Erotic Spirituality
Part Five: Christianity and Sexuality
She exclaimed, “Kiss me—full on the mouth!
For your love is better than wine.”
He replied, “You are tall and supple, like the palm tree,
and your full breasts are like sweet clusters of dates.
I’m going to climb that palm tree! I’m going to caress its fruit!”
She murmured back, “Breathe on my garden, fill the air with spice fragrance.
Oh, let my lover enter his garden! Yes, let him eat the fine, ripe fruits.”
So, he took me home with him for a festive meal, but his eyes feasted on me!
—Song of Solomon
Imagine an R rated book in the Bible! Scholars agree that the Song of Songs (or Solomon) is, first of all, an erotic love poem. It is passionate poetry about human relationships and sexuality. After all, there isn’t even a single mention of God in the entire book.
Mystics and saints down through the ages also tell us that it is an image of the passionate love God has for us. A beautiful and relatable metaphor for the passion and intimacy the depth of divine-human connection that we should strive after.
So which is it? Both of course! The energy of Eros—one of the strongest forces in the human body—is a powerful and sacred force of attraction that draws us forward, beyond ourselves into a union with another human and with God.
Condemned to Wear A Chasity Belt
The Church took another approach to the erotic
Sadly, throughout most of its history, the Christian church has denied and fought against this energy.
Church leaders began to name specific sexual “transgressions” as primary forms of human wrongdoing, and sexuality itself became the root of human evil. The early Church Fathers saw sexual intercourse as inherently flawed because it transmitted original sin. They called women “the gate of hell” because they saw women as essentially bodily and sexual. These the Church Fathers, yes, they were always men, told the faithful to wait until they were at least sixty before reading the Song of Solomon so that it would not inflame the passions.
Church leaders began to teach that God does not approve of sexual pleasure, and that sex is dirty. Saint Augustine (354-439 CE), one of the early prominent Catholic Church leaders, proclaimed that a sexual relationship is only for married couples and, then, only for the purpose of having children. Nine hundred years later, the medieval theologians taught that “sexual sins” such as masturbation, sodomy, and contraception are more perverse, as sexual sins, than adultery or rape. Many of these oppressive attitudes are still with us today.
Integral Christianity affirms a positive view of human sexuality. Many Christians have much to overcome and heal from in this area as we seek to reclaim and rediscover eros as a beautiful and integral part of our incarnated being.
Eros—a resource for the Christian mystical life
Eros is our longing to connect with one another from both a physical body and an infinite soul. That longing begins in our innermost being and manifests itself in our bodies. Erotic passion connected with spiritual experience is a robust anchoring of that spiritual experience to our body.
In Tantric Jesus: The Erotic Heart of Early Christianity, James Hughes Reho and Matthew Fox write, “Eros drives us to seek union with the sacred. It leads us to find love and ecstasy and presence in all aspects of our world. Here we use the understanding of the erotic life held by Christian mysticism, which is broader than the common use of the term which reduces it to sexual desire alone. The erotic life is our life of deep desire, including our instinctual cravings for food and water, our sexual longings, our drive to create beauty and art, and our refined compassionate desires to serve the good of others and the planet. This erotic life is both highly spiritual and deeply physical.”
Turn it Up!
Contrary to widespread belief and practice, rather than fight and try to suppress our desires, the solution is to turn the volume up—really up!
Saint Teresa of Avila tells us, “for it is necessary not to hold back one’s desire.” And, as Saint Catherine of Siena says, “If you would make progress … you must be thirsty, because … those who are not thirsty will never persevere in their journey.” Eros, according to Origen, is the love that allows us to empty ourselves and awaken to our divine state. Teilhard says, “Man’s [sic] potentialities are magnificently released by physical love.”
Pushing past our own comfort zone and traditional religious boundaries can open up embodied doors and windows to spiritual energy and knowing, and non-genital sexuality. In integral spirituality, we become aware of the pleasure, longing, and bliss that flow from our erotic feelings.
