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Torn Between Two Lovers, Feelin' Like a Fool
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10483 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
1,922 Words |
| Author
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Richard Quebedeaux
Richard Quebedeaux is a senior consultant for the
International Religious Foundation in New York. He is the
author of The New Charismatics II (1983), By What Authority:
The Rise of Personality Cults in American Christianity (1982),
I Found It! The Story of Bill Bright and Campus Crusade
(1979), and The Worldly Evangelicals (1978). |
"Is it better to have fun with a kinky man or to be gloomy with a good one?" Colleen Sweeney is the central character in Gail Donohue Storey's first novel, The Lord's Motel, and the aforementioned question, which Colleen asks at the start of the first chapter, tells it all. Indeed, it often is the case that asking the right question is more important than getting the right answer, and in this book, good questions figure far more prominently than answers of any kind.
In a word, The Lord's Motel is the story of one woman's search for "true love" in an era when that kind of love has lost its meaning. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s was, in part, the glorification of erotic love over all other forms of love, including agape, the self-giving brotherly and sisterly love discussed so profoundly in the New Testament and in the writings of C.S. Lewis and Erich Fromm. Today, if one is to believe television, the movies, and the print media, love and sex are indistinguishable, and having sex is the only real way to "make love."
We can argue, also, that the sexual revolution was one aspect of the growth of selfishness in contemporary society at a time in which physical gratification--so empirical and quantifiable-- came to be the best "evidence" of love. Its spiritual components were lost with the further secularization of the United States, not only in business, government, and education, but also in religion itself, as indicated so convincingly by the carnal antics of televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker and many other ministers of the gospel less famous than they.
This is not to say that there in anything wrong with the celebration of erotic love per se, but when physical love replaces spiritual love, instead of joining it, something very important is lost the transcendent character of it all. Is it better to have fun with a good one? May be the truth of the matter is that erotic love is incomplete without spiritual love. Maybe it's not the case that good love derives from good sex--as we are so often led to believe--but that good sex derives from good love, or true love, as it used to be called. Colleen Sweeney's quest shows us that erotic love alone leaves women and men incomplete and unfulfilled in their wanton self-seeking until the spirit joins it and enlivens it with transcendence. Maybe she doesn't have to choose between carnal fun and good character in one man. Maybe she can have them both.
The first part of The Lord's Motel demonstrates to us that Colleen may, in fact, understand the nature of true love,
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