Sexuality as Sacred Call: When Desire Refuses to Be a Thing

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Towards a theoerotic christianity

Something Beckons, and I Cannot Ignore It

I didn’t choose this sacred path. I didn’t invent the desire. I didn’t plan the ache.

I was called.

There’s a whisper that stirs in my bones, a summons deeper than biology or identity. It comes like poetry at midnight. Like arousal during liturgy. Like longing that doesn’t make sense but demands everything. This is how I have come to understand sexuality—not as something that I can possess or define, but as something that possesses me, names me, pulls me toward the sacred and unfinished.

It begins with a tremble—not just in the body, but from the dark depths of the soul. A low, slow vibration, like a voice murmuring from beneath the floorboards of your certainty. Not a command. Not a diagnosis. A summons.

This is sexuality, not as identity or impulse, but as call—a wild, untranslatable longing that refuses to be explained.

Philosopher John D. Caputo speaks of the “vocative order”—the vocative order—realities that do not exist like chairs or doctrines, but insist like prophets, like ghosts, like God. They don’t exist. They insist – Forging a way of being not marked by existence, but by insistence. Calling … summoning … breaking through.

I believe sexuality is such a reality.

The Vocative Ache of Being Touched by Mystery

We do not possess our sexuality. It is not a box we carry, a word we wear, or a label that makes us legible. It is not a “thing” we possess—it is a fire that possesses us.

It is a ghost that walks beside us in pregnant silence. It is the tremor that unravels the seams of our ideological and theological embroidery. It is the breath that catches when beauty unfolds.

Sexuality does not explain—it haunts.

You see, I don’t believe sexuality is something static—a fixed asset we carry in our psychological toolkit. I believe it’s an unfolding hidden in our blood. A holy haunting that slips beneath any attempt to explain it away. It is not a checkbox marked gay, straight, bi, or queer. It is not reducible to practice or orientation or pathology. No. Sexuality is the whisper that startles you awake in the middle of the night. It is the trembling in your belly when your boundaries blur. It is the sacred stammer when your soul is caught off-guard by beauty. When someone touches your hand and your chest tightens—not out of fear, but recognition—that’s the vocative order. When you find yourself crying after sex, and you don’t know why—that’s the vocative order. When you feel your worldview, ideology or theology tremble because someone looked at you—that’s the vocative order. It is the prayer you mutter when you touch someone without understanding why your skin weeps in their presence. It is the moan beneath language. The sacred gasp that interrupts the liturgy with a scandalous, breathless, oh god … yes.

Sexuality is not content. It is calling.

And like every true call, it disrupts more than it clarifies. It doesn’t ask for definitions. It demands response.

We must admit we are not masters over desire. We are pilgrims wandering the erotic wilds. We are the ones being summoned—not the ones doing the summoning.

Why the Church Tries to Silence What It Cannot Hold

The institution cannot hold this kind of fire. Churches, institutions and governmental systems survive by turning wildness into order. They catalogue sexuality, legislate it, reduce it to preference, morality, accepted behaviours.

But the theoerotic doesn’t behave.

The theoerotic refuses to let sexuality be domesticated.

It is divine wildfire.

To speak of the theoerotic as something that insists is to admit it is not safe. It is to confess that we are not in control. Desire speaks in tongues. It ruins our carefully ordered ideologies and theologies. It stains the white sheets of orthodoxy with something alive, uncontainable, dripping with holy longing.

Theoerotics is not an answer. It is a wound that calls. A holy rupture. A burning bush that doesn’t burn up.

I have learned this the hard way. Through exile and return. Through wounds and wonder. Through moments of breathtaking arousal that felt more like communion than sin. Through shame that turned into sacrament when I stopped hiding and started listening.

What we call “sexuality” is not a problem to be solved. It is a sacred disruption. It’s the earthquake beneath the temple. The rendering of the veil.

Not written from behind the pulpit but carved from within the body—from the place where reason and structured thought is interrupted by breath, skin, sweat, moans, divine desire and inspiration.

Theoerotics isn’t doctrine. It’s disturbance. It’s not a position on a spectrum. Theoerotics – sexuality, spirituality and eroticism – are sacred trembles that resists every taxonomy and slips through every net.

The erotic and the divine are one, and they will not be silenced.

Listening to What My Desire Was Always Trying to Say

The theoerotic insists that desire is not the enemy of the sacred. Instead, a sacred insistence, an echo, a wound, a lure; A soft whisper, not heard but felt like a flame scorching your skin.

This, I believe, is where God meets us. Not in the neat categories we construct, but in the ache that refuses resolution. In the sacrament of arousal. In the unsettling encounter with another—where something more-than-human flickers between skin and soul.

To walk the theoerotic path is to consent to being undone. Not destroyed, but opened. Not explained or defined, but summoned.

This is the vocation of the body: not to be classified, but to be called.

If I have a theology now, it begins here: with the body, trembling under the weight of longing. With my heart and my sex, pierced by questions, I was taught not to ask. The flesh, not an obstacle but a divine oracle.

To live theoerotically is to let your body pray in its own dialect. It is to follow the thread of your erotic desire not toward resolution, but toward revelation. It is to believe that, deep in the erotic centre of your being, god speaks through the ache and the desire—not around it.

I no longer ask, “What is my sexuality?”

I ask, “What is this erotic fire calling me toward?”