"The 'great mystery,' which is the Church and humanity in Christ, does not exist apart from the 'great mystery' expressed in the 'one flesh'...reality of marriage and the family." ~Pope John Paul II
For the record, my quotes are going to come from Christopher West's _Good News About Sex and Marriage_, although if I had to recommend a book to read on the issue, it would probably be Kimberly Hahn's _Life Giving Love_. I lent out my copy, and I think they might have liked it because I told them to send it back if they didn't. Awesome!
In my previous post, I talked a lot about sex being an act by which two people engage in self- donation, the giving of their entire selves to one another, without reserve. This is clearly not the culture's view of what sex is. Today, sex is a recreational activity. I'm going to play tennis, I'm going to a movie, I'm going to get laid. Just do it! Where does this idea of sex as self-donation come from, and why do we insist upon each intimate embrace between a man and woman being such an intense experience, one that could change their lives forever?
If you're an atheist, you may wish to hang it up now, unless you care to go on a quest to understand the existence of God and why God is a Trinity of three Divine Persons sharing one Divine nature. Goodness knows there is no shortage of writing upon this and people willing to answer questions. But I will start from the presupposition that God exists, and is a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
One of the opening paragraphs in West's book reads:
"'Love one another as I have loved you,' (Jn 15:12). These words of Christ sum up the meaning of life *and* the meaning of human sexuality. At its core, sexual morality is about expressing God's love through our bodies. This is why Pope John Paull II can say that if we live according to the truth of our sexuality, we fulfill the very meaning of our being and existence." (West, p.17) He goes on to discuss that the opposite is true, that if we disregard the truth of our sexuality, then we miss the meaning of life altogether, and as such true happiness and joy will elude us. He says, "Disputes about sexual morality, then, are not merely about differing ethical perspectives, different interpretations of Scripture, or Church authority versus personal conscience. No, they go much deeper than that. At their root, disputes about sexual morality are disputes about the very meaning of life." This is very important to understand, and provides a key as to why Catholics are, as people say, "So hung up on sex." (West, p.18) A little more...
"When we search out the true meaning of sexuality, we touch on the core of our being as men and women. We encounter our deepest longings and aspirations and, at the same time, our deepest fears, wounds, selfishness, and sins. Here lies the challenge: we must face the reality of our humanity--the good and the bad--if we are to discover the truth about our sexuality. Inevitably this leads us to the cross. For it is Christ who, by showing us the truth about love, shows us the meaning of life."(West, p.17) So this is important to know, and it is real. It does not ignore that we are fallen beings with disordered wills and inclinations. We do not have to be perfect angels to fit into this paradigm. It will require struggle--the cross--but in the end it will bring life and redemption.
So we start with God. Genesis. Creation and a marriage. The Bible ends with Revelation, and a wedding, the wedding feast of The Lamb and His Bride, which we know is Christ and the Church. Sandwiched in between these two books is a love story with the theme of God's love for His people being as the love of a husband for his wife. Marriage and relationships form the underlying theme of most of the books. I am sure I do not have to give you example upon example, but I will point out the books of Song of Songs and Tobit, the former with its poetry of lovers and seduction and the latter with its emphasis upon the marital bed not being a place of unbridled lust, but a sanctified altar upon which a sacrificial coming together of man and wife occurs, not without risk to those who undertake that coming together with the wrong intentions! So you have God and His people, the Jews. He binds Himself to them through covenants, and no matter the extent of their faithfulness-sometimes it was quite poor- He always remained faithful. God formed a covenental union with His people and divorce was not an option. Then, as today, God's people were hard-hearted and it took a long time to prepare them for the coming of the Messiah. Christ did, come, though, the embodiment of the love of husband for bride. The New Covenant was going to be sealed with the sacrificial blood of God Himself. So, West says, "applying this analogy, we can say that God's plan from all eternity is to 'marry' us (see Hos 2:19). " (West, p.19) This plan was so important that God stamped it right onto our very beings so we wouldn't miss it. Our very existence, the meaning of our lives, who we are, who God is, how we are to live, all of these things are found in the truth and meaning of human sexuality and marriage. Now we're getting to the incredible stuff.
So God wants to "marry" us. Before He did this, before there even was an "us," there was God. John says that God is love, but it goes much deeper than this. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Read that again. God is a...family! He not only is "a" family, but He IS family. Our families are but mere images of the family that IS God. God is "a life-giving Communion of Persons." The Father pours Himself out, makes a gift of Himself in perfect love, to the Son, who is the "beloved" of the Father (Mt 3:17). The Son receives this outpouring of love from the Father, and returns the Father's self donation with His own. So the Father perfectly, eternally gives His entirety to the Son, and the Son back to the Father. That perfect love is "so real, so profound, that this love *is* another eternal Person--the Holy Spirit.
