Bodies transformed

Paul Griffiths brilliantly analyzes the lovers’ obsession with one another’s bodies in the Song ( Song of Songs (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible) , p. 30): “Lovers are interested in one another’s bodies, indeed absorbed by them. They gaze into one another’s eyes, they kiss one another’s lips, they lick and suck and graze upon every inch of one another’s skin, driven by a desire to inhabit and be inhabited by the other’s physical being, an urge to become one flesh; and they may imagine the body of the absent other with sufficient intensity that its particulars are vivid to them in absence as well as in presence. Their own bodies become transformed by this attention in two ways: by responsive attunement to the body of the other, and by movement from the capacity to be a beloved lover to the actuality of being one, a movement that can be received only as a gift from a lover. Lovers’ bodies are remade, coming into their own exactly as lovers’ bodies by being for another a source of excessive delight.”

A few glosses:

Griffiths’ comment highlights the way sexuality gives insight into the reality of love more generally. All love, not just sexual love is “responsive attunement to the body of the other” – responsive because love is always worked out (obviously) in relation with others; attunement because love is a kind of harmonization, or the creation of a fugal counterpoint to the other; the body, because love is never simply a meeting of minds. Even our love for God is responsive attunement to the body of the Other, because it is responsive attunement to the incarnate Christ and to His ecclesial and Eucharistic bodies.

Griffiths also shows how sexuality can be incorporated into the Pauline demand to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, and to be transformed in the renewing of our minds by that sacrificial offering. To make love is to make one’s body a “source of excessive delight” for another person; to receive the sexual overtures of a lover is to give one’s body so that another’s body can be transformed. Each lover gives a new, fulfilled body to the lover, a body that does what bodies were designed to do. Again, sex can be seen as the paradigm of life in Christ. Self-gift in sexual love becomes even a means for realizing that life in Christ; it is the paradigm of bodily self-gift.