Sexual Reverence (3): the Dark Side

"Fair and foul are close of kin, and fair needs four" I cried. Yeats As the holiest creation, sex can become the darkest reality. For many of us...maybe most of us in today's world...the abuse of sex is the quickest, easiest, smoothest path to hell. Because it is SO good, it can become SO bad! Since it is so dangerous, it demands a profound and delicate reverence. Even at its best, as spousal love, it retains four essential aspects that are dark in a deep way that requires decency: its intensity, its brutality,its association with lower bodily actions, and its relationship to death. Firstly, sexual arousal is an intense passion that takes over the person...physically, hormonally, mentally, volitionaly...to such a degree that we can say that the person "loses" his soul in the sense that intellect and will are overcome by emotional-physical desire. Again, within the protective and sanctifying shelter of marriage, this "loss of self" is blessed by God, open to life and motivated by a mutuality of self donation. It is, nevertheless, a real "loss of self" and demands a certain awe, protectiveness and fear. Secondly, even at its best as mutual conjugal surrender, the act of love retains a violent aspect: it is, after all, a penetration of the feminine by the masculine body. When invited and welcomed by the recipient in a posture of hope, trust and surrender, it becomes holy and good. But the brutal aspect remains even as it is transformed. We need to be aware that delicate spirits, especially females who are young and innocent, can be sensitive to this and even repelled. This is not abnormal or unhealthy, but a wholesome and realistic attitude. Advocates of the Playboy philosophy but even some students (usually men) of St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body sometimes are carried away by their reaction against puritanism to such a degree that they lose a sense of the complex, delicate, and profound nature of sex. Thirdly, we need not dwell on it but we need to acknowledge with Yeats: "Love has pitched it's tent in the place of excrement" and "'Foul and fair are near of kin and fair needs foul' I cried." Providence has associated the sublime with the ridiculous, the most holy with the very most profane. Why? I really don't know. But maybe He intended to further heighten the reverence, the delicacy, the protectiveness and the care we give to this, His holiest natural creation. Lastly, sex is close to death, psychologically and metaphysically. The deep exhaustion, release from tension and letdown after orgasm is itself a premonition of death. When the action expresses love, of course, this love endures and fills the ensuing quiet with deepest peace. But outside of such profound love, the act ends in desolation, despair and contempt: death! Other than death itself, sex is the most intense experience of "the flesh" and in its extreme volatility and fickleness it resounds with mortality. Sex is, then, a taste of death. As such, it needs to be redeemed by a love stronger than death. AS such it needs to move into such a deeper love: a love that is chaste and faithful unto and beyond death. And so, to review, these four deep, dark dimensions of sex are unavoidable. They require a deep reverence. The catechesis delivered to the Church by St. John Paul II has definitively proclaimed the positivity, the wholesomeness, the holiness of sex. But this positivity incorporates and transforms these four dimensions. And these four, in turn, add a gravity, a density, and a reverence to this Mystery.