Once upon a time, I had a friend. We spent a lot of time together one summer, left for different schools again in the fall, saw each other over the holidays. At some point in the heat of mini-golf excursions and trips for ice cream and conversation, I began to hope that we might be more than friends. And by that, I mean that I started listening even more obsessively than normal to Ani DiFranco (So many sheep I quit counting / sleepless and embarrassed about the way that I feel1), listening to my Walkman in bed on those hot summer nights, pining away and vehemently denying it when my parents asked if there was something going on between us.
Perhaps because the narrative in my family told of my parents’ long-standing friendship that precipitated and undergirded their romance, perhaps because I’d memorized When Harry Met Sally, I never had a hard time believing that friends could get together; in fact, I was pretty convinced friendship was a critical part of romance. If you didn’t like the other person, how could you like like them?
But “I only like you as a friend” was a common enough rejection in our circles. Long before men complained on the Internet about the treachery of the “friend zone,” I inhabited it. Couldn’t he see that we had something more? Couldn’t he see that I wanted him to take my hand? He wrote me letters that fall—was this a sign? Or just a throwback habit for aspiring writers?
We went to a party one night over winter break. Not one night—New Year’s Eve. We drank, but did not drive. As we were walking to a cab, emboldened by intoxication, I stopped him. Listen. If we weren’t friends, would you be attracted to me? Sure, he said.
Well. Do you think that even though we’re friends, you could kiss me? Because it’s New Year’s, and I haven’t been kissed yet.
He backed me up against a wall and kissed me. It was hot. Definitely maybe something he’d been thinking about doing for a while.
We said good night. He went back to school before we saw each other again.
A few months later I took the Greyhound to his school for the weekend. Just a friend visiting a friend. No subtext or anything. We ice-skated. We must have eaten, though I have absolutely no memory of that. We went to a party. We played beer pong, as you do. We went back to his apartment, sat on the couch in thick silence. And went to bed. I slept on a borrowed mattress, by myself.
He hugged me when I got on the bus to go back to Boston, but that was that.
At some point later, I asked him why nothing happened that weekend, why he’d never kissed me again, especially not over those days with so much opportunity. “We’d been drinking. I didn’t think anything should happen if we weren’t sober.”
As it happened, we were not in the same city again for almost a year, by which time we’d both started to date others. The moment passed and the window closed. Since emerging from the haze of my pining, I have never regretted that this boy and I didn’t end up dating. We would have been a terrible couple. And, in fact, I have been grateful that he was wise enough to see what I couldn’t: that alcohol can helpfully lower our inhibitions, can, when the moment arises, press the shy and nervous into action, but can also ultimately prove a crutch to the sort of intimacy that friendship and love require.
My months of pining for this boy were neither my first nor my only experience with unrequited affection. I specialized in those conversational moments when the transition from friendly flirtation could have moved to physical connection, and didn’t. In those myriad moments, I wished, wished, the fellow in question could simply read my mind. I want you to kiss me.
The desire to be seen and known, to be intimately understood, is central to the human experience, and certainly to the Christian longing for God, but so is its flip side. The idea of grace, or unmerited love and forgiveness, is so attractive and marvelous because many of us feel that, if anyone really knew us, or saw us at our ugliest, those all-seeing eyes would know once and for all that we were disgusting and petty and narcissistic and afraid. To be seen as we really are, we might fear, would render us unworthy of love, would make it impossible for anyone to want to make out with us, much less build a life with us. We desire intimacy in a number of ways—emotionally in our friendships, our families, spiritually in whatever way we worship the divine, and physically with a lover. In this chapter, we’ll look at what intimacy is not—not a mind-meld, not a once-and-for-always connection—and what it is: an opening ourselves up to be changed through relationship, in, we hope, holy and life-giving ways.
WHENEVER I THINK about spiritual intimacy, or intimacy with the divine, Psalm 139 comes to mind, something I have read for comfort and poetry, but which also freaks me out a bit: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me . . . Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:1, 7). Does that include the bathroom? I sometimes wonder. Or the corner of my mind where I shove my ungenerous, self-righteous thoughts? Or my bedroom, especially when I’m having sex?
