I don’t understand guilt” said my supervisor, an antipodean atheist.

I had just been describing another client in trouble and their self-lacerating I’m-a-bad-person-and-I-must-therefore-suffer moan that Catholicism seems to inculcate, like a cultured mould, in the psyches of its subjects. “More Catholic guilt” I had said, by way of shorthand, to describe their state of mind, for I’ve heard it many times before in my work. He looked at me, eyebrow raised, the devil’s advocate, the man from Mars.
Imagine not understanding guilt. As an intellectual exercise, it’s quite a challenge for me. I don’t mean the guilt when you forget a birthday or lose your temper or don’t call someone back when you said you would, the venials that are forgiven in an instant with a sorry. I mean the tortuous frenzied shame of the sinner, desperate for absolution, appealing for redemption from anyone who will listen. But it’s never chaste folk who give themselves this self-flagellating orgy. It’s reserved, as a special treat, for those of us who have given in to the temptations of the flesh.

“Is sex dirty?” asks Woody Allen: “Only if it’s done right”. As someone who, when the mood takes me, can get it very right, sex for me is a Dionysian rite, a form of abandonment to the Freudian id, swept away by the whirlwind until I come to earth with a bump. Afterwards, I tidy myself up and try to make sense of the experiences I’ve had, with blurry reminders of the deeper truth, that our desires can crush us and destroy us, as well as liberate us, and overwhelm us with pleasure.

The body, the part that is most animal about us, is an instrument waiting to be played, if we have the imagination. The mind, that most sexual of organs, can eroticise practically anything. The erotic is ungovernable, uncontainable, and threatens order, status quo – that is its function, to change us, to bring us to the frontier of life and death.
It is my earnest belief that the only way to deal with the chaos and confusion of sex is to talk about it, embrace it, negotiate it, laugh about it. Put words to the experience if we can, if not music or dance. If we don’t, if we enforce prohibition, then it goes underground and becomes even more compulsive and powerful, fighting back with a dark and furious passion.

And this discussion must happen early in adolescence, while the hormones are driving us crazy. Any later, and the opportunity has been missed; mistakes can already have been made, patterns already established, germs already passed on, terminations already arranged, secrets already buried. We’re as sick as our secrets.
Prohibition doesn’t work, in all areas of life. And shame-based religions are especially invidious in enforcing prohibition, because of their talent to get their flock to internalise it, almost like a shame-inducing microchip, popular in a dozen sci-fi movies.
This sin-chip causes the victim to squirm in a frenzy of mortified almost-pleasurable agony when the prohibition has been violated. Which is most of us, when we have really intense let-it-all-hang-out sex. If a moral code creates a polarity, like a see-saw, with body on one end and spirit on the other, then the body’s needs will inevitably force a loss of balance, and bring one crashing down to earth at some stage or other, on the “wrong” side – the remorse comes from the belief that one has abandoned morality and goodness.

But there is a different way – embracing sexuality as something sacred, to change one’s mindset and abandon the old Judeo-Christian polarity. If all sex is a spiritual act, even the most fleeting and seemingly unemotional, if communion between people in a physical sense is viewed as intrinsically good, then it changes the nature of sex – it’s no longer furtive and seedy.

In a funny way, it makes it less exciting, less dangerous; but we are also less distant from our usual sense of self. We are more present and emotional in the sex, and it’s kinder and more respectful. We keep the baby with the bathwater, and find meaning and satisfaction in every exchange. But this approach, as sane and healthy as it may be, is viewed with hostility by most mainstream churches. Because it makes them redundant.

The issue of homosexuality is, rightly, concerning established churches now, and becoming the number one item on their agenda. The Anglicans are going to split over the appointment of a gay bishop in the US. The Vatican, currently campaigning politically and viciously against the introduction of gay marriage all over the world, is making a nonsensical stand against the inevitable, but also revealing how its power comes from governing and maintaining the split between body and spirit. In so doing, only it can be the moderator, the confessor, the redeemer. It’s an obnoxious way of regulating a society, for it’s taking advantage of human nature.

As homosexuality is here to stay, saying that gay marriage is “immoral, unnatural, and harmful” flies in the face of logic. But the damage that that stance causes among young gay kids in Catholic families is something that causes me deep pain and anger. How much longer will the curse of sexual shame be passed on through the generations? For what reason? In whose name?