An Open Letter to My Sweet Sixteen-Year-Old Granddaughter

 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.

Women and Men - Beyond Good and Evil - the Body of Christ

So, here we are, male and female components of the Adamic image of God, knowing good and evil and suffering for that knowledge, being sinners and thus out of fellowship with God our creator. Oh, wait! Those of us who have come to know the Christ and have decided to follow him have been born again. Behold, all things are become new - hmm, except for this body of flesh. I seem to be pretty much the same as ever on the outside. Paul describes this problem in his letter to the Romans in chapter 7. Here are some verses:

For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. v5,6

Let me point out here that the word 'sinful' is unduly loaded these days, but it simply means error-prone. Do not take upon yourself the condemnation of Victorian old maids - it's bad enough as it is. I assert that this sinful nature is simply our knowledge of good and evil, inherited from Adam, that causes us to go so oft astray from the love of God.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. v15
I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? vs18-24

Paul argues here about how even the Law of Moses, given by God himself and thus as good as laws can get, simply became an opportunity for us to commit sin by identifying what sins are available to commit. I think that it is in our nature to want to do good; but Adam was not designed for good and evil. He, and all of us his children, are living in the physical world, not eternity. We "see through a glass darkly", meaning that because we are moving through the space-time contiuum, we can never see enough to reliably know whether something is actually good, until it's too late. And the more we wander off the path of righteousness, the more lost and messed up we all become. What's the answer? It lies in the word 'righteousness', meaning having the right relationship. The knowledge of good and evil was abstracted into the form of a beautiful fruit on a tree; Adam was an abstraction of the fellowship of God. With Christ's sacrifice on the cross, a way is provided for us to die to the old Adam and be reborn a child of the new Adam. So we Christians are learning to follow Jesus, moment to moment, trying to be in fellowship with Him. Never mind figuring out good vs evil: what does it take to get closer to Jesus, to know him better? That is the new guiding principle. We cannot see much of what is happening in the world, and less of what is happening in eternity; but we can see Jesus`as he reveals himself to us, and the more we see him, the more we become like him. The more we become members of his body, the less being male or female will matter.

Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. Eph 2:3-7

I think I can safely say that in the spirit, I am a new creature, made alive by the grace of God and immersed into Christ's spirit. In my spirit, I am seated in the heavenlies with Christ and in the coming ages, God will be able to use me, built together with the rest of the Church, as an example of his incomparable riches of grace and kindness. In my spirit, I have already begun living eternal life in Christ Jesus, hallelujah!

In my flesh though, phooey! I'm still here in this wayward world, and oops! I'm still kind of wayward myself. By faith, I know that I am free of the law of sin and death; but every day, every moment that ticks by seems to bring me another choice to make, to live by faith in Him or by the knowledge of good and evil. Why couldn't it work so that when you're born again, your flesh is transformed too? Or just die on the spot, dust to dust, and all that's left is my spirit in Christ while I await the resurrection? Well for one thing, that might have hindered evangelism, but hey, it could have been worked around ;^)

Anyway, the serious answer is that God has decided on a different end-game, one that ultimately brings him greater glory. God is not into quick fixes; he likes the performance aspect of how this creation is playing out, in spite of all the grief it causes him. I really don't quite get how the payoff can make it worthwhile. He doesn't throw away this nice universe he's created just yet, but instead we go through a series of transformational experiences in our lives that are intended to make us more like Christ, more the building block of the Temple that each of us was meant to be. And collectively, we will be his bride, a new Eve for the new Adam and the two will become one.

This is the last of my series about Women and Men and Adam and Eve. I haven't really answered quite what I set out to answer, but instead feel as if I have found something that renders the question less important than it seemed. For more detail about this incredibly rich metaphor of Elohim, Adam and Eve, and the Body of Christ, I suggest looking at the Song of Solomon.

Women's Place - and Men's - the Fall and Beyond

So here we are in the Garden of Eden, the man and the woman, naked and unashamed. Next thing you know, there's this serpent, more crafty than any beast of the field that God had made, and he talks to the woman. Where did this son of a talking dinosaur come from? Is he actually an animal that God had made? Maybe not. There is virtually nothing directly said about it in the Scriptures, but we commonly suppose this is an embodiment of Satan, the enemy, the father of lies. How he got there is completely outside the scope of the story, and so there is very little to be said about that, only speculation. It's always good to keep in mind your limits.

And while we're out of the box, let me be the pot criticizing the potter for a moment and ask, why the heck is that tree in the garden? Didn't you know that this would happen? The whole history of mankind looks like the consequence of an error in judgment, doesn't it? Well, I have to believe God did know. Again, maybe there was a reason he planted it there that is outside the scope of this story, but I don't think so. Here is my theory, and that's really all I can call it: God is such an incredibly cool person that He longs to be known as fully as possible. He can't help being under-appreciated; it is in His nature to want to be known. That is why he chose to personify Himself; that is why he created this work of art we call Creation, and Adam in particular, then Ish and Ishsha. And still there's more to be revealed. If it were any other person, that person's ego would be outrageously inflated to have such an attitude; but in God's case, it is only what He deserves. So He has set the stage for another increase in entropy that will reveal his loving nature to be greater than anyone thought possible.

