Spiritual Sexuality
By Charles Rush
October 11, 1998
1 Corinthians 7: 1-16
veral people asked me to speak on Spiritual Sexual Integrity.
‘Rev, what is it that we are striving after? After all this
business in the Starr report, I feel like we need a bath.'
Most of us feel like that. Perhaps you heard the woman on National
Public Radio last week. She was imagining what her grandfather would
have said to President Clinton. He was a black Baptist preacher from
South Carolina. This is what she imagines he would have said.
‘Mr. President, you done stepped in it now And instead of
cleaning it off your shoe, you tracking it all around de house.'
That is as accurate a summary as anything I've heard.
I was reluctant to say anything about our hopes for sexual integrity
but after reading the bone headed remarks about how monogamy is
probably outmoded in the New York Times, I was lured into the fray.
I find myself in the uncomfortable position of the Episcopal
Chaplain at Princeton several years ago. One of the eating clubs at
Princeton asked the Episcopal chaplain to the college to talk to them
about sex and he agreed. He was a demure man from the old school of
modesty, near retirement, and his wife asked him what he would be
speaking on at the eating club. He couldn't bring himself to tell
her that he would be talking about sex, so he said he would be talking
about sailing. The next day, the chaplain's wife was walking the
dog down Prospect Street and some of the college boys were coming out
of the eating club. They said to her, ‘we're looking forward
to the chaplain's talk tonight.' She replied ‘I
don't know why he thinks he's an expert on the subject,
he's only done it twice and the second time his hat blew
off.'
Neither do I stand before you as an expert this morning, though
with four children, I think it is obvious that I have done it at least
four times. I believe it was Maureen Dowd, in one of her scathing
columns on the President, who said that the Monica and the President
was a case of over-reaching adolescence colliding with middle age
vulnerability. According to the New York Times magazine, the President
is not alone. They claim that fully two thirds of all married men and
one third of all married women have had affairs, a disturbing
statistic. It means that either I hang around people that are dull or
deceptive.
It reminded me of a call I got a couple years ago from a college
friend, Lance. Lance needed to make confession to someone. He was at
a conference in Atlanta that brought together some of the people that
used to work for him in his old division before he got the big
promotion and moved to the company headquarters. There was a
27-year-old woman that used to work for one of the women that worked
for him. They had spoken in the past, small talk mostly. Lance is a
big joker and she liked to hear his jokes. He sees her again at this
meeting, just bumping into each other. She is quite a looker and
actually Lance is something of a looker himself. A fairly large group
of people are out for a couple of drinks to close out the evening on
the last night of the meetings. Lance and this woman bump into each
other again at a table with a number of other colleagues. They are
walking back to their rooms and they take an elevator together. She
gets off, he steps out just to say goodnight. No one else is there.
They exchange a few pleasantries and then there is a moment of
silence. He looks at her, she looks at him.
Chuck,' he says, ‘I swear it was like I was in
college again. In a moment, completely unplanned, I'm kissing
her; she's kissing me back. I was justswept away.' Lance was
lucky. He said, ‘we were standing in front of these elevators and
I opened my eyes for a moment. There were mirrors all in front of the
elevators and I see myself. In my mind, I'm thinking that I am,
you know, like Brad Pitt. But in the mirror there is this guy with
salt and pepper hair and the salt is clearing winning the battle. This
guy looked so ridiculous and I have two voices in my head going at the
same time. One says ‘gimme more, gimme more' and the other
is shouting ‘what are you doing'. I was immobilized by this
image and confused by the volume of these inner voices.'
‘So what did you do next.'
I said, I gotta go, and I just walked away.'
With a little distance from the event, Lance felt a lot different
about what had transpired. He was pretty good at putting it out of his
mind which he did, at not letting it bother him, which it didn't.
I said Lance ‘So why are you calling me if it is not a
problem?'
Well, it just pops into my mind at the oddest times'.
Like when Lance?'
Like like the other day at my daughter's soccer
game'
And?'
And, one evening when I was kissing my wife on the
neck'.
What did it feel like?'
It it was embarrassing and it was like there was no firm
ground.' I didn't have to say it. He didn't have to say
it but that is the feeling of your integrity crumbling, unraveling
around you.
Of course, our sexuality as a whole is not so straightforward or
simple. This week E.L. Doctorow, writing for the
New Yorker, put it this way. He said ‘The sexual act can be barbaric,
brutally selfish, and self-aggrandizing, or loving and revelatory. It
can be infantile and ludicrous, or spiritually exalted and profound.
It can be narcissistic, heedless, and exploitative, or devotional. In
the course of one person's life, it can, at one time or another,
be all these things" (From ‘The Talk of the Town', Oct. 12,
1998, p. 29).
