For Christians: Articles On Dating And Sex

http://www.christianitytoday.com/teens/fea...abstinence.html

some articles on related topic...

http://www.joshharris.com/whatsnew/notevenahint.htm

Not Even a Hint: Guarding Your Heart Against Lust, by Josh Harris

http://www.familylife.com/articles/article_detail.asp?id=208

Tips for Remaining Sexually Pure
by National Coalition for the Protection of Children

Develop your own personal boundaries for sexual activity.
Make a choice to realign your peer group to include like-minded students who are committed to honoring God and their own personal boundaries in their character and conduct.

Find an accountability partner with whom you can be completely open, honest, and vulnerable who can help keep you from falling into temptation that could lead to sexual activity.

Share your pledge of sexual purity with significant relationships (parents, dates, close friends) to help underscore the seriousness of your commitment.

Make careful decisions about whom to date and where dating activity takes place.

If you make a bad choice, promptly admit it and get back on track.
Remind yourself often that premarital sexual activity can result in unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted disease, emotional problems, and spiritual problems, to name a few of the consequences.

Walk away, use the telephone, or call a parent or friend if you find yourself in a compromising situation.

Be of help to a friend in his or her fight to remain sexually pure.
Avoid all drugs and situations where they are likely to be present.
Avoid all drinking situations or occasions.

Don’t let yourself become overly dependent on another person.

Seek knowledgeable help when you feel weak.

Live in TODAY, not yesterday.

When in doubt, ask questions. The only stupid question is the one not asked.

Be willing to go to any lengths to stay sexually pure.

Be honest and consistent. These behaviors are fundamental to maintaining sexual purity.

http://www.boundless.org/2000/departments/...s/a0000168.html

(Don't) Kiss Me
by Bethany Patchin

Kiss me beneath the milky twilight. Lead me out on the moonlit floor. Lift your open hand. Strike up the band and make the fireflies dance, Silver moon's sparkling. So kiss me.
You might recognize this chorus, from one of the most popular Christian songs-gone-mainstream — it was #1 on the Billboard chart for two weeks in May of '99. It's "Kiss Me" by Sixpence None the Richer. Scan your radio channels for a minute and you're bound to catch the tune's signature descent of guitar chords and whimsical vocals.

In a recent Christian catalog I came across an endorsement for the self-titled Sixpence CD - "One of the most talked-about albums of the year!" From the discussions I've had with Christians my age, I believe it. All the talking can be summed up in a statement I found on a Christian listener's Amazon.com review:

"What in the world does 'Kiss Me' have to do with Jesus?"

It's a fair question, but I think it reveals a profound misunderstanding. You might as well ask: What does the Song of Solomon have to do with Jesus? It is called The Song of All Songs, though it never mentions God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit by name. Yet, it's an important book of the Bible because it teaches us that sexual intimacy (kissing included) in the right context is a gift from God. I'd bet Matt Slocum (songwriter and creative force behind SNTR) and lead singer Leigh Nash understand the connection between kissing and Christ, since they're both married.

I don't question Christian musicians singing a poem about kissing. I do question the rest of my Christian family separating such a deeply significant act from the One who designed it for us. Mind you, I understand their concerns. "I'm not thinking about God when I hear that song," a 22-year-old male friend of mine said. "I'm thinking about kissing my girlfriend. That's not very worshipful." My friend is trying to honestly assess his own motives, and he's right to do so. But he's missing the significance "Kiss Me" has in pointing toward an experience God intends as a type of worship. Worship literally means "to kiss the cheek of." I firmly believe that we are kissing the cheek of God when we take delight in the pleasures of intimacy with our marriage partners. Of course my friend was probably also right that he wasn't thinking worshipful thoughts. And here's where I get controversial. I also believe that kissing a romantic interest outside of marriage is not gratifying to God.

"Treat younger men as brothers ... and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity" (emphasis added) (1 Timothy 5:1b, 2b). There are two states of sexuality outlined in the Bible, celibacy and marriage — and during the transfer from the first to the second we are still under Paul's command of restraint.

Rethinking a Kiss
"Passionate kissing is: (1) a harmless recreational activity, (2) a godly way to show true love while dating, (3) something only married people should share, (4) a means of seducing your date."

My eyes were immediately drawn to the survey question-of-the-week at the Christian Web site www.singleness.org. Of the 302 people surveyed (I'd guess most were Christians), 27 chose the first answer, 76 chose the second, and 40 chose the last. Add that up and over 47 percent of them allowed that passionate kissing is acceptable outside of marriage.

Something only married people should share. I added my click and my vote to that group. At one point I might have chosen while dating, or even harmless recreational activity — but over the past few years I've found Bible verses that have convicted me otherwise. "Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth" (Proverbs 5:15-18).

'Never' covers all of time — before, during and after marriage. Since I'm not married yet, I am responsible for guarding my husband's 'fountain' (my body, which includes my lips) from strangers, even strangers who would only take a sip. I am attempting to rise to the challenge of Proverbs 31 — "a wife of noble character ... brings her husband good, not harm, all the days of her life." Men, likewise, are responsible for drinking only from their own wells, only from their own wives, and for staying away from mine.

Christians give the actual act of sexual intercourse a great deal of spiritual significance, yet we rarely examine the motives behind our casual exchanges of physical intimacy with brothers and sisters. We don't fully acknowledge sexual intimacy as a whole package; we don't realize that the beginning and ending of passion are inseparable. Most Christians of my generation would agree with the biblical teaching of physical purity as a goal. Yet when it comes to following up in action, we make the same mistakes as our supposedly more worldly peers. Why is that?

I believe it's partly because kissing is treated so nonchalantly — it's something we exchange between dates, and it's justifiable as long as the people involved are Christians and they don't take it "too far." It has little to do with God; it has been reduced to a touch exchanged between two, instead of its intended purpose of three-way communion between man, woman and God. The Bible never says "Thou shalt not kiss" so we assume Jesus doesn't come into our physical connections until we are on the way to marriage.

I'm a sophomore in college with virgin lips. A few months after turning 16, I vowed to keep my "bow" tied until a man promises to commit himself to the whole package. My first kiss will be from my husband on our wedding day. Yes, that's quite a progression, from an inexpert kiss at the altar to the complete unwrapping of the wedding night — believe me, my friends have pointed that out. Then again, Adam and Eve managed to figure everything out in a day.

God never intended the engagement period to be a time for physical experimenting, for peeking under the wrapping paper. Kissing — which quickly turns passionate when you are in love — carries a current intended to light a fire. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for "kiss" (nashaq) is derived from the primary root meaning "to kindle." I don't want to open the matchbox. "Why preheat the oven when you can't cook the roast?" as Doug Wilson puts it in Her Hand in Marriage.

We see this truth reflected in places ranging from Scripture to literature that has endured for centuries. Song of Solomon 8:4 says not to arouse love until the right time. The fairy tales of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White hold a deeper symbolism: a kiss is (and should be) an awakening. I want to guard my fiancé; I want him to be asleep to me until we are one before God. There will be other ways of showing affection without arousing passion.

A Virginal Heart
Ultimately I am not as concerned about what Christians' lips do as I am about where our hearts are. One short kiss might not spark anything (though a string of short kisses quickly becomes a fuse). What's behind your kiss is what God is concerned about. Are you bestowing devotion or taking gratification? If you truly love that person, is it in their best interests to whet their thirst when you cannot give them the whole glass of water?

Elisabeth Elliot says it best in Passion and Purity: "Can I say categorically that a kiss is a sin? I can say that it might be. I can say that it might take the edge off, spoil the taste and the pleasure later on. It might reduce power. It might distract the heart. ... It is the heart's direction that is always the central issue. God knows what the heart is set on. We can deceive others. We can easily deceive ourselves. The humble and honest heart will always be shown the truth."

God asks different things of different people. My point is not that everyone should take a vow against premarital kissing. My challenge is that this generation of Christians would take a deeper look at something we treat so lightly. That we would take the initiative in saving something so precious for the right time and person — that we would pray about grasping what Solomon meant when he said there is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. That we would understand how intricately kissing is involved with Jesus and that we would ask Him how we can better obey His commands for purity.

Since I don't have a boyfriend and have never been kissed, when I hear "Kiss Me" on the radio I turn it up. I get a little dreamy and ponder on what it will be like to dance among the fireflies and moonlight with my husband. And I know that when he kisses me the joy I feel will be praise that goes straight to heaven.

http://www.boundless.org/2002_2003/regular...y/a0000673.html

6 Steps to Great Dating

by Steve Shadrach

I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was a freshman in love! Yes, I was a Christian as was she, but our emotions were more wrapped up in one other than in Jesus Christ. I had this gnawing feeling the Lord wanted us to break up, but I wouldn’t listen. Most of my Christian buddies had girlfriends, and certainly all my fraternity brothers did. Why shouldn’t I?
I carried this heavy load of rationalization around with me through the fall semester. She and I finally got enough courage to bring up the subject, talk and make a decision. Using our heads and not just our hearts, we broke up because we felt it was God’s will.

That night I went and hid in a dark, empty classroom and cried for three hours. Not because I felt sad or jilted, but because 100-pound weights had been taken off my shoulders. I’m not very emotional, but that night there was a steady stream of joyous tears signaling I was finally free! Having fully obeyed, I was now willing to do anything and everything God wanted me to.

This gave me the courage to make another important decision that night. For the rest of my college years, I resolved I would develop friendships with Christian girls, not romances. Making a commitment like this may sound radical and unrealistic to some, but for me, it was a choice that allowed me to develop the personal and spiritual foundation I would need to last a lifetime.

Spending those college years building genuine brother-sister relationships with girls, along with studying the Scriptures to learn what a godly relationship looked like, aided me in piecing together a Christ honoring plan that would help me be successful in this modern day, mostly American concept we call “dating.”

Just because we can’t find dating in the Bible or in most countries around the world doesn't make it wrong. But I want to warn you ─ if you follow these “Six Steps to Great Dating”, you will need to go against the grain of your culture. You'll also be pleasing to God and preparing yourself for an awesome marriage someday.

And now for the list!

1. Date Only Committed Christians

“You will marry someone that you date” may be one of the few original things I’ve ever uttered. It’s so obvious that it’s humorous, but still our country, where we get to choose our mates, has some of the highest divorce rates in the world. If someday you want a Christ-centered marriage (which clearly requires the commitment of two Christ-centered people), then you better start with the end in mind and take a close look at who you’re attracted to. Yes, I do believe 2 Corinthians 6:14, which says, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers” means not to marry non-Christians, but if I were you, I’d set my sights on dating and marrying someone who is more than just a believer.

The key is to build opposite-sex friendships with other committed Christians who have a vision and passion for following Christ, for becoming like Christ and for reaching out to others with the gospel. The only real way for you to know if these values will be true of them in the future is to look at their past. Check out their track record to see if their talk matches their walk, knowing college students are notorious for changing and adapting their goals to line up with their latest flame!

2. Plan your Dates in Advance

Having the same goals is one of the essentials for any strong dating or marriage relationship. Not only does it take time (i.e. years) to develop and live out those goals, it takes careful planning too. Bill Gothard, founder of Basic Youth Conflicts seminars, says “the chief purpose of dating is to achieve spiritual oneness.” If you incorporate that purpose into your dating life, it will require you to prayerfully map out your activities, helping you and your date draw closer to God through your time together. This approach is a rarity in this age of entertainment-addicted Christians where most couples seem to always end up at the local movie theatre or the couch, watching another late- night video rental.

I’d like to talk to the guys right now, because I believe you are primarily responsible for the spiritual leadership in a relationship. Cultivate your and your date’s love for God, for the Scriptures and for others by planning enjoyable, but meaningful activities that will produce fulfillment and mutual respect for each other. If your dating style is just kind of a lazy “hanging out,” consider transforming yourself into “the man with the plan.” If you come up with the what, when, where and how it will not only communicate that you care enough to do some advanced thinking, but she will respect you as a spiritual leader who knows where he’s going.

3. Save Yourself for Marriage

Here’s the vicious cycle that many college couples go through each weekend: first of all he calls up, then of course, they must dress up, he then drives over to pick up, fully stocked to drink up, only to eventually throw up, but still later that night choosing to shack up, and with a headache the next morning they finally wake up, once again possessing a deep nagging feeling they’ve really messed up! I hate to break the news to my female readers, but many college guys show love to a girl in order to obtain sexual access. But in the same way guys give love to get sex, there are an equal number of girls who are guilty of giving sex in order to get love. Our holy God, who thought up sex, didn’t say “Let the marriage bed be undefiled” in Hebrews 13:4 to rob us of physical pleasure, but instead to give it to us in fullness ─ and at the right time. In my counseling over the years, I’ve observed that to the degree a couple is sexually intimate before marriage is the same degree that they lack sexual satisfaction after marriage. Reading a classic together like Pure Excitement by Joe White or Choices by Paula and Stacey Rinehart will help you set up and stick to biblical standards, build trust and prepare you someday to have one romantic marriage!

4. Work on Communication

If you’re dating someone who wants a little less talk and a lot more action, you might want to check their spiritual pulse. Getting to know a person’s body has nothing to do with getting to know the person inside that body. In fact, communication vanishes as the fog of guilt rolls in. Anybody can kiss, but how about carrying on a meaningful conversation? In other words, if you end up marrying the person you’re dating, the wedding night may be great, but what do you talk about at breakfast the next morning? And as the years slip by our beautiful bodies have a way of sagging and wrinkling, so there better be a deep bond of friendship that outlasts temporal physical attraction.

Learn how to ask good questions, how to share facts and feelings, and how to listen. There may be a reason God gave us two ears and only one mouth! Get to know their past and present, likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, values and dreams. Most married couples are shocked when they realize 90 percent of their dating period was activities and only 10 percent communication, and that after the honeymoon, those percentages reversed themselves. Understand that God made men and women with a spirit, soul and body, then later handed us divine instructions how to connect with one another ─ in that order.

5. Throw Out Expectations

Sometimes pressure comes from within when one partner has stronger feelings than the other and wants to always “define” the relationship. Jealousy and possessiveness dominate many couples and the only brand of relationships some students know are the conditional kind that always says, “I’ll love you if . . . ” or “I love you because. . . . ” Give each other lots of room to roam, earnestly desiring God’s best for them ─ even if it’s not you. And why let your heart be torn in half every time there’s a breakup? Let’s face it, every relationship you get into is going to end until the “right one” comes along. Relax, go slow, build a friendship, and beware of someone who, on your first date, peppers you with questions about how many children you want!

