“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!”

No, that isn’t the latest Heated Rivalry fanfiction — it’s the opening line of a 2,000-year-old erotic poem. Yes, in the middle of the Hebrew Bible, a text that has so often been weaponized to shame sexual desire, there is a collection of straight-up filth: 

“I arose to open to my beloved,

    and my hands dripped with myrrh,

my fingers with liquid myrrh,

    on the handles of the bolt.” 

Girl. Tell me more…

As a gay kid growing up in the 1990s, sex was far from holy. Indeed, it was deemed dirty, diseased, and damned by the church. The shadow of AIDS lingered long and information readily accessible to me was limited to guidance on birth control. Nothing about pleasure; certainly nothing practical about the mechanics of gay sex. It meant that my first time, aged 18 at a youth conference with a Brazilian boy whose name I hardly knew, was both messy and painful.

For years, it didn’t cross my mind to look at what religion had to say about having good sex. Why trust these traditions that have been so callous and cruel to queer people like me? Well, it turns out that those sages of yore were just as horny as we are. And the practice of worship, the experience of divine intimacy, and the sweetness of surrender are as applicable in sex as they are in spiritual life.

To get more insight into this, I called author and Rabbi Jay Michaelson, whose book, God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual Practice, first got me thinking about sex as a spiritual practice. In it, he argues that spirit and body are not separate at all, and that our bodies are the very place where holiness expresses itself in the world. 

For Michaelson, there are three key gifts that religion offers us as a way of connecting with our sexual selves. First is the cultivation of presence. Michaelson isn’t just a rabbi; he’s also a meditation teacher, and so Buddhist practice is core to his spiritual life. “I don’t understand how people have sex without meditation!” he jokes. “To miss out on the intimacy with the other person or just with one’s own experience, with one’s own body, is, to me, a shame. … It can be really simple.” He adds that if you can have mindful eating, you can have mindful sex.

How can we practice presence? Take inspiration from religious rituals! Think about the ways in which worship services use incense, music, even mood lighting through stained-glass windows. The incantation of holy words, the eating of special food, the anointing with holy oil…these are all tools to help people be present in the here and now. So, the same is true for sex: Light some candles, use massage oil, tell your partner (or yourself) what you want and how, and put on a playlist to be truly present.

But just like meditating, sometimes being fully present to our sexuality can bring up unexpected negative emotions. Maybe we worry about how we look, or the sounds we’re making, or how we taste. We judge ourselves or get embarrassed about what we want. That’s where the second gift religion can offer us comes into play.

It’s “about really embodying the knowledge that pleasure is a blessing,” Michaelson says. Whether that blessing comes from God or is just the experience of being alive is immaterial to Michaelson; what matters is believing it. “That is something that is easy to read, but, like any other spiritual insight, to actually take it in and really believe it…that takes a lifetime of practice,” he says. 

In a story from the Talmud, a rabbi by the name of Kahana follows his teacher home and hides under the bed in order to learn how he should make love. He waits and listens — and when he’s discovered and scolded for his voyeurism, he tries to defend himself by saying, “It is Torah, and I must learn!” Luckily for us, we have better strategies for learning pleasure these days. 

Court Vox is an intimacy coach based in Los Angeles who helps gay, bi, trans, and queer men learn the language of their embodied pleasure. Through hands-on workshops that center sensation, touch, breath, and movement, Vox teaches men to understand their own nervous system and what feels good. You could try this by simply spending some time moving different objects over your body: a feather, a stone, a fork, a hand. Slow down enough to notice what really feels good, and where. You will likely be surprised by what does and doesn’t give you pleasure as you explore.

Fundamental to Vox’s work is moving people out of a state of hypervigilance so they can actually let go enough to enjoy themselves. “You cannot surrender when you are still managing,” he says. And for many, surrender can be so very sweet. Vox explains that for him, true letting go feels like being inside “some sort of Jell-O or honey, almost like a womb.” But for that to happen, you have to feel safe. If you don’t feel safe, you’re not going to find real pleasure — which means that consent is a prerequisite for everything that Vox does, and it should be for the rest of us too. 

