Monday, September 1, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Chastity
You, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness,
for that day to overtake you like a thief.
For all of you are children of the light
and children of the day.
We are not of the night or of darkness.
Therefore, let us not sleep as the rest do,
but let us stay alert and sober.
Yesterday I finished Chastity, a fascinating book composed by Erik Varden interweaving art, music, literature, bible, theology and apocryphal wonders like Cave of Treasures to generate a study of how we use our erotic (eros meaning life-force) energy. The subtitle, “Reconciliation of the Senses,” indicates Bishop Varden’s direction. He wants us to see how, as he says, “nothing is beyond God’s ordering power.”
For 6th century Orthodox Saint Climacus, spiritual and carnal eros belong to a single continuum. He acknowledged a flicker of eternity in passion. Even disordered eros can kindle a sanctifying love of God that drives out fear. Nothing is beyond God’s ordering power. Nothing in man is unredeemed. Everything natural to man is made in view of the robe of glory. The new Adam waits to embrace the old. The garments of skin are lent us for awhile, to warm and protect us. Then we are to leave them behind. (p. 125)
I am also reading Sermons of a Reluctant Preacher, written by Bob Huneycutt. After thirty years managing and owning (with writers Lee Smith and Hal Crowther) Akai Hana, a sushi restaurant near Durham, North Carolina, Bob ascended to the pulpit of Triangle Family Church, where he already was “music minister, emcee, council member and maintenance man.” In 1976 I met Bobby in Berkeley. He was 21 and I was 26.
Bob surfed, played his songs on his guitar and rode his skateboard. A few weeks earlier I had hitchhiked into town with my own guitar strapped to my back. We were two long haired potheads, but I’d cut my hair a few weeks earlier. Both of us met sweet folks who invited us to dinner at Hearst House, a block or two north of Observatory Hill on Hearst Avenue.
The house belonged to the Unification Church and Creative Community Project, and although they didn’t say so at first, our new friends were followers of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a charismatic pastor from Korea who had written his own Good News, the Divine Principle. When he preached, Rev. Moon could be “furious, silly, unassuming or regal.” Journalists spun scary stories about this man from another country who parents said wanted to steal children for his own purposes. Neither Bob nor I had heard many of those stories before we experienced the real thing, which was far different from how stories in Time Magazine or the Washington Post made it sound.
In 1981 Bob was matched with a Japanese sister named Ryoko (Child of Goodness) and a year later they were married at Madison Square Garden along with 2074 other couples by their pastor, Rev. Moon. They joined thousands of other “Honeymoonies” and have spent 40 plus years together – working, bearing seven children, including one, Yuka who was stillborn, and then surviving the loss of their oldest, Sam on his Ascension Date on September 22, 2022.
Bob and I spent several weeks together at a retreat center in Boonville, north of San Francisco. I remember sitting in a circle facilitated by Nadine, remarking that I experienced the greatest emotional and sensual experience in the throes of sexual climax. Nobody looked at me funny, and I imagine most of us might have said the same thing.
Nadine’s goal, however, was to move us from the either-or of physical and spiritual to a both-and understanding. In his book, Varden refers to the Desert Fathers, pioneers in Christian meditation.
He who lives in the desert is freed from three kinds of battle: the battles of hearing, speech and sight. He is concerned with only one, namely the battle of the heart, with its intimate thoughts, temptations and desires. The budding contemplative must learn to deal with the heart’s unrest. – p. 137
Remembering and reliving some of the times in the 70’s as I read Bob’s memoirs and sermons, I realize how much both of us have grown in our lives, founded on relationship with God. Talking with his adult kiddos, Bob says, “I would never dream of alienating my children over something as inconsequential as an opinion.” Although with the passage of time persecution of the Unification Church has diminished, both Bob and I continue to push back on flat-line expectations that fly at us from everywhere. Again, Varden has something to say about what he calls this “cocooned darkness”:
In calculating, risk-averse times it is hard to see life as a process of conversion, healing and change. It is counter-cultural to live with empty hands and to tread this earth chastely, freed from the will to domineer. We may think this bright ideal so far out of reach that we stop striving for it and languish in cocooned darkness. We need the testimony of the Desert Fathers. It reminds us: “If you wish, you can become fire.” – Erik Varden, Chastity , p. 148
Somewhere I have a photo of Bob playing with our kids when he visited Lincoln in the mid-1980s. Next February I’ve been invited to a birthday party for my 100-year-old uncle Merlie Sandel in Wilmington, North Carolina. Durham is a couple of hours north. I hope I can get up there and get another hug from my old friend Bob.
For God did not destine us for wrath,
but to gain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ …
I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.
(1 Thessalonians 4, Psalm 96, Luke 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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