Eros, at its fullest, is never just about addressing our own feelings, but tapping into that energy of desire to draw us out, to fulfill the desires of “the other” as well. We deeply need this energy to take us beyond ourselves to greater love and care for our neighbor, the world, and for God.
Let’s look at some expressions of eros for each of the Three Faces of God.
Eros — a yearning for the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us
Our erotic longing for infinite bliss should not be reduced to only a longing for sexual ecstasy. While we can get a taste of this expanse in sexual union, it is a glimpse into the great cosmic and infinite mystery of God-beyond-us who is always drawing us forward.
This is eros as the energy of evolution. It is the force of what Alfred North Whitehead called “The creative advance into novelty” and what Ken Wilber calls “Eros . . . the evolutionary drive of the Kosmos to evolve higher and higher wholes.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin related to God in this way as well, saying, “God is seen to be the supreme centre in which the multiplicity of lower forms of being becomes an organic whole—the focus at which matter is consummated in spirit.”
Just like our human relationships that always grow and develop, this union with the infinite will always draw us further beyond ourselves, into the unknown, and the continual unfolding of evolution.
Eros — a yearning for the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us
The Christian faith claims that not only that God loves us, but that God loves us in such an intimate way that the Scripture compares that love to the love of two people, husband and wife there, and today including wife and wife, and husband and husband in their most intimate embrace. The New Testament is filled with images of Jesus as the groom and those who follow him as the bride. While that points to other dimensions beside eros, it would be absurd to make marriage a metaphor of things like love and faithfulness, but fail to mention sex! God made us sexual beings— as bodies with a desire for union— to help tell the story of God’s love for us. And in Jesus, God took on a body to reveal divine spiritual love in erotic flesh.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite wrote, “In God, eros is outgoing, ecstatic. Because of it, lovers no longer belong to themselves but to those whom they love.”
Authentic devotion is erotic, as well as emotional. But that eroticism is more than merely sexual. Devotion that is flowing with eros takes us out of ourselves and toward the object of our love in a profound way. Devotion needs the personal face of God as experienced in the Living Jesus, God’s motherly/fatherly presence, Mary, or other spiritual guides.
Eros — a yearning for the Inner Face of God-Being-Us
Pope Benedict XVI said that true erotic love offers a path “towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” Our spiritual womb is the source of our divine identity, God ever creating and shaping us in the divine image and likeness.
Vivian Claire, spiritual teacher and South African member of Integral Christian Network, says that getting in touch with the gut or spiritual womb “restores the flow of eros energy as a spiritual resource.” She points out that for much of Western spirituality, the purpose of eros energy is limited to sexual relationships. Many are not aware of the wonderful circuitry between the pole of the heart center and the womb center outside of sexual activity. The practices of whole-body awareness can restore this flow of eros energy and bring back into play the qualities of holy eros.
Vivian writes, “Eros energy has particular qualities of tenderness, of intensity, of beauty, devotion and wholesome delight. Eros energy is drawn from the womb center up into the heart center to nourish and intensify the spiritual heart of perception. Eros energy moves not only within us but between us and beyond us radiating out into the world. The divine eros in the deeper self attracts human eros infusing and aligning the powerful sexual instincts for its own purposes. This is vitalizing for healthy bodies, for bringing a quality of devotion to all kinds of intimacy. And it is eros longing that is our fuel for devotion and prayer.”
Eros is the embodied energy that draws us beyond ourselves and into the pursuit of another, which is beautiful in its healthy expressions with other humans and with God. We can embrace our mind thinking about sexuality, our heart sharing in erotic feelings in connection with others, our womb identifying as sexual creatures and our erotic instincts, and our feet with our whole incarnated being. This whole-body erotic spirituality also helps us with the energetic drive to seek God in deeper devotion, connection, identification, and expansion.