Sex

Sex is fertile ground for thinking about faith and spirituality.

I grew up in a Christian tribe that taught sex simply: It’s intercourse for married people. It’s how husbands and wives make babies and sometimes blow off some steam.

Sex in marriage was OK. And that is exactly how they put it in my Christian tribe: “OK.” As in, “God allows sex in marriage. He’ll shake his head and look the other way while you indulge in marital ‘relations.’” It’s as if God needed a way for human beings to “be fruitful and multiply” and he settled for sexual intercourse.

So, sex in marriage was just OK.

Meanwhile, sex out of marriage was not OK. It was a sin. It was the sin. It was the sin of sins. Why? Because sex was such a bad thing that the sacred institution of marriage could only just barely redeem it. So outside of marriage, sex was all hell breaking loose. Pregnancy and STDs were the least of the bad things that could happen. The worst was that God finally had you right where he wanted you: In his crosshairs. If God was in the mood to damn some people to hell–and in my Christian tribe, God enjoyed nothing more than burning people to a crisp–any college campus or high school was like fish in a barrel.

So, it was as simple as could be: Sex is bad. Sex in marriage is OK. Don’t have sex until marriage and you might just escape the wrath of God.

Simplicity is supposed to make life…simple. In this case, simplicity made life a miserable mess.

How?

It made sex into something human beings do for a few minutes every once in awhile. It ignored that sex is something we are all of the time. We are sexual beings even when we’re not having sex.

So even though I did not have sex from puberty until age 32, sex had me that entire time. My Christian tribe taught me to abstain from an act, but it didn’t teach me how to live as a sexual being. As a consequence, I succumbed to pornography and sunk into 20 years of desperate and debilitating shame. I was so sure that being sexual was sinful that I even sought out someone to exorcise what I thought my “sex demon.” When the exorcism didn’t work (of course), I felt like I was so bad that even God could not save me.

It took years of counseling and therapy to finally begin to feel OK about myself as a sexual being. It took years to reconcile my projection of God and my projection of my sexual self.

And here’s the point: We can do very great damage to ourselves and others when we attempt to simplify spirituality to binary choices: Bad and good, wrong and right, allowed and not allowed. These binary choices that force us to choose between two extremes ignore the breadth and depth of human life between those extremes. When we reduce the life of faith to choosing between two behaviors, we overlook the being in humanity. We dismiss questions like: What does it mean to be a sexual being when I’m not actually having sex?

Binaries also force judgment–of others and of ourselves. In my case, I judged myself to be an irreparable sinner because I could not stop having sexual feelings. We often use binaries to judge others as dangerous, evil, sinful, and unfit. If we’re honest with ourselves, we pass these judgments to distract us from how guilty we feel in our binary traps.

All along we miss the beauty, depth, and wonder of God, humanity, life, and love. How can we see these things when we’re fixating on extremes?

The more I mature as a man of faith, the more I am certain of this: The Bible is not a prescription for morality; it is an invitation to mystery. God is not calling us to live moral lives by choosing the correct extreme in a binary system. Our calling is to allow faith to entice us into a heartfelt, lifelong pursuit of the divine mystery. When the mystery of God is our obsession, the morals take their proper shape by themselves. The mystery sets us free to be fully God’s and fully human. The mystery sets us free from binary extremes that enslave and oppress us.

Grace and peace.