Bisexual and Orthodox: Encountering the Erotic God

By Lewis H. Whitaker

“I want to unfold. Let no place within me be closed, for where I am closed, there I am false” — Rainer Maria Rilke

As a bisexual person who expresses intimacy with persons across all genders as well as a practicing Eastern Orthodox Christian, there are paradoxes and questions in my sexuality and my faith that I cannot explain. Both pathways are full of contradictions: multiplicities of genders and persons, flesh and spirit, things sacred and common. But part of my mature acceptance of sexuality and spirituality has been learning to live into the mystery of both and learning to live into the questions, while knowing that a full understanding with clarity and precision may be beyond my human limits, and knowing that not knowing is both acceptable and possibly even desirable.

Love can be different than what I was taught. Love can be mysterious and strange and uncharted. Love can take me places that are not on maps drawn by human fingers. I can understand love in languages other than my native tongue.

For me, the great gift of Orthodox spirituality to my bisexuality, and my bisexuality to my Orthodox spirituality, has been the acceptance of the love of God as an erotic love which crosses all boundaries of sex, gender, class, person, race, age, or any other human construct. Nowhere do the deficiencies of English or the paradoxes of faith inform one another more than they do here. Understood correctly, and not in the imperfect form that it has entered the English language, eros is one of four words Greek uses to describe the scope and nature of love. English has only one. Erotic love is not pornographic, but rather intellectual and intense, as is my love for Victorian Literature or Wagnerian Opera. It is strong and powerful, as is my love for teaching and learning. It is intense, and passionate, and wild, and all-consuming, and untamed, as is my desire for a soul-friend or a lover.

Eros is how I experience my love for God.

My erotic love for God involves all parts of myself: my heart, my mind, my soul, and, most significantly, my body. In all of these areas I open myself to all of the energies of God, which go beyond my human conceptions of gender and sex. Nowhere do I close any part of myself to God, for His love for me also has an erotic element. As a bisexual person, I experience no fear or shame at love that presents itself to me in any form, for I know that all shapes and forms of love are holy.

On its most intimate level, when I join my body with worship, I am made aware of a powerful and naked openness, an almost painful knowledge of the nearness of Christ. And I am aware of the closeness and nearness of divine eros, love at its purest, and its most profound.

Orthodox worship is peculiar among Christian traditions in using the entire body for worship. Prayer and Liturgy are not passive actions that I sit and receive, but rather something in which I take an active and participatory role. By joining my body in worship, I am afforded a more tangible glimpse into the transcendence of the Incarnation, one of the Mysteries about which I am unable to speak — unable because I simply cannot form the words with human speech. While the Incarnation is ineffable, I can catch a small glimmer of the joining of Christ’s spiritual body with human form when I use my human body to worship the divine. The explanation is not perfect, but it is something that can be experienced on a physical, visceral level, and I know it in my muscle and in my flesh.

Photo credit: Stefanos Kouratzis.

I use my body in other ways. For example, during the season of Lent, my physical posture changes. I prostrate, kneeling and falling forward onto my knees, hands, and face, as a sign of repentance and humility, offering all of myself, my entire physical body in expiation and penitence. Similarly, I venerate the icons of Christ, His mother, and His saints, by kissing their hands and feet, as if they were themselves present. I touch my head, chest, and shoulders with my fingers, making the sign of the cross rhythmically and repeatedly. And on Good Friday, the starkest day of the Church year, I solemnly kiss the wounds of Christ, imprinted on a long, life-sized embroidered icon of his body. I approach, shedding tears of repentance, pain and loss, for my bridegroom who has been taken away. I kiss the dread wounds on his hands, his feet, and his side. I weep openly and without shame, a man crying out for the loss of the man he loves, who lies naked and unburied before the entire gathered community.

Finally, each Sunday, in the most sublime moment of worship, I take the very Body and Blood of Christ into my own body, receiving Christ into myself in the Divine Liturgy. This moment of communion and consummation (and it is worth noting that this word is also reserved for the sexual culmination that is the private, fleshly seal of the of Sacrament of Matrimony) offers a foretaste of the final, ultimate union with the Holy Trinity that awaits me at the end of time. It is a touchpoint of joy and beauty and eternity.

For me, the intimate, personal, and relational encounter with the Divine is of ultimate importance. For me, no other faith or pathway offers me such an immanent connection to the holy. The connection to God, the unfolding of myself in all of my senses, and with every part of my body, allows me to live my spirituality more fully and my sexuality more truthfully. It makes me more whole, more true, and more fully innervated.

St. Ireneaus, the Bishop of Lyons in the second century claimed that “The Glory of God is the human person fully alive.” My Orthodox Spirituality, in mutual and coeternal union with my bisexual sexuality, gives me not only integrity, but full and complete life.

These two topics, spirituality and sexuality, are easily the most personal and intimate things that I hold deep within my spirit, and they are the most difficult ones to express to any single person except God. To God alone, perhaps, in the privacy of my most secret moments, do I dare attempt to trace the threads that form the fabric of my most intimate and private self. Yet, conversely, they are as close and as intimate — as grounded — as the contours of my own body. For this reason, they are never completely alien to me. They are mysterious, yet they are known.

Spirituality and sexuality, sacred and common, God and human, can ultimately be known to me if I seek them in my own body. There is only truth for me, where I merely unfold.