Along with others on our pastoral team, I’ve been reaching out to check-in with parishioners during this plague. The fear is palpable, and my virtual “ministry of presence” seems inadequate. I was drained after this afternoon’s round of phone calls.
Then I thought about The Girl in the Black Dress.
As I watch, she reaches behind her back and unfastens her bra. She seductively removes it, exposing her perky breasts. Then she inserts her fingers into the waistband of her panties. She slides them down her legs, stepping out of them. Her bare, shaved mons pubis is uncovered. Soon she will be spreading her legs for me….
Dr. Jen Gunter writes in The New York Times, “Right now the only safe sex is no sex with partners outside your household.” But I am carnal (cf. Rom 7:14). Sex researcher Justin Lehmiller writes that “we all have different propensities for sexual excitation (getting turned on) and sexual inhibition (getting turned off). Put another way, we all have a ‘gas pedal’ and a ‘brake’ when it comes to sexual arousal. However, some people have a gas pedal that’s always partially pressed (which makes it easier for them to get turned on)….” “Excitation transfer” is the clinical term for how strong emotions — including anxieties about mortality– amplify sexual response. There is historical precedent for this. An Italian historian at the time of the Black Death wrote of survivors, “They rushed headlong into lust.”
Susan Cheever writes, “For a while there is no such thing as ‘too much’ with the object of desire.” That almost ineffable feeling comes over me once more. Palpitations. Exposed by my raging hard-on. Yearning to give in to that throbbing need to fill a cunt hard and fast.
Crazed with spring all I want to do is fuck
Maggie Wells, “Sonnet from the Groin”
Her hands are pressed against the wall, her ass arched toward me. My hands grab her hips as I furiously thrust my pelvis back and forth. Filling her faster and faster, harder and harder. I fuck her with a desperate intensity, my entire being concentrated into this moment. My body tenses and guttural grunts accompany each hard thrust….
Once again, I stand naked before temptation, that “dizzy rush into perdition,” in Bataille’s words. “Temptation is the desire to fall, to fail, to faint and to squander all one’s reserves until there is no firm ground beneath one’s feet.” There is a queasiness from the specter of another fall from grace and the concomitant guilt. There is also anticipation of “the delirium into which temptation would have him slide.”
The taboo on sexuality which the religious of his own free will carries to extremes, creates in temptation a state of affairs abnormal certainly, but in which the erotic element, rather than undergoing a change, stands out more sharply.
Georges Bataille, Eroticism
One pastor wrote, “Virtue is a state where you have been tempted but have successfully passed the test.” By that definition, I am notably deficient in virtue. Having sipped from sweet stolen waters (Prov 9:17), I seek to slake the thirst of the flesh. Self-control is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:23). Yet when I picture The Girl in the Black Dress, I feel helpless before her seductive charms.
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
Oscar Wilde
My theology was unable to prevent me from acting out.
These words from an unnamed pastor have recently stuck in my head. “Justification can conquer fornication,” one prominent pastor promised. As I entered divinity school and ministry, however, my sexual failure only became more pronounced. In my earlier quest for purity, I prayed for a “hedge of protection” (cf. Job 1:10) and took up my “sword and shield” (cf. Eph 6). Sex was “the enemy” against which I waged battle. The thorn in my flesh (cf. 2 Cor 12:7) only pressed deeper.
A number of providers have moved to virtual platforms. On Pornhub, a petite redhead is pleasuring herself….
Lutheran Guilt 