Relationships

Leonard Cohen and biblical sex

StandardDanny Webster Leave a comment

“He saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you, she tied you to the kitchen chair, she broke your throne and she cut your hair, and from your lips she drew the hallelujah.”

A moment of madness, a rash act, a crazed maze of unintended consequences. One minute David was gazing longingly at a woman bathing, the next he was sending her husband to the front of the battle to cover over the shame of having conceived his wife’s child.

Avoiding the fact that Leonard Cohen neatly conflates David and Samson’s stories into one testimony of the triumph of sexual temptation, the picture he paints is one never far from our own experience. We may not have avoided the challenges of battle to recline and seduce our neighbour. We may not have lost our incredible strength by succumbing to the charms of Delilah. But I’m sure there are times when we’ve let sexual temptation steal something from us.

When we’ve let our lust take from us the hallelujah that is due to God. When we have ducked the challenges of life for the easy satisfaction that is purportedly presented to us on a plate. The chance to have what we want, when we want it, and walk away unchanged but with our needs satisfied.

Free love, that’s the tale we are told and the dream that we are sold. And was the topic for week 2 of Christchurch’s Love is a Verb series.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as free sex. Everything comes with a price. Sex is an act of commitment between two bodies. Not that I’d know, but one hears that it is an act of immense fulfilment, which creates an obligation beyond just the physical experience of the moment. Which is why sex is best within a relationship that can bear the weight of commitment in emotional, psychological, spiritual, material as well as in the physical sexual sense.

Otherwise, the free love that we are experiencing leaves us in debt. It carries the weight of more than it can hold, it either tries to hold all of those levels of commitment on a pin head or we remove the attachment it creates and empty sex of its meaning.

The problem for David wasn’t that he failed in his worship of God, but that his life did not match up to that worship. I know that feeling too well. The ecstasy of worship followed by the cascade of the fall. The love for God and the desires of self. One doesn’t do away with the other. I can love God with all my heart, I can be passionate in my worship for him and still walk in the opposite direction. I know that path all too well.

I know the grace that comes when I confess all that I have done and all that I have thought. I know the darkness of my soul that is washed clean, and rendered ruined once again.

But love and worship of God isn’t a part time hobby. It’s not something we can pop into and out of. It’s not something we can leave to the side and pick up after we are done with what we wanted to do. It’s more than a full time job. It is complete absorption in the purposes and rigour of a life defined not by yourself. It is giving every ounce that you have and know that you have given it all, and then realising that is the time God’s grace is most present. In the moment of weakness, not before we try, but once we have failed.

Two final thoughts that may make there way into further posts so I’d love to hear your thoughts. Firstly, David tried to cover over his shame, and that made things worse. It is the haunting effect of guilt that drags us into deeper secrecy and shame in a forlorn effort to cover over our sin. The fear of shame allows it to become more ingrained and more pronounced. How do we break the ties of shame that clamp us to the floor?

Secondly, and this one I almost expected. The line that sex is a great gift from God, complete with the requisite analogy demonstrating its power but also the need for it to be used in the correct way. Maybe that needs to be said, but it comes supremely close to a taunt, that it is the greatest gift you will never receive. Unless you get married. There’ll be more on singleness in a couple of weeks, both in the series and on this blog. But how do you handle this tension, the need to affirm sex as good without making the wait all the more difficult for those not in a place to experience it?

Let’s talk about sex

StandardDanny Webster 4 Comments

Romance Academy are running a series of road shows over the next couple of months called ‘Let’s talk about sex’ which are aimed at equipping adults to talk about sex with teens.

I wonder if we need a parallel series to help adults talk to each other about sex. Because it’s not really something we do particularly well. Maybe it is just because I am single and therefore not privy to the conversations of married couples who talk among themselves about the permitted relationships that I am not to know of. Maybe it is out of fear that we will corrupt one another with talk of illicit liaisons. I don’t know, I just know it’s considered off limits for polite conversation.

Even a very brief conversation in the office which flirted with the topic seemed awkward and hedged, and out of place. The hesitancy of asking someone who is married to write a guest post marked the inbuilt challenges of the topic.

It is not that I want to know the intimate details of people’s personal lives, or that I think it is essential to be fully informed about how each and every aspect of married life works out behind closed doors. But maybe it would be helpful if we knew a bit more, and if we were willing to talk about it with a bit of openness that might help those of us this side of the Rubicon know what lies ahead.

