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CHAPTER THREE Angels and Animals

This past year my family and I stayed at a wildlife lodge in Africa. We would wake up early each morning and climb into a Land Rover with our guide, who drove us all over the “bushveldt,” as the Africans call it, looking at animals in their native habitats. Rhinos, cheetahs, giraffes, elephants, birds that had flown to Africa from Russia for the winter—we saw it all. In the afternoon of our second day, as we pulled into a large clearing, we saw two lions lying out in the open.

A male and a female.

The female would periodically get up and walk back and forth in front of the male, then she would roll on her back and side, then she would lie still for a while, then she would go through her routine all over again. Our guide explained that it was—you guessed it—mating season, and the female was going through this ritual to get the male ready for their “encounter.” Our guide then launched into an extended explanation of the male-female relationship and how they attract one another and how the one relates to the other.

When you see the biological need up close, so raw and so primal, you can’t help but notice how strong it is. These animals are going to mate because it’s in their DNA, their blood, their environment. They aren’t lying out there in that field, thinking, I just really want to know that you love me for more than my body. They aren’t discussing how to make a difference in the world. One isn’t saying to the other, “I just don’t feel you’re as committed to this relationship as I am.”

Other than basic biological functions, there’s nothing else going on.

Pure instinct.

No higher plane,

no greater cause,

no transcendent purpose.

Biology. Period.

Those lions reminded me of when I was in high school and my sister and I were visiting some relatives in Florida during our spring vacation. We decided to go check out the “scene” at Daytona Beach. I’m assuming you know the scene I’m referring to. It happens all over the place every spring. Cancun or the Caribbean or an island off the coast of Texas or whatever spot is “the spot” for that particular year is invaded by thousands and thousands of students from all over the country to drink large amounts of alcohol and have sex with lots of people.

The vibe is the same regardless of the year or the location or even the weather. This is your week to let yourself go, to lose yourself, to give in to whatever cravings or desires or urges you have. Because whatever happens in (choose a city), stays in (that city).1

Perhaps you’ve been there, you’ve seen the footage, or you’ve heard the stories. There’s the pervading sense that if something feels good, it takes precedence over everything else. And so how do the stories that are brought home begin?

“I can’t believe I . . .”

“We totally lost our minds . . .”

“It was so out of control . . .”

“The next morning I couldn’t . . .”

These scenes aren’t just about partying and having a good time and hooking up with someone, they raise questions about what it means to be fully human. The temptation is to ignore your conscience or sense of higher purpose, sacrificing what it means to be human. Which leads a person to act much like . . . an animal.

Are we just the sum of our urges?

Think about some of the phrases that get thrown around:

party animal

we attacked each other

she’s a tiger

basic instinct

They’re all an acknowledgment of the primal, base nature of the person’s behavior. As if there are these incredibly strong forces down in there that are usually repressed but for these few days are going to be allowed to take over. And when they’re given the reins, you have no idea what might happen.

Food for the Stomach

In the ancient Greek world, people used a phrase to describe this understanding of what it means to be human. They would say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food.”2 They understood a person to be a collection of physical needs—you’re hungry and there’s food to satisfy your hunger, you’re tired and there’s sleep. They concluded that sex is just like food, so when a man was “hungry,” he would go to a prostitute, saying, “Food for the stomach . . .”

There’s a passage in the book of First Corinthians where one of the writers of the Bible addresses this worldview. He confronts his audience with a challenge: Can they live for a higher purpose than just fulfilling their urges? He then claims that their bodies are “temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God.”3

This is provocative language. A temple was a holy place, a place where the gods lived, a place where heaven and earth met. The writer specifically uses this image to challenge them with the idea that a human isn’t just a collection of urges and needs but is a being whom God resides in. He’s trying to elevate their thinking, to change their perspective, to open their eyes to a higher view of what it means to be a human. He’s asking them to consider that there’s more to life than the next fix.

The “stomach for food” perspective continues to be a dominant worldview, even to this day. The problem with it is that it’s rooted in a low view of human nature. The assumption behind it is that people are going to have sex because they can’t help themselves. This perspective is presented as freedom and honesty and just being who you are and doing what comes naturally, but it’s built on the belief that certain things are inevitable. What it really teaches is that people cannot transcend the physical dimensions of their existence. It views people much like animals.

And so many live with a low-grade sense of despair, thinking that they’re helpless, that this is

simply

how

it

is.

Nowhere is this chronic despair more visible than in a lot of sex-education curriculums, many of which are based on the premise that “kids are going to do it.” If you deconstruct that, what do you get?

A loss of hope.

Who decided that kids—or anybody else for that matter—are unable to abstain?

In a lot of settings, abstinence programs are laughed at. So are those campaigns in which students commit themselves not to have sex until they’re married. Have you ever heard a news piece on the television or read a magazine article about one of them that didn’t at least subtly mock the idea of “keeping yourself pure for marriage”? People who organize and promote these kinds of campaigns are often viewed as hopelessly naive messengers from a far-off land that simply doesn’t exist anymore. The criticism of the “sex is for marriage” view is usually presented as the voice of realism. Are people actually capable of restraint?

But it’s not realism. It’s the voice of despair. It’s the voice that asks, “Aren’t we all really just animals?”

And Now for Angels

In the same way that we can veer toward the animal impulse, we can veer toward the angel impulse. And the one is just as destructive as the other. If the animal impulse is to give in and let our cravings rule us, the angel impulse is the opposite. It’s the denial of the physical and the failure to acknowledge that our sexuality is central to what makes us human.

I recently had a conversation with a woman whose daughter has been dating a guy for several years. My friend was telling me that her daughter mentioned recently that she and her boyfriend had never kissed. Which I guess isn’t that big of a deal. . . But then my friend went on to say that her daughter is a little disturbed because her boyfriend isn’t physical with her at all. Nothing. Ever. Holding hands, you know, the basics—nada. Cold fish. And they’re several years into the relationship.

My friend’s daughter is starting to wonder if everything is all right with him. Which of course is leading her to a far more troubling question: Is everything all right with her?

Which got me thinking about a conversation I had recently with a group of friends. Somehow we got on the subject of how we were first told about sex. One friend heard about it from his dad, who used ticket stubs to show how . . . well, actually, he doesn’t remember how the ticket stubs fit into his dad’s explanation. He was so traumatized by the subject that he stopped listening partway through. Other than his experience, which made us laugh, and a few others, it was striking how many in the group did not hear about sex from their parents. In fact, as the conversation continued, it turned out that a good number of the group were raised in homes where sex was not talked about at all.

How can a parent ignore something this big?

A man I’ve known for years was recently telling me about some of his challenges running a youth camp over the past year. The biggest one involved a fifteen-year-old girl. It had recently come out that she had been having sex with a man in the area. Which, among other things, got the man in trouble with the law. But when my friend and the girl’s dad got involved, it turned out that she’d been having sex with, well, lots of men in the area. My friend said that as the truth began to come out, her dad was shocked. He had no idea that she was this involved with anybody, let alone with this many men.

How can a father be that clueless?

But as many of us read that last sentence, we were thinking, Lots of parents are that clueless.

Parents who don’t talk with their kids about sex, ever?

College students who have been dating for years who simply have no physical attraction for each other?

Think about the woman who has just gotten married and she’s trying to figure out what it means to be true to her new husband and yet she doesn’t want to have sex with him. She’s got a million confusing messages about sexuality and obligation and love and him and her and it, and so instead of talking about it and getting it out into the open and dealing with it and learning and being open and honest she

just

stuffs

it.

And he’s got images and pictures and fragments of stories floating around in his head about what a woman is supposed to be and do for him, and this woman he’s just married who’s supposed to do that and be that and perform a certain way simply isn’t delivering. His temptation is to deal with his frustration through all sorts of other channels that will only drive the two of them farther apart.

Denying and stuffing and repressing never work because it’s a failure to acknowledge what is central to being a human being.

They can pretend they’re angels, but they’re not. They have to talk about what they’re experiencing and how they’re feeling and what it’s doing to them or they will begin the long slow drift apart.

Or the person who was badly burned in an unhealthy sexual relationship and became cold and withdrawn from anybody of the opposite sex. And he’s been this way for years. He doesn’t let himself feel. And he has essentially turned his sexuality off. You can’t pretend you’re an angel.

Angels and animals.

There are these two extremes, denying our sexuality or being driven by it, and then there’s the vast space in between.4

More

In the creation poem of Genesis 1, God creates animals before humans. And something significant happens in the creation of people that doesn’t happen in the creation of animals: people are created in God’s image. We have a spiritual dimension to us that animals don’t have. Some call this consciousness, others an awareness of “more,” others call it transcendence. However it’s described, the writer of Genesis wants us to see the distinction between what it means to be human and what it means to be an animal.

Have you ever seen a dog concerned that its life just isn’t going anywhere?

A cat reflecting?

A horse not feeling centered?

Animals have a physical body but no spirit.5

In the book of Job, it’s written that when God created the world, “all the angels shouted for joy.”6 And in the book of Psalms, it’s written that God made humans “a little lower than the heavenly beings,” which is a reference to angels.7 The book of Hebrews says that an angel is a spirit.8 A spirit is a being with no body, no physical essence. Marriage and sex and procreation simply aren’t parts of their existence.

An angel is a being with a spirit but without a body.

When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels.

And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.9

The tension here cannot be resolved easily, if ever. In the first century in the Asia Minor city of Ephesus, there was a religious group that was aware of the powerful sexual forces that we carry within us.10 They observed that sex can get us into lots of trouble. Which we’d probably all agree with. Their conclusion was that because sex is so dangerous, it should just be avoided altogether. But to avoid sex, you need to avoid romance and affection and all that comes with them, and of course you’re going to need to eliminate marriage altogether. So this religious group forbade their followers from getting married.

They had a similar practice in regard to food. There were foods sold in the markets of the cities that had been offered to the local gods in the local temples as part of their worship rituals. The leaders of this religion decided that if something had been offered to a god they didn’t believe in, they wouldn’t eat it. Their response was to make lists of foods the members of their religion could and couldn’t eat.

Do you see the problem with their religion? Anytime things got ethically complicated, anytime the waters got even slightly murky, anytime there was something to be held in tension, they simply avoided the issue.

Instead of dealing with the ambiguity and the lack of clarity that many things in life can bring when a person first encounters them, they would simply throw the whole thing out.

This is where the first Christians come in. One of them, a man named Paul, who wrote many letters to the early churches, addresses this issue in a letter to the Christians at Ephesus. He warns them about those who “forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods,” telling them that those are things “God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth.”11

Paul’s point is brilliant. He makes a distinction between the inherent good of something and the abuse of it. People may have seriously distorted the good gift that sex is or offered food to gods that lead people into destructive ways of living, but that doesn’t mean that sex or food are inherently wrong. He continues, “For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.”12

He insists that everything God created is good, and we come to see this through what he calls “the word of God and prayer,” which is the hard work of study and reflection and meditation and discussion and debate. The temptation is always to avoid things that are difficult and complex. To go around them rather than through them.

Think about the parents of a junior high girl who has just hit puberty and all of a sudden her body has changed in some significant ways, and she’s being noticed in ways she wasn’t before and now she’s starting to notice that she’s being noticed. Her parents have to talk to her about all of this. They have to wade into the complexity and confusion and mixed messages that our culture is sending their daughter. If they indulge one way, telling her to use her body to get what she needs and encouraging her to draw as much attention to her body as she can, they’re encouraging her to act like an animal. But if they ignore these changes and hope the whole thing just goes away, they’re sending her an equally destructive message. They’re treating her like an angel. Her sexuality and her body and her beauty are good things. They were given to her by God. Her parents must embrace this and all that comes with it. And they have to teach her how to embrace it in an honorable, dignified way. They must live in the tension and then show her how to do the same.

And so Paul addresses this religious group with their narrow and restrictive lists, claiming that they are actually working against God’s purposes in the world. Things that God has made, things that are good, things that God created to be enjoyed, are being ignored and avoided because these religious people refuse to live in the tension.

And now for the opposite end of the spectrum. A friend of mine recently interviewed Hugh Hefner, founder of the Playboy empire, for a book she was writing.13 They did the interview sitting on a couch in the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles. As he answered questions about his upbringing, he said, “I was raised in a setting in which [sex] was for procreation only and the rest was sin.”

What’s he saying, essentially? He was raised by parents pretending to be angels.

He continued later in the interview: “Our family was Prohibitionist, Puritan in a very real sense. . . . Never hugged. Oh, no. There was absolutely no hugging or kissing in my family. There was a point in time when my mother, later in life, apologized to me for not being able to show affection. That was, of course, the way I’d been raised. I said to her, ‘Mom, you couldn’t have done it any better. And because of the things you weren’t able to do, it set me on a course that changed my life and the world.’ ”

It isn’t difficult to understand his reaction to an angelic upbringing. He was denied something central to what it means to be human: affection. And so the rest of his life has been a journey to the other end of the spectrum.

In reaction to denial, people often head to the other end of the spectrum, which is indulgence. The pendulum swings. But we were created to live in the tension. And when you lose the tension, you lose something central to what it means to be human.

Living like angels can be just as destructive as living like animals.

In the first-century example, the religious group understood how destructive the physical can be; in the Hugh Hefner example, Hefner saw how destructive a lack of the physical can be.

We see this back and forth in individuals, in families, in cultures, and in churches. By painting sex as this horrible thing that is unclean and of the dark side, a parent or a church or a school can make kids want to do what? Of course! Go have sex.

Getting It Out

The impulse in our world when faced with tension is to come up with the seven steps or the formula so that if you do things in the right order the tension will go away. But that doesn’t always work. One of the marks of someone who has experienced significant growth in their soul is their ability to live in the midst of tension. Often people are told, “Just don’t have sex and you’ll be fine.” Well, yes, that’s true, to a certain extent. If you’re talking to a room full of junior high students, they will be much better off if they learn the fine art of self-control. But it’s larger than that. Because they are still full of raging hormones. Much like the rest of humanity. To simply tell them to ignore the animal and be the angel puts them in the awkward place of trying to ignore something that is very real and very new, something central to who they are.

We have to talk about everything we’re experiencing. Repressing and stuffing and refusing to acknowledge never works. Whether it’s a friend or a group of peers or a priest or a pastor or a counselor, we have to get it out.14 Some friends of mine started a website where people could talk about their struggles with their sexuality, and right away it received several hundred thousand visitors.15

Several hundred thousand.

You are not alone. Whatever you struggle with, whatever you have questions about, you are not alone. It doesn’t matter how dark it is or how much shame or weakness or regret it involves, you are not alone.

Some say the struggle is about eros, which is where we get the word erotic. Others call it testosterone and blame it on hormones. The Greeks called it the madness of the gods. The truth is, we’re crammed full of sexual energy. It’s how we’re made. We have cravings and desires and urges and temptations that can easily consume us and make us feel helpless in their presence. We have to talk about what we do with the forces that rage within us. We have to get it out or we will begin to die on the inside.16

Some of the most comforting words in the universe are “me too.” That moment when you find out that your struggle is also someone else’s struggle, that you’re not alone, and that others have been down the same road.

Tohu Va Vohu

Which takes us back to the beginning, to Genesis and the angels and the animals, which were both created before humans. We’re told in the first chapter of the Bible that God created all of this out of chaos. The earth was formless and void, and God brought order out of it. The Hebrew phrase for this formless and void state is tohu va vohu. Some translate the phrase “wild and waste.” Each thing God creates and sets in motion is a step, a progression away from the chaos and disorder toward order and harmony. The first things God commands these people to do, then, involve the continuation of this ordering and caring for and the ongoing progression away from chaos.

The universe isn’t finished.

God’s intent in creating these people was for them to continue the work of creating the world, moving it away from chaos and wild and waste and formlessness toward order and harmony and good.17 As human beings, we take part through our actions in the ongoing creation of the world. The question is, What kind of world are we going to make? What kind of world will our energies create? We will take it somewhere. The question is, Where?

Either we’re acting in ways that move the world away from the tohu va vohu or we’re contributing to the chaos and lack of order.

In the creation poem that begins the Bible, people are created after animals. And from the rest of scripture, we learn that people were also created after angels. The order here is significant. The movement in creation is away from tohu va vohu toward greater and greater harmony and order and beauty.

Angels were here before us.

Animals were here before us.

When we act like angels or animals, we’re acting like beings who were created before us. We’re going backward in creation. We’re going the wrong way. We’re headed back toward the chaos and disorder, not away from it.

Our actions, then, aren’t isolated. Nothing involving sex exists independent of and disconnected from everything around it. How we act determines the kind of world we’re creating.

I remember a story in the news about a group of college athletes who hired two dancers to perform at a party they had. The party ended with allegations of rape, and from there the story became about race and power and money and economics and status and all sorts of other things. It was a big mess. But what kept coming up was that these particular athletes had a well-established reputation for being out of control. Their parties were legendary. So their defense, even if it was solid and true, had this cloud over it because of how they were known to behave. And the administration of their school was in the awkward position of wanting to deal with this nightmare but really just wanting the whole thing to go away. But instead they had to keep explaining why they hadn’t done anything in the past to deal with the—let’s call it what it is—animal behavior of their athletes.

And as a result this university was in chaos.

Because God has left the world unfinished. And with every action, we’re continuing the ongoing creation of the world. The question is, What kind of world are we creating?

How we live matters because God made us human.

Which means we aren’t angels.

And we aren’t animals.