If I get too far along that train of thought, I remind myself that intimacy with the divine is different, as the Lord God is no Peeping Tom. The Living God is, rather, that force that moves in and through me; the spirit in me that is best, and most loving, the mystery of grace. When I feel a judging eye, it emerges less from a wrathful dude somewhere, and more from the sense of an estrangement from who I am created to be; it’s feeling apart from the source of my life and the ground of my identity because of some sin I’m committing or some gross thing I’d rather not admit to.
There’s a history in Christian thought of describing sex—holy, good sex—as sacramental; a point of ecstatic connection with our partner, a collapsing of the distance that separates us from all other people, and even a collapsing of the distance between humanity and God. We often talk about different forms of love: “agape” is the grace-filled neighbor love we aspire to; “philia” is “brotherly” or familiar love. “Eros” is about communion. Union. The desire to join with another. We know this word. We witness eros depicted in art, poetry, film, music. It’s the popular love; we hear a lot less about agape on Top 40 radio.
Christian mystics have experienced God in ways that can only be described as erotic throughout the centuries: moments of vision or ecstasy in which they feel drawn in by the Divine Love. Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1210–1297 CE) wrote,
Lord, now I am a naked soul
And you in yourself an All-Glorious God.
Our mutual intercourse
Is eternal life without end.2
This language is strange and somewhat disconcerting if we think of God as the bearded fellow who creepily watches us all the time. But, as Bernard McGinn, scholar of medieval mysticism, once argued, “the mystics contend that divine love is the heart of all reality.”3
“The use of certain forms of erotic expression [is] for a different purpose—the transformation of all human desires in terms of what the mystic believes to be its true source.”4 That is, the divine reality, “God,” is the source and end (“telos,” or purpose) of love; that love reaches out to and moves through and is experienced by humanity, and can even transform human love, rendering it in service to the divine love that gave it its power in the first place. In those ecstatic experiences, the soul is known, naked, and brought into union with its source. The language is erotic; the experience is intimate.
Though I believe in the possibility of ecstatic communion between God and humanity, and certainly of the communion of bodies and souls possible in intimate acts and relationships between humans, I think those experiences can be hard to come by.
Intimacy with the divine has been cultivated throughout history through prayer, ritual, meditation, discernment. The transformation of our loves into service of the divine love is a lifelong endeavor. Whether we experience that intimacy as comfort and peace, ecstasy and passion, or something in between, will depend on who we are and the type of our deepest longings. Do we need peace? Do we long for passion?
INTIMACY WITH OTHER human beings seems different, first and foremost because those of us who long for intimacy with the divine tend to profess that we know things about the character of God. God is infinitely trustworthy; God graciously receives our longings; God forgives all our shortcomings. God will not fail to return our calls if we come off as too needy. We relate to God as the fabric of reality, the source of our Life, the One who moves within and through us. Other people require that you put your thoughts into words most of the time; other people are not merely mysterious to us, they are strange.
Connecting fully with another person is often no easy task. And, worse, the ease of a physical connection does not always translate into an emotional one; a spiritual connection does not always lend itself to a romantic one.
One night, just after I’d started dating the Billy Collins guy, he walked with me across a city parking lot that separated the movie theater and the nearby wine bar where we were heading for a post-cinematic drink. (Not being able to afford dinner and a movie on a grad school student budget, we were still trying to keep it classy.) Snow started to fall, and he stopped in his tracks, took my hand, pulled me to him, and kissed me for the first time in the glow of the lamplight.
It was straight out of a romantic comedy; I half expected the soundtrack to swell.
In his arms, in the snow: that was the movie moment I’d been waiting for. The flirting and speculation and hyperarticulate conversation of two students in theology (for God’s sake) finally led to action.
I swooned. Atta boy!
