It just occurred to me that I’ve been writing on this blog for five years now. I can’t exactly say for sure what compelled me to chronicle intimate (and scandalous) details about my sexual experiences. Perhaps it was an attempt to seek the underlying, hidden impulses that motivate my behaviors. “For I do not understand my own actions” (Rom 7:15). Despite the many words I’ve written since, I don’t believe I’ve acquired much in the way of self-knowledge.
A brief synopsis: I am a single man in his early thirties completing a PhD at a divinity school and serving in lay ministry at a Lutheran parish. The product of a traditional religious upbringing, I struggle to reconcile my sexual behavior with my calling. My Testimony provides a brief introduction to my dilemma. I’ve described growing up in the purity culture, the struggle to remain pure as a young man, and ultimately losing my virginity to a call girl. Paying for sex has remained an essential part of my sexual experience. There have been liaisons with married women, an extended fling with a classmate, a brief but intense entanglement with a colleague in ministry, plus the occasional hookup.
I’ve explored my Madonna-whore complex, my fascination with porn, Christianity’s trouble with sexual liberation, my darkest sexual fantasies, and my pained experience of trying to reconcile my sexual appetite with the traditional Christian sexual ethic. Some insight has been gleaned, to be sure, but my dilemma remains fundamentally the same. I suspect there will be no tidy resolution to this any time soon.
Lutheran Guilt 