No, we keep moving on a continuum, sometimes becoming more loving,
revelatory, and spiritual, sometimes becoming more selfish, infantile,
and exploitative. It is our profound hope as we grow that our
sexuality will become centering for our spouse and us. It is our hope
that we will be swept up in mutual caring, compassion, tenderness, and
love. It is clear that our sexual drives often seem to direct us more
than we control them. And it is for this reason that from antiquity
people have generally recognized the wisdom of Plato, who said that our
appetites need to be governed by our rational faculty. Our sexual
drive need to be aligned in light of the higher purposes for which we
live, precisely because it is such a powerful subterranean force. And
it has been recognized from antiquity that our lusts grow the more they
are fed, eventually becoming perverted and tragic if left unchecked.
We become slaves to their service.
That said, the Church has done a poor job at communicating the goal
towards which we hope we grow sensually speaking. One writer described
it as the great contradiction. ‘Growing up in Texas' said
he, ‘they taught us that sex is dirty, nasty, and disgusting and
it is so special we should save it only for the one we marry.'
Little surprise that our sensual expressions have not been more
integral to our spiritual lives. It is helpful to remember that our
religious tradition has only limited aid when it comes to integrating
our sensuality and our spirituality because we have evolved quite
beyond the cultural mores of 3000 years ago. When the bible was
written, the whole concept of marriage was entirely different.
Marriages were arranged and while it is true that most of the time the
children could veto their parent's arrangements, the whole concept
of connecting romance and marriage was quite different than today. The
virtue of marriage was that you learned to love your spouse who was
given to you. Obligations for fidelity centered around making sure
that your children were your legitimate heirs. Matrimonial duty,
remaining monogamous, was done also for the good of the wider, extended
family, since marriages were the foundation for economic relations in a
simple agrarian economy. Hindu's today live very much this way,
so do many Muslim countries, much of rural China, to a lesser extent
the Japanese, and most of Africa.
It was not until the King Arthur legends in the West, around 1100,
that we began to connect romantic love and the higher purposes for
which we live. Guinivere was married to the honorable King Arthur but
her heart beat for Lancelot. She was torn between her duty to her
husband and her desire for higher sensual fulfillment with Lancelot.
Ah, Romance.
With each successive century, we talked more and more of romance,
of falling in love with your spouse and achieving a sensual ecstasy- a
great word ecstasy- which literally means to stand outside of
yourself. We wanted to have that feeling of being swept away like
Romeo and Juliet, of being caught up in something that we were
catapulted into a sensual, spiritual adventure. It is a beguiling
idea, so beguiling that today if we don't have it, we feel that we
are missing out on something critical. And every where this idea comes
in contact with the old view of marriage-in India, China, Africa, it
produces confusion because the young people want romantic love at least
as much as to fulfill duty.
And then we are saddled in Christianity with some very unhelpful
tradition. In our text this morning, St. Paul tells us that celibacy
is of a higher spiritual order than marriage. St. Paul was convinced
that the world was coming to an end soon. He was wrong about that. He
advised spiritual celibacy to prepare for the imminent end. So there
it is and I think we have to say that, on the whole, the latter
writings in the New Testament are simply sex negative. They point out
all of the aberrations possible with sex- and many of them were present
in the early churches throughout the Roman empire- but they do precious
little to ground our sensual expression in a higher spiritual plane.
Paul says, better to marry than to burn with passion sounds like he
might be from Minnesota, a Lutheran minister perhaps.
The Roman Catholic Church followed St. Paul's teaching on
celibacy, despite the fact that the world didn't come to an end,
and made celibacy into a higher spiritual calling than marriage. And
we institutionalized it in the monastery and we made it a central part
of our European culture so that most extended families had some
relative in a monastic order. And this was a central part of European
culture for well over a thousand years. I'm not going to comment
on the spirituality of celibacy itself, but on the whole, the upshot of
the teaching from the church, was to impart to the vast non-celibate
part of the laity, a certain guilt, shame, and embarrassment about our
sensual selves. They are there and they give us great pleasure but
this pleasure itself must somehow be unspiritual and if we feel too
much of it, we must be doing something wrong. So we either don't
do it much or we feel bad after we do it.
What happens is that we create a bifurcation in our spiritual
souls. And this is what most of us do. There are two variants of this
bifurcation; one Catholic and one Protestant and we have two Presidents
that wonderfully exhibited them. President Kennedy appears to have
been a typical Catholic bifurcation. He was a good family man, a good
husband. But when Jackie was out of town, reportedly he would call in
the hookers and have a great bacchanal and let it loose. Presumably,
the next week, he would go to confession, hear Te Absalvo, and be done
with it. Sin, guilt, sacramental absolution.
