Agape Sluts Happy Hour: Casual Convos w/ Kate on Christian Eroticism

I know, I know—Agape Sluts. Yikes. It’s provocative, alarming, maybe even offensive. It made even me cringe when it first popped into my awareness. No fucking way, I thought. It’s different, perhaps, from the more general, earthy and over-all uncontroversial feel-good work I’ve engaged in for many years—though at the time, much of that felt risky in it’s own way. Psychic energy medicine—isn’t that out there enough?? Apparently not.

I’ll still be doing all the other work I have been doing. And I know this new work may activate or trigger you. It may make you unsubscribe. It may turn you off of me completely. I am wrestling with that possibility and likelihood.

Even so, it feels important to share this work, as well as some of the process behind it. The creative period I’ve been in over the last several months has felt incredibly risky, unbound and tentative, though in a way the erotic has always been a kind of underground thread of my work, surfacing here in there or present just out of sight. Of course that’s how Eros plays and flirts in the world at large. They are coming more into the open now, at least for me, and calling me to do the same. I don’t know where it will take me. I do my best (daily!) to respond to the impulse of Spirit, best as I can sense them in their multiplicity. Between that ‘thy-will-be-done’ flavored practice and the weave of my various ancestries and identities, there simmers and coalesces now into a new-ish curiosity about embodiment, spiritual practice, sexuality, christianity, untold parts of my own experience, and living in a good enough way cross/interculturally and with creation. You may have seen hints of it in my Triduum blog, or last month’s podcast with Tada. It emerges slowly, but clarifies bit by bit.

This is one version of my wondering:

What happens when Christians relate to the beings of our own lineage with (more) secure attachment and a sensate pelvic bowl (ie. an aware gut and thawed genitals)?

You might be like: what does that even mean or have to do with anything??? I can explain some, but I also posit the question to each of you and your own body. Whatever you notice in response to the question is data. It is the primary ‘research’ question of Agape Sluts, a new offering I’m curating as an experimental/experiential space for Christian-inspired eroticism.

Agape Sluts might be for you if you:

• are a ‘recovering Christian,” Christian animist, or formerly Christian person who isn’t (uncuriously) scared/offended by the word “slut” or sexy thoughts about Mary.

• want to explore relating to/with Christian ancestral beings as/through Eros—that is, that elemental erotic essence/being which has had many names but which has made itself known to me and (I believe) to the early followers of The Way by the name “Jesus.”

• are totally confused about all of the above, but feel curious, a little afraid, turned on, or any other clues of that spark of desire telling you that you want to be in this kind of conversation.

My guiding curiosity has been my own surprising experiences of sacred sexuality through Jesus as Lover/Eros/Shakti, as well as the quest for a less anxious relationship with my christian lineage and better attachment to the created world at large.

In my opinion the Christian tradition has sterilized the erotic force in innumerable ways, desexualizing Jesus, demoting the divine nature and spiritualizing the bodily reality of Mary, and preferencing Agape over Eros. Very boring, and probably why Jesus is always wearing that silly loin cloth.

But this has also had very real and devastating consequences to the world impacted by a sex-phobic, hypermasculine, white, colonially-driven Christianity devoid of an erotic sense of embodied connectivity to and with creation.

For many people shaped by this legacy, it has left us spiritual orphans, devoid of truly nourishing cultural and ancestral resources, addicted to business and burnout, in constant replay of the savior-victim dynamic, and with dry, stiff, shame-ridden, turned-off bodies that can’t dance or feel subtle pleasures of any kind.

This is why I just know, at least for me: we need to try this whole Jesus thing in a radically different way. Thus, allow me to welcome you to: