The Shadows Lengthen

CBC host, Jian Ghomeshi's dismissal and the resulting fall-out have delivered us into the midst of what one columnist calls "World War Q" and another calls a "national conversation” about sexual assault." The word that has stuck in my mind from it all is crepuscular. It was used in an article to describe the alleged state of affairs in Ghomeshi’s bedroom. According to Google's definition, crepuscular means "of, resembling, or relating to twilight," or, of an animal, "appearing or active in twilight."

Not long after the Ghomeshi story broke, this and this appeared on Huffington Post. Several other stories and blog posts about sexuality in crepuscular places have caught my eye just in the last week or so:

• "We know we cannot stop the tsunami of pornography," says Pam Krause, of the Calgary Sexual Health Centre in a CBC story about increased school calls for sex education here.

• Manitoba syphilis outbreak driven by social media hook-ups 

• Sexual images in Air Canada flight decks worse than airline admits 

• Jennifer Lawrence explaining why she posted pictures of herself nude in the cloud: “I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn, or he’s going to look at you.” How could an intelligent woman see a relationship requiring her to provide such pictures as loving, healthy and great? See Rowan Pelling's National Post piece here. 

• Sarah Bessey, Christian author and blogger weighs in here.

That's just a sampling. Add to that the national tragedy of so many missing and murdered women across our land, domestic violence, human trafficking, women's bodies being sold as commodities and it's clear that something is seriously off with the state we're in. The so-called sexual revolution has delivered us, particularly women and girls, into some sort of predatory sexual twilight zone. I suspect crepuscular is too light a word. The shades, whatever the number, have gone beyond mere grey and twilight to downright stygian, as in gloom and deep darkness. With apologies to Dylan Thomas, surely this is not a night into which we need go. This is also a dying of the light that needs raging against, particularly as it affects women and girls.

In 1967, Pierre Trudeau claimed that there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. By and large our society has embraced that notion. But, as a Christian clergyman in 2014, I'm concerned that many women and girls are suffering because there is less and less a place for Christian or any other religious teaching or moral compass in the nation's bedrooms either. 

How did we ever get from falling in love, getting to know one another, getting married, then enjoying love-making with one another and having babies—to a "tsunami of pornography" (even on our flight decks), hook-ups, friends with so-called benefits and all the other crepuscular grey shadings of our age? Surely the bedrooms of our nation would benefit from being re-illuminated with the loving goodness, purpose and delight God intended for human sexuality.