The spirit is willing and the flesh is too: integrating spirituality and sexuality.

Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

--Matthew 26:41

When Christians are asked to think about body issues, they often settle for a dualistic anthropology. This has often resulted in an attempt to be disembodied. Through the ages, embodiment has been a very serious problem to the formation of a Christian identity. Like Jesus wrestling in the Garden of Gethsemane, we have struggled with this issue and whether it is better to be embodied or disembodied. This challenge sounds odd, but when you consider that most of our physical associations with the world are described in terms of the negative physical pleasures of life, it should be no surprise that our physical preference is disembodiment in order to make Heaven our home.

Within the United States of America, the challenges associated with the body and embodiment are often guided by a dualistic impulse to dissect life. Most of us have been socialized to believe that the best way to understand something is by cutting it open and looking at its internal workings. When we want to try to understand embodiment and the gifts of our creatureliness, however, the impulse to dissect is not for the sake of examination. On matters of the body, our impulse actually tends toward surgical extraction or amputation. Our preference for disembodiment often perceives our body to be unhealthy and flawed. Our dualistic impulse for dissection assumes that there is a dysfunctional component to our being that must be extracted and discarded. This is particularly true when we identify ourselves as sexual beings. Notions of sexual purity tend to mean adding to life through subtraction from life. As a result, we have dualized spirituality and sexuality in Christian living and have often extracted sexualit y from our Christian identity.

Finding harmony

Many find it difficult if not impossible to conceive of opposites coming together to form a harmonious union. Even our characterizations of harmonious union support notions of irreconcilable differences. Consider the ways people talk about marriage. Our most common descriptions of holy matrimony reflect our difficulty in conceiving marriage as a harmonious union. Some of these descriptions express the tragic victimization that is embedded within human existence. Think, for a moment, about the fuzzy math we use to describe marriage. We say things like "I was half and you made me whole" or we make reference to a spouse being the "better half." "I was nothing before you." "I am nothing without you." "Always keep a little something on the side that he doesn't know about." "I always try on a shoe before I buy it." And, because shoes wear out, "a five-year marriage is an old couple." When many people describe the vital features of a harmonious union using holy matrimony as the prime example, the picture that gets g enerated is often a function of our dualistic impulse.

It is far easier for us to split things and people apart than it is to maintain the integrity of wholeness. This splitting behavior means we are inclined toward a misguided understanding of union. Our ideas of union tend to be expressed through the language of subservience resulting from an emphasis on a fallen state of being. As we describe the roles of husbands and wives, the basic descriptions of holy and harmonious union rest upon sex and gender differences that emphasize superior/inferior ideologies instead of stressing equality and mutuality. Through a puritanical "rule of thumb," we promote disembodiment and beat the life out of one another in the name of Christian virtue. Ultimately, we tear our spirits out of our bodies as our way of declaring harmonious union. Rather than promoting a harmony based on what we have in common, there is a tendency to define harmony through a defensiveness based on separation, which in the end offers a false sense of security regarding holiness.

Consider the myth of Lilith. According to this apocryphal myth, Lilith, was the first wife of Adam. Although their marital strife seems to be rather specific, the story has been interpreted to say that Adam and Lilith argued about everything. Believing the two of them to be equal, Lilith refused to be dominated in any way. But in the story, here is what actually breaks up the marriage: Lilith refused to be on the bottom during lovemaking. Because of Adam's lack of mutuality, Lilith left Eden. Angels of the Lord visited her, commanding her to return to Adam, and she refused. Her refusal resulted in her becoming the lover of many demons, the seducer of men, and the source of crib death. Among the many things to be concluded from this myth, this story suggests that equality is not an option, that equality is not what it means to be spiritual, and that a body without spiritual guidance is destructive. I wonder, can we imagine a harmonious union in the absence of dominance?

