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What’s
wrong with sex? God created me the way I am, with all my desires. Celibacy
is just a medieval attempt by the Church to repress homosexuality.
 es, God’s creation is
good.
For You love
all things that are
and loathe nothing that You have made;
for what You hated, You would not have fashioned.
And how could a thing remain, unless You willed it;
or be preserved, had it not been called forth by You?
But You spare all things, because they are Yours,
O LORD and lover of souls
for Your imperishable spirit is in all things! |
—Wisdom 11:24-12:1 |
Yet listen to what follows from
this:
Therefore You
rebuke offenders little by little, warn them,
and remind them of the sins they are committing,
that they may abandon their wickedness and believe in You,
O LORD! |
—Wisdom 12:2 |
The Call Away
from Sin
God’s creation is good.
God loves His creation. God created us to be good—to be capable of sharing
in divine love. Knowing we have fallen into
sin and disobedience,
He still loves us. But does this mean that “anything goes” and
that “everyone will go to heaven”? Well, no. God loves us by
calling us out of our sins—the very offenses that separate souls
from God in this life (and that separate souls from God eternally in
hell) if they are not repented. When the Jews
talked about God “wiping away sins,” they referred to God’s
willingness to allow us to be reconciled to Him if we repented our sins.
God’s willingness for reconciliation with us was later sealed with
blood—Christ’s blood—as a contract, the New Covenant of
Christianity.
Now, in regard to your question,
nothing is “wrong with sex” in the context of Holy Matrimony.
Something, though, seems to be wrong with your theology. You’re confusing
celibacy and chastity. Moreover, you’re mistaking desire
for love. All desire, unless it is pure desire for divine love, is
misplaced desire, and must be called back from
its sins.
The Distinction
Between Celibacy and Chastity
Celibacy
refers to the state of being unmarried, whether through simple personal choice
or by a formal vow; the celibacy of the priesthood goes back to Christ’s
ministry: to His own example, and to the tradition carried on by His
Apostles.
Chastity
refers to abstinence from all sexual activity which is not open to procreation
between a man and a woman within the indissoluble bond of
marriage and family. Chastity derives from the
essential message of Christ’s preaching: that the Kingdom of Heaven
is not of this world and renders meaningless all cultural and personal
satisfactions.
Love is of the
Spirit
Now, you could use comparative
anthropology to document all the varieties of human sexuality throughout
history, the pagan delight in eros (erotic passion), the different
cultural origins of polygamy and monogamy, and even the primitive origins
of matrimony in the Hieros Gamos between gods and women. But none
of it means anything, really, because Christ instituted a new reality for
us, a reality based not on the flesh but on the spirit, a reality based not
on finding personal satisfaction in a romantic desire for another person
but on serving others through holy
love.
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My love so delights
the soul that it destroys every other joy which can be expressed by man here
below. The taste of Me extinguishes every other taste; My light blinds all
who behold it . . . |
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—as told to Saint Catherine
of Genoa
Spiritual Doctrine, Part III, Chapter VII |
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And the theological proof of
this mystical understanding is obvious: look as hard as you can, but you
will never find a single reference in the New Testament to “romantic
relationships.” Sexuality has a temporal value in regard to the sacrament
of Holy Matrimony for the sake of raising a family
in holy service to God, but it has no enduring place in the Kingdom of
Heaven.
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At the resurrection
they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in
heaven. |
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—Matthew 22:30 |
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 True love, as Saint Thomas
Aquinas explained, is “to will the good of
another.”[1]
Real love is not self-indulgence. Real love does not plead
with desperate, hollow eyes for recognition from an other. Real love
is, as Christ showed us through His personal example, total sacrifice
of self for the sake of the salvation of others.
True love never ends, and it never turns to hate.
Eroticism
Eroticism has its basis in human
survival. God gave our sexual organs their erotic potential so that primitive
men and women would be inclined to copulate and reproduce. As humanity matured,
God gave us His commandments to protect us from the raw desires that make
the body into a fetish, desires that cause us
to see our reproductive organs as nothing more than the means to our own
pleasure. Without God’s guidance, we are led by our desires far astray
from the holy purpose God intends for us.
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If you obey the
commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him,
and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees,
you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in
the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts
and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I
tell you now that you will certainly perish. |
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—Deuteronomy 30:15-18a |
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And so, despite the delusions
of popular culture, eroticism is not
love. Eroticism is an expression of
desire, often degenerating into raw lust, the
allure of which resides in immediate, tangible gratification.
For men, this allure can be the
aggressive thrill of just reaching out and taking what you want, or it can
have a component of an infantile yearning to being seen, admired, and touched.
For women, it can be the infantile excitement of desire and touch, or it
can be the satisfaction of feeling cherished and protected. But, however
it’s experienced, male or female, this eroticism—this “common
love”—is just an immediate way of getting something that
you want.
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True love is
far more difficult than common love because true love is given, not
received, and it must be given with no expectation or hope of getting anything
in return.
