Let us pray

Sexual intimacy as prayer is a prayer for wholeness.

It matters not if you choose to make love with or without God. Just as it matters not whether you believe in a higher power, divine or otherwise. You will have sex. You may even have great sex. However, since I do believe in a transcendent co-creator who is present and active in my life, sex for me has never been as good as it is now. And it just keeps getting better.

Never before in my life have I thought about God or, for that matter, sex as often as I do now. Just ask my husband and my best friend. I recently realized that I never make love without sensing the ever-presence of this mystery of God. Call this mystery what you want, the energy is charged and one's perceptions shift.

This not about religion. Many religions fashion what they choose to acknowledge as revelation into a rule book. Break the rules and one is shamed into submission. Shame and sex don't mix well and the combination precludes the grace of sex as prayer. I choose Divine sex to guilt and sex.

Musings of a Sexual Mystic

There is a sacred element to making love. Certain components must be in place in order to experience this; at least that is true for me. A predilection for this image is probably requisite for such an encounter. A desire to experience a sacred moment during such a fleshy practice seems to be necessary. Obviously, both partners must understand that God is present in every moment of our embodied experience here on earth. As Jung believed -- bidden or unbidden , God is present. It helps to concede that prayer is more than closing your eyes and putting your hands together, asking God for your latest desire.

When I make love, I am waiting for God during most of the moments of passion that I share. (Most, not all -- I'm as human as the next gal.) I see myself as naked before God, not just my partner, and open to that divine and ultimate experience of pure ecstasy. I am humbled by my vincibility as I succumb to that transcendent source of life. And I am not afraid of the total exposure of myself to my partner and my God. Maybe the theology of God being present when two or more are gathered applies here.

Why didn't I learn this when I first learned about the sexual act? Why wasn't I taught about the goodness of sex more than the badness of sex? I don't blame my parents. I remember them as being very straight forward. Somehow the church's puritan conceit about sex informed my earliest understanding.

I remember the very first time I had intercourse with my then steady boyfriend. Despite the seedy surroundings (the sheets were clean) I was consumed by the beauty of the instant of penetration. We held that moment and were both still. Maybe there were no heavenly choirs, but my heart sang with that intimate expression of love. I was blessed that "the first time" was so beautiful and grace filled. I'm not sure that I fully grasped that until many years later. It was a lot to take in for a young woman experiencing all of those sensations for the first time.

What a difficult moment to replicate.

Immediately after, as we lay there holding each other, a sense of astonishment and fear overcame me. All of those bad girl images flooded my brain and I immediately tried to dissemble what I had just experienced. The beauty of the moment became a shadow to my need to reframe what happened. How could I have been a good girl in one instant, a bad girl the next? I can look back and see the absurdity of allowing the presumed judgement of others to propel my sacred self to deconstruct that timeless moment.

It has taken almost a lifetime to recover.