Let's consider that question in the context of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gethsemane narrative. Jesus is in the garden, separated from his disciples. He throws himself on the ground and begins to pray. He stops praying. He goes back to get some moral support from his disciples, whom he has asked to stay awake. Finding them asleep, he says, "Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Think for a moment of the variety of contexts in which you have heard or said, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." What meaning did you intend, or what was the intended meaning when those words were spoken by others? The context for this statement, at the very least, has something to do with Jesus' struggle within life as the necessity of his death drew near. While his statement suggests an awareness of death being imminent, a part of him was hesitant about actually "giving up the ghost." Our typical reading of this text, however, reinforces our notions of spirit power being more potent than physical power. We regularly conclude that spirit is superior to the body. This notion points to an idea that if the spirit simply dominates the body, or if we simply separate ourselves from the body, then the condition of the body is of no consequence. But to emphasize such an idea encourages the escapism that is a natural defense mechanism when we are physically assaulted. In the midst of experiencing the ultimate violent violation of the human soul, we may separate ourselves cognitively and emotionally from our bodies in order to escape the horrors of the victimization. In other words, as the victimizer dominates the body, the victim leaves the body. But if this becomes our way of addressing life, that is, separating what we perceive to be our "selves" from our bodies in the midst of struggle, what does it really mean to achieve a harmonious union? Is separating our spirits from our bodies really living?

A question of humanity

This for me begs the question that the world has yet to answer satisfactorily: "What does it mean to be human?" What is it about this question that throughout the ages makes us ask, answer, and ask the same question over and over again? Scholars and laypersons of all varieties and disciplines have answered this question again and again, with the latest social hope being the human genome project.

I would like to suggest one reason for our failure to answer this question once and for all. I believe our struggle to answer it has to do with our division of spirit and body, of spirituality and sexuality. If we considered the two to be parts of the same whole, our understanding of the human experience and condition would be very different. The bifurcation of our being does not simply result in the fracturing of our individual selves, it ultimately results in the destruction of our lives as relational beings. In general, the life of the spirit seeks to bring union, and the body longs to be united to another. We, however, do not tend to see spirit and body as longing for and desirous of the same goal; that is, we do not tend to see spirit and body longing for, desirous of, hoping for the end of an isolated existence. Instead of the positive goal of union being attributed to both spirit and body, we have tended to attribute negative characteristics to the body without realizing that this results in the destru ctive functioning of the spirit. Attempting to answer the question "What does it mean to be human?" by dividing spirit and body means that a person will always emphasize one part over the other and ultimately declare that emphasized part to be superior to the other part.

The black body

Many of my opinions have been formed and informed by African American life. For the remainder of my discussion, much of what I will reflect upon has been framed by my views of Black life in America.

Although the dominant ideological split in America is mind-body, across much of African American culture the guiding paradigm for analysis is a spirit-body split. African Americans have an "anthropodical" (anthropos + theodicy) understanding of the body. That is to say, we have some peculiar ideas about our physical nature as an evil nature. The ideas we have about our own black bodies make it difficult for us to be "at home in our own skin." If we are not conscientious, our dark bodies can feel like jail houses of shame and ostracism.

America's relational systems are regularly described as colorized polar opposites. I know today we want to see ourselves as a unified nation committed to fighting against terrorism, but the very terms we use to describe our country characterize us as the Good fighting against the Evil in the world. This fight is not seen as being merely temporal. This fight has been described to reflect the eschatological hope of the nation by declaring that God is for us and that choosing to not align with us is to stand against God. These contrasting positions, often depicted in black and white, symbolize life's eternal struggle of evil against good. Furthermore, these contrasting positions have become the defining features of God-human interactions.

In America, White and white bodies have been equated with God and good; and Black and black bodies have been equated with anti-God and evil. Hence, many of our relational dynamics are expressed as God versus evil. Even today, this is heard in our language of nationalism. The male body is considered weak when it is presented with the female body which is regarded as the evil seductress. Color and body together declare who is acceptable and can belong and who will always be rejected and outcast.

