Sex and All His Friends

Since I noticed that no one has ever said or written anything on the topic of sex, I thought I should contribute something.

The Catholic ideas about sex are one of the most contentious issues in all of Catholic theology and morality.  I remember telling myself that even if (in some bizarre possible future) I became Catholic, I would be a "liberal" Catholic who quietly disregarded Church teaching on sex.

Like many Catholic teachings, the teaching on human sexuality is baffling if considered piecewise.  It only makes sense when considered as part of the entire body of Church teaching.  The practices only make sense when viewed in light of the relevant ideas behind them.

Catholic teaching about sex includes:

• Reserving sexual intercourse only for marriage
• Defining sex as vital to a marriage
• Staunchly reserving marriage: 
• For one man and one woman, who are capable of having sex, who know what they're doing
• To last until the death of one of the partners
• Declaring that sex fundamentally is for bonding and making babies; pleasure is a side benefit
• Declaring that any practice that separates or perverts that purpose is wrong (masturbation, sex while using contraception, in vitro fertilization, et cetera)

Raised as a devout Christian, I believed strongly that sex was only for marriage, pretty strongly that marriage was only for heterosexual people, and sort of that remarriage was wrong.

But I had no problem with birth control, and as a future career woman, rather liked the idea.  The Catholic stance is that sex while using some contraceptive is wrong.  The idea behind the practice is that sex is not for pleasure; sex is for producing children and bonding with one's spouse.

I had a few real objections, but most of my beef with this teaching was a strong sense of, "But I don't wanna..."

(You have my full permission to read that in the whiniest nasal tone you can manage, because my inner self was doing exactly that.)

Now I see that my biggest objection was my rebellion! I didn't like the idea that sexual pleasure was not the goal, because I wanted that pleasure for myself.

But slowly, I began to let go of what I wanted.  I began to let go of the idea that God created sex to make me happy.

One of the first things that happened surprised me the most.  My body insecurities started to go away.  (If you're a 60-year-old man, that probably is not that big of a deal.  But for a twenty-something college girl in modern America, this is a BIG DEAL.)

I still watch my weight carefully, because I know it's a struggle for me.  I still want to be slender and attractive, but now I want it more on the level of "it'd be cool if I could juggle", not as an obsessive need.

If I plan to marry someday, and see sex as a goal in its own sake, then it matters whether I'm the sexiest I can possibly be.  But if I see sex as simply a gateway to bigger blessings (a close relationship with a husband, the gift of children), I realize that I am not an object to make my future husband happy!

I've heard that many times, but it never stuck when the bigger idea behind it (that sex is a goal in itself) did, in fact, objectify me in precisely that way.

Additionally, the sexualized advertising and media out there has lost its gloss for me.  Touting sex for its own sake was okay when I thought of sex as primary existing for pleasure, with the small qualification that you had to be married.  But now I see sexualized clothing, advertisements, and television and feel mostly confusion, similar to what I feel when I read about people building things out of cheese.

Building structures out of cheese misses the point of cheese.

Pursuing sex for its own sake misses the point of sex.

The sad thing is, the point of sex is absolutely glorious and beautiful.  God uses human bodies to house his act of creation, and gives parents the wonderful gift of being direct participants in the process of creating a human being.  

J. Budziszewski points out that the power of creation belongs to God alone.  Humans simply recombine old things in new ways.  Only God truly creates new things.  It isn't creation when you mix sugar with tea to make sweetened tea.  It isn't creation when we build a skyscraper or write music or draw things.  God made the bricks, the tools, the instruments, the paper, and even structure, sound, and color.

And yet God accomplishes his true creation of a new human soul through the sexual interaction of human parents.  

Additionally, God uses a simple biological urge to draw human spouses close to each other, so that they can share a bond neither of them shares with anyone else.

This is the Catholic picture, and it is glorious.  But the unexpected fruits of it in my own life have surprised and delighted me. Thanks be to God.

An Announcement

This post is significantly different from all others I have made.

But I feel the need to shout something to the world, so here goes.

I'm going to medical school!


The match results came in on Tuesday, and I matched to the school I really wanted.

