An uncanny amount of witchery and religion I have had at this change of the seasons.  Among them, an interfaith gathering to address domestic violence, and the full moon over the ocean at Coney Island and Janna swaying, bent over her single tea light, spangles glinting in the blowing hem of her turquoise skirt.  A clutch of us burned our wishes and baggage and let it blow off the fire escape with the candle smoke.

Thus feeling metaphysical, I could not help but ask my sister-girl-sister friends over a bottle of red wine: What is a soul anyway?  And what does it have to do with sex?

An excellent conversation, especially when the friends work for sexual justice.  The abortion rights activist descends from a long line of progressive Protestant ministers, and the public health scientist comes from a family of conservative Italian Catholics.  For the record, my family is Sicilian Catholic.  My mother, however, when asked why she did not raise me in the church, said, “Because I had a daughter.  And I loved her.”  Plus, for a place founded on a birth by a single teenage mother, it felt ironically hostile to her at the time.

By the end of the bottle, we concluded, more or less, the soul is the essential part of ourselves that is somehow internal, ethereal and transcendent.  Sexuality, being an essential part of every person—a normal and natural part of being human— is part of each soul.  Maria adds that asexuality must be included in the spectrum of sexuality, what we express and enact and what or who attracts us.

I had found a book of writers interviewing writers, The World Within, and it offered us this passage:

Rikki Ducornet: I think the sexual soul has to do with sexuality informing one’s entire being.  I always think of sexuality as the heart of who one is.  I think the sexual soul means one delights in the natural world and isn’t frightened of other bodies or new experiences.  A sexual soul is intrigued by other cultures, delighted by new music, by the sensuous experiences of language.

Naming this sexual soul or soulful aspect to sexuality bridges a soul/body disconnect perpetrated by our Western philosophy and religion, the traditional deliberators of the soul.  Many people of faith and those in the HIV and AIDS community have rejected this artificial dichotomy, arguing that it damages individuals and our communities.

To wit, we’ve been double-f***ed: from Judeo-Christian narratives of earthly suffering as a pathway to heaven to DesCartes, “I think therefore I am.”  If you include our Puritan heritage, we have a ménage e trios of repression.  On this foundation, informed by (dare I say) patriarchy, our modern cultural and institutional practices regenerate this disassociation.  We live it out.

Rev. Krishna Stone has been working for over a decade in New York to facilitate change within faith communities to support sexual wellbeing and support individuals in reunifying their whole selves.  So I went to talk with her too.

“What I do in my work is to reconnect sexuality with spirituality,” she said.  She facilitates personal and cultural shifts from an idea of sexuality that is connected with disease and damage to one rooted in our personality, our essential self, our soul.  The soul being this thing about us that just is; “no religion needed,” she notes.

“It’s all dislocated.  Like an eyeball over here, and a vagina way over here,” and she enacts the fragmentation many of us feel, waving about her golden hands.  She shares a blessing offered at a World AIDS Day vigil at Judson Memorial Church:

… We bless the condoms and lubricant as we nurture people:

to not let culture, media, religious or government institutions, schools, our friends and family tell us what our sexuality means or what we should do with it; to have sexuality be responsible, healthy and satisfying; to learn how to negotiate safer sex with confidence; to be open to support from peer educators and other allies who continue to bring the message of HIV prevention to communities; to have sexuality not be a thing of shame and embarrassment; to see sexuality embraced; and to know sexuality includes all feelings, thoughts and behaviors associated with relationships that include intimacy, as well as sensual and sexual activity.

ALL: Our lives matter.

To the One who has the creative energy for our greatest good, we bless the safer sex kits as we advocate for people:

to have more options for safer sex such as vaginal and rectal microbicides; to see it easier to negotiate a relationship, not so devastating; to see less hypersexualization of youth in our culture; to access safe sapces or support groups to share openly about sex, intimacy and relationships;  to see more attention paid to the perception and impact of images we all receive, including pornography; to see people less frustrated in their desire to express themselves; and to see sex as a deeper expression of the God or Goddess within to create love in our lives.

