Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Last Sunday a young, intrepid FOCUS missionary, Emily, and I headed out into the dark night to engage the UI student group called PRIDE. This group is a consortium of those who struggle with various issues associated with sexual attraction and sexual identity, though of course, they do not see it that way. As I had suspected, we were the only group invited who did not affirm that this group of students were right in pursuing whatever their loins tell them.

I was prepared for an opportunity for white martyrdom and perhaps a little red mixed in. Each representative group was given seven minutes to present and we were the last. The local UCC campus minister, a rabid anti-Catholic, expressed the view that Christian groups who denied the beauty of SSA disorder and the”relationships” that arise from such were evil, to be equated with the evil of Nazi Germany and that she was on a mission to fight and eradicate them. I half expected her to throw something. However, I could share with her the sense of compassion that she felt for these poor lost souls, even if her method of compassion was gravely misplaced.

All of the “death is life” affirming drivel (i.e. your sexual attraction is who you are so embrace it and act upon it) that these suffering young kids (along with the 60 year old guy in the third row with the long flowing black wig) heard left my head spinning. I was asking myself, if these people who are supposed to be “ministering” to these kids and who see their suffering, all are continually telling them they are o.k. and the pain that they feel is the fault of those at the end of the panel (i.e. Emily and yours truly) because they are telling them that they have something wrong with them, then what are the chances of getting the authentic message of healing and hope in Jesus Christ through to them?

It was very fortunate that Emily was there, because when it came our turn to speak my head was still swimming with the overwhelming questions of how to respond to each of these falsehoods that the previous panel members put forth. Emily gave her prepared statement, doing an excellent job by the way. She told the students of their dignity as persons because they were created in the image of God. She told them that no one had the right to deny this dignity and apologized on behalf of the Church for any of her members who might have contravened this truth. She also told them though that the Church has the fullness of the gospel message and is therefore an expert in the human person and that she was there to give them the message and the strength to become the glory of God–man fully alive. She then mentioned to them about the Courage apostolate which was there for any one who was “struggling with same sex attraction.” That final statement got some sneers but no tomatoes.

I answered the questions. One of the questions was about the source of moral rightness and wrongness. I mentioned divine law and natural law and of course spent the most time on natural law. In this I attempted to counter the atheist/unitarian anthropologist on the panel who admitted that we are at a point in human history that for the first time human beings actually consider same sex attraction to be an ontological aspect of their personhood (in so many words any way). But also he also avered to natural law as biologism and the plurality of sexual expression in various cultures and times. It was this I was attempting to counter by telling one questioner that we are body-soul unities and that we can affirm this in part, through universal experience. As such, what we see in our visible bodies gives us insights into what happens in our whole persons–our unity of body-soul.

So in sexual intercourse, we see that the natural telos is procreation–a human person. However, there is more going on in this act. We can and often do get a sense that the marital act tends toward the unification of two people into a moral union, though outside of the proper circumstances this sense is often distorted and even destroyed. So there are two aspects, at least, of the marital act. One is visible and procreative and the other is invisible, spiritual if you will, and unitive. But as the body cannot be separated from the soul without destroying the person (qualifications aside), the visible aspect of the marital act cannot be separated from the whole without destroying it.

Thus, sexual intercourse can be life giving love for the couple who engage in it only if it is an act which is open to and has the structure of life giving love in the whole of it. This means that the two must be in an irrevocable , exclusive, faithful, sacramental if Christian, union and each act of marital communion must be open to procreation. This is why the Church teaches that sexual intercourse is meant only for marriage between two complementary persons (male and female-who alone have the complementary gifts necessary for their personal and the union’s flourishing) and that the act must be open to its life-giving potency.

The audience member responded that he hears about this teleology being an indicator of the order of nature but that this just doesn’t correspond to his experience or reason. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and had to leave so we didn’t pursue this any further. That aside, a concise response showing him how personal experience is not always reliable did not immediately occur to me. However, as usually happens, I think of later what I should have said at the time.

To an earlier question, I had explained that natural law can tell us the difference between the things that “are” but are not as they should be, and those things that “are” and are as they should be. I used the example of cancer to show that while it exists, it does not belong to the natural order in the proper sense because it has no telos and in fact it disrupts the telos of the organism which is afflicted by it. I also indicated that inclinations, even natural inclinations, cannot always be followed but have to be subjected to reason. I gave as an example that when I follow my natural inclination to eat whenever the inclination occurs, I become fat and medically unsound.

