Sex and God II

A lot of personal correspondence has followed from my earlier posts about the Nerve moral values issue.

Two facets of the debate stick with me: 1) the church's need to speak to and value, not withdraw from/minimize/ignore, modern alienations and discords; and 2) that one part of that fight is to reach out to the healthy aspects of sexuality. S

To speak of twenty-somethings making fun of litugy as sexual: 1) Freud is right about the sexual content of our brains acting everywhere, and Christians submit to all forms of truth about the human condition; 2) laughter from outside does not mitigate the reality of the spirits' grace within; 3) the mocking is a sign of alienation among the cast-out in their 20s who feel like the church, like all forms of authority, is out to get them. Christians should comfort and encourage these people, not be shocked by them.

To speak to those taken aback by the allusions in certain blogs to the Christian textual history of sexual experiences with God: sexualizing the gospel is not an affront to God. When John Donne did it he testified to the gospel's ability to penetrate every facet of his personality. God cannot be denigrated by the human, any more than he is denigrated when the sinner or the sick turn to Him. That gospel can be read as a metaphor for intercourse is to dignify intercourse, not to delimit gospel.