The Confusion of Lust

So You Think You Can Dance is one of the rare reality shows that really inspires me sometimes, and in more than one ways.

Today I’m having my monthly visitor (ahem) so I’m all crampy on the couch, loving the dancing. This is the second time I’ve been quite affected by this scene in which this beautiful black man in his 20s dances this gorgeous, sensual scene with a woman. The man’s showing no passion for her, no lust, and it’s clear through the choreography that that’s what he should be feeling.

In the critiquing, the guy came apart and began to cry. Turns out he’s a minister by profession, so he’s all horrified at the thought of showing lust.

Unfortunately, due to the editing of the show, he was limited to what he could say to express that, but the tortured confusion on his face showed it all. He clearly, brilliantly understands the throes of passion in concept, because his routine showed lust and longing in all its languid ways, even if his face failed to convey it.

So we know he understands lust and longing, his choreography proved it (and it was his; Nigel absolutely loved the choreography and called it “brilliant” and him “talented”). Yet the prospect of demonstrating that longing facially and in his eyes just scares him to death.

And I don’t understand. Turns out his choreography was based on the Song of Solomon, in which it follows the courtship of a man and a woman, and the leaving of carnal relations till after the consummation of marriage. Thus, the lust and longing without acting that the fellow so struggled to convey.

That’s the part of religion I dislike, the part that puts such confusion into the mind of a young man like this, a man who is supposed to lead others to their own spiritual clarity but who cannot find his own.

How can it be wrong to simply showing the tortured pain of longing to be with someone you can’t be with?

I mean, ministers are allowed to fall in love and marry. It’s not like they’re priests. Feeling lust and not acting on it, isn’t that what it’s all about? Isn’t that the restraint religion demands of you? So, what’s the problem, right? It’s a sin to convey that that occurs, though? What?

But there you have it. It’s no coincidence, I feel, that religions are executed and administered by humans, the makers of human error. Mixed messages are delivered through various ministers and their “interpretations”, then unrealistic demands are expected of us, and not enough humility is used in explaining the limits of being human in a realm of gods.

We’ll all make mistakes, but it’s how we move beyond them that define us, in religion and in life. Religions would rather leave us thinking mistakes can’t happen, and when you do make them, there’s no open book for how to move beyond them. You’re often left to fumble and fuck it up, or go through the tortured self-loathing that may follow.

It seems to me that the greatest teachers are the ones who’ve made the most mistakes and best understand the struggles faces by their students. Why can’t ministers see that it’s their very humanness that makes them best skilled to lead us?

It breaks my heart when I see a young guy like this so eaten up by the struggles of his cloth that he can’t express what’s in his heart and embrace the artful creativity he doesn’t seem to want to believe his creator bestowed upon him.

What a silly, silly troublemaker this religion thing can be. Or maybe it’s just people fucking up something that shouldn’t be as complicated as we let it be.

Maybe part of the problem with believing that people speak to god is, we’re taking their word for two sides of the conversation. Any conversation I’ve had usually can use a little clarification on both sides of the equation. But what do I know?

I’m just a silly person who thinks that love and lust and longing and intimacy are far too beautiful things for a creator to tell us to never do them.

After all, any maker of any thing I know tends to want you to use everything they make, right? Sony wants you to buy all their home theatre products, use all the fancy add-ins so you can brag to your friends about all the stupid, unnecessary, “but at least it does it” gimmicks your new gadgets perform.

So why wouldn’t this God guy want you to explore being human in all its random glory? From screaming sex to tender kisses in the moonlight, from the exhileration of a skydive to the tragedy of a lost friend, from the moment you see your new baby to the moment your lifelong love dies, from 8,000-kilometres-apart longing to the emptiness of unrequited love…

All of it is what makes being human such a write-home-to-mom experience, man. It’s everything we feel, everything we can do, the incredible network of wiring and synapses that make emotions and life such a rollercoaster ride for us to live through.

How can any god think the look of tortured bafflement on that young dancing minister’s face be the road to spiritual divinity?

Sigh. Once again I’m left in utter confusion about how it can be wrong to simply be who we are.

3 thoughts on “The Confusion of Lust

  1. D.P.

    This is a great post to open up a conversation on such things as the role of “asceticism” in both the religious and secular realm, on what “God” wants or doesn’t want us to do (or act), on how our actions necessarily affect others, and the many distinctions between religion, cultural, and social practices–to name a few things.
    I’m going to start this out by admitting that as a religious scholar (NOT a theologian), such scholar’s opinions frequently miss the point of such discussions, and I’ll do my best not to fall into that trap–but I fully acknowledge it’s there and I certainly am prone to it.

    First, in terms of this minister, there is a critical distinction between feeling “proper” lust and “improper” lust–and here we’d need to know if his fellow dancer was his fiancee or wife, and whether she had a fiancee or husband. The Old Testament particularly celebrates the love, passion, and lust between two people who are husband and wife. But it must be remembered that in the ten commands, one is instructed not to covet they neighbor’s wife. This injunction, in essence, is the idea that coveting is permitted with your own wife/husband. Practically, we see why ancient Judaism (and ancient religions in general) would establish such a prohibition–lust, love, passion (all of that) is quite fine, but when it extends beyond the boundaries of proper community behavior (i.e. if you’re having an affair) there is a real risk of social disorder. Early religious traditions, it must be remembered, were fundamentally practical (let’s make it rain, let’s keep the city ordered, let’s establish who can be a banker and who cannot, let’s establish who can be a minister and who cannot, and what they must to). The Old Testament–Deuteronomy, specifically–is simply an ancient Judaic code of laws. And while those laws are “religious”, they were created to establish order so the religion and society could flourish under harsh conditions.

    Second, when you say “Religions would rather leave us thinking mistakes can’t happen, and when you do make them, there’s no open book for how to move beyond them”, it seems you are thinking of a particularly modern Catholic morality. Remember the Old Testament again–it is shot through with God’s initial mistakes with creation (Lillith–although I have problems seeing that as a “mistake”; the flood; the tower of Babel). Unfortunately this is not “remembered” by Roman Catholicism specifically, and most non-Judaic forms of Xianity. Further, the covenant between God and the chosen people–the Jews–is also full of human failings, failings that the Jews were indeed punished for (the Old Testament God can be quite mean), but mistakes concerning that original covenant that God also allowed.
    And Jesus is perhaps the best example. Excluding the Greek inspired Gospel of John, Mark and Luke (and to a lesser degree, Matthew), Jesus’ teaching are exactly that we are human, we err, and we are indeed forgiven by God (and arguably more importantly, we must forgive each other). This is, in the end, the point of the non-Johinne gospels–above all else, we must forgive ourselves in order to be forgiven.

    Third, and related to the above, is the fact that Xianity’s take on human error, lust, passion–basically, our failings–has changed radically since the much more forgiving middle ages period. It was with the rise of Rationalism within the Church (c.a. 1600) that the modern conception of “perfection” arose. We can see this, secularly, in the philosophies of that time, particularly Descartes, where it is argued that we can know perfection as humans because of God. This is a marked difference to the predominantly Catholic idea that original sin permanently affect our souls, forever limiting us.
    But on the flipside, non-Catholic traditions took this “dented soul” idea to explain how we are indeed human, and we do err–as you point out–and we just can’t help it. From these ideas evolved a series of practices (as opposed to ancient laws) to help us come to know how to overcome our humanity (this harkens back, of course, to Jesus’ teachings).

