"The feminist theologian Carter Heyward (1988) claims that the passion of sexuality is what also awakens in us a passion for justice and right relationships across the entire spectrum of life and meaning. According to Brock (1992, 40), 'The erotic compels us to be hungry for justice at our very depth because we are response-able. We are able to reject what makes us numb to the suffering and self-hate of others.'
"As distinct from the apatheia (passionlessness) advocated from earliest Christian times, today we experience the call of the gospel as a call to life, to the wholeness that is released by living interdependently in our world. The passion within and the passion without synchronize in whole new ways. In the words of the black feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde (see Plaskow and Christ 1989, 213), 'Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to purse genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.'
"While pride and passion were one time construed as the road to perdition — more accurately key feminine values that the patriarchal culture could not tolerate — today apathy and indifference are the cancerous parasites of our age, and as John O'Donohue (1997, 91) astutely remarks
"indifference is necessary for power; to hold control one has to be successfully indifferent to the needs and vulnerabilities of those under control. Thus, indifference calls for a great commitment to non-vision . . . When you become indifferent, you give all your power away. Your imagination becomes fixated in the limbo of cynicism and despair.
"Meanwhile our passionate energy is either numbed or dissipated amid the plethora of lurid and empty promises. The engagement with pleasure and pain is often reduced to the 'satisfaction' of a quick fix, a fleeting sensation that procures neither intimacy nor justice. The way out is not more control over our sex drive, but a radical reappropriation of who we really are as people gifted with passionate and erotic creativity."