There’s two aspects to this, one for those who are soon to get married, and the other for those for whom it seems a distant concept not really related to our everyday lives. In terms of marriage prep I’m assured that for some it is talked about and discussed well, but for others leaves gaping holes that become problematic after the glitz and glamour of the wedding day has faded away. This is not something I’m going to delve into but if you’ve got either a good or bad experience of marriage prep and are willing to write about it please get in touch, I’d be happy to feature something along these lines.

One day I hope to get married. I don’t know when that day will be, and it is possible it will never come. And it will change my life. Admittedly probably not as dramatically as having kids, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. So many parts of my life which I like the way they are will have to change: I will no longer have sole charge of my destiny (and my delusions that I do now will be even more abruptly shattered). I can visualise what it might be like to live in permanent commitment to another person, I can toy in my mind with the concept of a brutal crushing of the ego as the focus of my attention turns from me to another.

But then there is something else. Something that I have been told not to do. Something that I have reacted so strongly against in adherence to the creed that it is sinful and wrong. That thing which for so many years has been wrong suddenly becomes right.

And that is the problem. I’m not arguing for leniency or encouraging sex before marriage, in fact I think a more brutal openness about sex could lead to less sex outside marriage. At the moment it is so hushed up and secured in a lead-lined box of secrecy that it ferments activity in private that betrays the values we hold to in public. We’re told not to think about sex because it will lead to lust, and therefore are aided and abetted in covering over the temptations we face. We do not talk about it, we remain British, we are stoic and polite and proper and pretend that sex is something that only ever happens between married couples.

I’ve heard stories about couples who struggle to have sex after they get married, who are paralysed by fear that they are doing something wrong. The doctrine of sex as sin has been etched so deeply that the sanctity of marriage does not erase it.

How should we go about talking about sex in a more open and honest manner? How do we educate and inform each other about the joys and the frustrations, the license and the limits? How do we understand the love that sex is part of, and the lust that remains despite it?

Love is a verb: relationships are hard

Danny Webster Leave a comment

I have this idea of how I want things to be. How everything works out so that I am kept happy and other people don’t complain.

That’s really what I want most of the time. Peace and tranquillity. Harmony over hostility. A community of people defined by honesty, integrity and challenge. Not easy, but good.

But that’s not how things work. Not in my life, and not in yours. I don’t have to be a prophet to tell you that.

Yesterday ChristChurch London began a new series on relationships and eased into things with a broad overview of the vitality of relationships for us all. Yet also about how hard that can be.

Bonhoeffer makes this point well, if you parse through the complex language he makes a simple point.

Innumerable times a whole community has been broken down because it has sprung from a wish dream, an illusion a fantasy. The serious person is likely to bring with him or her a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realise it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams

Just as God desires to bring us to a place of genuine friendship, so surely we must be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment, with others, with Christians in general and if we are fortunate, with ourselves. God will not permit us, even for a moment to live in a dream world. Only the friendship which faces such disillusionment with all its unhappy and ugly aspects begins to be what it could be in God’s eyes. As soon as the shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.

Basically, life with other people is hard.

And that shouldn’t surprise us. God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Our dreams of autonomy, our dreams and ideas of how our life should be. Our vision of happiness and contented lives. Lives that are defined by our standards and not by commitment to others.

When we commit to others that we acknowledge that we do not come first. We give more than we take, we love more than we expect to be loved.

Because that is how God first loved us. He loves us more than we can ever love him. When Jesus asked Peter to tend his sheep and whether he loved him thrice over, Peter did not feel capable to match his love. But in the words of Kierkegaard, when we turn to God we find that He has already turned.

And that’s enough.

It’s a sign of what a committed relationship looks like. It’s the model that we should look to before we start designing the friendships of our halcyon desires.   

Relationships revisited

Danny Webster 1 Comment

When I started blogging I slightly accidentally stumbled into the label of being a relationship blogger. This wasn’t a title I wanted, nor what I wanted the blog to be.

But then again, I didn’t really have any idea what I wanted the blog to be. So for the first few weeks relationships was what I wrote about and that was what people wanted to read. However, I’ve got a small confession to offer to you: I don’t know much about relationships, I just make it up. Yet the more I talk to people, the more I read, the more I realise that this is a subject that people want to talk about, as they too feel as they are making it up as they go along. And regardless of the number of relationships that people have been in, or the experiences they have had, the questions remain.

