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Sacred Sexuality
A New Western Perspective
Note: We believe that the following article, while it was originally languaged for thinking Christians, has great relevance for everyone in the West at this time seeking to move toward sacred sex, for all of us are products of Christianity's 2000 year struggle to come to terms with sexuality.
"Sex is a kind of gnosis or holy knowing. In sex we get to know a person in a way that is more than special. Sex reveals much that is unconscious to both people, and so the unveiling that goes on at the physical level is mirrored as the soul itself sheds its protective covering……… Body and spirit marry in the chapel of the soul….. If they do not marry, we do not know sexuality with soul, and therefore our sexuality remains incomplete and insufficiently human." (1)
Thomas Moore - The Soul of Sex
SACRED SEX
It is likely that you have experienced this already!
If you are or have been in a close loving sexual relationship then the chances are very high that, on some occasions and to some degree, you will have already experienced 'sacred sex'. But equally, the chances are also very high that you have not understood that what was happening was a 'sacred marriage of souls'. This common lack of understanding comes about because most of us have never been exposed to either the context or language with which to describe what we at times experience and intuit at the highpoints of our love making.
We simply do not know how to understand what it is we are experiencing in those amazing 'Oh God, Oh God' orgasmic moments. We have no language to describe these outpourings and no concepts to explain the all-encompassing 'us-ness' that joins us in the wonder-filled after-glow of loving sex. Such a lack of understanding means that it is extremely difficult for most couples to enter more fully into and grow in the fullness and potential that is inherent in our sexuality.
The purpose of this article is to share our understandings of what the sacredness of sex may be about. We fully realise that we are not bringing the last word or 'all there is to know' on this deeply mystical subject. What we present springs from a strong desire, and indeed a sense of call, to seek to try and understand more deeply the profound joy and fire of our own relationship. Out sincere hope is that what we share may help in turning a light on in your mind and soul and cause one of those life changing 'aha' moments regarding the power and potential of your own sexuality. As you read, listen not only with your mind; listen also with your intuition and await its telltale inner surges of affirmation.
THE DEAFENING SILENCE or
What Christianity Teaches about Sacred Sexuality
Amazing though it may seem, any real understanding of and teaching about 'sacred sexuality' is virtually non-existent among practising Christians.
I have spent my entire fifty-four years within the evangelical/charismatic branch of the Christian church. Sixteen of those years, including my four years at theological college, were in fulltime study or pastoral ministry within the New Zealand Baptist Church. Never over that time did I come across anything from a Christian source that addressed the spiritual and sacred aspects of sexuality. Not in the hundreds, maybe thousands of books and articles I read. Not in the sermons I heard preached, nor in the sermons I myself preached. The occasional sermons on sex that I did preach were, as far as they went, thoughtful and positive efforts to promote the idea that sex was God-given and, if used rightly, a wonderful thing which helped bring a couple into closer relationship. Yet it never occurred to me that sex was, for all practical purposes, anything more than a purely physical thing.
In fact, like most evangelicals, I was extremely dubious about the whole idea of 'sacred sexuality'. The very term conjured up negative feelings. We associated it with eastern tantric sexual practices and the some of the hippie commune-based 'group sex' experiments of the seventies. Rather than seek to discover for ourselves the sacredness of sex from a Christian perspective, we 'threw the baby out with the bath water' and virtually made the sign of the cross every time we heard the expression 'sacred sexuality'. Then, safe in the usual frightening certainty that we evangelicals knew everything that needs to be known about everything that matters, we settled back down with our newly liberated but totally physical understandings and experience of sex, convinced that as far as sex went we had reclaimed all there was to reclaim. And as far as I can determine, thirty years on nothing much has changed!
Ask the average Christian or even theologically literate minister, "What about the sacredness of sex?" and the reply will almost certainly be a bemused if not dismissive, "Well I suppose sex has to be sacred, because God made us and we are in that sense sacred." End of story. This answer also highlights another blind spot of evangelical theology, namely its lack of any developed view of sacredness that extends beyond human beings to encompass the entirety of God's amazing natural world and vast cosmos. These more cosmic understandings of sacredness we have left to the New Age community, only to then churlishly and roundly criticise it for them.
