Getting to the Point: sex

Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Let's Talk About Chastity

Last week in this column on ‘gnarly questions’ I wrote about the basic Catholic theological understanding of the sexual act and its meaning – an embodied reflection of God’s love for creation and for humanity, hence an act occurring in a context of irrevocable commitment (marriage) and ordered towards creativity and life (pro-creative).

I am always amused at the commenters on such blog posts who feel it is necessary to inform me that Not! Everyone! Agrees! With! This! Ummm… yes, dear. I am aware that there are actually people in the world and even in the pews who do not quite agree with what the Catholic Church teaches about sex and marriage. This is not a well kept secret.

I ended last week’s blog post by asking ‘what about all the people who, under this understanding of sex, cannot morally engage in sexual intercourse?’ The unmarried, the gay—what about them? Does the Church then condemn them to a life of misery and loneliness? How can we be so cruel as to say to people that they must live their lives alone, alone, alone, forever alone, without love, without companionship, without anyone who cares for them or for whom they care.

Because of course the only possible way to have someone in your life who you care for and who cares for you, the only possible way to have ‘love’ in your life, is to go to bed with someone, right?

Actually, that’s not the Church who says that; that is our world and our culture that says that.

It is not the Church who condemns people to live lonely lives if they cannot find a sexual partner; it is the world that does that by deciding that the only possible way a person can have a close and loving relationship in this life is by sexual pairings. There is a problem here, but the problem is not what the Church teaches—it is that our society has lost the very concept of friendship and real social networks of care and concern, treats people as economic cogs in a giant wheel who can only find respite from the cold isolation of modern urban-industrial life by clutching on to one another in either long-term (but by no means life-long) sexually intimate relationships or (more and more frequently) short-term casual hookups.

So let’s talk about chastity. If it just happens to be true that sexual intercourse bears a divine meaning that can only be faithfully expressed in marital sex oriented towards life, then what about the reality that all of us have a sexual drive, have sexual desire, but a considerable percentage of the population are not able to ethically have sex? Even if this number is currently inflated beyond what is normal for humanity, due to economic and sociological pressures that make it difficult for people to get married (again, a situation that is not the Church’s fault, but society’s), nonetheless it is a simple fact that even in a healthy functioning society there will always be a large number of people who should not be sexually active, according to Catholic moral teaching.

This is not a situation of misery and endless desolation! Our sexuality, our capacity for generativity in love, that aspect of our humanity that is both a matter of intense pleasure and desire, but which far transcends the merely physical to reach the level of spirit and life, identity and personhood—there is much more to it, actually, than its seeming completion in the act of sexual intercourse.

The simple fact is, our existence as sexual beings means that our whole personhood is in its raw physicality ordered towards the ‘other’. We are not sufficient unto ourselves. As our bodies require food for life, so our bodies require another person for love. But as our bodies’ physical hunger for food points to that deeper hunger, that deeper life that comes to us from the life of The Other, so our bodies’ hunger for love and union points us to a deeper Love and a Communion that is far beyond what sexual union can bring us.

Both these basic physical drives—food and sex—essentially serve in their well-ordered expression to pull the person out of the fortress of the autonomous independent self into a position of inter-subjectivity, relationship, need. But as food in the vice of gluttony becomes food at the service of the ego, at the service of the untethered will, so sex in the vice of lust becomes mere use of the other to satisfy the appetite.

Chastity—well-ordered sexuality either in its lawful use in marriage or in celibate continence outside of marriage—is the virtue whereby our sexuality is held in this deeper context and meaning, and prevented from its terrible tragic degradation into lust and use.

And the answer to this terrible fear that sexual continence will deliver us to loneliness and misery lies, not in abandoning God’s moral order about sex and marriage, but in a spiritual revolution whereby all of us—married or single—come to know and believe that we are made ultimately not for the other, but for The Other, for God, and that the answer to loneliness, isolation, and the sadness of our human condition lies not in flesh and blood but in our entry into the Communion of the Holy Trinity, our divine destiny in which all the desires of our souls and bodies will be at last satisfied.

