Changes

Summer giving way to fall.
Kids going off to school.
Opting to do our own “church” for them… and for us.
Dramatically changing my diet… as well as my meds.
Learning to pick my battles more wisely and speak a little more patiently.
Standing on my own crooked feet.

Yeah, it’s gonna be kinda different around my little corner of life.
Yeah, I know I could be very wrong in some places.
Yeah, I know my pride’s still gonna get in my way sometimes.
No, I’m not giving up.
No, I’m not gonna be the good Christian girl everyone thought I was.
No, I’m never going to stop being outspoken and passionate.

But it’s good to get back into a routine again. And, it’s nice to see the kids actually participating in spiritual discussions rather than sitting there getting talked at (and not listening); now they’re free to engage, to speak out of turn and ask the honest questions welling up in their insightful young minds. And, it feels so good to be listening to my body, rather than fighting against it, so that I can be good to it for the first time in my life. And, I need to learn how to be more patient and graceful with people, both for them and for me. And, I’m very ready to be my own woman, to make my own choices in my own time—to say and think and do what I truly believe is best—and to not ever feel needlessly ashamed or be sorry to a single person for it.

Because, more than anything else, I’m realizing that God is so much bigger, so much more patient, so much more misunderstood, and so much more surprising than any of us can even begin to know.

Because, more than I believe in him at times, I believe the human soul should be loved and free.

And I realize that I have habitually been more a part of the problem than the solution.

Perhaps the biggest change that I am undergoing right now is learning how to settle into myself comfortably and confidently so that I can, in turn, be comfortable and confident in my relationships—to differentiate, as psychologists would put it.

If I can manage that, all of the other changes in my life will probably come a little bit easier.

Wrap it

I have seriously enjoyed this series. I hope that you have, too.

Sexuality is such an incredibly diverse, deep, and messy topic to delve into. (Then again, so is spirituality… and theology… and humanity… and….) I could make my entire blog about human sexuality, writing about it exclusively, and still only scratch the surface.

But human sexuality is only one of my passions (punny, eh?), so I won’t do that. No worries.

For now, I’m going to take a little break from the blog and from my social media. I may check in on Facebook and Twitter every so often, but I need to step back from it all for some time. I could go into details, but let’s just say it’s crazy and stressful around here right now.

But, don’t worry; I’ll be back soon.

In the meantime, feel free to give me some of your own feedback on this series of posts—or any other posts, really. What has resonated with you? What do/don’t you like? What wisdom do you have to offer to me and to the other people hanging out in this little corner of the internet?

Better yet, share a story. I know that you have a great many to tell.

Love and peace to all.
Carly

P.S.: For links to every post in this or any other series on the blog, you can now click on the “past series” page link over by my “author” and “(in)formation” pages.

Marriage is an endurance sport

“Marriage is HARD. Men and women are NOT meant to coexist.”
-Jack Fuller, Jr., What Happens in Vegas

One of my favorite things about the movie “What Happens in Vegas” is how humorously it illustrates the difficulty of doing “hard marriage.” Most of the movie is spent following this haphazard couple stuck in a drunken mistake of a marriage as they fight to coexist.

If you’re not married yet but ever plan to be, know this: the first year of marriage is going to be the most anti-climactic time of your life. We build up so much fanfare for things like “falling in love” and weddings and honeymoons, but when all of the fantasy fades away it comes down to the hard (yes, HARD) work of bringing two very unique lives together under one roof. You don’t just marry your best friend, you marry someone who is going to drive you absolutely crazy—and not in a good way. You marry his messy nature with her obsessive need for cleanliness (or visa versa). You marry each others’ families, as well as each other’s conflicting ideas on what a “normal” family should be.

And you fight. A lot. Over stupid stuff and over important stuff. You learn how to stand up for yourself, how to give in, how to compromise, and how to discern when to take each course of action (hopefully).

Marriage is an endurance sport, and it looks different for every couple.

