April 26, 2005
Jesus and "Real" Men
by Lorraine Berry
The theocrats' hatred of the body is a particular fascination of mine. It's a topic that haunts me, and, as things get increasingly worse in the United States in terms of the attacks on privacy, and as I feel the water getting hotter and the frogs still not jumping out of the pot, I search for answers, for words, for a way to understand them, extend compassion to them, and change their minds. Yes. I want to be the queen of the universe and make these people see the light. I really want to release them from their fears, because I think they are a people driven by fear. Fear is the basis of addiction. And fundies act like addicts in ways that I've articulated before.
And so, I feel obliged to try to feel my way through the relationship between the erotic and the spiritual. The sacred and the profane. Here's my thinking.
Attempting to find the connections between the sacred and the erotic seems a fool's enterprise. Immediately, my own intellect begins to mock me, presenting images of lascivious priests, porn shop editions of the Kama Sutra, or jokes about the ResERECTION or the Second Coming.
But, when I can release myself from the shackles of my rational self, I can admit some things. I don't know if god exists. But I do know that my understanding of the sacred, those moments when awe replaces fear, is linked to my understanding of the erotic-those moments when the distance between two bodies is breached by contact. The hum of flesh against flesh.
I recognize this aspect of myself, this desire, need, to find my connection to spiritual bliss in genital contact. After all, so many of the feelings used by mystics to describe their encounters with the divine have always sounded to my ear like descriptions of orgasm or its afterglow. When scholars make this argument, that religious ecstasy is sexual ecstasy sublimated, they are accused of reductionism. But what of persons such as me, who feel in ways that we are not always able to articulate, that sexual intimacy is as close as we'll ever come to feeling the fire of the divine? Am I the only one who feels this way?
To speak about sex as if it is capable of elevating us is to risk being accused of not being spiritual enough, of living only on an earthly plain, of privileging the body over the soul. But why? There are few religions that celebrate the body as the gateway to the divine. Mostly, we are advised to subjugate the body to the spirit, to discipline it, to control it, to prevent it from carrying us into excess. And this has never made sense to me.
It has on an intellectual level. I understand the notion of dualities: sacred and profane, suffering and pleasure, good and evil, man and woman. As someone who has studied gender in historical context, I could riff for hours on the association of women with the body, men with spirit, and how both women and the body became the gateways through which evil, the Devil, sin found ways to enter the world.
I look at the scriptural justifications for the ways that Fundies behave in the world, and most frequently, they cite Leviticus, or other books from the Old Testament. Or they quote Paul, who was not Jesus. Or, as I read in the May issue of Harper's, they cite the kick-ass Jesus from Revelations. That kick-ass Jesus scares the bejesus out of me, but perhaps he is easier for certain men to relate to.
When I was in Florida a few months ago, I saw a plethora of bumper stickers that read "Real Men Love Jesus." I've been thinking about that bumper sticker ever since. What it means. Real men don't love the faggy Jesus; you know, the one who had feelings, who wept, who felt suffering on the cross, who urged us to love our neighbors as ourselves, who commanded us to love one another. Love one another. Not to throw stones, missiles, drop bombs. That Jesus may well qualify as a sensitive new-age guy, a metrosexual, a wimp. How can a real man love that Jesus? Loving that Jesus means loving that part of themselves, and well, real men don't seem to do that.
I cannot speak for other women, but I can speak from my position as a heterosexual woman. When I have read many accounts of male experiences of interaction with the divine, the most frequent image is that of a piercing or penetration by the divine spirit. The metaphor is important for several reasons. I would argue that one of the reasons that there has been such an insistence on separating sex from the sacred is the fear that describing sex and the penetration of the soul homoeroticizes the relationship between men and their gods. I have never seen an instance where a male mystic refers to being engulfed by the divine.
In many hagiographies or confessions about the coming to the divine, there is a sort of negotiation that goes on. A negotiation in which the stubborn soul refuses the love of God, and then at some point, there is surrender.
The negotiations between men and women are similar. And what is the point of the negotiation? The point of the negotiation is surrender. What is it for a man to surrender to a woman? Is it to imagine what it is to be the glove, rather than the hand? To be the sheath. That is what vagina means, you know. Sheath. From the Latin. I find it fascinating that a part of the female body, the canal through which women bring forth new life, the first journey we experience as human beings-sliding through a fleshy tunnel into the light and cold-that the name for that conduit is not related to its function in birth, but rather, bears the name of a holder of a weapon. A scabbard-the covering in which you insert your sword.
Is this what men think of their penises as? Weapons? Swords? But a sheath is where you keep your knife to keep it safe, to keep it when you're not using it for violence. It's a place for it to rest until the next time it's needed. When you place your sword inside its sheath, you've put down your weapon, you've disarmed yourself, you've made yourself vulnerable. You've surrendered.
In many of these hagiographies, men lay down the life of the sword for the life of the spirit. In many of the images of the warrior Christ, he bears the sword of justice. Perhaps I'm being oversensitive to phallic imagery, but I am speculating as to why the most fundamentalist of religious extremists hate and fear homosexuality so much.
What is the experience of spiritual surrender? In the accounts I've read, it's the sense of penetration, of becoming whole, of feeling a divine presence move into your body. It's not unlike the experience for women of heterosexual sex. I'm not a gay man. I don't know if penetrative gay sex inspires the same feelings. But I come back to the fear again. I come back to the fear of homosexuality. If your deity is male, and you want to be infused with his spirit, what is involved in that process? How can you maintain a distance between your experience of the sacred and more bodily experiences?
Posted by in Body, Christian Fundamentalism, Conservatism, Culture War, Extremists, Feminism, Metaphor, Religion, Sexual Politics
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Say it loud, say it proud!
