IN
EXILE
By
Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In
sexuality, the church and world have much to learn from each other
The church doesn’t
understand passion and the world doesn’t understand purity. That’s
an axiom a friend of mine likes to use to explain why the moral landscape
around sexuality is as it is, polarized, intransigent and particularly
ill-equipped to invite people to assess their sexual lives honestly.
A healthy sexuality is predicated
equally on both passion and purity, but that is a truth both the church
and the world struggle to accept. Each tends to highlight half of that
equation.
Few analysts have articulated this with as much insight (and real understanding of both sides) as has Charles Taylor in his monumental work on western culture, A Secular Age. In a section of the book entitled The Age of Authenticity, Taylor analyzes the sexual revolution as precisely a search, however misguided at times, for authenticity. He suggests that it was not just hedonism and rebellion that drove, and are driving, the sexual revolution and radically changing how today’s generation thinks about sex.
We should not, he says, treat
the sexual revolution simply as an outbreak of hedonism that has radicalized,
as though its reality would fit into the discourse of Hugh Hefner and
Playboy. The sexual revolution was triggered by our culture’s
attempt to do a number of things. What things?
By its attempt to rehabilitate
the goodness of sensuality itself, to affirm the equality of the sexes,
to free women of stereotypical gender roles, to affirm sex as liberating
(the Dionysian ideal), and to highlight the conception that sexuality
is an essential part of one’s identity (as can be seen in the
language around gay liberation). The sexual revolution carries inside
itself much more than is found in Playboy or in the simple notion (now
prevalent in our society) that sexuality can be cut off from its link
to marriage. While hedonism and rebellion do play a role, much more
than Hugh Hefner and hormones undergird the mammoth shift in our sexual
mores and in our understanding of sex.
But, with that being acknowledged,
it is also becoming evident that the dream of sexual liberation as expressed
in much of today’s culture is sometimes pretty naïve. What
initially feels like liberation can soon feel like defeat. There is
enough bitterness within our relationships and there are enough broken
lives and murder-suicides in our world to alert us to a fact that we
would rather not admit, namely, that sexuality cut off from a long-sanctioned
link to the sacred, to community and to lifelong commitment sometimes
turns very ugly. Why? Are there inherent flaws inside the new sexual
morality?
For Taylor the new sexual
morality is not so much flawed (at least in its higher ideals) as it
is naïve. Jacques Maritain once suggested that only two types of
persons conceive of love as easy: those who through long years of sacrifice
are already saints, and those who have no idea what they’re talking
about. Much of our discourse today about sex, I fear, falls into the
latter category. Taylor simply submits that the dream often turned out
badly. Why? What went wrong?
The hard discontinuities
and dilemmas which beset human sexual life, and which most ethics tend
to ignore or downplay, had to assert themselves: the impossibility of
integrating the Dionysian into a continuing way of life, the difficulty
of containing the sensual with a continuing really intimate relationship,
the impossibility of escaping gender roles altogether and the great
obstacles to redefining them, at least in the short run. Not to mention
that the celebration of sexual release could generate new ways in which
men could objectify and exploit women. A lot of people discovered the
hard way that there were dangers as well as liberation in throwing over
the codes of their parents.
However, even given this
admitted failure, people are not flocking in large numbers to their
churches to seek guidance for their sexual lives. Why not?
Because the churches, past
and present, have been too reluctant to radiate much appreciation for
those elements, beyond hedonism and adolescent rebellion, that undergird
the sexual revolution. The churches have for the most part, and rightly
so, defended purity and chastity, and, in their best counsel, have also
shown how real passion is dependent upon purity. But often that defence
has been too one-sided.
Here is how Taylor puts it:
People are searching for
moral codes to help guide their sexuality, both for themselves and their
children. The churches need to offer their teachings. But these can’t
be simply identical to the codes of the past; insofar as these were
connected with, for example, the denigration of sexuality, horror at
the Dionysian, fixed gender roles or a refusal to discuss identity issues.
Taylor, himself a devout churchgoer, then adds: It is a tragedy that
the codes which churches want to urge on people still (at least seem
to) suffer from one or more, even sometimes all, of these defects.
A healthy sexuality is both
passionate and pure. The church and the world can learn from each other.
Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website: www.ronrolheiser.com.
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