CS Lewis's The Four Loves - this re-reading it seemed wrong and confused

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I took CS Lewis's The Four Loves on holiday to re-read for (I think) the third time - but this time I got stuck on it, it seemed wrong - and the 'climactic' chapter on Agape/ charity or the pure 'gift love' of God seemed particularly deficient, unconvincing, confused.

Lewis describes the three lower loves of Storge (familial or familiar love), Eros (romantic and erotic love) and Philia (friendship) - and there is, as always with Lewis, much worthwhile among his comments and observations.

But I find that his need qualitatively to distinguish charity from the other loves has distorted the whole argument. For Lewis it is vital that God does not need to love us, that God's love is a pure (unmerited) gift - a one-way love, in effect; and this is necessary because Lewis's view of God is a being that does not have needs.

My own view is that God does not (of course not) 'need' human love for His original or continued existence; but I would say that God does 'need' our love in the sense of wanting it and benefiting from it, and being saddened by its lack. And indeed this is precisely why God created Man - because of this kind of 'need' (desire, yearning) for Man's love - freely given.

And in this sense, God's Love (agape/ charity) is very-close-kin to 'Storge' - or more exactly paternal/ parental love - indeed the Bible tells us this again and again right through to include the Gospels - and there is not much scriptural warrant for distinction of quality between God's love for us, and a Father's love for his children.

My feeling is that Lewis's sharp and qualitative and essential distinction between Agape and Storge is something imported into Christianity post hoc, along with the Classical Metaphysical view of God as an omni-entity (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent) - since this kind of abstract and absolute entity is incapable of passions and needs.

So I would regard Love as in essence a single thing, not four things - with second order differences due to the entities between-whom there is love.

This is part of my 'Metaphysics of Christian Love' which I will describe soon - which tries to use Love as the ultimate, bottom line, metaphysical reality - thereby getting away from the physics-like descriptions which are usually posited by Classical Theology (such as Lewis's unclear and un-graspable description of Agape).

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The crucial importance of the heart - soft, open, warm, child-like

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My internet 'fast' did not seem to produce any striking benefits in my spiritual status - but one thing that came to the fore was to re-experience the conviction that the greatest enemy to salvation is a hard, closed, cold and cynical heart.

This seems to be the most difficult thing to overcome; because it has such a high opinion of itself.

And it is a factor in many religious people, and it is (I feel) characteristic of many Christian denominations - perhaps especially in the public arena, in debate and dispute.

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The hard heart shows itself in many ways:

The Right Man - the man who is - and always has been - right about everything (he sees himself as nobody's fool - others may be deceived, but not him!).

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The Oppressed Woman - no matter how objectively privileged, she is being treated unequally when it comes to the good things in life: her situation is making her feel bad; and her sense of hurt is an absolute, metaphysical injustice which requires immediate remedy.

Other versions of this hardness of heart feel resentment in terms of their class, race, region, sexuality... in the end everything is evaluated and judged from the perspective of, and in terms of, this victim-status.

The Oppressed Woman is thus a variant of the Right Man - because, ultimately and as the bottom line, nothing is their fault.

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The Cynical Adolescent - the hard-nosed sentimentalist, beady-eyed and harsh toned in criticism of others and a prickly crybaby in terms of sensitivity to the criticisms of others; sees himself as the subject only to science and logic but also 'passionate' about things which are exempted from this requirement. Sensation-seeking but lazy. Extravert but selfish. Fickle but moralistic. And so on...

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The ultra-correct Christian - a man with a formula. The formula may be a model of church authority, a highly specific idea of tradition, a set of rituals, a way of reading scripture, some creeds or rules especially prohibitions and practices... Christianity is seen 'legalistically' - in Pharisaic terms. Christianity by committee. No need for Love - indeed no place for it.

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In other words, I would much rather that people had soft, open, warm, child-like hearts and were wrong; than that they believed, said and did everything right - but had hard, closed, cold and cynical hearts.

I would much rather a child-like, simple, loving Christianity that is full or errors and inconsistencies; than the opposite.

And these opposites, precisely, may be the only actually-available options.

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Love is primary - and can save from any situation at any time; but the rejection of Love is terminal - and often self-reinforcing.

