ACT 3 Weekly : March 3, 2008
Sexuality and the Lord's Supper: Part Two
March 3, 2008
John H. Armstrong
Christianity should have a strikingly different view of sexuality than other non-Christian religions or philosophies for one primary reason-we cherish creation, and thus believe sexuality is fundamental to our humanity as creatures made in God's image. Christians believe, if they are orthodox, that the human body is good. The body is central to all other Christian teaching. God creates our bodies and then draws us to himself in the human flesh and blood of the man, Christ Jesus.
Our central sacrament, regardless of what Christian tradition we represent, is the Lord's Supper. Here the body is again central. In mystery, we partake of the body and blood of our Savior. And we believe he was raised from the dead in both body and soul.
But most Christians seem to be uncomfortable with their bodies. We find them baggage that weighs us down and prevents us from reaching our fullest spiritual potential. We somehow wish that we could shed them. We even speak of death as if it were liberation from bondage to our human flesh when in fact it is a sowing of our flesh into the earth from where it shall be raised fully and materially on the Last Day. We are not destined to ever be "bodiless spirits" floating around in heaven somewhere up there, or out there. This idea is closer to Descartes than to Paul and Jesus.
The assertion of a strong dichotomy between the spiritual and the material is not Christian. It is dualism and it is gnostic, the most ancient of all Christian heresies. Yet you hear this heresy regularly in Christian churches, especially conservative Protestant ones.
The Starting Point for Understanding Our Sexuality
In the last ACT 3 Weekly (February 25, 2008), I ended by arguing that the Lord's Supper is the proper starting place for understanding human sexuality. My point was that here there is real vulnerability. Here we have sacrifice and the real giving of a human body as a gift. This is the right place to begin all consideration of human sexuality precisely because this is the only place in which sex makes any real sense at all-it is a God-given reality that allows us to give ourselves away in a God-ordained way.
The Last Supper was clearly a risk. Jesus died because he loved so totally and took the risk. But, argues Timothy Radcliffe, to not take this risk "is even more dangerous" (What Is the Point of Being a Christian?, 96). Here is how C. S. Lewis put it:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell (The Four Loves, 111).
Love moves us out of ourselves where our individuality can then lead us to become real persons, living in communion as God the Father, Son and Spirit live. The Lord's Supper, rooted in the Last Supper established by Jesus with his disciples, was a time of community. But the community of his brothers was collapsing all around him as Jesus took upon himself the sin of the world. He was giving himself so totally to human persons that no person ever gave himself in this way. Says Timothy Radcliffe: "The Last Supper invites us not to run away from a crisis, but to embrace it, confident that it can bear fruit" (What Is the Point of Being a Christian?, 96).
The Place for Chastity
Chastity is not popular in our day. To be chaste is to embrace a quality or state of sexual abstinence. This includes a commitment to modesty and decency as well. This sounds fussy and foolish in our time. We have popular culture reminding us regularly that virginity is to be given away fairly soon in one's life or you are totally weird!
But the message of the Church is not chastity for the sake of chastity. It is chastity for the sake of love. "Chastity heals our loves by liberating them from fantasy," says Timothy Radcliife (What Is the Point of Being a Christian?, 97). Fantasy produces wild, bizarre mental images that do not correspond to anything in reality. Fantasy is not the same thing as imagination. Imagination is a positive creative force that leads us to form mental images that will actually allow us to understand or appreciate reality more deeply. A good imagination is to be cultivated while fantasy will always get you into real trouble.
This distinction is especially important when we think about sexuality. Fantasizing about sex as an object or an action is dangerous. Imagining the reality of a love bond with a person you have committed yourself to in a covenant is different altogether. Indeed, any human relationship that flourishes will need some creative imagination if it is to soar. Fantasizing will kill your real human relationships. Imagination (understood in the way that I have defined it) will help a good relationship be even better.
