Sexuality and Holy Longing: Embracing Intimacy in a Beautiful, Broken World

By Lisa Graham McMinn and David P. Gushee

In this newly revised edition of Sexuality and Holy Longing, author Lisa Graham McMinn beautifully describes how people are created by God for relationship, and our sexuality guarantees that we will long for and be drawn toward others. McMinn provides a blueprint for understanding sexuality--and our longing to be loved--at all stages of life (childhood, teen years, early adulthood, midlife, and old age). In the context of faith and a changing culture, she explores sexual awakenings in adolescence, choices, opportunities and challenges of single people, and mysteries of committed covenantal relationships. She addresses tough topics, including reproductive issues, sexuality for those who are single (divorced, widowed, or never married), and in this new edition, LGBT issues and same-sex marriage.

The author details practical solutions for ways that parents, educators, and churches can nurture others and ourselves in the quest to understand sexuality as a longing that draws us toward God and others, and to embrace it as a God-given gift. Thought-provoking study questions at the end of each chapter inspire readers to reflection and action in reclaiming our sexuality through grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Mar 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781506454825

Book preview

2018

Preface to the New Edition

Roads traveled by any of us over a fifteen-year period surely include expected and unexpected surprises along the way. The chance to revisit and revise Sexuality and Holy Longing showed me perspectives on sexuality that have both changed and stayed the same in our culture, as Christians, and for me as an individual. Cultural shifts around sexual norms, changing laws, new sensitivities, and greater awareness have affected us all. Some of us have seen our churches and denominations rediscover new ways of understanding the nature of God and each other. Some of us have seen our churches split over LGBT issues, collectively we’ve watched our children continue to leave the church, and collectively more of us are leaving the church.

Fifteen years later, Mark and I have now been married forty years and have six grandchildren to love and cherish from those three daughters whose stories peppered the first edition of this book. Twelve years ago Mark and I returned from our sojourn into the Midwest to our Quaker and farming roots in Oregon.

This new edition reflects all those sorts of changes. I’m more prone in the revision to emphasize the goodness of the marvelous gift of life over our brokenness, although I still name our brokenness and acknowledge that we all sin, wounding ourselves, each other, and the world in which we live. Each of us reflects something of God; each person carries the light of Christ within them, and to this I appeal.

The fundamental message of Sexuality and Holy Longing is unchanged. That we long for relationship is a holy longing, knit into our beings by God, who is relational at the core, and in essence is Love itself. This is as close as I come to speaking of a universal truth—a perennial truth—supported by Scripture and church tradition. God’s essence does not change even as much changes and will continue to change around us. Might we adopt a posture of humility that seeks to keep learning, holding what we think we know lightly, while holding firmly our convictions regarding God as Lover of the universe?

That we seek to embrace intimacy in a world both beautiful and broken is part of what brings hope. May our seeking invite God into both the beautiful and broken pieces of our lives that we may be made whole.

Lisa Graham McMinn

Newberg, Oregon

2018

Introduction

God is love.

Therefore love.

—Henry Drummond

We love because God is love.

On one level that says it all. Our capacity to love and to be loved comes from God’s initiation as the Lover who called life into being, who loved us into being, and sustains us by keeping a loving gaze upon us. Our capacity to love comes from God.

But love is sometimes confusing, proving that on another level saying we love because God is love doesn’t say enough. What are we to do with shifting norms around the experience of an adolescent boy whose awakening to love is for those of his own sex rather than for the girls vying for his attention? Who defines whom one is allowed to love?

My daughters (who came of age in the 1990s) and I grew up with somewhat different notions and expectations regarding kissing—that simple, innocent touching of lips. Our different expectations also said something about different notions of sexuality more generally. But the kissing evoked similar emotions in our adolescence: a longing to belong, to be loved. God created humans so that we would yearn for human companionship, and our sexuality keeps us restless and striving for meaningful connection. It is not good for the man to be alone, God said before creating Eve as Adam’s companion. When God presented Eve to Adam, Adam’s first words were, At last! (Gen 2:18, 23). Companions ease the existential loneliness of being created sexual—a  reminder  that  we  are  not  quite  complete,  not  so self-sufficient as we sometimes imagine. Sexuality is central to the human experience; it is embodied in our maleness and femaleness. We will all experience longing, even as our culture’s tolerance and ways of expressing sexuality change over time.

Ways of expressing sexuality and tolerance for different behaviors change because ideas about sexuality change. Ideas about sexuality are embedded in cultural beliefs about bodies, sex, and sexuality. We learn about these beliefs at home, through peers, at school, through the media, as well as in church, Sunday School, and youth group. Humans are social creatures by nature, so when we are unsure what is expected of us, when gaps are discovered in our knowledge, we look around to pick up cues. Movies, music, the internet, billboards, and TV fill in any discernible gaps—so completely, in fact, that not much is taboo anymore.

In the 1990s the long-running TV show Seinfeld broke through norms of privacy by introducing masturbation as a topic for public consumption and everyday conversation. We learned that all men do it (which we suspected already), that women do it too (which we were less sure about), and that a contest to see how long one can go without doing it demonstrates how much we need to be able to do it. We can watch a variety of shows now and voyeuristically experience the sexual indiscretions, preferences, and experiences of others. From soft-porn billboards on the freeway to invitations to pornographic sites popping onto our computer screen, images, attitudes, and values about sex make their way into our lives.

One of the most challenging and rewarding classes I taught at Wheaton College—a Christian liberal arts school in the Midwest—was Sociology of Sexuality. My goal for that class and for this book is to help students and readers understand and embrace their sexuality in ways that honor God and acknowledge the longing for consummation and completion that God has imprinted on our bodies and souls. I told my students the story of a Jewish rabbi who carried a satchel of dust in one pocket and a satchel of gold in the other. It reminded him that he was precious yet ordinary, made in the image of God, yet also broken. So it is with our sexuality.

As Christians, we tell our story in three acts: creation, fall, and redemption. Yes, everything was touched by the fall, and our longings won’t be fully met until we are made complete with God, and yet, and yet, creation was and is very good. In it God’s love is fleshed out. Our relationships carry a spark of the eternal from the One who is faithful, gracious, and merciful. Because of this spark, we can experience something of God’s perfect love in our imperfect relationships.

The church is a community of sojourners making their way through the dust and ashes of a broken world. There is much beauty along the way, as God has long been about the business of exchanging ashes for beauty and mourning for joy (Isa 61:1–3). We know about ashes. We see them in priests who molest children, pastors who are trapped in pornography addictions, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancies, the high divorce rate. Some ashes are subtle—so subtle that taken-for-granted assumptions about life are not recognized as distortions of sexuality. When girls and women hate their bodies, disdain their periods, fear childbirth, feel competitive with other women, or are crippled by fears of abandonment, these too are ashes—distortions of sexuality. When boys or men want to (or think they are supposed to want to) sleep with every girl or woman they encounter or want to be independent, silent loners like the Marlboro Man, or if they feel that inadequacy in any perceived area can be compensated for by asserting sexuality in some way, these are distortions of sexuality. Because we take distortions for granted (boys are subject to their raging testosterone; "menstruation really is horrible"), we fail to recognize how our sexuality is misunderstood, stifled, reduced to sexual interactions.

Communities of faith sift through ashes for beauty. Culture powerfully shapes our ideas about sexuality, but so can the church. The church resides within culture, always influenced by culture, but it is a unique institution that reminds us there is more to our existence than what we can see, feel, smell, and hear. Living with a longing for the mysterious fulfillment of heaven has the potential to change the way we see and live our lives as sexual people. When Christians examine their taken-for-granted assumptions about life, then myth and distortion can be recognized, maybe dispelled; perhaps ashes can be transformed to beauty. A student in the Sociology of Sexuality course wrote the following about his out-of-class discussion group:

My small discussion group was illuminating when it comes to the differences in the sexuality of men and women. It was there that I was able to more clearly understand that a woman’s period is an important part of her sexuality, that women also want to enjoy sex, that they may not feel free to do so, and that pornography among men is a big deal to women. This was good for me to learn because before I did not consider a woman’s period to have anything to do with sex, I thought that women would find sex gross, I never worried about whether I as a man would enjoy sex, and I considered pornography a relatively small detail in my personal history.

In the sifting, examining, and challenging of assumptions, this student began to experience the grace and power of God to redeem broken ideas and patterns regarding sexuality.

Sexuality: Embedded and Embodied

Human sexuality is both embedded in culture and embodied in physical, biological bodies. The depiction of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden might be the only human experience largely unencumbered by cultural traditions and norms. With subsequent generations, norms about sexuality emerged, multiplying quickly in the biblical record. The account of the Hebrew people shows a culture with numerous laws and practices regarding sexuality. Male circumcision, laws about intercourse, and rituals of cleanliness that surrounded menstruation and emissions of semen were spelled out and meticulously followed as taken-for-granted practices in Hebrew culture. Beliefs about sexuality are embedded in culture and cannot be separated from how a culture understands, legitimizes, and practices sexual behaviors.[1]

Sexuality is also embodied in that being human is to exist in a body that is generally either male or female.[2] To be male or female is to see, relate to, interpret, and experience the world through bodies that are male or female. Everything we experience, we experience as females or males; we cannot compartmentalize ourselves from our sex. We note, consciously or unconsciously, whether the teacher of a course we’ve signed up for is female or male. We notice the sex of the person who cuts our hair. We note whether our doctor, pastor, boss, or child’s coach is male or female; their sex affects how we experience them and how we relate to them. Words whispered or shouted come to us through bodies that are female or male. We are moved by a rocket taking off in space or by the sight of Michelangelo’s David through bodies that are male or female. We inhale ocean air or each other’s bodily odors through bodies that are female or male. We caress, push away, hold, release. All this we experience and interpret as sexual creatures because we are embodied, generally as either female or male.

Ideas about how we are to define and experience our sexuality and how we are to relate to others according to our sex emerge from our biology (the embodied dimension), our interactions with others, our religious beliefs, and our particular time and place in history (the embedded dimension). That five-year-old Jason thinks five-year-old Jacqueline has cooties is related to his time and place in history. It comes from his culture. If thirteen-year-old Jason has wet dreams, and thirteen-year-old Jacqueline is menstruating, this is a result of biology and would generally occur for any male and female, at any point in history. If Jason and Jacqueline believe sex should be saved for marriage, that comes from their culture, likely their religious upbringing. If sixteen-year-old Jason walks around in a perpetual state of sexual arousal that causes him a certain amount of anxiety, and Jacqueline (who finds Jason interesting and a bit frightening) walks around in perpetual state of anxiety regarding what her body looks like, it is an interaction between biology and culture. Jason and Jacqueline have learned to assign particular social meaning to physical and emotional feelings and have adopted cultural patterns that reinforce assumptions they have about males and females. And so our ideas about sexuality filter up to us through our embodied biology (chromosomes, genes, and hormones) and down to us from our embedded social environment (parents, peers, and the media). The interaction of our embodied and embedded realities is taken for granted. We learn cultural scripts that give meaning to and interpret experiences in our physical bodies and relationships, telling us how to negotiate being girls and boys, women and men.

Some argue that the essence of sexuality is only what can be reduced to physical or biological dimensions and that meaning and values given to sex are arbitrary and can be accepted or rejected without consequence. True independence and freedom, then, is to regard sex only as a physical, biological act not meaningfully connected to relationships or cultural values. In the national bestseller The Sexual Life of Catherine M., published in 2002, French author Catherine Millet’s quest for the meaning of sexuality takes her through a promiscuous lifestyle. She participated in her first orgy shortly after her eighteenth birthday and writes about her participation in group orgies, gang-bang sex, and serial sexual experiences. In defense of her memoir, Millet says, I couldn’t care less if people think I’m a nymphomaniac or not. I don’t think I am. For me sexuality is a way of life.[3]

Indeed, sexuality is a way of life for all of us. But how we envision sexuality, understand it, and live with it is shaped by our time, beliefs, and place in history as they interact with our social relationships and our physical biology. Millet’s sexuality is as much embedded in a culture as the sexuality of a fundamentalist Muslim woman who wears the hijab—a garment that covers her from head to toe—and who cannot leave her house without a chaperone. Religious and secular ideas alike give meaning to sexuality. All perspectives of sexuality are embedded in a cultural context.

