Ho Your Garden: Tending the Sexual Soul

Feeling metaphysical at the change of the seasons, I could not help but ask my sister-girl-sister friends over a bottle of red wine: What is a soul anyway? And what does it have to do with sex?

An excellent conversation, especially when the lady-friends work for sexual justice. The abortion rights activist descends from a long line of progressive Protestant ministers, and the public health scientist comes from a family of conservative Italian Catholics. For the record, my family is Sicilian Catholic. My mother, however, when asked why she did not raise me in the church, said, “Because I had a daughter. And I loved her.” Plus, for a place founded on a birth by a single teenage mother, it felt ironically hostile to her at the time.

By the end of the bottle, we concluded, more or less, the soul is the essential part of ourselves that is somehow internal, ethereal and transcendent. Sexuality, being an essential part of every person—a normal and natural part of being human— is part of each soul. Sexual acts or expression can be infused with our souls. Maria adds that asexuality must be included in the spectrum of sexuality, what we express and enact and what or who attracts us.

I had found a book of writers interviewing writers, The World Within, and it offered us this passage:

Rikki Ducornet: I think the sexual soul has to do with sexuality informing one’s entire being. I always think of sexuality as the heart of who one is. I think the sexual soul means one delights in the natural world and isn’t frightened of other bodies or new experiences. A sexual soul is intrigued by other cultures, delighted by new music, by the sensuous experiences of language.

Naming this sexual soul or soulful aspect to sexuality bridges a soul/body disconnect perpetrated by our Western* philosophy and religion, the traditional deliberators of the soul. Many people of faith and those in the HIV and AIDS community have rejected this artificial dichotomy, arguing that it damages individuals and our communities.

To wit, we’ve been double-f***ed: from Judeo-Christian narratives of earthly suffering as a pathway to heaven to Descartes, “I think therefore I am.” If you include our Puritan heritage, we have a ménage e trios of repression. On this foundation, informed by (dare I say) patriarchy, our modern cultural and institutional practices regenerate this disassociation. And we live it out.

Rev. Krishna Stone has been working for over a decade in New York City to facilitate change within faith communities to support sexual wellbeing and to support individuals in reunifying their whole selves. I went to talk with her too.

“What I do in my work is to reconnect sexuality with spirituality,” she said. She facilitates personal and cultural shifts from an idea of sexuality that is connected with disease and damage to one rooted in our personality, our essential self, our soul. The soul being this thing about us that just is; “no religion needed,” she notes.

“It’s all dislocated. Like an eyeball over here, and a vagina way over here,” and she enacts the fragmentation many of us feel, waving about her golden hands.

She gives a workshop for HIV-positive women called Spirituality: What the Hell is It? In one exercise, the group makes two lists of words, those they associate with “spirituality” and with “sexuality.” Time and again, the words for “spirituality” are Christian-centric and abstract, and the list for “sexuality” is full of painful and intensely personal words like damage, rape, and nasty. Pleasure is rarely mentioned, relegated to the realm of luxury. Hardly surprising since sex for many women is not a free choice but a transaction, security or duty. Pleasure almost always secondary.

In contrast, there is an idea of the soul as our basic goodness, the piece of God or Everything that is in us and in every living thing, creating mutuality and connection. To have sex that honors the divine in each feels like love to me. What if we (and our partners) were able to be fully present, connected to our own bodies and souls, for our partner’s ecstasy, the moment of orgasm imagined as a place beyond words in full harmony with the perfect resonance of Everything. Where you can hear the heartbeat of you, her and the universe.

In our brutal society, moments of feeling connectedness to everything can be precious and fleeting. To move soulfully through the day, to be fully present, takes tremendous courage. It makes you vulnerable. There’s a lot of static.

Krishna and I talked about inexplicably soulful sexual moments or soulful moments erotically charged. “It’s like falling in love immediately,” she snaps her fingers. An honor. When her whole body, mind and soul says, undeniably, “Yes!”

After heartbreak, barriers surround your soul at full depth and strength, feeling all the windows of your soul blow open in a moment of sexual connection, I add.

To experience yourself as having a sexual soul, perhaps, is to have done the work to be able to feel these moments, recognize them. Krishna said, “You have to believe in this kind of magic for it to work.”

So much of what we believe twists us away from our sexuality, our bodies. Many of us have experiences that break the sexual soul: sexual abuse; sexual shaming; misinformation; silence, silence and more silence.

It is easier to heal when a community supports you. Some ministers believe if faith communities had accepted and supported gay men, particularly gay men of color, we would not see the AIDS epidemic as it is today. Despite the work of such leaders, there remains much to be done to engender theologies that resonate with the bodily experiences of those of us most vulnerable to HIV infection, sexual assault and other injustices.

Although we have inherited this tradition of a soul/body divide, text and tradition can be reclaimed as tools of justice for our bodies and souls, united. At the corner coffee shop in my Brooklyn neighborhood, a local minister explained to me that the roots of the word “salvation” mean to heal the body, like a salve.

Krishna thinks part of this healing is acknowledging sexual pleasure as a sacred right. She said, “In my church, every service, we’d ask for a show of hands of everyone who orgasmed last night. Raise your hands! Hallelujah! Amen!”

All of these conversations drew me back to the following passage from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, where I first remember hearing the call for healing the disassociation of sexuality from our souls and God-talk:

Here’s the thing, said Shug, the thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. … She say, My first step from the [idea of God as an] old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I ran all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happens, you can’t miss it. It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh.

Shug! I say.

Oh, she say. God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ‘em you enjoys ‘em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like. … God made it. Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t.

God loves a mess of stuff you don’t love or understand. She loves our wildly variant bodies, tangles of addictions and fears, and struggles to thrive. Perhaps if voices like these from the faith community seized the values political platform, we would see federal funding for needle exchange, dissolution of the racist imprisonment system, and health care for all.

In my own faith tradition of offering yet more reading, here’s some good ones to illuminate and heal the sexual soul:

• Sensuous Spirituality: Out from Fundamentalism by Virginia Ramey Mollenkot
• The Survivor’s Guide to Sex by Staci Haines
• Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit (seems off point, but it’s not, swear.)

* I focus on Western traditions here because that is where my roots live, though this piece weaves in some Buddhist thought. When I manage to get a hold of my friends the experts, I will let you know where Muslims and other traditions fall in this mess. Not far, I am afraid. I believe when asked something similar, Waheedah responded, about Muslims, "Oh, you know, we just wanna kneel on the mat..."