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Excerpt from Honoring the Body

From Honoring the Body by Rev. Dr. Stephanie Paulsell, adapted by Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh

In her book Honoring the Body, Stephanie Paulsell writes of “the mending power of sexual intimacy” with a story about the novelist Martin Amis:

“After years of unrelenting tooth pain and disease, all of [Martin’s] teeth were removed and replaced. In the midst of this long, excruciating process, he had to wear, for several weeks, a prosthetic device that filled his mouth with saliva, made it difficult for him to talk or eat, and made him feel distinctly unlovely and undesirable. [In a note] to his wife [about] the night after he had been fitted with the false teeth, he writes, ‘That night you came belly-dancing out of the bathroom wearing (a) your silk bathrobe and (b) my teeth. Both were then removed. This was the war against shame. The next morning I woke early and lay there quietly laughing and weeping into the pillow. I felt fragile, guileless, and exquisitely consoled.’

Fragile, guileless, and exquisitely consoled. That’s a pretty good description of how we [can be] rendered by [such intimacy] with a loving partner. Fragile, because it is always a risk to expose ourselves, unguarded, to another. Guileless, because, in the deepest sexual encounters, the many ways we defend ourselves—our masks, our self-deceptions—fall away. And exquisitely consoled. To have our desire met and satisfied by the desire of another is exquisitely consoling. Honoring our own bodies, and honoring another’s body, in this intimate way can lift the soul. It takes trust and courage to simply let ourselves be the sacred and vulnerable creatures we are."