Sex+: “Wash Your Hands After You Pray” by Jasmine Cheek
Wash Your Hands After You Pray
Dear God,
I washed my hands thrice after masturbating for the first time. The first wash was a general cleansing, more for hygiene than anything else. The second was to scrub the prunes of shame and adrenaline from my adolescent fingertips. The third was so that I could kneel in prayer before You with hands that did not reek of a sin that unwound itself under the safety of quilting and mildewed pillows.
I was raised with the belief that You are an unreachable figure, and prayer was the pulpit upon which we could stand to get a closer look. I thought of You as a bestower of extraordinary miracles - people brought back from the brink of death, animals surviving catastrophic natural disasters, talking back to my parents and not getting punished. Prayer was the vessel that could carry our worries and wishes straight to Your ears, with the hope that there would be time for You to address more lowly, human concerns. It was a litany of words spoken with no emotional conviction. I could recite Your Prayer by the time I was three, and I am certain one of my first words was “Amen.”
As You know, the formative years of my life were spent in a private, Catholic school. Enclosed by palm trees and centuries old brick buildings, I was subjected to a monthly 30 minute morning mass. My hands were either clasped together or merged with a fellow classmate’s, our DNA mingling under fluorescent lights and a portrait of Your son. While my peers praised miraculous good deeds and pledged themselves to honoring Your kingdom, I was thinking about the hours that stood between me and going home to worship a different type of magic.
With no formal sexual health education, everything I learned between the ages of 13 and 18 was nurtured by independent research, experimentation, and fanfiction. Where phrases like “hallowed be thy name” and “on Earth as it is in Heaven” were molded into the folds of my brain, my fingers fumbled with a keyboard to find the answers to questions like “what does sex feel like?” or “I think I broke my hymen by accident…help?” Growing up in an immigrant household, and subsequently spending 65% of my life in church, birthed this idea that the purpose of my body was to serve. I was intended to be a servant to Heaven, one who prayed on my knees at night, thanked my parents every night, and acted in accordance with Your image and likeness. I felt like the victim of a pious Medusa, cast in stone and permanently recognizing myself as a thing that was purposeful, but not pleasurable. When I was 18, You watched as I left the church and went to college in New York, 6,000 miles away from my sheltered environment. I was both undersexed and hypersexualized, with no Bible verses to explain this dichotomy.
I spent the first three years of college not understanding that my body was a force I could pray to. You gave me the strength to pursue a thesis in Philosophy and Sexual Anthropology, yet I never applied the ideologies of sexual reclamation and reverence to myself. They were abstractions that were applicable for bodies that did not look like mine. For flesh that did not attract keloids, show ash, or have darkened crevices and corners. It took a lot of loneliness, tears, and frustration to come to terms with the reality that, if I wanted to be aware of my own eroticism, I had to sever my allegiance to the interpretation of Your existence that required an abandonment of sinful impulses. My body had to replace the book of scripture, and prayer became the touches that made me gasp, open, and arch. As my hands familiarized themselves with the plains of my skin, I fought the urge to reprimand the animal-like hunger that wished for satiation.
God, I hope this letter does not disprove my loyalty towards You or my gratitude for the gifts You have bestowed upon me. However, is there not a part of You that knew, by making me a writer, this day of reckoning would come? Did You not know that I would come to a conclusion that much of prayer resides in the imaginative realm. That the fantasies played out before bed, the daydreams throughout 9-5s or school periods, and the yearning that haunts a commute are all forms of worship. They worship a God that is Life, and they worship a God that is Pleasure.
Before I finish, could I make a request?
God, if I may ask, could You send me a partner sometime in the next year? One who has also come to terms with what sensuality and touch mean to their body. One who thinks about the body as a map of dissected parts and sex as independent stimulations, not a marker of character or a denouement to post-coital detachment or shame. I know You observe my prayer to Your grace. I pray by the trees, I pray by the water, I pray by the dirt. And at night, when I must be a servant to my private, pulsing worship I know You see me and I know You watch me decide whether or not I should wash off the anointed oil that coats my fingers. And we both know I usually do not. It is much better that way.
In the name of pleasure, I pray.
Amen.
About Jasmine Cheek
Jasmine Cheek is a New York–based writer and future MFA candidate in Creative Writing. In 2024, she began writing on Substack under the pseudonym Girl Genius, where she shares personal essays and excerpts of creative nonfiction. Her work lingers at the intersection of sexuality, faith, and self-discovery. She hoards books with enthusiasm and feels most herself by the sea, proudly identifying as a “water baby.” She can be reached at jasminecheek001@gmail.com and found on Instagram at @jasmineecheek.
