VIOLA

James P. Stobaugh

She was my twenty-first client. An overall-clad toddler was attached to one hand, and a mini-cart was in the other. This young, slightly overweight black woman seemed ordinary enough as she requested a bag of groceries from our cooperative emergency food pantry (operated by forty churches). I was one of the afternoon volunteers entrusted with this sacred duty.

“Hello,” I offered without looking up from my work pad. “My name is Jim.”

Number twenty-one replied with a quiet, defeated “Viola.”

Unusual name, I thought. I once knew a Viola. Twenty-five years ago, in Arkansas, my family subcontracted most of our game cleaning to a thin, tobacco-chewing woman named Viola. For good luck, Viola had tied around her ankle a Mercury-head dime that I would have loved to add to my coin collection. And she would have given it to me if I’d asked. She was that sort of woman.

Viola’s claim to fame, though, was her gift: She could clean, dress, and fillet black bass faster than any person alive. Her hands moved like wild birds.

Her gift generally unappreciated, Viola lived in poverty. Her house was a plyboard shack, absent of indoor plumbing or electricity. She had never ridden in a car, never been ten miles from where she lived, and had no hope of doing either in her lifetime. She ate cornbread, mustard greens with a little lard, and great northern beans. She had never visited a dentist or a medical doctor, and she never would.

Viola had a shy granddaughter, whom she affectionately called her “grandbaby.” Every summer this child visited her grandmother, and for six days a week, she chopped Old Man Smith’s cotton. With expertise and enthusiasm unmatched anywhere in the South, the girl single-handedly massacred whole acres of crabgrass and Johnson grass that threatened the tender cotton. With her six-foot hoe, she effectively equalized the equation. Old Man Smith knew he owed his cotton-growing success to a wiry little chopper from Marianna, Arkansas, who happened to visit her fish-cleaning grandmother every summer.

On Sundays, while Viola decapitated bass, the child tugged at her braids and suspiciously stared at us.

After one particularly successful fishing trip to Possum Fork, the cotton chopper and I stood alone and enjoyed Viola’s performance. Soon the braided girl disappeared. Before the screenless back door closed, she returned with a pathetic, sickly beagle puppy. “His name’s Cornbread,” she proudly announced. “And my name is Viola, the same as my grandmammy’s.”

Cornbread immediately took to me. Even now, I can remember wondering how he could survive at all; my father’s prize beagles ate better than Cornbread’s mistress. Or so it seemed. How could she feed poor Cornbread? Of course Cornbread ate very little, usually only fish guts. His coat was shiny enough, but he obviously suffered from malnutrition. When I thought about my father’s spoiled puppies and Viola’s Cornbread, for the first time I felt guilty about having so much. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how.

By ginning time in the fall, Viola-the granddaughter-disappeared from my life.

“Viola. That’s V-i-o-l-a,” said the woman seated in front of me. “Do you have any ground meat today?”

I was lost in a remembered cotton field.

“Mommy, when can we go?” said her restless baby. My mind was racing.

“Viola, do you know who I am?” I asked anxiously.

She wisely ignored my question. But I knew this Viola had been there. The young mother sitting across the table was my cotton chopper. Number twenty-one was my old friend.

Suddenly I was embarrassed. She only wanted my crackers and pinto beans, but I desperately needed to give her so much more.

“Viola, this is Mr. Jim! Your grandmother cleaned my fish!”

She did not remember.

“Viola,” I urged, “remember your grandmammy? Cornbread? Cotton chopping? Remember? Remember!”

Viola stared at me with tired eyes consumed with the present and not inclined to contemplate the past, no matter how glorious. Finally, though, she closed her brown eyes, and, when she opened them again, I had my little, braided chopper with me again. Her eyes were suddenly bright and alive.

“Viola,” I laughed, “you were the greatest.”

“I was good, wasn’t I? I really was. So very, very good. None better.” The overall-clad toddler reached up and touched her mother’s face.

Our day was suddenly full of remembered joy, which is what any pastor hopes for, we who presume to shepherd God’s people. We hope for moments when we share something special with our folk, when we really understand how they feel, when we discover forgotten feelings and fears in ourselves and in them.

But the moment soon passed.

“They don’t need choppers down home anymore,” Viola said quietly. “And they sho’ don’t need choppers in Pittsburgh.”

Cornbread, grandmother Viola, and my father were dead. Possum Fork was permanently contaminated by a fifty-five gallon DDT drum thoughtlessly discarded by a farmer along its willowy banks. But gentle Viola, cotton chopper par excellence, sat across from me. Or, at least what remained of the Viola I knew.

Her life once consisted of ten hours of honest labor, a refreshing RC, and Necco Wafers. Now she was one more struggling urban mother who had not had a job or an RC in fifteen years. Once the Desha County Cotton Chopping Queen, she was now an unwed mother who would eat generic peanut butter and spaghetti sauce for the next two weeks.

“Can you slip me a few extra peanut butters?” she asked as she gathered her child in her arms and started to leave.

I was ambushed by a longing for things to be better. That afternoon at the food closet, it occurred to me that I was tired of merely watching these human dramas helplessly. I had known Viola much longer than I’d known anyone in my congregation, but each person has his or her own personal joy or tragedy, good or bad memory, that I am alternately blessed or cursed to enter. I am forced to give a jar of peanut butter or something. I am rarely able to do much to affect the outcome one way or another.

If each life is a play, I rarely see the beginning or the ending. I think I understand the plot, and then I meet an old friend on the streets of Pittsburgh and it seems that someone switched theaters. And I sit, limited, in the audience.

I wanted to be the script writer that afternoon. I wanted to rewrite Viola’s story, to erase her past hurts, to author a happy ending. But I am not the author. I am not God.

My life is written into certain people’s scripts-like Viola’s-but the responsibility for each person’s story rests ultimately with God, not me. My responsibility is actually very simple: I am called to be a pastor.

I can give her only a loaf of bread today. But in our touching-even for a moment-I am called to point out that the final chapter has not yet been written. She has a future in God. And this profession of faith is the only real and lasting hope for Viola, and for my congregation.

-James P. Stobaugh

Fourth Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

- More from James P. Stobaugh

Pastors

The War Within Continues

Name Withheld

An update on a Christian leader’s struggle with lust.

Vladamir Kramer

Five years ago LEADERSHIP published "The War Within" (Fall 1982), a candid description of one Christian leader's fierce, protracted battle with pornography and lust. The article generated more mail than any single article, before or since, in the history of LEADERSHIP. Though responses were diverse, their sheer volume showed how troublesome the problem is for many Christian leaders. Since then, much has happened.

Pornography became the focus of national attention with the Attorney General's Commission and its landmark report last year, which among other things, documented the rapid spread of porn in recent years.

Technology has made sexually-oriented material much more easily available. Sales of hard-core porn videos, for example, more than doubled from 1983 to 1986.

This trend has not spared pastors, according to a LEADERSHIP survey (see How Common Is Pastoral Indiscretion?). Of the pastors responding to the survey, 20 percent said they look at sexually oriented media (in print, video, or movies) at least once a month. And 38 percent said they find themselves fantasizing about sex with someone other than their spouse at least once a month.

All this prompted us to seek out a pastor who knows how intensely difficult the war against lust can be-yet also knows God's grace and strength applied in that situation. Who better than the author of the previous article? Here then, is an update from the anonymous writer of "The War Within," and the lessons he has learned in the intervening five years.

I was sitting in an aisle seat on a cross-country flight when the passenger across the aisle, one row ahead, pulled out a magazine from his briefcase. I recognized something familiar in the furtive way he looked around, nervously adjusted his posture, and opened the magazine. He held the pages open just far enough to see inside, but from my angle I had a clear view of various women spreading their legs for the camera.

It seemed incongruous, even bizarre, for a man dressed in a business suit to be studying some anonymous woman's private parts in the artificial setting of jammed-together airplane seats and plastic folding trays. But after the sense of the bizarre had passed, I felt another twinge, this one a mixture of pain and sadness. Five years ago, I was that man in the business suit, addicted to lust. I wrote about my struggle in the Fall 1982 edition of LEADERSHIP, in an article called "The War Within." After the sadness had passed, I felt an enormous sense of relief, for I realized that my initial sense of bizarreness was a sign of the healing God has accomplished so far.

Not long after the airplane trip, an editor from LEADERSHIP asked if I would do another article, recounting what I had learned about lust in the five intervening years. At first, I didn't like the idea. It seemed an unnecessary probing of old wounds. The article had been for me a means of catharsis, a deliverance. Why dredge up the past? Finally, however, I agreed to consider the request.

I reread the original article for the first time in five years. Its passionate tone startled me. I had forgotten how completely sex had dominated my life. I found myself feeling compassion for the author of the article, momentarily forgetting his identity! Again, I breathed a prayer of thanks for God's healing. In the same file folder as the article, I also found an envelope from LEADERSHIP containing several dozen letters from readers, and I proceeded to read each one.

Some readers felt a sense of shock and betrayal. They criticized the article for being prurient and disgusting. The author had been far too explicit, they said; he dwelt on lurid details as if he still enjoyed his memories of lust.

"The author cannot possibly be considered a Christian," concluded one reader (I hope this person never encounters Augustine's Confessions). Others claimed the article had caused them to distrust their pastor and all Christian leaders: "Who knows what might be going on in their minds?"

I pray and hope that my article did not lead anyone astray. I must admit that, at a distance of five years, the article seemed somewhat overwrought. Does the issue of lust merit such a long, involved treatment? But I also know that the article was true, every word of it. I lived it. War raged within me for a decade.

Five years ago some people were scandalized that a Christian magazine would print such a blunt, realistic confession by a Christian leader. But in recent days we have read far more explicit accounts of Christian leaders' immorality in Time and Newsweek.

Not all the letters were negative, however. More than half expressed deep gratitude. I have a whole stack of letters that begin like this: "I thought I was the only one with this problem. Thank you so much for having the courage to bring it out into the open." Some go on to describe agonizing personal battles with lust and immorality. At least one reader said the article permanently cured his lust problem by frightening him away from the temptations of bare flesh.

The most moving letters, however, came from people who have not been cured. "Please, tell me how to solve my problem!" they wrote. "You said that God 'came through' for you, but he has not come through for me. What can I do?" It was this group of letters that ultimately convinced me to write about what has happened in the past five years.

The Road to Freedom

I begin with humility and gratitude to God for breaking my addiction. I came to see the problem of lust as a true addiction, much like addiction to alcohol or drugs or gambling. And I can truly say that I have been set free of, in Augustine's words, "scratching lust's itchy sore." For those still caught in the web of that addiction, I bring a message of hope.

