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Possibly more than any other aspect of monastic life, celibacy intrigues, mystifies, and (often) repels lay people, and for good reason. In the knees, in the heart, in the head, sex renders us weak -- the wisest and strongest among us understands what it means to be a fool for desire -- and to be weak is to be comically, tragically, poignantly human. To remove oneself from sex is arguably to separate oneself from one’s humanity, to place oneself in a class apart and above. Power inheres to the party who says no; unless undertaken within a larger discipline, celibacy is a kind of power play, and the institutions of religion -- East and West -- have historically used it to that end.
Which is too bad, because monasticism in both traditions can speak eloquently to matters of sexual morality and discipline. Most of us, most of the time, have sex not to make babies but to assuage desire -- not just physical desire but the desire to love and be loved, for union with the whole, for an end to the aloneness inherent in being alive. During sex, to invoke a Christian metaphor, we die to ourselves, however briefly; to invoke a Buddhist principle, we have a moment of surcease from samsara, from the endless cycle of dissatisfaction. We are one with ourselves, with another, with the other; we triumph over solitude, even over death. And then it’s finished, and we’re alone, dissatisfaction returns.
Monasticism seeks not to triumph over aloneness but to embrace it, and in so doing to transform the short-lived triumph of orgasm into an ongoing triumph of consciousness, an enduring acceptance of an union with the whole great roundness of being -- including birth, growth, love, insecurity, loss, aging, suffering, death. This is the place where desire becomes faith, springboard for the poetry of St. John of the Cross and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz -- both mendicants, both mystics, troublesome to their traditions while alive, valued once dead, writers of poetry that invokes spirit and flesh, in which faith is another manifestation of the crazy, fooling energy that drives the heart (among other organs) . . . .
Traditional monasticism is very good at disciplining the power of the mind; in the face of the power of the body, it has resorted to proscription more arcane in traditional Buddhism than even in Catholicism. The rise of feminism and the concurrent consciousness of the body has rendered that contempt for the flesh no longer possible. East and West, monasticism faces a fork in the road: in one direction lies reaction and fundamentalism; in the other, the labor of reforming the practice of celibacy to acknowledge and respect the body and its desires.
-- Fenton Johnson, “Beyond Belief: A skeptic searches for an American Faith,”
Harper’s
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