Can there be intimacy without healing?
I have tendered this theme before in the title link above, and having just re-read that article I find that all the nuances of that question are not yet tapped. The whole of my peter fox website is in fact an exploration of that singular question.
Simultaneously, I am reading 'Michelangelo and The Reinvention of the Human body' by James Hall. He explores the ice maiden theme in Michelangelo's sculptures of the Madonna. It reprises the same pattern found in Dante's relationship with his Beatrice - whose rejection could turned him into ice. Hall asks how could a mother, herself divine and 'knowing' her child's fate, allow him to go to his destiny on the cross. There is no evidence in the exquisite marble of Michelangelo's sculture that Mary doubted her role in bringing to life a child, later a Rabbi who would die horribly after only a four year ministry.
Michelangelo challenged the sweetness and light of the then and now prevailing Madonna icons (reflected today in a construction of marriage - wife a Madonna, lover a whore) by presenting her as having held herself at a distance with a self-sacrificing nobility. Her tenderness is unavailable to the viewer. Could you imagine that Madonna indulging in baby talk?
Her vulnerability only begins to show in the moment captured by the Pieter of 1498-9 pictured above, as if an iceberg had just begun to melt. It seems Michelangelo's Madonna must have had a source of self-sustaining intimacy from the outset. No doubts about her value as 'The Mother' nor any disconnection from that knowing in her self. Nor any passionate relationship with her man - a virgin (which, of course in contemporary translations of the Aramaic reads as an unmarried pregnant woman not an immaculate conception).
The utter exposure and vulnerability of her child collapsed in her arms in the Pieter points to a heart opening truth for those who have kept themselves at a distance from intimacy - you only know what you've got when you lost it. It is also a moment that is available in marriage - a healing without that burden of messiah, crucifixion or gender.
However, it is not safe to be so utterly exposed and vulnerable to a person who holds themselves at that kind of distance until you're dead. But guess what, it happens in marriages, especially those with this as a model of intimacy.