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I absolutely demand of religion that it be sweet - and no amount of correctness, toughness, power or courage can compensate for its lack; because a religion without sweetness cannot be truly Christian and can become utterly demonic, while sweetness will always have a door open to salvation.

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The Book of Job - obviously a fiction (not a history)

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I have noticed that Christian apostates and anti-Christians in general, often focus their attacks on The Book of Job - above and beyond any other part of the Bible.

For example, when the mythologist Joseph Campbell was giving his most mockingly anti-Christian lectures, he would often provide a summary of Job which emphasized God's nastiness and highlighted an irrational and authoritarian message. CG Jung wrote a whole book about Job (which I fund incomprehensible). And Robert Frost wrote a glibly facetious 'Masque of Reason' which was a continuation of The Book of Job.

Yet - from the perspective of someone who is analyzing Christianity - it is surely tendentious to focus on Job of all the books in the Bible: because it is either the least-Christian or else the least-understandable section of the whole Bible.

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For a start - Job is very obviously a fiction, a story, a fable, a myth - and it is not a history, an Annal, nor a piece of theology - the whole way it is written makes that very clear.

Furthermore Job is - in the Authorized Version  - astonishingly beautiful as prose; although I personally find it vastly overlong as a narrative. But the sheer sensuous beauty tends to suggest that it was substantially an aesthetic work (like the Song of Solomon).

Thirdly, it is perhaps the least transparent, hardest to understand, most contradictory Book of the whole Bible. Job strikes me as a puzzle to which the key has been lost - it is as if we nowadays lack some link or fact which makes sense of the whole thing.

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At any rate, for anti-Christians to 'pick on' The Book of Job is a bit of a giveaway - it is the dishonest rhetorical trick of picking on the least relevant, most ambiguous, and least central thread of an opponent's case, as a way of trying to discredit, rather than refute, their whole argument.

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Note: That a person 'Job' really existed is irrelevant to the point I am making - just as the reality (or otherwise) of a Celtic 'warlord' King Arthur is irrelevant to the status of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur as a fiction. 

The Marriage question is Truth Serum for Christians

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I have come across a better phrase than 'litmus test' or 'hot button' to describe key issues which divide the sheep from the goats, the real Christians from the faux Christians (aka 'Liberal Christians') - the phrase Truth Serum.

We have reached a situation when the question of marriage acts as a truth serum.

Since Liberal Christian is nowadays an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms - and since Christian Liberals are merely subversives and Fifth Columnists for the political Left; when a faux Christian is questioned in public about their attitude to marriage, their answer will reveal their status as either a Leftist or a Christian.

A Liberal Christian will never take the risk of being thought to favour marriage, but will always signal their primary allegiance to the Left, in terms which the Left can recognize as coming from 'one of their own'.


(Comments are closed for this post.)

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The Natural Selection of Creative Genius in Europe

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http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-natural-selection-of-european.html
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The Gaffer holds forth - the opening of the Lord of the Rings

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http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-strange-opening-scene-of-lord-of.html
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Untruths told to children: Pigs are *actually* very clean animals

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A dirty pig. Does she look miserable?

Actually pigs delight in digging and wallowing in mud and muck, and will bury themselves up to the snout - and they are very smelly creatures. I once mucked-out a pig sty, and was at first almost physically overcome by the stench.

But we hardly see any pigs in most parts of England - presumably they are kept out of sight, or else inhabit East Anglia. So the untruth is unnoticed.

Why the error? It is a small example of the way that kids are (mostly falsely) trained to assume that everything traditional and common sense is wrong and nasty - to say that pigs really are dirty is treated like a kind of racism. 

In passing, piglets, although cute to look at, from a distance, are the least cuddly animals I have ever held - it was like hugging a lump of wood; and they squeal blue murder as soon as picked-up.

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Living in the Past (or Fantasyland, or any other imaginative locus) - why is it so appealing?

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Why is living in the past so popular a pastime?

I have done this for extended periods - different periods. In my teens it was something like Bath, Somerset (and the surrounding countryside) in 18th century Georgian Times; at another point it has been Concord, New England during the pre-Civil War mid-1800s; at another point it was the Scottish-English borders of late-medieval and Elizabethan times (the time of the Reivers and Border Ballads).

