Tara Owens, CSD, is a spiritual director, speaker and author with Anam Cara Ministries. She teaches on the topic of spirituality and sexuality in seminaries and spiritual direction training programs throughout North America. She has a book on spirituality and the body coming out with InterVarsity Press in 2014. You can connect with her on Twitter or Facebook.

The term healthy sexuality presupposes that we have a good idea of what our sexuality is and does, and I would argue that, for the most part, both our culture and the Church have fairly disordered models of what sexuality is supposed to look like. Part of the reason we struggle with the question of masturbation is because we have trouble living in the tension of our desires. It’s easier (and I find the tendency in myself almost every day) to fall back onto the black and white rules that we’re often offered as answer to our struggles instead of doing the hard work of encountering our own desires and longings in relationship with God and others. For the most part, we’ve been given two sets of unhelpful “rules” for what we should do with our sexuality: (1) respond to our sexuality as an appetite, like hunger, and feed appropriately or (2) avoid or subjugate our sexuality as something to be expressed only in covenanted conjugal relationship and ignored or sublimated at all other times. This is a false dichotomy, and both of these paradigms tend to end up in dysfunction. We either find ourselves at the mercy of our “needs” which leads to a low grade despair, or divorced from the life and pleasure that sexuality brings, living in a kind of discontented numbness.

Like many of the questions surrounding sexuality, I don’t think we can find simple answers—or any answers that hold together in real life situations—outside of the context of relationship. For me, sexuality is broader than mere genital expression (intercourse, foreplay, masturbation, etc.), and encompasses all of the embodied ways that we desire connection with the world, with one another, and with God—as well as all of the ways we go about expressing that desire. While that definition can be taken to extremes, taking a broader view of sexuality allows us to see the ways that sexuality impels us to connection with one another. Taken in this context, masturbation and whether or not it is a healthy expression of sexuality for a particular individual become questions of whether or not the acts of masturbation at a particular season of life are drawing you deeper into isolation from others and from God, or into deeper connection and intimacy.

How does this play out? The answer will be different for different people in different contexts—but the principles underlying those answers will be the same. A single woman in her 20s who is discovering her body and her desires might be approaching masturbation as a celebration of sexuality and the gift of her body and desires; she could equally begin using masturbation as a place to take her sorrows, longings, and insecurities. In the former, masturbation can be a healthy expression of sexuality if kept squarely in the context of a relationship which, in her case, is with God, with her future mate, and with herself. In the latter, masturbation quickly becomes a place to go to hide from others and God, a place that, like any appetite-fulfilling activity, can quickly lead to addiction. Ultimately, the question of whether or not masturbation is healthy for a particular person springs from the question that governs all good discernment: Does this action help me love myself and others more fully and freely, and does it allow me to love God more deeply and with more of myself?

If you take this question as your baseline for the question of masturbation, a husband who chooses masturbation for a season while he and his wife parent young children can be seen as freeing and loving—a choice appropriate to healthy sexuality—as masturbation can take the sexual pressure off of the relationship and lead to greater intimacy (as long as the decision is discussed and not made unilaterally). On the other side of that situation, masturbation chosen out of frustration and expediency would push him further away from his spouse, compounding relational tension and making loving each other and God a further hill to climb in an already exhausted and exhausting situation.

I know “yes” or “no” would be easier answers to this question, but I don’t believe that our sexuality was created by God simply to be treated mechanistically. I believe sexuality is a gift and a grace that is given to us by God, and it can produce some of the most radically beautiful and loving acts as well as some of the most horrible and hateful. As the first line of the Didache says, “There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between these two ways.”

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So, is masturbation an acceptable component to healthy sexuality for Christians? How would you answer that question?

I look forward to reading your responses, and plan to share the most popular comment in a post next week!