-- C. F. von Weizäcker
Reading: by Unitarian Universalist minister Meg Riley (from a piece published by the UUA entitled “Religion, Morality and Sexuality”)
We believe that God, or the sacred, permeates all aspects of life on this earth, and that sexuality is a very strong force in human life. We can’t know God as separate, pure, ethereal—we only know God as interwoven into our beings, our relationships, our total lives, imperfect as these may be! Human sexuality is an aspect of life which can allow us to experience God’s love for our bodies and our souls. The sacred is known in radical mutuality, interdependence, the sheer knowing that our own joy and fulfillment are inseparable from that of others.
Reading: by Carter Heyward from an article entitled “Sexuality, Love, and Justice (from Our Passion for Justice, p. 85-87)
What might it mean – to love? I want to tell you what I am discovering, in the hope that you – each of you, all of you – will be moved to carefully consider your own experiences…
And so I speak personally, as a lesbian feminist Christian priest and teacher. I use each of these words to describe myself, because each of them has grown in an evolving sense of how I might best be a lover of sisters and brothers in the world today…. For now, these overlapping, at times interchangeable, senses of myself ignite me, excite me, infuse me with a sense not only of what love means, but also that who I am – and who you are, and who we are together – matters. If we love the world, we matter. Lovers make all the difference in the world. Lovers recreate the world.
We must begin to see that love is justice. Love does not come first, justice later... Our sexuality is our desire to participate in making love, making justice, in the world: our drive toward one another; our movement in love; our expression of being bonded together in life and death. Sexuality is expressed not only between lovers in personal relationship, but also in the work of an artist who loves her painting or her poetry, a father who loves his children, a revolutionary who loves her people…
… Where there is no justice – between two people or between thousands – there is no love. And where there is no justice/no love, sexuality is perverted into violence and violation, the effects of which most surely include rape, emotional and physical battering, relationships manipulated by control, competition, and contempt, and even war itself.
Reading: by Susan Griffin from The Eros of Everyday Life (p. 149)
Several years ago, when a group of friends gathered for dinner, we began to tell each the stories of our first sexual encounters. The psychologist Rollo May recalled himself as a gravely serious young man, shy and completely inexperienced in such matters. [A woman,] as he told us, invited him to her room... At the door she moved to embrace him, holding him close to her and then moving away, close and apart, close and apart until an irresistible force field existed between them. This was, he said, among the most erotic movements he had known.
Time, if one pays attention, is filled with such meetings. Not only between lovers, or parent and child, but also friends, community, and the common air. Waking, my hand meets the cotton sheets on my bed, my mouth meets the water I drink as I arise, my eyes meet the morning light, shadows of clouds, the pine tree newly planted in our backyard, my ears meet the sounds of a car two blocks east. Everything I encounter permeates me, washes in and out, leaving tracery, placing me in that beautiful paradox of being by which I am both a solitary creature and everyone, everything.
Isn’t this what shapes our days? The paradox accounts for gravity, which is a kind of eros. The great mass of the earth curving space and time around it, the greater mass of the sun drawing the earth in an even circular motion, balanced between fusion and solitary direction.
Of Spirituality and Sexuality
A Sermon Delivered on November 3, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Last month, my wife, Elaine, and I attended this year’s three-day fall gathering of Unitarian Universalist ministers in Racine, WI. As most of you know, and some may not, Elaine is also an ordained UU minister. She and I served this church as co-ministers from 1996-2001. Elaine came along to the minister’s meeting this year, because I was scheduled to deliver an hour-long talk on my life and ministry. It’s an annual custom at ministers’ meetings called an Odyssey. This year was my turn, and Elaine didn’t want to miss it. As it happened my Odyssey also involved reflections on my father’s and grandfather’s lives, both of whom were also ministers.
But the bulk of our meeting was devoted to a different theme. Our presenter was Deb Haffner, a UU minister who is also an expert on human sexuality – sexuality education, prevention of sexual abuse and harassment, sexual justice – the whole gamut. The topic of Rev. Haffner’s presentations throughout our gathering was “Becoming a Sexually Healthy Religious Professional.” The over-arching goal was to help create sexually healthy faith communities.
