Intimate Spirituality: The Catholic Way of Love and Sex

This is a book for which thousands have literally been waiting. I have never read a book that has integrated so deeply and successfully sexuality and spirituality. An enormous contribution to the Catholic as well as all faith traditions. Hilsman has written a book about our sexual lives that is loving, caring, holy, out of the context of a loving relationship with his faith tradition, the experience of a deeply caring human partnership and a holiness that comes from learning how God loves us and we can love God better through the deep appreciation of sexual love.

Gordon Hilsman is a wise, compassionate, and unhurried companion who speaks to our depths about what it means to be human, spiritual, and sexual at the same time. Hilsman speaks so comfortably about human experience, his own and ours, that our defenses fall away as do the fears that have kept us from seeing ourselves whole. Like a confessor who has never given a harsh penance, Dr. Hilsman affirms the essential health and goodness of our sexuality. He illuminates the ground that is made sacred not by a far off God but by up close humans like us as we share the intimacy at the core of religious mystery.

Let me simply say at the outset that I am beyond impressed. I am enthusiastic with both the approach and the practical, personal content of this book. Hilsman has taken some ancient biblical and theological traditions (the fruits and gifts of the Spirit, the theological and cardinal virtues, the capital sins) and breathed fresh 'erotic' life into them. There is a profound need to reclaim the gifted, good, and disciplined journey of eros as it can unfold over the life-cycle. Hilsman is doing so from the inside, and inviting all of us to join him in this most spiritual of journeys.

Hilsman, director of the Pastoral Care Education programs for the Franciscan Health System in Tacoma, WA, has written a necessary and rather carefully directed book on sexuality in a contemporary Catholic framework. As Hilsman reminds us, this is not a marriage manual but a guide to loving and spiritual sexuality; as such, it is a refreshing antidote to the tradition of body-repressive Catholic culture. . . .Hilsman's book, full of subtle strengths, should prove useful and instructive to many Catholic readers.