I recently asked someone what it was about those early relationship related posts that they appreciated. Apparently it was because I was being brave. In talking about issues with openness and honesty I was doing something that other people weren’t.

I don’t feel particularly brave, the number of times I held back from saying things because I was worried about being open in so public a forum, and the frequency with which masqueraded the point I sought to make. On top of all that I was speaking about these issues online partly because I so patently fail to broach them in conversations face to face, they live in the solitary confines of my mind.

Since those early summer days I’ve returned to tales of romance and attraction from time to time but I’ve mixed it up with bits of politics, theology and the occasional more philosophical post which only 27 people read.

Over the next six weeks my church (Christchurch London) will be covering sex and relationships in a Sunday sermon series. And this news has had a mixed reaction. People I speak to individually are quietly fascinated to hear what will be said, but in groups there’s a fair dealing of groaning and scepticism.

What I intended to do is blog alongside this series. Each week I’ll post some reflections and thoughts on the talk, along with a link to the audio for those who don’t go to Christchurch. But I also want to cover some other topics, I’ve got a few lurking in the back of my mind which I plan to cover, but I want you to provide the topics as well.

I want to write with honest and openness, and I hope to create a space where you can join me and we can discuss issues which intrigue and terrify us, and all too often tend to define us.

So please let me know, in the comments here, on twitter, facebook or carrier pigeon, what you want to talk about. It can relate to dating, singleness, lust and temptation, or just about any related issue you have on the mind. And if you want to guest-post during this series, you’d be very welcome, again just pitch me an idea.

Summer skirts and lingering glances

Danny Webster 12 Comments

The bout of warm weather which has so suddenly graced us with its presence brings to the fore a topic I’ve been mulling over for a little while.

How do we navigate the tetchy waters of modesty in what we, and what other people wear?

The other day someone at work walked in from enjoying the glorious rays at lunch and commented on what she had observed. A girl was laid on the grass in her bra. A guy sat on a bench nearby furtively got his camera out and took a photo of said girl.

The story was recounted with evident and justified shock which I and the other person party to this conversation shared.

But I pondered this a little further. The deliberate act of taking a photo makes this seem particularly egregious, but then I walk through the park and notice the low cut tops and the summer skirts. I see the girls in their bikinis working on their tan. And I wonder, as I try to restrain my gaze from lingering, how best to handle this particular visual challenge that comes with the beating sun.

And related to this, I am wrestling with whose responsibility it is. Is it the guy’s for the glances that they steal and the lust that it may represent? Or the girls for dressing inappropriately and acting the temptress?

The hyperbole in that last line was to deflect some of the inevitable rage it would produce.

Here’s my thinking on this, firstly, I am absolutely responsible for what I look at, why I look and the thoughts that it generates. And while I’m on the topic, men who use what a woman is wearing or the way they are acting as an excuse or as permission to act are completely abdicating their own responsibility. In the most extreme cases men who consider a woman to be asking for it if they are dressed in a certain way are wrong in the most definite and vilest sense.

But, I don’t think that absolves women of responsibility either. This is where it gets tricky. While guys are responsible for their response, I think women need to be aware of the impact of what they are wearing (or not wearing) on guys who are around them.

Modesty doesn’t need to be viewed as a dirty word, as a sort of Victorian notion of propriety which is now outdated. Perhaps we should view it as how we interact in a way that best serves everyone involved. It might also help to think about how we consider modesty in other arenas.

If someone is modest about their skills in a particular area, they are not denying that they have these skills, instead it’s just they are not going out of their way to flaunt them. Modesty in dress is not about denying or neutralising beauty, it is about placing it in its proper context and realising that exhibitions of beauty can be misused in the same way any other ability, talent or attribute can.

In practice what does this mean? For guys in the park when it’s hot accept that it’s tough. There are attractive girls not wearing very much. How we respond around people we know will depend on who it is and the nature of a our relationship. If you’re a girl and with a guy you know likes you and this isn’t how you feel, spare a thought for him.

Let me try and answer one challenge to all this: the beach problem. It goes something like this: girls wear bikinis on the beach so what’s wrong with sunbathing in a bra in the park?

I think it’s got to do with patterns of association and an understanding of normal behaviour. When you’re on the beach people are wearing less clothes so it is normal, when you see someone in a bikini in the park it comes across as more exceptional, it is not what you would expect and I think in some neuro-psychological way that I wouldn’t understand this makes it more exciting.

