(Editor's note: After reading the m.s. of Daniel's new book, I commented enthusiastically: In engaging, easy-to-read prose, Helminiak addresses the central work of religion and spirituality today: to tease out the rich meaning and significance behind the myths and doctrines that have come down to us in the great traditions without getting trapped in literalism and superstition, that is, to rearticulate religion so it makes sense--and makes sense especially to--and about--us lesbians and gay men who have been so influential in creating religion and yet who have been so victimized by it. In this collection of essays spanning his career as theologian, Scripture scholar, psychologist, and gay spiritual apologist, Helminiak shows how true Christianity is not at all inimical to modern GLTB/queer consciousness. The essays on heaven as everlasting orgasm and on the homosexual modeling of relations within the Blessed Trinity are delightfully provocative and downright queerly brilliant."

You can see why I chose this excerpt for inclusion in White Crane--TJ)

For one who believes in God, the endless longing of human sexual desire points ultimately to God. The theist understands the one, the true, the good, and the beautiful to be an expression of God. So the whole of the universe is God's good creation, and the ultimate desire of the human heart is the Creator-God of the Universe. So the theist can pray with Saint Augustine, "Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Sexual desire is somehow a longing for God.

Moreover, believers find hope in knowing that God made human love sexual--whereas angels, in contrast on the one hand, traditionally understood to be unembodied spirits, know no passion or physical arousal in their spiritual love; and other animals, on the other hand, have sex but do not make love and cannot savor the beauty and goodness of their sexual experiences. So believers continue to hope in the face of sexual frustration. They trust that somehow the good God, who in drawing the universe forward to its fulfillment, does heal the flaws, accidental or culpable, that foul their attempts to experience sexual integration and satisfaction. They believe that God at work in the universe does want them to have fulfilling sexual experiences.

Traditional Christianity affirms the Incarnation, the belief that the Eternal Son of God became human in Jesus Christ. This belief confirms the goodness of humanity: if humanity was good enough for God, it must, indeed, be good. Therefore, despite the overwhelming bulk of Christian practice, Christian doctrine must radically affirm that sex is good. Indeed, the Eternally-Begotten of God, Jesus Christ, as a real human being, certainly experienced sexual responses of one kind or another. In Jesus Christ, God became sexual. On the other hand, according to Christian belief, as exemplified in Christ and promised to all in the Holy Spirit, every human being is destined for divine glory. Humanity is to share in divinity--and this humanity includes sexuality. Thus, from both points of view--divine and human: God becomes human, and humans become divine--Christian belief insists that human sexuality is worthy of God.

Accordingly, a person's personal unity of body, psyche, and spirit and a loving couple's unity with each other are actually a growing participation in the very life and unity of God. Sexuality is geared not only to interpersonal human communion but also to human deification. Sexual encounters will have their ultimate fulfillment in human union with God.

So human lovers, sometimes frustrated in their sexual experiences with each other, may look forward to an ultimate fulfillment of their aching for each other. Their deepest longings will be satisfied. Their unity is to be like that of God, about which John 17:21-23 has Jesus say, "May they all be one; even as you, Father, are in me and I in you, may they also be in us... May they be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, may they become perfectly one."

According to Christian belief, heavenly fulfillment in God is not merely spiritual. It involves more than the human spirit, for it depends on "resurrection of the body." Belief in resurrection of the body means that the human being, as such, body, psyche, and spirit, is to be restored and fulfilled. Accordingly, resurrection of the body implies not only some transformation of the human body but also some perfection of the human psyche. Christian belief affirms perfect human integration as the heavenly destiny of every human being. In heaven one's human spirit is to reach its ideal fulfillment through participation in divine knowledge and love. But because of the unity of the human person, the psyche and body must also be perfected. The human spirit could not reach its perfections apart from the perfection of the body and psyche, which support and sustain the human spirit. Human fulfillment depends on the harmonious integration of all three of these human factors. So Christian faith expects full human integration--according to the model of Jesus: resurrected from the dead, united with God, and living as human in a glorified body.

Christian resurrection means perfection of all three: human body, psyche, and spirit. Specific focus on sexuality highlights another implication of this belief. Full actuation of the human body and psyche along with perfect integration of the human spirit would be nothing other than eternal orgasm. Then heaven would be an on-going sharing in divinity, which would entail ever fuller spiritual fulfillment, which, in turn, would entail never ending arousal and actuation of the body and psyche--a continuous experience of peak "turn on." Heaven could be conceived as making love with God and in God with everyone else and with the whole universe--all at the peak of never-ending arousal, eternally.

Such graphic sexual imagery is actually very Christian. Ephesians 5:23-32, for example, compares the Christian's union with Christ to the marital union of husband and wife. And a long-standing, though prudish, Christian tradition--almost despite itself--insisted on reading the Bible's Canticle of Canticles, a blatantly obvious love poem, as a spiritual meditation on the soul's love for God.

Admittedly, that conception of eternal orgasm is somewhat fanciful, but it has its validity. It is fanciful because it presumes that a resurrected body would still function as human bodies now do. But Jesus himself said that in the resurrection there would be no marrying and taking in marriage and all would become like the angels (Matthew 21:23-32; Mark 12:18-27; Luke 20:27-38). However, his point was merely to insist on the resurrection, not really to explain its mode, for he was refuting a counter-argument whose absurd core was an elaborate tale of multiple marriages. So Jesus' teaching does not eliminate the possibility of orgasm in heaven.

This conception also has its validity because it merely insists on the happy and wholesome actuation of the human body and psyche in heaven. And the experience of sexual arousal and orgasm is as valid an example of such actuation as any other one could present. Indeed, among all the biological and psychic functions, because of its radically out-going nature, sexuality seems unique in its ability to express the spiritual dynamism within the human--and hence to express union with the divine.

Concern for union with God envisages earthly sexual experience as some anticipation of human fulfillment in heaven, and in heavenly fulfillment it sees the continuation and perfection of our sexual experience on earth. Because of the unbounded reach of human spirit and in light of belief in union with God, the on-going integration of sexuality and spirituality must be seen as a process of deification.

Whereas a former Western era saw sexuality as opposed to spirituality, contemporary understanding insists that the two move hand in hand. Thus, a consideration of human sexuality provides the ideal example of human integration and shows that human integration is the sum and substance of spiritual integration. By its very nature, the human is spiritual, so in humans sexuality powers and expresses spirituality.

The human spiritual capacity emerges from its psychic and organic underpinnings. Human spirit can soar in its open-ended embrace of the universe only if the body and the psyche support it. By their very natures, the biological dimension of human sexuality is out-going, and the psychic dimension is bonding. They anticipate and foster the open-ended outreach of the human spirit and the attainment of the unity of all things that is its goal. When sexuality is the focus and human genuineness or authenticity rules the field, the human body, psyche, and spirit all move in one direction. Body and psyche instigate and support the ever self-transcending extraversion of the human spirit. Orgasm and romance sustain human caring. Interpersonal sexual sharing is spiritual communion. Human spiritual communion points to a fulfillment in what believers call "God."