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Each spring Body Sacred blooms in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania, a loving community of people who gather to covenant sex and spirit healing with each other for a weekend's span. Body Sacred began Fall of 1993 as a loose, nameless, ecumenical gathering of religious activists called together to think about what kind of group could help heal sex and spirit splits in our world.
Invited because of my work helping people understand bisexuality, I and several other bi activists listened in awe on that closing day six years ago when a handful of elder heterosexual church leaders told the conference how much they wanted to learn from the queer movement's political organizing and coming out models. They thought the newly-budding national polyamory movement could take a lot of cues from the LGBT movement and needed to link with us strongly. Heartened, I made a commitment that weekend to do more of my sex activism with the polyamory movement and spiritual radicals. In the years 1993 to 1999, these commitments have enriched my bisexual activism, my sex education teaching, and my heart, in many ways.
The Body Sacred celebrants gather each year at Kirkridge, a church retreat center founded earlier this century by Christian progressives. The center's simple buildings hug a Delaware Valley ridge just east of Harrisburg; a breathtakingly beautiful site of green-treed vistas and wide swaths of purple-flowered hillsides facing Three Mile Island on the far horizon. TMI's three white towers stand like sentinels across the valley from Kirkridge, their winking lights stark silent reminder of that day two decades ago when the reactor core almost melted and "We All Live in Harrisburg" became a generation's lament.
The Body Sacred's perennial emergence on this landscape evokes "Brigadoon" for me, that mythic, magic Scottish town which rises out of the mist one day each century, its people bound to awaken only during those times, due to an ancient curse. Coming back to Kirkridge now, six years after The Body Sacred's founding, (when I fought hard to keep "Body" in the name of the group, against conservative opposition that it sounded too "earthy" or "dirty"), I'm struck again by that strange cliff-edge we still face --things still may explode if we do not change our culture's sex/spirit split and the massive violence TMI holds for the sacred body of our earth. Yet this is mingled with the heady potential and opportunities crisis brings, and a new sense of hope that maybe we can bring sex-positive spiritual communities back and help them thrive, if only by beginning several days each year.
The Body Sacred was created by people who wanted to spread its energy by word-of-mouth and through circles of sex and spirit, friend to friend (as opposed to mass advertising). It was created to attract a certain sort of person who has already done some personal work on their own sexuality and spirituality and is on the road to putting them together and needs like-minded people to accelerate the process. It is "an ecumenical volunteer educational association interested in assisting networking, dialogue and community-building among those interested in the relationship between sex and spirit; and to witness, collect information, and comment upon the relationship of sexuality and spirituality as it evolves in our changing world."
[Song lyrics were here]
"We are more than one
We are more than two
We are more than
the sum of our parts
We cherish the old
and rejoice in the new
And we meet in the circle
of our hearts."
-- chorus, Ravenheart family song, by Liza Gabriel Ravenheart
The Body Sacred's coordinator for the past three years was the amazing Liza Gabriel Ravenheart, a member of the five-person Ravenheart family from northern California. They live with three other erotically bonded extended family members. Liza is also last year's vice president of Church of All Worlds (CAW), one of the oldest neo-pagan groups in this country.
Liza and the rest of The Body Sacred planning committee created an exquisite vessel for this year's 1999 gathering, governed by what she calls "the open boundaries of erotic space," and sealed with an covenant between all that what takes place there stays there (in terms of names and experiences beyond one's own), and that erotic energy and intense body and spirit explorations, including nudity, are welcomed and encouraged.
With this the group consents as a whole that expressions among us will remain this side of genital, this side of orgasm; poised on that sweet edge, respecting and working with the aroused energy of sex and spirit merged, for all it's worth. (Of course, what one does with oneself or others on one's own time, between sessions, is entirely up to you. Your joyous reverent connection to life is praised in each and every introductory rap and teaching exercise and you're surrounded by loving energy, beautiful nature and delicious food all weekend.