Pressure sometimes comes from others who are flashing their engagement rings everywhere or asking not so subtle questions like, “When are you two going to tie the knot?” or “Aren’t you going out this weekend?” Having to go on a date each Friday or Saturday night is a sign of insecurity and discontentment. Refuse to allow others to rope you into a dating pattern or relationship that you’re uncomfortable with. Having been in 13 weddings before I got married, it’s a miracle I was able to withstand my friends’ joking and jabbing until age 28 (my wife to be was almost 27) when we finally walked the aisle. Take your time and don’t force it. Let God develop the feelings in both of your hearts, in His way and in His timing.

6. Focus on Becoming the Right Person

Looking for love in all the wrong places, students are frantically turning to cyber dating, matchmaking services, even want ads in their search for intimacy. The guys have replaced wife swapping with wife shopping, while many females come to college to get their MRS degree and, if they’re not engaged by Christmas of their senior year, hit the panic button big time. But if you’ll focus on becoming the right person, instead of finding the right person, (i.e. staying on the road by “seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness”), the Lord likely will bring along someone who far surpasses your little checklist.

Are you willing to spend your college years (and maybe beyond) preparing to do it God’s way, instead of the world’s way? You better, because statistics show that 72 percent of couples divorce if one partner is less than 21 when they get married, and if one of the partners is 26 or less when they get married, there’s a 55 percent chance they’ll be split up before their fifth anniversary. I’ve heard couples tell me, “But Steve, we’re different. We’re really in love!” so many times I could gag. Truly, the riskiest decision you’ll ever make is who you’ll marry, and if this is true, then who you date ─ and how you date ─ can make you or break you.

A final truth that transcends any list is the fact that no human relationship can fill our deepest needs to love and be loved. Jesus Christ alone fits into the God shaped vacuum in each of us. Dating, even marriage will turn out to be a cheap anesthetic for an empty life until we are totally satisfied in Him and can pray Psalm 73:25 back to the only true lover of our soul: “Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and besides Thee, I desire nothing on earth.”

The Truth about Alfred Kinsey: http://www.family.org/topics/a0034455.cfm

http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000970.html

What he really means is...
by Kara Schwab

I have a new boyfriend. Well, I think he likes me, anyway. He’s got a certain look on his face that lets me know he’s interested. Or maybe he just has indigestion. OK, so he hasn’t asked me out yet, but I know he wants to. I’m almost positive he is just dying to ask me out. I’m not sure what the hold up is. Maybe he’s just worried that I would say no. I better call him. I think I should tell him how I really feel, or at least bake him a pie, so he won’t be too scared to ask me out.

A good guy friend once told me “if you’re confused about whether or not a guy likes you, don’t be. If he likes you, you’ll know. If he doesn’t, you may be confused. So if you’re confused, he’s not interested.”

I guess he was on to something because the New York Times Best-Seller He’s Just Not That Into You says basically the same thing to single women confused about men’s “mixed” messages. The book is co-written by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, former consultant and writer for the wildly popular — and wildly risqué — cable show “Sex in the City.” That’s some credential. If anyone can offer an insightful analysis on the nature of love and dating, it’s got to be these two. Hey, if we could all follow the advice of their characters on this show, I bet we’d totally be able to understand men and see fireworks on every date. Either that, or we’d at least contract an STD.

Falling into the one-on-one intervention-type genre of self help books for total morons, He’s Just Not That Into You has a humorous tone and an in-your-face style, as if the authors broke into your apartment and sat you down on your couch to say, “Girrrrl, you gotta get it together. It’s clear you don’t know jack squat about guys. So, listen up ... “ Actually, that’s a clean version. The authors must have side jobs as truck drivers, because the huge amount of cussing in the name of humor made me want to wash my own mouth out with soap after every chapter.

So why all the fuss? What’s compelling singles to buy the book in droves?

The basic premise of the book states “when a guy is into you, he let’s you know it. He calls, he shows up, he wants to meet your friends.” It’s good to know if a guy isn’t interested because “wasting time with the wrong person is just time wasted.” The authors describe the many ways women rationalize when men don’t call them, marry them or meet their needs in a relationship. They say women make excuses like “he’s got a lot on his mind” or “he’s afraid to get hurt again” in an effort to hang on to the smallest bit of hope that a relationship will work out the way they want it to.

The authors say this knowledge is power; that instead of waiting by the phone for hours and hours for a guy to call, you should assume rejection first and move on. Instead of obsessing with your girlfriends in an attempt to figure out why your boyfriend would rather play with his hamster than take you out, you should know he’s over you. “It’s intoxicatingly liberating,” they write, because if you know a guy isn’t that into you, you can “free yourself to go find the one that is.”

The book does have some good points. Yes, we should create healthy boundaries for ourselves as women. Yes, as the authors aptly counsel in the book, a woman should walk away from a relationship with a guy if he can only tolerate being with her when he’s drunk. And a woman should get a clue when a guy doesn’t call. She should know that if he really liked her, he’d find a way to call, even though he has an extra full load this semester, or is traveling a lot, or is caring for his sick mother suffering from a flesh-eating disease or is learning to play the harpsichord and is very busy practicing. If a guy is interested, he’ll find the time to let a woman know.

Actually that’s a useful reminder in today’s post-feminist dating world. Women ask men out. Men give women their phone numbers. More and more couples are having sex before marriage — and even before the second date. And shacking up is no big deal. No wonder dating can be confusing.

The book made me laugh at times and once or twice I found myself nodding in embarrassing agreement. But it also made me wince, blush and feel truly sad about the baseness of what people do and think when they’re not in relationship with God or living for Him.

For instance, take the chapter “He’s Just Not That Into You if He’s Not Sleeping With You.” Ludicrous. Not to mention totally unbiblical. As Christians, we know the opposite is true: if, outside of marriage, a man is having sex with you, he has no respect for you. And by agreeing to have sex with him, you have even less respect for yourself than he does.

Also troubling was the book’s basic assumption that all guys are out to deceive women. Sure it’s implied that men do this when they don’t want to hurt a woman’s feelings, but the huge generalization still isn’t fair. It’s just another example of our culture’s attempt to portray the male species as either incompetent fools or bad-boy players.

Take any sitcom on TV, and you’ll notice that almost every plot depicting a married couple weaves a story around a leaderless, blubbering nutjob of a husband and a wise yet critical, had-it-up-to-here wife who tolerates her husband’s weak mind, laziness and inability to pick out clothes that match. On the big screen, we usually see a tough guy who plays the field ... that is, until he‘s rescued by some lass who makes him see the error of his ways and realize what he really wants is a loving, monogamous relationship with her.

Facing that kind of disrespect, it’s a wonder guys are ever “into” anyone.

As bad as what’s printed on the pages of this book what’s worse is what’s missing. The authors have no understanding of the essential ingredient for successful dating: God’s will. Paul tells us in Romans, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world ... test and approve what God’s will is — His good, pleasing and perfect will.” We need to seek God’s will first in our dating life — even before our feelings or our gut instincts.

And what about prayer? I know several women who petitioned God about men they adored who were “just not that into them.” They sought the Lord’s will and prayed earnestly for these men to “come to their senses” and begin pursuing them ... and the Lord answered their prayers. I even had one friend who met a man she felt instantly connected to, but discovered he was engaged to another woman. Her first thought was, “Well, he’s not married yet.” And now he is married ... to her. The prayers of a righteous woman can move mountains — and men — if the Lord wills it.

The books appeal seems to be it’s bald promotion of self-centeredness. During an interview on CBS’s Early Show co-author Greg Behrendt told viewers, “You’re good enough to have the things you want or at least ask for them.” Upon first hearing this, you may be inclined to agree. But as Christians, we know we don’t get things because we are “good enough,” but because God has blessed us with them. And when we don’t get what we want, we should trust that He might be protecting us.

I know believers will pick up this book in the name of entertainment. Yet while they’re being amused, they may also find themselves being influenced: To take their dating life into their own hands. To forget God’s role in meeting the right man. To think that a “little” fooling around can’t hurt, especially if that’s really a guy’s way of telling a girl he’s into her. To veer even slightly off the narrow path they’re walking ... only to discover years later they’re totally off course. For a book boasting a modern satire, that would be a true tragedy.

http://www.boundless.org/departments/atplay/a0000974.html

Let's Not Talk About Sex
by Sam Torode

I’m not going to see Kinsey and I doubt any of my friends will, either. The movie is a sugarcoated biography of Alfred Kinsey, founding father of modern sexology. I walked by a poster for it the other day and noticed the promotional tagline: “Let’s Talk about Sex.” I politely declined the invitation.

Why are my friends and I opting out of the Kinsey conversation? Because we know what “Let’s Talk about Sex” really means: the aging veterans of the sexual revolution want to solemnly lecture us, for the umpteenth time, about the evils of “Victorian repression” and the wonders of “liberation.” Yawn.

All around, we see the fruits of the sexual revolution: half of marriages end in divorce; a quarter of the rising generation has been aborted; we’re swimming in sexual imagery and exploitation. Liberation has lost its charm.

So why memorialize Kinsey now? Maybe Hollywood senses that the sexual revolution is in trouble and needs reinforcement. If only people realize how awful life was before Kinsey and company came along, the Hollywood execs reason, they’ll forget about their longings for chivalry and romance and jump on the bandwagon of progress.


The Myth of Repression
What exactly was Kinsey’s contribution to our society? Is it true that nobody talked about sex before he came along?

I keep a stack of magazines from the 1930s on my desk, since I’m hopelessly procrastinating on writing a novel set in that period. Contrary to what you might expect, these magazines are far from silent about sex. A copy of The Home Friend, a publication for housewives, includes this ad for the book Sex Practice in Marriage: “Unless people learn how to make sexual intercourse harmonious and happy, a great deal of trouble usually follows. Many men are apt to blunder and then accuse their wives of ‘frigidity.’ Dr. Evans shows how to overcome this common condition.”

In fact, books on married sexuality were already so common by the late 1920s that E. B. White and James Thurber responded in 1929 with their hilarious parody, Is Sex Necessary? “The country is flooded with books,” they wrote. “To prepare for marriage, young girls no longer assemble a hope chest — they read books on abnormal psychology. If they do finally marry, they find themselves with a large number of sex books on hand, but almost no pretty underwear. Most of them, luckily, never marry at all — just continue to read.”


Kinsey’s Achievement
If Kinsey didn’t start the conversation about sex, as his movie’s slogan would have us believe, what did he do?

Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at the university of Indiana, specializing in the study of insects. But in the late 1930s, his interests shifted and he began collecting data on human sexuality. His great “breakthrough” was to approach his subject as a zoologist, treating human beings like any other animals. Under the banner of scientific objectivity, Kinsey set out to deliver “the facts” of human sexual behavior.

In his famous studies — Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) — Kinsey found that premarital sex, adultery, homosexual sex and other supposed “taboos” were widely practiced. He reported, for example, that 36% of men engage in homosexual acts, and that 50% cheat on their wives. Though he claimed to be a disinterested researcher, Kinsey’s reports had the effect of saying, “Everybody is doing it, and it’s perfectly normal.”

(Kinsey’s work was not limited to number crunching. He also carried on various sexual experiments in his lab, filming things that I don’t care to describe.)

Today, many mainstream sociologists acknowledge that his methods were flawed. Among his main sources of information were convicted sex offenders and pedophiles. Alan Wolfe, in a 1999 Atlantic Monthly article, stated that Kinsey “misrepresented the sexual habits and practices of Americans because [his] interviewees were so unrepresentative.”

If his statistics are wrong, why is Kinsey still celebrated? Because he separated sex from morality in the name of science. His particular findings don’t much matter. It’s more that he gave the authority of “science” to people who opposed the traditional Christian restraints on sexuality.

How successful was Kinsey? Consider the title of that 1930s guide, Sex Practice in Marriage. This book assumed that marriage provides the best context for healthy, fruitful, enjoyable sexual expression. But if it were published today, it would simply be called Sex Practice; and instead of “husbands” and “wives,” it would be about “partners” of interchangeable sex. That’s the difference Kinsey helped to make.


“Values-free” education
Perhaps Kinsey’s greatest influence has been through public school sex education programs. His philosophy became the basis of our nation’s “values-free” approach , which purports to teach “the facts” without drawing moral judgments. Opponents of this approach have argued that it only results in more broken hearts, unwanted babies and STDs. But no, the experts assure us — we just need to teach kids to gear up for sex like warfare, with an arsenal of barriers, shields and chemical weapons. Then all our problems will be solved.

If “values-free” sex education is such a great idea, why stop there? Let’s use this approach in teaching every subject. Imagine an English teacher unwilling to declare any one piece of writing better than any other; or a history teacher unwilling to “judge” Hitler and Stalin.

In the end, all education is about learning what to value. “Values-free” simply substitutes one set of values for another. Gone are the old-fashioned sexual virtues — love, beauty, romance, honor, respect and self-control—and in their place we now have “openness,” “exploration” and “freedom.”


Sex without Love
According to the old moral tradition, human beings are in an entirely different category from animals because we have souls. We are “created in the image of God,” as Genesis put it. (This is not limited to Christianity — orthodox Jews and Muslims would agree.) Our sexuality, too, is raised to a new level of dignity. We are called to express God’s self-giving love through our sexuality, either by forming lifelong, monogamous marriages, or by remaining celibate and dedicating our lives exclusively to God’s kingdom. Sexuality is both love-giving and life-giving. Childbearing is much more than biological reproduction, since the “image of God” is passed on through procreation. And honoring sexuality is a public concern, because the family — which springs from the sexual embrace — is the foundation of society.

That’s the tradition that Kinsey tossed aside. In order to do away with morality, his followers eagerly bought into the idea that human beings are just animals. What could be sillier than expecting animals to behave morally? We are creatures of instinct — our sex urge is no different from our hunger urge.

When sexuality is reduced to the animal level, it ceases to be an expression of love. Anything goes, and the strong are free to exert their will upon the weak. Of course, if Alfred Kinsey had openly mocked the ideal of love, or championed the exploitation of women and children, he wouldn’t be celebrated today. (On second thought, though, remember that pornographer Larry Flynt was given the same sugarcoated movie treatment a few years back.)

Another prophet of scientific naturalism, Francis Crick (best known for co-discovering the structure of DNA) took this philosophy to its logical conclusion. Love, he said, is a fiction. The physical world is all that exists, and there are no higher values. “Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will,” Crick wrote, “are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

A vast assembly of nerve cells? That’s it? That’s what makes heroes sacrifice their lives to save others, husbands to love their wives, mothers to give up everything for their children?

