Guilty Pleasures

As I unfastened her long blue skirt, I was reminded of the woman in a Graham Greene novel who, with “fear and pride,” confessed, “We’re going to do a mortal sin.” I gently brushed my hand against her crotch and felt damp fabric – she was creaming her panties in anticipation of her sin. She removed the rest of her clothing but continued to wear her engagement ring and the cross on her necklace, symbols of the two sacred pledges she was now about to violate.

In “Guilty Pleasures: When Sex is Good Because It’s Bad,” feminist Jewish rabbi Rebecca T. Alpert explores the irony of how rules intended “to limit and control sexual desire unwittingly enhances the power of sexual desire.” She writes from the perspective of Judaism, but its implications apply to other creeds. “Regulating sexual behavior is a significant dimension of most religious systems,” distinguishing between licit and illicit desires. Traditionally in Judaism, sex was valued almost exclusively for its procreative potential. “For the purposes of procreation, sexual desire is understood as useful, but it is still called yetzer hara, an evil inclination, and must be controlled and limited.” Narrowly circumscribing sexual activity has the result of “making sex seem bad, dangerous, and shameful.” It also acknowledges that sex is daemonic. “Forbidding people to act out on sexual desires affirms that sexual desire is dangerous.”

Sexual desire is not so easily tamed. “The erotic is connected to wildness, chaos, and disorder–just what the rabbinic tradition wishes to tame and make orderly.” Sexual regulation invites its own subversion. “The efforts to control desire make it more desirable.” A medieval mystical Jewish account of the story of Adam and Eve suggests that sexual desire came from eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The forbidden is erotic. “Illicit sex is appealing because it is an opportunity to do what is forbidden, to test the rules.” Desire is heightened, not diminished. “Sex with the wrong person at the wrong place or time enhances erotic pleasure.” In a system that regulates sex, people whose desires do not conform to the regulations must hide their erotic selves. Yet “the pleasure of illicit sex is enhanced through secrecy.” As it’s been said, the best sex is the sex you can’t tell anybody about.

There are “unintended liberating consequences” to all this. Not only can transgression heighten erotic experience, “it has the potential to challenge the privileged status of licit relationships.” Alpert notes that in both contemporary Orthodox and liberal Jewish sexual ethics, sex is attached to commitment and intimacy. Sexual pleasure per se is devalued as a good. Transgressive sex outside of committed monogamous relationships subverts this paradigm and challenges the assumption that sex is merely instrumental to other values.

At that moment, we were nothing more than two sinners fucking. The engagement ring. The cross. Solemn promises abjured for a few moments of furtive pleasure. Her mouth on my neck, her nails in my back, her legs clamped around my waist. As her pleasure intensified, she took the Lord’s name in vain. Her little blasphemies are almost liturgical in their cadences. In their desperation, I detect a plea for divine mercy for her sin. And as I thrust into her over and over again, I continued our erotic liturgy, one “which makes flesh a deity” (Shakespeare). Our sex was unprotected, but conception was not our intention. Nor was it a sign of romantic commitment. The truth was starker: we fucked because we could.

“Could I enjoy what was forbidden for no other reason except that it was forbidden?”
Augustine, Confessions

Pieces of a Puzzle

As much as possible, I try to compartmentalize my “church” life from my sex life. Excluding my brief (and intense) fling with The Deaconess, I haven’t become sexually involved with any woman from my parish. Some of it is probably a mechanism to reduce the dissonance in my life. I try to compensate for my sexual guilt through my work in ministry. In the #MeToo era, relations between church leaders and congregants are especially dangerous. Sexual misconduct is grounds for dismissal from ministry.

“Anne” is tempting my restraint.

Anne’s relatively new to our church. She’s a single twentysomething Christian school teacher who remarkably resembles Shannen Doherty on Charmed. In the classes I’ve taught, she’s revealed herself to be whip-smart. (Tonight she made a long but penetrating digression on The Pilgrim’s Progress.)

Tonight she came up to me after class. She said was interested in forming a young adults group in our parish and asked if I could be of assistance. With church and school, I’m pressed for time as it is, but I agreed to help because

A young adults group would be an excellent ministry and advance our mission.
It would give me the opportunity to spend time with Anne.

