Sex in the City of God.

It's not surprising that we Christians have trouble talking about sex. The public consequences of doing so are prickly enough that the church should applaud itself on even gathering to speak the word "sexuality." Our culture seems to find every mention of sex so titillating that speaking a nuanced word on sexuality and actually having it heard is nearly impossible. Especially when the church speaks on this topic, the media inevitably try to capture complexity in a phrase, invariably reporting only what they wanted to hear, or what they wish they had not heard, or what will make a story that is sure to attract lucrative advertisers. And that's when we work up the nerve to say anything at all about it. Talking about sex, as my 14-year-old daughter reminded me, is embarrassing. How many of us know more than a few people with whom we can discuss our sexual experience in any depth and detail, let alone feel comfortable sharing with a congregation or an adult-education group?

The first task, then, is accomplishing the considerable feat of refusing to give in either to embarrassmen or to the tyranny of the sound byte. Beyond it lies the real project of constructive conversation. Here, I'd like to suggest a metaphor. In a culture that likes to buy its opinions ready-made, as if they were beds-in-a-bag on sale at the local department store, we must choose an almost inconceivably labor-intensive path: to quilt, experimenting with small bits of the fabrics of systematics, liturgics, theology, ethics, psychology, biblical interpretation, spirituality, sociology, and pastoral studies, laying them out next to each other like puzzle pieces to create our own complex and authentic pattern.

There are two important dimensions to this project. First comes the piecing. This is a logical and aesthetic challenge (remember the math puzzle: How many colors does a mapmaker need to ensure that no two neighboring countries on any map have to be shown in the same color?): to discover a design that incorporates each and every fabric appropriately, a design that cannot succeed if one of these fabrics is missing. It must be comprehensive.

Then comes the quilting itself. Quilting, as you may know, is ideally a community enterprise. There are two rules for this stage of the project. For a smooth result, work from the center in small increments, smoothing the extra fullness out as you go, so that there are no points of tension that will rip later, no bulges or lumps. And, for a pleasant day, trade stories, debate, reminisce, laugh, cry. Talk. At the end is the satisfaction of not only having created a work of beauty that is useful and almost indestructible but also of having formed an intimate and trusting community that will move on to other quilts on other days.

These are the challenges of the conversation on sexuality: to be balanced and comprehensive in our piecing, to begin in the center, to talk, and to deepen the bonds of intimacy that will enable us to tackle this task and new tasks together. Painstaking? Yes. Sometimes nearly endless? Yes. Aching back, pricked fingers, stitches ripped Out and redone, even a few blood stains? Yes. But we will, we hope, end up with an heirloom--a beautiful, strong, warm covering.

Invitation

A further obstacle to conversation about sexuality is that talk seems to turn instantly to all the old, rutted, tired, and tiring arguments that have led us to stalemates. These old routes by definition cannot lead us to the new destination of fresh insight and consensus! I invite you to lay aside questions about what to do--questions like "are homosexual relationships ethical?" and "what about sex outside marriage?" Answers to these questions can be faithful and meaningful only if they follow a discussion of basic questions about who we are--about our being as sexual creatures of God. What does it mean to relate sexually to another person? What exactly does married sexuality mean in a society of individual longevity, divorce, and "starter marriages"? (1) What is God's command for us as redeemed and sexual beings? and similar questions. As Rudolf Bultmana said, it's the indicative--our description of ourselves in faith--that yields the imperative--the command. (2)

First, we must suspend the contemporary assumption that sex is merely a private matter between me and my partner, if I have one. This notion causes two problems. First, it can make it seem that the only rules governing sex are the rules that govern relationships between equals. This obscures the fact that sex is also a social, economic, public matter that ought to be governed by rules of social justice just as much as by rules of intimacy. Second, if we say that sex is "all about" interpersonal relationship, then we lose sight of ourselves as individuals who are relating. We forget about the intersection of our sexuality with our psycho-spiritual sides and the inseparability of our sexual maturity and expression from our psychological development and our progress in the Spirit. (3)

For the same reason, we must resist the contemporary cultural reduction of sexual orientation to either heterosexual or homosexual, an assumption that makes the exclusion practiced by straight, gay, and lesbian people alike seem logical and acceptable. Heterosexuality and homosexuality are only two of a wide range of possible secondary expressions of basic human sexuality. Many people do not occupy either extreme but are trying to make their way in a world that demands that they choose between them.

We must also resist the tendency to define "having sex" as "vaginal intercourse." When pollsters ask "How many times a month do you have sex?" they usually mean "How many times a month do you participate in coitus?" The question is imperative but may not provide us with the information we really need. First of all, this assumption too is reductionistic. Our sexual lives, even in heterosexual marriages, involve a great range of expression that is not limited to intercourse. Those of us who are parents of teens especially cannot forget that how you kiss and where you squeeze are questions fully as important as whether your genitals make contact. A friend of mine recently rewrote the old joke that begins, How can you recognize a neo-conservative? The answer: A liberal with a teenaged daughter! (4) The moral and spiritual meanings of all these kinds of sexual affection will never receive the attention they deserve as long as the only question we ask is, Did you go all the way? Second, as Patricia Beattie Jung, Ma ry Pellauer, and a number of other sexual ethicists have pointed out, the identification of sex with intercourse makes it axiomatic that men will have pleasure in coitus (erection is a precondition) and forgets that women often do not. (5) This forgetfulness generates all sorts of contradictory assumptions--for example, that "sexually active" women and girls approach intercourse with exactly the same expectation of pleasure as men and boys rather than for other reasons (like pressure ordesire to please); or, conversely, that women who do seek pleasure in sex are "fast" but men who seek it are not. (6)