Learn how to be secure in yourselves in relationship with each other; when one of you has to lord it over the other or one of you has to lose your sense of self in the other, you’ve both lost. Take the good with the bad and learn how to let it all make you more and more married to each other every day.

Because nobody can “become one flesh” overnight.

Nobody can “get married” by saying the right words in a ceremony, signing a legal document, or even having sex. What a shallow view of marriage! It is so much more than that.

Marriage is not a destination; it is a journey. It is not something that happens once, but something you do again and again every day. It is not something you magically become overnight, but something you spend a lifetime becoming.

Marriage is an endurance sport.

This post is part of the Marriage and Sexuality series.

Baby, I love your… garden…

The only biblical account I have come across that strikes me as being about romantic love is the account of an affair between two shepherds recorded in the Song of Songs… which gets misinterpreted as the Song of Solomon… which demands all sorts of “theological gymnastics” to reconcile with modern American nuclear family values because Solomon was a major playboy… but that’s beside the point.

This unnamed (and, more than likely, fictional) couple may or may not have actually been married; the text doesn’t say, all though at the end of the piece the woman sure seems pretty demanding about the level of her lover’s commitment to her (“place me like a seal on your arm,” or “marry me already, dammit!” …okay, maybe that’s reading a little far into it). The only clear reference to a wedding in the poem(s) is at the point when the woman is describing the ridiculous scene that King Solomon made as he paraded down the street, fancied up so much that he looked like he was about to get married yet again. Her point with all of this is to say that the king’s extravagance is a foolish and shallow overindulgence, but that her lover was even more of a king to her than Solomon was to all of Israel on that day.

It should be noted, however, that the style of the poetry is ripped off from Mesopotamian love poetry and/or sacred marriage poetry. With that in mind, it is perhaps a given that the couple is married.

It should also be noted that this piece is not meant to be understood in a linear way. We read and write things in a linear-time fashion (i.e. consecutive events in the order they happened). So many times I hear this piece (along with everything else in the scriptures) get interpreted in such a way, but that’s a very disrespectful hermeneutic to force on the texts. That’s not at all how Hebrew or ANE people thought or conveyed information. Honestly, we’re not even sure that it’s all one poem; it’s likely to be several poems put together.

The wonderful thing about the Song of Songs is the mystery of the poetic language. It’s not supposed to be precise; it’s supposed to be beautiful. So, I really don’t want to go too crazy trying to interpret its exact meaning because poetry (just like much of art) is supposed to strike different people in different ways and have multiple different layers.

For example: To me, the Song of Songs is about the tension between “Eden” and the real world beyond it, as experienced in love-relationships. When they’re together enjoying each other’s… um… gardens… everything seems so wonderful, like how we think of a honeymoon being. But then there’s rough times, too. In the end, it all makes their love stronger.

Poetry also tends to enjoy reflecting culture while simultaneously subverting, transcending, and/or making a statement about it. In a world where marriages were so much about political, social, and economic gain, two shepherds having the unlikely love affair of the century would stand in distinct and rebellious contrast to the likes of King Solomon who bought right into the culture’s shallow and pathetic ways. It’s also very interesting how, in the context of a grossly patriarchal culture, this collection of poems is about mutuality in love and marriage.

For the sake of our next conversation, a good take-away from the Song of Songs is this: True paradise is found when sexual love is about mutual love, enjoyment, and commitment—not personal gain.

This post is part of a Marriage and Sexuality series.

What about Jacob and Rachel?: How hot ass saved the world

Some may disagree with my contention that marriage in the Ancient Near East (ANE) had nothing to do with romantic love. There are lots of love stories in the Bible, they argue. What about Ruth and Boaz? What about Esther and King Xerxes? What about Jacob and Rachel?

Warning: These aren’t your momma’s Bible stories. If you’re sensitive to blunt honesty, unappreciative of snark, or want to keep on believing that the Bible is a nice G-rated children’s book, for the love of God, RUN AWAY NOW. You’ve been warned.

