Sex, Spirit, Selfhood: A Story of Abuse, Healing, and Transformation

By Dr. Mike Luedde

The pebbles, rocks, and boulders of our wounds and failures litter the path to authentic selfhood. In Sex Spirit Selfhood Mike Luedde offers healing words to those who are faithful to Gods guidance on their journey. As he shares his own experiences of Spirit, attention to the inner life, and openness to Gods love, Dr. Luedde gives hope that God will transform our garbage into gold and shows us the holiness that awaits us in ordinary life.

I found this book hard to put down! Dr. Luedde had me from the beginning.
-Terry Richter, MSW, LCSW

It held me from the first page. Mike inspired me to reflect on my own experience of God.
-Elizabeth Garney, RN

Sex Spirit Selfhood begins with subtlety and builds to a crescendo. It is a courageous book.
-Rev. Robert L. Dees, Hospice Chaplain and Spiritual Director

Mike Luedde eases our entry into an enlightened take on contemporary theology that never overwhelms his dramatic arc. The playful way he describes his mystical experiences is very seductive and quite original. The book was a treat to read. Mike Lueddes prose often sings and sings well. -Lewis Garvin, Poet

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491788196

Dr. Mike Luedde

Dr. Mike Luedde has been a horse trainer, water-ski instructor, sailor, potter, pastor, ski patrolman, psychotherapist, writer, poet, nature photographer, desert hiker, life coach, spiritual director, and professor of family therapy and spiritual direction. He is married to his soul mate and has two children, five grandchildren, two stepchildren, and an amazing dog.

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Copyright © 2016 Mike Luedde.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8820-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8819-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016901328

iUniverse rev. date: 02/18/2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph

Dedication

Chapter One:   Looking For The Holy

Chapter Two:   God Under My Pillow

Chapter Three:   God In Our Suffering

Chapter Four:   Flying With Jesus

Chapter Five:   God In The Throne Room

Chapter Six:   The Playboy God

Chapter Seven:   God Got Your Tongue?

Chapter Eight:   Desert Healing

Chapter Nine:   Cracking Concrete

Chapter Ten:   Remember The Alamo

Chapter Eleven:   Who Do You Think You Are?

Chapter Twelve:   A Dreamy Cathedral

Chapter Thirteen:   God In The Ordinary: The Sanctuary Of Everyday Life

Epilog

References

EPIGRAPH

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours … It is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes God’s self known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

-Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Yes, Christians formally believed that, ‘somehow,’ Jesus was both human and divine at the same time. However, with our largely dualistic thinking we humans were only human, and Jesus, for all practical purposes, was only divine. We missed the major point—which was to put the two together in him and then dare to discover the same in ourselves!

-Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, Daily Meditation 3/17/15

Now, however, the personal, mystical, immediate, and intimate is emerging as the dominant way of engaging the divine. What was once reserved for a few saints has now become the quest of millions around the planet – to be able to touch, feel, and know God for one’s self.

Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution

DEDICATION

I am grateful for the influence of (at least) two women in my life, one my current muse whom I am sure I knew in Heaven before we both embraced this wonderful world of low-vibration energy that we call material, and the other my mother, Jeanne Louise Herring (Jinny Lou) Luedde, a misplaced sad little girl and would-be southern belle.

My beloved wife, Candy, has been patient beyond expectation with my neurotic obsessions and my childhood wounds. She slept beside me in the hospital after cancer surgeries, hikes with me in mountain heights and desert trails, prays with me and for me, and has been my friend and playmate throughout the grace of our time together. She is my ideal reader, my inspiration, a gifted teacher, a heart-melting soprano, and altogether the most decent and loving human being I have known.

As the reader will discover, my relationship with Jinny Lou was more complex. She was emotionally incestuous with my siblings and with me for most of my life and was perhaps physically so as well when I, and perhaps they, were very young. She brought her narcissistic emptiness to me for fulfillment as she leaned on me when my siblings acted out or my father was near his self-imposed death. For many years I have marveled at the love I see between other mothers and their sons. I don’t have such love for her nor did I receive such love from her. I have learned that I don’t know what normal maternal love is.

But in the ways that she could, she loved me. She was conscious of her emptiness and her wounds, and she gave them, finally, to God. She taught me to love God, to seek God, and to know that God alone is the answer to the longing of our souls. Her brokenness became mine, and her hunger for healing brought me to my own.

And so I am grateful to know honest love from my wife that helps sustain my being and grateful to know the broken ambiguous love from Jinny Lou that prompts me always to look farther, to search deeper, and to seek first the realm of divine grace. I dedicate this work to both in the hope that it honors each in her deepest heart: Candy, in her continuing offering of love to her students, to her children, to me, and to the church; and Jinny Lou, in redeeming her memory in honesty and with the promise of healing – may she finally find peace in the arms of the one Lover who can satisfy us all.

CHAPTER ONE

LOOKING FOR THE HOLY

Excuse me, said an ocean fish, You are older than I so can you tell me where to find this thing they call the Ocean?

The Ocean, said the older fish, is the thing you are in now,

Oh, this? But this is water. What I’m seeking is the Ocean, said the disappointed fish as he swam away to search elsewhere."

-Anthony de Mello, S.J., The Song of the Bird

You were the only child I nursed, she said told me. Her words wounded me. I was less than three years old the first time I heard them. I felt neither loved nor privileged. I did not know for years that I what I felt was disgust.

