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Sex as Grace for the Spiritual Journey
My spiritual journey through disillusionment with my Christian denomination eventually took me through a study of World Religions, reading the whole bible, visiting various Christian denominations, and finally at 30, being challenged to say this prayer: Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, I accept you as my Savior and Lord. Take my life and make me into the person God created me to become. The result of that was being suddenly overwhelmed with joy from the sense of being loved tenderly, totally, just as I was “without one plea.” It gave me openness to grace that has not only brought unquestionable miracles, but also strength to deal with the extremely heartbreaking parts of my life that come without miracles.
Now, at the age of 88, I have become convinced that life is a spiritual school for learning to love our imperfect selves, then not only those who love us, but those who frighten and even hurt us, and ultimately God, when we are suffering and feel abandoned, just as Jesus did.
I can look back on my journey and see Micah 6:8 playing out. What God has taught me slowly is to “seek justice, love mercy,” and now in my old age to learn to “walk humbly with my God.”
My main activity now in sleepless nights is reviewing both my outer and inner life over all those years. I have gone from denial, to cringing, to trying to do something better than my younger self has managed to do, to finally accepting that we all are unfinished, imperfect human beings, even at the moment of death. And we were not all dealt the same hand, so we can’t judge anyone, even ourselves.
I was married to my husband for almost sixty years. We were total opposites in personality, upbringing, and even what we valued in life. It was not an easy journey to unconditional love for either of us. And though as humans, we never reached perfection, we grew in love and in understanding. I think for most people, marriage is the best school for learning to love like Jesus did.
God made sex pleasurable so that early humans, who did not know how we made babies, would procreate and increase. Early humans lived short lives and married early. The world, cultures, people, and the needs involved in spiritual evolution have changed.
Sex as pleasure is still part of the journey, but the need to populate the earth isn’t.
However, I have discovered that part of the spiritual journey is experiencing a oneness with all people, with nature, with the universe, through the Spirit of God in all of it.
Three times I have experienced this life-changing understanding.
The first was when cooking out with the young boys in my husband’s and son’s Indian Guides group’s campout. All the fathers went to sleep before the kids, so instead of going back to my in-laws’ nearby country house, I stayed there, sitting in a lawn chair all night, keeping the fire going and pulling the sleeping boys back when they wiggled close to it. Just before dawn, the night sounds stopped. It was like the earth was holding its breath. Then, as a pale light tinted the edge of the world, the chorus of the day sounds began. I suddenly experienced a sense of total oneness with it ALL. It was not only joyous, but mind-blowing. I am one with everyone and everything. Hating them is hating myself. It was the beginning of a long process of learning to not judge or hate, even when I must fight to stop actions I consider destructive. Our universe and everything in it are one because we have the Spirit of God within us.
The second time was when I walked alone at midnight in a freshly fallen snow to the top of the hill behind our house in our “Winnie the Pooh Hundred Acre Wood.” The silence was profound, and the sky was thick with stars, more than I had ever seen. At first, the magnitude of it all made me feel tiny and insignificant. But then I realized that even though smaller than a pinpoint in eternity, I was like a tiny spot in a beautiful painting. A spot that would have left an empty white space if I wasn’t there. Again, I was transformed by that feeling of oneness with all that glory!
The third and last time I have felt this oneness was when my wonderfully kind husband came home late from work wanting to make love. I usually was delighted to make love, but this night I just didn’t feel like it. As I hesitated in responding, the thought hit me that he may have had a terrible day and needed not only the pleasure, but the affirmation of being loved that way. So, I chose to be responsive and affirming. When I did, I experienced a sense of total oneness with him, which after a few moments morphed into that sense of oneness with everything and everyone, including God.
Sex is part of having an intimate, life-changing relationship. Like other things, it can become an addictive escape from loneliness or a need for affirmation. Using others, even for mutual pleasure, is not love. But it’s human. We all do it, even in marriage. But as part of a commitment to loving a partner, it can be spiritually life-changing.
