McCleneghan - Good Christian sex: why chastity isnt the only option--and other things the Bible says about sex

B oston student apartments are hot in the summerrare is the window-unit AC offered to subletters; infinite are the fourth-floor walk-ups. Summer nights are best spent outlistening to a free concert at the Hatch Shell along the river, or something on the Commons. But if theres nothing to do or see, no rooftop parties to attend, an evening can be whiled away on the phone with a friend while alternately drinking an ice water and allowing the sweating glass to drip down on your own sweating arms for a moment of relief.

I learned these things about Boston in the summer months before I turned twenty. Armed with an internship at our local NPR affiliate and a part-time job in retail, I lived in an apartment, on my own, for the first time ever. I loved it, despite the heat. On one such sultry night a friend from high school called with a question. We hadnt spoken in ages, hadnt been close in years. She called for advice. Should I sleep with my boyfriend?

I was surprised by her question. Surprised she was asking, surprised she was asking me. I thought this was a pretty personal question, and one she could probably answer better for herself than I could.

We talked for a bit. How long have you been together? Do you want to? Do you love him?

Finally she made it clear why I was being asked. I was a Christian, as was she, and she wanted my opinion as such. Im also a preachers kid, and presumably had some insider authority on how to make such decisions faithfully.

I dont know if our surprise was mutual when she realized that neither I nor my very marvelous, very faithful parents were particularly opposed to sex outside of marriage. Sex among young teenagers, sex with inappropriate or nonconsenting partners, sex had by methose were things my parents were not wild about, even against. But sexeven if it happened between people who werent marriedthat wasnt such a terrible thing. We had family friends who were gay and partnered, and we had known couples who had lived together before marrying. These things happened, and they were not at the center of our moral concern as a family.

Thats not to say that we didnt have moral concerns as a family. My parents are politically engaged, care passionately about poverty and peace and womens rights, about equality and freedom and justice. I was probably the only kid in my third-grade class who could explicate the reasons why Michael Dukakis was the better candidate for president, the only one with opinions (however borrowed) about the arms race and the death penalty.

We went to church and I heard the gospel proclaimed week in and week out, and I heard that institutionalized gambling overburdens the poor, and that in some parts of the country people dont have access to clean drinking water and garbage pickup, much less good schools and health care, and that guns are, in the words of the grandfather in Witness, for the taking of human life, and thus to be despised.

I heard about Jesus and Paul and Abraham and Sarah and Mary and John and Peter. I heard about John Wesley and Sren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Phyllis Trible and Peter Berger (and his A Rumor of Angels). I learned the stories and the songs of the faith. I learned that our Christology was high and our God was good. I learned that we are called to grow ever more perfect in love, but that sin is real, in individuals and in society, and our hope is eschatological. I learned that holiness is both personal and social.

But I very rarely learned about sex or romantic love in the context of church, or God. Agape, yes. But eros? Not on your life.

My parents were not too prudish or too proper to speak of such things. Or, at least, they were not too prudish or too proper to hand me books about such things.

We had several how babies are made books available on our bookshelves at home, including one with the most amazing color photography of fetal development. As I got a little older, I was offered a copy of Joanna Coles Asking About Sexand Growing Upthe text was enthralling enough, but the book also featured illustrations by the same guy whod done all the drawing for my beloved editions of Beverly Clearys Ramona books. While it was a bit odd to see a character resembling Ramonas friend Howie nude and gradually maturing, the familiar illustrations led to my dawning understanding of human sexual development as just a normal everyday part of life.

A normal everyday part of life that wasnt coming my way anytime soon. I was a late bloomer, straight up and down for years, with my still-tiny features dwarfed by a series of huge, brightly colored pairs of glasses. My failure to fill out anything, even the most modest of training bras, rendered sex and growing up an unattainable and thus deeply alluring goal.

Maybe my parents didnt push the sex talk with me because I was so obviously awkward for so very long. All I know is that my mother handed me this wonderful, nurturing, factual book, with the vague instruction to just read what applies to you. She probably meant just do the chapters about menstruation and breasts, but Id been a reader for years by then and devoured the whole thing. I read the chapters about girls and boys and crushes and secondary sex characteristics, but also about masturbation and birth control and going all the way.

Shortly thereafter, on the endlessly long ride from our hometown in suburban Chicago to Washington, DC, to visit my grandparents, Id finished all the books Id brought along, worn out the batteries on my Walkman, and was bored, bored, bored. I could feel the whine rising in my chest, when my mom told me to reach into the backseat and dig out something from the big bag of novels shed brought along.

In this bag was probably a wide assortment of paperback editions of literary fiction. My mothers affinity for the Books section of the Sunday paper predates most of her other loves, and it was through her that I was introduced to great contemporary authors, especially great women writers, in my early teens. I read Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich.

That day, though, I homed in on a trashy romance novelthe sort with a virginal woman busting out of a ripped petticoat or bustier, swooning in the arms of a muscular man with equally long, flowing hair. It was most likely a castoff from my paternal grandmother, something shed picked up in the thrift shop where she volunteered. At that agelate elementary school or early junior highI wasnt really ready for Atwood or Erdrich. Their vocabularies were beyond me. The content of the cheesy paperback was risqu, but the reading level was closer to my own.

I held it up to show to my mom. Can I read this one?

I guess. Just make sure you skip any parts you dont think you should be reading.

And that is how, in the back of my parents minivan, with my parents and sisters on a family trek across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I came to be acquainted with oral sex.

I will tell you: it sounded awesome, and made the deciphering of the increasingly obscure euphemisms for human anatomy well worth the effort.

Now, I dont know if this is a particularly common experience, or that Id recommend this strategy of sex educationthe take and read approachto just anyone. I was shy and awkward, flat-chested and bespectacled, and had largely internalized the Dorothy Parker adage that men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses years before I first encountered her work as a freshman in high school. I was also generally supervised; I was either babysitting or being actively parented, so there was no opportunity for me to get into trouble. Knowing about the existence of sex acts was simply that; I was in no danger of getting any hands-on (ahem) experience.