"...and the two shall become one flesh"
Sexual orientation is thought by some to be irrelevant to marriage, as is evident by the push to legalize same sex marriage. But marriage is not the only thing where it is thought to be non-essential. Those that defend the ordination to the priesthood of people with homosexual tendencies also argue that one’s sexual orientation is not a threat to the meaning of being a priest. Many of these arguments hold one premise in common: that what really matters is sexual maturity, not orientation.
To answer, we should ask if there is a mentality characteristic of those using contraception. A mentality that is different from those using NFP to accomplish the same goals.
Let’s try a little thought experiment. Let’s assume that there is no difference in environmental or health effects between NFP and contraception used for the identical purpose of avoiding pregnancy. Let’s also assume that the couple using NFP and the couple using contraception are both using their method for avoiding pregnancy for just reasons: another pregnancy would threaten the health of the Mother.
What would the difference in mentality be between the two couples? If you could avoid pregnancy for just reasons and never have to abstain from sex, why would anyone choose the more difficult path of self-denial and abstinence? What does each choice say about that person’s mentality and attitude? Anything at all?
For our cultural contraceptive mentality, where fertility is divorced from sex and no longer seen as an essential aspect of it, sex ends after intercourse ends.
But in reality, the nature and significance of sex reaches far beyond the individual act of intercourse. And only by seeing it in relation to everything it affects as a whole, does one really see what its true nature is.
We might say, then, that sex ends with the conception of a child. This brings fertility back in the picture, making an essential connection between sex and children. And this is correct, but we can go further.
Just because a wire is plugged into a socket, doesn’t mean there’s a connection.
If there is no electricity, there’s no connection; nothing to connect an individual thing, into the universal grid.
But if there is an electrical current flowing between them, they are connected to each other and connected with the grid.
The coupling of the male and female is not enough to establish unity. The electricity must be there, effecting a true and objective unity.
Fertility is electric. It’s what makes sex what it is. It’s the magic.
And it’s what connects two individuals to each other, and to the objective, universal purpose of the Creator.
The fertile nature of sex is a necessary component to being plugged in to one’s lover, to Nature, and to Nature’s God.
The metaphor of “bearing fruit” indicates something different than the mere production of something. “Production” is a manufacturing metaphor, but “fruit” is a metaphor taken from the world of living things.
Life has been traditionally defined as anything having a principle of growth, motion, and reproduction originating from within itself. That “vital force” is intrinsic, it comes from within, not from outside from some extrinsic force. It is from this unique kind of growth and movement found in the plant world that we get the metaphor “organic”. Something grows organically if it grows naturally from within, if it assimilates things into itself and where everything new that comes about is related to what came before.
When living things like plants and flowers bloom, we call it fruit.
But the way we bring things into being through our technology is much different. It is not organic. The process is something we have put together, it is not found within the materials that we use. It’s not the nature of silicon to act as a circuit board, we have to make it function that way. It is the nature of a cherry tree to grow cherries.
Life, and therefore fruit, is after all our technological progress, still a mystery. Even more mysterious is the nature of love, which involves freedom, knowledge, and choice. Love doesn’t produce things, it doesn’t make things, it bears fruit. “Love is diffusive of itself” the philosophers say.
Which metaphor is closest to the way the natural family comes into existence, the metaphor of fruit or the metaphor of manufacturing, technology, and production? Today, we can take the genetic material from two unrelated people, hire a surrogate mother, and give the resulting baby via adoption to gay men or women, and call that a family. Someday in the future, I’m sure we will have the technology to “grow” babies in artificial wombs. Then the government itself could regulate the population and could be called with even greater literalness a nanny state, raising its own children under the watchful eye of government employed “parents”, and this too would probably be called a family.
But how would this compare to the natural family? Is the manner in which these families come about organic? How does the unity of the natural family compare with the unity of a family thrown together through law and technology?
Would these families be equal, or would one be the mockery of the other?
Can technology reproduce the natural family? Can the natural family be “produced”?
