The Soul of Sexuality
Given by James Covington on May 21st, 2006
SEX! Novelist and preacher Frederick Buechner once said it’s like nitroglycerin: you can use it either to blow up bridges or to heal human hearts. When people think sexuality, their mind almost always goes to SEX, meaning sexual behavior. But sexuality is much more than just sexual acts. And it seems to me that’s exactly what our fine young teens have learned through Our Whole Lives curriculum. Based on what we have heard this morning, they have learned something about the complexity, dangers and wonders of sexuality.
For example, sexuality also includes gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy, and reproduction. It is experienced and expressed in thoughts, fantasies, desires, BELIEFS, attitudes, VALUES, behaviors, practices, roles and relationships. While sexuality can include all of these dimensions, not all of them are always experienced or expressed. Not everyone experiences or expresses their sexuality through all of these dimensions, and for an individual all of the dimensions may not be expressed or experienced. Healthy sexual relationships are consensual, non-exploitative, pleasurable and safe.
Religious communities have always struggled with how to talk about sexuality. As a way to demystify the role of sexuality in our every day lives, in the year 2000, several clergy and religious professionals from different faith traditions, including our own, came together and presented to the public a “religious Declaration on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing”.
In the declaration they acknowledge the joy and pain surrounding sexuality. The declaration states, “that all persons have the right and the responsibility to lead sexual lives that express love, justice, mutuality, commitment, consent and pleasure”. And it also states that the religious community is called to see, hear and respond to the suffering caused by the violence against women and sexual minorities, the HIV pandemic, unsustainable population growth and over consumption, and the commercial exploitation of sexuality.
In common parlance we speak of human sexuality as “making love’ as if love were something that we manufacture, produce, construct. Where did we ever get that notion—reducing that deep expression of human feeling to an assembly line? Making love is not about the latest marital or sexual escapades of the rich and famous or Academy Award movies. It is about affirming that we are good, that our partner is good, that love is the bond between us and that it is good to be alive, to be alive together.
I must say I have a great concern these days about the expanding use of pornography in our society. I believe we are currently engaged in one of the most wide ranging and risky social experiments ever undertaken. The role that internet pornography is playing in the lives of our boys and young men, and women too, terrifies me. We re not talking about a couple of magazines stuffed under a mattress. What I fear is the long term effect of live action pornography which teaches boys to treat women as objects, to demean and degrade them and to feel pleasure in the process. Will heavy internet porn users eventually be able to build healthy relationship with women? Heaven knows? In my psychotherapy practice and in those of my colleagues, we are already seeing the signs of its effects.
I fear that by the over commercialization of sex, and particularly in pornography, we gravely demean the soul of sex. By “soul” I mean the essence and energy of life which both fulfills and transcends sexual desire itself. The soul of sexuality is the élan vitale, our will to life, rooted in our sexuality, expressed in desire, but going way, way beyond the overt act of sex. It is a radiance that is there in all of us, if we would but call upon it.
Unfortunately for us and for our children, sexuality in contemporary American culture has been banished from the sacred and degraded to the status of commodity.
We are so right in seeking love, in longing for intimacy, but so wrong in the ways we too often go about it. It is interesting that in the Old Testament, sexual intercourse is expressed as the act of “knowing” someone. To “know” someone in this case, is an act of connection, an expression of intimacy and an act of responsibility that honors the whole person.
I find perspective in the poetry of sensitive souls who realize that sexuality is about overcoming our ultimate loneliness, about bridging the gaps between people, about feeling more at-home in an often impersonal universe; about loving and being loved; about expressing our feelings when words just get in the way. Sexuality transcends the physical.
Sexuality, in the Biblical sense of knowing, is ultimately about our passion for living and communion and connection. While the physical experience of pouring one’s life into the beloved other can be a temporary but unifying experience with life itself, sexuality does not have to be solely expressed in a coital way. Sexuality is the expression of our whole selves our whole lives. This is the soul of sexuality.
Making love is not what we do, but what we are.
Where love is—there is holy ground.
We are, therefore, we love,
Cosmic bits of mass and energy come to life together.
We love, therefore we are. May we be humble before the wonder
Of what we dare to create.
The body, the emotions, the spirit are all connected. They are one. This is how we are made. It may be tempting, it may seem to simplify things, to imagine sex as purely physical. It never is. Hear me. Even when you think it is, it never is. It always has repercussions in the soul. Think about it. With sexual intercourse, one person’s body actually enters another person’s body. Even when sex seems meaningless, it never is. It is never “just sex.”
Rainer Marie Rilke once wrote: “Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” I pass that comment along in a letter I send to every couple after I have had the honor of officiating their wedding. Whether it be sexually, or in friendship or through interaction with all our human brothers and sisters, Rilke poetically defines the essence of love and sexuality—to protect, touch and greet each other. Martin Buber named it the “I-Thou” relationship.
All through our lives we have the need to touch and be touched, to love beyond our thinking, to rest in the grace of another.
Don’t settle for less. I say to all of us and especially our young people this morning, know that the divine in you is there, waiting for expression, in all kinds of ways. Don’t be afraid of it. Life is a gift and our days are short. Don’t waste a single one to cynicism or sloth or anger. Give yourself to life, give yourself to love. Regardless of color or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation, our responsibility to one another and to love one another remains the same: to protect, touch and greet one another. Therein lies the soul of sexuality.