A number of years ago I went to a one-day seminar hosted by M. Scott Peck entitled, Spirituality and Sexuality. It was part of a profound shift in my thinking that was occurring at the time around issues of human sexuality. Well, to be honest, it wasn't so much a shift in thinking as an attempt at reconciling my own thoughts and ideas about faith and views on sex and sexuality that were not necessarily open for discussion at the time. It was prompted largely by the fact that the community I had been involved in planting had spent a number of weeks(which turned into months) exploring human sexuality and Christianity in particular. Out of that we wrote our own manifesto for sexuality as a community--it was viewed as quite progressive by some, profane by others, and a starting place for most of us. This was when I swam in more evangelical circles and a lot of people who came to our gatherings were refugees of some sort from that arena. In his lectures Peck linked sexuality and spirituality closely together and explored some of the writings of the Christian mystics to support his view. The lectures were held at a church called Agape--a church of Religious Science that has experienced a lot fo success in West LA and, through it's founder Michael Beckwith, gained some prominence as part of a new movement of spirituality that emerged out of what was more traditional New Age spirituality (yes, like most other belief systems, New Age spirituality has undergone many transformations of late).
This issue came up again around this time last year when I was teaching in Italy. One of our day trips was to Sienna--the home of one of Italy's patron saints, Catherine. Catherine's life was marked by many issues that I fond quite troubling--food deprivation, extreme asceticism and a somewhat sexualized overtone in her relation with God. Talking of these things created some tense moments on the trip to say the least and contributed to my latest spiritual 'review' I wont call it crisis because the connotation is too negative!
All of that to say that I came across some artwork linked to simialr themes of sex and spirituality. James Roper created a series of images entitled Rapture series. Here is the blurb,
"The pursuit of release or transcendence occur most purely within the seemingly opposing natures of religion and 'sin'. This is dealt with explicitly in my Rapture series, the inspiration for which originated from my interest in Bernini's sculpture 'The Ecstasy of St.Teresa' and how Bernini visualised 'religious ecstasy' in an abstract form and inadvertently drew comparisons to psycho-sexual release:
"He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it." (Life of St.Teresa of Jesus – St.Teresa)
This is explicitly symbolised in the Rapture series by the use of porn stars as the vehicle for the expression of this 'spiritual' emotion, the shedding of carnal bodies giving way to an abstract purity beneath. The idea of release from the material to the spiritual is apparent in many religions as if there were a divine soul trapped in our earthly bodies, this is analogous to contemporary imagery found in comic books specifically the way in which Clark Kent, a normal man, sheds his clothes to become a Superman."
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