The elements of that kiss—the romance and the snow, plus the fact that this boy was a mainline Protestant graduate student just like me, had me well-nigh convinced that this one was the one that was going to stick. Whether I had the fates or providence to thank mattered little to me; I was just glad to be there.
But, to my great disappointment, that one moment was easily the most successful moment of our brief relationship (academic quarters are only ten weeks at the University of Chicago, so while we started in the snow, we were definitely done by spring break). A moment, even a singularly hot one, does not a life-lasting love make. We were always much better at reading each other’s bodies than minds.
For all the hope and possibility of having a universe simply pulsing with Love, it’s harder work than we, at the cusp of adulthood and sexual awakening, tend to realize. I don’t just want to blame the romantic comedies for our bewilderment: there’s also the Spice Girls (remember “2 Become 1”?) and the Bible.
Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.”
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.
(GENESIS 2:23–24)
Paul uses that last verse to remind the folks at the church in Corinth not to sleep with prostitutes: “Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, ‘The two shall be one flesh’” (1 Corinthians 6:16). He’s like a first-century version of that terrible youth group abstinence activity: the one with the cup that everybody spits in; or the one with the tape that gets less sticky over time.
I’ve always wrestled with the “one flesh” phrasing. It’s descriptive about certain acts, to be sure, and captures the erotic desire of lovers to be as closely intertwined as they possibly can be. But there is a distinct difference between actually losing the boundaries of one’s self and the ecstatic joining of hearts and bodies that sometimes happens in the best sex. What we want to aim for, what we sometimes get, is deep, intimate connection, not the annihilation of parts of ourselves. The language in Genesis and used by Paul is metaphorical. Just as in mysticism, the drive “is toward a moment in which the difference between lover and beloved is extinguished.”5 When it happens, it’s a wonder, but it lasts only a moment.
“You and I,” a love song by the band Wilco, illustrates this phenomenon beautifully: You and I, we might be strangers / however close we get sometimes. We can swap bodily fluids, we can spend hours wrapped in the arms of another, we can learn her lines and curves as well as we know our own, but we can never read his mind.
My parents have been married, pretty happily, for close to forty years. They know each other better than anyone; sometimes, it seems, better than they know themselves. But there are times when one of them is in a funk, when one is overly anxious, when I ask, “Hey, what’s up with [your beloved spouse]?” Close to forty years, and the response is still, often enough, I have no idea.
The same is true of Josh and me. We can periodically finish each other’s sentences, but just as often I ask him what he’s thinking. That’s less frustrating than you’d think: it is good to still be able to be surprised. It is hot—soul-stirring—to ask and receive, to learn what the other wants, in her own words, from his own lips.
In the film What Women Want (2000), chauvinistic advertising executive Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) acquires the ability to hear the thoughts of any women in the vicinity. For the viewer, it’s an interesting look at the nature of intimacy. This proves to be a curse, then a blessing, then an opportunity for personal growth. But before that, Nick sees it as an opportunity to get laid.
There are huge problems with the film’s premise; there are some jokes that ought not be made. You can tell the difference sixteen years have made in terms of what’s acceptable. But there’s an interesting insight on intimacy as our misguided protagonist romances the local barista. On a date, Nick’s told Lola (Marisa Tomei) everything she wants to hear. She invites him up, but once they’re half-naked and kissing, he finds himself distracted by her critical inner monologue. He tries to ram his tongue down her throat; he apparently does not appreciate that her breasts are attached and ought not be grabbed and twisted. She wonders which celebrity will be appearing on the late-night show, and if they’ll be done in time for her to catch the broadcast.
Nick needs to regroup, and does, successfully. He starts to listen to Lola, and his responsiveness leads to heart-pounding, sweat-inducing, ecstatically marvelous sex. She reels: “Amazing! Ohhh! It was like, you were more inside me than anybody. Ever! I mean more inside my head! Like, you knew what I wanted and how I wanted it . . . We connected in a way that was beyond . . . beyond!”
