Sexuality and Its Saintly, Sacramental Nature

 It happens.  You learn you are going to be parents, and you and your spouse vow that they won't let the romance die after the baby is born.  We're not going to be "that couple" that loses all interest in each other,and romance, and their sex lives. We can do this. 

Our children deserve to be a part of a healthy marriage, and one of the biggest parts of a healthy and happy marriage is sexual intimacy.  Our sexual selves are so transformed,changed, and different after we become mothers, and this is the subject that everyone thinks about, but is hard to get really honest about.  We tend to shy away from the topic.  We might share a few details with our closest friends, but the norm is not to say too much.  The most common reaction to the topic of sexual intimacy is to joke about the topic. Laughter can ease tension and nervousness. Just go to a greeting card store, and you can find a million ways to be lighthearted about the subject of sex.


But then the children enter our lives and our sex life tends to exit our lives.  Exhaustion consumes us.  Constant physical contact with our babies overwhelms our senses.  Time is at a premium, and the last thing that is on our minds is sex.  After giving birth we are told not to have intercourse for six weeks.  And for a lot of mothers that is music to our ears.

There are all kinds of books and television shows that offer advice on this topic, but there are two topics that involve our sexuality, and you don't often here of the two intertwined, and that is that our sexuality and our spirituality are deeply joined together.  They are intertwined in many ways, one of which is healing our sexual selves.  There is a statistic out there, that I find really frightening.  1 in 4 women are sexually abused in some form.  Anything from rape, incest, molestation, or harassment.  That is an alarming statistic, and some experts believe that is a low estimate because a lot of women don't report what has happened to them.  And as you move along on your spiritual journey, this must be addressed because it not only affects you, the woman and mother, and your spouse, but it also affects your children.  If you have trouble getting comfortable with this topic, you aren't going to be any more comfortable when talking with your spouse or your children.  By allowing God to move you toward healing and wholeness in this area of your life, you will heal and transform your children's lives and your marriage.

 What happens to our bodies happens to our spirit as well.  When someone violates our body, our spiritual nature is also violated.  When our spiritual nature is violated, we  can feel abandoned by God. We feel even more separated from God.  We have trouble feeling God's presence. Unfortunately, we question God's will, and often see God as "wanting" this for us. When that couldn't be further  from the truth. The image of a loving God is often hard to believe.  It makes it difficult to give and receive love.  We can't trust ourselves, others, or God.  The shame we feel takes the space in our hearts where Love should reign.  The anger we feel, takes up the space in our hearts where forgiveness should reign. The guilt we feel takes up the space where acceptance should reign.  Healing our sexual selves makes a holy space, in our center, our soul, purely intended for God to love us so we can understand how to love ourselves and learn to love others as God has loved us. 

We are both holy and sexual.  We are both sensual and saintly.  Our sexual nature is as much of God as our divine nature.  God created us to both give and receive pleasure.  God can touch us as much through the physical expression of love as through the emotional expression of love.  When two people express their love through sexual intercourse, it is as much  a spiritual experience as it is a purely physical/emotional experience. The ecstasy and joy we feel is God's way of reaching us and desiring to know us with the same ecstasy and joy.  The closeness we feel to our spouse is the closeness that God longs for with us. Sexual intercourse becomes our prayer. God enters our lovemaking, so that we might know God in the deepest way possible. Sexual intercourse in many ways is sacramental in that we are engaged in experiencing the presence of God more fully through the physical and spiritual connection we have with our loved one. Sacraments are a sign and symbol of our oneness with God.  When we love our spouse through the act of intercourse, that oneness is eternal and forever, just as God is in our lives.

Our act of lovemaking is the creation of an altar where love is offered, oneness is felt, and pure joy is shared.
The expression of love to our spouse through the physical act of touching, kissing, embracing, and caressing is a holy expression of worship, where we worship God-with-us.  We worship the divine nature of each other, and the divinity that is expressed in our covenant with each other.  A covenant to love, honor, cherish, and grow with each other.  The expression of love, in the physical, allows Divine Light to cover us in the eternal and wrap us in forever. Lovemaking allows us to really experience the eternal "now".  Past and future do not exist while we love our beloved.  It is only us, and nothing else but this moment. The act of intercourse rejects the need for man-made time, and clings to the simplicity of the present.
Loving someone else both physically and emotionally could not get anymore symbolic of God's love for us.  Our spouse is our sign and symbol of the revelation of God's unconditional love, support, trust, and belief in us.