In addition to suspending old questions and assumptions, we must make systematic, explicit use of something we too often draw upon haphazardly and unthinkingly: the wisdom of our own honestly examined experience. Gathered in any Sunday worship service are centuries of ordinary lived sexuality. The best of it contains sensitive insights into genuine goods and ways to pursue and protect them; the worst of it contains mistakes and bad experiences that help us both to articulate boundaries with confidence and to be compassionate companions for others in their journeys.

Setting the context

One final important deterrent to the discussion of sexuality in the church is that as long as we do not probe too deeply, Christian congregations may look like relative refuges from a culture preoccupied and occupied by sex. For instance, a Search Institute study of 46,000 public school students found that teenagers who attend religious services at least once or twice a month are about half as likely to engage in at-risk behavior, including sexual activity, as those who never attend. (7) If active and "out" gays and lesbians are as rare in our churches as they are in the culture at large, they too seem a small concern: a recent study indicates that only about 1.3 percent of women and 2.4 percent of men report that as adults they have experienced homoerotic desire and had gay or lesbian sexual relationships and identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual--though the numbers are much higher in urban areas than in rural. (8) 84 percent of mainline Protestant adults report having had sex with only one partner , or no one, during the last 12 months; this rises to 96 percent if we count married people of all backgrounds. (9) People who said their sexual activity was guided by their religious beliefs were significantly less likely than others to have had two or more partners in the past year. (10)

But before we sit back too comfortably, we should consider that this margin is almost negligible. In addition, 16 percent of the adults in our pews did have more than one sex partner in the last year. Other statistics should give us pause as well. Nearly 15 percent of women and 25 percent of men born between 1933 and 1974 report extramarital sexual affairs. (11) Whereas among those born between 1933 and 1942 almost 84 percent of men and 93 percent of women experienced intercourse for the first time in marriage, only 34 percent of men and 36 percent of women born between 1963 and 1974 married as virgins. (12) And about 9 percent of women and 10 percent of men report that as adults they have experienced same-gender desire, had same-gender relations, or identify as gays, lesbians, or bisexuals. (13) Many gays and lesbians "come out" in marriage. 23 percent of women and 4 percent of men report having been subjected to forced sex, (14) an abuse that we know makes it difficult to connect sex with love, fidelity, an d tenderness later in life. And, naturally, even if the teenagers in our youth group are only about half as likely to have sex as their non-worshiping peers, the likelihood is still rather high that they do! Recent statistics suggest that 61 percent of men and 58 percent of women overall have at least one opposite-gender sex partner before age 18. (15) Clearly, for a large proportion of ordinary Christians, some significant dimension of their history or present life departs in an important way from the church's traditional teachings on sexuality.

In addition, recent cultural changes in the meaning and practice of marriage, the traditional locus of sexual expression, indicate a profound need to reexamine traditional teachings on sexuality. Sex, marriage, and romantic love were thought to go together only in the last couple of hundred years; sex and childbearing were thought not to do so only in the last fifty or so years, and only in the last twenty or thirty years have a small percentage of women worldwide truly been able to exercise choices about when to have sex and bear children. (16) When we add these new, undigested cultural phenomena to the ordinary challenging passages of life such as adolescence, childbirth, menopause, illness (physical and psychological), and death of a partner that can throw a previously comfortable and unproblematic sexual life into a tailspin, we realize that the people who are sitting in the pew with or in front of us cannot be as comfortable and settled in their sexuality as they seem to be. Maybe we aren't either, or if we are now, we might not be next week.

The church is a place to gather under God's graceful wings, to find and read and hear and speak the Word of God together. This Word has been publicly opened for social justice, for liturgy, for the message of the gospel of grace; it has not been fully opened for all of us who are dealing with the mystery of our sexuality in silent solitude, including those who because of this struggle are milling around outside the church, feeling unwelcome, waiting for an invitation to come (or come back) in.

Thus our conversation must model itself on quilting in a second way: it must not only embrace all theological disciplines in all their wisdom and variety but also embrace all people in all their wisdom and variety. If we really believe that the kingdom of God comes to all, then we must be able to speak the Word to all in a liberating way. And if we really believe in the priesthood of all believers, we know that we can truly hear that Word--in all its richness and nuance--if all of us preach to each other. Only in this way can we create a quilt that is beautiful, strong, lasting, and large enough to cover all of us.

Theology: Affirming the body

Although many contemporary quilters go to fabric stores, traditionally quilts were made of sewing scraps and the salvageable parts of worn-out clothes: here a bit of mother's old Sunday dress, there a piece of father's stained shirt, over there a fragment left over from cutting out a wedding dress. Quilts, that is, were new and beautiful coverings created out of the pieces of old and sometimes cherished garments. Likewise) the theological observations that follow include nothing new or even comprehensive. Rather, they bring out a number of durable doctrines that the church might use in assembling a new vision of sexuality.