Can technology replicate an act of love by human beings?
If you’re practicing Natural Family Planning, it quickly becomes evident that it’s hard to abstain during the fertile period. It’s so hard, that no one could do it without serious reasons. No frivolous reason can stand up to the force of Nature to keep life in bloom. NFP is like a motive filter. It rejects most of the selfish and superficial motives couples have to avoid children and ensures that only the most serious motive survives. You don’t have to worry if your reasons are serious or not, the sacrifice of abstinence will put them to the test.
Many think that the Catholic church only allows sex for the purpose of procreation. But actually, it could be argued that the Church is against the use of sex solely for procreation.
Having sex just to get pregnant can be just as utilitarian as having sex soley for pleasure. And utilitarian actions suffer from the grave danger of using another person. One can be used as an object of breeding just as well as an object of pleasure.
One can feel just as used when pregnancy becomes the all consuming object of one’s sex life, as when gratification becomes the all consuming object of one’s sex life.
If it’s true that the unitive and procreative dimensions of sexuality are inseparable; if it’s true that the unitive should not be separated from the procreative (contraception); and if it’s true that the procreative should not be separated from the unitive (IVF), then doesn’t it follow that we should never intend procreation alone and separate from the unitive? Is there such a thing as trying too hard to get pregnant?
But, what then is the object of sex if we are not to isolate the pleasure nor to isolate procreation?
I think the answer is that love is the object of sex. The Church is for making love. It’s because the Church is for making love that it says no to contraception, and no to lust and license, and no to producing children outside the protective womb of love. But sexual love is indeed inseparable from procreation. Procreation may not be the object of sex, but children are the natural fruit of making love. Try an take the fruit of this love out of the equation, and you cancel out the love itself.
Evangelical Christianity seems to be harboring two conflicting approaches to sex, which might be called the spirit approach and the flesh approach. The spirit approach refers to the Evangelicals who are questioning the nearly universal embrace of contraception that occurred after the 1930 Lambeth conference. According to Dr. Albert Mohler, young Evangelicals “are doing their very best to rethink the basic questions and, in doing so, they are embarrassed by the easy, rather unreflective embrace of the contraception culture that marked evangelicalism in the 1960s and ’70s. So they want to rethink all this.”And then there is also the small but growing “quiverfull” movement which completely rejects all contraception and family planning (including NFP) and aims at producing large godly families.
On the other hand there is the “flesh” approach, which refers to the disturbing trend among some evangelical pastors, in the name of correcting a lack of information about sex, of embracing a slightly modified version of the sexual revolution. This approach can be summed up as “don’t lust, except for your spouse.” Anything goes as long as you are heterosexual, married, and monogamous. A mainstream media series called America Unzipped did a profile of one such pastor, Joe Beam. Beam is a “sex expert” studying “sexology” in Australia. He gives his eager audience of evangelical Christians sexual advice that is too shameful to describe.
In the famous Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” a traveler comes to a fork in the road. He chooses a path, but knowing “how way leads on to way,” considers with some sadness the road not taken. Eros (sexual love or attraction) is also a path on man’s journey where two roads diverge.
St. Paul names these roads “Spirit” and “flesh.” Paul tells us to take the path of the Spirit, because the Spirit and the flesh are opposed to each other and the flesh keeps us from doing what we know to be good and right. Paul describes some of the attributes of these two paths. Included in the works of the flesh are “immorality, impurity, selfishness, and licentiousness.” But the fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” To which road does contraception belong, the Spirit or the flesh? Does it promote self-control or aid licentiousness?
We’ve all heard the word ‘narcissist’ before. But most probably don’t know the story behind it. There are many variations, but it is generally about a vain boy who arrogantly rejected all the nymphs that fell in love with him. Upon hearing the prayers of the jilted nymphs, the avenging Goddess put a curse on Narcissus so that he would feel what it was like to love and receive no return of affection.
The resulting curse is very suggestive for our own times. Here is a description of Narcissus’ fate:
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