Take this a step further, bikinis are designed to be worn on their own, whereas bras are (usually) worn under something else. Therefore, in some very real way, a girl wearing a bra in a park is more likely to draw attention, and for guys, be a source of temptation where a girl in a bikini on the beach might not.

Is this fair? Maybe not, but in each and every situation there will be many different factors at play so that what is worn in one context is reasonable, but in another might be unhelpful and even unkind. I’m not making any recommendations about what girls should wear or where guys should avoid in the scorching sun, that would be dangerous territory. And I’ve ventured far enough already.

What advice would you give to guys struggling with skimpy skirts in the summer sun? And would you tell a girl to cover up if you found what she was wearing unhelpful?

A merger of gluttony and lust

Danny Webster Leave a comment

I’ve got a bit of a confession to make: occasionally I go to the cinema on my own. I’ve always thought that it’s an unusual social activity, but the first time I went to the counter to buy a ticket – just one ticket – it was rather awkward, I could feel the person at the counter judging me.

But that’s enough of a tangent before I actually begin, it is all to say that earlier this week I walked out of work with my head spinning and headed to the cinema picking the film that best suited my arrival time regardless of what it was. This is how I ended up watching ‘This Means War’. I know that’s no excuse, my taste in films is dreadful, but as usually happens, even in the most dreadful films, something catches my attention.

Curiously it was a similar theme that had already piqued my interest while rampaging through the Hunger Games trilogy all in around a week.

A girl likes two guys at the same time.

Yes, I’m back to blogging about relationships.

I had slightly accidentally eased off writing too much about relationships because I didn’t like being referred to as having a ‘relationship blog’. But you may have noticed that I have more or less eased off writing about anything in these hallowed lines of html in the past month or so. Here a minor side note: I will return to women in leadership at some point, and those who offered to write guest posts, I haven’t forgotten.

In the Hunger Games the issue lingers below the surface gradually pushing its way to the surface as the pages turn into books and one cover closes and the sequel opens as quickly as you can get to the shop to pick up the next instalment. In contrast, This Means War could not be more obvious if it tried, the posters make watching the film an optional extra.

There are stand out lines in each that sum up the main protagonist’s efforts to make their minds up. In This Means War she is told to pick the man who will make her better, in the Hunger Games the two competing love interests accept she’ll go for the one who she thinks will give her the best chance of survival.

Because we all make choices. We all have a frame of reference that informs and influences our decisions. In Bill Hybels’ book Courageous Leadership he examines how he makes decisions and the factors that come into play; it’s a combination of experience, rationality, emotion and prejudice. The things that allow us to decide when to cross the road. The things that tell us that we like one person a little more than appropriate for us to be friends.

The things that might tell us we like more than one person more than appropriate to just be friends.

Is that just crazy? Or is it really just owning up to what actually goes on in our crazy little heads? And does it force us to re-evaluate the frame of reference that we use to come to those conclusions?

First of all, this is not crazy. It happens, I don’t think I’m making some stunning revelation to dare suggest that I have, and others have too, liked more than one person at once. And in my case, I should say not at present, that dilemma has been the cause of hesitation and avoidance, and the hope that in time one would take precedence. Usually in time honoured fashion not one but both fade from my affection.

Now we’ve got over the fact that it is not analogous to polygamy to have split affections how do we deal with it? Because it’s not a sustainable place to linger. For a while you can juggle the competing claims on your heart, and rearrange the aspects of your life that tessellate with each in turn. But sooner or later you have to make a decision. And that’s where it stops being about emotion and it starts being about will.

So often I opt out of making a choice in the hope that it will be made for me. I hope that events will conspire to lead me to one and them to me. And make it clear that choosing them is like waking up each morning and the night sky eclipsed each morning as it fades to light.

Both the Hunger Games and This Means War offer a selfish view of love, but a selfish view that exists within us, and one which we often do not try to disown. We chose the partner who will make us happy, or make us better, or making it sound all to utilitarian the one who will give us the best chance to survive.

And there is something selfish in our thinking when we try and decide if we like someone and if they like us. When we might be attracted to more than one person at once maybe it is time to make you mind up and follow through on that decision. It’s not easy, or perfect, or certain, but it’s better than trying to get everything you want. That’s just a merger of gluttony and lust.

