Of all the puzzles the Herd of God presents, this is the one members most enjoy explaining: how a religion built around eros, madness, and the red-blooded human passions can have, at its intellectual center, a man who has renounced sex entirely.
Michael Enlightened is a voluntary celibate, and does not hide it. He describes a life lived, by choice, "from the mind" — disciplined, contained, oriented upward. Within the Herd this is not treated as hypocrisy but as vocation. The group teaches a kind of alchemical tantra: the doctrine that erotic force is not to be spent but transmuted — raised, like everything else in the cosmology, up the tree toward the crown, converted from desire for a person into fuel for the ascent. Michael, in this reading, is not the exception to a religion of the passions; he is its most extreme practitioner, a man who has taken all of that force and pointed it entirely at the god.
Not everyone in the Herd finds the arrangement stable. The order's priestesses — the two the group calls the Handmaidens — are said to regard the theologian's celibacy as something between a koan and a dare, and their attention to him is, by several accounts, its own ongoing drama. I will say, as someone who once lived under a discipline like his, that the transmutation he describes is real, and is also lonelier than its practitioners admit, and that the line between offering your longing to God and simply having nowhere else to put it is thinner than the doctrine lets on. Michael would likely agree. He has staked his life on the thinness of that line being the point.