You can have “sexual freedom” and your vast assembly of nerve cells; I’ll take love, morality (which is just love in action) and the God on which they depend. Maybe I’m opting to believe in fairy tales. But what if fairy tales are truer to life than the reductions of science? If I’m wrong, I’ll have “paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve,” in the words of C. S. Lewis. “And yet how could that be?” Lewis asked. “How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?”


Restoring Wonder
My generation has its problems, but I don’t think we’re going to buy into Kinsey — the movie, the man or the myth. We’ve had enough of “sexperts.”

How amazing that a cohort of scientists, doctors and professors can take something as wonderful and mysterious as male-female attraction, and reduce it to something as dull and crude as “satisfying the sex urge.” Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised. These are the same sort of folks who make reading Shakespeare an agonizing exercise in “textual analysis.”

The sexual revolution was all about separating things — sex from marriage, sex from procreation, sex from love. Now our job is to put them back together again, rediscovering the full joy and wonder of our sexuality as expressed in the biblical account of Adam and Eve.

“Let’s Talk about Sex?” Sure. But first, we need to talk about love.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2004 Sam Torode. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/arti...?id=18-01-018-v

Novel Bioethics
Claire Barshied on How a Book Taught Her to Reimagine Sex

It is a good bet that many Americans view bioethics as the exclusive province of academic specialists with prestigious degrees in philosophy, law, cell biology, embryology, and similar fields. Their esoteric debates over stem-cell harvesting methods and clinical trial review procedures seem removed from the real-world experiences of most people. Until recently, they certainly seemed that way to me. What few bioethical opinions I had—opposing cloning and abortion, for instance—were unconnected to choices I expected to face.

Then I read Being Human, a 600-page anthology of literature released by the President’s Council on Bioethics. What guidance could stories and poems offer on cloning and stem-cell research? In the book’s introduction, the council’s chairman, Leon Kass, explained that bioethics as currently conceived by professional bioethicists is much too narrow. It emphasizes what is technologically feasible, securing patient consent, ensuring access to care regardless of income, and so on, but ignores “the full range of human goods that we should be trying to promote or protect.”

Guarding that fuller range of goods requires a better grasp of what it means to be human and what good things humans prize. Our best sources on these questions are not scientists, but the writers and thinkers of the aptly named humanities. They are not everything, of course—who would entrust national science policy to John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates?—but perhaps they can point the way to deeper understandings of our nature.

Being Human’s editors hope that reading great literature can make bioethical arguments accessible. Stories embody the consequences of our choices, the tension between our aspirations and imperfections, what it means to love unconditionally, how we face sickness, loss, and death. And subjects such as these—“matters close to the core of our humanity,” as Kass puts it—can be profoundly changed by new technologies.

A book that illustrates these universal aspects of the human experience and that poses questions about their vulnerability should prompt us to think carefully about society’s embrace of biotechnologies. Such a book could even challenge us to examine more closely our own moral values and inclinations.

Our Common Nature

As I have been reading, thinking, and scribbling about Being Human for the past few months, I have been surprised to find some of my long-held assumptions being transformed. I have begun to see more deeply the importance of human design: In body, mind, and spirit, we seem to have some kind of common nature that defines and delimits us. When characters violate that design, they and others inevitably suffer.

Being Human excerpts the screenplay for Gattaca, a futuristic movie about a society in which ambitious parents can use in-vitro fertilization (IVF) technology to select the embryo with the best genes—the one without any diseases or “potentially prejudicial conditions” such as premature baldness, myopia, or tendencies to addiction, violence, or obesity. Children of the right sex, the right hair color, and the right predilections to music and mathematics can be ordered, and their genetic resumés open doors to education, careers, and marriage: After all, they are measurably more likely to succeed. For those conceived “naturally” the reverse is true; their less reliable genes close doors.

Science fiction? If only. Modern medicine is constantly refining its means of prenatal genetic testing. These tests are mainly used to determine whether the unborn child has any abnormalities, and as the Washington Post noted, “The majority of women who discover a serious disorder will terminate the pregnancy.”

Even more discriminating in its effects, in vitro fertilization allows embryos not yet implanted to be tested for 90 percent of common genetic disorders. Thus, as the Post noted, doctors can “report back to the patients on the apparent condition of each embryo and decide whether any of them should not be implanted in the mother’s womb.” Though no one can order certain eye or hair colors yet, several IVF clinics around the country already allow parents to choose the sex of their child. The technology will be refined still further, playing on the legitimate desire of parents to give their children every advantage, regardless of cost. At the same time, of course, these technologies emphasize the old eugenic idea that there should be minimum standards for those who get to be born.

Reflecting on Gattaca, though, I realized that the central problem was not the discrimination faced by the genetically inadequate characters. The trouble came long before, in the parents’ desire to control the outcome of procreation’s genetic roulette. Once procreation became fully separated from the sexual act, it looked less like the fruit of a couple’s love and more like manufacture—children stopped being unique gifts from God and became commodities of superior or inferior quality. The problem was that the natural relationship between sex and babies had been severed.

Literary warnings of this abound, most famously in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but you need not look far in the real world of clinical reproduction to see the effects. IVF technology has removed sexual union from reproduction, prompted scientists to create embryos only to harvest their stem cells, produced the market for Ivy League donor eggs, and promoted selective abortion when multiple embryos become viable pregnancies at the same time. Further, embryos “left over” from IVF attempts and put into cold storage raise a host of bioethical questions (questions many mainstream bioethicists do not ask): Are they alive? Do they have anything that amounts to human dignity? Can they simply be disposed of like the overstock at a grocery? Do they have souls?

Personal Valences

But here is where this gets personal: When I first picked up Being Human, I was thinking only about the moral valences of other people’s decisions.

Still in my mid-twenties, I do not anticipate needing fertility aids any time soon. In fact, since I am newly married, contraception is a much more pressing concern. If severing the connection between sex and babies can create so many moral quandaries, and if it can upset social relationships so profoundly, I cannot help but wonder what effect it has on the sexual relationship itself. I have had to reconsider the implications of one of the most common biotechnologies in our society: the eminently respectable use of contraception.

It is not difficult to see the social effects of the mainstreaming of contraception in the last fifty years. By removing the responsibility of parenting from the sexual act, it opened the door to the Sexual Revolution: When there was a decent chance of pregnancy every time a couple engaged in sex, individuals thought longer about their partners and their promiscuity.

I can also see the influence of birth control’s acceptability in myself: Like nearly all other Americans, I feel that I have a right to have sex without the ever-present possibility of conception. Most churches I have attended highlight the role of sex in maintaining healthy, loving marriages, but they emphasize the bonding features of sexuality almost to the exclusion of the child-bearing aspects. And I have always assumed the Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception was simply medieval—a stubborn dogma that resigned poor people to ungovernably large families.

Back in Being Human, though, I ran across a provocative poem by Galway Kinnell. Titled “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” it describes a small boy who sleeps through all nighttime disturbances except his parents’ quiet lovemaking, which wakes him and sends him running into their bed to snuggle and sleep. I wanted to affirm the poem’s warmth toward the “familiar touch of the long-married,” as Kinnell puts it.

But I was disturbed that the poet thought it sweet, even good, that “habit of memory” propelled the boy “to the ground of his making,” in between his parents. It seemed almost disgusting to think of a third person involved, even only proximately, with sex; making love is for two people, between two people. And yet, thinking further, I started to question my own reactions: Why wouldn’t there be a mysterious connection between making love and a child? That, after all, is the pattern of human reproduction—intimacy between two lovers becomes parental love. Babies follow sex.

Stripping the Mystery

What is more, I have begun to suspect that God’s design for procreation, as in so many other areas of life, might contain hidden blessings. In the poem, the parents’ lovemaking grows deeper, infused with new affection and wonder, with their son’s appearance: “In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across his little, startlingly muscled body.” The son, too, benefits by the stability and love of his family, “his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.”

Do we miss some of the good gifts of marriage, sexuality, and family by stripping out the procreative mystery of sex? The poem portrays a family flourishing through connections that are greater than themselves; its spirit is one of awe and gratitude, the very opposite of the need for control we so often require.

Is there something to be gained from assigning a lower priority to our individual, immediate desires? Perhaps sex is inherently about more than just two people, involving more than just pleasure and bonding. Reuniting sex and procreation would protect against the temptations of genetically screening for “acceptable” children and other kinds of surreptitious eugenics. Indeed, the poem’s son, regardless of his characteristics, is “this blessing love gives again into our arms.”

So where does this leave my husband and me, as we begin both our marriage and busy careers in a big city? I cannot say I know God’s stance on every form of birth control. Thinking about what it means to be human, though—and what it means to be obedient to the design a good God gave us for our benefit—has led us into a much larger project of re-imagining sex; in a surprising turn, I found myself driving out to a Catholic church once a month for Natural Family Planning classes.

This is just the beginning, I know, of a long and unexpected journey, but at the moment I’m content to marvel at God’s mysteries, wonder about our nature, and try to get the most out of being human.

The table of contents of Being Human can be found at www.bioethics.gov/bookshelf/reader/table_of_contents.html.

Claire Barshied is a freelance writer in New York City. After receiving a degree in English and American Studies from Princeton University, she worked as a research assistant at the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org) in Washington, D.C. She and her husband currently attend Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

http://www.exceptionalmarriages.com/weblog...il.asp?ID=20453

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/002/14.48.html

What to Say at a Naked Party
Three common strategies to check sexual 'liberation' no longer work.
by Frederica Mathewes-Green | posted 01/21/2005 9:00 a.m.


Anyone who's been on a college campus lately will confirm the depressing report delivered by Vigen Guroian in this essay. As someone who does a lot of campus speaking, I've seen my fair share of posters announcing sex-toy workshops, transgender celebrations, and, on one Ivy League campus, an open invitation to a "naked party." What's a naked party? Anybody who wants can attend, but you have to take off all your clothes to stay.

It makes you want to weep for the children, for girls in particular, who deserve to be protected from this carnival of leering and molestation. Guroian hits the target in his demand that colleges do more to provide such protection. But what about the students themselves? How can we help them resist this expectation?

There are three typical strategies, and I don't think any of them works. The first is practical: We tell students to abstain because immorality leads to misery. But the libertines in the audience don't see evidence that this is so; they're having fun, for the most part, and it doesn't look like anyone is harmed. The second is romantic: We tell students that marriage is glorious. Once again, they don't see a lot of evidence of that, not in the lives of married people they know, perhaps especially in the lives of their parents. What they saw at the breakfast table for the last 18 years doesn't look that great, and what they did last night didn't feel that bad.

The third is our foundational premise that it's a matter of "objective morality." We regularly complain that young people have no absolute values; that, in Guroian's words, "There is no right and wrong." But this message is likely to strike hearers as irrelevant, speculative, and quaint. Not only that, but flat-out wrong. These students have an objective morality. It's just different from ours. They believe that it's objectively wrong to dump someone in a callous way. It's wrong to have sex with someone who isn't willing. It's wrong to transgress any one of a hundred subtle etiquette cues about who may sleep with whom under what circumstances. There is plenty of objective morality on their side, and they think it's better than ours. As far as they can see, theirs is working and ours looks pointlessly difficult. Why should they switch? This argument sounds like nothing more than "because I said so."

What we really mean, of course, is "because God said so." And indeed persevering in chastity is so difficult that no other motive except self-abandoning love of God is sufficient. All the warnings about the dangers of promiscuity, all the vaunted bliss of marriage, can be irrefutably countered by somebody's experience. Doing the right thing is not guaranteed to make you happy, and the wicked sometimes thrive. But because the love of God constrains us, because our bodies are not our own but bought with a price, we persevere in a difficult path, pressing on toward the light ahead.

Now, this is a difficult sell to people who don't believe in God. For them, this is like a shiny new car with no engine. If you don't have the motive of love for God, passion for purity looks like an empty shell.

I believe that the only conversation that will currently make sense begins with faith in God. The best we can do is speak passionately about our own experience—our own transformative contact with God, and how it has reordered actions and relationships, and empowered ever-greater deeds and greater love. It's not a bad story, actually, and authentic passion connects with an audience in a way that theoretical propositions cannot.

I say "currently" because I think there is long-term hope. Look at It Happened One Night. While that excellent film exhibits good sexual morality, it also displays behavior we consider unacceptable today: drunkenness, smoking, threats to "sock" the female star. Hollywood wouldn't include such elements today, because the culture changed. It got better. Bad behavior hurts, and eventually this becomes undeniable. Chastity has been such a fixture of human history that the current situation is wildly anomalous, and I expect it will eventually right itself, probably due to women realizing that promiscuity doesn't make them feel empowered, but endangered. It may even turn out, in a supreme irony, that the current phenomenon of transitory student lesbianism was just a strategy of desperation, the only way society currently allows young women to tell boys, "Go away, I'm not ready."

"God hates sin," some emphasize. But God hates sin like the parent of a leukemia victim hates cancer. God really does love the sinner. In order to reach the sinner we will have to love them, too, and offer ourselves humbly and authentically as examples of what God's power can do.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex, and Feminism (Conciliar, 2002).

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/010/3.46.html

Holy Sex
How it ravishes our souls.
by Philip Yancey | posted 09/30/2003

A PHYSICIAN FRIEND OF MINE spent two months in a remote part of the African nation Benin. The airplane on which he traveled home was showing current movies, and after two months away from all media, he found them jarring. Each movie centered on sexual intercourse, as though this were the only significant topic in the world, whereas David had just been dealing with weighty matters—disease, poverty, hunger, religion, death—while relating to colleagues in a way that had nothing to do with sexual intercourse. When the plane stopped for refueling at the Brussels airport, David saw rows of magazines for sale featuring women's breasts in various stages of exposure. That, too, seemed odd, for he had been working in an area where women commonly uncovered their breasts in public, not for sexual arousal but to feed their children. Welcome back to Western civilization, he thought to himself.

I know no clearer example of the modern, reductionistic approach to life than human sexuality. We survey people about their private sex lives, and write manuals based on data gained by watching people perform sex in a laboratory setting. To junior high students we teach details of sexuality forbidden to previous generations.

At the same time, I know of no greater failure among Christians than in presenting a persuasive approach to sexuality. Outside the church, people think of God as the great spoilsport of human sexuality, not its inventor. The pope utters pronouncements, denominations issue position papers, and many Christians ignore them and follow the lead of the rest of society. Surveys reveal little difference between church attenders and non-attenders in the rates of premarital intercourse and cohabitation. Surveys also show that many people have left their churches in disgust over hypocrisy about sex, especially when ministers fail to practice what they preach.

