The Terror of Sex

Let me be blunt: If this article doesn’t work, blame my editor. If it does, you can thank me. Just kidding—sort of. He suggested the topic of this piece. I’m inclined to trust his wisdom. Besides, I could never walk away from a fight when I was a kid. But this is scarier than a fight for an old man. It’s about sex.

You know that book, The Joy of Sex? Think of this as The Terror of Sex. What could be more frightening for an old man than the cold realization that your sexual desire is less now than it once was? And you see a definite trajectory.

I led a Bible study made up of men from 23 to 64. Sometimes we older men would swap stories about the indignities we suffer at our yearly physical exams.

We would laugh uproariously as we watched the color drain from the faces of the younger men. They had no idea! Neither did we when we were their age.

But one thing we never joked about was the fact that our sex drive was considerably less than theirs. Then the color might have drained from our faces.

Do most men feel this fear? The boom in Viagra sales, along with the proliferation of potency and penile enhancement clinics offers strong support. There has to be a better way to get old than this, to find out what it means “to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). A good start would be to let diminishing sexual desire do its proper work of humiliation, especially if we have worshiped sex, as so many of us have in this culture.

Though painful, it’s good to be stripped of an idol, to find out that the growing bald spot on our heads really isn’t a solar panel for a sex machine, after all. It was good for the false god Dagon to topple when set next to the Ark of the Covenant.

Prop up the idol all we want, with drugs and surgery and psychotherapy, we will be better off to just let it fall over—if its demise leads us to worship the Creator instead of the creation. Jesus said the humble would inherit the earth.

I don’t want Viagra! Finally, at long last, my errant desires are more manageable. Why would I want to go back to the raging hormonal myopia of adolescence?

Frankly, I think I see my beloved wife—and all women—more clearly now, more appreciatively. She and I used to joke that sex makes kids and then kids kill sex. We were referring to the exhaustion many couples feel when caring for little ones.

Then we discovered that sex rises back up again, better, stronger, wiser. Maybe the urge dropped a bit, but the meaning soared, and meaning is a powerful aphrodisiac. It horrifies my young adult kids to hear us say this, but sex now is paradoxically better than ever.

How do old people make love? Very carefully, says the theologically perceptive joke. We are careful because making love with one foot closer to the grave, and the other on a banana peel, is a dangerous thing. But hope makes it safe, and fun.

Like Job, we can thank God for what he gave instead of cursing him for what he took away. More important, we can thank God that we now see that sex was always less, and more, than we thought. It is not a stairway to heaven, or heaven itself. It’s a signpost to the God of heaven.

If we like sex, it’s because it is a little bit like the God who made it. In ways our shrunken imaginations can only guess at, our bodies were not made for sex, but for the God who made sex.

What can that possibly mean? The only way to find out is when sex ends and what is sown in weakness is raised in strength, and we say, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

Ben Patterson is campus pastor at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA