"Sexuality and Spirituality"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 21^st of January, 2001

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
for a thousand reasons:
social and private, habitual and urgent.
Worship is a splendid time of stillness
when only movement is possible,
movement away from all that is garish or naïve,
movement toward reconciliation and renewal.
To the beauty of the music, word and silence
we dance, and thus learn the more to love our lives.

(assembly) And may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we might together become…

The Great Silence [Next] [back to top]
a body prayer using the words of James Broughton.

Bodies, shift weight back and forth, back and forth without moving feet.
Clap in the air in front of you, starting on the left, once at the end of each
short line. After 8 claps, hold your hands above your head to clap once
again 8 times, once at the end of each line. When the poem is done, bow
slightly to your neighbors, and then sit down, and experience the silence in a new way.

This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It,
and That is That.

O It is This
and It is Thus
and It is Them
and It is Us
and It is Now
and here It is,
and here We are,
so This is it.

(silence)

To reverence is to bow to what is true…
to bow to the joys of our lives,
to bow to the sorrows of our lives,
to bow to the love that we have received
and which we have felt for others.
Some among us have lost dear loves this week,
some among us remember the loss of loved ones past;
some of us are care-taking for folks flat in bed,
others among us are feeling new pains here and there.
Some among us have found new jobs,
or made new friends, or let go of things
that were holding on to them;
let our compassion and solidarity for all of
our sisters and brothers here gathered flow now
in the bow of naming aloud
the names of those who suffer
or those who know joy
or the naming that is a simple and quite silent bow.

(naming)

Sacred is the grief which binds the many into one.
Sacred is the joy which holds us together and whole.
Sacred is the art of music,
which, like a spirit we cannot name,
flows through our lives as a blessing
and as a reminder of all that love is and will be.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
is a selection from the famous biblical book called Shir Ha Shirim in Hebrew, or the Song of Songs, or Great Canticle in English. It dates in final form to around 250 BCE, but was probably not written by one author, but rather, it was probably a series of love or even wedding songs gathered by an editor from many sources.

Voice one:

My love is radiant as gold,
brighter than crimson.
His hair in waves of black
like the wings of ravens.

Eyes like doves, afloat
upon the water,
like a layer of fresh cream
floating on the surface.

Cheeks like a bowl of spices,
or banks of flowers.
Lips like lilacs, sweet,
and wet with dew.

Studded with jewels, his arms
are rounded and golden,
his belly smooth and hard
as an ivory shield bright with gems.

Set in gold, his legs
are like the columns of the temple.
He stands as confident
as the cedars on the mountaintops.

A man of pleasure is he, sweet
to my taste is his love.
He is my lover, and he is my friend,
my chosen, my chosen.

Second voice:

How fine you are my love,
your eyes like the eyes of a doe
behind your veil.

Your hair is black,
and winds down your neck
the way a dark flock descends a hill.
Your lips are like an embroidery
of crimson silk,
woven with a beauty beyond words.

A gleam of pomegranate;
I catch a glimpse of your cheeks
behind your veil.

Your breasts are lovely
as fawns curled round
in a field of flowers.

Until the daystar goes down,
and the shadows lengthen,
I'll be in the fragrant hills with you.

How fine you are
my love,
my perfect one.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
is a poem by the great Rumi-like visionary poet, James Broughton, written in the year 1983 for his book Ecstasies.

For You Beloved

For you, Beloved
I will open all orifices of my heart
I will empty the trash bins of my mind
I will polish the horizons of my soul

For you, Beloved
I am blowing up old escape routes
I am mapping improbable safaris
I am placing my demons in a rest home

For you, Beloved
I am believing in the liberation of the unloved
the gratification of all human desires
and the impending arrival of worldwide bliss

Sermon: Sexuality and Spirituality [Next] [back to top]

The great Italian sculptor, Gian-Lorenzo Bernini shaped his great works with a skill and attention to detail which often surpassed that of his great predecessor, Michaelangelo Buonarotti. On the cover of your order of celebration, you will find a photo close-up of one of his greatest works, St. Teresa in Ecstasy.

One can only marvel at the confidence of a man who dared to sculpt, in solid stone, so rich an emotion as human rapture. But Bernini had confidence in spades. When you see the sculpture in Rome, you will note that he had enough confidence to carve fluffy clouds out of Carrara marble. You will find he had the temerity to sculpt actual light beams, and with irresistible delicacy. You will see St. Teresa's marble robes fold with all the grace of real linen. And, clearly, Teresa's marble face is a portrait of sheer, swooning ecstasy.

Ah, but of what kind of ecstasy? Spiritual or sexual?

You see, scandalously, Signoro Bernini used his own girlfriend as a model for his St. Teresa. He made drawings of her face while she was experiencing sexual excitement, and used those as the basis of his sculpture. He felt justified in doing such a thing because Teresa herself described her ecstasy as a visitation by a handsome young seraph who shot her in the heart with a kind of dart, a dart aflame with "all the pain and joy" of love. Thus Bernini, centuries before Sigmund Freud, clearly understood the sexual nuance of this vision, and boldly and unashamedly portrayed it.

The final work is undeniably spiritual, the very sight of it having inspired devotions in the faithful and encouragement to the artist for over three centuries.

It's also an undeniably frank expression of an aspect of human sexuality.

I begin with this example because it is so concrete, literally carved in stone.

But I don't think for a minute that what I am going to say this morning will be as easy to grasp as a piece of rock. I think those of us who are North Americans and English speakers by birth may have as difficult a time understanding what I am trying to say as I had producing it. Or, as my friend and teacher Keith Hennessy says so well in his Performance Piece "Sacred Boy," "if you're not really understanding what I'm talking about, this is kinda what I'm talking about."

Let me tell you why.

We Unitarian Universalists justifiably take pride in our sophistication in the realm of sexuality. Our congregations have been at the forefront of sexual education programs for almost 50 years. Our intergenerational courses, About Your Sexuality, and now Our Whole Lives, have been avidly used by both churches and secular organizations. But despite our great achievements, I want to try and prove to you that there is an inherent problem whenever North American English speakers address this subject at all.

This week, I have gone around asking all my friends, and asking members of this congregation I met in the halls, a simple question. I asked everyone to tell me what a certain Christian religious doctrine called "the Immaculate Conception," means…. in plain English.

Without exception, I was told that the phrase Immaculate Conception refers to the idea that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born, his conception occurring without male seed.

But, you see, this is completely false. Look it up in the dictionary if you don't believe me. The doctrine has nothing to do with Jesus or sexuality. Only Roman Catholics teach this unusual tenet, and then only for the last 150 years. It refers only to the state of Mary's soul when she was conceived, conceived through the ordinary sexual intercourse of her parents, Hannah and Joachim. The doctrine asserts, however, that she had no stain of original sin on her soul, unlike, apparently, the rest of us. This is an arcane teaching, certainly, for those of us who have decried the whole strange concept of original sin for centuries. Yet everyone I talked to this week…and please believe me when I tell you that all of them are well educated indeed… told me otherwise.

Why would this be so? I think I know why. All English speakers are part and parcel of a culture where sexuality is almost entirely interpreted by negative words, like "filth" and "dirty." You know, if someone tells you they have a good "dirty" joke for you, you do not think for a minute they are talking about a violent joke or a joke about mud. They are going to tell you a joke that has to do with sex.

When someone uses the word "filthy" about a movie, you know they are not talking about the number of gunshots or car accidents, but about the frequency or passion of the sexual escapades.

In the colloquial English speaking mind, however liberal, sexuality is almost always dirty, filthy, or unclean. Thus, the arcane phrase "immaculate conception" came to mean a "sexless conception," since immaculate means clean, right? And sex, we affirm daily, is simply dirty.

No one deliberately caused this change of meaning, or hi-jacked the dictionary. It all happened unconsciously over the last hundred or so years. And that our culture is not only permeated with the idea that sex is dirty, shameful, something to be apologized about, sinful, and perverse; it also maintains that it is the polar opposite from "pure" spiritual concerns, clean living and the sacred.

But what I am saying this morning is that spiritual and sexual concerns are not polar opposites. No. Just the reverse. I am telling you that the relationship between the spiritual and the sexual is far more complex, far more woven together than our common cultural experience would dictate. Let me give you a few dozen examples to make my point. And then, I'll try to conclude this sermon by suggesting why spirituality and sexuality are so connected, and, how we might change our daily practice to honor the reality of this sublime connection.

Take the Bible for example, the book that makes a lot of modern liberal people nervous, but which no one denies is the quintessential religious text of the West.

Although it's true that people who have never read the thing will tell you that the Adam and Eve's apple tree in Eden at the beginning of the book somehow stands for a sexual event, which is just not true, it is true that sexuality is at the center of almost every other story in this supposedly spiritual book. Not just the gorgeous Song of Songs you heard from this morning, which is clearly a set of sensual love poems, and not an allegory as the clergy have vainly asserted for years. But almost everywhere. The Bible is the most sexual spiritual book I can think of.

I'm not saying that all the sexuality in the Bible is good; some of it is quite awful. But that is also true for all of the spiritual doctrines found there as well - some grand, some terrible. Holy Father Abraham? His is the story of a man with several wives, concubines, a man consumed by jealousy and the idea of spouse-sharing. The sons of holy Noah, who were the only righteous family left on earth? They "uncover their father's nakedness," which is only a Hebrew idiom for incest. Lot flees Sodom only to sleep with his own daughters, who consciously seduce him in order to bear his children. Jacob marries out of convenience but lusts for another woman, his wife's sister to be exact, for most of his adult life. The Egyptian eunuch Potiphar clearly buys Joseph as a sex-slave for himself, only to have his wife spend a whole chapter trying to seduce the handsome Hebrew. The Lawbook attributed to Moses spends a lot of its time telling people not to act like their Canaanite and Philistine neighbors, both of which cultures used priests and priestesses as sexual surrogates in the temple, sex serving as a form of communion with their gods. Ruth makes love with Boaz in the harvest field. Great King David, the noblest and most holy figure in the whole book by some accounts, passionately kisses prince Jonathan in a meadow near the palace. Their love as "companions" clearly makes King Saul furious. After Jonathan's death, David has another man murdered so he can claim the gorgeous widow… as one more wife among his many. He also dances naked in front of the Ark of the Covenant, eliciting lust from just about everyone, and making his first wife Michael stew about his shamelessness for several chapters and verses. Great king David's son Amnon cunningly and brutally rapes his half-sister Tamar. David dismisses the weight of this act with a slight wave of his hand, which makes Tamar's full-brother Absolom so mad that he eventually murders Amnon, declares war on his own father, and almost destroys the dynasty. Solomon courts the Queen of Sheba lavishly with gifts. The prophet Hosea marries a prostitute to make a sermon point. Isaiah walks around naked as another illustration of wisdom. Jesus makes it a practice to have dinner with socially unsavory types, including, apparently street-walkers; furthermore, he promises us that these street-walkers will find God's blessing way before all the highbrow religious priests do.

Conversely, these same gospel texts go on to hold virginity in high esteem. In this, they imitated many of the Greek philosophers, like Pythagoras and Diogenes, who didn't think much of either sex or marriage. And not just the philosophers…after all, even the famous Parthenon simply means "Temple of the Virgin." Marriage itself is both praised and damned in alternate chapters in half the letters of St. Paul. Passive sex acts are condemned, and active ones are permitted in the later Epistles. This, too, is not so much a peculiarly Christian thing, but simply a typical expression of Graeco/Roman culture, a culture which the Christians were clearly part and parcel of. Yet the Christians irritated the government royally. Why?

Because, the early Christians were not only considered anti-religious atheists by the Romans, they were also considered sexual "perverts." This might be surprising if you think about American style movies where the Romans appear to be quite sexually wild, but you have to remember that only the educated Roman upper classes and imperial families acted that way. Most middle-class Romans, at least, claimed to be as conservative about sex as most Western religious people still claim to be, even though I think you and I can agree that both parties exaggerate quite a bit. And why were the Christians hated for "perversity"? Simple. Because they ate their communion ceremony with women and men sitting at the same table, a scandalous mixing of genders no Roman would tolerate at a spiritual feast. Christians went to the lions as much for such license as for their pacifism. Of course, there were some Christians down in Egypt who fulfilled the Romans' worst fears…the Carpocratian Christians participated in a communion ceremony that was basically what we moderns would call an orgy. But such groups were admittedly relatively rare. Just as rare as Roman Dionysian feasts, phallus-worshipping cults and other such things we find evidence for at Pompeii. The Vestal Virgins were a far more typical expression of Roman piety than the wild sex described by Nero's court reporter, Petronius Arbiter.