Was Anne signaling any attraction to me? I doubt it. Still….

What followed was what Catholic moral theology used to call delectatio morosa.

Anne’s welcoming smile turning into a naughty smirk….panties falling to the floor….pushing open her thighs….her nails pressed into my hips, pressing me deeper into her….a shriek of pleasure.

I recently watched the movie First Reformed about the crisis of faith of a Reformed pastor. It got weird toward the end, but the film culminates in the suicidal pastor embracing a young pregnant widow he had been counseling (played by Amanda Seyfried). Implicit in the embrace is the sexual consummation which will follow. One heterodox interpretation could be that even when faith is obscured by doubt, shards of salvation can be glimpsed during sex.

One female pastor confessed that her sexuality was “like pieces of a puzzle that I haven’t put together yet.” I haven’t put that puzzle together, either.

Pure

I recently stumbled upon Linda Kay Klein’s Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free. It details the personal journey of a young women who came of age in the purity culture and how it warped her sexuality. While the book is narrated from a female perspective, I recognized much of the culture she described from my own personal experience. Girls were admonished to dress and behave modestly lest they become “stumbling blocks” for boys. An “impure” girl was considered to be damaged, akin to a chewed-up piece of gum. Sexual impurity isn’t confined to actions; inappropriate thoughts and feelings can also render one impure. There was even an Abstinence Study Bible. It all gave the impression that sexual abstinence was essential to living one’s Christian faith. As a young evangelical woman said, “Sex is the big issue that…marks your spiritual standing with God.”

Klein found that a common experience among women formed by the purity culture was sexual guilt and shame. (Klein recounts how, even after she had left the church, she thought she was a “slut” for attempting to have sex with her boyfriend.) Premarital sexual experimentation only exacerbated this. (“Masturbation is what got me through so many years of chastity,” one woman explained.) Sexual dysfunction was common among those who practiced abstinence before marriage. (A common theme in purity literature is that a woman devoted to chastity will turn into a tigress in the bedroom upon her wedding night.)

A couple of thoughts:

I recall that girls were taught to not be “stumbling blocks” because men were easily provoked to lust. The message I received is that women, at least in part, are triggers of temptation and responsible for a man’s fall. I remember one encounter with the Deaconess in which I felt surge of contempt for her because she had not guarded her purity and had led me into sin.
While it may be more keenly felt by women, I can also relate to conflating my identity as a Christian with sexual purity. As my sexual behavior has deviated from that rigid standard, I’ve struggled with doubt.
Sex cannot be separated from guilt for those formed in this culture. Some researchers have concluded: “It turns out that those who are sexually active and have experienced abstinence education and/or have stronger beliefs that the Bible should be literally translated [a core tenet of evangelicalism], have more sexual guilt.”

The Banquet of Chestnuts

On October 31, 1501, the Papal Palace hosted the Banquet of Chestnuts. According to a diary account by Pope Alexander VI’s master of ceremonies Johann Burchard, it was an eventful evening. William Manchester described it in A World Lit Only by Fire:

After the banquet dishes had been cleared away, the city’s fifty most beautiful whores danced with guests, “first clothed, then naked.” The dancing over, the “ballet” began, with the pope and two of his children in the best seats. Candelabra were set up on the floor; scattered among them were chestnuts, “which,” Burchard writes, “the courtesans had to pick up, crawling between the candles.” Then the serious sex started. Guests stripped and ran out on the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. “The coupling took place,” according to Burchard, “in front of everyone present.” Servants kept score of each man’s orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man’s machismo by his ejaculative capacity. After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes – cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those “who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times.”

627

The fete was dramatized in The Borgias, narrated by Burchard:

It is my sad duty to report that the said habits did not remain on the comely maidens long beyond the first course. They flaunted their nakedness for the cardinals with the abandon for which Roman prostitutes are noted.

Item: 200 candied chestnuts.

The festivities began at ten and descended into debauchery around midnight. La bella Farnese distributed the chestnuts on the floor and challenged the valiant damsels to pick them up using only their nether regions, in which enterprise they showed considerable invention.