1. Incarnation, cross, and resurrection. Christians have two important justifications for celebrating the goodness of the physical world. The first is creation: Genesis 1 declares that at the end of the sixth day, looking over a brand new humanity, "God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Gen 1:3 1). According to this passage, embodied humanity is God's intentional--and crowning--creative achievement. And we are God's good creations individually, too, with our particular gifts and personalities, not just in the abstract: "You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Ps 139: 13b-14a). God creates and blesses our whole selves. (17) Nothing can erase this original and founding goodness.

But an emphasis on the goodness of our bodies does not take into account subsequent human sinfulness, especially our tendency to abuse ourselves and all of creation thoughtlessly. We need an additional reason to celebrate the goodness of embodiment. This is the incarnation, the moment when God chooses to enter the world in a human body: "The Word became flesh and lived among us" (Jn 1:14). Traditionally Christians have been reluctant to think comprehensively about what this means. (18) But James B. Nelson reminds us that if we take the incarnation utterly seriously, Jesus must have been, just as we are, a "laughing, crying, sweating, eating, drinking, digesting, urinating, defecating, sexual, sensuous bundle of flesh." (19) The body is holy enough for God to inhabit, or holy because God has inhabited it; whichever path we take, the incarnation reaffirms the goodness of embodiment, including sexuality.

The Lutheran emphasis on cross and resurrection, often seen as body-denying, interprets the incarnation far more profoundly than traditions that focus primarily on the incarnation. The birth and life of Jesus do not tell us conclusively that embodiment is, at this point in sacred history, a good in itself. If God walks around in a body without sinning, that only confirms God's omnipotence. It is really the death and resurrection that commit us to the doctrine of the Incarnation. First, consider the theology of the cross. We think of Jesus' death on the cross as the highest sacrifice, the greatest gift possible. How much would that sacrifice be worth if the body were not more valuable than any other created good, or if Jesus were only "apparently" human? Jesus's death is a complete sham otherwise. (20) And second, consider the resurrection. Jesus rises from the dead and ascends to God, confirmation that our bodies are so integral to our humanity that through God's grace they become immortal. According to Luthe r, this immortality becomes ours in the Eucharist: our bodies become immortal when they eat eternal food. (21) The body is not a disposable "something extra" that weighs down the soul. We are united with God in our bodies, and only in our bodies.

We are united with God in our whole bodies. Just why the Christian tradition has had difficulty with this point, other essays in this issue explain. Suffice it to say that contemporary prayers and hymns recognize and bless the parts of the body rather selectively. Frances Ridley Havergal's well-known hymn begins "Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee." It moves on to eyes, hands, feet, voice, intellect, and lips, in one version at least concluding that when I have dedicated all these parts of my body to God, my life will truly be consecrated "ever, only, all for Thee." Something integral to human experience is clearly missing here. It may not be surprising that Augustine, who experienced such profound distress over his own sexuality, would neglect to dedicate this dimension of himself to God. Even Paul, in his ambivalence, says we are to give "the greater honor to the inferior member" (1 Cor 12:24)!

But it was shocking to me, as a person in theory more comfortable with my sexual self, that it was not until I began the process of preparing this article that I noticed that I too have always neglected to offer this piece of myself to God in daily prayer. What a difference this simple act makes in my understanding of sexuality. Rather than being tidily boxed up and put in a corner to be pulled out when it does not bother anyone else, sexuality is an inseparable part of the self I dedicate to God--with more or less success--every day. It has led me to ask whether I let myself off the hook too easily, or dishonor my sexuality too gravely, when I explicitly withhold sexuality from my self-offering to God, and whether I too easily rush to judgment by assuming that people who seem to live their sexual lives differently than I have failed to dedicate themselves in this way.

2. Christ, the bridegroom. One well-kept Christian secret that can help us in the project of affirming and dedicating our sexuality is the theoerotic tradition, a tradition of prayer in which sexual union is used as a metaphor for union with God. (22) The allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs as a poem about love between God and the people of Israel or the individual soul is an obvious example. Many male and female mystics describe the soul-the bride--and Christ--the bridegroom--in a romantic relationship. In the language of mystical prayers and poetry, their romance of longing is consummated in a mystical union described in decidedly physical terms. Catherine of Siena speaks of the "fire of holy desire" and joy "in union and love's affection." (23) Mechthild of Magdeburg writes,

O God, You abound with Your Gifts!
You flow with love!
You burn with desire!
You melt in the union with Your love!
You rest on my breasts, and I cannot exist
without You! (24)

In "God Caresses the Soul in Six Ways," Mechthild writes (in the voice of God speaking to the soul): "You are My pillow, My lovely bed, My secret resting place, My deepest desire, My highest honor. You are joy in My Divinity, solace to My humanity, a cooling brook to My fervor." (25) Margaret Ebner's description of God as lover is unmistakably erotic:

It is unlikely that many ordinary, distracted Christians experience God in exactly this way. But we can take two lessons from the mystics nonetheless. First, as Ebner concludes, we can experience the presence of God not in spite of but through our sensuality. For Christ is "not a robber of the senses [but] an enlightener of the senses." (27) When she receives Christ's holy kiss, the sweetness of his grace fills and overflows her senses rather than dulling them. Second, the possibility of constructing such a metaphor depends on the goodness of the premise. The holy washing of baptism depends on the essential wholesomeness of ordinary washing; the holy eating of the Eucharist depends on the basic necessity of ordinary eating; the holy, orgasmic power of union with God depends on the foundational goodness of ordinary sexual pleasure. Contemporary authors acknowledge this relationship when they write about making love (as distinguished from simply "having sex") as an occasion of experiencing and appreciating the presence of God. (28)

Often, I felt such a strong, powerful grace from my desires that I thought I could not survive from one desire to the next. I felt the sweetest thrusts against my heart with the most powerful grace and sweetest movements, so that I thought my heart would fly to pieces from his raging love and would like to dissolve from his grace. But then he acted like a clever, knowledgeable lover and withdrew the turbulence from me so that my frail humanity could better bear it." (26)

3. Power of sexual desire. In addition, many great classical theologians, including Augustine, recognize and accommodate the human need for sexual relationship. Paul, Augustine, and Luther all recognize the incredible power of the sexual urge and see marriage as a structure for organizing it. Married people, Paul says, should not deny each other sexual comfort (1 Cor7:3-5). He does recommend against marriage for those who feel able to live a celibate life, but only in order to remove the family obligations that make it hard to prepare for the impending return of Christ. He assumes that children and connected distractions inevitably result from marriage, but it is channeling of desire, and not procreation, that justifies the union. (29) In "The Good of Marriage," Augustine--although skeptical that we need any more people in the world (30)--prefers that married people have intercourse only when they want to procreate. But he nevertheless agrees with Paul that marriage is the solution for people who cannot live a celibate life (31) and looks the other way when married people have sex when not seeking children. He asks, rhetorically and amusedly, "whom have we heard ... saying to us that he never had intercourse with his wife except when hoping for conception?" (32) For Luther the urge for sexual connection is a product of God's command to be fruitful and multiply, and it is irresistible: God "creates them so that they have to multiply." (33) "Not one in a thousand" people born with the capacity to experience sexual pleasure can manage celibacy. (34) So insistent is Luther on that point that he recommends that a person whose spouse refuses sex get a divorce or take a lover. (35) Certainly Luther argues that intercourse is never without sin, (36) but this is true in the same sense that no human act is fully pleasing to God.

For these three authors, interestingly, sex and procreation become progressively tightly linked. For Paul, sex incidentally procreates, producing distracting children; for Augustine, procreation excuses sex (which he sees as irrelevant to companionship); for Luther, sexual desire is a product of God's plan for our ongoing propagation. This trend toward procreation deserves critical examination by others. It is worth asking with Augustine whether, in a world already strained to its limits, God intends us to continue multiplying. John Chrysostom, writing at about the same time, may have been prescient: he concluded that in a crowded world procreation could not be the point of marriage; prevention of fornication was argument enough. (37) In the end none of these authors values sexual desire and pleasure in themselves, but all recognize the desire for sexual union as inherent and see the need to construct an acceptable way to channel it. Luther even assumes that no one should expect to be celibate; rather, celiba cy is a rare and unusual gift.

In sum, our Christology (incomplete though it is), our spiritual traditions, and our theologies of marriage all point us in the direction of the goodness and inevitability of our embodied sensuality. It is these highly traditional insights, not "pop psychology," that inform contemporary affirmations that "sex is a wonderful gift from God, given to us for our enjoyment." (38)

4. Sacrament and liturgy. Another source of wisdom about the body is the liturgical tradition. One of the greatest insights of the Reformation was that God's ability to bestow grace in the sacraments does not depend upon human folderol and doodads. In fact, insofar as human beings become distracted by the project of producing, procuring, and arguing over "just the right ones," and as long as they are themselves convinced that these things are necessary in order to receive grace, these objects actually prevent people from experiencing and understanding God's infinite, free love for us communicated in Word and sacrament. In this way European Protestant worship removed nearly all of the sights, smells, flavors, and textures of Roman liturgy and stripped itself almost bare, to the spoken and sung word.

Fast-forwarding to the twentieth century, we see a new impulse: the great insight of Lutheran liturgical renewal has been that while physical objects are not essential to the experience of grace, they can be helpful. We cannot imagine how to experience human love without embraces, without pictures, without the particular scent of our loved ones or memories of foods we have eaten together. This same sensuality can help us to anchor the presence, or immanence, of God, and also the transcendence, the "beyondness" that is so much larger than the objects we use to represent it.

Our family has two church homes, Lutheran and Roman Catholic. When we asked our youngest child in which congregation he wanted to prepare for Eucharist, he answered without hesitation, "At the Lutheran church, because there they use real bread, and at the Catholic church they just use those little round plastic things!" Physical objects, used reverently, provide an anchor for the "for you" that is characteristic not just of Eucharist and baptism but of the Word of God, read and preached in the community. (39) Thus we have the lectionary and the colors of the liturgical seasons; we have periods of light and darkness, feasting and fasting, presence and absence, simplicity and opulence; we have rhythms of alternating pleasure and deprivation and learn to find God in both. The great accomplishment of the ecumenical liturgical renewal has been to help us understand the difference between a sensuality that blocks out God and a sensuality that trains us to sense and respond more fully to the many modes of God's pres ence.

