When I moved into the city from the suburbs ten years ago, I was surprised to find the urban atmosphere much more sexually charged. Downtown health clubs, billboards, magazine racks, porno shops, and street wear all reveal, well, more. Much more.
It seems somehow odd that a culture advancing in sophistication and technology should increasingly emphasize sexuality, that most-primal human drive shared with all animals, but in my travels I have noticed this consistent pattern. In the Amazon jungle, sex has its place, surely, but it ranks somewhere below a successful hunt or a communal feast. In New York or Paris or Tokyo, sex is the sine qua non, the Prime Mover that advertisers rely on in order to sell fine wine, computers, and dental floss.
Sex Excess
I hope you are not expecting a moralistic screed against the sex excess in modern society. Moralizing does not have much effect when set against the raw power of human sexual drives. In fact, I wonder if we haven’t used the wrong approach entirely. Too often the church has treated sexuality as a rival to spirituality. If you’re oversexed, why, sublimate your sexuality and express that energy instead in your longing for God.
Between the third and tenth centuries, church authorities issued edicts forbidding sex on Saturdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and also during the 40-day fast periods before Easter, Christmas, and Whitsuntide—all for religious reasons. They kept adding feast days and days of the apostles to the proscription, as well as the days of female impurity, until it reached the point that, as Yale historian John Boswell has estimated, only 44 days a year remained available for marital sex. Human nature being what it is, the church’s proscriptions were enthusiastically ignored.
I question the motive behind such edicts. Can we so neatly substitute one drive (toward spiritual union) for another (toward physical union)? I doubt it. After all, in the Garden of Eden, when prelapsarian Adam had perfect spiritual communion with God, even then he felt a loneliness and longing that met no relief until God created Eve.
The Last Mystery
I propose a different approach toward sex excess. The more I observe our society’s obsession with sexuality, the more I see it as an expression of thirst for transcendence.
My urban neighbors, in their condominiums and high rises, don’t have much transcendence left in their lives. Few of them attend church; they are convinced that science has figured out most of the numinous mysteries of the universe, like disease and weather; except for the New Agers among them, they tend to scoff at superstitious practices, such as Nancy Reagan’s astrology.
But sex—ah, there’s a mystery. Normal principles of reductionism don’t apply: Sex is not something you can “figure out.” Knowing about sex, even taking a degree in gynecology, does not diminish its magical power. Probably the closest thing to a supernatural experience my male neighbors ever have is when they watch actress Michelle Pfeiffer in a clingy red dress atop a piano, or when they pore over each microdot of the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. It is no accident that these swimsuit models are often called “goddesses.”
In this view, sex is not a rival to spirituality, but rather a pointer to it. When a society so completely blocks the human thirst for transcendence, should we be surprised that the primal longings reroute themselves into an expression of mere physicality? Maybe the problem is not that people are getting naked, but that they aren’t getting naked enough: We stop at the skin instead of going deeper, into the soul. Recently, I talked with a priest returning from San Francisco, where he had visited various ministries to people with AIDS. “They want love so bad, it’s killing them,” he said.
More and more, I see sex excess as a modern mutation of classical idolatry, a commitment of spirit to something that cannot bear its weight. When God blasted the Israelites for their idolatry, he was not condemning their urge to worship, nor even the more immediate urges that pushed them toward idols: a desire for fertility, for good weather, for military success. Rather, he condemned them for seeking those things from senseless hunks of wood and iron, instead of from himself.
What the Old Testament calls idolatry, enlightened Westerners call “addictions.” These, too, are often good things—sex, food, work, chocolate—that outgrow their rightful place and begin to control a person’s life. To a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, alcohol represents an “idol” in which he or she invests all hopes and dreams. The idol of alcohol, like the golden calf, cannot bear such total commitment. It always lets you down.
(Tellingly, even our secularized society has found but one effective way to break the pattern of addiction: 12-step programs, all of which require submission to a “Higher Power.” In their own desperate ways, these strugglers are searching for an elixir that will quench their thirst for transcendence.)
Quenching Our Thirsts
I was thinking some of these thoughts as I read again the account of Jesus’ conversation with a Samaritan, a California-style woman who had already ditched five husbands and who liked to stay current on the latest religious trends (John 4). Two things struck me. First, I was reminded of the exquisite tenderness Jesus showed to those who had sinned grievously. He saved most of his moralizing for folks who, like the Pharisees, denied their guilt; this Samaritan woman had no excuse, and made none.
I was also struck by Jesus’ skill in connecting her thirst—literal, parched-throat thirst, and also her thirst for intimacy—with a thirst for transcendence that only he could resolve. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst” (vv. 13–14, NIV), he said.
A few verses later we learn that after her conversation with Jesus the wicked woman led a wholesale revival in her town. I doubt that she stopped having sexual desires, or that she instantly metamorphosed into an ideal wife. But when her deepest thirst was quenched, a thirst she had never even recognized before Jesus named it, all other thirsts took their rightful place.
