An Other Love

Abstract

As LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER I have been in love with some manifestations of Christianity (not always ones that my Christian friends would themselves love, or even approve). Tennessee Ernie Ford singing on television the hymn The Garden moved me to tears when I was a child (I won't pretend to remember how old). For an oddly gendered teenager, St. Francis the Sissy proved an incredibly tantalizing figure of a man. Later on it was medieval Christian art and architecture, the cathedrals of Europe, the spirituality of Meister Ekhardt and Jacob Bohme. Still later, and most significantly, it has been the writings of the Fathers of the Church (and their excluded others, the Christian heretics) that have been most riveting to me, pulling me into a world so close to that of my own beloved rabbis of late antiquity and yet so foreign as well, a world in which oceans of ink (and rivers of blood) could be spilt on questions of detail in the description of the precise relationships between the posited persons of a complex godhead -a world, as well, in which massive numbers of men and women could choose freely and enthusiastically to live lives without the pleasures of sex and the joys of family. I find this world endlessly moving, alluring, even at its most bizarre to me. For the last decade or so I have devoted much of my time and spirit to learning the languages of and understanding something of the inner and outer worlds of those early Christian men and women who wrote such texts and lived such lives. Some Jews, it seems, are destined by fate, psychology, personal history, or whatever to be drawn to Christianity.2 My research won't be