Aaron's rod

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AARON'S ROD
direction, he too had believed that the final achievement, the
consummation of human life, was this flinging oneself over
the precipice, down the bottomless pit of love. Now he
realised that love, even in its intensest, was only an attribute
of the human soul: one of its incomprehensible gestures.
And to fling down the whole soul in one gesture of finality
in love was as much a criminal suicide as to jump off a
church-tower or a mountain-peak. Let a man give himself
as much as he liked in love, to seven thousand extremities,
he must never give himself away. The more generous and
the more passionate a soul, the more it gives itself. But the
more absolute remains the law, that it shall never give itself
away. Give thyself, but give thyself not away. That is the
lesson written at the end of the long strange lane of love.
The idee fixe of today is that every individual shall not
only give himself, but shall achieve the last glory of giving
himself away. And since this takes two you can't even
make a present of yourself unless you've got somebody to
receive the present; since this last extra-divine act takes two
people to perform it, you've got to take into count not only
your giver but your receiver. Who is going to be the giver
and who the receiver.
Why, of course, in our long-drawn-out Christian day, man is
/ given and woman is recipient. Man is the gift, woman the
receiver. This is the sacrament we live by; the holy Communion
we live for. That man gives himself to woman in an
utter and sacred abandon, all, all, all himself given, and
taken. Woman, eternal woman, she is the communicant.
She receives the sacramental body and spirit of the man.
And when she's got it, according to her passionate and all-
too-sacred desire, completely, when she possesses her man at
last finally and ultimately, without blemish or reservation in
the perfection of the sacrament: then, also, poor woman, the
blood and the body of which she has partaken become insipid
or nauseous to her, she is driven mad by the endless meal of
the marriage sacrament, poisoned by the sacred communion
which was her goal and her soul's ambition.
We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any