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