I read and thought so much about this times and places that my sense of them was not just visionary but tactile - as if I could feel it on my skin.

In one sense this is always 'idealised' and may bear little to no relationship to the actual historical life of the majority of the people - but in another sense this does not matter to the process; because this is not a matter of indulging in pleasures or avoiding pains - not a matter of wish-fulfilment in terms of an imagined paradise.

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Rather, the appeal is much like living in a Fantasy-world such as that of Middle Earth or Harry Potter - or in some kind of situation abroad when not much is known about that country - the appeal is that the world imagined is wholly-meaningful.

Indeed A world imagined is a meaningful world, exactly because it is an imagined world - intended or not there is both specific-in-detail and general-inter-related meaning which comes from the fact of being imagined.

An imagined world cannot-not be meaningful.

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And that is a clue.

Real Life is meaningful when imagined; not meaningful when not.

And for the world to make-sense in detail and overall - it needs to be an imagined world: produced-by and comprehended-by the mind of God.

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Before I was a Christian, this imaginative identification felt like an actual need - because 'the imagined past' was the only truly meaningful world in my experience; since I became a Christian, such imaginations (such as Byzantium, late Anglo Saxon England, and the past 150 years of the Intermountain Western USA) are bracketed by the larger and more comprehensive imagination of God's universe.

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Microaggression - an accurate term

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Micro = a-millionth-of

I think that is pretty accurate - if someone performed a million "microaggressive" acts - like looking sideways at you, or failing to treat you as deferentially as you think you ought to be treated - then that would indeed be roughly equivalent to a single act of 'aggression' - such as a shove.

But it would take a long time.

If a man was "microaggressing" at you every five seconds, he would take more than two months to reach the level of an actual physical push...

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How cancer research harms and kills

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Cancer research has - like medical research generally - two basic categories: irrelevant pseudo-medical science, and pseudo-clinical randomized trials in reality designed for marketing.

1. Medical research funding has been doubling every decade for about half a century - consequently many biological and chemical sciences have re-spun themselves as 'medical' research on the most remote/ tenuous/ dishonest grounds.

In a nutshell, scientists pretend that their research has medical implications - sometimes they even convince themselves - but they really have no idea whether it really does, nor do they care - so long as grants are forthcoming.

(Because nowadays, 'scientific' reputation, and your living wage, depend on successful grant-getting. Actual real scientific discovery has nothing to do with it.)

This makes for mediocre/ bad science (because researchers are following the funding rather than the science) and zero improvement of clinical medicine - but results in a crowding-out of real (and much more likely to be helpful) clinical research.

It also has created a cadre of know-nothing and care-less fake 'experts' on cancer who are merely glib fundraisers and lab project managers - and who constitute the peer review cartel that controls the prestige, publishing, prizes and funding in the whole field.

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2. A lot of 'research' money is spent on performing randomized 'therapeutic' trials - but these trials are actually designed, conducted, analyzed, published and pushed to enhance drug marketing.

And since the pipeline of useful new drugs has long-since all-but dried up; and since cancer chemotherapy has been little more than a decades long list of sickness producing and misery inducing failures; this means that almost all new drugs are inferior to the existing drugs - and some of them are dangerous without any serious prospect of benefit - and this means that patients in cancer trials are certain to be harmed (because all these supposedly anti-cancer drugs always have bad side effects) - and perhaps fatally harmed - and will have near zero-prospect of being helped.

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But none of this matters to the armies of people whose livelihood and prestige depends upon designing, performing, analyzing, publishing and hyping ever-more of these pseudo-trials.

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So this is how your charity money for 'cancer research' is mostly actually being spent - on shroud-waving extortion, institutionalizing self-serving dishonesty, damaging lives, and on actually harming people - including mortally.

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Why did God create Men? Thoughts from William Arkle

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http://www.billarkle.co.uk/greatgift/text/thenatureofgod.html

From The Great Gift - 1976.

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My own understanding is that the Creator, who is also God, is self sufficient in a sense. That is to imply that, although we need God, in every meaning of that term, God does not need us in the same way.

Against this we have to set the understanding that if God didn’t have a purpose which included us, no doubt He would not have gone to all this trouble of bringing us into existence.

