Love, Marriage and Pure Sex
OK. It was not the sort of thing that people who know me would expect me to be doing – speaking at the opening of a sex shop. And even though I have spoken at the opening of more than four hundred buildings – retirement villages, nursing homes, hospitals, children’s homes, unemployment training centres, educational facilities, – this was the first of its type I have even been in, let alone officially opened. And why have a prayer at such an opening?
When we were teenagers we attended Father and Son and Mother and Daughter nights at our church run by the Family Life Movement. The lectures were accompanied by some fairly racy black and white anatomical drawings. We read books like “Just Friends” and one or two others disguised by brown paper wrappers. The church elders were seemingly opposed to sex of any kind. I got the idea that pre-marital sex was absolutely forbidden because it might have led to ballroom dancing!
Later on, as a young minister not much older than the young teenagers I was trying to help, I ran ‘SLAM” nights which were always crowded. SLAM was an acronym that young people understood but parents didn’t: nights of discussion on Sex, Love and Marriage.
For fifty years I have had a commitment to making marriage work. This has always been at the heart of what Beverley and I do. Apart from counselling multitudes of married couples, we own a magazine called Marriageworks. Long time marriage counsellors, Jim and Grace Vine, magnificently edit it. Well known Christian psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors feature in this free online magazine – just look up www.mwmagazine.com.au. We promote this magazine everywhere because we want marriages to work.
My parliamentary legal staffer, Linda Munoz-Scott and her husband Luke recently asked Beverley and I to launch a new venture that she and her husband had developed. It is an Australian first. It is a website that is dedicated to providing resources to married Christians on how to keep the spice in their love life – a resource committed to making marriage work. Their hearts are in making marriages work.
I realise that some churches have been running programs for women and sensuality, and programs for “real” men and fatherhood. It seems that the church has re-discovered sex.
At the launch of “Puresex” in the Wollongong Art Gallery, over a hundred people gathered for a “White Party”. I had never been to one before. Every one present was dressed in white. All the men were in white suits and the women were dressed to kill, all in white. The three-course meal consisted of ingredients that were white food. Even the strawberries were dipped in white chocolate! I had not realised how much was naturally white!
Next year will be our 50th wedding anniversary. Beverley and I have been going together since we were 13 and so we have done everything together all of our lives. That’s wonderful. We’ve been through painful times and happy times. We have four children, plus four spouses and eleven grandchildren. We find that marriage is absolutely wonderful.
It makes us sad to see what’s happening to marriage in Australia. Over the next 20 years, we will see over 1 million children hurt by divorce or separation. Divorce is never lovely – there are always people who will get hurt. Sometimes it may be necessary but it is never lovely or easy for children.
Of course I delight in blended families and remarried families. But one of the problems with second marriages is that 2 out of every 3 second marriages fail. So if it’s hard the first time, most people haven’t learnt much the second time. But it gets worse – if you go to third marriages the chances of staying together is less than one-third. Only one third of these marriages survive. So how do we make marriages work?
In my work as a legislator, we work with all kinds of bills that come before Parliament. We often get legislation that deals with human relationships – it might be proposed gay marriage, it might be de-facto relationships, it might be blended marriage, or it might be those who are pushing for elbow room to have other partners in multiple relationships. In all of these things relationship I know kids are often hurt and that presents a real problem. Further, much of the new morality is plain old immorality.
In my life, as a minister of religion, I have married over 2000 people. But before I married these people, I spent time with each couple talking about their relationships. For decades on radio and television I had thousands of people ringing for relationship counselling. In this period of time, every Tuesday night for over twenty five years, I was training sixty or seventy counsellors in two year long courses. They in their turn counselled over three million people on the telephone or sitting in front of them.
I came to the conclusion that there was never a problem we couldn’t handle. But that required communication and commitment. Often the lack of these two qualifications led to estrangement and sexual problems. No matter what the problem is, you can make marriage work if you both want to. There are many helpful references in the Bible about marriage. At the opening of “Puresex” I read from Peterson’s translation “the Message” (Ephesians 5) of the privileges and responsibilities of wives and husbands to each other and to the Lord.
Ephesus is a gorgeous city on the west coast of Turkey. Archaeologists have excavated it and almost the entire city was a place where Romans would holiday. Marvellous villas and houses adorn Ephesus, including the three-storey Library of Celsus, the magnificent 25,000-seat theatre, the agora – a large marketplace, municipal buildings and the great temple of Artemis, reportedly four times the size of Athens’ Parthenon. But Ephesus was also a very ‘progressive’ city – a city of free love, of brothels and bath houses, some with frescos of a pornographic nature, a city of prostitutes and a city where basically anything went.
In this city a church of Christians flourished. To them the Apostle Paul wrote: “Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that. Don’t allow love to turn into lust, setting off a downhill slide into sexual promiscuity, filthy practices, or bullying greed.”
“Out of respect for Christ, be courteously reverent to one another. Wives understand and support your husbands in ways that show your support for Christ. The husband provides leadership to his wife the way Christ does to his church, not by domineering but by cherishing. So just as the church submits to Christ as he exercises such leadership, wives should likewise submit to their husbands. Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives, exactly as Christ did for the church—a love marked by giving, not getting. Christ’s love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty. Everything he does and says is designed to bring the best out of her, dressing her in dazzling white, radiant with holiness. And that is how husbands ought to love their wives. They’re really doing themselves a favor—since they’re already “one” in marriage. No one abuses his own body, does he? No, he feeds and pampers it. That’s how Christ treats us, the church, since we are part of his body. And this is why a man leaves father and mother and cherishes his wife. No longer two, they become “one flesh.” This is a huge mystery, and I don’t pretend to understand it all. What is clearest to me is the way Christ treats the church. And this provides a good picture of how each husband is to treat his wife, loving himself in loving her, and how each wife is to honor her husband.”
It doesn’t take much imagination how a preacher can expound these words to suit such a white clad gathering of young marrieds. They listened in rapt silence.
Some years ago, I was elected the National Father of the Year. On the day it was announced (just before Father’s Day), a large press gathering came to our house, wanting to take pictures of all the kids and us. I remember a reporter saying to me, ‘What’s the best thing I can do for my children?’ I replied, ‘The best thing you can do for your children is to love their mother. Because in loving your wife, you are going to build the kind of relationship and build a family and household that will last forever.’
Marriage is absolutely wonderful. It can work. But you’ve also got to keep the spice in it. You’ve got to keep the interest going. Is it possible to develop sensuality in a Christian manner? Is it possible to have “pure sex” keeping to Paul’s admonition “Don’t allow love to turn into lust, setting off a downhill slide into sexual promiscuity, filthy practices, or bullying greed.”
This is what Linda and Luke’s venture is all about. That is why I prayed for God’s blessing on them. Here is Linda and Luke’s story as they told it together: “Lucky Luke and Lovely Linda were married one fine day. Luke is lucky ‘cos he got Linda, and lives to get lucky with her. Linda is lovely, ‘cos she just is. Both of them loved God and from the moment they discovered sex (i.e. after they married) they loved it! They love God with a big ‘L’ and sex with a little ‘l’ (relatively speaking).
“They wanted to continue to add some red hot relationship to their already sizzling monogamy. But they couldn’t find any clean, decent place that sold marital aids to add to their playpen. That got Lovely Linda thinking. ‘What if we could create an online h(e)aven providing clean, fun products for married Christians?’, she said. ‘Why not?’ said lucky Luke. ‘I’ll be the quality tester and market researcher’. Of course he would. Lucky Luke loves his work, and his co-worker.
Lovely Linda did some hunting and gathering of some great products (with no smutty blokes and sheilas on the packaging). Then with the help of some creative minds and many hours in a labour of love, ‘Puresex’ was conceived. Are you ready for making love an adventure?” You can check it out at: www.puresexworld.com
After the prayer of dedication, there was a display of sexual aids, designed to help Christians. There was nothing smutty or pornographic. Just aids to help Christians develop in their sensuality and respect for their partners.
Like most of my generation. I took only the quickest of glances rather embarrassed. But I thought that the countless hours of counselling adults with sexual hang-ups and rejection, may have been avoided if my generation did not read about sex inside a plain brown paper cover.
Rev Hon Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC