Ian McEwen's Enduring Love

A gay Jesus freak stalks a secularist, straight, middle-aged man. You can tell right away it ain't gonna work. But as you watch this crash in slow motion, you experience all the textures, shadows, colors, and sounds of a dysfunctionality that is both sexual and religious.

It starts with a tragic accident in the Chilterns where science writer Joe Rose sees a hot-air balloon tossed by the wind; there's a boy trapped in its basket. Joe joins the effort to bring the balloon to safety, as does a young loner, Jed Parry. Quickly obsessed with Joe, Jed mistakes his uncontrolled feelings as a divine calling to bring Joe to God. That destructive, pseudo-religious mission tests the limits of Joe's beloved rationalism, threatens the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drives him to the brink of murder and madness. It's goodbye real love, hello Fatal Attraction--but with a religious twist.

In an appendix, McEwen reflects: "It is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology." He got that right. And these days the pathological forms of both sex and religion are hard to miss. Think of the heart-breaking stories of domestic violence and child abuse. Or the many pseudo- religious "missions" that end up crushing both bodies and spirits--Bush's war in Iraq, for example, or the crusades against gay equality.

But here's the amazing thing: Given the many possible distortions of both sex and religion, most of the time we still manage to get them right. Despite its pathological forms, as San Francisco writer Mark Morford states, sex still "shoots huge gobs of endorphins and raw divine energy" into our ids, raises our kundalini, inspires awareness of the cosmos. It reveals "the interconnectedness of all things from all time in all places everywhere." And despite the many religious nuts running around these days, the genuinely religious missions of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and the slain Jesuits in El Salvador still inspire our own smaller efforts to make the world a little kinder and lovelier.

We don't always get sex and religion right as McEwen so vividly observes. But sometimes we do. And in those moments, we humans are nothing short of magnificent!