Chapter 46: The Inner Sanctum
THE INNER SANCTUM
GOD did not limit the gift of sexuality to those who He foreknew would marry. But the gift of sexual intercourse He ordained exclusively for those who marry. This is unequivocal in Scripture. There are no exceptions. Intercourse without total commitment for life is demonic. This supreme intimacy was mysterious even to Paul, who wrote, “Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. . . . The two shall become one. This is a great mystery, and I take it to mean Christ and the Church.” (No one who “hated women” could possibly have written that.)
No stronger language could have been found to denote the intimacy which exists between Christ and His Bride. Unquestionably it is because of these mysteries that physical union is reserved for husband and wife, two who have given themselves unconditionally to one another before God and the world. They enter into “knowledge” which no one else is permitted to enter. It is the inner sanctum of human knowledge. “And Abraham knew his wife.”
I’m not going to tell you where, how, or when to do it. I’m not going to tell you what to wear. I’m leery, as you know, of getting too technical. There was a man in one of my Greek classes when I was in college who, when we would be discussing at great length some particle or mood in a New Testament passage, would mutter, “If you get too technical you’re going to miss the blessing.” As with New Testament Greek, so with sex. Beware of the how-to-do-it books. There is danger in analysis. You can’t learn the meaning of a rose by pulling it to pieces. You can’t examine a burning coal by carrying it away from the fire. It dies in the process. There is something deadly about the relentless scientific probe into the mechanics of sexual activity —the lights, cameras, artificial organs and instruments, the note-taking observers and the horrifyingly detailed reports published for the world’s delectation —to say nothing of the volunteers who participate in the collective experiments, willingly exhibiting themselves for the cause of science and reducing this precious gift not merely to banality but to a bodily function as devoid of meaning for the human being as it is for an animal.
It’s all “perfectly natural,” we’re reminded, and it is therefore supposed to follow that mystery, silence, and privacy are entirely out of place. We’ve outgrown all that. We’re liberated. I very much fear that this liberation is not freedom but a new and demonic bondage. By throwing away the very things which guarded its meaning, we have thrown away the thing itself. What was once priceless is now the cheapest commodity on the market.
George Steiner wrote, “Sexual relations are, or should be, one of the citadels of privacy, the night place where we must be allowed to gather the splintered, harried elements of our consciousness to some kind of inviolate order and response.
“The new pornographers subvert this last vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the rooftops, making them hollow. The images of our love-making, the stammerings we resort to in intimacy, come prepackaged. . . . Our dreams are marketed wholesale.”[20]
You can buy textbooks, diagrams, and full-color photographs of sexual techniques. We are expected to be a nation of bedroom virtuosos.
Yesterday Jo and I went to Provincetown. We sat at an umbrella-shaded table by the sidewalk and watched the passing parade of dejected, disheveled, seminude humanity shuffling and sashaying and schlepping along the sidewalk in search of a good time. The nudity is not supposed to move us. We are asked to behold without shock, without even surprise, the nearly total exposure of every conceivable shape and size of physique. But I don’t want to look at nudity without emotion. I want it reserved to enhance, not exhibited to destroy, the depth of individual experience. I feel I am being robbed of the incalculably valuable treasures of delicacy, mystery, and sophistication. Modesty was a system of protection. But the alarms have all been disconnected. The house is wide open to plunder.
The distinction between intimacy and openness is rubbed out altogether. The craze for “sensitivity” and “sharing” has done its pernicious work. There is no longer a sense of occasion or appropriateness. What ought to be hidden is displayed. What ought to be whispered or covered in silence is shouted. What ought to be kept back for a chosen time, a chosen place, and a chosen individual is thrown out into the thoroughfare.
Sex is not the most important thing that makes a marriage work. But it is important. It has no authority of its own. It cannot lead to freedom. It must not control. It cannot finally fulfill. In love’s highest ecstasies the lover knows that this is not all there is. The closest closeness is not close enough. The “I-thou” that we thought was ultimate brings us ultimately to that other Thou. It is the will of God that leads to freedom. It is the will of God that finally fulfills. “The world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear, but the man who is following God’s will is part of the permanent and cannot die.”
But sex is a part of the will of God for husbands and wives. It is one way in which they glorify Him (think of it!). They are not to deny it to one another. Love your husband, love his body, love to be close. Read the beautiful Song of Solomon, a love poem included in the inspired Word of God (would we have thought a love poem belonged in the Bible?) which describes the beauties of the lover in the eyes of the beloved, and of the beloved in the eyes of the lover. They saw each other. His head, his hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, his arms, his legs, his appearance, his speech are all cited with rapture. “My beloved is all radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand.” This woman had eyes to see, a heart to love, and the ability to put it into words.
Perhaps all three of these things need (in some women more than in others) to be learned, but I believe they can be learned. A wife needs eyes to see the man, in all his aspects, which God has given her. She needs a heart trained by practice to love him. She needs to be able to express what she sees and how she loves. We are human beings, made of flesh and blood as well as of brains and emotions. The Word had to be made flesh before we could truly understand what God was like. A man prefaces his proposal of marriage with a declaration of love —“In the beginning was the Word.” He says it in as many ways as he can think of —words, gestures, looks, gifts, flowers. But it is not until he marries the woman that the word finally becomes flesh, and his love is expressed most fully. But then the flesh must again become word. Both the woman and the man need to be told, and told again and again and again, that they are loved. “Behold, thou art fair, my love. There is no spot in thee.” Word, then flesh, then word, and so on through life.
The essence of sexual enjoyment for a woman is self-giving. Give yourself wholly, joyfully, hilariously. (Have we ever talked about the hilarity of sex? No one had prepared me for how rollicking it can be at times!) Neither husband nor wife should withhold this pleasure from the other except by mutual agreement for a limited time. His body belongs now to you, yours to him. Each has “power” over the other’s, each holding the other’s in holiness and honor under God. You will find that it is impossible to draw the line between giving pleasure and receiving pleasure. If you put the giving first, the receiving is inevitable.
There are times when you will find it impossible to give, and your husband, in love to you, does not demand. There are times when you will be ravenously hungry and he will want nothing so much as to go to bed and go at once to sleep. Your love, then, will want what he wants more than what you wanted yourself. This is another kind of giving.
You will want to bring forth, for your lover, your own treasures. They are not to be revealed ahead of time to him nor in retrospect to anyone else. These are your own gifts, unique and exceptional and not to be delivered over to the commonplace. Hold them sacred. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “My moments signed by God need not be appraised in the marketplace.”
It will not always be clearcut and simple. In this matter, as in all others where your life is bound closely to your husband’s, you will sometimes be aware that you need help. Remember first that love itself —the “educated heart” —has a way of teaching you what to do. Worry is worse than useless, it’s destructive. Paul wrote, “Don’t worry over anything whatever, tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus.” It’s God who thought up sex. “Every detail of your needs” includes sexual ones. You can talk to Him about them. You can’t shock or embarrass Him. “If any of you does not know how to meet any particular problem he has only to ask God, who gives generously to all men without making them feel foolish or guilty.”