The Spirit

The church I went to as a teenager was full of sex. It seeped through the worn wooden pews into the pours of our skin It filtered through the sunlit air. The aroma of young girls at prayer was overpowering for an adolescent boy, yet only now in my own old age do I recall how the older members of that congregation, how with closed eyes and backs arched, seemed to be holding onto some sudden and unexpected arousal; that orgasmic instant was called ‘feeling the Spirit of the lord,’ a sort of magnetic and divine experience, but now I know it as that very same energy as sexual pleasure, and consider this ‘knowing’ as not a blaspheme but a gifted glory one just as powerful as prayer and capable of a much greater holiness.