new church life: march/april 2015
We need to note
especially what the
Lord has directly
taught in His Word,
rather than be guided
in any way by the
poor example of how
people in the stories
of Scripture too often
responded to His
teaching.
The love of woman and woman is as the love of
affection and affection, the affection being the
affection of the understanding of men; for woman
was created and is born to become the love of man’s
understanding. These loves, that is, the love of
man and man and of woman and woman, do not
enter deeply into the breast, but stand without and
merely touch each other; thus they do not inwardly
conjoin the two….But the love between man and
woman is the love between the understanding and
its affection, and this enters deeply and conjoins.
Such conjunction is the love itself. [Emphasis
added]
Such same-sex relationships just cannot
work. “Of themselves,” they cannot bear
any fruit – certainly not the kind the Lord
especially wants and commands. He is not able
to bestow His boundless and eternal blessings
on them. No “little children can come” to the
Lord as result of them, taken by themselves.
These relationships, which may seem alluring and pleasurable at first,
ultimately – if not in this world then in the next – can yield only frustration
and eventual bleak despair. Maybe that is just one of the reasons that so
much promiscuity tends to enter in and be associated with many of these
conjunctions. So the Lord, in seeking to save people from the sad results of
these relationships, says in effect: “Don’t do it! It does not work for Me, and it
does not work for you.”
In Conjugial Love 54:e the Lord is speaking of those who have lived a
celibate life in the natural world and are now in the next life, and especially
those who have lived a monastic life:
Those, both virgins and men, who in the world have been shut up in monasteries,
at the conclusion of their monastic life, which continues for some time after death,
are set free and discharged. They then enjoy the longed-for liberty of their desires,
as to whether they wish to live a conjugial life [of one man and one wife] or not.
If they desire a conjugial life, they obtain it; if not they are conveyed to those who
lived in celibacy at the side of heaven; but those who burned with forbidden/
impermissible lust (aestuaverunt in concessa libidine) are thrown/cast down
(dejiciunter). The reason why celibates are at the side of heaven is because the
sphere of perpetual celibacy infests the sphere of conjugial love, which is the sphere
of heaven. That the sphere of conjugial love is the sphere of heaven, is because
it descends from the heavenly marriage of the Lord and the Church. [Emphasis
added]
If one wishes to learn more specifically what is meant by “forbidden” or
“impermissible” lusts, read De Conjugio 55-57, then Last Judgment Posthumous
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