Sermon: Sex, Sensuality and the Sacred

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Sex, Sensuality and the Sacred

By Charles Rush

February 8, 2004

ring half-time at the Super Bowl game last week, one of my fraternity brothers called me, "What did you think?" I said, "pretty slow first half." He said, "I mean about Janet's boobs or should I say boob?" I'm puzzled, "I didn't see that." I'm probably the only guy in the country that turns for nachos at precisely the flash moment. This is the story of my life. He calls back in two minutes and says, "here is the internet website. You can pull up a replay." I understand that this speaks volumes about the guys that I hang around with but this is our world. It is all available, all the time.

In the week previous to that, Nicholas Kristoff wrote for the New York Times about buying two girls, 17 and 15 in Cambodia for $350. That is all it costs for sex slaves for life. A couple weeks ago, the Sunday magazine had a similar long article on the sex slave trade and the author opened with a visit to a house right here in Plainfield. He went on to note that if you type in 'Naked Women' on Google, over a million websites pop up. Porno remains, far and away, the biggest internet business and really you can find anything with enough wit and patience. The paper two weeks ago featured a child porno ring out of Lithuania or Estonia, I believe, run by two 20 year old guys that had subscribers all around the world, including quite a few people here in New Jersey and New York.

We are living through an architectonic shift culturally and socially. Porno is in the backdrop of our lives for good. What impact this will have on the rising generations that have always lived that way, no one can say. The internet is bringing together the vulnerable poor and the lust-laden rich creating a new market world-wide. It is all available, anything you want and that is not going to change. So the question is, what do you want? In my grandfather's world a man could become virtuous by never encountering sexual temptation. That era is over. You are going to have to be intentional about your sexuality, your sensuality and the sacred.

In this regard, we are all pretty much in the situation that Tony Soprano finds himself. Tony, the 45 year old, head of the New Jersey Mafia, has one of his offices in the Badda Bing, a strip joint on Rte. 17 in Paramus. Just like you, he has to field a variety of calls every day, some pertaining to business, some from the local politicians, some even from his teenagers and their latest crises. In the background when he is on the phone, there are the strippers working their dance around the pole on the bar. It is all just out there in the background of our lives. Unlike most of us, Tony regularly conducts business in the VIP room of the strip joint, where, if you grease the palm of the bouncer, certain rules of engagement can be shall we say, relaxed.

Tony is a compartmentalized guy, and it is the full pathos of this compartmentalization that explains much of the success of the show. Middle age men recognize in Tony the vocational hazard that comes from tough and morally compromising work that yields large money. They recognize the contradictions.

Tony is married to a perfectly lovely woman, Carmella. They have a nice suburban life. Together they are very good parents and Carmella is really wonderful dealing with Tony's extended, dysfunctional family. She has important psychological insight. She is bright, pretty. She tends to him when he is sick. She covers his weaknesses. And he likes to do nice things for her. He buys her nice things, gives her a good life. He cares deeply about her opinion.

But when it comes to his sex life, Carmella is peripheral. Tony keeps finding Russian girls in their 20's, showering them with money and presents, arranging quick trysts here and there. He occasionally works in a quickie with one of the strippers at the Badda Bing and once in a long while he gets a legitimate girlfriend.

Over a period of a decade, he and his wife have just grown independent. It hurts her too much to even talk about and if she confronts him, he has nothing to say at all. He just looks like a teenager nabbed with the pot and condoms in hand.

In the last couple years, watching this train wreck slowly unfold, I keep asking myself, 'Why can't he just love this woman?' When the feds start closing in, she is the only one he trusts. She is the mother of his children, the matriarch of the extended family now, attractive, interesting. Why can't he romance this woman?

In a manner that is all too familiar, he has his sex life over here, his sacred life over there, and his sensual self is really quite atrophied. He does angry well. He is comfortable with tantrums. He does needy little boy. He does rational manager. But tender, passionate, emotionally available, supportive, creative, romantic, understanding, touching- he is a klutz. He is not a spiritually, sensually integrated person.

