“I thank you for all that is good, for my creation and my humanity…”
“I forget that I am your home. Spirit of God, dwell in me.”
“Be present, Spirit of God, within me, your dwelling place and home…”
These three lines are taken from A New Zealand Prayer Book’s Night Prayer (traditionally called Compline). This is the Book of Common Prayer for the Anglican Church of New Zealand. It is this service of prayer which ends my day before sleeping.
Unlike many traditional prayers, the New Zealand Prayer Book conveys that it is a gift, a grace to be human, to be created in the image and likeness of the Divine, to be the dwelling place of the Spirit of God. These prayers step beyond traditional Christian theology that’s been flawed by Augustine’s understanding of original sin and John Calvin’s doctrine of human depravity. Instead, these prayers focus on the Judeo-Christian understanding that human beings are created in the image and likeness of the Divine, that the Holy One breathed into us the Spirit of Life, and for Christians, that our bodies are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. It’s these foundational Judeo-Christian beliefs which are the appropriate starting place for understanding human sexuality as Christians.
If we consider the Bible to be the sacred scripture of the Christian tradition, as both inspired and inspiring, then we need to affirm what the Bible first says about us as human beings: that we are very good. That’s the proclamation of the Creator in the book of Genesis. Yes, the story continues and we fall from grace. But the fall from grace, represented by eating the apple in the garden of paradise, doesn’t take away our fundamental nature as human beings. Further, as Christians, we affirm that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus restore us to the original wonder of our creation. The redemptive ministry of Jesus is both saving and healing for our whole being: body, mind, and soul — and not just soul.
One aspect of who we were created to be is that we are physical bodies who experience pleasure. That’s part of the wonder of what it means to be human. We experience pleasure in many ways, including the awe of watching the Sunrise, the refreshment of a cold drink on a hot day, the satisfaction of good meal, and the excitement and re-creation of sexual encounters. Human sexuality is a great pleasure to us on multiple levels precisely because it was made to be that way. To claim that physical pleasure is a temptation or source of sinfulness is to claim that part of the God-given design which makes us human is itself flawed. Just as part of being human is to have an intellect to develop and use, so to part of being human is to be embodied and experience a wide range of sensations through our bodies, including pleasure.
While the Judeo-Christian tradition holds that to be human is to be fundamentally good, the tradition goes even further than this. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the heart of what it means to be human is to have something of the Divine at the core of our being. Not only does one of the creation stories from the Hebraic text Genesis convey that the Creator breathed into us to make us human, instilling in us the breath of God’s own life, but also in the Christian Gospels, Jesus also repeatedly states that the realm of God, the realm of heaven is within us. This means that as we experience the world around us, whether that’s experiencing awe which watching the sunset or tenderness in the arms of the beloved, the Holy One is also a dimension of that experience. As we appreciate, savor, and enjoy the wide variety of experiences of being alive, God also appreciates, savors, and enjoys what it means to be alive in and through us.
One writer who captured this dimension of God’s delight in pleasure through human experience is Alice Walker in her novel, The Color Purple. A section not found in either the movie or play is an amazing theological dialogue between the main character, Celie, and her friend, confident, and lover, Shug Avery. Speaking about God and sexual intimacy, Shug Avery says to Celie:
“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.”
When we affirm that to be human is a gift, an amazing grace and that the Holy One is at the core of who we are, every dimension of our experience has the potential to be transformed into something sacramental. That includes human sexuality. When we affirm that God-in-us is a dimension of our sexuality, then we are able to understand our sexuality is entirely new and positive ways.
Photo source: foter.com
