Words by Yael Wolfe

Even though I experienced a conservative Christian education as a child, thanks to my “religious-curious,” liberal parents, I always had my own ideas about God that didn’t seem to fit in to what I was being taught at school.

For instance, I can remember being in the 5th grade, during the mid-eighties, and hearing my teacher try to explain why God had created AIDS. It was a horrible, hateful, homophobic theory that I won’t repeat here, and I remember sitting back in my seat, crossing my arms over my chest and shaking my head. No way, I thought. The God I believe in loves us all.

I don’t mean to say that I had the arrogance to think I knew God. But I felt inclined to believe that God was not about judgment, punishment, or shame.

I think I understood this because when I felt pleasure or witnessed beauty, something in my heart opened so wide, I could literally feel my soul remembering its origin. Touching the creative energy that made it. Connecting with…something that I couldn’t quite understand or put into words.

I realize it might sound like a provocative affectation for me to say that I felt something like a sexual charge in the most non-sexual of moments (standing in the wind, watching bees crawl over flowers, feeling rain on my face). But I mean, in all non-provocative, not particularly alluring sincerity that I felt alive and lit up by moments of beauty, not unlike the way I felt with a lover.

…creative energy is, in my opinion, God.

To me, sexual energy (sans all connotations and mental images that might come with this phrase) is the same thing as creative energy. And creative energy is, in my opinion, God.

I always tried to open up a dialogue about this with past lovers — to talk about what was so obvious to me. The way souls can connect in the act of sex. The way it fuels my creativity outside the bedroom. The way I feel the zipping currents of energy flowing through me when I see a hawk circling in the sky, which connects my body, my soul, my mind back to a moment of intimacy with a lover, which connects me to that time a gust of wind enveloped me in its embrace, pulling at my scarf, making my hair fly up around my face, which connected me to the cherished memory of a kiss with my partner, his hands slowly lifting my skirt up…

There is no time when I experience such moments. No space. No boundaries.

This is the whole point of sex, right? This is why we want it and need it so badly. So we can experience our souls, which so often go neglected in this modern world. So we can remember the oneness we all share. So we can touch God.

But no. None of my lovers felt comfortable discussing this. Not even the liberal atheist who, if he had worshiped a god, would have chosen Dionysus. Even he thought my theories were sacrilegious.

“God doesn’t belong in the bedroom,” he said, and that was that. The implication, of course, was that sex was human, animalistic, impure. Not within the realm of the divine.

My last partner was even more horrified when I told him I felt more connected to my soul and to God when we were having sex. He said he tried not to think of God at all in those moments because the prospect of being watched from above was so mortifying, so shameful.

God wasn’t a man (or a woman, for that matter) peeking down on humans, peeping on them in the bedroom.

I couldn’t make sense of his perspective. God wasn’t a man (or a woman, for that matter) peeking down on humans, peeping on them in the bedroom. That notion seemed so absurd to me.

It didn’t help that my partner thought that living together outside of marriage was a sin (even though he’s the one who didn’t want to get married), or that sexual pleasure was morally and spiritually shameful (even though he pursued it with a vengeance).

None of that made sense to me.

I, too, had a lot of shame surrounding sex, but mine was more about the understanding that women were supposed to be “good girls.” I felt judged and shamed by my fellow humans, not by God.

After all, why would God make such beauty and such potential for pleasure in every aspect of life (from nature to our bodies) and then randomly determine that some of those experiences were “sacred,” and some of them were merely tests of our moral restraint? Yes, it’s okay to enjoy the caress of the wind. But no, experiencing sexual pleasure (in bodies that were designed to feel sexual pleasure) is wrong.

In response to this kind of nonsense, I typically assert my belief that the clitoris tells us all we need to know about God and sexuality. It’s the only organ on the human body that is solely designed for pleasure. Think about the implications of that — biological, spiritual, and even moral. Isn’t it our duty to use our bodies well, which includes engaging our clitorises in the job they were designed to do?

Oh, and who designed them? God.

I think one of the biggest issues we have with this is that we’ve anthropomorphized God, imbuing them (non-binary pronoun because you cannot convince me that God has a gender) with our own flawed human traits.

So no, we don’t want God in the bedroom, frowning at us or getting an eyeful of what we might not want witnessed.

God is the mechanism of blood flow, heartbeat, breath, and yes, orgasm.

But I don’t see God as a person. I see God as life force, creative energy, chi. God is the mechanism of blood flow, heartbeat, breath, and yes, orgasm.

So of course God is present in moments of beauty, experiences of pleasure, acts of connection. Of course God — the essence of creation — is present in the bedroom, in a moment of creation (whether literal or not).

I don’t mean to imply that it’s quite that simple. So many of us have known sexual experiences that did not at all feel like God was in the room. Experiences in which our souls felt shut away into little boxes. But who can sufficiently discuss the ultimately unknowable mysteries of sex and the soul in less than 1,200 words and dive into everything?

So for the sake of brevity, I’ll stick to the basics:

Yes, I believe God is in the bedroom. And everywhere else.

The thought doesn’t make me uncomfortable in the slightest. And why should it? I think we should be grateful that we have been given such a beautiful, pleasurable way to connect with the deepest, most mysterious part of ourselves, other souls, and the force that made us all.

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