Ruth needed someone to save her beloved mother-in-law’s line and rescue the two of them from poverty, so the women cooked up a scheme to seduce a well-off older man who still hadn’t married for whatever reason (ahem, workaholic, ahem). Alex, I’d like gold-diggers and cradle-robbers for 200, please. Note that the reason he noticed Ruth at all was because she was such a gosh darn hard worker, better than some of his paid employees. But, since he wouldn’t do anything about it, Ruth (under her mother-in-law’s instruction) put on a negligee and some sexy perfume, paid him visit late in the night after he had passed out drunk, and went down on him “uncovered his feet” while he slept. Now, we can’t know for sure whether or not they had intercourse that night (though I’ve found that’s how Jews interpret it), she sure isn’t the model for feminine purity and modesty that we make her out to be today.

After Vashti was deposed (for refusing to be womanized by prancing around naked for all the drunk men of Persia to gawk at—why we don’t give her more praise is beyond me), Xerxes had Persia’s finest scour the kingdom for sexy virgins to take from their families like tax money and add to his harem. He then had them brought to him (after a year of exhaustive beautification processes) so he could force them into a one night stand with him and then decide which one to make his queen. How the hell does a sweet little Jewish virgin girl (who was supposedly a descendent of Rachel, by the way) impress a foreign king who has access to all of the exotic tail he could ever want? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t become queen by exercising her godly feminine purity to make him fall in love with her in one night.

Jacob fled from home after being a big thieving jerk to his older brother, who then decided he wanted him dead. I really don’t understand why anyone likes Jacob. He’s a manipulative, selfish, conniving, back-stabbing momma’s boy. How come he gets to be the hero? Oh, right, because whoever wrote Genesis just loves irony—ahem, I mean, because it shows that God repurposes misfits for use in his holy plans. Anyway, he ends up running into his cousin, Rachel, as she’s shepherding her father’s herds, and he thinks, “Yay! Relatives who don’t want me dead! I’m saved!” So, he moves in with them and goes to work for his uncle, Laban. One day, Laban says to Jacob that he should get paid for all of his hard work, and Jacob says he’ll stay on for seven more years in exchange for Rachel, the youngest of Laban’s two daughters. Why? Because he loved her, of course! That’s what the Bible says… in English.

Traditionally, the oldest daughters get married off first, but Rachel’s older sister Leah had a “weak appearance” (often mistranslated into “weak eyes”). Rachel had wide hips for bearing children and big breasts to nurse them, plus she was a hard worker and had a pretty face to boot, but Leah looked like she would be too weak for either job. What ANE man wants that? Only one that wants his name going extinct faster than a mammoth, and that was not Jacob—especially after all of that hard work he put into stealing the family birthright. He was in the market for a strong woman who could pull her weight in the home and give him more strapping sons than he could count. Ironically, Laban pulled a fast one on the master conspirator himself to get seven more years of labor out of him… and it worked. Jacob ended up married to both sisters (Leah first, then Rachel—note that neither of the women had any say in these proceedings), but in another stroke of irony it was Leah who had more kids and Rachel who struggled to compete at all with her surprisingly fertile sister (and she also ended up dying in labor). Again with the irony, mister writer!

In short, Jacob’s “love” for Rachel could be better understood as his preference for her because of her hot… assets.

But, wait! There might be one actual love story within canonized scripture. Think, Carly, think…

This post is part of a Marriage and Sexuality series.

Biblical marriage?

“Biblical” has become a major buzz-word lately, and the issue of how to define marriage is up for major debate. For many, it has turned into an ugly culture war, and even within Christianity there are multiple perspectives all claiming to be “biblical.”

So, let’s take some time to survey what “biblical” marriage actually looks like.