CHRISTIANITY'S RECENT SEXUAL LIBERATION
Most modern Christians will be aware that the largely positive attitudes we now share about our bodies and sex have come about, at best, only over the past one hundred and in many cases only the past forty years. But most Christians are not prepared for and will be will be shocked by how appalling the attitudes of both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches were in times past toward the human body and sexuality.
Today's Christians, most pastors included, simply have no idea that for nineteen hundred years the Church vigorously preached frighteningly repressive and plainly unbiblical doctrines as to the essential sinfulness and evil of both the body and its sexual passions. The outcome has been nineteen centuries of obsessional concentration on and exaggeration of the seriousness of most forms of sexual failure. In the case of masturbation this has manifested as hysterical opposition to the practice, despite the Bible's total silence on the matter. The result - incalculable torment and vast false guilt laid upon millions of sincere Christians down through the centuries. Without doubt this scandal is one of the darkest and least owned up to aspects of the Church's history.
Note: We deal much more fully with this important history in our book Sex, Celibacy, Sin and Sacredness: Christianity's Two Thousand Year Struggle with Sexuality.
The book can be purchased from this website.
While it is not within the scope of the present article to deal with this issue, we feel it is necessary to briefly explain how the Church came to hold so passionately and obdurately to views that were so opposite to the overall teaching of its own Bible.
CHRISTIANITY'S DISTORTED VIEWS OF BODY AND SEX
At the outset it is vital to realise that this distortion did not come from the teachings of either the Jewish scriptures or of Jesus Christ. While the beginnings of it can be seen in Paul's writings, even here sexual relations in marriage were presented very positively compared with what was to happen in the centuries which followed.
The Jewish Bible espouses a consistently positive view of sex when conducted within the context of approved Jewish societal relationships. (And this was not always the same as the modern Christian view of legal marriage! But that is another issue.) Their scriptures bear witness to the Jews' overall ease with things sexual. This ease is most clearly demonstrated in the explicitly erotic 'Song of Songs', which would never have made it into the Bible if the Old Testament canon had been decided by the Christian Church. To this day Christianity hides its embarrassment over the sexually charged nature of this powerful love story between a couple who show no evidence of being married, by resorting to the most ridiculous allegorical interpretations. The Jews had no such qualms. Their Bible taught them in Genesis 2.7 that God had made humans 'living souls', and that everything God had made, including the body and sex within the boundaries of 'right use' was 'very good'.
THE GREAT JEWISH REVELATION: AN UNDIVIDED BODY-SOUL
In his book Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, theologian and former Catholic priest Matthew Fox writes:
"In Hebrew any body part can be used to represent the whole. While the Greeks pitted the body against soul, the Jews did not….. [For the Jew] man does not have a body, he is a body…. The body is the soul in its outward form." (2)
This view, which saw a human being as a seamless undivided 'body-soul', was far removed from the huge separation between body and soul which had begun to develop, especially in the Greco-Roman world, by the time of Christ and beyond. Religious theories which had travelled along the trade routes from the East and Mesopotamia into the Mediterranean world now began to form the basis of a cluster of powerful new religious movements which became known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics rapidly gained a wide following in the Greco-Roman world, and the movement reached its height during the very period in which the early Christian Church was beginning to find its feet (that is, from 50 to 250 CE).
Of particular significance was the Gnostic teaching that the body, far from being God's creation, was in fact the creation of an evil demon or 'demi-urge'. The body, including and especially the sexual urge, was therefore deeply impure and evil. Only the soul or spirit was said to have been created by God, and therefore good. Gnostic thinking thus totally separated the body from the spirit or soul and set them in implacable opposition one against the other. 'Dualism' is the term given by present day historians and scholars to this unfortunate view. It was a view which led the Gnostics to despise all things sexual and to go as far as declaring sex within marriage at best doubtful, and at worst evil. Groups taught that no-one could be truly pleasing to God if they were also in a sexual relationship, and celibacy and virginity began to be seen as the only truly spiritual way of life.