Likewise, though baptism and Eucharist are the only two Lutheran sacraments, there is a growing recognition that other acts--in and out of liturgy--can be sacramental. This sword cuts two ways, both of which are helpful to a theology of sexuality. First, through sacramental events we may experience undeniably the power and goodness of God. These moments differ for all of us. For me they have included hiking alone in the Cascades, breathing in the smell of the pines at the very moment when the sun has warmed the trees just enough to release their scent; particular, magical meals shared with friends or family; childbirth; and prayer in which I imagine God enveloping me physically. These are moments of physical, psychic, and spiritual receptivity, moments in which we make ourselves open and vulnerable on every level so that physical sensations, emotions, and a sense of God's presence come rushing in on their own terms. Making love can be one of these events, and when it is it deserves to be called sacramental.

It makes sense, then, to ask, What are the parameters of a sexual experience that reveals the power and love of God? What does such a moment look like? Patricia Jung and many others have written eloquently on this subject, but it is a conversation we need to widen. (40)

The sword has a second edge, however. Unlike the sacraments, these events do not always "work," do not always become occasions of grace. Still, we would not say it was morally wrong for me to go hiking if all I got out of it was exercise and a good view; we would not say it was wrong for me to eat a meal in which I did not experience the power of communion (I hope not, as I think of all the stand-up bowls of cereal eaten while I unload the dishwasher or the sandwiches wolfed down in the car or in front of the computer!). Likewise, we wouldn't want to say that sex without a revelatory experience was wrong. There are, even within marriage, many other kinds of sex: sex that starts Out as angry, silly, bored, or comforting, or as a release of tension. (41) We might want to consider the possibility that there are other kinds of good sex, beyond the sacramental, that there is nothing "wrong" with sex that does not reach these wonderful heights.

In a related vein, we would also be unwilling to say that I must go hiking, have a dinner party, have another baby, or have sex so that I can experience the divine, that I can't be fully human unless I'm in regular pursuit of peak experiences. In her article on sex as a moment of grace, Rebecca Parker also argues strongly that "sex is not the be all and end all of life," it is not "the only means of grace," and sometimes it "is not a rewarding or appropriate part of our lives." (42)

What are the parameters of good hiking, good dinners, good sex? When and how is it fitting to do these things, and when is it not? We need descriptions for all of them that allow moments of transcendence to be "something extra"--grace--rather than condemning moments without transcendence as "missing something essential." (43)

Theology of desire

Garrison Keillor Lutherans are used to the idea that if it's alluring, it must be evil. The idea that anything enticing could be good for you is suspect. Desire is frightening to Christians who are used to saying that only agape--unconditional, self-emptying love--is truly Christian. But desire is precisely what we find in Luther's forebear, Augustine, who embraced a theology of eros, of yearning after and possessing the good. In City of God, he outlines the difference between inhabitants of the City of God and the City of the Flesh. By God's design all people love erotically: all recognize things that meet their needs, all desire these goods, all seek to possess them. (44) The difference is that only citizens of the City of God recognize God as their greatest good and therefore desire to live for God. Citizens of the City of God do not refuse to pursue created goods, nor do they regard their bodies as evil; (45) it's just that they know that these things do not provide ultimate happiness. Inhabitants of the City of the Flesh, on the other hand, try to find ultimate happiness in created goods. The citizens of this city correctly believe that created goods participate in God, but they do not realize that only God, and not these created goods, can satisfy the basic longing of their souls. (46) Citizens of the earthly city are doomed to failure and unhappiness because they are "not living in the way for which [they are] created." (47) Transferring this insight to sex, we could say that most of the desires tied up with sexuality--pleasure, comfort, companionship--are real goods. But if we desire God above all we will realize that only God can fulfill these needs perfectly; living as if sex could do so is the sure path to frustration and unhappiness. (48) It's fine to desire a created good if we are clear about what we can and cannot expect from it, and in a sex-saturated and sex-obsessed culture it's easy to expect too much. (49)

Augustine's insights suggest that we ought to reflect more on our own desires so that we can figure out what it is that we really desire when we want sex. This in turn enables us to put sex in perspective, which loosens its power over us and frees us to use it constructively. There are moments when we feel keenly the bottomless emptiness, the void, the deep hunger, the God-shaped hole inside ourselves that we sometimes try to fill with people, or work, or food, or alcohol. Does sex have a role to play? It may, as long as we realize that it cannot fill the hole. My experience in my own marriage is that sex can confirm a deep bond of companionship, and it can help clear away the distractions that allow us to pretend that the void is not there or that some other person is causing it or that something other than God might fill it. It can help loving partners have the courage to face that emptiness together. (50)

Then there is the desire to complete a union with a particular person--mind, spirit, soul--with a union of the body: a keystone, a completion, a melting into one another in sacramental recognition of a deep union. And there is the desire to maintain that union, which can take on quite different shapes from day to day or year to year. A friend described this as the "strings of desire" that can bind us together in dry or difficult moments, allowing us to express love and experience connection even when words contradict love. We must not forget the desire to give delight--those incredible moments of grace when our happiness comes from having given joy to another. There is the fact that we can cultivate desire--feed it and tend it and keep it alive--in some cases to maintain a relationship and in other cases to sustain the hope or fantasy of one. There is the desire that frustrates Augustine, the desire of our bodies almost independently of our minds inspired by a look, a scent, or a touch. And finally there is t he just plain physical ache for sexual release. How do we interpret these layers in our concrete lives?

