I wanted this to be open because there are so many other sixteen-year-old girls out there who I think need to hear this, and it wouldn't hurt the boys to hear it either. I know you're busy, so I apologize for running on as long as I did.
I want to talk to you about sex, about what it means to have a sexual relationship with someone. Sexual activity is one of the most exciting pleasures, the most deeply satisfying, the most emotionally powerful things we can experience. In the wrong circumstances, however, it can be the most violent, ugly assault we can experience. Most of us experience it somewhere between those two extremes, and the key is the relationship we have with the person we are experiencing it with. I think that the power of this experience and the capacity for it to be so good or so bad comes from our origin.
If humans are just a part of the evolution of species on this planet, then the meaning of two people having sex is minimal at best. The
mythos of evolution would encourage us to try to choose the best genes to mate with and so advance the species; but it is virtually impossible to do that with any confidence: You never know what will be a useful gene in the future. But sexual activity is about far more than mere propagation of the species. By the way, I use the term '
mythos' to describe a story that explains something about us or the world around us, why we are the way we are, where we came from. Even if you don't accept the story as something that literally happened, as with the Greek or Navaho myths, it often contains profound wisdom and truth.
Consider with me an alternative
mythos to Evolution: in the Judeo-Christian
mythos, God specifically and personally created Adam, from whom humanity has propagated like a ring of smoke, to be a metaphor of Himself in this physical world. I do accept the Judeo-Christian myth of our origin as something that literally happened, insofar as it is meaningful to say that; but the Biblical account is admittedly poetic. Let's look at some of the details.
Let me first summarize the story of Adam's creation, something I have written about with other emphases
here. Prior to Adam, God who is called "Elohim", ie "the mighty ones", created the physical universe and the earth in particular, then He created plant life and animals. He did this by saying things like, "Let there be light," and "Let the earth bring forth plants, with seeds, and fruit trees yielding fruit according to their kind." By using that expression, the Bible leaves plenty of room for evolutionary processes to take place. He created the gene machine and has let it run. But when it comes to Adam, the Bible says, "God said, 'Let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness...'". And then it says,"So God created Adam in his own image; in the image of Elohim created he him; male and female created he them." I want to point out two things here: one is that Elohim is a plural noun, but used repeatedly to refer to the God of Israel, who is One God. The idea that God is one is repeated throughout the Bible, and is a foundational concept for Judaism. Christianity asserts that there are multiple persons making up this unified being, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In modern terms, what we have here is a problem with entropy. This multiple-person spirit-being is unified in loving intimacy. Jesus uses lots of poetic language to try to describe his unity with the Father and the Spirit.
But lets get back to Adam. That's the second thing: Adam was also a multi-person being, just like God. Sometimes that passage uses the singular, him, and sometimes it uses the plural, them. Again we have a similar entropy problem, and the analogy, the image God uses to describe the unified but distinct aspects of Adam is that they were male and female. Adam is a single unified physical multi-person being that is a metaphor for God himself. Themself. Whatever.
Now, Adam was the last thing God created in his initial six days of creation. As the first chapter of Genesis ends, it says that He saw everything He had made, and behold (ie 'look at that!'), it was very good. He liked it all so much that he took the next day off, demarcating all that He had done so far from everything He was going to do afterward.
So everything is wonderful. The time-space continuum is unfolding, the earth and all its fullness, the sun, moon, and stars are out there, and Adam is like a self-portrait in the midst of this work of art. Ah, but this is a work of performance art. This is just the initial motif, the set-up. In the second chapter of Genesis, we take a closer look at some of the events described in chapter one. Here we see how God specifically and personally created Adam, in verse 7:
"And the Lord God formed the Adam of the dust of the ground [heb. 'adamah', see where his name came from?], and breathed into his nostrils the breath [alternatively, 'spirit'] of life, and the Adam became a living soul."
Okay, so we have some more detail here about Adam's creation. The dirt guy. Maybe we should translate 'Adam' in English to 'Dusty'. Anyway, there he is, and God plants a garden in a place called Eden, somewhere to the east of where He had created Dusty, and He takes old Dusty there and puts him in charge of taking care of it. It's all very good, right? Dusty has all the food he/she/they need with fruit trees and other stuff all around in the garden. Oh, yeah, there are these two trees, right in the middle of the garden, one called the Tree of Life, and one called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Dusty is not supposed to eat fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and God tells him that.
"Just one thing, Dusty, don't eat the fruit from that one tree. In the day you do, you will certainly die."
Again, I pursue this train of thought
elsewhere. Then in the very next verse, God says, "It is not good that the Adam should be alone. I will make an appropriate companion for him."
