Galavanting vs. Fidelity
One way to understand the planet earth (and don't we like to talk global nowadays) is to travel far and wide ... to galavant across the continent and the big sea. We like to think that people who are well traveled are wise and understanding (don't get me wrong there is much good to come from travel). BUT that is not the only way to know the world ... and in fact it is only a way of understanding the surface. In fact, much of that has been little more than walking a concrete map ... their understanding is paper-thin.
Another way of understanding the world is to buy a lot of land and live there for a long time ... maybe your whole life. To spend a lot of time walking in your backyard and looking at the trees and the bugs. Listening to the birds and observing the seasonal changes. Going to the same spot for groceries and talking to the same neighbors. This brings a different type of understanding of the world around you.
Today, we often try and understand sex and relationships in the global way ... galavanting from one to another in some strange hope that we will become wise and understanding. But the mystery of the other is of such complication and such symbolic purpose that the only way to ever hope to understand is to spend an entire lifetime tooling around the same backyard. One women makes sense if we are to have any hope of cultivating even the facilities of knowledge required to cross the gender divide. What is more the uncovering required is so much deeper and transcendent than a physical revealing that it can only be rightly received with within life commitment. Nakedness points to the goal of God's metaphor for one flesh. But galavanting is to never know beyond the physical bodies, and since physical bodies are made to convey spirit, it is to never know the physical body either.
If we are to ever understand and know the opposite sex we much promise to sleep in one place ... we must lay aside the open road and plunge ourselves into the abyss of one.
Another way of understanding the world is to buy a lot of land and live there for a long time ... maybe your whole life. To spend a lot of time walking in your backyard and looking at the trees and the bugs. Listening to the birds and observing the seasonal changes. Going to the same spot for groceries and talking to the same neighbors. This brings a different type of understanding of the world around you.
Today, we often try and understand sex and relationships in the global way ... galavanting from one to another in some strange hope that we will become wise and understanding. But the mystery of the other is of such complication and such symbolic purpose that the only way to ever hope to understand is to spend an entire lifetime tooling around the same backyard. One women makes sense if we are to have any hope of cultivating even the facilities of knowledge required to cross the gender divide. What is more the uncovering required is so much deeper and transcendent than a physical revealing that it can only be rightly received with within life commitment. Nakedness points to the goal of God's metaphor for one flesh. But galavanting is to never know beyond the physical bodies, and since physical bodies are made to convey spirit, it is to never know the physical body either.
If we are to ever understand and know the opposite sex we much promise to sleep in one place ... we must lay aside the open road and plunge ourselves into the abyss of one.
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