And it's thus that the Graeco-Roman codes which feared the spiritual worth of sexuality won out in the end. Many of the so-called gnostic groups disparaged the body and sexuality outright. The newly-created communes of monks and nuns made the denial of sexual expression an even more central value. Still, I have to note that every Sunday the celebrants of the communion ceremony would say phrases like "This is my body," which, whatever else it can be taken to mean, clearly has a sexual nuance to it. As does the Holy Kiss, which was part of that sacred rite.

The Middle Ages didn't change a thing, despite the silly charge that these were the "Dark Ages" when everything was completely different. Plenty of priests kept concubines and lovers. So did popes and bishops. Marriage itself was not even a church ceremony yet. But, according to John Boswell, there was a ceremony to unite two members of the same sex in a union comparable to that of David and Jonathan. There were also individual religious heretics who praised all sorts of free love. At the universities around 1200, hell was denied, the Trinity was tossed, the sacraments questioned, and sexuality was lifted up as something that might even express the highest form of spirit. The Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit (whom our Czech Unitarian sisters and brothers claim as one of their direct ancestral communities) preached the same ideas to the peasants who never went to school.

The counter forces were strong, however. The noted philosopher Abelard was castrated for making love to his admittedly very young lover Eloise. Heretics like the Bogomili and the Cathari, who preached against heterosexual sex, were nonetheless often portrayed as liking homosexual sex a lot; and for this and their other heresies, thousands, no, tens of thousands, were killed in murderous crusades.

The Reformation, at first, appeared to change things a bit, but didn't really do much, save to turn things upside down. Luther and Calvin praised marriage, so much so that in the Protestant future any minister who chose to remain single after age 24 was suspect of all sorts of illicit carnal acts. On the other hand, the famous Puritans, whom we associate with a very anti-sexual approach, were actually quite frolicsome, and do not deserve the reputation they have. And as many of you know, there were quite a number of 19th Century communal religious sects in America which illustrated both these poles of sexual/spiritual attitude. The Shakers practiced celibacy, but the Rappites and Amana community practiced free love and community marriage…both based on Christian principles. And then you have people like the breakfast cereal magnates Mr. Post and Mr. Kellogg, and Mr. Graham of Graham cracker fame. These men were absolutely obsessed with keeping children, especially boys, from discovering the pleasures of the body or any sort of self-love by touting their grain products. These refined cereals were supposed to tame the temper of sexual lust caused by eating meat, thus saving teenagers from even discovering they were sexual beings until ten years into their future marriages. I personally think these men, more than many others, actually shaped the modern American cruelty of refusing to talk about sex candidly in an intergenerational setting. They had a huge following in this country, and inordinate influence.

Now I am not just saying that the West alone blends the spiritual and sexual at every juncture. In Asia Minor and East Asia you find similar approaches: you'll find both celibacy lifted high and sex praised to the highest, by religious groups with supposedly the same theological background. For example, almost no one doubts that there is a clearly erotic component in the very spiritual poetry of Rumi, the Muslim Sufi poet (who is the number one selling poet in the United States). I, for one have little doubt this had something to do with the man he passionately loved, Shams of Tabriz. Furthermore, wild sexual delight is promised at least to male Muslims bound for Heaven, something the Christians never thought of apparently. In India, you will find temples at Kajuraho with copulating couples carved in stone dancing around the inner and outer walls. But, India also brims with totally celibate holy men wandering by rivers. You'll find among the Buddhists and Hindus, a doctrine called Tantra, which openly celebrates sexuality as a twin of spirituality. You will find religious festivals in Japan where giant sculptures of human sexual organs are carted about with religious fervor, but you'll also find traditions of monkish celibacy as severe as any in the West. Both of these approaches in the East as well as the West, the wild and the restrained, claim to be spiritual, religious expressions.

I agree with those claims. Sexual engagement is one way of "relating to reality." Sexual discipline is another. Thus, as Chandra Patel reminds us at the top of the order of service, both of these approaches can claim a spiritual dimension, since spirituality is basically "our relationship with reality."

Of course, I am sure I do not have to say that both of these approaches can go overboard. Self-limits can lead to isolation. And sexual exaltation and excitement can begin to blur the very real boundaries. Thus, limits and ecstasy, for their own health, require each other …to correct the other into balance. Sexuality and spirituality share some of that relationship as well.

If we get out their way, this corrective, this balancing act between the two realms can happen very easily. This is because I am convinced that the spiritual and the sexual overlap a great deal in two areas. One area is the realm of control and order. The other is the area of ecstasy and transcendence.

