Hi. My name is Sophia. I'm engaged. And I've had sex.
Yeah, I know, I'd like to introduce you to other aspects of myself (like the fact that I think I have the dubious honor of being the only person to have actually met in person all but one of the members here). Or the fact that I'm an event planner and I just got the most brilliant internship ever. Or the fact that my fiance and I are improvisers, and I think that basically all of life should involve doing improv comedy or reading a book.
But honestly, the thing that has kept me lurking in the background, afraid to open up to this community, is anger and fear and shame and joy regarding the very purpose of the community: sex.
I'm a pretty liberal Christian, which I think makes me a minority in this community. I'm a Lutheran (ELCA). My pastor is a partnered gay man. My relationship with God is long on love and short on obedience. I'm a bit defensive about this, because I've been pretty burned in the past by people of a more conservative theological bent whose keen intent on holiness had narrowed into an obsession that deadened them to remembering to love me. I'm defensive about saying that, because several members of this community are members of the church community or network that I perceive in this way, that I still feel I am recovering from, that I still occasionally desperately want to warn people away from.
I'm also bisexual. I'm defensive about this too! (Are we noticing a trend?) But I think that the fact that I am attracted to both men and women is a healthy, beautiful, God-given thing, and that my sexuality as the whole being of my thoughts and spirit and body in relation to sex cannot be untied from its queerness, and shouldn't be. That I have a uniquely lovely sexuality in part because it is queer.
Right, back to the having sex. I was talking with Kay on the phone earlier today, and she mentioned that everyone here is struggling with sex and sexuality in a very visceral, powerful, painful way--we're just struggling with different aspects of it. That's hard for me to enter into, because the struggle of sex being so right because everything is right about it except the timing wrestling with the words of well-intentioned friends who believe the lying Church narrative of "you will feel horrible about sex before marriage" is very, very visceral and painful right now. It's hard to look up and see other people's struggles, and it's hard to believe that the well-meaning but ultimately useless platitudes are actually well-meant, that the somewhat academic space in which our minds meet is underlain with blood and tears and love.
And the short version is: I don't regret having had sex. (Maybe I will tell this story sometime, how the first time I had sex was, in the words of the Exultet, a "happy fault / O necessary sin of Adam / that won for us so great a redeemer." How I treasure it, because of its beauty. How having sex was what finally helped me see why God asks us to wait, what finally helped me to trust God enough to want to wait for sex until marriage.) What I regret is that we keep trying not to have sex and failing. It's discouraging. It allows guilt and shame and separation to God to enter into something that is staggeringly gorgeous and intimate and freeing and unifying (us to one another and us to God). It's alienating, lonely-making.
So, here I am, sisters. I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. I ask Blessed Mary, all the angels and saints, and you, my sisters, to pray for me to the Lord Our God.
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Hi. My name is Sophia. I'm engaged. And I've had sex.
Yeah, I know, I'd like to introduce you to other aspects of myself (like the fact that I think I have the dubious honor of being the only person to have actually met in person all but one of the members here). Or the fact that I'm an event planner and I just got the most brilliant internship ever. Or the fact that my fiance and I are improvisers, and I think that basically all of life should involve doing improv comedy or reading a book.
But honestly, the thing that has kept me lurking in the background, afraid to open up to this community, is anger and fear and shame and joy regarding the very purpose of the community: sex.
I'm a pretty liberal Christian, which I think makes me a minority in this community. I'm a Lutheran (ELCA). My pastor is a partnered gay man. My relationship with God is long on love and short on obedience. I'm a bit defensive about this, because I've been pretty burned in the past by people of a more conservative theological bent whose keen intent on holiness had narrowed into an obsession that deadened them to remembering to love me. I'm defensive about saying that, because several members of this community are members of the church community or network that I perceive in this way, that I still feel I am recovering from, that I still occasionally desperately want to warn people away from.
I'm also bisexual. I'm defensive about this too! (Are we noticing a trend?) But I think that the fact that I am attracted to both men and women is a healthy, beautiful, God-given thing, and that my sexuality as the whole being of my thoughts and spirit and body in relation to sex cannot be untied from its queerness, and shouldn't be. That I have a uniquely lovely sexuality in part because it is queer.
Right, back to the having sex. I was talking with Kay on the phone earlier today, and she mentioned that everyone here is struggling with sex and sexuality in a very visceral, powerful, painful way--we're just struggling with different aspects of it. That's hard for me to enter into, because the struggle of sex being so right because everything is right about it except the timing wrestling with the words of well-intentioned friends who believe the lying Church narrative of "you will feel horrible about sex before marriage" is very, very visceral and painful right now. It's hard to look up and see other people's struggles, and it's hard to believe that the well-meaning but ultimately useless platitudes are actually well-meant, that the somewhat academic space in which our minds meet is underlain with blood and tears and love.
And the short version is: I don't regret having had sex. (Maybe I will tell this story sometime, how the first time I had sex was, in the words of the Exultet, a "happy fault / O necessary sin of Adam / that won for us so great a redeemer." How I treasure it, because of its beauty. How having sex was what finally helped me see why God asks us to wait, what finally helped me to trust God enough to want to wait for sex until marriage.) What I regret is that we keep trying not to have sex and failing. It's discouraging. It allows guilt and shame and separation to God to enter into something that is staggeringly gorgeous and intimate and freeing and unifying (us to one another and us to God). It's alienating, lonely-making.
So, here I am, sisters. I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. I ask Blessed Mary, all the angels and saints, and you, my sisters, to pray for me to the Lord Our God.