Ironically, I am most grateful for two things I normally try to avoid: guilt and fear. Augustine records rather candidly that, except for the fear of God's judgment in the afterlife, Epicurus would surely have lured him even deeper into carnal pleasures. A similar kind of fear and guilt kept me on edge during my long struggle with lust.

Psychologists use the term "cognitive dissonance" to describe the battle inside a person who believes one way and acts another. For example, a woman will normally feel intense cognitive dissonance if she secretly carries on an affair with another man while pretending to be happily married to her husband. Even if her husband suspects nothing, her own mind will constantly remind her that she is living with contradictions. Because the mind cannot sustain too much cognitive dissonance, it will seek ways to resolve the contradictions. Perhaps the wife will unconsciously let slip certain clues about her affair, or maybe she will accidentally call her husband by her lover's name. In such unexpected ways the mind will attempt to bring together her two lives.

A sense of cognitive dissonance haunted me during my addiction to lust. I believed one set of things about Christian ethics, the dangers of separating physical appeal from other aspects of sexuality, and the irrationality of an obsession with body parts. But I acted contrarily. From the pulpit I preached that a person's worth is measured internally, and that ugly people and fat people and the physically handicapped can express God's image. But, like much of male America, I spent my time drooling over shapely women with well-formed legs.

Most urgently, I experienced cognitive dissonance in my marriage. I had roped off large areas of my sexuality from my wife, which I cultivated in private, usually on trips, in visits to adult movie theaters and magazine shops. How could I expect to find sexual fulfillment in my marriage when I was nurturing a secret life of sexuality apart from my marriage?

Guilt and fear finally forced me to deal with the cognitive dissonance. Guilt made it feel dissonant in the first place; it constantly reminded me that my actions did not coincide with my beliefs. And fear, especially the fear I experienced after I learned how sex had utterly destroyed my Southern pastor friend, forced me to face my own sin. It led me, kicking and protesting all the way, toward repentance.

I mention this because guilt and fear do not often get good press in our liberated society. Had I sought help from a professional counselor, that counselor may well have dealt with the symptoms of guilt and fear rather than with the root problem. I have come to believe that the guilt and fear were wholly appropriate; they were, in fact, the prods that led me to resolve the cognitive dissonance in my life.

Today, I hear cries of outrage against anyone who, like President Reagan or Jerry Falwell, conveys a tone of judgment. President Reagan simply asks that sexual abstinence be taught as an option, possibly the best option, for young people who wish to avoid the health dangers associated with sexual promiscuity. "Don't lay a guilt trip on us!" many people respond. "Don't try to scare us." But I have learned that guilt and fear may serve us well, as warnings against the direct dangers posed by a disease like AIDS, or against the more subtle dangers represented by an addiction to lust.

Yet guilt and fear are such powerful forces that they may also deceive. In my case, they deceived me into seeing God as my enemy. Now as I read "The War Within," it reminds me of a testimony delivered at a revival tent meeting: "For many years I wallowed in the stench and filth of sin until finally I reached the end of my rope and in desperation turned to God." Typically, as I did in the article, the testifier spends most of his time on vivid descriptions of the smells and sights of that sin.

I now view my pilgrimage differently. I believe God was with me at each stage of my struggle with lust. It wasn't that I had to climb toward a state of repentance to earn God's approval; that would be a religion of works. Rather, God was present with me even as I fled from him. At the moment when I was most aware of my own inadequacy and failure, at that moment I was probably closest to God. That is a religion of grace.

The title of one book on my shelf, He Came Down from Heaven, summarizes the gospel pretty well. Immanuel: God is with us, no matter what. He calls us to heaven but descends to earth to rescue us.

I wish we in the church did a better job of conveying God's love for sinners. From the church, I feel mainly judgment. I cannot bring my sin to the church until it has been neatly resolved into a warm, uplifting testimony. For example, if I had come to the church in the midst of my addiction to lust, I would have been harshly judged. That, in fact, is why I had to write my article anonymously. Even after the complete cycle of confession and forgiveness, people still wrote in comments like, "The author cannot possibly be considered a Christian."

Having said that, however, I also recognize that many people who struggle with addictions have been greatly helped by counselors or other mature Christians to whom they have made themselves accountable. They testify that knowing there is someone to whom they have to report honestly and regularly has been a key factor in resisting temptation.

I have attended a few meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and they convinced me that we in the church have something to learn from that group. Somehow they require accountability and communicate the "Immanuel-ness" of God. He is with you when you succeed and when you fail. He does not wait with folded arms for you to pick yourself out of the gutter. His hands are stretched out toward you, eager to help. Where are the hands of the church?

Bearing Scars

So far I have given mostly good news: the good news that an addiction can be broken, that God's love extends to the uttermost, that even guilt and fear can work for our good. But in honesty I must bring bad news as well.

In Sunday school we learn simple illustrations about the long-term effects of sin: "God will forgive you for the sin of smoking, but you'll always have spots on your lungs." Damage from sexual sins is rarely so easy to detect, but such sins do indeed have consequences.

I bear scars from my addiction to lust, even though the addiction seems broken. First, there is the scar of "spoiled innocence." Sex has a certain "you can't go back again" quality. Pornographers understand this well: They know that what titillates this month will only bore next month, and they must constantly search for new and exciting sexual variety in order to hold a viewer's attention. Pornography feeds on our fascination with the forbidden, but as the rules of what is forbidden change, our fascination changes as well. We want more.

I don't know exactly how to describe this long-term effect, but I definitely feel a sense of spoiled innocence. My sexual fantasy life far outstripped my sexual experience within marriage, and I have not been able to bring the two together. I was a voyeur, experiencing sex in loneliness and isolation. But sex is meant to be shared. To the degree that I indulged my voyeurism, I drifted away from my wife and our shared experiences.

And of course my years of deception undermined trust. Eventually, I told my wife everything about my addiction to lust, and she accepted it with astonishing grace and forgiveness. Still, though, she must wonder: When I travel without her, am I trustworthy? I sometimes wonder if I can even trust myself.

By living in a state of cognitive dissonance for a number of years, I developed a great ability to live falsely. As I ignored the early warning signs of guilt, I opened up even greater possibilities for self-deception. Perhaps I have seared my own conscience. I continue to pray for the Holy Spirit's healing of my receptivity to him.

These are some of the long-term effects from my experience with lust. Surely similar scars form as a result of adultery, divorce, or a decision to abort a child. God will forgive such actions and grant repentance and restoration. But healing does not come free of long-term cost.

How do I respond to sexual pressures now? I am still a sexual being, a male. That has not changed. I still experience the same magnetic force of sexual desire that used to pull me toward pornography. What do I do with those urges? What do any of us do? As I see it, we can respond in three possible ways: indulgence, repression, or reconnection.

The Way of Indulgence

"The War Within" described in detail-some say too much detail-a process of indulgence, of following my sexual desires wherever they might lead. Our society seems strangely schizophrenic on the wisdom of that approach. On the one hand, authors advocating "The New Celibacy" appear on talk shows, and Time features articles on the new ethic of intimacy. On the other hand, you need only flip through the advertisements in a magazine like Vogue or Glamour to realize our society's approving attitude toward lust.

"Lust is back!" heralded an article in Esquire a few years ago. The sexual revolution of the sixties stemmed from an overall assault against tradition and authority. Soon feminism put a damper on anything that treated women as sexual objects. But now it seems perfectly acceptable to treat either women or men as sexual objects. Today's sexual revolution is fueled not so much by a reaction against authority as by The New Paganism that glorifies the human body (witness the incredible boom in bodybuilding, fitness, and exercise).

Cable television and videocassettes now make pornography available to nearly everyone. The recent book Vital Signs reports that of Christian households hooked into cable television, 23 percent subscribe to porno channels-the same percentage as the nation as a whole.

What harm is there, after all, in displaying a little skin? Christians tend to be so uptight about sex; why not experiment with pornography to help loosen us up? There are many answers, I suppose, but one especially seems to fit my experience: pornography radically disconnects sex from its intended meaning.

Human sexuality, a gift from God, was designed to express a relationship between a man and a woman, but pornography separates out one aspect of that gift-physical appeal-and focuses exclusively on it.

The specialists like to remind us that sexuality reveals our animal nature. It is a matter of biology, they say, of glands and hormones and physical maturation. Sex is technique; it can be learned, and mastered, and perfected. And perhaps pornography can assist you in mastering the technique.

But certain facts about human sexuality still puzzle the experts. While it resembles animal sexuality in some ways, it also expresses fundamental differences. Human beings possess disproportionate sexual equipment: Among mammals, only human females develop enlarged breasts before their first pregnancy, and among primates the human male has the largest penis. In contrast to virtually all other animals, human beings engage in sex as a year-round option rather than limiting intercourse to the time of estrus. Behaviorists puzzle over these anomalies. What evolutionary advantage do they offer?

Perhaps the answer does not lie in "evolutionary advantage" at all. Perhaps it lies in the nature of human sexuality as an expression of relationship rather than as an act of instinct for the purpose of reproduction.

The most telling difference between human and animal sexuality is this: all other animals perform sexual acts in the open, without embarrassment. Only human beings see any advantage to privacy. "Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to," said Mark Twain. For us, sex is different. It has an aura of mystery about it, and instinctively we want to keep it separate, to experience it in private. We treat it as we treat religion, with an aura of apartness, or "holiness."

As free creatures, human beings can, of course, rebel against these natural tendencies that have characterized all human societies. We can treat sex as an animal function, separating out the physical act from any aspect of relationship. We can tear down all the fences that societies have traditionally erected to protect the mystery surrounding sexuality. That, in fact, is precisely what pornography does. And it does so at our peril.

A few years ago in major cities like San Francisco, you could find certain establishments that catered to the sexual interests of gay men. Some of these reduced sex to its most basic nature. A man could enter a stall and insert his genitals through an opening in the wall at crotch level. He could thus have a sex act performed on him without ever seeing his sexual partner. Such parlors offered efficient and anonymous sex, free from the trammels of relationship. In 1970, at the height of the gay sexual revolution, Kinsey Institute researchers found that 40 percent of white male homosexuals in San Francisco had had at least 500 sexual partners and 28 percent reported over 1,000 partners. (The hysteria over AIDS has greatly reduced those statistics, although now "safe sex" is being touted as a way to enjoy such pleasures without the risk of infection.)

What does all this frenetic sexual activity prove? It demonstrates, of course, the enormous power of the sexual drive in human beings, who are capable of indulgence at a rate without precedent in the animal kingdom. And it also shows that sex can be reduced to an utterly anonymous act, disconnected from relationship. The San Francisco statistics make that point most dramatically, but our society offers many other, more subtle reminders. "What's love got to do with it?" Tina Turner bellows into a microphone. Surely you can have great sex without the complications of love.

