 Question II Redemption though the mortification of the flesh fasting, hair shirts, flagellation, celibacy, reclusion, martyrdom, et cetera has been prevalent in the history of Catholicism. Since pain and denial can lead to an acute awareness of the body, did such practices ever have any sexual components for ascetics? |
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 One of the great sexual gods of the Greeks was Dionysus, who was dismembered. Tradition says he is the affirmation of life and death in one act. If sex is saying yes to life, as I suggested earlier, it includes a willingness to suffer and fail. One reason we may be motivated to control our sexuality excessively is to avoid the pain of too much vitality. There is a way, then, that saying yes to pain is being open to life and therefore to sex. In sex we are vulnerable. In sex we limit ourselves to intimacy with a certain person or certain people. Especially in marital sex, which can be ever-deepening and pleasurable at many levels, we may find pleasure in limitation. Deep, meaningful bondage can be pleasurable, a pleasure that can be ritualized in S/M lovemaking. If it is not deep, bondage is simply painful and depressing. As a therapist I worked with several couples who were experimenting with S/M games. Sometimes, it?s simply a matter of ritually acting out power issues. In these cases, I feel S/M is dangerous, an indication of their failure to be vulnerable (which means woundable) in their ongoing relationship. Still, I do think it is possible to play at S/M without these dangers. So, when my namesake Thomas More wears a hairshirt, I think that practice is part of his sexuality. Biographers say he imagined it as a way to control his strong passions. Well, I would imagine that he got some pleasure from that discomfort, at least the pleasure of his spirituality which in his case I believe was largely sexual. Except for a period in which he became a rabid prosecutor of heretics, he was by all accounts a loving, pleasure-seeking man. I lived as a celibate in a religious community for twelve years, during my teens and twenties no less, and I never felt anti-sexual. I was a sexual person then, even though I didn't have what we call an active sex life. Once we begin to include our emotional lives and our total way of living as a part of our sexuality, it doesn't make much sense to ask if one practice is sexual and another isn't. It all depends on how and why we do it. I have written a book, Dark Eros, about sadomasochism. In it I say that self-denial and excessive subjugation to others are symptoms of our failure to be vulnerable, open people, and the ultimate openness is to be vulnerable to what life wants us to be. So one way of reading fasting and flagellation is to see them as efforts to stop controlling life, to be affected and influenced, and to let life itself have the upper hand and make us into whatever it wants us to be. This philosophy seems to me to lie at the heart of the Gospel message and is embodied beautifully in the life of Jesus, right up to the crucifixion. It is a challenging way to live, it is profoundly masochistic, and it is entirely pro-sexual. |
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