Wednesday, October 29, 2008

"Sexual energy drives the engines at church"

The negative spin on sex is that it is "easier than love":

"Sex is currency
She sells cars,
She sells magazines
Addictive bittersweet, clap your hands,
with the hopeless nicotines..

Sex is industry,
The CEO, of corporate policy
Skin-deep ministry,
Suburban youth, hail



your so-called liberty"

-Switchfoot. "Easier than Love"



But in taking my leadership class through the "Personality Type and Religious Leadership" book the other night, a passing phrase hit me (emphasis mine):

"this need not be viewed as negative. Sexual energy is often the gasoline that drives the engines at church."

"Why do some men and women spend long hours in church meetings? For many reasons, to be sure, but one unconscious motivation may be sexual energy generated. When, however, people begin acting out their sexual fantasies this energy gets dissipated. Possibly that is one reason for sexual taboos in religious systems. We want this sexual energy to be working for the Kingdom, not being disippated intercourse. The spiritual discipie of tantric yoga works with sexual energy, raising it from..genitals to..heart...In church systems, we beed to learn more about using and managing sexual energy without being explosive or abusive. (130)



I have written on, and wrestled with, the shepherd sexualixing/fleecing the flock (especially when the church has "22 pews" here:

The Reduction of Seduction: Part 2



But often the vice is versa..the sheep (via projection, transference) can easily sexualize the shepherd.

Yet if we start by admitting all this (actually being honest in church...see: "Stones,Starfish, and Wolfgangs Cry Out: 'a life full of s*&^"), accepting it as it is, but intentionally thwarting, subverting...nay, prayer-elevating it ..

as the rabbis and Bono of course have recommended.

Rabbi Jeffrey Cohen:

Prayer is not something one just recites...it is an experience he enters into. There is no room for inhibition; ,, emotional cleaving to God….but such ardor/desire for God has to be so overwhelming that any extraneous thoughts are excluded…If distractions are erotic in nature…and the pray-er faces up to the predominance of the sexual urge at both conscious and subconscious...then he has learned to take measures…by
introducing the ancient doctrine of the "elevation of strange thoughts." This is
a Chasidic Jewish technique not of sublimation, but of thought conversion, whereby the beauty or desirability of the woman is latched upon and used not as a sexual but rather as a mental and spiritual stimulus. We are taught to "elevate" these thoughts by substituting the beauty of God for the physical beauty that is currently bewitching us. The pray-er has
learned to immediately contrast the pale reflection of beauty that humans are endowed with, on the one hand, and the supreme Divine source of authentic and enduring beauty, on the other. This is not sublimation, but
elevation.
(This is a must read).


If we could only activate and embrace elevation-prayer, maybe we could even speak on the
oral sex passages in Song of Solomon that everyone knows are there, but we deny at great expense.

Maybe it will take a few forerunners talking as candidly and coarsely as Bono recently did:

"You see, rock stars, we have two urges -- really, just two."

Bono also confessed the inevitable (and eventually elevated) sexual energy and electricty in the room, when in that same speech...to a room of 14, 000 women!...he begged:

Please, please, please don't tell the band that I'm actually here because they could get cross. They actually formed the band so they could play in front of 14,000 women. And I am here to raise my voice for Maria Shriver. What a mother, what a babe, what a warrior, what a lioness..

...And I said to Tim Shriver earlier, we were talking abut faith. I said, "Tim, I believe in God, but God knows I have an eye for the



goddesses." And I say that in the presence of my wife Ali and my daughter Eve; they're here this evening. (looks for them in the audience) I get the goddess thing..


Now (gives an exaggerated cough) -- I can see your expressions. "Oh Bono, I bet you say that to all the girls."
link




If we refuse to sexualize history and people,
and instead allow Holy Spirit, history, heilsgeshichte to gently and appropriately "sexualize" us:

This is the sound of the world coming down
this is the sex of history
this is the sound of the big house caving in
this is the fiction of joy and misery
-"Murder in the Big House," Chagall Guevara
May that friction and fallenness of our humanity, and our bentness toward baseness
elevate us into real, relational and redeeming church in the real world.



Rob Bell and have Carmen Berry (a woman) have both recently written good books on the sexuality/spirituality connection. Bell's is provocatively titled "Sex. God.":


"Sex. God. They're connected. And they can't be separated.


Where the one is, you'll always find the other."
(15)

We can only start where we are.




See also:


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