I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are.
—ADRIENNE RICH
The intimacy of these lines traces something deep and hungry and erotic in me. They run a finger along my enfleshed soul, my ensouled body, stirring a craving for something I can barely name.
I want.
I want to be touched in this way.
I want someone to reach for me, to reach from inside her own perception, her own feeling, her own need. I want to feel her stir next to me, as a lover turns in the dark blue night to face me with her entire body, bury her face in the skin of my back, the palm of her hand traveling from my hip to my stomach to my chest. She holds me there, knows me, wants me, needs me. I want this and need this, too: the power of this connection, this touch.
When one’s identity is caught up in one’s sexuality, it is not a stretch to perceive the erotic at work as it courses through our lives.1 I don’t mean physical sex, necessarily; I mean the underlying electric current that connects people intimately, and that connects human beings to God.
The desire for this electric charge—palpable, sensual, spiritual—is what leads me to risk. My need of it is so great that I’m not sure I could not pursue it. But if I had a choice about the matter, if I could choose whether or not to pursue the erotic desire for deep connection, I know that I would choose it. Absolutely. This desire is very like my queerness in that regard: something built into me, something I love. Something I want, even as I know that it is itself the essence of wanting.
The human species has a long history of ambivalence about the value both of bodies and of desire. By “ambivalence,” what I mean is that it is possible to trace through many cultures, philosophies, and theologies a near demonization of flesh and of desire. And sometimes that demonization isn’t just “near.” Sometimes it is explicit, and deadly. It’s not hard at all to see disparagement of bodies and fear of desire undergirding sexual violence the world over—against women, against people of color, against children, against queer people.
When queer people begin to live openly, when we make our queerness visible, we take on both aspects of this demonization. That need to live openly is born of desires that are hard for a healthy individual to repress, that a healthy individual knows in his gut he should not repress: desire for connection, desire for authenticity, desire for pleasure, desire for human dignity. And of course, that desire is located intimately in our bodies.
Life is a struggle for most of us, in some ways for all of us, queer or not. You have to want simply to survive, and you have to put some energy behind that wanting if you are going to do more than survive. For the vast majority of people, just getting one’s basic needs met can feel like a long trudge up a steep hill. I once heard someone describe the amount of privilege you have as being like your position on that hill. If you have a good life, a loving family, a level of material comfort, you don’t have to trudge so far to live well. But for every challenge handed to you, you start a little lower down the hill. If you live in poverty, or in the midst of violence, or if your tribe/gender/racial or ethnic group is disparaged in some way, those facts put you a few notches down. The further down the hill you are, the more grit you have to have to get your needs met, let alone to succeed beyond that.
The image of this hill is compelling. All by itself it makes me skeptical of theologies that posit desire as somehow problematic, or worse, as sinful. There is no question that for many, many people in the world, desire for life is what keeps you, your family, your children, alive. Wanting to live, wanting a better life, keeps people walking up that hill. Not only does this desire, this drive, make sense, but it is clearly valuable, honorable. Maybe this is why so many queer people have no trouble extending a basic acceptance of desire to include the desires that define so much of who we are.
Many queer people want. Openly. We have to want openly if we are to get the things we want and need. What queer people want is probably not a lot different from what most people want: connection, meaning, safe harbors, belonging. Love. What is different about us is that we are marked by these desires in a way many other people are not marked. And we are marked by a very specific aspect of those desires: many of them are carnal. They involve our bodies. They are about sex, whether as identifier, or physiological phenomenon, or activity.
Some queer people pay less attention to the implications of embodiment, but many of us are fiercely carnal—and aware of it. We have to be aware of it, because our carnality commands so much attention, infuses so many conversations about our lives. Our carnality is the subject that people discuss when they talk about “the issue” of who we are. This fact alone distinguishes queer carnality from heterosexual embodiment. What is extraordinary, breathtaking, is the degree to which we as a people have boldly claimed our carnality. In our various communities, we celebrate it. We take pride in it.
But something more. Something important. Even as queer communities have paid careful attention to bodies and sex, we have also paid careful attention to spiritual health, to our inherent human dignity and integrity. We have had to do this, in a world that all too often pits body against spirit in dualistic, antagonistic tension. We have had to do this, because we want. Because wanting itself is so often a deeply spiritual impulse.
