It never is.
It's complex and theological and representative of the fullness of complete Love that we will one day know.
It should be explored and studied and celebrated.
Because sex is a little glimpse of heaven.
Literally.
I just finished reading an awesome book called Sex God by Rob Bell. [Several years ago, I fell in love with this same author's writing and passion in Velvet Elvis. After this + that, I am officially his fan for life.]
As a Catholic newlywed and a theology nerd, I love how this book paints the picture of our intimate lives as Adam and Eves and Johnny and Junes.
Why?
Because I want our marriage to be better and better and better...
I want to be more in love as the years go by...
I want to be weak where he is strong and strong where he is weak...
I want our marriage to have a mission...
I want a glimpse of heaven...
And most importantly, I want to be naked....... Forever! [Just read, just read.]
Below is one of my favorite chapters word for word. Verbatim. Check it out, and, as always, let me know if you want to borrow the book! :)
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SEX GOD | CHAPTER 8: JOHNNY AND JUNE
Somebody recently gave me the Johnny Cash Unearthed box set. Theres's around a hundred songs on five CDs, all recorded in the last ten years of Johnny Cash's life. With the box set came a book, and it's fascinating reading. It covers how Johnny Cash's career was revitalized in his later years by producer Rick Rubin, how he would sit for hours at the microphone strumming his guitar and playing the hymns his mother taught him, how he gained a whole new audience of people in their twenties and thirties when he was in his seventies.
But what struck me the most were the interviews with the various musicians who consistently mentioned the love between Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash. What I've come across in everything I've ever read about him or by him is that their love grew over the years. They were most in love in their sixties and seventies than ever.
Their marriage got better and better and better.
They were more in love as the years went by.
Tom Petty said, "You just couldn't help but love her. John so depended on June, and he so bounced everything off June. It was just such a deep love that it was great to see how the two of them were such a team, really involved in everything together, including the music."
According to Benmont Tench, "She was such a delight...He was kind of 'the man in black' and she was this entirely different light, and it was wonderful the way that they fit together."
Here are people in their seventies who have been married for well over thirty years, and the thing that everybody who spent time with them mentions is the love between the two of them.
Whatever it is that they had, it spread.
It spilled over.
It couldn't be contained by just the two of them.
It affected those around them.
It inspired those around them.
Maybe when we meet older couples who obviously still love each other and love being married to each other, we're inspired because so many things around us are in the endless process of falling apart. When something isn't dying but it's going the the other way, it's growing. It's not losing life, it's gaining life.
What is it about their marriage that inspires us? Is there something that a couple can do now so that people will talk about them someday like the way they talk about Johnny and June Cash?
To find some answers, we need to go back to the Garden of Eden, to God declaring everything "good." The only thing God declares "not good" is Adam's being alone. None of the animals fit with Adam. None of them are adequate to be his partner. After naming them all, he is still lonely. It's in this context that God announces the need for a woman.
There's a mission here. Adam has been commanded to watch over the earth and manage it and creatively order it. Adam has something to do, and it's not good for him to do it alone.
So God says, "I will make a helper suitable for him."
The word helper is the word ezer in the Hebrew language. We can find it in Psalm 121: "I lift up my eyes to the mountains - where does my help [ezer] come from? My help comes from the Lord."
Here it is in Psalm 89, where the words of God are recorded: "I have bestowed strength [ezer] on a warrior."
In Psalm 121, the word refers to help that comes from God. In Psalm 89, ezer means strength.
To give more depth to the phrase, notice what Adam says about this woman: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." "Bones" is a way of talking about strength, and "flesh" is a way of talking about weakness. He's essentially saying, "Where I am weak, she is strong, and where she is weak, I am strong."
Eve is a corresponding strength for Adam.
They fit together.
They fill each other in.
They cover for each other.
They're better off together than apart.
The passage continues: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife."
This leaving involves his whole life. This leaving involves her whole life. They cannot do this halfheartedly. They have to commit all the way. They have to give everything to it. His place of residence and his primary ties to his parents and family now take second place to his commitment to her.
A new family has formed.
|ECHAD|
Think of how many marriages suffer because one or both of the people maintain all sorts of ties and connections with their family of origin that get in the way of their new marriage bond. Their first loyalty is now to each other, not to their families. Obviously this is not about cutting off contact with your parents or having nothing to do with them, at least in most cases. It's about realizing just how profound this uniting is.
So the man leaves his parents, unites with the woman, "and they will become one flesh."
Now the one flesh seems to be about their having sex. Which, of course, it is. But there is so much more going on here. Even having sex in this story is about something else.
In the Jewish consciousness, words are extremely meaningful. While an English dictionary has somewhere between one and two hundred thousand words, the Hebrew language has around seven thousand words.
So in Hebrew, words have to cover a lot of ground. A single word can have tremendous depth and significance. When it is said that the man and woman will become "one flesh," the word for one in Hebrew is the word echad.
Echad is oneness made up of several parts or members. So the man and woman are two people, two separate, independent beings, and yet when they come together, they're "one." The word is significant because it occurs in one of the most well-known passages of Scripture in Jewish history. It's a prayer from the book of Deuteronomy that begins, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one."
This prayer, called the Shema, from the word "to hear," is the central declaration of the Jewish faith, a way of reaffirming all that life is about. It's said by Jews when they wake up, when they go to sleep, when they gather on the Sabbath, when they study, when someone dies - there are numerous legends of great Jews having it on their lips are they were martyred.
The Lord is one.
The Lord is echad.
God is echad.
It's the same work as the "one flesh" in Genesis: "And the man and woman shall be echad flesh."
Central to the Bible is the affirmation that there is one God. Not many, one. And sex between the man and woman has something to do with God.
Who God is.
What God is like.
Adam and Eve are one as God is one.
Same word.
This marriage between a man and a woman - their having sex - is about something much bigger than the relationship itself. It points beyond them to somebody else - to God.
The point of marriage isn't marriage.
It's a picture.
A display.
A window that you look through to something else.
A marriage has a mission.
Our world isn't echad. It isn't one. It's broken, shattered, fractured, with pieces lying all over the floor.
We all have friends who are from "broken homes."
A couple "split up."
A spouse is "shattered" by his lover's infidelity.
Somebody's marriage fell apart and she's "picking up the pieces."
When our trust has been betrayed and those who were supposed to stand by us don't, this naturally has consequences for how we think about God. It becomes hard to trust that God is good when our significant relationships simply aren't that good.
A marriage is designed to counter all of this. Not to add to the brokenness of the world but to add to the "oneness" of the world. This man and this woman who have given themselves to each other are supposed to give the world a glimpse of hope, a display of what God is like, a bit of echad on earth.
|THEY THRIVE, WE THRIVE|
Is that where the phrase "making love" comes from? An awareness that something mystical happens in sex, that something good and needed is created? Something is added to the world, given to the world. The world is blessed with something that it desperately needs. This man and this woman together are in some profoundly mysterious way good for the well-being of the entire world.
When we go to a wedding, maybe we're so moved because we want this new couple to succeed. We intuitively know that their "success" is somehow tied to ours. Their making of love makes the world a better place to live, a place where there is more love for all of us. Maybe this is why we always notice great marriages. When their love is growing, it inspires us. Their life together gives us life.
A wedding reminds us that it's all connected.
We're all connected.
So when it's written that Adam and Eve were one flesh, their "echad flesh" is actually a celebration of a million other things. Things that ought to be celebrated: God. Life. Creativity. Potential. Shared partnership in caring for the world. Strength for weakness, weakness for strength. A new family. The ongoing creation of the world.
And finally, after all of this leaving and cleaving and bones and flesh, the passage ends with the line "the man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame."
No shame or embarrassment.
No apologizing for who they are.
No covering up or pretending.
No masks or secrets.
Total acceptance of each other.
That's what we want, isn't it?
We want someone to see us exactly as we are and still love us.
It's terrifying to let people see who we really are. To see the darkness in our hearts, our bad habits, all of the things we've done in the past that we regret. Our biases, our shortcomings, the things we aren't good at.
Being naked is terrifying.
What would it be like to be with someone who loves you exactly as you are?
If you see me for who I really am, the me that no one else has ever seen, the me that I wouldn't dare to show anybody else on the planet, the parts of me I'm not sure I want anybody ever to see, if I give you that kind of glimpse into the seat of my being, into my soul, will you still love me like you do now?
