Good Thoughts

I want to come out in support of sexual fantasy as a tool for promoting chastity and integrity.

If that sounds weird to you, I agree wholeheartedly. It still sounds weird to me.

When I was a kid, I definitely got the opposite message loud and clear. I got a lot of good advice from my parents, my leaders, and my church about not rushing into sexual behavior. And I also picked up a lot of anxiety about sex in general, and about sexual thoughts in particular. One pamphlet said the following: “Do not do anything … that arouses sexual feelings.”

I took that to heart. It was difficult, because I had a pretty strong natural interest in sex. But I also had one really clear goal: I wanted to get married and have a stable, happy family.

It seemed obvious that my sexual thoughts were not going to help me achieve that goal. They rarely featured a faithful, committed relationship!

I gathered that there were two ways of dealing with my sexual thoughts. Hypersexualized media told me that I should not only indulge them, but also try acting them out. The church told me that I should shut them down.

I wasn’t interested in acting them out. I believed that lasting pleasure came from doing things that made you proud of yourself, not from having a lot of orgasms. And part of me was hoping to get both! That same pamphlet also said that “physical intimacy between husband and wife is beautiful and sacred.”

So I shut things down. I learned how to block out my sexual thoughts. Do you know that trick where someone says, “Don’t think of pink elephants,” and then all you can think of is pink elephants? Someone tried it on me in high school. I was singing “I am a child of God” in my head before a single rose-colored pachyderm had time to cross from one side of my mind to the other. I had a lot of practice not thinking about things.

I was extremely anxious about anything that triggered sexual thoughts. A sex scene in a PG-13 movie could make me feel guilty for years afterwards. I told my mission president that I felt guilty reading Shakespeare because the sexual references were titillating. I doubt I said “titillating” though. That word made me uncomfortable!

There are worse ways to grow up. I didn’t get anyone pregnant, spend time or money on pornography, or even get my heart broken. And eventually I met a wonderful woman who loved me, and we got married and started a family.

I had achieved my goal, and it brought me a lot of happiness. But marriage did not cure my sexual thoughts. During the act of sex, I could relax. But that still constituted a tiny fraction of my waking time. And my sexual thoughts were always there.

At first, my wife and I earnestly tried to keep up with my constant interest in sex. It eventually became clear that no amount of sex would ever be “enough”. So we put the responsibility for initiating sex almost entirely on my wife, and things settled down. We had sex regularly, but we also spent time watching Netflix and playing board games. It was exactly what I had always hoped my home life would look like.

But, to my deep confusion and frustration, I found that I was never really at peace. I struggled with insomnia. I would lay awake, stare at the ceiling, sing “I am a child of God” in my head, and hate myself.

I started to pray for my interest in sex to just go away. Did you know that graham crackers were originally marketed as a cure for lust? The Victorians thought bland food might depress people enough to inhibit their sex drive.

I figured it was worth a shot. I spent a month eating a lot of graham crackers. It didn’t help.

I prayed more. I also looked for mormon experts on sexuality. I read books, and listened to podcasts, and did a little therapy. One message about the nature of God gave me some hope.

One of the core tenets of my faith is a belief in an embodied God. I believe that God has a physical body. I believe that God consists of both a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother, and that they are married. I further believe that our destiny is to become like them.

And it was pointed out to me that this implies that I believe that God is a sexual being, and that my sexuality is something I will carry with me into eternity. So that means it must be both an integral part of me, and a good part of me.

It was a nice sentiment. I still couldn’t square it with my sexual thoughts, though. They were just as bad as ever. And the logic seemed clear: thoughts lead to actions, actions lead to habits, and habits become character. And nothing in my sexual thoughts seemed worthy of integrating into my character.

I took it to God. “Did you give me this part of myself on purpose? If I try opening up to my sexual self, will you keep me safe? Will you stop me before I go too far?”

In response, I felt peace. I didn’t trust it completely, but it gave me a little hope. I decided to face my fears, open the door to the basement, and see what my sexual thoughts had to say.

That was about three years ago. Since then, I’ve found out some really helpful things.