The orgy inspired German illustrator Heinrich Lossow to paint The Sin (1880).

Lusts of Their Hearts

I recently discovered that the Deaconess has resigned from rostered ministry in our denomination and is “no longer eligible to receive a call.” I haven’t been in contact with her since we broke off our entanglement, so I have no way of knowing what prompted her decision. Part of me wonders if her struggles with chastity and fidelity drove her from ministry.

After one steamy encounter with the Deaconess, in a surge of post-coital guilt, she awkwardly confessed to having fervently prayed for “deliverance” from her “bondage” to sexual disobedience. She struggled with her unanswered prayers.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity (Rom 1:24).

Paul uses the word paradidonai (“handed them over to”) to describe God’s act of judgement on those who “took pleasure in wickedness” (2 Thess 2:12 KJV). Another way of putting it is that they have been “abandoned” by God.

It’s a frightful passage. Right now I’m under no illusions about being capable of seriously pursuing a life of purity. The lust (epithumia) that grips my heart craves that sin which is forbidden. “The heart is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked. Who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). The extent of my impurity (fornication, soliciting prostitutes, adultery) indicates a downward spiral into sensuality. I know I am without excuse. I’ve prayed, fasted, memorized Scripture, committed myself to ministry. My craving to indulge my fleshly desires, however, has only intensified. Have I passed the point of no return?

I think back on those furtive couplings with the Deaconess. Despite our positions in ministry and grounding in Christian morality, we couldn’t seem to resist our “degrading passions” (Rom 1:26). Had we, too, been abandoned?

Youthful Passions

One of the Bible verses burned into my memory growing up in the “purity culture” was 2 Timothy 2:22: “Flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness.” With “a pure heart,” we were exhorted to battle lust (which I understood to be synonymous with sexual desire) and guard our chastity. We were not to give in to the desires of the flesh. A single sexual sin could jeopardize our relationship with God. We were encouraged to resist mounting pressure from our peers and the media to have sex. “Holiness” was synonymous with “purity.”

“But I see in my members another law waging war” (Rom 7:23).

My erection betrayed me.

In youth group, when I would shyly interact with “Summer,” I tried to honor her purity. I averted my eyes as best I could from her protruding bust, her round rear. I did my best to banish impure thoughts about her. We always behaved chastely when we were together.

But Summer made me hard.

Philosopher Alain de Botton observes, “[T]he wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.” My erection revealed, to my shame, the true depth of my lust. No matter how hard I tried to take those thoughts captive (cf. 2 Cor 10:5), those unforgivably dirty thoughts I had about Summer always came back. I believed that I was called to be pure in heart. If erections are “particularly true and honest indices of interest,” as Botton suggests, what did every hard-on, every dirty thought, every intense desire to violate my pledge to remain pure reveal about my heart’s intentions?

I had been invited to facilitate a Bible study one night for our parish’s support group for single moms. Somehow the discussion turned to sex. (Awkward. Despite my obsession with the matter, I find it hard to talk about sex in public.) One of the participants (young and pretty, she reminded me of Alexis Bledel) startled her peers by saying, “No normal human being can abstain from sex. And God doesn’t really expect us to. I know God will forgive me for having sex.”

My faith tradition continues to place severe restrictions on sexual expression. As one official Lutheran theological statement bluntly puts it: “Sexual intercourse engaged in outside of marriage is forbidden by the Scriptures and must be condemned by the church.” The New Testament explicitly condemns πορνεία (porneia), commonly translated as “sexual immorality.” Accordingly, I made a commitment to my church that as a single person I would “live a chaste life.”

“It was like entering a time warp back to the 1950’s,” she said, referring to encountering our denomination’s policy mandating celibacy for single persons seeking ordination. “There’s this assumption in the pews that you just don’t have sex.” She thought the prohibition patently unrealistic. “We’re not monks and nuns.”

She had spent time at a Lutheran seminary as well our mainline Protestant school. On each campus, she discovered that most unmarried seminarians are sexually active. Some were in committed relationships. Some were having casual sex. Monastic self-denial clearly was not characteristic of seminary life. “Seminarians have sex, too.”

