Sexuality, blasphemy and spirituality

While blog-hopping, I found a very special blog containing this superb article on sexuality, blasphemy and spirituality. Recently, I posted on the question of illicit sex and received quite an interesting array of responses to my musing.

My main thought there was to question why we take it for granted that all sex within the bounds of marriage was automatically good, morally acceptable, and spiritually uplifting. I probably wasn't able to put my thoughts in coherently, perhaps because of my approach. I was approaching it negatively by asking what illicit sex meant. My own thoughts came out of the vigorous discussion that my earlier posts about same-sex marriage generated.

In Thinking about K*nsey, Karen Haluza reflected on the movie, Kinsey and her experiences as a college student in a class on human sexuality. I really liked what she has to say about sex and especially the way she connected sex to spirituality.

When we engage in sex for purely recreational purposes, it becomes disengaged from its spiritual context and it is that tell-tale "morning after" feeling that reminds us that something isn't right. This can happen either inside of or outside of marriage, or other committed relationships. I'm not convinced that there are hard and fast rules that say when sex is sacramental and when it is not. But I do believe that it must always be considered within this spiritual context.

She explained the ambivalence our culture has towards sex insightfully:

I believe, in fact, that much of our shame, misadventure and longing as it relates to sex are precisely because it has been divorced from its spiritual nature. Some people blame Dr. K*insey, and those who followed him, for this phenomenon. I do not. Dr. K*insey was reacting to the dishonest and damaging information, much of it influenced by church teaching, that was put forth as the truth at that time. His experiences led him to a strict belief in empiricism and a rejection of any involvement by a Creator. Unfortunately, the spiritual nature of sex is not something that can be measured or quantified.

Her next paragraph is especially enlightening:

So, I asked myself, "Why did God create sex?" To my way of thinking, the primary function of sex is to be a way to draw closer to God through the intimate union with another created being. It's a way to go back to the garden, back to paradise. It is a sacramental act and, when it is divorced from this context, it has the potential to become a blasphemous act.

You have to read the rest of the article here. Well worth it.