1. Genesis 2: one man and one woman (later called Adam and Eve, or “man/human” and “life”)
2. Genesis 16: one man, his wife/wives, and wife’s female slave(s)
3. Genesis 38:6-10: one dead man, dead man’s brother(s), and one woman
4. Exodus 21:4-6: one man, one female-slave, and one male-slave to whom the man gives female-slave to as a wife (of course, the owner gets to keep the female-slave-wife and kids if the male-slave decides he wants freedom more than his family)
5. Numbers 31:1-18, Deuteronomy 21:10-14: one man, virgin female POW(s) (man can decide to keep her and force her to submit to him, or he can send her away after he sleeps with her if he doesn’t like her)
6. Deuteronomy 22:28-29: one man and rape victim (or, it could be argued, one man and one woman caught having sex without her father’s consent to the relationship; see also Exodus 22:16-17)
7. Across the Old Testament: one man, many wives
8. Across the Old Testament: one man, his wife/wives, and concubines

What can we take from this?

1. Biblical marriage is patriarchal; men own women as property (just like they “owned” slaves, children, and livestock).
2. For women, virginity is everything. Premarital sex isn’t a punishable offense, but the loss of property value (virgins were worth more money than non-virgins) for the father is what really matters.
3. Biblical marriage is primarily about sexual reproduction for the sake of producing male heirs and building up the family estate. It generally has nothing to do with romantic love (or sexual orientation, for that matter).
4. While it can be argued that polygamy was not God’s intent or ideal (i.e. Genesis 2:4, 1 Timothy 3:2, 12, and Titus 1:6), it is irrefutable that God still recognized these other kinds of marriage as marriage and, at times, blessed them as godly family units.

My point with all of this isn’t to try and justify any “liberal” or “immoral” view of sexuality that I want by doing “theological gymnastics” with these texts; my point is that we all pick and choose how to read and apply the Bible in our own lives. Fitting biblical marriage into the 1950’s nuclear family ideal takes just as much “theological gymnastics” as does justifying cohabitation or same-sex marriage. Truly literal biblical marriage is the product of several very different cultures existing many thousands of years ago and adhering to multiple very different ideas about men, women, marriage, family, sexuality, inter-personal relationships, and ownership.

A few easy-to-read resources:
(Disclaimer: The views of these authors, articles, or websites may not always reflect my own, just as my views may not necessarily reflect theirs. My posting of these articles should not be confused for my total and complete endorsement of the authors and their views or those of the websites that feature them.)

Marriage in the Bible
Marriage and families in the Bible
Jennifer Wright Knust on marriage and sexuality in the Bible (NOTE: there are three parts to this)
Sexuality in the Bible

This post is part of a Marriage and Sexuality series.

Overnight

Ever since I got married, friends who call, text, or write me on Facebook will often start the conversation by asking, “So, how’s married life?”

I never quite know how to answer. Should I give the trite and expected, “Great”? Should I have a little awkward-turtle fun with a “I love it—sex is FUN”? Should I be honest and tell them how freaking hard it’s been?

Truthfully, that question feels about the same as being asked on my birthday how it feels to be another year older. Really, in spite of all of the ridiculous build-up, I don’t feel any different. I’m still me. Chris is still Chris. It’s just that we share life together now. And, perhaps it’s just me being a pessimist, but in my experience life is far more likely to suck than to be “great.”

That’s not how the movies portray it, is it?

You see, just like fairy tales and chick flicks make love/marriage into this big-deal, life-transforming moment, I see much of the “true love waits” movement doing something similar. Everything is so focused on one thing—”getting married.” A wedding. A legal ceremony, sacrament, and ridiculously large and expensive party all smashed together into one big event that’s so important it often takes at least a year to plan. (Is it obvious that I hate weddings? Well, I do. I really, really do.) Once the vows are exchanged and the license is signed, suddenly the happy couple is supposed go from being two people practically banned from being at all in touch with their sexuality to magically being “one flesh.”

Overnight.

Even if you’re completely ashamed of showing your naked body to this person. Even if you try to have sex, with expectations for a big fireworks show, and can’t bear to finish because it hurts too much. Even if you wake up not feeling any different than the previous morning. Even if you spend half of your honeymoon fighting. Even if it takes months to even begin to get over all of the shame you’ve associated with sex, bodies, and desire for so many years.

Is that really what marriage is? Is that really the box God wants us to fit our sexuality into?

This post is part of a Marriage and Sexuality series.