Nothing intrinsic in human sexuality keeps a person from experimenting with multiple partners, both genders, even children, close relatives, or animals. Yet every tribe studied by anthropologists has taboos that fence off some of these practices. As if by instinct, the most "primitive" of humans recognize in sex something beyond a merely physical act.

Only in technologically advanced cultures do people reduce sex to an act of pleasure we perform like any other animal. Music gives us away. A popular song by Bloodhound Gang urges, "You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals, so let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel." Why not? The Discovery television channel often portrays close-up detail of sex in the animal kingdom.

The attempt to reduce human sex to a merely animal act, however, runs into unexpected problems. The more we learn about human sexuality, the more it differs from how the animals do it. Most obviously, humans come vastly over-equipped for sex. The human male has the largest penis of any primate, and the female is the only mammal whose breasts develop before her first pregnancy. Virtually all other mammals have a specified time in which the female is receptive, or in heat, whereas the human female can be receptive anytime, not just once or twice a year. In addition, the human species is one of very few in which females experience orgasm, and humans continue to have sex long after their child-bearing years have passed. Why are we so oversexed?

Relationship is the key. Human beings experience sex as a personal encounter, not just a biological act. We are the only species that commonly copulates face-to-face, so that partners look at each other as they mate, and have full-body contact. Unlike other social animals, humans prefer privacy for the act. In many species, females openly advertise their receptivity with swollen, colorful genitals, and the male and female mate in full view of the group.

Zoologists puzzle over the oddities of human sexuality, unable to find any evolutionary advantage in sex that does not directly lead to reproduction. Some conclude that for humans sex represents a huge waste of time—certainly true if the point of sex was fertilization rather than relationship.

In every feature, human sexuality encourages relationship. Humans negotiate a contract between consenting parties—a contract as simple as a marriage vow, a tourist paying for an hour of a prostitute's time, or as complicated as a Shakespearean love triangle. Unlike domestic bulls or rams, which service every receptive female within sniffing distance, mating humans demand some sort of mutual consent. When none exists, we call that rape and punish it.

Some people try to treat sex as an animal act. In a scene from the movie A Beautiful Mind, the brilliant but socially inept mathematician John Nash approaches an attractive woman in a bar: "Listen, I don't have the words to say whatever it is that's necessary to get you into bed, so can we just pretend I said those things and skip to the part where we exchange bodily fluids?" He learns quickly, from the imprint of her palm on his face, that reductionism does not work well as a pickup line.

Schizophrenic is the best way to describe modern society's view of sexuality. On the one hand, scientists insist that we are organisms like any other animal, and that sex is a natural expression of that animal nature. The pornography industry (which in the U.S. grosses more money than all professional sports combined) happily complies, supplying sexual images of the famous and the anonymous to anyone willing to pay.

But when people truly act out their animal natures, society frowns in disapproval. John Nash gets slapped for telling the truth. A few states in the U.S. allow legalized prostitution, but no parents encourage their daughters to pursue such a career. Hollywood may glamorize adultery onscreen, but in real life it provokes pain and a rage sometimes strong enough to drive the wounded party to murder the rival or jump off a bridge.

The root cause of this schizophrenia is the attempt to reduce sex between humans to a purely physical act. For humans, unlike sheep or chimpanzees, sex involves more than bodies. In A Natural History of Rape, Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer report that only 22 percent of rapes involve "gratuitous" violence beyond what is necessary to subdue the victim, yet any rape counselor knows that the real violence occurs on the inside and may lead to years of depression, nightmares, memory loss, and sexual dysfunction. Victims of abusive relatives and pedophiliac priests testify that something far more than a body gets hurt when a trusted adult abuses a child sexually. Decades later, suffering persists.

In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot outlaw "virtual child porn," consisting of computer-generated images on the Internet, since no one gets harmed in its manufacture. Their decision neglects the harm done to the people feeding on such images, for the real damage in sexuality occurs inside. Sex may engage our bodies, but unlike such bodily functions as excretion, sneezing, and burping, it also touches our souls—as tenderly, and as precariously, as they can be touched.

WHY DOES SEX PLAY SO MUCH LARGER in modern cities than, say, in the villages of the Amazon? Clothing fashions, billboards, and ads on the sides of city buses give human sexuality a prominence it never attains in the naked jungle. The French sociologist Jacques Ellul saw our modern fixation with sex as the symptom of a breakdown in intimacy. Having detached the physical act of sex from relationship, we can only work at perfecting the "technique"—hence the proliferation of sex studies, sex manuals, and sex videos, none of which address the real source of our pain.

When a society loses faith in God, lesser powers arise to take God's place. "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God," said G. K. Chesterton. In modern Europe and the U.S., sex has a near-sacred quality of mythic, numinous power. We select our sexiest individuals and accord them the status of gods and goddesses, fawning over the details of their lives, broadcasting their bodily statistics, surrounding them with paparazzi, rewarding them with money and status. Sex no longer points to something beyond; it becomes the thing itself, the substitute sacred.

The very word sex comes from a Latin verb that means to cut off or sever, and sexual impulses drive us to unite, to restore somehow the union that has been severed. Freud diagnosed the deep pain within as a longing for union with a parent; Jung diagnosed a longing for union with the opposite sex. The Christian sees a deeper longing, for union with the God who created us.

Unfortunately, few people look to the church for perspective on the true meaning of human sexuality, since they view the church as an implacable enemy of sex. It should be obvious why the church so often falls on the side of repression, rather than celebration, of sexuality: No human longing is more powerful, more difficult to rein in. Sex has enough combustive force to incinerate conscience, vows, family commitments, religious devotion, and anything else in its path.

How the church got its reputation as an enemy of sex is a long story, in some ways shameful and in some ways understandable. Every society sets boundaries, or taboos, around sexuality, and in Western civilization Christianity was the main force to set those boundaries. Against the background of pagan Greek and Roman culture, which incorporated temple prostitutes into worship activities, the early church went through a period of purging.

Saint Augustine, converted out of that pagan background and tormented by his own guilty past, connected the transmission of sin with the act of intercourse and proclaimed that sex for any purpose other than conceiving is a sin. He came to regret that God had created sex in the first place.

Augustine's contemporary, Jerome, went much further. Plagued by sexual fantasies, he often found himself "surrounded by bands of dancing girls."

He turned to studying Hebrew as form of sublimation. His scholarship resulted in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible used by the church for a thousand years, but did little for Jerome's attitude toward sex. "I praise wedlock, I praise marriage; but it is because they produce me virgins," he said, and proceeded to give prison-like rules to the mothers who raised these virgins. To husbands he declared, "Anyone who is too passionate a lover with his own wife is himself an adulterer."

In the succeeding centuries church authorities issued edicts forbidding sex on Thursdays, the day of Christ's arrest; on Fridays, the day of his death; on Saturdays, in honor of the Blessed Virgin; and on Sundays in honor of the departed saints. Wednesdays sometimes made the list too, as did the 40-day fast periods before Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost, and also feast days and days of the Apostles, as well as the days of female impurity. The list escalated until, as John Boswell has estimated, only 44 days a year remained available for marital sex.

The Protestant Reformation brought about a shift in attitudes toward sex. Luther scorned the church's proscription against marital sex for the sake of pleasure, and transferred to the home much of the respect that had been accorded the nunnery. When secular revolutions swept across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, the church's position as guardian of sexuality faded. Yet in England and America, Victorians brought back an ethic of repression, even to the extent of covering the legs of furniture lest they arouse impure thoughts.

I dwell on the church's severe attitude toward sex because I believe we Christians bear heavy responsibility for the counter reaction so evident in modern society. Jesus treated those who had fallen into sexual sins with compassion and forgiveness, and reserved his harshest words for the hidden sins of hypocrisy, pride, greed, and legalism. How is it that we who follow him use the word "immoral" to signify sexual sins almost exclusively, and reserve church discipline for those who fail sexually?

Perhaps worse, though, the church in its prudery has silenced a powerful rumor of transcendence that could point to the Creator and originator of human sexuality, who invested in it far more meaning than most modern people can imagine. We have de-sacralized it, in effect, by suppression and denial, and along the way our clumsy attempts at repression helped to empower a false infinite. Sexual power lives on, but few see in that power a pointer to the One who designed it.

UPTIGHT CHRISTIANS forget the fundamental fact that God created sex. Having studied some anatomy, I marvel at God laboring over the physiology of sex: the soft parts, the moist parts, the millions of nerve cells sensitive to pressure and pain yet also capable of producing pleasure, the intricacies of erectile tissue, the economical and ironic combination of organs for excretion and reproduction, the blending of visual appeal and mechanical design. As the zoologists remind us, in comparison with every other species, the human is bountifully endowed.

A connected view of life assumes this is God's world, and that despite its fractured state, clues of its original design remain. When I experience desire, I need not flinch in guilt, as if something unnatural has happened. Rather, I should follow the desire to its source, to learn God's original intent.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." In this, the Bible's strongest statement about sexual desire, Jesus cuts to the heart of the matter. He affirms that sexual desire affects the inside of a person ("in his heart") whether or not anything takes place externally. He also connects sexual desire with relationship, startlingly, by linking lust and adultery. The voyeur wants to keep his desires both discreet and discrete, disconnected from any actual personal contact; Jesus exposes the deception.

Recently I came across Martin Luther's pastoral advice about lust:

But some might say, "Waiting for marriage is unbearable and aggravating!" They're right. It's very similar to other difficulties requiring patience that believers must face, such as fasting, imprisonment, cold, sickness, and persecution. Lust is a serious burden. You must resist it and fight against it. But after you have overcome it through prayer, lust will have caused you to pray more and grow in faith.
It struck me that most of the difficulties Luther mentions—fasting, imprisonment, cold, persecution, even most sicknesses—no longer confront Christians in prosperous democracies. We have eliminated many of the spiritual burdens common to our forebearers. Lust, however, we have perfected. In Luther's day, a teenage boy might get a glimpse of a girl's bare legs as she stomped on grapes or bent over to draw water from a well. He did not face the temptation of MTV reports on coeds who flash their breasts on the beach during spring break; he did not have photos of Britney and J-Lo and Anna Kournikova streaming digitally over his DSL line in the privacy of his bedroom. In modern lust, people sit in living rooms or even office cubicles watching strangers undress and make love. Yielding to such unattached desire can become addictive, and often damages true relationship. A wife who discovers her husband fawning over pornography may well feel rejected and devalued, her feelings of intimacy betrayed.

Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" tells of a precocious 12-year-old girl and two country boys who have come to court her visiting cousins. The girl overhears her teenage cousins mock a nun, Sister Perpetua, who has suggested a formula to use in fending off fresh young men in the back seats of cars. "Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!" the nun taught the girls to say. The cousins think such advice hilarious. The girl, however, is moved. The news that she is the dwelling place of God makes her feel as if somebody has given her a present.

The nun's formula comes from a passage, 1 Corinthians 6, that is among Paul's strangest. In trying to shock the Corinthians out of their wild behavior, Paul uses this astonishing argument: "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, 'The two will become one flesh.'"

Whether or not such an argument might deter an adolescent's groping hands—much less the Corinthians' worldly escapades—Paul does reveal something of the multi-layered nature of desire. The biology of sex has a seamless integration with the deeply personal (Paul quotes God's original formula for marriage in Genesis) and also the spiritual. We cannot simply compartmentalize sexual desire. Luther correctly identified lust as a spiritual battle, not merely a physical one.

IN A REMARKABLY CANDID BOOK, Jean Vanier, founder of the worldwide l'Arche communities where the author and priest Henri Nouwen spent his last years, discusses what he learned in many years of working with the profoundly retarded. Man and Woman He Made Them (Paulist Press, 1986) describes men and women so disturbed or mentally challenged as to be incapable of a normal relationship with another human. Some cannot speak. Some are blind. Some cannot control their spastic movements. Some seem unable to process any sensory data from the outer world.

Still, most of the damaged people Vanier works with experience sexual desires. One young man masturbates almost constantly. Others "fall in love" with other residents, though they lack the social ability to express that love, and want to get married. Others have no comprehension of marriage and simply want to have sex.

Meanwhile Vanier, a lay minister, tries to live out his chosen life of celibacy. He confesses the difficulty of that struggle, a struggle to which many others succumb. He tells of the loneliness on the road, away from the supportive community he serves, when he feels most vulnerable to seduction.

Vanier admits that his life of celibacy includes very real suffering. Yet he prefers his own suffering to the suffering of those who exercise genital sexuality without responsibility or commitment. In his vocation, he has heard many of their stories in confession. Often they end up disappointed, and more isolated than ever. Relationships based primarily on sex do not wear well, for when the physical attraction fades, so does the love.

For Vanier, a commitment to purity is a sign of hope, an effort to bring personal order into a disordered world. Purity can be sought as a celibate single person or as a married person. Either state involves loneliness and sometimes anguish as well as hope. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God," Jesus promised. Note the extent of the promise: not that they will find complete sexual fulfillment and solve all loneliness, but that they will see God.

"We all have to choose between two ways of being crazy," says Vanier: "the foolishness of the Gospel and the non-sense of the values of our world." Both Jean Vanier and Henri Nouwen (who looked upon Vanier as a mentor) cast their lot with the foolishness of the Gospel, leaving prestigious careers and living in community with some of the saddest, most neglected human beings on earth. To those who have known these men, however, the choice looks like wisdom and not foolishness.

At times I have given in to lust. I cannot deny that nude women, whether in art museums or magazines or over the Internet, exert on me a power like gravitational force. Our culture has mastered the disconnected "technique" of sex, and I have fallen victim. I must also say, though, that when I resist the temptation, and pour sexual energy into my marriage—a much more complicated and less selfish transaction, to be sure—the obsessive power of sexuality fades away. The air clears. Marriage becomes more of a haven. My life with God yields unexpected rewards.

LYRICS FROM THE LOVE SONGS broadcast on pop radio stations tap into romantic yearnings but promise more than any person can deliver. "You are my everything." "I can't live without you." Sexual desires and romantic longings are a kind of debased sacrament. If humanity serves as your religion, then sex becomes an act of worship. On the other hand, if God is the object of your religion, then romantic love becomes an unmistakable pointer, a rumor of transcendence as loud as any we hear on earth.

I credit three things—classical music, the beauty of nature, and romantic love—as responsible for my own conversion. The first two convinced me of the goodness of this world, and prodded me to search for the One who had made it. The third convinced me of the possibility of change in myself. I met a woman who saw worth in me where I had seen little. The hard, cynical shell I had carefully cultivated as a form of protection split apart like a carapace, and to my surprise I discovered that vulnerability need not mean danger.

