“Ever wanted to do it in a church?”
Little did she know.
Since my first transgression with Rhonda in the chapel, I have on more than one occasion committed sacrilegious fornication.
As Dylan Elliott recounts in Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, there is historical precedent for sex in holy places. During the Carolingian period, sexual activity in a church was categorized in The Second Diocesan Statute of Theodulf of Orleans as a form of “Irrational Fornication,” akin to incest. An eleventh century penitential gravely stated:
Concerning those who would have fornicated or committed adultery within the church. At present, there is nothing more dangerous than to sin lethally, and nothing more damnable than, on account of the heat of the flesh, that one consents to fondle some whore even within the walls of the holy church…. If anyone performed fornication in the church, that person should have penance all the days of his life on bread and water….
The Pontificale Romano-Germanicum of the mid-tenth century contains a prayer for a rite to cleanse a church from sexual desecration, lest it invite God’s wrath. (A Dominican preacher ascribed lightning strikes that hit churches to the sexual sins committed within them.) Hildegard of Bingen lamented those who “defile that dedication originated by Jacob by polluting holy places with…the impure seed of adultery or fornication.” That such prayers and penances were assigned means the offenses were not hypothetical. Sex between a confessor and a penitent was not uncommon. Two knights having affairs with the queen of Navarre and her sister-in-law confessed to consummating their adultery in holy precincts. (As a practical matter, in a society that afforded amorous couples little privacy, churches provided a spaces for amorous activities.)
Even in our secular age, the erotic allure of sex in sacred precincts remains. More than one Baptist girl has been covertly fingered in a pew during the sermon. A number of Catholics had to later confess that they had sex in a confessional. Graham Greene is reported to have had sex with his mistress behind altars in Italy. A few years ago, a priest in Louisiana was busted for having sex on his church’s altar with two dominatrices.
My first sexual encounter with the Deaconess was on a sofa in the parish office, but our sexcapades soon took us elsewhere. (As parish ministers, it was easy to access different places for sex.) We fucked in a closet storing old hymnals. We fucked in the vestry. We fucked in the choir loft. We fucked in a pew in the back row. We fucked in the nave in front of the baptismal font.
Having sex in a church poses it’s own particular challenges. Wooden pews and stone floors make copulating difficult (I bent the Deaconess over the back of the pew and railed her from behind), but I’ve found that adrenaline compensates for any physical discomfort. The risk of being caught, while part of the thrill, also demands that the rendezvous occur when one is reasonably sure that the church is empty. (Plus a church’s unique acoustics amplifies the grunts and moans emitted during sex.) Yet that “heat of the flesh” compelled us to commit so damnable a sin.
And hearing the Deaconess gasp “Oh, God” made it worthwhile.
Lutheran Guilt 