It all began in the Garden of Eden - this notion that human sexuality has been tainted from the beginning - that sex is bad for us. According to the Genesis story, when Adam and Eve saw themselves naked, they "were not ashamed"[1] - at first. But when they ate the forbidden apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they instinctively knew God would be angry, and so they hid themselves. When the Creator found them and discovered they had disobeyed, God condemned the woman to pain in childbirth and the man to a life of toil.
When Saint Augustine of Hippo - youthful lecher turned church father - got hold of this story he transformed it into the concept of original sin - linking Adam and Eve's rebellion against God with their sexuality: There is none so pious as a reformed sinner. "For lust is a usurper," he wrote, "defying the power of the will and playing the tyrant with man's sexual organs."[2]
The late Bishop James Pike mockingly portrayed the orthodox Christian notion of original sin - not as "the apple in the tree, but the pair on the ground."
Augustine apparently forgot the Song of Songs or Solomon, with its erotic love poetry. It makes no mention of God - is completely humanistic - speaks of love's passion - not, as later apologists would have it - as love of Christ and Church. And I read you only the less steamy section. So it goes with the mistaken identity of sexuality and sin. And so on this Valentine's Day a focus on love - and sex - and sin - and a thesis that human sexuality, far from being an original sin, is an original blessing.
Sex and sin have been much in the news lately. President Clinton, impeached but acquitted, has put sexuality at the top of the national media agenda forever it seems. The longtime editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association was fired for publishing a study concluding that college student definitions of sexual relations were in line with the President's - coitus, not oral sex, qualifies. Monica Lewinsky took offense when one of the House Managers described her relationship with the president as "salacious." One House manager's "salacious" is a Generation Xers "sex." What a moral miasma we have created!
The political fallout of this sordid affair came down - ironically, on the accusers: Newt Gingrich is gone for overemphasizing the scandal; heir apparent Bob Livingston resigned rather than face up to past sexual peccadilloes; and several anxious Congressmen wait for Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt's other shoe to drop - presumably exposing their unfaithful past. Sexual McCarthyism is alive and well in Washington.
And then there is the case of Dr. Laura Schlesinger, whose morning talk show on relationships is fast overtaking the fading Rush Limbaugh. A recent convert to Orthodox Judaism, her moral code is strict. Dr. Laura's fans admire her no-nonsense cut-to-the-chase response to troubled callers. Her critics are uneasy with her spontaneous and cryptic answers to the most complicated relational questions. I would not dare to make such sweeping pronouncements about what people should do with their lives - even after counseling with them in person. But then came the crushing revelation - a long-ago lover who helped launch her career became miffed at her and posted nude photos of Dr. Laura on the Internet. Is nothing sacred?
Speaking of the Internet, here is a high-tech means for purveying so-called "adult entertainment" and contributing to the notion that sex is naughty. Just last week the following message appeared - unsolicited - on my screen at church: "It's new, hot and sizzles. What are we talking about? We are talking about a FREE adult site. That's right, come get your FREE membership to the greatest adult site on the Internet. This site was rated as one of the top 10 adult sites on the net and you can get it for FREE. Just point your browser to (to protect the innocent I will not divulge the address) and enjoy your FREE adult entertainment. You must be of legal age to view this site." So goes our obsession with sex of the most impersonal kind.
Sex has always been a staple of the motion picture industry, but two recent films have reminded us why. They stand apart from the tedium of sexual violence that seems to dominate our cinema. Shakespeare in Love is the fictional tale of the bard's love affair, its plot paralleling Romeo and Juliet. This William is a young and promising playwright with writer's block. Enter the lovely Viola and voila, he is inspired. The uninspired Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, becomes the love classic Romeo and Juliet, presumably growing naturally out of the author's life experiences.
It is good theater though this Shakespeare has but one emotion - intensity - and Viola always is breathtakingly beautiful, whether as his female romantic inspiration or dressed as a boy, playing Romeo in the play's rehearsal. Their love scenes are torrid; the lovers save the play by acting out the plot -- this time with Shakespeare as Romeo, and Viola as Juliet. The movie ends as does the play - with the lovers separated - though by geography, not by death.
While this is a wonderfully entertaining comic romp through romantic love, it does little to answer our question, is sex bad for us? By conventional American standards - and Americans are sexually very conventional, puritanical - at least rhetorically - here is illicit love. After all, Both through much of their "affair," are married to others - although unhappily so. True love should conquer convention, but it doesn't. Why does love so often fail to work out the way it is supposed to? Love can be tragic.
The other cinematic period piece is the totally modern You've Got Mail, which is as up-to-date as the latest computer out of Comp USA. Here is a charming fluff piece built around the overwhelming commercial power of a mega-bookstore, masterfully promoted by Tom Hanks, and the nearby, hapless little mom-and-pop children's bookstore, lovingly tended by Meg Ryan. They meet on-line, and there is such a virtual explosion of cyber-tenderness that their E-mail personas fall in love.
Finally they discover they are bitter competitors; but this time love triumphs over commerce and one supposes they live happily ever after, no doubt reading the "great books" in the great mega-store. The larger social issue of commercial juggernauts destroying the small family businesses is lost in the riveting power of romantic love. Here we must surmise that sex is good for us - for it can blur business ethics into the inconsequential, while two lovers replace cyber-love with the real thing.
Two films, then, which barely scratch the surface of human sexuality, which celebrate the libido with little regard for anything else. Except one knows that the poignancy of Shakespeare's tragically lost love fans the creative flame of his genius, and that the rampaging mega-stores will continue to gobble up the mini-stores, and lovers can meet in cyber-space.
What can we learn from all this? From our national obsession with presidential sex? From the off-air lives of talk-show pundits of sexual virtue? From the cinematic excesses of romantic love?
I have concluded that the president's sexual habits should be none of our business, but that they are apparently everyone's business; that one's huge ego and over-active libido can get one in trouble; that while a politician may master the levers of politics, he is as subject to sexual temptation as the next; that disloyalty, sexual exploitation and dishonesty may not get one thrown out of office, but do lower the nation's moral bar; that while William Jefferson Clinton may get an "A" for politics, he gets an "F" for personal morality and for distracting the nation with his juvenile affair.
I have learned from Dr. Laura, who has repented, confessed and reformed, that people in morally opaque glass houses should throw stones of advice with a touch of humility. Our love lives are far more complicated than can be discerned in a sound-byte. She is in a hurry to help, cautioning her nervous callers to slow down, while she machine-guns answers to their most complex and pressing problems - answers received with a reverential, "Oh, thank you, Dr. Laura," as if hers were the word of God.
I have learned from the movies that the passionate romances of the silver screen bear scant resemblance to the ordinary sexual lives of most of us - unless a lot of us are having a lot more fun than I think we are. It is emotionally appealing to view these images on screen - the likable Tom Hanks; the delectable Meg Ryan; the passionate Joseph Fiennes; and the delicious Gwyneth Paltrow. But Academic Award performances aren't really very helpful as we struggle to relate to our lovers. Is sex really that good?
I also take issue with Saint Augustine and his modern apostles that sex is bad for us. Far from being the original sin, human sexuality is an original blessing - it helps make us what we are; it perpetuates the race; it lifts us above the struggle to survive. Sex is, or at least can be, good for us. I am reminded of the introduction to a lecture on sex which was over long, and concluded - finally, - "Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure!"
Pleasure, yes, but more than pleasure. I find perspective in the poetry of sensitive souls who realize that sexuality is about overcoming our ultimate loneliness, about bridging the gaps between people, about feeling more at-home in an often impersonal universe; about loving and being loved; about expressing our feelings when words just get in the way. And so I share with you, this Valentine's Sunday, poetic snippets which persuade me that sex - at least loving sex - is good for us.
The neo-pagan Starhawk writes of the ecstatic nature of human sexuality, as ecstasy blends with spirituality: "(I)n sex we merge, give way, become one with another, allow ourselves to be caressed, pleasured, enfolded, allow our sense of separation to dissolve. But in sex we also feel our impact on another, we see our own faces reflected in another's eyes, feel ourselves confirmed, and sense our power, as separate human beings, to make another feel."[3]
Here is the inherent mysticism of good sex - the feeling of union with the other and a sense of kinship with the wider universe - the feeling that we are affirmed as loveable people, that we have the power to affirm another person. - that is a singular blessing.