* * *
Sexuality is an important aspect of ministry and congregational life. Two areas in which we have addressed sexuality here recently are in the sexual education curriculum we offer our middle schoolers, “Our Whole Lives,” and in our Welcoming Congregation efforts, which focus especially on affirming and supporting those among us who are gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender. But Deb Haffner made the case that there is a lot more we could be doing in terms of education and advocacy.
As I thought about it, I realized that while I have preached on marriage equality and reproductive rights in the past, I have never preached a sermon on “sexuality.” Sexuality is a sensitive and loaded issue. And, quite frankly, I generally avoid talking about it. (In our household, whenever our children had questions about sex, my good fatherly response was: “Talk to your mother.”) But silence on sexuality isn’t the solution.
Talking with my colleagues, it became clear that many of us are reluctant to break the silence. Early on in Deb Haffner’s presentation, she introduced an ice-breaker designed to get the ministers talking to each other. We were supposed to stand up, pair up with someone, and then take turns sharing our thoughts, for one minute without interruption, on a particular word she gave us. And then split up, and team up with another colleague for same routine, with another term. The first word we talked about was “flirting.” The second was “kissing.” The third was “masturbation.”
The atmosphere in the room got pretty tense. There was a fair amount of nervous laughter. I think it is safe to say, many of us were pretty uncomfortable. The exercise certainly left me with a heightened appreciation for how challenging it can feel to break the habit of silence, and to talk about sexuality openly and straightforwardly.
* * *
There are many reasons for our silence surrounding sexuality. Part of it has to do with the power, the complexity, and the controversy surrounding sexuality – whether in our individual lives or in our society at large. Another part of it has to do with past experiences of hurt that have never fully healed, have never been squarely confronted, and which, over the years, have become secrets.
Among my colleagues, it was striking to realize how many of our congregations still struggle with half-acknowledged histories of ministerial sexual misconduct or sexual abuse. We may like to think these sordid stories are found only among Roman Catholics, since their struggles have figured most prominently in the news. But the truth is most denominations, including Unitarian Universalists, have had their own share of troubles.
There are so many UU ministers who serve congregations struggling with past instances of ministerial misconduct, that they have a name. These ministers call themselves “After Pastors.”
A good friend and colleague of mine leaned over during our meeting, and confided that he has had several parishoners approach him over the years, who have told him troubling stories of past misconduct in their church. But he has not found a way to bring these stories into the open and help facilitate healing.
And, truth be told, in our church right here, in the 1990s, the minister’s marriage “imploded,” ended in divorce, and then was quickly followed by a marriage to and divorce from a church member. As the minister wrote in his resignation letter soon thereafter, these events “caused some people to question and withhold their support” of his ministry.
Today we know that romantic relationships between clergy and congregants undermine healthy boundaries, which are needed within a religious community. These boundaries foster trust and safety. To make this point perfectly clear, just this past summer UU ministers added the following statement to their Code of Conduct: “I will not engage in sexual contact, sexualized behavior, or a sexual relationship with any person I serve as a minister.”
By educating ourselves in any and all of these areas, we can help break the silence surrounding sexuality. We can help foster healthier attitudes and create safer communities.
It is a sad fact of our society today, that sexuality is often abused. Sexualized images of men and especially of women in movies, television, and advertisements contribute to an atmosphere in which sex is commodified, young women are objectified, even children are victimized, and sexual acts are trivialized.
So what can we do? At our ministers’ meeting last month, Rev. Haffner invited us to each fill out a “Congregational Assessment on Safe Congregations.” It asked questions like: Do we have written policies and procedures specifically on preventing sexual harassment? Are they posted on our website? Or on a bulletin board? Do we know the state laws on reporting child abuse? Do we have support groups available to those who have suffered abuse, or do we have a list of community resources?
And when it comes to sexual education, do we make good use of the many curricula available? The program we teach here is not limited to middle schoolers. There are curricula for Kindergarten and First Graders, Fourth through Sixth Graders, High Schoolers, Young Adults (ages 18-35), and older adults. We can also do our part to promote sound sexual education in our schools and cities.
As a religious community we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to address sexuality.
