Personal Note. Thursday we celebrated the birthday of St. John the Baptist, the "voice" in the desert pointing to his cousin, the Word of God, Jesus. Your world is filled with a cacophony of voices, many discordant, disruptive and deceptive. My own lifelong intention has been to be a "catechist" or a "voice". The word "catechist" means "echo"...to echo the voice of Christ, in one's own unique circumstances and person. More than anything I want to share my faith, my voice, with my own blood.
Angimals: Sexual Spirits
Angels, as pure spirits, have no bodies, no gender, no sexuality. Simple! Must be nice!
Animals have sex but it is very simple for them. They are "born that way." Their "sexual orientation" is hardwired into them at birth and springs into action automatically after a short period of maturation. They simply follow their urges, copulate, and reproduce. No meaning, freedom, decision, intimacy, culture, shame, guilt, loyalty, virginity, fidelity, betrayal, jealousy, vow, lust, covetousness, chastity or consecration! No drama! No sin! No freedom! No glory!
For humans, both spirit and material and therefore angimal (I got this word from Christopher West), it is infinitely more complex, dramatic, dense, mysterious, glorious, dangerous, and treacherous. We might also call ourselves "sexual spirits": our sexuality, masculinity and femininity in relation to each other, is the manner in which we express our spirit as reception, gratitude, freedom, truth, love, intelligence, self-donation, communion with each other and with the Trinity. Or, our sexuality expresses hatred, violence, suspicion, disobedience, manipulation, seduction, deceit, hopelessness and despair. Drama, understood as the encounter between freedoms, is at the heart of our sexuality.
Human sexuality is the convergence of four levels of existence:
1. Biological: Our natural sexuality resembles that of animals but matures slowly, emerging after 12 years of life, and so is vastly more pliable and infused, for better or for worst, with the following.
2. Cultural: We are shaped in every way by our culture. Without the fixed, frozen instincts of the animal kingdom, we are "mimetic" ("we imitate") to the core: looking and imitating what we see around us.
3. Psychological: All our important developmental events impact our personality and therefore our sexuality, especially interaction with parent figures, siblings, friends, traumas, wholesome-or-toxic nurture and relationships.
4. Moral: The decisions we make, given our received biological-cultural-psychological endowment, give moral orientation to our sexuality.
5. Spiritual: We are created to image the holy Trinity, a community of love, and therefore manifest through our masculinity/femininity, in all our relationships: reception, self-donation, truth, love, freedom, and purity. In an unsurpassed Drama, however, the Enemy contrives to destroy this image.
Cultural
Without fixed animal instincts, we are entirely "mimetic" in that we imitate the behavior, the culture, we see around us. We are largely, but not entirely, the products of our human environments. Even when we react against something around us that itself can be an inverse-mimesis: I reject my father's alcoholism and never drink; in reaction to my mother's passivity I become aggressive. It is a great blessing to live under the influence of those who are (although imperfectly) chaste sexually and faithful to their marriage or religious vows. Unfortunately, in the last 50 years, since the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, our society has widely degenerated into sexual decadence in many ways.
Psychological
When your sexuality explodes within you at puberty (move violently for boys), it is not an innate, fixed animal instinct that emerges. Rather, your sexual yearnings are infused with the curses and blessings of your entire personal history. A girl who never experienced a father's love may, in her desperation for masculine love, become promiscuous; or, on the other hand, suspicious of men, become lesbian. A boy who is sexually abused by a man may become himself a pedophile. A child who has been protected, cherished and loved by mother-and-father figures is more prone to be confident in gender-self-esteem, generous, trusting, tender and reverent to the opposite sex.
There is a vast range of tendencies or attractions that emerge, even in the same person. On the scale from worst to best we have, first, the blatant pathologies. Sadism, masochism, pedophilia, vicious misogyny and other severe disorders all arise usually from trauma, abuse and neglect.
Second we might consider a litany of sexual addictions: pornography, especially on the internet, is surely the most pervasive but that can lead to prostitution, promiscuity, and other.
Third are the "normal" temptations and urges from our fallen nature. These result from "concupiscence" which is the disordered desire we all (excepting Jesus and Mary) have in our sexuality. This comes to us from the original sin of Adam and Eve but more proximately from our own personal emotional history. Even the great saints were afflicted with burning temptations to unchastity as fornication, adultery, and other.
Fourth, we have the wholesome longings and urges: for intimacy, companionship, generosity, nurture, protection and purpose.
Last are the genuinely holy longings to give fully, to spouse/family or religious/priestly life to our Lord who gave himself fully to us on the cross.
Moral
The moral involves the intellectual determination about right and wrong, the act of the will about what to do, and the decision of one's identity. For example, a woman in poverty and distress may consider prostitution wrong but decide to do so out of necessity. These acts are compelled by necessity so she maintains a correct, if troubled, conscience and does not deeply self-identify with the profession.
Likewise, a teenager with homosexual attractions has a variety of moral options. Homosexuality itself, as attraction to the same sex, is not a sin; it is a suffering, especially of loneliness, a cross to be born, a temptation, an ordinary example of the concupiscence we all share. If a practicing Catholic, he might accept the Church's teaching, receive his condition as a cross, and set himself to live a chaste single life. If his attraction is not "deep seated" (meaning at least that he is free of compulsion, capable of celibacy, not self-identifying as gay), the priesthood is not entirely ruled out. Or, agreeing with the Church, he might nevertheless practice the lifestyle, under compulsion, with a troubled conscience, hoping and praying for release from the addiction and a return to the serenity of chastity and sexual sobriety. In this search he might find support in Courage (a wholesome Catholic support group for homosexuals seeking to live chastely), and/or Sexaholics Anonymous (12-step program with a strict definition of sexual sobriety), and/or reparative therapy (a Catholic-friendly approach which seeks to heal underlying wounds but does not attempt "conversion of orientation" in the manner of problematic, fundamentalist practices.) If he is somewhat bi-sexual (attracted to men and women), he might succeed as husband and father. He might lead a double life, accepting the Christian view in public but privately disobeying it, as did some Catholic priests so scandalously.
