We started by trying to acknowledge the forms of love — for instance, the feeling between friends, between parent and child, between lovers. Love in Christian Science is a synonym for God and is felt by man through reflecting God, his source. The human forms of love are ennobled and uplifted by bringing the Love that is God to bear.

Then we looked at sex. At the biological level it's about reproduction, as plants and animals show. At the human level it includes an important communication element.

Sex is a troubling area in present society. The member who suggested our topic last week wanted to show how Love had healed him to some extent of severe sexual problems. He and others wanted to push forward into the darkness still surrounding this subject.

He outlined the healing. Raised in an abusive and homophobic time and place, he found the sexual liberation movement of the 70's quite a relief. He rapidly became dependent upon what he calls "drop your pants sex". When the AIDS crisis broke over us, fear drove him from the field — he started having romantic obsessions and even heterosexual fantasies. A 12-Step program and psychoanalysis came to the rescue with insight and understanding — even spiritual revelation. Church science and its practitioners were valueless in the struggle, as their own faulty beliefs and homophobia paralyzed their abilities. He engaged in several brief flings or romances, which strained his narcissistic core. The pain and suffering were awful, as he continued with the therapy and 12-Step meetings. He never let go of his study of Science which was beginning to make sense as well. Finally he met and fell passionately in love with a man, and while he never had sex with him the feeling level carried him into foreign territory where caring, altruism, sacrifice were part of the mix. This was adult relating!

He still feels he has much work to do, with one foot stuck in self-centered baby-type relating and the other now firmly in adulthood. His focus is now on the revelations of Christian Science which he feels will carry him to the full healing.

We then went on to a more general discussion. "What is the value of sex as communication," asked one member. We were a bit scattered here, but the one point to emerge was that there's value, in a highly intellectualized setting, to have access also to feelings and emotions normally repressed. Sex is the royal road to a loss of control permitting this access.

How could such an experience possibly be of value to a Christian Scientist? This brought the comment that many Christian Scientists practice the Science from a thinking standpoint that virtually cries out for some offsetting feeling element. Each will have his or her own means of doing this, and we must not prescribe sex for everyone in the predicament.

Our Jungian jumped in to elaborate the four functions of mind: thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting. Ideally in sex, or anything else, all functions would be engaged and active. He surmised that divine Mind would have the same four functions, if in somewhat grander and of course non-dualistic form. Good sex on the human belief level is analogous to good spiritual at-one-ment — divine Mind flowing, functioning, being man and the universe.

A member read us something from a book by Quinton Crisp about the need for good manners in a relationship. We all agreed and endorsed the Golden Rule. Crisp felt Othello should have been more considerate of Desdemona. That brought a laugh. Platitudes and behavioral attempts to deal with the huge emotions unleashed by romantic involvements often lead to destructive results, including murder. At the very least we end up with hypocrisy, self-righteousness and pharisaism. The answer for both personality types — Othello/perpetrator and Desdemona/victim — is something like Christian Science. Both require deep probing of the underlying dynamics, and the ministrations of Christian Science make this painful work bearable.

Here are a few brief matters that also came up:

1) A narcissistic person is only interested in what pleases him. The so-called "other" is seen as merely an extension of himself. This structure leads to much frustration and pain as an attempt is made to relate to others, who do not live to fulfill the needs of the sufferer. Psychotherapy deals with this problem all the time, but Christian Science might be of help in seeing God as a total narcissist, interested in His own realities only, extending Himself as man and the universe (see Mary Baker Eddy's comments on egotism vs. egoism in Unity Of Good, page 27). An appreciation of the facts of being in this somewhat shocking way might just melt the God-impersonation.

2) Casual sex vs. nesting. The former is exciting but dangerous while the latter is safe but perhaps suffocating. It might require discipline to proceed with a relationship if it became boring, but deep intimacy and the healing of early wounds might better be addressed in a long-term setting. We could conceive of times when a casual encounter might open some insights. A member told us of a quickie where he had to to give a treatment in order to make it a safe and harmonious engagement.

3) May-December romances. Men seem to be wired to choose young mates by biologically deterministic instincts. But some break through to other models: for instance, the two partners may access the senex-puer axis, an alternate vision of attraction, which seemed to us a more evolved sense of relationship, partaking of the divine Self archetype rather than merely biological requirements.

4) Testosterone was the subject of an article by Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine of April 2, 2000. He's taking shots of the male hormone to relieve symptoms of HIV and chronicles his mental and physical reactions to it. It's raw data about maleness, particularly as experienced by a Gay man. (We understand in Christian Science that matter causes nothing; he's allowing himself to have feelings right straight from prevalent fantasies about being male). One member quoted this line from Science and Health: "Let us feel the divine energy of Spirit, bringing us into newness of life and recognizing no mortal nor material power as able to destroy" (p. 249:6-8). Sullivan's article is confirmatory of this description of the male in Science. While the article is valuable as a pure description of one half of being, it certainly makes one realize the value of the feminine in balancing the energy. Here's what Mrs. Eddy says of the female: "Let us rejoice that we are subject to the divine 'powers that be' " (p. 249:8-9). Each individual must be both.

5) In one version of the Grail legend, King Amfortas, his court and the whole Kingdom are withering as they plead and argue with each other about the king's sin and why the health giving access to the Grail is blocked. Parsifal, a "simple fool" enters and brushes by all the turmoil to ask "Where is the Grail?" The mere asking of the question revives the Kingdom and its inhabitants. One member used this mantra during the week to remind himself to go straight for the most vital facts of being and not waste time on fruitless arguments and ideation. "The great spiritual fact must be brought out that man is, not shall be, perfect and immortal" (Science and Health, p. 428:22-23).

We'll work on Food for next week.