Ok, maybe four. Sometimes there is blood. I have a confession, I tell Daniels. You know, being a priest and all. God is in people, he says. Which means, God is also in sex. Daniels loves love.
He seeks it in everything he does, he tells me, but especially in people. I invite people into a relationship with God through those sacred ritual acts. A rogue in a clerical collar. In , he auditioned for season 7 of American Idol and made it all the way to Hollywood Week. He returned to Raleigh and dug deeper into what eventually became his calling. Hence the whole spit, semen, sweat thing. He encounters it on Instagram his favorite dating platform and the various hookup apps he frequents.
Jason Parham: As a priest who uses dating and hookup apps, how do you navigate your relationship to desire? Michel de Certeau, a French Jesuit and literary theorist, said the mystic is always on the move because God cannot be circumscribed to any one place or any one thing. My relationship to the holy has been in the spirit of that kind of mystical movement. But also I love sex. Where all of yourself, all of your guards, all of your insecurities, all of your fear evaporates in the image of love.
Yes, almost like God. A person becomes the image—and idol—of love. To share love in that way is so visceral. Literally, it is spit. It is semen. It is sweat. Sometimes it is blood. And to have all of that in the context of tenderness, of course shame would be evacuated. It is visceral and it is gross and it is suffering, but that is also the image of our salvation. That sacrifice happens for our capacity to see ourselves as no longer subject to the state, no longer subject to powers that would attempt to shame and silence us.
Jesus gives his life that we might see ourselves more clearly and more bravely. One of the greatest sins is that people have had their capacity to be brave in their desires stolen. The sin is not sex. Instagram, Hinge, Tinder. My only relationship in LA began on Hinge. Instagram is basically a dating app for me. My profile is curated mostly for the sake of flirting. There is nothing on my grid that is in line with my calling, in terms of being inspirational and accompanying people into a new understanding of God.