Ecstatically mind-blowing sex is certainly something to aspire to, but even though Nick has a deeply personal (problematic, somewhat violating) perspective on Lola’s needs and desires, theirs wouldn’t exactly qualify as an intimate relationship. Or, if you buy the notion that conversation, that give and take, is erotic, neither is theirs particularly hot.
Intimacy requires mutuality: mutual vulnerability, mutual disclosure and openness, mutual invitation and consent (obvious, but worth stating). Mutuality in turn requires two distinct selves, which can be in relationship with each other. If, as Oscar Wilde suggests, “the essence of romance is uncertainty,”6 romantic intimacy depends on the risk-taking step of opening ourselves to someone else. Psychologist and marriage counselor Harriet Lerner states:
Intimacy means that we can be who we are in a relationship, and allow the other person to do the same. “Being who we are” requires that we can talk openly about the things that are important to us, that we take a clear position on where we stand on important emotional issues, and that we clarify the limits of what is acceptable and tolerable to us in a relationship. “Allowing the other person to do the same” means that we can stay emotionally connected to that other party who thinks, feels, and believes differently, without needing to change, convince, or fix the other.7
That part about “allowing the other person to do the same” often proves particularly challenging, especially as we seek to be in a relationship with someone who is not just individually different from us, in that way all selves are, but who’s a different gender, or practices a different religion, or grew up in a different cultural milieu. Most people like to believe that their own view of reality is the best one . . . if they’re even aware that theirs is only one of many. Lerner notes this seemingly obvious, but often overlooked fact: “People are different. All of us see the world through a different filter, creating as many views of reality as there are people in it.”8
We usually get that intellectually, but emotionally? That’s another story entirely. This reality feels threatening; if someone’s filter is different from ours and carries some truth, does that mean our filter is somehow less valid? In our early adulthood, figuring out what our personal filter is in the first place is hard, and tends to create no small amount of ambivalence before we even attempt to consider how it relates to the worldviews and habits of others.
It’s not just romantic relationships that cause us trouble. In the midst of the decrescendo of a recent disagreement with my father-in-law, I had an epiphany. “John! You think, as the parent, you are meant to support us forever. That ours is a one-directional relationship. But in my family, we tend to think we’re mutually obligated to care for each other over generations.” Once we figured out our differing assumptions, we were able to make sense of what we were arguing about in the first place.
COMPLICATING THE MATTER of intimacy and acceptance is that each and every person is different, and puts their filter together in different ways.
One of the most irritating things about the church is when it traffics in stereotypes about men and women. Women are faithful and emotional and nurturing; men are leaders, but can’t control their sex drives. This is irritating because these claims derive from lousy theology and cultural convention, but also because they claim to be strictly biblical when they’re not. I know plenty of men for whom monogamy comes easily and women who are challenged by it. Nurturing men and assertive women. Women who love physical affection and intimacy as a means of expressing love, and men who could talk about their feelings all night long, baby. Men and women, straight and gay, and everybody in between, we all speak different love languages; our attempts at intimacy are hindered when we cling too closely to narrow scripts for who we are supposed to be. We stumble not because of our inherent differences, but because, as Lerner notes, of “our reactivity to differences,” and the ways in which our “reactivity exaggerates and calcifies differences.”9
Scripts can be oppressive; the unknown can be paralyzing.
No wonder we experience intimacy as both terrifying and exhilarating. To face uncertainty, the risk of rejection, the vulnerability of connection, head-on and act: that takes courage. Many of us are aware of that but, not knowing from what source we might draw it, settle on the illusion of courage, or do our best to otherwise distance ourselves from the risk involved. Some folks chemically, if temporarily, banish their inhibitions. Some retreat into relationships that can’t possibly be intimate, with sex workers or strangers, or varied pornographic media.