It's our question for each other, and it's our question for God.
Unconditional, absolute acceptance.
From a lover, from God - it's what we crave.
This is why a marriage is always about something bigger than itself. It's two people, in their unconditionally loving embrace of each other, showing each other in flesh and blood what God is like. These two are naked, and they feel no shame.
|OUT OF ORDER|
There's a progression here, a pattern in this passage for how we're made to connect with another. It's built into the fabric of creation. There's a way for souls to mingle.
And it's possible to get this progression out of order. We have to understand that we were created by God to live as integrated beings. Whole. One. Not splintered or fractured but one.
In the Psalms, it's written that "fools say in their hearts..." It's written in another psalm, "My spirit asked..." In another, "My heart and my flesh cry out." Hearts speak and spirits ask and flesh cries out. The body and the soul and the brain and the heart and thoughts and feelings are all merged into one being we call a person.
The passage in Genesis about Adam and Eve is about whole persons coming together. All of him being given to all of her. All of her being given to all of him.
If he wants her just for her body, that splits her. It means that she is good to him only for a part of her. That's why when she's slept with him, she wants to know where the relationship is headed. She wants to be integrated. She craves it. She wants to know that he will be there in the morning, and the next morning, and the next morning. She wants to know that beyond the sex, he loves her, he wants her - all of her.
The "naked and they felt no shame" part comes last in the story of Adam and Eve. It's a celebration of all the ways they've bonded. All of the ways their souls have mingled.
It's easy to take off your clothes and have sex. People do it all the time. But opening up your soul to someone, letting them into your spirit
and thoughts
and fears
and future
and hopes
and dreams...
that is being naked.
This is why when people sleep together after they've just met, they're raising the chances significantly that the relationship will not survive. Racing ahead of the progression always costs something.
When there is no common mission, no shared task, no sense of bone of bone and flesh of flesh, no bonds that take years to develop, many end up moving from relationship to relationship, having sex but never really being naked.
Too much too fast rarely endures.
As it says in the Song of Songs, "Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires."
I have some friends who have been married over thirty years. They have one of those Johnny and June marriages. I was in a meeting with them last week, and I noticed that when the meeting was over and everybody was leaving the room, they were still seated, deep in conversation about something. He was smiling. She was leaning close to him as she spoke. It reminded me of a conversation I'd had with him recently in which he was telling me about a vacation they'd just taken and how the highlight for him was the conversations he had with his wife.
It struck me as I walked out of the room: they're still getting to know each other. Still talking, still telling stories, still exploring just who this person is. They understand that people are highly complex beings and that the soul is infinitely deep. If you're mingling your soul with another soul, and there's no end to the depth of both of your souls, this could take a while.
Which reminds me of an outdoor restaurant I ate at last week. At the table next to our was a couple, probably in their early fifties. I noticed as we walked in that they weren't talking. Which isn't that unusual. But I watched them again after we'd sat down and ordered. And they still weren't talking. And so I must be honest and say that I began checking on them every minute or so.
And they just sat there.
I assume you've seen this before. Couples who don't talk. I'm fully aware that you can have an off night and that sometimes sitting in silence together can be very peaceful. But some couples, though they're together, they're a million miles apart.
|INFINITE DEPTH|
To pursue being naked, you have to believe that this person is worth getting to know for the rest of your lives. Being naked is peeling back the layers, conversation after conversation, experience after experience, year after year. It's rooted in a belief that the soul has infinite depth and you'll never get to the bottom of it.
Our understanding of what it means to be naked reflects what we believe about the human soul. Is it infinite? Or can you get to the end of a person?
The failure to understand the infinite depth of the human soul is often why people who are married have affairs. They stop exploring the person they married. They find somebody who appears more interesting.
Another couple I've known for a while just told me that they have been taking dancing lessons. They've been married well over thirty-five years, and they've just taken up a hobby together that's new to both of them. It's so simple, taking up a hobby together, and yet it's so profound.
We need to keep them dancing, don't we? Because we intuitively know that if they keep dancing, the world will be better for all of us. We see God in their echad. We desperately need more Johnny and Junes.
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