But when that phase of shadow boxing is in the past and we are committed to one person as an act of will. Then selfishness just doesn’t get a look in. It is, as marriage was recently described, something designed to gently destroy the ego.

Perhaps, in the words of Summer, we hope that one day we will wake up and just know. But I think it’s a bit harder than that.

Life in joined up handwriting

Danny Webster 1 Comment

Sometimes very strange things can motivate you. Things that you would not give credence to in the cold light of day. But these can be the things that cause us to act with the greatest fervour, provoke us to respond with haste and all the while convince us that we’re acting of our own accord.

I do things because I think people will like them.

I don’t do things because if I did it might cause people to think badly of me.

I write because I want people to read.

I write stuff I know people read because I want lots of people to read what I have to say.

It makes me think that what I have to say matters, as though I have a contribution that is worthy of the stage upon which I stroll. A bit like back in December when I waded into the discussion of whether women should be more like the image set out in Proverbs 31 or a Victoria’s Secret model. I knew that my readership stats would rocket. They do whenever I write on relationships. Which is probably why I’ve returned to it more times than perhaps I should.

Yet should this cause me to desist from writing just because it is popular, or should it cause me to question why I write? Of course it’s the later, I have never claimed to have any particular expertise on relationships, in fact it’s all rather comical the way things unfolded during last summer. But another motivation was suggested to me: am I writing to get a girlfriend?

And to that the answer is a simple no. At no point has that motivated me or caused me to write something which I otherwise wouldn’t write.

But I write to provoke a response. I think most writers do. And I know what the response is to different kinds of writing. I know that an angry rant isn’t going to win me any admirers. But I know that sentences carefully crafted and strung together in a particular form will show me as an understanding, considerate person. And maybe once I realised that, I chose to write like that.

So if I’m writing in a way about an emotional issue in a way that causes people, but in particular women, to think better of me, then does that equate to writing to find a girlfriend? Only as much as walking out the door after double checking how your clothes look could mean the same.

Only as much as my performing to the best of my ability when I know people are looking, is a little better then when they might not.

So when I read a blog recently with the caveat that it wasn’t in the search of a partner, despite ostensibly being all about that, I was a bit sceptical. Because if you’re single and unless you’ve taken a very absolute decision to remain so, most things you do have at least the smallest token of intent towards what the future might look like, maybe not always your marital status, maybe job promotion. Or the esteem you are held in by your colleagues, or your friends. Or even the likelihood of getting home in time for the final episode of Downton Abbey.

Because our lives are not made up of one off events. We have to learn to live in joined up handwriting, what we do today impacts on tomorrow, how we act in front of a crowd, a screen or an audience of one makes a difference.

Maybe we should have more confidence in our motives, last night I alighted on a twitter conversation on the back of someone else’s twitter gleanings. One lady put out a pitch on twitter for a husband. Simple, to the point, with four key prerequisites. And another replied suggesting maybe we should follow her lead.

I’ve heard a few stories of people meeting through comment threads on blogs, sharing tweets, and their relationship taking off from there. But I’ll be honest, I find it all a bit tough. Every now and then I read the words someone has written, and feel a connection to what they say. But I know nothing about why they are saying the words they use. I do not know if the inflection that connected with my own emotions was intentional, and if so, what specific intent it was laden with.

We can connect with people we would otherwise never meet. But we can also hide from those we perhaps should invest some face to face time. And while the online world can be real I would label it as a dubious reality, full of holes, uncertainty, confusion and misunderstanding. Maybe not that dissimilar to the rest of our lives.

Because it’s not just online that I can act differently. It’s when I’m on my own, thinking I am invisible to the world. Or when I’m with a certain group of people rather than others. It’s when I want someone to think better of me.

But before I leap to the inevitable conclusion that we should not live hypocritical lives with false facades and distinctions hold on a moment. I will act differently around different people because I don’t get to control everything, and I’m not just an individual making my way on my own. I am one of many, I am a part of a community, a multi faceted, permanently evolving community. Of people I know, of those I’ve just met, of people I’d rather avoid and maybe someone who I pay particular attention to.

And I live under the gaze and in the hand of a God who loves me. So I don’t get to run the show. I get to live in a wonderful opera with voices that soar and occasionally I join the action on the stage, responding to the story crafted by the myriad actors I share the stage with. Throwing in my own plots for consideration and interaction, my thoughts and idea, my hopes and my dreams. The things I hold so dearly it almost hurts. And the ones that never see the light of day but are known by god nonetheless.

