by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given October 14, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning. Welcome to you all, whether you’ve been worshipping here for years or whether this is the first time you have entered this sanctuary. This church is a haven where we can come for comfort. This church is a home for spiritual growth. This church is a place of prophecy, where we seek justice, where we do not turn away from the troubles of the world. Come, let us worship together.

In one sense it seems strange this morning for me to be talking about sexuality—the tragedy of the terrorist attacks, and now the terrible tragedy of war and the possibility of germ warfare. But in another way, what better time? We are drawn now as we perhaps have never been to need closeness, to crave depth and authenticity of relationship, to value fidelity.

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. In the sexuality section of bookstores we find numerous "how-to" books, mechanized prescriptions featuring positions and formulas, promising a path to sexual fulfillment. The malls are full of clothing for our teen and pre-teen daughters, clothing that seeks to display their bodies as objects of desire. Exercise for those abs, plastic surgery when normal aging makes the tummy a bit rounder, the billion-dollar make-up industry—all to make our bodies more desirable, to dress up poor flesh, all to find love.

We are so right in seeking love, in longing for intimacy, but so wrong in the ways we too often go about it. We are led astray, though, not just by those who have commodified love as a thing for sale, but by a long cultural history of separating the spirit from the flesh. The flesh has been seen for centuries in the Western world as that sinful earthly force which pulls us away from the higher, the nobler realms of spirit.

I’m now going to give you a quick and dirty history of how we adopted these attitudes, but before I do, let me say in no uncertain terms, that this split is a lie, and perhaps even the most destructive lie, in our cultural history. It at least partially explains why we think women and people of color are seen as "less than"—they are closer, you see, to the primitive, to the earthy, to the earth, and therefore to be despised and feared. This lie makes us believe that if we choose the delights of the body, we are somehow desecrating the sacred, and so attaches guilt to our lovemaking, removes eros from our houses of worship and makes them seem dry and dead.

This life force, though, this elan vitale, just keeps on breaking through. Someone tells the story of seeing a sign in front of a church and the sign said, "If you’re through with sin, come on in." But underneath that sign, scrawled in lipstick, read the words, "And if you’re not, call 533-4986."

But I promised you a quick and dirty history—so here goes. This split between the sexual and the sacred did not start with women. Once upon a time, before the rise of patriarchal religion, there were no whorehouses, no brothels, but rather Temples of the Sacred Prostitutes—the original whore was a priestess. Warriors soiled by combat would come there to be cleansed and reunited with the Divine, for war separated men from the Divine, and the sexual act was a means of re-entry. An interesting concept: sex as a means of cleansing, of wholeness.

And this split between the body and the spirit did not begin with the Jews. In Hebrew culture the human is a whole person—with the emphasis on person. The flesh is neither evil nor antithetical to the "higher" parts of the human. Not so with the Greeks and Plato. Both Plato and Socrates believed that there is constant conflict as the soul and the mind attempt to be liberated from the prison of flesh. They agreed that any form of sexuality was inferior to abstinence and harmful to the soul’s health.

Likewise, Stoicism, the dominant philosophy of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian movement, endorsed Platonic dualism—this same separation of spirit and flesh. In the words of Seneca, "Do nothing for the sake of pleasure." He further warned that sexual desire is "friendship gone mad." A third influence that turned Christianity against sex and pleasure was the deeply pessimistic Gnostic philosophy, which demonized the body. The Gnostics taught that the soul was a spark of light chained to the dark dungeon of the body.

In the early fourth century, the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion and sexual abstinence and celibacy became central to Christian moral life. Augustine was the leading theologian of the day, and throughout history has remained the single most influential theological voice of Christianity. Augustine had his own personal problems with sexuality—he had fathered one child out of wedlock, and gave up two mistresses, in fact, when he became a Christian. But when he rejected sex, he unfortunately did so with the zeal of a convert. He is the one who came up with the idea that original sin is passed from parents to children at birth—how? By the passion and desire, and therefore the sin, of sexual intercourse.

Well, there you have it. Condemned by history. Well, maybe not entirely condemned. But surely we have an uphill battle if we are to bring sexuality into consciousness as sacred stuff. I have already mentioned the commodification of sex, its being treated as something aside and apart from a person, a person who has a history, who has feelings, longings, fears. Sex is seen as something we can get, as in "get some." It is something we can have, as in "having sex." Having sex is very different from making love, isn’t it? Making implies creating, love implies relationship, deep affection.

You know, the other day I was in line at the grocery store—I always get in the wrong line, the line with the cashier in training or the customer with 500 coupons. Anyway, the other day as I was waiting, I noticed a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine. These women’s magazines are full of various ways we women can attract and keep our man, of course, and Cosmo specializes in sex. An article caught my eye. It was entitled, "The One Thing to Say During Sex That Will Bring Your Man to Ecstasy," or "Drive Your Man Wild," or something like that. So I hurriedly turned to the article before it was my turn to check out, and do you know what I found? Are you ready for this? The secret, the magic word, is you. YOU. Instead of saying, "That turns me on," a woman is admonished to say, "You turn me on." If you really want to go off the deep end, I suppose you could actually use his name. What a concept! Personalized sex. Recognizing that you are there in bed with a specific person.

Instead of seeing sex as a Holy Mystery that we enter into reverently, joyfully, thankfully, sex has become, for many people, work—performance, if you will. Well, that fits the way we go at life, doesn’t it? We are task-oriented, linear, moving toward a goal, in this case the goal of orgasm. But good loving is all in the process, all in the trip along the way, in every touch, every look, every moment—not the goal, but the getting there.

