Sex Before Marriage

All my life, I've been trying to figure out what it means to "do the right thing." As a Coptic Orthodox Christian, you would think it would be simple - just follow the rules of your religion, and you'll be fine. Even if I were not one to question everything (which I am), it has not always been clear to me what it means to be Coptic Orthodox Christian, or who even makes the rules.

Let's not be so naive to say "God makes the rules." Anyone who likes a rule will tell you that God made the rule, and anyone who doesn't like a rule will say "God never said that." To speak for God is a presumption that should be reserved for the foolish or the divine, and you never know which one you're dealing with. 

Sex before marriage

We all think we know the rules for a good boy or a good girl in the Coptic Orthodox Church: you do not have sex before marriage, and as soon as you get married you only have sex so you can make grandchildren and deacons, the prized possessions of any Coptic community. This is not complete nonsense, but it's hard to parse out what's the truth, what's the Truth, and what's the nonsense. 

The truth is what we really believe as a community. The Truth is what God would want us to believe if we could truly discern the Mind of God. The nonsense is what happens when we allow culture to speak for God.

A community is defined by its members, and it can be any size. A recently immigrated Coptic family is a small community. Egypt is a large community. Each community will have a way of establishing and enforcing norms, which are often framed as both enforceable and unenforceable rules. These rules are not arbitrary, but they are a combination of existential realities and sociocultural preferences, both of which are key to forming a shared community identity.

An existential reality is a rule that you cannot change even if you try. It is a rule that God made that becomes clear to us as a rule through what I like to call spiritual physics. Just as there are physical laws of nature, there are spiritual laws of nature. Just as we can discern the law of gravity, we can discern the spiritual world that God created for us.

Sociocultural preferences will vary from one community to another. Depending on the size and complexity of the community, they can even vary within a community. We have Coptic Orthodox Christians who think it is "not Christian" to dance, get tattoos, or drink alcohol. Are these things inherently bad? If you dance provocatively, get a naughty tattoo, or drink irresponsibly then yes these things can become damaging to your body, soul, and spirit. 

I understand there may be genuine confusion about what is an existential reality and what is a sociocultural preference; however, we must resist the temptation to declare something to be True, when all we mean is that we believe it to be true and have agreed together as a community that we will behave as if it were true. Unlike murder, which is universally recognized as morally wounding to the murderer, it is hard to make a strong case that sex outside of marriage is inherently evil.

Let's pause to take a deep breath and reread what we have said so far to be crystal clear that I have not said "It is ok to have sex outside of marriage." What I have said is that there are different reasons that we choose to do or not do things. We choose to wait for marriage as Coptic Orthodox Christians because this is the sociocultural norm that we have agreed upon as a community. This is as good a reason as any to do something.

Managing Diabetes

Let's take a little detour and settle our frustrations by talking about diabetes for a few moments. We have many people in our community who struggle to control their blood sugars, and their success or failure in doing so relies on the rules that govern their diabetes management. These rules are not arbitrary, but they are a combination of existential realities and sociocultural norms that each individual uses to create a personal rule book to follow.

It is an existential reality that consuming carbohydrates elevates your blood sugars, some people have insulin deficiency/resistance that makes it impossible/harder for them to clear that sugar from their bloodstream, and consistently elevated sugars wreak havoc on all of your organs including your heart, your kidneys, and your brain. 

It is a sociocultural norm that Egyptian people love to eat carbs. It is simply cruel to expect a human being to feel truly alive knowing that macarona bechamel exists, but you can't have any. There is a reason my good friend and colleague, Dr. Tamer Yacoub, is a very busy diabetes specialist in Fall River, MA. Most of the population near our medical practice is Portuguese and for some reason, it is typical for a Portuguese meal to be served with rice, bread, and potatoes. 

A friend recently told me that one of the reasons he has trouble managing his diabetes is because he does not want to live longer at the expense of his happiness. His father lived to a ripe old age but at the cost of not being able to eat anything more than chicken and vegetables. My friend would rather eat whatever he wants and be happy than extend an unhappy life.

The tensions between our existential realities and our sociocultural norms are real. Biology tells us that we should eat healthy, and our culture tells us we are required to gain 30 pounds in the Holy 50 Days. We do not have to submit ourselves to a false choice between two extremes. Finding a balance requires an understanding of what is the right thing to do, and what would make us more or less likely to do the right thing.

Proclivities and Propensities

We all have different proclivities and propensities. Our proclivities are the sources of dopamine that we are drawn to, and our propensities are the potential negative consequences that we are prone to facing. A person who has a proclivity to eat Nutella out of the jar and a family history of diabetes is in a risky place. 

We only have partial control of our proclivities and we have little control of our propensities. The partial control we have of what gives us pleasure comes in the form of how well we are able to control our personal experience. Once we expose ourselves to a source of dopamine, it is impossible to un-know how it feels. Different people respond differently to the same exposure. One person's temptation is another's poison.