Because our ideas about sexuality come from a variety of sources, communities of faith can be powerful agents of change and redemption. As a community of faith, we can hold assumptions to the light of theological truth, and challenge unhealthy ideas about body and sexuality, trading them for a spirituality that recognizes the significance of our embodied lives. Our sexuality is fundamental to being human, but sexuality is not fundamentally about sex. Sexuality is broader, deeper, and more inclusive of human experience than just sex.

The Role of Relationship in Sexuality

I invite you to sit with and consider three theological statements fundamental to our sexuality. First, we love because God is love. Second, we are made for relationship but are incapable of completely satisfying our longings in relationships. Third, grace bridges the chasm between our longings and our inability to satisfy them.

We Love Because God Is Love

The early church explained the mystery of the Trinity as a mutually loving relationship of three. This social Trinitarian view holds in tension the Oneness of God in unity with the Uniqueness of three distinct persons or essences. Perichoresis is an ancient Greek term that refers to the mystery of the Trinity as an indwelling in mutual love, cleaving together, dancing around. This understanding of the Trinity as God-defined-by-Love has always been held in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and is gaining a greater audience in the Western church in the twenty-first century. Seeing the Trinity as a mutual relationship of three held together in love, rather than a hierarchical relationship of three impacts how we see God, the gospel, our view of sin and redemption, and our relationships with others.

If the very essence of God is a loving relationship, and out of that love God spoke life into being, and holds it together in love, then love takes priority over all other characteristics of God. God created a relational world that, at its best, gives and receives in love.

Sin is broken relationship. We sin because we are broken. Healing comes through restoring relationships with ourselves, one another, our communities, and creation itself. Reconciliation, which we all long for on many levels, is the restoring of relationship.

Created in Love, held together by Love, we too can love.

Longing for Relationship

A second theological statement is that we are made for relationship, drawn into relationship with others. Our survival as a species depends on it.

Fundamentally, our longing is for God, though we may not recognize it. Augustine acknowledged this in The Confessions when he said of God, Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. The Heidelberg Catechism asks, What is your only comfort in life and in death? It answers, That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.[4] Our primary longing is to rest in the arms of God, recognizing that we belong to God.

We also long to be loved and known by others and to love and to know others. In their introduction to Sexuality and the Sacred, Nelson and Longfellow say:

Sexuality is intended by God to be neither incidental to nor detrimental to our spirituality, but rather a fully integrated and basic dimension of that spirituality . . . human sexuality . . . is most fundamentally the divine invitation to find our destinies not in loneliness but in deep connection . . . we experience our sexuality as the basic eros of our humanness that urges, invites, and lures us out of our loneliness into intimate communication and communion with God and the world.[5]

In our maleness and femaleness, in our embodied aloneness, we are drawn toward others. Theologian Stanley Grenz argues that God is the foundation for human sexual bonding, forging the bridge between the Creator and the created.[6] We are made to be in relationship, to be social, to live in community. The author of Hebrews encourages us to persevere in living the good life, to continue to meet together with other believers, encouraging and instructing each other, bearing witness to the life of faith. The concluding chapter of Hebrews reminds readers to love each other with true Christian love that shows hospitality to strangers and care for people in prison, honors marriage, remembers leaders, and submits to the authority of spiritual leaders. We are made for relationship, called to live vibrant, active lives in community.

We are also drawn to the Other—a longing that echoes throughout history in art, poetry, and stories, resonating with our own hopes and yearnings. Most of this book is about that particular longing for another with whom we can share an intimate sexual relationship.

To be human is to be drawn to others. We cannot exist in the world apart from relationships that define and shape us. By our very nature we can all say, as Catherine Millet does, that sexuality is our way of life. Sexuality is good; its very foundation emanates from God, whose image we bear. Our sexuality allows us to experience the world as embodied creatures fundamentally drawn to relationship with others. Being made for relationship bestows hope and blessing on our sexual nature that draws us into relationship.