So maybe being clear helps us all. Throwing the curtains wide open to let the world see into the life we lead. Maybe a pitch for a spouse doesn’t hurt. Maybe an acknowledgement that most single people are on the look out most of the time helps clear the air. But where’s the line, because surely there is one?  What’s too much information, or emotion to throw out into the ether in the hope it might connect with another who might then respond? Is it not that different from our everyday flirting? I guess it isn’t, but that little bit harder to know who’s receiving it and how they’re reading it.

And maybe soon I’ll get to penning a few words about internet dating. But not right now. I’m off to do my hair and check the colours of my clothes work together.

Proverbs 31 woman or a Victoria’s Secret model?

Danny Webster 6 Comments

NOTE: this is the hardest post I have written yet, it is a work in process, the overflow of my thoughts, it will no doubt be superseded by further, more enlightened words. I want to know what you think.

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There’s a line in the West Wing where President Bartlett says to Governor Ritchie in an election debate ’10 word answers can kill you in political campaigns’.

The context was that Ritchie had just pulled out a snappy answer to a tricky question about tax. The president’s staff had been working hard trying to craft such effortless remarks but had hit a brick wall. So before he responded with that little vignette Bartlett shifted into one of his trademark step backs and told his challenger and the audience that was what they’d been looking for all week. But then he moved on, to pose a question of his own, what are the 10 words after that, and the next 10?

CJ Cregg, the president’s press secretary, stepped into the post debate spin room to reinforce her bosses’ message that complexity was not a vice.

Why do I tell you all this? Because I think sometimes we do the same in the church. We like quick and clever answers, we like the aphorisms that role of the tongue and deftly communicate the message we want to convey. Sometimes 10 word answers can kill you in Christianity too.

If you’ll let me take 12 instead of 10 here’s a pretty current example: “I’d rather have a Proverbs 31 woman than a Victoria’s Secret model.”

From the live31movement, with its burgeoning facebook fan page, popular Youtube video and trending topics on twitter, this has championed the cause for women who want to be like this and men who pledge to prefer it. So my question echoes President Bartlett, what are your next 10 words? And the 10 after that?

Because that’s the challenge isn’t it? What does it actually mean to prefer a Proverbs 31 woman, and come to think of it, if you find one could you let me know? The passage is often used to demonstrate a wife who is entrepreneurial, compassionate and loving. But the actual lines in the text don’t take us very far, they are not a useful reference point as I look around and try and assess how many attributes noted in scripture the girls I meet possess.

A point picked up by Preston Yancey in his now redacted post was that a portrayal of women centred on these verses misses the witness of the wider narrative of scripture. It tries to sum up in a few words what a wife should look like. The danger of 10 word answers is not new, context is important when we try and interpret scripture: what came before and what comes after, what is the situation, the environment, the externalities, the things that made the words on the paper we read mean something more than just snappy labels for us to adopt and print on t-shirts.

It’s not just that the 10 word answer is incomplete and that it fails to really answer the question. My problem is that sometimes it is a lie.

It’s pretty easy to win some kudos in the Christian world as a guy if you stand up and say you prefer virtue to beauty. And a plethora of girls despairing at not looking like the scantly clad girls in festive commercials will fawn over your spiritual maturity and pursuit of righteousness. (I’ve very nearly deleted these two sentences every time I’ve read through this, but decided to keep them, they are not, absolutely not, directed at the guys behind this movement, they’re about me as much as anyone)

But this is where I call guys out for their crap and ask girls to bear with us a while.

The problem with this movement, and in fact in virtually everything that Christian guys write about relationships, is the tendency towards neutering romantic and sexual attraction to make a point about virtue and purity.

I actually want to be attracted to the woman I marry. That’s a shock isn’t it?

Of course it isn’t, it is what living and breathing guys want. There is certainly such a thing as lust, and there is such a thing on valuing someone for what you can get out of them, and these tendencies are ones we should not to indulge. There maybe guys out there not affected by physical beauty, and that’s great, I know most Christian guys go through phases when they would be desperate to swap places with you. For a day or two at least until they want to appreciate the wonders of God’s creation once again. And then they would probably like their inclination to physical attraction back.

