Friday, May 31, 2019
SOULFUL SEX VI
Sisters and Brothers,
A personal note and joy.
Please share my happiness
and gratitude to God.
Fifty years ago today
I was ordained.
Deo Gratias!!
John Frank
*****
SOULFUL SEX VI
HELLO !
THIS IS THE CONCLUSION
OF OUR SIX PART SERIES.
FOR THOSE JUST JOINING US,
IT WOULD BE OPTIMAL -
AND TAKE A FAIR SHAKE
OF TIME FOR SURE -
TO READ THE PRECEDING
FIVE POSTINGS PRIOR
TO DELVING INTO THIS ONE.
PLEASE CONSIDER IT
AND GO TO BLOG ARCHIVE,
RIGHT COLUMN ONLINE:
.
THANKS !
JOHN FRANK
*****
HI There !
So, sex and soul
it's been for these six segments.
A lot of time and attention for sure.
Given the significant cultural shifts
occurring in both
understandings
and
experiences
in matters sexual/gender,
Soul Health
very definitely calls for
their careful consideration,
and, pardon the play on words,
and very definitely calls for
naked honesty -
no cover over of convenience
or tries at selfish justifications,
whatever one's sense and persuasion.
.
Soul and sex are zones for Love.
Doesn't get more pivotal than that.
Our spiritual life and health
are in play and at issue.
In this series we've seen
some of the confusions
and conflicts clouding
SOULFUL SEX.
There's more and better
for sure.
Spiritually
seeking and speaking,
there are a host
of truly beautiful,
expansive elements to
this flux and evolution.
Some are renewals,
some are quite new.
- A new found joy that our
human bodies are
sacred images,
incarnations of God,
gender and sexuality
very much included.
"In the image of God
they were created,
male and female
God created them."
Genesis 1:27
- Jesus is God
"bodied,"
and
we are too!!
"In his body lives
the fullness
of divinity,
and in him
you too find
your own
fulfillment."
Colossians 2:9
- The divine indwells,
animating
soul, mind, and body.
Sense the divine passion
of all that in the
erotic, biblical poetry of
The Song of Songs.
- Mystics, well know ones
like Teresa of Avila,
and little known ones
like my mother,
experienced a love movement
from separation to divine union
through all sorts of happenings,
happenings way wider than conjugal.
Sex from the Latin means separation.
It is understood here in its widest sense.
So is its resolution in union.
The mystics give us a vast field
of reference and hope.
In it we can see the more specific
sexual/gender matter
of separation and union
worked out beautifully.
The mystery is that separations
of all sorts between:
- people,
- elements of matter
- segments of society,
- ideologies,
- artistic expressions,
- religions,
- earth care,
- scientific understandings,
- any and all separations
are transformed into loving union
through the dynamic
of ongoing creation working wonder.
That wonder is the working of all to
ALL
COSMIC UNITY
and that in splendid,
UNIFIED DIVERSITY.
Mystery it is,
marvelous mystery.
A simple and simply lovable example:
My mother used to go
for 5:30 AM summer walks
around our neighborhood.
She would filch a flower
every few days
from some neighbor's yard
( never the same neighbor,
never caught either -
we kids used to tease
the living heck out of Mom,
but assured her that if arrested,
we would indeed bail her out!!!).
Coming home, Mom would put
the flower in a vase on
the kitchen windowsill.
She would get lost
in the beauty of it
during the day,
finding God in it
and
being found in God
through it.
Creative union.
Separation overcome,
a divine unity right there
in the kitchen
on Park Street,
Montclair, NJ
It's so freeing to see sex as
love wanting to be together,
person to person for sure,
and just as sure and widely
that there is no limit to it
in ongoing creation.
In other words, we are discovering
that what we call sex is part
of a vast dynamic of creation
working separation to loving union.
That goes for people.
It goes for all and everything
as well, and well it sure is!
- The passion of divine love
becomes wildly free in us.
Many of us these days are
warming open to the intensity of
human/divine love
as so powerfully,
so wildly worded for us
by the Sufi mystic and poet,
Hafiz:
You Left a Thousand Woman Crazy
" Beloved,
Last time,
When you walked through the city
So beautiful and so naked,
You left a thousand women crazy
And impossible to live with.
You left a thousand married men
confused about their gender.
Children ran from their classrooms,
And teachers were glad you came.
And the sun tried to break out
Of its royal cage in the sky
And at last, and at last,
Lay its Ancient Love at Your feet."
What passion.
What a beautiful balance,
integration there of
masculine and feminine.
Hafiz knew what we are learning,
that gender matters are
" ...fluid concepts that exist along a
spectrum, rather than as
fixed binaries determined
by biology or genetic imprinting."
Incarnation: The New Evolutionary Threshold,
Diarmuid O'Marchu, Orbis 2017, pages 126-127
This is a zone of greatest change
and challenge today.