But to have a purpose in which we can play some part is quite a different thing from having an absolute need of us in the way that we have an absolute need of God.

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In the way that a child needs its mother and father, we need God for sustenance and support of our own reality because our own reality rests upon the reality of God, and all our sustenance comes from that reality.

But in quite a different way, I believe, our God wishes us to come to life, to come to a full expression of our potential, our Divine reality, and that must be for a purpose which is not essential to the Being of the Creator, but which may be essential to a particular longing and delight in the heart of the understanding of that Creator.

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In simple words, I think that the Creator wishes to have other individual divine Beings who can be His friends with whom He can share the content of His own reality, with whom He can enter into conversation, understanding and discussion about possible experiments in living, in trying to go beyond the understanding that God has already, which to us, at our stage of development, seems infinite, but this is obviously only a relative term, and is not infinite to the Creator’s possible understanding.

(...) 

I believe that it is in the nature of all healthy spirits, all healthy individuals, to want to achieve spiritual goals. And those goals, when we look at them closely, are always goals which are impossibly difficult to reach.

They are goals which are endless goals; they are goals which are concerned with the ultimate perception of the most valuable and beautiful things which, when we reach them, will only incline us to look for more beautiful and more valuable things...

Therefore I think the Creator wishes to have friends, not only to share the delights of friendship with, but also friends who will help Him with the sort of exploration, the sort of experimental living out of life, which will enable us all to stumble upon new potentialities within that reality which we call the Absolute Divine Nature.

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We can suggest that the Creator is aware that there are potentialities in nature which have not yet been fully actualised.

He also realises that He needs other beings to help Him to permutate, as it were, all the possibilities of the potentialities in that nature.

That is why He wishes to share His nature with us, and give us a nature similar to His own as an outright gift for us to use in our own way; so that each of us actualises it in a uniquely different way.

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Note added: 

My feeling is that Bill Arkle was making an extremely important point here. Something of potentially great value to all Christians - but perhaps especially Mormons.

That while on the one had God does not need for there to be Men, he very much wants for there to be Men; and that this desire is partly the desire for Children, and beyond that the desire for (adult) friends; and even beyond that - that Men have the potential actually to assist in the divine plan: that God can achieve things with the help of Men that could not be achieved (so well ) otherwise. 

This implies that the creation and salvation of Man was not a gratuitous act; but part of a plan - a multi-phase and indeed infinite plan which is, in its bottom-line and ultimate nature - about society, about relationships, about love.

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Ultimate reality is a personal-y thing; not a physics-y thing. 

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Graph to show 38 milliseconds difference between predicted and observed slowing in simple reaction times with age

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Circles and dotted lines are actually observed reaction times in three longitudinal cohorts aged 16-12, 36-44 and 56-63.

Crosses and solid lines show the predicted slowing of simple reaction times across a lifespan of 16-63 years old.

Shorter reaction times correlate with higher general intelligence (IQ) - so this means that actually observed 63 year olds were (38 milliseconds of sRT) more-intelligent than would be expected if they had aged at the expected rate.

Which probably means that the 56-63 year old cohort were significantly more-intelligent than the 16-24 year old cohort, when they were the same age.

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/further-evidence-of-significant-slowing.html

One of the best books I have ever read: The Glory of their Times by Lawrence S Ritter

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Of course you have to like baseball - actually you have to love baseball (even if you are not an expert on it) - but given that qualification Lawrence S Ritter's The Glory of their Times (1966, revised 1984) is one of the very best modern books I have read - and I mean 'best' from a literary point of view.

It consists of Ritter's edited versions of interviews with twenty-six ball players from the late 19th early 20th century - describing in their own words their lives in and around baseball. I find it beautiful, completely enjoyable, funny, moving and just extremely interesting!

I probably read it about 9 years ago (not long after I got interested in baseball) and it has stayed with me - in terms of a strong flavour, an emotional memory and specific details - ever since. I am currently re-reading, and it is every bit as good as I remembered.

The Glory of their Times has stayed with me, therefore, in way that very few novels or plays ever have (and I speak as someone with an MA in English - thus pretty well-read in that field).

And this fact fuels a conviction - or rather two of them - that has grown on me over recent decades.

