Rite and Reason: My recently-published book, A Sexual Life, A Spiritual Life: A Painful Journey to Inner Peace, was not an easy one to write, and I don't expect that everyone will find it an easy or comfortable read. However, I felt compelled to write it and had wrestled with it for years, writes Bishop Pat Buckleyof Catholicism, writes Bishop Pat Buckley
During nearly three decades as a priest I have ministered to literally thousands of men and women who were in deep pain and distress over some aspect of their sexuality. Much of their pain and distress was intensified by the belief that their sexual difficulties created a serious barrier between them and their God or indeed cut them off from God completely.
Some of these people were simply troubled with what they called "bad thoughts" or "impure actions". Others were married and troubled by the fact that they were using artificial contraception in contravention of official church teaching.
Many were divorced and wished to marry again "in the eyes of God". Others were gay, lesbian or bisexual. And others still were married or single transvestites or trans-sexuals. A small number were adults who had hurt children. Many of those I listened to were suffering from severe anxiety and depression. A small number were suicidal.
But they all had one question to ask me: "Does God understand me and love me and accept me as I am, and will I get to heaven when I die?"
I could not approach my ministry to these lovely but suffering people with a professional detachment because there was a huge battle between the sexual and the spiritual raging within my own soul.
I had been sexually abused at the age of six and was carrying all the confusion, repression and guilt of that with me. At the end of a tortuous adolescence, during which I was unable to co-operate with the excellent child-guidance psychiatry offered to me, I entered a seminary to study for the priesthood with full-blown repression and guilt.
On top of this I was carrying the secret that I was gay. I was praying frantically every day that I would not be found out and that God would give me the grace never to "fall" into sin.
I knew that I had to make a journey from inner turmoil and confusion to inner peace. I knew that I had to make this journey for my own sake and for the sake of all those who turned to me for support and guidance.
That journey involved prayer, reflection and reading. It involved spiritual direction, counselling and therapy.
I wrote A Sexual Life, A Spiritual Life to encourage people to cast off their repression and guilt, a repression and guilt imposed on them by society in general and by the church in particular. I also wrote the book as my challenge to traditional Catholicism, which has convinced so many of us that only the soul and the spiritual is good and that the body and the sexual is at best tolerable, ie in heterosexual marriage, but is generally dirty, sinful and evil.
Over centuries we have been seriously misled into thinking that the rejection, subjugation and punishment of the flesh was the only path to God. I challenge this most vehemently and declare that there is another, equally valid way to God - the way that embraces the physical, the sexual and the erotic. From such a perspective, the human sexual encounter that occurs in the context of love and affection is also an encounter with the Divine, and the orgasm becomes a "sacrament" of the pleasure we will experience when we bond with God in heaven.
Here I am not proposing a new theory at all. This theory, in different ways, is as old as the spiritual and erotic words of the Bible's Song of Songs and the writings of many of the great mystics of our faith.
Most of all I want to see an end to the sexual/spiritual theological schizophrenia at the heart of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, and I want to be able to meaningfully say to God: "With my body, I Thee worship."
A Sexual Life, A Spiritual Life: A Painful Journey To Inner Peace is published by Liffey Press, Dublin, at €14.99 or £10.99 sterling. Email: bishoppatbuckley@hotmail.com