As I look back over the lessons I have learned, this seems the most important. Lust, and its expression in pornography, led me away from relationship toward raw desire. It enticed me with the promise of relationship: Cheryl Tiegs and Madonna and the monthly Playmates would remove their clothes and smile at me from the pages of magazines. But the photos lied. I was developing a relationship with ink dots printed on paper, not with real human beings.

Gradually, at a deep level, I was learning to view sex as mere technique, an exercise like gourmet dining. I was forgetting the crucial distinction between gourmet dining and gourmet sex: I have no human relationship with the food I eat, but I must have some sort of relationship with a sexual partner. Pornography attempts to abolish that distinction.

The magazines, especially the soft porno magazines, convey the message that sex is merely a physical act, a matter of technique. Television soap operas, in their own way, express much the same thing: only 6 percent of the sex depicted on them occurs between a husband and wife. Through them, we learn that we can disconnect the sex act from normal social mores.

And yet society can never sever the connections completely. Inconsistencies continue to surface. Consider two examples:

-Every society on earth acknowledges incest taboos. The United States, if anything, has recently become even more sensitive to incest and the sexual abuse of children. But why? If sex is merely a physical act, a matter of technique, what difference should it make if parent and child have sex together, or brother and sister? The taboo against incest shows that human relationships are a part of sex at its most basic level.

-Movies very often depict an affair that begins "just on a physical basis." But rarely can the characters continue the affair on that basis. It grows, dominating the characters' emotions and gradually undermining their marriages. The old cycle of cognitive dissonance sets in, and what began as a physical affair soon blossoms into a full-fledged relationship. Linda Wolfe, a feminist author, wrote a book called Playing Around: Women and Extramarital Sex, in which she expressed amazement that so many physical affairs begun "to preserve a marriage by giving me a sexual outlet" ended up destroying that marriage.

I have come to realize that the greatest danger of pornography lies in its false depiction of sexuality. It focuses exclusively on physical appearance and technique, without recognizing sex as an expression of relationship between two human beings. Because pornography begins with a false premise, the more I follow where it leads, the less able I will be to find a well-integrated, healthy experience of sexuality.

Gay men in San Francisco with 1,000 partners may be light years beyond me in sexual technique and proficiency. But I doubt whether they have found a high level of mature sexual satisfaction. They have addressed the "animal" aspect of their sexuality, but at the expense of developing relationships. We are more than animals: that is the basic Christian contribution to sexuality. (And, in fact, as the anomalies of human sexuality show-disproportionate sexual organ size, the need for privacy, the constant availability-in sexuality we may be least like other animals.) Whatever leads me to emphasize exclusively the "animal" side of my sexuality will likely lead toward confusion and dissatisfaction.

I have learned that my addiction to lust probably expressed other human needs. What was I searching for in the porno literature and movies? The image of the perfect female breast? More likely, I was searching for intimacy, or love, or acceptance, or reinforcement of an insecure male ego, or maybe even a thirst for transcendence. I was searching for something that could never be satisfied by two-dimensional photos printed on slick magazine paper. And not until I recognized that could I begin to turn toward a more appropriate sexual identity.

In my search, I "de-mystified" sexuality. I made the female body as common as a daily newspaper, rather than as rare as the one woman I had chosen to spend my life with. I destroyed the fences around sexuality, chasing away any remnants of "holiness." Nudity became not the final mutual achievement in a progression toward intimacy, but the very first step. These are the results of my choices toward indulgence. From all of them, I am still trying to recover.

The Temptation of Repression

Some people writing in response to my original LEADERSHIP article could not identify with my struggle at all. They offered me stern advice, mostly consisting of admonishments from the Bible.

Wrote one pastor: "Nowhere does the Bible say to pray for victory over lust. It does say to flee immorality (1 Cor. 6:18). It does say to saturate our minds with Scripture (Ps. 119:9, 11). It does say to make a covenant with our eyes so that we do not gaze on a virgin (Job 31:1). It does say to take every thought captive to Christ (2 Cor. 10:3-5)."

Several people also cited the apostle Paul's statement about the perversions of Ephesus, "It is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret."

Reading so many of these letters in one sitting, I had to question my own experience. In my struggles with lust, was I making complex something that should have been very simple? I had written page after page about "the war within" and the forces that pulled me toward lust. The letter writers seemed to think the solution to lust was the same as the solution to the drug problem in America: Just Say No!

But then I read the letters of people who had felt every moment of my struggle. These, among them godly men and women, had succumbed to temptation. A firm resolution to say no did not seem enough.

What is the difference between "fleeing immorality" and simple repression? By automatically turning away from any impulse toward sexual desire, will I dam up a reservoir of repression that will one day overflow? I don't know, but I do believe that we who learn to practice repression at an early age may be woefully unprepared to face real temptation.

I think of the classical distinction between virtue and innocence: virtue, unlike innocence, has successfully passed a point of temptation. Perhaps a person who grows up in a Christian subculture, attends Christian schools, watches Christian television, reads Christian books, and listens to Christian music can survive the 1980s in something like a state of innocence. But there is a danger also: a person reared in such a hothouse environment may wilt once he or she steps into the broader society.

I grew up in a sheltered Christian background, where I learned to rely on simple, black-and-white, just-say-no repression as the best defense against all forms of temptation. But that defense failed me in the matter of lust. I was utterly unprepared for the force, the almost magical force, of human sexuality.

Since those days of innocence, I have read thinkers like Wilhelm Reich, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Sigmund Freud, each of whom explains almost all human behavior on the basis of the sexual instinct. I do not agree with them, but they do underscore the enormous power of human sexuality.

"I feel as if I had escaped from the hands of a mad and furious master," said Sophocles when old age finally quelled his sexual drive. Sex cannot be reduced to neat, rational formulas and explained away. And I wonder whether any degree of repression can withstand its force. Will any amount of repression ever prepare us for virtue?

Yet I must confess that in the past five years, I have often used pure repression as a response to temptation. Once the back of my "addiction" to lust had been broken, I was able to repress temptations in that direction. But just saying no became possible only after I had dealt with the nature of the lust impulse.

Different people develop different ways of controlling their sexual impulses. I recently read of the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who together with his wife took a vow of celibacy. Both in their early thirties and having been married ten years, they kept the vow the rest of their lives. Maritain revealed his secret only after Raissa's death: "We decided to renounce a thing which marriage fulfills, a deep need of the human being-both of body and spirit. … I do not say that any such decision was easy to take. … It implied no scorn for nature but a desire to follow at any price at least one of the counsels of the perfect life." Maritain also reported that "one of the great graces of our life was that . . . our mutual love was infinitely increased." I stand in awe before such a decision, even as I choose another way for myself. But whatever you think about the Maritains' choice, it hardly seems like repression. They made the choice in full awareness of their sexuality, in full commitment to their relationship. It sounds more like virtue than like innocence.

I ultimately came to reject repression as the best response to my sexuality for the same reason that I rejected indulgence: it fails to satisfy the underlying human needs. Indulgence meets temporary needs but disconnects them from the underlying needs of intimacy. Similarly, repression may give me an escape from an immediate temptation toward lust, but it will not satisfy the state that made me susceptible to lust in the first place.

Reconnecting the Sexual Self

The only ultimate solution for my sexual needs, I am convinced, will involve finding a balanced and mature way of expressing the full range of my sexuality within my marriage. I experienced sex in its "disconnected" form, as a voyeur of other people's bodies, apart from a relationship. My healing process will surely involve reconnecting that sexual power and energy with the growth toward intimacy it was designed to accompany.

G. K. Chesterton once likened this world to the desert island site of a shipwreck. A sailor awakes from a deep sleep and discovers treasure strewn about, relics from a civilization he can barely remember. One by one he picks up the relics-gold coins, a compass, fine clothing-and tries to discern their meaning. According to Chesterton, fallen humanity is in such a state. Good things on earth still bear traces of their original purpose, but each is also subject to misinterpretation or abuse because of fallen, "amnesiac" human nature.

Evil is a kind of subverted echo of goodness and spirituality. Power, a wonderful human gift, can be used for great good or can through violence be used to dominate others. Wealth may lead to charity or to exploitation; delicious food may inspire gratitude or gluttony.

Sexual desire, one of the most powerful "relics" we find on this earth, invites obsession. When we experience sexual desires, it seems only right to follow where they lead. As the modern song puts it, "It can't be wrong when it feels so right."

John J. McNeill, the Jesuit psychotherapist who was expelled from his order for his teachings in his ministry to gay people, wrote, "I was convinced that what is bad psychologically has to be bad theologically and that, conversely, whatever is good theologically is certainly good psychologically." McNeill then concluded, "Every human being has a God-given right to sexual love and intimacy."

McNeill's philosophy sounds very appealing. Who could argue against our psychological good corresponding to our theological good? His philosophy has only one basic problem: If I am the one determining my psychological good, there will be no end to my rationalization. A bulimic teenager may, for example, determine that vomiting will make her feel better psychologically, and thus starve herself to death. An alcoholic may determine that one more pint of Scotch would provide oh so much psychological relief.

The problem is that we are the problem. The good things on earth-food, drink, sex, recognition, power, wealth-are not spoiled; we are. They are relics of Eden. But our amnesia affects our very ability to determine their proper use.

Christians, of course, believe that we have a message from the one who designed the relics, the ship, and the sailor. That message teaches us that sex is tied to relationship, and desire finds its best and most satisfying fulfillment within marriage. It's a message I do not always like, and one I have often rebelled against. But I am convinced it is true. And thus the only hope for me to find balance and maturity in my sex life is to pray and work toward a healthy marriage relationship, which includes sex.

The authors of the best-selling book Habits of the Heart reported that, of all the people they interviewed, only evangelical Christians were able to articulate a reason for continuing to believe in marriage. We have been given a message from God that connects and gives meaning to such things as physical desire, gender differences, reproduction, love, and mutual sacrifice.

I now see the challenge before me as a process of reconnecting what, during my addiction to lust, I had so tragically separated. Can my physical desire for my wife develop along with my desire for union with her emotionally, and even spiritually? Can our experience of union, interpenetration, and shared pleasure convey the very deep spiritual-more, sacramental-significance that lies at the heart of a Christian view of marriage?

I would like to conclude with a glowing profile of how that has been accomplished in my marriage. I cannot, not yet. My wife and I are both committed to that goal, and we both seek it. We will continue to seek it even as we recover from the distrust and distance that entered our lives during my addiction to lust.

Easy Lie or Hard Truth

I tremble to say this in an age when anyone who focuses on the differences between the sexes is held up to ridicule, but I am convinced that the experience of lust is one in which gender differences stand out strongest. The same Kinsey Institute survey that discovered almost half the male homosexuals in San Francisco had more than 500 partners also revealed that more than half the gay white women surveyed had had less than ten sexual partners. Most of those women rarely had casual sex and tended toward monogamy with one gay partner.

