1999
Originally published in ESSAY, Fall 1999, edited
Today the world is adrift on a sea of rapidly shifting mores. Every aspect of our lives and sexual thinking is affected. Thousands of voices clamor for attention, preaching new “freedoms” of every kind. Was it not but a few years ago that “shacking up”—what the courts called “cohabitation”—was thought to be abnormal? Today it is called a “meaningful relationship” or having a “significant other.”
There is a dissolution of the entire fabric holding couples and families together. Such forces as the Pill, the Bomb, the technological revolution, world war, the population explosion, and especially the media, are all facilitating changes in the attitudes and beliefs of men and women.
One historian called it the “Sexual Wilderness.” The problem seems to be spiritual. There is rebellion here—against authority, against God. There is movement toward destruction here, sexual victimization has broadened to damage every aspect of life. We sexaholics, victims of our own attitudes and actions, are nevertheless children of our times. As a result, we found ourselves not only adrift, but drowning in this sea of relativism, with nothing to anchor our frail lives against the storm of change without and the storm within.
Most of the voices we hear today on the beguiling wind song playing about us offer the easier softer way. They appeal to the lower instead of the higher, to weakness instead of our best, to the transitory instead of the lasting. To have and indulge. Their cry is “DO IT!” rather than “I can do without it.” “Here and now!” rather than “Thy will be done.” Theirs is based on a deception, the primacy of the physical and emotional instead of the spiritual. And God is not there.
The best among these voices would settle for the “good.” But as Bill W. of AA used to say, the good is often the enemy of the best. And if SA has anything unique to offer, it is the best—sexual sobriety. Sobriety as we have come to see it. To the world at large, we have nothing to say except to bear witness to the truth of our experience. To the storm-tossed suffering sexaholics—and only to sexaholics—who want survival and freedom from the bondage of their “freedom,” this program offers an anchor for the soul, a Connection with the unchanging, the real, and the true.
Roy K.
Published in SA loose literature in March 1982, this piece seems to be even more relevant with the passing of time. The work of a patient and loving God in the SA Fellowship during the same time period is also evident. The presence of a Higher Power at the recent Cleveland business meeting became clear as delegates and trustees broke through seemingly insurmountable obstacles to unity to forge a simple interpretation of the SA sobriety definition that was accepted by all.
