Column You dont have to make babies to have a holy kind of
sex
By JEANNETTE BATZ
Im working my way through a
stack of computer printouts, doing some armchair research into Vatican
pronouncements on homosexuality.
Its taking a long time because I keep stopping.
I think of Deb and Susan, a lesbian couple whove been
together many years and whove adopted several children of another race.
Their Xeroxed Christmas letters chronicle a succession of sports and school
events and funny stories from lives these kids would never have known. Yet they
dont count as a family, in the eyes of the church.
Next I think of Jenny, who was born with male chromosomes and
ambiguous genitalia. The surgeons castrated the miniature penis
when she/he was a baby, removing nerve sensation (and future pleasure). But
even artificial hormone injections wont make Jenny male or female. Any
sexual partner she/he had now would be illicit in the eyes of the church.
I scan a little further. Then I remember Tom, now president of
Dignity, who was married 25 years and spent most of that time drinking,
masturbating, snapping at his wife and mocking his daughters gay friends.
He came out of the closet and is now in a committed gay relationship he says
has taught him, for the first time in his life, what real intimacy feels like.
The kind where you bare, not just your body, but your soul. The kind where --
he confides eagerly -- the best part of sex is holding hands afterward.
Tom never experienced that depth, freedom, wholeheartedness and
ease with his wife, although to this day they remain dear friends. His body and
his psyche simply werent oriented toward a woman. It was like forcing a
compass to point south while youre heading north. And it nearly broke
him.
Im told, by a Jesuit philosopher I deeply respect, that Pope
John Paul IIs teachings on homosexuality flow from a coherent framework
that honors the dignity of the human person and attends to our full biological
nature. Im told the pope believes sex should always be, not only
committed and consecrated, but generative. Literally generative, capable of
procreating another human life.
I think the pope is defining biology and generativity pretty
narrowly.
Geneticists tell us there are not two sexes, there are five. Even
the animal kingdom (from which we tend to exclude ourselves) exhibits
hermaphroditism and other chromosomal/hormonal variations. Some fish and
reptiles even change sexes midstream, depending on whats needed at the
moment. And animals exhibit same-sex copulation, too. Lets face it:
Natural instinct may drive us to procreate, but if every creature was fertile
and actively procreating every time instinct beckoned, the world would be
overrun, incapable of sustaining itself or evolving. Biology builds in its own
checks and balances. Whos to say the wide range of sexual behavior
isnt part of that?
What Ive loved best about Catholicism all these years has
been its insistence on inviolable human dignity. A central part of this human
nature we cherish is the self-consciousness that allows us to understand,
celebrate, control and redirect our instinctual life, using its energy to fuel
intellectual and spiritual pursuits. We can turn base hunger into a Eucharistic
meal; we can redirect the will to survival into selfless martyrdom.
And we can use libido as a way to open ourselves emotionally and
spiritually, stripping away all the defenses, rendering ourselves vulnerable in
an act of trust that can bring us closer to divine love even as it binds us to
each other.
Every act of sexual intimacy does not do this, of course, just as
every meal is not Eucharist. But the drive to join in the most intimate,
vulnerable way with another human being is the drive that opens the door for
another kind of communion.
It neednt make a baby to be holy.
At a St. Louis University conference on the popes thought,
Janet E. Smith, a philosophy professor at the University of Dallas, explained
John Paul IIs belief that if sex is not open to the responsibility of
parenthood, it is exploitive and objectifying, nothing but bilateral
pleasure.
What about the tender, solemn responsibility you feel toward your
partner after youve shared your deepest most private needs and
nature?
Much has been said -- particularly by celibate men -- about the
way natural birth control methods strengthen a (heterosexual) marriage.
Its true that the necessary cooperation is deeply intimate in itself;
its true that the constant possibility of conception is a humbling
reminder of the acts power. But what natural birth controls
proponents do not mention is the soul-numbing, joy-killing, desire-inhibiting
anxiety, the stark terror of getting pregnant when you have neither the money
nor ability to cherish a new life.
Thats not romantic. It does not let you fall, receptive and
defenseless, into each others arms.
What is pernicious about sex, in my opinion, is not its
variations, but the way we objectify each other, take each other for granted,
reduce intimacy to physical pleasure, put up barriers to protect our own egos.
And all of that is perfectly possible -- indeed, common -- in a lifelong,
consecrated, heterosexual, childbearing marriage. In fact, the obsession with
the procreative function of sex can be reductive in itself, giving so much
primacy to biology and the survival of the species that you lose sight of any
other creative possibility.
What is Roman Catholicism saying to the sizable percentage of the
human population that is infertile, has a different physical or hormonal
makeup, yearns to be the opposite sex or grew up oriented toward the same sex?
Stifle who you are. You can be it, technically speaking, but dont express
it, dont use it to build a relationship, dont integrate it with the
rest of you.
If youre desperately lonely, or you do feel a vocation to
love someone intimately and share your life with that person -- ignore your own
inclinations. Get some therapy, summon every ounce of energy youve got
and shift your natural orientation counterclockwise, so you can live as society
and the church dictate and make babies.
Those babies wont thank you for it. Tom says when he was
married, theyd all be putting up the Christmas tree, and his wife would
start to hum Christmas carols, and hed tell her to shut up. Hes not
proud of that. But its the kind of thing that happens when youre
spending all your energy repressing and suppressing and masquerading and hating
yourself and hating the charade.
Somehow I dont think thats how our creator intended us
to live. I dont think he would have given Oscar Wilde a job selling
insurance and a house and three kids in the suburbs. I dont think he
would tell Jenny shes a freak of nature because shes
neither male nor female. I dont think hed condemn her to
involuntary celibacy and solitude, either.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called love the most powerful and
still the most unknown energy of the world. Weve tapped only a
fraction of its potential. And thats as true of physical love as it is of
spiritual. In fact, its the times these two dimensions merge that remind
us of marriages ongoing sacramentality.
Little by little, love becomes distinct, Teilhard
wrote elsewhere, though still confused for a very long time with the
simple function of reproduction. No longer only a unique and periodic
attraction for purposes of material fertility; but an unbounded and continuous
possibility of contact between minds rather than bodies ... the pull towards
mutual sensibility and completion.
Our bodies can help us realize that.
If we let them.
Jeannette Batz is a staff writer at The Riverfront
Times, an alternative newspaper in St. Louis.
National Catholic Reporter, February 26,
1999
|