Allan, I agree with you - nothing philosophical would be in my mind at that moment, either ! What that quote is saying is what is happening (invisibly) in the (invisible) soul/spirit aspect of a person's make-up as they make love. This is not on a thought level.

Here are a couple more quotes from that book, which will hopefully clarify this:

"People who decide to have sexual intercourse without also having mutual commitment to whole-life union are actually choosing against their own wholeness by dividing their sexuality into separate parts. They are doing one thing with their bodies and another with their spirits. Such a decision is a choice to bring pain upon themselves. You just can't separate sexuality into parts without creating pain. When people seek to enjoy the physical pleasures of sexuality without the spiritual pleasures, they will find in time that the physical sexual experience becomes empty and hurtful."

"Perhaps on the surface we can act as if we do not need the deeper, inner meaning of sexual intercourse. But it is not very easy to just have intercourse with our bodies. Somehow our bodies seem to be inextricably connected to our souls. And our souls demand interpretation of our actions in meaningful terms.

Our natures give us a message about our sexuality. It is both spirit and body, and we cannot separate the two. We cannot take our bodies to bed with someone and park our souls outside in the car to wait. We may try to do so, but in the end it is impossible.

I remember counselling a married woman who had had an affair. She was very cold and unemotional as she told me about it. It had not meant anything at all, she declared. She had been silly to do such a thing. And after all, she said, 'All I gave him was my body.'

In the conversation that followed, I pressed her to back up that statement. Eventually, she was in tears as she admitted that her soul had been very much involved during intercourse with the man. She had hoped that he would love her, wanted him to care about her in a lasting way, wanted him to share her heart. It had proved to be a relationship without a future, and her heart was filled with disappointment, guilt, and shame. How could she feel those things if all she had given him was her body ? In reality she had given him more. It is impossible to have intercourse and bring only one's body to bed. It is impossible because of the way we are made."

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On a different note - I loved your story, Amos. So true, so true !