"Eros once lit the stars—
a holy ache in the fabric of things,
pulling cosmos from chaos,
and Adam toward Eve.
She moved through gardens
with oil on her hair
and honey on her lips.
She called in the night,
not with noise,
but with longing.
A whisper,
a calling.
Come.
She was there
when Adam first turned toward Eve—
not to name,
not to tame,
but to behold.
Flesh of my flesh.
Bone of my bone.
The first liturgy of wonder
spoken in the language of touch.
But now—
we live in the age of forgetting.
The world has been mapped,
measured,
monetized.
Desire is tagged and tracked.
Every ache is answered
with an advert.
We no longer seek—we scroll.
We no longer ache—we click.
We no longer rise at midnight
to search the city for the One—
we settle
for mirrors and phantoms.
Even love
has lost its scent.
No longer spiced with mystery,
or slow as song,
but made instant,
hollow,
and safe.
Eros—
once the fire that drew Moses to the bush,
once the cry of the psalmist
panting for streams of living water—
has been reduced to appetite
and buried beneath shame.
But eros is older than shame.
She is the breath of transcendence—
a trembling of the soul
toward beauty,
toward communion,
toward God.
She is the pull
between lovers who have waited,
who have vowed,
who have weathered storms
and still reach for one another
with reverence.
But she is also there—
in the clasped hands of friends
who share soul-deep laughter
and carry one another’s pain.
In the artist’s ache to name the unnameable.
In the silence shared by pilgrims
beneath a darkened sky.
In the fierce joy of solidarity,
and the holy solitude
where longing turns to prayer.
She is tenderness that knows
both wound and healing,
both ache and joy,
both fire and fidelity.
In covenant,
she becomes holy flame—
not transaction,
not performance,
but presence.
Body and soul,
offered and received
in trust,
in truth,
in time.
And beyond the veil of flesh—
she becomes sacrament.
A glimpse of divine desire,
a shadow of the feast to come,
a whisper of the Bridegroom’s voice
in every act of love
that honors the other as mystery.
But the dragon still whispers
from within the pixel and the algorithm.
He sings songs of disembodiment.
He names our ache “weakness”
and sells it back as illusion.
He tells us to grasp,
to gorge,
to objectify.
He disenchants.
He digitizes.
He devours.
And so the chaos deepens.
Bodies become currency.
Desire becomes commerce.
Love becomes contract.
And Eve is left
scrolling through shadows,
longing to be seen again.
But I remember Eden—
not as a myth,
but as memory.
A place of first touch,
first gaze,
first ache—
where eros and agape
walked hand in hand
through a garden not yet guarded
by shame.
And I remember the Song,
hidden deep in the Scriptures,
where God is not only Shepherd
or King
but Lover.
Where the voice of the Beloved
calls not from the temple,
but from the thicket,
where desire meets delight.
Christian faith
was never meant
to be managed.
It was meant to burn.
To ache.
To kiss the feet of the Beloved
with tears and oil.
To say with trembling lips:
I found the one my soul loves.
So let eros wake in me again—
not to consume,
but to commune.
Not to possess,
but to praise.
Not to flatten,
but to follow.
Let her fire lead me
through the silence,
through the wilderness,
through covenantal tenderness
and mystical prayer,
through friendship and faithfulness,
through longing that never needs to be named,
to the place where the veil is torn
and the Lover still speaks
in the language of longing.
Arise,
she says.
Come away.
And I—
soul stirred,
flesh sanctified,
spirit singing—
go.
- Rev’d Jon Swales, as part of a collection called ‘Desire’
