What Conservatives & Liberals Can Learn about the Ascetical Healing of Desire

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Last week I told you a bit about the book my parish read last month as a part of our summer book group: The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God by Anglican priest and renowned theologian Sarah Coakley. As I told you, Dr. Coakley’s goal in the book is to reach past the traditional divides between “conservatives” and “liberals,” to suggest that the approach of neither is truly satisfactory and to encourage a different way of engaging some of the most pressing theological issues of our time. After she noted the impossibility of the conservative approach of applying the Bible literally (because no matter what, everyone has some verses they contextualize and interpret and some they do not) and then likewise pointing out the problem of the liberal approach of simply unmooring entirely from Scripture and tradition, she suggested a new third way. In that third way, she suggested that both liberals and conservatives would do well to dive deeply into the ascetical tradition of the church to find a better way to wrestle with and engage contemporary questions about sexuality. The ascetical tradition of the church is the ancient Christian practice of spiritual training—much like how an athlete trains their body. It’s about intentionally shaping your habits, thoughts, and desires so they line up more closely with God’s will. And when that lens is applied to questions surrounding sexuality, interesting points rise to the fore. When we approach sexuality through the lens of ascetical theology, we move beyond debates about rules or libertinism and instead begin to ask, “What kind of person am I becoming through my desires? Are my longings drawing me into deeper union with God—or away from that union?” Coakley insists that Christian maturity requires patience, prayer, and humility—what she calls the “long obedience” of contemplative waiting. It's not about quick moral answers or rigid categories, but rather about becoming attuned, over time, to how God might be shaping us through even our most intimate experiences. In this sense, sexuality is neither a problem to be fixed nor a freedom to be celebrated uncritically. It is, instead, part of the larger spiritual terrain through which we journey toward God. And that means we need prayerful discernment, not just policy positions; vulnerability before God, not just identity labels. Desire must be held in the crucible of divine contemplation, not resolved too quickly. So, the myth that Christians must either prudishly repressive or liberally unmoored misses the point. The truth is more demanding and more beautiful: God desires to transform our whole selves—body, mind, and heart—into vessels of love and holiness. And that transformation happens not through ideology, but through the slow, sacred work of spiritual practice. And that means everyone has work to do. The liberal answer of insisting upon complete freedom for sexuality is inadequate because it doesn’t invite theological reflection upon the way that desire can at times be destructive and at other times salvific. And the conservative answer of rigidly excluding LGBTQ people means that conservative Christians are missing out. They are missing in seeing how the holy and self-giving love in queer relationships can teach them more about what Godly love looks like. Rowan Williams points this out in an essay called The Body’s Grace, where he acknowledges the traditional understanding of opposite-sex relationships (where marriage exists primarily to provide an appropriate setting for sex and the procreation of children). As Williams notes, the problem with that imagined ideal is that “the facts of the situation are that an enormous number of ‘sanctioned’ unions are a framework for violence and human destructiveness on a disturbing scale: sexual union is not delivered from moral danger and ambiguity by satisfying a formal socio-religious criterion.” Thus, Williams notes that queer relationships “poses the question of what the meaning of desire is in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process (the peopling of the world).” To put it another way, queer relationships experience sex without the same assumed instrumentality of straight relationships and, thus, can help straight people better understand what a graced and embodied desire might look like, particularly one that is healed by God’s grace and focused on the flourishing of the other. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.