Limits: vocation and sin

Desire and its satisfaction are not goods in themselves. How can we evaluate them self-critically? How do we preserve good reasons and forbid self-deceptive rationalizations?

One important technique for tempering, testing, and directing desire is to put it in conversation with vocation: What is God, through the community around me, enabling and inviting me to be and to do? This is a very different question, Luther implies, than the rule-bound query, What am I permitted to do? or even the personal-growth questions, What are my gifts and needs? Vocation, instead, is about the intersection of my abilities and personality with the community's needs. The question is, What has to be done, and how can I harness my talents to help? Luther is aware that this is a complex question. Serious attention to vocation can entail embracing very different roles that we imagine for ourselves. If your community needs judges, jailers, or even hangmen, and you are qualified, he declares, sign up! (51) The point is not about grasping power but about taking responsibility for ourselves and for sisters and brothers both within and outside the church. How often do we ask not, May I act on my desire? but Wit h whom, if anyone, is God calling me into sexual relationship? and what wonderful things can I contribute to the community and to other individuals by answering this call?

Finally, a Christian theology of sexuality must deal honestly with sin. The most important Lutheran contribution to the discussion--rooted in Augustine's convictions about our inability to desire God above all else--is that sin permeates all human doings equally. Sexual sin should not be singled out for special attention, and when it is, we ought to be highly suspicious that, in a sort of reverse idolatry, sex is being used as a decoy to distract us from other vices we would rather not examine. The great theologians know this. According to Eastern theologian Chrysostom, our great temptation and surest family wrecker is not sex but love of money. (52.) Augustine may seem to worry endlessly over sexual lust, but his paradigmatic example of human disobedience is greed, theft of pears that he neither wanted nor needed. (53.) When sex becomes the litmus test of morality, when we focus disproportionate attention on sexual sin, we do harm by omission. We sap the energy that we could use to identify and correct other injustices in the world around us and within ourselves. These injustices include the sin of "excusing" many of our sexual sins by categorizing them as minor sins of weakness in the face of desire--rather like succumbing to a doughnut--when their deeper evil lies in exploitation, abuses of power, or idolatry. If we say only, My desire got the better of me, we avoid facing these other demons.

Overemphasis on sexual sin obscures other sins of the body and hides their relationships to each other. It prevents us from having to deal honestly with the sin of gluttony, for example. I am guilty of this sin daily. If I'm not overeating, I'm caring too much how food tastes, eating too high on the food chain, buying foods that were not organically produced, or putting my own desire for French Roast coffee ahead of others' need to eat at all. And this sin, over the course of my life, probably harms me and unseen neighbors around the world more than any sexual sins I've committed or will commit. Yet if we called a conference on the sin of gluttony, would anyone register? Would the press cover it? Unlikely!

But we also need to preach the comforting side of this doctrine: God asks that we first love and believe in God, and then that we live out our vocation in the world as well as we can. If we have this sort of faith, we can walk forward in that odd combination of humility and confidence: we know we will fall short, but we know that God forgives all our weaknesses and mistakes. The many friends whom I consulted emphasized this point strongly. One wrote, "For me, the greatest sin would be to turn my back on someone who needed [God's] touch. The person who needed to just talk, or needed a shoulder to cry on. A family needing transportation to visit a loved one... a child needing an adult to acknowledge them and give them hope. To love someone no matter what their background may be." Her point was not that her sex life was morally insignificant. Rather, she was pointing out that the sexual is only one of many realms in which we must manifest the love of God, and that the same faith and love that enable her to order her priorities in this way give her confidence that God has forgiven her weaknesses and missteps--sexual, and other. Luther is serious when he says that our "infirmities and offences" do not stand in the way of holiness if we truly love and follow Christ. (54)

Two postscripts

These meanderings reveal that most church discussions of sexuality are missing dimensions that are essential to a comprehensive Christian treatment of it. I will point out two, although there are many more. First, Augustine's belief that even "good" marital, procreative sex ought to be hidden away in the dark has probably contributed more than anything to the impression that our sexuality--unlike any other dimension of our humanity--is essentially private, immune to or isolated from all our other social, political, and familial connections. The great insight of recent philosophers and theologians is that even secret and nonprocreative sexual expression has a social context and power implications: our sexual relationships reproduce the economic injustice, racism, homophobia, and sexism of the world around us. It is impossible to "mend" human sexual relating as if it were simply about private passions, immune from these larger powers. Thus the standard of sex in the City of God has to be the reign of God--not, as in Augustine's vision, merely the silencing of passion and desire, but the reign of justice. Augustine ultimately agrees. However much ink he has spilled on the shamefulness of sex, what truly irritates him is simply that sexual arousal is the only involuntary function that appears when it is biologically unnecessary and that the will cannot discipline it into submission. The real root of sin is pride, with its very public, social manifestation in aimless greed and the desire to dominate. (55)