There's another strange body/spirituality connection: scourging, hairshirts, Muslims who cut themselves, etc. Bodily pain as a way to spirituality. This seems to me the opposite of bodily pleasure (sex, gastronomy) as a way to spirituality. I wonder if to become spiritual via pain is the perverse extreme of body fear. I frankly believe sex, drugs and rock 'n roll are all excellent ways to spirituality, if it's defined as a heightened state of consciousness. But why pain? Then again, at certain extremes of sex, pain does become pleasurable. This stuff is worth a LONG conversation.
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Comment by: Adam Ash at April 26, 2005 06:31 PM
Something else: being a "man" precludes surrender. A matter of male honor, never to surrender. So: would the world be a better place if all hetero men experienced the surrender of a butt-fuck (what if it had happened to Hitler and Stalin)? After all, men have been blessed with a sheath, too. Apparently it's a current underground vogue for modern couples to indulge in -- the female strapping on a dildo and doing her boyfriend -- maybe the harbinger of future male surrender.
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Comment by: spyder at April 26, 2005 07:31 PM
The flagelletes of the christian middle ages were daily reminders among the cities and villages of Europe of the spiritual path maintained by inflicting pain on oneself and others. Theologies abound with adversity through pain, and Christianity is replete with saints and mystics and litanies of same.
Many of these states are linked in some consciousness studies with altered states initiated through sensory deprivation, sensory overload, starvation and cutting, and so forth. Shamanism's initiatory experiences, reported among researches and within indigenous communities, often describe the absolute need of the initiate to completely surrender to a process of dismemberment, disemboweling, dissassociation with consensual reality, etc.
Women surrender to child birth in ways that men are completely incapable of fully comprehending. It is through this incredible act of creation that all of the measured and practiced approaches to sexual bliss are generated. This capacity to surrender all of one's life to another living being, to choose to take within oneself the burden of bearing the pain inorder to send forth into the world, is hugely magical. Men need to learn more from it, become more familiar with it, spend much more time around it, to fully embrace the ecstatic possibilities within themselves.
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Comment by: Adam Ash at April 26, 2005 07:59 PM
Why is pain as a way to spirituality so prevalent in Christianity and Islam? Is it part of the religious impulse? Or part of the abnegation/fear of the body? Or part of the male horror of body pleasure with the female? Spyder, your bringing up of childbirth is most instructive. I think the idea of penis envy is ludicrous -- but male envy of the female ability to bring forth human life might afford a much deeper insight into male psychology than Freud thought penis envy could explain female drives. In fact, his idea of penis envy might simply be his silly compensation for his subconscious birth envy.
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Comment by: davidt at April 26, 2005 10:26 PM
Sex is fine with Jesus. God made sex, and he made it well. Man screws it up and so we have to go back to God's design for sex - one man, one woman, love, commitment, sacrifice, fun, forever. Read Song of Solomon 1, pretty fun stuff. Sex is not like cheating on your taxes, this stuff can screw up your life really bad. So God has a lot more to say about sex than about money. As far as sex and spirit, Song of Solomon can be taken symbolically to mean intimacy between man and God. That's not wrong, and in fact is very normal. We just have to be aware of the language we use because this is such a sensitive topic, we should handle it carefully.
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Comment by: Adam Ash at April 27, 2005 02:18 PM
"God's design for sex - one man, one woman, love, commitment, sacrifice, fun, forever."
This does not sound like God's design for sex. It sounds more like some manmade design for sex. BTW, there's a difference between religion and spirituality. You can be spiritual without being religious, and religious without being spiritual. There should be wall between sex and religion like there is a wall between the state and religion. Theocracy starts when religion becomes prescriptive about sex, and brings in its fear of the body and its suspicions about its pleasures. The sooner religion gets it blue nose out of sex, the better.
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Comment by: davidt at April 27, 2005 06:16 PM
In reading Song of Solomon, Genesis 1-3, Ephesians 5, Colossians 4, you get a picture of God's design for sex. Man wants to divide, but God wants to unite. Just because one is against the Bible, it doesn't mean God has nothing to say about. Read the texts and see what you get.
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Comment by: Lawrence Krubner at April 28, 2005 02:58 AM
"Something else: being a "man" precludes surrender. A matter of male honor, never to surrender."
That's a cliche, and one I have trouble understanding the origins of. Feudal language is a language of submission. Roland proclaimed his love for his king with language so intense a husband might be embarrassed to speak to his wife that way. Men submit to other men, everywhere, in every culture, and they have a language, in every culture, to describe that language in positive terms. Warrior cultures call it honor. Marcus Aurelias spoke of the rewards of service. Monks speak of their love and submission for God.
"Men don't do submission" is a modern ideology, and even now it is not widely practiced, though it is now given lip service everywhere.
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Comment by: Lawrence Krubner at April 28, 2005 03:25 AM
"Perhaps I'm being oversensitive to phallic imagery, but I am speculating as to why the most fundamentalist of religious extremists hate and fear homosexuality so much."
That is a good question, and I don't think anyone has a good answer for that. The timing of the fear can be dated fairly well. In the 1600s men were still viewed as being natually bi-sexual. When Milton has Jesus on the cross, he has Satan come and tempt Jesus a final time, with beautiful women and pretty young boys. At the time, in the 1600s, it seemed normal that Jesus might be tempted by pretty boys. Sodomy was understood as drugs are today - as a sin, but a pleasurable sin.
In the 1700s there emerges what you might call modern heterosexuallity, the assumption that men do not enjoy having sex with other men. Why this emerges during the 1700s is an open question.
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Comment by: Adam Ash at April 26, 2005 06:14 PM