By the end of the first century Christian churches had begun to face a major problem. It was they who were beginning to be seen as 'unholy' and sexually permissive in a world where the Gnostics held themselves up as the truly spiritual ones standing against every sinful passion of the flesh. Under intense pressure to keep up with so-called Gnostic 'holiness' there began a steady about-face on the matter of the body and sex as leading Church theologians strove to reinterpret their scriptures (both the Old Testament and the emerging New Testament) to match, if not outdo, the Gnostics in teachings on sexual purity.
Tragically they were so successful that by the third century CE the positive view of the body and sex, as taught in the Jewish Bible and the early Apostolic churches, had been totally replaced in official Christian doctrine by this pagan 'dualism' heresy. In fact the Church's dualistic teachings went far further than the Gnostics ever did.
It is important to realise that it is this Gnostic dualism which formed the basis of Christianity's misunderstanding of the body and sexuality for virtually the next two thousand years. The damage caused by such a view has been nothing less than catastrophic and has resulted in a terrible harvest of sexual cruelty, distortion and repression. Even today the hang-over from this heresy lies not far below the surface of the psyche of many evangelical Christians and explains why large sections of the evangelical Church, for all practical purposes, still tend to regard 'sexual sin' as the greatest of all sin.
It is Christianity's adoption and development of Gnostic dualism which goes a long way toward explaining its almost total inability to arrive at a deeply sacred view of sex.
The problem for the Church has always been that it regarded the body as so highly dangerous and suspect that it could at any moment drag any individual into lust and uncontrollable desire, thereby dooming him or her to the eternal fires of hell. A doctrine of the body as 'dangerous and suspect' hardly lends itself to a mind-set that feels at ease with the body and its sexual desires, even when these are expressed within the prescribed marital setting. It becomes almost impossible to arrive at a view of sacred sexuality. How does anyone see their sexual desires as truly spiritual and sacred when they are incredibly fearful and suspicious of these desires, along with the body that is their vehicle of expression!
However, progress has been made, especially over the last forty years.
By and large, Christians have now at last accepted the rightness of the joy of physical sex! We have come a long way in reclaiming our birthright to celebrate and enjoy sex within the context of a loving committed relationship. For instance, enter any Christian bookshop today and you will find many books on sex in marriage, all of them presenting sex in such a positive and explicit light that, without doubt, had they been written prior to the beginning of the twentieth century they would have been denounced by the Church of the day and burned as works of the devil. However, this new liberation is still a work in progress. Even today, while in theory Christians would say that they accept the body and sex as God-given, the old fears and suspicions still run very deep for some. As a result, it remains difficult to make the changes needed to enable people to at last see sex in its sacred power.
It is our deep conviction that in reclaiming much of the physical side of sex we have not reached the end of God's purposes for sexuality. We believe that God is putting pressure on those who seek to follow divine will to go further and begin to reclaim a fuller understanding and experience of what he created it for. We hasten to add that this is not in any way to reduce or tone down the joy of uninhibited physical sexual expression. God forbid. The goal is rather, through a conscious awakening of our understanding and intuition, to allow what Thomas Moore so insightfully calls the marriage of body and soul 'in the chapel of the soul'.
THE NEXT STEP - THE SACREDNESS OF SEX
What is sacredness?
The most common and accepted definition of sacredness is:
'That which is holy, consecrated to God or the Divine. Pertaining to worship or service of God or the Divine.'
Put simply then, to talk of sacred sexuality is, at the very least, to acknowledge that as humans we are created in the image of God, and we know that God declared that everything he created was 'very good'. It follows then that our sexuality and sexual body parts are God's masterpieces of design and that in a real way they reflect very powerfully something of the deepest nature of God. Most cultures since the dawn of time have had a deep awareness that our sexuality and sexual body parts are endowed with a unique and special sacredness which has, in some very real and unique way, at least the potential to usher us through the veil that separates us from the parallel world of Spirit and into the presence of God.
The way ahead requires that certain key questions be asked.
Questions like:
• If sex is sacred, in what way is it sacred and how does this work?
• How do we turn vague concepts into a living experience?
• What are the practical results?
• If one major part of sacred sex is about producing a powerful bonding between a couple, how is this bonding achieved?
• What is it in the way we are created that makes this undoubted bonding possible?