She didn’t feel comfortable discussing sexual behavior with anyone in the church. In candidacy committee meetings, she dreaded the possibility of being asked if she was living in accord with our church’s teachings. She fantasized about announcing at the next meeting, “I have sex!” and seeing what the reaction would be. (Pastors and church leaders aren’t naive. During a developmental interview, she was advised to exercise “discretion.” In other words, she wouldn’t be pressed on her sexual activity as long as she kept up an appearance of propriety. Don’t ask, don’t tell.)

She wasn’t alone. Apparently a lot of unmarried Christians are, as one commentator tartly puts it, “saved and having sex.” One recent survey determined that among young evangelicals, 80% have had sex, 64% have had sex within the previous year, and 42% are in an ongoing sexual relationship. Adolescents who had made abstinence pledges were five years later no more likely to have refrained from sex than their peers who hadn’t. Anecdotal evidence seems to confirm this. One writer told of a friend who recently ventured into online dating. Apparently the Christian women he’s dated “want to jump right from a very public conversation and a vanilla latte at Starbucks to very private whispers and physical exchanges between the sheets.”

“Kylie” is an evangelical at a secular college. She was raised Lutheran but identifies as a nondenominational Christian. She’s active in her campus’ InterVarsity Fellowship. She enjoys engaging in spiritual conversations with her fellow believers and sharing her faith journey. There’s one thing she doesn’t disclose to her colleagues in InterVarsity, though.

Kylie has sex.

She’s sleeping with her boyfriend. She doesn’t see anything wrong with it. “I started to question a lot of the teachings of my church specifically about sexual impurity including sex before marriage and homosexuality,” she wrote in her journal. She dismisses the notion that “a line in the Bible” should determine her sexual conduct. Having sex doesn’t affect her relationship with God, she believes. Her religious life and her sex life are separate. Kylie’s double life, according to Donna Frietas in Sex and the Soul, is not uncommon “even within evangelical subcultures.” Frietas writes, “Because of the strong hold of purity culture, many students learn to practice sexual secrecy, professing chastity in public while keeping their honest feelings and often their actual experiences hidden.”

I used to know a girl from a church young adults group named “Rebecca.” I recall she used to sanctimoniously condemn premarital sex. I later heard whispered rumors that she had slept with other guys in the young adults group. It would be easy to judge Rebecca a pious fraud, a hypocrite. Viewed more sympathetically, Rebecca simply couldn’t live up to her ideals. A primitive impulse had seized her body and compelled her to violate her values.

The incongruence between my religious beliefs and my sexual behavior has been a source of anguish. There is a cost to violating deeply ingrained values. As a young Christian, I adopted a set of strict morals regarding sexual behavior (i.e. the only acceptable sexual expression is confined within the context of heterosexual marriage). Eventually my behavior could no longer align with that code. “The moment I knew sin, I fucked.” At the heart of my spiritual struggle was this dissonance between my religious commitments and my sexual sin. My lofty aspirations couldn’t overcome my carnal desires. Once while dating a “respectable” girl from the church who (because True Love Waits®) refrained from all sexual expression (we didn’t even kiss), I hooked up with some other girl from my “Old Testament Method” course and visited escorts because I just couldn’t help myself. As a spiritual leader, I feel pressured to be above temptation. But in the midst of moans and cries of pleasure, as I was overpowered by the sinful flesh, the truth was revealed: I was incapable of chastity.

Veritas in coitu. Foucault said, “At the bottom of sex, there is truth.” Sex is self-revelatory. In bed we expose our true selves. There is a raw honesty in the sexual act itself. Literally stripped naked, we abandon any pretensions when we fuck. Author John Hubner writes, “Sex strips away identities it takes a lifetime to build. A naked aroused man is not a brain surgeon or a university president or a Methodist bishop. He is an animal with an erection.”

An animal with an erection. When I stand naked before a woman, my hard-on blazing, it’s a moment of confession. Regardless of my efforts to control my sensuality, my sexual appetite has confounded my attempts at mastery of the flesh. My arousal deconstructs my personality. My other attributes and commitments wither away. The shy, quiet seminarian becomes uninhibited during sexual passion. (As Stephanie teased, “You’re not reserved during sex!”) My pledge to purity could not withstand the white heat of lust. And so I kissed purity goodbye.

