Together

Wow. Get a load of this. From Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah.

We b elieve that much of the thinking about the self of educated Americans, thinking that has become almost hegemonic in our univ ersites and much of our middle class, is based on inadequate social science, impoverished philosophy, and vacuous theology. There are truths we do not see when we adopt the language of radical individualism. We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to our selves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love, and learning. All of our activity goes on in relationships, groups, associations and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by them.

And this... from David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise, where the above was quoted.

But the ultimate problem with spiritual freedom is that it never ends. As [the American philosopher Richard]Rorty points out, it widens endlessley, Freedom means always keeping your options open, so it means you never settle on truth, you never arrive, you can never rest. The accumulation of spiritual peak experiences can become like the greedy person's accumulation of money. The more you get, the more you hunger for more. The life of perpetual choice is a life of perpetual longing as you are prodded by the inextinguishable desire to try the next new thing. But maybe what the soul hungers for is ultimately not a variety of interesting and moving insights but a single universal truth. Dostoeyevsky has the Grand Inquisitor say, "For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living."

Huh.

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about S/M as a spiritual path. And, I've spent my life in the Episcopal church. Spirituality and religion.

The Christian tradition has a lot to offer. Birth, marriage, death are given meaning and a context. There is a place to go--a safe harbor--when things go really really wrong. My experience is not about People With Answers. It's about a group of people who are sure that they don't know. And together, they ask questions and try to find answers.

And S/M has a lot to offer. Connection with your body, and with the man you play with, exploration of the limits of human experience, alternate states of consciousness.

Can the two be brought together? Well, that's not a great idea. I'm not sure how I'd feel about whipping in church. Put it this way: is there a way to import the community and the tradition of organized religion to the diffuse collection of people who engage in kink?

Hmmmm.

Hmm.

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