First, my fantasies are not meant to be taken at face value. My fantasies have more in common with my dreams than with my other thoughts. They kind of bubble up from my subconscious, and my subconscious is a land of symbols. The situations in my fantasy are not things I actually want to do. They are symbols of who I actually am.

Second, who I actually am isn’t all that scary. As I’ve learned to decode the symbols of my fantasy, I’ve found that almost all of them are organized by one central truth: I want someone I admire, and who knows me accurately, to want me.

Last, my sexuality is not a source of darkness. My fantasies do turn dark at times, but it’s because of different truths about me, like this one: part of me believes that no one who knows me accurately could ever want me.

In other words, the problematic thing isn’t my sexuality: it’s my shame.

The most ingenious, diabolical thing my shame ever did was convince me that my sexuality was evil. Then the very fact that I wanted sex was proof that I was unworthy of it! No one who knew me well enough to see my sexuality could ever really want me.

Overturning that idea took more than just acknowledging that it was self-defeating. I had to convince myself that my sexuality really was good, and that I believed it was good. Engaging more with my sexual thoughts has helped me to do that.

I have shifted from thinking about my fantasies as a hedonistic “to-do” list and started understanding them as a window into myself, my childhood, and my internalized cultural messages. Sometimes the view disturbs me, but I don’t blame the window. Instead, I’ve learned to appreciate the insight. 

My sexuality is a messenger, and all good messengers deliver bad news sometimes. Blaming my sexuality for my immaturity would be as wrong as blaming Charles Dickens for 19th century poverty or blaming Harper Lee for racism.

For almost two decades, my sexuality troubled me almost every day. Now, my sexuality is more often a source of peace and strength. Because of it, I feel closer to God.

Arousal is ok. Sexuality is good. Sexual thoughts are symbolic messages that teach me about myself. And that gives me a chance to be a better person.

I recognize that this contradicts a lot of my culture. And it also comes into conflict with some specific advice from leaders who I think are both well-meaning and inspired. But I think it’s in good alignment with my core beliefs about the nature of God and the nature of man. 

And it also happens to be based on a true story. It’s my story. I hope it helps.

PS: Everything I’ve written here is my own, and I don’t claim to be speaking as an expert. If you are interested in experts (who may not agree with me!), then some of the ones I have found most helpful are Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, an LDS marriage and sex therapist who has a great library of podcasts on her website, and Dr. David Schnarch, whose book Passionate Marriage has had a revelatory impact on my life. 

For dealing with shame in general, I also recommend Brené Brown’s books and TED talks, especially Daring Greatly. 

For some sex- and body-positive scripture, see Genesis 1:26-28, Genesis 2:24-25, Moses 6:8-9, D&C 88:15-16, D&C 130:22, D&C 131:1-2, Joseph Smith - History 1:17, and Ether 3:6-16. 

For an uplifting essay on the miracle of the body, see the "Physical Gifts" section of this 2012 talk from President Russell M. Nelson.

Mormon Grace

I think the Mormons may have a unique solution to the millenia-old debate of faiths versus works. I just don’t think most of us know it yet ;)

Context: The Return to Grace

A few weeks ago, spiritual discussion in the mormon world was focused on one phrase in a sermon from the early part of the Book of Mormon: “for we know that it is by grace we are saved, after all we can do.” Most of the discussion centered on just five words: “after all we can do.”

It came up as part of the weekly lesson in the church-wide curriculum, and throughout mormondom I presume that the majority of Sunday School teachers and fireside podcasters tried to do something like what I observed my Sunday School teacher do: attempt to make amends for the way that this verse was misused for decades to deny the atonement of the Savior.

This phenomenon is reflective of the most dramatic convulsion in mormon theology that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime: the return to the doctrine of grace. In the middle part of the twentieth century, that verse was widely used to support the mormon church’s attempt to reject salvation by faith alone.

Growing up, I was taught to interpret it roughly as follows: God saves us, but only after we’ve saved ourselves by “keeping the commandments”. The phrase “keeping the commandments” was a little vague, but under the hood I understood it as a set of outward performances: paying tithing, attending church, not smoking or drinking, not having sex outside of marriage, not stealing, and saying yes when asked to perform an assignment. If you messed up on any of these, you went to your bishop, did penance, got the record adjusted, and then you hoped God didn’t audit it all too carefully. Yes, God saved you. But you had to be living right first. You had to do “all you can do”, and then God would come in to make up the difference.

