Can We Be Both Holy and Horny?

On Catholic mysticism, yearning for Jesus, and the sanctity of queer love.

Photo: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (Getty Images)

The thesis that I submitted for Harvard Divinity School was titled, Is Jesus Kinda Hot? Instead of composing an entirely new body of work for my final, I decided instead to chip away at a book I’ve been working on since before I enrolled. The sample chapter that I sent to my publisher details my adolescent observations that Jesus was…well, kinda hot. I got a boner in church when I was looking at the crucifix—but you’ll have to wait for the book for the rest of that story.

The more I unearthed the historical Jesus, though, the more I realized he looked nothing like the lithe, six-packed, blonde-and-blue-eyed Jesus of my Catholic church’s imagination. In reality, Jesus was probably short, either Black or brown, with dark wooly hair and a beard. This isn’t to say Jesus wasn’t hot in the historical context—but for me, someone who worked in magazine covers and the beauty industry for over a decade, this was a startling revelation. I began to wonder: Who stood to benefit from the whitewashing of Jesus’ image? Alternatively, who stood to feel marginalized by this artistic revision? Did this rendering of Jesus stand to equate whiteness with divinity? Could this mythological Jesus therefore be propped up as a tool of a white, conservative Christian empire—even though he himself was ostensibly neither white nor all that fond of empire? 

This was an essential component of my studies at Harvard, but because it’s so central to my forthcoming book, it’s not something I’m ready to have out in the world just yet. It also represents a pre-formed notion that I had before entering the Divinity School. So instead of elaborating on that topic, I want to use this idea of Hot Jesus to help me pull on (sorry!) a new thread I discovered during my studies.

There was a common belief in my Catholic schooling that our nuns—or, the Sisters, as we sometimes called them—were married to Jesus. Adults always felt compelled to offer us this explanation, maybe because they thought we schoolchildren would be startled by the concept of an unmarried, adult woman. I never heard, for example, that the priests were married to, say, the Virgin Mary. The nuns’ devotion to Jesus was supposed to mirror a wife’s devotion to her husband which, in retrospect, is quite a troubling power dynamic. If Jesus was involved in the eternal judgment of our souls, what was the Church then saying about a man’s power over his bride? 

I was reminded of this metaphor when I was enrolled in a class about the Catholic mystic, Teresa of Avila. In her writings, Teresa expresses a powerful, all-consuming love for Jesus Christ—one that at times causes her physical agony. She wrote about her soul being a crystalline castle with many rooms. The deeper she prayed, she thought, the deeper inside the chambers of the castle she could go, until she was reunited with her bridegroom, the Lord. Teresa writes about Jesus like he is the ultimate heartthrob. Throughout her books, I kept on envisioning the rapture—of teenage fangirls at a Harry Styles concert. 

Teresa’s writing is widely noted (not just by me) for its eroticism. Bernini made a famous statue inspired by one of her visions: it depicts our Saint being pierced by an angel’s flaming arrow. Despite the violence of the scene and the fiery pain Teresa detailed in her writing, Bernini sculpts her with her eyes closed, and her mouth open in what can only be described as a mystical orgasm. The name of this piece—The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa—captures the paradox of her experience. It was (in certain contexts and in certain time periods) acceptable for women of the Church to experience the divine in a fully embodied, metaphysical way. 

But (said no one ever) what about the men? We read a lot of them at Harvard Divinity School, after all, and it didn’t take much analysis to realize that the old boys of the Church were also engaging in an erotic kind of devotion. And yet, we’d be hard pressed to find larger-than-life statues of monks burning with lust for Jesus the same way we do with Teresa. On the one hand, this might be because our society will always find a way to sexualize women, even if that’s not exactly what the woman herself intended with her words. On the other, we might assume a level of objectivity or a lack of emotionality from holy men, because those characteristics are traditionally coded as masculine. 

After we finished Teresa’s autobiography, a colleague of mine voiced her outrage at Bernini’s sculpture. She considered it to be a violation of Teresa’s faith to place her on display in such an obviously sexual scene. Teresa was a woman of the cloth, and this posthumous artwork could be seen as violating her modesty or making a caricature of her mystical experiences. Her argument was sound, for sure, and it was echoed by feminist theologians. This particular artwork of Teresa stands out for its sexual connotations—and it’s hard to point to an artwork of a male mystical experience that occupies the popular imagination quite like it. 

But I also wondered if it erased the possibility that Teresa could be experiencing something deeply holy and also…a little horny? After all, if part of the mystical experience was about learning how to use our embodiment to achieve a transcendent spiritual experience, it kind of stood to reason that one might get a little aroused in the process. And it’s only under our moral imagination (which is, in and of itself, deeply informed by religiosity) that physical arousal is rendered unclean or dirty. Maybe our mystics show us there could be a way to reconcile the two. Could we, their readers, ever free ourselves from the holy versus horny binary?

