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CHAPTER TWO Sexy on the Inside

Last year I was in Canada for a couple of days, staying in downtown Ottawa. When I got to my hotel, I noticed that there was a buzz about the lobby. Lots of people with cameras and lots of British accents.

I got my key and took the elevator to my floor, and as I walked down the hall, the door of the room next to mine opened and a woman stepped out wearing a shirt with four words on it: “Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Charlie.”

Ah, yes, the Rolling Stones.

With great passion, she told me that they were staying in this very hotel and that the concert was tomorrow night, only a mile from here.

The next night, I went to the stadium and bought a single ticket from a man standing at the main gate. I found my seat and began talking with the couple next to me. At one point they asked what I do for a living. I told them that I’m a pastor.

They looked at each other, stunned. They told me that they weren’t very religious or part of a church or anything like that, but on the way to the concert, they both had this unusual sense that there would be some sort of significance to whoever they ended up sitting next to that night.

We discussed politics and the environment and literature and nuclear energy and music and family—all during the opening band. At one point the woman asked why the world was so broken and why people have such difficulty getting along. The question seemed to come from years of reflection. And it wasn’t just an intellectual issue; this was something that deeply troubled her soul. She pointed to the forty thousand people seated around us in the stadium and asked, “Why is it so hard for us to get along? Why do we have to fight with each other and go to war and hurt each other and sue each other and say horrible things about each other?”

As she was saying this, I realized that what she was saying was less a series of questions and more of a lament. A grieving.

We’re disconnected from each other, and we know it. It’s not how things are supposed to be. Even people who would say they have no faith in God or in any sort of higher being or supreme power still have a sense that there is a way things are supposed to be. And that way involves us as humans being connected with each other.

I recently talked to a woman in our church whose husband has a history of physical abuse. She told me about the group of people who have come around her to help her through her pain. They’re helping her set boundaries so that she and her children are protected, offering her whatever they can in the way of resources and support.

Several weeks after talking to her, a man walked up to me with tears in his eyes and told me that he had hit his wife and he wanted to get help so he could put his life and his marriage and his family back together.

It was him.

I asked him who he had to talk to about all of this, and he said he had no one. As I stood there looking at him, I had this sense that in this one man I was seeing what is missing with so many in our world. He was made for loving, connected relationships with others, but he’s cut off. Separated. Alone.

But our disconnection isn’t just with each other.

The Earth and Us

My boys and I were at the beach recently searching for shells and unusual things that had floated to shore. We found a giant jellyfish (dead), hundreds of hermit crabs (alive), a baby shark (dead), and lots of starfish (which are alive but appear to be dead). We also found broken glass, pop cans, plastic bags, and candy wrappers, and at one point, when my boys ran ahead, I looked down and there at my feet was a used syringe.

We’re disconnected from the earth. And we know it. Or at least we can feel it, even if we don’t have words for it.

We have been given this responsibility to take care of our home, to carefully steward and order and manage it, and we’re in trouble. From oil to air to pollution to wetlands, we find ourselves in our bare feet on a beach, almost stepping on a needle.

Notice the premise of many car commercials. How many of them deal in some way with getting out of the city and exploring nature? The makers of these commercials understand that we are alienated from the earth.

Many people live in air-conditioned houses and apartments.

We alter our air with electric machines.

We spend vast sums of money and energy to change our air. And we drive in air-conditioned cars—the 8 percent of us in the world who have cars—to air-conditioned schools and offices and stores with tile floors and fluorescent lights.

It’s even possible to go days without spending any significant time outside.

And it’s still considered living.

It’s easy to go for weeks and maybe even years without ever actually plunging your hands into soil. Into earth. Into dirt.

But this car— this is the one, the one with the space for my cooler and the kayak that I don’t own. This is the car that will change things.

Massive amounts of money are spent convincing us that this particular automobile will give us access to the mountains, streams, and deserts that we are unable to access at this moment. And when we make that trip, in that car, the one from the commercial, we will be connected with the earth. With our home.

We see this disconnection in the relationship between our sleep patterns and the invention of electricity.1 Prior to the lightbulb, people generally went to bed when the sun went down and woke up when the sun came up. With the invention of electric light, sleep habits became less and less regulated by the rising and setting of the sun. As a result, people today get far fewer hours of sleep a night than people did a hundred or two hundred years ago. We even have third-shift jobs in which a person works through the night while it’s dark, and then sleeps through the day while it’s light. All of this affects our connection with nature. Where once the rhythm and flow of life were dictated by the rhythm and flow of the earth, we now live relatively independent of these forces.

There’s no better way to understand how disconnected we are from our environment than to ask the big metaphysical question, the question that has challenged the great minds of our generation and the generations before us, the question that if we had a clear answer for it, would unlock the deepest mysteries of life on this planet:

Where does our trash go?

The truck comes to our place of residence, they dump into the back whatever we dumped into the approved container with the phone number and name of the company on the side, and we think no more of it.

Have you ever later in the day thought to yourself, I hope my garbage made it there safely?

Where is “there”? And how many “theres” are there? And what do they do with it when it gets there? Does every town have a there? Can the people who live next to there smell there? Are there laws about how many theres a town can have? Is there a point at which a there is full? How is this determined? Can the people who run the theres give us a percentage of how full their there is? Do they get together and discuss these sorts of things with other people who own theres?

No, we don’t even think about it. We know that skilled, highly trained people are on the job, and so we don’t spend a moment thinking about it.

Until we go camping. And the sign says to take out everything we take in. And for an hour or a day or a week, we’re highly attuned to what we’re doing to the environment. We pick up every wrapper, we bury everything that should be buried, we wait until every last coal is burned out. All because we don’t want to pay the fine.2

Which of course raises the question, Is there some sort of larger fine that all of us are going to have to pay, as the human race, for our actions? And if we were aware of what that fine was going to be, would we all of a sudden care very much about “there”?

But our disconnection isn’t just with each other and the earth.

Yesterday I was with a friend who recently started a new job. He had taken the job because he had a clear vision for how he could help bring significant change to the company. A few months into the job, he was exhausted. As he sat across the table from me venting about all of the ways he’s frustrated and burned out and tired, something powerful began to happen. He began to remember why he took the job in the first place. He started articulating all of the ways that he had become disconnected from his original vision for the company because of the voices around him telling him how he should do his job. Right before my eyes, he rediscovered his passion for the work he was doing. He repeatedly asked me, “How did I get so off track? How did I become so disconnected from myself?”

We struggle in our connection with the earth, in our connections with each other, and with being connected with ourselves.

But it wasn’t always like this.

In the Beginning

In the first chapter of Genesis, when God creates the first people, he blesses them. This is significant. God’s blessing is the peace of God resting on people. The story begins with humans in right relationship—in healthy, life-giving connection—with their maker. All of their other relationships flow from the health of this one central relationship—people and God. They’re connected with the earth, with each other. They’re naked and feel no shame.

And then everything goes south.

They choose another way.

And they become disconnected.

God goes looking for them in the garden, asking, “Where are you?” The first humans make coverings of fig leaves, and then they’re banished from the garden.3

Disconnected from each other.

Disconnected from the earth.

The woman is told that there is going to be conflict between her and the man. The man is told that there is going to be conflict between him and the soil.

And this is where you and I come in. We were born into a world, into a condition, of disconnection. Things were created to be a certain way, and they’re not that way, and we feel it in every fiber of our being.

Is this why the first thing newborns do is cry?

We’re severed and cut off and disconnected in a thousand ways, and we know it, we feel it, we’re aware of it every day. It’s an ache in our bones that won’t go away.

And so from an early age we have this awareness of the state of disconnection we were born into, and we have a longing to reconnect.

Scholars believe that the word sex is related to the Latin word secare, which means “to sever, to amputate, or to disconnect from the whole.” This is where we get words like sect, section, dissect, bisect.4

Our sexuality, then, has two dimensions. First, our sexuality is our awareness of how profoundly we’re severed and cut off and disconnected. Second, our sexuality is all of the ways we go about trying to reconnect.

Last year I was swimming in the ocean with one of my boys on my back in the midst of a pod of dolphins. They were swimming around us and under us and making their noises, which are incredibly loud and piercing, when one of them shot up into the air above us and did a flip. Right over our heads.

When we describe moments like these, the words we use are rarely about distance. The words we use are about nearness and connection, sometimes even intimacy.

Your friends just got back from hiking, and they say, “We felt like we could just reach out and touch the mountain.”

I just spent an afternoon with a doctor who donates significant amounts of time working with people who have AIDS and can’t afford proper treatment. He loves it. He talked with great passion about the joy it brings him. He’s a successful, educated, wealthy man who loves to spend his time with poor, uneducated people who are from a totally different world than he is. He was telling me how his work brings him a sense of connection, an awareness of the simple truth that we aren’t all that different from each other.

These moments move us because they have a sexual dimension. They help us become reconnected. They go against our fallen nature, which is to be cut off.

This is why music is so powerful. Have you ever noticed that when you ask people why a particular song or concert moved them so much, they often resort to ambiguous explanations? You rarely receive a response such as, “Well, the prolific use of polyrhythms offset with the arpeggiated succession of relative minors touched my heart.”

No, of course not. You get words like emotion and passion and energy and relationship and connection. Music is powerful because it is sexual. It connects us. We generally don’t think of it in those terms, but it’s true. The experience of a great concert—with everybody singing together, waving their hands in the air, and a feeling of oneness permeating the room—has a significant sexual dimension to it. We don’t know each other, we come from vastly different backgrounds, we disagree on hundreds of issues, but for an evening, we gather around this artist and these songs and we get along. The experience moves us so deeply because it taps into how things were meant to be, and we have so few places where we can experience what God intended on such a large scale.

Whether it’s a concert or a church service or a rally for a just cause, certain communal events draw us into something bigger than the event itself. We feel connected with the people we’re having the experience with, and not just connected but aware of something bigger than us all that we’re brushing up against in the process.

What we’re experiencing in these moments of connection is what God created us to experience all of the time. It’s our natural state. It’s how things are supposed to be.

It’s written in the letter to the Ephesians that there’s “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”5

And in the book of Hebrews, it’s written that God is the one “for whom and through whom everything exists.”6

Rethinking Our Definition

If we take this understanding of our natural state seriously, we have to rethink what sexuality is.7 For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that’s only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all of the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God.8

A friend of mine has given his life to standing with those who have been forgotten and oppressed the most.9 He’s in his early thirties, he’s single, and he talks openly about his celibacy. What makes his life so powerful is that he’s a very sexual person, but he has focused his sexuality, his “energies for connection,” on a specific group of people.

Some of the most sexual people I know are celibate.

They sleep alone.

They have chosen to give themselves to lots of people, to serve and give and connect their lives with beautiful worthy causes.10 These friends help me understand why the Red Light District in Amsterdam is so sexually repressed. If you’ve ever walked through this part of the city, where prostitution is legal, you know that it can be a bit jarring to have the women in the windows gesturing to you, inviting you to come in and have “sex” with them.

What is so striking is how unsexual that whole section of the city is. There are lots of people “having sex” night and day, but that’s all it is. There’s no connection. That’s, actually, the only way it works. They agree to a certain fee for certain acts performed, she performs them, he pays her, and then they part ways. The only way they would ever see each other again is on the slim probability that he would return and they would repeat this transaction. There’s no connection whatsoever. If she for a moment connected with him in any other way than the strictly physical, it would put her job, and therefore her financial security, in jeopardy.

And so in the Red Light District there’s lots of physical interaction and no connection. There are lots of people having lots of physical sex—for some it’s their job—and yet it’s not a very sexual place at all.

There’s even a phrase that people use with a straight face—“casual sex.” The rationale is often, “It’s just sex.”

Exactly. When it’s just sex, then that’s all it is. It leaves the person deeply unconnected.

You can be having sex with many, and yet you’re alone. And the more sex you have, the more alone you are.

And it’s possible to be sleeping alone, and celibate, and to be very sexual. Connected with many.

It’s also possible to be married to somebody and sharing the same bed and be very disconnected. It’s possible to be married to somebody and sharing the same bed and even having sex regularly and still be profoundly disconnected.

There’s a saying in the recovery movement: “You are only as sick as your secrets.” This is true for relationships as well. If there are secrets that haven’t been shared, topics that can’t be discussed, things from the past that are forbidden to be brought up, it can cripple a marriage.

And so they’re sleeping together, but they’re really sleeping alone.

The Communal Dimension

This has huge implications for what it means to be a part of a community. How many people do you know who aren’t a part of a church, company, or community because of the way they were treated?

When we hurt each other,

when we gossip about each other,

when we fail to forgive each other,

when we don’t do the work of making peace with each other,

we get severed from each other, cut off, divided.

I often meet people who aren’t part of a church and don’t want anything to do with God because of “all those religious hypocrites.” Often they have great pain that they blame on “the church.” But it’s not possible for an institution, whether it’s a church or a school or a business or even the government, to hurt somebody.11

Institutions are made up of people.

People hurt people.

Somebody in this group hurt somebody in that group. Somebody at that school or in that office wronged somebody else. And they haven’t done the work to apologize and make amends and work through it. When I meet someone who has been burned by an institution, my first question is, “What was the person’s name?”

We’ll never heal until we can identify who did what when. Only then can we begin the process of being set free.

People who move from relationship to relationship, church to church, group of friends to group of friends, may do this because they have a hard time connecting and committing. Some people refuse to humble themselves and do the difficult work of learning how to forgive and reconcile, and so whenever a relationship hits a bump or turns sour, they leave it. They move on to the next one.

Perhaps we should call this what it is: sexual dysfunction.

A friend of mine who is celibate makes it very clear that her vow of celibacy is not to go without love, but it’s a vow to what she calls “universal love.” I’ve realized over time that she is a deeply connected person. There is a certain potency to her presence that is hard to describe. She owns no property and she lives as simply as she possibly can because she committed early in her life to give everything she had to making the world the kind of place God dreams it could be. It is a joy to be with her because everything matters in her life. Nothing is shallow or trite or superficial. She’s very funny and smart and compassionate—a magnificent human. Because she’s been exploring her own soul for so long, she knows herself inside and out. She’s at peace, and it’s contagious.

You can’t be connected with God until you’re at peace with who you are. If you’re still upset that God gave you this body or this life or this family or these circumstances, you will never be able to connect with God in a healthy, thriving, sustainable sort of way. You’ll be at odds with your maker. And if you can’t come to terms with who you are and the life you’ve been given, you’ll never be able to accept others and how they were made and the lives they’ve been given. And until you’re at peace with God and those around you, you will continue to struggle with your role on the planet, your part to play in the ongoing creation of the universe. You will continue to struggle and resist and fail to connect.

The other day my five-year-old son asked my wife, “Mom, what does sexy mean?”

She thought about it for a second, and then replied, “Sexy is when it feels good to be in your own skin. Your own body feels right, it feels comfortable. Sexy is when you love being you.”12

Because it all starts with being sexy on the inside.