If we remember the ethical language from chapter three, these failures of courage provide a critique of an overreliance on fantasy or pornography, or of “hookup culture.” If sex is for the appropriate practice and experience of vulnerability, then repeated behaviors that mask that purpose are unethical. I’ve always wondered what to do with the apostle Paul’s condemnation of “fornication” in that letter to the church at Corinth (6:18 in particular). In the Greek, it’s “porneia.” In the new Common English Bible, it’s “sexual immorality.” Fornication is traditionally seen as extramarital sex. But that seems both overly broad and overly narrow. Porneia includes just about every naughty thing you can think of, including sex with relatives and animals, but also some that seem categorically “not like the others” to our modern ears (i.e., sex with someone who has been divorced). “Sexual immorality” is similarly all-inclusive, and unhelpfully vague. What makes something immoral?
If, like some of my survey respondents, I used erotica10 with my partner, or we got a little drunk on our anniversary, would that be a problem? I think, as with most things in Christian ethics, the question is not about the nature of the act itself, but the intent and the effect of the action. The use of erotica or a little alcohol might help a committed couple to explore their sexual relationship together, to ease some tension, help him last longer, increase the likelihood of laughing together. The question then is, does the action serve the purpose of deepening intimacy and self-knowledge?
Masturbation (or, as we’ve determined to be the nicer-sounding terms, solo sex or self-stimulation) is another great example of how critical context can be in considering the ethical status of an act; in the first chapter, we explored it as a means to discussing pleasure. It’s worth revisiting now for what it can reveal about the nature of intimacy. The sex columnist Dan Savage routinely gets letters from guys who are accustomed to a certain amount of self-love, administered with a particular grip.11 Sometimes these letter writers find themselves losing their erections in the warmer, moister, softer climes of their partner, and they fret about that. Savage inevitably tells them to back off a bit, loosen their grip, try some other things. Reengaging their partners, opening themselves to different sexual approaches and environs, will help them to keep their erections and will open the door to greater intimacy with their partners. It is no trick, one could say, to help oneself achieve orgasm. The right hand not only knows what the left hand is doing, but is usually working in concert with all one’s other parts. There are no barriers in communication, no space between selves to navigate. If you want intimacy in addition to an orgasm, you have to slow down and learn to communicate.
That’s not to say that masturbation is always a problem for men, and that solo sex isn’t a great, free, safe way to experience pleasure. As Christine Gudorf writes: “There is seldom any recognition [in much current Christian conversation] that intimacy with one’s own body is possible; there is even less recognition that a good is at stake.”12
Sometimes it can become a roadblock to intimacy and mutual pleasure in the way Savage describes, especially for men. But paradoxically, masturbation can be an important aid for women in defining themselves, their needs and their desires, which is critical for the building of intimacy. Two complete selves are required, we recall, for intimacy. If she doesn’t know who she is, or what she likes, or what she wants, how can she share that with her partner?
Gudorf reports:
While many fewer women masturbate as adolescents, those who do are more likely to be sexually successful within partnered sex because of greater self-knowledge. The turn to solitary sex in adolescence actually seems to facilitate and not to impede learning to turn to others for the meeting of physical and sexual desires and needs.13
Context matters, and in figuring out how it ought to matter to the ordering of our romantic and sexual lives, it’s important to consider how that context relates to what we consider faithful norms. What constitutes sexual immorality?
In What Women Want, Lola and Nick have sex on their first date. Such a thing has been known to happen in real life, and I’m not convinced (even as a pastor) that the act is, in itself, necessarily immoral. What makes it ethically problematic at the beginning is that he sees sex as an opportunity to perform, to stroke his own ego, and to derive personal pleasure without any particular regard for her pleasure; it lacks mutuality. But the onus does not rest solely on him; Lola was passionately engaged in their foreplay, but when things become less pleasurable, she critiques her partner snarkily and then checks out.
