Cannibalism is the practice of killing one’s enemy in order to harvest and then eat the body part the killer envies. It is usually one of the major organs, organs which people consider the center of the person’s character, like the heart, or a large organ like the liver.
The rationale is that if I want the characteristic that makes my enemy brave or strong or fierce, I can transfer that quality to myself by eating the organ where it resides.
In the world today, we have something I think is analogous to cannibalism, in a moral sense: homosexuality. Homosexuality is–at its deepest essence, hurt, and longing–an attempt to find one’s
own gender wholeness. It is idolatrous in that it makes the object of desire an icon of perfection.
“I can be whole if I just have that perfect example of masculinity or femininity.”
But the whole process is a delusion, just like in the mythological story of the hunter Narcissus, from which we get the word ‘narcissistic,’ obsession with oneself. Narcissus was stuck at the pool enraptured with himself his whole life, and just before his death realized that his love could not be fulfilled.
It is eerily prophetic in that he was said to have been lured there because he had refused love to the woman Echo, a mountain nymph. So in a sense, homosexuality is an attempt to find love in an ‘echo’ of oneself, rather than the Echo (compatible opposite) that exists in nature.
The answer to moral cannibalism is not easy, but it is true: finding wholeness in one’s relationship to the one who is absolutely the model of paragon perfection: Jesus Christ; and whose love brings a person beyond gender identity or struggle, intimately deeper than sexuality, and closer even than one’s mirrored reflection.
Then the question “Who’s there?” will result in not an echo but an answer, “It is I; do not be afraid.”
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