Romance gives intriguing hints of transcendence. I am "possessed" by the one I love. I think of her day and night, languish when she leaves me, perform brave deeds to impress her, revel in her attention, live for her, even die for her. I want to be both heroic and meek at the same time. For a time, and only for a time, I can live on that edge of exaltation. Then reality sets in, or boredom, betrayal, old age, or death. At least, though, I can see in it a glimpse of God's infinite capacity for such attention. Could this be how God views us?

Charles Williams, a colleague and close friend of C. S. Lewis, wrote that romantic love gives us a new vision of one other human being, an insight into his or her "eternal identity." For a brief time, at least, romance gives us the ability to see the best in one other person, to ignore or forgive flaws, to bask in endless fascination. That state, said Williams, gives a foretaste of how we will one day view every resurrected person, and how God now views us. Romantic love does not distort vision but corrects it, in a very narrow range. The Bible uses explicit romantic images to describe God's love for us: What we feel in passing for one person, God feels eternally for the many.

DOSTOEVSKY'S Notes from the Underground contains a chilling scene in which the underground man, a disturbed egoist, visits a prostitute. He pays his money, she performs, and then the two of them lie there in silence. Suddenly he looks to the side and sees two wide-open eyes staring at him. "The look in those eyes was coldly indifferent and sullen, as though it were utterly detached, and it made me feel terribly depressed." Then it occurs to him that for two hours he has not said a word to the naked creature beside him, and has not even thought it necessary.

Now, however, I suddenly saw clearly how absurd and hideous like a spider was the idea of vice which, without love, grossly and shamelessly begins where true love finds its consummation. We went on looking at each other like that for a long time, but she did not drop her eyes before mine, nor did she change her expression, so that in the end it made me for some reason feel creepy.
An extraordinary conversation takes place. The underground man asks the prostitute's name. "Liza." He inquires about her nationality and her parents. He speaks of a funeral he observed that morning. He asks about her profession, and they discuss love, sex, and married life.

Gradually the two, who have wordlessly completed the most intimate act of physical union, become human to one another. A relationship, guarded and manipulative but a relationship nonetheless, stirs to life. In the remainder of the book, a plot plays out in which Liza penetrates the underground man's armor of cruel egoism by responding to him with tenderness and selfless love. "Something was not dead within me," he finally realizes; the prostitute Liza, a person even more pitiable than himself, has coaxed it out.

A few mysterious passages in the Bible hint that, besides being a token of human intimacy, sex has layers of further meaning. Weddings often include the passage from Ephesians in which Paul declares, "After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.' "

In one sense, we are never more Godlike than in the act of sex. We make ourselves vulnerable. We risk. We give and receive in a simultaneous act. We feel a primordial delight, entering into the other in communion. Two independent beings open their inmost selves and experience not a loss but a gain. In some way—"a profound mystery" not even Paul dared explore—this most human act reveals something of the nature of reality, God's reality, in his relations with creation and perhaps within the Trinity itself.

I will go no further because to do so seems a kind of sacrilege, an ignorant probing of what we cannot possibly comprehend, an attempt to reduce an irreducible mystery. Simply recognizing the sacramental nature of sex does, however, shed light on some of the sexual taboos of the Bible. I now see them not as capricious rules to spoil our sexual adventures but rather as guidelines protecting something of great value that can only be realized in an exclusive, covenant relationship.

Confining sex to marriage does not guarantee that we will realize anything beyond physical gratification in our sex lives. It may, however, create an environment of safety, intimacy, and trust where the true meaning of sex, the sacramental meaning, may at times break through. Marriage provides the security we need to experience sex without restraint, apart from guilt, danger, or deceit. Teenagers worry that they will miss out on something if they heed the Bible's warnings against premarital sex. Actually, the warnings are there to keep them from missing out on something. Fidelity sets a boundary in which sex can run free.

I ONCE HEARD AN ACTOR being interviewed on late-night television. "Tell me," said David Letterman. "You're a sex symbol who plays all sorts of exciting roles with gorgeous women. How does that compare to your real life, off-screen?"

The actor reminded Letterman that he had been happily married for 20 years. Then he said, "Here's the difference in a nutshell. In the movies, life is mostly about sex and occasionally about children. Married life is mostly about children and occasionally about sex."

Sex is such a powerful force that a young person may have trouble understanding how anything else could ever eclipse it. Most married people, like the actor, will tell you that sex within marriage is neither as easy nor as important as they had imagined before marriage. It expresses intimacy, yes, and provides pleasure. But much of marriage consists in making day-to-day decisions, managing the complexities of careers and schedules, rearing children, negotiating differences, juggling finances, and all the other effort involved in keeping a home running.

Marriage strips away the illusions about sex pounded into us daily by the entertainment media. Few of us live with oversexed supermodels. We live instead with ordinary people, men and women who get bad breath, body odors, and unruly hair; who menstruate and experience occasional impotence; who have bad moods and embarrass us in public; who pay more attention to our children's needs than our own. We live with people who require compassion, tolerance, understanding, and an endless supply of forgiveness. So do our partners. Such is the ironical power of sex: It lures us into a relationship that offers to teach us what we need far more—sacrificial love.

Philip Yancey is a CT columnist and author of Rumors of Another World (Zondervan, 2003), from which this article was adapted with permission.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10, Page 46

http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/pr.../002/13.44.html

Dorm Brothel
The new debauchery, and the colleges that let it happen.
By Vigen Guroian | posted 01/21/2005 9:00 a.m.


"The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose."

Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman (1966)
Nineteen sixty-six, the year in which Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman was published, is also the year I entered as a first-yearman at the University of Virginia. We did not stoop to the State U level of referring to ourselves as freshmen, sophomores, and such—not at "The University." We were all men at U.Va.—"gentlemen," we were told. Young women visited on weekends from Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon, Mary Washington, and Hollins College. But they did not stay in the dormitory or the fraternity house. They stayed in college-approved housing, more often than not the home of a widow who had a few rooms to let and happily accepted a delegation from the colleges to assume the responsibilities of in loco parentis.

Parietal rules were enforced even in the fraternity houses—self-enforced by those of us who lived in them. Young women were not permitted in the bedrooms and had to be out of the house by a certain hour. We dated, blind-dated often. We did not know what "hooking up" was. We had never heard of date rape either, though some of us may have committed it. It could happen in the back seat of a car, a cheap motel, a cow pasture, or a Civil War battlefield, but not in a college dormitory or fraternity house bedroom, not yet at least; it was not until the end of the decade that all the rules and prohibitions came tumbling down and the brave new world of the contemporary coeducational college commenced.

Back then, and from time immemorial, so far as I knew, there were the "easy" girls. We had a provocative name or two for them, and they were quickly sorted out from the "other" girls. Word got around fast. These were not young women one seriously considered marrying, and most of us expected and hoped to find a mate in college. If, however, a guy got especially "hungry" or "horny," there was no special stigma attached to taking advantage of what the easy girls had to offer.

The gentlemen of the University of Virginia lived by a double standard, but there were standards. There was little doubt about that. The arrangements the colleges provided for the sexes to meet and mix, strict dorm-visitation hours, approved housing, curfews for female visitors, and the like made that abundantly clear. When we set off on a road trip to a girls school, either by hitchhiking or jamming six or eight into a car, and arrived at the dorm, we did not just mosey on up to our dates' rooms and hang out. We waited, garbed in coat and tie, in the big informal parlor until our dates made their entrance.

My college classmates and fraternity brothers at the University of Virginia and I were certainly not Victorians, but we were not post-Christian and postmodern young men either, not quite yet. Maybe we were the last gentlemen, which certainly should not be interpreted to mean that we always behaved like gentlemen, just that we had some appreciation for the meaning of the word and maybe even aspirations to become what it signified. Furthermore, we knew what the opposite of a gentleman was. In fact, in those days "The University" was often called, proudly by some, the Playboy School of the South. So we were gentlemen and playboys both, spirited by our friend Jack Daniels. We knew there was a contradiction in being a gentleman and a Don Juan at the same time. But being a Don Juan or playboy has significance only in a world in which the idea of the gentleman exists, in which fidelity is acknowledged as a virtue, and in which sex is considered most appropriate to the marital union. We had absorbed these notions from a culture that had not yet abandoned them. We knew the game had to end eventually, probably when we met the right girl and got married, and most of us got married by the age of 23 or 24, many to our college sweethearts.

One could say that in 1966, what men and women called dating was a late—and as I look back on it, probably also tenuous—version of courtship. We understood, at least implicitly, that there was an important difference between going whoring and dating. Treating a young woman like a whore was what a Don Juan would do, but not the mark of a gentleman, especially one looking for a future wife. But today is entirely different. My grown children tell me so, as do my students at Loyola College, and much has been written on the subjects of dating, courtship, and the sexual attitudes of our youth that confirms their testimony. But why is dating, as a form of courtship, an endangered practice?

Experts identify a variety of reasons and causes, but I do not pretend to address the subject scientifically or dispassionately. I will not review this literature here. Nor do I have a sentimental attachment to a remembered past. Lest I be misunderstood, I do not call for a return to the "good old days" of dating as it was when I was a youth anymore than I would advocate a return to arranged marriages. As a college professor and father of a college-age daughter, however, I am outraged by the complicity of my college and most other schools in the death of courtship and the emergence of a dangerous and destructive culture of "hooking up."

Doane College in Nebraska recently mailed a recruiting postcard that showed a man surrounded by women, with a caption that read that students at this college have the opportunity to "play the field." After a public outcry last December, administrators hastily withdrew the marketing campaign, explaining that the postcard was harmless and a metaphor for exploring a variety of education options. But the very fact that the campaign was conceived and approved in the first place speaks volumes. The sexual revolution, if that is an appropriate title, was not won with guns but with genital groping aided and abetted by colleges that forfeited the responsibilities of in loco parentis and have gone into the pimping and brothel business.

Sex Carnival
I do not use these words lightly or loosely, and rarely is a college so blatantly suggestive as was Doane, although this attitude about the commendability of sexual experimentation has become an orthodoxy among many who hold positions as deans of student life at our colleges. Of course, some colleges take concrete steps to resist this revolution of morals. Still, in most American college coed dorms, the flesh of our daughters is being served up daily like snack jerky. No longer need young men be wolves or foxes to consume that flesh. There are no fences to jump or chicken coops to break into. The gates are wide open and no guard dogs have been posted. It is easy come and easy go. Nor are our daughters the only ones getting hurt. The sex carnival that is college life today is also doing great damage to our sons' characters, deforming their attitudes toward the opposite sex. I am witnessing a perceptible dissipation of manly virtue in the young men I teach.

Nevertheless, my more compelling concern about this state of affairs is for the young women, our daughters. Since my student years, colleges have abandoned all the arrangements that society had once put in place to protect the "weaker sex" so they could say "no" and have a place to retreat if young men pressed them too far. And although even when these arrangements were in place, one could not always say with confidence that the girl was the victim and the boy the offender, the contemporary climate makes identifying predator and prey even trickier. The lure and availability of sexual adventure that our colleges afford is teaching young women also to pursue sexual pleasures aggressively. Yet, based on my own conversations and observations, there is no doubt that young women today are far more vulnerable to sexual abuse and mistreatment by young men than when I was a college student, simply because the institutional arrangements that protected young women are gone and the new climate says everything goes.

In 1966, my fraternity brothers and I were caught up in a monumental shift in relations between the sexes that Will Barrett, the young protagonist of Walker Percy's tale, struggles to understand and come to terms with. One evening, Will and his love interest, Kitty Vaught, retreat to a cramped camper. They try to dance and then lie together in a bunk with all the expectations ignited by young flesh pressed against young flesh. A conversation ensues that is profoundly emblematic of what my generation went through. Prompted by the intimacy and abandon of the situation, Will tells Kitty a story about how his grandfather took his father to a whorehouse at the age of 16. Kitty asks Will if his father did the same for him. Will answers that he did not. Then, after some chatter about the meaning of love and the difficulty of it, Kitty says to Will, "Very well, I'll be your whore." Will does not protest, so Kitty injects,

"Then you think I'm a whore?"

"No," that was the trouble. She wasn't. There was a lumpish playfulness, a sort of literary gap in her whorishness.

"Very well, I'll be a lady."

"All right."

"No, truthfully. Love me like a lady."

"Very well."

He lay with her, more or less miserably, kissed her lips and eyes and uttered sweet love murmurings into her ear, telling her what a lovely girl she was. But what am I, he wondered: neither Christian nor pagan nor proper lusty gentleman, for I've never really got the straight of this lady-and-whore business. And that is all I want and it does not seem much to ask: for once and all to get the straight of it.
This is what dating was becoming back then, as young men and women without traditional adult oversight started to entrust themselves to one another. A clear sense of the formal stages of courtship had faded and authoritative rules of conduct were dissolving. Percy's scene is not wholly foreign to my students. But neither is it typical. The culture has changed dramatically.

Literary Hook-ups
When, in Tom Wolfe's most recent novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Charlotte's mother asks her during Christmas break where students go on dates at Dupont University, Charlotte responds: "Nobody goes out on a date. The girls go out in groups and the boys go out in groups, and they hope they find somebody they like." This is Charlotte Simmons's description of "hooking up." "Hooking up" has replaced traditional courtship and dating among today's college students. "Hooking up" is dating sans courtship or expectations of a future relationship or commitment. It is strictly about user sex. I use you and you use me for mutual pleasure. And liquor is more often than not the lubricant that makes things go.

We all are familiar with contemporary sitcoms and so-called reality television shows that bring young men and women together with precisely the intent of getting them to eye each other's genitals like candy at a convenience store, respond to each other's sexual nature in animal fashion, and hop in bed together with no regrets. There are no evident prohibitions or taboos. The comic or dramatic plot is all about sexual adventure and getting as much pleasure from the experience as possible. The rules are strictly instrumental. Often, they are made up along the way merely to facilitate the smooth going of the "game" or "hunt," as it might more appropriately be called. There is no right and wrong.

I cannot say for sure whether these shows influence real life or whether it is the other way around. In the end, it does not much matter. What I do know is that a latter-day Walker Percy could not write the scene I have cited with the belief that it faithfully depicts how contemporary young men and women meet or what is at issue between them.

