Domine non sum dignus

“Candidates for ordained ministry shall make a complete dedication of themselves to the highest ideals of the Christian life. To this end, they shall agree to exercise responsible self-control through fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness.“

If I am to continue my path to ordination, the Candidacy Committee must grant endorsement. “This is a time for mutual assessment of a candidate’s strengths and growth areas in discerning readiness for completing candidacy.” A crucial step is the endorsement interview with representatives of my synodical candidacy committee and appropriate seminary faculty. The committee uses the interview to decide whether to grant, postpone, or deny endorsement for supervised ministry. The committee scheduled the interview after the spring semester, which allowed me more time to complete my endorsement essay, which guides the discussion during the interview.

I dread the possibility of questions concerning whether I am living entirely in accord with our church’s teachings.

I began my candidacy with the hope that as I progressed toward ordination, I would become capable of dedicating myself to this standard of behavior.

My hands firmly clasp her hips as my pelvis slams repeatedly against her ass. My face is contorted in anguish as I desperately strain to climax. In a perverse sense, this is a mortification of the flesh. Our coupling is starkly emotionless, simply marked by raw physicality. Amidst the intensity of sexual frenzy, I feel driven by a sense of desperation. When Audrey had earlier opened the door to her hotel room in her white lingerie, her sensuality overpowered me. Now as I fuck her with manic intensity, I experience a curious blend of liberation and dread. My muscles tighten, I become slightly dizzy, and an aching cry escapes my throat. The void that follows in the wake of orgasm subsumes me.

As my sexual explorations intensified, it became apparent that my lust was propelling my behavior in a decisive way. Before each furtive encounter I promised, “This will be the last time,” only to once again renege on that promise. I prayed for deliverance. Victory. At one point I bluntly pleaded, “Please stop me before I fuck again.”

But I couldn’t stop fucking.

I came to realize that there wouldn’t be one last time.

Hier ficke ich, ich kann nicht anders.

I recently watched clips from the film Nymphomaniac. The protagonist is a middle-aged woman who proclaims, “I am a nymphomaniac, and I love myself for being one. But above all, I love my cunt, and my filthy dirty lust.” The film details her sexual precociousness in explicit detail (she has anal sex when she loses her virginity), and her sexual odyssey goes on to include sex with an endless number of partners, masochistic encounters, and lesbianism. Simply put, she can’t stop fucking.

I am devoured by desire.

Roland Barthes

Feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote of the “stigma” that indelibly marks the one consumed by sexual compulsion: “The person, made for sex or needing it, devoted to it, marked by it, is a person incarnated restless and wild in the world and defined by fucking: fucking as a vocation….”

Fucking as a vocation. “For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war” (Rom 7:22-23). “The bondage of the will” no longer seems merely theoretical. Each furtive encounter manifests a disequilibrium between my spiritual aspirations and my lust. I struggle to inhabit the dichotomy of piety and passion. My good works vie with the works of the flesh. I’m burdened by a sensitive conscience and a robust libido. Perhaps my perceived calling to ministry is nothing more than the cry of a guilty conscience to atone for this other vocation.

I have an acute sense my profound unworthiness. Domine non sum dignus. I’ve certainly questioned my fitness for ministry. Of course I wouldn’t be the first man of the cloth to succumb to sexual temptation. Among the “cloud of witnesses” I look to for inspiration were men of willing spirit but weak flesh (MLK, Jr.; Merton). The “randy vicar” is a staple of Anglican lore. The prospect of the exposure of my double life, and the disrepute such scandal would inflict on the church, makes me hesitate. “He must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace” (1 Tim 3:7).

A dominant characteristic of the conservative religious culture in which I was raised was what has been termed “sexual exceptionalism,” in which sexual sins outweigh other transgressions. I have acutely felt this thorn of the flesh. My incapacity for sexual discipleship strikes at the heart of my religion.

I don’t want to be pure.

The guilt has been intense. I’ve done things I would have never thought I was capable of. But the pleasure has also been intense. There’s the sheer physical pleasure, of course. But there’s also something else. “In the electricity of stigma there is a mixture of sexual shamelessness, personal guilt, and a defiance that is unprincipled, not socially meaningful in consequence or intention, determined only by need or desire,” Dworkin wrote. By “electricity of stigma” I assume she meant the frisson of transgression. My fascination with call girls, in addition to their practical convenience, certainly derives from the taboo surrounding prostitution. Georges Bataille in Eroticism argues that the transgression of taboos constitutes the erotic. Bataille was haunted by the remnants of his Catholicism yet considered the brothels of Paris as his “churches.” My acquaintance with the mysterium iniquitatis is most keenly felt in sex. There is a genuine thrill in leading a double life. “I have grown to love secrecy,” Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray. “It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.” Replace that common thing with illicit sex and it becomes even more marvelous.

Have my sexual transgressions implanted doubt? Or has my doubt led me to transgress? The late Rachel Held Evans dismissed “doubt as a STD.” I’m not so sure. The distinction between belief and faith is not theoretical anymore. Faith is hard. The divine is notional rather than an experienced presence.

I don’t want to be pure anymore.