Indeed, it is worth reflecting upon whether pride, greed, and domination do not infect our sexuality much more profoundly than does the simple hunger for pleasure. Mary E. Hunt's pun, "just/good sex," is a wonderful starting point for the discussion of sex's public dimension. To begin with, sex must be safe: from abuse, from disease, from fear of persecution, and from coercion. If it is not always physically gratifying, it must at least genuinely pursue pleasure, health, and wholeness. It must be community-building: our relationships must engender and nourish, rather than jeopardize, a love and creative energy that spill over into the community around us. Finally, it must create and model just relationships, partnerships between equals in which power is shared and renewed rather than used to control others. (56)

Second, to a degree human knowledge is cumulative; one generation can build on the achievements of the last. Nevertheless, neither denominational conversations nor any other human efforts to "get sex right" will ever reach a conclusion. Some kinds of wisdom have their own trajectory and life in each person. As Soren Kierkegaard says, if we want to learn complicated dances, we have to begin with simple steps; (57) neither dance theory nor other people's accomplishments can help us become good dancers. We know this about faith. We know it about moral psychological development. It has to be true about sexuality, which exists at the nexus of body, spirit, and emotion. A mature and faithful sexuality cannot be learned in a manual, whether it is The Joy of Sex or the Bible. Instead, we grow by living well: by listening to and being conscious of ourselves, by being accompanied, by thinking and talking, by praying, by learning how to love God, others, and ourselves authentically. Says Kierkegaard,

What ever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing. In this respect every generation begins primitively, has no different task from that of every previous generation, nor does it get further.... This authentically human factor is passion, in which also the one generation perfectly understands the other and understands itself. Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation, and if here one is not willing like the previous generation to stop with love but would go further, this is but idle and foolish talk. (58)

Our life's goal is simply, by the grace of God, to learn to love.

(1.) Pamela Paul, author of The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (Villard Books) has documented the contemporary trend she calls "starter marriages," typically childless marriages entered by people in their twenties that last five years or less. See Jennifer Owens, "Where the Aisle Ends...," in The Chicago Tribune (January 30,2002, section 8, pp. 1, 8).

(2.) Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 76-77.

(3.) See Elaine Ramshaw's and Lee Butler's essays in this issue of Currents.

(4.) Thanks to Stephen Pope, Boston College, for this quip.

(5.) The original Kinsey data show that 10 percent of married women do not experience orgasm during coitus, and that by the twentieth year of marriage 24 percent of women reached orgasm during coitus less than 30 percent of the time (Alfred C. Kinsey et at., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female [Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953], 352, 408). For a more recent analysis, see June Machover Reinisch, Ruth Beasley, and Debra Kent, The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex: What You Must Know to be Sexually Literate (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).

(6.) Note that 95 percent of married men, but only 75 percent of married women, report "always or usually" achieving orgasm with their primary sex partners (Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, Edward O. Laumann, and Gina Kolata, Sex in America: A Definitive Survey [Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1994], 129).

(7.) Carolyn H. Eklin and Eugene C. Rochlkepartain, "What Role Can Churches Play In At-Risk Prevention?" Source Newsletter (February, 1992), http://www.search_institute.org/archives/tff.htm.

(8.) Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 299; see interpretation of data on p. 293.

(9.) Michael et al., Sex in America, 102-3. Note that 83 percent of people overall report the same degree of limitation: 77 percent of men and 89 percent of women.

(10.) Laumann et al., Social Organization, 217.

(11.) Laumann et al., 216.

(12.) Laumann et al., 207.

(13.) Laumann et al., 299. Demographics play an important role here: among residents of the twelve largest U.S. cities, 16.4 percent of men and 6.2 percent of women have had same-gender sex partners in their adult lives; in rural areas, only 1.5 percent of men and 2.8 percent of women have had same-gender partners (p. 304).

(14.) Laumann et al., 336.

(15.) This figure holds for persons born between 1963 and 1974 (Laumann et al., 329).

(16.) See Wanda Deifelt, "Beyond Compulsory Motherhood," in Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World's Religions, ed. Patricia Beattie Jung, Mary E. Hunt, and Radhika Balakrishnan (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 96-112.

(17.) See Matthew Fox, O.P., Original Blessing (Santa Fe: Bear and Company, 1983), and his critics; e.g., Loren Wilkinson, "Christ and the Land: Recent Books on Earth-keeping," Sojourners 19 (February-March 1990): 41.

(18.) Quotations from Tom Driver, Joseph Blenkinsopp, and Norman Pittenger, in William E. Phipps, The Sexuality of Jesus (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1996), 12-13.

(19.) James B. Nelson, Body Theology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 195.

(20.) See Martin Luther, "This Is My Body," Luther's Works 37 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955-1986), 72.

