In the previous post I invited you to ponder on what spirituality means to us so we can get a felt sense of it rather than try and define it. I’ll continue with that theme in this post.
What about our spirituality and our sexuality? Because I believe that both have a transcendent quality, and sex appears to have meaning for us beyond the procreation of our species, I said that I’d give the connection between the two a post of its own.
Another reason to spend a little time exploring the connection is that while we accept nowadays that our sexuality is linked to our spirituality, somewhere along our timeline of evolution (in recent centuries in the Western World anyway) great efforts were made by people of influence to get us to believe that the two were separate.
It might be of interest to explore the impact of this separation in respect of what spirituality means to us. Because the separation, I believe, had the effect of considerably narrowing our understanding of spirituality and rendering one significant aspect of it – our sexuality – off limits.
I also believe that control (which is linked to suppression) of both by powerful forces in society is linked to the wider power and control of vast numbers of humans since civilisation began.
And finally it might be good to raise our awareness of how this control is woven very subtly into our culture, language, norms etc.
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When I was young if someone suggested that sex, even between two responsible adults who love each other, could be a spiritual experience I’m not sure if it would have induced a positive reaction from those who were of most influence in Irish society at that time – in particular the all-powerful Catholic Church. The Church instructed us as to what spirituality was – and to best of my recollection it had no link to sex.
Intellectuals (including Catholic ones) throughout history have, of course, posited the strong link – and I am sure that at some theological level the official Church would have linked sexual-union-within-Catholic-marriage in some way to spirituality – but I am referring here to how the vast majority of ordinary people (including myself) would have imagined its attitude to be. [1].
The fact that pleasuring oneself sexually and/or having sex outside of Catholic marriage were not only impure acts, but were mortal sins punishable by eternal damnation not only put a damper on sexual exploration, but drove a fairly substantial wedge between sex and spirituality – which was manifest in being holy, humble, simple, quiet, clean, pure, meek, like the inside of a monastery – perhaps seeing the wonder of God’s creation in nature or enjoying hard-to-understand poetry – and above all observing a wide variety of religious obligations. (Note the terms, pure and impure, which I also mentioned when I referred to how we associate the word spirits with purity because spirits are distilled).
Another fairly big wedge was that the people who were the gatekeepers, or exemplars of spirituality, (brothers, nuns and priests) didn’t really choose their job. Unlike the rest of us school-leavers, who might get a job in the bank, or selling carpets, they were called by God, they had a vocation, and one aspect of their vocation was they didn’t have sex for the rest of their lives.
Even within the confines of Catholic marriage the purpose of sex was to make more Catholics, [2] and using artificial birth control methods to enjoy sex without worrying about getting pregnant would also have been a sin. (I’m not sure whether or not it was mortal).
The fact that there might be joy involved (which is a word that is also linked to spirit and spirituality) seemed almost an embarrassment. And, after the much-hoped-for baby was born as a result of a man and woman having sex within marriage, blessed by the Church, the woman had to be churched (now – as far as I am aware – discontinued) to rid her of the uncleanliness that arose from childbirth.
One day something struck me about all this.
In our world, the Church decided what spirituality was, and also decided for us under what circumstances we were allowed to have sex. The link between the two was control.
What better way to control us ordinary people than to set the status of a kind of pure spirituality above the spirituality of sex that mature adults engage in that serve the dual purpose of having a bit of fun and, of course, making more humans.
And this lived on in our language – where books/films that contained explicit sexual images were called dirty. (Or were when I was young anyway). And dirty (like impure) is hardly a word that we associate with spirituality!
The founder of the Catholic Church (and all of the Christian Churches), Jesus Christ, was conceived, not by his mother Mary having sex, but by a spirit coming upon her. (Luke 1:34-35). The conception of Jesus was not a sexual event but a spiritual one. The joy that Mary felt was not the playful abandon of having sex with her husband, Joseph, but the pure joy of spiritual union – and the joy of being chosen to be the mother of Jesus who was the son of God.
When I was a boy I was fed dogma that I had to accept and felt that I had no choice but to believe things that I thought were unlikely if not impossible. When I got a bit older and began to think things out for myself I considered much of what I had to do and believe to be the opposite of what I understood spirituality to be.
Yet I know people that I greatly respect who feel that there is a significant spiritual dimension to all that they do and believe, who experienced much the same as I!
Let me remind you here that I am still discussing how we understand spirituality, i.e. what it means to us. And I’m going on about it a bit to highlight the difficulty that we have when we want to define spirituality – and how it is so subjective – which I mentioned in a previous post.
[1]. As an aside, when I was describing trauma, I used the image of a flywheel to illustrate how trauma lives long in the body, after the original incident has long disappeared from cognitive memory. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to say that it’s similar with the Catholic Church in Ireland. Even though a lot of welcome changes have taken place the old controlling-attitudes flywheel still pumps energy into our current norms.
[2]. As far as I remember, the Church only allowed marriage between a Catholic and another religion if the children were brought up as Catholics. I’m not sure whether this was different in centuries past, or in different countries, or, indeed, whether it is still the case, or not.