Doxa on Eros

How are these deep God-given desires made manifest, what are the channels where these deep energies flow?  Some that I can identify are:

• Intimacy - We are made for intimate relationship, ultimately with God, but including the forms of human intimacy - romance, friendship, and marriage.
• Community - Being human means forming concrete communities; social and political community, the community of the baptised, the People of God.
• Compassion - Realizing that the Other, is not an other, coming to identify with the stranger, the sick, the poor, the prisoner. the small ones of God.
• Joy - our recognition that God's spirit dwells in us, that we loved and valued

It is in these ways, in these areas that God calls and we respond, we are pulled both out and further into ourselves and we search to find what or who is pulling us onward. These  channels  for our searching, ascending love, our eros, are also the ways that God's answering, expanding agape reaches down to and through us into the world.

Our expression of these ways is subject to certain constraints or qualities that condition how we respond. It must be:

• personal  
• intentional - voluntary for a reason with understanding
• incarnate
• bound by time and place
• embedded in a social and cultural context.

A note on some Greek words -- we have already been discussing eros.  Another such Greek word is doxa, the root word for such terms as orthodoxy and heterodoxy.  In this context, it means the structure of experience and belief that we construct as we gain experience in the spiritual life. Propelled by eros, based on doxa we move to the third Greek word, praxis.