Bare-chested Christianity.

Don't get me wrong. I wholeheartedly join in Frank McConnell's (October 10, 1997) ruling on the merits of ABC's religious soap opera, "Nothing Sacred." Insofar as television can be good - and my tastes are too mainstream to feel any serious need to apologize for the medium per se - this is good television. My only purpose in coming at this thing from a distinctly female perspective (several of my women friends are devoted to the show) is to offer you some reasons why you should put in an hour on Thursday nights to watch it. After all, you could be gathering stunning insights from Karl Rahner or worrying about the collapse of the Asian markets....

My additional reasons for tuning in? Jim Mullen's witty/catty (I never miss it) "Hot Sheet" item on "Nothing Sacred" (Entertainment Weekly, September 26, 1997) hints at them: "A new show about a young, unorthodox, poker-playing priest.... "Mullen pauses, slyly, wickedly, then hoots, "A young priest? Maybe on 'The X-Files.'" Science fiction aside, Mullen's blurb raises serious theological questions. The bearded, bespectacled reverend recruited by TV Guide (October 18-24, 1997) from Our Lady of Malibu (no, that's not a misprint) parish to discuss the series gives his age as fifty-four. By contrast, the (alas!) fictional Father Ray ironically admits to his former lover (in fact, she still loves him; but wait, I'm getting to that) that he's just turned thirty-four. "One year older than Jesus. If I were doing my job right, I'd be dead by now." Did I mention that broad-shouldered, luxuriantly-tressed Kevin Anderson, whose Father Ray looks like he spends a fair amount of his spare time weight training, just happens to make the self-deprecating comparison with Jesus while (gulp!) stripped to the waist?

O.K., so here's the punch line. No, this isn't The Thorn Birds. This is weekly, prime-time, network television about, well, incarnational spirituality. I kid you not. It's not for nothing that "Nothing Sacred" has Jesuit advisers. They read Karl Rahner so you don't have to. (Unless, of course, you want to.) My guess is these particular Jesuits are knee-deep in Rahner's principle of "mediation." Nothing (that is, no one thing) is sacred because everything is sacred.

And I do mean everything. The persistent love between Gemma (his old flame) and Father Ray is alternately frustrating and healing, as much a source of inspiration as temptation. In one memorable scene, Wendy Gazelle, at once luminous and (almost painfully) lucid as Gemma, asks the spiritually troubled Ray, "Can you feel how much God loves you? .... No." A slight shake of the priest's chestnut mane. It falls, unruly, past his collar, brushing stray fibers of a hand-knit wool sweater. (Everything about Father Ray is so agonizingly touchable.) She lays her palms, ever-so-lightly, on his shoulders. "Can you feel how much I love you?"

By episode's end, Gemma has the bittersweet satisfaction of hearing the man she loves lift his voice in an ancient prayer: "I bind myself to God in the sun and the moon and the stars ." There is no space here to consider whether his ex-lover's wise-and-effective support of Ray's priesthood offers an implied critique of celibacy. But, if this isn't "mediation" with a capital "M," what is?

Could the same scene play out between a Ray and Gemma aged fifty? Sorry, but no. Biology dictates that Ray and Gemma generate a passion distinct from the passion of older lovers. They can make choices - career choices, reproductive choices, that another twenty years will foreclose to them. They are old enough that the choices they might make are heart-rendingly complicated, young enough that the choices they have made are not irrevocable. I think that it is in just such choices that we are likely to encounter God, in ourselves and in each other.

In his review, McConnell points out that "Nothing Sacred" is, after all, a television series that "mainly wants you to buy the sponsor's product." Among all the sacred canons of advertising, none is more familiar or more timehonored than "Sex Sells."

For the record, I submit that Father Ray's physical beauty, lovingly caressed by the camera, operates in reciprocal relationship to his body as consecrated symbol. When Gemma unexpectedly confronts Ray's near nakedness, we are meant to catch our collective breath along with her. We feel that shock of desire paralyzed by unease - not so much guilt as a sense of being out of place. Such moments in our human experience parallel the "awe" Rudolf Otto (O.K., so some nights I do skip television) described as the primal response to the holy.

Admittedly, I am alluding to visual/spiritual effects that some viewers may be ill-equipped to appreciate. The downside for me of watching "Nothing Sacred" is that it is a little like stepping into a time warp. The youthful, troubled Father Ray and angry, ardent Sister Maureen - still hoping to find the way to her own embodiment of imago Christi - occasionally strike me as sad ghosts of a more hopeful time, before so many of their real-life counterparts made their own hard choices and, however reluctantly, walked off the set.

P.E. Cruise is a practicing attorney. She is currently pursuing a graduate degree in theology.