• If we conclude that one possible result of this sacredness is that we are also, in a special way, opened up to the presence of God, how does this happen?
In order to answer these questions we now need to explore issues that may shock some readers. This first is this.
THE POWER AND ATTRACTION OF FEMALE NAKEDNESS
Why are men so overwhelmingly attracted to, if not obsessed by, the sight of the naked female body - especially the sight of a woman's wide open legs and naked vulva?
The male of the human species has, since the dawn of time, been utterly and completely intoxicated by and irresistibly attracted to the naked body of the female, and her naked vulvic cave in particular. The art, pottery, writing and storytelling (and of more recent years the photography) of every culture in history bears witness to this the deepest and most primal of all male longings.
The key question is why?
It is in the answer to this question that we begin to find the vital key to the above questions.
The mystery of 'sacred' testosterone
Quite obviously, at the level of natural bodily functions, the production of the hormone testosterone is a very significant factor. This hormone is of course the powerhouse of the male sex drive. Both genders have testosterone but men have on average fourteen times more than females. It is important to realise that God made men this way and that we can therefore validly call testosterone 'holy' or 'sacred', to be celebrated not despised. It follows that as a general principle this God-given hunger for female nakedness must be from God and that if used in the divinely prescribed manner has to be something that God not only approves of, but actually encourages and indeed celebrates!
This then raises another important question. Why is the naked female body, the sight of the breasts, and in particular the sight of the naked vulva (and its spread lips), the object of such desire for the male? Why not the same level of universal vast erotic hunger among males for the sight of a woman's chin or nose or knees? And why is the greatest male hunger of all to enter a woman with his penis in intercourse?
The lost secret of sex
The lost secret of sex is this. In the amazing wisdom of God the penis and the vulva are designed to be the outward physical extensions of our souls. They are nothing other than our souls expressed in flesh!
The hunger of the male to look on the wide open vulva is based on his primal hunger for the sanctuary and welcome that comes from soul-bonding with his special female. This very deepest of longings arises out of his own soul-knowing (and sadly, for most males, that knowing will never reach their conscious mind) that the mysterious power the vulva exerts over him arises because it is the 'sacred vestibule', the 'holy gateway' into a woman's soul, the place of greatest sanctuary and deepest welcome.
The vulva has rightly been called 'the grand entrance into the temple of the soul'. It has been designed by God not only to perform vital physical functions but powerful spiritual functions as well. This is entirely consistent with the 'seamless undivided body-soul' teaching of Genesis 2.7, where the body and soul were mysteriously woven into an undivided twoness, a concept that is more easily understood by our intuition than by our rational mind.
What is meant by 'spiritual functions'?
The vulva is firstly and quite literally a most powerful physical channel out of which flows the special sexual/bonding energy from a woman's deepest sacred centre. This is her soul energy expressed in the form of sexual welcome to the one she wishes to give her self to in love and commitment.
Secondly, and just as importantly, the vulva is one of the most potent entry points into a woman's body-soul. Clearly women have a very deep instinctive 'knowing' that there is something special about 'down there', even though most western women in particular could not explain exactly why they feel this way. It is this primal knowledge that explains why women the world over regard their vulva as the most private part of their anatomy and are more protective of her than of any other body part. In some cultures it was and still is quite acceptable for women to go around with their breasts exposed, but very few societies will allow their women to expose their vaginal area in public on a day-to-day basis. This also explains why women are far less likely to indulge in casual sex than men. They have an instinct which tells them to be very careful who they let into their vagina, because they 'know' that they are likely to be giving them access to their soul as well.
Conversely, the truth of this fact is shown by the huge trauma that women suffer if they are raped. Rape is not just a violation of a woman's physical body, bad though that is. Much more traumatic, rape is a very real invasion and violation of her deepest sacred centre, her soul.
Note: The energy of the body-soul flows in and out via other designated parts of the body too, such as through the laying on of hands in prayer or loving touch. This is what we usually call 'the comfort of touch'. Other powerful points include the eyes. It is often in the eyes of a person that you get a glimpse into their inner self, to your comfort or at times great discomfort. Still another particularly powerful inflow/outflow point is the chest/breast area. If couples concentrate when lying naked side by side facing one another it is not difficult to feel the loving energy flowing from this area between a couple. Try it sometime!
