Da Mihi Animas: sexuality

Friday, April 8, 2016

Msgr. Charles Pope: God, Our Bodies and Creation

The following comes from Msgr. Pope at NCR:

Our body is revelation because it comes from God with a specific design. Through it, God is teaching us; He is revealing His truth, just as He does in the whole of His creation and in the sacred Scriptures.

The notion that our bodies have anything to say to us, let alone teach us, is not popular today. Indeed, there seems today to be a great divorce of the human person from the body. For many moderns, the body is little more than a machine that can be redesigned and accessorized at will.

This mentality finds its most extreme form in the widespread sexual confusion of our day. It is a kind of resurgent Gnostic dualism in which one’s “identity” is something separate from one’s body. And thus there is the idea that one can be a woman trapped in a man’s body, a man trapped in a woman’s body, or any of 50-some-odd other categories (see Facebook) within a fluid notion of “gender.”

Nothing could be more clear than our sex as disclosed by our body. We are either male or female. But to many moderns, our body has nothing to say to us, nothing to reveal to us about our own self.

But just try to say to supporters of “transgenderism” that a person is quite obviously male or female, that it is clearly indicated by the very structure of the body. The usual response is a blank stare followed by the insistence that the body has little to do with it, that feelings and attractions are what matters.

This same scenario plays out when speaking with those who support homosexual acts. Saying to them that the design of the body reveals the flawed nature of homosexual acts, that the body parts don’t “fit” in this way and that something is obviously amiss elicits blank stares and a sort of incredulity that the body really has anything to do with it.

It is pure Gnostic dualism, an almost complete divorce of the human person from the body. Only feelings, attractions, and thoughts matter; the body is irrelevant. In our culture we have elevated feelings to such an extent that we seem to have lost our reason. Indeed, if someone from a mere ten years in the past, let alone fifty, were dropped forward into our time, he would conclude that we had lost our minds or become delusional, denying the obvious reality right before our very eyes.

Our time traveler, unaffected by recent errors in thinking, would make the (once) common sense assessment that an obviously male person who thinks he is actually a female needs psychological help and healing. He needs our sympathy and offer of help, not our encouragement of his delusion. Our time traveler would marvel at the shocking and collective delusion of a culture that so widely approves of and even celebrates such sad confusion.

And so here we are as a culture. Yet here we are and in such a bad state that there are so-called “bathroom bills” in various phases of the legislative process in many states, to require that people must use the public bathroom that conforms with their biological “gender” (we used to call this a person’s sex). Even five years ago, such a legislated requirement would have needed no law to spell it out; it was axiomatic, just common sense. But the reaction to such legislation today has elicited denunciation and calls for boycotts.

How have so many gotten so lost so quickly?

Read the rest here.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Sex, Love and God: The Catholic Answer to Puritanism and Nietzcheanism

The following comes from the CNA:

Many of the Catholic Church’s teachings are vilified in both the high and popular cultures, but none more than its doctrines concerning marriage and sexuality. Time and again, the Church’s views on sex are characterized as puritanical, life denying and hopelessly outdated — holdovers from the Bronze Age. Above all, critics pillory the Church for setting unreasonable limits to the sexual freedom of contemporary people. Church leaders, who defend traditional sexual morality, are parodied as versions of Dana Carvey’s “church lady” — fussy, accusatory, secretly perverse and sex-obsessed.

Let me respond first to the charge of puritanism. Throughout the history of religion and philosophy, a puritanical strain is indeed apparent. Whether it manifests itself as Manichaeism, Gnosticism or Platonic dualism, the puritanical philosophy teaches that spirit is good and matter is evil or fallen. In most such schemas, the whole purpose of life is to escape from matter, especially from sexuality, which so ties us to the material realm. But authentic Biblical Christianity is not puritanical. The Creator God described in the book of Genesis made the entire panoply of things physical — planets, stars, the moon and sun, animals, fish and even things that creep and crawl upon the earth — and found all of it good, even very good. Accordingly, there is nothing perverse or morally questionable about bodies, sex, sexual longing or the sexual act. In fact, it’s just the contrary. When, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus himself is asked about marriage and sexuality, he hearkens back to the book of Genesis and the story of creation: “At the beginning of creation God made them male and female; for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and the two shall become as one. They are no longer two but one flesh” (Mk. 10:6-8). That last sentence is, dare I say it, inescapably “sexy.” Plato might have been a puritan, and perhaps John Calvin too, but Jesus most certainly was not.

So given this stress on the goodness of sex and sexual pleasure, what separates the Christian view from, say, the “Playboy” philosophy? The simple answer is that, for Biblical people, sexuality must be placed in the wider context of love, which is to say willing the good of the other. It is fundamental to Catholic spirituality and morality that everything in life must be drawn magnetically toward love, must be conditioned and transfigured by love. Thus, one’s business concerns must be marked by love, lest they devolve into crass materialism; and one’s relationships must be leavened by love, lest they devolve into occasions for self-interested manipulation; even one’s play must be directed toward love, lest it devolve into mere self-indulgence. Sex is no exception to this rule. The goodness of sexual desire is designed, by its very nature, to become ingredient in a program of self-forgetting love and hence to become something rare and life enhancing. If you want to see what happens when this principle is ignored, take a long hard look at the hookup culture prevalent among many young — and not so young — people today. Sex as mere recreation, as contact sport, as a source only of superficial pleasure has produced armies of the desperately sad and anxious, many who have no idea that it is precisely their errant sexuality that has produced such deleterious effects in them. When sexual pleasure is drawn out of itself by the magnetic attraction of love, it is rescued from self-preoccupation.

Now there is a third step as well, for human love must be situated in the context of divine purpose. Once Jesus clarified that male and female are destined to become one flesh, he further specified that “What God has joined together,” no human being should put asunder. When I was working full time as a parish priest, I had the privilege of preparing many young couples for marriage. I would always ask them, “Why do you want to be married in church?” After some hesitation, the young people would invariably respond with some version of “Well, we're in love,” to which I would respond, “I'm delighted that you're in love, but that’s no reason to be married in church!” My point was that entering into a properly sacramental marriage implied that the bride and groom realized that they had been brought together by God and precisely for God’s reasons, that their sexuality and their mutual love were in service of an even higher purpose. To make their vows before a priest and a Catholic community, I would tell them, was tantamount to saying that they knew their relationship was sacramental — a vehicle of God’s grace to the wider world. This final contextualization guaranteed that sexuality — already good in itself and already elevated by love — had now something truly sacred.

Our culture has become increasingly Nietzchean, by which I mean obsessed with the power of self-creation. This is why toleration is the only objective value that many people recognize, and why freedom, especially in the arena of sexuality, is so highly prized. It is furthermore why attempts to contextualize sex within higher frameworks of meaning are so often mocked as puritanism or fussy antiquarianism. Thank God that, amidst the million voices advocating self-indulgent sexuality, there is at least the one voice of the Catholic Church shouting “No,” a no in service of a higher Yes!