I’ve been writing about the invitation I received from one of my grad school professors to pay attention to my sensitivity and discomfort with regard to sexuality rather than just trying to overcome it. (Scroll down to the previous posts to see what I’m talking about.) I want to say a little more about what I discovered in myself as a result of those words.

Sharon’s words gently exposed me—but they didn’t mock me for feeling uncomfortable about sexuality. Her words invited me to be kind and curious with myself. And what did I find? I found that, more deeply than I had realized, sexuality was still “profane” in my mind and heart. The sensitivity and arousal that come with being seen and known were realities that I had not grappled with and celebrated as deeply as I had thought.

I had presumed that being able to say, “Sex is awesome! God made sex!” meant that I had moved beyond shame about sexuality. (The kind of shame that is exemplified by the Bible story of Adam and Eve realizing they were naked in the Garden of Eden—and then covering their genitals.) I hadn’t known that the goal wasn’t to “get past” my sensitivity, but to welcome it and become familiar with it. After all, as the story goes, when God found Adam and Eve in the garden, he didn’t rip off their fig leaf coverings and demand that they be comfortable in their nakedness; he tenderly provided them with better, fuller coverings made from the skin of animals. This indicates that, yes, it would be good for us to be “naked and unashamed”: but the path to overcoming shame is patient and gentle, not abrupt and violent.

Life and sexuality are all about what happens in a world that consists of Self (“me”) and Other (“not me”): all the mystery, exhilaration, delight, vulnerability, and— as long as we live in a broken world—terror and discomfort that you experience when you encounter something other than yourself. In any encounter with otherness, all of these feelings are present in some recipe. Maturity isn’t about getting rid of all the discomfort; it’s about becoming acquainted with it, and tending to it with kindness.

The culmination of reality is relationship: knowing and being known at that frontier where I end and everything else begins. This intimacy can only occur when the eyes that see me are seeing me with kindness, and when, instead of closing my eyes and turning my face away in shame, I can stand in my “nakedness” and receive that loving gaze.

Growing in sexuality is about becoming more and more able to receive that gaze.