***

I wrote most of the above yesterday and I’ve been pondering it. What worries me is that I’m writing to excuse myself. Justifying why I don’t always value virtue, and why instead I prefer beauty. The answer is that I am frail, and I am weak, and maybe sometimes I do not always get my priorities right. But the answer is also that maybe we shun beauty too easily. Maybe we cut it out of our wish list because we think there is something wrong with it. I think there’s something wrong with that.

I think at its core this nascent movement gets something very important right, the call to value the depth of a person over a shallow verdict based on their looks. And that is good, but my problem is that I’m not really sure that’s what it conveys. I’ve chatted to a few guys and girls in the past two days about this, and one guy commented that just because something is simple doesn’t mean it is simplistic. I think I disagree, I think that in this case a quest for a catchy sound bite has made it overly simplistic.

Where this gets difficult is the segue between aspiration and acknowledgement of reality. I think it is crucial to hold up our ideals, to know that some things are better than others. But we tend to do that often enough. What I think we do far less well is accepting that we live in a messy world and we are broken beings who don’t always make the right choices. Too often we focus on the aspirational and miss out the ambiguity that for most of us is the norm. Calling on guys to declare their preference for something which they may only choose on certain days is not always helpful. It can lead to disenchantment when you realise it is not always what you want, and even deceit when you pretend it is what you want because you think it is what you ought to. Admitting to liking attractive women is not always approved of in the church.

This isn’t all I’ve got to say, but it’s about enough for now. These are very much unfinished thoughts, I want to know what you think, is the call for Proverbs 31 women any more than a pious catch phrase?

Is singleness an issue in the church?

Danny Webster 4 Comments

Should the church do anything about the single people in its midst?

I threw this out on twitter and got more feedback than on anything I’ve ever tweeted before. So one thinks there might be a few things to ponder here.

The responses fitted into two broad groups, those who thought it wasn’t really an issue, and those who wanted the church to stop being so sympathetic and patronising.

But maybe we conflate the church with the church leadership, or the church staff, or the officially organised and sanctioned programmes of the church.

Because the church doing something about it is you and me deciding to help people get together. Or encourage people struggling with relationships. Or discipling people to help them not find their identity in being someone’s girlfriend – or having that girl on your arm. The girls blame it on there being too few guys, and the guys say there’s too many girls. (seriously, they do.)

And I’ve heard enough sermons with the intentional brief asides that challenge guys to man up and ask girls out. And I’ve had enough conversations with girls frustrated with guys not asking them out, and with guys daunted by the prospect, or dizzied by indecision.

The core criticism seems to be that the church treats married people as the norm, and single people as those who are waiting for the right person to come along. Thrown into this mix are those with the specific calling to be single, which we are told to remember to affirm as a gift from God andSt Pauland John Stott are cited as our exemplars.

This description lets two groups of people off the hook and leaves the people out side these mutually exclusive groups rather stranded. If you’re married then you’re ok, if you want to be single, you’re affirmed. If you are single and pretty desperate not to be you’re kind of in trouble.

You are in trouble because the church doesn’t know what to tell you. Should they tell you that marriage is an ideal that you strive for? Of counsel that singleness is a wonderful calling?

We’re not very good at living in a place where things don’t add up. We’re unable to handle the ideal of one thing, the gift of another, and the role of God in redeeming humankind and working in each of our lives at all times.

We want it simple. We want someone else to do something about it. But we also want our independence. So we like the idea of speed dating in the church. Of semi arranged marriages avoiding the social awkwardness of dating, and well, removing the risk element from it all.

But that’s the fastest post I’ve ever written, so I haven’t really thought this through. What are your thoughts? Is there such a thing as a singleness problem, and if so, is it in the number of single people or the way in which they’re treated?

Please tell me.

From one to another

Danny Webster 5 Comments

Dear guys,

Last week I wrote a letter to the female race, you may have read it. If you didn’t, it might be a good place to start.

This is quite a different letter, to the ladies I was trying to give a glimpse of insight into the way one particular guy thought, felt and acted. To you I’ve got a few words of advice.

Decide if you like a girl, find a way to let her know, and explore if that liking turns to love.

I told you I only had a few. Because, who am I to try and tell you much else?

You have walked a road that I have not travelled. The chances for love may have been punctuated with disappointment. I do not think I can write for every situation that you will have experienced.

It is not my place to opine about you longing after a girl who has walked away.

Can I with any credibility chastise the philanderer who leads each girl on and into his arms, but finds that there is another more pleasing to his eyes?