It’s a way of protecting herself, I bet. (And now I will stop psychologizing a movie character.) Gudorf reminds us that the power of sex lies largely in the pleasure it brings. There’s pleasure in desire, in arousal, in exploring and kissing, of course. But sex aims to end in orgasm, a pleasure so intense and laden with potential meaning that descriptions tend toward the metaphorical. To speak of an orgasm as a contraction of muscles and a crescendo of heart rate and blood flow doesn’t really capture the sense of standing outside oneself, outside of time. Sometimes referred to as “a little death,” an orgasm is an experience of letting go of control and self-consciousness. Yet it manifests a strange paradox, too: one usually can’t will an orgasm absent any physical stimulation, but the physical isn’t usually sufficient, either—for men or women. To be carried away “often demands a kind of conscious, deliberate, letting go of control over oneself and one’s reactions, a willingness to immerse oneself in the sensation.”14
The pleasure we take from sex, then, is tied in a number of ways to our ability to feel safe when at our most vulnerable and to our willingness to let go of control and self-consciousness. That’s not exactly the same as obliterating that which separates us from our partner—sex need not be an ecstatic and divine experience of unity with all creation in order to be considered good. Indeed, the frequency with which a pair reaches orgasm simultaneously suggests that such a thing cannot be the primary end of sex. (For that matter, if we’re talking about divine intention and design, the design of the clitoris suggests that women were designed for pleasure, but not necessarily for deriving said pleasure from heterosexual intercourse.)
This insight, though, helps to make sense of the research done by Donna Freitas, a Roman Catholic theologian who studies hookup culture on American college campuses.15 A self-described feminist, Freitas began her work a few years ago when she questioned several thousand college students at several types of colleges and universities about their sex lives. Many reported that a culture of “random” or nonmonogamous sexual activity reigned at their schools (save the evangelical colleges). Freitas’s work is limited dramatically by the wide scope of activities she includes in her definition of “hooking up”: anything from kissing to intercourse. While kissing strangers isn’t for everyone, the level of intimacy, trust, and vulnerability inherent in a kiss on a dance floor is hugely different from nailing half the campus, or even just that girl from your psych class, if only from a public health standpoint.
But the great insight of her work is that a number of students who reported participating in hookup culture also reported their ambivalence about it, and many who were having actual sex (oral, penis-in-vagina, or anal) weren’t particularly satisfied with the quality of the sex they were having. Freitas is funny: she feels sad for these “sexually liberated” students who are having terrible sex. If you’re going to be “liberated,” she marvels, shouldn’t you at least be enjoying it?
Hers is a good and important question. It’s easy to see why the sex isn’t always very good: for those who feel ambivalent about the culture in which they find themselves, and yet haven’t honed in on a way to opt out, it makes sense that they should drink to numb their doubts, or disengage to decrease their emotional and physical vulnerability. And sex, without the dance of intimacy, is just not very much fun; “bumping uglies” is about as far from transcendence as you can get.
Freitas wants to reclaim abstinence—total abstinence, or temporary seasons of abstinence—from the extremes of religious finger-wagging. Students should go on dates. She commends small groups of students who take pride in their virginity, and refuse to be shamed for their sexual inexperience.16
There’s surely some good advice there—dates can be awesome—but it seems strange to me that the prescription for a failure to navigate intimacy and vulnerability would be to abstain from the learning curve. She’s trying to lower the stakes, maybe—test out intimacy through conversation first—but why “abstinence”? Why not only sleep with people you think are interesting or experiment with speaking up with your partner about what you like?
AS CHRISTIANS, OUR preoccupation with abstinence arises, I think, from a desire to talk about how sex is important: meaningful, special, and sacred. And sex is often those things. But it seems one of the only arguments we’ve got against promiscuity, or any extramarital exercise of our sexuality, is related to Paul’s 1 Corinthians admonishment, something I call the “Horcrux defense.” In the Harry Potter universe a Horcrux is a magical object that can be created only through the darkest magic. It’s a means of grasping at immortality, of stowing a portion of one’s soul in an object. To make one requires a murder, and both that act and the subsequent dividing of one’s soul compromise the integrity of the individual’s soul. A soul ought not be divided.