Sex: it can lead us to use others for our own gratification, wound those we claim to love, become an obsessive escape from reality, and ultimately destroy us; or, sex can lead us to fulfillment, augment and celebrate our deepest love, and teach us to overcome our fear in joyful union with our beloved; finally, it can point us toward God, teach us that the desire for union with another is an analog of our deepest heartfelt desire for union with God. It can dull our awareness of anything but itself, or it can enhance our celebration of the Holy in all of reality. Sexuality and the celebration of the senses give vitality to Spirit. Spirit gives order and meaning to the sensual and to sexual longing. Sexuality without Spirit is vacuous. Spirit without sexuality is passionless.

I’m not talking about hooking up or even intercourse, but the erotic desire for relationship – especially our desire for God expressed so richly in the sermons of St. Bernard on the second verse of the Song of Solomon: May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine. That such a verse is rarely the text for a sermon betrays our fear of what we cannot deny within ourselves. We are people of the Incarnation, the Eucharist that happens when matter and Spirit consummate their union and Christ comes once more. In suppression of desire that finds its fulfillment in union with God, the church has castrated Jesus and turned him into an impossibly ephemeral spook in a human suit. And the church has neutered its members and shamed them for their sexuality with the consequent loss of their essential nature as God’s children. How can such a flawed being overcome sexual shame and enter the dimension of the Holy? How can the most holy one, Jesus, really be a sexual human being? We have perverted our identity as sexual beings, denied our identity as spiritual beings, and created a yawning abyss in the center of our hearts that yearns for fulfillment found only in the union of divine holiness with sensual humanity.

As the reader will discover, sex can twist a child’s consciousness into shame. The quest for a pathway that will redeem desire must lead to a new identity grounded in divine love, for only the Holy can heal. I am one among the millions whose lives have been distorted by misdirected desire – that of others and of myself – and the shame that follows.

I have sought the Holy since I was a child only to discover in the third half of my life that the Holy has been seeking me. My earliest childhood friend Sammy and I roamed the field next door where we hunted spitting cobras, carved paths in the jungle with our scout knives, and carefully explored pastures and creek beds where no person had ever stepped. To us the land was virgin, rich in secrets, laden with unexpected dangers, and close at hand. The field lay between our houses, and its virginity lay within our minds. We discovered ourselves in that field, where forts became refuges among giant trees and no carping parent could invade.

I found the Holy in that field with Sammy in the ineffable beauty of all that is created. The natural world transformed in our presence into a temple whose priests were chickens, rabbits, goats, hawks, and horses. The windows of the temple were clouds that spoke knowingly of their sculptor, the invisible One whose voice silently shouted in all that I could see and touch and smell and hear. Holiness overwhelmed me on snake hunts, in the wonders of frogs, and on one quiet snowy day in the midst of winter when I sprawled in my snowsuit, like a polar astronaut, in the soft down of a deep drift and gazed at the steely winter heavens. I knew, without being taught, what every creature teaches. I knew that God saw that all being is good, except, that is, for me. I was creation’s mistake, the one shameful flaw in an otherwise perfect natural universe.

I sought the Holy in church but rarely found it there. My heart went out in compassion to my well-intended pastor as he preached week after week to people whose ears seemed deaf to any challenge from God. I prayed for him until his death and wondered if he thought that it was all worth the effort. Now I have stood where he stood on countless Sundays. I understand the complexities of parish life. Then I was an idealistic youth who was easily bored by duplicity and masks. It is a tragic act to trivialize the Gospel and to sentimentalize Christ. There became better places to be on Sunday mornings. I often fight the urge to run out of church in the middle of worship. I still wonder if it all is worth the effort.

I sought the Holy in the joys of my first real girlfriend. I found it there. She affirmed me and loved me and taught me what I had known but forgotten: that all is good, perhaps even my own being. She celebrated the first lilacs of spring with exquisite joy and reveled in the creations of a loving God. She reawakened my memories of snow banks and virgin fields, and I have never dulled my awareness again in the presence of creation. Sometimes, when I was with her, I even felt that church services were worth enduring. I shall always be in her debt for the lessons I learned from her.

For some reason I have yet to understand, I continued to seek the Holy in the church with the illusory persistence of a wildcatter hoping that his dry hole will one day flow with riches. Once, when I was twenty, I went to the Communion rail at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio. My world split open in that instant. The bread, the cup, and the Spirit fed and filled me. It was years before I could go the rail and watch what happens there: it was too much for my eyes. A Presence in that sacrament – when matter and Spirit united - shouted the same silent joyful Word that was in all of creation, and in that Presence I knew who I was and that I was good. But I left knowledge of my goodness at the altar.

I sought the Holy, and discovered that it sought me, as I became a pastor and a therapist. My consulting room was a sanctuary and awe was a familiar experience. SomeOne happened there, between client and therapist, that was More than either of us could know though we often intuited it together. Gradually I understood that human relationships are the ultimate sacrament, the most powerful means of grace, and I discovered a new and potent form of worship. Not every session was a religious experience: some were boring and some frightening, but in those moments when Real Self could break through the prison bars of egocentricity, the Spirit would dance with joy, and my heart would know that we had once more joined at the Communion rail. Once more creation was in process and new birth was evolving. I often left my office at night with humble prayer. My clients, despite all of their painful complexes and complexity, were discovering their goodness and value. But I was not so confident about my own. My shame and persistent sense of inferiority plagued me. I would not receive what I gave to others.

I sought the Holy from the Abbot of a small Southwestern monastery. An analyst and spiritual leader, he simply listened. We interpreted my dreams. He prayed for me, and sent me off to hike in the mountains. Somehow, it all came together: creation’s hymn of praise, Spirit’s presence in relationship, and the longing of my own Self for wholeness sang in harmony that day, and I am still learning their