That is what many of us experience in our queerness, and in our spirituality. They work together. They overlap, intermingle. Part of the premise of this book is that being queer has taught me a lot about how to be a good Christian. But it does sometimes go the other way, that my faith tradition helps me understand my queerness.
Contemporary Christianity has expended so much wattage on disparagement of bodies and of desire that most people probably take it as a given that this disparagement of flesh, of wanting, is a bright thread in the history of the tradition. But Christianity has always celebrated desire for God, even fierce desire of that electrically charged (yes, I’m going to say it) erotic variety. Now don’t let that word sidetrack our conversation. I’m not going to get all defensive here and tell you that by “erotic” I don’t mean sexual, because you and I both know that eroticism has a sexual component. But let’s not fall into that trap by which sexuality gets opposed to spirituality as if they had nothing to do with each other. We should be able to talk about desire for God as erotic in a way that does not sound creepy or profane. In fact, Christianity has a bold and vibrant history of doing exactly that. The Christian tradition is loaded with images that use bodies and bodily desire to communicate just how fierce our desire for God can be.
From its inception, Christianity has drawn on the relationship between a bride and her bridegroom as a metaphor to represent communion with God. This notion of God as bridegroom did not begin with Christianity; it existed in Judaism, and it appears throughout Hebrew scripture. What Christianity did was suggest that when we human beings come together in Christian community—aka the church—we become the bride. Paul fancied himself a proud father who had promised his churches in marriage “to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.”2
This image isn’t about Jesus and humanity sharing a metaphorical cup of coffee while reading the morning news on matching iPads. It isn’t about humanity donning an apron, making a nice home-cooked meal, and having it all ready on the dining room table when God gets home from a long hard day of creating new galaxies and waging war against cosmic evil. The ancients drew on the metaphor of bride and bridegroom to point to something specific: sexual consummation. Paul expected his churches to remain “chaste” until Jesus returned. The gnostic Gospel of Philip uses the image of the bridal chamber to illustrate human redemption—our reconciliation to God.
This is not an obscure motif in the tradition. That’s what the Song of Songs is trying to do: tell us about God by simultaneously sexualizing spirituality and spiritualizing sexuality. Not denying either, but using both to convey something about the other.
Sex as metaphor for communion with God makes a lot of sense. Imagine what it would really be like to encounter God. Not from a distance, but up close. Such a spiritual union would have to be mind-blowingly intense. Could you put it into words? If so, what words would you use? What experience would you draw on for comparison? Would you talk about a really good meal? A gorgeous sunrise? Those can be amazing, sublime. But if you are talking about physically interacting with God, what human experience could possibly approach it except sexual union?
To compare union with God to sexual union does not necessarily mean that all sex approaches that level of the sacred—nor should “non-sacred” sex be demonized as profane. But if you are lucky, you know the extraordinary experience of coming hard in the arms of someone whom you love deeply, who loves you beyond measure. You know that this is a singular experience that differs in quality and intensity from anything else we humans do.
What the authors of these ancient sacred texts seemed to perceive is that the sexuality that comes closest to expressing divine communion is the sexual consummation that takes place in the bridal chamber, an experience that ideally includes and cultivates both spiritual and sexual connection. This is “marriage,” not as so many people still want to define it, as a predominantly heterosexual union that is legal, exclusive, and privileged; but rather, as a spiritual relationship—a sacred relationship—that is expressed sexually as well as spiritually, physically, emotionally, economically, and so on.3
Many lesbians and gay men have long grasped this notion of marriage as a sacred/sexual union. Until very recently, our “marriages” were exclusively sacred/sexual covenants. That was what we had access to, it was what we intentionally invoked when we entered consciously into covenanted relationship.
We live in a time when it’s common for people to reject mind-body dualism as antiquated.4 Though it still influences Christian thought, I’ve never let myself get too hung up on dualism. Somehow I’ve always had a clear sense that these dualistic ideas were misguided, that a rigid attachment to dualistic thinking was a misinterpretation of an ancient idea, not intended to be applied to sexuality in a glib and condemnatory way. I have always sensed this, because I’ve always had the queer gift of knowing myself both as a carnal being and as a spiritual being.
Christianity sheds light on the queer relationship between carnality and spirituality by demanding that we grapple over and over again with the inherent, mindbending puzzle of God coming to earth as a human being. We Christians refer to this astonishing event as the incarnation.
The idea of God becoming incarnate is one of the richest veins in Christianity, offering vast opportunity to enter spiritually into an encounter with God. The stories of Jesus figuring out his own embodiment are pure gold, a gold that is seldom mined for even a fraction of what it is truly worth.
Many Gospel stories portray Jesus as being Mr. Compassion. You see this a lot in the healing narratives. Some leper gets up in Jesus’s face to ask to be healed, and Jesus is filled with compassion and heals him.5 The Greek word often translated as “compassion” is splagchnizomai. It literally means “a yearning in the bowels.” Just try to pronounce it. It sounds like a yearning in the bowels.
Well, imagine if Jesus’s compassion was like the word’s literal meaning—a yearning that snuck up on him. In him, I mean. What if splagchnizomai was something that he didn’t control or choose in some moment of remote divine objectivity? Maybe Jesus wasn’t standing around all the time being pious and sounding Godlike: “Ah, here is a leper. I feel such compassion for this poor soul.” Maybe his experience was a lot more like what happens when you’re walking next to somebody who trips on the sidewalk, and even though you’re late for work and you totally don’t have time to stop, you just instinctively reach out to help right the person. And while you digest what just happened, somewhere deep inside, you get that yearning in the gut thing that makes you take an extra moment to look the person in the eye and ask, sincerely, “Are you okay?”
It is such a normal human instinct to reach out to someone next to you who needs a hand. If it really is a human instinct, then maybe that impulse isn’t just a spiritual one. Maybe there is something carnal at work in it—something both carnal and spiritual.
And maybe what made Jesus such a provocative and compelling figure in his day was precisely the fact that he was so deeply in touch both with his body and with his spirit. Whatever dualism existed back then, whatever body/soul binary Jesus had to deal with, there is no question that he ruptured it. People watching him were astonished at the way his flesh and his soul worked together.
There is something very queer about this convergence of sensitivities, attunements, to the spiritual and to the carnal. That’s why it should come as no surprise that so many queer people are fiercely carnal, at exactly the same time that we are highly attuned to transcendent beauty and joy. This is what makes it so clear that it is a lie to say there is no spark of the divine in us. This is what makes it so clear that we are not merely carnal, but incarnate: a potent mix of body and soul, of earthly and divine.
Incarnation is both a strength, creating opportunity for movement and expression, and a vulnerability. We know about both. And with a focus on our sexuality, we go public with the most vulnerable aspects of our incarnation, both physical and spiritual.
Of course, whenever you reach out from a place of both strength and vulnerability, you don’t know what you are going to get back. The challenge in laying your soul or your body bare is that being touched in intimate places is sometimes exquisitely pleasurable, and sometimes monstrously painful. It is a paradox that to achieve the ecstasy of erotic connection, one must also risk—and all too often experience—agonizing pain. Sometimes you get both, ecstasy and agony, simultaneously.
Scripture tells us that this is exactly what it is like to be touched by God. This is one of those extraordinary lessons that Christianity inherited from Judaism. The word that communicates this potent, life-altering touch is Hebrew: naga.
One passage in which naga appears is Genesis 32: the story of Jacob wrestling the angel. Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, son of Isaac, is third in the line of patriarchs whose descendants will number as the stars in heaven, who will become the people of Israel. Jacob is fiercely alive, fiercely carnal. And oh, does he want. He wants to be firstborn; he wants to be blessed; he wants the stunningly beautiful Rachel. And he’s not afraid to go after what he wants, even if it means he has to coerce his brother, or lie to his father, or work his butt off year after year for Rachel’s father. Jacob is successful, and he doesn’t need anyone but himself. Which means that he is also, in a sense, very alone. The encounter with the angel takes place after Jacob has gotten most everything he wants. He’s rich, has two wives, a raft of children. He’s set for life. Oh, except for one thing. He hasn’t been home in a very long time. You see, a couple of those little schemes of his cheated and thus wildly infuriated his brother, Esau. Jacob has been on the run from Esau for his entire adult life. But now, as he grows old, Jacob wants something he cannot steal and he cannot earn: he wants to go home. To do that, he needs Esau to forgive him. And unbeknownst to Jacob, that brings God into the picture.
