SEXUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY A sermon delivered by Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer at First UU Church Ann Arbor on Jan 4, 2004. Sexuality. Spirituality. In these two words is found much of what makes human life interesting and worthwhile. Use some form of the word sexuality—sex, sexy, sexual, etc.—in the title of a book, magazine article, play, movie, seminar, lecture, or course, and more than likely there will be a good crowd eager to read, see, or hear what you have to present. The only group that might be an exception to this is intellectuals, an intellectual being defined as someone who thinks there really is something more interesting than sex. Most of us do not, and the word alone will rouse our interest very quickly. Spirituality is also a word that has great drawing power. In America over the last few decades it has become popular to make a distinction between religion and spirituality, with a majority of people eager to reject the former and claim enthusiastically the latter. By self-definition, we are the most spiritual people who have ever lived. The few—and they genuinely are the very few—who admit to no spiritual feelings only prove the rule by their tiny numbers. Sexuality in the most minimal of understandings has to do with our physical selves, the body in which we experience the world, those yearnings that point us toward this or that gender or both of them, those social learnings that shape the way we comprehend and act in the world, that special attraction we feel towards certain individuals, that pleasure like unto no other that can bring us ecstasy or in its absence cause us great distress. The doctor was asked to address a noon-time crowd following lunch. After an insufferably long introduction that included mention of her topic, sexuality, she rose and said, "Ladies and gentleman, it gives me great pleasure…" and sat down. We all understand that as regards sexuality, such a brief statement is in its way quite sufficient to convey the madness and the magnificence of human experience with sexuality. Spirituality in the most minimal of understandings has to do with that in us which is not purely physical, the questions we ask of the universe that has thrust us into life and the answers we give and give up, the gropings after meaning and worth in the face of death's finality, the connections we make and maintain with that which is not us and that which is not human, the courage that in the face of suffering enables us to hold on to our existence and even affirm its goodness. It is a common view of those who believe in God that the Deity watches over us. Some suggest that, given that fact, we have an obligation to be entertaining. As Jules Feiffer once remarked, "Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?" Spirituality can be the cause of madness, as it was with Jim Jones and the people of Heaven's Gate, or the cause of magnificence, as it was with Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. Ancient peoples understood how interesting, worthwhile, and urgent these two potent forces really are. Most ancient cultures believed that at the most profound levels sexuality and spirituality are linked. Some even thought they merged into one another. The mystery of sexuality was commonly celebrated as a holy mystery. The Sumerian goddess, Inanna, was explicitly sexual in her divinity, requiring that a throne and a bed be carved to mark her ascendancy. Various erotic Hindu statues celebrate symbolically intercourse within the individual self. The sexual shenanigans of the Greek deities reflect a sensuous understanding of divinity. The ancient Hebrews often used sexual language and metaphors to express the relationship between the God Yahweh and themselves. The prophetic book of Hosea, for example, tells of a faithless wife, a stand-in for Israel, being accepted back into the fold by her husband, God-Yahweh. The love poetry of the Song of Songs was often understood by the rabbis as conveying the sweetness of the relationship between God and Israel. The same Hebrew word, yadah, is used to speak of knowing God and knowing one's lover sexually. Ancient peoples may not have understood the biology of sexuality as well as we do. They did understand the essential wonder of the process. They did see the connection between sexuality and spirituality and they celebrated this connection. Traditional peoples in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world continue into the 21st century to recognize that link between sex and spirit. In the western Christian world that connection was frayed by an attitude that arose in the early Church that understood sexuality and spirituality as competitive, body and spirit in eternal conflict. Originally, Christianity, a Jewish heresy, was as embedded in sensuality as Judaism had been. Recall that the first commandment in the Torah was to "be fruitful and multiply." Jesus as God embodied was given to using very sexual metaphors about himself, referring, for example, to himself as the bridegroom (John 3: 29-30). He forgives adulterers, he never expects that his disciples will forego marriage, and, as Jack Miles has pointed out (see CHRIST: A CRISIS IN THE LIFE OF GOD, p.54ff), Jesus's "sexual tolerance is exceptional." Christianity changed with Augustine in the late fourth century. The sexual and the spiritual became opposite tendencies of our humanity, the sexual being demonic, the spiritual being divine. No longer was fruitfulness the standard of goodness but celibacy and chastity. Not sexual connection but solitude and contemplation and prayer became the