The goal is not to avoid all sources of dopamine. The goal is to be aware of which sources of dopamine are most appealing to us and which are the most dangerous for us. This awareness of our proclivities and propensities helps to inform us what rules we should put in place for ourselves to protect us from ourselves. I am not saying that nicotine, cocaine, and alcohol are not dangerous, but I am hoping people realize that sugar may be the most dangerous substance for the Coptic community. 

Back to the Sex

The core question that we are wrestling with is "Why should we wait till marriage to have sex?" The answer, as you have already suspected, is a combination of existential realities and sociocultural norms. I do not think it is possible to make an airtight argument for waiting till marriage based on just logic and data. There are definitely very good reasons to wait, but at the end of the day, we will still be left with a remnant of reasonable rational skepticism. Just as we cannot prove that God exists, we must be comfortable declaring our faith, not because we think we are right, but because we are seeking the mystery of what it means to know God.

Sex outside of marriage is a common practice outside of, and not unheard of inside of, our Coptic community. Let's not pretend that this is not the case. Does sex outside of marriage make sense to some people? Yes. Are there objective issues and concerns about sex outside of marriage? Also, yes. Even serial monogamy without a lifelong commitment puts couples in a position where one may be expecting more than the other is willing to give.

The value of the Sacrament of Marriage is more than just the obvious theological and pastoral requirements prescribed by the Coptic Orthodox Faith. There are universally generalizable reasons why it makes sense for two people to stand up in front of everyone they know and make a commitment. It is not just a matter of having witnesses to hold each of them accountable - it also requires each of them to truly examine himself and herself before entering into a hasty decision. 

Sex is the ultimate unitive and procreative human experience. It is unitive because of the hormonal release of oxytocin that promotes human bonding and the dopamine that evokes a sense of pleasure. It is procreative in that this is how we create more humans. Are there other acts that are unitive? Yes, but less so. Are there other ways for humans to be productive, generative, and participants in God's divine plan? Yes, but they are all shadows of this unique gift that we have been given to co-create human life with God.

Once we have shared in the making of life, we are responsible for that life. It helps to know that someone will share that responsibility with us, no matter what happens. This partnership is an icon of the Trinity who are the origin and source of love. Parenting is hard, and it is only by the grace of God that we become icons of Christ to our children, as we are helping them to be formed into icons of Christ themselves. It is important to mention briefly here that it is possible to raise children outside of marriage, and some of the clearest images of God's love are seen in single and adoptive parents. 

Going back to proclivities and propensities, I do believe that it is a nearly universal proclivity to want to have sex and a universally risky propensity to desire sex in a way that is not edifying to yourself or the object of your desire. This is why it is so important to understand that sin of any kind, including sexual immorality, is damaging to not just your body, but also damaging to your soul and spirit. Like the diabetic eating Nutella out of the jar, any human indulging in sexual promiscuity is playing with fire.

A Godly marriage is one in which each person individually is growing in virtue as an icon of Christ, and the couple collectively is working in cooperation as an icon of the Trinity. This is an existential reality that is True. This is much easier to do if both people in the marriage share the same sociocultural norms and work out of the same rule book.

In Conclusion

I realize I have not made any friends here. The hope of some is that we can prove the inherent wisdom of abstinence from sex before marriage in the same way that they hope to prove the existence of God. Others hope that we can justify all of the ways that we put ourselves in harm's way simply because it is hard to do the right thing. 

I started by saying that I am always trying to figure out what it means to do the right thing. Knowing what to do and doing it are not the same thing, even for the great St. Paul as he writes the seventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans. As he also says in 1 Corinthians 13 we now see dimly, as in a mirror, and we are working to discern what it means to love. 

Sex is a beautiful thing, and it teaches us more than we hoped to know about love, intimacy, and the sacrifice that is required for two to become one. It is not out of judgment for those who do not wait, but out of encouragement to those who do, that we honor the sanctity of this beautiful act by encouraging everyone to wait. 

Fathers Passing

This morning I woke up with a dream in which I was attending my friend's father's funeral. The woman giving the eulogy was telling us that he moved to the United States so long ago that music was different then. She played some of that music, which was timelessly eclectic. It had a beat that made it alive, and a soul that made you feel it in your chest. The young blood in the room reacted with approval, and some of them even chimed in and sang along to these classic songs. My friend's dad is loved by all of the people in the room. They love his timeless soul as much as they love his favorite music.