And Tony makes the viewer nervous, not just because the Fed's are closing in on his racket, as inevitable as day follows night. But he runs his life with all 8th grade glee that comes from breaking the rules and getting away with it. And there are no demonstrable problems as long as he is on top of everything. But the spiritual fabric of his marriage and his family is shredding and he doesn't notice how weak it is becoming. And there is going to come a day, probably when the Fed's close in, when he turns around and his wife is not there for him. Right about that time, his children will become insular and withdrawn. And he is going to find himself all alone, really hurting, with a crashing realization that he has punted on everything that is important to him. Spiritually he has missed the whole point. Apart from the crime, apart from the perq's of his life, he is suddenly going to internally cry out for spiritual emptiness and despair.

And we know that this is the case because it has already happened time after time after time to our friends, our neighbors, our extended families. His life is our lives, just with more violent enemies, more obvious moral compromise, and sexier alternatives. But the spiritual stakes are the same we face. I've just described a heterosexual marriage but the same spiritual issues exist in homosexual relationships, perhaps with slightly different symptoms. But the spiritual challenge of integrating our sexuality, our sensuality, and the spiritual is the same.

Someone once said that 'the Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision."[1] And we do need some supervision, some guidance, some wisdom.

We are born with very powerful sexual drives. One ancient philosopher described the lust of his youth by saying it was like riding a bull, you could only sort of direct it some of the time. I like that image because most of us, at one point of our lives or another, have that feeling that we are only barely in control of ourselves and we cannot entirely explain why we have just done what we have just done.

Tony Soprano makes the viewer nervous for another reason, one that will increasingly become an issue for the rising generations. There are consequences to the paths that we choose in our lives regarding our sexual, sensual selves. We are wiring our libidinal forces all of the time. They are very powerful and it is not an easy matter to unwire them as we go. You set yourself in a direction and you grow in that direction, your attractions, your appetites become defined and pointed. That becomes more and more important in an age when it is all out there because there is someone willing to sell you whatever you want.

It is implicit in the show but after a decade and a half of living in this dichotomy- with hookers, sex with anonymous people, short trysts with lovers for hire, all twenty years younger than him- even if he wanted to go home to his wife and love her up, he is really unable to. It just doesn't do it for him anymore. It is too complicated for a sensual relationship to develop at this point. He has wired himself in a way that he can't unwire himself. That is what is at stake for all of us. That is the profundity of the opening words of Dante's Inferno. The author says, "I found myself walking at mid-life as darkness fell over me in the woods and I could not find my way home." We can become estranged, not only from others, but even from ourselves

Twenty five years ago, I saw a documentary on the sex trade done by the union of Canadian prostitutes- Yes, hookers in Canada really have a union. They were addressing these issues even then. One of the people interviewed made a comment that has stuck with me ever since. She said, 'what we desperately needed in the 70's was a dose of erotica. What we got instead was pornography.' It is an important insight.

The fundamental teaching in Judaism, right there in Genesis 1 and 2 is that our sexuality is good. The sensual expression we have one to another is beautiful, pleasurable, a spiritual force that heals us, that binds us together, that comforts us and builds us up, a force of caring and tenderness…

One of the great unintended by-products of the Christian church is the whole notion of romance. It is said that the very idea of 'Romantic Love' developed in the late middle ages. Up until that point, marriage was principally understood in terms of duty, loyalty, responsibility. It was primarily a family arrangement and only secondarily about emotions.

Of course, people had the emotion of love but there was no cultural expectation that you were supposed to develop a relationship with your soul mate, your lover. Rather, you learned to love the person that you were married to.

By the middle ages, however, Christians had been teaching about the self-sacrificial love of Jesus. St. Paul had, in many places, suggested that love is the glue that really binds people together with spiritual depth- more so that family, land, class, gender, or nation. Europeans began to understand the importance of love, not only in the Church but also in the family.

Finally, in the era of chivalry, depicted, for example, in the tales of King Arthur, the spark jumps the gap as to how agape- 'sacrificial love'- might be related to eros 'the love that makes the heart tingle'. Guenivere is married to King Arthur. She respects him, she is loyal to him. She is obedient to her family and her class in life. But Lancelot is her 'soul mate'. And in this tension, the notion that we should follow the lead of our heart is born, looking for a soul-mate rather than someone our parents pick for us because they have the right credit line, the right education and the right social connections- however important those might be, they are not enough in and of themselves.

