PART 4 (edit Christian-ese)
The Glory of Sexuality
Lastly, Sharon said something else on that first day of class that has been transforming my worldview ever since. She said,

“By the time all of you graduate and become counselors, you will be experts at spotting brokenness in people. And that is not what good counseling is! Good counseling is about seeing, naming, and inviting forth the glory in people.”

Glory is a word that is usually only heard in religious contexts, but you don’t have to be religious to use it. It just means magnificence or beauty or goodness. The “glory” of a thing is the absolute best that that thing is capable of. To call forth someone’s glory is to invite them to be their best possible self.

Sharon helped me to realize that, in fact, love is about seeing, naming, and inviting forth glory—in everything. This can include naming—sometimes even boldly —what has gone wrong. But it is always with a view towards the manifestation of the best possible outcome if everything were to be put right.

This is not easy to do. In the real world where things really do sometimes go terribly wrong, evil shouts and goodness whispers. Curse words written in graffiti grab our attention; professions of love fade into the background. When we are insulted or shamed, it can sting for decades; compliments and praise can roll of our back and be easily forgotten. And so, it’s not surprising that many people—especially religious groups—have often specialized in naming what can go wrong with sexuality. It takes effort to remain focused on what is beautiful rather than what is ugly. Reality doesn’t “ask permission” to be itself, and quite often it accosts us with ugliness, harm, and cruelty.

And yet… And yet there are other possibilities as well: other possibilities besides evil and violation. There is such a thing as love. There are good encounters with otherness that can jolt you awake and make you realize you’ve been half asleep, barely living, disconnected from your truest self. There is a possibility of experiencing pleasure, delight, and transcendent meaning.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent years of his life in a slave labor camp in Soviet Russia. The environment was soul-killing. He writes of a moment that would sometimes come after many days of being lost in the darkness of the “raging evil spirit” that seemed to possess life in the camp: He would overhear someone softly singing a song,

“And something would stir within you; Life . . . exists! It exists!”

This. It is possible that a sudden encounter with glory could wake you up and bring you alive. I think this is precisely what sexuality is for.

I am hoping that just that possibility will inspire you to hope as you take a deeper look at sexuality and ask, “What is it, really? What story is this meant to tell me about reality?”