Sexuality

Intended for Love – Part 1: Humans as Love-Driven Rather Than Sex-Seeking Creatures

Jeb Ralston blog , , ,

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There is an ironic issue of disconnectedness in our progressively sexual culture. Why would it be that as we increase in what is most intimate that we would simultaneously increase in isolation?

I believe one essential reason is because we have confused ourselves to be primarily sex-seeking creatures rather than primarily love-driven creatures and as a result have deprived ourselves of something necessary for relational flourishing. In this post, I hope to articulate what I mean by that, so that in the posts following I may be able to lay out some of the repercussions of operating off this sex-seeking framework.

Okay, so first a bit of clarification, when I say that we are love-driven creatures, I do not mean that we are necessarily kind or benevolent creatures. It is true that often in our misguided attempts to find and receive love, we can actually be quite unloving. Without a doubt, we can still very well be love-driven and yet terribly selfish. For example, there is a stark distinction between appropriately attempting to fill our desires for love with intimate conversations, self-giving sex with our spouses, and sacrificial acts of service to our friends versus inappropriately attempting to fill them with desperate, manipulative words, illicit sex, and suffocating codependent acts. But it remains, we are attempting to fill these desires with something that we hope will make us feel that we are loved and/or are capable of loving. And yes, sex is a part of this. It can be both a beautiful gift when used in the context of marriage and comparatively a destructive force when utilized outside of its proper context.

Let me clarify just a bit further as I do not mean to argue that we are exclusively love-driven creatures. As I was talking to a wise friend of mine about this idea of being a love-driven creature, he mentioned that he believed that we are actually and ultimately worship-driven creatures as Timothy Keller would say. Essentially, Keller argues that we are all worshiping something whether that be money, sex, relationships, or something else, and worship of anything but God is idolatry— making a good thing an ultimate thing. Keller says in his book Counterfeit Gods, “An idol is whatever you look at and say, ‘If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.'” I agree with my friend, but I do not believe that it runs contrary to being a love-driven creature. If anything, it would seem to me that we are love-driven because we are worship-driven that we seek that which will make us feel loved or lovely and thus satisfied by something… We love that which we worship. And yes, we can still be idolatrous in our affections. For the sake of this post, I will be operating under the assumption that to be love-driven is a byproduct of being a worship-driven and desiring creature, so bear with me.

To partially address this issue of isolation, I believe we must begin to deconstruct the idea that we are fundamentally sex-seeking creatures – at least not as Freud would have it. I would agree with Freud that our relationships are operating out of our sexualities, but our views of how sexuality manifests itself are quite different. First, in contrast to Freud, our sexual desires are not simply consuming desires for sensory pleasure. Also, while properly functioning, we do not seek relationships because we simply want sex. And last, we do not have a sexual appetite that if left unsatisfied will cause us psychological maladies.

Consider the modern comedy series “New Girl” whose premise is derived on the suspicion and awkwardness of a house full of guys living with a female roommate. It seems a comical idea considering our culture’s obsession with sexualizing nearly all forms of relationships. How could a woman and three men live together without there being at least some form of promiscuous behavior? The male protagonists in the show seem to divide up relationships into two categories: friends and sexual partners. Friendships (I use this word lightly) being reserved for the same sex and sexual partners reserved for the opposite sex. This show is fueled by a sex-seeking anthropological framework. For example, it is not infrequent that the male roommates encourage other male roommates to “get laid” after they act unusually [feminine] after a prolonged amount of time since their last sexual encounter. Most episodes seem to imply that a life without sex is 1) unfulfilling 2) unhealthy and 3) wrong. The show essentially revolves around a social-sexual order— an order that reflects our culture. It assumes that for a relationship to exist between two people of the opposite sex the relationship must ultimately end in sex while to believe otherwise is nearly comical enough to produce an entire comedy series. This is a flawed and crippling view of human sexuality.

So if we are not as Freud interpreted then what are we in regards to sex?

I believe sexuality is far deeper than just a longing for sex although it certainly does not exclude it. Jonathan Grant’s words from his book Divine Sex resonate with what I believe to be a better step into what it means for us to be sexual creatures: “to reduce sexuality to sex is to miss the deeper essence. The greater part of sexuality is affective or social, including our fundamental need for relational intimacy across a broad range of nurturing friendships.” We are far more driven by love and connection than the act of sex itself. To put it in a different way: we are not relational creatures because we desire sexual union… we desire sexual union because we are relational creatures. That ordering is important. It is true that we are sex-driven creatures insofar as it is true that being a sexual creature does not mean we just want sex from people but actually want people. Again, this does not mean that we do not desire sex. Clearly a majority of us do, but I believe we appropriately desire sex precisely because we desire the type of intimate love that it suggests – both on the giving and receiving end of it. Unfortunately, I must emphasize the word “appropriately” because we do not live as originally intended.

I do not want to sound insensitive or naive as I recognize some of the tragedies of sexual abuse in this sin-tainted world of ours. It would seem that all I have said is sentimental trash in light of the harsh fact that people are often malevolently and sometimes casually used by others for sexual gain. These are a result of mankind’s desires being horribly mangled by sin and not at all how we were intended to be. The last thing I want to do is teeter on a sentimental view of our reality. If sexuality is one of God’s greatest gifts to us, it is also the area where Satan and sin can bring about the most vile of distortions. As Adam once walked in glorious intimacy with God and rightfully desired intimacy with a creature like himself before the Fall, we now walk in the disorientation of those desires seeking that which can not fulfill us if not for the Spirit’s work upon us and in us. Grant, again from his book, articulates this superbly by drawing off of Bernard of Clairvaux, “the divine ‘image’ refers to our being created as desiring creatures (our essential nature), while our divine ‘likeness’ (our virtuous character) is something we lost when these desires became disordered through sin.” The Fall does not eliminate the fact that we have the image of God in us, however, it does mean that we are inherently sinful and our desires must be reordered and redeemed. But as G.K. Chesterton once said, “I should always believe the good in the world was its primary plan.” Our desires for love remain, though our quest for fulfillment of those desires are sometimes rampant and despicable.

We may seek sex improperly to fulfill us, which may lead us down some scary roads, but as St. Augustine once famously wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” As I mentioned previously, it is not that we are asexual creatures, but that we are sexual creatures because we long for our Creator’s love and subsequently the love of those created in His image. Our greatest longing is for a Love that knows us in our nakedness and still desires to be one with us. If sex and marriage both present something of Christ’s union with His Church, the link between our sexuality and spirituality should come as no surprise, and Freud’s view of sex would seem dim if not completely antithetical in comparison.

We are restless creatures in this Fallen world of ours, and we seek that which we believe will allow us to be loved. And if it is truly the love and communion of our Creator that we (sometimes blindingly) seek, it would seem evident that our apparent unrest in a hypersexual world would indicate that we are creatures who have sought sex for fulfillment and have been left alone and restless for the love of something far greater.

Falling Through the Cracks of Same-Sex & Traditional Marriage

Jeb Ralston blog , , , ,

“Loneliness is the greatest plague of our generation. The fight for gay-marriage is simply a response to it. Church, we are doing something wrong in our approach. Until we can be a nest of intimate friendships and a holistic community for the lonely, estranged, and non-married, a traditional sexual ethic will never be attractive.”

I wrote that last week in a bit of frustration over the responses I’d been reading about the recent SCOTUS ruling, and I wanted to follow-up on explicitly what I meant by those words. Hopefully this post will explain a bit of my frustration from both sides’ responses, and maybe this post will offer a little hope of something better.

If you haven’t been able to notice by now, if you know me or read this blog, I talk about loneliness and isolation a lot. Not just because I deal with both, but because I’m beginning to recognize like Henri Nouwen did that “loneliness is one of the most universal sources of human suffering today,” and I’d like to see a way forward for me, for my friends, for my community, for my church, and for my culture.

I was visiting a church service this morning by myself in my hometown looking through the church bulletin which was covered in pictures of beautiful families, and as the pastor ran through his pastoral prayer for the congregation, I felt a tinge of isolation. His prayer hit on all the families in the church, the kids, those adopting, the grandparents, and those married without children – all wonderful things to pray for – but I felt like an oddball by its conclusion. Very rarely do I hear of single or celibate people being prayed for within churches. I hear many sermons on marriage and parenthood, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a sermon in person on singleness or the goodness of celibacy, despite what I see in scripture as a commending of those who are single. Add to this the little phrases littered throughout Christian culture like “family first” and “focus on the family”, and hopefully you can begin to see just some of my frustrations with being a celibate man in the church.

