Sex, God, and Lies
 

Open any magazine or newspaper and in short order you will be introduced to the most absurd and patently artificial postures of women — and increasingly, men — in scant or suggestive attire. You will see flawless (and largely undernourished) women assuming the most suggestive postures and stances, making unmistakably lewd gestures that you would never encounter in real life, or if you did, would likely prompt you to laugh at its absurdity.

What is the not-so-subtle suggestion, the implication of the image or photograph? It is this:

The journey, it is clear, from sexual pre-occupation and inordinate desire, to chastity, is very, very, long and arduous. In fact, we begin to realize that chastity is not so much a virtue that will one day be finally acquired, eventually attained to, as it is a virtue to be constantly and diligently embraced, enacted. Certainly, if chaste means “free of sexual desire”, then it is either unattainable or altogether a fiction. This is not to say that there are individuals who experience no sexual desire whatever, but given St. Paul’s own problematic, and that of humanity in general, such an absence would seem to be more of the nature of a pathology than a virtue.

How then, in the midst of the turpitude and moral morass by which we are surrounded, do we embrace chastity, enact it, and in that perpetual choice become what we understand to be chaste?

We become chaste by involvement with others and through learning to love rightly.

It is a long process of the purification of memories, memories of sin in which we had once delighted, through which we found pleasure, satisfaction, and what we experienced, however transiently, as momentary “fulfillment”. It is also an active and vigilant practice of self-discipline, a self-discipline that enables us to be judicious and wise as to what images we allow to penetrate our minds, what literature we read, what movies we watch, by our conversation, or at the very least, the tenor and nature of conversations in which we participate.

We all know our points of weakness and our susceptibility to temptation. This recognition and the acknowledgement of our weakness is the first crucial step toward chastity. Knowledge alone, however, does not suffice. It requires cooperation with grace and the resolve to resist our own inclinations and all that would lead us to mindless sensual indulgence. We must recognize that we have a deeply personal responsibility in the struggle for chastity.  We must never succumb to the feeble excuse, the lie really, that, “I can't help it — therefore I am not morally responsible for it. I am, after all, just human.” So was St. Paul. We must love both ourselves and others responsibly. Love without responsibility is not love at all — it is a euphemism for indulgent selfishness.
 

The Fire Within ...

We have two choices, then: we can either subdue or we can sublimate our sexuality. What we cannot do is avoid it. We cannot avoid it because we cannot extinguish it. Even if we could, we would not, for that reason, be more perfectly human, but rather imperfectly human; we would not be possessed of a virtue, but deprived of a perfection, the perfection of that being human which is human being — we would be in a state of privation — but deprived of a perfection, the perfection of that “being human” which is “human being” — we would be in a state of privation — of a good (sexuality) that ought to be present and is not. Sexuality, sexual desire, is a good. Why? God created it, endowed us with it. And everything God created is good.

Instead of coming to terms with our created sexuality, however, we mistakenly, and vainly seek to extinguish sexual desire altogether through every conceivable form of self-denial, abnegation: not eating, wearing sackcloth, punishing our bodies, avoiding the other gender. Of course it is prudent to avoid the Occasion of Sin — the person, place, or thing that is likely to induce us to sin — but we do not subdue what we avoid; we merely defer the conflict; still less do we sublimate the encounter through ennobling it.  

We remain, all our lives, sexual beings. In profound ways it is the source not only of the unspeakably beautiful creative act culminating in children, but must at least be conjectured upon as a mysterious part of that vital impulse expressing itself through creative love: music, poetry and art.

This creative and irrepressible impetus to life and being, this capacity to give life, cannot be confined solely and exclusively to the vocation of marriage, excluding those who are single, Consecrated, or Religious men and women (that is, belonging to a Religious Order). Grace perfects nature; it does not destroy it. The tremendous creativity we find in figures so disparate as the Franciscans Thomas of Celano, Jacapone da Todi , Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel, and the composer Franz Liszt, to name a few, can only be expressed in terms of passion; passion deriving from love which is always procreative and in the being we understand as human — the human being — a procreativity that, whatever its nature, finds its paradigm in the procreative love that is inseparable from human sexuality.

We blench at this suggestion as unworthy — that things noble, lofty, even holy, should proceed from what we have reflexively come to esteem as base — the very thing that alone yields the most beautiful and holy of creatures: our very children.

The most perfect moment of union between the bride and the groom, husband and wife, the lover and the beloved — the literal climax of love (love’s most exquisite expression, utter consummation) in which lover becomes one with the beloved — is disdained not just as base, but as abysmally base. 

What madness is this?

What evil and distorted inversion has caused us to esteem what is beautiful and holy as ugly and profane — such that the foulest word in any language is synonymous with it!?

We speak of “making love, as though love could be made ... and then do not recognize it apart from its epithet!
 

At this point, I think it fairly clear that our disordered perception of sexuality has skewed not only our understanding of God, but of ourselves — and most importantly, the relationship between the two.

Even the notion of sin, in all its complexities, is more readily understood by us in our relationship to God, than sex — which, paradoxically,  to so many of us is fraught with sin, or what is worse yet, indistinguishable from it! Were most of us asked what physiological feature in both men and women is most susceptible to sin, and most likely to lead us to sin, we would point, like ill-taught and unthinking children, immediately to our loins.

The fact of the matter, however, is that in the way of preponderance of sin, our sexuality would be fifth at best, the first four, in order of gravity and number, would be:

Is this to diminish the gravity of sexual sin? Of course not. It is, however, helpful in placing our perception of sexual sin into perspective. We must remember that sexual sins are considered by the Church to be sins proceeding from weakness — as distinct from sins proceeding from malice, the latter, of course, being the more grave of the two.

But we must see that it is equally indicative of our inability or unwillingness to come to terms with the the other 8 Commandments that prohibit other sins – sins not of a sexual nature – but upon which we are seldom so fixated:
 

Of the Ten, why the Sixth and the Ninth?

Of the 10, it is most often the 6th and 9th that we focus upon. Why?

This is an odd state of affairs. The first sin, that of Adam and Eve, so often depicted in sexual terms, had nothing whatever to do with sex — it was disobedience prompted by the sin of pride. Succinctly put, they sought to be like God (even though they were already created in His image, which is to say that they were already like unto God — but not in plenitude, hence the pride, and from thence the disobedience)  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us,

In fact, the most persistent and pernicious sin of which the Chosen People of God, the Israelites, were guilty was idolatry. For this reason they wandered in the desert for 40 years. It was a sin that provoked God, through their obstinacy, ultimately to banish them in the Babylonian Exile for 70 years. Once again, it stemmed from the immediate sin of disobedience to the First Commandment — not the Sixth or the Ninth.

There are (121) references to idolatry and in the Bible, (40) relative to adultery, and (36) to fornication. Why, then, the inverse disproportion that we append to sins of a sexual nature? The breach of each Commandment is equally repugnant to God, so we have, on the one hand, no warrant to minimize one, and by the same token, no warrant to emphasize another, either. Certainly some appear to be more reprehensible than others, and most of us would likely deem killing a more grave offense than, say, adultery or lying. In other words, the proscriptions that we encounter in Exodus 20 do not appear to be hierarchical. There is a reason for this. But we do not, it is clear, acquire our focus on sexual sin from the Decalogue, nor, if we examine it further, from the Books of Leviticus and Numbers, both of which are replete with ancillary laws.  Why are some apparently more abhorrent to us than they are to God?

Adultery and Coveting our Neighbor’s Wife