Furthermore, color and body also play a part in fantasy life. The body naturally stimulates the erotic senses, but color, among many other features of the body, exaggerates the erotic sensations through an identification of the exotic. There is a constructed sense that the exotic is more pleasurable than the "typical." As a result, black bodies are often thought to be at the extremes of sexual behavior and sexual pleasure. Through spiritual pronouncements based on racialized sexual differences, black bodies are frequently seen and experienced as the unholy, unclean incarnation of evil in America. Consequently, we African Americans sacrificially escape our bodies through an over spiritualization of our lives, trying to transform that which is unholy into the holy by separating our sexuality from our spirituality.

Spirituality and sexuality

African American spirituality, which is rooted in African spirituality, promoted our survival through generations of hard times by an insistence that we maintain our self-understanding as whole and holy human beings. Generally speaking, spirituality is the active integration of our humanity resulting in a singularly directed effort to be in communion with God and others. It is the human spirit moving and being drawn toward God's Spirit. African spirituality has a multi-layered, communal understanding of reality. From this perspective, the world is filled with spirits, and God's Spirit is an inescapable presence in the world. Because God is in everything and everyone, the most mundane activity is regarded as a spiritual activity. This is why African spirituality declares there is no separation between the sacred and the secular.

Contrary to this guiding principle of African spirituality, spirituality and sexuality for many African Americans tend to be seen as separate and unequal. Spirituality is seen as superior and sexuality as inferior. When there is an attempt to describe spiritual poverty, most often the expression is causally related to sexuality. The poor in spirit are thought to be those who are the most worldly and sensual. This, I believe, has led to a denial of our humanity by separating our spiritual lives from our physical lives. If our spirituality instructs us to maintain holiness by maintaining wholeness, then we must maintain our spirituality and our sexuality as integrated components of our humanity. We cannot say "no separations" and act in ways that establish multiple separations and expect to be whole and healthy human beings.

Whereas spirituality and sexuality should always be considered parts of the same, single whole, they have been described and defined as unrelated parts. An exercise I borrowed from a friend usually helps me to convey this point. The exercise is as follows: On a piece of paper, you are going to make two lists of words. For the first list, describe the feelings that communicate a positive worshipful experience. After giving people an opportunity to develop the first list, for the second list I ask them to describe the feelings of "afterglow" following lovemaking. What most people discover is that they use the same words to describe both experiences. Spirituality and sexuality are not only related, they have the same purpose as the end goal, that is, to integrate human persons with one another and with God through the harmony-producing activities of community.

The damage done by splitting

Life is most fulfilling when it is lived out relationally. Spirituality purports to unify all things, yet our Western practices have split our spiritual functioning into the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the mundane. This action has tended to result in an understanding of sexuality as profane and mundane. The splitting of spirituality and sexuality has meant the splitting of our lives. Rather than spirituality and sexuality being unified to overcome human isolation, we have separated them into independent functions with separate expressions. As a result, our desires to overcome human isolation move us to "pray" or "prey." Because we have been socialized to know that there are appropriate places for "praying" and different places for "preying," and never the twain shall meet, we have come to understand spirituality as the separation from the body, which has promoted the condemnation of sexuality. Within the spiritual world of our making, the body has taken on the description of everything evil, cit ing that no good can come from the flesh.

This splitting of spirituality and sexuality has had a devastating impact upon African American relationships, not just within the community but also as we relate to other communities. We have been regarded as being without religion, spirit, or morality, that is, without spirituality. Those who have viewed the African with contempt have thought our nature to be lustful, sensual, and animal, that is, uncontrolled sexuality. Historically, we have been seen as less than human and therefore not spiritual. While only some of us have believed these outsiders' opinions, all of us have been influenced by these opinions whether we believe them or not. Consequently, the splitting has had a negative influence upon our relational openness and intimacy.

For our spirituality and sexuality to be reunited, we must lift high the relational qualities of equality and mutuality. We must return to thinking on the individual, family, and community levels all at once rather than thinking of the individual, family, and community as single, unrelated parts. We are in need of healing to reunite spirituality and sexuality in order to restore our humanity. I see healing as the transformative process necessary for integrating the spirit and body and mending broken lives. Healing restores us to life by restoring us to relationship.