1. Much of the best literature is outwith the usual categories of novels, plays and poems.

2. Much of the best literature is the product not of great writers, but one-hit-wonders.

As a further example, Akenfield by Ronald Blythe is a somewhat similar book to GotT - in the sense that the meat of it consists of edited interviews with inhabitants of a composite East Anglian English Village circa 1968 - providing a portrait stretching back about a hundred years of oral history.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/akenfield-and-tippett.html

Blythe has written a lot of other good things, but Akenfield really stands out.

English-speaking literature is in fact full of these (usually) one-off  'non- fiction' first rate classics - The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, Brief Lives by John Aubrey, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, Walden by Henry Thoreau, Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, Ceremonial Time by John Hanson Mitchell, to mention a few favourites.

I would take a dozen of these and their like in preference to the output of any specific big name novelist you could care to name, whether great or minor.

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Individuation - Jung's idea

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For CG Jung individuation was the purpose of life.

It is hard to be exact about what he meant by this - it was a lifelong process of self-creation and self-therapy - a project of re-making the worldly self in conformity with the inner self.

The inner self has an unique aspect - the individuality - and a common aspect shared with other people - the collective unconscious of archetypal forms and stories.

Well, all this gives people something to do with their lives - to 'work on themselves' - and it is quite possible that doing so makes people feel better than otherwise. But of course it isn't going anywhere and it doesn't provide any link with anybody else - life becomes a matter of 'memories, dreams. reflections'.

(Which is the title of Jung's purported autobiography - mostly a highly-selective work written by Aniela Jaffe with a propagandistic eye for Jung's posthumous reputation - it also happens to be far more enjoyable and interesting than anything Jung ever wrote by-himself!)

So, Jung's project is on the one hand radically inadequate - leaving all the fundamental problems un-addressed hence un-solved; and on the other hand, radically selfish (not to mention idle).

Yet Jung's project ought to be part-of a viable, satisfying, therapeutic, engaging religion in the modern world - partial for sure, but that part worth having. 

Lacking-which we have religion as social control; something external, coercive, alienating - something that boils-down-to do this: don't do that.

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Deep sea divers - a metaphor of mortal earthy life

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The Platonists have it that on Earth we have glimpses of the ideal Heavely realm of perfection, but we see it only through a glass, darkly.

Another idea is that we recall our pre-mortal existence but only through a veil of forgetfulness - the veil being translucent, not transparent - us perceiving only shapes and shadows.

But maybe our mortal life down here is most like being a deep sea diver; our light swift spirits encased inside a protective suit; slowly pushing-through a dense medium; held-down by leaden boots; peering-out through a thick, barred porthole - and the divine communications faint and distorted by having to reach us via a long, thick, rubber tube...

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Mainstream Right wing journalism

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Some modern Leftist lunacy is noted, described and analyzed in terms of causation - there is an implicit and unspecific appeal - demand, even - that this-time, now, 'we' do something about it (really do something about it).

Perhaps there is a momentary lift of spirits from reading robust and witty polemic; and a flicker of optimism that now 'we' know about it, and understand what is going-on - then 'we' can work together to... well... put a stop to this kind of thing, and do some other and better kind of thing... or something.

Trouble is that there is no we - just a handful of individuals who are recurrently being set-back and demoralized by the repeated recognition that there is no 'we' but only (to all intents and purposes) me.

So yes to analysis and understanding causation - but we, or should I say me - are going to stop pretending there is a we, and stop vaguely-hoping that we will do something about anything.

Witty polemic doth not make a we. 

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Why are things-in-general set-up the way they are?

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Christians have several kinds of explanation for why things-in-general set-up the way they are:

1. They could not be otherwise.

2. This is the best way. (Things could be otherwise, but this is the best of the alternatives.)

3. This is the best that can be managed, at the moment, given the constraints.

The third explanation sees God as working within constraints such as time, process and substance - also the existence of purposive evil (Satan and demonic activity).

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The kind of answer we are looking for to this question of why things-in-general are set-up he way they are also varies.

1. A physics-type reason in terms of fundamental structures and processes. This is the view of Classical Theology.

2. A relationship-type reason in terms of the purposes, desires, affections and aversions, wishes and needs of the personages involved. This is the view of Mormonism.