models of goodness. Sexual experiences, even in one's head, even unbidden, were filthy and sometimes thought of as worse than death itself. The Reformation brought welcome changes. Luther was unquestionably a vigorously sensuous man. In the Calvinist tradition, the Puritans, according to Edmond S. Morgan, "placed a high value on the affections, specifically on the love that Christ excited in believers, and the most intense love that most people knew or felt was sexual. Hence in Puritan sermons the most common metaphor for Christ was the bridegroom. What He did for believers was what bridegrooms did for brides, and ministers did not hesitate to use the word "impregnate' to describe it." Both the repression and the celebration of sexuality have come into our own times. Ken Starr thought even the word sex was wicked while Bill Clinton thought sexual acts were on like having a cup of coffee with someone. What both men lacked was an awareness of the link between sexuality and spirituality. Neither can be whole or healthy or fully moral without an appreciation of the other. The ancients were right. There is a deep connection between sexuality and spirituality. Let me briefly suggest three ways in which sex and spirit touch one another, reflect one another, influence one another. First, both sexuality and spirituality, in Sam Keen's telling phrase, "shatter the categories of understanding." Just when we think we comprehend what is going on in either realm, the answer we have begins to slide away from us into the unknown, the mysterious, the paradoxical. This is hard for us to accept. We live in an age in which we expect to be able to know truth. We believe that truth is cumulative. We expect truth to be rational. We believe that things that matter can be measured. Frustratingly, sexuality and spirituality reveal very little of themselves in this way. Psychologists, sociologists, counselors, and doctors have been measuring sex for nearly a century. We know all kinds of biological and physiological and even emotional data about what happens to the body in sexual arousal. We know a lot about the frequency of sexual experience—more sex for married people than for single people. We know a lot about how many people commit adultery—about half the married people, more men than women but the women are catching up. We know a lot about how many of these people seek counseling and how many benefit from it and how many never seem to learn anything, and lots of other information about human sexual experience. Dr.Kinsey and his team of researchers and Masters and Johnson and their team of researchers and all the others who have followed in their wake have given us a staggering quantity of data about how we do sex. The why of these recorded behaviours remains beyond our knowledge. Why with two fundamental genders are there such a wide variety of attraction, desire, and anatomy in each of them? Why are we drawn against all sense to certain persons? Why are some of us monogamous for a lifetime and others of us caught up in an endless number of sexual partners? Why are some of us happily celibate? Why are some of us drawn to sadomasochism or autoeroticism or pedophilia? Why do such attractions and desires sometimes vanish? Numbers do not help much with such questions as these. They remain essentially unanswered, each new generation having a go at trying to find definitive ways of answering them. Scholars in many fields—sociology and history and psychology and sociobiology and anthropology, among others-- have given us numbers and chronology about how many believers in a particular religion there are and how many people go to a worship service regularly and how doctrines have actually developed and changed and the place of religion in a society and much other factual information about human spirituality. The work of Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud and James G.Frazer and Arnold Toynbee and hosts of other very bright students of religious phenomena have given us concrete pictures of the ways humanity does religion—our rituals, our doctrines, our mythic tales of origin, our apocalyptic sagas of End-Time, our symbols, our texts—and how similar and different these ways are. But the questions in our souls persist. Why am I alive? Is there any purpose to my existence, any meaning? Why is there evil? Why goodness? How can I feel a sense of wholeness? How can I feel at home in this world? Why do I do the things I know that I should not because they will harm me and others and refrain from doing the things that I should because they will benefit me and others? Numbers, measurements, the most reasoned explanations do not fully— sometimes do not at all—satisfy our need to know the answers to these disturbing questions. Every effort to define them—that is, to place boundaries around and make easily understood categories out of either sexuality or spirituality—runs aground on the fundamental mystery of each of these kinds of experience. Sexuality and spirituality are essential aspects of human life, ever beyond our grasp, sometimes seeming to blend into one another as in moments of ecstasy that defy rational description, always surprising us and thereby keeping us humble. Mystery is the first connection between sexuality and spirituality. Identity is the second. Sexuality and spirituality are crucial ways in which we come to understand ourselves, to know who we are and where we belong and with whom in the world. Each of us has/is a body. That body is gendered in some way. Biologically we inherit certain traits of the flesh—skin color, approximate height and weight, a shape of the head and