Monday, April 24, 2006

Sermon suggests soul of sex touches the divine

Last year, Rev. Roger Bertschausen gave a sermon that relied heavily on Thomas Moore's Soul of Sex for the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Appleton, Wisconsin. Rev. Bertschausen says in his address: "I want to begin by observing again the weird paradox at the heart of so much of American society today: we both repress sexuality and are obsessed with sexuality. We are simultaneously prudes and voyeurs; we simultaneously flee from sex and are preoccupied with and consumed by sex. I think this troubling paradox probably came to life in America during the Victorian age—and we have not yet escaped its shadow. Maybe this is Victoria’s real secret—a secret we haven’t yet really figured out!
Moore suggests that the answer to all this is soul. As an Emersonian, I find this to be a very appealing answer! After all, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who famously said that the remedy for what ails our world is “first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.” So I agree with Moore: soul is the answer to our repression/ obsession view of sexuality."

The sermon is downloadable as a 5-page PDF file.