Via Adorations, Via Obliquities (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798993542539)

Via Adorations, Via Obliquities: A Life

in Love and Reflection

by Philip Hughes-Luing (Author)

A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Lifelong Devotion

Across five decades of devotion, loss, and spiritual discovery, Philip Hughes-Luing chronicles a rare and unwavering current of love that endures through time, grief, and transformation.

From youthful first love in rural Minnesota to the profound partnerships that shaped his life through the AIDS era and beyond, Via Adorations, Via Obliquities is both a tender memoir and a philosophical reflection on what it means to love without end.

Through journals, poetry, and meditations, Hughes-Luing gives voice to a generation of men whose stories of fidelity and faith too often went unspoken. His words illuminate how love, queer, sacred, and human, can transcend mortality itself. He survived the deaths of four men with whom he committed to share his life.

This book is for readers who have ever loved deeply, mourned profoundly, and found meaning in the mystery between.

The title, Via Adorations, Via Obliquities, conveys the overall theme of the book, a spiritual quest for the meaning of love despite coping with mortality. That theme is carried out in various ways. Book 1 chronicles the genesis of young love. Book 2 uses Canonical hours for the chapter titles. There are letters to pastors, interrogations of God, and struggles to understand spirituality with or without God. Book 3 is a Song of Songs, erotic and fun.

Adoration refers to reverence that is carried out through words (hymns, psalms, poetry) and actions; it is how we demonstrate love and reverence. Via Adorations describes very direct experiences of love. Obliquity is deviation from a norm, and it is through this indirect route, this interrogation of the normal idea of God, love, and creativity that a resolution is reached.