Life often makes us fearful, and often leaves us damaged. 2020 has done that to so many in so many different ways, but what has truly encouraged and helped me stay OK for most of it is that there have been some very precious moments of genuine candour and exposure of real thoughts and feelings, and I believe that to be vital to our seeing a way back to health as God's people in the days ahead, so, it is with that in mind, that I share this posting, which wasn't easy to compose...
"Pornography is about hacking male sexuality. It's part of the program to destroy men's confident, daring sense of themselves as men". George Gilder.
"Why is pornography the number one snare for men? He longs for beauty, but without his fierce and passionate heart he cannot find her, win her or keep her.... What makes pornography so addictive is that more than anything else in man's lost life, it makes him feel like a man without ever requiring anything of him. The less a male feels like a real man in the presence of a real woman, the more vulnerable he is to porn.
A man's heart, driven into darker regions of the soul, denied the things he most deeply desires, comes out in darker places". John Eldredge - Wild at Heart.
We all find ourselves in situations when we're out of our depth. In my childhood, it was when my asthma severely impaired my abilities to engage in physical activities, leaving me obviously hindered compared to others... and when before reaching eleven I discovered my Father's pornography.
"Every boy, in his journey to become a man, takes an arrow in the centre of his heart, in the place of his strength. Because the wound is rarely discussed, and even more rarely healed, every man carries such damage... and the wound is nearly always given by his father" (John Elderedge - 'The Wound').
Some years later, being married to a woman who gracefully taught me so much on how to value and engage with the true worth of images in her vocation as a photographer, and her precious companionship as my wife, I recall meeting with a Christian fine art photographer who focused on creating works of art of the female form. I asked how he found himself called to such a distinct and somewhat surprising profession.
He told me of his prior days involved in engineering with the Royal Air Force. He would travel all over the world in his duties, but the one thing common wherever he went was the display of naked images of women in the quarters from 'mens' magazines. The women were often beautiful, he noted, but the method and means of their presentation in the images was clearly demeaning as it defined them solely as objects for male pleasure. On one such moment, he had a surprising thought - 'one day, I will create images of the female nude, but they will be beautiful, uplifting works'. Some forty years later, he was doing just that amidst some of the remote locations where his air force work had stationed him.
The works he created were simply excellent, and helped affirm to me that beauty isn't the problem, when given and employed well.
"The beauty of the female", noted C S Lewis, "is the root of joy to the female as well as the male... to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes of her own delightfulness".
Joy, fulfilment, obedience, solace, pleasure are all meant to derive from the majesty and elegance that God has bestowed upon us. "The naked woman's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man" wrote the artist William Blake, so it is indeed awful to see just how tarnished such glory can become when this radiance becomes squandered in sin. Lies demolish the reality we all need by causing us to buy-in to a narrative that enslaves.
What we are truly needing is a full engagement that brings about a return to the genuine personification and realisation of the beauty and joy that God intends (Philippians 4:8,9).
All of these insights, and many more, have aided in my own personal pursuit to take such virtue and splendour beyond the impaired corruption of our broken world, both in life in general, and my creativity, but they also touch on another trouble - how we can equally so demean the purpose, value and purity of God's living body, the church.
Beyond The Fig Leaves.
Time for some realism.
"I understand the church to be both lovely and broken, full of both desirable and undesirable traits. As such, she is a mirror of who I am... and I have learned to love this disappointing church" (Chad Bird - the Community of the Broken).
Words that echo what the Lord Himself says.
"I caused you, Israel, as the bud thriving in the field, to increase - to come to full maidenhood, tall and noble of stature and alluring, your breasts fully formed and your hair radiant and adorning, naked and bare" (Ezekiel 16:7). This is the majesty that the Lord adorns with His love (verse 8), cleansing her and ennobling her, bedecking with silks and jewels and finery, that the nations might behold her elegance (verses 11-14).
What a startling image of how God cares for His own, but it is one sadly absent from what is often evidenced.
This people abused what was gifted, and became confident in themselves (vs 15), giving their virtue to idols (other loves), hence her beauty was made abominable (vs 17). Because of such squandering, the beloved became stripped of her dignity by the nations she had courted in idolatry (vs 39), clothed only in shame and disgrace.
All of us know that manner of murder through the brutality of sin (Romans 7:8-24).
Mercifully, events do not end there. Such shaming clarity will finally lead to their repentance, and then, they will be healed (verses 53,59-62).
As with Israel, so with the church (1 John 1:7-10).
"The ugly side of life in the church often goes unmentioned or, at best, is sanitised and downplayed" (Bird). Eugene Peterson equates such behaviour to believers seeking to photo-shop their understanding of pietistic pornography, "parish glamorisation is ecclesiastical pornography" (Under the Unpredictable Plant). Such 'images', notes Bird, 'excite a lust' for gratifying uninvolved and impersonal spirituality - the 'pornographic unreality, "free" of deep and abiding flaws' creates dangerously unrealistic expectations. This can lead to our buying-in to a surrogacy to a conception of "church" devoid of both Christ and the reality of us.
We're a congregation - clergy and laity - of sinners, and scripture is very often there to remind us of the dark side of that malady, often in candid detail.
Chad invites us to look at the stories - Jacob's sons, or the poison amidst the people as they obtain the promised land, which festers and thrives as you see what unfolds in the books of Samuel, Judges and Kings, leading even to the abomination of child sacrifice. The disciples don't fare any better, often entirely misunderstanding or seeking to prevent what Jesus states is vital, before falling away as He goes to the cross, and heresies and apostasy would abound as the church grew into the gentile world.
They were just like us, underneath the veneer - saints by grace, sinners when they turned to their own devices. Life in the church is life amongst fellow sinners. It's amidst that mire that we discover the shocking, beautiful truth that God is here, with us. The horror of Hell is not that God is not present - He is - but it is God without the mantle, the shelter, of His beloved disclosure in His saving 'Immanuel', Jesus Christ.
That's essential to understand right now, as we all begin to move, God willing, out of this period, in some measure, of acute crisis.
Loving a people that make you angry, disappoint you, provoke you, because they show their true selves rather than the cosmetics, is essential if we are to grow in His all-sufficient grace. Look again at the description in Ezekiel 16, and see that the only thing that made Israel precious was the unmerited and unrelenting care, attention and certainty of God's nurture towards them, even in judgement, to bring them to His unceasing hold.
I know that I have sought to say and do things this year that have often been difficult to accept, and I'd be the first to admit that I have often done so with quite a bit of 'me' in the mix (sorry about that), but the desire has, at least in part, been because we all need to be brought together in a care much greater than ourselves.
Naturally, we're all often highly unattractive because of the selfishness that resides in our core. Thankfully, Christ's death and resurrection are the remedy (Romans 6), and full resurrection is on the way (Romans 8). That is what the Gospel alone brings about (Romans 3: 21-26), so let our fellowship, our life together, be found in and bound to the beauty of this extraordinary grace alone.
That needs to sober, humble and gorgeously enrich each of us, in our own lives and our union together, so we can become that beautiful bride.
God is at work, mercifully, in spite of us - as the good Dr Luther notes, 'The Whole Gospel is Outside of Us'. That is the cleft, the hiding place, that keeps us all.
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