3. A psychological/ therapeutic reason to do with individual well-being. This the the view of Liberal 'Christians'. 

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The first day of a new era for British Christians

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Alastair Roberts valuably clarifies the consequences:

http://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2014/03/29/on-the-legalization-of-same-sex-marriage-in-england-and-wales

Comments are closed. 

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Book of Mormon - Mormon 5:

17 They were once a delightsome people, and they had Christ for their shepherd; yea, they were led even by God the Father. 18 But now, behold, they are led about by Satan, even as chaff is driven before the wind, or as a vessel is tossed about upon the waves, without sail or anchor, or without anything wherewith to steer her; and even as she is, so are they.

Reincarnation - three explanatory functions

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1. Animism - reincarnation is the unending circulation and transformation of a finite number of immortal souls through multiple sentient entities - this circulation and transformation is  'life' itself.

2. Eastern Hinduism/ Buddhism/ Jainism - reincarnation is the purpose of life: reincarnation is a punishment. Life is suffering, but death is not an escape unless or until multiple lives have educated the soul to die and escape reincarnation, when individual self-hood is extinguished and reabsorbed into the primary energies.

3. Modern New Age-ism - reincarnation is the purpose of life: reincarnation is an ascent towards divinity; necessary because one life is not enough to accomplish all the learning and spiritual progression needed to bridge between the human and the divine.

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Christians, I take it, believe that reincarnation simply does not happen, at least not as a norm; although I don't think Christians would regard reincarnation as absolutely impossible, if it was necessary in some way to God's purposes - which means it might have happened, but exceptionally and not as a standard part of God's basic plan of salvation. 

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First Ever Group Portrait of The Inklings of Oxford - major artistic discovery...

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http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/my-attempt-at-group-portrait-of-inklings.html
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We must become as little children - but then we may choose to grow-up

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Matthew 18:3. And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 

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I feel that this is the best possible advice for the jaded and corrupted modern Man - to become again as a little child; become again as you were when (as I think almost all children feel) the world was alive, the soul was immortal, everything was potentially meaningful and significant - and God was like a loving Father, and Jesus like a protecting Big Brother, and the Holy Ghost could be summoned as an invisible presence.

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However it is conceptualized, a return to childlikeness is dangerous to the strategy of evil, because it reopens the possibility of a fresh start. 

In contrast with becoming a child again, evil wants us to be concerned about being cool, or hot; or sophisticated or impressive - evil is permanent adolescence and sophomoric pseudo-sophistication.  

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Becoming as a child is to be equated with salvation - anyone who is as-a-child is saved; because salvation was achieved for us by Jesus, and all we need to do is accept the great gift (a gift with necessary conditions) - and no child or child-like person would be so foolish as to reject salvation (whereas a cool/ hot sophisticate is exactly the kind of person who rejects the real good and argues that evil is the real good - all the time).  

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Becoming as a child may be the end of the matter - we may return to God as a child (but with experience of incarnate mortality), we may choose to stay as a child in our Heavenly relationship with God. 

Or we may embark upon the path of growing-up spiritually - the path of theosis/ sanctification/ spiritual progression towards 'adulthood' which is god-hood (not capital G Godhood - because there is One God; but a small 'g' Son of God godhood - which can be conceptualized as living as a mature adult in Heaven in terms of our relationship to deity. 

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Our Heavenly relationship to God and to Jesus Christ - the God-Man relationship - may therefore metaphorically be imagined on a spectrum from being an adult-child relationship for those who are simply saved, to an adult-adult relationship for those who are saved and also chose to undergo theosis conceptualized as maturation - those who have reached a sufficiently advanced point in that maturing process become more like adults in their relationship with God - while presumably others are in the intermediate 'youth' phase, and probably we may choose to stop at various points on the path (some indeed remaining perpetual Heavenly youths).  

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So we must become as little children - but then we may, or may not, choose to embark on the further path of theosis (which is a path of struggle against resistance); and we may choose to progress on that path to varying degrees (and we will have varying rates of progress). 

Salvation is necessary (since the alternative is horrible), but theosis is optional and multi-level.

We must first be God's children; and we don't have-to grow up; and we don't have to grow-up more than we want to - but surely God Himself wants most for us to grow-up to spiritual adulthood - to have some Men with whom He has an adult relationship.   

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