We have degraded the erotic. We use the term erotic when we speak of sleazy books and movies. We need to redefine erotic, and see it in its original sense, as energy, aliveness, elan vitale--yes, our will to life, all rooted in our sexuality, 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. In fact, it should be said that one may be very much in touch with the erotic and not be partnered, and on the other hand, one may be partnered and dead erotically.

Which reminds me. I want to say something now about this phrase "living in sin." You’ve heard it used, sometimes playfully, in explaining that two people are living together, but are not married. Times have changed—when I grew up, people really meant "living in sin." What if we thought about this phrase in a different way? What if we believed that "living in sin" is living a life unconnected to others, living a life of boredom? Boredom, after all, is just keeping the lid on. What if we refused to keep the lid on, repressing who we really are, what we really want? What if we believed that the more sensual we are, the more moral we are? Can we trust our bodies to lead us to the good? Yes, if they are integrated with spirit, yes. That would be a shift, wouldn’t it? To be moral is to be connected, to be joyful, to be thankful, to be juicy. This is what I mean by the erotic life.

At one time we were connected to the earth and her rhythms, connected with life as mystery and death as certainty. We have desacralized the earth, and now with our secular, mechanistic, reductionistic view of existence, we find ourselves longing and unable to fulfill that longing, even to understand it. What is it?

Sy Safransky speaks of his friend Ron. He says that one time Ron said one of the most honest things he ever heard a man say. "The only time I’m happy, really happy," Ron said, "is when I’m in a woman’s arms." Sy goes on to say that, yes, some men may be happy only in the arms of another man, some men may be devoid of passion because their hearts were never broken, some men are only happy when they’re making money and may seem indifferent to love. But, Safransky continues, "I wonder whether this kind of indifference isn’t always a lie, whether it doesn’t mask the greatest need. There is a howling in all of us. Some admit it; others say it’s the wind, and shut the window and go to sleep. But in their dreams everything they touch screams." Longing. I believe this howling, this longing is a longing for connection, for wholeness, ultimately a longing for God. Sexuality is one path to the Holy.

If that is true, than how may we traverse this path? Well, to begin with, "the head bone’s connected to the neck bone, the neck bone’s connected to the shoulder bone," and so forth and so on. 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." There is no such thing as "free love." To understand this is a beginning. We become respectful, then, of the subtlety and mystery and power of sexuality.

If we then begin to see sex as a "divine mystery," how would our sexual relationships change in practice? They would grow in power and beauty.

At times we might experience a mystical transcendence in which the ego loses its sense of separateness and feels a unity with all that is. Listen to the words of Alan Watts, one of the most eloquent writers on this spiritual dimension of love-making. "For what lovers feel for each other in this moment is no other than adoration in its full religious sense, and its climax is almost literally the pouring of their lives into each other. Such adoration, which is due only to God, would indeed be idolatrous were it not that in that moment love takes away illusion and shows the beloved for what he or she in truth is—not the socially pretended person, but the naturally divine."

When we move from sex as a commodity to sex as sacred relationship, soul to soul, sex can take us out of ourselves, as Watts suggests, and we find that we are temporarily immersed in what feels like fundamental life forces. We become part of a passionate unity that goes beyond our own love-making, that connects us to every woman who has ever made love, to every man who has ever made love.

Sexuality when it is misused has the power to hurt, to cut deeply. Making love is the closest thing to what we experienced as an infant, in the arms of our mother, when all of our needs were met unconditionally. Remember the words of Susan Griffin that Tom read earlier? "We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech." I believe that the act of love recapitulates that early experience of the infant with the mother and connects us therefore to our very survival needs. That is why infidelity can wound so grievously. That’s why loss is so hard to take.

But if sexuality has the power to hurt, it also has tremendous power to heal. First of all, it puts us in touch with our power, our ability to give pleasure and release and pure joy to another. If we trust in our lover, and leave our defenses, if we give ourselves to the divine mystery, to the wonder of it all, then we become innocent and open. As Thomas Moore says, "We let ourselves be revealed, be communicated."

And if we find ourselves truly "revealed," truly undefended, then we will be open to radical transformation. Now that is a scary thought. Perhaps it is such a scary thought that we rarely allow ourselves to surrender this fully. Surrender is the perfect word to use, I think, in speaking of a sexuality immersed in spirit. We surrender to our partner, we surrender to God, we surrender to the Divine within ourselves. I have seen people healed by this kind of love, blessed so greatly that they become a new person. I know it to be true. Sexual love is not the only spiritual path, but it is a path.

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, and if it’s good love, to rest in the grace of God. Don’t settle for less. Know that the divine in you is there, waiting for expression, in all kinds of ways. Don’t be afraid of it. After all, what do you have to lose? Only your hunger, this howling that you think is at the window, but is in your heart. Oh, my friends, don’t wait any longer. Haven’t we learned how short our days are? Don’t waste a single one to cynicism or sloth or anger. Give yourself to life, give yourself to love.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of the Living God, let us not squander our days. Forgive us when we insist on being only half alive, when we give ourselves half-heartedly. Each day, may we rise in thankfulness, be truly present to those we encounter, and sleep at last in holy peace. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you know the Divine Light within you, may you live fully, may you love well.

---------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2001, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.