The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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this why the first thing newborns do is cry?
We’re severed and cut off and disconnected in a thousand ways, and we know it, we feel it, we’re aware of it every day. It’s an ache in our bones that won’t go away.
And so from an early age we have this awareness of the state of disconnection we were born into, and we have a longing to reconnect.
Scholars believe that the word sex is related to the Latin word secare, which means “to sever, to amputate, or to disconnect from the whole.” This is where we get words like sect, section, dissect, bisect.4
Our sexuality, then, has two dimensions. First, our sexuality is our awareness of how profoundly we’re severed and cut off and disconnected. Second, our sexuality is all of the ways we go about trying to reconnect.
Last year I was swimming in the ocean with one of my boys on my back in the midst of a pod of dolphins. They were swimming around us and under us and making their noises, which are incredibly loud and piercing, when one of them shot up into the air above us and did a flip. Right over our heads.
When we describe moments like these, the words we use are rarely about distance. The words we use are about nearness and connection, sometimes even intimacy.
Your friends just got back from hiking, and they say, “We felt like we could just reach out and touch the mountain.”
I just spent an afternoon with a doctor who donates significant amounts of time working with people who have AIDS and can’t afford proper treatment. He loves it. He talked with great passion about the joy it brings him. He’s a successful, educated, wealthy man who loves to spend his time with poor, uneducated people who are from a totally different world than he is. He was telling me how his work brings him a sense of connection, an awareness of the simple truth that we aren’t all that different from each other.
These moments move us because they have a sexual dimension. They help us become reconnected. They go against our fallen nature, which is to be cut off.
This is why music is so powerful. Have you ever noticed that when you ask people why a particular song or concert moved them so much, they often resort to ambiguous explanations? You rarely receive a response such as, “Well, the prolific use of polyrhythms offset with the arpeggiated succession of relative minors touched my heart.”
No, of course not. You get words like emotion and passion and energy and relationship and connection. Music is powerful because it is sexual. It connects us. We generally don’t think of it in those terms, but it’s true. The experience of a great concert—with everybody singing together, waving their hands in the air, and a feeling of oneness permeating the room—has a significant sexual dimension to it. We don’t know each other, we come from vastly different backgrounds, we disagree on hundreds of issues, but for an evening, we gather around this artist and these songs and we get along. The experience moves us so deeply because it taps into how things were meant to be, and we have so few places where we can experience what God intended on such a large scale.
Whether it’s a concert or a church service or a rally for a just cause, certain communal events draw us into something bigger than the event itself. We feel connected with the people we’re having the experience with, and not just connected but aware of something bigger than us all that we’re brushing up against in the process.
What we’re experiencing in these moments of connection is what God created us to experience all of the time. It’s our natural state. It’s how things are supposed to be.
It’s written in the letter to the Ephesians that there’s “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”5
And in the book of Hebrews, it’s written that God is the one “for whom and through whom everything exists.”6
Rethinking Our Definition
If we take this understanding of our natural state seriously, we have to rethink what sexuality is.7 For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that’s only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all of the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God.8
A friend of mine has given his life to standing with those who have been forgotten and oppressed the most.9 He’s in his early thirties, he’s single, and he talks openly about his celibacy. What makes his life so powerful is that he’s a very sexual person, but he has focused his sexuality, his “energies for connection,” on a specific group of people.
Some of the most sexual people I know are celibate.
They sleep alone.
They have chosen to give themselves to lots of people, to serve and give and connect their lives with beautiful worthy causes.10 These friends help me understand why the Red Light District in Amsterdam is so sexually repressed. If you’ve ever walked through this part of the city, where prostitution is legal, you know that it can be a bit jarring to have the women in the windows gesturing to you, inviting you to come in and have “sex” with them.
What is so striking is how unsexual that whole section of the city is. There are lots of people “having sex” night and day, but that’s all it is. There’s no connection. That’s, actually, the only way it works. They agree to a certain fee for certain acts performed, she performs them, he pays her, and then they part ways. The only way they would ever see each other again is on the slim probability that he would return and they would repeat this transaction. There’s no connection whatsoever. If she for a moment connected with him in any other way than the strictly physical, it would put her job, and therefore her financial security, in jeopardy.
And so in the Red Light District there’s lots of physical interaction and no connection. There are lots of people having lots of physical sex—for some it’s their job—and yet it’s not a very sexual place at all.
There’s even a phrase that people use with a straight face—“casual sex.” The rationale is often, “It’s just sex.”
Exactly. When it’s just sex, then that’s all it is. It leaves the person deeply unconnected.
You can be having sex with many, and yet you’re alone. And the more sex you have, the more alone you are.
And it’s possible to be sleeping alone, and celibate, and to be very sexual. Connected with many.
It’s also possible to be married to somebody and sharing the same bed and be very disconnected. It’s possible to be married to somebody and sharing the same bed and even having sex regularly and still be profoundly disconnected.
There’s a saying in the recovery movement: “You are only as sick as your secrets.” This is true for relationships as well. If there are secrets that haven’t been shared, topics that can’t be discussed, things from the past that are forbidden to be brought up, it can cripple a marriage.
And so they’re sleeping together, but they’re really sleeping alone.
The Communal Dimension
This has huge implications for what it means to be a part of a community. How many people do you know who aren’t a part of a church, company, or community because of the way they were treated?
When we hurt each other,
when we gossip about each other, when we fail to forgive each other, when we don’t do the work of making peace with each other, we get severed from each other, cut off, divided.
I often meet people who aren’t part of a church and don’t want anything to do with God because of “all those religious hypocrites.” Often they have great pain that they blame on “the church.”