ABSTRACT
A critical reflection upon the last chapter might well have raised a significant question: why does the liturgical exchange in/of the fraction become the privileged site for making visible the Church as the erotic community, rather than the symbolics of the marriage service. I would suggest there are, for this project, two key answers to that question. First, that question can be answered through the attention in the eucharist to the breaking, exchange, absorption and dismissal of the body of Christ. It is the body of Christ, as I indicated both in Chapter 3 and 4, which governs a theological reading of bodies per se. The eucharist becomes then, as Aquinas recognised, the sacrament governing the nature of all the other sacraments – including the sacrament of marriage. Further the fraction is the liturgical hinge between the consecration and the distribution which both articulates and constitutes the nature of the community. It is, I argue, erotic in its movement from breaking to union to dispersal. Second, that question is answered through what I wish to present in this chapter in elaborating the erotics of redemption. That is (1) a critique of the marriage liturgy, and the place, politics and ideology of such heterosexism within Christian dogmatic thinking and ecclesial practice; and (2) the refiguring of a much broader Christian erotic relationality. In brief, the character of marriage at the moment, I will argue, privileges one form of relationship over another, constructs gender along the lines of biological, reproductive difference, and reinforces a social policy that needs to be challenged and transformed. The politics of the heterosexual family are
predicated upon an unreflective biosociality which renders unnatural (if not even criminal) homosexuality and, what is possibly worse, reifies two models of sexual orientation within which all human being is situated. I will argue that kinship is a symbolic, not a natural, arrangement, and that there are many genders as there are performances of being sexed. Marriage, as the Church conceives and practices it today, sacramentalises an exclusive relationship between two positions, one biologically male and the other female. I argue for the need for a redemption from such an erotics and outline the economy such a redemption might take.
