Greetings from Malibu. I’m right now looking at the Pacific, the mountains, and landscaping filled with trees and exotic flowers.
I was just hoping that I could share that beauty with you.
Does that help?
Archive for May, 2006
My mom just called, making sure I will be at the 7:00 devotional at Pepperdine. The brochure says I’m speaking there.
Sorry, Mom. Larry Bridgesmith (chairman of the Zoe board, an elder at Woodmont Hills, and a good example of what Christ-following looks like in the world of lawyering) is speaking in my place.
I had to stay last night to coach. Our game lasted all of 12 minutes, when it was zapped out by lightning. Since the first inning wasn’t finished, it’s as if nothing ever happened. (Which isn’t bad since we were already behind!)
If the weather and AA cooperate, I will be there for the 2:00 class, though.
You may remember that I wasn’t going to broadcast my traveling (at Diane’s request) until after the trip was over. But for now, we have picked up another son and daughter — temporarily before they leave Abilene for their first fulltime ministry in Houston — so she feels safe.
Here’s another strange trick of travel. If I keep my rental car for four days, it costs me twice as much as if I keep it five days. Go figure. But at five days, I can get the one-week rate.
It’s going to be close, given my return schedule on Sunday. But I need to get my car as quickly as possible today and keep it as long as possible Sunday, making sure that I’ve had it at least 4 days and 1 minute. In which case, it’ll be a really cheap rental.
Is that crazy?
More from Lauren Winner (Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity):
As theologian David McCarthy argues in his provocative book Sex and Love in the Home, a Christian ethics of sex, love, and marriage needs to reconceive sex and love as practices that exist ideally only within the basic prosaic rhythms of house and home: candlelight, long-stemmed roses, and lingerie can’t sustain love, but domestic economies can. This is not, at root, an argument based on realism or expediency. Rather, the point is that it is only through household practices that Christians come to embody the Christian virtues of mutual care, forgiveness, generosity, community, interdependence, and reconciliation. Our humanity cannot be separated from the moments of joy, anger, friendship, sadness, attention, confusion, tedium, and wonder that unfold over time and in specific places. Human intimacy is hammered out on an anvil made of nothing more, in McCarthy’s phrase, than the “day-to-day ebb and flow of common endeavors, joys, and struggles of love in the home.” Love, sex, and marriage, to be theological, must drink from the very same wells. Love, sex, and marriage, to partake in their transcendent mission of revelaing God’s grace, must embrace life’s decidedly untranscendent daily goings-on. In a Christian landscape, what’s important about sex is nurtured when we allow sex to be ordinary. . . .
Secular culture, after all, has made a fetish of sexual technique, suggesting that if we just follow the steamy tips of experts, sex will be frequent, and always a fantastic production that culminates in astonishing multiple orgasms. This is the message that creeps into our e-mail inboxes in the seemingly incessant unsolicited ads for potions, pills, and devices that will “increase sexual performance” (itself a disturbing phrase suggesting that sex is a theatrical production to be enacted according to the dictates of a director, a play cloaked in costumes and props.) Glamour fills readers in on “11 Sex Moves Men Wish You’d Make” and “9 Sex Moves Men Wish You’d Skip.” In a recent issue of Maxim, I saw an ad hawking a pillow designed to promote a greater variety of sexual positions; the pillow, tellingly, is called The Liberator. It is meant, I suppose, to liberate us from the natural constraints of our limbs and mattresses. And on and on. According to books like The Sex-Starved Marriage (and according to shopworn jokes about marriage being the great guarantor of chastity), married couples are in an outright crisis of libido. Twenty percent of married couples have sex less than once a month. Couples are harried, busy, stressed, exhausted. They’re clinically depressed, or their hormones are out of whack, or they’re dealing with childhood sexual abuse. Whatever the cause, married folks don’t seem to be having much sex.
To be sure, one hopes that satisfying sex characterizes the majority of American marriages. But the tips and steps and easy how-tos for married folk seem to misdiagnose the problem. The problem is not only that new moms are exhausted and collapse into bed at night wanting only sleep. The problem is also that we think we need to aspire to Hollywood sex; we think husbands and wives, when they’re doing it right, will approximate the unbridled passion of Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster’s Ball. We’ve defined sex as something unsustainable — bodice-ripping, stupefying, and nightly. It is not only insatiable, it creates the desire for more sex. It is adventurous, not habitual, and happens best during romantic weekend getaways, after candlelit dinners that recall the restaurants you frequented on dates before you were married, before you were plunged into routine.
Good sex, to be sure, is characterized by physical pleasure. It is also conditioned by moral context. And, as I suggested in the last chapter, it is inextricable from domestic routine. Moms and dads do need to be intentional about making time for sex, but Christians can perhaps remind the broader culture that good sex, by definition, is part and parcel of, not antagonistic to, ordinary marriages and domestic life.
It has been my Mecca since 1986: the Pepperdine lectureship. For 20 years, it has been a fresh breeze in my life.
It’s been a place to speak openly — in evening lectures, classes, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. (Jerry Rushford has had a way of talking you into doing more than you’d really like sometimes. He’s a very persuasive sort of guy!)
It’s been a place to listen to rich teaching and to be refreshed by times of worship. Great memories of Ken Young’s welcoming smile and worshipful heart, leading at the evening lectures.
For me, it’s especially been a place to connect with good buddies. Lunches with Rick, Chris, Randy, and Milt. Hangin’ with Darryl and Leonard–as well as with Rubel, Brandon, and many others. Even catching up with Searcy friends (David, Don, and some years James and Marla) and Abilene buddies (Thom, Dwight, Eddie, Jack . . .) in a more relaxed environment. This year, for the third time, I think, my parents will be there.
And then there is that other little serendipity: the outrageous beauty. Mountains smacked up against the ocean. What more could you ask for? Plus, the Reel Inn, Malibu Seafood, John’s Garden, The Chart House . . . .
Once again this year, I’ll be teaching my class with Zoe. (Brandon, we’ll miss you!) The class is called “Baptism and Sex.” I know, I know, it opens the door to way too many jokes. But what I really want to talk about is living within a story. The way we live flows out of the story we participate in.
This year makes 21 straight years to speak there. But next year . . . my final year to manage one of Chris’s baseball teams . . . I’m trying to keep the whole Spring schedule open . . . . We’ll see! The string has to be broken sometime.
But not this year. In a couple days, I’m headin’ west!