We teach our children that sex involves loving someone unconditionally and that sex with another requires emotional maturity, but we often leave out that sex is a spiritual experience and is one of God's greatest gift of love to us.  We often forget to tell our children that it is prayerful, holy, and one of the most sacred experiences we will ever have.  Teaching our children that when you engage in sexual intercourse with someone you are also affecting, loving, and respecting the spiritual part of that person.  You are encountering God through the person you love.

 If you are a woman who has been affected by any type of sexual abuse or harassment, you are not alone.  You are worthy of all love, all healing, and all joy that life has to offer.  It is not your fault, even if parents or someone else told you it was.  Let me say that again.  It is not your fault. You don't have to carry around the shame, the blame, or the guilt of what happened to you.  God will lead you every step of the way to healing, and to wholeness.  Pray, get help, and set the victim in you free!  Resurrect your "self".  You have everything you need inside to heal and to get through even the roughest days.  God promises a path through the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  Go boldly into the darkness so you can feel the light.  Follow the inroads of your Center, where God lives, moves and has His loving being.

Note:  This article was taken from the soon to be published book,  "Motherprayers, Mamawisdom"by Susie Uhlik

Next Week:   Housework, a Rich Source of Prayer and Ritual:  Taking the ordinary and mundane work of cleaning, laundry, giving baths, and more, while allowing ourselves to be awakened to their potential to transform our inner selves.

Our Bodies and Our Spirit

Anybody who has children at home knows that they spend a lot of time in the kitchen.  You can fix a meal, serve it, and not twenty minutes later, your children are already thinking about a snack.  You go out, and you pack a snack just in case they get hungry.  You go to the store and you pack a snack for the cart, so they'll be more content while you shop.  All of this time spent with food, not only feeds our children, but sometimes mom ends up eating more than she realizes, and then before you know it, we've gained a few pounds and wonder how it happened, and then we start to tell our bodies how we feel about our appearance.  Some of the conversations we have with ourselves about our bodies are conscious, and some of the things we say about our bodies, we are not aware of.  I think 90 percent of our self-talk about our bodies just plays in the background of minds over and over.  It is like turning on a radio and just letting it play continually, hearing some of what is on that station, but most of it being just background noise.  However, if someone shut it off, we would notice. 

I believe these "conversations" we have about our bodies are absorbed by every cell that makes our physical self up.  If we started to write down the conversations we have about our bodies, it might shock us.  Standing in the shower, the conversation is, "Gee, I hope I have a good hair day today - I hate my waves, and this color..I really need to think about a new color."  Here's another conversation,  "I'll take my clothes off in the corner to avoid the mirror because I'm too ashamed of the way I look. I wish my stomach would just disappear."  And then there's the conversations we have in the department stores trying on clothes. "I look disgusting in those dept. store mirrors.  And I am supposed to try on a bathing suit in there?  I could cry trying to find the right suit for this body."  And then there's the conversation in our heads about losing weight.  "I wish I could drop 10 pounds. I really should try some of those pills they advertise.  It probably wouldn't work anyway.  I never have the discipline to follow through.  My thighs are beyond help anyway.

We punish ourselves by trying diet after diet, and going through the cycle of gaining and losing weight over and over again.  We punish ourselves through anorexia and bulimia.  We punish ourselves by denying we have an addiction to food, and we convince ourselves that we are eating because we love to eat.  Instead, we are eating because we don't feel love.  We punish ourselves by denying that we are overweight.  If I don't talk about it, maybe it will disappear.  No one will know how disgusted with myself I really am.  They'll believe I am happy being this overweight.  We punish ourselves by trying to become a number on a scale, when we've been treated as "just a number" far too often.  We punish ourselves by making food our God, instead of feeding our spiritual hunger to feel loved by our Creator.  God-in-us literally lies in our Center, our mid-section, and we often gain a lot of stomach weight trying to feel "full" there, when we really long and ache for feeling the fullness of God.

