The Bones of Sex and Spirit

On the relationship between sexuality and spiritual practice.

A compact 1996 position paper that strips the sex-and-spirit conversation down to its load-bearing structure. Everything, Sam argues, rests first on the premise that sex is good — a premise a genuinely sex-positive culture would never have to state. His complaint is with the incoherence of a culture that uses sex to sell everything else while treating the plain exchange of it as degenerate; if sex were held to be innately good, that traffic would carry no moral or criminal charge at all.

The cost of the suppression is spiritual as much as social. Sam lists the places where spirituality wakes up — the limits of human existence: life, death, birth, food, cosmology, ethics, and sex. Close that last door and you lose an entire mode of access, along with the images and metaphors of divine action that come with paired union. Open it, and sexual interaction becomes sanctified in both directions: sacred imagery is sexualised, sexual imagery becomes sacred, and adoration of a partner as a revealer of the holy follows naturally.

He then names the failure mode. A spirituality built on pleasure can curdle into self-absorption. Sam's answer is that delight is an entry point rather than a destination — the exaltation reached through invocation and union carries real power, and that power is owed to the work of healing, envisioning, transforming and relieving suffering. Being able, he writes, it becomes required. The piece closes by reducing itself to four numbered points: sex is good; sex is a contact point with the sacred; the divine can be invoked in and by sexual union; and the power so raised must be placed in the service of liberation from suffering.

Originally published at samwebstermage.com →