So, if good sex is about presence and pleasure, the final element Michaelson says that we can pull from religious tradition is integration. “It’s not where I want to be spiritually to have great sex and then 15 minutes later…I go on as if it never happened,” he says. Sex shouldn’t be a random experience that’s separate from who we are in every other part of life. Sex connects us to the world; to each other; to the very force of life. 

Religious traditions have often integrated sex into daily living through myths and storytelling. By integrating stories of sex into their own creation myths, sex was deemed natural and necessary. Usually, these myths focus on fecundity — new life literally coming from some sexual activity. For example, the Mesopotamian goddess of the salt sea Tiamat mates with the freshwater god Abzû to birth a pantheon of newer gods. Or the Sumerian god Enki masturbates and ejaculates semen to create the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

So, how might we find stories and rituals that give sex a meaningful place in our everyday lives? Yes, we might entwine our sex lives with the cycles of the moon, or host board game nights with a host of lovers! But some old traditions can find new life when we look at them anew, too.

Father Jarel Robinson-Brown is an Anglican priest. On Sunday mornings he officiates the Mass, or Eucharist, which is a ritual retelling of a story of love, sacrifice, death, and resurrection. This ritual has integrated core theological ideas into worshippers’ everyday lives for 2,000 years.

But for Robinson-Brown, this church service isn’t the only place where God’s presence is felt. Speaking in a personal capacity in an episode of the podcast All Out With Jon Dean earlier this year, he explained that dark rooms and cruising grounds can be similarly sacred. “The space of a dark room [is a] kind of metaphor for what I think a particular experience of God can be and with other people can be in terms of intimacy and safety. … People are not judged on their appearance, or their differences, but come to each other as they are.” In these sexual encounters where individuals are nameless to one another, there is an experience of union that transcends identity, biography, and status. They are simply bodies together. And for Robinson-Brown, being embodied is what Christianity is all about. “Not only does God belong in the bedroom, or wherever the erotic space might be,” he tells me, “God is already in us.”

What Robinson-Brown is modeling here is the integrating of our sex lives into a larger pantheon of meaning. Cruising and sex in a dark room is an affirmation of each person’s sacredness and the necessity of human connection. 

That’s our task: to find ways of narrating (through stories and rituals) the presence and pleasure we experience in sex. To celebrate it; to delight in it; to see its holiness. That’s why there’s an erotic love poem at the heart of the Bible. Its closing words offer us this invitation: 

“Come away, my beloved,

    and be like a gazelle

or like a young stag

    on the spice-laden mountains.“

Whatever you believe, and however you have sex, I hope you find presence, pleasure, and stories that can integrate it all into your life. Good sex is spiritual. And good religion is full of sex. Let us be glad for it!

I used to think I could change the world. 

More than that: because I could, I felt the responsibility to do it. 

I was 22 when I helped lead a delegation of young people to the United Nations. There, we pressured presidents and prime ministers to reduce carbon emissions, hoping to prevent the horrors of rising sea levels and catastrophic heat waves. Strangely, although I was immersed in the distressing climate science and the details of international policy negotiations, what I remember most from that time is my own sense of agency. If we organized, if we took action; I knew we could protect the beautiful world we loved. 

I don’t feel that so much anymore. Though I’m not yet 40, and still going through the motions of voting and donating to causes and candidates doing good, my heart has been crushed by the headlines lately. I feel defeated. Rather than believing my choices can shape the world around me, I oscillate between sadness and cynicism, numbing myself by eating a lot of chocolate cookies.

If you, too, suffer from weltschmerz, as the Germans call the despair at the state of the world — or if something else, like a death or divorce, has you feeling low — it might be time to pause on taking action and give into the grief.

Religious traditions have long centered grieving rituals amid the happier celebrations and festivals in their calendar. Entire sacred texts consist of lamentation — crying out to the divine in dismay.

Walter Brueggemann, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, explained in 2020 that lament is not just an expression of sadness. He said, “Lament is the breaking of numbness by the admission of pain and loss.” In a culture where grief is still seen as unseemly or inconvenient and people are encouraged to “be strong” and move on quickly, this ancient wisdom teaches us that we have to cry out if we want to retrieve a sense of hope and possibility. As Brueggemann writes, “Only those who embrace the reality of death will receive the new life.”