The striking difference in statistics might shed light on this whole issue of lust. Wives wrote to me confessing that my article had touched on an area of great conflict in their marriages. When their husbands had admitted some acquaintance with pornography, the wives found that disgusting and perverted.

I would not attempt a theory on why sexual aggression and lust seem more of a danger to men than to women. But the picture comes clear if you simply compare the number of porno magazines directed toward men with those directed toward women. Or, simply stand outside an adult movie theater and count the number of men and women who enter. The compulsive thirst for sexuality that leads to the voyeurism seems to fall more within the male domain. It contains within it an element of sexual aggression that seems foreign to most women.

What does a man want in sex? What need was being met in the days when I would fawn over photos of women I would never meet? What lay behind the appeal? Pastors' wives wrote to ask me the question, and in turn I have asked it of myself.

Here is the answer that seems closest to me. In sex, I want to feel welcome. I want to feel accepted, not rejected. In some primal sense, I want to feel like a conquering king, like a warrior (and I know how out of fashion those images are in this liberated age).

Yet, ironically, sex combines aggression and insecurity in a precarious balance. I think most women would be surprised to learn how intimidating, even terrifying, sex is for many men. Pornography lowers the terror. It's an easy form of arousal. And the key to the arousal is the illusion of welcomeness. Miss October arches her back and spreads her legs. Beautiful women from around the globe smile at me, beckon me to enjoy them.

Real life is never so easy. Sex comes, for most of us, after months or years of courtship. There is romance, yes, but there is also conflict, and boredom, and incompatibility. The woman I desire is busy asserting herself, seeking her identity, fending off a culture that tends to treat her like a sex object. She has kids around the house, a career to juggle with her other chores, and financial hassles. Unlike Miss October, she doesn't spend all day preparing herself to look appealing and available.

So I am left with an easy lie or a hard truth. The easy lie is the illusion of pornography. It offers its own rewards, and I would be dishonest if I said its appeal eventually vanishes. It doesn't. I miss the thrill that lust used to provide me, just as a recovered drug addict misses the highs he once experienced. How can sex in marriage, complicated by real-life commitments, intricacies of compatibility, and the inconveniences of children, possibly compete with the illusory thrills of Playboy women?

But there is a hard truth suggested by Chesterton's analogy of the shipwreck. Why are we here? Are we on earth primarily to experience pleasure, to have fun? If so, Christianity, with its offer of a cross and sacrificial love and concern for the weak and the poor, seems pretty thin. If we are here for no real reason, why go through all the bother of trying to connect glandular desire with lofty goals like intimacy and marriage?

Or are we here on a mission? Are we indeed creatures who will best find fulfillment by living up to the demands of the Creator? If the latter, then the thrills offered by the easy lie of pornography will not permanently satisfy. Indulgence is not an option for me, and neither is repression. I have only one option: to seek God with all my heart, so that God may continue his process of healing and bring me to sexual fulfillment-at home, with my wife, where I belong.

- More from Name Withheld

Pastors

WEAVING PRAYER & COUNSELING

Nancy D. Becker

Consulting the Wonderful Counselor can be the key for pastoral counselors.

Some time ago I counseled a church member who felt trapped in a cold, nonsupportive marriage to an alcoholic husband. She had come feeling hopeless, looking for comfort and suggestions. I tried to help her sort the options, hoping to open up some new ways of thinking about her problem.

“Do you think marriage counseling might help?” I asked.

“Oh no. My husband would never go,” she answered.

“Have you thought about a trial separation?”

“I have no way to support myself, and we can’t afford two homes.”

“Have you ever been to an Al Anon meeting?” I pressed.

“I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of going to a public meeting like that.”

For every new avenue I tried to travel, she had a quick detour.

Years of living with emotional barrenness had made her rigid. Despair had become such a constant condition of her life that she could no longer see beyond the pain. Finally, she apologized for taking up my time and began to gather up her purse and her wet tissues. I felt so inadequate. I had been unable to give her the comfort of even a glimmer of hope. Other than providing her the catharsis of telling a sympathetic human being about her plight, I felt I had accomplished nothing toward changing either her life or her attitude of helpless despair.

I asked if we could pray together before she left. Sitting on the edge of her chair, she obviously expected this to be a short and formal conclusion to our time together. But as I began to pray, I sensed her relaxing for the first time.

I suddenly realized we had never talked about her spiritual life. What an oversight! What had this long-term problem done to her relationship with Christ? Had her misery made her unable to formulate any but the most rote prayers for deliverance? And how long had it been since she had felt the forgiveness and loving acceptance of the Lord?

I prayed for God’s comfort to surround her and his peace to fill her. I prayed slowly and left spaces of silence, hoping to allow her to feel God’s presence as deeply as she was able. When I finished the prayer, she was weeping again.

“I think I had forgotten that God can work in my life,” she said. “I haven’t been able to pray in such a long time.”

My friend’s problem was by no means solved, buts somehow the act of prayer had opened her heart a little. Somehow it had lowered the defensive barriers that served as a protection from the pain of many years. Often, I’ve discovered, prayer has become the most productive and comforting part of a counseling session, the means by which God enters into a difficult human problem.

The Uniqueness of Pastoral Counseling

As I considered the profound effects of prayer in counseling, I wondered if I needed to redefine my role as pastoral counselor. Had I let the secular definitions and forms of counseling set the rules by which I guided those who came to me? Instead of a therapist, were they really seeking a pastor, a spiritual guide?

I had learned techniques of guiding people to psychological maturity with models similar to those used by secular counselors, and I felt reasonably proficient with them. Yet often I felt I had missed the mark in a counseling session, that I had been more of a professional and less of a pastor. Perhaps I had undervalued what I as a pastor am specifically called to do for people-to pray for them and with them.

As I thought back over many of the people I had counseled, I realized there were particular situations in which my counseling techniques were not achieving what the time of prayer was. These situations involved relational logjams, difficult decisions, anxiety about family members, anger and frustration about things done to them, and the inability to forgive. Attitudes and hardened hearts appeared to be a large part of the problem.

Many times prayer cut through the difficulties that pragmatic and problem-oriented forms of counseling only stumbled over.

As objective observers, we’re often more able than counselees to see where healing is needed and that healing is possible. Frequently a sense of hopelessness overcomes people faced with a crisis and prevents them from dealing with it.

A young couple came to me separately, both in panic because they had experienced their first serious argument. They were terrified that their marriage was doomed. “I don’t see how things can ever be the same again after the things we said,” moaned the young husband. “She’ll never be able to forgive me, and probably God can’t either.”

He needed to pray not only for forgiveness (which in his saner moments he truly understood), but also to thank God for his wife and his marriage and for God’s power to heal the rift between them. That second part of the prayer needed my formulation, because he couldn’t see past his own fear to God’s love and power. After I prayed with him, he left my office in much better shape than when he came in.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. Prayer is no magic formula that causes problems to vanish. Some deep wounds in lives and personalities need long-term, sensitive care. I can never consider prayer a Band-Aid to patch a deep hurt, nor is it an easy way to disclaim responsibility and end an uncomfortable or unproductive counseling relationship. Yet as I thought about the effect of prayer on some cases, I couldn’t escape the fact that it was often the prayer that opened someone to healing.

I once listened for nearly an hour to words of anger and bitterness from a woman who had been abandoned and divorced by her husband of twenty years. She knew in her mind that the anger would destroy her, yet I couldn’t advise or argue her into peace, even by the words of Jesus from the Scriptures. She had tried to pray, but every time she tried, she found herself hardening her heart to hold on to her anger.

“I don’t really want to stop being angry,” she finally confessed, “and that frightens me the most! Would you pray for me? I think I’ve forgotten how to pray.”

I prayed. Eventually she would need serious counseling to work out her anger and find a way to remake her life, but at this point in her journey, she first needed to reestablish her sense of God’s continuing love for her. Fortunately, she understood this need, and thus her request for me to pray for her until she could once again pray for herself.

This woman’s intuitive understanding of her own need reminded me again of the importance of keeping my pastoral function in the forefront of my counseling.

The Power of Prayer

Prayer is powerful. All of us would readily agree. Yet don’t we sometimes speak of prayer and counseling as if they were separate activities with different goals? We counsel, and then we pray that the counseling works. I’m growing to see prayer and counseling as two strands within the single fabric of God’s work. It’s my job to weave the two together.

Most counseling problems we face involve a large element of wounded spirit caused by a damaged relationship with God. This prevents some people from fully receiving God’s love or having healthy relationships with other people.

In all of us reside guilt and anger, sometimes growing out of past experiences and the imperfect child-raising practices of our parents. Many people project the human imperfections of their parents onto God. Many blame God for the trouble in their lives, believing God is giving them trouble as a punishment for some unremembered wrong of the past. More often than not, people don’t realize consciously that they hold these attitudes, but their lives and relationships are infected by them anyway.

George was a hard-working leader of the church who came to me because his extensive church activity was becoming a source of tension at home. As we talked, I sensed a drivenness in his attitude, a fear that he must never let up. He wanted “things to be done right.” He didn’t enjoy relaxing with his family; he tried to avoid “nonproductive activity” because he was sure God was displeased with “less than our best.”

The church had become not a sanctuary of solace but an arena of inner tension. His service grew not out of love but out of an unconscious fear of God as a harsh, demanding authority figure. He seemed to feel God was looking for some reason to deny him the fruits of Christ’s sacrifice.

His fear and guilt were deeply embedded in his personality and would not be eliminated by any simple or short-term counseling, nor by some quick prayer techniques. George was not the kind of guy I could just look in the eye and say, “George, relax. God loves you and created you to enjoy him!”

One thing did, however, begin to break down his fear of God: praying before the loving Creator-Redeemer. Had I tried to tell him he demanded more of himself than God did, I surely would have invited his contempt for “sentimental pastors who peddle cheap grace.” So I asked if I might pray for him.

I wanted my prayer to make George aware that he was in the presence of a loving Father who cares for him and delights in him just as he is, a unique and valued person. In formulating the prayer, I wanted to express for George his unspoken-perhaps even unconscious-plea. My words would be addressed to God, but they would also reflect the needs of that person sitting across from me. In this case I concentrated on God’s grace, which demands nothing but to be received and accepted. I hoped George would relax and just enjoy being a child of God for a few moments.

When we finished, George’s eyes were moist as he said in his characteristically low-key way, “It’s nice to have someone else pray for me.” George’s problem certainly didn’t end there. Lifelong attitudes don’t disappear easily. He still needed counseling to find the roots of his drivenness and deal with them. But he also needed to learn how to pray, knowing God’s love for him as well as God’s call.

