FROM THE BOUNDARY: Sex and soul – Part 6
I’ve no doubt that some of you will be shocked that a priest should write openly about sex. But then, I’m not courting friends, and I don’t suppose for a moment that anything I write will touch the Pharisees out there – well, with horror maybe. For me, it’s equally shocking that some still act the judge and executioner in telling young people that if they have sex before marriage they’ll go straight to hell. I wonder whether, in some churches, young unmarried women with babies are still ostracised? In either case, it’s time we stopped the nonsense, playing God, rubbishing young, and maybe not-so-young, minds with confusion, fear, guilt and shame.
The sad thing is that extra-marital sex, despite the ‘sexual revolution’, has so often been treated punitively. It’s sacred quality has rarely been recognised, if ever understood. But isn’t it the most basic of human instincts we all share, and the most creative in its nature? And IF you profess Jesus, why do you judge others so dismissively? Get the beam out of your own eye, for Jesus’ sake.
What a gloomy thing it is at times to assert ‘Christianity’, and it all began with a story about an apple! Some still call for a return to the sexual morality of the Bible. Well, let’s pause and remember. All the books are marooned in the customs and understandings of the times in which they were written; and, yes, there are the most heartfelt love stories. The ‘Song of Songs’ trumpets God’s gift of sexual attraction, but there’s also those tawdry tales of rape, incest, seduction, sexual revenge and prostitution told, mostly, in the most non-judgmental way.
The homophobes love the Sodom story, but find no problem with the ‘righteous man’, Lot, offering his daughters for gang-rape, and the daughters committing incest with him to save the tribe. Tamar played the whore (Gen. 38:1-30). Solomon had his 1000 wives and concubines. The body of his maidservant/concubine, Hagar, was used by Abraham to make a son, because he thought Sarah was past it (Gen. 16, 21). Despite the Mosaic Law, Moses solved the problem by having at least two wives and, allegedly, various affairs such that “the men in the camp were jealous of him” (Ps. 106:16). Yeah for the ‘sexual morality’ of the Bible then!
At best, ‘Don’t do as I do. Do as I say.’ Has anything changed?
When Jesus asked “Why do you call me ‘good’?” (Luke 18:19) he was signalling that none of us is perfect other than by expressing who and what we truly are as God made, with our heart’s Love, the pure heart we were born with, the heart which should signal everything that’s good and beautiful in our physical relationships. Our rotten behaviour crawls from us in the confusions we’ve gathered like weeds in life’s passage. Transformation may still come – through love, the “new commandment”, the light the darkness can never overcome. Our grasping, clinging, manipulating needn’t be us. Sure, mothers who trade their kids for sex with adult men – not unknown here – have much to answer. Girls who see fellas as easy pickings disgrace themselves. Fellas who play around as if women are things, toys, are silly little boys who ‘want, want, want’ in long trousers. Yet maybe, just maybe, underneath it all, it’s a relentless search for the love previously wanting in their lives. It’s all too easy to be judgmental, isn’t it?
The Buddhist would speak of ‘right action’ in a ‘middle way’ when it comes to sex. It’s a way of tenderness, harmony, love, not harming yourself and others. It’s not marriage which sanctions it for the Buddhist any more than it was for Jesus. Sex as sin came long after the cross, inter alios through the Roman Church’s Pope Gregory the Great, bless him, who absurdly declared that sex, other than for baby-making in marriage, was taboo. And birth control? It’s out. The pill’s a sin!
Go safely, then – until the next time.
The essence of life, from the boundary: “Taking off the clothes of the mind and making love to the body of reality.” (Kenneth White)