Losing my father when he was 60 and I was 25 has put me in a bittersweet family of people that have lost their fathers too soon. It is always too soon. The youngest members of this family of mine lost their dad at the ages of 1 and 3 almost 40 years ago. The oldest members are friends who were lucky enough to call their fathers geddu (grandfather) for many years. It is always too soon. The sooner you lose your father the more you feel like he could have passed on to you so much if he were around longer. The later you lose your father the more you feel like he has passed on to you so much and there was still so much more to learn. 

When my father first passed I felt guilty for a long time. I wished I were a better son. I wished I appreciated him more, and I were attentive enough to learn what he had to teach me. Now almost twenty years later I realize this was just another piece of the mosaic of grief that represents the loss of the intellectual contributions of my father in my life. This concept of the mosaic of grief is crafted beautifully by Melissa Kelley, in her book Grief: Contemporary Theory and the Practice of Ministry, where she explains:

"While traditional grief theory can often seem to encourage 'paint-by-number' results, the contemporary field allows us - invites us - to understand each person's grief experience as a particular mosaic, fashioned out of innumerable and varied aspects of one's life, such as one's history of losses, one's relationships, one's ways of making meaning, one's experience of the Divine, one's religious resources, one's sense of community, one's culture, and so on. Each grief mosaic is unique, nuanced, and intricate."

Therefore, even though losing my father was a profound loss, it was accompanied by an equally profound process of ongoing meaning making that continues to shape who I am becoming as a person. Even though my life will never be the same again without him, his death did not mark the end of his deliberate and methodical work of raising me to be someone he is proud to call his son. He continues to pass on to me wisdom about life, about himself, and about the world that he envisioned. These lessons are not written in books or recorded on YouTube videos, but more like trying to retrace your steps back to a place that you remember well enough to think you can get there without a map.

Every time we welcome new members into our family of people who have lost their fathers, I am tempted to write something like this. I am tempted to sit down and share how much I love them, how much I love their fathers, how much their fathers loved them, how much I can appreciate of why it hurts so much to lose them, and so on. The problem is that we are all still left without our fathers, and a silly little essay or blog entry will not change that ... but we do have each other, and our fathers have each other.

I sometimes reflect on what it would be like when Mounir meets Victor and Talaat and Samir and Chuck - do they know their kids are friends, and if so, does this make them closer friends in the eternal realm? Do they introduce each other and say "hey, I want you to meet Sameh, he's new, but he's one of us now?" I sure hope so. We have each other here, and it gives me comfort to believe that they have each other there. Maybe they like the same music.

Three years is a long time ....

Over the course of the three years between 2014 and 2017 I contributed to this blog as a means by which to work through some intellectual challenges I was having as a person of faith. One of the reasons I did this in a semi-public forum was to be able to share it with the youth in my community who struggled with some of the same questions, and the other reason was to commit to the ideas in a way that invites dialogue from anyone who comes across what I wrote. It has now been almost three years since my last post, and I am revisiting the content in hopes to incorporating it with new material into a spiritual leadership curriculum that helps in mentoring the future leaders of the Coptic Church. To that end, I will reorganize the previous posts here in a somewhat cohesive narrative, in order to better clarify the gaps that need to be addressed. 

Science/History/Physics

As a scientist by nature and by training, I first have to clarify for myself the relationship between how we learn about the world through science and how God reveals to us why we are here in the first place. Just as it is a metaphysical statement to reject metaphysics, as was done by the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle, it is an act of faith to believe that God does not exist. The belief in the multiverse is still hypothetical and it currently does not have an even hypothetically falsifiable scientific standing, and it is crucial to distinguish this as a hypothesis and not mistake it for a well worked out theory of science. While I do accept the reality that some people do not consider the existence of God to even be a worthwhile question, I do think it is worth asking, and I have faith that God exists. Within that framework, it is then possible to consider how God has given us the capacity to align our physical reality with our spiritual reality to a unified understanding of the the mystery of time, the relationship between perception of gravity to our spiritual depth, and living in the present. This orients us eschatologically to history as not something that is removed from us in the past but unified with us as we are able to perpetually live out the life of Christ through the anamnesis of the Sacramental life of the church.

Relationship to the Mystical Church

While the relationship to the physical church may be complicated at times, the unity of all Christians to the mystical Body of Christ inthe Eucharist allows us to experience the antifragility of radical unity. Each faith community and each of its members take on a unique combination of differentidiosyncratic elements, but ultimately the spirituality of each church or individual is more than just about the language used in worship or other superficial factors that do not affect the essence of our relationship with God, but rather add to the flavor of how the worship is experienced. The Coptic Church is our mother, and previous generations have passed her down as a gift for us that nurtures us and guides us to engage with God in a physical reality that is a window into a greater spiritual reality. We must therefore avoid seeing the rules of the church as a burden, while at the same time not just treating them as an end in and of themselves. Our relationship with our church is as complex as any other relationship, and we must decide if we are willing to be committed to it despite the ongoing challenges.

