Sermon: Notes To My Grandsons on Sex and Spirituality

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Notes to My Grandsons on Sex and Spirituality ^[1]

By Charles Rush

October 24, 2004

friend once said to me, "If I ever got any positive advice on sex and spirituality, I can't remember what it was – which speaks volumes." He speaks for the generation, because way back when before the sexual revolution, we just didn't speak about sex in public circles. But boys, it is estimated think about sex every 20 minutes during the day and it is far too powerful a force to be left to infuse our subterranean impulses. Like a stallion, it can carry us off in a myriad of different directions, but harnessed by a bit, it can be directed to noble spiritual ends.

As different as we are, we both grew up on the same side of the sexual revolution. I was just year four after the change, you are living 50 years or so after the change. I can still remember the day when I was 19 and turned the motorcycle onto the beach near Nueba, north of Sharm-el-Sheik on the Red Sea in Egypt with a traveling companion from Holland. There before our very eyes were several hundred naked girls, a great many from Sweden. I looked at my friend and said, "Heaven can wait, Nirvana will have to do."

Your world has been far more sexualized than that. Since the time you were very little, you have been surrounded at least by images of naked people on the internet. Every night you have at least three different T.V. Shows to choose from that feature people tempting one another on some fantasy island, interviewing one another on blind dates with not only lurid descriptions of their sex life, but down right graphic descriptions at that. Before you were 18, you've already watched the equivalent of months of movies on sexually explicit themes, seen days' worth of advertisements for 'Girls Gone Wild', and of course you can surf the internet and find any manner of fetish. No, you have been over-exposed sexually and probably found yourself titillated in ways too complicated for your level of development, that made you, in your early formation as a very young man, more anxious more than anything else.

And you have grown up in a permissive society. Sex has always been casually available and no one has really asked you for much of a commitment in exchange for it. It is all out there if you want it and the question is, what do you really want?

A wise man once noted that a very few of us can learn from reading books. And some of us learn from watching others. But the vast majority of men have to pee on the electric fence. When it comes to what is best for us sexually, the vast majority of men pee on the electric fence half a dozen times before they get it.

A large part of this has to do with our first step towards girls as they are becoming women. Right out of the gate, the vast majority of men categorize women into two camps: hot and not. We let physical attraction lead. At the same time, most young men are secretly worried that they are not attractive enough and this is an essential issue that they must prove to themselves, to girls that they know, and to their buddies. So you become fixated on being hot and being with someone else who is hot, hopefully in a manner that a few significant people will notice. You are following exactly nature's hormonal prompting, the primal 'urge to merge' Charles Darwin described as the process of natural selection. We come naturally wired with a powerful sex drive that is attracted to a list of hot attributes in women so that the procreation will take place in such a way that the gene pool is most likely to broaden and improve in quality.

A surprising number of young men are content to let this Darwinian hunt be their sensual guide, almost exclusively. And it does work for a while. Physical attraction can make couples and physical friskiness can keep them together for a while. For those guys that compartmentalize well or who have low emotional quotient, it may actually be quite a while before they notice the limits of this approach to romance.

The symptoms look something like this. If you have only been together a very short time but physically involved, you many find yourself suddenly saying to yourself, 'what was that?' when you see this girl in a normal social context.

If you've been together for some time, you may discover that you have a hot physical relationship but you are uptight when you are around her otherwise. You may feel boxed in or like you need your freedom. You may say to yourself that she seems emotionally needy or she's too dependent on you. It is just a kind of a vague dis-ease that is hard to describe.

This is actually a spiritual subconscious reverberation from your soul warning you that your approach to romance is anemic and that you are setting yourself up for frustration, regret, and unhappiness. But most of us don't get to that level of reflection. Most of the time, you will just create some distance from this particular young woman that you have been so hot for, turn your interests elsewhere and find someone else who is hot and start the cycle over again. And you are likely to go through this several times, hopefully with a generally deeper approach to these relationships but perhaps not. It is actually possible in your world- because of the way that young men and women hang out and hook up- to stay in this rinse cycle of changing partners for quite a long time.

One thing you will notice fairly early on during this phase is that you are actually physically attracted to a very large proportion of the female population. And secondly, you will begin to notice that, even if you consider yourself ordinary or ugly, that there are a fair number of women that find you attractive. Everybody has their market. The attraction part is relatively easy as it turns out. What is tricky is finding someone that you really like being around all the time. What's not so easy is finding someone that is really fun, someone you are really simpatico with.

And, of course, sometimes even with your failed Darwinian hormonal hunt method, you just might get lucky and actually stumble upon someone that really is your compliment, someone that really understands you, someone you want to share yourself with unreservedly. And what magic that really is. Plato used to say that we spend our whole lives looking for our other half, that one person that can make us feel whole. He recognized that it was such a difficult thing and such a rare thing that he literally believed that there was only one person out there for each of us. I do not think that is literally the case but it does feel like you found the key that unlocked the door. It is a wonderful thing and I hope it happens to you. Most people say that this was the single best thing that happened to them in their life. Most people act like they were given a great gift and have a gratitude that they can't really even put into words. It is a good thing.

I can't give you a formula to make that happen for you but I can tell you a couple things that might help amend your approach and make it more likely. St. Thomas used to say that our libidinal drive is so strong that it has to be channeled and directed towards spiritual ends for us to find real fulfillment. Our spiritual selves must harness our physical selves. He was about half right and the part that is right is this.

In your quest for romance, don't let yourself be limited in your search by looks and personality, focus on character as well. How do they treat other people? How do they treat themselves? It will have a lot of bearing on how they will treat you and one day what kind of children they are likely to raise.

What do you look for? What are the qualities that define people with substantial character?

People with good self-esteem. You want someone that is at home with themselves, someone who takes pride in their work, someone who is interested in growing. You want someone who respects themselves and doesn't let other people take advantage of them. You want someone who can live and love out of their abundance not in order to fulfill something that is lacking in themselves.

What do you look for? People who are positive. People who focus on what is right about the world and who look for solutions when real problems present themselves. You want to find people that believe they can make a difference in the world, people that tend toward improvement and who occasionally dream big.

What do you look for? You want to be with people that are emotionally generous. They are not afraid to share their feelings with you and make it clear that you are appreciated. You want to be around people that will open themselves up and share with you what is inside of them. You want people that want to become deeper, who want to lead more profound lives.

What do you look for? You want people with integrity. You want people that are honest and will tell you the truth. And when it is something difficult like a character trait that you really need some work on, they will tell you the truth in love and support and not make fun of you.. You want to be around people that are honest with themselves, people that you respect, people that you look up to. You look for people that have a sense of humor and are able to poke fun at themselves and don't take themselves too seriously.

What do you look for? You want to be around people that are responsible, people who tell you what they are going to do and who do it. You want people who take care of themselves and who take care of those around them as well. You want people who honor boundaries, other people's things, other people's feeling, other people's trust. You want people that give some concrete evidence that they are growing.

What do you look for? You look for people with substantive moral and spiritual values. You want to be around people that are compassionate, who are concerned about injustice, who are genuinely interested in the things that make for peace, who know enough about the social challenges around us to carry on an intelligent conversation. You want to be around people that are broadly humane and who are aware of the spiritual dimension of our world and want to cultivate that. You want people that reach out to others in tragedy and are interested in service, who make a place for prayer in their lives and are interested in other religious traditions.

What do you look for? You look for young women that are on their way to becoming strong women. They will ask more out of you and they will get more out of you too. And here is the thing, you will get more out of you to boot. What you are hoping for is not just a lover but a partner and if you find a worthy partner, trust me, you will become fine lovers.

By the way, these character issues do not go away, they actually become more acute the older you get and character becomes more and more central and supplants physical attraction alone. Your body and your soul get more complicated and intertwined for attraction. And issues of character do not mysteriously and automatically resolve themselves just by aging. They have to be worked on every day. And these become the issues that prevent you from taking your romance to the next level until they are resolved.

In every relationship, you periodically get to an impasse that has to be negotiated, understood, and grown through. The issue itself is not always important but what is important is that it is always reflective of some character issue. It illustrates an area of your life that you need to grow through and mature. Until that character issue shows signs of growth, the relationship is on hold or impaired. And when the relationship is stalled, it affects your sexual expression as well. Ultimately, the way that you have to resolve threes issues is to strengthen your whole character, your whole relationship, in order to let your sex life reach its potential. That is the way it is. This is the spiritual substructure that undergirds physical attraction.

Of course, it is possible to ignore this substructure. Some people choose, consciously or subconsciously, to change lovers regularly enough that they don't have partners that make them face their character issues. Other men just compartmentalize their lives and devise a complicated negotiation with their spouse that trades silence on character issues for other things, so that there is an implicit agreement that sex is independent from growth. In both cases, what is lacking is integration. And what happens is that your full romantic self becomes more and more elusive. It is tinged with emptiness. It feels more and more hollow. It lacks something that is fulfilling. Your physical relationships start to atrophy but that is really a symptom that your spiritual growth has been in atrophy for quite a while.

My guess is that this is going to be a bigger challenge for guys in your generation than it was in mine. And it was a pretty substantial challenge in my generation. You were exposed to much more sophisticated and varied forms of sexual stimulation when you were young. You are probably much wider and more varied experiences of pleasure which seemed like Nirvana at the time.

My guess is that it also probably distracted you from the spiritual dimension of sexuality that has to do with interpersonal character growth and soul formation. My guess is that for too long you were just content with manipulating a formula for pleasure and that integrating your interpersonal spiritual growth and your physical sexual relationship hasn't come very naturally. I'm willing to be that you've had a vague sense that you were not integrated but it took you a fairly long while before you really understood that this was a problem. You had to pee on the electric fence three or four times.

Gentlemen, you are not alone. The very first converts in ancient Rome only came to Christianity after they figured out that their way of living wasn't working for them very well. After several missteps they decided to try to do life guided by a spiritual dimension. St. Paul said it was like harnessing powerful hormonal energies in a spiritually productive way: it was letting go of 'doing whatever you like whenever you feel like it, grabbing whatever strikes your fancy; letting go of being driven by your explosive anger and simple lust' (Col. 3:3-8). It is putting a bit in the mouth of those powerful forces and corralling that energy.

He said that the bit we put on those forces is love. And when we do, that energy gets channeled in a transformed way: into compassion, kindness, honestly knowing ourselves for our gifts and flaws, quiet strength, being even tempered, and forgiving. Having, in short, character (Paul uses the word discipline but it connotes the same thing). Gentlemen, that is what we need from you. We need character. Make us proud. Amen.

[1] I am largely indebted for this sermon to a website; I chanced upon when doing research for another subject and decided to expand upon their work. The website is www.boysunderattack.com and the section in this sermon that deals with character qualities comes from a page that deals with "Partner Compatibility, Isn't Sexual Attraction Enough?" It is used by permission Copyright 1998-2004" All rights reserved.