Sexual Sacrament
Sexual Sacrament
Aaron Cline Hanbury
On Sex & Communion
True, the Eucharist doesn’t conjure the most erotic connections, not at first, but that’s how I’ve come to receive it. Not that you’d notice.
I’m just sitting here, rocking my torso like a stationary bobblehead doll, while this week’s collection of curiously beautiful people sings a breathy song I’ve maybe heard before. A guy younger by at least a decade arrives just off my left arm, and I think he’s probably better at church than I am or trying to compensate for being worse. Or hopefully it’s just that single people have more time to volunteer for more stuff. He hovers a vessel at about where my car’s steering wheel would go, and I reach for its contents: a morsel of unleavened bread (Costco cracker) and a medicine dropper’s worth of Byzantine liquid (origin unknown). A high-pressure exchange begins, and I try to be smooth. Hannah watches and waits her turn, and it seems like maybe she’s not over this morning’s four-way tug of war that turned us all into malcontents. We just have to get more sleep on Saturday nights, I repeat to myself. My fingers stutter on the wafer, and I watch over my nose as my middle finger scrape-drags the cracker along the bottom of the plate to where my thumb awaits at the edge. The drink procures simpler. I pull my feet as far under my seat as these suddenly squeaky sneakers allow.
I should pray, I think, but I need to use the restroom. I should have gone before the preaching started. I always do this. At this point, I’ll wait until the sacred part ends. Except then we’ll need to merge into the nursery bull run to pick up our daughters. Alright, I can go at the restaurant—but only if we’re eating out. I’m realizing we haven’t talked about lunch, and now I’m thinking that last week’s microbattle about how much we spend on food casts doubt on the prospect of a restroom anywhere before home. Here’s what I’ll pitch: We eat out today and then next week and every week after that we just make lunch at home. I determine I can’t wait, when my peripheral vision reports that a woman one row up, with her shoulders pulled toward her knees, has tears descending her cheek. My attention span is crap, and I blame the internet.
God, forgive my neglect of you and of the things that matter to you, I mumble, and forgive my attentiveness to things that don’t matter at all. For sins this week of sloth and lust and envy, my body is no place for this cracker and this wine. I’d keep going if I could, but the song ends and the preacher is already reciting from Corinthians. Thank you that your Son’s body was enough and that you invited me to come alone. Everyone around crunches into the host and shoots the tiny cup. I use a mild pause for spiritual effect, then partake.
*
Just a few weeks ago, I read reports of a conspiracy-level cover-up of sexual abuse among a particular group of churches. A group that includes the church where I grew up, the same church where a guest preacher reportedly first preyed on one of the victims. Onlookers and rank-and-file clergy seem scandalized, and I wish I were too. Specific incidents include specific details, I know, and I don’t know all that much about them. But the extent to which men addicted to power will manipulate people and systems to keep it doesn’t surprise me anymore. I’ve spent what feels like my entire adult life observing, with numbing regularity, faith leaders I believed in, indiscriminate of tradition, trade their own professions in exchange for political and social influence. For power, really. I’ve been allowed behind closed doors in many corners of the evangelical and evangelical-adjacent landscape, in the company of some of the men who, ostensibly, define and defend the faith on cable news and attract book buyers and conference attenders by the thousands. No, reports like these don’t surprise me, they just highlight how much the reporters still don’t know. It’s a dejecting exercise that gives voice to whispers unwelcome.
Eugene Tkachenko
*
We’ve made it, the statisticians say, past one or two of the divorce milestones. Year 1, then year 7, and now only Year 15 remains before Hannah and I can just be married without all the foreboding. I sometimes think we’re accomplishing something, especially as more friends don’t make it, but usually it feels less like an accomplishment and more like something we just do. Something we keep doing.
We do keep doing it, which appears the older we grow like an odd cocktail of both rote-ness and significance. In the past year or so, at least three of our friends stopped their marriages in one manner or another. These friends’ relationships comprise myriad factors, both unique and common, and there’s a lot I don’t know. One of the common parts: In each instance someone eventually tells me that well before the end, sex stopped. Not all that deliberately, I gather, sometimes slowly, but certainly. The books about marriage push a lot of vanilla, overpriced pages about communication styles and family org charts. The vanilla-est ones talk about sex as a marriage barometer, or a weathervane, or tarot cards. This kind of sex can live only in a coldly secular world where the act is merely decorative, an accoutrement to go along with a substance located somewhere else. It’s a silly, if marketable, idea that can’t make sense of my friends’ marriages or mine. We keep doing it, Hannah and I—distantly informed by the apostle’s command that husbands and wives should fulfill marital duties—and I think it’s less about the doing and more about the keeping.
As far as I can tell, my sex life is middle. Our Etch-A-Sketch patterns of pleasures and problems pretty much mirror those of other couples. Sometimes elating, other times a variety of chore. On average, I’d say sex ends up like a good weeknight meal. You enjoy the food so long as it reasonably corresponds to the effort, and it doesn’t sap too much of the evening. We’re past those eager early years of marriage, I know, and we’re a ways from the medicine cabinet of obstacles around the corner. Middle. I try to be smooth, but petty arguments and pinched attention spans stutter the whole thing. Anyway, that’s just the doing part.
*
An indeterminate blur of yesterday and forever ago, Hannah gave birth to our two daughters over the course of three years. And in the three years before, she miscarried three times. So for both its inhabitants and its memory, sex plays a defining part in our home. Its joy and its heartache. Its lifes and its deaths. When I talk to people about these realities, I hear words about biology and stats on the one hand, and about God’s plans and his gifts on the other—but nothing at all about sex, as though any of this exists apart from the marriage act. I think that’s because many of us, wittingly or not, accept the cheap, decorative version, instead of receiving sex as it is.
The apostle describes misuses of sex as sins against the body. This body language comes up again. Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. And those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves. Sins against the body, the only ones I read, are sex partaken in an unworthy manner and misuse of the Eucharist. If I’m understanding, the inverse is this: The constitutions of both marriage and church—of one-flesh bodies and of Christ’s—include specific acts. Sacraments, with all the dangers and limits there entailed, the reception of which are part of the thing itself. Both require blood and flesh, notwithstanding distractions and the unsexy soundtrack of a toddler’s sound machine.
The keeping part. A lot of stuff happens in my marriage, some essential and some tangential. An essential is regular, local, exclusive, submissive communion with one another, rehearsing our consummation over and over, participating in our present, and—like anything we practice—hoping into the future. This kind of sex draws and binds, even as it’s fraught, easily distorted in its use. But as earnest as all this probably sounds, I think it’s actually the easy part.
The way I read it, the apostle doesn’t talk about Christ and the church then draw little applications for relationships. Those vanilla books do that. He seems to say, not unlike he does at the Areopagus, you understand something of this already, and that experience is instructing you about God and forming you in his ways. Your elemental connections tap a deeper space where Christ loves and keeps his people. Sex is no token. It’s an icon.
And this is a great mystery. I know first-hand how the marriage bed humiliates, welcomes, accumulates, and propels. How it brings into focus and perspective all that precedes it. How the climax demands rhythms and patience. The apostle says of sex and God that the mysterious things are being made known. Like the song goes, the book of love, long and boring, is full of things we’re all too young to know.
*
I’m driving back to church, and it’s been a few weeks since the sex abuse dustup. Not that it’s over. More will come out at some point, maybe not related to sex abuse, but more trusts betrayed—and what does won’t be as haunting as what I already know. The sun blares into the sanctuary, which is how I think God intends. It’s cool we have these big windows. But we’re sitting in a different section, and oscillating just 45 degrees presents a kaleidoscope of new distractions. Plus my younger daughter rejected all pleas to go into the nursery and is now on the floor of our row demanding a drink we didn’t bring. Mercifully, the sermon is boring enough that she asks if she can go to the kids’ classroom. Yes. I walk out and back in, making sure to pull my gut tight for this catwalk. Why did I tuck in this shirt, I think. And why are all these people beautiful. Can we get some uglies in church? I sit down and exchange celebratory eyes with Hannah. Getting both kids to the church service is no small victory. Several moments—minutes?—pass before I remember what I’m doing. The preacher puts some words on the screen, and they make sense to me, even though I’ll not be able to recall them in 36 hours.
This new seat means the communion guy arrives on the right, and for the most part, I grip the elements without trouble today. I stare at the floor to avoid the new scenery. God, I whisper, for sins this week, my body is no place for holy things. Thank you for inviting me to your table anyway and for giving the body of another whose manner is only worthy. Help me receive it. I’m trying not to think about my daughter, but I bet she won’t be happy to get the short version of kids’ church. Irony. The music stops, the preacher repeats words from the apostle, and we all partake. It’s an in-joying exercise that whispers back tales of history and of the consummation of all things. Just for a while, it satisfies.
Next week, it’ll be Sunday again, and if the details of life allow, I’ll be back for Costco’s holiest stock. Not for a token of my nice Christian life but for the substance of the thing, one of the things I’ll just do. And keep doing it.
Aaron Cline Hanbury
Writer & Editor
Published in The Atlantic et al. Editor of Common Good and the podcast Writers & Writings
Photography by Andrea De Santis