President Clinton exhibits this Protestant bifurcation. He too
appears to be a good family man. But there is this part of him that
wants to furtively fool around behind partially closed doors. He does
it but he can't quite do it either because he knows it is wrong,
so there is all this strange touching, pull back, touch pull back. He
is filled with guilt, even in the midst of his furtive fun, and it
appears that he can't really let himself enjoy it. And since
there is no one to absolve him, he probably remains more conflicted
about it. This is the Protestant sin with guilty conscience.
In neither of these variants, is their sensual self-integrated into
their spiritual selves even though they are both very religious and
spiritual men. What happens with this bifurcation is that these two
dimensions of us get split. One is our Saturday night self and the
other is our Sunday morning self. They just exist in different realms
and if they overlap it is quite in spite of what the church is teaching
us or what the culture is teaching us. The church for the most part
these days simply pretends that our sensual selves don't exist.
And the culture exploits our sensual selves by marketing non-spiritual
sexual images designed to stimulate our lust, make us want more.
I heard a woman talking about the failure of the sexual revolution of
the sixties and this is what she said. She said, ‘what we
desperately needed in American culture in the 60's was a dose of
erotica. What we got instead was pornography.' Pornography
encourages the bifurcation between our sensual and spiritual selves.
What she meant by erotica was a healing and blending of the sensual and
the spiritual and that has not happened in our culture.
By contrast, I have a friend in Austin who met a woman that he
married. Before they got married, he was extolling her virtues to me
and they were many. I said ‘Man, it sounds like she's got
the whole package.' He said ‘Chuck, she can get down and do
the Georgia crawl and she can sing in the Spirit of the Lord.' He
meant to say that she had overcome that bifurcation but I like it
better the way he said it.
There are hints at the way we might overcome this bifurcation in
scripture, despite its overall modesty on the subject. We must
remember that in Genesis, God creates Adam and Eve, commissions them to
procreate and fill the earth, and tells them that it is good. The
prophet Hosea used the metaphor of marriage to suggest what our
relationship with God is like, both in its brokeness and fullness.
Hosea says that God comes after us and woos us like a groom woos his
bride. And we, Israel, are like an adulterous woman. He uses this
earthy image. He says we run after other gods, this fad, that power we
run after other gods like a Mule that is in heat, sniffing the wind in
every direction to see where a mate might be. God, says Hosea, comes
after us to get us back and make a reconciliation with us, like a hurt
lover that swallows his pride and goes to get his bride after a very
public, embarrassing infidelity. The point of Hosea is to lift up the
faithfulness of God towards us. He shows just how important
faithfulness is to create in us a trust and confidence, self-esteem.
The implication is that we should try to be like God in our relations
with our beloved community, creating faithfulness and sustaining it.
God's love for us is much more than our understanding of
erotic love for our lovers. But, our erotic love for our lovers does
attain a spiritual dimension from time to time. There is a spiritual
quality to it. When we are caring, when we bring our full selves to
the moment and allow ourselves to be vulnerable and open. When we
honor the trust that others place in us and build their self-esteem.
When we lose ourselves and think about what is pleasing and fulfilling
to the other. When our lover is made to feel truly safe, at home, at
rest That too is part of Sabbath. Feeling safe, at home, day in and
day out is another face of faithfulness. When we create for ourselves
and our lovers that child like sense of play like that touching scene
in a French movie, where the two lovers spend an afternoon coloring
each other with magic markers, only to discover in the bath that they
are permanent ink, a discovery made just minutes before an important
meeting.
I have been using the word sensual rather than just sex because I
am talking about much more than just intercourse. When the President
displayed that painful exercise in moral casuistry, trying to limit the
definition of sex to intercourse, I was thinking how that too manifest
this bifurcation of the Spirit and our sensual selves. Of course, the
sensual moment can begin with just a glance, a change of voice, a
touch.
And the spiritual sensuality that I am describing does not have to
reach orgasmic proportions either. It is much wider than that. Our
hugs, our hand holding, touching someone's cheek, laying hands on
someone's head in prayer, tears shared together. We need the
intimacy of each other, lifting us up, showing us that we are worthy
and loved, making us non-anxious, at rest. It is about becoming
transcendently human. It is about making an intimate connection in
loving care.
So I send you from this place and I am commissioning you to
practice spiritual sensuality as you go. Over lunch, I am sure we will
hear ‘Now dear, the Minister asked us to.' If I could only
get such eager response on Pledge Sunday. So go from this place and
heal the split that we were given, doing what you
can to give your sensual self its full spiritual expression.
Amen.
© 1998 .
All rights reserved