Ah, ecstasy. Many, if not all people have what psychologists sometimes call "peak" experiences in their lives. They have a sudden sense of being at one with the large world, a sudden sense that they are a small part of a vast and unbelievably mysterious universe. This fills them with a very tangible awe. Religious folks having such an experience may interpret it as a mystical experience or a vision. They may speak of communing with God. Theresa was having one of these peak experiences when she described her vision of the flaming dart.

But do not be fooled…so non-religious a man as Bertrand Russell also had experiences like this, as I will point out on Easter Sunday. One such peak experience, he claims, transformed his life completely till the day he died.

Now, of course, such experiences can lend themselves to many interpretations, both secular and spiritual. I really don't know why they happen…hardwiring in the brain, chemical changes in the body, ineffable stirrings of the spirit beyond any present explanation? A mixture of all three of these things? Who knows?

But I do know that many loving sexual experiences can be described in a very similar way to these peak spiritual experiences. There can be a sense of transcendence, a feeling of walls breaking down, a sense of losing one's self into a larger, wordless reality of joy, of pleasure and, yes, love. You know as well as I do that popular wisdom has it that some people even cry out O God! O God! or other religious sounding phrases during moments of extreme pleasure and communion. Communion! That is another word usually used by religious folks, but found also among the writings of those who speak of sexuality. And there are many others. James Broughton in his erotic love poem I read this morning even attaches a sort of sublime vision of "heaven on earth" to his erotic feelings for another, the Beloved.

For you, Beloved, I am believing in the liberation of the unloved, the gratification of all human desires, and the impending arrival of worldwide bliss.

Belief? Worldwide bliss. Liberation? Is this eros or religion? Spirituality or sexuality? I really cannot tell the difference anymore.

But, as I said in my first sermon on this subject, there are difficult things which get confused with sexuality. Abusive power and control for example. But abusive power and control also get confused with the religious and spiritual realm too, no? Strict, unflinching doctrines with no support but external authority, hierarchies that define religion for others, shunning, shaming…these are abuses of power and control that do no more good for spiritual experiences than their parallels do for sexual experiences.

Yet clearly, some restraint can be good. To expect ecstasy all the time is simply infantile. To expect to always get one's desire met all the time is immature.

And there certainly can be no rational reason to force sexual needs on anyone. When force and sexuality are combined, only force is left.

And thus, clearly some order and restraint in the area of sexuality makes sense. As an expression of sexual restraint, birth control, for example, can be seen as a sacred act. In this era of Sexually Transmitted Diseases of all sorts, other restraints come to mind as well. Limitations in sexual expression can become as significant as spontaneity and ecstasy when you are talking about real human lives, real human relationships, real human children that can be born, after all, without intention or any promise of commitment.

Ecstasy and limits. Both of these words frame the spiritual for me equally, and both of these words frame sexuality for me equally. Furthermore, both words define the edges of what I would call sacred play. That's right, play. A sexual act and an act of public worship like this one can both be forms of play. And play can forge and heal real relationships. Sexual responsibilities involving boundaries, and spiritual disciplines like meditation, prayer or yoga are equal expressions of what I would call a mature religious education.

Note, please, I am not saying they are the same thing, sexuality and spirituality. I am only saying that to me they make no sense without each other.

But I wonder, what kind of revolution we would make if you and I exempted ourselves from the environment of Western English-speaking culture, and tore the words dirty and filthy from our vocabularies? I wonder what would happen if we talked of the sacredness of sex more often, it's spiritual aspects more frequently? What would happen if we refrained from certain self-degrading words and expressions the way some Jews and Muslims refrain from certain foods? What if we treated our sexuality with the same respect, honor and poetry we treat our friends or our beloved religion? It would be like moving a mountain to be sure. But, as we learned this morning in the children's story of Ming Lo, if we ourselves moved, word by word, act by act, I wonder, could we reach a place out of the shadow of the oppressive mountain of our culture? Could we reach a place where we, as Broughton says, "empty the trash bins of our mind" until all loving sexual acts of whatever kind are beautiful, spiritual and yes, as always, utterly and beautifully immaculate?

Prayer [back to top]

Joy, pleasure me.
Apples, sweeten in my mouth.
Eyes, glisten with desire while you live.
Sunlight, paint the world a new coat of gold.
Shooting stars, fall from heaven with laughter.
Lovers, delight in the truth.
Joy, recreate the universe anew, for this it.

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