Sex and the Sacred

Rich Heffern in the National Catholic Reporter:

Why is sexuality so precious? “Because it is the great enabler,” writes Diane Ackerman, “that allows us to commune with every aspect of being alive, with people and objects, landscapes and cities. One needs love to feel harmonious, to feel part of the rich landscape of one’s life.”

To say that sexuality is just an animal instinct, an obstacle to holiness, is to say that sexuality has nothing to do with our humanity. But in fact our sexuality is an integral part of our personal and interpersonal identities. From childhood it looms large in our lives, and we must deal with it one way or the other. Thomas Moore, in his best-selling book The Soul of Sex, writes:

We have a habit of talking about sexuality as merely physical, yet nothing has more soul. Sex takes us into the world of intense passions, sensual touch, exciting fantasies, many levels of meaning and subtle emotions. It makes the imagination come alive with fantasy, reverie and memory. Even if the sex is loveless, empty or manipulative, still it has strong repercussions in the soul, and even bad sexual experiences leave lasting, haunting impressions.

There is an ancient wisdom, even within the Judeo-Christian tradition, that maintains that sexuality is primarily spiritual, possibly the single greatest source of spiritual vitality in the human psyche. Sexuality is a mode of interaction with divinity.

The Old Testament’s Song of Songs describes the relationship between Yahweh and humans in the most gloriously sensual and erotic images and poetry. Catholic mystic St. John of the Cross used sexual intimacy as the effective analogy for understanding intimacy with God. St. Augustine referred to the cross of Christ as a marriage bed, intimating that our sexuality has infinite redemptive dimensions. . . .

In short, our sexuality is a rich source of religious experience, a great and holy mystery that brings beauty, meaning and divinity to our lives. Human love is a shape taken by the love of God.

Honk to Andrew Sullivan.

Sunday Drive: Where Is Your Soul?

From rocker and philanthropist Bono comes this poignant meditation in the New York Times on rebirth and regeneration, not for one soul only, but for the whole world. A must-read.

It’s Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up . . . self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.

Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.

It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea. . . .

I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.

The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?”

Well, yes. It is us.

Carnival is over. Commerce has been overheating markets and climates . . . the sooty skies of the industrial revolution have changed scale and location, but now melt ice caps and make the seas boil in the time of technological revolution. Capitalism is on trial; globalization is, once again, in the dock. . . .

Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption. But redemption is not just a spiritual term, it’s an economic concept. At the turn of the millennium, the debt cancellation campaign, inspired by the Jewish concept of Jubilee, aimed to give the poorest countries a fresh start. Thirty-four million more children in Africa are now in school in large part because their governments used money freed up by debt relief. This redemption was not an end to economic slavery, but it was a more hopeful beginning for many. And to the many, not the lucky few, is surely where any soul-searching must lead us. . . . It's not alms, it's investment. It's not charity, it's justice.

Strangely, as we file out of the small stone church into the cruel sun, I think of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose now combined fortune is dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty. Agnostics both, I believe. I think of Nelson Mandela, who has spent his life upholding the rights of others. A spiritual man — no doubt. Religious? I’m told he would not describe himself that way.

Not all soul music comes from the church.

Sunday Drive: Closer to God

Okay, so I've been remiss in my blogging the last few days though I did post quite a lot last week to keep you Truckbuddies entertained, I hope. This time of year, I tend to go into a kind of mental hibernation. Sometimes I wish people could hibernate through the cold, dark winter just like bears do. Wouldn't that be nice, eh? And put all the bills on hold for that time too.

It's after midnight here, so the Sunday Drive feature is way late. I couldn't find any essays or articles on a spiritual topic to post here, so I'll just post a wonderful painting by artist Michael Breyette, and let the picture speak directly to your hearts without commentary from me. It's called "Closer to God." I love this one.

(Honk to the very studly Michael Breyette, who has a great collection of e-cards, prints, and originals available at breyette.com. They're not all this saintly. Check it out.)

Sunday Drive: God Is Love

An excerpt from Taking a Chance on God: Liberating Theology For Gays, Lesbians, and Their Lovers, Families and Friends (1988), by John J. McNeil, psychotherapist and former Jesuit priest:

It is important for us to be aware that our religious faith needs to grow up and mature, just as we grow up and mature in all other aspects of our lives. This is a process that continues until we die. There are aspects of our faith that are healthy and favorable to growth; there are other aspects that are neurotic and destructive. We are all called on to be aware of the state of our faith, to strengthen what is healthy in it and to diminish what is sick and neurotic. . . .

Today we gay people have a desperate need for a healthy and adult faith; a faith built directly on our own experience; a faith that can lead us to reach out in love to each other; rather than selfishly seek our own security; a faith strong enough to overcome all fears, especially fear of death. . . .

The threat of AIDS can cause us to fall back into immature, neurotic faith. Neurotic faith is based in fear and a spirit of cowardice. In the chapters that follow I will attempt to spell out many of the forms that neurotic faith can take and what we must do to live out our lives as gay people with a healthy commitment to life and to each other. . .

The supreme gift of God is love. To experience genuine human love, to be part of a community of love is to experience the presence of God. However; love is paradoxical. It is absolutely necessary for a happy, fulfilled human life. And it is absolutely impossible by human means alone. That is why John could write, "Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love" (1 Jn. 4:8). . . .

Love is always a miracle; always God's gift of self; always an experience of the divine. In the community of love to which we belong, we daily experience the presence of God. This is an experience we freely receive, and one that we can, if we wish, out of gratitude freely give to others in return.

London, 1802

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.

Wordsworth had his reasons for admiring Milton, who, I’m sorry to say, is not at the top of my list.

But when I substitute Lincoln for Milton here, and America for England, the poem makes brilliant sense in 2008.

Sunday thought: "God is weeping . . . "

Link to BBC News video: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7602535.stm

Bishop Tutu, former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize winner and a leader in the struggle to end apartheid, says he's "ashamed" to be associated with religious leaders who are "persecuting the persecuted" . . . i.e., the gays. "I can't imagine anyone in his right mind choosing a way of life that would expose him to so much hatred."

Basically, Tutu is telling the Church to get over it and stop "obsessing" over homosexuality. And get on with feeding the hungry, healing the sick, helping the poor. You know--the original plan; wasn't that it?

"the victory of our queer race . . . "

I first read Forster's famous statement of belief when I was about 19 or 20, trapped and closeted in a fundamentalist church in a far province of the Deep South, knowing no one gay, fearing I was the only one who ever felt that way . . . and I've never forgotten Forster's ringing affirmation of the truth and goodness of one's real inner self. It was a momentary balm to the soul. I don't remember whether I knew Forster was gay when I first read this, but I do recall I recognized a soul somehow like my own.

I believe in aristocracy. . . — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke. I give no examples — it is risky to do that — but the reader may as well consider whether this is the type of person he would like to meet and to be, and whether (going further with me) he would prefer that this type should not be an ascetic one. I am against asceticism myself. I am with the old Scotsman who wanted less chastity and more delicacy. I do not feel that my aristocrats are a real aristocracy if they thwart their bodies, since bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world. Still, I do not insist. This is not a major point. It is clearly possible to be sensitive, considerate and plucky and yet be an ascetic too, and if anyone possesses the first three qualities I will let him in! On they go — an invincible army, yet not a victorious one. The aristocrats, the elect, the chosen, the Best People — all the words that describe them are false, and all attempts to organize them fail. Again and again Authority, seeing their value, has tried to net them and to utilize them as the Egyptian Priesthood or the Christian Church or the Chinese Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut, they are no longer in the room; their temple, as one of them remarked, is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

–E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, “What I Believe” (1951)