Sexuality & Spirituality

It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace. Inside of us, it would see, something is at odds with the very rhythm of things and we are forever restless, dissatisfied, frustrated, and aching. We are so overcharged with desire that it is hard to come to simple rest. Desire is always stronger than satisfaction. Put more simply, there is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul…

Spirituality concerns what we do with desire. It takes its roots in the Eros inside of us and it is all about how we shape and discipline that Eros… to offer a striking example of how spirituality is about how one handles his or her Eros, let us compare the lives of three famous women:  Mother Teresa, Janis Joplin, and Princess Diana.

 We begin with Mother Teresa. Few of us would, I suspect, consider Mother Teresa an erotic woman. We think of her rather as a spiritual woman… Yet she was erotic because she was a dynamo of energy… She was a human bulldozer, an erotically driven woman. She was, however, a very disciplined woman, dedicated to God and the poor.

Everyone considered her a saint… A saint is someone who can, precisely, channel powerful eros in a creative, life-giving way…Nobody disputes that Mother Teresa did just that, willed the one thing – God and the poor. She had a powerful energy, but it was a very disciplined one. Her fiery eros was poured out for God and the poor. That – total dedication to everything to God and poor – was her signature, her spirituality. It made her what she was.

 Looking at Janis Joplin, the rock start who died from an overdose of life at age twenty-seven, few would consider her a very spiritual woman. Yet, she was one. People think of her as the opposite of Mother Teresa, erotic, but not spiritual. Yet Janis Joplin was not so different from Mother Teresa, at least not in the raw makeup and character. She was also an exceptional woman, a person of fiery Eros, a great lover, a person with a rare energy. Unlike Mother Teresa, however, Janis Joplin could not will the one thing. She willed many things. Her great energy went out in all directions and eventually created an excess and a tiredness that led to an early death. But those activities – a total giving over to creativity, performance, drugs, booze, sex, coupled with the neglect of normal rest – were her spirituality. It was her signature. It was how she channeled her Eros…

Most of us, I suspect, are a bit like Princess Diana – half-Mother Teresa, half Janis Joplin… Princess Diana is held up as a person who is both, erotic and spiritual. That is rare, given how spirituality is commonly understood. Usually we see a person as one or the other, but not as both, erotic and spiritual… Spirituality is about how we channel our Eros. In Princess Diana’s attempts to do this, we see something most of us can identify with, a tremendous complexity, a painful struggle for choice and commitment, and an oh-so-human combination of sins and virtues. Spirituality is what we do with the spirit that is within us. So, for Princess Diana, her spirituality was both the commitment to the poor and the Mediterranean vacations… Hers, we can see, was a mixed road… she chose some things that left her more integrated in body and soul and others which tore at her body and soul. Such is spirituality. It is about integration and disintegration, about making the choices that Princess Diana had to make and living with what that does to us.”