So Jacob sets off. Esau comes out to meet him. For all Jacob knows, Esau is going to kill him. The night before they are to meet, Jacob sends his family across the river, leaving him alone. This is the moment of reckoning. Jacob has to get right with Esau, but first, he has to get right with himself and with God. Some mysterious figure appears—a man? An angel? Whatever it is, this being jumps Jacob. They wrestle all night, neither of them prevailing. Finally, as dawn is about to break, the angel delivers a brutal blow to Jacob’s hip—naga. This is the touch of God, and in this story, it may mean the death of Jacob. The next morning, Jacob limps to meet his brother. Jacob can’t fight his way out of this one. His autonomy compromised, Jacob has to rely on Esau’s love and forgiveness. Will Esau embrace Jacob, or kill him where he stands? They meet, and Esau throws his arms around his brother. At last, Jacob finds a kind of connection that demands reliance on another, one that demands vulnerability. At last, he is healed; he is home. That angel’s excruciating touch, that moment of naga, has crippled Jacob for life; it has also saved him.
Naga also shows up in a famous passage from Isaiah.6 Isaiah is standing inside God’s sanctuary, mesmerized by the beauty and by the astonishing angelic creatures flying as they attend to the Most High. As smoke rises from the altar and fills the room, seraphs chant a rhythmic praise so stunning, so evocative, that for two thousand years, right up to this day, it has been sung every week as part of the Eucharistic feast in churches the world over:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of [God’s] glory!
Isaiah is both riveted and terrified by the spectacle. He cries out, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Suddenly a seraph flies up to Isaiah’s face, carrying a hot coal from the altar. The seraph touches—naga—the coal to Isaiah’s lips to blot out his guilt and free him up to speak. In that moment, God calls Isaiah to be a prophet. Just like the angel’s touch in the Jacob story, this touch is one that both wounds Isaiah and saves him. Whatever pain he experiences from the coal searing his lips, he pushes past it. When God cries out, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah does not miss a beat. “Here am I; send me!”
Even more than Jacob, Isaiah comes face to face with this basic truth: God is terrifying. Angels are terrifying. Not because they are punitive (though they might be), but because true glory and majesty and love and strength are terrifying, chaotic, big. When this God touches you, you hardly know what to make of the experience. It is so intense, so extraordinary, as to be nearly unbearable.
We must seriously consider and understand both sides of the naga equation. The healing it brings does not mean that the wounds hurt any less; nor does the wounding cancel out the glorious freedom and joy that follow it. God’s touch is exquisite; God’s touch is excruciating. Comprehending love means honoring the truth of the paradox.
Knowledge of oneself, of love, demands to be proclaimed in a way that makes oneself vulnerable, that puts one in danger. Naga is the place where the paradox of risk becomes incarnate. Risk leads to a touch that wounds and heals, both, often simultaneously.
Queer people understand naga innately, not just as an individual experience of love, but also as a condition of identity, of life. For us, it is the price of membership, of belonging, of self-knowledge. Many queer people know that touching in this way involves terrible risk. We know that it will exact a price. And we do it anyway. We do it because it is also the most exciting, life-giving experience some of us have ever known. It is maddeningly thrilling. Exquisitely liberating. Scary as hell.
Queer experience points to the terror of love as love, not as punishment for rule breaking. It is common for Christians to approach Christian ethics as a series of rules, and to assume that God condemns us when we violate those rules. This is the same problematic misinterpretation we saw operating in the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac: God sets up rules and demands compliance with them. If we break the rules, this thinking goes, we are wrong and worthy of punishment. This is a flawed but powerful notion that has done immeasurable harm to queer people. Many of us are forced to confront again and again the internalized homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and plain old sexphobia that this thinking breeds within us.