I do realize that there is so much more to be said on all of this—a blog post can only be so long, and say so much. But that is what I have to say on the matter, at least in this context.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Let's Talk About Sex

So why does the Church hate gay people? Why does the Church hate sex, generally? Women? The human body? Pleasure? Why is the Church so darned hateful, hateful, hateful? Why can’t it just get with the program like everyone else has?

Ah, gnarly questions, my new blog series! It had to come around to sex eventually, didn’t it? I want to talk in the blog post about the basic teaching of the Church regarding human sexuality—not this issue or that, but the fundamental teaching without which all the ‘rules and regs’ just seem arbitrary, bizarre, and frankly just plain mean.

Now I realize full well that at least some people read the blog who just ain’t buying what the Church is selling on this matter. I ask those people to at the very least try to understand what the Church is saying and why. At least know what it is you’re rejecting.

And of course most people reading this blog are Catholic and do accept what the Church teaches, maybe with struggles at times, but nonetheless. For all of you folks, I suggest that the basic teaching is simple enough, but there are heights and depths in it that need to be explored and that have implications far beyond the ‘rules and regs’ of what we can and cannot do in our sexual behavior.

So what is the fundamental thing at stake here, in this whole messy business of sex? The essential positive teaching, the teaching about what sex is that determines all of the negative teachings about what sex is not (and therefore what we should not do, sexually), is that sexual intercourse has an inherent meaning.

Furthermore, the meaning of sexual intercourse, the sexual act, is not something human beings have devised, which can thus be changed at will. It is not something private or individualistic—you decide what having sex means for you, and I will decide what it has for me. No, the sexual act has a meaning, and that meaning is created by God. And our whole sexuality is important—it is not some trivial afterthought of our humanity, but is a central and vital part of what it means to be human (finally, something on which the Catholic Church and the most dedicated progressive libertine can agree!).

And the meaning of the act of sexual intercourse is fundamentally a simple one. It is meant to be a physical, bodily expression of the love of God for his creation, the love of God for the human person, you and me, and specifically the love of Christ for redeemed humanity, the Church. Sex has a sacramental essence—it is meant to be a visible sign of the invisible reality of God and His passionate love for all He has made. It points beyond itself to something else

To be a faithful representation of God’s love made flesh in Jesus Christ, reflected and imaged in the actions of the body in our sexual being, means that we cannot just engage in sexual acts any old way. The way human beings have sex has to correspond to the way God loves the world, or it falsifies the reality it signifies.

And so God’s love is covenantal, faithful. God does not love us one day and turn away from us the next. God is not on again, off again. God does not use us. He is not a ‘friend with benefits’. God commits himself to loving his creation so much that when it is broken and wounded He becomes a man so as to be broken and wounded with it, and when it dies, He becomes a man so as to die with it. ‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health…’

So sex must occur within a committed relationship, and commitment does not just mean ‘until either one of us decides we’re not happy.’ That is… not what the word commitment means, right? Commitment means for life. Commitment means marriage. Sex outside of marriage is wrong because there is no commitment of the one to the other, and so it in no way, shape, or form corresponds to how God loves us.

And God’s love for us gives life, brings life. God is the creator. His love is fruitful. This time of year the whole of creation here in the Northern Hemisphere is exploding with new life. God’s fecundity, expressed through the natural cycles of the earth, is obvious. But His love in the human person is equally fruitful. Where God is present in a person’s life, that person’s life increases, there is growth, there is newness, there is fruit. Always and at all times.

So sex that is either inherently sterile (i.e. sex between two people of the same gender) or sex that has been deliberately made sterile (by an act of contraception) simply does not communicate the nature of God’s love. The two people involved may genuinely care for one another, but nothing can come from this love—no life, no newness, no fruitfulness.

People counter that the Church has no problem with an older married couple engaging in sexual intercourse, nor with couples having sex during the times of the month when the woman is not fertile. This is because they have done nothing themselves to sterilize themselves, and the act itself is still ordered towards generativity even though the natural process of aging or the natural rhythms of the woman’s body have made it non-procreative.

The bottom line is that God’s love is faithful and committed, an unbreakable bond, and God’s love is creative and fruitful, life-giving. Sex, to be a faithful sacramental sign of God’s love, must be within marriage and open to the generation of life. And I will say more next Wednesday about all the people who, therefore, cannot have sex (at least not in their current situation) and why the Church does not actually hate these people and is not condemning them to a horrible empty life. Next week!

