Homer and the Sacred Fire
By Annie Crawford
Over spring break, I spoke to parents and students in Houston about how to help to recover a sacred understanding of human sexuality. We live in a world that has destroyed the meaning of sex and turned the body into a mere tool for pleasure.
Meaning comes through stories, and the story that captures our imagination will determine the way we live in the world. We become the stories we tell, so we need to be telling ourselves and our children the sacred story of sexuality again and again in a hundred different beautiful ways so it might become real to their minds and hearts.
Let’s start now. Here is a very old, enduring story you can read with your family tonight.
There once was a great Greek warrior named Odysseus, who sailed away from his home in Ithaca to help his allies defeat the corrupted city of Troy. An old prophecy in Troy had warned that Paris, the young prince of Troy, would one day burn down the city. Paris believed the prophecy meant he would set Troy on fire metaphorically with his love. He abducted Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, who also happened to be the wife of the Greek prince, Menelaus. The Greeks came to recover Helen, and after ten years of battle, they indeed burned Troy to the ground.
After helping lead the Greeks to victory, Odysseus sets sail on his ships to return home after the war, but is tormented by the vengeful gods. He is lost at sea for another ten years—unable to return to his faithful wife and son, who are struggling to fight off invaders at home.
After twenty long years of longing for Odysseus to return, his wife, Penelope, is running out of hope. She has defended her home and delayed her pursuers as long as she could. Finally, at the very last hour, just in time to stop his wife and home from being taken over, Odysseus finally returns.
Now, if he marched right into Ithaca, the invaders would simply outnumber and kill him, so Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar and enters the palace secretly. With the help of an old loyal servant and his now-adult son, Odysseus arranges for all the invaders to gather in a locked banquet hall for dinner, without their weapons.
While waiting for dinner, to prove their right to take over Odysseus’s house and wife, the invaders dare each other to string Odysseus’s great legendary bow, a bow that no other man was thought strong enough to use. At this climactic moment, Odysseus stands at the front of the hall and reveals himself by stringing the great bow. His son and servant leap out from behind the draperies, and together they slaughter every last weaponless invader trapped in the hall. The mighty warrior king has finally come home.
Penelope is astonished and glad, yet it has been so long since she saw Odysseus, twenty years stolen from his prime of life! How can she be sure it is really him and not some impostor or trick of the vengeful gods? The ever faithful Penelope declares that she will not sleep with a man whose identity is unsure, so she offers to move Odysseus’s royal bed into another chamber for him to use until she can be sure that he is truly her long lost, beloved husband.
Odysseus cries out in rage and grief: “Woman! What have you done! Why have you destroyed our marriage bed? How could you have done this to me!?”
You see, when Odysseus married Penelope and built their palace home on the island of Ithaca, he built their bed out of an old living olive tree, still firmly rooted into the ground at the center of the house. Their marriage bed could not be moved without destroying it, for the whole palace was secretly built around this rooted bed, which no one but Odysseus and Penelope knew.
Overjoyed, Penelope burst into tears and ran straight to Odysseus, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his head and crying, “The gods sent us misery, but now we will have joy!”
The Iliad and the Odyssey are great stories, favorites for nearly 3,000 years, because they reveal an essential, eternal, inviolable truth: the marriage bed is the foundation of society and civilization. Destroy God’s firm design for sexuality, as Paris did, and you will destroy the world; preserve the faithful marriage bed, as Penelope did, and you will restore the world.
Ironically, Paris was right; he did burn down Troy with his adulterous love. Sexuality is a powerful fire. Song of Solomon tells us that “love is strong as death, . . . Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord.”
Fire can be good. The ancient myths tell us it was the gift of fire that enabled humans to build civilization – to harness the energy of creation so they could cook and weld and build. Without heat and energy, we can’t live much better than animals. But fire is also dangerous; it can burn down everything in its path, leaving nothing but formless ashes.
Placed securely in the proper place—the hearth or fireplace of the home—fire will heat the whole house, provide energy for cooking, and gather the family together with its dancing light and warmth. But when the fire breaks outside the hearth, it will destroy.
This is why God clearly and repeatedly instructs his people in both the Old Testament and the New Testament to flee sexual immorality and keep the marriage bed holy. Sexual desire creates very powerful physical, emotional, mental, spiritual bonds.
When kept within the hearth of God’s design, sex gives life and light and warmth and joy to the whole home; it is the power that fuels the family and builds civilization. When we let sexuality spill outside the marriage bed, that deeply rooted center of the world, it corrodes relationships and destroys the bonds of community.
Stories like the Odyssey help us recover the meaning of our own sexuality. We identify with the characters and imaginatively experience the consequences of their actions. We grieve the destruction brought by Paris and feel the joy of Odysseus’s reunion with Penelope. Through such stories, we see that our individual choices both affect others and form our own ultimate destiny.
We realize that we can and must choose which story we will live – the story of Helen and Paris or the story of Penelope and Odysseus. We can choose to live like the world, fanning the fire that is breaking our world apart, or we can live like faithful Penelope and preserve ourselves and our homes by honoring the marriage bed and keeping it holy.
—Annie Crawford is a cultural apologist and classical educator with a Master of Arts in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University. She teaches apologetics and humanities courses and is co-founder of The Society for Women of Letters where she serves as Senior Fellow. She has written for Salvo, The Symbolic World, Circe Institute, The Worldview Bulletin, Classical Academic Press, and An Unexpected Journal. Learn more at anniecrawford.net.