Today I’d like to address four topics in what I see as Christian Tantra, and how they might differ from buddhist and hindu tantra. Those four topics are sex, magic, use of entheogens (aka consciousness modifying chemicals) and Transmutation of flaws. In addition to following Jesus, the Christian’s tantric Guru, these are core concerns in whatever a well oriented Christian Tantra would become. But because of the history of Christianity, they paint a slightly different picture than the same concerns do in Buddhist and Hindu Tantra. I’d like to deal with them one at a time. [bxA]Sex: Western dependence on logic, along with its ignorance of emotional layering and the subconscious, gives sex a bad name from the start—it’s a legacy which, though difficult, any Christian Tantric practitioner will have to deal, and one which will inevitably locate us on the Cross with our teacher.
Despite my personal admiration for the Saint, I take exception to Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the Body. Its thoroughgoing essentialist gender theory is too simplistic. In other words, the claim that that men are masculine because they have penises, women are feminine because they have vaginas—this is too simple a reading of the book of Genesis. To be more specific, I believe it’s a false claim that there are enforceable gender roles and ironclad gender rules. I also believe Aquinas’ claim—the claim that sex is only good when it lives up to its telos of procreativity—to be a harmfully limiting claim. The many different reasons married people have sex, the many challenges involved in their times of abstention, are not addressed in such a vision.
While someone who is biologically male is complementary to someone who is biologically female—and that complementarity plays a huge part in Christian Tantra’s capacity to awaken us-- in the working out of gender identity I would go further back. Just as Adam and Eve were originally one, we all have in us energies that, on one level, can accurately be labeled masculine and feminine. But it needs to be said that, given western society’s inability to examine the cognitive and emotional content underlying the terms we use, I don’t find these labels optimal. I would prefer to say we all have willful energies and willing energies. Willful energies are classically more forceful, willing ones more receptive, but they’re all “us.”
In my view, a well-articulated view of Christian Tantric sex would start with these two assertions: first, use of sexuality that’s not unitive, procreative and monogamous, can, when consciously engaged in, lead to spiritual awakening and ever diminishing suffering for others. Second, how gender and sexuality align is up to the individual to figure out—sexuality is the stuff of wisdom par excellence, not something others can figure out for us— and no Church edict is right in judging individuals whose efforts express a conscious and informed conscience. In other words, while not denying the Christian moral model its validity in the sphere of the ego, Christian tantra acknowledges a psychological model that's also active in pursuit of non-self, and the two models are often, for reasons we'll see when we talk about "transmuting the flaw," very much in conflict.
The church would benefit much, I think, by a practical view of sexuality, and by a temporary ability to suspend moral judgments. Were we able to suspend moral judgments, we could see that sensation can serve as a mantra. It's possible for sensation to usher an initiate into an experience of egolessness. In my years of studying the Cistercian literature I remember two stories. One monk was struggling with his desire for drink--being the cellarer, he had access to the monastery's wine. As he passed through church, he realized he was doing so mindlessly, and he stopped to reverence the altar more consciously. At that moment a demon appeared-presumably a symbol of alcoholism--saying to him that, had he not stopped to more consciously reverence the altar, he would have been plagued by desire to drink--alcoholism--for years to come. Another story tells of a preoccupied monk who, every time his hand touched the church door, would abandon his concerns to the father, to resume dealing with them when he left church.
The conscious use of devotion and sensation is imbued with principals that can apply to sexuality as well. Why can the touch of a lover's hand not be as self-abandoning as touching a church door? Why can satisfying love-making not be as consciousness inducing as a bow to the altar? I suppose the reason is "we haven't been taught to practice that way." If nothing else, let this suffice to clearly voice the need.
What follows that dovetails on the things said about “Spirit” in the post “Disciplines and Layers of Christian Tantra.” In short, the Spirit is one, and it, in part, ascends and descends the spine through the chakras. In Christian Tantra, just as prayer can raise the energy of the Holy Spirit within (Kundalini energy) Sex has the capacity to do the same, and thereby open us to the highest levels of spiritual awakening. In order to do that, though, sex has to be freely engaged in, sex has to be free of underlying resentment and anger, sex has to be engaged in without objectifying our partners and without the “going somewhere else in our heads” maneuver that is characteristic of lust. Sensations can free us from ego if we stop attaching our preferences to sensations and simply be with them. Another person can help us give up resentment if we commonly name it as a problem. And all forms of entitlement have to go—even the “right” to sex we commonly conflate with whatever “sexual availability” each partner promises the other in marriage. It’s all a gift, and we are not in charge of whether, or how, the gift will be given.
Magic: I will confess to not having read much about the tantric practices around Magic. Christians have had an uncomfortable relationship with magic since Simon Magus tried to buy the power of the apostles in the book of Acts. Theoretically, though, those who maintain a stance of willingness can experience the threefold opening to the spirit, within themselves (kundalini), in transmission to others, (giving shakti) and in renewing the Church (as it did at pentecost.) And without forsaking humility, this can be done with the individual Saint quite conscious of being the “doer of the act.” In other words, the Saint may, by all appearances, have "made something magical happen." However, I hope Christian Tantra, as it develops, will always claim that such an individual maintained a stance of passive volition and willingness—openness to grace, in other words—that allowed God to act in them.