The serpent says to the woman, "Yeah, so did God say you couldn't eat from any tree in this garden?" Was he fishing or did he know the answer?

Women's Place - and Men's - In the Beginning

When Jesus was asked whether it was lawful to put away their wives (Matthew 19 and Mark 10), he first engages the legal question on the Pharisee's turf. He asks, what did Moses say? Then, he launches into a deeper discussion of causes. In the Beginning, Jesus said, he that created them made them male and female; for this cause the two become one flesh. I always wondered what that meant, and the remark is made in four different places. For what cause, exactly? and what does that mean, becoming one flesh? I think the answers to both of those questions lie in Genesis.

Near the end of the sixth day, God, elohim, the mighty ones, said to himself/themselves, "Let's make Adam in our image, after our likeness..." So He did, and Gen 1:27 states, "in the image of elohim he created him; male and female he created them." God also told them to be fruitful and multiply. How they were to accomplish this we don't know.

The language is confusing because, I think, both God and Adam were a single entity that had a plurality of persons, and Adam abstracted something of Elohim into the flesh by being male and female. Some years ago, I heard a funny radio commercial in which a guy was advised to become "at one" with himself. He replied, "Yeah, it would be really hard to be at two with myself." Adam was able to directly experience in his/their flesh the kind of multiple-personal intimacy of the godhead that leads us to talk about the trinity. God gives them dominion over the earth and the animals, and tells Adam so, then looks it all over, pronounces it very good, and takes the next day off. Perhaps one reason He hallowed the seventh day and wants us to remember it is because it was the only day off he ever got.

Okay, so on to Chapter 2. God forms Adam out of the dust of the ground ("adamah" in Hebrew) and breathes the spirit of life into him. God plants a garden in Eden and puts Adam there to take care of it. In this garden is every tree that is pleasant to the sight, every tree that is good for food, and two more trees: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. More on that later.

Things sound pretty smooth and peaceful, but immediately, God goes on to introduce the next artistic theme. It is not good that Adam should be alone. Say what? It had been very good on friday evening. Well, from that moment on, it wasn't. God - and starting with after the seventh day he is referred to as the LORD God, Yaweh Elohim, I Who Am the Mighty Ones - God alters the design and sets himself a creative challenge: make an appropriate companion for Adam. I've written about this before, so I will repeat that the LORD God makes an artistic counter-move and creates an instance of every beast and bird he's thought of, and brings each one to Adam to see what he would name them. And the name Adam gives them is the name they get. Naming things, symbolizing things, is in Adam's nature and is one important way he and his children can participate in Creation with God. Okay, so finally God puts Adam into a deep sleep and takes out a rib, from which he created a woman. When the LORD God brings her to Adam, he names her, not Adamita, to continue the naming convention that God had started, but ishsha, because as he said, she was taken out of ish. Thus Adam also renamed himself: he knew that he was missing more than a rib. And here the Holy Spirit interjects a bit of omniscient narration to say for the first time, "Therefore shall an ish leave father and mother and cleave to his ishsha, and they two shall become one flesh." Wherefore? Because only be recombining can they recreate the Adamic image of God. This is more than just having sex; they have to recreate the personal relationships. But it is thoroughly bound up in the flesh, so sexual combining is part and parcel of this achievement. God has revealed something about himself in this higher entropy that was not knowable before. That has to be behind Jesus' unusually hard line about divorce. And the only reason it seems like such a hard line is the hardness of our hearts.

Women's Place in the World, and in the Church

I want to undertake this ambitious subject because of discussions I have been having with a woman who is smart, independent, and sensitive to women's issues. Being a man, I find that I have not been nearly as sensitive as I always thought I was about the way some of our more glib brothers talk about God's intended design. So I intend to conduct the most thorough review of the Scriptures on this subject that I can manage, and I intend to write a series of posts as I go. Please come along and help me.

Let me say at the outset that my beliefs as to what the Bible says about women are probably more liberal than many, but there are some places where I am forced to draw the line as to how women can best fulfill their intended role in Creation, if I am to respect the authority of the Scriptures. I think this is a matter of entropy and not value. By that I mean that men and women are different enough, both by original design and as a consequence of the Fall, that their paths through this life have distinct differences. That said, I assert that every one of us, man or woman, has a unique path to follow through this life, and we are all sinners, all needing to receive the redemptive work of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, all equally valuable members of His body when we do. And so I hold the notion of women's equal value with men as one of the most important revelations that Christianity has given the  world.