"If God Made Us For Joy ..."

Rowan Williams:

"Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process (the peopling of the world); and this immediately brings us up against the possibility not only of pain and humiliation without any clear payoff, but - just as worryingly - of non-functional joy: or, to put it less starkly, joy whose material 'production' is an embodied person aware of grace.  It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralists by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in "his" attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy...?"