Or he might decide (1) that these acts are morally good (2) that he will feel free to practice them and (3) that his identity is deeply, personally engaged in this life style. If he decides affirmatively on these three questions, he freely embraces a gay identity. He will, of course, hate the Catholic teaching (sex is conjugal or unitive/fruitful) as misguided, homophobic, shaming, toxic and possibly hateful. Support for the LBGTQ agenda is thus contradictory of the Catholic view of chastity, of the 6th-9th commandments, and our way of life.
Spiritual
The common beliefs that "I was born gay" or "God made me gay" are inaccurate. A human ("angimal") sexual posture...gay, celibate, pedophile, consecrated virgin, devoted wife, polygamist, rapist, chaste bachelor, co-habitor, loyal husband...is not created or given at birth in the way of animal instincts. It comes from a dramatic history...of events, blessings, encounters, traumas, decisions, engagements, confrontations, surrenders. No doubt there is a predisposition already at birth; but those are shaped by the life experience within a culture. They are directed by free choice, involving a moral/intellectual judgement and life-shaping decisions about actions, participation and identity.
Last but not least we must consider that within this drama and history, at work as well is the hidden hand of God, and of Lucifer. Whatever tendencies and circumstances, there are two spiritual plans for your sexuality: that of God and that of the Enemy. For each of us there are finally two spiritual orientations: to chastity and fidelity; and to selfishness, manipulation, and objectivation of the other.
As Catholics, we participate in the Church as the "Bride of Christ." Jesus himself had no wife; but he gave himself to us all on the cross to make us holy and pure, his very bride, his very body. Receiving this gift of his life, his Spirit, his body and blood, from the cross, we have the urge to give ourselves in return, fully, in a vow. Such a vow takes two forms, the "states of life": marriage/family or the religious/priestly life of celibacy/virginity. In both of these there is a total giving. The single life is a preparation or waiting for that decisive event. Some of us for various reasons never make that vow. It is my view that such a single life is in effect, if without deliberate choice, a form of the religious life if accepted humbly, gratefully, generously. Both states of life, however, require the same interior form: chastity and fidelity.
The Spiritual Battle
Chastity is the primary arena of combat in the Great War against the Dragon. Arrayed against our purity is a great triumvirate of evil: the world, the flesh and the devil.
The "world" (organized against God, not the world created and redeemed by God) in which we live is dominated by Cultural Liberalism which has ripped sexuality out of its home within marriage/family and set it loose, chaotically and violently, into the anarchy of misogyny, pornography, promiscuity, infidelity, and self-satisfaction. We have here an entire empire organized in defiance of God and his intentions for chastity and fidelity. It is all around us, in the very air we breathe. Abortion, the genocide of the unborn, is the furious, futile defense against the chaos unleased by sexual license.
Our flesh is weak, wounded, and vulnerable as a result of sin. Our greatest vulnerability is in our sexuality because that pervades our personality, reaches to the depths of heart and soul, is the way in which we are meant to image God, the deepest expression of intimacy, and the path divinely intended for the creation of new souls. Mysteriously infused in our sexuality are all our longings, wounds, traumas, resentments, frustrations, anxieties, and insecurities. It is our Achilles heal. It is the locus of our heart ache, loneliness, sadness. It is, in God's grace, our glory!
Lucifer, the devil, the most intelligent of God's creatures, is aware of our weakness and firmly in control of the "world" in which we live. His primary strategy is to strike, through unchastity, at our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit, at our masculinity/femininity as iconic of the Trinity, at the sacredness of sexuality, at the holiness of marriage and the vowed life. By undermining chastity, he destroys the family and the Church, the two and only two institutions created by God himself.
Conclusion
Chastity is:
- Tenderness and reverence for the other sex.
- Interior sobriety, serenity, and freedom.
- Self-esteem in the mode of humility and gentleness.
- Gender, masculinity/femininity, as generosity/generativity, as paternity/maternity.
- Courage, fortitude, steadfastness, resiliency and anti-fragility.
- Openness to God, his plan, and his inspirations.
Chastity is more than difficult! For many of us it is impossible through our own efforts, so weak are we in flesh, so powerful "the world," and so cunning the Serpent.
But God's grace is superabundantly available for us, in the Church, and vastly more powerful than the Evil that threatens to engulf us.
When our own children were teenagers, my wife and I were relaxed: we had no curfew, we didn't monitor or control, they came and went as they pleased, we trusted them. If they misbehaved we generally didn't know about it. But we were firmly united in our two priorities: you NEVER miss mass Sunday; and you save sex for your spouse. If you do fail in these, which you might and generally we do, you get to confession as soon as possible. And you do NOT, repeat, you do NOT go to communion in the state of mortal sin because that is a sacrilege.
And so I exhort you, our grandchildren: protect and cherish your chastity. Stay close to the sacraments! If you fall, run to confession! Get the healing you need! We are all so weak! Encourage each other in purity! Trust in God to help you and make you radiant in His love!
I am writing this on the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Yesterday was the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These two human hearts were united in a most awesome, pure union. Let us turn in prayer to them, as well as St. Joseph, chaste spouse and father: and ask that we might emulate them in purity, strength, serenity, and generosity!
God bless you! I love you!
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