June 18, 2005

The Flesh and The Devil
by Lorraine Berry

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?

And what of those moments when we go off seeking that connection and find something awful instead of the awe that we're after? How can sex mean and not mean simultaneously?

A few Christmases ago, I found myself alone. My ex was with my kids at his new girlfriend's house and I felt piercingly lonely and sad. A casual acquaintance invited me to go for a hike with him, and, rather than being alone and miserable, I opted for company. At the end of the afternoon, there was a tacit agreement that we would have sex, this virtual stranger and I. And thus followed a horrendous encounter. It would be an exaggeration to say that I was raped; after all, I had agreed to be there. But this man I barely knew did unspeakable things to my body over my objections and subjected me to a barrage of verbal humiliation. When I was able to extricate myself, I drove away from his house in rage at him and in an agony of anger at myself for allowing my loneliness to lead me down such a dark path.

There didn't feel as if there had been a moment of sacredness in any of what had happened. It was empty and malevolent and icky, and I wanted to cleanse myself of it-but I wasn't certain how.
In writing about this event so many months later there is the urge to remove all reference to it, to erase it from the past, treat it as if there is nothing sacred there. But there is, if only in the recognition that took place-not that day, but eventually-that sacred experiences are not always about bliss. Sometimes they are about the recognition that pain and suffering are the result when we attempt to unhitch the erotic from the better part of ourselves and denigrate it.

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.
So resorting to dualities explains away many of my questions. But it does nothing to solve the dilemma of my own questions-because I see sex as containing within it the potential for everything at all times.

The pain of existence is that we do it alone while constantly longing for contact with something other. We elevate the idea of spiritual communion with something outside of ourselves while we downplay the significance of the physical communion with another human being. And we denigrate it in ugly ways. I'm not saying that we should be worshipping the yoni or erecting statues of Priapus, but it seems to me that our insistence that sex is earth-bound is shortsighted. What other activity allows two human beings to grant to each other such release?

I think that sexuality is a gift. I don't know whether to call it divine because I don't know whence it came. But I know the places it has taken me. I have made realizations about when sex is sacred, and when I am using it to find a false sense of completion.

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.

Because my experiences of sex involve the penetration of my body by a man, it has felt in ways that sex was an act of completion. Somehow, I saw in sexual intercourse and the complementary anatomies a desire to be completed by another human being. But it's become increasingly clear to me that I cannot be a whole person by the filling of Slot B with Tab A. Sacred sex cannot be about finding my other half.

This was not an easy illusion to give up. So much of our language of coupledom is about half coming together with half to form a whole. So many times I thought that sex could fix what is broken inside of me. But I cannot fix anyone else; nor can I be fixed. So many times I have mistaken my desirability as power, when I see now that frequently, I was in a weakened position. And so many times, I have walked away from those experiences diminished.

In the last few years, my whole self has emerged. The self that is capable of keeping itself company, of not feeling flattened by loneliness (although loneliness has not been completely banished). Instead, as I have written about before, I have learned to relish being alone, to find spiritual peace and emotional fulfillment in my presence. Still, questions about sex remain. And I let them remain unanswered, even as I acknowledge their insistence to be asked.

Posted by in Body, Creativity, Ephemera, Epiphany, Gender, Life, Mythologies, Religion, Sex, Sexual Politics
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