God bless those ancient Hebrew hippies who loved to live in their bodies, who understood that denying our sensuality and sexuality would be denying the very thing that draws us into joie de vivre and links us to the Divine. Because, as the old poets knew, our spirituality has everything to do with our desires and passions.
In other words, as Ron Rolheiser sets forth in The Holy Longing, our spirituality is what we do with our sexual energy.
The preaching I heard growing up, more often than not, made me feel guilty about desire and pleasure. And the Song was avoided, or if not, it was sterilized — keeping us safe from budding desire and associative pleasure, which, it was thought, would lead to sin.
But Sebastian Moore, a Benedictine priest, turns this conventional view of sin on its ear. “Sin,” he says, “stems from a lack of desire for pleasure.” Dom Moore is saying that desire and pleasure are not only gifts, they are God’s own calling cards, and their repression is not only an offence to the Giver but a sure way to snarl up our psychological, emotional and spiritual health.
“Sin stems from a lack of desire for pleasure.” Our greatest good is being in communion with God. Not to desire that good is sin. In some cases to acquire a good requires some pain or deprivation. Is repression of desire really a problem in our current culture? Sublimation of desire in order to direct it to our greatest good is what makes for a healthy culture and our present popular culture seems to be struggling with coming up with reasons why persons should sublimate their desires.