God and Sensuality

The Disappointment of Religious Disembodiment

“With great difficulty by advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millenniums, my teeth have wasted, and nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work.  I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.” – Octavio Paz

Sexual experiences – both abuse and experimentation – are woven into the fabric of my earliest childhood memories. The culture into which I was born was one in which most of the women and girls I knew well had been sexually abused in their lifetimes. I later discovered similar things were true of the men and boys, but no one talked about that. These tragedies were all whisper and shadow, and somehow this stuck. As I grew up, I began to connect my sexuality with darkness and condemned myself for being at once deeply repulsed by it and hopelessly attracted to it. A sort of dualism began to take root.

As I grew into a young adult, my sexual interests and appetites did as well. Now, as someone well-acquainted with human formation, I would call this a holy longing in need of wise tending. Back then, it just felt like frustration, confusion, disgust, and guilt.

Like most (if not all) adolescents, bodies were constantly on my mind. I obsessed over my body – was it too much of this or not enough of that? Likewise, I stared at the bodies of others, sometimes in wonder, other times in lust, and oftentimes in comparison to my own. The culture was teaching me how to be an un-souled body, valuing image, and pleasing others over interior freedom. The dualism deepened.

Looking back now, I can see a fissure opened wide in the sacred ground of my soul. On one side of the chasm, my sexual being is one of pleasure and intelligence, my body is Creator-given and holy. My longings are part of the Image of God within me, intended to lead me into ultimate fulfilment and deep purpose. On the other side of the chasm, my sexual being is damaged and gross, perverse, and rightfully ashamed. My body is a hindrance to my relationship with God and my longings a signpost of sinful desires as old as the Fall of Humankind.

---

What We Do with the Fire Inside

I married the very day I was legal. I met a young man, just a boy himself, and four months of dating later, we recklessly vowed our lives to one another in the back room of a convenience store in rural Louisiana. By this time, I had heard enough sermons and teachings on sex to know that the most important thing to God is that sex occur inside the confines of marriage. It would be disingenuous for me to say we did not marry in such haste, to a large extent, because we wanted to have God-approved intercourse. We both naively believed that once we signed that wedding license, our lusty desires would suddenly become holy longings. This ignorance is one of the most devastating byproducts of the “purity culture” American evangelicals promote. The idea is that marriage saves, sanctifies, and seals us all in sexual safety, that saying some words at an altar (or in my case, behind the cash register), somehow creates a context in which our sexuality can develop in health and wholeness. Yet, as the great mystic John O’Donahue often said, our bodies are contained within our souls. Sensual development and spiritual development are of the same piece.

“Spirituality is about what we do with the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros. And how we do channel it, the disciplines and habits we choose to live by, will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our bodies, minds, and souls, and to a greater integration or disintegration in the way we are related to God, others, and the cosmic world.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

---

Self-Abandonment

A large portion of my mid-life disenchantment is with how I abandoned myself bodily (and sexually) when I took on the yoke of religion. And a bodily abandonment is a soul abandonment.

When I became a wife, and then a mother, I committed myself to a complete overhaul of my sensual being. It’s almost as if I boomeranged from immature, but developmentally appropriate body obsession of one kind to a much more negative, developmentally stunted body obsession of another kind. I read books on how to please my husband, how to live a chaste and faithful life, and how to carry myself as a modest Christian woman. Everything became routinized, sanitized, and artificial. I lived, often, as a disembodied soul.

My self-improvement project was little more than behavior modification designed to please an inherited image of God which I didn’t realize until much later was: 1.) A thoroughly subjective, and man-derived interpretation of scripture and 2.) Wholly antithetical to the deeply embodied and fleshy Jesus I learned to love and trust at an early age. Instead of channeling the passionate energy of my eros into spiritual maturity, and remaining faithful to my wild life force, I was busy ‘carving a road in the rock’ that was burying it alive. As it turns out, the religious messaging was as fixated on image and people pleasing as the broader culture. Human habits are hard to break, I suppose, even in God’s household.

After decades of this self-abandonment in the name of holiness, I am disappointed with the results. I really thought that if I prayed enough, read my Bible enough, and worked on my marriage enough, I would be made healed and whole. When I survey the damage done by piling all this rock between me – all of me, including my beautiful body and my wild life force – and the Light that is Christ, I shudder. Like most folks schooled in this crazy mixture of modern, Western, Cartesian dualism and ancient Christianity, I feel disembodied. I feel separated from my sensuality, my fleshiness and, consequently, part of myself. When it comes to knowing and loving my sensuality, I am soul sick, all ‘trembling teeth and bloody hands.’

Now I suspect that the Creator of my body and soul has always been knocking at the door of my being, waiting to be invited inside where real healing occurs. I’m opening the door, a little at a time, asking questions I was either too busy or too afraid to ask before, like what is the purpose of my body? Why do I have these physical senses? Who told us physical senses keep us far from God or, conversely, that they were the most important part of life?

I sense something stirring within me as my eros is allowed to emerge from under the rocks of religious and cultural conditioning. I see the Light on the other side as I tear down these walls and bust open these doors of false Divine imaginings and social pressure to be pleasing. I hear echoes of this ancient, flesh-and-blood-celebrating song:

I am a rose of Sharon,
    a lily of the valleys.

As a lily among brambles,
    so is my love among maidens.

As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,
    so is my beloved among young men.
With great delight I sat in his shadow,
    and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house,
    and his banner over me was love.

– Song of Solomon 2:1-4

Little me needed to understand that God’s banner over her sensuality is love. Adolescent me would have experienced such healing if she could have believed that she was a ‘lily among brambles.’ Young married me needed to know that delighting and tasting, in the light and freedom of Christ, was always part of God’s plan for her. And middle-aged me is here to learn and live these truths for us all.

I want to find out: What does this great God, who created our beautiful bodies, desire for us to live out bodily?

How is it with your body that is in your soul?

Perhaps you’ve experienced the pain of disembodiment, physical exile, and stunted sensual development because of social and religious conditioning too. We’re bombarded with schizophrenic messaging about our bodies and our sensuality. It would be weird if we weren’t dizzied and disturbed by it all. If that’s you, take a moment to breathe deeply and then flow through the graphic below as I have been doing. See what stirs within you.

Let’s remember, together, that well-meaning religious teaching is born of fear and a perceived need to control. Likewise, cultural messages surrounding sensuality come from a place of desperation for identity and validation. It’s never too late to develop a healthy relationship with our bodies, to create a context for sensual flourishing, to integrate all parts of ourselves. Our exiled parts are crying out to us in the disappointment of middle age. How will we answer?

“The chasm between the spiritual and the physical is no greater than that between a thought and a word. They cannot be disconnected. And it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, perhaps because there is no such place.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us