From Abstinence to Polyamory

Sunday, May 8, 2005

Rev. Gretchen Woods

Opening Words:

Love comes in many forms: love for nature, love for the arts, love for children, love for friends, love in primary relationships. It is part of our spiritual discernment to open our selves to deeper understanding and wider love for the many forms of human expression of love. We may be asked to unlearn stereotypes and listen more closely. If that bring greater truth, so be it!

Sermon: “From Abstinence to Polyamory”

Happy Mother’s Day! I cannot let this day go unremarked. Mother’s Day was instituted by Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian, to encourage mothers to work for peace in our world. Let us never forget that. It has become another “Hallmark Holiday,” which I hope will bring some peace and rest to mothers in our world. I need to acknowledge that some of us had difficult relationships with our mothers, relationships which affect our relationships with others. Some of us have been blessed with mothers who have been sources of love, enlightenment, and encouragement for our lives. Some, like me, have experienced the full spectrum of relationship with our mothers and continue to puzzle over this as we struggle to provide guidance to our children.

So what better topic to discuss on Mother’s Day, than the thing that made us mothers: sex? When I first came to this congregation, the leaders of the “Our Whole Lives” program, which is the sequel to the ground-breaking “About Your Sexuality” curriculum, requested that I offer a sermon on an aspect of sexuality every year. This is the 2005 edition.

I usually offer this sermon on the Sunday before my birthday, which would not occur without sex. But this year, the complications of our service schedule set it at this date. We are never bored. . .

In this congregation we like to encourage open conversation on a wide range of conflicted and conflicting subjects as part of our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” while affirming and promoting the “inherent worth and dignity of every person.” In past we have considered various gender expressions. Some feel we talk about this too much. Some feel we talk about it too little. We continue to deal with the reality that gender expression is still one of the few areas for which one may be openly discriminated against through our civil laws. ‘Nough said.

Today, I feel called to address varied forms of sexual expression because Unitarian Universalists are becoming more open about the variety of sexual expression that already occur within our congregations. I have yet to serve a congregation in which the range of expression from abstinence to polyamory was NOT included within the relationships of congregants. At our General Assemblies since 2001, polyamorous folks have gathered to discuss their sexual expression. So what do we make of this?

Some of us view conversation about sexual expression as uncomfortable “over-sharing.” Others long for acknowledgement of their way of being human and seek a way to “come out of the closet” about their particular expression and to find others they might never know share their experience. They recognize that varied styles of sexual expression have occurred for millennia and are accepted in other cultures, unlike current “family values” imposition of norms.

As I considered the title for this sermon, I realized that there was a step beyond abstinence that I had disregarded: asexuality. Asexuality is not the same as abstinence. As one web site on asexuality states: “Celibate people choose to abstain from sexual relationships, while asexual people simply don't feel compelled to form them.” An asexual person simply does not feel a desire to engage in sexual expression at all. As the site notes, “While there are many people who don't experience much in the way of sexual attraction there are only a few who describe themselves with the term ‘asexual.’” (AVEN)

A person who chooses abstinence is not necessarily asexual. For any of a number of reasons, some people choose no to have sex, even though they have sexual desire. Unfortunately, many who choose abstinence don’t actually practice it. Recent studies of youth who are taught abstinence in schools indicate that the educational process is highly unsuccessful. Youth who are taught abstinence are more likely to have unprotected pre-marital sex than those who acknowledge their sexual desires and prepare to act upon them. Of course, the whole issue of celibacy for religious reasons is so fraught with difficulty, that that must wait for another time. Many blame celibacy for the recent difficulties of the Roman Catholic Church, for one example.

Monogamy is the norm for our society and has been for a long time. Our civil laws assume “ one man, one woman.” The recent effort to broaden that view of sexual expression has found just how strong the emotional commitment to this norm is. We may discuss the varied positions this pairing may assume, but we mostly assume this pairing. That is why the few books that offer another view are often banned or hidden away. Monogamy is expected, supported by most religions, and revered as the only way to raise children to be healthy adults.

The paradox is that it is rarely practiced throughout a lifetime. One of my friends was told by her father, when she yearned for a monogamous response from her husband, “You should have married a swan!” What we often experience is serial monogamy or other more varied expressions, hidden away from honest discovery. Even in the Victorian era, women and men had special friends who were accepted into the normative family with varying degrees of sexual expression as part of the package. No one yet knows for certain if Henry David Thoreau enjoyed a sexual relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second wife, Lydia, while Emerson was out of the lecture circuit and Thoreau was helping raise his children. The household was certainly a polyglot of relationships that overlapped and intermingled in ways astonishing to most staid Unitarians of the time.

Which brings us to polyamory, the subject that many advocates of same-sex marriage want kept quiet until civil rights are attained for monogamous same-sex couples. The fear is that becoming open about other forms of sexual expression will inevitably set back the legal possibilities for those who want to follow the societal norm. Are you still with me here? Sigh . . . I think it helps that I am out here in Corvallis where what I say won’t be picked up by the media and used to lambaste Unitarian Universalism.

