In a sense, everything is sacred. God is always and everywhere present. Every place is God-filled. Every moment is God-infused. And yet part of sacredness is that it be recognised, in some sense chosen. Certain times and places and objects are set apart so that they remind us more intently that God is present. It seems to me that sex is one of those times.
The Anglican bishop John V. Taylor suggested three marks by which we can recognise the action of the Holy Spirit (or the Divine for those who’d prefer to avoid his Christian assumptions):
- A sense of transcendence, of being taken out of ourselves to feel an intense awareness of some other
- A compelling urge to make choices and take risks
- Acts of self-sacrifice motivated by love for another rather than self-preservation (The Go-between God , p39)
Transcendent moments, such as when we are awestruck by a waterfall or moved to tears by a piece of music, are sacred because they draw back the curtain of the profane to expose something beyond ourselves. In sex, we experience a transcendent moment that is even more sacred because it not only reveals that other but draws us into a space where we can personally encounter and be changed by that other. Sex, in its ideal expression, arises from a mutual choice to be other-centric and consequently involves personal risk and self-giving. In that intimate meeting-of-beings, God is smiling, laughing, comforting and nourishing us.
What I don’t mean
I don’t mean to imply that all sexual acts are sacred. Like every sacred act, the ideal of sex can be corrupted. Coercion for instance – in all its many physical and psychological forms – undermines the sacred by removing all three of Taylor’s marks of the Holy Spirit. Coercion uses power to take rather than enabling the choice to give. In doing so, it constricts both parties, replacing the expanding generativity of transcendence with the contracting impotence of fear.
I also disclaim the notion that to be sacred and pleasing to God, sex must be expressed within the bounds some divinely proscribed law. By saying “sex is sacred” I am not saying that “You’d better do sex the right way otherwise God will be angry.” To say that sex is sacred is not to say that it should be turned into a ritual that requires obedience or compliance. Sacred does not mean serious or religious or rule-bound.
The simple stuff
An obvious hint about the sacredness of sex is its relationship to love. Love is a fundamental quality of God, embedded deep within our human nature and displayed whenever one person seeks the good of another. To the extent that sex is other-centred, it expresses that part of the divine in human nature.
In modern Western culture this relationship between sex and love has become quite confused. Within my lifetime the dominate approach to sexual expression has changed from “Sex is only legitimate within a marriage” through “If you love someone why shouldn’t you have sex with them?” to the Sex in the City approach in which the tricky question is “How many times can I have sex with someone before one of us needs to say ‘I love you’?”
Is sex an expression of commitment? An expression of love? Simply an animal act? I’m sure that the impulse behind sex is biological but in humans so much more is in play. No doubt there is a feedback loop in which a feeling of love motivates a desire for sex and the act of sex promotes feelings of love. But it has always felt to me that sexual intimacy expresses a promise. Even a kiss says not just “I’m enjoying you” but “I care for you”. For me it also says “I will care for you. I will not mislead or defraud or trick you. I am giving myself to you and I will treasure what you are giving to me.”
The Bible shows no shortage of sexual images. In the King James Bible, to have sex with someone was to know them. The Song of Solomon depicts not just the desire between two lovers, but the desire of God for us. Paul compares marriage and the relationship between Christ and the Church (though the direction of the comparison is delightfully ambiguous: is it that marriage acts as a metaphor to help us understand the relationship between Christ and the Church or that the Christ-Church relationship is a metaphor to help us understand marriage?).
Apart from love, another consequence of being made in the image of God is that we inherit God’s creativity. Through sex, we join with God as co-creators, making new life together.
I would hope that those observations already situate sexual intimacy in the realm of the sacred, because love and creativity show that we are in the presence of God.
BUT WAIT! There’s more …
Longing and desire
Sex is sacred because it is based on a desire given to us by God. How we seek to satisfy that desire may be good or bad, loving or hateful, creative or destructive, selfish or caring. But the desire itself is good, intended to bring pleasure and joy.
As René Girard has explained, desire is always copied. We want something because others want it. We learn what to want by watching what others want. This imitated, or mimetic, desire nearly always puts us in competition with the people whose desires we imitate. The social dynamic in which imitated desire creates rivalry is seen no more clearly than in sexuality. I would hardly know what sort of woman was desirable if it wasn’t for what I’d seen modelled by the opinions of family, friends and advertising. I want others to think my partner is hot because that validates her desirability, but the more desirable my partner is, the more likely it is that others will compete against me for her.
And yet there is something deeper to this desire for sex. Putting aside how we determine which potential sexual partner is desirable, the desire itself does not find its source in the imitation of other people but in the imitation of God. Contrary to an all too common belief that we are objects of God’s displeasure and anger, we are loved by God. We are desired by God. Our desire for sexual intimacy, which includes the longing for companionship, for pleasure, and for connection, are mimetic extensions of God’s desire for us.
Copying a desire from God differs in at least one crucial way from imitating the desires of other people: since God has no need to be in competition with us, our sexual desire does not make us God’s rivals. God is not jealous of our sexual relationships in the way that a human rival might. As a result, the pleasures and joys of sex can be celebrated with God rather than held tightly to ourselves as though we might lose them.