THE MALE 'PENIS OBSESSION' EXPLAINED
In a very real sense men's lives revolve around their penis much more than they are prepared to admit either to women or to themselves. In fact men are to a significant extent obsessed about that small ungainly and often unruly piece of flesh between their legs. Why?
The view that the penis, quite apart from its obvious physical functions, is at a spiritual level the extension of a man's soul, goes a long way to explain this.
While men and women do make endless jokes about cocks and dicks, just let a woman, or another man for that matter, begin to make nasty comments about a man's penis and in an instant everything changes, because in insulting a man's penis you are insulting him at a very deep level. In fact, you cannot ridicule a man's penis without ridiculing all of him in a most profoundly hurtful way. If told that his penis is ugly he will automatically hear it as saying he is an ugly person inside! This is especially true if the ridicule comes from a woman he loves and trusts.
Conversely, one of the most amazingly powerful and 'soul lifting' experiences for a man is to be told that his penis is beautiful. The way he is wired means that he cannot but hear it as being told that he is a beautiful person on the inside.
The penis: 'nourishing divine wand' or 'weapon of evil, abuse and fear'
The penis too is designed as an extension of soul expressed in flesh. In loving sex it bonds both the man to his beloved and the beloved to the man. It is the channel through which, in loving sex, both the sperm and its spiritual counterpart 'loving soul energy' flows into the woman. On these occasions the penis is experienced by the woman as that which feeds and nourishes her deepest centre. The poet mystic would say, "When the divine wand dances in the divine cave healing magic is conjured and God laughs."
Yet sadly, too many women experience the penis not as that which brings closeness and joy but that which brings fear, pain, domination and even great hate. Too many women have experienced the erect penis not as a divine loving wand, but as an advancing enemy, or a threatening invading spear, intent on wounding their body and soul.
The message of the sacredness of male sexuality is desperately needed in the world of men. Too many men are fixated on soulless exploitative manipulation of women to 'score' or to 'get as much pussy as possible'. Too many, like one male I overheard recently, number 'going cunt hunting' among their trophy-gathering sports!
What the world needs, as never before, are men who are willing to make the effort to learn about and grow in the experience of the sacredness of their own and their beloved's body-soul and to share this among their male world.
THE POWER OF SEX
Why and for what purpose did God give men and women such amazingly powerful physical/spiritual sexual potential?
I suggest the following answers for your consideration:
1. The obvious biological need for a level of sexual attraction and physical pleasure powerful enough to ensure frequent intercourse, and the continuation of the species through the production of children.
This is the favourite and often sole answer given by those locked into the narrow mindset of fundamentalist scientific atheism. Yet there must be more to sex than this, especially when we consider that the vast majority of our sexual encounters have nothing whatsoever to do with any desire or need to produce a child. In fact, ninety-nine percent of the time we have sex for pleasure and intimacy only, and a resulting pregnancy is the last thing we would want.
This all-powerful human hunger for sex that has no chance of producing a child was dramatically seen when the first birth-control pill arrived in the early 1960's. It ushered in what we now call 'the sexual revolution' and brought in its wake something unique in the history of human sexuality, an explosion of female sexual promiscuity. At last women could be as sexual as they wanted to without the risk of pregnancy, and some at least rushed to embrace this new freedom. Young Christian married couples also embraced new sexual attitudes. For the first time they too could pursue sexual enjoyment for its own sake without the fear of unwanted pregnancies.
So, while the 'sex for procreation' forms a powerful and vital aspect of our sexuality it is only part, and often a very minor part, of the story.
2. The need to have a soul-to-soul bonding mechanism so powerful that it would greatly increase the potential for couples to live in long-term stable relationships. Such stability would mean children brought up in happy and stable homes and the possibility of a stable society - facilitated by parents whose love for one another and regular sacred sexual bonding would cause them to exude the presence of God in their homes and communities.
But it is the third reason/answer which is the vital 'missing link' in western Christianity's understanding of 'why God gave sex'.
Loving sexual intercourse: a couple's private 'sacrament'
3. Sex was created with the built-in potential to provide a way for couples to enter into the powerful presence of God and for the powerful presence of God to enter into them!
