Sexuality and spirituality: an attempt at understanding
By Andrew Symes:
Jesus, my passion in life is to know you…
Hear my heart’s cry, and my prayer for this life:
Above all else…give me yourself.
I have sung this song in church, and led others in worshipping the Lord using these words. A simple, beautiful song, expressing a desire to know Christ more fully, to deepen the relationship with him that is the privilege of all God’s children. It was written and sung first by Vicky Beeching.
One of the original foundations of “worship music” is a teenager, recently converted and in love with Christ, searching the Scriptures and excited about the new relationship with the Saviour, sitting in his or her bedroom with a guitar and pouring out heartfelt emotion to God. The result is songs which are more likely to say “I love you Lord” than “the Lord has done this for us”. The popularity then comes from the fact that in this postmodern generation that simple authenticity touches the heart, and expresses what many Christians feel. One could be critical and say that this is heart over head, but in the Psalms and the Christian tradition of worship there is surely both. So while many of the big names like Redman and Beeching are wealthy from their music, they are not the product of marketing men, vain and with limited talent and no message. Rather they have been called by God to help us get to “the heart of worship” which is “all about you, Jesus” (from a song by Matt Redman).
So the “coming out” of Vicky Beeching is significant because here is someone who made her name not as a theologian or church leader, but as a young person expressing authentic love for Jesus. In a previous article I looked at this as part of an orchestrated campaign to radically change Church of England teaching and practice. Here I want to try to explore why I believe Beeching’s public declaration is not a complete abandonment of her ministry and calling, but can perhaps be understood as a corruption and misapplication of it, and why this challenges orthodox Christians to urgently develop and proclaim the good news about desire, sex, marriage, relationship and God’s plan for their fulfilment.
Human desire: reaching for God
American Catholic author Christopher West combines insights from Pope John Paul 2’s “Theology of the Body” with reflections on Scripture and on the “soundtrack of his youth”, mainly rock music of the 70’s and 80’s. Beginning with Springsteen’s “Born to run” and “Everybody has a hungry heart”, he shows how as human beings we are created with desire for freedom, truth, beauty and ultimate fulfilment in union with another: “desire is part of our design, and if we follow it through…it will lead us to our destiny” (Fill These Hearts, Random House 2012, p6). West goes on to develop the idea that gender, what Scripture teaches as the binary opposites of male and female with the inherent “call to completion” through union, is part of this. There is a strong connection in all the world’s poetry and song between sexual desire, the yearning for completion through a loving relationship, and the quest for something more – infinity or heaven. And the Bible teaches this consistently according to West – it begins with man-woman “one flesh” exclusive marriage and perfect relationship between human beings and God in Genesis 2. At the Bible’s heart are the Psalms and the Song of Songs. And at the end there is the marriage feast of the Lamb, as the New Jerusalem is in perfect union with Christ.
So “sex is not just about sex” but “is meant to point the way to the ultimate fulfilment of every desire…when we aim our desire for infinity at something less [like a human relationship] we’re inevitably left wanting, disillusioned and disappointed” (ibid, p11). Ultimately, then, the raging desire which God puts in all of us can be partially fulfilled temporarily by a monogamous, faithful, heterosexual marriage, but only completely fulfilled in relationship with Christ, and then only fully in heaven. West goes on to talk about the two most common ways in which as human beings we deal with this raging desire or appetite for “the other”. We either try to suppress it – “the starvation diet”, or we indulge it with immediate false satisfiers – “the fast food diet”.
Wrong ways of dealing with desire
The philosophical underpinning of the “fast food diet” has taken hold in the West to give respectability to the second sexual revolution and infiltrate into the church. It says, we are creatures of desire to the extent that we are defined by our desires. Repression of desire is bad (according to Rousseau, Freud et al), so happiness and fulfilment comes through obtaining what we want, specifically through close relationships which include sex. But survey after survey shows that wellbeing and mental health among middle class Westerners liberated from sexual taboos is not improving and in some ways may be worse than those in poorer and more “sexually repressed” societies. As CS Lewis pointed out in “the Weight of Glory”, it may be that the problem is not too much desire, but too little; claiming to be satisfied with a series of imperfect and transient human relationships when actually God has designed us for something beyond even what the best man-woman marriage can offer.
The “starvation diet” on the other hand, holds that desire and yearning itself is the problem. Its not just sexual lust, pornography, thoughts of adultery and all kinds of immorality according to the Law that defile us spiritually, according to this teaching (which Jesus affirms), but that inchoate yearning for intimacy, connection and ecstasy is in itself too hot to handle so we try to put a lid on it. The result is, as West put it, desire “is condemned by the ‘righteous’, and its distortions are celebrated by ‘the sinners’”. So at its worst, some examples of conservative Christian life become an law-driven attempt to escape from and suppress desire rather than use it for doing good, building strong marriages and going deeper into the worship of God. But much liberal Christianity, in reinterpreting the “fast food” philosophy of satisfying desire as somehow inherently holy and spiritual, loses touch with the true and holy God who is calling us to him through our desires, and instead calls those desires and the fulfilment of them “God”.