(21) Luther, "This Is My Body," 71, 93-94, 118-19.

(22.) The term "theoeroticism" is the creation of Richard Kieckhefer.

(23.) Suzanne Noffke, O.P., trans. and ed., The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena, vol. 1, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 52 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1988), 207-8.

(24.) Mechthild von Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Divinity, trans. Christiane Mesch Galvani, ed. and intro by Susan Clark (Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Series B, vol. 72 (New York: Garland, 1991), 13.

(25.) Mechthild, Flowing Light, 13.

(26.) Margaret Ebner, Major Works, trans. and ed. Leonard P. Hindsley (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 125-26. See also passages on the divine kiss, e.g., p. 122. In the example above, to "desire" and to be "set afire" by "ardent love" puts Ebner immediately in mind of Christ's universal salvific love. What we would call the sexual character of the experience is transmuted into theology. Note that even Luther uses bride and bridegroom language, although in a different context and without the ecstatic dimension: Martin Luther, "The Freedom of a Christian," in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), 60-61.

(27.) Ebner, Major Works, 100.

(28.) See for instance Rebecca Parker, "Malting Love as a Means of Grace: Women's Reflections," Open Hands 3 (Winter 1988): 8-12. On this theme, and on mutuality and pleasure in sex, see Christine Gudorf, Body, Sex, And Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1994); and works by Carter Heyward, Mary Pellauer, Susan Ross, James B. Nelson, Patricia Beattie Jung, and Cristina L. H. Traina.

(29.) See also John Chrysostom, "How to Choose a Wife," in On Marriage and Family Life (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997), 99-100.

(30.) Augustine of Hippo, "The Good of Marriage," Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1955), chap. 9.

(31.) Augustine, Treatises on Marriage, chap. 10.

(32.) Augustine, Treatises, chap. 13.

(33.) Martin Luther, "The Estate of Marriage," Luther's Works 45:18. See also p. 19.

(34.) Luther, "The Estate of Marriage," 21.

(35.) Luther, "The Estate of Marriage," 33-34.

(36.) Luther, "The Estate of Marriage," 39.

(37.) Chrysostom, On Marriage, 85-86, 99.

(38.) Herbert W. Chilstrom and Lowell O. Erdahl, Sexual Fulfillment for Single and Married, Straight and Gay, Young and Old (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001), 152.

(39.) On the particular character and power of the sacraments for the individual (as opposed to humanity in general or the congregation) see Luther's Works 36:348-49. Thanks to Elaine Ramshaw for this insight.

(40.) See Patricia Beattie Jung, "Sanctifying Women's Pleasure," in Good Sex, 77-95.

(41.) Thanks to Susan Ross for this observation.

(42.) Rebecca Parker, "Making Love as a Means of Grace," in Sexuality: A Reader, ed. Karen Lebacqz with David Sinacore Gunn, The Pilgrim Library of Ethics (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999), 136-37.

(43.) This is the difficulty with the ethics of John Paul II and others who believe that every act of sex must achieve the ideal of grace, of total self-gift and complete vulnerability. For a full treatment, see Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981). And this is what is of value in evangelical theologian Stanley Grenz's notion that neither marriage nor sex is a means of grace, a source of power adequate to preserve a union; see Stanley J. Grenz, Sexual Ethics: An Evangelical Perspective (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 82-83.

(44.) Augustine, Concerning the City of God: Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson, intro, by John O'Meara (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), XIV:6-7, pp. 555-58.

(45.) Ibid., XIV:5, pp. 554-55.

(46.) Ibid., XIV:13, pp. 57 1-74.

(47.) Ibid., XIV:4, p. 552.

(48.) See M. Scott Peck, Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Toward Spiritual Growth: The Edited Lectures (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

(49.) This is not, by the way, exactly what Augustine concludes; he is so uncomfortable with the involuntariness of sexual passion that he wishes married men could achieve the good of conception without sexual desire or pleasure (City of God XIV:16, p. 577). One might with fair confidence assert that many wives have approached this ideal.

(50.) See for example Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas," Praise (New York: Ecco Press, 1974), 4-5.

(51.) Martin Luther, "Secular Authority: The Extent to Which It Should Be Obeyed," in Martin Luther, ed. Dillenberger, 374-75; and "The Freedom of a Christian," in Dillenberger, 65.

(52.) Chrysostom, On Marriage, throughout, but especially 58, 68-69.

(53.) See Martha Ellen Stortz, "'Where or When Was Your Servant Innocent?': Augustine on Childhood," in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Marcia Bunge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 84-85.

(54.) Luther, "The Letter of Paul to the Galatians," in Dillenberger, 159-60.

(55.) Augustine, City of God, XIV.

(56.) Mary E. Hunt, "Just Good Sex: Feminist Catholicism and Human Rights," in Good Sex, ed. Jung et al., 171-73.

(57.) Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 56-57.

(58.) Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 130.

Thanks to Amanda Downs, Avani Lodhavia, and Sandra Longfellow for research help; to Elaine Ramshaw for references; to the many friends whose good questions and observations shaped this essay, especially Karla Grimmett and Joan Kelly; to my husband, Bill Hutchison; and to our children, Kate, Maggie (who proofread), and David.