It took many months of both counseling and prayer before I could sense any relaxation of George’s tension, and I don’t know whether listening or prayer helped him most. I suspect it was a combination of the two.

Preparing for Prayer

One sure way to undercut prayer is to forget that the prayer is addressed to God and not to the counselee. All of us have heard manipulative sermons disguised as prayers: “Lord, you know that Joe here has caused his own problems. Help him to shape up before he wrecks his marriage.” Moralizing or problem-solving statements in prayer obstruct the effect of placing the problems into the hands of God. Only actual prayer, growing out of the pastor’s own soul and informed by the understanding gained during the counseling session, can be truly effective.

Likewise, my prayer needs the mental endorsement of the one with whom I’m praying. Only as long as my words actually reflect the prayers from deep within the soul of that person will he or she give consent to my words. If I misread the situation radically, the person will simply shut it out. He or she might listen to the prayer but will not pray it.

Prayer that’s effective demands prior thought and personal preparation during the course of the counseling session itself. I need to do two things: understand clearly what counselees would pray if only they could, and develop a receptive climate in which they will feel safe enough to open themselves to God.

Experience has taught me not to hurry to the prayer prematurely. One time I met with a young couple whose baby had been stillborn. The husband was concerned that his wife seemed unable to get over her depression. Aha! I thought. A situation needing prayer. So after I had heard the basic facts, I suggested we pray. I prayed and the husband prayed, but the wife didn’t. When we finished, she said, both to me and to her husband, “You just don’t understand how I feel.”

Truly I did not. I had missed her need to express anger toward God for what had happened. She couldn’t open herself to God’s healing until she had been given the chance to vent her anger. I should have encouraged her to talk about these feelings before we prayed. That experience taught me the importance of timing, of preparing for the pastoral prayer through careful listening.

As the person tells his or her story, I try to listen with eyes and ears wide open, and without judgment. Many people come hesitantly, expecting my disapproval. They come because they know they’ve done something wrong. Many have built strong defenses to protect themselves against the judgment of others and of God. To find themselves accepted without judgment relaxes those defenses and may open a little crack for God’s forgiveness.

I also pray silently while I listen, consciously bringing God’s presence into the counseling situation. This helps me remember that God is at work here and I am not under the burden of “solving” anything by myself. Under my breath I may pray: Lord, thank you for joining me as we seek to minister to this person. Please help me rein in my own ego and remember that though I may be a channel of your grace, it’s only at your initiative.

Often I’m tempted to point out solutions that seem perfectly obvious to me. Yet just as often, if I wait and pray, the “obvious” also becomes clear to the counselee. When this happens, finding one’s own answer is an integral part of the person’s journey. It isn’t something imposed from without by my overzealous need to be instrumental in someone’s life.

It’s also important to listen for what needs prayer. A woman asked me to pray that her husband would become a responsible Christian and fulfill his obligations to his family. “He just refuses to come to church. Every Sunday I remind him how important it is to go as a family. I bring the printed sermons home and leave them on his chair. I point out other men who take their responsibility more seriously. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but the more I try, the more stubborn he gets.”

Her anxiety had blinded her to the fact that his stubbornness was a direct result of hers. She had forgotten about her love for him in the midst of a marital power struggle that was consuming her energy and attention. When I tried to tell her God could work on her husband without her having to turn life into a battlefield, she defended herself by claiming, “I’m so afraid that if I don’t keep reminding him, he’ll slip further away from the church.”

During our time of prayer, I included prayers of thanksgiving for the love that had brought the two of them together and for the qualities in his life and character that had endeared him to her.

As the prayer ended, her anxiousness seemed drained. “I guess I’ve been concentrating so hard on converting him that I forgot what a wonderful man he is.” She decided to turn over to the Lord the problems of her husband’s spiritual life.

We’re complicated people, and in some strange sense, she fought against receiving advice from me even though she had come seeking it. But prayer created a space in which she could remember her husband is in the Lord’s care. Because of her prayer, occasioned by mine, God was able to enter into her situation and melt those barriers blocking her relationship with her husband. And now that the husband would need less defensiveness to avoid losing a power struggle, perhaps God could begin to work on him, too.

Caution: God at Work

When I offer the pastoral prayer, I try to keep two basic assumptions in mind.

Though we can point the way to God, it is God who does the healing. My job is merely to create an open space in the person’s life where God can work. If I become too involved with solving the problems with my own skills, I will probably do no more than add to the accumulated layers of errors and false solutions. The “answer” must come from within the person, and God is quite capable of dealing directly with each person. The apostle Paul was very firm about this: “We are not competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of the new covenant” (2 Cor. 3:5, 6).

God is already at work in this person’s life. Each person has a past and a future, which are known to God. I have to resist the tendency to see only that which is presently troubling.

Helen and Bob came to me upset and confused by the attitude and activities of their 15-year-old daughter, Doreen. “We used to be so close and do things together,” Helen said. “Now she spends all her time in fast-food places with her friends. I don’t like the way she dresses and wears her hair. She has become so different, and I’m afraid of what it might lead to.”

We can’t minimize the dangers that face those passing through adolescence, yet often the dangers loom so large that it’s hard for parents to remember that God is also working in the child’s life. We did talk about how to monitor Doreen’s adolescence and what signs would indicate the need for intervention. But it was clear that Helen and Bob were concerned not so much about what was happening as about what might happen. Their fear was contaminating the communication with Doreen at just the time when she needed them to be most open and receptive to her struggles to become a separate individual.

After we talked, we prayed together. I thanked God for the gift of Doreen, for her creativity, her intelligence, and her bright, happy spirit. I thanked God that she was growing into womanhood with strength and independence. I thanked God that Helen and Bob had given her courage and freedom to try new things in the security of their love and support for her. I asked God to protect her as she lived through these difficult years so that passing fads would not endanger the true person God had created her to be, so that she might emerge from this transition period strong in faith, with her character formed as God would have it be. I also prayed for Helen and Bob, that God would give them both wisdom and patience, a vigilant awareness of her progress, and the fearless love to let Doreen find her own way to Christ.

Afterward Bob thanked me. “While you prayed, I was reminded that we aren’t going through this time alone and that Doreen is God’s child, too.”

Prayer sets problems in the context of God’s presence and power. It’s easy for people to forget that God’s love and presence encompass their immediate problem; they forget they are part of a larger reality.

In prayer God has given us a unique gift to draw people to him. Pastoral prayer helps us look past the problem to the Solver of problems. It shifts the focus from self to God. When I’ve used it with humility, sensitivity, and love, I’ve found prayer opening hurt and rigid people to God’s healing. And that’s what I want to accomplish in counseling.

Nancy D. Becker is pastor of Ogden Dunes (Indiana) Community Church.

- More from Nancy D. Becker

Pastors

APPROPRIATE AFFECTION

Michael E. Phillips

How to keep your cool while showing warmth.

I couldn’t have painted a better scene of missionary life. Small, native children ran alongside, urging me to take their picture. Scraggly dogs yapped in rhythm. The air was heavy with rain, the smells rich and primordial. We walked a tree-lined road that was overgrown yet stately. As we walked, the pastor of the local church was explaining the move of God’s Spirit in his country.

Then he unconsciously broke the marvelous mood. As a show of affection, this African pastor took my hand and firmly held it as we walked. The action took me by surprise. Every nerve in my arm screamed to my head, “Pull away. Fast!”

I looked around to see if anyone could see us-two men holding hands on their way to the next village. I hoped my sweaty palm would make further hand holding impossible, but the pastor ignored the squishiness and retained his warm grasp. In my discomfort, I learned something about myself: I am a child of my culture.

Even though all of us are learning to break through “macho” stereotypes, which prevent many men from showing much affection at all, on that African path I forgot all notions of the liberation of the changing modern male. As the seconds collided together, I planned my escape.

“Look at that!” I said, pointing my sweaty hand at a child holding a scorpion by the tail. It happened to be the hundredth one we had passed in the last mile, but it gave me an opportunity to slip my hand out of his and firmly embed it in my pocket for the rest of the trip.

I was safe from my hangups for that day, yet the incident began a trail of thought that I would walk many times. Why had I reacted with such alarm? Why is intimacy such a dark closet in my mind, while others have acquired such holy freedom to express emotions outwardly?

Several years have passed, and I have tried to answer those questions in the context of my own ministry. As a pastor, I have also noticed the dilemma as perceived by men and women in my congregation: To hug or not to hug? It’s a haunted house with many rooms and few guides.

A Time to Refrain from Embracing

I notice a secular world fidgeting more and more at the idea of being close to others. Back in 1984, Ms. magazine was calling intimacy a “turn-on,” and Harpers was warning society of “Enemies to Intimacy.” But since affection and sexual attraction are rarely divorced in the secular mindset, sexually transmitted diseases are closing the door to intimacy, public or private. Now the world feels it will survive only if it shows the cold shoulder. And by its definition of intimacy, perhaps rightly.

However, the fidgeting is not restricted to singles bars. It’s also found behind the pastor’s desk. I can recall a half-dozen tragedies that involved pastoral colleagues’ being removed from ministry for adultery. Each one of those moral failures steels my resolve to avoid the situations that wreaked such havoc.

But what is improper affection? And how do I avoid it? I’ve encountered several situations where I’ve decided strictly to avoid any show of affection.

When my emotions are unstable. Affection is proper under certain emotional conditions, but when I am emotionally unstable, a powder keg of problems is lit.

When my dad died close to my sixteenth birthday, I suffered an emotional letdown of mammoth proportions. I began to respond to dates in uncontrollable ways. The emotional strain was leaving me vulnerable to the dark side of affection: attachment without self-control. That, of course, was not good. I needed to still my raging emotional life before I subjected others to my misguided affections.

Several years ago in ministry, I came face to face with another potentially dangerous situation. A young woman came to me with a deep need to be released from alcoholism. We spent several sessions together, which resulted in both the alleviating of her drinking problem and her becoming a Christian.

During that same period, however, my wife and I were struggling through the stress-filled early weeks of having a new baby. We were getting very little sleep and were not as close as we should have been. One afternoon while preparing mentally for a session with the woman with the alcohol problem, I found myself floating into a sensuous daydream-involving her. I realized what was happening and invited a deaconess to join us for that session, which became the last.

I have no idea how close I was to the emotional precipice of infidelity, and I don’t want to know. I do know, however, that I was in no condition to show or receive any affection in relation to that counselee.

When the person pulls away. We’ve all seen the romance movies where the hero pulls the petulant damsel into his arms. She fights him at first but eventually succumbs to his charm, melting into his embrace.

A forced churchly affection, however, will never turn warm someone who doesn’t want it. At times, some people simply don’t want affection of any kind. It comes across as an unwanted commitment to an equally unwanted emotion. They need the security of distance. We’ve all known occasions when an overly familiar touch on the shoulder sends a shock wave of recoil.

When I sense a growing gap between myself and someone in the body, my immediate response is to attempt to bridge that gap with affection. I tried it last year, and I learned my lesson.

The elders had rebuked an older couple for an impropriety. During a particularly warm Communion service some weeks later, I sought to embrace them both during our time of greeting one another, but they decidedly pulled away from me. The wife summed up their feeling: “Pastor, we are no longer that close to you. Hugging us will not solve the problem.”

I realized I was using affection as a quick-fix substitute for the gradual rebuilding of a relationship. The one is not interchangeable with the other.

When it means nothing. A recent article in a well-known women’s publication bore the auspicious title, “Have You Hugged Your Dry Cleaner Today?” At various times in the secular world as well as in Christian circles, affection becomes the latest fad. The indiscriminate hugging of a dry cleaner points out that affection can be emptied of meaning through random and meaningless gestures.

But are there holy hugs that can be dispensed with integrity and surety of purpose? In the face of many emotional needs, let us not shrug off completely the ministry of touch.

A Time to Embrace

How do we know when to express affection in appropriate ways? Some situations lend themselves to brotherly shows of affection. Here are situations in which I’m willing to step out on a limb.

In the face of loss. I often think of the story I heard about a young boy and an old man. A family of three moved into a two-bedroom house. The boy, 5 years old, loved to play outside because his new house was too small. Across the lane lived an old man and woman whom he loved to visit.

The old man and the boy talked and played together every day. One day, however, the old woman died. The old man would not be consoled, and his neighbors left him alone with his grief. The boy’s mother repeatedly warned him to stay away from the old man and under no circumstances to bother him.

However, children have insatiable curiosities, and the boy eventually crossed the lane to talk to his elderly friend. When the mother looked out the window, she saw the old man weeping uncontrollably. She urgently called her son home. As he came in the door, she scolded him. “What did you say to the old man to make him so sad?”

The boy lowered his head. “I didn’t say nothin’,” he stated. “I just climbed on his lap and helped him cry.”

I cannot hear that story without thinking of my friend Joe. Although he is a well-respected member of our church, at times he can be an enigma, for he is sometimes caustic, sometimes comical. He loves the Lord Jesus, and he loved his wife, Edie.

She died one night after a lengthy illness, and I fought with myself over what I should say to Joe. I hate sounding insincere with words of comfort, especially to a good man like Joe. The moment I came into the room, however, his posture helped me know what to do. He sat slumped in his chair and looked ten years older and six inches shorter than he was.

I walked over, helped him up, and embraced him for twenty minutes. He cried and then talked till late evening. It’s been over a year now, and every time we greet it’s with a warm embrace.

When someone is hurting, affection is much more than a warm fuzzy or a mild turn-on. Intimacy is the bonding of comfort, the balm of closeness, the first and greatest expression of understanding. There are very few who will misunderstand its intentions, and fewer still who will misappropriate its vulnerability.

Remember when all cameras were turned to a small-town school in 1986? The space shuttle had exploded, and a beloved teacher was dead. How would the school kids react? The television cameras revealed a disheveled group of kids holding one another, embracing each other’s hurt. In the face of loss, genuine affection is definitely needed.

Yet even the embrace of comfort is not automatic. God’s people need reassurance that intimacy is not an enemy. Unless people have been trained to do so, most will not react to sorrow with physical closeness. More likely, they will speak some awkward, ill-chosen words. As a pastor, I take responsibility for bridging the affection gap.

I recall a delicate situation where affection was helpful. The man of the house had been killed in a plane crash. Since there had been very poor communication in the house before his death, the family had very little they could say to one another. In the middle of a visit to their house, I decided to instruct them about affection.

I voiced their inner anxieties about putting their grief into words, and I suggested they skip the words and enter into the intimacy that heals. I started it all by raising the oldest son to his feet and hugging him. Almost immediately they began to embrace one another and share their mutual hurt.

I left at that point, but I heard later that the affection had opened the floodgate of speech. Today, the family is closer than ever.

In the face of discouragement. Our denomination requires that each candidate for pastoral ministry complete a stint as a parish intern. I arrived on the scene of my internship with excitement and plans. This would be where I would cut my pastoral wisdom teeth! However, my enthusiasm was no match for my inexperience. I had to deal with a string of ideas that never developed. That’s when God brought into my life a strange type of affection meted out by a beautiful human being.

His name is Bob. God gave me healthy injections of Bob just when I felt my spiritual reserves reaching empty. Bob would saunter over in my direction after a worship service and place his firm arm around my shoulder. Then he would grab someone and say to him, “Tell me something nice about my friend Mike.” As forty other people listened, I had something nice said about me. All the time, the ever-present arm of Bob lingered. I couldn’t have survived without those times of encouragement.

It’s tough to define discouragement accurately. A slumped shoulder, a shattered voice, or a war-worn smile may be the only clues of a friend’s discouragement. But we pastors know that discouragement can be a killer, draining the last vestiges of personal goals and dreams. Warm, bear-hug affection can cut through discouragement faster than anything else.

We have an exercise in prayer meeting that we call “the filling station.” If someone is discouraged, we invite him or her to stand in our circle. Then we all lay hands on that person and begin to pray in turn. We thank God for this person, for the person’s Christian life and testimony, for past, present, and future ministries. The prayers ask God to fill the person with encouragement, but one of the keys to the exercise is God’s working through the laying on of hands.

Jesus loved to touch those who labored under discouragement. Touch became the signature of his healing ministry. A woman whose body had been tormented twelve years with hemorrhaging reached out to touch her Healer. As he asked who had touched him, the woman fell at his feet in fear that she had violated some law.

People in churches today also hesitate to touch lest they break some law about showing their affection. I picture Jesus raising the woman to her feet and holding her hand gently as he speaks a word of comfort: “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

Caroline, a woman I know, has suffered for years from kidney disease. She had undergone months of preparation for dialysis, and her kidneys were giving her immense pain. Yet insensitive people had chastised her for lack of faith. Just months after dialysis began, she was rushed to a nearby hospital for a kidney transplant. Her heart was full of hope and praise. The kidney was rejected by her body, however, and had to be removed.

I came to her bedside not knowing what to say. She lay there despondent and worn out. All my words of comfort sounded hollow. I asked if I could hold her hand. She took both my hands in hers and held on tight. Then I began to sing songs of worship to God.

I was singing on behalf of her wounded spirit. For two hours I sang like that. My hands were holding hers, my spirit responding to the low condition of her spirit. As I left, her eyes caught mine. “God touched me through your hands,” she quietly told me.

In the face of rejection. I read a newspaper advertisement that totally caught me off guard. They were advertising for people who could work as deodorant testers. Every morning the testers would be expected to put on a prescribed amount of deodorant, work up a sweat during a one-hour workout, and then report to the laboratory. A paid “sniffer” would bury his nose in their underarms to see if they-and the deodorant-passed the test.

I could never be a tester. I’m sure the sniffer would flunk me, and I couldn’t handle the rejection.

The pews are populated with burdened believers. Many Christians feel so frustrated and inadequate because of past sin, failure, and doubt. And to finish them off, there are always plenty of “spiritual sniffers” to let them know when they aren’t making the grade. Therefore, to avoid rejection, people retreat into a world of don’t-touch-me-because-it-hurts-too-much. They are afraid to be touched, and they won’t touch.

A good way to bring people out of this cocoon of rejection is to show them through affection the warmth of unconditional acceptance. God’s people, however, must be subtle and sincere with this kind of warmth. Few things are more distasteful than a Christian who goes around handing out affection insincerely. People instinctively know when they’re victims of a spiritual cheerleader.

Ted had two qualities that made him as popular as fungus. In conversations, he did all the talking. But people could have accepted that quality if the other weren’t so obvious. Ted weighed 360 pounds. He had tried every diet and was on the mailing list of every weight-loss clinic in the Western Hemisphere. Even an amateur psychologist could see that Ted was carrying around a ton of rejection, which he tried to hide with food and words.

I tried to show affection to Ted, but he wasn’t easy to get close to (no pun intended). He kept pushing me away.

One day he phoned me and he was frantic. I rushed over to his house to find him in a pool of water. His pipes were leaking, and he knew nothing about plumbing. He couldn’t afford a plumber. And to top it off, he was too big to get under the sink himself.

I’m no plumber’s apprentice, either. But I asked the Holy Spirit for some Noah-like advice and then rolled up my sleeves. I got the water turned off and the tap disconnected. Ted and I drove with the cracked faucet to a local plumbing supplies store, and we returned with a new faucet, which I paid for. A mere four hours later I had it installed, like a true professional.

At the end of this ordeal, I put my arm almost around Ted’s shoulders and said I was glad to be of some assistance. At that, Ted began to cry like a baby. He said, “No one has ever cared enough to put an arm around me.” We spent the next two hours in talking and healing, crying and hugging. That day, Ted gave his life over to the control of Jesus Christ.

When I saw Ted a month later, he had lost sixty pounds. My embraces became increasingly more effective as they covered more territory.

Perhaps one reason there are so many untouchables around us is that they’ve rarely been touched by an accepting hand. My spiritual plumbing exercise opened a door to Ted’s heart, which could then accept my heartfelt emotions. I’ve learned I must build a foundation of acceptance first, and then I can erect a structure of affection.

Affection Ambivalence

My closest friend shuffled nervously as we waited in the airport to say good-by. As college freshmen unsure of whether we would return to school the next year, we sensed this could be our final time together. Blaine was leaving for his home, and I would head home in a car later. The terminal was teeming with people, which made our final moments more hazardous. To hug or not to hug?-we both felt the awkwardness of the situation.

“Why do guys find it so hard to show friendship with a hug?” Blaine asked. I didn’t have an answer. All I could think of was the possibility of a thousand eyes focused on us. But as I looked around, I saw many people embracing as a token of a fond farewell. That emboldened us to do the same. We exchanged bear hugs!

Affection reacts to genuine love the same way forgiveness reacts to confession: it’s the suitable reaction. Still, I am cautious, wary of those times when I might be out of line with a warm embrace. But through my friends who have cared enough to hold me close, I am beginning to feel release from the bondage of remaining distant. In the face of my own insecurities, I’m learning to sort out the time to embrace from the time to refrain.

Michael E. Phillips is pastor of Lake Windermere Alliance Church, Invermere, British Columbia.

Leadership Winter 1988 p. 108-112

- More from Michael E. Phillips

Mission Possible

Two popular notions running rampant within evangelicalism are, frankly, more rumor than reality. One is the so-called leadership crisis (see “So Where’s the Crisis?,” CT, Nov. 20, 1987), which portrays a generation of saintly “go-getters” retiring with no one in the wings to replace them. The other concerns the state of missions, or more specifically, the perceived lack of missions interest on the part of the church in the West.

As in the case of our leadership “crisis,” grim scenarios are presented as immediate realities (in this case, an evaporating pool of missionaries) if the church does not wake up and offer its best and brightest to the future advancement of God’s kingdom.

Now, granted, the church can ill afford to rest on the success of its missionary past. The Great Commission still lies before us. But these persistent rumors of crisis (an effective way of generating ministry monies) overshadow the fact that there seems to be no lack of missions interest among today’s collegians and young adults. One need only travel to the University of Illinois campus in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, at the end of this month to see what we mean.

There, for the fifteenth time since 1946, thousands of students will gather to have their missionary hearts quickened and their missionary vision rekindled. There, thousands of students will commit themselves to servant careers in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

The Urbana student missionary conferences have touched nearly every major sending agency in the U.S. According to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the conference sponsor, 1,000 students who attended the last Urbana in 1984 are either on the mission field or near departure. And another 2,000 have declared their availability to go within the next three years.

As for Urbana ’87, over 18,000 delegates are expected to attend, and organizers have little reason to anticipate that the positive fallout—namely, more of the best and brightest commiting themselves to the mission field—will be any less impressive than in 1984.

And yet, as impressive as the numbers are, perhaps the greater story here is simply Urbana’s sustained popularity. Even in the wake of student unrest in the sixties, student commitment to and involvement in Urbana persisted. And today, despite the almost universal conjecture that the eighties have bred a me-first mentality among youth, Urbana continues to attract thousands of students eager to make themselves available to God’s call.

While it would be unwise to place the need for new missionaries on the church’s back burner, it is equally unwise to create a crisis where none exists.

The missionary vision of the church is alive and well. And while missions challenges will always be with us, thanks to Urbana, so too will those who are eager to meet them.

By Harold B. Smith.

The Significance of Augustine

Adolf Von Harnack called him the greatest man “between Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer which the Christian Church has possessed.” Benjamin B. Warfield wrote that “he took up and then transfigured the Christian faith for those who would follow.” He has been described, with equal fervor, as both “the architect of the Christian Middle Ages” and as “the first truly modern man.”

Augustine’s significance in the history of the church is difficult to overestimate. His mission was to be a bridge, for, as Warfield again noted, “he stood on the watershed of two worlds. The old world was passing away, the new world was entering upon its heritage.… [I]t fell to him to mediate the transference of the culture of the one to the other.”

Augustine, the doctor of grace, became the living way by which Western Christianity passed from antiquity into the Middle Ages. Thus, Kenneth Scott Latourette wrote that “he moulded the whole of the Middle Ages” and “without St. Augustine’s massive intellect Western theology would never have taken the shape in which it is familiar to us.” In fact, said Daniel D. Williams, if “Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, we can say with equal justice that theology in Western Christianity has been a series of footnotes to Augustine.”

For Augustine, however, his theology was only an expression of his life in the City of God, and that city, of which the church was the living incarnation, was built upon the foundation of God’s grace revealed in Christ.

Consequently, Augustine would admit that he labored in theology “with all the fibres of [his] soul.” E. Portalie wrote of Augustine that he expressed his faith “not with his heart alone, for the heart does not think … nor with his mind alone, for he never grasps truth in the abstract, as if it were dead.” Rather, to his task as a theologian he brought “emotional tenacity, immense intellectual power, purpose of will, deep spirituality, and heroic sanctity.”

Augustine’s orientation in his theological reflections was thoroughly evangelical, for he regarded caritas, “charity,” or “love,” as the “animating force” of life, grace as its end result, and faith as the means by which the Christian was to journey. For Augustine, intellectual comprehension was the result of active faith. From the Latin translation of Isaiah, Augustine took a text that would illuminate his theology: “Unless you believe, you shall not understand” (Isa. 7:9).

A prolific author, the works penned by Augustine during his time in Hippo have stood the test of time. His work ranged from psychological autobiography, as the Confessions, to extended historical/philosophical essays, as The City of God, to theological treatises, as The Trinity. He defended the faith of the church in tracts against three major heretical groups: the Pelagians, the Manichaeans, and the Donatists. He also gave attention to the teaching of the faithful in catechetical manuals.

Augustine’s work, On Grace and Free Will, would be formative for Luther, as On the Predestination of the Saints would be for Calvin. Augustine’s correspondence, his philosophical dialogues, and his enormous number of sermons, came to fill volumes. Near the end of his life he would spend a good deal of his time organizing and editing a massive library that consisted entirely of his own literary labors.

Augustine’s restless heart was set alight at his conversion by the fire of God’s grace. That flame could not be extinguished by either time or events. Rome fell to the Goths in 410, causing Augustine to write The City of God. The holocaust then turned to the west and the south. Even as Augustine died on August 28, 430, the Vandals were besieging Hippo. A year later, the town was taken and burned, with two exceptions—Augustine’s church and his library.

Two centuries later Hippo would come under the sway of Islam. Even as the West entered a “dark age” and as the light of Christianity in North Africa was quenched, the light of Augustine’s faith and learning would steadily grow brighter—for the flame issued forth from a life that had been touched by God’s grace. After a millennium and a half, our hearts are still warmed, our minds are still enlightened by this remarkable man who journeyed from the desert, through the garden, into the city, lighting the path as he went for those who would follow.

By Duane W. H. Arnold, minister of the First Congregational Church of Detroit, Michigan, and C. George Fry, Protestant chaplain, Saint Francis College, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

North American Scene from December 11, 1987

UPDATE

Swaggart Responds

Television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart has responded to a CHRISTIANITY TODAY survey of the 15 most-watched television ministries. Results of the survey were published in the October 16 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAYs (dd. 46–49).

Jimmy Swaggart Ministries produces daily and weekly television programs. The weekly show, according to the Arbitron Ratings Company, is the most popular religious television program, reaching 1,759,000 households.

The ministry lists Swaggart’s salary at $86,000. He receives no bonuses or royalties, nor does the ministry provide him with a vehicle. Swaggart’s compensation package is determined by a nine-member board of directors. Members of Swaggart’s family, who make up less than half the board, cannot vote on the compensation package.

The ministry employs about 1,500 people, claims a net worth of $150 million, and lists its 1986 income at $141.6 million. The survey response stated that 8.7 percent of the ministry’s income is spent on fund raising. The organization is audited annually by independent certified public accountants. And a full, audited financial statement is provided to donors who request one.

NCC

A New Leader

Patricia Ann McClurg has become the first clergywoman to head the National Council of Churches (NCC). A non-ordained woman, Cynthia Wedel, of the Episcopal Church, served in the top NCC post from 1969 to 1972.

McClurg, 48, is associate executive for missions of the presbytery of Elizabeth, New Jersey. She is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Elected last month to a two-year term, McClurg succeeds Bishop Philip Cousin of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. McClurg said her goals for the NCC include extending its membership beyond the current 32 Protestant and Orthodox member denominations. That will not be easy, she said, because “the name NCC scares some folks” who oppose the ecumenical organization’s liberal agenda.

McClurg made no apologies for the council’s controversial political stands. But she said it is time for the NCC to go “back to the basics: caring about the Bible [and doing humanitarian] work in the world that lives in considerable pain.”

CUSTODY BATTLE

Favoring A Homosexual

A California superior court judge has awarded custody of 16-year-old Brian Batey to the homosexual lover of the boy’s deceased father. The case has attracted national attention in part because the boy’s mother, Betty Lou Batey, is a conservative Christian.

Judge Judith McConnell said the teenager had requested that Craig Corbett become his legal guardian. Corbett was the lover of the boy’s father, Frank, who died in June of an AIDS-related illness. McConnell said Corbett could provide the “stable and wholesome environment” that the boy’s mother could not provide.

Mrs. Batey lost custody of her son in 1982 after a judge ruled that she was denying child-visitation rights to her former husband. She later picked up her son for a weekend visit and then went into hiding for nearly 19 months. She was acquitted of child-stealing charges last May.

“I’m not fighting anymore,” Mrs. Batey said last month after McConnell issued her ruling. “We’re leaving it to whatever Brian wants.”

GAMBLING

Racetracks And A Lottery

Voters approved gambling proposals last month in Texas and Virginia. Pari-mutuel wagering will be allowed on horse and greyhound races in Texas. And in Virginia, a state-operated lottery was approved.

Virginia became the twenty-ninth state to approve a lottery despite the opposition of nearly every government leader who took a public stand, including Gov. Gerald Baliles. Leading business figures and the state organizations of United Methodists and Southern Baptists joined the effort against the lottery. And bishops from the Catholic and Episcopal churches warned that the lottery would impose hardship on the poor.

In Texas, supporters of pari-mutuel betting said racing would be a financial boon for the state, which has suffered economically because of a weakened oil industry. But Sue Cox, campaign manager for the antigambling group Texans Who Care, said voters may have been “duped by claims that pari-mutuel [gambling] will bring economic prosperity.… It is now our responsibility to be watchdogs of the industry, to be sure economic benefits are realized, animals are not abused, and crime is kept out.”

SUPREME COURT

Teenage Chastity

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide the constitutionality of a federal law designed to encourage sexual abstinence as a method of birth-control among unmarried teenagers.

The law, known as the Adolescent Family Life Act of 1981, allows religious groups to receive federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services to promote self-discipline as a birth-control method among teenagers. The law requires programs applying for funds to describe how, in providing services, they will “involve religious and charitable organizations, voluntary associations, and other groups in the private sector.”

The law was challenged by a coalition including clergy, a taxpayers group, and the American Jewish Congress. In April, Federal District Court Judge Charles R. Richey declared the law unconstitutional because it had “the primary effect of advancing religion and fosters excessive entanglement between government and religion.”

The Reagan Administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Arguing that Richey’s ruling “rests on brittle legal premises,” government lawyers said “large numbers of unmarried teenagers, some pregnant and others likely to become so, may lose vital benefits that Congress intended them to have.”

World Scene from December 11, 1987

EGYPT

Finding Joseph’s Remains?

Researcher Ahmed Osman says he has located the mummified remains of the biblical patriarch Joseph. In his recently published book, Stranger in the Valley of the Kings (Souvenir Press), Osman says the mummy of Yuya, which is kept at the Cairo Museum, is really Joseph.

“I am sure that Yuya, who was chief administrator and therefore virtual ruler of Egypt under the pharaohs … between 1413 and 1367 B.C., was the Joseph of the Book of Genesis,” Osman said in an interview with the Associated Press. “The [mummy’s] hands are placed palms down, under the chin. It is the only mummy we know of whose hands were not across his chest in the conventional position of the god Osiris, suggesting he did not subscribe to the gods of Egypt.”