In short: we are created for ultimate communion with God and temporary intimacy with another human being. But what if our desire is for a relationship with someone of the same sex? The Bible is very clear: such relationships cannot be seen as holy. So what do we do? One option is ‘starvation’; to try to repress the human side of desire, but this may lead to intolerable stress. Another option is ‘fast food’; to reject or radically reinterpret what the Bible and all the respected teachers down the ages have said about gender, sex and marriage, to pursue and find fulfilment in a same sex relationship while at the same time continuing to worship Jesus. But then the question has to be: which Jesus? The current project to fit celebration of same sex relationships into Christian faith involves rejecting the clear teaching of Scripture and re-envisioning Christianity to the extent that it ends up being a different religion. A neo-pagan parody of Christian faith, or Biblical faithfulness with Stoicism: is there a third way?
Unfulfilled desire: its purpose
The question about what to do with our desire needs to go wider than just those who have homosexual orientation and want to live within the revealed will of God. Any single person who has a desperate desire to “meet someone”, marry and have a family; any married person in a relationship where the love has gone cold and others are potentially on the horizon is in need of experiencing the wedding feast that the Gospel promises. Any amateur bedroom guitarist who is fed up with the boring job as an accounts clerk and longs to be singing on stage in front of thousands, any disabled person dreaming of a new body when watching top quality athletics. All of us have unfulfilled desires. Some of them are just sinful; others may be given for a supernatural purpose. Scripture teaches us that God gives us powerful, eternity-seeking desires in bodies and psyches with frustrating limits for a reason. We know that God says to all of us “I want you, all of you, including your body” (eg Romans 12:1), but our response is usually poor – if we acknowledge him at all we give him part, and make an idol out of the rest that we retain. Or we are embarrassed about the intensity of these desires and try to dampen them down and focus on an intellectual faith.
The meaning of marriage
The church has not been very good at teaching positively that man-woman marriage is a wonderful invention of God, it points to the church’s relationship with Christ in the same way that other earthly good things like wine (John 2), water (John 4) and bread (John 6) point to the relationship of the individual and the church with the Saviour. Marriage is a fusion of opposite genders with a procreative potential and a satisfaction of physical and one level of emotional desire. But it is a hard calling; it involves self sacrifice and selfless caring for a partner and often a family unit before community and world. It does not mean the end of lust or desire for other people, and it can replace and diminish desire for God. In other words marriage is an icon of salvation but should not become as it easily does a false idol in place of salvation. Marriage requires chastity, the training and discipline of the soul for creative and holy love.
The meaning of singleness
We then need to say that singleness, certainly the Christian version (I am not talking about being “single” in the contemporary sense of being sexually promiscuous) is not a state in waiting for marriage, or an incomplete state. Singleness is a special call, sometimes for a season, to a particular type of chastity that by-passes the exclusive spouse and family relationship, so as to be more powerfully effective in community and perhaps to experience more intimate union with God – and to tell others about it.
But Christian leaders with exclusive same sex attraction are in a special category. If we are going to be faithful to God’s revelation we cannot say as many in the church and their supporters in the secular world are saying, that those with homosexual desires must be free to fulfil them in a same sex relationship. God’s intention must be either to reorient desire resulting in heterosexual attraction and marriage – and there are many examples of this which have happened, either with or without careful, sensitive counselling. Or his reason for permitting same sex desire is perhaps to prevent a single dominant relationship so that one can devote one’s life to serving others and most importantly, publicly yearn for Christ, to be satisfied in him, and let remaining frustrations point to our need of heaven – to help others in their devotion. Of course it would be wrong to downplay the difficulty of this. We are human, and the traditional answers can seem too hard and unfair and cruel.
But others have been single down the ages and have remained faithful despite yearning for intimate relationship. Notably, women who I know very little about such as St Therese of Lisieux, Theresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich, and other more recent examples like Corrie ten Boom and Helen Roseveare. These single women appear to have captured something of the hunger and the experience of the Bread of Life and in sharing it have embarrassed the ‘righteous’ with their openness in expressing desire, yet have helped the church. We have been conditioned by Freud and others to believe that “sexual frustration” is always negative. But for such women, it was their singleness and in a way their battling through the frustration that led them on to even greater heights of mysticism as they shared with Paul the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings and the desire to leave this world and be with Him. Yet paradoxically, at the same time, their lives were not world-denying in a dualistic, super-spiritual sort of way – rather they were more fully human, enriching the lives of others. I would tentatively suggest that they can be a model for same sex attracted people, especially those who have a special talent and calling to worship God and tell others about him.
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