Sensual Holiness

Sensual Holiness is a spirituality of precious Otherness. Of the Other as The Beloved. Of the Other as precious. It blossoms as a spirituality of The Beloveds, and its ritual act is the Embrace of the Beloveds.

I first experienced this precious Otherness when in federal prison. I had not sought this presence of myself as Other. It took resistance to the Vietnam War which was sourced in my resistance to the ritual violences of the Catholicism of my young adulthood to unleash the forces, external and internal, which exiled me, broke me down and thrust me out into Otherness. Tagged as federal inmate 8867147. Once, Friar Otto, O.F.M, Conv. Key aspects of this journey are recorded in two Cross Current articles, “Resistance as Sacrament,” (Vo. XXI, #4, Fall 1971) and “Prison, Bottoming Out, the Mother,” (Vol. XXXVIII, #1, Spring 1988). “The Healing of Vietnam,” Voices: Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists (Spring/Summer 1991, Vol. 27, No. 1& 2) complements these two. I left prison in 1973 both broken and embraced as Other - newborn as Beloved - yet without images and words.

Sensual Holiness in theory and practice is anathema to Biblical culture in its religious and secular guise. Its theological analysis and expression violate orthodox and liberal Biblical doctrines, dogmas and rituals. Core to Sensual Holiness is the concept and ritual practice of sacred sexuality. It is a sacred sexuality fully drenched in the sensual. Here, sensual defined and experienced as a term of relationship – sourced in the embrace of the precious Other. The Embrace of the Beloveds.

Sensual Holiness is more than oxymoronic to Biblical culture, theology and spirituality. It is all that this Biblical Tradition is not. Does not want humans to be. Claims that God is not. It is what, in the foundational story of Genesis, is not just forgotten or omitted, but obliterated. In the Biblical Tradition there is no Beloved. There is only a Lone Male God and the created, not birthed, Lone Male Adam.

These are, at once, simple assertions, yet, as with simplicity, they are anchored in complexity. Part I presents the simple assertions of “Sensual Holiness: A Declaration.” Part II introduces the complexity as presented in “Sensual Holiness in Genesis” and “Jesus’ Homoerotic Theft.”

Quotes Opening to Sensual Holiness

Sensual Holiness Declaration