I also ran the numbers and realized that I'll be roughly $130,000 in debt in four years and still have 3 - 5 years of making $50,000 per year while working 80 hours a week in residency.  This is roughly twice the recommended amount of debt I should take on with the salary I can expect to earn even after residency, as a practicing physician.

But that's not what matters here.  God has been good to me; I marvel often at how the blessings of heaven are poured out on my head.
I'm doing what I really want to do, and I'm tremendously excited about the school, the hospital where I'll be training, and the city itself.

Thanks be to God.

The Politics of the Penguin

To make up for not posting yesterday, I'll share the latest thing that made me laugh out loud this morning.

Mark Shea, of www.markshea.blogspot.com, senior editor at CatholicExchange.com and InsideCatholic.com, wrote the following in his predictions for the new year:

Politically, I predict that the Stupid Evil Party and the Evil Stupid Party will work hand in hand (while feigning radically different agendas) to increase the power and riches of the rich and powerful.

 This, ladies and gentlemen, sums up my entire stance on politics and the reasons I rarely participate in it.  I sincerely hope therefore that it is the absolute last post on politics that will ever be seen here.

Good day!

The Antidote

Sometimes I find myself feeling gypped in this faith.

I catch myself thinking how inconvenient, almost rude, it seems that I would be expected to give up things that make me happy.  How can I be expected to sacrifice my deepest desires? It hurts to deny myself.  Why?

Why can't I decide who I want to have sex with? Why can't I decide how many children I want? Why can't I lie when it seems warranted to me?  Why can't I sleep in when I want to, watch what I want, and say exactly what I think on occasion?

Why am I not even allowed my basest self, my own selfishness?  How can I possibly be expected to give up, to deny myself?

I'm not the only one who feels this way.  I have seen downright outrage at the idea that homosexuals should live celibate lives.  Who has that kind of nerve, to deny someone sex and a lover for the rest of his life?  Who could possibly ask that?
I feel the outrage in myself, at the thought of living without contraceptives.  How on earth can I be expected to give up sex with the man I love for several days each month, or to welcome child after child into my family?  It's my life!  How can I be expected to suffer so?

But over and over I've noticed something when I sit in Mass or kneel in Adoration.  When I look up at the crucifix, my outrage vanishes.
When I look up at the representation of Jesus Christ in the Crucifixion, I understand in ways too deep for words how I can be expected to deny myself, to suffer for the sake of holiness.

This, then, is the antidote to the poisonous rebellion of the self: the cross, and the one who gladly bore it.

Want the Change

Happy New Year!

I've decided to widen the scope of this blog a bit to encompass a more than simply my searching about Catholicism.

One of my informal New Year's Vague-Inklings (as none of them can be properly called a "resolution") is to write here more.  So here we are.

Today Boyfriend and I drove to one of our favorite coffee shops, to program (for him) and read (for me) in a slightly different location than usual.  (Now he's staring intently at his code.  Each of his features is like an arrow, pointing at the screen in deep concentration.  He likes debugging code, but his face looks like if he can make all those arrows' vector sum in the direction of his laptop high enough, the code will submit to his will.)
I grabbed a couple of my new books, which turned out to be "Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again & Again" (by Roger Housden) and "The Everlasting Man" (by G.K. Chesterton).
As I read the first poem in the former book, the power of it swept me forward with something like a low-grade inspiration.  (Don't hurry; you must read poetry slowly, with a halting, back-and-forth gait.)

SONNETS TO ORPHEUS, PART TWO, XII
by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated from German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.


What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.


Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.


Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,
becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

Fantastic poetry compels me to a certain stillness, like the sort of stretching pause in a conversation when it is interrupted by some stunningly beautiful music that suddenly started on the radio. Everyone stops to listen, and no matter what was being said or how urgent it was, suddenly it can wait.
I often feel like I'm gulping it, and I'm both drowning in it and starving for it.

This is the reason I write poetry.  Poetry is a bit like ham radio: it's this special skill you cultivate so as to communicate with other people who are cultivating the same skill to communicate with you.  Few non-poets actually read or enjoy poetry.  But as a poet, I find myself drowning in the beauty of someone else's work often.  Usually it's the work of someone like Rilke or Emily Dickinson, but not always. One of my classmates in my poetry workshop class wrote some things that were so beautiful that I asked if I could keep the drafts she shared.  I relished the brief spark of perfect connection between her mind and mine that is the business of poetry.

On the facing page, the author of the book included the following, taken from Jackson Pollock's headstone on Long Island:

ARTISTS AND POETS ARE THE RAW

NERVE ENDS OF HUMANITY.

BY THEMSELVES THEY CAN 

DO LITTLE TO SAVE HUMANITY.

WITHOUT THEM THERE WOULD BE

LITTLE WORTH SAVING.

(I find it fascinating how commonly we see this compulsive belief that "humanity needs saving".  No one seems to fervently believe that "humanity needs improving" or "humanity needs a little polishing".  It seems that the more we polish humanity, the more clearly we see it rotting from the inside.)

For each of the ten poems, the author, Roger Housden, has written a bit of exposition about the poem.  He highlights Rilke's assertion that if we accept constant change, even our sense of self must be subject to it, leading to a certain dismemberment.

Housden deals with the notion of dismemberment as a consequence of accepting the constant change of life.  He points out that dismemberment runs throughout world religions: the Egyptian stories about Osiris, the Tibetan chod, in which you visualize your own dismemberment, and even the Christian celebration of the Eucharist, with the pivotal phrase "This is my body, broken for you."

The whole thing made me think about how I've changed this semester.  It's been one of the hardest of my life, mostly because of the constant change.  Unlike most, this one feels like it's been a decade long.  Like a labyrinth, or the miles and miles of DNA coiled in each of my microscopic cells, the distance I've traveled over the last few months overflows the time that was meant to contain the journey.

It makes life seem nice and full, like I'm savoring every second of it.  But it also means that I feel the soreness from each and every hard day, even if I don't remember it.  Maybe I'm getting old.

  

In any case, this seems a fitting beginning of the new year.  May we simply embrace the truth, want the change, and receive the grace for each new day.  God be with you.

Sometimes, when I hear the voice of God...

(I sometimes hear the voice of God.  Did you know that?)

... I am musing about deep theological truths.

But more often, I'm simply afraid, worrying myself sick over something or other.

And so often, he says something like,
"... my rod and my staff will comfort you.  I will prepare a table before you in the presence of your enemies.  I will anoint your head with oil.  Your cup will run over.  Goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life, and you will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

The Widow of Nain

Yesterday, I read this passage on the bus.

"As He approached the gate of the city, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow; and a sizeable crowd from the city was with her.
When the Lord saw her, He felt compassion for her, and said to her, 'Do not weep.'"


I stared at the letters in dark red and thought about what Jesus' direction "do not weep" meant.

Do not weep.

Did the mother even hear Jesus?

If she did, did she think he was mocking her?  "Do not weep"?  She was leaving the city on her way to bury her only son. Who could say to her, "do not weep"?

Maybe she wasn't even mourning yet, still in denial.  Maybe she looked at him numbly and tried to understand what the words meant. "Do not weep."  Is someone trying to talk to me?

Maybe she raged at him inwardly.  What was wrong with him, trying to cheer her up at a time like this?  When your entire world is quaking as the storm rages inside you, "do not weep" is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect.

Did she feel that she had a right to mourn (a reasonable thought on her part), and that he should just leave her alone? "Do not weep".  Yeah, fat chance of that.


In those few seconds after Jesus looked at her, felt compassion for her, and said, "Do not weep", what went through her mind?

On what grounds could he possibly say to her, "Do not weep"?

"And He came up and touched the coffin; and the bearers came to a halt. And He said, "Young man, I say to you, arise!"

The dead man sat up and began to speak. And Jesus gave him back to his mother."

He could say "do not weep" because he knew that he was the one about to turn her broken world into something unspeakably wonderful, about to make everything that was wrong right again.

So when everything that I hold dear seems to be crumbling, when I can't see my way clear in any direction, when I feel like the pain of a fallen world will crush my very existence, there is a small still voice that says,
"Do not despair.  Do not lose hope.  Do not fear.  Rejoice and be glad."

On what grounds can he possibly say that, when it seems like the sky itself is hostile and the floodwater will never go down?

He can say "do not weep" because he is the one who, in the end, makes all things new.