Sex, as a gender, as an act, is a central part of our being. I imagine the fullness of the soul in every cell of the body, like the fullness of God in every Holy Eucharist held high over the head of the alter Christus, the priest; and the fullness of that soul in every cell, acts with and through the body. The highest love, Our Lord states, is in one who lays his life down for his friend, and in the sexual sphere, the highest love is the gift of self. It is the body as physical expression of the soul, making a gift of self to the spouse- but in the way of God, the ever-creative One, the gift is fecundated and every sexual act is a potential gift of the two for the one, a gift with God of new life. The spousal act of love within which a new soul can spring is the crowning act of the natural life, and so much a central part of the spiritual life of those whose vocation it is to be married.
Sounds simple. It is; all things close to the Heart of God are simple. Sin and disorder make the things of love seem like knots of barbed wire. Within a marriage, there can be the baggage of past sin, or the present load of faults and disorders which can mar the simple beauty of conjugal love, even to the point of making it so very complicated and impassable. Outside of marriage, it gets worse. Sin in the sexual sphere can literally warp the soul, as I imagine, present in every body part, every offended member. Some sins, though, are not born of mature, well-versed volition on the part of some lustful adult. Some are the disorders resulting from damage done by Jansenistic or its siren sister, Libertinism; some resulting from differing abuses of childhood; some resulting from the wily corruption of a blabbering TV (especially if it was cable) or other seemingly ‘normal’ parts of growing up.
Further outside marriage or a vocation to have Christ as Spouse, there are those who “have exchanged the natural for the unnatural”. They are individual souls whom Christ loves, and grieves for, they who yearn for love, for the incarnated love that they were meant for, and yet cannot make their affections ordered to what is natural. The natural law is written on their hearts, deep inside, yet they are like boomerangs, always tending back towards the wound, always tending toward the image of self, the sameness of sex.
I do differentiate between types of those with sexual disorders. Some are simply sexual entrepreneurs, seeking the new and ever-wierder for the sake of the thrill. This is a disorder of the ego closing in to the level of a sociopath, in my estimation. They are the predators. But not all sexual deviants fall into this category. Some are genuinely wounded, people who, if they want to appear to themselves and to others as “proper Christians” live in a limbo of guilt and non-contact with the world of the expression of love in the body. They busy themselves with intellectualism or aestheticism, with any proper “ism” that will keep their cover. This is the arena of suicide for them, and I mean this in a real way. They are those who do not act on their disorder, but yet long for true contact. Their desire for union and expression, the “laying down one’s life” in the fecundity of love, is still very much present. They most probably have the vocation for marriage but have somehow been disordered- they are those within the Body of Christ who need the attention of the other members.
Unfortunately, too many have been seduced into acting on the disorder, out of desperation. Some have committed suicide. Some have changed the Church’s, Christ’s teachings to fit themselves in order to, as they think, “live a full human life”. Others have simply gone to Christian ‘churches’ who support their actions. Some are on a journey of trying to live honestly, yet unsure of their choices. And these sincere but disordered souls get shoved behind the activist types on our radar screens, behind those who in larger and bolder numbers, sport rainbow bumperstickers, lobby for changing laws and societal norms and march in parades dressed like peacocks.
But how, how does the Church of Our Lord reach out to those who are sincerely disordered but who want to love Him? How does the Church at once remain a Rock and yet also a Mother?
I believe the answer lies at the foot of the Cross; for the earthly life, the human life, of Christ was cut short, truncated by the evil and disorder that was the crucifying of God. As Guardini in his book, The Lord, relates, can one imagine what a beauty that Christ would have been to the world as an old man? God Himself has known having one’s yearnings cut short, although His yearnings were always ordered, and ours are often not. Yet I imagine Him standing on one of the hills looking toward Jerusalem, the last light leaving an afterglow on the sandstone and mud stucco; the olive trees making a rustling sound in a teasing wind; and the Lord crying out, “Oh, Jerusalem! How I wish you would let me gather you under my wings, and a hen gathers her young- but you would not, you would not.” Yet, yet, out of this truncation of earthly life, Our Lord wrought an even richer life in the body. He became part of our bodies, in the Eucharist, and made us part of His body, in the Eucharist and the Church. He can therefore transform disorder, make warped and frustrated yearnings bloom into something beyond expectation: but only if they are first laid on the ground below Himself on the Cross.
So the truncation of what one yearns and leans toward must be laid at the Cross. I can only say that these who struggle with sexual disorder and yet lay their yearnings down under the Cross are miraculous, for it takes more than a natural strength to have this kind of disordered-ness and yet lay the clamourings of one’s being down. But we all, in some form or another, must do it- and for all of us, each of us alone, it is utterly lonely- until we look up at His feet and His gentle eyes, the eyes who show forth a heart that can fill every need and straighten every disorder.
For those of us who do not struggle in this way in the sexual realm, I would think we need to look carefully into every face, like Mother Teresa, and try to see what Christ asks us to see, to try and love where there has been no love. And to lay ourselves at the Cross as well, in solidarity with all our fellow-sufferers, our fellows in sin and disorders of all kinds; but without ever taking the easy, destructive road away from the teacher that is the nature God made, or from His positive /revealed laws.
I suppose it is a bit pat- or rather, simple.
