BDSM as religion

This, too, is sacred.

In BDSM, I encounter the numinous. It is a mystery in the authentic, religious sense: inscrutable to non-initiates, a madness; yet a wonderful one, whose practice transcends the mundane. They are profoundly irrational, profundly powerful subjective experiences, made all the more wonderful for their preposerousness (as the 3rd century theologian Tertullian said, "It must be believed because it is absurd.") Their experience cannot be denied by those in the throes, nor can they be understood in the same way the rest of the world is; they require their own logic, their own lexicon, a profoundly different way of viewing the world. Here, I shed the trappings of and authentically experience the world, authentically become my own self. I have never known any truth more true than what I feel kneeling at the feet of my Master. Subspace, they call it, but, by the gods above, it is so much more wonderful, so much more terrible, so much more meaningful than that nearly clinical term can express!

Betimes I wonder what the God of the bible had to do with this. Of course, a vengeful God with a penchant for poetic justice might see it fit to afflict one who sees hubris as a virtue and considers obeisance to divine forces unfitting to the dignity of man, with a need, rooted in the basest of human inclinations, to perform yet more humiliating acts at the feet of the merely human, not divine. Yet I prefer to think of it as a divine gift, if divinity indeed be involved: that, if my rigorously logical positivist viewpoint prevents me from authentically grappling with the issues of faith, that nevertheless, he saw fit to instill in me a capacity to feel at least some measure of the awe and ecstasy that the faithful experience when contemplating the numinous, even if its causes be purely material.

And yet, if this be the case, am I doing the numinous a disservice by bringing it to the realm of the rational? As I will away the recalcitrant longings in order to concentrate on the logical formulations in this post, do I do the longings, the authentic experience, a disservice by placing them in a subordinate role? Either alternative seems distasteful: I can easily see myself losing sight of the experience in my musings, becoming BDSM's equivalent of 3rd-century theologians hashing out whether The Holy Spirit proceeds simply from the Father, or from the Father and the Son. Yet the unexamined life is not worth living, and mere surrender to the experience feels as if it would cheapen them as well. Perhaps there is a middle ground between stoic contemplation and hedonistic indulgence. If the simple faith of the believer and the staid scholasticism of Aquinas ring hollow, nevertheless, I may find guidance in Augustine and Kierkegaard, those who strove to never let go either of the experience or their examinations of it.

The skeptic in me periodically dismisses the above as so much flowery rhetoric. The entire labor of this blog, it says, is merely so much posturing, an attempt to set yourself above the majority, while reconciling your intellectual self-identification with your perversions. If this is what is needful to convince yourself of the kind lie that there's something there beyond a quirky, if not pathologically abnormal, misifring of the sex drive, then, perhaps it's worth it: but you know that you are only deluding yourself.

And then, the emotions return. And I know the doubts for the rank, entirely unjustified pessimism that they are.