After several requests to write a series of articles on sexuality and after an invitation to help advise the Catholic bishops on their pastoral statement on sexual morality, I have discovered a strange and uncharacteristic reticence within me. I still have not answered the bishops' personal letter (if not disobedience, certainly disrespectful!), and I cannot believe that I am actually beginning to write this article.
Why am I procrastinating? What am I afraid of? Undoubtedly my attitude toward this very favorite subject is revealing one of the central problems that we must deal with here: human sexuality has been so long denied a hearing that it remains in a shadowlike world and is seldom retrieved in a positive and creative way. Such a powerful aura surrounds the subject, which is both terribly attractive and wonderfully frightening, that I am quite sure we are dealing with a character of holiness.
After many years of serving as a retreat master for Christian groups of every sort, the last five largely for Catholic priests, and after 10 years as pastor of a large lay community, I am convinced that our sexual lives are the most universally damaged parts of our human nature. Just about everyone will admit that they really do not understand and often do not like what they see happening and not happening in their sexual experience. It is surely both demon and divine messenger, but most of us seem to be meeting the demon in one disguise or another.
I do not presume that we can change all of that in two articles, but I do believe that this moment in our history provides us with an opportunity to open some doors and shed some healing light on a shadowy subject.
The atomic structure of the material world, for example, reveals a surprising phenomenon that is dynamic, relational, paradoxical, predictable in its effects, and yet finally uncertain and "relative," as Einstein has told us. Whether we like it or not, this discovery has radically affected the mind of civilization forever, and has given spiritual explorers the courage to trust and to examine their similar intuitions about the nature of this body-psyche-spirit reality that surrounds us.
As we examine what may be new material for most people, I ask only that you bring along a whole-minded understanding of the scriptures (both rational and emotional), a willingness to examine your own experience and the experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and at least a beginning commitment to self-knowledge and emotional honesty. You will likely discover a psychic, spiritual, and sexual world which is also dynamic, relational, paradoxical, and deeply mysterious. This "storehouse of new and old" (Matthew 13:52) is not an unknowable mystery, but in true biblical fashion, a mystery that is infinitely knowable and therefore never tires of discovery. As Shakespeare put it, "This is as strange a maze as e'er man trod, and there is in this business more than nature was ever conduct of" (The Tempest).
But I must, by way of preface, try to answer one more question. For whom am I writing these articles? Sojourners' constituency comes from a number of different backgrounds. But we all seem to have at least one thing in common: a commitment to the biblical tradition and faith, while trying to live out that faith in our own moment of history and culture.
Only a spiritually profound and truly catholic tradition could ever hope to gather and speak wisdom to such a disparate assemblage of tribes. And yet that is what I hope to do. I am writing these thoughts to disillusioned liberals from the '60s, well-trained youth from strong Christian families, young idealists who are still weighing the choice between marriage and gospel celibacy, those in communities who find themselves becoming dangerously whole and androgynous, guilt-ridden products of repressive denominations, liberated charismatics, and the liberally entrapped, youth asking the question, "How far can we go?", well-marrieds who know there has to be even more, and older folks who still feel but also fear their bodies. It is you that I hope to invite into this giant storehouse. Let's all enter its murky and magical darkness to see if we cannot learn something from, yes, our flesh, and from the God who became flesh.
Incarnation
Both the Holy One and the Evil One know something that we are only beginning to suspect: power has been hidden in weakness, "mystery has been masked as a mistake." God knew that only humble vulnerability could be entrusted with spiritual power - and so he hid it like a treasure in the body of Jesus (Ephesians 3:5,9; 1 Corinthians 2:7,10; Colossians 1:26). "My power is at its best in weakness," Paul tells us. "For it is when I am weak that I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). "And what is more, it is precisely the parts of the body that seem to be the weakest which are the indispensable ones" (1 Corinthians 12:22). Why? "So that the sovereignties and powers should learn only now, through the church, how comprehensive God's wisdom really is" (Ephesians 3:10). We are only now daring to believe, after 2,000 years of revelation of the mystery of Christ, what Satan discovered at the crucifixion. The Evil One knows that the place to attack us is in the area where we are most subject to shame, where we are most weak and truly "out of character": our bodiliness. Satan knows that is the last place where we will expect or look for God. And God knows that only forgiven sinners and spiritual searchers will find God there.
So Evil has found the breach in the wall and attacked each one of us there with "a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan" (2 Corinthians 12:7). And unfortunately, it worked! Much of the tradition has been negatively and uselessly trapped in guilt and preoccupation with the flesh, while the great issues of gospel and grace have gone unheeded. The result has been rigidity and repression - much of it called "holiness." This response has been Evil's greatest triumph over gospel freedom. It has horribly entrapped the positive power of human affection, which is the heart of the matter.
But the embodied and hidden Christ is still coming forward in history, "a mystery hidden for generations and centuries and revealed to his saints. It was God's purpose to reveal it to them and to show all the rich glory of this mystery to pagans. The mystery is Christ among you, your hope of glory" (Colossians 1:26-27). This Christ will have his harvest, and it will be through weak flesh, that least-suspected place, that health and growth will be revealed.
We must begin, however, with a firm act of trust in what God has done in Jesus. We cannot return to a healthy Jewish and incarnational view of reality until we accept that God has forever made human flesh the privileged place of the divine encounter. We have had enough of dualism, enough of mystification, and enough of gnosticism. We must reclaim the incarnation as the beginning point of the Christian experience of God. We must return to the Hebrew respect for this world and for ourselves. This is the mind that formed Jesus. He freely became body, and I am body. It is the only self that I have ever known. We have no other beginning point, we have no other receiver station - except this body-person that God has created and apparently trusted and named "temple."
What God has trusted, I am going to start trusting. What God has been willing to release and take risks with, I must also risk. After 10 years of retreat work and spiritual direction, I am convinced it is the only way of wisdom, and is not the way of laxity and decadence that so many fear. Teilhard de Chardin, the French scientist-poet-priest, put it perhaps best of all: "Avoiding the risk of a transgression has become more important to us than carrying a difficult position for God. And it is this that is killing us" ("The Evolution of Chastity").
Only when someone gives us permission to start trusting ourselves do we also start listening to ourselves, do we take ourselves seriously, as I believe God does. Only when we start trusting ourselves do we also begin to take responsibility for ourselves and for our mistakes. Only then do we grow and become "fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself" (Ephesians 4:13). In this transient world of human limitation, there is nothing purely secular or purely sacred. There is only good direction and bad direction. Jesus came to show us the way - the way through. The theologians call it the "paschal mystery," the way of dying and rising.
We must admit that both directions are happening in our lives, and it is in this creative tension that the spiritual journey finds its energy and force. Forgive my absolute, but all else is illusion. The wondrous work of grace is to be able to gather those opposing forces together in one place and make them into forces for life rather than death. We call it holiness.
I am sure that bodies have been literally entangling themselves with one another since the beginning of time. It is rather basic and universal and not really that surprising when you consider that this "who" that we are appears to be encased in a bodily sheath. We seem to like, or even need, to be touched, to be reminded that we are alive or that we matter to another. Most so-called "primitives" seem to be naturally aware of this, whereas most products of civilization have created huge denial systems and taboos to protect themselves from its power. As you might expect, the need only takes on more sophisticated and subtle disguises, and we have a sexuality we no longer understand or have any creative control over. Superficial observation would tell you that bodies are trying to express themselves to one another, bodies are trying to feel good, bodies are trying to unite with one another, bodies are trying to overcome the pain, bodies are enslaved to their own chemical and hormonal needs, bodies are trapped in being body. Frankly, I cannot deny that many if not most bodies are entrapped. I would agree with the most rigid moralists that something is awry here. But if we are to exorcise this demon of sensuality or lust, we must first name the demon rightly. We must know what is really happening, or we might call forth the wrong demon and deny the right angel.
It appears to me that bodies are not so much trapped in being body as they are feverishly trying to become spirit. They are not so much trying to express themselves as they are trying to become themselves. They are not so much trying to become one with another body as they are trying to become one within themselves. Bodies are not nearly so preoccupied with union between the opposing sexual polarities as desperately seeking union within their own sexual selves. In all truth, many bodies are not so much seeking to overcome the pain as to deeply and definitely feel the pain of being alone and human. Sexuality is much more a journey into the inner darkness than a denial of it. Even the anguished looks and suffering groans of lovers reveal the truth that our unconscious has grasped hold of: I am still alone.
Yet the opposite is also true. A person who has been allowed to grow, make mistakes, trust themselves, change, and grow again into other mistakes and graces will probably experience the profound nature of human and divine communion. And once that is experienced, mere genital sex is forever relativized and revealed for the avenue and window that it is. These people will be capable of deeper and deeper communion and yet not likely enslaved to its momentary rituals. This must be what we mean by gospel freedom.
We must admit that the Christian tradition has been largely blinded to this aspect of freedom. If there is such a thing as a corporate Christian shadow, an area of life that has been denied existence, it is surely in this area of the positive character of human sexuality. How ironic that the very religion that has believed that God became flesh has been the most consistently negative in its relatedness to human flesh.
How did we come to this point? In the New Testament period there were already elements of Stoicism present. Then we moved into various forms of dualism. Monastic and hermetical asceticism took the place of an idealized martyrdom for Christ; penance and mortification were often sought for their own sake in many religious communities; the medieval church found itself preoccupied with death, purgatory, and fear of hell. The questions of the Reformers were largely concerned with church structures and theological definitions, but not with the corporal works of mercy or the quality of human life. And we then continue with 400 years of "angelism," Pietism, Puritanism, Victorianism, and endless Catholic legalism and Protestant verbalism. Furthermore, we export it in good colonial fashion to all the corners of the earth in the name of Jesus.
"No!" is not wisdom. And now in our time we are reaping the rewards of such repression. Much of the Western world has given up on the church and is going other places for wisdom. Unfortunately, in these other places they are sometimes "willingly filling their belly with the husks the pigs are eating" (Luke 15:16). But we in the church must ask ourselves if we have not been the parent who sent them away because there was nothing trustworthy or life-giving at home.
We must face up to our past bias against emotions, our condescending attitude toward the body, and our love/hate relationship with our genital-sexual selves. If we are to be honest, we must admit that the tradition has always been gnostic, overly spiritual and "metaphysical." It has preferred to struggle philosophically with abstract theological questions. It divided peoples, churches, and history over discussions of the relationship of the Spirit to the Father and the Son, the relationship of the divine and human natures of Christ ("hypostatic union"). It gave rigid, reasoned solutions to biblical promises of God's presence ("transubstantiation") and salvation ("justification" theories and "atonement" theories). The Western church has been afraid of the holistic intuitions of our deepest selves for centuries now, and has lost the power of synthesis and the energy of paradox. In that sense, it has surely lost touch with its biblical roots and the transformative power of the Judeo-Christian religion.
I do not believe that any of these questions were or are idle or unimportant. But the trouble is that we never saw them as anything more than theological. It might have been more fruitful for the human race if we had drawn out the implications of the hypostatic union for our own lives instead of simply affirming it as a theological datum. We never saw them as psychology and anthropology, but simply as theology. We never connected the truth of our questions to real life. We were more concerned with spiritual control than we were with spiritual power. And our fear of spiritual power has put us out of touch with the spiritual world in general and the sexual world in particular.
Perhaps this proves the point that theology is best done by those who are also in practical and pastoral ministry. For after centuries we have not been able to put human and divine, flesh and spirit together in any believable and creative way. And now Western civilization finds itself in a largely decadent sexual rebellion, with an inability to creatively use and understand its emotional life, and with an exaggerated idolization of materiality - precisely, I believe, because the Western church has failed to give the world what God gave the world in Jesus - incarnation (John 1:1-18) and integration (Colossians 1:15-20).
Let's go one step further in our attempt to name this demon. I think all of the above is understandable for any number of historical and cultural reasons. The church has been the victim of history as much as it has been the creator of it. It seems that God is humble enough to put up with that and wait for maturation. But the problem is deeper. I think we could deal with a church that is human, secular, and caught up in bodiliness and emotion. In fact, I think that would even be a reform. But what makes the situation most difficult and illusive is that since its beginnings the church has been grossly material and engaged in the physical but pretends that it is not. It continues to use the language of abstraction and mystification, so that no one does know, is able to know, or should even want to know what this refers to in the world of human experience. Christianity refuses to admit that it is historical and human. It refuses to recognize that it moves in the vehicle of culture, and so it becomes trapped in culture, all the while using the language of counterculture, almost as if it is trying to fool itself.
Note, for example, the early cult of relics and shrines, the continuing "edifice complex" of the Western church, the preoccupation, sometimes bordering on obsession, with sexual morality, the temporal power struggles of the papacy, the self-serving ritualism of many Orthodox groups, the behavioristic and cultural morality of much of Protestantism. All of these could be seen as the physical entrapments of a Christianity that refuses to admit that it is human and historical. It is a victim of what it denies in its idealized self. It has shown itself very weak in the true discernment of spirits, often incapable of distinguishing true good from real evil. As a result, it is not really at home in what should be its eminent domain: spirituality and its bodily manifestation, sexuality. It has not yet developed the eyes to see that some of what it considers to be its greatest assets might well be its liabilities, and some of what it considers to be its weaknesses might well be its greatest strengths.
We thought we could deal with God on paper and meet God in correct practice, whereas the biblical pattern seems to be that we can meet God only in our own history and precisely as we face our own sinfulness. We thought that when we had condemned monophysitism (the belief that Jesus is one nature, fully divine and not human) on paper as a heresy we had dealt with it. In fact, the church has been not only gnostic for much of its history but also monophysite. Fortunately, there have been graced breakthroughs in the lives of whole and holy men and women, and momentary syntheses. Unfortunately, it seems that what you deny and repress is, in fact, what controls and forms you. We have refused to dialogue, listen to, accept, and relate to our sexuality positively. Now we find ourselves awkward and out of touch with its positive meaning. It haunts us from its shadowed position.
Our direction, of course, is to go back to the beginning and perhaps to "know the place for the first time" (T.S. Eliot). Christ, "the Flesh-taker" will be our guide. "Before anything was created, he existed, and he holds all things together in unity. God wanted all fullness to be found in him, and all things to be reconciled through him and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth" (Colossians 1:17,19).
In Jesus we see God as the "perfect exchanger," to use Rosemary Haughton's apt image of the trinitarian God. He gives only what he has first received (John 5:19,8:28), and he holds back nothing that God has given to him (John 15:15); he becomes the perfect receiver and therefore the perfect giver: "For the Father, who is the source of life, has made the Son the source of life" (John 5:26).
The New Testament language for God is not so much sexist or concerned with dominance or preeminence as it is with the essential character of whole relationship. The Spirit is the personal and personalizing result of such vulnerable exchange. Sin is the refusal to exchange - either to receive or to give back. Sin is to claim the self as an independent possession or as a private right. Sin is always a type of self-absorption, which is a lie about the nature of reality; whereas the Spirit, who teaches all truth, celebrates and reconciles that which is fragmented. The Spirit of God makes all things one by reminding them that they are first one - more one than many fragmented parts of a larger whole.
What looks like discovery is really recognition. What appears to be exploration is much more homecoming. The Spirit unites. Sin always separates. The work of God is total and full reconciliation. In other words, our only real badness consists in the repression of our goodness, which is the Spirit given and promised. And that is indeed bad.
Empirically, this badness shows itself in hardness, closedness, non-listening, the refusal to feel, self-hatred in its many disguises, and superficiality in general. This is the great sin of non-belief, which aborts the human soul a thousand times a day. We refuse to believe in what the Son has told us we are - sons and daughters of the living God. We hate ourselves mercilessly, and in many ways our preoccupation with sins has kept us from the recognition of this great sin. It is the unforgivable and unrecognized sin against the Holy Spirit. Unforgivable because it is unrecognized disbelief in what God has done.
It is here that the Christian tradition opens us to true wisdom. First, it has defined God as trinity, or mutuality, communion, and vulnerability. No other religion, therefore, provides such a beginning and basis for a theology of relationship. The Christian God is not a loner. The Christian God is perfect right relatedness.
God's Longing
Secondly, therefore, the Judeo-Christian tradition reveals a God who is passion. God is not the passionless and omnipotent abstraction of the philosophers, although we have often tried to make it seem so. God is angry, tender, jealous, and seems to be hopelessly in love. God is so "out of control" with this love that he makes unilateral promises and covenants that we cannot break or change. God is apparently willing to wait around for centuries for a believing response, and puts up with all kinds of abuse in the meantime. A real fool, of sorts.