Yuya’s tomb was discovered in 1905 between the tombs of two Egyptian pharaohs. Archeologists have observed that Yuya does not have strong Egyptian features, suggesting he may have been of foreign origin. However, the Bible says Moses took Joseph’s bones with him when the Israelites left Egypt (Exod. 13:19). And some conservative scholars, taking the Bible’s chronological statements at face value (Exod. 12:40–41; 1 Kings 6:1), would date Joseph several centuries earlier than the period during which Yuya ruled.

CHINA

Christian Medical Assistance

American Leprosy Missions (ALM,) a Christian medical organization based in New Jersey, has been asked to help the Chinese government eliminate leprosy in that country before the end of the century.

China’s Leprosy Association and the country’s Ministry of Public Health issued the invitation for the American organization to supply drugs and microscopes to complete a World Health Organization pilot project in Guizhou Province. Some 30,000 persons in Guizhou and two other provinces have the disease, ALM has also been asked to help rehabilitate persons disabled by leprosy.

HONG KONG

Aiming High

The assocate director of a Christian camp in Hong Kong says his ministry is aiming for 100,000 conversions before 1997, the year Hong Kong returns to Chinese rule.

“We’re going to keep busy and work very hard in the next 10 years …,” John Tsang told Pulse. “The Communists will eat us up like a big shark, but we will be alive and witnessing inside the shark.”

Last year, 45,846 people attended the Suen Douh (To Proclaim the Truth) Camp, and 6,304 became Christians. During the first six months of this year, 3,545 people were converted. About one-third were adults and teenagers, and the remainder were children in grades five through nine.

The three-day gospel camps include games, a family emphasis, and education about religion and ethics. The gospel is taught both in large sessions and in small groups. Public school students, as well as those from Catholic and Buddhist schools, receive permission to attend the camp because of its emphasis on citizenship, family, and religion.

SUDAN

Saying ‘No’ To More Aid

The government of Sudan has ordered three Christian relief-and-development agencies to leave the country, saying the worst effects of the drought in the early 1980s are over. But the three agencies—Lutheran World Service, World Vision, and the Association of Christian Resource Organizations Serving Sudan (ACROSS)—have appealed the order.

The agencies will be allowed to remain in the predominantly Muslim country while their appeals are being processed by the Ministry of Social Welfare. In its appeal letter, ACROSS noted that it began working in Sudan years before the drought, “ACROSS has been in Sudan since 1972 with the objective of working with the people of the Sudan in the development of their country with the emphasis on community development and self-help.”

The government, in a letter asking the agency to leave, stated, “… after two seasons of sufficient rainfall and alert measures taken by the government, the drought has been abated.” But the government-owned Sudan News Agency issued a report stating the organizations were given “three weeks to terminate their work on the grounds that their operations threaten national security.”

In the past, the government has expressed displeasure over relations many aid agencies have with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which controls much of the southern part of the country where the Christian population is concentrated.

AUSTRALIA

Biking For Bibles

Hundreds of Australians joined a bicycle marathon, some of them pedaling as far as 2,800 miles, to raise money to provide easy-to-read Scriptures in Kenya, Burma, and Brazil.

Called Bike for Bibles ’87, the event has been sponsored every year since 1984 by the Bible Society in Australia. This year’s event raised $200,000 for the society’s Overseas Literacy Development Fund.

Bicycle teams embarked from various cities around the country, some riding for five weeks to arrive at Canberra, the nation’s capital. One 47-member team covered a combined total of 45,857 miles. The team that left from Perth, on Australia’s west coast, covered a distance nearly equal to crossing the United States from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.

Abortion Law Complications

The U.S. Supreme Court continues to conduct business while Congress and the Reagan administration debate who should fill the Court’s vacant seat. Last month, the eight justices heard oral arguments over a law requiring minors to notify both parents and then wait 24 hours before obtaining an abortion.

The case, Hartigan v. Zbaraz, involves a 1983 Illinois law that requires parental notification, but not consent, before an unmarried minor obtains an abortion. The law provides for a court waiver of parental notification if the young woman can demonstrate that she is mature enough to make the decision herself, or that parental notification would be against her best interests. Legislators say the 24-hour waiting period was included to provide time for discussion between the parents and their daughter.

Previously, the high court struck down an Akron, Ohio, ordinance that required a 24-hour waiting period for both adults and minors seeking abortions. However, the Court has approved a Missouri law that requires parental consent before a minor can obtain an abortion.

Opponents of the Illinois law have charged that it would “interfere with a minor’s right to an abortion.” They also say the waiver of parental consent, known as a judicial bypass, is confusing and could cause further delay before an abortion is obtained.

Jurisdictional issues

Much of the oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court centered not on the merits of the law, but rather on the complex issue of whether the Court has jurisdiction to rule in the case.

A federal appeals court earlier upheld a lower court ruling against the 24-hour waiting period. The appeals court also said the law’s judicial-bypass provision could not be considered until the Illinois State Supreme Court issues rules concerning how the provision would be carried out. To date, those rules have not been issued.

Opponents of the law argued that the U.S. Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to rule in the case. But Illinois Deputy Attorney General Michael J. Haynes disagreed, urging the Court to rule on the merits of the law. “There are important issues of public policy in this case,” he told the justices. “Illinois and other states are confused as to what are the boundaries of these issues.”

The matter is further complicated by the vacant seat on the Court. Observers say a vote on the merits of the case would be close, with the strong possibility of a 4-to-4 split. If that were to happen, the appeals court decision would stand: the 24-hour waiting period would be held unconstitutional and the Illinois Supreme Court would have to issue rules about the judicial-bypass provision so it can be enacted, and then reviewed again by a state district court. Such a tie vote by the high court would not set a national precedent.

Americans United for Life, a prolife law firm that filed several friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the law, has been a key participant in this case. Chief staff counsel Maura Quinlan said Hartigan v. Zbaraz is important because several states with similar laws are waiting to see how the high court will rule. About 30 states have passed abortion legislation involving some form of parental inclusion. Quinlan said a Minnesota statute similar to the Illinois law resulted in significant decreases in the number of teenagers who became pregnant, gave birth, or obtained abortions.

The Character Debate: How Much is Too Much

The recent downfall of former Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg has refueled the debate that began with the thwarted presidential campaigns of Gary Hart and Joseph Biden: Does a leader’s personal moral character have any bearing on his ability to serve in public office?

With the news media continuing to look into such issues as drug abuse, adultery, and academic cheating, new questions are being raised about moral standards for leaders, reasonable public expectations, and the appropriate role of the media. CHRISTIANITY TODAY asked religious leaders, public officials, and other observers of the political scene to comment on the current climate.

Pros And Cons

“The public absolutely has the right to expect a certain moral standard from its leaders,” says Harry Dent, who served as special counsel to former President Richard Nixon. “… When people ask others to entrust them with a position of public honor …, [character] issues very definitely should be subject to examination.” Dent currently heads a ministry known as Laity: Alive & Serving.

Theologian Carl F. H. Henry agrees there is a connection between the private and the public. “If a congressman has an affair with a prostitute abroad and happens to be on a committee that governs funds to that nation, would not the threat of public exposure affect his political conduct?” he asks. “Do not the sins of the leaders contribute to the downfall of a nation?”

For Robert Dugan, director of the National Association of Evangelicals’ Washington Office on Public Affairs, the idea of holding leaders to a moral standard is rooted in the Bible. “In the Scriptures, higher standards are demanded of those who would presume to teach,” he says. “… So reasoning from that, I certainly believe people who are going to choose their leaders have every right to expect that they will be of excellent personal moral character.”

But defining those standards raises a problem. “I don’t think there is one carefully spelled-out moral standard for all leaders to follow,” says Patricia McClurg, president-elect of the National Council of Churches. “There is a general public expectation that the leaders will be leaders in all areas of life and in their personal life as well. But I don’t believe there is one absolutely clear job description here.”

U.S. Sen. Bill Armstrong (R-Colo.) also expresses concerns about a litmus-test attitude. “Issues of character and moral behavior are not only valid, they are an essential part of the equation when people are deciding who they want to vote for,” he says. “But, having said that, I’m really ill at ease about the direction that all of this is taking us. We’re getting into a situation where every candidate for every office and every appointed position is going to be asked a laundry list of highly personal questions.… And if the list gets long enough, I would assume that there is probably no candidate who could get a good score on such a thing.”

Drawing The Line

Where should Americans draw the line on what character issues are appropriate for public debate? U.S. Rep. Floyd Flake (D-N.Y.), an African Methodist Episcopal clergyman, says the Bible can help determine a standard. “I think there is a reasonable expectation that is consistent with our historical Judeo-Christian teachings in terms of living within the framework of some morality,” he says. “However, I think we also understand that our biblical interpretations talk about forgiveness and repentance, and that also needs to be included in the equation.”

Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas says it is appropriate to question a political figure’s personal moral character if there is reason to believe that person is guilty of indiscretion. However, he adds, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to go on a witch hunt—a ‘do you now or have you ever’ line of questioning.…”

Senator Armstrong adds that the circumstances surrounding past behavior are helpful in determining whether questions are appropriate. “If it had come out that Judge Ginsburg had smoked marijuana as a youth, in a setting of immaturity, I would have felt that was a lot less serious than the fact that he evidently did so when he was well into his thirties and indeed was already a professor of law at one of the nation’s most important law schools and a role model for students.”

Ungentlemanly Code?

The proper role of the news media lies at the center of much of the discussion. In the past, the press corps honored an unspoken “gentlemen’s code” stipulating that reporters avoid covering private matters. Today, with that code apparently shattered, some people are questioning the press’s qualifications to delve into character issues. At a recent political gathering in Iowa, the Democratic presidential candidates were bombarded with questions about smoking marijuana. One reporter was overheard saying, to the amusement of a colleague, “If anybody ever asked us these questions, we’d be in big trouble!” Theologian Henry, a former newspaperman and magazine editor, says journalists have moral responsibilities in the current climate. “Is ethical integrity due from media leaders no less than political leaders?” he asks. “I would argue that indeed it is.”

Thomas contends that some of his colleagues’ intentions in pursuing character issues are less than honorable. “To a certain extent, the press looks for something new in every election.… Frankly, no issue is sexier than sex. It sells newspapers and air time and all the rest.…” Yet Thomas agrees it is valid for the media to be asking character questions, especially in the areas of drug abuse and illicit sex.

Flake, observing the trend both as a clergyman and as an elected official, sounds a cautionary note. “I think the danger is that this new emphasis on character issues opens the door for persons with axes to grind, realizing that the public is waiting, and almost salivating, to hear bad news about politicians. All it takes is one person who has a problem with you as an elected official to create an image that may not necessarily be true.”

By Kim A. Lawton.

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