Sex

I’ve recently been thinking quite a lot about sex. (A colleague asked “How’s that working for you?” when I made this statement at staff meeting this week.) Like many words we’ve considered over the past year, this one raises lots more questions than it does answers. But I’m thinking those questions are important ones for our community to be considering. So here goes:

This week the University of Guelph held its 32nd conference on sexuality. This is an excellent conference that focuses on current trends in sexual behaviour, sexual health, education, ethics, even spirituality. I attended one of the workshops a few years ago on “Sexuality and spirituality” and found it extremely helpful. We talk about spiritual wholeness, integrity, and authenticity in the church. I’m not sure we always give sex and sexuality enough place in our conversation or those discussions.

Generations approach the whole subject area in different ways. This factor might be considered a big piece of that troublesome “generation gap” we often deplore. Certainly the generations learned about and speak about sex in quite different ways. One area I’ve been paying attention to in my role as a congregational support person is educating and informing youth workers about abuse prevention, and trying to promote wholesome and healthy relations among children, youth and adults who guide, protect and teach them. ( This is a great text I use in that training. )

I keep bumping in to questions that have an element of sex, how we learned about it, what our values and sense of ethics and morality are and how we came to hold those values. Questions about the sacrament of marriage, how teens and young adults live and make life decisions, what to do about priesthood and members’ “behaviour” –might I even suggest questions of dress and interactions between campers and counselors?

You may look at that list and take issue with my audacity in connecting them all to sex. But have you talked about them? Is there a way or a place that’s appropriate to talk about those questions? It’s a challenge for me. Because I think the church should be a place that finds a way to talk about these very questions and helps people be whole and healthy and well-balanced and lead ethical and moral sexual lives; to decide which values are eternal and which ones really need to change. How will we do that if we don’t figure out a way to talk?

Anybody out there have thoughts or questions to add to my list?

Posted by Marion