Sermon: The Beauty of Intimacy

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The Beauty of Intimacy

By Charles Rush

May 20, 2001

friend of mine was recently in Copenhagen for several months. The first day he arrived, he took his boys down to the beach so his wife could unpack a few things in peace. He is standing around the playground equipment chatting with some of the other Mothers watching their kids. A few yards away from the playground equipment is an area for sunbathing. After a while, several of these young Mothers drift over to the sunbathing area, strip nekked and stretch out on the ground. “Hello, and welcome to Denmark”. My friend is thinking he needs to make more time for bonding with his kids at the playground. Within a week, his boys are sidling up to him, “Dad, let's go down to the beach and look at some butts.”

The Danes have a reputation for being comfortable with their nudity. It is not uncommon to see women topless in the parks or wearing see through blouses in the Mall. The bus stop next to my friends house featured a 20 foot tall picture of a shirtless Model in an advertisment. It was a monument for his boys. “Dad, time to get off the bus. There's the nekked lady.

He dropped me an e-mail about Danish television. The first week he is there, he is sitting with his daughter in his lap, flipping through the channels in the evening, looking for Barney, when up flashes two Swedish porno actors, wailing away on each other. He flips quickly. His daughter asks, “are they okay?” Porno is just one channel among many.

Titilation is great for most of us. I never asked him, but truth be told, at the end of his first week in Copenhagen, he probably thought he had died and gone to heaven. But after several months, the euphoria waned. In an e-mail to friends, he said, “The Danes have done what I did not think possible. They have succeeded in making sex boring.” I read that line and thought to myself, “welcome to the future.”

Two decades ago, there was an important documentary done on the Sex industry by the union of prostitutes in Canada, called “Not a Love Story”. One of the people that they interviewed made what I thought was an arresting observation. She said, “what our society desperately needs is a shot of eroticism. What we got instead was pornography.” What is the difference between the two? It is the difference between the sensual and the sexual. Sensuality celebrates sexual expression as part of our spiritual selves, pornography is simply about technique.

We live in an increasingly sexualized culture and we are just going to have to deal with it. One of the only television shows I regularly watch is The Soprano's that celebrates the rich cultural heritage that is Northern New Jersey. Tony Soprano and the boys regularly hold meetings at the Baddabing, a strip joint on Rte. 17. It adds nothing to the show but a little bare bosom in the background. I have to imagine that gratuitous sex starts first on HBO and eventually becomes main streamed. [I just wonder if these gangsters kids ever call them at the Baddabing for help on their homework.]

Or flip over to the other leading cultural indicator for the future, Championship Wrestling. Vince McMahon has hired some famous porno stars and a bevy of strippers to parade provacatively in between bouts. You have to admit, the guy is a genius. Strippers, porno queens, and wrestlers appeal to the same crowd. We can fairly well expect that it is only a matter of time before pay per view TV has stripping in between wrestling matches.

We will raise our children and our grandchildren in a wide-open sexual environment. The present generation has before it, the rite of passage into teenage sexuality via pornography on the internet. Porno remains, by far, the largest industry on the internet and it is basically accessible to anyone anytime. We use one of the major internet providers in our home that comes with the latest child protection software and it blocks out about 90% of the explicit porno sites. But our kids only need 1%, let alone 10% to have total access. And I doubt seriously that the answer will come in better software protection. Our kids will stay one step ahead of us on software that evades protection filters.

The fact of the matter is that a large group of young teens of this generation will first been introduced to sexuality via the voyeuristic privacy of the their own screen, exposed to a variety of positions and fetishes way beyond the parameters of their emotional imagination in a masturbatory environment. As yet, it is far from clear what this will mean for them. It almost makes you long for the safe old days of the tame Playboy magazine and the girl next door. My prediction, and I hope that I am dead wrong, is that it will be increasingly challenging to get our kids to connect their hips with their hearts. It is a huge and important spiritual challenge in any age. This generation will have a twin challenge on our hands: 1) the over-sexualization of our culture in general and 2) the main-streaming of pornography which is essentially vouyeristic and masturbatory. It is not an ideal environment to nurture healthy sexual selves that are integrated spiritually and grounded in a monogamous relationship of love.

I do not believe that there is a qualitative leap between the generations. I suspect that we are likely to see a subtle but substantial compartmentalization. More often, we are likely to hear from the next generation, “Sex is just sex.” It is related to our love relationships but it is only one part of them, so a lot of things might work for different people… Whatever.

I don't want to talk about sex as such but about one insight from the bible that is relatively profound, one that will become more important as we negotiate our way through an over-sexualized world. The Bible suggests, and it is subtle, that the spiritual key to an integrated sexual life is intimacy.

In the second and third chapters of Genesis describe the meaning of our sexual selves in the great saga of Adam and Eve. The scripture has Adam say of Eve “at last bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” and the author goes on to explicate that our original union is also the purpose of marriage. “So a man leaves his mother and father and joins with his wife, that they might become one.” A deep and powerful union of souls.

Likewise, in the beginning of Chapter four, the scripture says “Now Adam knew his wife and she conceived and bore Cain.” At first glance, we would be tempted to say that this is simply modest. The biblical authors are too shy to talk about sex, so they describe it in euphemism, like Adam and Eve were just talking- “they knew one another”-when along came Cain. It reminds you of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez sleeping in separate beds with full night clothes and robes. It is rather quaint.

But the Rabbi's say that this term, “he knew her” is not simply a euphemism. It is also a recognition of the deep intimate knowledge that ought to accompany sexuality.[i] It points the way towards the meaning of love. Part of love's sexual expression is losing yourself with your spouse. The theologian Paul Tillich noted that the root meaning of ‘ecstasy' is literally ec- (out of) stasis- (to stand). It is a standing outside of oneself. Sexual union is transcendent and so it is fundamentally a spiritual experience. I am sorry to say that the Church and the Synagogue, for that matter, have done a poor job of communicating this over the years. Our awkward silence on the whole matter of our sexuality has left most people to conclude that sex is in some kind of juxtaposition with our spirituality, probably just something to be corralled, possibly something to be ashamed about. Certainly that is the world I grew up in the religious world of the South. Many Catholics have told me stories that echo the same milieu. We have religion up here and sex down there. We have our Saturday night self and our Sunday morning self and nary the twain shall meet. The Church, it seems to me, has started us down the path of compartmentalization already and now internet porno is simply going to further the quest.

What makes intimacy such a challenge, inside or outside marriage, whether you are 19 or 81, is that real intimacy is necessarily a celebration of vulnerability. As one Rabbi has said, intimate sensuality “touches the softest spot in each person, the most private and fragile part of a human being. Therefore, we must cultivate a healthy environment for our intimacy, one that allows us to appreciate and revel in this vulnerability, secure and protected… Most of us desire true intimacy, but we are afraid to experience true vulnerability, to lose control. But this makes it difficult to ever experience true intimacy, for being comfortable with your vulnerability is the ultimate intimacy. The illusion of intimacy-where each person is getting what he or she needs- only makes people feel good at the moment, if at all. If they are still in control at the end, if they have not exposed their vulnerability then their ‘intimacy' was just another form of exercising control over another person.”[ii]

When Masters and Masters, later Masters and Johnson, did their first exhaustive study of sex in America, you may recall that they interviewed all manner of people for their study: they had the swinging singles, old married couples, spouse swapping couples, divorcees, couples living together, on and on. When it came to the simple question of sexual fulfillment, they discovered- alas- that married, monogamous couples that had been together for a fairly long time were, on the whole, the most fulfilled group that they interviewed. I know, today over lunch, many of you will be saying to your spouse, “Look dear, it could be a lot worse.”

Of course, it is not about marriage as such, or monogamy as such or longevity as such. I suspect that if they refined their research somewhat, they would discover that the key to sexual fulfillment lies in your ability to be intimate- to give and receive love in vulnerability. Monogamy and longevity are the conditions for safety, where people are more likely be open to intimacy.

I saw another poll in the paper recently that said that couples who attend Church twice a month or more are more likely to be sexually fulfilled than those who don't. It may be the coffee, I don't know. I asked our denominational leaders if there was any way we could work this into a Marketing strategy…

Again, I don't think the correlation is direct. It is just that, on the whole, Church people are trying to open themselves to becoming more loving. They are trying to be more giving, understanding, to listen and bless those around them. Those are the spiritual qualities that open the door for the possibility of true intimacy. Together, they form the spiritual matrix that grants us a safe space, a secure space. It is out of such a safe space that we then have the freedom to let ourselves shine from within. We make a soul connection. Great sensuality follows from soul connection.

Great sensuality, of course, is bigger than sexuality itself. It is very nearly synonymous with people that are able to make a spiritual soul connection. It is the same spirit of character that makes for profound friendship and sharing. It radiates passion for others, passion for life, passion for God. Occasionally we will meet people that simply possess a passionate aura, a charisma. It has an infectious, magnetic draw. It is inspiring.

It transcends age and physical beauty. In the funky cult movie from the 70's Harold and Maude, Ruth Gordon plays a woman that exudes this infectious passion for living. Despite being in her early 70's, she takes an alienated, nihilistic 20 year-old young man under her wing. She is zany and eccentric and he is beguiled. Slowly but surely, her presence has a healing, life giving effect on the young man, and he is drawn out of his self-imposed obsession with death to a concern about her impending death because he is-even though he can't verbalize it- in love with life when he is around her, he is in love with love when he is around her, he loves her because she is passionate and it is infectious.

Passion is essentially a spiritual quality. It has to do with our soul. And our soul never ages, it only grows. Our bodies age, so it gets harder and harder to stay really sexy. Younger people have better physical tools. But we can experience more and more profound intimacy, more profound passion, as we age. True beauty is what shines from within us.

Because the spiritual quest is actually for intimacy, that is why we cannot be casual with our sexual expression. Intimacy is necessarily reserved and limited. It has to be nurtured in safety. It is delicate. We have to have boundaries. We have to say “No” to casual sex, not because we are prudish or legalistic but to protect intimacy, to nurture it.

Again, I am afraid that we have done a poor job of communicating this to our young people in the Church. Too often, we have just told them that sex is wrong, or nowadays we just try to scare them with all of the sexually transmitted diseases that are out there. But, we have done poor job of telling them what we hope for them in intimacy, passion, and sensuality. We haven't been clear enough about how important it is to find a partner that you have a soul connection with, that you can share with, that you can be vulnerable with in safety.

Similarly, intimacy is not mere familiarity. It is possible-some people say it is likely-, that over time, you can become less intimate despite being married for quite a long time.

Intimacy doesn't just happen automatically. We have to practice the things that make for intimacy- practice honesty, practice openness, practice vulnerability, engage in communication in a context of safety. Obviously, if you want to be good at something, you have to practice it.

It is curious though that we live in a world, where people know they have to work out to stay in shape, they know they have to go see a pro when their golf swing is out of the groove. But when it comes to developing deeper intimacy, better communication, these same people are reluctant to routinely get involved in marriage counseling. We tune up our cars from time to time, we spruce up our yards a couple times a year, but we only get involved in counseling when there is something seriously wrong. It is almost as if you have a character flaw if you can't do this on your own.

In fact, one of the best gifts you can give your spouse is a relational tune up every so often. You can grow from that.

For others of us, the best thing we can give our spouse is to get away together- drop the stress of the job, away from family, away from friends- and give ourselves a chance to re-create our selves. I had a friend who got away with her spouse for the first time in several years- all alone- it was just for a few days. She gets back. I asked her what it was like. She said, “I remembered why we got married in the first place”. What a great idea. Some of us don't take enough time alone and we should.

Brothers and sisters, Paul says “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own terms; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice when others make mistakes, but pulls for small victories… make love your aim.”

Amen.

[i] Schneerson, Menachem. Toward a Meaningful Life (1995), p. 67.

[ii] Ibid. p. 69.