Spiritually speaking, it was a real leap forward. That primal sexual urge was harnessed in the service of passion. And passion is so much more positive and wide open… What if, instead of simply fulfilling our obligations to the family, the clan, the crown, we might actually fulfill each other? What if we might encourage one another to try something new we wouldn't have tried before? What if we helped each other discover gifts we didn't know that we had? What if our life was one long adventure? I don't know, it sounds much more promising to me… It was a great leap forward spiritually.

It was a great leap forward, not least of which because romantic love is about partners. It only really works in its depth when the two of your are roughly equals. In the old days, it was not at all unusual to read about 35 year old men taking 13year old wives because their primary function was to produce heirs. The relationship was usually, though not always, over/under- on all levels.

That was what was so wonderful about Romeo being absolutely swept away at the Capulet dance by his enemies daughter Juliet. All of that breathy optimism that, come what may, they would tackle it together and the magic that was between them would be enough- and probably just enough- to get them on through.

And that love between partners in crime is no less endearing at mid-life. I think of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, back in the era when the details of romance were left a bit more mysterious. It didn't matter much the movie, or whether they were young or old, they were partners. They kept each other honest. They grew together. They respected one another. They knew when to back off and give the other person space. Touching, tough at times, warm, confident with each other… and man, they had the mo jo between them… What chemistry. That is what we want. That is what we hope for. That is what we want for our children.

Sometimes we have to settle for less…I know. And sometimes, much of all this passes us by because, for a variety of reasons, we don't have anyone to romance… I know. And sometimes we have to patch things together, compromised and incomplete… it just is what it is… I know.

But if you can, fill your life with passion. I'm watching those ad's during the Super bowl. Ad after ad hawking Viagra and the incredible variety of pills for erections. I'm thinking to myself, we don't need a medical solution nearly so much as a spiritual solution to most marriages if we could peer into the home in a hidden camera. We need husbands to romance their spouses and wives to think of surprising, transforming initiatives that they can do for their husbands. We need to break out of the box and think of thoughtful things we can do for the most important person in your life just because it will make their day.

Most of us men need to think about this and plan it more than we do. Someone sent me a joke last week that said, "How does a man show that he's planning for the future? Answer: He buys two cases of beer." We can do better than that.

I know that some of us don't feel real confident in this area. We are better at buying presents than we are at sensual romance. But romance is one of those few areas in life that you get a whole lot of unspoken points for effort… The most important relationship is right there with you, start living up to it. Make sure they know it and not only know if up here (the head) but that they have lived it here (the heart).

There are a lot of choices out there. You are going to have to choose how you structure your sexual libido in the future. Even before antiquity, thoughtful writers have recognized what a challenge this really is for most of us. St. Thomas said that for us to be integrated we have to have our pleasures channeled towards virtue. So he said, sexual pleasure has two serve two higher goods: first, the bond that we have in marriage or fidelity. The pleasure of sexuality binds us together. Higher still, he said, it ensures procreation. He was close, but he got the last one wrong. The more transcendent good than a solid passionate faithful relationship is not new life as such, but the wider family that follows after you.

It is not just physical birth… The blessing that you grow into if you are lucky is children and grandchildren grounded in passionate, humane spirituality- people of substance, warmth, and solidity. And it is not just your physical off spring. It is your wider spiritual family, those in the next generation who look to you, who quietly model themselves on something that you express, something you pass on to them. That is the blessing and it is an intrinsic one. You can one day die in peace if you are surrounded by that. That is where we are headed. That is what we want.

There are many other paths that can be taken, some more titillating perhaps. Many are kinkier to be sure. But spiritually, none are more fulfilling than loving your spouse, your equal, your partner in adventure. Noting has a blessing quite like the love that spawns a new generation of passionate humanity, a generation that hopefully gets it even better than we did.

Fill yourself and your quadrant of the world with passion. Be a blessing. Amen.

[1] From the comedian Lynn Lavener, quoted in Marie Fortune, Love Does No Harm (Continuum, 1995), p. 54.