wonder then that she heads a chapter with the quote: “God himself and not just human language must be liberated”. She is historically careless throughout her polemic, as when she writes that Aquinas meant that virtue belongs only to “an individual man’s (male’s) ‘habit’.” What the 13th century Dominican said was that it belongs “to man”, i.e., to humanity.
Two back-cover blurbs tantalizingly endorse this as a “dangerous” book. But like the book itself, the puffs are pretentious. The book is a parochialism written in exclusivist jargon to what must surely be no more than a few pews of similarly angry insiders. Indeed, there are so many footnotes to her own works that she may be talking too much to herself. In the tradition of Humpty Dumpty, who said, “when I use a word, it means what I want it to mean,” Heyward appends a 9-page Glossary of her eccentric use of what are, mostly, common words. She adds other oddities throughout her text. But for all this seeming originality, her work is affectation and cant of that vague and circular variety we’ve come to expect from the latest remodeled rhetoric. Hers are, as C. S. Lewis once said, “the ideas of our own age trick[ed] out in the traditional language of Christianity”. But given the hunger and thirst of lesbians and gay men for compassionate words of encouragement and given the scarcity of such, an apparently pro-lesgay book from a “christian” (Heyward refuses to capitalize the term) may be welcomed without a thought as to its actual effect. The book is hardly “dangerous” in the sense meant by Heyward’s fans and publisher. But it is dangerous. She offers utopian, fallacious froth to those in desperate need of real psychotheological nourishment. Twenty years as a psychotherapist have taught me that sexuality and relationships are far more complex, more nuanced, than Heyward rationalizes and than her students may realize. The rigors of relationship between the wounded and fragile egos we all are call for hardier fare than “faith in our erotic power as sacred” or “the power of the erotic [as] the incarnate ground of friendship” or “a strong desire for sexual pleasure, and lots of it, with a lover – or lovers” or a call “to touch and rub and lick and suck each other silly”. At what cost – emotional, physical, spiritual, social, economic – will we follow her call?
Notwithstanding the weathering of trans-cultural tests of time, the pretensions of even the sturdier structures of classical theology can be rather ludicrous in the real world. But clearly more so are the pretensions of inchoate theologies of fad. And even more when they have already been running aground on the reefs of everyday life.