The Christian Case for Sensuality

How's that for a provocative title, eh?  My teenaged self is prude-panicking right now, and it's all Kenneth Branagh's fault.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  

You see, it all started when I finally got around to watching the 1993 adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.  I'd been vaguely familiar with the film for years, of course, but had never actually sat down and tried it before.  I expected to enjoy it, but I had no other expectations for my viewing experience.  I certainly didn't expect to be as utterly entranced by it as I ended up being. 

The enchantment started working early, probably about five minutes into the show.  As soon as those triumphal horns ushered in that sublime overture, I was hooked.  The flock of revelers descending from the picnicking hill in flutters of tousled curls and white linen, racing toward the house ahead of the delightfully macho Returning Heroes — well, I don't mind telling you, Jeeves, I was Stirred.

The rest of the film proved equally charming, rollicking along with such a giddy and infectious sense of abandon that all I could think was how jubilant and energetic it all was.  In fact, I mentioned here on Rivendell that I hadn't seen a movie so joyous since Mamma Mia — and I haven't since, either.  These two films, quirky and exaggerated as they are, manage to preserve a sense of genuine mirth and gladness that I don't know that I've ever seen replicated in any other piece of cinema — at least, not so fully, nor so continuously.  

Of course, this narrative emphasis on loud, embarrassing, uninhibited displays of enthusiasm does leave the films vulnerable to criticism.  It's easy to dismiss them as "silly," shallow, insubstantial.  And I understand that:  after all, they are silly.  But, my dears, I think that's the point.  There are few things so sublime as the sight of humanity ceasing to take itself so pathetically seriously, laying down its absurd self-importance and kicking up its heels.  And that's precisely what happens in these movies.

I've gradually realized that the primary reason I find these films so mesmerizing is that they are so unabashedly sensual.  Not sensual in a sexual, immoral way (although both movies certainly do involve/glorify sexual/immoral sensuality); rather, sensual as in the celebration of our physicality in a non-sexual way.  The sensuality of these movies is the indulgence of sight and taste and hearing and touch — of bread and grapes and fresh earth — of clothing and sandals and ocean spray — of dances and mirth and music.  These stories focus on the delight of being human and earthbound, of being physical as well as spiritual creatures.  They focus on the joy of the temporal, and they do that without shame.

Now, anyone who's grown up in the evangelical Christian Church knows that this is not exactly an attitude which is encouraged in that sphere.  If anything, it's actively condemned.  "Set your minds on things above, not on things below."  The spirit may be willing, but the flesh is oh, so weak.  The heart is deceitful above all things.  We must daily die to self if we are to live with and in Christ.

Yes and amen.  How, then, is it possible to make a "Christian case" for sensuality?  What communion can there be between its apparent hedonism and the apparent asceticism of these practices that Scripture so explicitly encourages?  Are we not told over and over that our natural inclination is toward deeds of darkness rather than deeds of light?  If that is true (as we can empirically verify that it is), then how can we trust ourselves to embrace only those sensual pleasures which are innocent if we once give ourselves license to try?   How are we to pursue the spiritual righteousness God has so clearly called us to pursue if we are also devoting even a portion of our energy to physical enjoyment?  How are we to crucify our sin nature if we are indulging the physical nature to which it is so closely, so heartbreakingly tied?

Well, I think we start by uncovering a biblical truth that we seem to have done our level best to bury:  namely, that God delights in humanity.  It is — we are — the reflection of his Edenic ideal.  He delights in the intricacies of our anatomy and the aberrations of our personalities.  Our skin is glory; our humor is wonder.  We are the desired and created and beloved of the Master of the universe; yet we are more likely to look at the temples he has given us as bodies and say, "Get thee behind me, Satan," than "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

Beloved, this should not be.  It is true that, since Eden, our humanity has been tainted and torn and enmeshed with evil.  But it has never been, nor will it ever be, worthless or irredeemable.  Nothing that Almighty God has made ever is.  We are not so powerful as to be able to render refuse what he has created treasure.  Neither height nor depth nor angels nor demons nor our own damnable sin can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  It is for freedom that he has set us free — and, while we are not to use our freedom as a license to sin, we are to use it as a license to enjoy every good and perfect gift which comes down from the Father of lights.

