It’s a trophy, but it’s more than a trophy.
Jewelry, pictures, sculptures made by children, antiques that have been in the family for years, art projects, souvenirs, velvet paintings—we hold on to them because they point beyond themselves. If we were to ask you about a certain picture and why you have it displayed in such a prominent place in your home or office or why you carry it in your purse or wallet everywhere you go, you’d probably respond by talking about the people in the picture, where it was taken, when it was taken. But that would only be the start. Those relationships and that place and that time are all about something else, something more. If we kept exploring, you’d probably end up using words like trust and love and belonging and commitment and celebration.
So it’s a picture, but it’s more than a picture.
This physical thing—this picture, trophy, artifact, gift—is actually about that relationship, that truth, that reality, that moment in time.
This is actually about that.
Whether it’s what we do with our energies
or how we feel about our bodies
or wanting to have the control in relationships
or trying to recover from heartbreak
or dealing with our ferocious appetites
or the difficulty of communicating clearly with those we love
or longing for something or someone better,
much of life is in some way connected with our sexuality.
And when we begin to sort through all of the issues surrounding our sexuality, we quickly end up in the spiritual,
because this
is always about that.
And so this guy always has a girlfriend, and it has become a joke among his family and friends that the day he loses one girlfriend, he finds another—they actually use the phrase “trade her in” behind his back—which raises the question, Why does he need to have a girl? What is his real need, the one that drives him to need a girl? And if we could get at that, would he not need a girl so much?
And she’s got a coldness in her heart toward her husband, but it’s really about something that happened years before she even met him.
And he’s got this thing he does, and he keeps telling her that all guys are like this, and she wants to trust him, but she’s dying to know if all guys really are like him, because it’s getting a little weird.
And she’s single and fine with it but still has this sense that she’s a sexual being, and she’s trying to figure out how to reconcile this because her married friends keep trying to set her up with a “nice” guy they know, which gives her the feeling that her friends think she is somehow incomplete because she isn’t married.
And they keep having these arguments about things that are so trivial it’s embarrassing. Yesterday they got into it over how the cars should be parked, and the day before it had something to do with the phone bill, and before that it was about whose turn it was to take the dog out, and now it’s happening again—they’re in the kitchen debating how a tomato should be properly sliced. They’ve been living together now for several years, and they would say it’s been great, but they’re at this point in the relationship where issues like trust and commitment and future and kids and marriage are starting to linger in their minds and hearts, and underneath it all they both have this question: Are you the one? But neither of them has ever actually voiced it, and both of them experienced their parents’ divorcing at a young age, so anytime the subject of marriage comes up, things get confusing and tense very quickly, and so they’re just at this moment realizing that this argument really has nothing to do with how to slice a tomato.
Because this is really about that.
It’s always about something else.
Something deeper. Something behind it all. You can’t talk about sexuality without talking about how we were made. And that will inevitably lead you to who made us. At some point you have to talk about God.
Sex. God. They’re connected. And they can’t be separated. Where the one is, you will always find the other. This is a book about how sexuality is the “this” and spirituality is the “that.” To make sense of the one, we have to explore the other.
And that is what this book is about.
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