Arthur Davison Ficke reminds us that in a world of "sweat and blood," making love can transcend the dinginess and create something beautiful - a "gentle sacrament."
"Love is the simplest of all earthly things.
It needs no grandeur of celestial trust
In more than what it is, no holy wings:
It stands with honest feet in honest dust,
And is the body's blossoming in clear air
Of trustfulness and joyance when alone
Two mortals pass beyond the hour's despair
And claim that Paradise which is their own.
Amid a universe of sweat and blood,
Beyond the glooms of all the nations' hate,
Lovers, forgetful of the poisoned mood
Of the loud world, in secret ere too late
A gentle sacrament may celebrate
Before their private altar of the good."[4]
But there is another dimension in human sexuality which transcends the physical. There is a regrettable Hollywoodization of sex and romance and love with those beautifully contoured and muscled bodies, those perfect faces and dulcet tones with inevitable and invisible stringed instruments in the background. I found Nancy Westerfield's "A Light Touch of Love" most loving, most powerful, most compelling, most real.
"The woman at the salad bar, accompanied
By a one-armed man, shares such
An animated understanding of his choices
That we who watch know they chose
Each other twenty-odd years ago. Laughing,
She goes ahead of him, balancing his salad
With her own. The sleeve that hangs
A hook for a hand touches between them.
In a sudden burst of tenderness, she threads
Her fingers through the iron claw, and draws
It to her. It is him.
Watching, we whom her tenderness challenges
To turn to each other with as light
A touch of love, see how the iron hand
Shot from time's sleeve has clawed
The face across the table, leaving what
Once we never would have chosen to begin
The infinite journey down the salad bar.
Changed we are, changed bitterly, but changeable
Again, by the lightest of love's disarming
Touches, into a chosen her, a chosen him."[5]
We're not all the "beautiful people;" we can't all whisper poetic phrases into the ear of the beloved; our own tragi-comic lives probably aren't the stuff of great drama; hopefully our sexual activities won't make the evening news. But our admittedly clumsy attempts at loving and being loved are real; they are genuine; they help us move through our lives with less loneliness; they help give us reason to be.
And sex is not for the young alone despite what the culture says. There is intimacy of another kind - physical, yes, but increasingly spiritual as well - far perhaps from the bursts of passion that marked our youth - but deeper perhaps than then. Archibald MacLeish writes of "The Old Gray Couple."
"They have only to look at each other to laugh
no one knows why, not even they:
something back in the lives they've lived,
something they both remember but no words can say.
They go off at an evening's end to talk
but they don't, or to sleep but they lie awake
hardly a word, just a touch, just near,
just listening but not to hear.Everything they know they know together -
everything, that is, but one:
their lives they've learned like secrets from each other;
their deaths they think of in the nights alone."[6]
Is sex bad for us? No. Augustine was wrong. Human sexuality is not our rebellion against God. At its best it is a liberation - not from responsibility, not from caring, not from comforting - but from loneliness. It is a bond that liberates, a human communion.
Human sexuality is a daemon - not a demon as in demonic - but a daemon - as in the emotional energy within us longing for, insisting upon, expression. The daemonic in this sense has the power to take over the whole person - for good or ill. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, "If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well."[7]
The daemonic will be expressed - come what may. If it cannot be expressed in loving another human being totally - it can be expressed in service to humanity, in artistic creativity - but also in tawdry ways that simply gratify our immediate physical needs, that exploit the feelings of others for the sake of our own; that are devoid of meaning and commitment.
In common parlance we speak of human sexuality as "making love" as if love were something that we manufacture, produce, construct. Where did we ever get that notion - reducing that deep expression of human feeling to an assembly line? Making love is not about presidential peccadilloes, or talk-show wisdom, or Academy Award movies. It is about affirming that we are good, that our partner is good, that love is the bond between us and that it is good to be alive, to be alive together.
Making love is of body, spirit and soul; it is the work of a lifetime;
The joy of existence; the pain of parting.
Making love is not what we do, but what we are.
Where love is - there is holy ground.
We are, therefore, we love,
Cosmic bits of mass and energy come to life together.
We love, therefore, we are. May we be humble before the wonder
Of what we dare to create.
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