The Power of the Erotic

The Power of the Erotic

“God’s always been there for me, even in the worst of times,” a Manna House guest said to me this morning.  The temperature was 28 degrees with a strong wind already blowing out of the North.  Holding the hands of guests to pray as we opened, I could feel their numbed cold fingers.  As one guest took my hand she said, “You’re a living hand warmer.”

            Today is the Feast of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, who died on this date in 1231.  She was noted for her work with the poor, which she undertook while married to the Landgrave of Thurgia (basically a king).  She caused scandal for being personally involved serving poor people, including lepers.  In fact, she caused so much scandal that when her husband died, she was thrown out of the castle, and had to take refuge in a nearby cottage.  She died at the ripe old age of twenty-four.  “We must give to God what we have,” she said, “gladly and with joy.”

            In giving comes joy.  But it is also true that giving to others comes out of a deep sense of the goodness of life, the graciousness that we have experienced in God, in others, and in God’s creation. 

In her famous essay, “Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde wrote, “once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”  In an interview she shared, “I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way. And when I say living I mean it as that force which moves us toward what will accomplish real positive change.”

            So it is not simply giving that emerges from the erotic, it is giving in resistance to the powers that oppress, that dehumanize, that deny the dignity of those who are suffering.  This is giving that is not self-emptying, but rather giving that is firmly rooted in the shared power of living, and with a desire for that power of living to be extended against the powers of death.

            The cold hands this morning on the porch at Manna House were cold because of the powers of death; powers that isolate us from one another and so drive the despised and vulnerable to the streets.  Those powers of death deny our connection with each other and assert a radical competitive individualism.  Those powers assert a game of the survival of the fittest in which some already have a head start and make the rules that ensure their ongoing domination.

            It was those powers that St. Elizabeth stood against, and so did Audre Lorde.  And so, in our little way at Manna House, we also seek to stand.  Sharing hot coffee, showers and clothes, socks and hygiene, and a warm place to be for a few hours on a brutally cold day, are little acts of resistance to a system that denies our connection with each other.  And we join those little acts with other acts, speaking and acting with others for a just society, for housing, for health care, for jobs that pay a living wage.

            In the New Testament, Paul developed the image of the Body of Christ to help us envision our close relationship with each other.  He wrote, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:12-13).   We are not isolated individuals in a “war of all against all” (Thomas Hobbes); we are members of the Body of Christ.

            Audre Lorde wrote of this bodily connection as “the power of the erotic.”  St. Elizabeth of Hungary saw this connection when she embodied her joy by risking her life to share life with the poor.  When we joined hands this morning we affirmed our connection with each other as we shared our human warmth.  And in all this connection there is God’s graciousness, even on a hard cold morning.  “God’s always been there for me, even in the worst of times.”