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Sexuality and Holy Longing
Sexuality and Holy Longing: Embracing Intimacy in a Broken World by Lisa Graham McMinn Jossey-Bass, 2004 224 pp., $23.95 |
Exasperated during a class discussion about sexuality, a female undergraduate said, "I just want to explore my sexuality without being called a whore!" Don't we all, my dear, don't we all, I thought. Separated by a generation, my student and I were both raised in evangelical environments that shaped our thinking about sexuality with harsh binary oppositions. People are pure or impure, Christian or worldly, and for women especially, madonna (with a lower case m) or whore. In Sexuality and Holy Longing, Lisa Graham McMinn quotes an undergraduate who wrote, "sexuality is more about repression than expression, especially in the Christian subculture." Indeed, despite widespread calls for grace, evangelicals often use rule-based approaches that establish a purity treehouse club to which one comfortably belongs, doesn't belong, or is scrambling back up the ladder toward.
But critiques of such evangelical legalism are readily available, and McMinn wastes no time ranting. She creates a framework for sexuality that is both fresh and orthodox, and uses it to discuss adolescence, singleness, marriage, parenting, and the nature of sex and gender. Grounded in her sociology expertise, she describes sexuality as both "embedded in culture and embodied in physical, biological bodies." A person experiences sexuality in the body, as male or female, and makes sense of that experience through culture (or "cultural scripts," in McMinn's words), but the human yearning for beauty, intimacy, and satisfaction transcends all such differences. We are made for relationships, but we can never fully satisfy our longings in this life. Grace is the bridge between our longings and their incomplete satisfaction. In this way, sexuality illuminates our longing for heaven, where we will experience wholeness at last.
Theologically, McMinn mixes Reformed understandings of creation, fall, and redemption with a Pietist emphasis on lived experience and longing for heaven. She also writes from her tradition, using the Quaker concept of querying with chapter-end questions that invite introspection and dialogue rather than simple answers. Throughout, she develops a "theology of grace" that promotes the embracing and expressing of sexuality in a broken world.
Because the book is discussion-oriented and because I was hungry, I tested it on two groups of friends. (I invited both men and women but ended up with all women.) Two holy longings—for dinner and dessert—were met by enchiladas verde and brownies, and others were explored in discussion.
The first gathering included four women, aged 21-27, who read the chapter titled "Adolescence: Awakenings and Choices." They appreciated McMinn's framework of offering information and inspiration rather than rules and strategies for repression. One woman said that instead of appreciating the God-created mystery of sex, Christians in her circles declared the mysteriousness of all things sexual, inadvertently enhancing the curiosity prompted by taboo. Another said that the "inspiration and information" frame would support her mentoring relationship with an adolescent girl.
McMinn says that adolescence is "primarily a time of awakenings and choices, of opportunities and the refining of one's identity." She encourages parents and elders to help adolescents make wise choices and understand their rapidly changing lives. The chapter does, however, assume that teens are raised by parents who are appropriately protective and attentive, and many of the discussion questions assume the reader has parented adolescents. It gives scant attention to the dark side of adolescent sexuality, in which children—of both attentive and inattentive parents—are exposed to sexuality through adult media, sexual abuse, non-consensual fondling, or supposedly consensual relationships between underage girls and adult men.
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