This time the kink in the track has to do with sex, specifically: the intersection of sex and faith. I'm guest editing a special issue of a journal dealing with religion and theatre, an issue about spirituality and sexuality. I'm charged with writing an editorial statement (due, like, yesterday) about those intersections, and right now that topic is using up all available brainpower.
I mean, where do I start? Well--I'm past the starting point, actually. I started with "don't!" Specifically, I related how sex in my Southern Baptist childhood seemed like the opposite of faith. Thou shalt not...commit adultery, fornicate, look with lust, lie with a man as one lies with a woman, dwell on fleshly things... not a sex-positive book on first glance. None of the Bible heroes I learned about seemed particularly defined by (or even possessed of) a sex drive, and those that did (I'm looking at you, David and Solomon) fell from grace through the tragic flaw of--that's right--lust.
I remember early on characterizing sex along with basic excretory functions. Sex was like using the bathroom: a necessary fact of life, but nothing you talk about in church.
Certainly popular culture seems to share my childhood impression of What God Thinks of Sex. There's no easier way for a TV show or movie to signal "this character is squeamish about sex" than to let the audience know that he or she is religious. The alienation from sexuality can manifest as charming niavete (e.g., the nuns from Sister Act) or stern authoritarianism (John Lithgow's character from Footloose). More often than not, the more pious the religious anti-sex crusade, the greater the crusader's comeuppance, as the character typically is either revealed to be a hypocrite or a secret sexpot. Either way, the revelation/reversal coincides with a relinquishing of the character's faith. Sex and religion just don't go together.
Of course, both my childhood impression of sex and the pop culture stereotype prove untenable on closer examination. As I grew older--as I became aware of what sex actually was, in other words--I gained a new appreciation for the sexual themes and metaphors that run throughout my faith tradition. The passion of God for humanity may technically be agape rather than eros, but the language Christ and the scriptures use to describe God's relationship to humanity is starkly sensual: God coming for his bridegroom the church (i.e., us), God feeling a cheated lover's sense of betrayal (see Hosea and Gomer),
The very act of incarnation, Divine becoming flesh, bespeaks a promise of intimacy (in Greek and Roman religion, remember, gods become flesh to have dalliances with mortals). We don't need to endorse extrabiblical slash fiction about Christ and his followers to see that such intimacy persists even in acts and images we take to be non-erotic. Consider the Eucharist--take, eat, this is my body. Christ rubbing his spit on men's eyes so they might see. Christ speaking with the woman at the well. Christ allowing Mary to wash his feet with her tears, perfume, and hair. Christ allowing John to recline against him.
Or look at Caravaggio's take on The Incredulity of Saint Thomas:
Stunningly intimate and borderline pornographic--yet there undeniably in the faith tradition.
Indeed, the whole notion that my faith is anti-sex seems... childish. Even the most ostensibly anti-sex sectors of Christianity--medieval monks with their vows of celibacy and cloistered life--become, on closer inspection, quite conversant about matters libidinal. I take my cue here from the last work of philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, a man who famously wrote a three-volume History of Sexuality. The fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh, was near completion when he passed away of AIDS-related diseases in 1984. His lectures and interviews from around that time, however, point to his interest in monastic practices not as a denial of sexuality but an elaboration of a different kind of sexuality.
Such an approach represents an extension of Foucault's general theme throughout the History of Sexuality--the critique of what he calls "the repressive hypothesis," the notion that certain older cultures (the Victorians in England, particularly) were so nervous about sex and sexuality that they repressed all discussion about it and became willfully ignorant about a whole dimension of human existence. Nonsense! says Foucault. What seems to us like repression is, on closer examination, an explosion of sex-talk. This was, after all, the period in which medical science (especially the nascent field of psychology) turned its attention to matters of desire. It's in this period--the late 1800s--that we get words like homosexual and heterosexual, the very notion that people are a particular kind of person by virtue of the gender of their sexual objects. Sex talk moves out of domestic spaces and into medical spaces, where doctors and scientists begin asking deep and probing questions, performing deep and probing experiments, and creating whole new vocabularies as a result. This is not to say, of course, that standards of polite public discourse weren't a great deal different than they are now. Nor is it to deny that rules against sexual behavior labeled "deviant" were by our standards quite draconian.
But Power, for Foucault, is never merely repressive. It also creates new ways of living. From one doctor's new pathological category of homosexuality, we get a whole new way of thinking about our own identities (gay, straight, bi, etc.).
So too with the medieval celibate monks. It wasn't merely that they decided not to have sex 'cause it's dirty. They found themselves having to confront their desires, to name them, to explore and map out the boundaries and cartography of their lusts and temptations, and to create rules and ways-of-life to manage them. Monastic celibacy is a lot of work, a day-to-day, moment-to-moment habit of awareness, seeking, conviction, confession, penance, and regulation. So long as you have an unhindered sex drive, you have to know more about your own sexuality to be any good at celibacy. It is a way of life, an ascesis--an art of self-creation.
Toward the end of his life, Foucault actually began defining spirituality in general as a kind of ascesis--an art-of-self made up of moment to moment gestures and awarenesses great and small. I find that kind of view of faith life intriguing, exactly what is meant by discipline in the spiritual sense.
And, while I do not care to copy the ascetic practices of medieval monks, I think that imagining God and Christ as with me as I submit all aspects of my life to that discipline is in a way as intimate as Saint Thomas reaching into the body of Jesus.
Now to write all that down in academicese...
More tomorrow,
JF
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