The reason for this focus, as I absorbed it, was an underlying anxiety which can be stated fairly simply as follows: if we say people are saved by faith alone, they may stop feeling pressure to do good works. And if they stop feeling like their soul is in danger when they don’t do good works, they may stop doing those good works entirely.

I was taught that this is what separated us (in a positive way) from the Evangelicals, those shiftless bums who proclaimed their belief once on a Sunday in their youth and then wasted away the rest of their lives sinning and drinking caffeinated beverages. Tsk. 

Some of those Evangelicals, by the way, got the message loud and clear, and used it as a chance to reflect back to us our rejection of Christ’s grace. They pointed out (accurately) that we looked pretty foolish when we were trying to pretend that we were making it on our own.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the entire church had rejected grace. Derek Knox makes a good argument in this Beyond the Block podcast that the original understanding of the verse would have been a grace-centering one. And a firm grasp on the meaning of the atonement of Christ can be found throughout our history if you look for it. But based on my personal experiences, I can say that such understanding was not always readily available to the average member.

In my mid-teens, I started to encounter emissaries of the shift that was already in motion: the shift back to grace. My seminary teacher taught me that I was like a child before God, no more capable of earning my salvation than an infant is capable of feeding itself. David A. Bednar began delivering sermons on the “enabling power” of the atonement - grace that was required to give us the strength to keep the commandments, rather than the kind that was given out as a reward for compliance. Slowly, one talk at a time, one lesson at a time, one book at a time (i.e. “Believing Christ” by Stephen Robinson), I saw my church bending back towards grace. 

One dramatic example was a talk by Brad Wilcox titled “His Grace is Sufficient”, which told us what we should have known all along: our works do nothing to save us. Even more pointedly, five years ago Dieter F. Uchtdorf gave an address entitled “The Gift of Grace,” where he directly addressed the “after all we can do” phrase. In his talk, he converted it from meaning that God saves us only after our full efforts are expended to meaning that we are saved in the process of believing in Christ. No mean feat! I recommend the talk.

So all this is partly just to say: the church is coming back to grace, and thank God for it! It’s been long enough trying to save ourselves and bury the impossibility of it all in quarts of jello salad.

But although I’m grateful for the return, I think there may be some profit in trying to imagine why we turned away from grace in the first place. Beyond the simple anxiety I explained above, I think there may be a deeper truth waiting for us, and some wisdom buried in the foolishness.

A Note on Faith

Before we get into the next section, I just want to pause for a second and criticize the New Testament (lol). You see, I think Paul makes a mistake, or at least I frequently make a mistake in my reading of Paul. The mistake is to conflate faith and grace. For instance, in Romans 1:17, Paul says that “the just shall live by faith.” I think this is technically true, but I also think it’s misleading. Faith is not what gives us life: grace is. I suppose faith is a trigger for grace, in which case I agree with Paul. But faith is also a result of grace, so it seems a little silly to frame it as a fundamental source.

I also think claiming that faith saves us is just as defeatist as claiming that our works save us. Anyone who’s honest about their faith will have to admit that it waxes and wanes and that even at its best it’s rarely at mountain-moving levels. Most days my faith is well shy of being able to fit a camel through the eye of the needle, so I’m grateful that it’s not my faith that’s going to try and get my rich-straight-white-male self into heaven. That’s a job that only Christ and his grace can do.

But I digress! Let’s return to one reason that I think may have understandably led my mormon forefathers to get so wound up in works that they left both faith and grace behind them.

A Uniquely Mormon Contribution

One of my absolute favorite parts of my religion is the doctrine of the immortal body. It shows up in multiple places in our faith, but one of the ones I go back to most frequently is this radical line from Joseph Smith: “And the spirit and the body are the soul of man. And the resurrection from the dead is the redemption of the soul.”

Whoa! The body is part of the soul? The body is coming back as part of the redeemed soul? An equal partner with the spirit? It’s a bold claim. And if that’s not enough, here’s an even more insane statement: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.”

God has a body. It’s a contradiction in terms to most of the Christian world. The philosophy of separation and antagonism between mind and body is not only baked into Christianity but also the English language: self-control, mind over matter, pleasures of the flesh, inner beauty, the real me.

What Joseph is teaching in these verses is that the attempt to split ourselves apart into a “disembodied logic center” temporarily shackled to a “meaty appetite sack” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of our eternal nature as children of God. When God tells us he has a body, that says something even more powerful about us than it does about him. It tells us that we are not meant to escape the body: we are meant to recognize it as part of us. When we degrade and diminish the body, we are not trying to control a parasitic infection: we are trying to cut ourselves in half. When we ignore it, we ignore something with just as much divine potential and wisdom as our minds. We ignore fully half of our divine destiny.

In this context, the question of faith and works suddenly becomes almost meaningless. I may have a picture of myself as a faithful, believing person: but that picture is not me. The real me includes what I’m actually doing with my body. If the actions of my body don’t line up with my beliefs, then those beliefs aren’t really mine. I may wish I believed those things! I may be working to believe those things! I may be praying to believe those things! But if I’m not doing them, then in some very real way I don’t believe them.

In the standard view of the world that we’ve inherited, the soul is kind of like a little dude who sits in our heads and tries to steer the body around. But the body is a weird, demented, broken beast with its own agenda. The little dude yells at it, pleads with it, cajoles it, whips it, digs in the spurs: sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. As long as the little dude has the right intentions, the ultimate actions of the body aren’t so relevant.

But that’s not the way it actually is. The little dude up in our heads isn’t our soul: he’s our ego. He’s our imperfect, self-flattering view of ourselves, the one that thinks it’s already perfect. The one that blames everything else for when things don’t go well, and that isn’t afraid to throw its own body under the bus. 

The ego is the one who’s terrified of being called out. The one who trembles at the idea of not being good enough. The one that dies every time we admit to ourselves that we’ve sinned.

But, thank God, the ego is also the one that gets resurrected again, every time. When we kill our ego, God’s grace gives us back a better one. A slightly more aware one, one that acts a little bit better than the last one. One that is able to get more of its esteem from things that are actually true, that are actually lived out in the body.

So the shift to works is actually a really powerful recognition of truth: there is no fundamental difference between faith and works. The difference between them is purely illusory.

Now, here’s where I think we went wrong: I think we pulled a Paul and conflated grace with faith. We thought that faith saved us: since faith and works were basically the same, we then thought that works saved us. We should have instantly seen how ridiculous that was! We should have come to God and confided in him: 

“Lord, I know you only save us through faith, and I know my faith is manifest in my works. I’m sorry, Lord: my works are works of wickedness as much as they are works of good. I can’t do it.”

And He would have bound up our broken hearts. He would have strengthened our feeble knees. He would have lifted up our hands as they hung down. He would have said:

“Of course you can’t do it. I did it. I already did it. Show me your wicked works. Give me your false vision of yourself as God, and let me crucify it. Here, here is my grace. Take as much as you can carry. You are a little better already. Come back as soon as you can.”

But we didn’t do that. We panicked. We thought: our works save us, but my works are awful! Quick, a loophole! Find a loophole! Maybe there is a subset of works that I can do, something that I can succeed at! Maybe that subset will be enough!

So instead of acknowledging how broken our works were, and taking them to God, I think we fled for comfort to a list of works that we thought we could accomplish. 

We knew we didn’t love our neighbor, but we thought maybe we could donate ten percent of our income with perfect consistency. 

We knew we couldn’t stop ourselves from avoiding our feelings with distractions, but we thought maybe we could get it done with sugary confections instead of alcohol. 

We knew we couldn’t fully love our spouses without fear or judgement, but we thought maybe that would be excused if we managed to only have sex exclusively with them.

Faith without works isn’t dead: faith without works is a contradiction in terms. But both faith and works are dead without grace.

So as the church bends back towards grace, I hope we don’t forget works. Our works do not save us: they convict us. But if we trust in grace, we do not have to fear the conviction. We can be grateful for it. Because only when our imperfection is revealed is God’s grace made manifest. 

Only when we die can we live :)