Authentic Ritual

William Hurt, as interviewed by Don Shewey, with thanks for permission to reblog. Photos by Susan Shachter.

I started out as a religion major. I wanted personally to be saved, and I wanted other people to be saved. I had lived in many countries with my father and seen tremendous agony inflicted on supposedly innocent beings. I couldn't comprehend how a God I loved could allow these things to happen. I began to ask the question when I was eight and worked on it 'til I was nineteen or twenty. In the center of my thoughts, I didn't really work on anything else. I became furious. I was also probably furious at myself for lots of reasons.

I was raised as a Presbyterian. I had myself confirmed as an Episcopalian. I learned about ritual and how important it is.If possible, I wanted to belong to a ritual that leaves people their independence but at the same time allows each participant to learn more about him or herself and the mysteries of this existence. A lot of religious rituals are too dogmatic. I guess I wanted to belong to a ritual in which one is encouraged to ask questions. In drama, the order of the day is curiosity about the human condition, not judging it. Your effort is to become more compassionate and to seek compassion.

Coming to Mindfulness

Photo by Andrew Graham

How did some proponents of mindful self-pleasure end up sidelining a natural, indeed essential, part of the rhythm of male sexual experience? How did New Age thinking ever line up so compatibly with repressive Roman Catholic moral teaching from the middle of the last century?

Just to be clear, I'm talking about masturbating--or having partnered sex--until you cum.

So runs an orthodoxy variously expounded by adherents of multiple schools and traditions: the energy you raise through sexual arousal gets expelled when you ejaculate. Squirt it and lose it. Hold it in, and you hang onto it. The Life Force it takes to produce semen is quantifiable, and finite. Spooging is a drain on the body, and on the spirit. Men crash when they cum. Athletes know not to have sex before they compete. When you retain semen, you recycle that energy within yourself and can use it to cultivate mind-blowing, multiple full-body non-ejaculatory orgasms. You can achieve a sense of timeless presence and a state of bliss in which you can remain suspended for as long as you choose. You can also channel the energy into other aspects of your life. (See Competing Athletes, above, as well as soldiers in combat, and presumably otherwise occupied alpha males as well.)

But, um, guys--at least some of this does not correspond to reality. 

First of all, the counterargument from, like, science. Studies are increasingly lined up on the benefits of frequent ejaculation for prostate health.

Second, not all men crash after ejaculation to the same extent. We don't necessarily crash as much each and every time. Some of us barely crash at all. Some of us feel euphoric. Some of us maintain a baseline of erotic charge that's higher with frequent ejaculation than without it.

Third, I'm not sure that getting ready for the Big Game, or even more for the Big Battle, is a great argument for why men are better off not cumming. Given the current state of the world, soldiers dropping their guns in favour of jerking off instead just might be the plus that saves us all. (If more spooge could result in less toxic masculinity, bring it on.)

Mindful sexuality, whether alone or with partner(s), is about balancing raw desire with conscious awareness. Some men love to edge--for hours, or whole days or weeks. Undeniably, chosen periods of non-ejaculation can induce altered states that open us to seeing ourselves and the world in a new and sometimes glorious light. Some solosexual men say they never want to cum and instead aspire to ride waves of pleasure and stay continually horny. I have no desire here to denigrate the validity of any man's experience, chosen for himself. 

But the questions that get close to the heart of the matter for me are these: why do dogmatic proponents of semen retention tout its benefits in metaphysical and experiential terms, while they talk about ejaculation as an occasional physiological necessity, at best? Why the universalizing pronouncements? Why are the positive emotional meanings many men attach to ejaculation so sidelined by this rhetoric? Why so little attention to ejaculation as a conscious choice that can offer spiritual lessons of its own? 

There are alternatives to this orthodoxy, for those who find it oppressive, or reductive of their own experience. For some men, ejaculation figures in the spirituality of solosexual pleasure. Some men experience cum as a sacrament: as evidence of the divinely given joy our bodies are capable of offering us, to be treasured, honoured, shared. 

What's more: the drop in energy after ejaculation can itself serve as a teaching we learn from our bodies: to mindfully choose a moment of swiftly transitory bliss can be a profound way to embrace change--a supreme acknowledgement that we are mortal creatures living our lives within time. We were born, we came to sexual maturity, and we will die, just as our forefathers have before us, and our sons will after us. It's not so farfetched that the French sometimes call orgasm "la petite mort"--"the little death." The conscious decision to cum can be a way of celebrating our lives in humility, a means to affirm that we're part of nature rather than Masters of the Universe who transcend nature. 

In the parlance of Jesuit spiritual direction, "ejaculation" refers to a short, spontaneously uttered prayer. A very different meaning, yes. Or perhaps, exactly the same.

When we ejaculate and honour our semen--however we may feel moved to honour it: when we anoint ourselves and our brothers with our seed, when we taste it and share it with others, when we use it in ritual or in art, when we offer it to the soil at our feet--we make an offering of our lives to the Mystery from which we emerge and to which we'll return. 

Blessed Be.

Breaking the Idols

 "We have to break through our ideas about God to find out who God really is...

"We truly have nothing to be afraid of. The Trinitarian flow of God's love is like the rise and fall of tides on a shore. In a Trinitarian Universe, reality can be pictured as an Infinite, Loving Outpouring that empowers and generates an Eternal, Loving Infolding. This eternal flow outward is echoed in history by every animal, fish, flower, bird, and planet you have ever seen. it is the universe: the first incarnation of God.

"All we have to lose are the false images of God that do not serve us and are too small."

Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: Exploring the Mystery of Trinity (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2004).

Love and Death (In Commemoration of Thich Nhat Hanh)

Tomorrow, on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, Christian churches will be full of people waiting in line to hear the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

A downer, yes. 

But a gift as well. Just as the Buddha's admonition to his disciple is a gift to those who thirst for deliverance: "Everything that arises is subject to dissolution."

Not because it's helpful to wallow in anxiety and denial of life. But because the only way to embrace life fully is to recognize that it's fleeting.

"Is there no change of death in Paradise?/  Does ripe fruit never fall?" Wallace Stevens asks, at the beginning of Section 6 of one of my favourite poems ever, "Sunday Morning." His rhetorical questions point to the impossibility of life without change. And a few lines later, he reaches his unavoidable conclusion, "Death is the mother of beauty." For change is nothing other than our dying to one moment so that the next moment of our lives may come into being. As we walk, as we breathe, as we eat, as we make love.

We are finite creatures in time, and as much as we'd like to conquer death by denying that, we only succeed in refusing the life we have. (Christians call that denial sin. Buddhists call it illusion.) To deny it is to undermine the very conditions of our life. It's only by embracing our mortality that we can fully embrace what Mary Oliver gloriously named our "one wild and precious life."

In the next section of "Sunday Morning," Stevens gives us a spectacular, celebratory image for the joy of our embodied life: "Supple and turbulent, a ring of men/ Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn..." But here too, we're brought back to the fundamental conditions of our existence: "And whence they came and whither they shall go/ The dew upon their feet shall manifest."

No mud, no lotus.

Everything that arises is subject to dissolution.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.