Faith Meets Life: Back to basics with sex and religion
Whenever I think of Sexual Awareness events, I can't help but wonder, do we really need more awareness of sex?
This is the age of on-line pornography, some of it live, featuring masturbation and (almost) every form of sexual liaison you can imagine. Information about how to engage in sex and how to deal with some of its unhappier consequences, such as STDs and unwanted pregnancy, is not exactly tricky to find.
We live in a part of the world where the “sexual revolution” of the sixties and seventies has produced the intended results. You can “do what you want with minimal consequences.” Sex has been deconstructed and reconstructed in a thousand ways. Professional researchers and amateurs have studied its components and permutations to the ninth degree.
Every part of it has been disconnected from the whole. Like choosing a hair colour, we can experiment with any of the components of sex. Mix and match till you find the combination that's right for you. And at the end of it all, is the tantalizing to some, and unnerving to others, commitment to the deliberate transgression of socially and, therefore, artificially (so the ideology tells us) constructed taboos and other boundaries.
But have we lost something in all the busy experimentation toward sexual freedom? Has sex become divorced from the rest of life?
We de-link it from procreation. We play with the relationship between the male body and male sexual expression. Ditto for the female body and a female expression of sexuality. The physiology of male-female sexual complimentarily is astounding, but for us it has become a mere canvas for our sexual experiments, which have no commitment to complimentarily.
Have we lost a sense of the integrated nature of things sexual? Ironically it seems to me, while we work towards an appreciation of the integration of life systems concerning our environment, regarding sexuality, the momentum is in the opposite direction.
The question of the loss of appreciation for the interfaces between sexual expression and so much else came to me again, as I perused the on-line version of the Roman Catholic Catechism.
Now I'm not Catholic. I'm plugged into one of the Protestant expressions of Christian faith and life. Still, my feeling is that the Catholic understanding of sexuality, while having more hard edges than I would like, makes a profound contribution to our awareness of sexuality. The Catholic, and indeed the Christian, view across the board (of churches all over the planet) stresses the integral nature of sexuality — as part of God's integrated creation.
How we express ourselves sexually is connected — integrated — with many important aspects of who we are. On the one side is a range of connections that include sexual exploitation of minors, careless marriage and divorce, polygamy, incest, adultery, prostitution, family disintegration, co-dependency, date rape, promiscuity, and abortion as a fall back method of birth control.
On the other side are connections that include respecting the other, care in marriage, extreme reluctance to divorce, boundaries that protect children within the family, faithfulness and fidelity, reticence, community, freedom from pressure to perform, love of procreation and parenthood, human dignity, and healthy development as full human persons capable of loving others.
Catholic and other Christian awareness of sexuality have, lately, been sidelined by views whose consequences are disturbing. It's time for a reappraisal — and for those who value the less popular view to come out of the closet.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.
This is the age of on-line pornography, some of it live, featuring masturbation and (almost) every form of sexual liaison you can imagine. Information about how to engage in sex and how to deal with some of its unhappier consequences, such as STDs and unwanted pregnancy, is not exactly tricky to find.
We live in a part of the world where the “sexual revolution” of the sixties and seventies has produced the intended results. You can “do what you want with minimal consequences.” Sex has been deconstructed and reconstructed in a thousand ways. Professional researchers and amateurs have studied its components and permutations to the ninth degree.
Every part of it has been disconnected from the whole. Like choosing a hair colour, we can experiment with any of the components of sex. Mix and match till you find the combination that's right for you. And at the end of it all, is the tantalizing to some, and unnerving to others, commitment to the deliberate transgression of socially and, therefore, artificially (so the ideology tells us) constructed taboos and other boundaries.
But have we lost something in all the busy experimentation toward sexual freedom? Has sex become divorced from the rest of life?
We de-link it from procreation. We play with the relationship between the male body and male sexual expression. Ditto for the female body and a female expression of sexuality. The physiology of male-female sexual complimentarily is astounding, but for us it has become a mere canvas for our sexual experiments, which have no commitment to complimentarily.
Have we lost a sense of the integrated nature of things sexual? Ironically it seems to me, while we work towards an appreciation of the integration of life systems concerning our environment, regarding sexuality, the momentum is in the opposite direction.
The question of the loss of appreciation for the interfaces between sexual expression and so much else came to me again, as I perused the on-line version of the Roman Catholic Catechism.
Now I'm not Catholic. I'm plugged into one of the Protestant expressions of Christian faith and life. Still, my feeling is that the Catholic understanding of sexuality, while having more hard edges than I would like, makes a profound contribution to our awareness of sexuality. The Catholic, and indeed the Christian, view across the board (of churches all over the planet) stresses the integral nature of sexuality — as part of God's integrated creation.
How we express ourselves sexually is connected — integrated — with many important aspects of who we are. On the one side is a range of connections that include sexual exploitation of minors, careless marriage and divorce, polygamy, incest, adultery, prostitution, family disintegration, co-dependency, date rape, promiscuity, and abortion as a fall back method of birth control.
On the other side are connections that include respecting the other, care in marriage, extreme reluctance to divorce, boundaries that protect children within the family, faithfulness and fidelity, reticence, community, freedom from pressure to perform, love of procreation and parenthood, human dignity, and healthy development as full human persons capable of loving others.
Catholic and other Christian awareness of sexuality have, lately, been sidelined by views whose consequences are disturbing. It's time for a reappraisal — and for those who value the less popular view to come out of the closet.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.
