The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica

"Talking About Sex at Church"

READING: 

There is Something I Don't Know - Anonymous

There is something I don't know
That I am supposed to know.
I don't know what it is I don't know,
And yet am supposed to know,
And I feel I look stupid
If I seem both not to know
And not to know what it is I don't know.

Therefore, I pretend I know it.
This is nerve-racking
Since I don't know what I must pretend
To know.

Therefore, I pretend to know everything.

I feel you know what I am supposed to know
But you can't tell me what it is
Because you don't know what I don't know
What it is.

You may know what I don't know, but not
That I don't know it.
And I can't tell you.  So you will have
To tell me everything.

 

REFLECTION:

Why talk about sexuality at church?

We all have bodies, as I discussed earlier in this service with our young people, and our Unitarian Universalist faith tells us that our bodies are good – our bodies are the medium through which we experience the world in all of its richness and complexity.  The spiritual is inherent in the physical, not separate from it.  How different this message is from what young people so often encounter in other aspects of their lives.

I was a relatively quiet 8th grader when I attended About Your Sexuality – the predecessor to the current Our Whole Lives sexuality education program – at my UU church in Cleveland in 1990.  I was often uncomfortable, and wouldn’t have said I enjoyed the class, but I was listening, and taking in more than I realized.

By the time I got to About Your Sexuality, which was offered only at the middle school level, I had already gotten many messages in other places about bodies and sexuality and what it all meant.  Perhaps the most personally troubling was the message I began receiving at about 8 years old that my body wasn’t good enough.  I had become a pudgy kid, and peers and even teachers began teasing and taunting me, and I learned quickly that an inverse proportional rule for calculating worth pound by pound was in effect at school: being bigger-than meant I was worth less than the other kids.  This message was borne out by what I saw in the media: girls who looked like me were only portrayed as the butt of jokes or as objects of sympathy or pity, they were never the heroes or the desirable leading ladies.  It was pervasive, and the hurt is still there, all these years later, but somehow I was still able to develop a strong sense of self worth and confidence in making choices about my body and the way I would relate to others.  And I truly believe that that was possible because of the UU values-laden sexuality education I received at church and from my parents.  Thanks to them, I was able to reach beyond the negative messages about my body and about my sexuality that surrounded me at school and when I turned on the TV, and I learned even more indelibly that bodies are good – even my body, and that physicality is a natural and beautiful aspect of being human, for everyone, not just those who are slender and conventionally attractive.  Nor just those whose gender expression and sexual identity fit society’s assumed norms.  I was lucky.  Some young people are never taught anything that counters the negative messages they receive about their bodies, their identities, or their sexuality. 

Religious educator and author Maria Harris says that there are three kinds of curricula: explicit curricula (what we intentionally teach), implicit curricula (what is learned from the patterns and structures that surround the explicit curricula), and null curricula (what is learned from the things we don’t see because they are missing).  We all received some form of sexuality education, from our parents, from our schools, from our religious communities and from the media.  But if we did not have people in our lives – parents or teachers or even peers – who were willing to talk directly with us about sexuality, most of what we learned came from the implicit or null curricula in our homes, in our schools and in the world around us. 

I’d like to take a moment to invite you to take part in an activity from the parent orientation to the OWL program.  I’d like you to think about the explicit, implicit and null sexuality education you received as a young person.  What messages did you receive about your own body?  About touch and the need for human affection?  About gender roles – how girls and boys should behave?  About loving and intimate relationships?  About dating and sexual attraction?  About when it was okay to engage in sexual behavior?  About sexual responsibility?  If you could sum it up in one phrase or sentence, what message did you get about sexuality in your youth?  And then, what message about sexuality do you want young people today to get?  I invite you to speak those desired messages aloud. 

There is something I don’t know that I am supposed to know.  Haven’t we all felt that way at times in our lives?  Adolescence especially is a confusing time – young people are growing and developing physically as well as intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and socially.  They’re working out who they are and how they fit into the world.  They’re beginning to explore relationships and experience new feelings and urges of love and lust and longing.  How many of you have ever heard the phrase, “It just happened”?  “It just happened” is code for “I made the choice to act without regard for the consequences of my actions.”  OWL is a vaccine for “It just happened.”  We offer comprehensive sexuality education to young people so that when they are faced with making choices about entering into relationships or becoming sexually active, they have already thoughtfully considered their own values, what they’re ready for, and how to be a responsible and respectful partner when they decide it’s time.  We educate not only our own youth, but their peers, too – sometimes directly, when friends of UUCCSM youth enroll in our OWL classes, but I’ve also heard from parents that after taking OWL their children have become known among their peers as the go-to people for honest, accurate information about sexuality.  We are educating beyond our own walls.

The Our Whole Lives program is grounded in four key values: Self Worth, Responsibility, Sexual Health, and Justice & Inclusivity.  I am proud that our congregation offers five levels of the Our Whole Lives sexuality education program: K-1st grade, 5th-6th grade, Jr. High, Sr. High and Adult.  Not many churches are able to offer all the levels of OWL, and we have done so thanks to our large team of dedicated, trained OWL facilitators, and also very much thanks to our OWL Coordinator of more than a decade, Beth Rendeiro. She is tireless in her support and advocacy for OWL at UUCCSM, and we are very lucky to have her. 

Yes, we talk about sexuality at church.  We talk about sexuality at church because no matter what age or stage of life we are in, our Unitarian Universalist faith and values can guide us in forming healthy, mature and joyful relationships with others in our lives.