Still, perfect fellowship, perfect communion with others—either a community of others or one particular other—will not be realized in our lifetimes. As Catholic priest and theologian Ronald Rolheiser says, all symphonies are incomplete this side of heaven. We are Grand Canyons without a bottom, longing for completion, for perfect communion with another that we will not experience this side of heaven.[7] But we are made in the image of God. In our fundamental longing for unity, communion, and consummation, we simultaneously reflect imago Dei. Whether or not we know it, we are yearning ultimately for union with the One who can satisfy our deepest longing to be known and loved.

Because our ability to perfectly reflect the image of God was broken in the garden of Eden, our sexuality has been broken as well. Cornelius Plantinga’s book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin reminds us that all of life is affected by sin.[8] The world in which we live is not supposed to work this way. Romans 3:23 tells us, All have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Spouses are not supposed to have affairs; children should not be sexually abused; men and women should not become trapped in sexual addictions. Our sexuality is not the way it’s supposed to be; it falls short of God’s glorious intention. We long for relationship—a perfect communion—and in an effort to satisfy unmet yearnings, we fill our lives with what we hope will satisfy, forgetful of the very relationships that hold the most promise for fulfillment. Psychiatrist Gerald May describes addictions as attachments to things that do not satisfy our deepest desires and longings. To escape the pain of unfulfilled longings, we experiment with behaviors that give us momentary pleasure or relief but soon enslave us in a cycle of unfulfilled hopes and expectations that multiply our suffering.[9]

Living in Grace

The third theological statement brings hope to the second: living in grace bridges the chasm between our longings and our inability to satisfy those longings. We have a yearning that ultimately only God can satisfy, yet God extended grace to humanity by creating us with a desire for relationship that extends to others. While we wait for completion, we love and learn and find easement from our loneliness in relationships with others. When we acknowledge that our yearnings will never be fully satisfied, we can welcome God into our disappointment to love well and to be well loved. We turn toward the abundance available through our various memberships and commitments—that is—through our relationships with others who long to (but fail) to love us perfectly, and whom we long to (but fail) to love perfectly.

Sometimes God’s redemption of our broken sexuality manifests itself in a satisfying covenantal relationship and healthy sexual expression with a lifelong partner. Sometimes it is in richly satisfying friendships and belonging to a community that eases the ache of our longings. Sometimes redemption comes through both.

Redeeming sexuality manifests itself in the ongoing work of recognizing our inability to love selflessly and unconditionally and to be loved selflessly and unconditionally. Grace accepts the imperfections of others and those in ourselves while opening ourselves to God’s love, thereby being conduits of greater and better love.

Other times, God’s redemption of our sexuality calls us to comfort others in pain. Henri Nouwen speaks of compassion as being the ability to sit with those who suffer.[10] As a culture of consumers we do not much care to sit with suffering but would rather escape it, using Advil to escape physical pain and incessant activity, shopping, and a variety of addictions to escape emotional pain. To extend grace is to be willing to sit with our wounds and the wounds of others rather than attempting to escape or fix them—to look at and own our failures. God redeems and restores that which is broken and calls us to be hands and feet of mercy, easing the suffering of others. We learn something of our human condition and our need for God when we sit with our suffering and the suffering of others.

Ours is a lifelong journey toward wholeness. Henri Nouwen’s biographer, Michael Ford, says Nouwen struggled with same-sex desires throughout his life and never experienced the wholeness he sought. Some struggle to overcome the pain of a sexually abusive father, an unfaithful wife, infertility, the body’s betrayal through sexual dysfunction or disease, or the challenges that come with experiencing oneself as the other sex.

Mary Jo Valenziano, my Franciscan spiritual director, once confronted my impatience for achieving the wholeness and holiness I longed for by reminding me that the woman whose hemorrhaging Jesus healed had spent twelve years seeking help. Part of her journey toward healing was to crawl toward Jesus in the midst of a throng of people where she hoped to touch the hem of