Mutuality is an essential part of the healing process. It says that our meeting ground, though it may not be common ground, is holy ground. Unfortunately, mutuality is still being avoided by choosing to argue about who is or should be on top. Should the patriarch be on top or should the matriarch? Should a man be over a woman? Should black be over white? Should the straight be over the gay? We fight to prove that a man cannot be a man if a woman is on equal ground. We are more inclined to promote hierarchical than mutual relationships. We have separated aspects of life that should always remain together. The church from the community, the nuclear family from the extended family, and men from women, all these are separations upon which we have based our existence. We spend inordinate amounts of time trying to prove how different we are. We energetically seek to validate our ideas of one being superior to the other. These separations have divided our humanity. If we are truly going to live in peace with ourselv es and others, we must become whole human beings again. If only we would spend as much time working to establish mutuality as we do in working to maintain a system of dominance!

Encouraging mutuality acknowledges that our spiritual existence affects our physical existence. It also means that our physical existence affects our spiritual existence. Those areas of our lives that have been fractured need to be integrated and made whole. The main fracture that needs to be mended for health is the split that has occurred between our spirituality and our sexuality.

Health and healing

In order for us to be wholly (holy) human, spirituality and sexuality must be reconciled. We will not be able to restore our full humanity if we maintain this split. The body has frequently been identified as what is bad, or, if not bad, at the very least as a hindrance to spiritual enlightenment and unity. There is an overwhelming tendency to encourage an absence from the body in order to have a holy experience with God. This condemnation of the body has been conflictive for Africans in America. Historically, we were reduced to being a bodily people only, and as such, seen as less than human and thought to be driven only by primitive desires. Our degraded bodies have been exploited in every way possible: for labor, for sex, and for science. Whereas spirituality has been the strength of our survival, rarely have we been seen as spiritual people.

To our advantage, we also have had another understanding of the relationship between spirituality and sexuality which points to the possibility for our healing. When we think of health issues, most everyone is aware of the intimate relationship between spirit and body. In those instances, many of the negative ideas we have about the body are removed. As a result, good health is understood to be when one is "of sound mind and body." That is, good health requires spirituality and sexuality to be together. Consequently, any time we encourage the spirit-body split, we encourage poor health by splitting spirituality and sexuality. When they are kept together, we are fully human and healthier.

Good health is a physical and a spiritual matter. When good health is challenged, healing is required to restore one to health. An unhealthy body is one that has experienced some sort of breakdown in one or more of the body's systems. An unhealthy spirit is one that has experienced some sort of breakdown in the flow of life energy or the lines of communication between the person, God, and others. If the body is unhealthy, it affects the health of the spirit. If the spirit is unhealthy, it affects the health of the body. Healing restores the body and the spirit to a harmonious relationship. Put simply, healing is the process of being restored to a life of relationships. If we are going to obtain and maintain healthy relationships, we must first be healed.

Is the spirit willing and the flesh weak? I do not think that is the lesson we learn from the passion of Christ. The message that comes to us from the empty tomb is that the spirit is willing and the flesh is too! If the spirit is willing, the flesh must be equally willing. What does it mean to be a "living soul" if not the integration of spirit and body? Maintaining a hierarchical split between spirit and body diminishes our humanity and denies the gospel of the abundant life.

We know what it means to be healthy; but in order to achieve good health, we must be healed. If we continue to conduct "business as usual," the end result will be that the wounds of our relationships will go unhealed. We must mend the fracture that exists between our spirituality and our sexuality. Our healing will restore our humanity. It will restore our community. It will restore our families. Our healing will turn us toward each other and cause us to see one another, perhaps for the first time in a long time. Our healing will turn us into friends and lovers. It will turn the hearts of children toward parents and parents toward children. Our healing will make us whole and holy, spiritual and sexual, human beings. *

* For further study, see Lee H. Butler, Jr., A Loving Home: Caring for African American Marriage and Families (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000).