The Thing Missing In Our Purity

Why purity cannot be the goal of your sexuality and what a little studied emotion has to do with helping you embody sexuality better

“There is a way of beholding that is a form of prayer.” Diane Ackerman^⁠

My family used to live by a Saturday morning ritual that went something like this. After a lazy breakfast, my wife, my toddler son, and I all piled in the family Subaru to taxi my wife to her art class. My son and I carried on to find a new park to explore until it was time to reverse the process and pick my wife back up. 

Once home again, my wife would ask, “Want to see my drawings?” 

And there she’d stand patient with eager eyes, waiting for an audience in me. 

“Sure, of course,” I’d say, smiling. 

She’d pull out her giant sketch book and flip open pages full of freshly minted nude drawings of a man or a woman in some form of repose. 

If you know anything about art education, you know artists for centuries have trained their skills through the ritual of live nude figure drawing classes. It's just like it sounds. A paid model disrobes, assumes a statuesque pose in the middle of a classroom, and freezes for as long as his or her muscles allow. The students then busily take in and interpret on the blank page the one whom they’ve just beheld, until the model fatigues and needs to reposition. And it starts all over, giving artists time to work their craft from a different angle. And my wife had pages of work to show. 

While our son played with his toys in the other room, we sat at the kitchen table and studied every drawing for the flow of its lines and awe of its subject. She paused at most drawings to retrace with me her line work. She described the importance of keeping the pencil in motion and attempting long curving lines versus short tight ones to mimic the movement and grace of the human body.

She ended the ritual almost always the same way.  She sat back, paused in silence, near trance like, taking in the last glimpses of her artistic labor. Then she shut the book and declared, “The human body is a work of art. I love drawing it so much!” 

And with that, life moved on to Saturday chores.

Photo by Christopher Ruel on Unsplash.

Eyes to See

That ritual changed my life. There was a time when I struggled with looking at pornography. It had taken so much from me. But maybe most enduring, I had lost my capacity for awe. It wasn’t dead, per se, but I struggled to trust my relationship with beauty and in the name of sexual purity shut down anything that moved in me . You’d think these Saturday mornings with my wife would only pour gas on the embers of my lust. But the slow-sit-and-study liturgy of it actually gave me back the gift of beholding. In many ways, it gave me eyes to see again. Yes, I was getting back my ability to see with wonder. I was getting back my innocence. 

If you grew up in the church, there’s a good chance you’ve been told that purity is the goal of your sexuality. That what God wants most from you is to stay pure. We often equate this with virginity and, even worse, a hyper purity where we never think or feel anything sexual. We couldn’t get it more wrong. We’ve become obsessed with purity when purity in the Bible was never the point in itself. It was always preparation for worship. You cleansed yourself so that you could commune with God. The point was the encounter with God. Not the purity. 

Somehow we made purity the point and stopped at the preparation. It’s like preparing for a romantic date but never going on the date. All this purity was meant to take us somewhere. 

But if we forsake purity, does that get us the free and alive sexuality we hope for? The culture at large whittled it down to one main rule: Consent. We talk a lot about consent because we’ve needed to do that. It all must begin with this freedom of invitation. But then what? Is it just magically awesome? As author Abigail Favale writes, “Consent should be the starting point rather than the end of the discussion about sexual morality. It's not enough to say that the best we can expect from sex, morally speaking, is that it's not rape." Even this culture is aching for something more.

I’ll step on the land mine of presumption to say, I think the thing missing in our sex is not more indulgence or more purity but a recovery of awe. There’s evidence for this. In her research on male lust, author Shelia Wray Gregoire found that 75.5% of Christian men self-reported a struggle with lust. Which would seem to indicate we need more purity. But when she explored in detail what these men actually struggled with, she found that 56% of these men show no evidence of any lust whatsoever. Her conclusion was that these men were having an internal response to a beautiful person and didn’t know what to call it. 

In an attempt to understand hookup culture more, professor Lisa Wade asked several of her college students to journal their experience of campus sex life. Most of the culture is fueled by alcohol use, again a push to allow anything to go. But a theme emerged among those who were sexually active without alcohol. “They talked about having sex while sober in these reverent tones. Like it was an amazing unicorn: it was meaningful in a way that drunk sex was not.” Greater sobriety and presence created greater awe. 

When it comes to sexuality, I think it's fair to say we actually need to be moved more, not less. And that moving is the emotion called awe. Dan Allender said, “Innocence is the ability to be in awe.” This awe  is actually at the heart of our innocence, our child-likeness. 

Lost Capacity for Awe

What is awe? A group of researchers defined it as an emotion, “…in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.” Yes, that’s it. Think of the feeling you get a few feet from the thunder of a waterfall or as a lion roars behind an inch of glass at the zoo. There is fear yes, but a jaw dropping pleasure that overtakes our whole body. It's also what we experience at the sight of a wildflower or a breathtaking mountain vista or in hearing a heart-rending musical solo. We relish in the beauty and marvel at how an experience so beautiful or innocent or small or fragile could overpower us. 

Or it can happen in the presence of the beauty and glory of another person. Researcher Dacher Keltner asked the question: what brings us the most awe? He assumed it would be landscapes or music or communal religious rituals. But to his surprise, he discovered we are most moved by other humans—particularly those living with what he called moral beauty. We wow when people display courage, kindness, strength, or perseverance. In his words,“Exceptional virtue, character, or ability—moral beauty—operate by a different aesthetic.” 

A different aesthetic. Don’t miss that. 

We tend to think of beauty in very malnourished terms as just something pretty to look at. But beauty is far more robust than this. Beauty is about presence, not simple appearance. As John O’Donohue said, “Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming.” The substance of a thing. Its presence. It’s how our whole being is moved by someone or something—all the senses and the heart.

In this sense, every human being is beautiful and moving. You’ve never met a truly boring or ugly person, only those who have buried it. The Biblical writers call this beauty the glory of God. We all carry this weight and radiance as the image of God. It’s what drove David to say in Psalm 8, “You’ve made them a little lower than God.” There may not be a more scandalous and beautiful sentence ever spoken about human beings. We are all nearly gods and goddesses.

No wonder we are so moved by each other. 

It makes greater sense of a story of Moses. After spending weeks atop Mount Sinai communing with God in the thunder and tumult of his glory, Moses came down to bring the commandments to the people. All of this had been so much awe and terror for the Israelites. And yet here now was Moses, alive and well.

Except his face was glowing. 

So powerful was this time with God, it literally made his face radiate. Which is weird and amazing, but it gets even crazier. The Israelites couldn’t handle it. It terrified them. They begged him to cover his face, to veil his glory so they could talk to him. In other words, their capacity for taking in glory was too small. They had too little ability to awe. I know that struggle.

Not Too Much, Too Little

We tend to think of sexual sins as a problem of too much—too much looking or too much sexual energy or arousal or too much taking in the beauty of another. Some might say that lust is looking too long and solved by simply turning away one’s gaze. Bounce your eyes, they say. But I would argue the opposite is true. I know now it's a need to look with different eyes. Not longer but deeper. Not to stare but to behold. The thing missing in my sexual desire was awe—a reverence for what I was beholding.

Lust is too little capacity for awe. It's too little being moved. Rather than being undone by the presence of another, we cope by lusting. We prevent the whole person before us, this nearly-god-like artwork of the divine, to move us. So we reduce them down to a sexual release. What a lost opportunity to reverence. 

This is the stuff a drunken hookup misses almost in its entirety. So too the flittering clicks of pornography use. There is no beholding, just no time for it. When you’re trying to get off and get it over with, you can’t stop to be moved. Here’s one man's lament of this experience: “I’ve had two one-night stands in college, and both of them have left me feeling empty and depressed. I have no idea what I gained from those experiences other than being like, ‘Yeah, I had sex with someone.’ There were no feelings of discovery or pleasure or intimate connection, which is really the thing I value.”

Contrast that with the iconic moment a bride reveals herself to her lover. Veiled as she may be (a carry over from that very story of Moses) and shining in her full glory, she turns the corner of the aisle. What do most grooms do in this moment? Break down. Overcome with the joy of the one before them, they lose it. I can still remember my own moment of this with my wife. Her face that day is forever in my heart.  

That is arousal at its finest. Sexual sin is a lesser moving. It stops at the loins and refuses the heart its full act of delight. Because as our hearts are moved, something completely other than simple sexual arousal happens. Not simply driven by release, we find our whole being rising to something. All genuine awe moves us to gratitude. And gratitude takes us to worship. If we let it, we will want for someone to thank. As Eugene Peterson said, “Gratitude is our spontaneous response to all this: to life. Something well up within us, Thank you!” 

All genuine awe ends in wanting God. And in this way, all beauty leads us to God.

Spit and Mud

What if what our sex needs most is not more techniques nor accountability, but new eyes, fresh eyes? Maybe we don’t need less arousal, but more and fuller. Not simply to look away. But to look with awe. Does it require staring at nude sketches? That was my spit and mud in the eyes from Jesus. But maybe that’s not yours. Maybe it's letting yourself read and imagine the slow lines in the Song of Songs. Or taking a longer minute with the next sunset or vista view, long enough to let the “Thank you!” rise in your heart. But that’s for you to search out. The whole earth holds his glory.

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This article first appeared in Restoration Project’s print journal Small Batch. They exist to support men and fathers in life and love and I love what they do. Please go check them out!

I wrote a whole book on recovering the heart of masculine sexuality—including this very idea—called The Sex Talk You Never Got. You can preorder it now and get free bonuses including a book club with me, a free BOGO paperback copy of the book, and an ebook on how to give a sex talk. Order it wherever you buy your books and get bonuses here:

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