Let's go even further. The Son comes down, sent from the Father to make the marriage covenant with the people. Jesus comes. He fulfills the Father's Will perfectly. He gives Himself entirely to and for His people, past, present and future. He seals this New Covenant in His Blood, the infinitely perfect sacrifice of the New Adam making reparation for the infinitely offensive rebellion of the first Adam. So He gives Himself, and then it's all done? Well, yes...and no. Our redemption is complete, and now it is left to us to participate in this. How do we participate in Calvary? We participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which places us mystically at the crucifixion, and at which we do what the Father commanded His children to do with the Sacrificial Lamb, what Jesus, the Lamb of God, told us to do: We eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus Christ. We "communicate". We "receive Holy Communion." We take Jesus Christ into our bodies, body, blood, soul and divinity. We participate in our redemption by participating in the renewal of that Covenant that has taken place since the first days of Christianity, in which Christ is made present, under the form of bread and wine, offered to the Father (He is not sacrificed over and over; He is re-presented to the Father, for all those present. The one sacrifice is sufficient, and re-entered into, and re-presented to the Father), and then here's the kicker: this marital covenant, the new covenant, is consummated in the receiving of Jesus Christ into our bodies, our offering the totality of our beings to Him at this time, and from this communion of God and man springs forth life: spiritual life. He said in John 6 that whoever eats His Body and drinks His Blood lives in Him and He lives in us and He will raise us up on the last day. This is a mystery, a spiritual reality that we do not see or completely understand, but a reality nonetheless. Read the book of Revelation. Read about the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. It is the Mass. It is what we do every Sunday, and some of us every day. For a much greater exposition of this teaching, read Scott Hahn's _The Lamb's Supper_. But why am I talking about Mass and Holy Communion when I should be talking about sex?
As men and women made in the image and likeness of God, what does this mean for us? Well for one, as images of God, we need to mirror in our own lives the love of the Trinity. Our families on earth are but reflections of the Family that is God. We have both the model of the Father pouring Himself into the Son and vice versa, creating the Person that is the Holy Spirit, and we also have the model of Jesus Christ saying, "This is my body, given for you. This is my blood, poured out for the covenant," and then the reception of Jesus Himself into our bodies in this form to seal this marital covenant and bring forth the life that springs from this unbridled, liberal, selfless giving of the totality of persons to each other. These are not just "models," however. These are guides, directions by example of how we are to love each other in our families.
Husband and wife are called to submit to each other, in love and respect, and give of themselves sacrificially, saying to each other, "This is my body, this is my blood, shed for you." As the woman gives her body and blood in the sexual act and the bringing forth of a child, the husband gives his body and then blood in the efforts to support his family. Admittedly, it used to be a little more bloody for the guys than it is now. We are to love each other as Christ loved us, with our totality, unto sacrifice. He gave it all for us, and we are called to give it all for Him. In our marriages, this means we do not conracept. I speak about this in the context of marriage because it is the only context in which the sexual union--the renewal of the marital covenant which unites the spouses and from which new life springs--can licitly take place. The sexual act is a consummation and renewal of a covenant. (Holy Communion is also a consummation and renewal of a covenant. We should, of course, not over-sexualize the Mass, but these are Truths that cannot be denied and which help us place our sexuality into perspective.) To have sex outside marriage is to say a bond exists which does not yet exist, no matter whether the two people love each other, or plan on marrying, until God has joined them, that bond is not present. In some of the Eastern Catholic marriage rites, the bride and groom are presented to each other as each other's crosses by which they will get to Heaven. This is not a put down; we all know that marriage does not come without its sorrows and difficult times. The covenantal bond, and the renewal of that covenant in the marital embrace are what provide the grace to get through these difficult times.
How does contraception fit in? Well contraception is a refusal to give all unto sacrifice. It basically says, "I want the pleasure with none of the commitment, none of the pain." It is a naturally human feeling to be afraid of sacrificing. I cannot say that I am sitting here just jumping at the bit to go through morning sickness, watch my house fall to bits, and deal with the general chaos which come with pregnancy. But I'm either going to give my husband my ALL, or I'm going to wait until I can do that. Contraception, it could be said, could be akin to Jesus calling it quits right at the height of his popularity as He rode into Jerusalem to shouts of "Hosanna!" I'm sure that was a nice feeling for him, to feel the love from others. His love, however, was a different kind of love, one that did not end at the prospect of pain, suffering, and death. Jesus' love brought Him to Calvary, to suffer and die, and then back to each and every one of us who will come to Him in the Eucharist to receive Him. How beautiful that He still makes Himself vulnerable to us so that each and every one of us down through the ages can receive Him just like the apostles did at the Last Supper.
What if you applied contraception to the model of the Holy Trinity? You'd have no Holy Spirit. What if you applied contraception to the institution of the New Covenant? If the body of Christ did not suffer and die, then the body of Christ is not brought forth through the words of the priest and the power of the Holy Spirit for us to receive. This would all make John 6 very difficult to understand, and also Revelation. But fortunately for us, this is not God's way. Just as God does not divorce His people, and so divorce is not permitted to us, He does not withhold even the tiniest drops of His love, not within the Trinity, and not from us, His people, as evidenced in the Crucifixion..and so neither are we permitted to hold back from our spouses, even when it would bring sacrifice. This is love: the selfless pouring out of one to another without counting the cost to self.
