Filed under: The Home
“As theologian David McCarthy argues in his provocative book Sex and Love in the Home, a Christian ethics of sex, love, and marriage needs to reconceive sex and love as practices that exist ideally only within the basic prosaic rhythms of house and home: candlelight, long-stemmed roses, and lingerie can’t sustain love, but domestic economies can. This is not, at root, an argument based on realism or expediency. Rather, the point is that it is only through household practices that Christians come to embody the Christian virtues of mutual care, forgiveness, generosity, community, interdependence, and reconciliation. Our humanity cannot be separated from the moments of joy, anger, friendship, sadness, attention, confusion, tedium, and wonder that unfold over time and in specific places. Human intimacy is hammered out on an anvil made of nothing more, in McCarthy’s phrase, than the ‘day to day ebb and flow of common endeavors, joys, and struggles of love int he home.’ Love, sex, and marriage, to be theological, must drink from the very same wells. Love, sex, and marriage, to partake in their transcendent mission of revealing God’s grace, must embrace life’s decidedly untranscendent daily goings-on.
In a Christian landscape, what’s important about sex is nurtured when we allow sex to be ordinary. This does not mean that sex will not be meaningful. Its meaning, instead, will partake in the variety of meanings that ordinary life offers. Sex needs to be clumsy. it should at times feel awkward. It should be an act we engage in for comfort. It should also be allowed to hold any number of anxieties–the sorts of anxieties, for instance, we might feel about our child’s progress in school, or our ability to provide sustenance for our family. Sex becomes another way for two people to realistically engage the strengths and foibles of each other. Not only sexual intercourse is transformed as we allow it to take on the varieties of the commonplace; the varieties of the commonplace themselves are transformed as well. If we allow sex to be ordinary, we might better understand that human love is forged in, say, time spent cooking together, or in picking up our loved one’s laundry, or in calming our children’s fears. Through sexual practice, we come to find each other fallible, and we come to love each other for the way we see each other creating very human lives out of those very fallibilities.”
Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex, p. 81-82
Filed under: Wisdom from the Ages
John Henry Newman, commenting on his own spiritual pilgramige in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua , relfects on a time when his thoughts on the nature of reality changed for him. He is speaking specifically about the role of angels in the created order. This is apocalyptic realism:
“Again, I ask what would be thoughts of a man who, ‘when examining a flower, or a herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible thigns he was inspecting, who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for the purpose, nay, whose robe and ornaments those objects were, which he was so eager to analyze?’ and I therefore remark that ‘we may say with grateful and simple hearts with the Three Holy Children, ‘O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.””
“Thus says the LORD GOD: ‘Clap your hands, and stamp your foot, and say, Alas! because of all the evil abominations of the house of Israel; for they shall fall by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence. He that is far off shall die of pestilence; and he that is near shall fall by the sword; and he that is left and is preserved shall die of famine. Thus I will spend my fury upon them. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when their slain lie among their idols round about their altars, upon every high hill, on all the mountain tops, under every green tree, and under every leafy oak, wherever they offered pleasing odor to all their idols. And I will stretch out my hand against them, and make the land desolate and waste, throughout all their habitations, from the wilderness to Riblah. Then they will know that I am the LORD.“ Ezekiel 6:11-14
This is not an uncommon theme in redemptive history, namely that God demonstrates his God-ness through the judgment of some nation, people, king, etc. We see this with His destruction of the Egyptians to be sure. This judgment was so devasting and powerful, the Canaanites heard of it and were terrified and it caused some to turn to Him in faith (i.e. Rahab). The point I want to make is that part of our witness as followers of Christ is that He judges. When we shy from this, we diminish our witness and weaken the gospel. God is who we witness to. We don’t have the option as to what parts or actions of His that we like and choose those as our “talking points.” Let us not draw back from his overwhelming, all demanding love or His unapproachable holiness or His passionate jealousy for His name.
Filed under: Missional Musings
“The life of the community is the primary form of its witness, and it is also the equipper and supporter of each individual Christian in the practice of his or her vocation as witnesses for Christ.” Darrell L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church, p. 68.
