SESSION 1

Our Ministry to Sexual Wholeness

• Prayer
• Introductions. Definitions.
• Class members' experiences with the church and sex.
• Sexual opinion survey.
• Audiotape of Wilson Yates on the vocation of those who teach about sexuality.
• Gary Pence's Sexual History. [Click on "Course Documents," then on "Texts," and then on the link to "My Sexual History."]
• "Life Behaviors of a Sexually Healthy Adult" / "Sexually Healthy Faith Communities"  These documents require the free Acrobat document reader.  If they do not automatically, download  Acrobat by clicking here: 

 

"What happens when you try to ride a horse backward? "You don’t have to answer that question, since whether it’s you or the horse who are moving backward the result will be something less than pretty. You do have to answer the following three questions, however. They are a test. They are only a test. But you should know going in that the vast majority of you (i.e., the honest ones) are going to fail. Yes/No responses, please; our essay question comes later. And no peeking at your neighbor’s answers! "First question:  Can you take off your clothes, stand in front of a full-length mirror, and honestly enjoy the body reflected there? "Second question:  Can you use words like penis, vagina, cock, pussy, prick, cunt, lingam, yoni, or the big F,  . . . in casual conversation, free of any fleeting hesitancies or abrupt upward or downward changes in volume that might indicate some significant psychological charge? "Third question:  If you had to walk naked from one end of Chicago’s O’Hare airport to the other, could you do so without feeling any emotional discomfort? "All done. You can breathe. So how many big NOs did you score, hmm? One? Two? Three, maybe? Zing! Told you you’d probably fail. These questions dig into hardcore body stuff, and it is absolutely astonishing how much shame, guilt, mortification, dishonor, embarrassment, humiliation, pain, and free-floating angst modern American society connects with anatomy, especially sexual anatomy. What’s equally astonishing is that these associations are completely bogus. They aren’t natural, or preordained. You won’t find them in any cosmic rulebook. Truth is, we made them up. You don’t even have to look beyond the American fishbowl to understand this. Though a ramble through the different sexual mores and erogenous zones prized by other cultures can certainly be enlightening, all it takes to pull the rug out from under our own precious belief system is pointing out that every question you answered “no” to, you would have answered “yes” to without a thought . . . when you were three years old. "At three you hadn’t learned shame. You were still free." from Connor Freff Cochran, Sammy the Dancing Scrotum (Read all about Sammy by clicking here.)