Further, chastity forces us to "get real." It fosters the imagination that leads to hope. And it corrects despair. This is precisely how a single person can live without sex and yet not fall into fantasy and personal devastation. (Singleness can be a calling and thus a unique gift. It appears to be an unusual gift, however, since the answer to loneliness generally offered to us in Scripture is marriage, an even more wonderful creational gift! Far too many evangelical teachers have not appreciated this point and have urged single adults to deal with fantasy in the wrong way.) Imagination focuses on the future in a proper way. Fantasy creates something in the moment and leads to despair. W. B. Yeats wrote, ""We fed the heart on fantasies, the heart's grown brutal from the fare." Chastity liberates us and makes our hearts human and tender.
Chastity helps us shape our lives into "a coherent story [that] can be told of it" (Radcliife, What Is the Point of Being a Christian?, 98). Because God has become, in the human body of Jesus Christ, we are called to be incarnate in our bodies. Chastity is generally thought of as the suppression of desire. But chastity is about living in the real world, the world that uses imagination but is not the world of fantasy.
Thomas Aquinas taught that no one can live meaningfully without sensual pleasure. He even said the one who teaches you that pleasure is evil "is bound to be caught in some pleasure" (Summa Theologica II.II.151.1).
Pleasure
Pleasure is the feeling and delight that we take in something that brings us joy. It is satisfaction and gratification. Pleasure is a God-given gift to us. I am thus suggesting, as the Church has always taught when it was at its best, that sexuality is given to us for our pleasure.
And I am further suggesting that fantasy kills real pleasure. There are two forms of fantasy that will kill sexuality and make it unhealthy: infatuation and lust. Infatuation will make you foolish and thus you will lose sound judgment. When we treat sex with infatuation it loses its giftedness and power to bring pleasure. At the other end of the spectrum is lust. Lust, in the Christian sense, is excessive desire, or seeking for unrestrained gratification. Christian virtue is found between these two mirror opposites.
The cure for both of these errors is to have true love and thus to give yourself to someone that you live with day after day. By this you will soon see that they are not God, nor are you. And you will also see that they cannot fulfill your fantasies. You will be healthier the more you surrender yourself to the giftedness of this relationship in this manner.
This is also precisely what happens at the Eucharist. We see that we are not God. We are delivered of all our spiritual fantasies. We imagine, if we are using our minds wisely as framed by the Holy Scripture, that the glories that are to come, as well as the sacrifice that brought this gift to us, are what remain real in this broken world.
Conclusion
But even sexuality, as good a gift as it is, can not satisfy our desires fully and completely. Augustine was right when he said that we are capax Dei, or made for God. "Our hearts find no peace until they rest in you" (Confessions, Book 1, 1, 3).
We find no comfort in another person until we realize each of us is truly alone before God. Every one of us needs solitude and space. This cannot be done away with, and marriage is never meant to remove it. A good marriage recognizes this reality and even nurtures it while at the same time it seeks deeper and deeper communion with the one loved.
In our modern context we are always faced with the danger of making the other person an object for our desire. We do not receive the personhood of the other, in all their goodness and weakness, and thus we cut them up into pieces that we devour and use. The words of Matthew 5:29 ring in our ears if we know the teaching of Jesus. He is not teaching self-mutilation here. I think he is saying something like this-if we do not wish to be mutilated by others then we must not lust after them. This practice and discipline of chastity is thus given to us so that we can live well in the real world.
The Church has a message for all-single, married or homosexual. Sexuality is a gift to be used in a way that bonds a man and a woman in a covenant. And this covenant is mysteriously connected with the covenant meal, the Lord's Supper. Here we see that God gives us himself. We do not set the Table. In receiving his body and blood we do not take the meal on our terms but rather on his. We come at his invitation. We partake as he gives himself to us. We celebrate what he has done and is even now doing. There is profound mystery here, just as there is in the gift of sexuality. This mystery must be taken on his terms or it will be destroyed by human fantasies that are self-destructive. If we could grasp this we would have a message for this generation that doesn't sound so much like judgment as blessing.
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