Gender and Sexuality: Week 1

Reuniting Our Separated Selves
Tuesday, April 17, 2018

The body is a sacrament . . . a visible sign of invisible grace. . . . All our inner life and intimacy of soul longs to find an outer mirror. It longs for a form in which it can be seen, felt, and touched. The body is the mirror where the secret world of the soul comes to expression. The body is a sacred threshold; and it deserves to be respected, minded, and understood in its spiritual nature. . . . The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. [See 1 Corinthians 6:19.] —John O’Donohue [1]

How we relate to one thing is probably how we relate to everything. How we relate sexually to ourselves and others is a good teacher for how we relate to God (and how we relate to God is an indicator of how we will relate to everything else). Religion, as its root re-ligio (to “re-ligament”) indicates, is the task of putting our divided realities back together: human and divine, male and female, heaven and earth, sin and salvation, mistake and glory, matter and spirit. This is the task of every human life.

The mystics—including many faithful lovers, parents, friends, and artists—are those who reconnect what has been separated and experience deep intimacy and union with God, self, and others. “Sinners” are those who keep everything divided and never enjoy things in their wholeness. When we only relate to parts instead of wholes, we can make terrible mistakes, and we all do this in one way or another.

The Muslim mystic, Shams-ud-din Mohammad Hafiz (c. 1320-1389), wrote Persian poetry with such intimacy between human love and divine love that the reader often loses the awareness of which is which. Consider this poem inspired by Hafiz, “You Left a Thousand Women Crazy”:

Beloved,
Last Time
When you walked through the city
So beautiful and so naked,

You left a thousand women crazy
And impossible to live with.

You left a thousand married men
Confused about their gender.

Children ran from their classrooms,
And teachers were glad you came.

And the sun tried to break out
Of its royal cage in the sky
And at last, and at last,
Lay its Ancient Love at Your feet. [2]

Yes, the poet is talking about God’s abundant presence walking through the streets, but his images come from human fascinations and feelings. Yes, he is talking about seething human desire, but he is also convinced that it is a sweet path to God.

Why has this integration, this coincidence of seeming opposites, occurred with relative rarity within Christianity? One would think that if there were any religion that would have most welcomed this connection, it would have been Christianity. After all, we believe that God became a living human body through the Incarnation in Jesus.

If we don’t recognize the sacred at the deep level of gender identity and sexual desire, I don’t know if we will be able to see it anywhere else. When Christians label LGBTQIA [3] individuals as inherently sinful or disordered, we hurt these precious people and limit ourselves. Fear of difference creates a very constricted, exclusive, and small religion and life—the very opposite of the abundance into which God invites us.

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April 17, 2018
Every Good Thing
Pam Manners (New Jersey)

Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. . . . Those who fear him lack nothing. . . . Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. – Psalm 34:8-10 (NIV)

Over the years, my neighborhood has become home to a rather large stray-cat population. Several of us within the community provide clean drinking water and fresh food for these cats daily so they’re well fed and not tearing apart everyone’s garbage in search of a meal.

It has worked well, with the exception of one cat we call Smokey. Though I’ve seen Smokey eating from various food bowls often enough, he continues to tear through trash bags and to drink dirty water from gutters and puddles.

Once, in frustration, as I caught him feasting from a neighbor’s trash, I yelled out, “Smokey! Why are you messing with that garbage when I’ve got something so much better for you here?” Not long afterward, I wondered to myself how many times God has asked me that very same question.

God has so much better to offer us — the best there is! In Psalm 34:8, we’re invited to “taste and see that the LORD is good.” Yet for various reasons we keep picking through life’s garbage. Maybe it’s time to leave the trash where it belongs and joyfully come to the table where God has every good thing waiting for us.

Today’s Prayer
Faithful God, help us to joyfully receive every good thing you have prepared for us. Amen.

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