Entheogens: Let’s not call them what history has called them, “drugs" or “psychedelics." Let’s call them what they have the capacity to be: “entheogens.” In other words, substances that have a known capacity, used correctly, to open the mind and soul and body to God.
Let’s also call out some of the mistakes of history: The Catholic Church demonized teonanacatl, mexican psychedelic mushrooms, at the time of the Spanish conquest. This uncovers two negative assumptions: first, a prejudice about “primitive cultures” and second the tendency to demonize what we ourselves have not experienced. Much of that underlying prejudice has been repudiated by modern anthropology and the second vatican council. Anthropology is starting to grapple with the experiential knowledge that’s lost in the objectifying gaze of the scientific method. The Church now assumes that it can’t demonize indigenous cultures, and that an indigenous culture has as much right as the Church to have its search for the divine taken seriously on its own terms. The use of plant-medicines for healing spiritual ills has undergone no such rehabilitation.
Christian Tantra would do well to take as Gospel the stance of Bill W., whose own experiences with LSD hearkened back to the religious experience that founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Though the group ultimately and righty said spiritual awakenings come from the lived experience of a mutually vulnerable community, its founder went on record as saying entheogens could temporarily downscale the ego and enable one to experience what selfless spirituality feels like in the first place. In the drive for chemical-free existence, and in the societal tendency to see no middle ground between abstention and abuse, Bill W.'s response is largely lost to history to say nothing of as yet undeveloped into a working model of middle-ground use of healthy chemicals.
The brand of Christian tantra to which I personally ascribe does not believe entheogens are God, the sacraments, or the height of charity. Nor does it believe entheogens are the devil, or an easy route to addiction. As Maharajii told Ram Dass, entheogens will help you “come into the presence of Christ, but you can’t stay.” In other words, the temporary break from egotism is a beginning, not an end, and should make you more capable of living sober.
That said, much work remains if the Church is going to have a healthy relationship to entheogens. Bad trips will abound if a tantric practitioner’s first look at his shadow is occasioned by chemicals. A better idea would be to spend years in meditation, willingly and consciously seeing what terrors lurk in the subconscious. The Church has yet to democratize her teaching on prayer, though organizations like Thomas Keating’s Contemplative Outreach have begun the work. The church has yet to democratize the knowledge that diocesan exorcists face--that some energies are sentient and malevolent, and those energies are no more to be clung to than any other. The church even has yet to teach that attraction and aversion, desire and attachment are important, and in some ways more important in overall spiritual development than the moral teaching.
Ideally, priests trained in working with entheogens would initiate middle aged meditation students into entheogen use as a sort of mystagogical experience, specifically designed to bring initiates into the deeper mysteries they’ve received. But the many layers of work that must be done: the years of meditation on the part of the individual, believing indigenous cultures when they speak about the benefits of
Transmuting the Flaw: For me, this is the most personal piece of this article. Incarnations are dualist, and it’s natural for all of us, not only to label inner phenomenon and feelings as “negative” and “positive,” but to avoid the negative and crave the positive. I’ve spent years doing just that. But I’ve come to realize that the example of Christ is specifically to encounterthe negative, to know it completely and to be the presence of God in a situation we’re apt to think God is absent from. Long experience of the futility of avoidance has me, lately, consciously nudging myself in the direction of encountering inner experiences I see as negative. Slowly, anxiety, sadness, depression, loss, suffering—and all other things that go bump in my own inner night—they’re losing their power to freak me out.
My first real experience with this was at a home for the disabled in North Carolina. I was a monk then, and went, in the habit, to a care facility run by sisters of charity. While there, I was confronted with my own aversion to the disabled. I, myself, am slightly disabled. My own self-aversion stood out in sharp relief that day. The isolation of the home’s residents—evident even though they were well cared for—came to the fore that day, and the extent to which my own mild disability had been a cause for lifelong isolation welled up too. By and by, I had an encounter with one of the home’s residents. I simply reached out and touched her cheek. I bowed to something I’d been ignoring that day, and touched something in myself that I’d been drawing away from.
The girl’s name was Jennie. Thinking about it now, she was my first tantric upa-guru. Though, in many ways, it spelled the beginning of the end of my Trappist vocation, it began a deeper pattern. Jennie was the hinge, that taught me that negative exterior experiences and negative interior ones are connected—when I encountered her, the worth in a consistent practice of encounter solidified. Since then and slowly, discordant experiences are becoming the ones I learn the most from. And though I was 40 years old before I saw that pattern as a clear lesson divinely intended in the life and example of Jesus, I’m much more confident in the midst of hardship because of it.
There’s certainly more to be said. “The Guru” is central to tantra, and the specifics of following Jesus—the specifics of what that means for us who have never experienced his historical form-- deserve a more detailed look. But what I’ve written, I’ve written because it’s founded in the unity of God’s mystery as opposed to the dualism of incarnations and revelations. That unity is the starting point of Christian Tantra, and it's our own.