During my fourteen years of counselling with Christian couples I very occasionally had couples make statements like, "We know this will sound really weird, but after sex we not only feel amazingly reconnected to each other, we also feel amazingly reconnected to God. It's as if God's presence fills us in a special way and we bask in his smile. In fact the sense of God's closeness is at least as powerful as in those special times of worship in church. Are we heretics to bring God into something so fleshly?"
A sacrament is most simply defined as a spiritual practice, usually (but not of necessity) group based, that is designed to open up our soul and allow, in Jesus' words 'the rivers of living waters to flow from out of our innermost being'. It puts us in the right attitude and space for the divine presence to be released from within us and to come upon us.
We are all familiar with the practices which religions teach to help bring us into God's presence: things like prayer, meditation, contemplation of scripture, the private and public reading of scripture, private and public worship including the singing of songs of faith and praise, and for Protestants the communion or eucharist, for Catholics the mass. Yet for all the reasons already emphasised, Christianity has tragically been blocked from being able to recognise that what is happening in loving sex is something akin to a God-ordained and -designed powerful private sacrament - a means of enabling couples not only to re-bond themselves but to re-bond with God in a special way.
Loving sex is given not only to wonderfully reconnect and refresh the couple's relationship, the bonus is that at the same time there is a real sense in which it helps to reconnect and refresh our relationship with God. In loving sex we are escorted in a special way into the presence of God and this floods our being. In this sense loving sex is a private sacrament that, albeit briefly, rolls back the veil and allows us for a moment to enter the outer courts of the parallel world of Spirit and touch the hem of the garment of God. As one writer put it, 'To experience the sacredness of sex is to ascend a ladder from the top of which we catch a fleeting but unforgettable glimpse of the realms of divinity'.
When it at last begins to dawn on us, and we deeply 'see' what is actually happening in those sublime soaring moments of sexual connection, orgasm and 'after glow', we are able to admit, probably for the first time, that these incredibly deep feelings which have always seemed so amazingly spiritual feel like that precisely because they are truly spiritual!
In those magical moments when we 'come' (it should be mentioned that some women can 'come' at a soul level that does not involve actual physical orgasm), when we lie panting in each other's arms, when we are flooded with that deep indescribable sense of what my wife and I call 'us-ness', when we find ourselves filled to overflowing with a deep, almost tangible soul peace, when we are bathed in what can only be described as 'healing presence', when we feel just so 'bloody marvellous' - the reason we feel this way is because we are experiencing both the up-welling of divine life from within our own sacred centre (our souls) and, in addition, the presence of the Divine overshadowing and penetrating us once more. This is the 'coming' of God impregnating us afresh with Divine love and amazing grace.
Christian 'marrieds'' lingering guilt over uninhibited sex
The earlier statement by the couple in counselling raises the issue of a degree of lingering guilt, especially in married Christian women, over full-on uninhibited sex.
It is not uncommon for some married Christians to question whether it is sinful to indulge in any erotic sexual practice in addition to conventional intercourse. During a conversation with a Christian couple who enjoyed a wonderfully liberated sex life, the wife confessed to thinking that although she hugely enjoyed their sexual antics she simply couldn't conceive that God would be at all comfortable being in the bedroom with them when they made love. She said that she still struggled with guilt, feeling that God must somehow be offended by their lack of inhibitions. I was instantly back in the presence of the early Christian Fathers, who were convinced that God turned away even when married couples made love!
It was only as I talked with the couple that the wife began to realise that part of her dilemma was that while, on the one hand, she struggled with 'evangelical guilt' there were times amidst the guilt when, if she had the courage to admit it, she actually felt amazingly close to God, in fact a lot closer than on most other occasions, including some of the times she was in church! This of course tended to make her feel even guiltier. Sadly I was not able to help her as at this stage I myself understood none of the principles of sacred sex. Taken aback by what she said, I was able only to mumble some half-hearted reassurance that I didn't think that God would be all that upset. As for feeling closer to God during rampant sex than in church (where I was likely to be the one leading proceedings!), at that stage in my journey I simply didn't have a clue how to respond, and so quietly ignored this part of her comment.