We are sorting out changes
in our understandings of
gender
and changes in how
those understandings
are lived out.
All sorts of traditional things,
and quite new ones as well,
are sensed and experienced
in evolving ways.
SEX
GENDER
CREATION
MYSTICISM
words meaning the beautiful tones
and touches, hues and intensities,
energy and mystery of
DIVINE LIFE
alive in us,
moving us all from
separation to union,
and that in a cascade
of combinations,
often varying
over time and expression.
For example,
strength and tenderness
are not seen and sensed as
the reserve of
one gender or another
Rather they are understood
as moving across
a freeing and fluid spectrum
not limited by one's sex/gender.
Other examples/instances:
- caring for a baby
- challenging injustice,
- being rational
- feeling deeply,
- expressing
our intuitions
and imagination,
- nurturing
- defending,
- penetrating/being penetrated
in all sorts of loving,
unitive bondings;
- letting a child's love
really get into us,
- intervening to save
a drug addict
- lovers getting
into each other
body and soul,
- joyous abandon
to God's enfoldment
in mystical union,
- leading and following
- freely passive, freely active
to note so few of so many
that ebb and flow
in us over time and growth.
Another way to see and sense
the sea change in
gender
and
sexuality
as understood
and lived,
is to lightly touch
the sense and expression
of the masculine and feminine
as found in mythologies
and in archetypal psychology,
and to realize that
they are no longer
the exclusive purview
of one sex or gender:
" ...the feminine principle
has greater interest
in the inner, the soul, the formless,
intuition, connection, harmony,
beauty, and relationality in general...
The masculine principle...
is more interested in
the outer, the mental, exterior form, idea,
the movement or action of things,
the naming and differentiation of things
one from another; solar clarity
of individual things as it were,
as opposed to the relationship
of one thing to another...It often moves
toward "agency" and action
before relationship or intimacy."
Richard Rohr, daily email,
Center for Action and Contemplation,
Sunday, April 22, 2018
"...Even as we acknowledge
the sacredness
of gender and sex, we also need
to realize there's something deeper
than our gender, anatomy,
or physical passion:
our ontological self,
who we are
forever in Christ.
As Paul courageously puts it,
"There is neither male nor female;
for you all are one in Christ Jesus"
(Galatians 3:28)...
Both sexuality and gender are mysteries
much broader than genitality
and intercourse. It is the inner drive
toward the other and beyond
the small self, which some call eros."
Richard Rohr, daily email,
Center for Action and Contemplation,
Monday, April 23,2018
Eros is divine love creatively uniting,
energizing separation into union.
That's the core of our spiritual lives.
Our spiritual lives are always full of
surprise and mystery.
These days we are in the midst of
surprising and mysterious evolutions
of gender as channels of eros.
It helps me to see that as I see the sunrise.
Masculinity and Femininity are like a
palate of rich colorations in the vast sky
blending in ever various beauty
as they morning move.
Our core self, our spirit,
is embodied in
a male or female manner
for the majority of us.
Our core self, our spirit,
lives and loves
in a gendered manner.
That is culturally specific.
Our culture is split and contentious
about a lot of that just now.
Whatever our gender understanding
and experience, authentic spirituality
is the flow of Love through us.
It is essentially the same
and specifically unique be we
single, married/partnered,
widow/widower, celibate,
LBGTQA.
We honestly face the separation
that is all through and about us.
That's sex, "secare."
We joyfully let the Love Who Is God
course through us bringing all into One
through our living/loving.
Not only us, but all matter and spirit
are evolving forward into the mystery of
Divine Diversity in Unity.
That's what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
highlighted as the evolution
of our universe to the
Omega Point
That's creation, and it is sure is
simply divine!!
So, two people wrapped in love
are wrapped in God,
because "God is Love."
So, in soul stillness God possesses us
in the Limitless, Cosmic Love
that is Very God.
Mystical rapture.
So, our partners in being, elements and energies,
move and merge in the paradox and mystery of
Cosmic and Diversified
Unity.
Every blessing for
SOULFUL SEX
as we face separation
and
embrace creation
unto
ONE.
In God's Dear, Creative Unifying Love,
John Frank
*****
Thanks to all who hung together here
the six weeks of this series.
Cake it was not.
Protein - I hope so!!
If you wish a fuller consideration
of the interfacing of sex and soul,
please see;
- Richard Rohr's daily email, free,
Center for Action and Contemplation,
( Meditations@cac.org ),
"Gender and Sexuality,"
April 15 - 27, 2018
- Incarnation A New Evolutionary Threshold,
Diamuid O'Murhu, Orbis Books, 2017,
chapter seven, Sex and Gender
- Sex God, Rob Bell, Zondervan, 2007
*****
Welcome to all joining in here for the first time.
*****
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THANK YOU!
*****
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