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Sexual Healing

Wednesdays on the blog I am presenting the various chapters of my book Idol Thoughts, on the traditional doctrine of the eight thoughts that take us away from God and how to pray with Scripture to overcome them.

We have reached the second of the thoughts, which is the thought of lust. Now, because there is everlasting confusion on this point, I need to clarify that what the Church means by lust is not simply sexual desire. God made us sexual beings with that strong drive towards sexual union—this is not something that in itself takes us away from God. The lie that the Church ‘hates sex’ is so commonplace that we have to keep clarifying this.

Sex is good; sex is God’s creation; sex is how God in His infinite wisdom ordained living creatures should reproduce; sex in our human creation is both an expression of that generativity and a faithful committed union in love. In this it becomes a most profound expression of our being made in God’s image and likeness, of the God who created the heavens and the earth and each of us in it out of love.

So what is lust, then? Lust is the thought that happiness is the body of the other. In other words, lust takes one aspect of sexuality—that it is intensely pleasurable—isolates and elevates that aspect to be the whole of it. Lust is the thought of using another person in his or her physicality to bring pleasure to oneself, apart from the God-imaged, God-designed purpose of sex as a fruitful union in love.

Well, I don’t need to (and certainly don’t want to) go on any kind of intemperate rant to show that lust is rampant in our society. The so-called ‘adult entertainment’ industry is multi-billion dollar one, and the use of on-line videos and images to fuel lust is pandemic (I am avoiding the ‘p’ word so as not to get blocked in your spam filters!).

Meanwhile hook-up culture, the complete sundering of sexual encounters from any kind of relationship whatsoever, fueled by social media sites and mobile apps, is the norm for many young adults. The whole idea is to take what is one thing—sexual intercourse, openness to fertility, and committed union in love—and sunder it into its component parts so that none of those things are related to the other.

All of this is, strictly speaking, demonic. Strong language, but I mean it and stand by it. When that which is the most precious and extraordinary creature in God’s world—the human person, the one ‘thing’ about which we say ‘image and likeness of God’, is reduced to an assemblage of body parts for the pleasure and gratification of the other, this is a triumph of the demonic in the world.

The abuse of food in the thought of gluttony is at least an abuse of something that is in fact meant to be used. Food is for eating, after all, even if in our broken humanity we eat too much of it or make more of it than we should. But another human being is not meant as an object of use for my pleasure. We are meant to regard each person, every man and woman, with such reverence, such awareness that this person is a reflection of God’s glory, infinitely beloved of Him and destined and desired by Him for eternal life.

Lust utterly destroys that reverence and does incalculable damage to the person who is its object. It is such an assault on the human person, and in that such a rebellion against God’s whole plan of creation and redemption, that it is essentially a descent to the demonic sphere of reality.

Now in my book I do talk about the Scriptures that might help purify our minds from the false beliefs that underlie that struggle with lust in our world. I won’t go into that now (hey, why don’t you buy my book if you want to see what I say there!). I also talk about the need for discipline, especially what used to be called the ‘custody of the eyes’, the careful choice around what images we allow to wash into our minds and hearts in our lust-saturated media culture.

What I only mention in passing in the book, though, is that the whole of the Church’s sexual moral doctrine, which we believe is a faithful presentation of God’s will and God’s truth, is also the path to healing the deep wound of lust in the human person, a wound that does go to the very core of our broken humanity.

In other words, sexual intercourse is held within the covenant of marriage, a life-long commitment of fidelity and love, and held to be open to the generation of new life, and in this integration of sexual activity into fruitful committed love there is a perpetual healing of the dis-integration of lust. The traditional language spoke of marriage as a remedy of concupiscence, and that’s what it means.

By placing sex where God intended sex to be placed—within the indissoluble bonds of matrimony, open to children—the tendency to use and abuse the other, to reduce the other to an object of my ‘happiness’, is so situated that it at least can be healed (human freedom is such that it is of course not a given that it will be).