So when I'm asked about the poor, and shouldn't they have contraception, I naturally recoil. Jesus had a special love for and affinity with the poor. He told us we'd always have the poor with us. They enable us to become Christ to others. They teach us what is truly important in life, especially when in the midst of their poverty they radiate joy and love. The poor may have few material possessions, but they have large hearts. Don't ask these people to compromise the extent of their ability to give and receive love within their marriages. Let them be generous with each other. Support their covenant of love. Give them tools to understand and work with their fertility so that if they need to postpone pregnancy for a time, or even indefinitely, they can do so without ruining the image of God's love in their love-making. Let them selflessly pour themselves into each other as they renew and strengthen the truest thing they have on this earth, their road to Heaven, their marital bond. For the little they may have, their dignity demands we not strip them of the selfless marital embrace. This will give them the grace they need to endure their hardships with strength.
God has given us periods of fertility and infertility each month for a reason. It is good for our bodies, and it is good for our marriages. Pregnancy is good for our bodies and good for our marriages. We could not have been designed any better. When we are trying to avoid pregnancy, rather than rendering sterile something which would otherwise be fertile and partaking of it in a degraded form, when we abstain during the fertile times, we are still accepting each other in totality, but saying "I accept your fertility and I respect it, so we will not suppress it for the sake of selfish pleasure. We would have to hold back our expressions of love, and therefore render divisive what should be unitive between us." When we contracept, we engage in the bulemia of sexuality. We binge and binge, and then do something very unnatural to reject the consequences of our gluttony. When men see their women as available 100% of the time, they may struggle when she does not wish to engage in relations as much as he does. He may come to resent when she turns his initiations to intimacy down, and take it personally, when it is not personal at all. Conversely, when the woman feels she has to be available all the time, she may give of herself more out of obligation to satisfy her husband's needs than out of a desire to give herself totally and receive the person of her husband, and the depths of the intimate union that entails. The union of man and woman is shortchanged, the spark that is the possibility of new life--even if a lower possibility due to a perceived time of infertility--is extinguished. Many couples experience the deterioration of their marriages when they contracept for long periods of time, or even worse, sterilize themselves. They do not know why, but if I had to guess, I would say that it has to do with the selfishness that gradually creeps into the marital embrace which renders it dull, and eventually dead. To those who know contraception is a mortal sin--one which cuts you off from the grace of God and extinguishes the life of God in your soul (until you receive forgiveness through Jesus Christ through the ministry of the priesthood)--they may not understand that their sexual unions no longer are providing grace to their marriages. You maybe cannot touch grace with your hands, but when the grace is gone, you know it. I don't see the oxygen I breathe, but I'd know pretty quickly if it were gone. I cannot see my husband's love for me, but I would know if it were gone. So mirroring the love of the Trinity, and the love of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom, for the Church, His Bride, we are called as spouses to keep our lovemaking open to receiving children. Even if we think we are infertile, God still has the power to open the womb. Our openness to this, and trust in His plan for us is paramount. Otherwise, when we take that pill, insert the IUD, or place the condom on, we are essentially shutting God out of the renewal of our marital covenant--the one we contracted with Him, for a marriage is really between three: man, woman, and God. We're saying, "Your kind of love is good for you, but we're not interested in loving as You do. It hurts too much." A slap in the face of the God who loved us so much He sent His Son to die on the cross for us. Could it hurt more than the Crucifixion did? "But God can get around a condom, IUD, pill, etc." Sure He can. But remember the stern warning of Our Lord, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test." Do not play that game with God, and do not make presumptions on His making an exception in "your situation." He made no exception for His Son.
All this established, let it be known that Catholics are not prudes. We are a sensual bunch of people--we love sights, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. We are not afraid of our sexuality. We embrace it! It is good! You should hear Pope John Paul II discuss it, encouraging men to be sure their wives are receiving pleasure in their coming together. I have even heard it stated that the sexual climax is about the closest that we can come to the experience of the ecstasy of being one with God. It is no wonder we have a sex addiction problem in our society. We have a bunch of poor souls who don't have a correct understanding of the God who loves them so very much.
One last word, before I end this, to those Catholics who may be reading this and are using contraception. Now that you understand why contraception is such an affront to the love of God, and an insult to not only your spouse, but your marriage, the next time you go to Holy Mass, please refrain from receiving Holy Communion in a state of mortal sin, unless you have gone to confession and received absolution with the intent to never commit the sin of contraception again. Remember what Holy Communion is. Remember what contraception says. Do not receive the totality of Him who gave His All for you if you are not prepared to in turn do the same for your spouse, to "Love one another, as I have loved you."
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