Our bodies hold our feelings.  Our bodies absorb the shame, the fear, the hatred, and the blame about why our bodies look the way they do.  Something I read once really hit home.  The things we say to ourselves about our bodies we would never dream of saying to a child. So why would we say them to ourselves?  We are so focused on the physical appearance that we forget the blessing our bodies really are.  We forget that our bodies have brought children into the world.  Our arms hold those children.  Our hands hold their hands and our fingers stroke their hair.  Our bodies express love through the ability to smile,  kiss, and dance.  Our bodies allow us to see the beauty around us and hear the birds chirping, hear our children playing, and hear our favorite songs on the radio.  Our hearts beat without our even noticing most days.  Our ability to ride a bike makes for the perfect afternoon in the spring.  Our brains communicate to our body parts without us ever being aware of the commands that get us through a day's activities.  It isn't often that you see a magazine cover with the title:  Thank Your Body For All Of the Many Things It Allows you To Be and Accomplish.  Instead, we're most likely to see a title that looks something like this:  Lose 10 pounds in 10 days Eating Everything You Love.  

Our self-talk about our bodies, not only is held in our cells, it separates us from being one with God.  God created us with this body.  Our Spirit has manifested itself in this body in order to live as one with God.  When we cover our bodies in shame, we are worshiping our physical selves, and not God.  When we speak badly of our bodies, we are speaking badly of our Creator.  Our thoughts and our feelings about our bodies are prayers.  Will they be prayers of praise and thanksgiving, or prayers of desperation and lack?  Because God thinks through us, every time we have a negative thought about our body, we are only serving darkness, and we cause even further separation from God.  Because our minds our joined with everyone else's minds, when we think a negative thought about our body or someone else's, we have strengthened darkness in ourselves.  Comparing your body with someone else's body is of darkness.  Labeling your body as imperfect and unattractive is not living in light. The thoughts and beliefs we hold about our body sends forth energy to the rest of the world.  The thoughts and beliefs that we hold in our minds radiates either love or fear.  If you hate your body, you are fearful no one will love you, and that you are not worthy of receiving love.  You have built an altar around this fear, that you are "less than" because of your thighs, your hips, your hair, or your arms.  Instead, we must build altars around gratitude, acceptance, and compassion for our bodies.  They are miraculous and amazing, and we forget that.  We need to change the radio station to another frequency whenever we catch ourselves thinking otherwise.

You don't have to speak these thoughts aloud in order to pass them on to our children.  Children absorb the body language of shame, guilt, and lack.  They are as attentive to the energy of the unspoken as well as the words we speak.  They can sense very quickly, and with great ease, your lack of love for yourself.  If you feel disgust about your body, they will feel that disgust too.  If you talk about your appearance a lot, they will absorb your unease and your doubt about your worth, and they will start to talk the same way about their bodies.  If you spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, your children will too.Children also absorb the power of denial about your health, mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Yes, we need to exercise, eat healthy, and get enough rest. Yes, we need to try and look our very best, but we also need to practice compassion, acceptance, and forgiveness toward our physical selves.  I have two girls who are going to inherit society's legacy of facelifts, botox, and obsession with plastic surgery, the "right" makeup, the "right" handbag and shoes, the "right" length of skirt, tattoos and nose rings.  As mothers, it is critical to take the opportunities to talk about their bodies and tell them how beautiful they are, just as they are.  It is critical that we give them the right tools, vocabulary, and mindset about loving our bodies, and the difference between taking care of them and obsessing about what they "perceive" to be imperfections.  It is vital that our children understand that they are spiritual by nature, first and foremost,  "mind" next, and "body" last.  That's right - body last.  When you can walk in the direction of that compass - Spirit, Mind, Body, and help them "work" on the inside first, the outside beauty will follow.  For years we have lived in the opposite, and now is the time to start bringing this new belief into your conversations.

Our culture has a long way to go in healing our minds of the things we say about our bodies, and what we do to them, in order to achieve someone else's definition of beauty that seems to change daily.  We are fearfully, wonderfully made.  Fearfully in this case means reverently. We were knit together perfectly in our mother's wombs.  Turn to Psalm 139 when you doubt how beautiful you really are.  Ask God to make you aware of the stories you are telling yourself about your body, the fairy tales about our body that society would have us fall for, and the words that you are using to describe your body.  I think we would all be shocked to know what we are doing to ourselves just in our thinking.  It is definitely time to awaken from our slumbering when it comes to our physical selves.

Next Week:  Sexuality and Its Saintly, Sacramental Nature