As a few Unitarian Universalist ministers came into the ministry with multiple partners, polyamory among us has come “out of the closet.” So what is polyamory? According to a generic polyamory website:

Polyamory means "loving more than one". This love may be sexual, emotional, spiritual, or any combination thereof, according to the desires and agreements of the individuals involved. . .

The Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness web site says:

Polyamory is the potential for loving more than one person within a given period of time. Here we’ll define “love” as a serious, intimate, romantic, stable, affectionate bond which a person has with another person or group of people. Responsible non-monogamy is another way of saying polyamory, and it is used to distinguish polyamory from “cheating.”

Polyamory is a general term covering a wide variety of relationship styles, including group marriage (polyfidelity), open marriage, expanded family, intimate network, and some kinds of intentional community.

Polyamory is a relationship choice available to people of any sexual orientation. Sometimes language familiar to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people is used to describe aspects of living as a polyamorous person (such as "coming out" as polyamorous). However, there are polyamorous people of all sexual orientations, just as there are monogamous people of all sexual orientations.

Polyamory is often confused polygamy and polyandry. Both assume that one person of one sex or the other is the focal point of the power in the relationship(s), holding power-over the other or others in the relationship. Further, this is also often confused with “free love.” The UUs offer clarity about their commitment:

The polyamory movement with which I identify is something fundamentally different from the pervasive casual free love of the sixties, or the anonymous casual sex of swinging. And it is different from the oppressive patriarchal polygyny that is many Americans' understanding of polygamy. Polyamory is about relationship, about sustainability of intimate connection, and about reclaiming the right to decide for oneself who one calls spouse (or spice).

What can be wrong with that, from a Unitarian Universalist viewpoint, so long as the inherent worth and dignity of each person is honored?

Now, I confess I don’t find olyamory threatening to my relationship. I know what Judy and I expect from one another, and that is exclusive monogamy. Just because this is our choice, and maybe because it is a conscious choice, I do not need to impose it upon others, any more than I am willing even to suggest that all people ought to be in same-sex relationships.

Ultimately, I am concerned about the spiritual dimension of relationships as much as the purely physical, sexual dimension. The body-spirit connections that exist are of most importance to me and provide the ground for whatever covenant is developed among or between people in relationship. A covenant goes beyond a contract. A contract is legally binding and refers to the laws of society. A covenant is an agreement that contains physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, some of which are often totally over-looked in our litigious society, to our great detriment.

Our UU polyamorists take this into account:

Many polyamorists are Unitarian Universalists, and many UUs are poly. UUs are drawn together by the shared need to discover one's own theological truth rather than to accept an existing dogma. We come together to share our findings, but mostly to share our questions. Is it any wonder that some of us also reject dogma and choose to live in the questions in the sexualoving aspects of our lives? And in fact, that for some they are the same questions? Indeed, many polyamorists practice in one way or another a strong integration of their sexuality and spirituality, an integration which might be unwelcome in a religious community other than the UUA.

These UU polyamorists point out that they have met with acceptance along the West Coast, in Florida and in Hawai’I, but not in North Carolina, where offering an adult education program met with opposition from the Adult Enrichment Committee. No doubt this idea is far from generally accepted. It flies in the face of our unexamined cultural norms and makes some of us uncomfortable for reasons we have yet to discern.

There is one more notion that needs to be highlighted further here, “polyfidelity.” As I began to hear about and to grasp the meaning of this, it struck me as going to the heart of what we need to expect, whether in personal relationships or within this spiritual community. We need to know that everyone within the relationship is going to be faithful to the agreements of the group, and that those agreements are made with transparency and love. This requires honesty, candor, and willingness to negotiate and then commit. Every person involved needs to know that she or he is being treated with respect and regard for all the others and is expected to act with respect and regard for all the others. This builds connection and ultimately trust – and isn’t that what faith is, after all?

So whether we choose – or know ourselves - to be asexual, monogamous, or polyamorous, our fidelity to our covenant, individually and collectively, is what ultimately makes relationship(s) work. Which leads me to some questions to ponder further another time:

· Do we want the state to determine this for us, giving rights and privileges to a certain subset of the human spectrum of expression while withholding them from others?

· How do we co-create and maintain covenants, both of varied types and processes?

· How are we able to gather in communities and work this out openly? By what effective process

What does loving covenant ask of us? Perhaps Alice Walker puts it best:

Love is not concerned

with whom you pray

or where you slept

the night you ran away

from home.

Love is concerned

that the beating of your heart

should kill no one.

My greatest hope is that we shall remain in this struggle, trusting one another to engage with respect, responsibility, and relish for the process – with Love to guide us.

So Be It! Blessed be!