Eros and Holiness: Part Six: Marc Gafni
marc gafni
published on marcgafni.com
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We abuse the earth and allow twenty million people to die of hunger or related diseases every year. The simple and essential cause is a lack of Eros. We desperately need to feel like we are full but we aren’t. So we settle for pseudo Eros. We pretend that we are in the inside by placing others on the outside. We do not feel embraced in real Eros of love so we grasp for the pseudo Eros of fear, war, and obsessive consumption. Life is a mess.
Even if we could somehow put aside the starvation and the wars, a superficial view of our society reveals that something is seriously askew. Not a detail problem but an essential flaw in the plumb line of our culture. Every forty seconds someone kills themselves. This year, upwards of one million people will experience a failure of love so intense and painful that they will violently end their lives. In the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by sixty percent world wide. Among the countries with the highest rates are western democracies such as Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, and of course the United States.
Suicide used to be largely limited to the elderly. People who had, at the end of their lives, looked back and been unable to make sense of their story. This is not particularly comforting news because all of us want to, and most of us will, reach old age. The even more jolting news, however, is that the average age is going down. Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44. Now, of course it would be nice to dismiss this slightly unpleasant information with the thought that only crazy or severely depressed people commit suicide. Note, however, that for every actual suicide there are ten suicide attempts. Suicide attempts have increased in the last 45 years to twenty times more than “successful” suicides. Add to this the easily inferred reality that for every person who attempts suicide, there are a lot more people in just as much pain; just as lonely; just as alienated; and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo―suspended between hells―all the while maintaining the façade of normal and even successful lives.
And yet our guilty feet have no rhythm. Beneath our desperately dancing steps lurks a yawning abyss of emptiness that kills our joy and poisons our satisfactions. We need another way to dance. It is the old dancing master we met {in blog post eighteen} who shows us how. He reminds us that Eros is a genuine possibility in our lives. Stay in the emptiness, he tells us, and it will become full. Where before you danced to the music of competition and envy, you now begin to feel that you are part of the seamless coat of the divine universe. You no longer feel like you must obey God; you participate in the divine. Eros is the sound of a woman singing, the caress of a small deed of loving, a gentle tear, or rocking laughter. Shechina is genuinely felt pain and joy, anger and ecstasy. All of these fill your emptiness and enliven your days.
You are no longer alienated from your own life―living externally―wondering: is this all there is? To dance with the Shechina is to step inside to the full erotic glory and wonder of your life.
To live and love erotically in all the facets of your being is to live a sacred life.
marc gafni
