BOOK REVIEW: Sex and the Sacred

Sex and The Sacred: Gay Identity and Spiritual Growth, by Daniel A. Helminiak (Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, 2006), 235pp. (Review by Scott D. Pomfret, www.sincemylastconfession.com.)

Daniel Helminiak’s project in his 2006 collection of previously published essays, Sex and the Sacred: Gay Identity and Spiritual Growth, is a naked act of reclamation. Helminiak, a Catholic priest, professor of psychology and longtime member of the gay Catholic group Dignity, sets his sights on terms like “spirituality”, “Christianity”, and “natural law,” and wrests them from those who would use them to oppress gay people. He provides a cogent re-description of these and related terms in an effort to draw gays and lesbians back to the Eucharistic table. Helminiak’s manner is gentle and affirming: he knows that he is preaching to a GLBT audience of the wounded, who regard religious concepts with wariness at best and an understandable outright hostility in many cases. Heroically, he barely acknowledge Sisyphusian nature of his project; he says one thing that brings GLBT spiritual beings close; religious authorities say something new and hurtful that drives them away all over again.
Because he starts from Ground Zero (literally: many of these essays invoke 9/11), some of Helminiak’s statements and conclusions are so obvious as to be banal. But patience with these initial assertions pays off: they are building blocks to more ambitious arguments.
Helminiak begins by describing a concept of spirituality that is independent of religious institutions. He describes it as “a dimension to human experience . . . that pulls us out of ourselves and lets us know that we, our very selves, are caught up in something that is vast and marvelous.” He posits that the homosexual experience is necessarily spiritual, because the coming out process is one of growth, integration, and self-transcendence. Authenticity is the highest God/good of his conception of spirituality; indeed, for him, authenticity precedes genuine religious experience. Helminiak then reclaims sexuality for spiritual beings, arguing that sexuality – GLBT or otherwise -- is a necessary component of spirituality and not its enemy, as many contemporary institutional religions – including the Catholic Church – seem to believe. For Helminiak, sexuality is also a means of expressing spirituality.
Having reclaimed the term “spirituality” for the non-religious or those with antipathy toward organized religion, Helminiak shifts gears: he argues that while spirituality does not require God or organized religion, there is nothing about spirituality that precludes organized religion -- and, specifically, Christianity. Helminiak then introduces us to Jesus as a model of coming out: drawing especially from the Gospel of Mark, Helminiak shows us a Jesus who did not know that he was God and did not have all the answers, yet spoke from authority – an authority rooted in faith. His take on this Jesus is not one-sided, however. He also acknowledges the difficulty some – particularly oppressed or abused women -- may have with the historical fact of Jesus’s maleness.
Helminiak also introduces us to the mystery of the Trinity, but he reclaims that word “mystery” in a way that is liberating:
Most take ‘mystery’ in a negative sense: something that cannot be understood – and they leave it at that. However, there is a more positive understanding of religious mystery: something so rich in meaning that its meaning can never be exhausted.
From here, Helminiak goes to his roots: Catholicism. He first notes that Catholic teaching, in theory, is relatively good for gays and lesbians. The Church does not regard homosexuality as a choice, nor is merely being homosexual considered sinful. Moreover, the Church condemns violence against GLBT people. But Helminiak rightly points out that this teaching has been largely perverted from a pastoral perspective that lives in the real world and recognizes the primacy of conscience to a rigid perspective that makes a fetish out of rules – especially rules involving sexual matters -- claimed to be so eternal they are divorced from history. Eloquent chapters dispatching rule-bound Catholic teaching and defending gay marriage follow. The format is perhaps too short for the full exposition the topics require, but I have never before read a clearer, or more concise, demolition of the position of the Catholic hierarchy as expounded by JPII and B16 and their progeny bishops.
In his final chapters, Helminiak takes on Fundamentalists who call themselves Christian. It’s not a well-written chapter: repetitive assertion clouds logical argument and white-knuckle fury blurs Helminiak’s more measured prose. But the conclusion is clear: Fundamentalism is incompatible with Christianity. This conclusion leads Helminiak to some of his finest observations. He writes, “It is not the what, but the how of the Bible that turns out to be most important – not what the Bible says, but how it arrives at what it says. “ Scriptures are relevant for an ethics built on virtue, excellence, and character formation: “The scriptures teach us to be honest, loving and kind, and this unchanging lesson applies everywhere and always. However, if our intent is the modern preoccupation with … ethics built on rules that would spell out in legal fashion every act that is to be performed or avoided ...the scriptural teaching becomes moot, for it is debated.” What matters to Helminiak is a Biblical attitude: filled with wonder, questioning, dedication, honesty, personal integrity and a commitment to truth. This is why even Fundamentalists ought to admire the hard work of coming out, because it reflects these qualities, whether or not you think homosexuality is a bad thing.
Not everything in Sex and the Sacred works. Some statements consist of maddening assertions that do not follow from the logic of the preceding sentences and left me scratching my head: “Christian belief affirms perfect human integration as the heavenly destination of every human being.” “Human integration” was certainly never a topic in any Sunday school class I attended. Moreover, there is considerable repetition here, which no doubt results from the fact that this book is a collection of previously printed material addressing a variety of audiences. Finally, I craved more stories and case studies. In the opening essay, Helminiak introduces Richard, the teen rent boy with keen interest in religion as well as an internalized sense of damnation, but we never hear from Richard again in the ensuing two hundred pages.
Nevertheless, this book’s strengths far outweigh any weaknesses. In the closing essay, Helminiak asserts what is singular – and worth defending -- about (reclaimed) Christianity as opposed to other world religions: the inherent coincidence of the divine and the human. God became man in the person of Christ, but equally we Christians believe we can touch and merge with the divine through self-transcendent spirituality – prayer, work, and even more mundane occurrences. Invoking sexual imagery that has a (suppressed) tradition within the Christian church, Helminiak says “Heaven is a never-ending orgasm” – in the sense that orgasm brings us outside of ourselves, is transformative, and is the stuff of spiritual communion.