Teaching-Learning Devotion -- Is There a Better Word?

We need a new word or phrase in our over-sexed, media-saturated culture to describe the physical sensations and cognitive overwhelm of devotion. At this point, this term refers to that generative, holistic, even holy, driving force of connection that reaches outside the self toward expressive delight, what some scholars call “a horizon of ultimate meaning.” Others of us settle for “wholeness” or “fullness of life” given specific articulation in distinct traditions of religious heritage. This force is often observed between spiritual teachers and their students, professors and their graduate students, spiritual companions who find themselves sharing a path, or those who have married or are in a covenant with one another. If and when it happens on an intentional (or unintentional) spiritual path, the unsuspecting recipients have few, if any, categories or tools with which to make sense of the experience. It may be just fleeting too, like in an exchange of strangers that startles new awareness of life’s fullness. Such things happen all the time as seeds to awakening. Without frameworks of sense-making, so many of us miss the beautiful force of Life devotion is, how it connects those who are different and similar in its web of compassion for all. Instead, we seem to live, captivated, in a media-saturated, love-hungry popular culture, starving itself from the healthy generativity it requires for survival. A teacher of mine called this the “sex charade” and its “loss of intimacy,” but I think there’s more than just sex and intimacy. A new word or phrase won’t get at this “more,” nor will it change the cultural poverty, of course. But it would sure ease my own mind a bit. It would open a crack to seeing the fullness of life that surrounds us all, even amidst overwhelming turmoil that is the daily news. That’s not nothing.

In full blossom, the sensation and cognitive overwhelm of devotion is not unlike “falling in love,” but that phrase is inaccurate and imprecise on so many levels to almost make it useless. First of all, it’s often suspect to fall in love unless it is within socially acceptable norms of gender pairing, orientation expression, biological comforts. “Falling in love” describes a state so desirable for many, yet also so contentious. With whom? What is his/her biology—same or hetero to yours? In what standing (legal or otherwise)? In what sort of community of others? We seem to have created a cultural setting in which it’s a political statement—perhaps even dangerous—to fall in love. How did we get here, and how do we brave connections of life with others within and beyond our established ‘norms’? What a strange world we live in, where it’s socially and politically suspect to “fall in love.”

Part of the issue here, of course, is that “falling in love” has primarily sexual connotations in common parlance. What I mean by devotion, in contrast, is not primarily sexual in nature, though it does have erotic and/or sensual nuance. A description that arose recently was “a sensation and unruly overwhelm of cognition by a beautiful, frightening, wonderful force of Life that seems to come from elsewhere even as it is irrepressibly intimate in body.” Devotion, like sex, is a body thing. It is irrepressibly intimate, attractive, enlivening of body and mind, opening of heart and spirit. Unlike sexuality's common associations, however, devotion can flow easily between persons who never touch one another, physically, at all. Devotion can be sensed in a gentle gaze offered, not demanded; received, not refused. Eyes, a gentling physicality, healing energies—all beckon this sensual, erotic but non-sexual phenomonen of devotion.

It need not be—one might even say ought not to be—captivated by our culture’s social norms of monogamy either. Because it is a force for Life, without attachment or need, it overflows human beings as a force of connection and transformation. Unlike sex, which seems to require intensely care-filled and mutually negotiated boundaries in any society I know, devotion is most powerful when allowed, shared, without specification, without demand for return. Philosopher Jean-Luc Marion describes what I mean with his erotic phenomenon in which a love without being grows in direct proportion to the reduction of reciprocity and insufficiency of reason. Devotion grows when there is no necessary expectation for return, for reciprocation. It is a free gift offered into the world, rooted only in its own erotic rationality. Not that of provision and consumption, certainty and truth, but instead, an unexpectedly answered quest for assurance, a discovery that when one learns to love first, devotion arises.  When one lives into attempts to love first, to love without expectation or attachment, abundance grows everywhere.

This is an impossible human journey, of course. As soon as devotion breathes into unexpected places in human life, human minds and spirits attempt to hold onto it, to grasp it, to earn it. We conceive social norms to socialize any erotic, sensual phenomenon for steadying control, and this steadying is good. Except when it causes us to forget the connective and compassionate work devotion does regardless of tradition or belief. Captivating it, attempting to place it within socialized norms of sexuality, misdirects its energies. Then, this force for Life intended to be shared without specification with all becomes a hothouse plant unable to bear any fruit at all.

Another complication is that devotion is irreparably particular, connected with the uniqueness of a human person and his/her narrative, struggles, way of being in the world. Devotion requires an individual willing to open heart and mind to another whereby the Life between them becomes Real and liberating for them both as they live it into the world around them. It is exquisitely intimate, therefore, but free. This does not mean without cost of course. It’s a wisdom path that de-stabilizes as it grows, transforming all who walk it. But it is freely chosen. It is free to share and be shared, to shape and be shaped by others’ mind(s) and wisdom.

All this arises from a relatively recent "new hypothesis" in my life and embodied self: perhaps it's not a shameful thing to feel this force of devotion from time to time—a sensate-spirited, even erotic love—for others known and unknown. Perhaps it's even a most holy gift that has been too heavy for me to hold in awareness until now. I have wrestled with my body and its sensate communications with me for decades. A sensate awakening when I was six so overwhelmed me, especially within a cultural context of body-shaming for young women, that the only logical thing to do was disconnect, dissociate from these unruly feelings of connection with others (both boys and girls). Dating life was sporadic but gifted—high school crushes, preliminary explorations of sexual expression—but again, the intensity of experience created need to dissociate and vow utterly willed control of this shameful force of attraction, yearning to connect. Integrative work in young adulthood, through clinical training for a ministry profession, opened doors to the primary relational commitment of my life, marriage to a dear friend now lover. “That should take care of it,” I thought to myself. But it only intensified the outward reach of what I now know as this devotion. Within the ultimate commitment to another, to this one I know as my home-mate, a stability of cognitive and embodied expressiveness has seemed to shape a container or channel of sorts to share this gift of connection, within limits, with others both known and unknown. Sexual ethics lie at the heart of this force of devotion, but the force refuses to be contained in my socialized mind. We find ourselves in the strange predicament of ultimate commitment to each other and a sense of radical covenant and companionship with multiple others.

Why has it taken so long to allow the force of devotion to overflow, to sustain its current within my body and mind? When will I learn to see, at least with more regularity, that the societal shaming and resistance I know within and beyond my own mental-voices speak a deep cultural yearning for the fullness that only devotion can provide?

Maybe when we have a word or phrase to describe the abundant gift and conceptual overwhelm that is devotion for another, for the world.

Until then, collaborative poetry will have to suffice.


The divine bows to itself, multiplying its wisdom in the overflow.
Do not struggle. Do not strain to name that which cannot be, but love.
Embody it. Sculpt it. Sculpt it in yourself with others until you see
Non-self everywhere, opening to the night air, moon above,
Warm air surrounding nature and God in abundant devotion.