As a queer person matures in understanding hir identity, ze can begin to perceive that when we encounter punishment as a response to our identities, it is the punishment—not the identity—that is a problematic, inauthentic response.
There is strong scriptural support for this understanding. Perhaps the most vivid passage is in the First Letter of John, when the author meditates on what it means for us to declare that “God is love.” The author writes: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment. . . . Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”7
So what does it mean to “fear God”? This is not a marginal phrase in the Bible. English translations of scripture spend a lot of time talking about “fearing God.” It is easy to read these translations and jump to the conclusion that we are supposed to fear God because God has the power to hurt us. I mean, that’s usually what fear is about, right? I fear things that might cause me pain. But maybe there is another way to think about fear.
Naga tells us that God’s touch is a chaotic mixture of extraordinary blessing and extraordinary danger. Touching the sacred is risky—the opportunity to feel love like no other, and destruction like no other. It is thus exciting—and terrifying. Doesn’t it make sense to be afraid?
How could one not be afraid of the risk, aware of the danger? Such awareness, such fear is what makes the risk of faith all the more valuable, all the more visibly courageous. But this is not the same thing as being afraid that God is filled with wrath, and that God continually directs wrath at us (us humans in general, us queers in particular). Perhaps when scripture advises us to “fear God,” the idea is not that we are supposed to be cowering on the floor, whimpering for our lives. Perhaps it’s just the opposite. “Fearing God” may be a matter of acknowledging the full truth of God’s touch, and taking up the steep challenge to love fiercely, passionately, openly, courageously—despite all the risks that such love entails.
Often even the caring and compassionate side of love is no picnic. The author of First John does not suggest nonchalantly that this business of loving your brother or sister is easy, or self-evident. It can sometimes be very hard—wrenchingly hard—to love in an active way even the people you will always, no matter what, love deeply: your life partner, your children, your dearest friends, members of whatever community you need, the people you really rely upon.
This is where naga comes keenly into play. In those relationships where your heart is most invested, where you have power over someone else and where someone has power over you, this is where it matters to understand the complex relationship between love and pain. This is where it matters to understand the distinction between pain and punishment. This is where it matters to know who you are, to risk touching and being touched.
Queer people are not alone in living out these dynamics; everyone does. Indeed, this business of putting oneself intentionally in the path of love, of taking on its challenges and perils, laying one’s soul bare to the agony and ecstasy of naga—this is what Christianity claims as its distinguishing characteristic. Christianity is at its heart a path, a posture: one that embraces our incarnate state while recognizing the vulnerability it creates, one that calls us to tend to each other when we are struggling, one that offers and demands in the name of God a conscious decision about how each of us will respond to violence and fear.
Queer people don’t experience these dynamics occasionally. We are dropped into them daily as into a deep pool of water. We have to learn to swim in them, anticipate the shock, navigate the cold spots, luxuriate in our ability to float. Day in and day out we risk our lives in order to feel, to touch. We put the most vulnerable aspects of ourselves on the line. A great many of us learn to do this publicly, openly, in ways that other people can see and, we hope, we pray, respect.
An individual queer person may not see the sacred at work in this aspect of our experience. But as a priest, I see it clearly. It is the identity that exists within each of us and connects us to something bigger than ourselves. It is the call to proclaim that identity. It is the impulse to make that connection manifest, incarnate. I cannot but see God at work when queer people courageously speak our truth to a world torn by ambivalence, to people who fear the touch of another, of God, but who want it, who need it, fiercely.
On that score, queer people do the same thing that Jews have done for millennia, that Jesus did when he walked the earth, and that many of his followers have done since: we don’t just feel the glorious sting of naga; we celebrate it. We strut down Fifth Avenue in New York, or whatever local community we happen to be living in, making our Pride, our fabulously incarnate selves, as visible as we can.
This queer heart, this queer body, with its persistent desires, fierce hungers, is scandalous to those who view God dualistically. God knows that. God knew that Ze would be viewed scandalously for embracing—entering—one of these bodies. And Ze did it anyway. I love that in God. I need that in God. I need to feel God taking my hand, bearing me up, because this path we are walking together is about to lead us directly into the heart of scandal.