Take, for another example, the benchmark movies of the '60s about young men and women coming of age, such as The Graduate or Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now. They are now passé. The sexual innocence depicted and the presence of adult supervision, limited or mocked, against which the young protagonists struggle, are no longer realistic. Frank Capra's classic romantic comedy It Happened One Night, released in 1934, contrasts even more strikingly with contemporary sexual mores. In that movie, a newspaper reporter named Peter Warne, played by Clark Gable, heroically and humorously lives up to the standard of a gentleman in his behavior toward a rebellious young heiress named Ellie Andrews, played by Claudette Colbert. Occasions arise that certainly present Peter with opportunities to make sexual advances. But Peter does not take advantage of these occasions, despite his increasing desire for a woman whom at first he disdained. Only after these two spirited combatants of the war between the sexes get wed is it suggested that they are sexually intimate. At the end of the film, a symbolic trumpet sounds, announcing that the "walls of Jericho" are falling.

Over the years, I have asked my students whether they have seen this movie. Only a handful of the students in my course on theology and literature acknowledge even having heard of it. If they were to watch It Happened One Night, I do not doubt that some of my students would enjoy it and highly appreciate its artistry and humor. Yet I hardly think many would identify strongly with the characters and their situation. In simple terms, the symbolic curtain that Peter builds from a clothesline and a blanket in order to separate two twin beds in a rented room is hardly the correlative of life in coed college dormitories and apartments.

The nature and depth of this cultural disconnect is illustrated by a scene in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published just two years after It Happened One Night premiered. John, the so-called Savage, is brought to London from the Indian reservation. During a conversation with Helmholtz Watson, a young author of radio jingles and touchy-feely movie scripts, John recites lines from Romeo and Juliet, a play that has been banned and is unknown to the inhabitants of Brave New World. Despite the fact that Helmholtz rebels against the shallowness of life in Brave New World, the plot of Shakespeare's play puzzles him. After listening to the scene of the lovers' first meeting, he wonders what the fuss is all about. He does not understand the nature of the tragedy because he has no knowledge of courtship or the roles of parental and filial love and fidelity in Shakespeare's world. "Getting into such a state about having a girl—it seemed rather ridiculous. … The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have someone she didn't want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having someone else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical."

It Happened One Night was filmed more than 300 years after Shakespeare wrote his plays. Nevertheless, its humor and ennobling power rest on standards of propriety and courtship nearer to the 16th century than to Huxley's futuristic London or even today's hook-up culture. The reading public of the first decades of the 20th century might find the abolition of courtship and marriage in Brave New World interesting and remote, but my students readily admit the possibility of such a future. I recently gave a lecture at Loyola on Brave New World. During the question-and-answer period, there was a brief discussion about the similarities of dormitory life with Brave New World. I opined that whatever the resemblances, there is a clear difference between the two: Sexual promiscuity and hooking up among college students is voluntary, I said, whereas in Brave New World this behavior is mandatory. A young woman and dormitory resident adviser walked up to me afterwards and chided me: "Dr. Guroian, you are mistaken about that. The peer pressure and the way things are set up make promiscuity practically obligatory. It doesn't matter what the school says officially. The rules are to be broken. This freedom can make girls dizzy and unsure of whatever else they believe about 'saving oneself' for marriage. When it seems like everyone else is 'doing it,' it is hard to say no. It is more like Brave New World here than you think. I deal with it or, more frequently, turn my eyes from it, every day as an RA."

During the spring semester, this same young woman, who was enrolled in one of my classes, wrote a brief exposé on what goes on at Loyola College and other colleges. She explains the sundry distinctions today's young men and women make in relationships and sexual liaisons.

It may not be that dating is at the brink of extinction, but … it has taken a back seat in the modern-day lives of students. Hooking up, going out, going steady, and dating, contrary to what some may think, are not the same thing. … If you are "going out" with someone it means that you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, you are in a "steady" relationship with that person. However, a couple needn't actually go anywhere [go on dates together] to be in this kind of relationship. Hooking up is basically dating without the romance. It has become customary for young adults to simply cut to the chase, the sexual … part of a relationship. A hook-up can be a one-time thing, as it most often is, or it can be a semi-regular thing, but not a full relationship. Although it may take on the signs of one.

One might conclude that modern-day youth have simply gotten lazy and careless. Most … are not looking for a romantic relationship; they see the new freedom and plethora of sexual opportunities and simply take what they can get. They get to college, and it's an amusement park with so many different enticing rides, one would be missing out on the whole experience to settle with the first one they tried. And why should they bother with the responsibility and formalities of a date when they have a better chance of getting immediate satisfaction after buying a few drinks at a bar?
I could have foregone quoting this young coed to cite any number of studies that describe these phenomena more "scientifically." These studies try hard to be "objective," but as a result they cannot convey the immediacy and passion of this young woman's narrative or the matter-of-fact manner in which she draws connections between the breakdown of courtship, the rise of a hook-up culture, and what we used to call pimping and prostitution. "Coed dormitories," she continues, "are they an ideal situation or a sad form of prostitution? You go out with your friends on your terms, after a few drinks you're both attracted. … Interested and lonely, you go together, no obligations, no responsibilities, and no rules. Then there is that late-night 'booty call.' This has become such a custom of the college lifestyle [that] most have come to accept it, although maybe not respect it. If it were really the ideal situation, the walk home the next day [to one's own room] wouldn't be called 'the walk of shame.'" At Loyola College, the vast majority of students live on campus, and since the college has bought up a number of neighboring high-rise and garden apartments, after the freshman year the "walk of shame" need not even be made. It may be only a few steps from the boy's apartment to one's own, or better yet, from the boy's room to one's own.

The Culpable College
The campaign against alcohol and drugs, which it seems every American college has proudly announced it is waging, is a smokescreen that covers the colleges' great sin. Regulating a substance like alcohol on an urban campus like Loyola's cannot succeed unless there is radical reform of the whole of college life. Nothing that the college does to limit alcohol consumption can make a significant difference until the major incentives to drink are removed, beginning with coed dormitories and apartments. Many of my students have explained to me that drinking, especially binge drinking, serves as the lubricant for the casual sex that living arrangements at Loyola invite and permit. There is no need to find the cheap hotel of yesterday. The college provides a much more expensive and available version of it.

The sexual adventures that follow can take a variety of paths, but what this young Loyola man describes is not atypical.

True story: I woke up at three in the morning one day last year to my roommate having sex in his bed five feet away from me. Taking a moment to actually wake up, I realized what was going on. I got up … heard what was going on, and … recognized the voice of the girl. … I had two classes with her the semester before and one that semester. … The next morning … there was no awkward exchange. No childish giggling. I simply told him that I could not believe that she didn't mind having sex with someone for the first time while someone else was in the room sleeping. I also couldn't believe that she hadn't stopped and covered herself up when I had walked out of the room. My roommate looked at me with a casual smile, the same smile I'd seen when talking about the Mets or Red Sox, the same smile I'd seen at our dining-room table over Taco Bell, and he said to me, "Whatever, she's a college girl."
This is a disturbing description of the demise of decency and civility between the sexes for which the American colleges are culpable and blameworthy. It is not that what this student describes was unheard of in the 1960s. Frankly, I can tell similar stories about my college experience. Nevertheless, this was the exception rather than a commonplace occurrence. For colleges made it clear to young men and women that such behavior was unacceptable, and had in place living arrangements with rules and sanctions that discouraged it.

There is nothing new or novel about human depravity or debauchery. Outrage over debauchery is deserved. Nevertheless, as I have suggested already, my outcry is not directed at the debauchery among college students, but rather at the colleges themselves. Today colleges not only turn a blind eye to this behavior, but also set up the conditions that foster and invite it. I am concerned about the young men and women who wish to behave differently, but for whom this is made especially difficult by the living conditions their colleges provide and often insist upon.

In I Am Charlotte Simmons, a fictitious counterpart of the young woman and resident adviser whom I cited earlier says to the new freshmen under her supervision, "The university no longer plays the role of parents." She means sex is permitted. The satiric irony is that there are rules against keeping or consuming alcohol in the dorms. Is that not also in loco parentis? Charlotte quickly learns, however, that all of these rules are made to be broken and that being "sexiled," which means being expelled from one's room so that the roommate may have sex, is routine and obligatory at Dupont University.

In the new culture that our colleges incubate and maintain, everyone is a "guy." Everyone is "familiar." Young men and women who have never seen anyone of the opposite sex naked or in underwear, other than family members, now must get used to being seen by and seeing others—perfect strangers—in just such a state. Everyone is available to everyone else. It would be antisocial not to be.

Under such conditions, how could dating and courtship possibly survive? How could traditional marriage survive, in the long term? Courtship and dating require an inviolable private space from which each sex can leave at appointed times to meet in public and enjoy the other. In other words, in a courtship culture it ought to be that two people who are "serious" actually do "go out" together and do not merely cohabit in a closeted dormitory or apartment. Yet over the past 40 years, American colleges have created a brave new unisex world in which distinctions between public and private, formal and familiar, have collapsed. The differences between the sexes are now dangerously minimized or else just plain ignored because to recognize them is not progressive or politically correct. This is manifestly the case with coed dorm floors and shared bathrooms and showers. These give the lie to official college rules against cohabitation. They are the wink and nod our colleges give to fornication and dissipation. Even in 1957, when he was chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, Clark Kerr was almost prophetic when he stated humorously that his job responsibilities were "providing parking for faculty, sex for students, and athletics for the alumni."

Loyola College and a great many other colleges and universities simply do not acknowledge, let alone address, the sexualization of the American college. Rather, they do everything possible to put a smiley face on an unhealthy and morally destructive environment, one that—and this is no small matter—also makes serious academic study next to impossible. Most of the rhetoric one hears incessantly from American colleges about caring for young men and women and respecting their so-called freedom and maturity is disingenuous. Should we really count it to their credit that colleges are spending more and more resources on counseling and therapy when the direct cause of many wounds they seek to heal is the Brave New World that they have engineered, sold as a consumer product, and supervised?

To serve in loco parentis involves caring for the whole student not as an employer or client but as parent. In its statement "Vision and Values: A Guide for the Loyola College Community," Loyola says it holds to "an ideal of personal wholeness and integration." The college aims "to honor, care for, and educate the whole person," enjoining the entire college community "to strive after intellectual, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual health and well-being." The statement correctly associates these goals of education with the Roman Catholic faith and the liberal-arts tradition. Many other colleges and universities issue similar statements of aim and purpose on both religious and secular grounds. Yet the climate at Loyola College—and many, many others—produces the antithesis of these aims. It fosters not growth into wholeness but the dissolution of personality, not the integration of learning and everyday living but their radical bifurcation. It most certainly does not support the church's values of marriage and family.

Young men and women are being enticed to think of themselves as two selves, one that is mind and reason in the classroom and another self, active "after hours," that is all body and passion. They begin to imagine—though few entirely believe it—that they can use (that is, abuse) their bodies as they please for pleasure, and that choosing to do so has nothing to do with their academic studies or future lives. In reality, they are following a formula for self-disintegration and failure.

This is the grisly underbelly of the modern American college; the deep, dark, hidden secret that many parents suspect is there but would rather not face. The long-term damage to our children is difficult to measure. But it is too obvious to deny. I remember once hearing that the British lost the empire when they started sending their children away to boarding schools. I do not know whether anyone has ever seriously proposed that thesis. I am prepared, however, to ask whether America might not be lost because the great middle class was persuaded that they must send their children to college with no questions asked, when in fact this was the near-equivalent of committing their sons and daughters to one of the circles of Dante's Inferno.

I have lived long enough to understand and be thankful for the fact that the sins and indiscretions of youth may be forgiven and overcome. Nevertheless, the behavior of our American colleges and universities is inexcusable. Their mendacity is doing great harm to our children, whom we entrust to them with so much love, pride, and hope for the future.

Vigen Guroian is professor of theology at Loyola College in Baltimore. He is author of Rallying the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life (ISI Books, 2005).

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2, Page 23

http://www.dawneden.com/2005/02/sanitized-...protection.html

Sanitized for My Protection

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Do you ever have a moment when you recall something from your past—and realize that, for many years, you've been rewriting your own history?

Ever since I began to seriously work on being chaste until marriage, I've had a certain party line about my past. I'll tell people that before I became a Christian, I had some concept about the importance of saving myself for the one I loved, but I misunderstood the nature of chastity. In essence, I thought that as long as I waited to have sex until Mr. Right came along, there was no harm in making out with an attractive Mr. Wrong. But an unexpected flashback to my young adulthood recently reminded me that I was only remembering half the story. Something simple and innocuous sparked one of those memories that opened floodgates.

I suddenly recalled that, in a strange way, I was chaste for much of the time that I was in makeout mode—only it was despite my own wishes.

What I'd forgotten were all the times when, as a college student, I'd be out with a male friend, enjoying his company, hoping for something more—only to have him give some reason why it couldn't be.

That happened to me more times than I could count. It probably happened many more times than I had actually managed to snag a passionate good-night kiss. Yet I'd blocked it out for all these years—because it was painful.

I can still remember the sequence of events. I'd be out with a man whom I considered a love interest. We'd share great conversation, laugh together, and develop a rapport. But when the romantic tension became too great, he'd back off.

Most times, I don't think I even got the "lets be friends" speech. I just had the uncomfortable realization that, for some reason, he didn't want to risk ruining a friendship by adding the element of passion.

It always made me feel rejected. I'd second-guess myself, certain that I was too intimidating, or too unattractive. I'd beat myself up with the thought that I would never meet a man who'd desire me as I desired him. I'd buy an 8-ounce bag of Cheez Doodles and a bottle of Diet Pepsi on my way home and get orange fingerprints all over the "Swineherd" story in my book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, only to feel self-piteous and fatter to boot.

But at the moment when I first felt that rejection, there was also another feeling in my mind—something that annoyed me, but which I couldn't shake. It was the nagging thought that what was painful now might someday make me thankful.

I really didn't like imagining any future happiness coming out of such an experience, because I wanted only to feel sorry for myself—to think I'd been right in wanting a man to validate me by showing me just how attractive I was. Once I became sexually active, I quickly blotted out all memories of the awareness that it might be better to not have sex at all than to force a sexual element into a relationship that was doing very well without it.

Looking back, I realize that what I took as a rejection was really a form of protection. Those men saw something in me that they didn't want to corrupt. They could have perceived me as innocent, or, more likely, as a lonely young woman who was trying to fill an emotional void with physical contact. But whatever the reason, whether they consciously realized it or not, they were protecting my chastity.

Times have changed, and my heart's "God-shaped vacuum" now has a permanent Tenant. In relationships, God's grace has enabled me to resist the desire for physical validation, and focus on giving rather than taking.