Now, we mostly don’t equate sex with murder,17 but more often than not Christians talk about sex as giving a part of ourselves away, as creating an irrevocable bond with any and all partners we’ve had, as inviting ourselves to be changed, or defiled, by the characteristics of those partners. It’s not something we want to share with just anyone. It’s not something we want to have too much of outside of a monogamous marital relationship.
Sex is, of course, an important and meaningful thing—with the potential to heal hearts and blow up bridges, as we’ve noted—but I want to stop and consider for a moment what theological questions arise from the Horcrux defense. First: Can our “selves” be divided, defiled, or otherwise diminished? If so, what can accomplish such a thing? So, too, we should ask: Are we forever bonded with whomever we’ve shared a physically intimate interaction with? And, relatedly: Isn’t it totally jerky to be like, I’m too good for sex with that person?
Sex—intimacy—opens us up to change. It asks us to trust and let go, to relax and experiment. It draws us into play and pleasure, but also the work of communicating with another person who cannot get inside our heads. Through sex we can practice attention, invitation, hospitality, and the means of grace. As Gudorf says, “When sex is not segregated from the rest of our lives, the pleasure of orgasm can reach far beyond the moment of intense pleasure itself, and change, a little at a time, the way we relate to our partner, and even to the larger society and the world. It can encourage us to trust more, to be willing to risk more, to reach out to others in love.”18
When sex is segregated from the rest of our lives—when it is understood as something that must be set apart to be kept holy, when our sexuality is treated as something we can divorce from the rest of our selves, kept in a box until we’re ready to use it within marriage—we misunderstand the critical importance of context in shaping ethics and a holy, healthy life.
Our holiness, our worth, our identity as image-bearers of God, is not compromised through the attempt to grow in love and intimacy with those around us. Our worth is not something we can give away; it’s something we’re supposed to share with others. Voldemort, the one who divides and divides himself, is barely human anymore; our humanity can never be diminished, no matter how many sexual partners we’ve had. We’re created to be in relationship, after all. It’s not sex outside of marriage that threatens us; it’s our fear of living and growing in intimacy with others. It’s our unwillingness to open ourselves up to the abundance of life’s created goodness—to wonder and mystery and pleasure and relationship—that often leaves us feeling empty.
The call of the gospel is not to protect ourselves at all costs, but to risk ourselves in love. Not always, not with the whole rugby team or all the ladies in the marketing department, but nonetheless with hope, wisdom, and courage.
The call of the gospel, too, is to actively refrain from dismissing anyone as outside of the circle of God’s care. Jesus healed bleeding women who were ritually impure; Jesus responded with gratitude to the extravagant and intimate gesture from the woman who washed his feet with costly oil and her hair (whether she was “a sinner” or his friend “Mary of Bethany” is lost to history; Luke says one, John says another; Jesus accepts the loving gift either way). These and other stories in the Gospels serve as important reminders to a culture rife with double standards about sexual experience as an admirable and enviable quality in men and a source of shame and sign of moral laxity in women.
True intimacy requires us to eschew those double standards and to transcend our assumptions about others. We cannot read minds; we have to learn to be in conversation with our partners—not just about shared sexual experience, but about our feelings, our hopes, fears, and interests. Coming to know another person intimately, in body, mind, and soul, is exhilarating and joy-filled, even as it can be terrifying to open ourselves up, to be seen and known in new ways. We may have a host of intimate relationships of varied types throughout our lives; if we are lucky, sharing and seeing will be a blessed adventure. It is not always so, however.
The last theological assumption of the Horcrux defense instructs that we ought to limit our number of partners because sex inevitably binds us to another in lasting ways. We should try to avoid the breaking of our hearts because they are subsequently less capable of opening widely and deeply to our future spouse; we should avoid placing claims on people who will one day belong to someone else. The exploration of that claim opens the next chapter. How do we talk about the meaning of love and sex, and the possibility of intimacy and right relationship, when many of us have been in love more than once? How do we navigate the kind of world in which my mother found herself saying, “You may not invite anyone you have slept with to your wedding”? How do we claim and make sense of the past in ways that allow us to live with courage in the present and with hope for the future?