face, a way of walking and talking. Socially we inherit certain notions about these traits of the flesh, attitudes about the beauty or ugliness of different colors of the skin, different heights and weights for one sex or the other, different shapes of head and face, different ways of walking and talking. We present ourselves to the world inescapably as male, female, lesbian, gay, bisexual, heterosexual, transsexual, transvestite or some other form of being sexual. Part of this is a given in our lives from birth. Part of it we choose. What we are given and what we choose has a profound effect on who we are and how we are able to live. The passage through adolescence is easy for almost no one, but how much harder it is for someone who is not heterosexual, the majority form of sexual orientation. The added agony about bodily unworthiness that is experienced by most boys and girls who are part of a sexual minority is one reason why the rates of suicide and of suicidal attempts are so much higher among these groups. Being a male means to have a body that on average is physically stronger than females of the same age, to be biologically capable of fathering but not of mothering children, to enjoy as females cannot the pleasures of having a prostate gland—about which the evangelist Will Campbell once remarked that he "knew the Creator had a sense of humor because of where he put the prostate." There are certain social ideas associated with maleness in our society—and these ideas will vary from society to society. The ones I grew up with included such notions as that men should be breadwinners in time of peace and warriors in time of battle, that men should not cry in public nor very often in private, that men should run the world, and that men have no place in the nursery. Part of my identity has been shaped by the ways in which I have both met these expectations and fought against their imposition upon my life. I have been a breadwinner but I have also relied upon a woman to keep us from starvation and homelessness. Tears flow readily from my eyes at sentimental or sad moments. I have never nor have I ever wanted to run the world. I was a single parent for almost three years. Who we are is shaped in large degree by how we experience ourselves and how we present ourselves to the world sexually. Each of us has/is a body that houses as well a spiritual dimension. Spirit refers to those aspects of our humanity that go beyond the merely physical. Spirituality embraces intellectual, emotional, moral, and theological questions and answers. We are given certain ways of looking at the world by those who bring us into it and who are our first care-givers. They may be Japanese or African or Filipino. They may be Muslim or atheist or Native American. They may be one or two or several in number. They may be deeply nurturing or provide only the minimum necessary physical elements of food and clothing and shelter. Which of these or literally thousands of other options and combinations is true for us will have a profound effect upon how we understand the world: as a safe place where we can trust people, as a hostile place where survival is at risk every moment, as a place where our ways are not valued by others, as a place where our ways are the dominant ways of the world. Then, as we grow in consciousness, we begin to form our own questions: why is the grass green?, what is God?, has Fido gone to heaven? why is the world so often unfair as it was this afternoon when my brother got to play outside longer than I did? Our spiritual development is influenced by the experiences we have: of living as a member of a minority religion that is oppressed, as most Jews throughout Christian history have had to do; of living as a black person in America, in slavery for centuries, in a segregated country for another 100 years, and in a society still unable to come fully to grips with its racism for the past four decades. What we have been taught as children and what incidents confirmed or refuted those teachings, what has happened to us since that time and how we have reflected on those events will shape the kinds of questions we ask and the way in which we answer them and the group with whom we will feel a spiritual identification: Roman Catholic, Buddhist, humanist, earth-centered, Fundamentalist, Unitarian Universalist, or one of the thousands of other spiritual identities. With others with whom we feel an affinity we proclaim and we search out meanings in the world, worth for our lives and for the lives of others, hope for the future for all humanity and all life. Our spirituality, ever in flux, is an important way of understanding who we are. Sexuality and spirituality are deeply influential factors of our personalities, keys to self-knowledge. They aid us in identifying how we want to live in the world. They push us to the limits of comprehension of what it means to be humanly alive. Thirdly, sexuality and spirituality both have to do with power. The power of sexuality lies in bonding. Two, and sometimes more, persons are attracted to each other. They draw close and find something of interest and delight and begin to learn about and relate to each other. In the process of such a relationship, each person is enabled to find strength, release, joy. Love is the result. Love then generates and fertilizes further sexual experience with a wonderful sense of happiness. One of the important factors in the development of such love is vulnerability. When we confront one another sexually we do so in nakedness. Physically and emotionally stripped bare to who we are, we offer ourselves. There is a certain measure