I have since come to realise that as the Bible never tries to set out for couples what are acceptable or unacceptable sexual practices, the normal rules of common sense and loving relationship must come into play. If it causes pain or is medically dangerous, if it is totally unacceptable to one of the couple, if it violates the principles of love, then don't do it. If not, then enjoy yourself. God is not upset. How could he be, he made you this way!
SEX IS A 'SACRED SITE' WHERE WE MORE EASILY MEET WITH GOD
In the early books of the Jewish Bible we find that certain places were regarded as 'sacred places'. These were the geographical locations where in the past God or angels had moved back the veil and spoken with humans. They were most often glades of trees or mountain tops and altars were commonly built there (Genesis 13.18). This idea of special 'holy places' where God or the gods might speak or be more easily invoked is universal and can be seen quite clearly even today in that people will still seek out a church, cathedral or sacred site, to meditate or offer prayer in, subconsciously feeling that somehow God is closer in such a dedicated sacred place.
The ancient Celts of Ireland had many such sacred sites where they carried out their religious rites. They had a most interesting way of understanding such places. They called them the 'thin places'. By this they meant that the energy field which they believed acted as a separation between the physical world of man and the world of the Divine was, at such sacred places, very thin. Here man and gods could pass back and forth more easily through the veil of separation.
This is a very helpful and accurate way of understanding and describing the sacredness of sex. Our sexuality is one of those special and divinely designated 'thin places' at which we and God can more easily pass back and forth in special fellowship.
This 'thin point' way of understanding sex provides a helpful launching pad from which to begin to consider some other important questions that may have already have emerged.
The first question is:
What about the huge numbers of couples who, while already in or moving toward a committed loving relationship, have little if any spiritual consciousness and are firmly locked into a more or less totally materialistic view of life? Could they ever experience 'sacred sex' even if they have no way of understanding what is happening to them?
The short answer is 'yes'. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck is a Christian and best-selling author. Many of his patients were people who lived their lives within a non-spiritual materialistic framework, yet when it came to talking about their sex lives they often seemed unable to describe their experiences without using distinctly spiritual language. This led Scott Peck to the view that for materialistic people loving sex was their most often experienced spiritual encounter, even though they obviously had little understanding of this. (The other was the birth of their children.)
He commented thoughtfully that it is no accident that at the point of orgasm a common cry was 'Oh God, Oh God'. Could this be their deepest self crying out its longing for connection to the God they have forgotten, trying to somehow awaken them to their need to begin to seek a spiritual dimension in their lives? Even for these people sex is a 'thin place' capable of brushing the veil aside and disturbing their sleeping consciousness.
The second question:
What about plain bad sex - sex for money (as in prostitution), abusive sex, commercialised sex (as in the many forms of pornography)? Is there any chance that the sacred centre of sex could ever break though in these non-loving misuses of the sexual gift?
While it must be stressed that this is not the norm, stories of the help received by men from warm-hearted caring working girls are not uncommon. Men quite sincerely tell of the warmth and even love they were given, especially in longer term relationships with one particular prostitute. Some of these commercial liaisons have blossomed into loving long-term committed relationships. As for the remainder of the above list, the answer is 'no'. Their abusive nature precludes it.
Because sex of any sort is, by its very nature and design, a 'thin place' then the very real danger exists that, especially in the more extreme forms of sexual perversion, the veil will begin to move aside and what will come through the curtain is not the Divine but the powers of darkness. There is little doubt that tangible evil, best described as actual 'evil spirits', is invoked by and becomes part of those people who continually and wilfully involve themselves in the various darker forms of sexual distortion. Two recent articles written by secular journalists on sadomasochist bondage and discipline parlours, describe the tangible and disturbing sense of real evil experienced while visiting the parlours.
The Power of Pornography:
Using Divine Design with Evil Intent
The ideas put forward in this article as to the true power and design inherent in our sexuality go a long way to explain the pervasive success of the pornography industry. I quote from our book Lust and Longing: Towards a Deeper Understanding of Male Sexuality for Men and Women:
"Why is it that pornography has such huge power over men? And over some women too, in the sense that thousands of them are more than willing to be photographed in the most explicit positions. These women are not, in the main, prostitutes and drug addicts as the popular stereotype would try and have us believe. The vast majority are normal women from every walk of life. And often they are not doing it for money either, as many send their pictures off to internet sites and magazines for little if any payment at all. It is as though they have a primal hunger 'to be seen' at what they at least intuitively know to be their most beautiful, powerful and in one sense their most sacred!