Still, I look back on the girl who felt rejected, and in some ways I don't know what to say to her. She had her reasons for wanting to obtain something physically to make up for what her fears and loneliness made her incapable of obtaining emotionally. I want to tell her that it was all for the best—that all those times she felt shunned, God was really protecting her.

She wouldn't believe me. I have a hard time believing it myself sometimes. But I know that the life I live now is so much better than the one I lived before. No matter how important my worldly desires and passions may seem to me, there is something above them. I don't know what that higher, marital love feels like. I only know that it exists—and it's worth all the effort to be the kind of person who can give and receive it.

The Apostle John writes:

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not.

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.

And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.

http://www.godspy.com/life/Purity-The-Way-...he-Celibate.cfm

PURITY: THE WAY OF THE CELIBATE

What could heal the hidden sexual turmoil that caused me to hurt and condemn others? How might I stop viewing sexuality as a power game? How might I become simple and loving toward every single human being, regardless of gender or erotic sub-currents?

By Paula Huston
[Editor's note: We've decided to publish this entire 6,000 word chapter from Paula Huston's The Holy Way. It is the most convincing, real-life explanation of the liberating power of sexual chastity—and celibacy—we've ever read. It's unique because it makes the case for chastity on a natural, rather than a supernatural level. Almost no one understands these spiritual practices—including many religious people. Yet they are the keys to solving what is becoming the next great public health and human rights crisis: sexual addiction and enslavement.]

But whatever is done either through
fear of punishment or from some
other carnal motive, and has not for
its principle that love which the Spirit
of God sheds abroad in the heart, is
not done as it ought to be, however it
may appear to men.
- St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430)

Until I was forty-five, I never thought much about what I wore (I was from California, after all). Then, I was suddenly presented with the opportunity to take a round-the-world trip, and clothing became a significant issue—maybe even the significant issue. I was a lone Western woman making my way through conservative countries in the Middle East and Asia; I was going to attract enough attention as it was without adding to the problem by accidentally violating local dress standards. I knew that India insisted on women covering their shoulders and legs. Other societies would be offended if I wore pants. At times (when entering an Orthodox church, for example), I'd need a scarf to drape over my head.

I went shopping for what frankly seemed to be the dowdiest clothes on which I'd ever spent good money: ankle-length skirts, voluminous tunic-like blouses meant to conceal my money pouch, and chunky walking shoes. Everything, of course, in plain, dull colors—the duller the better. I also seriously considered dyeing my blonde hair dark so as to blend in more easily, but finally decided instead on a toad-brown hat. It not only concealed my hair, but most of my head.

On the day of my departure, a male friend remarked that I'd never looked less attractive—which was precisely the reaction I'd hoped for. I could not afford to be "attractive," even in the most casual and innocent way, for along with the possibility that I might unintentionally give offense loomed a larger and more sobering one: I could become a target.

Benedicta Ward, in her book Harlots in the Desert, talks about the female counterparts of St. Anthony and Pachomius—women who fled the cities for the solitude of cave and sand and sky. Very often, no one knew that they were women until after their deaths because, for safety's sake, they disguised themselves as men. I, too, felt as though I were in disguise, not my usual self, as I embarked upon my solo journey. This was a surprisingly disconcerting feeling, knowing that I didn't look like me. It raised an interesting question: Just how much of my self-identity was based on appearance?

In American culture, the answer for most of us would have to be "a lot." A competitive consumerist society such as ours requires that we constantly "sell" ourselves to get ahead, and thus the good-looking take the prizes. Though I'd never in my life consciously set out to be seductive (well, maybe not never), I was just as aware as anyone else of the edge that came with dressing attractively.

I had the strong feeling, as I boarded the plane swathed from head to foot in my dull robes, that such attire went far beyond unattractive—all the way, in fact, to "unnatural." Here I was, about to set out on the most challenging adventure I'd ever undertaken, and I was voluntarily giving up one of my "powers," a power that, however meager it happened to be in my case, had always helped me get the job done.

St. Augustine and Sexual Obsessions

One of the most famous works of Western literature, The Confessions of St. Augustine, deals directly with this interesting connection between sex (for the term "attractive" always implies an element of sex) and power. In fact, Augustine is notorious for dwelling so long and so intently on the issue of sexuality in what is ultimately a spiritual autobiography. In his particular case, the greatest obstacle on the spiritual path happened to be a sexual one. His deep attraction to "beautiful bodies" led to what moderns might term an addiction. This addiction to cupiditas, or erotic passion, began at a relatively young age—sixteen-and took him many years to overcome.

Augustine's proclivities are at least partially explained by his era. Born in A.D. 354 in the North African town of Tagaste near the eastern border of Algeria, he grew up in bloody and decadent times. Though the most violent forms of persecution against Christians had by then subsided, the emperors relied upon the spectacles of the circus in Carthage, where Augustine went to school, and the savage gladiatorial games in Rome, where he eventually lived and worked, to keep the populace of the empire entertained.

His mother, Monica, was a devoted Catholic, but his pagan father, Patricius, was a minor government official. This meant that even in the smaller and more provincial Tagaste, the family had links to the Roman ruling class and thereby to the cultural standards of the day. Augustine's early years were famously wild. In The Confessions, he attributes his delinquency not only to the general moral decay of his time, but also to a misguided love on the part of his parents.

On his father's side, he says, there was too great a respect for book learning for its own sake. On his mother's side, there was an overly intense focus on education in hopes that it might lead him to Christianity someday. His parents made great sacrifices so that he could go to the best schools. Meanwhile, nobody noticed the trouble into which he was drifting, the "brambles of unclean desires" spreading thick over his head; there was "no hand to root them out." He began running the streets with a crowd of bad youngsters, and his status in this group became the most important aspect of his life.

One night, for example, they stole great loads of fruit from a nearby pear tree for the sheer joy of stealing. They did not consume the pears themselves, but instead threw them to the pigs. "Even if we did eat a little of it," he says, "we did this to do what pleased us for the reason that it was forbidden."

Far more enticing than stolen pears was the forbidden fruit of sex. Augustine says that in this same year, the year of "youth's seething spring," he became increasingly driven by desire. "I could not distinguish the calm light of chaste love," he says, "from the fog of lust. Both kinds of affection burned confusedly within me and swept my feeble youth over the crags of desire and plunged me into a whirlpool of shameful deeds."

At school in Carthage, the situation only worsened. Here, he discovered firsthand the price extracted by a devotion to cupiditas. "For I was loved, and I had gained love's bond of joy. But in my joy I was bound about with painful chains of iron, so that I might be scourged by burning rods of jealousy, and suspicion, and fear, and anger, and quarreling."

In time, he took on a mistress, a woman he lived with for many years, who bore him a son, Adeodatus. Apparently, Augustine never even considered marrying this woman—primarily, it seems, because of his friendship with Alypius, a young man who convinced him that unmarried, he was free to live the life of a philosopher, a life of "unbroken leisure in love of wisdom." Still, Augustine writes, "I thought I would be too wretched if I were kept from a woman's arms."

This admission led to great anguish. He very much admired Alypius's life of "strictest chastity," but was sure that he himself was incapable of giving up sex. "I believed," he says, "that continence lay within a man's own powers, and such powers I was not conscious of within myself. I was so foolish that I did not know that . . . no man can be continent unless [God] grant it to him."

Struggling to find some relief from the conflict, he gave up his mistress and betrothed himself to a girl too young to marry—and while waiting the requisite two years for her to be of age, took on yet another lover. However, "not yet healed within me," he says, "was that wound which had been made by the cutting away of my former companion. After intense fever and pain, it festered, and it still caused me pain, although in a more chilling and desperate way."

Our Confusion over Romantic Passion

I must confess that this passage made me cringe. Somehow, in a single sentence, Augustine manages to catch all the confused anguish of a broken love affair—a love affair that has nothing to do with another human being, but instead with a certain celebrated notion of love. I knew exactly what Augustine meant, for I'd been in that place myself for many, many years.

Since nothing in our culture is placed on a higher pedestal than this notion of love, my situation was not uncommon. Passionate, romantic love is our be all and end all, our highest good. At age fifteen I went out with a boy for the very first time and decided, in the space of less than an hour, that I would someday marry him. When I finally did so, he was twenty-one and I was nineteen. The marriage was doomed from the start—not because he was a bad person or because we were deeply incompatible, but simply because I had not married him at all.

When I left that marriage thirteen years later for another man—somebody, I thought, who would complete me in a way my increasingly baffled first husband could not—it was because of this allegiance to romantic ideals. Nobody could have lived up to my romantic expectations, however. One human being cannot possibly provide all inspiration, all meaning, all sustenance for another. Yet because of what we are taught to believe about love, we think we can demand this, especially, sad to say, if we are women.

As a result, I felt justified, even self-righteous, about being brave enough to leave what I termed an "unsatisfying marriage." That phrase had the ring of somber inevitability—what else could I do, after all? I was not "fulfilled"; I had to be with someone who could fulfill me. Off I went, banners flying, to learn exactly the same lesson all over again.

In my own way, I was just as enslaved to cupiditas as Augustine had been. My notion of love may have been more romanticized than his frankly sexual one, but my self-built prison was made of the same stuff. It was also windowless—this is what I remember most about those years of being obsessed by eros—romantic passion leads to strange, cruel, lonely blindness.

Precisely because romantic passion is a form of idolatry, the worship of a false god, it can sometimes lead us, via profound disappointment, to the real thing. This is what happened to both Augustine and me. This is also what ultimately led to my return to religion after a twenty-year hiatus—and to some of Augustine's most profound theological insights.

First, however, someone had to help us break the chains.

In the case of Augustine, this turned out to be a fellow North African who came to visit, a devout Christian who noticed that his friend was reading a book by St. Paul. During the ensuing discussion, the visitor told the unhappy young Augustine about St. Athanasius's Vita St. Antonii, published only twenty years before. Augustine was not only riveted by Anthony's life story, he felt convicted by it. He describes his reaction thus: "As he spoke, you, O Lord, turned me back upon myself. You took me from behind my own back, where I had placed myself because I did not want to look at myself."

Augustine's famous spiritual crisis had begun. He realized that for years he had prayed, "Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!" Much as he longed for healing, wholeness, and peace, he was unwilling to give up sexual pleasure to get them. Now, torn nearly in two, he found himself weeping uncontrollably in the garden while his friend Alypius sat by in silent support. Suddenly, Augustine heard what sounded like the voice of a child chanting the words, "Take up and read. Take up and read."

Remembering Anthony's pivotal moment—the words of Christ to the rich young man—Augustine ran for the book by St. Paul. He opened it to this passage: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in strife and envying; but put you on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences." "Instantly," Augustine says, ". . . all the dark shadows of doubt fled away."

My version of Augustine's North African friend was a patient philosophy professor who, over time, managed to convince me that every aspect of my life was being affected or directed by romantic fantasies—that, in fact, I was not thinking about life at all, but instead creating a world in which I'd always feel charmed and pleased. It was he who one day handed me an essay by philosopher Iris Murdoch entitled "The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts."

In this essay, Murdoch spends some time talking about art and artists, and about two different ways that art presents reality to us. The first kind of art is "consoling fantasy," which simply reassures the needy ego. No doubt many of my notions about romantic passion came from this kind of art-for our culture has produced hundreds of books and movies on the subject, some of them quite famous and respected. From Gone with the Wind to Titanic, we can't resist a dramatic love story.

The second kind of art, however, presents life as clearly and truthfully as possible. These books and poems and movies may also present stories of great erotic love, but in an honest, realistic way that also follows through to the consequences. This art does not set out to supply us with the fantasies to which we so easily become addicted.

These are the stories, says Murdoch, that can open our eyes to the dangers and the glories of love, "the general name of the quality of attachment." Our human tendency to attach ourselves to things and people and ideas is "capable of infinite degradation" (for we are always ready to distort for our own egoistic purposes what is essentially good). In spite of all the temptations that surround it, however, "its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun."

One of the most important turning points in my own life came when I realized this very thing: My obsessive romantic passion was actually spiritual passion in disguise.

Augustine was struck hard by the same insight, but he went on to share it with the world. In fact, he became a major—perhaps the major—influence on the development of Western Christianity for the next sixteen hundred years. At least partly out of his own long struggle with sexual enslavement and the abuse of sexual power was born a simple conviction about God and his relationship to humans, one that serves as the groundwork for Augustine's own theology: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it rests in you."

What Augustine calls cupiditas, can never bring peace, for ephemeral pleasures can never satisfy when what we are really seeking is God. Peace comes instead with agape, the disinterested love displayed by Christ, the kind of love that does not lead to possessiveness, dependency, jealousy, wrath, or any of the other self-centered emotions that he himself had suffered through. This agape love is what Murdoch seems to be talking about. Augustine's celebration of chastity and continence can only be understood in this light: These two acts of self-control help simplify and purify the heart, making it possible to love other people in a genuine, non-manipulative way.

For Augustine, a chaste life is a life that acknowledges and honors the original goodness of all flesh: "Both soul and body, man was made good by a good God." The physical passions are a divine gift. It is only the perverse will (we would probably call this "egoism") that leads to abuse of this gift. "Do not accuse the nature of flesh when you hear: 'If you live according to the flesh, you shall die,' for it could have been said thus, and most truly so: 'If you live according to yourselves, you shall die.'"

In addition, chastity is very difficult to maintain, and the struggle to do so is humbling. Augustine admits to being plagued for years with "images as [his] former habits implanted" in him, and "so great a power [had] these deep images over my soul and my flesh that these false visions persuad[ed] me when asleep to do what true sights [could not] persuade me to do when awake." He was a powerful and intelligent man, but helpless in regard to his sexual appetite. He finally concluded that "continence is a gift of God," that he had to give up the illusion of his own strength before he could be healed of his weakness.

In spite of some of the disturbing problems in our society today directly linked to sex and its abuse, Augustine's hard-won commitment to chastity can seem antiquated, even misguided. We believe we have "moved on" from the days when people denied themselves sex for the sake of their religion. We secretly pity those celibates left among us (priests, monks, nuns). How can they experience life, we think, if they never make love?

Laurence Freeman attributes at least some of our cultural attitudes toward sex to the "cult of desire" that emerged during the late medieval period by way of the troubadours and their romantic ballads. "A culture that so exclusively identified love with the passion of erotic desire finds it particularly difficult to hear about the goal of elimination of desire or its transformation into a desire for God."

