Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
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With My Body I Thee Worship
By Bishop Paul Marshall
Diocesan Life, June 1997
"Are you in love?" "No, we're just having sex." Sound familiar?
The most repulsive expression I have ever heard is having
sex. Besides its essential ugliness, it brings to mind everything
that our culture seems to miss about physical intimacy: the phrase
focuses on the act rather than the persons, on having rather
than giving and receiving, and sounds mechanical, value-free,
and a bit boring. Where is passion, where is commitment, where
is ecstasy in those two drab words?
Why bring this up? There is in the tradition of the Reformation
a much healthier and certainly more exciting view of sex. Luther
took the first step by insisting that marriage is just as noble
a Christian calling as the life of a nun or monk. The liturgies
of the time began to move the actual marriage ceremony from the
church porch into the church itself, a witness to its improved
status.
It was Archbishop Thomas Cranmer who took the step I want to dwell
on here. Cranmer's marriage rite, which survives in large part
in the English 1662 prayer book, is in many ways quite conventional.
But besides giving us the "Dearly Beloved" heard in so many movies
and soaps, Cranmer inserted in the marriage vows, "With my body
I thee worship and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.
With my body I thee worship. Nothing could be more different from having
sex. (It is important to recall at this point that in English, worship does
not always mean the honor paid to God, and Cranmer had no interest
in creating idolatry.) But consider the possibilities of physical
intimacy as worship of a spouse. The expression making love takes
on new possibilities when we see ourselves giving pleasure as
an act of worship -- affirming the worth -- of the other,
doing what we have learned to do to move as one flesh to
a repeated experience of ecstasy. Love making can then be understood
as just that. This also means that casual, drunken, begrudging,
unskilled, or predatory sexual acts are a kind of sacrilege,
as are acts that use, oppress, or humiliate another. That there
have always been people who have eroticized just such moments
is no more testimony to their appropriateness than the existence
of tumors argues that cancer is a good thing because it occurs
in nature.
It is not just the how of sex that needs to be taught:
the what and the why that give humans the possibility
for more sublime moments than doing what comes naturally can provide
needs to be taught and retaught.
How we came to lose these powerful words, "with my body I thee
worship" is revealing, if not surprising. The century in which
the United States and the Episcopal Church first saw light was
the Age of Reason. Along with its many advances, it brought a kind
of sterility to the life of the body, emphasizing the life of the
mind.
As people increasingly thought of their minds and bodies as separate
departments, what the body did became less honorable. It was possible
to separate the acts of mind and body completely. French philosopher
Rousseau had 19 illegitimate children by a number of women, put
them all in orphanages, and then wrote a book about child-rearing
without feeling that anything might be wrong or even inconsistent!
So it is possible so see how, their heads divorced from the rest
of their bodies, High Church and Low Church people reacted negatively
to Cranmer's phrase, because it so obviously meant what it said.
And what it said was counter-cultural. In all the arguments that
took place over prayer book revision in the 1780s, not one drop
of ink was spilled over the elimination of these words.
No American prayer book restored Cranmer's words. The 1979 prayer
book gets honorable mention, however, for its tasteful and altogether
too-tactful insertion of "with all that I am and all that I have,
I honor you."
As liturgical language, this is a failure, because it can float
by unnoticed. It is a start, however, and is a great gift, because
it makes the point that sex and money are indeed something we talk
about, must talk about, in church. It is our entire lives that
God wants to bless. It is our entire lives that we live in response
to God's love.
All of this is to ask us to rethink the erotic aspects of our
lives. Eros does not necessarily mean "lust," but often
means "desire for union." It is from this truth that so many Christian
mystics -- men and women -- went on to see Christ as their lover,
or how the prophet Hosea could describe God as wooing back an unfaithful
Israel. Learning to worship our own beloved means, first of all,
honoring the desire we have for them as being from God.
It is June, and we think of weddings. It is also time to think
of the marriages that come after the weddings. It is also the opportunity
to remember that God has given us our own most intimate moments
to allow us to communicate the worth-ness of our spouse, and to
make love indeed.
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