Sexuality and Pastoral Care: How can I help others if I don't understand myself?
by Kathleen Fick

How we see and believe and attend to the issues of sexuality in our own lives has ... to do with the church.

The body of Christ is sorely in need of seeing and believing not only the Word made flesh, but also the Word for the flesh. The issues of our sexuality cry out for the empowering word of grace that the church has to offer. Church professionals, lay and ordained, are not exempt from this cry. We long to, understand ourselves as sexual beings, all the while fearful of what we might come to know.

Talking openly about sexuality has long been taboo not only in the church, also in society in general. In addition, we are faced with the challenge of offering pastoral care, aware that the health of our sexuality strongly affects the style and quality of care we offer. Without a clear understanding of our own sexuality, doing our work well poses a serious question: How can we help others if we don't understand ourselves?

How do we discuss sexuality? In most instances, we talk about it, oh so gingerly. We use euphemisms to keep our distance, and usually hope for less- than-candid responses to our inquiries. Even when attempting honest conversation, we maintain enough control to avoid depth. I was reminded of this by a young man who sat in my office recently, describing a difficult marriage that was clearly in jeopardy. At one point, I asked when he and his wife had last slept together.

"Do you mean when did we have sex the last time?" he asked bluntly. I told him that was exactly what I had intended to ask, and I thanked him for the clarification.

How do we talk about sexuality with others? With hesitation. How do we talk about our own sexuality? Without confidence in our tentative approach others!

Our own sexuality is a key issue in pastoral care and counseling. Understand- ing it is not only useful, it's crucial. Sexual intercourse-as a symbol-lives in our psyche as an inner way of understanding passionate and meaningful involvement with others, ourselves and life itself.

Healthy sexuality demands relationship, and healthy relationship demands intimacy. Intimacy affords true friendship, but requires vulnerability. The interdependence of these is key in understanding the nature of intimacy without genital activity. The difficulty we often have in establishing intimate relationships without a genital component has to do with crossing boundaries into what one author calls "the forbidden zone." Instead of crossing the boundaries without a backward glance, we need to identify the boundaries for ourselves. This conscious recognition makes it more difficult to rationalize behavior that crosses the boundary into sexual inappropriateness.

Paying attention to the boundaries in relationship to our behavior requires a bit more vigilance than we might wish, but it will provide clear messages about appropriate behavior. Being proactive in maintaining the boundaries when another would choose to have us cross them means work for us, but also results in strong, positive relationships. When the boundaries are challenged, knowing that self-defense is not only appropriate, but imperative, can help us maintain healthy sexual boundaries in our relationships.

Those are some ways of maintaining a healthy sexuality in relationships. Martin Marty pointed to another way in a recent piece in the Christian Century. Friendship, he observed, is essential for a healthy understanding of oneself and one's life. Marty writes: Friendless clergy take themselves seriously, lose perspective, put them- selves above the law and invent self-justifying rationales.
Friends are essential to the penumbra of support of which Aristotle's habitually "good" person is aware. Friends say to people who acquire power and position- and even the pastor of the humblest parish has some of that-"Watch it, buddy, " or "We knew you when..., " or "This time you went too far, " or "You really are hurting me, and us, and the cause, "or "Have you lost your head?" or "Count on me to be at your side if temptation comes. " Each friend has a different way of staying close. Each befriended person is aware of what the staying close can mean in the life of discipline.

Why all the fuss about our own sexuality? Why the need to know and understand who we are in relationship to ourselves as well as to others? Why all the energy expended in this arena? For this very reason, if no other: the unexamined areas of our lives keep us blind to those conflicts and dilemmas in the very people who come to us for help. We miss critical information, deny obvious clues and overlook the inappropriate when we live in our own denial.

The proclamation of grace that we speak to those on the journey of life takes on new meaning when we, too, understand the power it has. Having wrestled with the issues surrounding our own sexuality, we will offer our preaching and teaching, counseling and modeling in a new way. By risking self-examination, we make a place for others to take those risks with us. When they tell us the struggles of their lives, we will know some of the journey.

We see with new eyes and believe with fresh hearts as we give attention to the issues of sexuality that surround each person. This has to do with the church- it most certainly does. It has to do with each of us. It has to do with the Word made flesh. Be brave!

Resources: Kennedy, Eugene. Sexual Counseling. New York: Continuum Publishing; 1980. Marty, Martin. What Friends Are For. Christian Century, November 4, 1992. Rutter, Peter. Sex in the Forbidden Zone. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher; 1986.

Kathleen Fick is a Lutheran campus minister at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.