Holy Longing and Theological Pearls

This is the first in a three-part exploration of desire, control, and intimacy. Join me as we unpack centuries of religious conflation and reclaim what was always meant to be sacred.

Me, every time I try to talk about sacred desire and everyone around me clenches their theological pearls…

There’s a difference between desire and lust—a big one.
But from the early conceptions of church, rarely has it been honest to name it. And when it does, it usually gets it wrong.

Desire is about connection. Beauty. Longing.
It’s the ache to be known. To create. To be held. It can be sexual, but it’s not only sexual. It’s spiritual. Rooted. Good.
It's the resonance of Eden's original harmony, when desire flowed freely before power disrupted connection, still living in our bones.

Lust, though—lust is what happens when desire gets cut off from relationship. It’s what happens when longing is reduced to consumption. It grabs, it possesses, it devours. And in the church, we’ve treated them like the same thing for centuries.

That conflation has damaged people. It’s shamed bodies. It’s silenced questions. It teaches us to fear our own bodies. It teaches us that desire itself is sinful. It tells us that to long is to fail. That to ache is to betray holiness. And it’s severed one of the most powerful ways we come to know God: through our own sacred yearning.

Enter the Song of Songs.
You know—the book we never read out loud in church unless it's being awkwardly sanitized for a wedding.
But it’s there. In the sacred texts we inherited. And it’s not shy. It’s sensual. Embodied. Lyrical. It’s dripping with erotic and fleshy tension and mutual admiration. And there’s no marriage certificate tucked inside the margins. No "wait until you're wed" clause. No moralizing.

Just desire. Bold, unashamed, holy desire.

“Eat, friends, and drink—drink deeply of love.” (Song of Songs 5:1)

Sanctified longing. That’s what this love letter of Solomon is.
And yet, we keep treating it like a poetic accident. Like God somehow let it slip through the editorial cracks.

I believe we’re afraid of the sensual because we’ve forgotten it is part of the image of God.

Audre Lorde once wrote that the erotic is not about control, but about deep aliveness. I believe the erotic is the pulse of the Spirit—it’s where creation begins. If we’re created in the image of God, and we are erotic, longing, sensual beings, then God must be too.

That doesn’t make God sexual in the way the church fears.
It makes God alive in a way we’ve forgotten to honor.

If that moment of Homer squirming in a pew, nervously declaring he's 'not doing anything sensual or erotic,' hits a little too close to home...maybe it's a mirror; a commentary of how far we've drifted from the sacred truth that our bodies—our longing, our intimacy, our presence—were never meant to be shamed.

Somewhere along the way, we traded that sacred design for a narrative of repression. Desire became lust. Longing became weakness. Intimacy became secretive, solely sexual, hidden—something for marriage beds and whispered prayers shrouded in embarrassment rather than honored as sacred.

Longing isn't proof of our brokenness. What if it's evidence that we still carry the echoed promise of Eden—that we were always meant to be connected, seen, touched, held, cherished?

And then we begin to see—God longs for us too. That may be next level

This isn't just about sex. It's about what kind of people we are becoming.

We've been trained to treat intimacy as dangerous unless it follows strict rules. It tells us that embodiment is dangerous, and desire is proof of short-comings.

The longing in us—to be known, to be touched, to be witnessed and loved—is not a flaw. It's the blueprint. It's the image of a God who exists in eternal intimacy and invited us into that same space of holy oneness.

We begin to pay attention to the ways we pull away from closeness—because it feels risky. We ask ourselves where we've confused desire with danger.

Because God is not afraid of your longing. God is the source. God moves through it. Speaks in it. Loves you in it.

And maybe—just maybe—if we can unlearn the fear, we can become people who embody something truer, freer, and far more holy than we were ever taught to expect.

And if it makes you want to whisper “not doing anything sensual or erotic” under your breath while you lean in a little closer?
You’re probably right where you need to be.

Next in the series: " Echoes of Eden, Wounds of Empire.” ---- the part where Adam dodges his own shadow, blames Eve, and the church spends the next few thousand years trying to keep desire locked down. (Yes, we’re going there.)