The Bible has been interpreted to say a lot about sex and sexuality—none of it all that fun, at least if you ask a homosexual. That’s why the Song of Songs is such a confounding and beautiful piece of scripture. As the Judaic scholar Marcia Falk notes, the Song of Songs is the only text in the Torah or the Bible that is predominantly narrated by a woman—a Black woman, at that. Our female narrator, known as the Bride, is exceptional for her sensual and erotic descriptions of her Bridegroom, who she says has “cheeks like spices” and “lips like lilies.” She is also extraordinary because she is no Disney damsel who waits for her beloved to rescue her from the castle; the Bride of the Song actively pursues her lover through the city streets, yearns and begs for his kiss, and even faces punishment for trying to meet with him. 

The Song of Songs is one of the most beloved of both the Jewish and Christian holy texts, and is valued as the sole romantic love story of these scriptures. Interestingly, the word “God” is absent from its pages. Some scholars believe the Song predates the Torah and the Bible, and point to its recitation at wine halls as proof of its secular nature. It’s possible that it existed as a treasured love poem (or series of poems) that was adopted into the religious tradition because of its value to the people. According to this timeline, the Holy Men would then give the Song its allegorical meaning: a metaphor for God’s love (the bridegroom) for Israel (the bride) in Judaism, or for God/Jesus (the bridegroom) and his worshippers (the bride) in Christianity.

It’s easy to see why the Song would become beloved by mystics in the Catholic tradition—these were holy people who delved deeply into scripture to try and find hidden and expansive meanings in between the lines. The mystical tradition also encouraged a deep and particular form of prayer, particularly with the Psalms. The theologian and mystic John Cassian urged his followers to envision themselves as the narrator of the Psalms during their prayers. In this exercise, he said, you could better visualize the Biblical tradition, which could in turn lift you up and bring you closer to God. 

However, this meant that the male followers of this tradition would therefore need to place themselves in the bridal shoes of the woman narrating the Song of Songs. In God’s Beauty Parlor, the theologian Stephen D. Moore (gleefully) details this longstanding tradition of homoerotic scriptural interpretation among male monastic communities. Moore shows how some of the most prominent male names in the Catholic tradition—Origen, Saint John of the Cross, Bernard of Clairvaux, and more—envisioned themselves as the brides of Jesus Christ. Their writings are lit up with graphic descriptions of the body of Christ, musings of his unearthly beauty, and desires to feel, kiss, or taste him. Saint John of the Cross even begs for Jesus’ breast, as though he wants to suckle from it like a babe. Poor Bernard spends about 80 sermons begging for the kiss of Jesus’ mouth, like he’s a schoolboy pining for love in his diary. Some of these holy men experienced their most prolific writing when envisioning themselves as the brides of Christ and, all these years later, we’re still studying them with reverence at Divinity Schools. 

One could call these writings homoerotic in nature because it was men yearning for Jesus’ intimacy. You could also see how this mysticism encouraged a transgender experience, since men thought it was holy to envision themselves as women to best be received by their Lord, their King. Undoubtedly, many would view my contemporary reading of these meditations as sacrilegious, especially since the Catholic Church frowns upon homosexuality, gay marriage, and transgender people. 

But I’m not asserting that anyone here is gay or trans or queer. (I’m also not not asserting that, because how could we ever really know?) Labeling anything in this way misses the bigger point. To access the innermost chambers of their souls, these holy men had to give up what it meant to be men entirely. The mystical tradition teaches us many things about the body, but a common thread among its luminaries is the desire to give up the body so we can achieve a sublimation of the soul. There, it is not the gender, the expression, or the sexuality that matters. In front of God, what matters is that we’ve been able to transcend all of that meaning to ascend to the truth. This is, despite itself, a queer vision. 

According to these mystical readings, we can better reach spiritual enlightenment when we put ourselves in the shoes of those unlike us and try to see what their soul can teach us. The politics of Christian Empire feels meek when faced with this revelation of our collective spiritual power—the belief that each of us has something valuable to bring before God. If God sees our souls and not our gender, then why are members of the Christian right trying to eliminate transgender people? If holy men can spend their lives worshipping and waxing poetic about their male savior, why would he care at all about same-sex couples?

It says everything that to achieve their transcendent form of prayer, holy men of old had to close their eyes, don a bridal dress, and beg for the kiss of a man. The purest love they’d ever experience was, in its essence, spiritually queer. In this way, I found an unexpected familiarity in this Catholic tradition. It is only a radical, rule-breaking, empire-defying, rebellious, libidinous, fiery kind of love that will bring us before the face of God. And on this Earth, the closest example we have to that lies in queerness.