by Brian Killian on January 5, 2010
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?
by Brian Killian on December 19, 2009
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.
by Brian Killian on December 18, 2009
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.
by Brian Killian on December 13, 2009
According to Christian revelation, God is love. Love is identical with God’s nature. It is said that in God alone, is his nature identical with his existence. Since God’s nature is love itself, his existence is love and love is his existence. There is no distinction between his nature, his existence, and love. But if God alone is the very nature of love, then every created thing can not be love; no other creature can have a nature that is identical with love itself; they can love, but they can not be love.
But angels and men, and any other creatures out there that are rational, are made to love and for love. It is the nature of rational creatures to love, but love is not the nature of rational creatures. Love is not the very essence of their being, as with God. Since love is not the nature of creatures, they must perform acts of love in ways that are not identical with their being.
For human beings there is a further implication. If we are to show love, if we are to give love, not only will those action not be identical with our being, but they must be actions that are communicated through our bodies. We have no other way to communicate our being than through our bodies and through material things in general.
This means that for human beings, there is no action that simply is love. There are only actions that have some other more immediate goals and purposes. From these actions which are other-than-love, we must turn them into acts of love. If we are to love at all, we have no choice but to assume these acts into love, and turn them into symbols of love.
If we are going to show love, we have to use the raw material at our disposal. That material is supplied by our bodies, the biological necessities of our animal existence, etc. And so in most cases, it will involve giving food to those that are hungry, and drink to those that are thirsty, and clothing to those who are naked. These are actions that Christ told us are done to him when they are done to "the least of the brethren".
The primary purpose of food is to nourish. But in some cases, the giving of food takes on a further importance, it becomes the medium for someone to show love and concern to another person. It becomes an expression of love.
Does not every act of human love have this characteristic? We can’t love except in and through the limitations of being living, physical beings with bodies.
by Brian Killian on December 12, 2009
My initial plan for NP was that it would be a place where I would only publish polished articles with some great eye candy; and that the overall look and feel of the site would be sort of fantasy-ish, pointing to the mystery and the transcendent in human love and sexuality.
That’s what I still intend it to be eventually. But I’ve realized that I need to work through my ideas more before I can create that kind of content. So, for a while anyway, I will be posting shorter, less polished, less coherent, and more spontaneous entries (but at least they will be more often–probably). Some of them may even be the ramblings of a mad man, but oh well. I still have a few older articles that are relevant that I will publish here too.
From this chaos of ideas and reflections, I hope to organize my thinking better and build them up into some really awesome articles.
So thats the program for the next little while. If you have any thoughts about this, shoot me an email!
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.
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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.
The Spirit and the Flesh
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?
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by Brian Killian on October 27, 2009
Since persons are rational and moral, it would not be charitable or just to treat other persons as if they were mere non-rational objects. Mere objects are capable of serving our needs without much of an ethical problem. But no one enjoys being someone else’s tool.
When we use another person, we are not doing justice to the nature of who they are. We are treating them as if they were not persons, as if the person was not even there. This is the same problem with lust. Lust doesn’t see the person, it only sees flesh. When a human being is the object of lust, that person is invisible. Lust’s gaze fails to penetrate deep enough to see the person. If desire manages to see the other person, it understands the body as the medium through which that person is reached. Seeing through to the person breaks the spell of lust because the shallow gaze of lust can no longer maintain the illusion that the body exists as mere ‘flesh’, as something which is a mere tool for my personal excitement and satisfaction.
When the body is seen as the the body of this person, it is more easily seen as something relational, something through which the person communicates his or her being. This is the aim of virtues like chastity, to properly educate and integrate desire to see all the way to the person, to see the whole reality and not just stop at the flesh on the level of mere titillation.
But this is what happens in all forms of using, the person drops out of sight, he or she becomes invisible. We should never use another person, sexually or otherwise. The reformation of sexual desire has as its aim, to always make person visible; the man for the woman, and the woman for the man.
This is part of a series on the book Love & Responsibility by Pope John Paul II. This book was written before what is now called the Theology of the Body, and is more accessible. This series tries to break it down into even more digestible pieces.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” ~ John 12:24
What we call “bread” contains the mystery of the Passion. Before there can be bread, the seed—the grain of wheat—first has to be placed in the earth, it has to “die,” and then the new ear can grow out of this death. Earthly bread can become the bearer of Christ’s presence because it contains in itself the mystery of the Passion, because it unites in itself death and resurrection. This is why the world’s religions used bread as the basis for myths of death and resurrection of the godhead, in which man expressed his hope for life out of death.
….Jesus is no myth. He is a man of flesh and blood and he stands as a fully real part of history. We can go to the very places where he himself went. We can hear his words through his witnesses. He dies and he is risen. It is as if the mysterious Passion contained in bread had waited for him, had stretched out its arms toward him; it is as if the myths had waited for him, because in him what they long for came to pass.
Joseph Ratzinger
