If I were to sing this title, it could easily sound like some traditional Gospel hymn. “Please rise and turn in your songbooks to hymn number 69, ‘Oh, God! Oh, God! I’m gonna’ cum!’ Praise Jesus for good sex! Can I get a witness?” Of course, the thought of God and sex in the same breath can make most of us cringe and shudder (not to mention turn the Religious Right’s collective stomach on end). In fact, how many of us, in the middle of sex have had that odd sense that God was in the room watching? The good news is if we were to unshackle ourselves from the current political and religious impositions, we’d find that sexuality and spirituality have a lot more in common than we realize.

Dr. Jenny Wade in her book, Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil, interviewed dozens of people regarding their sexual experiences and how they found themselves swept away into different spiritual realms regardless of their religious, societal, or educational backgrounds. Margarita Laskey did a study on the key events that transcendent experiences come from. Forty three percent of her subjects (the largest single category) felt that lovemaking brought on their spiritual experiences, and this was a study done back in the 1950’s when talking about sex was far more taboo. Even the oldest document in known history, The Epic of Gilgamesh contains a story of transcendent sex!

But don’t just take this kind of information as the only evidence. Listen to your own body. Make a list of the things your body experiences during sex — euphoria, increased heart rate, a great sense of peaceful satisfaction and yet a lot of energetic excitement, etc... Now make a list of the things your body experiences during what you might call an enlightened experience — euphoria, increased heart rate, a great sense of peaceful satisfaction and yet a lot of energetic excitement, etc... Holy incarnation! The two lists are pretty much identical! Furthermore, the very thing religion might cast aside as evil and corrupted, is the very thing that best understands the spirit/sex connection: our bodies.

It's important to note that I use the terms spirituality and religion differently. My definition of spirituality is the awareness of the mysterious “something more.” It’s everything we encounter that defies explanation. It gives us a sense of awe that lingers beyond our five senses. It is observing aspects of nature — a sunset, the ocean, birth and death — and perceiving that something more than just biology is occurring. It is knowing scientifically how the body works, yet being unable to explain how we develop emotions, creativity, a soul and, well, hot sex. Religion, in my opinion, is our attempt at understanding and standardizing spirituality. Even though we can’t and shouldn’t keep ourselves from trying to comprehend spirituality, all too often we mistaken it as religion — we reduce and confine spirituality by what we believe about it. This of course, gives life to all the misuse and abuse of spirituality throughout the ages.

Speaking of which, Dr. Wade also traced back ancient sexual constructs and it looks like around the time “rules” started being placed on sexual activity is about the same time we started allowing religious leaders to tell us what to do. Now read the previous sentence carefully, because religion has not forced us to do anything. We have allowed our spiritual mentors to tell us what to do and think about sex. You see, it’s not my intention to indoctrinate the masses about sex and religion. I just don’t think we should go on believing that, say, contemporary Christianity holds a moratorium on anything, especially spirituality.

Ultimately, if the Religious Right has firmly convinced itself that sex is from hell and the spirit is from heaven (Hmmm, sounds like men are from Mars and women are from Venus), it only emphasizes the need to celebrate diversity all the more! After all, they continue to be resolutely wrong about homosexuality. Why in the world should we agree with them about the fictitious polarization between sexuality and spirituality? For no other reason than to piss off sex-negative religions, I will continue to find the sacred between my legs. I will acknowledge ecstatic transcendence in sexual activities and I will see the divine eyes of God/dess in the eyes of my loved ones, ‘cus like hell am I going to let the Religious Right tell me where I find my enlightenment. And you shouldn’t let them keep you from yours, either!