Sex and the Business of Heart Killin’

Just recently I’ve been invited into another man’s story—a story littered with all the characteristics we would typically associate with an addiction to sex. Recently, my friend has taken the time to thoughtfully chronicle the events, the twists and turns, the shame and inability to bring his desire under any control, the collateral damages to family and career, defeats and victories, and losses he’s encountered throughout his journey.

In the process of identifying the real source for his obsession, he’s had to dig deeper into his own story to find the definitive place of broken-ness. That is, to find the point in time at which his heart was broken, the lie became truth, and the vow made. This broken-ness is presupposed when Jesus stands to read the scroll from Isaiah 61 in Luke: “He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted.” The origin can usually be found in those distant echoes of our formative years: the home we grew up in, a traumatic event, our family systems, the communities to which belonged and their corresponding systems, circle of friends only name a few.

As I turned the pages of his story, it became more and more clear that my friend couldn’t avoid sex any more than I can avoid breathing. This is true of any addiction in that it becomes defining to us. It’s who we are. It’s my own opinion that, really, the true force behind our addictions isn’t what you’d think—sex in this case, alcohol and drugs in others, work, sports—but a deeper longing that the sex replaces (actually, numbs).

One of the things I’ve noticed in his story is the familiar approach to combatting these wayward desires: just kill it. We vow to do better. To try harder. To pray more. To stop. Just not do it. But just trying harder only works for a spell if it works at all. (Either that or our efforts are reduced to mere behavior management.) What happens most often—and it’s the easiest and probably the safest—is that we just kill the heart. Most often our pledges to ourselves amount not to addressing the identifying the real problem and inviting God to heal us, but stamping out the heart. Just killing it. The problem, however, is that we are not called to kill our hearts. We are not asked to stamp out and kill desire. Instead we are called to “guard our hearts” as the “wellspring of life” (Proverbs 4:23). And we are invited into desire. We are invited to remain the in wake of Eden’s loss … and look forward to paradise regained.

We’re not in the business of killing the heart. We are in the business of life. Addictions in their various manifestations make a play to destroy us at the very core of who we are created to be. Our hearts were created for paradise, Eden no less. God allows desire in order that we do not forget what we have lost, and what we stand to re-gain. Accordingly, our hearts long for a paradise lost. But we have a tendency to distort desire. These distortions of paradise promise fulfillment, but leave us empty; promise adventure, but actually rob us of adventure; promise control, but ultimately seek to own us; offer us beauty, but in reality only provide a veneer of beauty; suggest infinite pleasure, but at best only come through with fleeting, hollow moments.

Where our addictions are concerned, we would do well to take this question to our hearts: “What do I really want?”

Name The Animals

Thinking just a bit about God giving Adam the role of naming the animals. Never really thought much about this. It has always just made sense in a father-letting-his-son-have-the-pleasure kind of way. But being asked by Andy Crouch to consider this with more intention and depth I’ve come to realize that, really, this event is more akin to God making room Adam’s creativity. God could have named the animals Himself, just as the book says, and just given Adam a manual for how to maintain. But He doesn’t. What He does do before stepping back, though, is provide the raw materials required to conjure Adam’s creativity. Crouch describes it like this:

And this is what we see, subtly in Genesis 2 and more clearly in Genesis 3: In order for humankind to flourish in their role as cultivators and creators, God will have to voluntarily withdraw, in certain ways, from his own creation. He makes space for the man to name the animals; he makes room for the man and the woman to know one another and explore the garden. He even gives them the freedom, tragically but necessarily, to misuse their creative and cultivating capacities. God is always willing to be present, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, but he is also willing to grant humankind their own cultural presence. Without this gracious carving out of space, they would never be able to fulfill their destiny as divine image-bearers

The idea of God stepping back—actually withdrawing His presence—is admittedly a little new to me. But what makes a lot of sense in this respect is His tolerance for mistakes. That is, this makes it absolutely clear to me that He can deal with our mistakes; our messes; our questions; and dare I say given my conservative heritage even our disobedience. Although I don’t think this is necessarily conditional, I am compelled to add that our objective is significant. If our desire is to live with abandon, delighting in creation in addition to justice and righteousness and lovingkindness—if we’re living as the image-bearers of the one true God and out of the new heart He has given to us—then He is more than willing to redeem all of our “stuff” and make it work for good. In short, God gives us room to create. He is willing to let go of the bike and run alongside.

At the heart of the message lies what we make out of the word we’ve been given. Do you insulate yourself and hold on to what you’ve got? Or do you begin each day risking everything? How we answer these questions will say alot of about how we will ultimately look back at the question Gandalf puts out there in The Lord of the Rings: “The only question is, What are you going to do with the time you’ve been given?” It could be that we live too safe. It could be that we’ve become too soft. It could be that we’ve forgotten how to live as kings and queens in the Larger Story. Perhaps we have failed to accept our birthright. Although Eden’s lost, there are certainly elements of our original fingerprints that can be re-captured with a step in the right direction. He has given us—you and me—what we need. Now God is saying to us, “Name the animals.”

I’m Cold, Yossarian

The cold front the weather monsters promised has not disappointed. I realize that the 50s is very tame compared to the blustery chill we can expect in December and January, but given the 70s and 80s we’ve experienced the last few weeks, today puts me very much in touch with something very real. For inherent in the cold is a palpable reality, something that comes close to romantic although not in the sense we normally understand “romantic,” but in the sense of deep and profound pathos, in the sense of a deeper understanding of those things around us and an anticipation of something to come.

The final moments of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 chronicle the death of Snowden who, after catching flak during a WW2 bombing run, slowly loses consciousness as John Yossarian comforts him. Over and over Snowden tells Yossarian, “I’m cold. I’m cold. I’m cold.” Every time I feel cold against my skin my memory takes me back to these pages of Catch 22—the most bizarre, random, and absurd novel I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a bunch of John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut books, just for the record).

Amidst all this absurdity and the many laugh-out-loud moments ring Snowden’s last thoughts: “I’m cold. I’m cold. I’m cold.” It’s a brilliant juxtaposition, really, in that in life we have moments of euphoria and moments of pain. Across our many days we’ll experience seasons of prosperity and loss in unequal parts—and somehow all of this works toward some good. At the same instance the fictitious Snowden conjures images and recollections of paradise lost, I am also reminded of an Eden that is yet to come. Tragically, this is something neither Joseph Heller nor John Yossarian ever realized. Instead, each is left with Yossarian’s feeble reassurances: “There, there.”

Yes, we are supposed to enjoy the moments in the sun. But that’s only half of the deal we have implicitly made with reality. We are also called to endure the sunless months of life during which we are anything but dormant. It’s during these times we exercise a patient faith in the work of God and look forward to ultimate restoration and redemption. “I’m cold. I’m cold” is only a drop of time.