My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed myself and quieted my ambitions. I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content.

Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore.

Psalm 131

I loved nursing; my twins nursed for fourteen months, and my singleton for nineteen. It was clear when the time to wean Max (the singleton) had come. From about fifteen months until the time he was weaned, he couldn’t sit still on my lap. If he was anywhere near the nursing position, he rooted as if desperately hungry. He asked to nurse when he was bored, when he wanted me off the phone, when he was hurt, when he hadn’t seen me for awhile, when he was tired, when he wanted to get my attention away from one of his siblings, and—I nearly forgot this one— when he was hungry. As an infant, milk was his only source of sustenance, but after he started eating hamburgers and pretzels, nursing took on a host of other meanings.

When Max was weaned he sat on my lap in a new way, as his older brothers had. Without the powerful draw to the breast, he could be still instead of rooting and clinging. And he faced away from me, instead of toward me. His sitting position mirrored how his whole life was reoriented, reaching out toward childhood instead of turning in toward infancy.

Weaning was difficult for all of us. Each of my boys easily favored food over milk to satisfy their hunger, but for years after they were weaned they continued to suck on fingers, pacifiers and shirt cuffs. For my part, I still sometimes find myself daydreaming about nursing, wanting to enjoy that special intimacy again, if only in memory. Even as I welcomed their healthy development, it was hard to see their interests expand beyond the shelter of my arms. But there was no way to hold onto it; nursing had to end, and we all had to grow up.

With respect to our topic, I’m suggesting that we wean ourselves from the pattern of this world, the sexual identity framework that limits our ability to be calm, mature and at peace about sexuality. Sexual identity categories keep us rooting after moral law and clinging to moral judgment. They hinder us from cultivating an ethos of calm and quiet around sexual issues in our Christian communities and lives. When we claim to know the full measure of a person on the basis of sexual desire or actions, we are concerning ourselves with matters too great for us. When we gird our own identities by maligning others, or judge our sexual identities or sex lives in comparison to others, we are seeing with haughty eyes. When we root after the wrong things, we miss the peace and rest of a mature relationship with God, and whether or not we intend to, we deny that peace to others.

Unpacking the Groceries

When a young child is weaned, she may move from her mother’s breast (or a bottle) to a highchair at the kitchen table. This is a monumental transition, to be sure, but eventually she’ll need to develop even more independence in adulthood as she chooses and prepares her own meals and cultivates relationships with the people who share her table. Weaning ourselves from sexual identity categories takes us beyond nursing and childhood (and extends the metaphor in Psalm 131 beyond early childhood) toward a place of greater maturity. Instead of relying on sexual identity categories to tell us who we are and what our sexuality means, we’re invited to steward sexuality in a more careful way, perhaps even with the contentment and calm described in Psalm 131.

To illustrate this, I brought two brown paper bags filled with groceries to class one day and set them side by side on the table that usually holds my lecture notes. John, a student in my anthropology class, volunteered to be my conversation partner:

“Which bag would you choose?” I asked.

John played along. “I can’t make an informed choice because I don’t know what’s in the bags, or why I’m choosing one.”

“Could you say which is good and which is bad?”

“No,” John said. “I need to see what’s inside each one.” I turned the bags around to reveal that one was labeled “homosexuality” and one was labeled “heterosexuality.”

“Let’s try again, John. Which bag is good and which is bad?” I asked. John paused and tentatively offered, “It’s not that simple—there are good and bad elements to each, depending on the situation or the person.”

“Well, then, which would you choose for yourself?”

A longer pause. “That’s not a good question, Dr. Paris. In the real world, it’s not as straightforward as picking a bag of groceries. It seems like some people aren’t given a choice at all.”

“John, you’re not being very cooperative,” I teased. “Try this one. Based on their labels, what can you tell me about the items in the bags?”

He was quick to retort, “I don’t even know what’s in the bags! How could I evaluate what I haven’t even seen?”

Our conversation could have gone on and on like this, with me asking overly simplistic questions about a subject that John hadn’t been given time or information to adequately understand. The mounting sense of frustration that he seemed to experience was precisely what I wanted the class to observe.

Michelle, another student, got mad at the bags. “I’m so sick of the way we talk about homosexuality in the church,” she said. “We’ve got to get past the labels. The labels just put people down.” I agreed, and added that labels also raise other people up. No matter how much we strive for equality, respect and compassion, the categories themselves perpetuate inequality and hierarchy.

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