* * *
“Sex and religion have never been separated in human history.” This is what the Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong writes in his book The Sins of the Scripture.
“Sex and religion have moved in tandem since the dawn of human self-consciousness. Sex is such a powerful force that religion has always felt it must master and control it in order for religion to have credibility. Organized religion has also related to sexual activity as something to be feared, which in turn has led to enormous efforts throughout history to tame it, incorporate it, deny it or in some manner make it the servant of religion.” (p. 42)
Spong is critical of conservative Christians who oppose women’s reproductive rights, children’s sexual education and same-sex marriage. He sees their sexual attitudes as remnants of a very long history. Since its very beginnings Catholicism opposed what it considered “loose sexual practices” in the ancient Mediterranean world, where sexual practices were linked to fertility rituals and sacred agricultural cycles. Instead, early Christians “made the suppression of sex the first prerequisite for the holy life.” Celibacy for priests, monks and nuns is expression of a view that considered holiness and sexual practice as antithetical and mutually exclusive.
Early believers were taught that “bodies were unclean, even loathsome, and physical desire was nothing other than the mark of the evil one.” And these beliefs, in turn, were rooted in an ancient Neoplatonic worldview that “separated bodies from souls, flesh from spirit, and material things from spiritual things.”
As Spong sees it, the controversy in religious circles over sexuality is expression of an ancient “battle that pitted a religion of control and repression against a religion that celebrated the goodness of creation.”
* * *
I myself am a product of this battle between a religion of repression and control, and a religion that celebrates the blessings of creation.
My grandfather was a celibate Roman Catholic priest, who served as a military chaplain in World War I Germany. But in 1917, he met a young woman, who worked at the ticket booth of the local movie theater. She caught his eye. He asked her out. They fell in love. So after the war, in 1919, he left the priesthood. (Good thing for me!) Two years later they were married. They started a family, and he became a liberal religious minister.
* * *
In Unitarian Universalist circles, many of us today share Spong’s opposition to a religious conservatism that suppresses sexuality. But cultivating healthy sexual attitudes and healthy sexual practices involves more than simply rejecting repression.
In the 1960s and 70s, during the so-called sexual revolution, our progressive religious beliefs seemed very compatible with the sexual permissiveness of the times. Many religious liberals imagined themselves at the forefront of a more enlightened sexuality.
I was only a child when my father served UU congregations in that period. But I have clear recollections of how church gatherings at our home were shaped by the spirit of the swinging sixties and seventies. Alcohol was an accepted social lubricant, and the codes of conduct were much more relaxed than they are today.
My father could be quite a party animal. I remember he was called to the UUA headquarters in Boston once, after a particular party got a little too relaxed – even by the standards of the sixties. Memories of those days help me appreciate the wisdom of current efforts to cultivate healthier sexual attitudes and practices, with clear boundaries and limits.
* * *
Sex is too powerful to be silenced or suppressed. But the answer is not to plaster our billboards with sexualized images. The answer is not to promote promiscuity.
Sex is too profound to be trivialized and commercialized, or exploited in the marketplace and our entertainment industry. Doing so allows sexuality to be perverted into violence and violation.
Sexuality, at its best, is celebrated and honored as the sacred gift it is. Sexuality, at its best, is an expression of deep love, divine love. As such it is inseparable from justice.
We should love our neighbors as ourselves, the scriptures say. We should respect others, as we ourselves long to be respected. We should protect others, as we ourselves want to be protected. This is the root of the Golden Rule. It is the source of the intimate connection between love and justice, health and wholeness, sexuality and the sacred.
“Sexuality is expressed not only between lovers in personal relationship,” Carter Heyward writes, “but also in the work of an artist who loves her painting or her poetry, a father who loves his children, a revolutionary who loves her people.” Susan Griffin says eros can be experienced, as our mouth meets the water we drink, as our eyes meet the morning light, when everything we meet permeates us, and we perceive “that beautiful paradox of being” by which we are each “both solitary creature and everyone, everything.”
May our lives be guided by a spirit of health and wholeness.
May we be grounded in both body and soul.
And may our love inspire us to create a world of justice
For everyone.
Amen.
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