What? Everything was fine, it was "very good". What happened? Well, I had a friend in the Seventies who was a Jewish Christian. He used to say, "They don't call him God for nothin'." And this prompted a corollary on my part, "What God says, Goes." In other words, when God says something, it is true, even if it radically changes reality in heaven or in the physical world. With a word, He called into being the time-space continuum, a brilliant invention for someone who lives in Eternity, a place where time does not pass. Then He filled it with all kinds of cool stuff as an expression of His Glorious nature, and finally He filled the earth with life and made old Dusty, specifically as a self-portrait in the midst of a colossal work of art. And it's all good. So when He says it isn't good for Adam to be alone, from then on it Isn't Good. Now we have some dramatic tension, because Adam IS alone. See why I call it performance art?
I was telling this story to a young woman on the train that took me south on my way to see my mother, and she interrupted at that point and said, "But God is alone." I just about fainted, because she is right. And suddenly, I was thrilled to think I had an answer to a long-standing question I have been asking Him: why the heck did you do all this? Maybe it's a hint that God decided that it wasn't good for
Him to be alone either, and we know that some day He will not be alone any more, because we will be with him in the intimacy of the Godhead, collectively an appropriate companion for Him.
But let's get back to Adam. God goes into this artistic counter-move and spends God-only-knows how much time creating a copy of each animal and bringing it to Adam, "to see what he would name it." Again there is a richness of theme in this
mythos, but let me stay focused and say no fit companion for Dusty was found among the animals, even the dogs ;-) So, having made a certain point, God puts Adam into a deep sleep, and does a little surgery. He takes out a rib and uses it to make a woman. Then He brings the woman to Adam (I guess He waited until Adam regained consciousness) and it's love at first sight. Adam, or what's left of him, says, "This now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called 'Ishsha', for she was taken out of Ish." Thus he renamed himself and the woman, in light of the new increase in entropy that God had caused. And the Spirit of God, who is narrating this story, says, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother and bond with his wife, and they two shall become one organism." Organism is a much better translation these days than 'flesh'. A human couple is like a Portugese Man'O'War, or the Star Trek world's "symbiant" beings, consisting of more than one physically different individual, each with a role to play in the whole for it to function properly, each with a deep vital link to the others. A loving human couple, male and female, recreates the Adamic image of God, and especially when in sexual union. That is my heart-felt opinion. I admit that the Bible does not explicitly state such a thing; but nothing else makes any sense to me. As we, the descendants of Adam and Eve, reach physical maturity, as you are doing, we become aware of a desire deep within us to find a companion; and engaging in sexual union with another person causes a deep emotional bond to form.
With the introduction of the organism consisting of two whole persons, one male, one female, in loving intimacy, a whole world of metaphor about the nature of God and Man opens up. Christ and the Church is like a bridegroom and a bride. And it all feeds back in every direction. Husbands are commanded to love their wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her. This is not an image of possessing a woman like you can possess a dog or a car. The two become vitally involved with each other as members of a greater organism, a super-person. It is about belonging rather than possessing. This is a chance to be more like God, to fulfill the intention of the design: it is the hope that beguiled Eve into sin, a chance to really fulfill that potential and be a living metaphor of God in the World. That is the hope and potential of finding a lifetime companion with whom to live in loving sexual intimacy.
You may ask why not have sex with as many other people as you like, as long as you like them. Well, all I can say is that there is only one God and one mediator between man and god, the man Jesus Christ. He originally made only one Adam and one Eve. I too suffer from the knowledge of good and evil, and so I too have trouble understanding why adultery is so grievous to Him, but it is, Jesus made that very clear. There is a spiritual and emotional benefit to taking your time and forming a loving lifetime companion relationship just once.
There's one last remark at the end of chapter two: "They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed." Now again, don't take that possessive form the way it is usually meant in English. A more accurate modern translation might be 'Adam, together with the woman'. But who said anything about being ashamed of nakedness? The writer of the story did, looking back to the time before sin came into the world. Before that, there was nothing to be ashamed of because their nakedness existed in a state of God-like loving intimacy. Now, however, the state of men and women has changed, spoiled by the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Gaining that knowledge completely changed our perspective on life, separating us from God and each other in a way we were not designed to experience. The stress of this error is what causes ageing and death, to say nothing of all the bad decisions we make all the time about what is good or evil.
Now here is a mystery. I call it that because I don't think the Bible gives a definite answer to this question and so we cannot know this with certainty: something about the way God made our genitalia seems to be inappropriate to look at. I think something about the most private part of the fellowship of the Godhead is exposed in the metaphor of our genitals and looking at the genitals of other people when you are not in the sexual delirium of love is somehow bad (see? there I go with the good/bad thing). I am not a very modest person, physically, but considering my own feelings about being exposed, I think it has to do with what we call human dignity. Perhaps the metaphor exposes God's dignity, which again is not a problem when the other person is in a loving intimate relationship, but becomes humiliating in the cold light of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God took a certain personal risk in creating Adam, and an even bigger risk in separating him into male and female, bringing this thing more into the open. Considering this, it is not we humans who are humiliated by our nakedness so much as God himself. So for His sake, I try to respect this dignity issue regarding my own nakedness and that of others.
