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Soul pours forth from our wounds in general; and the soul of sexuality in particular often enters through an opening made by sexual wounding. We can learn to see that the places of our sexual punctures and violations are areas of potential intimacy between us and those we love, even though on the surface they may seem to be precisely the areas of mistrust. In this it is terribly important to resist the modern tendency to champion health and wholeness. All of us have sexual wounds. It does no good either to wallow in them or to deny them, but it may be good for the soul of a relationship to give them a place -- protecting them, not trying to figure them out and solve them, giving them the privacy they demand, and yet also inviting them into our most vulnerable conversations.
Current talk of sexual woundedness often turns to cause and effect. We want to know why we experience certain difficulties, and we would like to find someone to blame for the problem. Another, more soulful approach is to resist the temptation to stroll down the road of causality, which never leads to soul, and instead open ourselves to the thoughts, feelings, memories, and longings that are baked into sexual fear and regret. Sex then becomes a means of soul-making, a channel to the erotic caverns of the heart.
A few lines from a poem by Mary Mackey point to the difference between the soul's intimacy in sex -- intimacy defined as "the most within," which happens to take the longest -- and the quicksilver spirit of a passing sexual encounter:
love comes from years
of breathing
skin to skin
tangled in each other's dreams
until each night
weaves another thread
in the same web
of blood and sleep
and I have only
passed through you quickly
like light
and you have only
surrounded me suddenly
like flame
This is not to say that there can be no soul in a casual, quick sexual meeting, but that one way sex weaves people into soul is through the repetition, the mere sleeping and dreaming, and the years of breathing skin to skin. These are part of sex, and they are what give the soul its invisible threads of intimacy. Often, the poet says, we focus only on the light and the flame, wishing for the exceptional, overwhelming "experience," whereas the soul's need for sex may ask for a slender spider's web of connection and the steady weaving together of hearts and skin.
-- Thomas Moore, Soul Mates
If God is left out of sex, it becomes pornographic. And if sex is left out of God, it becomes pious and
self-righteous.
-- Leonard Cohen
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