We are all powerfully, incurably, and wonderfully sexed, this is part of a conspiracy between God and nature.  Sexuality lies right next to our instinct for breathing and it is ever-present in our lives, writes Ron Rolheiser. 

Spiritual literature tends to be naïve and in denial about the power of sexuality, as if it could be dismissed as some insignificant factor in the spiritual journey, and as if it could be dismissed at all.  It cannot be. It will always make itself felt, consciously or unconsciously.

Nature is almost cruel in this regard, particularly to the young. It fills youthful bodies with powerful hormones before those persons have the emotional and intellectual maturity to properly understand and creatively channel that energy.

Nature's cruelty, or anomaly, is that it gives someone an adult body before that same person is adult in his or her emotions and intellect.  There are a lot of physical and moral dangers in a still-developing child walking around in a fully adult body. 

Further, today this is being exacerbated by the fact that we reaching puberty at an ever younger age and are marrying at an ever-later one. This makes for a situation, almost the norm in many cultures, where a young girl or boy reaches puberty at age eleven or twelve and will get married only about twenty years later.

This begs the obvious question: How is his or her sexuality to be emotionally and morally contained during all those years? Where does that leave him or her in the struggle to remain faithful to the commandments? 

Admittedly, nature seems almost cruel here, but it has its own angle. Its dominant concern is to get each of us into the gene pool and all those powerful hormones it begins pouring into our bodies at adolescence and all those myriad ways in which it heats up our emotions have the same intent, it wants us to be fruitful and multiply, to perpetuate ourselves and our own species.

And nature is uncompromising here: At every level of our being (physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual) there is a pressure, a sexual one, to get us into the gene pool. So when you next see a young man or woman strutting his or her sexuality, be both sympathetic and understanding, you were once there, and nature is just trying to get him or her into the gene pool.

Such are its ways and such are its propensities, and God is in on the conspiracy. 

FULL STORY The power and purpose of sexuality (Ron Rolheiser)