Wednesday Miscellany: On Sex and Transcendence

Whenever a topic or cluster of topics keep showing up in different areas of my life and ministry, I eventually decide it’s worth paying attention to and, if possible, try to write something about it. When I can’t quite seem to come up with a solid piece of unified writing, I default to a “Miscellany” post. So, what follows is not necessarily a coherent argument, just a few short reflections and observations picked up over the last little while.

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Every few months, I get together with a few other pastors for coffee and conversation. This fall, we’ve been discussing former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ Holy Living, a collection of essays on a wide range of topics. One essay we spent a bit of time discussing was called “Forbidden Fruit” which dealt with sexual ethics in the New Testament. Sexuality and gender are, of course, among the more explosive topics of our time, and many of us venture into them with great trepidation (if at all). Williams, perhaps surprisingly, urges readers to interrogate why matters of sex matter so very much to us.

A few of us were struck by this quote, in particular:

Only if sexual intimacy is seen as the last hiding-place of real transcendence, to borrow a phrase from the American novelist, Walker Percy, could we assume that it mattered above all else. But we are now in a cultural situation where there really isn’t much left of transcendence for a lot of people, and they have to take what they can get… it may be that for more and more people sex is practically the only way they can feel sure that they are really there, really the object of another’s attention.

I think what Williams says could be applied more broadly to not only our obsession with sex itself (pornography remains among the most lucrative industries on the Internet), but to the roles in which sexuality and gender play in creating and curating our various identities. We are well-acquainted, by now, with the emancipatory narrative when it comes to sexuality and gender (I once was repressed but now I’m free). I wonder if we might also ponder the prominence that we accord these matters in our cultural discourse. Could this be a symptom of a loss of transcendence? The last hiding place of a creature that longs for transcendence but doesn’t know how to find it or where to look?

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A friend recently wondered about the “spiritual desert” that Mennonite Church Canada seems to be in. Many churches have left the conference or are “quiet quitting,” to borrow a popular term. Many others are shrinking, aging, dying. South of the border, Mennonite Church USA is splintering off into all kinds of rival conferences. And behind all of this, matters of sexuality and gender loom large, of course.

Indeed, like many denominations around the world, this is the fault line. This is the issue, functioning almost like a test of orthodoxy, whether it’s progressives or conservatives administering the test. It’s almost impossible in 2025 to imagine a church in the West (Mennonite or otherwise) fighting and splitting over, for example, the nature and scope of salvation, or our theology of the Eucharist, or even the divinity of Christ (which would seem a rather significant question!). It requires no imagination whatsoever to imagine churches splitting over gender and sexuality.

I’m not suggesting questions around sexuality and gender are unimportant. Not by any stretch. But, again, it is curious that we increasingly seem to think that they matter more than anything else.

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Speaking of transcendence… Out at the jail last week, I got a blockbuster of a question with five minutes left. It came from a very young man—a kid, really. His head had remained down for most of the hour. He looked shy or uncertain or afraid. I’m pretty sure he had only recently arrived, and jail can be a pretty scary place for a kid.

“Can I ask a question?” His voice was barely audible. The room was instantly silent. “Of course,” I said, nervously looking at my watch. He paused, and then said, “How do I have faith? How do I get closer to God?”

Whew, what a question. Where do you even begin? I was almost certain this kid was starting from zero and a thousand options popped into my head. Start with the content of belief. No, start with basic trust. No, start the connection between belief and behaviour. No, start with human desire and longing for justice, truth, beauty. No, just tell him to take one step toward God, say a prayer, read a story from the gospels… I ended up mumbling something about all those things. I’m not sure how much of it landed. We’re going to reconnect one-on-one. I’m going to try to think of something simpler and better to say.

Many of the young men I encounter in jail are in there for similar reasons. Their crimes are often connected to drug use and/or some kind of deviant behaviour in the realm of sex (the pursuit of it, the consumption of it, the production of it, etc.). Both of which are awful and vicious in their own way. Both of which could also be interpreted as a desperate, dangerous, and destructive search for transcendence.

Whether it’s behind bars or in church sanctuaries. we would do well to pay attention to if, how, and where we seek transcendence. Instead of “taking what we can get” in the arid desert of the post-Christian West, perhaps we might reconnect with the God who has never stopped summoning us, rebuking us, pursuing us, and loving us. We do not need to seek God’s attention. We already have it.

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The feature image above is a picture I took somewhere in Portugal while walking the Camino de Santiago this past spring.