When you tell me that you have asked out one woman and then the next, and this has happened time and time again and they continue to turn you down: because my rejection count does not compare, I cannot advise.

And when you meet the one who you love, when she takes a step into the church and you turn and gaze up the aisle, the joy that overwhelms must be contained.

Because I have not been there. I have not lived the life you live.

But in fact, we need to help each other. We need to be honest about the challenges we face, share the hopes that we have and the dreams that one day might be our reality.

We need to cry when sadness darkens our day, confide when we’ve nowhere left to turn. Tell each other when we are being idiots, encourage us in our pursuit, or caution against heartache that might lurk ahead.

We do not know the life that each other leads unless we let each other in. We cannot help each other until first we welcome help. We are not ready to love a lady, with all our heart, with all our strength, if we have not first learnt who we are.

We cannot use the exceptionalness of our lives as a shroud to permit secrecy. Of course we all have experiences that others have not shared, and we will sometimes struggle to comprehend what greets each others’ day. The words of advice may be idiotic, the comfort we bring ineffectual, but that is not an excuse to close our lives off. And how will we ever get better at helping one another if we do not give it a go.

I talked to a few girls before writing this letter, and basically, they want to know if we like them. I recounted a story, maybe because it’s quirkiness hid my true vulnerability. That there was a girl who I liked, and I chose to spend time around her, and as my affection grew I realised that my actions could be construed as evidence of my interest so I backed off. I was worried that the girl to whom I was expressing an interest might actually realise how I felt. I also didn’t want anyone else getting onto the idea that I liked her. That might puncture my charade.

That’s how crazy I can be, I can tie myself in knots. And the ladies I told struggled to comprehend this ludicrous behaviour.

And I know that in other ways, you too can act a little crazy. Sometimes we purport ourselves as content on our own that we ignore the interest of the fairer sex. Sometimes we are so desperate for attention that we take the easy chances, find the girls that will have us. Sometimes we stay with someone long after our interest has waned because our fear of conflict takes over.

We have also emasculated our emotions in an attempt to conform to the cultural caste of gender.

We think that guys should be manly, concerned only with adventures, hand-wrestling grizzly bears and we have turned Jesus into that man. We have tried too hard to make God masculine. We have forgotten how to cry.

As Joe Carter put it: “Young men don’t need a Jesus who strolls like the Duke, squints like Clint Eastwood, and snarls like dick Cheney. They don’t need Jesus the cagefighter, they just need Jesus the Savior”.

Until we are comfortable with Jesus as a paragon of vulnerable masculinity we will try to live a life that isn’t reflecting Him. And I think for a start this means countering our pride. I’ve made it clear before that I’m open to girls giving a relationship a kick start. This can be a hard thing for us, it seems like we’ve been pre-empted, had our role taken. But we get things so very wrong so very often, whether it is about misplaced attraction, about ignorance of how other feel, about how we may have led a girl to think we were interested. About how we may shy away from facing that spectre of rejection, and if a girl gives a guy a helping hand we should welcome it and not resent it.

Finally, a word on singleness and marriage. We have got to esteem marriage more highly, and stop just thinking one day it will come to us, at a time when it is convenient, at a moment when we are less busy, less lustful for the next beautiful girl, at a time when we are ready to settle down.

But it’s also a problem when we are too desperate for marriage, I could pretty much quote all of what Max Dubinsky has written over at the Good Women Project, but this will suffice: “The enemy loves that you so desperately want to be married, that you’re crying on your bedroom floor begging God for a boyfriend or girlfriend because you can’t handle being alone. That your attention is focused on finding someone to marry. He loves that you don’t think you will be happy until you find ‘the one’”. We have to learn to be single well.

If this all sounds a bit too emotional, that’s okay, we’re all made differently. But if it does sound like I’m trying to get you to open up, think about your feelings, then I am. I think there is nothing worse that the facade that we perpetuate that we men do not have feelings. That we are unemotional beings with a lustful intent that we conquer by brute force as Ulysses chained himself to the mast to avoid the charms of the Sirens.

There’s much more I could say, but for now let’s end it here, and let us also remember to talk. So maybe my words were not as few as I made out, or my advice as limited as I suggested, but we shouldn’t shy away from taking time to grapple with complexity.

Your brother.

Girls, if you’ve been reading I guess that’s okay. Give us a chance, and help us where you can.