But that is what passion does to you: it makes you feel and it makes you suffer - so much so that we use the same word for both meanings. As you might expect, we are not quite sure whether we want a God with passion. We have not yet learned how to live with that reality. But God seems to be here to stay, and I think that will finally make all the difference. God is not going to change. But we will, I'm sure. We cannot resist God's passion for us much longer.
Which brings us to the third enduring value of the tradition: faithfulness. It has almost taken us this long to realize that time itself is the great revelation. "Staying in there" gives us the time in which to see the patterns and rhythms of life and love."
If we listen, if we keep listening, we will know. If we remember, and we keep remembering, we will meet. If we are willing to go deep in at least one place, we will recognize continuities, direction, and purposefulness. We will say, "Who is upholding me?" "Who is this being good to me?" "Is there someone walking with me, or ahead of me?" Then we will meet the Faithful One. And then faithfulness will make sense. In fact, it will be the only thing that will make sense out of anything. Faithfulness is the pattern of God. "Staying in there" is the sign of salvation.
Fourthly, the Jewish tradition in particular makes us aware of the constant danger and nature of idolatry. It teaches us that we are habitually addicted to the making of gods. We are fascinated with absolutes and answers. We are terrified by ambiguities and paradox. We want a "rightness" that we can always rely upon, a power that is always in control and on our side. We want a warm body that will protect us from our own coldness. We want almost anything rather than journey, and search, and trial and error. So we make gods that do not last, and "their makers end up like them" (Psalm 135:18).
The tradition tells us, however, that all human and created things are to be relativized and put in harmonious balance. This includes our relatedness to and expectations of others, our sexual taboos, our bodily pleasures, and even our individual rights to happiness. As old-fashioned as that sounds, I think that is what the scriptures are saying. As someone once said, conservatives are not necessarily wrong about their certitudes. It is just that they are too easily certain about too much. That form of conservatism creates a lot of idols for all of us and keeps us from religious surrender.
In this area of sexuality we all seem to have our areas of blindness and our sacred cows that cannot be touched. The liberals will find some way to say that it is always good, the conservatives are determined to enforce the law. Both seem to be nervous about nuancing. Idols, with clear shape and explanation, seem to be easier to live with. The wisdom from the tradition, therefore, is that whatever God is doing, it is certainly beyond cultural fears, fads, and social taboos. This is particularly true in this area where there has been so much overlapping, and where it is most difficult to distinguish what God is really saying from "what my mother told me," and from what my mother church told me. Only the tradition gives us the criteria for individual and wise discernment.
I think that the tradition has handed on to open and obedient people a very intuitive and almost common-sense wisdom about what is real and what is unreal in regard to our sexual relatedness. It gives us an arena in which to move and discover our true bodily and spiritual selves.
The Catholic Theological Society's 1979 study Human Sexuality summarized it rather well when it stated that our sexual actions must aim to be "self-liberating, other-enriching, honest, faithful, socially responsible, life-serving, and joyous." That is certainly the task and journey of a lifetime, but it is no more or no less than what Jesus said when he taught the greatest commandment of love of God and love of neighbor. The two loves "resemble" (Matthew 22:39) one another. They are each the school of the other. We will learn how to be properly sexual as we understand the properly passionate relationship that God has with us. And we will learn how to be properly spiritual as we come to understand the true character of human longing and affection.
Finally, the only biblical mandate that matters is to copy and allow the pattern of God's love in us. If this sounds soft and liberal, perhaps it means that we have never loved "all the way." We have never let it carry us through all its stages, all of its internal ecstasies, lonelinesses, and purifications. Maybe our very theological argument over grace and good works reveals our inability to put love and work together. To attain a whole and truly passionate sexuality is going to be hard work. We are going to have to want it more than almost anything else.
As the mystics always said, "God's love can be a thousand times harder than his justice." So can human love! And of this I am certain: it is God's love that we are afraid of, not his justice. It is one another's goodness that we are protecting ourselves from, not the law.
God's way of loving is the only licensed teacher of human sexuality. God's passion created ours. Our deep desiring is a relentless returning to that place where all things are one. If we are afraid of our sexuality, we are afraid of God.
So once again, in Merton's fine phraseology, we must "make ready for the Christ, whose smile, like lightning, sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps in your paper flesh."
Richard Rohr, OFM, was pastor of New Jerusalem community in Cincinnati and a contributing editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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