title: Beloveds
author: Kroncke, Francis
description: Nick and Karen, two small town Minnesota kids, meet during a college visit to San Diego State. He is a star athlete. She a budding Mesoamerican archaeology student. As he rises to fame, she struggles with the sexual and spiritual implications of the polytheistic Aztec mythology which has numerous, both wondrous and fearsome, female deities. She flees back to Minnesota. After plundering the sexual benefits of being a collegiate hero, he returns and they marry. She promotes a rigid, biblically fundamentalist story about the divinity of male dominion. As a woman, it is her role to enable Nick to exercise dominion. Just as she starts to abandon this notion, she dies in a car accident. Nick is forlorn; a dysfunctional father for their twin children. He sends them off to college in California, and, unknown as to her relationship with Karen, he develops a relationship with Nona, her therapist. Nona intends to heal Karen by helping Nick develop and embrace the mythic sexuality story Karen was developing to move beyond dominion. Nona gets intimately involved with Nick and they move forward on this deeply sensual and erotically challenging journey. They discover themselves as making present the creative force of numinous intimacy which is the Love that is source for all living, now and for eternity. Their journey challenges the understandings and models of love, intimacy, marriage, relationship—the whole Western, biblical spiritual/sexual mythic story. They begin to live and love within a vision wherein males and females make themselves present as Beloveds—lovers embraced in an eternal, numinous intimacy.