The Sacred Sources of Sexual Shame

"It is the Church's fault: they made me feel guilty about sex, treating it like something bad and dirty." This is the standard accusation thrust at the Church by the architects of Cultural Liberalism: Mead, Kinsey, Hefner, Marcuse, and the dismal litany of the heroes of the sixties. It is a false narrative. It is a lie from hell. I have spent about 30 years in Catholic schools: sex is rarely mentioned. From the pulpets: sex is rarely mentioned. The occasions I can recall are factual, sober, reverent. Okay: there is of course the warning, especially to adolescents, about the dangers of unchastity: any religion worth its salts instructs its youth thus. I was NOT taught to be embarassed about sex. If anything, it was the "null curriculum"...avoided and not adequately addressed. Then I have to ask myself: Why at the age of 13 was I so profoundly ashamed of my flaming, surprizing sexual desires? My shame was not a result of socializaion: it was my instinctive, intuitive response to the boundless fury and intensity of the feelings. For a long time I thought I was different, weird; but now into my 70s I look back and think I was pretty ordinary. This sexual, romantic urgency is like nothing else on the earth. Sex is a "daimon"...a power, a force overwhelming to everything natural. The sheer power, fascination, obsession, enchantment, and desperation is such that embarrassment, shame, guilt, and fear are appropriate. Gustav Siewerth in an essay on Original Sin (reprinted in Communio Spring 2020) offers a refreshing and relieving insight into sexuality after original sin. His broader treatment of original sin rejects that we were left depraved or corrupted. He prefers not to understand it, primarily, as a tendency to evil or sin. Rather, it is loss of the original grace of communion with God in which we enjoyed boundless peace, joy, and peace. The union with God was intended as the source of our joy and energy so loss of such resulted in a weakening of acceptance of the good, a diminishment in our rejection of evil, and an overall loss of personal integrity in every dimension. So, it is not an actual evil as much as a diminishment and a vulnerability to temptation. Nevertheless, our foundational dignity in the image of God is preserved and so is our infinite desire for the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Original sin does not reside in our sensuality, but in the overall integrity of the person. And so, romance and sexuality retained, in themselves, the freshness, goodness, generosity and worthiness inbued in them by creation. But Siewerth helpfully illuminates two dimensions of sexuality, even before sin, which infused them with a more-than-natural ferocity and fascination. First, since we are created not as separate, autonomous individuals, but as participants in the human race and other communities, the impetus to procreate was intended, by God, to have an overwhelming power, a force so fierce that it would not be restrained by an individual's intellect and will except for the presence of God's grace. And so, we see, that even without sin romance/sex is extravagant, excessive, reckless by its God-intended nature. Secondly, he notes that in the Garden all the natural, finite goods were not just finite goods but gifts from God and therefore imbued with a mystery, a transcendence, an interior depth. So, a rose: it is the smell, the perfect shape/color, but it is much more. The rose has a magic and mystery infused into it since it comes from God. So: in the garden, every flower, sunrise, smile, task accomplished...every finite creature and event is mystifying and mesmerizing because it opens up to God. Adam and Eve "went crazy" with Joy...all the time...in a manner that far exceeded what we mean by intellect and will. Now enters sin: romance/sex remains the magnificent creature it always was. But our own capacity to appreciate the good and our ability to resist evil so weakened that this fierce force becomes very dangerous if not revered. The human soul is now vulnerable to the world, the flesh and the devil and needs the kind of vigorous protection provided by a rigorous ethic and the strenth provided by the sacramental economy of divine love. The good news: our sexuality is still and always will be a magnificent Mystery of joy, generosity, fecundity and hope. Sin has not spoiled that!