Day Ten – Frank Talk about Sex

Question: Yesterday we addressed how the Rule talks about money (and it sounded like the beginning of a new conversation). What do you want to take on next, sex or power?

Br. Curtis Almquist: I’ll speak to the chapters we wrote on celibacy (9 – 11). I think the language is not quite real enough yet. We moved in the right direction, but the subject was still too fraught with fear and anxiety for many of us and it was just too difficult for some of us to talk about frankly. We were moving in the right direction, but we need to go further.

Br. Mark Brown: Some of the language around both poverty and celibacy struggles for the ring of truth, I think. We take the practice seriously, of course, but some of the language overreaches, even obfuscates. Those chapters are the ones that I find myself critiquing when they come around in our daily reading.