Living In Wholeness

sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor

February 11, 2001

Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church

Readings:

"Here," said Baby Suggs, "in this here place, we flesh. Flesh that weeps, laughs, fleah that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people, they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! ... This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.

--Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments.

--Marie Rainer Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Sermon:

Christine Robinson, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Albuquerque recently shared this story with her congregation: Last year, I was driving some of Kevin’s classmates on a class trip. In his multi-age classroom, some of the kids are nearly adolescents and some are young enough to call the adults by their children’s names, as in “Kevin’s mom, am I going in your car?” Anyway, that sorted out, we left. I was confident I was up to this excursion. I’ve been driving for 30 years, now after all, and driving children for 9…what can happen? So I was busy thinking my own thoughts. One of the kids had turned on the radio and they were listening to some music that I was successfully ignoring. The song ended and the radio was turned off, and one of the kids said, “So what IS a virgin, anyway?” I snapped to attention, wondering what the heck they had been listening to. “I know. I know,” called out one of the girls. “A virgin is someone who is saving herself. Like I’m saving myself for Leonardo DeCaprio. “No,” said one of the older boys, “that’s not it. You don’t know anything.” The original questioner asked the boy, as if the first response had been perfectly understandable and he only wanted to hear another opinion on the subject, “Well, then, what do you think a virgin is?” The older boy hesitated, suddenly aware that he was on slippery ground, and turned to me: “Do you know what a virgin is?” I nodded my head while frantically trying to decide what to say in this mixed group of other people’s children. “Well then, YOU tell him.” All that came out of my mouth was, “A virgin is someone who hasn’t had sex yet.” “See!” said the boy to the girl. “I knew that already!” she said confidently, “I know all about this sex stuff.” Then she turned to me and said, in her most grown-up conversational voice, “So, Kevin’s mom, have you had sex yet?”

What an experience—and the conversation would be funny if it weren’t so common. Children have more information and misinformation that most of us had at their age. The little girl clearly had been exposed to words and ideas that she had not come anywhere close to assimilating. Even her sophisticated classmate, if he had really known what a virgin was, should have been able to assume that his friend’s mother did. Today I want to reflect on what we are teaching our children about sex. And I want to couch this reflection within the wider realm of human sensuality. I believe sex is best understood as one of the many ways people find pleasure—and not the only one, and certainly not the most essential to a fulfilling life. For it is the realm of being touched, both figuratively and literally, that is at the heart of a fulfilling life. So I will begin reflecting on touch and will return to the question about what to teach our children about sexuality.

When I met some friends for dinner, one brought his two year old boy, and little Isa had a hard time sitting still. I let Isa climb into my lap. He stood on my thighs, put his arms around my neck and with his fingers recently dipped in salad dressing, he reached for my mouth. This little person wanted to touch and be touched, to share his physicality and surroundings with me. How wonderful it is to have another person, regardless of their age and relationship smile at you, gingerly wrap their arms around you or, when you're not looking, put their fingers into your mouth, giving you the taste of bleu-cheese.

Young children often are great explorers of sensuality. They delight in fingerpaints or mud, playing with the food on their plate or jumping on a trampoline. They relish being in their bodies, giving themselves over to feeling the great array of textures, shapes, densities, and mobilities in our world. And they love to be held. I wish I could say that about all children. All have the potential for this delight-- every person, child or adult. But some children, many adults, find touch threatening.

For example, abused children fear being touched. Most of the boys in the home I worked in resisted offers of a hug. Yet these boys desperately longed for attention, especially being held, and sometimes would act out to get physically restrained, just to get this need met. These boys embodied our cultural mores. Any touch from a man was considered gross--from a woman, sexual. The only way they imagined getting touched was through a sexualized encounter.

One day the boys had been running around and it was getting late. I wanted them to settle down.

I said, "Wow, my heartbeat is over 100. E.J., come here let me check yours." I pulled him in to me, put my hand on his heart, and looked at my watch. "Oh my, E.J., your heart is beating at 150 times a minute. Let's see how far you can bring that down in ten minutes." Suddenly all the other boys were lining up, including Al-mon, the small 13 year old who terrified the other boys and most the staff with his cold calculating voice and threats of violence. Of all the boys I touched, I will never forget touching Al-mon. As he kept up his typical front of ferocious superiority and an invincible will, I put my hands around his little chest. His heart raced. All the while, he kept up his "don't mess with me" look. This was the boy that refused affection and thwarted attempts at relationship. And each time I pulled him into me to check his heartbeat, the hug that he was too proud and scared to receive finally was his. In time he smiled and asked for me to check his heart. As I wrapped my arms around him, pulling him into my embrace, he insisted to anyone else that all I was doing was checking his pulse.

Diane Ackerman reports in A Natural History of the Senses that massaged babies who are born premature gain weight as much as fifty percent faster than unmassaged babies. They're more active, alert, and responsive, more aware of their surroundings, better able to tolerate noise; they orient themselves faster and are emotionally more in control. They are better able to calm and console themselves. In a follow-up examination, massaged babies were found to be bigger in general, with larger heads and few physical problems. The touched infants, in these studies and in others, cried less, had better temperaments, and so were more appealing to their parents, which is important because the 7 percent of babies born prematurely figure disproportionately among those who are victims of child abuse. Children who are difficult to raise get abused more often. And people who aren't touched much as children don't touch much as adults, so the cycle continues.

Touch is as essential as sunlight. Children have re-taught me that all delight is related to my capacity to touch, either literally or metaphorically. Touch requires the presence and encounter of another. One especially powerful way to touch another is through physical intimacy.

Many parents dread the day their child becomes sexually inquisitive. We might offer information of safe sex and anatomy, perhaps even condoms, but usually nothing about what will make for being a good lover. We talk about plumbing, but not about relationship. What do we fear? That a good understanding of sexual response and pleasure will lead to permiscuous behavior? Or perhaps that we don't trust what we ourselves know?

Some parents dread their children will seek information about sexuality from the schools and the media rather than from them or their church. These parents have good reason to have concern. A recent study of 1,351 randomly selected television shows by the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation found that over the course of one week, 56% of TV programs and 67% of primetime shows contained sexual content—in word or deed.

How many of you have seen the film Addams Family Values? It begins with Pugsley and Wednesday Addams in the waiting room of the maternity ward, awaiting the arrival of their new sibling. Another child is there, explaining how her parents are getting her new sibling. The complex, colorful story involves fairies, storks, and cabbage patches. The little girl clearly has been swept up by the fantasy her parents weaved for her. Wednesday Addams turns to the camera with a deadpan expression, and tonelessly replies, “My parents had sex.” I thought it was funny too. But now I wonder whether really how much twelve-year-olds like Wednesday really understand about sex—sure they may be aware of the plumbing involved but what about the context in which healthy sexual relationships take place?

Popular culture rarely shows the sexual values that our children need to learn. In my perspective, sexuality education needs to focus on self-respect, mutuality, responsibility, and care. But this isn’t what our children are usually learning from mass media or from their friends. The Unitarian Universalist Association believes that sexuality education is so important that we have spent over a million dollars to develop the Our Whole Lives curriculum and train adults to teach it. Different modules have been developed for junior high, high school, and elementary grades. An adult curriculum will be available next year. In co-publishing this curriculum, the UUA specifically relates it to our shared principles and purposes. The development of the program has been done in conjunction with the United Church of Christ. Ours has a component that relates the material to our principles and purposes.

The Our Whole Lives program, which has been dubbed OWL, promotes compassion, justice, and truth seeking. OWL honors and celebrates sexuality as a natural, healthy part of being human. OWL promotes justice, equity, and compassion in human relationships by addressing sexism, heterosexism, and sexual stereotypes. OWL welcomes participants with differing viewpoints. OWL embodies in both form and content what we mean when we say we cherish the free and responsible search for truth. OWL engages all ages in critical thinking and values-building. And every individual is encouraged to decide what is right for oneself.

It is a common misunderstanding that the sexuality program encourages people to explore sexuality before they are ready. Instead, it provides youth and adults with the opportunity to infuse information about plumbing with the values of self-respect, mutuality, responsibility, and care. If children grow up to believe that they should be suspicious of their sexuality, or worse, hate it, consider their developing attitudes of experiencing sexual pleasure. They will likely join the conservatives of our culture who argue that giving youth comprehensive information about their sexuality will urge them into premature sexual activities. Such conservative voices have effectively blocked the sharing of information in the public schools. And these people usually believe that moral strictures can persuade children to “save themselves” for an average of 14 post-puberty until marriage. This hope is unrealistic at best and dangerous at worst.

My family, like the vast majority of families, was silent about delight, about pleasure, and about sex. Sexuality for me growing up was about the Playboys hidden in my father's closet. At puberty, I went there alone, secretively, and thereby assumed that sexuality is something you always have got to hide--in the closet.

Spiritual director Dody Donnelly says that people struggle with issues of sexuality more than any other. Erotic power and longing are a part of every person's life. Novelist and preacher Frederick Buechner put it well: sex is like nitroglycerin—it can be used either to blow up bridges or to heal human hearts. It can either be a way in which sacred mutuality and spiritual fidelity is both expressed and developed, or it can be a mere end in itself—which serves to isolate oneself and objectify and sometimes hurt others.

I appreciate Audre Lorde’s distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. The pornographic evokes a plasticized sensation—it isolates. Whereas the erotic brings us into relationship with others. Her understanding of the erotic encompasses anything that draws from our sensuous experience. In her words, “[An] important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.”

Are we not all divinity incarnate? Woman or man, we all embody God, this I believe. To pay attention to our bodies is in no way sinful. The only sin is to dismiss or ignore the delight of our own fleshly existence that connects us with others. Each one of us has a body that is a sacred landscape, a precious sanctuary. As human beings we are capable of all sorts of sensations. We can determine what gives us delight. Physical intimacy is just one of the many pleasures of life. It doesn't matter whether we have sex or not to embrace the erotic. The erotic is that energy which brings us most alive, and is not relegated to the bedroom. Every person can reach for wholeness, no matter how broken you are. No matter our age, no matter our looks, no matter the way we talk or hold ourselves, we all are sensual beings, we all have the capacity to be delighted, we all can take pleasure from our physical world. That's what makes us human. We can notice when we're anxious, when we need to calm down. We can pull our selves inward to check our own pulse, whether it be our heartbeat or our heart's longings. We can check in with ourselves to determine what we need.

We have a lot of work to do with Our Whole Lives. May each of you take to heart the religious imperative to embracing the good and beautiful you find in your world, and so that everyone of us can be living in wholeness.

As Rilke says, bodily delight is a great, infinite learning given to us, and it is not our aceptance of it that is bad but the misuse and squandering of it, applying it as a stimulant and a distraction. He says, “People have even made eating into something else: necessity on the one hand, excess on the other; have muddied the clarity of this need, and all the deep, simple needs in which life renews itself have become just as muddy. But the individual can make them clear for himself and live them clearly. He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to the necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding.”

We are fortunate to participate in a religious tradition that teaches our children about the goodness of their bodies and promotes the values of self-respect, mutuality, responsibility, and care. There is so much brokenness in our world that have resulted from misunderstandings about sexuality. May our ministry of the Our Whole Lives program flourish and bring goodness to the world.

Blessed be. Amen.