Early in his career, Matthew Fox wrote: No one who has admitted he or she is vulnerable to goose bumps can any longer believe in the violence that separates spirit and body, spirituality and sensuality. *
James Reho takes this sentence as the starting point of his exploration into Tantric Christianity. He finds that the split between spirituality and sensuality has been the pitfall of the Christian tradition, when it allowed itself to be influenced by Gnostic and Platonic beliefs, but also the mistake of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, which in its efforts to proclaim that there is no duality between the human soul and the divine ended up asserting that Brahman in the only truth and the world is unreal .**(Shankara, 9th century).
On the other side, Reho places Tantric speculation and experience, together with early Christian speculation and experience. Tantra, like Vedanta, asserts that reality is composed of being (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ananda). Yet whereas Advaita Vedanta sees Satchitananda as pure non-evolving spirit, Tantra understands Satchitananda as expressing itself as Shiva-Shakti, the divine couple locked in a perpetual loving embrace. Therefore, Reho continues, from the tantric perspective, pure being that does not have the power to become is only half-reality. In tantric yoga, our goal is not to escape from the world of causation or dissociate from it, but to transform desire, to harness the energy of desire (eros) so as to experience fully the dynamic interplay between Shiva and Shakti and to come to know their unity.
This standard explanation of tantrism becomes, however, a really juicy matter when Reho claims that some Christians have experienced something very similar, even when they tried to communicate it with Platonic and Neoplatonic language — indeed transforming those languages to suit their experience rather than being simply colonized by them.
What is the evidence that Reho brings to substantiate his claim? First, the Jewish root of Christianity. Second, the sacramental identity of Christianity. Third, the trajectory of Christian mysticism. All of which are familiar, of course, to Creation Spirituality practitioners.
- Christians inherited from Judaism the strong notion of the reality and the goodness of the world. In particular, Reho notices that the Hebrew word nephesh, usually translated as “soul,” includes emotions, willpower, and mental activity; it includes eros, the life of desire.
- This in turn explains this sentence that Reho cites: Nothing is more central to Christianity than its affirmation of the sacramental significance of material reality (Jim Forest). “Sacramental” means that physical realities bear divine weight; they can convey the divine energy, through them God shines.
- Moreover, Reho is aware that Christian mystics of any age echo these notions. For example, John Scotus Eriugena (9th century) regarded the world as a theophany, a visible manifestation of God, and Meister Eckhart (14th century) taught that each creature points us toward God until the world becomes transparent and all things become nothing but God.
The parallel understanding of reality found in Tantrism and (true) Christianity leads Reho to the most interesting part of his project, which is not theoretical but practical. In short, Reho suggests that Christians might come to understand through Tantrism some traditional Christian practices much more deeply, while borrowing from Tantrism some other practices which might also be adumbrated in early Christian sources, so that the theoretical promise of “divinization” becomes an experiential reality for those who choose this path.
The essence of such a path, the Christian Tantra, consists in living, honoring, and harnessing erotic desire, rather than ignoring it, repressing it, or splitting it from spiritual life. Among the practices that Reho suggests and describes at length we find: gazing lovingly with a chosen partner in each other’s eyes; the Jesus prayer, which involves the breath, the heart, and the whole bodily consciousness; the ritual washing of each other’s feet; sacred sexual union. None of this is purely sensual, yet it always remains sensual and bodily. Physical pleasure is always involved, never repressed, and yet it is not at all the point of the practices and the path; indeed, a lower level of pleasure may be forgone for the sake of a higher level of union.
In my view, Reho’s proposal is extremely interesting. For those of us who were trained in a Western modern family and church, it requires however a life-long effort to rejoin the ties between spirituality and sensuality, which for many historical reasons have been severed, even though in theory we might understand Reho’s discourse very well.
*Matthew Fox, Whee! Wee, We, page 6.
**James Reho: Tantric Jesus: The Erotic Heart of Early Christianity
Banner Image: “Couple in Love” Photo by Lightfield Studios, Adobe Stock
Queries for Contemplation
What is your experience with the splitting of sensuality from spirituality and your efforts to rejoin them?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
WHEE! We, wee All the Way Home: A Guide to Sensual Prophetic Spirituality
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic Warrior for Our Time
Meditations with Meister Eckhart: A Centering Book
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
2 thoughts on “Spirituality and Sensuality”
Contemplative, Creation and Incarnational Spiritualities have helped me to be open to the ongoing and evolving Presence of the Beauty and Joy of All Co-Creation~Cosmos, physical and nonphysical spiritual beings/dimensions, in Our Loving Eternal Diverse Oneness….
My experience and understanding of the Mystical Oneness of All — which I believe is the foundation of Jesus’s Christianity and also the Mystical underpinnings of Judaism, Islamic Sufism, Hinduism and some Buddhism, is of the Totality reflected into the individuality of all people, all things, all time, and beyond.
Jesus, I believe, tried to teach, by example and by nudging, the lessons that such awareness points toward. He taught an EQUALITY of existence — women are equal to men. slaves equal to free, honor the birds of the field and the Divine Oneness. I believe he understood this Oneness and tried to share it, better than other Mystics. He LIVED this Mysticism.
Personally, I’ve lived with this Mystical Awareness for so long, slowly building upon its roots, that I have a hard time thinking of things as “inherently separate”. I may not be as grounded as I could be, and certainly never as totally immersed as Jesus was, but I do feel a part of the totality rather than a duality of body and soul.
Sensual/sexual energy is just another beautiful aspect of total Energy, total Existence, total Being. What WE think and do with it is where the problems come in.