The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary: The Sexual Mystery at the Heart of the Christian Tradition

by Jean-Yves Leloup

Seeking pleasure is also natural but not necessary to life’s continuation.

Seeking pleasure may be more necessary for life than we realize. Without a seeking of pleasure in the sexual experience, we have no procreation.

The fact that contemporary people have such a difficult time conceiving that Christ had a sexual life is one of the symptoms of a recurrence of Docetism.

A great adage of the early desert Fathers is: “God became wholly human so that the human could become wholly God.” For the human to become wholly God means for us to participate fully, in all elements of our being, in the life of uncreated love.

Today, this seems to be as difficult for people to hear and understand as it was in ancient times.

Why does the word diabolical so often accompany the “desire of the flesh?” If the devil is in our flesh, it is because God has lost his place there.

The devil comes only to fill the place that we dare not give to love.

The poet Paul Valéry said, “If you knew how deep is...

This shows where God can and has beco...

Why cannot physical desire be g...

Sexuality itself then takes on a numinous quality. For many of our contemporaries, it is perhaps this, even more than art and natu...

To refuse erotic feeling and sexuality is to refuse the great life in its aspect of fullness and its thrust toward unity. It is curious that sexual desire, whose source is in life itself should (so to speak) be r...

Ecstasy is fundamentally the way in which being, present in our essential Being, becomes conscious of ...

The world, our bodies, and our minds can offer only pleasure because they participate in his Being.

The only wrong would be to forget his Presence in pleasure—in other words, to make love without consciousness, without Love.

Our birthright is consciousness of the divi...

Otherwise, we are reduced to the more or less mechanical functioning of animal impulses...

Eros gives wings...

“To love someone is to say to them: ‘You will not die.’ ”

Bodies, thoughts, feelings—these all pass. But what manifests through them abides.

Even deeper than the encounter of bodies and thoughts is the

encounter of the heart, which decisively removes the Other from the world of objects, so as to become a unique You.

Why is sexuality not a path to the divine in Christianity, as it is in other traditions?

Why is it considered as an obstacle or an impediment in the spiritual life?

Why this opposition between sexua...

sa...

we must first consider the attitudes toward sexuality held by a certain number of thinkers of the early Roman Church, which played a role in shaping Western culture afterward.

These influences, consciously or unconsciously, are what prevent us from examining this subject with objectivity and freshness.

Here we must consider not only the canonical gospels, whose main role was to give stability and structure to the early Church,

but also those gospels judged as useless for the building of those institutions.

The latter are essential if Christian believers are to find balance, imagination, and...

Such study will help us to see that a sexuality that is fully lived is not only in harmony with the laws of life and of its Creator, but also can become a realm of knowledge and revelation.

Macron must have had some bad traumatic experience early in life that caused him to think less of human flesh.

Far from “despising the body,” Christianity brings the love of the flesh down to earth, in each individual—a limitless responsibility and one

that we do not know what to do with.3

None could suspect the Christ was homosexual—nor heterosexual, for that matter.

In actuality, he was presented as having no sexuality at all.

Why do some people claim that Jesus, born of a virgin, remain...

Others have pointed out that in order for him to teach in synagogues, the religious law of the time would have required him to prove h...

Ranke-Heinemann does so with a detour regarding the taboo on menstrual blood prevalent in ancient times and its repercussions in Christianity.4

Others point out the divergences

of interpretation of the words attrib...

Most of these emphasize the importance of the views of the Church Fathers, who were influenced by dualistic currents ...

Especially important for Western Christianity was the very powerful influence of St. Augustine (354–430), for whom “true human ...

Augustine adopted a very hostile attitude toward sexuality af...

this father of the Latin Church it was celibacy that distinguished man from animal and Christian from Jew or pagan:

This virtue is indeed our exclusive gift, lacking among Jews and pagans and not found among peoples still in a savage state.

we nevertheless escape the miseries of this same

nature in every respect, through the sole fact of virginal chastity.6

So only Christianity is spiritual and pure, whereas Judaism i...

It is not hard to imagine the consequences ...