Another tradition that contributes to our attitude comes out of nineteenth-century Romanticism with its near-worship of nature and its elevation of the natural over the artificial. This combined with the flowering of the new science of psychology in that same century has made us hyper aware of the "power of biology." Sexuality is natural, we are taught, and we only hurt ourselves when we deny what is natural in us. Repressing healthy desire can cause psychological problems, even emotional crippling. If I did not hear this from the cradle (I was born in 1952, after all), I certainly grew up with it and was especially affected by this attitude during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when "free love" became one of the most important symbols of the utopia that awaited those brave enough to claim it.

Nowadays, when Augustine is mentioned at all, he is usually portrayed as a dour, self-hating moralist, responsible for whatever has gone wrong with the Western church throughout the centuries. One popular spiritual writer blames him for the notorious mind/body split bequeathed to us by Western philosophy, and another refers dismissively to his "prejudice against the body." Women (including me, when I first began to read him) seem particularly offended by his dramatic repudiation of sex.

The Unacknowledged Desire for Approval

Given my commitment to simplicity, I realized that I could not afford to overlook the complex layers of sexuality in my life. Though I was no longer enslaved by obsessive romantic fantasy, I was still inundated on a daily basis with the subtle and not-so-subtle erotic images that were meant to create in me the yearning for beauty, wealth, status, and sophistication. The disheveled ingenues staring moodily from the magazine racks at the grocery store, the movie star couples-of-the-week, the smart, sexy models on the cover of Cosmopolitan—all bore the same message: You are somehow inadequate unless you wear makeup like ours, dress like we do, live in the kinds of houses in which we live, take the vacations we take, spend the money we spend, and attract the people we attract.

I realized that if I took the message of the advertisers seriously, my own course was set. The beautiful, unconscious simplicity of Amish farmers on their way to church, the white-robed Camaldolese monks filing in for mass, or the black V of ducks flying over the jack pine in early morning would never, ever be mine. I began to think hard about how a person like me, a married woman living a non-monastic life in a sex-centered culture, might embrace the spirit of loving chastity.

The Gospels did not provide a lot of help, at least not in the sense of directives or injunctions. Christ is anything but a finger-wagging moralist when it comes to sex—in fact, he offends the local moral experts when he shows compassion toward the woman caught in adultery, Mary Magdalene with her seven famous devils, and the Samaritan woman who lived with five different men. Instead of focusing on the act, he focuses on what's in the heart: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matt. 5:27-28).

Scrupulosity in outward behavior means nothing if it does not spring from a genuinely pure heart/mind. As Augustine discovered to his great chagrin, even when he gave up his mistresses, he went right on fantasizing about and longing for the sexual passion that had once enslaved him.

Though my outward behavior had changed a lot from the days when I centered my life around that clandestine romance, I realized that I was not so very different from Augustine when it came to these old patterns of thought and emotional response. Much of my self-identity was still tied to my ability to attract and hold male attention (hence the weird sense of losing my identity as soon as I clapped that toad-brown hat on my head), though I'd consistently denied this. I told myself instead that I liked men for themselves, not for the ego boost their friendships gave me. I insisted that men were more straightforward, more honest, and less self-absorbed than women.

One side effect of this unacknowledged desire for male approval was that I'd become scornful toward most women. They were silly, frivolous things, I told myself—always worrying about how they looked. I'd been extra cold to young women for this reason. Their insecurities were so obvious, the overcompensation (push-up bras, heavy makeup, tight pants) so blatant. I'm different, I thought. Men like me for myself because I don't play those games.

I was also contemptuous of another kind of person: the occasional poor soul who fell for my unspoken but powerful need for sexual approval—people who became smitten with me. This didn't happen much, but when it did, I heaped coals upon the head of the offender. It was terribly important for me, a woman who'd been to hell and back on the tail of an illusion called romantic passion, to crush out with prompt cruelty any sign of starstruck fantasy in someone else.

For example, once at a large writers' conference, a kindly professor in his fifties tearfully confided to me on an evening walk back to the dorms that he'd had an affair with a student-an affair that was apparently going to cost him not only his job, but his wife and children besides. I listened to his sad story—the sort of tale that is endemic in a culture that worships romance—and when asked, I offered my bit of advice.

My apparent sympathy, however, was too much for a man so addicted to female consolation. He became a hopeless pest, tagging along behind me everywhere I went for the entire two weeks of the conference. I found myself increasingly plagued by insomnia. When, in frustration, I pulled back the curtains late one night so I could look at the moon instead of the drab dorm-room wall, whom should I spy but my pest, keeping faithful vigil beneath my second-floor window.

His growing obsession was not only obvious to me, but to others. I noticed people giving me sympathetic looks—in fact, rolling their eyes—when they saw him trudging mournfully along in my wake. I could not have been more disgusted. What was with this guy, anyway? Couldn't he get a life?

As I tried my best to examine my own attitudes toward sexual passion and romance, I thought of this poor beleaguered soul—how quickly he'd become re-enslaved to the same kind of fantasy that had already blown up his life. Had I dealt with him compassionately? Not quite. I put up with him for the duration of the conference, then sent him a scathing and condemnatory letter the moment he tried to contact me after my return home.

Why? I had done so because he'd had the audacity to reveal to me and to others something I did not want to know about myself—that my preference for male friendship was in some part a power trip. Male attention did something important for my needy ego. At some level, sex still drove me. By falling so hard and so publicly, this man had called attention to this unsavory aspect of my character. He'd become a living, breathing bit of evidence for something I mightily resisted having to acknowledge. No wonder I'd sent him straight to the outer darkness, "where men may weep and gnash their teeth."

In addition, he was a painful reminder of my own humiliating years of romantic enslavement. He was like a mirror, reflecting back a self I never wanted to see again. This was a shocking realization-that he was I. How had I responded to him in his weakness? I gave him the bitter fruit of self-hatred.

Who else had I hurt without knowing it?

The answer became obvious to me: the rare man who could attract my attention. Rare, because I was so nervous about slipping back into fantasy that I might as well have been wearing spiked armor. It was one thing to know that others found me attractive—that left me entirely in charge of the situation. It was quite another to feel that old tug myself. Woe to the poor unsuspecting soul who triggered it.

I remembered a dimly lit restaurant and a table full of writers, especially a tall, handsome, and quite famous one with whom I'd had to briefly share a chair. As we chatted quietly, sipping wine and exchanging personal history, it became clear to me that, contrary to all my internal swaggering, I was still very much a human being, as subject as anyone else to inconvenient desire.

My response? In its own way, it was just as unloving as the one I'd made to that poor pest at the conference. I deliberately wrecked the budding friendship by pouring salt in an open wound that had been trustfully revealed to me. Perhaps I did well to flee. Perhaps he was the kind of person who abused his power over others; but how on earth would I know that? He was not part of the equation. I never allowed him to show his character. I was far too absorbed in my own anxieties to focus on the person beside me.

What could heal this hidden sexual turmoil that caused me to hurt and condemn others? How might I stop viewing sexuality as a power game? How might I become simple and loving toward every single human being, regardless of gender or erotic sub-currents?

Augustine discovered through years of frustrating failure that we cannot run the show when it comes to our sexual natures. Doing battle with ourselves, putting our trust in personal strength or willpower, is ultimately a lost cause. Worse, we can fall into unconscious self-hatred, as I did, when we attempt to rule or dominate some God-given aspect of our natures. "Peace, then," Augustine says, "will be perfect in us when, our nature clinging inseparably to its Creator, nothing of ourselves fights against us."

I thought about my friends at the hermitage, all of who have taken a lifelong vow of celibacy, and I wondered how they had calmed and redirected the tremendous force of eros, for (with varying degrees of success) they have. This is one of the most striking differences between life on the mountain and life "in the world."

Fr. Bernard of the mismatched sandals has watched retreatants come and go for nearly forty years. One night while we were walking the road together, he told me what he had noticed about the women visitors. "I think they feel safe here," he said, "especially the ones who have been hurt by men. They realize they can trust the monks, and you can just see them relaxing and starting to smile."

I realized that this was one of the reasons I kept going back-because it was safe, and not just in the usual sense (freedom from attack; freedom from all the other real and imagined threats I had worried about on that long, solo trip around the world). It was safe to love, warmly and wholeheartedly, with no holding back. This was one thing that united the far-flung group of regular visitors to the Hermitage: our deep and abiding affection for the monks.

After nearly a decade of retreats, there were people whose names I still wasn't sure of—was the tall guy with the round face and black glasses Br. Mark or Br. Anthony? how about the little one with the longish hair?—but even those I loved. I loved them in the sense that I expected them to be in their places in the choir and missed them when they weren't. I loved them because, whether I passed them on the road at dusk or stood beside them in the dish line after Sunday dinner, I could feel love coming back at me—a sort of beaming benevolence that lay self-consciousness to rest.

Here there were no speculative looks, no sidelong, implicative glances—none of the automatic assessments that we are so tediously, boringly subjected to, men and women alike, as we move through the world. There were no judgments that, silent or not, still keep us, in the words of T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "pinned and wriggling on the wall." Like poor Prufrock, we are so wearied with the effort of attracting and keeping love that we're tempted simply to go cold. Loneliness is easier to bear than rejection or betrayal. "Shall I wear my trousers rolled?" asks Prufrock, knowing full well that nobody cares what he does, for he is no longer a contender in the game of love. "Do I dare to eat a peach?"

It's a cruel, cruel question, for it suggests that there are limits on who may take delight in the world. It suggests that only the young and beautiful are permitted to love, to offer themselves to other people.

The Liberating New Rules of Agape Love

These, however, are the rules of cupiditas, not agape. Augustine, when he finally saw the difference, lamented, "Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you! Behold, you were there within me while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and, a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you. They kept me far from you, those fair things which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all."

This grief is genuine; chasing the ephemeral butterfly of erotic beauty, Augustine had missed the real thing. It should not therefore surprise us that he became an influential proponent of the vow of celibacy for clergy, which was finally adopted at the fifth Council of Carthage in 401. Augustine thought that celibacy would free men to love God and others without the distraction of eros. Such a difficult rule is only rightly obeyed, he said, "when the motive principle of action is the love of God, and the love of our neighbor in God."

This was the freedom I felt at the hermitage-the freedom to love my neighbor without fear of sexual entanglement. This was the gift of celibacy, the difficult sacrifice made for the sake of agape. I was deeply grateful to be a recipient of that generous gift.

At home in the world, however, I still had to deal with the fact that cupiditas ran the show, and that it still lived in me. I realized that I must find a way to transform its unruly energy into something more useful—and that this was no longer an option, but an obligation.

As Laurence Freeman says, "Desire can lead us to create. But disordered desire starts the chain of events that leads to evil when in its pain and ignorance it imagines the unreal and attaches itself to these images." Precisely. Other people had also suffered because of the consoling fantasies to which I'd so stubbornly clung. "In this understanding of evil," adds Freeman, "illusion cannot be lightly explained or dismissed. Responsibility for it sits squarely with human beings."

Bede Healey, a New Camaldoli monk and psychoanalyst, has also written about desire. That which Augustine calls concupiscence, lust, or cupiditas, and I have termed sexual enslavement, Healey, like Freeman, refers to as "deformed or distorted desire." Desire is built in, he says; as humans, we are naturally desiring creatures. It is when fear attaches itself to desire that it becomes dangerous.

What is the nature of this fear? "It is a pervasive, overt and yet subtle questioning of our own worth, goodness, abilities, motivation, and desirability. Over time it undermines our basic sense of selfhood and self-worth." It makes us entirely vulnerable to both real and imagined negative judgment. The smallest things can stir it up—for example, having to wear that toad-brown hat and those dull, dull travel clothes.

Under fearful conditions, we crave what we think will calm our self-doubts. Our natural desire to be loved, for example, becomes an obsessive craving that can only be assuaged by fantasy—a fantasy that allows us to become more beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished than we really are. This, in turn, allows us to attract astonishing people like ourselves into love affairs—affairs that, even if we never acted them out physically, are legendary for their passion and depth. Absorbed in fantasy, we cannot see who is really in front of us; and certainly we cannot love.

The unwelcome truth was beginning to dawn that a serious effort in the realm of chastity would be just as disorienting as my efforts to obtain solitude, silence, and awareness had been. My attitudes toward sexuality were indeed a tangled mess, and the process of finding and unraveling all those knots was no doubt going to occupy me for the rest of my life. It was also becoming clear that genuine simplicity was impossible without such an effort.

The problem has not gone away, but recently I came across a heartening story, one that gave me hope. It was the story of Pelagia, a well-known actress in Antioch who lived during the days of the desert hermits, perhaps even as a contemporary of Anthony and Pachomius. Young, beautiful, and heedless, she rode one day with a group of laughing companions past a meeting of bishops and monks. Most of the men turned away or hid their eyes so as to avoid being seduced by the lovely sight. One of them, however, a monk-bishop called Nonnus, "did long and most intently regard her and after she had passed by, still he gazed and his eyes went after her. Turning to his fellows, he asked, 'Did not her great beauty delight you? Indeed, it delighted me.'"

In time, Pelagia, who had noticed his frank joy in her natural loveliness, came secretly to see him and was so overwhelmed by the gentle agape he extended to her that she was converted. Voluntarily setting aside her considerable sexual power, she disguised herself as a man and went to the desert to live out the rest of her days as a hermit.

What I found inspiring in the story was not so much Pelagia's part in it, the giving up part, remarkable as that was, but instead the beautiful way that Nonnus loved her. For him, she was yet another proof of God's astonishing goodness, just as, one would guess, the desert flowers of spring or the starry night sky might be. Her beauty was not in his case an occasion for sin, as it was for the others, but instead a hymn to the glory of God. This could mean only one thing: Nonnus had achieved genuine chastity—that is, a pure heart no longer troubled by disordered desire.

With such purity, he was able to reach out to others with the love that St. Paul so famously celebrates:

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous,
[love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not
rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not
quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices
with the truth. It bears all things, believes all
things, hopes all things, endures all things.
(1 Cor. 13:4-7)

Augustine, commenting on this passage, adds, "Now the end of the commandment is charity, out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned." St. Paul, who is accused nearly as often as his disciple of a cold and unloving severity, answers with joy, "So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor.:13:13).
November 19, 2003

PAULA HUSTON, a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, has published fiction and essays for more than twenty years.

"Purity: The Way of the Celibate" is excerpted from The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life by Paula Huston (Loyola Press 2003). Reprinted with permission of Loyola Press. To order copies of this book call 800-621-1008 or visit www.loyolabooks.org.