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The Soul of Sex: Is there a connection between sex and religion?
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The Soul of Sex: Is there a connection between sex and religion? Here's some wisdom about sex from a minister, celebrating sex at its best as an imaginative, artistic, spiritual act. From Thomas Moore, "The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love" (199  : We have a habit of talking about sex as merely physical, and yet nothing has more soul. Sex takes us into a 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. We may think of sex as something we should do well, with skill and healthy motives. But health and technique, valuable as they may be, are not enough to evoke the depths of sex, which calls for imagination, reverence, and full presence. Like all ritual, too, sex requires art, attention to details, and a devoted imagination. It calls for the kind of humility proper to religious ritual.... The very point of sexual experimentation may be to sense together, in mutual generosity and complicity, the joy of transcending rules and expectations. In this spirit communities have often celebrated important religious festivals with orgies and other kinds of sexual license. Everywhere we are told to set limits on eros, to be careful that we are not lost in its passion. But if we listen to these worried cautions, we may end up with only a modicum of self-possession purchased at the costs of life's passion. Sex lies at the very base of our identity and at the core of our need to escape loneliness and discover joy. The mystical possibilities of sex flow from a similar surrender sex asks of us: surrender to passion, to another person, and to the life mysteries that sex often ushers in. The portrayals of eros in sacred art as a young man with wings shows its spirited nature, its ability to lift the heart, and its capacity to animate and quicken. People who choose to live life in its fullness have no choice but to test the limits of accepted morality and often transgress them. To improve our sexual lives we don't need new techniques or new electronic and mechanical aids. We need a transformation in the way we imagine the point of our lives: whether to live narcssistically towards the fulfillment of our own complicated fantasies of pleasure, or to live generously with an open heart and appreciation for a lively sexual imagination. Morality should be joyous, an affirmation of life rather than a denial.....We are attached to our moralisms because they protect us from the rich possibilities of life. Fundamentally, we don't trust our sexuality. Sex can lift our attention upward and offer a visionary experience of life based in love and passion that is the equal of any abstract<b> philosophy </font></b>or highly spiritual form of contemplation. Sex focuses our attention, as perhaps nothing else can, on our sensuous presence in this world and on another person, while at the same time it fulfills our desire for emotional and spiritual union with another, for transcendence of our self-consciousness, and for meaningful experience. An erotic life begins in a fundamental affirmation of life in the face of opportunities, challenges, and defeats that crop up in daily experience. |
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11/12/2009 5:07 am |
OK, I should give Deida another look. At first glace, several years ago, I found him to categorical--too essentializing--about those differences between men and women. I didn't find myself fitting in comfortably with how he described men and what men want, but I also see how and why, for the purposes of the book and his audience, he was writing about "likely differences" between "most men and women." I highly recommend Esther Perel's "Mating in Captivity," as she is also willing to recognize--and celebrate--differences between men and women in the bedroom or in their erotic imaginations and desires, but she does it, I believe, in a more subtle way. She argues, for instance, that while equality between men and women should hold outside in the boardroom and political forum, it can make for boredom in the bedroom....as she celebrates play with domination and submission, surrendering and taking. Ben Franklin write an essay defending a fictional Polly Baker, who had two illegitimate children. Polly, in her defense, said she was just following the Bible: "Be fruitful and multiply." Personally, I'm an atheist (with some attraction to Buddhist principles or spiritual practices), but I am willing to worship at the altar of a relationship. My father, instead of saying prayers with me at night as my Mom did, had me memorize speeches by FDR and William Jennings Bryant and a poem by William Cullen Bryant, and I do have reverence for the values and ideals articulated by our best ministers of our civil religion: figures such as Lincoln, FDR, MLK Jr.
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11/6/2009 11:09 am |
Alas, I did not get any comments on this blog until yours (thank you). But I did a post on a similar topic entitled "How erotic is religion, and how religious is sex," and this blog received a number of comments, some of them poignant and fascinating. This post is on page 3 of my blogs. Here's one of my favorite comments on the post from "Huntress": I'd like to share this with you. It was written by a friend and gifted to me, here, in comment form. It has become my mantra: "For you, sex is a sacred ritual that, when it is the way it should be, it is a way that you connect with the infinite. It involves taking the part of it that might be considered profane, and celebrating it. Elevating it to the level of the sublime. The kink, the D/s, the exhibitionism, the fluids; all stuff that society, our parents, the Church all say is base and shameful. But you know in your heart that it isn't. That all of it, the lust it brings to the surface for you, your enjoyment of being controlled, deflowered,debased, taken -- it takes you higher, not lower. It is your religion, on some level. It is worshiping your pagan gods through the transcendence it affords you. Your lover, he is at the same time your despoiler and your high priest. The union of souls is what sex is for you. In order for that to occur the act does need to profane you. You need to be split open, ripped asunder. Not literally but figuratively and emotionally. Your lustful needs exposed for the world to see. Your submission rendering you helpless and at the same time taking you to Nirvana. Your body becomes a sacrifice to the gods." i've seen god in his face While an atheist now, I was raised as a Catholic and until my forty-first year, I was a mostly devout Catholic. The true joys, exultations of sex, making love, pleasure - discovered in parallel with losing my Catholic god. The Host, the body of Christ, now the body of my Lover, now the spilling of his sacred seed upon my tongue. My body, my womb, the spirited chapel of our communion. I've left the form of my body during moments of sheer, immaculate orgasm and have ascended to blinding elysium. I've been resurrected by a Lover's artful touch. Eighteen months ago now, the face of beloved hovering above mine, his rapture, and I remember those words, I remember them pealing away in my head like orgiastic choir bells, "I see god in his face, I see him." I remember being shattered by his beauty in those most exquisite moments. Trinity is the equation of a man, a woman, and their coupling - when the three entities become one absolute divinity. I have not read Deida's "Finding God through Sex," but I have checked out some of his other writings. He's written a lot on the same themes, emphasizing sacred sexuality. Frankly, I find him arrogant and too chauvinistic, as suggested by the title of one of his books, "The Way of the Superior Man." I get the sense that he considers himself God's gift for teaching sexuality...and to women. I much prefer Thomas Moore on "sacred sexuality" and Margot Anand on tantra.
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