Although it can appear naively anthropomorphic, I believe that God smiles with pleasure when we experience the satisfaction of our desires. It was God who placed those desires within us, and God who provides the means by which those desires can be satisfied. When those two come together, God sees that it is good. That is true when we enjoy food, when we share a coffee with friends, when we delight in a waterfall, and when we appreciate a new discovery in science or maths, for in each case we are experiencing the creativity and goodness of God.
I am even tempted to take that thinking one step further. Although I can only half grasp it, it seems to me that the satisfaction of desire is itself a religious act. “Accepting a gift returns honour to the giver” (Stephen Donaldson). If our sexual desire was placed in our hearts by God, if it is part of what Genesis means when it claims we are made in God’s image, then satisfying that desire in a way that recognises and honours the other is inherently holy, regardless of whether you recognise the God who is the source of both the desire and its fulfilment. That would be equally true of other desires too, like eating and peace, … safety … belonging. As we find true shalom and joy in life, and enable the same in others, we are engaged in the most sacred of tasks.
Bridging the separation
Sex is sacred because it involves seeking the divine in each other.
“Aching for we know not what, we meet Eve’s daughters and we are history. She is the closest thing we’ve ever encountered, the pinnacle of creation, the very embodiment of God’s beauty and mystery and tenderness and allure. And what goes out to her is not just a longing for Eve, but a longing for God as well.” (Wild at Heart, John Eldredge)
As a man I can attest to that feeling. I imagine that something parallel is true for the attraction a woman feels towards the sons of Adam.
I believe that part of the reason God created two genders is that it allows more scope to express God’s complex character. God is neither male nor female but God’s character abounds in both stereotypically masculine and stereotypically feminine aspects. God is strong, nurturing, creative, loving, adventurous, risk taking, comforting, rational, emotional, relational. There is no distinction between a feminine side of God and a masculine side: they are just all comfortably mixed together in the one being. When God grouped some of those characteristics and formed a human they became feminine; and when God grouped other characteristics in a different human they became masculine.
This is part of why we feel a sense of alienation. Individually we reflect some aspects of the divine nature but are separated from other aspects. There is a gap between us and other people as well as between us and God.
If God had to separate aspects of God’s nature to express them in two genders because they could not be contained within a single gender, then the re-unification of those genders through physical and psychological intimacy is an even deeper indication of what God is like. The mutual knowing of each other in sex – the intertwining of daring and strength and beauty and allure and mystery – is even closer to the image of God than what any of us contain within our single-gendered self.
Underlying the inexpressible fun of sex there is a truth of the deepest and most serious kind: that the divine image in each of us draws us towards each other and towards its source. You may say that the same is true of friendship and in fact of all human community. I agree. One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to reverse the effect of the Tower of Babel. It is God who enables communication within creation and between us and God. That does not apply to just communication by word: the very ability to understand, to empathise, to touch another’s life, is mediated by God. But this is never more true than through sex. This most intimate touching and seeing of each other is correspondingly the most profound experience of God being with us.
Sex bridges (or at least reduces) the separation we feel so central to being human. But sex not only bridges the gap between the two lovers. The feeling of transcendence during sex also draws us towards God. Sex takes us out of ourselves and opens our hearts to a greater joy beyond our imagining.
God always leans towards us to embrace us as a lover and sex is sacred because it acts as a metaphor for our union with God.
Vulnerability
One of the great paradoxes of sex is that it is simultaneously totally focussed on the other’s pleasure and totally selfish. In seeking above all else to bring joy to the other we find ecstasy for our self. The deepest pleasure arises out of our desire to please the other.
Nevertheless, the path towards that ecstasy requires us to be vulnerable, and in particular, to accept the risk of rejection.
In his lecture The Body’s Grace, Rowan Williams emphasises the centrality of vulnerability and risk. “Sexual activity without risk, without the dangerous acknowledgement that my joy depends on someone else’s as theirs does on mine”, he writes, is perversion. The dynamic that Williams points out here is that my desire is not just a desire for pleasure, or a desire for you, but a desire that you will desire me. In an authentic sexual encounter, I take the risk of expressing my desire knowing that it might not arouse the corresponding desire in you for me.
This vulnerability in the context of sex acts in the same way as the vulnerability between us and God. We come naked before God, unsure of our own desirability. Conversely, God desires us, knowing that we may reject that grace. As Williams observes, “Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.” When that parallel is brought back to the human plane, we find that “Properly understood, sexual faithfulness is not an avoidance of risk, but the creation of a context in which grace can abound because there is a commitment not to run away from the perception of another.”
Sex is sacred because it is a place of grace.
Incomplete
I haven’t tried here to argue any specific case but only to write down how I see it. I’m not claiming anything new here, nor intending to convince anyone else. These are just my personal reflections, with an unstated “I think” prefacing each sentence.
My view of sex is inevitably incomplete and I dearly hope to still discover its deeper truth and joy.
It would be dishonest to end without also noting that sex itself seems incomplete. My experience doesn’t match the ideal. And even if the ideal were reality, the satisfaction that comes from sex is incomplete. It provides partial appeasement of a recurring desire. But that itself is part of its sacredness, for its incompleteness also points beyond itself and draws us towards a meta-desire: the (often misleading) desire that all our desires would be fulfilled.