ALL: Our lives matter.

She gives a workshop for HIV-positive women called Spirituality: What the Hell is It? In one exercise, the group makes two lists of words, those they associate with “spirituality” and with “sexuality.”  Time and again, the words for “spirituality” are Christian-centric and abstract, and the list for “sexuality” is full of painful and intensely personal words like damage, rape, and nasty.  Pleasure is rarely mentioned, relegated to the realm of luxury.  Hardly surprising since sex for many women is not a free choice but a transaction, security or duty.  Pleasure almost always secondary.

What if pleasure were central?  There is an idea of the soul as our basic goodness, the piece of God or Everything that is in us and in every living thing, creating mutuality and connection.  We (and our partners) can be fully present, connected to our own bodies and souls, for our partner’s ecstasy, the moment of orgasm imagined as a place beyond words in full harmony with the perfect resonance of Everything.  Where you can hear the heartbeat of you, her and the universe.  To have sex this soulful way seems to honor the divine in each of us and seems like love seems like God to me.

In our brutal society, moments of feeling connectedness to everything can be precious and fleeting.   To move soulfully through the day, to be fully present, takes tremendous courage.  It makes you vulnerable.  There’s a lot of static.

Krishna and I talked about inexplicably soulful sexual moments or soulful moments erotically charged.  “It’s like falling in love immediately,” she snaps her fingers.  An honor.  When her whole body, mind and soul says, undeniably, “Yes!”

After heartbreak, barriers surround your soul at full depth and strength, feeling all the windows of your soul blow open in a moment of sexual connection, I add.

To experience yourself as having a sexual soul, perhaps, is to have done the work to be able to feel these moments, recognize them.  Krishna said, “You have to believe in this kind of magic for it to work.”

But so much of what we believe twists us away from our sexuality, our bodies.  Many of us have experiences that break the sexual soul: sexual abuse; sexual shaming; misinformation; silence, silence and more silence.

It is easier to heal when a community supports you.  Some ministers believe if faith communities had accepted and supported gay men, particularly gay men of color, we would not see the AIDS epidemic as it is today.  Despite the work of such leaders, there remains much to be done to engender theologies that resonate with the bodily experiences of those of us most vulnerable to HIV infection, sexual assault and other injustices.

Although we have inherited this tradition of a soul/body divide, text and tradition can be reclaimed as tools of justice for our bodies and souls, united.  At the corner coffee shop in my Brooklyn neighborhood, a local minister explained to me that the roots of the word “salvation” are in old language for healing the body, like a salve.

Krishna thinks part of this healing is acknowledging sexual pleasure as a sacred right.  She said, “In my church, every service, we’d ask for a show of hands of everyone who orgasmed last night.  Raise your hands!  Hallelujah!  Amen!”

All of these conversations drew me back to the following passage from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, where I first remember hearing the call for healing the disassociation of sexuality from our souls and God-talk:

Here’s the thing, said Shug, the thing I believe.  God is inside you and inside everybody else. … She say, My first step from the [idea of God as an] old white man was trees.  Then air.  Then birds.  Then other people.  But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.  I knew that if I cut a tree my arm would bleed.  And I laughed and I cried and I ran all around the house.  I knew just what it was.  In fact, when it happens, you can’t miss it.  It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh.

Shug! I say.

Oh, she say.  God love all them feelings.  That’s some of the best stuff God did.  And when you know God loves ‘em you enjoys ‘em a lot more.  You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like. …  God made it.  Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t.

God loves a mess of stuff you don’t love or understand.  She loves our wildly variant bodies, tangles of addictions and fears, and struggles to thrive.  Perhaps if voices like these from the faith community seized the values political platform, we would see federal funding for needle exchange, dissolution of the racist imprisonment system, and health care for all.

In my own faith tradition of offering yet more reading, here’s some good ones to illuminate and heal the sexual soul:

• Sensuous Spirituality: Out from Fundamentalism by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott
• The Survivor’s Guide to Sex by Staci Haines
• Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
• Cooking as Courtship by Susan Wiegand