But how do we do it? Where can we go to weep and mourn? And how do I get out of my own way? I’m pretty good at talking about the sadness and the anger and the pain; I can understand the therapeutic need to grieve. But actually doing it? Turns out, I suck at that! 

Then — just recently — a portal opened.

I’d gathered a group of friends for my monthly singing night: a chance to make music together for the joy of participation rather than performance. We sing simple rounds and folk songs, harmonizing where we can, and always close with a rousing rendition of an old shape note song in four-part harmony. After putting the foldable chairs away and clearing the wine glasses into the dishwasher, a few of us lingered behind.

Inspiration struck, and I shared my heartache about the latest horror from the White House. One by one, others started to share their pain, too. And then, Matthew, a particularly talented musical improviser, got behind the piano to sing his sadness. His voice jumped from one note to another and suddenly my eyes filled with tears and my heart filled with life. Something was shifting.

Ahlay Blakely is not surprised by this. Not at all. Blakely is a modern-day grief ritualist, songwriter, and facilitator. She sees herself as a professional mourner, hosting retreats and gatherings that help people touch their grief in tender and radical ways. 

“Singing with people is often a gateway to deeper work with grief,” she explained to me. Because so many of us have a sense that our voices aren’t good enough, singing immediately makes us vulnerable, opening us to the deeper pain we might be avoiding in our everyday lives. Singing, Blakely said, is “not about what it sounds like at all, it’s what it feels like in your body.” Blakely’s insight into the power of communal singing led her to create an entire album of grief songs with some 200 amateur singers, and that listeners like us can join in with. Its purpose is nothing less than the re-enchantment of the human soul. 

A study from 2014 shows there might be a scientific explanation for this. Musicologist Gunter Kreutz conducted an experiment with amateur choral singers in which he measured oxytocin levels across two contexts: before and after a 30-minute choir rehearsal, and before and after an informal conversation with another choir member. Remarkably, oxytocin, which is sometimes described as the “love hormone,” increased only during group singing — not during ordinary social interaction. In other words, singing enhances our well-being and connects us to others more effectively than conversation alone.

But that magic doesn’t come by moving through the grief — processing it and moving on. No, insists Blakely, “People often are trying to get over their grief. And grief is just as powerful and potent…as happiness and laughter. Are we trying to get over our laughter? Are we trying to get over our happiness?” Blakely wants us to court grief as an ally. 

Carla Fernandez, author of Renegade Grief, agrees. For her, grief is not something to overcome, but to befriend. Whatever our assumptions about falling apart, grief, she told me, “is not messy — it’s wildly fertile. When we don’t go there, we miss out on such fecundity from which real relationships can grow, and solutions can form, and ideas can emerge.” In other words, grief isn’t a dangerous can of worms, but the soil from which new life can grow. 

That’s what I felt sitting on my living room carpet as my friends and I sang together. And if you don’t have a crew to do that with yet, start by singing along to music that helps you open up to grief. Laurel Premo’s Laments is another great grieving album — or you can just make up sounds to this digital chord-creating shruti box. Remember Blakely’s advice: this isn’t about how you sound. It’s about how it feels in your body. If it feels like something is moving in your heart, keep singing.

Maybe this practice of collective singing is what we need more of in our political spaces, too. The success of the Singing Resistance in Minneapolis earlier this year was a testament to what music can do to mobilize people for collective action and bear witness to injustice in a way that keeps us hopeful and aware of the power we have to do good. Who knows — maybe singing will find its way back to cross political divides, too. One candidate in Iowa is starting every town hall by having people sing “America the Beautiful” to remind them that whatever their differences, they can create beauty together. 

Heidi Wilson, the composer of “Hold On,” which has become somewhat of an anthem in the Singing Resistance movement, puts it best. “Grief is about feeling cut off from something, losing something, and singing is an experience of reconnecting.” I think that’s what we’re all looking for now. In fact, it might be the only way forward.