Two Rivers of Life

We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging. But the other is our real reality...that dark river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls - the black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this - our sea-born Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.

D. H. Lawrence in Women in Love presents us with the age old dilemma. Our schizoid personality's are constantly warring within ourselves. The silver river battles with the dark river, brightness and dissolution are in hand to hand combat over some valued treasure, perhaps our very souls. This deals with much more than the niceties of a "good and evil" plot. Even the movies depict it poorly. This is that awful internal struggle of doing what we don't want to and not doing what we want to do.

Why must our natures war within themselves? Certainly our divine nature instilled in us requires disciplining and intense promotion to take the "front." On the other hand our carnal nature seems to enjoy the stage lights and glides towards them quite easily. Yet, I think perhaps in our employment of spiritual disciplines we overlook the fact that we are also to discipline our bodies. St. Paul spoke of "beating his body" and we are told in another of his letters that we must "mortify" (that is, execute) the sins of our bodies. This execution is reminiscent of the mutilation promoted to us by Christ Himself as He urges the cutting off of sinful members in the Gospels.

It is interesting that Lawrence should reference the "sea-born Aphrodite." This is the goddess of love, beauty, and sexual desire. When Chronos took his son, Ouranos (Uranus) and castrated him the genitalia was cast into the sea and from the foam that created Aphrodite was born. She is also the mother of Eros. Lawrence is, of course, infamously controversial because of the highly charged sexual content of his literature. Immediately we think of Lady Chatterley's Lover because of the publicity surrounding that case, but there are intense sexual undercurrents to every one of his pieces.

Strange how this, our sexuality, is one of the most physical and most spiritual realms of battle. Lewis himself said that it was a "transcendental union" and as such was one which had to be eternally enjoyed or endured. In Mere Christianity he also wrote, "I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they are wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body - which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once."