All the great religious traditions have linked love, sex, and spirituality. God is love, say the poets and mystics of the great theistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism. For them love is the force that drives the dance of life. Love can introduce us to the reality of what Christian and Sufi mystics have called the "Beloved" — that loving presence whom we can meet in the most private level of our own being.
— Tracy Cochran, Jeff Zaleski, Transformations