Sex isn't Dirty

The passage below is excerpted from Sex With God: Meditations on the sacred nature of sex in a post-purity-culture world.

The Song of Songs is a love poem told in two voices. It’s saturated with sensory descriptions, yearning, and seduction. Saints and mystics throughout the centuries have viewed it as a description of God’s desire for relationship with us. Let’s have a look:

How beautiful and how pleasant you are,

 love, for delights!

This, your stature, is like a palm tree,

 your breasts like its fruit.

I said, “I will climb up into the palm tree.

 I will take hold of its fruit.”

Let your breasts be like clusters of the vine,

 the smell of your breath like apples.

Your mouth is like the best wine,

 that goes down smoothly for my beloved,

 gliding through the lips of those who are asleep.

I am my beloved’s.

 His desire is toward me.

Come, my beloved! Let’s go out into the field.

 Let’s lodge in the villages.

Let’s go early up to the vineyards.

 Let’s see whether the vine has budded,

 its blossom is open,

 and the pomegranates are in flower.

 There I will give you my love.

(Song of Songs 7:6-12)

The verses drip with eroticism. In this passage we read of breasts, and taking hold of fruits, and gliding through lips, and opened blossoms which promise love. The Song is all about love, longing, and sex. There’s no getting around it.

Clearly God doesn’t view human coupling as dirty. Sex is designed into the vast majority of living things; plant, animal, and in-between. It’s an intrinsic piece in the ongoing co-creation which takes place all over the planet. In humans, it is used to co-create new souls in partnership with God.

So how could our Creator view it as shameful?

I’m not sure how it all became so twisted. Some blame the serpent in the garden, some blame John Calvin’s idea of “total depravity” in which our nature is fundamentally debased rather than being injured by sin. Given the power our sex drive has over our minds, hearts, and bodies, it’s a short jump to label physical desires as disordered and connected to fallenness. And it’s generally easier to label something and dismiss it than to examine complexity.

Sex can be disruptive, with impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. But treating it as “bad” is like putting Band-Aids on budding breasts and hoping they’ll stop developing. It’s silly, shame-inducing, and useless.

Go back and read the scripture verses for today. Relish their lush beauty. Listen for the seduction. Feel God’s breath on your neck as they whisper to you.

The Song of Songs shows us how God feels about human sexuality. If God doesn’t view sex as dirty, why should you?

Originally and naturally, sexual pleasure was the good, the beautiful, the happy, that which united man with nature in general. When sexual feelings and religious feelings became separated from one another, that which is sexual was forced to become the bad, the internal, the diabolical.

Wilhelm Reich

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 Suzanne DeWitt Hall (she/they) is the author of the Where True Love Is devotional series, the Living in Hope series of books supporting the loved ones of transgender people, The Language of Bodies (Woodhall Press, 2022), and the Rumplepimple adventures.