If I were quick-witted, I would have immediately gone back to the last example in order to explain to the questioner why he needed to be cautious about what he intuited from his experiences. We are body-soul unities. Much of our natural constitution, we share with animals. However, we are different than the animals. Our appetites, emotions, sense knowledge, etc (let’s call them our affectivities) supports especially that aspect of our nature that we share with the animals. However, the affectivites are not equivalent with those of the subpersonal animals. Our affectivites are ordered to reason, the faculty which distinguishes humans from subpersonal animals. We can easily see from experience they are different because while animals can flourish by following their inclinations, human beings do not. We damage ourselves when we act like animals (i.e. habitually respond to our inclinations as if they were no more than irresistible instincts).

In our fallen state, our affectivities are no longer easily controlled by our rational faculties. The integrity between our sensible faculties and rational faculties that was ours with original grace, is no longer there. And so we experience an interior conflict between what our rational faculties recognize to be the authentic good, and the apparent good that our sensitive faculties present to us. We now experience our affectivities in a way in which they appear to be so insistent, almost (but not) irresistible, that we often choose to eliminate the tension by giving in and “rationalizing” as to why we did so later.

What we must realize is that these human affectivities are goods. They are meant to be, and are, authentic and compelling truth tellers made to motivate us to overcome inertia that might otherwise keep us from acting (e.g. love which allows us to put aside our inclination for survival in order to save our child in danger). But they are suppose to be subordinated to the rational faculties. They tell us the truth about what are goods that deal more (but not entirely) with the animal aspect of our nature and so they are more likely to respond to lower goods, regardless of whether or not pursuing those goods will damage the higher, authentic good. This is what we call concupiscence, or the inclination to sin.

In addition, often in our fallen state we confuse and conflate our experiences. We often confuse pleasure–an affectivity associated with the sensible aspect of our soul, with joy–an experience associated with our spiritual faculties. Pleasure is limited, is reduced when shared, and deals with the immanent. Joy is transcendent of ourselves and in fact, is oriented toward the Transcendent. Joy is the experience of the happiness for which we were created. Pleasure can come from illicit experiences, joy can only come from our authentic human experiences…i.e. our naturally and morally ordered human actions.

In this young man’s case, when he said that his experiences did not indicate to him that same sex attraction is contrary to human flourishing what he meant is that he experiences this interior tension called sexual attraction oriented toward those of the same sex that seems to be a good. When he resolves this tension by engaging in acts that the inclination suggests to him that are a good, the interior tension is resolved, though temporarily. At the same time he experiences pleasure in the act from the affectivities working as they are supposed to act. All of these appear to him to be goods. However, the experience of pleasure and relief of the tension which arises because of unfulfilled sexual desire do not indicate human flourishing–i.e. authentic joy.

If we take the example of eating whenever the inclination arises (though eating is not disordered in itself) we can see that we also experience the same resolution of the interior tension that is drawing us to eat and we experience the pleasure that comes from eating. However, this experience does not tell the complete story. It will only be in the long run that I will come to realize that the habitual giving in to the desire to eat has made me a slave to my passions and that the health implications will begin to take their toll. All of this could have been foreseen and avoided if the inclinations had been subjected to reason in the first place. Thus, in the fallen world, one cannot simply dismiss reason (common sense?) because one’s interpretation of his experience does not immediately accord with the dictates of nature.

This is the problem of the man of concupiscence (see related post). By the way, the new English translation of JPTG’s Theology of the Body replaces “lust” “concupiscence.” While concupiscence is the inclination toward the lower goods at the expense of the higher goods, lust (most often) means that we have interiorly consented to acting on the apparent goods. John Paul actually meant concupiscence.

The man of concupiscence is living east of Eden. He no longer has the inherent integrity that came with original grace. The result is that self-possession is no longer a simple reality but it is a task to be achieved. We have to practice virtuous living if we are to achieve it. The fallen world also leaves open the possibility of disorder, such as we have with SSA. Giving in to disordered passions more quickly and severely damage us and make the recovery of self-possession more difficult.

Because we live in a Freudian culture of death that says resisting your inclinations is the source of pathology and that the way to happiness is to express yourself in whatever way you are inclined. Lust, therefore, is now good our culture tells us. It doesn’t take much to see the satanic origin of this idea. It becomes clear when one sees its trajectory is spiritual, and often physical, death. It is not an easy task to reach the man of concupiscence, especially one who is severely burdened with distorted inclinations, in a culture that encourages him to pursue the way of death. However, I am very grateful that Providence has left us with such a powerful tool for this era of confusion, in John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body.