Thus, I believe it is vital that we, as Christians, learn to not only accept but revere the reality of our own carnality.  We need to embrace the parts of our humanity that are still good and right and beautiful, even if they are not "spiritual" in the only sense of the term that we have ever been taught.  We need to appreciate the fact that our souls were placed in bodies that please the Lord.  We need to respect the fact that these divinely created bodies crave and respond to food and touch and water and sunlight and play.  

We know that our humanity carries with it a loathsome and powerful depth of sin.  We know (rightly) that we are to confront and uproot and ruthlessly destroy this sin wherever we meet it in ourselves.  But the problem, I fear, is that we have spent so much time focusing on and condemning our sin nature that we have permanently conflated it with our physical nature.  And that error is not only harmful, it's unbiblical.

God has created our physicality and has declared it good.  (Which is why, in my opinion, an anthropology of total depravity is not only empirically inaccurate but also profoundly theologically disrespectful.  But I digress.)  The Lord has declared your body good and blessed, my sibling.  Allow it to be so.  Allow yourself to enjoy this green and golden earth that he has given you.  Play on it — celebrate on it — with the joyful abandon befitting a ransomed and liberated child of God.  You are a co-heir with Christ, so start acting like it.  This broken world has a wondrous healing in store for it; the victory is secure.  So go forth and glory.  Glory in your God and glory in the body he has given you.  Join in the great, divine romp that is all of creation.

In my opinion, the Mamma Mia movies and the 1993 adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing encourage viewers to do just that.  They're not perfect films, either technically or thematically, but I think they are worthwhile.  I think it's important for the media we consume to include a healthy dose of unadulterated, gleeful, cheeky, celebratory extravaganza every now and then.  We need to allow ourselves to simply be and feel human once in a while, however goofy or embarrassing that feeling might be.  

Of course, as a Christian, one could point out that the celebration in these films often lists pretty heavily towards the bacchanalian side of things, which is more than a little dangerous if one is seeking to maintain a biblical ethos of sex and sensuality.  And that's a fair point.  But, even conceding that there may be a strain of sexual abandon inherent to these movies, is it not worth acknowledging that a certain degree of sexual abandon is actually fully consistent with a proper Christian anthropology?  Sexuality was a part of God's original, unblemished plan for humanity.  Sexuality existed in Eden, and I very much doubt that it was, in any way, um . . . "restrained."  The fact that these movies may misdirect human sexual impulse does not mean that they are wrong to include it.  Improperly channeled sexuality should not be glorified, but there is nothing wrong with celebrating sexuality itself — or celebrating it openly, for that matter.  Bible-believing Christians have good cause for temperance, but they have none whatsoever for prudery.

So, yes:  I love these films.  They're good for me, body and soul.  They help to heal the exhausted ascetic that my teenaged self thought she had to be in order to honor her Savior.  They teach me that it is a good thing to revel in my humanity, in my body, in my senses.  They reinforce the value of the joy I derive from other pieces of media, like the sound of the beat dropping in "Electric Love" or the sight of Ariana DeBose twirling around in that splash-of-sunshine yellow dress.  They remind me that I am a human being and that that is not a bad thing to be.

It is true that my God has commanded me to set my heart on things above:  on the unseen, on the eternal.  It is true that he has commanded me to cultivate my spirit, and I am grateful that he is no shallow, hedonistic deity.  He desires more from and for me than simple happiness:  he desires holiness.  But that holiness necessarily involves true, deep, divine joy; and that joy does not come into being despite my humanity but, in some ways, directly because of it.

My Lord has given me a soul, and I am at home in it.  But he has also given me a body, and I am at home in it, too.  He has given me limbs that love to be clothed and love to be naked.  He has given me legs that love to run, feet that love to dance, arms that love to wave.  He has given me fingers to feel the breeze and toes to feel the loam.  He has given me a human heart that delights in the vicissitudes and absurdities of all human relationships.  He has given me a mind to know wit and a smile to know glee and a skin to know sunlight.

My physicality may have been fundamentally damaged when Eden was broken, but it was also a part of his fundamental design before the breaking, and scraps of that divine exuberance still linger on in my oh-so-human bones.

This, too, can be an altar.