Contrary to popular
culture, even the desire to erotically arouse another person is not an act
of giving. The deep psychological truth is that such a desire masks a more
hidden desire: to gain some control over our own helplessness. That is, because
we as children felt the helplessness and resentment of having our bodies
controlled by our parents, as adults we unconsciously compensate for this
helplessness by seeking out ways to control others. We can do this with wealth,
we can do this with education, we can do this with social status, we can
do this with physical strength, and we can do this with eroticism. Sad to
say, therefore, the thrill of arousing lust in another person is really an
act of self-serving power over that person. |
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The Christian sacrament of Holy
Matrimony protects the holiness of a living sexual activity (i.e.,
open to procreation) within a marriage blessed by the Catholic Church, but
all other sexual activity is just a dead, bartered transaction, a form of
narcissism which rejects the true love in which
God created us, and this narcissism consequently defiles the soul’s
mystical union with God. In this adulterous betrayal of God—this common
“love”—your desires do nothing except make your
“partner” into an object of your own pleasure so as to
seduce the despair of your own
emptiness. Yet the price for using common love
as an escape from emptiness is emptiness itself: eternal separation from
God.
The psychological proof of the
emptiness of common love can be found in all botched “relationships”:
once your needs are not met, this common “love” suddenly switches
into hatred and spite. True love, as I said above,
never turns to hate and never ends.
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It’s simply
impossible to fill our own bodily emptiness with
an external presence. We can’t alleviate our emptiness with food, or
cigarettes, or erotic fantasies, or sports, or entertainment, or anything
else generated by our culture. We can fill our
lack only with the Body and Blood of
Christ.
The Body of Christ
is faith, by which we see the invisible Father in
the visible appearance of bread. And the Blood of Christ is
love, for there is no greater love than to shed
your blood to save someone from destruction. |
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Holy Matrimony:
Real Marriage
Now, if you want a good image
of Holy Matrimony, take a piece of string about a foot long and tie two small
weights to the string, one weight on each end of the string. Then stretch
the string out on a table. What happens? Nothing. All right. So now grasp
the string in the middle and lift it straight up off the table—and,
as the weights are lifted by the string, they will swing
together.
In a similar way, a marriage
blessed by the Catholic Church is not made by a man and a woman drawing
themselves together by their own efforts. Holy Matrimony is made when a man
and a woman, through their mutual love for God, welcome Christ into their
lives to lift them up into divine love and service. Holy Matrimony, therefore,
never ends because it does not begin in the individuals—it
begins in the eternally enduring covenant of love between God and
humanity.[2]
The Call to Be
Holy
And, believe it or not, that
eternally enduring covenant of love is what the call to Christianity
is all about, whether in Holy Matrimony or in celibacy. As Christ emptied
Himself in order to become human—to bring
forgiveness and to show us love—so we must
empty ourselves of all that is not love in order to be drawn up into divine
love, to become holy, and to lead others to holiness. Be holy, for I am
holy (Leviticus 11:45, 19:2, 20:7; 1 Peter 1:16; cf. Matthew
5:48).
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Do you think
that God’s commands are some arbitrary set of rules created by dictatorial
whim? The commands flow from love, to protect us from
defiling love.
When Saint Paul
warned us that by works of the law no one will be justified he meant
simply that justification—that is,
redemption—is not a
magical process. A mere legal or ritual act,
performed simply as an act, has no meaning. Justification is about love on
God’s part for our sake, and our response to that love has to come from
the heart. Even the celebration of the
Eucharist is not a mere act—it’s
a liturgical act, the work of the people. And it is hard
work.
 The proof is in Christ himself.
“Love one another as I have loved you,” he said. Did He cheat us,
lie to us, kill unborn children, or desire the death of His enemies? Did
He use us for his sexual pleasure or to find “self-fulfillment”?
No. Instead He suffered for us, as an act of
mercy. In His Passion He showed us what
love is—and what it has always been: a call
away from sin into holiness. And then He called us
to live a life of love, within Him, free from our own
identities. Thus Paul says, I have been
crucified with Christ, and the life I live now is not my
own. |
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Freedom, not
Repression
The mystics learned this lesson
of the call to be holy, and they learned something else, too. They learned
from personal experience that, just as the Apostles preached, you only come
to understand the truth of these things by submitting to them. It’s
freedom, not repression.
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Those who do
not have a sound palate, but seek other tastes, cannot taste the spirit and
life of God’s words; His words, rather, are distasteful to
them. |
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—St. John of the Cross
The Living Flame of Love, 1. 5 |
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So if you aren’t willing
to give up everything—including any sexual
“identity”—you are holding back
something from your service to God. You’re trying to serve two masters,
as it were, and thus you cut yourself off from receiving all the
graces God has to offer for the sake of your
salvation. Sadly, if you withhold
anything—whether it be eroticism, or wealth, or power, or intellectual
presumption, or even the pride of wanting revenge
on those who hurt you—from the work of your spiritual
purification, there will always be in your heart
some dark selfishness which resists true love and
holds you in slavery to
disobedience.
And that’s why a culture
of sex—in which reproductive sexuality has been stripped of its
life—dooms itself to being a culture of
death.
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1. Saint Thomas Aquinas, STh I-II, 26,
4, corp. art..
2. See, for example, Isaiah (54:4-8; 62:1-12),
Jeremiah (32:36-41), Ezekiel (16:1-63), Hosea (2:4-25), and the Song of Songs.
The writers of these works all use motifs of the pagan eros, easily
understood by the secular cultures to whom they wrote, to explain God’s
love for Israel.
  
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