There are many ways of experiencing sexual pleasure. The difference isn’t in the “how”, it’s in the “why.” And that goes for all genders and combinations.
Sexual pleasure started as practical. Our choice now is between using it just for pleasure, like eating pie, or as part of our journey to becoming able to love someone more than ourselves. And that can connect us to the Spirit of God within and all around us.
Sex and the Different Generations
OK, it’s time to write about sex. At 88 I’ve lived through decades of change in our general attitude toward sex. I’ll share my own early1950’s sex “education” which as I’ve aged, I’ve discovered was pretty much the norm for that time.
At fourteen, which today would be much too late since ten-year-olds now have periods, my mom attempted to explain how babies get here. Her take was to explain that babies came from a husband and wife physically connecting. She said it was a beautiful act to create new life.
I took this as meaning this was something we did only when we wanted to have children.
But I went to a Catholic all-girls high school where we had yearly retreat days where a priest would talk about not letting a boy even put his arm around us because it would give him sinful thoughts and urges. I couldn’t imagine why a teenager would want to have babies, so I began to suspect there was more to sex than just getting pregnant.
Me being me, I became curious about this. As a sophomore I started going steady with a nice Catholic boy who was also having retreat talks about sex at his all-boy high school. He was fortunately either better informed or not of a curious nature and took these warnings seriously, though he did put his arm loosely and carefully around my shoulder at movies. He eventually kissed me goodnight at my door, but it was a very sweet short, closed mouth kiss. I thought it was nice, but it didn’t make me want to have babies.
He went away to college and I started college at Rice in our hometown so we agreed to date other people. Rice was an all-scholarship school.( It cost me $200 a semester for books! That was all since I lived at home.) It happened that it was mostly a science and engineering college so at that time there were 4 boys for every girl. I dated quite a few boys my freshman year and kissed one good-bye at the end of the year when he was graduating and going into the navy. Again, a sweet, closed mouth kiss. I remember one good looking football player who, when I demurred kissing on our first date, told me I was never going to have many dates that way. I was reasonably good-looking and outgoing, so I thought that was funny, but figured that since he was a freshman and a football player, perhaps he hadn’t figured out the boy-to-girl odds at Rice. My high school steady came home for the summer and we picked up where we had left off with sweet, closed mouth kisses at the door. In the second half of my sophomore year, I began to date another football player who was a senior and not playing after the season. We were snuggled on a school bus coming back from an out-of-town basketball game with a throw around us. He not only started open mouth kissing, but touching my upper body in ways that suddenly made me understand what the big deal was about sex. I’ll be honest…I never actually had sex with anyone before I married. But I really enjoyed dating that guy. But at the end of the school year, when he asked me to marry him, I realized I didn’t love him in the same way I did my high school boy friend. It really was just about sex. I don’t think I can claim the moral high ground on sex because of what havoc many of us so called “good” girls in the fifties caused the guys we dated for any length of time.
God cleverly made sure humanity procreated by having sex be very, very pleasurable. When people were marrying at fourteen and fifteen, that may not have caused as much havoc. Having more than one wife probably helped on one level also. But times changed. And society’s attitude toward sex has gone back and forth between extremes ever since. And I don’t think the illusive far-off possibility of hell ever stopped anyone. The total life changing shame my generation of women experienced from pre-marital pregnancy limited me to just torturing my football player for the pleasure and not because of love. I’m pretty sure, I wasn’t in the minority.
One of the problems with the changes in society from one generation to the next is that as parents, we didn’t recognize that the next generation would be living in mixed dorms with the freedom to make out in your own room, and movies and books making it look like everybody’s doing it, so our attempts to teach them the hazards are insufficient for the new freedoms and temptations.
More to come on the changing issues of each generation and our difficultly preparing the next to find solutions that don’t turn sex into a toy or make women the only gatekeepers or gays/lesbians being the only ones that don’t make mistakes and have abortions or divorces with children who end up the losers in our social attitudes toward sex.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 