Christian Anthropology/Psychology

If we continue to participate in the Sacramental life of the Church, we are then also able to see everything in the world around us through the eyes of its teachings. Our very nature as human beings created to be in the image and likeness of God makes us more than just a physical mortal body. Since we are called upon to be icons of Christ, we must strive to see ourselves and the world around us through God's eyes, so that we can better appreciate how far short we fall of that standard and that it is only through the grace of God that we can grow spiritually. This will be a constant struggle, but we are invited to follow in the example of the saints to serve without expectations and accept our spiritual lives as a perpetual work in progress. The reality is that if we could have complete control over our spiritual growth, this would have a negative effect on its raw, intrinsic beauty. 

Hopefully this train of thought is connected enough and helpful enough that you engage with this material. If there is an inconsistency or fallacy please give me the gift of your voice and the benefit of your correction. To God be glory in all things known and unkown.

Horizons

Watching a full moon set over my roof tonight, I noticed a superficial similarity to the sun setting over the horizon. From where I was sitting, I watched it dip over the edge of the tiles out of sight, but unlike a sunset, all I needed to do was move back a few feet and the moon was still there in full sight. 

Just before this, I was staring at the planets and stars, and wishing as I often do that I could soar out to see them up close. Like a little fly on the wall of a NASA drone, I wish I could look out and enjoy the beauty of outer space. I wonder if one day, when all is said and done, that we will have the freedom to do so. I also wonder if on that day we will still have the same desire to see what we wish to see now. 

For now, I see us all struggling to know more, to see more, to understand more. For now, I see us lamenting our constrained reality, knowing that there is so much more out there that we are not able to experience. If you are like me, you think that if only we could loosen these shackles, even for a few moments, it would open up a window into the reality that we can only now see by Faith.

How many times have I watched a sunset and wished I could watch it over and over again because of its striking, majestic beauty. Tonight, with of the angles and distances involved, I could the moon set over the roof as many times as I wish ... but I only watched it set once. For some reason, my control over the situation was inversely proportional to its intrinsic beauty. What I am guessing is that if I had the same control over the sunset (e.g. if I were in a fast airplane and I could fly back and forth to see the sun set over and over again) I think the sunset would also lose some of its beauty.

It seems as though we are chasing control, but oftentimes this control is not just an illusion but an actual detriment to our appreciation of beauty. Perhaps God can still appreciate the beauty of a sunset. Perhaps He can appreciate it a different way. Perhaps the beauty of a sunset is a metaphor for some kind of beauty that only He can see, for now. All I know, is that I realized tonight that if I somehow obtain the ability to fly out to see the planets and the stars, that the price I pay may be that sunsets will no longer be what they used to be. May God grant me the patience to see what He allows me to see, and no more.

Giving God Space

We have discussed before Maslow's stages of competence and how they relate to spiritual competence. The take home message there is that while we will never be really "competent," we were created to be loved by God and we should strive to accept his grace to help us learn to love Him and each other. If that is the case, then how do we increase in our knowledge of God and not just in our knowledge about God, with the distinction being that we should be improving our relationship with him rather than just "stalking God."

We can start this time by asking what prayer is and how we should pray. We realize that we are limited in our ability to pray by our limited knowledge of God. The more we know God the more we know how to pray, and the more we pray the more we know God. If our destination is prayer, we need to figure out how we are going to "get there" without losing our way with shiny, worldly distractions. We used the analogy of trying to get to Chicago from Boston and accidentally getting on I-87 South at Albany. The sooner you figure out that you're heading in the wrong direction, the sooner you can do something to correct the error and start heading to Chicago, and we identified three ways:

1) Listening to the Holy Spirit or your conscience - this is the equivalent of seeing the road signs and exits a few miles south of Albany and realizing you're heading South on 87 and you need to turn around and go back so you can keep heading west on I-90. To do this, you must be sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and this can get better or worse with time depending on how attuned you are to His voice.

2) Listening to Spiritual Guidance - this is the equivalent of someone seeing you are driving south through NY or DC and asking "aren't you supposed to be going to Chicago?" We can either listen to their advice or insist that we are heading in the right direction. The more someone knows us the sooner they will notice and hopefully intervene. The more trust we have and the more open we are to taking spiritual guidance, the more likely we are to listen and change direction.

3) Waiting for rock bottom - this is the equivalent of being on a boat to Cuba and finally asking "wait, I'm going to Chicago, why am I on a boat???"

We then discussed many different types/methods of prayer (e.g. psalms, agpeya, psalmody, attending liturgy, singing, personal prayer, petitionary prayer, etc.) and mentioned that it is important that the method does not become the final destination. If we are praying to say that we prayed, then we are still the center of our prayer. We must be most careful not in choosing the method but in our intention - we must keep God at the center of anything we consider to be a prayer.