A cross-shaped antithesis

[This is copied from what I wrote after coming home last night - ]

Here's the scene: I'm out drinking with CHQ types after the 'new premises' launch, having a conversation in the Good Luck Bar about getting a non-Christian "nice guy, hard worker, 24" workmate laid for the first time. As you do.

Against most at our tables, I asserted

(1) that this workmate's reputed virginity was wasn't due to some lack which we had to help him overcome, and
(2) that his virginity was clearly more valuable to him than what could be gained by losing it to some slapper.

As part of (2) I asserted that sex was by definition a relationship, and as such could not be counted as meaningless - something to be engaged in merely because it hadn't already been done.

The conversation was amiable, good-natured and fun, rather than strained and awkward: "o, here we go - now we get the compulsory 'christian' view". I felt I did my piece in it without losing the right to be heard or the privilege of an audience - and perhaps even gained the respect of some listeners. But the fact is that one could drive tankers full of effluent through the positions adopted by most of the people present. The idea, for instance, that a loss of virginity is a goal in itself that has nothing to do with a relationship involving another human being - what's with that? How does that view the other person? Surely, merely as a piece of meat having the right bits - with which one can achieve orgasm, a trophy of conquest. A human substitute for the masturbatory and self-serving hand.

I realize in reflecting on this that I am deeply committed to the 'antithesis' - the Van Tillian term for the epistemic and ethical gap, or dichotomy, between man-in-exile and man-in-redemption - between the principles of flesh and spirit. I am committed to it because I think there is a radical perversity in man, an exilic way of viewing the creation that is not cross-shaped. And at every point in the discussion I wanted to press the cross-shaped view; I wanted to narrate a story that was beautiful and lovely in its view of life, of human dignity and of relationships, a view that is practically irresistible in its allure and attraction. A story that, once told, requires a diminution in the hearer to resist; a kind of slinking away into the darkness to suck up the vomit of false gods. But my story produces beauty because it is the story of Yahweh, God of love, self-sacrifice and healing, and of us as His images.

Therefore I think that man is at odds with his Creator when he insists on blinding himself to the ordinary meanings of words, words shaped not only by a Christian tradition and knowledge of God, but by man's inescapable constitution as a being created on God's terms, part of a cosmos imbibed with God's breath. In that crucible of meaning one cannot say 'sex' and not mean 'relationship'. Any linguistic community that does so, as my fellows were attempting, is on the verge of complete hedonistic suicide (death in the pursuit of pleasure) - an utter collapse of the constitutional threads upon which real gratification, love, and life depend.

Our conversation, of course, did not continue to its logical end. People have an instinct for when a dialogue has reached the borders of its usefulness, in views received and given. There's only so much that can be absorbed in one sitting.

I hope, though, that my contribution to the question of getting a workmate laid was effective in making the others think that perhaps there's another way. A way to live and to be that enlarges, rather than diminishes, the dignity and privilege we have as images of the creator God, a way to enlarge the honour we accord others. At the least, I hope it built a wee piece of 'social capital'. Perhaps, when the time comes for really serious questions, those of existential crises that rise in the quiet of personal solitude, someone will remember that guy Aaron Stewart, and think "yeah, I'll ask him. He seemed to have a trustworthy and beautiful way of looking at life".