Finding a Voice

Another excerpt from Lauren Winner's new book, Real Sex. "Timely" for this time of year, as students return to college, especially Christian colleges, with the intention and expectation of being formed further in the likeness of Christ. This word can help us all be a little more patient and full of grace -- with ourselves and with each other:

One ingredient in my own moving toward chastity was time, months and years of growing as a Christian. For, though I was baptized and confessing the name of Jesus at twenty-one, the process of living into Christianity, of being formed in Christian ways, is a long process, a life-long process. I say this not to excuse the sins of those new to the faith (and certainly not my own sins), but rather to remember what, in church-speak, we sometimes call discipleship and sometimes call formation. Something very dramatic and transformative happens when a person becomes a Christian, when a person is born again or baptized and gives her life to Jesus and the church. But conversation makes one a new Christian, not a mature one, and though it effects a change in one's heart and one's very being, it does not usually effect an instantaneous change in all one's habits and assumptions. In the early church, catechumens often took three years to prepare for baptism, precisely because new patterns of living take time to establish. In my own case, I became a Christian when I learned one very basic, true thing--that Jesus was God Himself, and that He had died to save me from my sins. There were, after that first lesson, still many things to learn--or, more to the point, to relearn. I had to relearn how to pray, how to interact with my family, how to spend money, how to use my time, how to comport my body, how to understand my work. Learning those new Christian habits took time. Indeed, it is still going on.

In my attempts to live chastely, prayer has been key. It may sound hokey, but I have prayed regularly that God would reshape my heart and my desires so that I would want the things He wants for me. And every day, I have prayed about sexuality when saying the line from the Lord's prayer, Lead us not into temptation. Of course, "temptation" doesn't refer just to sex, but for most unmarried Christians, sex is right up there on the list of temptations worth avoiding.

And (you may as well know upfront that I am an unreconstructed bookworm) reading had helped--reading the Bible, of course, but also ranging around Christian classics, the fathers and mothers of church history, whose accumulated wisdom about chastity offers a robust alternative to the confused messages our contemporary society sends us about sex.

Finally, a most important key ingredient: the church. The church--by which I mean the body of believers, rather than the buildings and pews they inhabit on Sundays--is part and parcel of that formation and discipleship of which I spoke earlier. We, one another's siblings in Christ, are meant to instruct and nurture, and we are also meant to reprimand and hold accountable. To be honest, in my own walk with chastity I have learned the importance of the church as much by the church's absence as its presence. sometimes I have been bowled over by the harm the church has done--in my life and others'--by speaking thoughtlessly, or not speaking at all, about sex. But other times I have been stunned by the generosity and compassion and firmness fellow Christians have shown me as I have wrestled with chastity and sexual sin. Like my confessor, they have quite simply spoken truth in love. (22-24)