Making this group-wide genital/orgasm boundary has an interesting effect - it creates safety for people along a wide range of comfort levels and encourages intimate communication and transformation that might not otherwise take place, if sex were rushed into too precipitously or the body left too swiftly for meditative trance on other planes.
I loved the way we were encouraged to play joyously with our sexual/chi/life energy together in a spirit of trust and connection. Each session started with dancing; the music an eclectic mix of partying and trance-like world sounds, people aged 20-70 naked or half-clothed, moving in and out of rhythm waves, unwinding, stretching, shaking out. The first day we made a HeartWheel -- two circles, inner and outer, facing, sharing deep eye contact with each person in turn. "This person in front of you has come to represent The Body Sacred...look at them with gratitude..."
The rest of the weekend's activities were heavily concentrated on massage exchanges, breathwork, periodic check-in sharing times in small "family (support) groups," and one afternoon devoted to workshops - both experiential and discussion. The leaders managed to get through the entire weekend without invoking any one tradition's set of deities or values, continually validating a variety of paths and encouraging people to find what works for them and to pursue it.
The Body Sacred participants are about half new and half return-celebrants. Each year the group is different but with continuity threads that keep the spirit moving along certain sure lines. When I walked into the first night's dance and saw several people already naked and sweaty, kicking up a musical group storm, I knew the level of comfort with nudity had changed since six years ago when none of us knew if it were permissible or not. This year there was more cheerful chaos, a mad medley of clothed and unclothed, scarved and costumed creatures. "This first day is more where we got to after four days, several years ago," I heard someone say, verifying my assumption that the group's thriving is in and of itself speeding up some of the intimacy and risk-taking allowed.
Having been absent for the group's development over the past five years and after co-leading a bisexuality workshop at that first gathering in 1993, I notice other changes too. There is much more of an easy relaxed acceptance of various sexualities, among men as well as women. There is much more of an acceptance of paganism as a valid spiritual path. And there is much more wild dancing. Some of the church elders are gone, though I feel their blessing for us still. And, I'd like to see this Body Sacred spirit move more into the churches and synagogues and mosques, not just the pagan community too.
There seems to be this tribal need now to merge and cling and process to points of release. As Liza says in an Intimate Explosion newsletter, "What I feel emerging is a web with many centers of power and many viewpionts and approaches." There are community efforts like Body Sacred happening in an increasing variety of geographic areas. Liza writes about Celebrations of Sexuality and Spirituality in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as The Body Sacred in Pennsylvania, but there are other groups I have heard about in Seattle, in Atlanta, in New York State, in Tennessee.
The Body Sacred itself is moving in several different directions and it remains to be seen where it will most focus or flow. I participated in several discussions there about its future. A Body Sacred VII and VIII are planned for Spring 2000 and for Spring 2001, and there are a variety of opinions about how it should grow. In addition to The Body Sacred Weekend, which will continue, people talked about wanting to convene a summit of sacred sex leaders - for exchange and collaboration, as well as wanting to offer more structured leadership training to help more people become sex and spirit teachers themselves.
There is also some interest in becoming a political, advocacy lobby for sex and spirit in our society. As Liza says in her article, "In my daily life I am meeting and sharing love and connection with many powerful souls, more all the time. People who are emerging into an experience of sexuality and spirituality that is deeply personal . . . What I feel emerging is love, trust, recognition, compassion, consensus and cooperation. I feel I have a family. Some of them I may never even meet, yet we are swimming in the same stream. We are living the same dream."
To find out more about The Body Sacred and its West Coast sister group, Millenial Connections, sponsors of The Celebration of Sacred Sexuality, visit their website (http://sacrendsexuality.org). This summer, Liza and other members passed the mantle of coordinator of The Body Sacred to Carol Schoenleber. You can reach her at cschoeny@slip.net. "The Intimate Explosion" newsletter's email address is AniColt@aol.com.