It often feels like there isn’t room within the church for those outside the context of biological families. I’m not saying this is always the case as I (and many others) have been blessed by a beautiful church home which has loved me incredibly well, and I only hope to love them a fraction as much as they’ve loved me, but I feel as though this is a rare treat. There’s definitely a pressure present in the mainstream of Christian culture in America of feeling as though I have two options: get married or be alone.

This is what has me sympathizing (but not agreeing) with the Left over the recent SCOTUS ruling. Although I don’t believe in a sexual ethic of anything but a man and woman engaging sexually in the context of marriage, I do understand the dark corner in which those with a homosexual orientation or who are experiencing same-sex attraction have been cast.

There’s a tension in our culture that if you don’t fit into the mold of a traditional family that you will forever exist in isolation and loneliness. For many who’ve considered themselves “gay” or “same-sex attracted” within the church, there’s this seeming, unwritten dichotomy in most places:

1) go away… and don’t get married despite not being in the church.

2) stay… but magically shift your entire orientation, and get married.

Is it any wonder there has been such a push for gay marriage? There’s an assumption in place that only in marriage can we escape loneliness. So why wouldn’t the LGBT community long for the same thing? We’ve offered what we’ve considered to be the “antidote” to isolation, and we’re now angry that others are seeking the same antidote.

I want you to consider living the rest of your life with no promise of a spouse, no promise of kids, no promise of grandchildren, no promise of people to take care of you when your old, no promise of people to love you if you fall seriously ill, and no promise of ever experiencing lasting intimacy with another. These are just a few of my thoughts that circulate when I imagine a life without marriage in this culture. Does this not sound even just slightly despairing? It makes sense that gay-marriage would be inevitable does it not?

As I scanned my newsfeed last week through the outrage and celebration over the results of the ruling, I again felt overwhelmingly overlooked. As someone who identifies with a traditional sexual ethic yet also experiences exclusive same-sex attraction, both sides left me frustrated. I don’t agree with the impossible dichotomy imposed by some of those in favor of traditional marriage, but, besides not morally agreeing with same-sex marriage, I also don’t agree with the conclusion that by marrying members of the same sex that we have found an answer to the problem of loneliness.

Between the traditional family and (now) the progressive family, I feel like someone caught in no-man’s land, and I know plenty of others who feel the same. Consider the single women who long to be married but can’t, the men and women who’ve chosen to live celibate lives despite their sexual orientations, the socially impaired, the mentally handicapped, the widows, and all the others that Jesus alludes to in Matthew 19:12. Consider this in the church where the traditional family reigns supreme, but consider this with the progressive family as well. Loneliness still exists, and (gay or straight) marriage can’t solve that.

So where do we go for the answer?

That’s the million dollar question isn’t it?

I have a few thoughts, but I’d be foolish to claim to have a definitive answer to such a question.

I think my own church has been a really beautiful reflection of what it may look like to move forward, so much of what I’m about to say has been sparked by the hospitality I’ve already so received and have been allowed to personally give to others.

So hopefully without sounding too idealistic, the church needs to begin to be a nest for those inside & outside the framework of the nuclear family. We need it to be a place that if you were to no longer be married or have kids, for whatever reason, that you’d still have enough meaningful or intimate relationships to sustain you. Single people need a place they can expect lasting, intimate friendships and not be looked down upon or suspiciously questioned for it. Families need a place they can be cared for by other families and single people – others who enter into their dysfunction, help cook meals, help look after kids, and take part of their load and place it upon their own backs. The church should look like an integrated community of single people, married people, families, widows, the elderly, college students, those of racial and sexual minorities, and all those I’m too naive to name.

Or as Wesley Hill quoted J. Louis Martyn in his recent article, “the answer to loneliness is not marriage, but rather the new-creational community that God is calling into being in Christ, the church marked by mutual love, as it is led by the Spirit of Christ.”

We need a way forward that proves that a life without sexual intimacy can still be a life full of intimacy in the context of friendship, community, and a “water thicker than blood” family. And perhaps by cultivating a community which includes those who’ve fallen through the cracks, we can begin to close the cracks themselves.