According to one psychologist, sex is daimonic. That is, sex has the power to seize control of the individual, overwhelming one’s rational faculties and obliterating consciousness. Freud observed that we were compelled by subconscious primitive, irrational forces. Lust exposes the primal self beneath our civilized facades. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh.” He meant that our instincts contain a primordial truth obscured by he called “cerebral consciousness.” The strongest natural impulse is the sexual instinct. “In sex we have our basic, most elemental being.” This instinct is not abstract. It seeks consummation in the fleshly union of male and female in the act of sexual intercourse. “Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges,” writes Camille Paglia. Whores, wrote Sade, are the “only authentic philosophers” because they see sexual desire at its rawest, denuded of sentiment and morality. The Dionysian pursuit of sexual satisfaction brooks no restraint.

“Sex is as important as eating or drinking, and we ought to allow the appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.”
Marquis de Sade

I’ve lost the battle for purity. I haven’t been able to navigate between my sexuality and my faith. I haven’t fled youthful passions; I’ve succumbed to them.

Sex and the Conservative Church

“I began to associate sex with sin, and I imagine that it had to do with being surrounded in a conservative religion in my home, church, and school. My attitude about sex and sexuality was that it was something that only married or sinful people engaged in.”

– A young Christian woman

In Sex, God, and the Conservative Church, Tina Schermer Sellers diagnoses conservative Christianity as an incubator of sexual shame and dysfunction. Based in large part on her experience as a therapist treating clients struggling to reconcile their faith and their sexuality, Schermer Sellers explores the church’s “sex negative” ethic, which she attributes to “two millennia of sexual baggage.” (She deems the purity culture “one of the more ascetic and toxic eras in sexual ethics in the last 100 years.”)

A dualism which tore asunder soul and body is largely to blame. This attitude owes more to Greco-Roman culture than the teachings of Jesus. Plato idealized the world of the forms, disparaging the material. Sex was to be transcended through self-discipline. Later philosophers deemed sexual pleasure as inferior to other human pleasures. Stoicism subordinated bodily passion to reason, which was supposed to guide human behavior. As Christianity emerged in this milieu, it absorbed these philosophies, stamping its ethics with a perspective far removed from its semitic Palestinian roots. Early Christian ascetical practices such as fasting and the exaltation of virginity reflected this mindset and were later institutionalized in monasticism. St. Paul was certainly a formative figure in this tradition. Paul’s apocalyptic expectation gave preference to celibacy and colored his view on marriage as a means of fighting temptation (“For it is better to marry than to burn with passion” [1 Cor 7:9]). His ethics focused on the avoidance of porneia, the immorality born out of sexual frustration.

Patristic theology sought to marry Platonist thought with Christian revelation. Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Pseudo-Dionysius were notable in this regard. But it is Augustine, who Schermer Sellers calls a “sexually troubled soul,” who is most responsible for the spirit/body dualism at the heart of traditional Christian sexual ethics. Before becoming a Christian, Augustine had been a Manichaean, a Gnostic, ascetical sect which sharply divided the spiritual from the material. Peter Brown in Body and Society writes, “For Augustine the Manichaean auditor, sexuality and society were antithetical…. Intercourse, and especially intercourse undertaken to produce children, collaborated with the headlong expansion of the Kingdom of Darkness at the expense of the spiritual purity associated with the Kingdom of Light.” Not only was sexual activity abhorred; even sexual thoughts were verboten. Augustine later renounced and condemned the Manichaeans, but he retained a deep-rooted suspicion of sexuality. Augustine believed sexual “desire was the result of human sinfulness and disobedience to God,” according to Merry Wiesner-Hanks in Christianity and Sexuality in the early Modern World. Augustine’s profound pessimism about human nature was at the heart of his doctrine of original sin. “In his view, no other after Adam and Eve had free will; original sin was transmitted to all humans through semen emitted in sexual acts motivated by desire, and was thus inescapable.” Sexual pleasure itself was a product of concupiscence.

Augustine cast a long shadow. “His legacy of shame, fear of the body, and suspicion of its desires is with us today,” laments Schermer Sellers. Eventually it was institutionalized. The Penitentials, guidebooks for confessors assigning penances, contained, according to Margaret Farley, “detailed prohibitions against adultery, fornication, oral and anal sex, masturbation, and even certain positions for sexual intercourse if they were thought to be departures from the procreative norm.” Gratian’s Decretum, a compilation of canon law, in Farley’s words, “contained regulations based on the persistently held principle that all sexual activity is evil unless it is between husband and wife and for the sake of procreation.” The Reformation, spearheaded by the Augustinian Martin Luther, retained a negative judgement on sexual desire. Descartes’ reduction of knowledge to deductive reasoning and being to cognition can also be seen as a philosophical outgrowth of this attitude.

“Sex Always Wins”

Can religiosity lead to sexual obsession?

Perhaps religion and sex aren’t quite that antithetical. Sexologist Dr. Susan Block observes, “Sex and God are quite often at odds, but sexuality and spirituality actually have certain key factors in common. The mystical and the erotic experience are the most intense in human life; both connect desire with awe, love, anguish, ecstasy, terror, pain and extreme logic–defying pleasure.” No wonder during the throes of erotic passion, we cry out the divine name.

The God of monotheistic religion, however, is markedly sex negative. “[T]he Bible contains far too many rules against way too many kinds of sex.” The doctrine of original sin, Dr. Block avers, links sex with sin, historically condemning sexual pleasure as literally damnable. (She predictably attributes this to the sexual dysfunctions of St. Paul and St. Augustine.) Fueled by shame, adherents of traditional religion are taught to abhor their desires.

The irony is that repression can breed obsession. Religions emphasize the restraint of primal impulses, writes psychologist Nigel Barber. Sexual modesty is stressed. Sex outside the parameters of heterosexual marriage is condemned. Sexual expression nevertheless eludes restriction. “If a devout person wants to eliminate all sexual thoughts as potentially sinful, this is much easier said than done.” It’s a basic psychological insight. If you’re told to not think about, let’s say, baseball, you’ll most likely to think about baseball. When told not to think about sex, you’ll think about sex. (This might explain the lure of pornography for sexually frustrated religious believers. Porn star Angela White says a lot of the subscribers to her website come from Utah and the Bible Belt.) “So the research evidence suggests,” Barber continues, “that, contrary to their principles, religious people are unusually bad at restraining their sexual impulses…. Perhaps religious people are poorly equipped to deal with the reality of their own sexuality.”

Excessive religiosity, especially when married to extreme sex negativity, can lead to sexual obsession and a fascination with illicit sex. Religious repression of sex feeds sexual curiosity and breeds taboos. Dr. Block writes, “Of course, the irony of creating a taboo is that, once something is forbidden, it becomes very exciting, kinky and very, very sexy. Everyone knows that naughty sex is hot sex!… So, if, according to your religion, sex is bad (and it usually is), then ‘bad’ becomes very sexy.” The French philosopher Georges Bataille believed that transgression is at the heart of eroticism. Or to put it another way, sex has to be bad to be good. Convinced that sex is bad and dirty, the religious sexual obsessive can only experience arousal if sex is experienced as sinful. The taboo thrill and the guilt, the dread and the desire, the insatiable urge — all are wrapped up in what Hawthorne called “lawless passion.” An example was given of a woman whose attendance at Bible studies and church services coexisted with sexually provocative dress and promiscuity. (Even those who have left intense religious environments report being still marked by those attitudes. An escort brought up as a Pentecostal said, “Religion made me the dirty girl I am!”)

“The secret passion of the erotic is that it puts us in touch with our animal nature,” Block writes. “So, Sex and God are pretty much at odds. An ongoing struggle between organized religion and natural human sexuality pervades civilized history. And though religion is powerful, sometimes seemingly all-powerful, somehow sex always wins.”

Pangs of Guilt

“The proof that sex is a very crucial point in the spirituality of sinful man is that shame is so universally attached to the performance of the sexual function.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man

Sometimes I feel guilty about not feeling guilty enough.

Growing up in a conservative religious environment, sex became associated with sin. I was taught about the “dark side” of sex. Anything outside of the biblically defined parameters of marriage (fornication, sodomy, pornography, masturbation, immodesty, lust) was sinful. Sexual sins were different. Sexual sins were committed against our own bodies, which were not our own, but temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:18-20). Sexual sin corrupted body, mind and soul. I inferred that my sexuality was inherently sinful and that my desires must be overcome.

I was condemned by my own sex drive.

When I could no longer conform my behavior to my beliefs, I felt guilt and deep shame. I suspect that guilt and shame, to some degree, will always be inseparable from sex for me.

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
Genesis 3:7

Augustine linked the Fall to sexual sin. Modern biblical scholars and theologians dismiss this, but what if he was on to something? Reinhold Niebuhr concedes that puritanism and Christian asceticism have contributed to this sense of shame. He also discounts the Freudian analysis that the sense of guilt surrounding sex is due to the repressiveness of civilization’s conventions. Shame, according to Niebuhr, antedates these conventions. It’s primordial, inherent in the act itself. “Man, granted his ‘fallen’ nature, sins in his sex life.”

Think about the sexual act itself. We use those parts of our anatomy we keep most hidden, commit acts we usually use euphemisms or vulgarities to describe, abandon our rational selves to flights of senseless passion, all in a process designed to propagate the species but rarely engaged in to do so. I can see why shame arises.

Sex is explosive. It blows up our moral imagination and leaves our prudential judgment in tatters. When I do experience pangs of guilt, memories of her scent or the curvature of her body banish them from my mind.

Pastoral Matters

ninfomani-cristiane

“Don’t do the pew,” we’ve been admonished at seminary. That’s one boundary I haven’t crossed…yet.

“Maggie” is an active parishioner at our church. She teaches Sunday school. Married with two small children, she’s a curvy lady in her late 30’s with short blonde hair. She teaches at a local elementary school. Maggie is a gracious Southern belle with a sweet accent who’s friendliness is intertwined with an air of propriety. She’s a Republican who passionately adores Coca-Cola, Margaret Mitchell and her favorite college football team. She’s a devout Christian, raised Southern Baptist before she found her way into Lutheranism. (Our parish’s liturgy appeals to her.) Her Facebook page is filled with pictures of her family and Bible verses. She’s fond of pearl necklaces and low-cut blouses that reveal a bit of cleavage. She radiates sexual energy.

Our paths cross occasionally at church. Maggie is a bit flirtatious (although I admit I’m not very good at recognizing such signals). I recall her staring at me with her blue eyes, playfully running her fingers across her necklace. Was she sending me a signal? I decided to find out. Last Sunday, I took her aside and asked if she wanted to discuss some “pastoral matters” over coffee at Barnes & Noble. I was busy this week, so I couldn’t meet with her until Friday afternoon.

I arrived at the bookstore and sat down in the café. She texted me that she would be a few minutes late. I anxiously waited her arrival.

Maggie walked in wearing a low-cut pink dress and a white shawl sweater. She gave me a wide smile when she spotted me. Unexpectedly, she reached out and gave me a big hug, then told me she was going to order some tea. The enchanting scent of her perfume stayed with me.

After she returned with her beverage, I asked her how her Sunday school class was going and how I could be of help. She replied that she appreciated my offer of assistance, but her class was going well. Our discussion of church-related matters wasn’t going to last very long.

I had to be careful. I wanted to signal my interest in her, yet not so overtly as to provide grounds for sexual misconduct.

I asked her how things were at home. Perhaps her marriage was troubled.

Maggie responded with a long monologue about her kids and school and their many extracurricular activities and the vacation they took to Washington, DC and the relatives who were going to visit at Christmas and yada yada yada.

I sensed my seduction of Maggie was stillborn. If she had any real interest in me, she would have signaled it by then.

We continued our conversation for another half-hour before she had to go pick up her kid at something or other. As we said goodbye, she gave me another big (but chaste) hug. Any fantasies about a torrid fling with Maggie remain just that — fantasies.