of trepidation in doing so. We know all too well how flawed and frail we really are. When our openness is met with an answering vulnerability and openness, trust develops, a trust that enables us to develop greater depth in the relationship, deeper love. Joy radiates out to others from an overflowing cup of our own delight. Sexuality has the power to make us happy and by making us happy to make us kinder people so that not just we but those around us reap rich rewards from our relationship. There is a dark side to the power of sexuality. This is seen when the vulnerability and trust of one partner is met with anger, secrecy, manipulation, indifference, or physical force. Abuse in the most intimate of human relationships is one of the most grievous sins of our species. My anger is directed most specifically at those religious leaders, a few of whom I have known personally, who have taken advantage of children or of hurting adults to work out their own distorted sexual fantasies. Sexuality becomes a nightmare. Sexuality has enormous power, to send us into hell or to lift us into heaven. Spirituality is no less powerful. The power of spirituality is the power of connecting us to other life, life in nature, life in our animal cousins, life in other human beings. We see a beautiful sunrise and rejoice at the prospects of the day ahead. We feel the soft fur of a Wheaten Terrier and the soft tongue that licks us in friendliness and know the universe has a gentle side to it. We talk with our son about his plans for graduate school where but a few years ago not even college seemed possible and feel the goodness of this world in how much we love this boy. Relationships teach us about love. Love in turn generates and fertilizes further experiences with nature and animals and people that can also bring us great measures of happiness. An essential part of spirituality is yielding, becoming aware of our frailty before the vastness of Time and Space and a world brimming with people and ideas and plans and pains and potentiality and births and deaths and disappointments and hopes. How small we are before All That Is. How little influence we can have on the destiny of this planet. Yielding before this reality, trusting that love will survive even though we shall not and accepting, even loving the world on these terms, we are able to find the place where we belong, the place and the people and the language that are for us home. This may be Taoistic, Marxist, Muslim, Lutheran, naturalistic humanist, UU, or any one of thousands of ways of being at home in the world. In trusting the world and in loving the world, despite the fact that we are not gods and we are not going to live forever, we can know a joy that fills our lives and radiates out to others from the overflowing cup of Existence Itself. The power of spirituality is the power to make us happy, and by making us happy to make us kinder people so that not just we but those around us reap rich rewards from our spiritual depths and relationships. There is a dark side to spirituality. Our parents, our spiritual counselors, our religious leaders can sow seeds of hostility and mistrust, can encourage us in exclusion and narrow-mindedness, can move us toward hatred of those who are different from us. What could be worse than to fill the open mind and generous heart of a child with such wickedness? What could be worse than to lead people in search of spiritual fulfillment down the path of evil? Every religious option seems to have those who do these things, leading to rape and assault and murder, excommunication and shunning and oppression. Too many fundamentalist leaders in too many religions have blighted the earth with such monstrous crimes of distortion of the power of spirituality. Spirituality becomes a nightmare. Sexuality and spirituality both have great power, a power that is similar in operation, in scope, and in the potential for good and for evil. Sexuality and spirituality are related in that both are embedded in mystery, both are ways in which we are identified, and both have great power. One of the best descriptions of the interplay between them is by Jan Morris. Jan Morris, formerly Jim Morris, has lived on both sides of the sexual divide, and writes movingly of what she has learned. Her words close these reflections on sexuality and spirituality. "Actually all the best sex, in my view, aspires to the condition of incest. Brothers and sisters we all become, if we love each other deeply and long enough. I have lived with one partner for nearly forty (now 50—KWP) years, through a greater permutation of sexual relationships than a Grecian fabulist could conceive, and out of it all I have drawn the conclusion that the ultimate object of sex is not physical after all, but spiritual—beyond the production of children, the sealing of profounder unions. If evolution decreed that sex must be a pleasure to ensure the continuity of the species, a higher will conceived it more sacramentally, and its ultimate delight is nothing less than a glimpse of that final unity, the infinite. "It may be the only glimpse we get, and is hard to imagine sometimes. The…couple in the dining room…is it conceivable that, when they go up to their room, they are this very evening to be afforded the momentary vision of the unimaginable that is sex's truest meaning? Certainly it is. We all feel it, every one of us, even those whose approach to sex is most vulgar. We may think it merely the crowning of bodily urges, but it is also an intimation of the divine." PLEASURES OF A TANGLED LIFE Jan Morris Pages 11-12 Copyright Kenneth W. Phifer. All rights reserved.