    Fourth, and this is perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of religion (we can thank philosopher Michel Foucault, ironically, for bringing this to light in his “History of Sexuality” series), within religion there is a clear difference between practices and ideals. Ideals are what we are taught to seek; practices are the “nuts and bolts” “how to” ways of trying to attain that goal, even though we may never attain it (a nearly identical division lies in Buddhism, in terms of reaching Nirvana/Enlightenment, as well as Hinduism, as well as Islam and Judaism).
    The reason practices are critical is this: you ask why a creator would not want us to: “explore being human in all its random glory?” Ideally (although I’ll be arguing against this below), you may be right. But in practice, we must be excruciatingly aware that in seeking such experiences, we must follow either Jesus’, or some secular morality/ethic of not harming others. And in practice, we have to admit that a critical balance must be struck between experiencing our lives in all it’s glory and not hurting others. This is why to a large extent we’re not, according to the commandment, to covet our neighbor’s wife/husband. It hurts others.
    In practice then, religion guides us in such a way as to not hurt others, or in more modern terms, to maximize our exploration and minimize the way we affect others.

    Finally, this leads directly to asceticism, and your question: “How can it be wrong to simply showing the tortured pain of longing to be with someone you can’t be with?” It is a matter of the expression of such pain being “wrong”, it’s the pain itself. Both secularly and religiously, we all practice forms of asceticism. We restrict ourselves, not simply as I stated above in terms of others, but in terms of ourselves. As Nietzsche explored in his third essay in the GM (and no, I’m not copying this from the Wikipedia page on asceticism; if anything, the N reference is flawed), there is an incredible power in self-initiated asceticism, where we hold in check, sacrifice, and channel certain feelings, passions, appetites, and lusts, in order to make ourselves stronger and better.
    Such asceticism is strikingly odd to our “have it now” culture, but reflecting on some modern movements like veganism and the like we can see it everywhere. Again, not copying from the Wiki page, we all do it in one way or another: saving that good bottle of wine for the perfect day (it will taste that much better); sacrificing comfort and ease in order to work out and be healthier; and appropriate in the context of your blogging, drawing out sex in order to make it that much better (in “Obre los Ojos” and “Vanilla Sky” the theme of delayed gratification is prominent).

    I could go on more, but I think this is enough at this point. Like I said, this was a wonderful post for bruinging to light the complexities of what you saw on that show, and what we likewise experience every day in our lives. There is no clear-cut “correct” interpretation of these phenomena, and I am in no way arguing that religions have always been both positive and life-affirming. However, given the fact that religion was, in ever case, the first thing to arise with an ancient society, the connection between the practices of religion and secular society cannot be denied. On the other hand, it is striking and disconcerting to see how, as religions became more institutionalized and powerful, their originary positive practices were skewed, and in many cases, turned against us.

  2. Scribe Called Steff

    Second, when you say “Religions would rather leave us thinking mistakes can’t happen, and when you do make them, there’s no open book for how to move beyond them”, it seems you are thinking of a particularly modern Catholic morality.

    I’ll get back to the rest of your healthy tome there later as I feel a nap coming on, but I’m not thinking anything in particular beyond the young man’s tortured face. He just had no idea of whether this was wrong or not, and it was obvious that although he seemed to suspect it was wrong he clearly didn’t understand why it should be.

    Just that look, that’s all it took for me to wonder. Wading into the morality of all the different faiths is too complicated; enough faiths have enough leaders who lead through muddled means. This kind of tortured confusion exists throughout every dogma. Relaxed, easier interpretations of each faith also exist, and for them such dilemmas of morality don’t occur.

    Having been that person who suffered the tortured confusion, it’s something I’ve always identified with and continue to identify with, I guess.

    And I think people in faiths across the board understand the feeling. But maybe that’s fanciful on my part.

  3. C.J. Strata

    Once again I’m left in utter confusion about how it can be wrong to simply be who we are.

    My contention is that, when you spend your life thinking about the divine, you never really develop a ‘self.’ Live long enough believing you’re an “an instrument of God,” and you won’t know how to be anything else.

    Not to mention…how many people even have a clear idea of who they are?

    My belief is that, the world over, we need to start teaching that we are all human FIRST. And I’d go into further detail, but I wanna keep my potential Nobel prize material to myself. đŸ˜‰ (Not really. I’m just tired, and it’s late).

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