Pornography in most of its forms has intuitively tapped into and owes its huge success precisely to this God-given primal hunger in the male to experience love and welcome from a woman at both a human and divine level. And the female's willing co-operation is based on a soul hunger to give the power of her love and welcome to a man. Pornography is so 'successful' because of the vast inherent sacred power which pours forth from the naked female body, and from her vulvic cave in particular. It perverts that power for sure, but is successful because the pornographers know instinctively how to plug in illegally to God's power grid, and then they misuse that sacred power. Those who are sucked in are there because they too are longing for love, longing for welcome - but all they get is a sad counterfeit, a warped, unfulfilling and addictive marred image of the real thing. It drains them of divine presence and produces only shame, addiction, loneliness and sad rejection." (3)
At this point a sobering fact needs to be faced up to. It is all too easy to imagine that pornography is totally a non-Christian problem. The evidence says clearly that this is not the case!
Questionnaire-based research done by Doctor Archibald Hart, dean of Psychological Counselling at the prestigious Fuller Theological Seminary, found that among evangelical/pentecostal American men 15.5 percent of non-clergy and 6.8 percent of clergy admit to masturbating while using pornography. Doctor Hart commented that, based on his twenty-five years of clinical counselling of what he calls 'good Christian men', these percentages were lower than he would have expected, mainly because, even in anonymous surveys, men find it very difficult to tell the truth on such sensitive issues. (4)
How to Foster the Experience of Sacred Sex in Your Relationship
There is little in sacred sexuality that is of itself to do with sexual technique or positions or special meditation exercises or rituals. All of these have their place and do assist in producing a rich and fulfilling sex life, along of course with the many other essential 'out of the bedroom' ingredients that go to make up a warm life-giving relationship. At its essence, what brings us into the life and deep joy of sacred sex has all to do with the 'lights going on' in your mind-soul. Once the truth 'dawns on you' it is like sunbathing. When, suddenly, the sun comes out from behind a cloud, you don't have to do anything. All you have to do is lie there and the sun does the rest. This is the power of mind-soul received truth! It was Jesus who said, "You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free." As I look back at the way our already wonderful sexual (and in every other which way) relationship deepened as these truths began to dawn in our hearts, it convinces me that the power is in the knowing!
Sacred Sexuality
Teach it to couples and to young people. Teach it to everyone! It is God's recipe for life-long joy-filled powerful couples relationships. It is the answer to the misuse of sexuality and the explosion of pornography.
Instead of doing the usual evangelical thing of sitting around wringing our hands over the state of sexual morality in the community, loudly proclaiming the end of the world and writing letters to the editor, it would be far more helpful and positive for the Christian community to begin understanding and teaching both the 'churched' and the 'non-churched' the principles and practice of physically uninhibited and liberated but truly sacred sexuality.
It was the Apostle Paul who taught the powerful spiritual principle of "Where sin abounds, there grace abounds much more." As far as sex goes, moving beyond the mere physical enjoyment of sex into the powerhouse of sacred sexuality is God's 'much more, where grace abounds'.
In closing I take the liberty of borrowing a famous sublime prayer of Paul's. In redirecting in emphasis, I do not seek in any way to alter its grand original meaning but rather to borrow its sentiment and timeless sacred principles. This is our prayer for you:
"I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance." (Ephesians 1.18)
References
1. Moore, Thomas The Soul of Sex HarperPerennial New York 1999 (1998) p13, 24
2. Fox, Matthew Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh Gateway Dublin 2000 p27
3. Puddle, Bruce and Lawson, Jan Lust and Longing Theolema Press Rotorua 2001 p74 (available from this web site)
4. Hart, Archibald The Sexual Man Word Publishing Dallas 1994 p95
By Bruce Puddle
www.ists-spiritualschool.org
From section: Sacred Sexuality
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