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.