Okay, let's move on to Eve and the original sin. She forgot, or maybe was not consciously aware of, the concept that she was designed to fulfill the image of God together with Adam; but she was a whole person in and of herself, and the Devil deceived her into thinking she could improve the metaphor alone. It was a very clever ploy on the Devil's part to appeal to Eve's wish to be as much like God as she could; but the metaphor requires ish and ishsha unified in love. Once the Adam were separated into two individuals, neither was meant to be able to embody the complete image of God alone. Let me say as an aside that there are individuals who are genuinely called by God to celibacy, to live their lives not as part of a couple, but they are very rare. Celibacy sacrifices this potential to fully express the Adamic metaphor in order to pursue more single-mindedly a life of ministry to the Church.
Even though all the offspring of Adam and Eve are tainted with the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we are still capable of becoming members of a couple and recreating the Adamic metaphor - but that damaging perspective has consequences, and God acted to modify the nature of the man, the woman, and the world, in order to moderate those consequences (and to move the story on toward the redemption He would ultimately provide as the Christ, the sacrificial lamb). I will skip what He said to the Serpent as being off-topic, and get to what He said to the woman: "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you will bring forth children; and your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."
That last point men have seized upon for the last hundred thousand years in order to lord it over women; but I would like to point out that God did not then turn to the man and say, "Okay, you're in charge here." No, He said, "Cursed is the ground (the 'adamah' remember?) for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it, all the days of your life..." The consequences of Adam's sin were visited on the whole world; the consequences of Eve's sin were visited on her own body. Make of it what you will, but Dusty was made from the dust of the world; Eve was made from the living flesh of Adam. The only way the man can properly rule over his wife is in the love of God, as the New Testament also commands him to do. I am here to tell you that any authoritarian crap is not part of this picture.
So her conception was increased, which I believe means that God speeded up her fertility cycle. If women only ovulated one time per year, as many other large mammals do, they would be fertile for over three hundred years; but the ageing process that the Knowledge of Good and Evil has caused makes it dangerous for women to try to bear children much past the age of forty. And okay, I guess that menstruation is also a consequence of that speeded up cycle, sorry. At least now you know there's a reason for it.
Sorrow is another matter, and that word means something more than physical pain. I'm not saying it doesn't hurt to deliver a child, and being a man I cannot pretend to know what that's like; but I have been present at the birth of my children and I can tell you that the pain of childbirth is not like the pain of an injury. In the word there is an element of sadness as well as pain, and work. Going back to the metaphorical feedback, the Christ is described as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." Women too, seem to be given an understanding of the sorrow (as well as the joy) that comes of bringing children into the world.
There is one last thing I want to mention. In Solomon's Song of Songs, the woman's lyrics mention at least twice that "with his left hand he holds my head and with his right hand he embraces me." Another way to translate embrace is to clasp, or to push it a little, to caress. We men want not only to put our arms around the woman we love, but we also want to caress their bodies. We want to gently clasp her breast or feel the contour of her cheek, her belly, her hip, her vagina. We men seem to gain a special knowledge of the world around us through our hands. When we handle something, we feel as if we know it better; and we deeply desire to know the woman we love. Many misguided men, blinded by the Knowledge of Good and Evil, think this touching is an expression of ownership. They think that if they can get a woman to submit to this kind of intimate touching, they own her. And so, all too often, men become aggressive about this, even threatening. Even violent. This is clearly a violation of God's design, and when physical intimacy is not accompanied by loving tenderness, it is as if the fellowship between the Father and the Son were to exclude the Spirit. It is a violation, an insult to the metaphor. God is One. When physical intimacy, even this relatively mild form, is forced it becomes the most egregious kind of assault. Another thing the woman's lyric repeats in Solomon's Song is, "I am my beloved's and he is mine". Love prompts a person, not to take the other, but to give oneself; not to possess the other, but to belong with the other. Thus we can fulfill our ability to recreate the image of God in the world.
So to summarize, sexual desire, sexual affection, sexual intercourse, are all about expressing love, the very essence of the God who created this universe. I hope that I have given you some positive reasons to relax, take your time, build a relationship. Resist our society's constant goading (which they do simply to make merchandise of your soul). If you examine your heart, I think you will see that there really isn't the urgency that you may sometimes feel in your flesh. As wonderful as a loving sexual relationship is, it is well worth approaching carefully, even reverently, in order to gain the greatest value from it.