I have much more to say on this subject and all subjects, but will leave you to explore the rest of it for yourself.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

A Fair And Reasonable Question

What does the word ‘gender’ mean?

I have been wanting to write a post about this for some time. I realize that the very fact that I have written the above sentence is enough to brand me in some people’s minds as a ‘H8R’, a bigot, who should be jailed if not killed, and at the very least driven from polite society.

I find it interesting that asking a simple question about a definition of a common word yields that reaction. Gender has become the third rail of public discourse today, and to even touch on the subject with anything besides the rote and rather vacuous slogans of the day (‘Love Wins!’) is to take one’s life in one’s hands.

Well, nobody has ever accused me of being timid. So I’m going to jump on the third rail and ride it as far as it will take me here. The architects of critical gender theory, the activists of the LGBTQ movement, do indeed want their concept of gender to be the organizing principle of society, to deconstruct and discard the binary notion of male-female polarity for… well, what, exactly? What does the word ‘gender’ mean, as it is used by these activists? It seems to me that this is a reasonable and fair question, since we are supposed to construct society around their definition.

So let us first establish what gender is not, according to this world view. First, gender is not anatomy. It is not body morphology—men are shaped one way, women are shaped another way. This has nothing to do with the person’s gender—so we are told.

Second, gender is not sexual orientation. There are men who identify as men who are gay, women identifying as women who are lesbian.

Third, gender is not a list of personality traits. This of course was established by second wave feminism. It is sexist, we have been told (and I happen to agree, largely) to say that women are gentle, sweet, empathetic, emotional, while men are logical, aggressive, strong.

Fourth, gender is not defined by the things we are interested in or are good at. Women like flowers, clothes, cooking, babies, while men like cars, sports, guns. I also happen to agree with this, being very much a man while having precisely zero interest in cars and guns and only a slight interest in sports (I’m not much on flowers or clothes, either…)

Fifth, gender is not defined by social roles. Women stay at home and take care of the kids while men go out and earn money for their families.

So… gender is not your body, your personality, your interests, your actions, or who you want to sleep with. Ummm… what is it, then? Please, someone elucidate it for me. I swear I am not being sarcastic or asking the question rhetorically. I want to know what people mean when they say that someone with the body of a man is ‘really’ a woman, even if he (sorry, she) does not choose to have the radical body modifications needed to outwardly resemble a woman in body morphology.

It does seem to me that there is something almost mystical in this deconstructed notion of gender, something so interior and ineffable that it is difficult to put into words beyond the phraseology of ‘I just know it to be so.’ But, my brothers and sisters, massive and complete social reconstruction cannot be done on the basis of such interior and mystical knowledge – it is unreasonable to expect society to reconfigure itself around something ‘you just know.’ I just know that I am a Catholic priest, not as a job or profession but as a mystical configuration of my soul to Christ the head of the Church. But I would never expect a non-Catholic to call me ‘Father’.

For myself, I believe gender is, simply, body morphology, determined by chromosomes. Yes, there are the vanishingly rare instances of babies born inter-sex, and this is a medical and social problem for those very few people—but this is not common enough to justify jettisoning the male-female bi-polarity that has been the basis of every human society since human beings have existed.

And just to completely cook my goose, I wish to say very simply and without any rancor or dislike or indeed anything but great compassion and friendship for all people, that I believe the men who believe they are women and the women who believe they are men are in fact suffering from a mental illness and need psychiatric help, not surgical mutilation and society enabling.

I do find it odd that this is considered by many to be a hateful thing to say. That attitude itself seems to reflect contempt and hatred for people who are mentally ill. As a priest I have many people in my life who suffer from various kinds of mental illness. It is a hard suffering, but it’s not a death sentence and it is not inherently an insult to someone to say “I believe your problem is psychological.”

Anyhow, I don’t intend to write ongoingly about the whole ‘transgender moment’ we are having in our society right now – this is not that kind of blog, obsessing over whatever the controversy of the day is. But I think the question I raise is reasonable and fair. I have given my answer to it, and I would be interested to hear other answers, and other civil responses to it (for anyone who is new to the blog reading this, abusive nasty comments will be deleted without mercy!).

So, what does gender mean?