Let's Talk About Chastity

Last week in this column on ‘gnarly questions’ I wrote about the basic Catholic theological understanding of the sexual act and its meaning – an embodied reflection of God’s love for creation and for humanity, hence an act occurring in a context of irrevocable commitment (marriage) and ordered towards creativity and life (pro-creative).

I am always amused at the commenters on such blog posts who feel it is necessary to inform me that Not! Everyone! Agrees! With! This! Ummm… yes, dear. I am aware that there are actually people in the world and even in the pews who do not quite agree with what the Catholic Church teaches about sex and marriage. This is not a well kept secret.

I ended last week’s blog post by asking ‘what about all the people who, under this understanding of sex, cannot morally engage in sexual intercourse?’ The unmarried, the gay—what about them? Does the Church then condemn them to a life of misery and loneliness? How can we be so cruel as to say to people that they must live their lives alone, alone, alone, forever alone, without love, without companionship, without anyone who cares for them or for whom they care.

Because of course the only possible way to have someone in your life who you care for and who cares for you, the only possible way to have ‘love’ in your life, is to go to bed with someone, right? 

Actually, that’s not the Church who says that; that is our world and our culture that says that.

It is not the Church who condemns people to live lonely lives if they cannot find a sexual partner; it is the world that does that by deciding that the only possible way a person can have a close and loving relationship in this life is by sexual pairings. There is a problem here, but the problem is not what the Church teaches—it is that our society has lost the very concept of friendship and real social networks of care and concern, treats people as economic cogs in a giant wheel who can only find respite from the cold isolation of modern urban-industrial life by clutching on to one another in either long-term (but by no means life-long) sexually intimate relationships or (more and more frequently) short-term casual hookups.

So let’s talk about chastity. If it just happens to be true that sexual intercourse bears a divine meaning that can only be faithfully expressed in marital sex oriented towards life, then what about the reality that all of us have a sexual drive, have sexual desire, but a considerable percentage of the population are not able to ethically have sex? Even if this number is currently inflated beyond what is normal for humanity, due to economic and sociological pressures that make it difficult for people to get married (again, a situation that is not the Church’s fault, but society’s), nonetheless it is a simple fact that even in a healthy functioning society there will always be a large number of people who should not be sexually active, according to Catholic moral teaching.

This is not a situation of misery and endless desolation! Our sexuality, our capacity for generativity in love, that aspect of our humanity that is both a matter of intense pleasure and desire, but which far transcends the merely physical to reach the level of spirit and life, identity and personhood—there is much more to it, actually, than its seeming completion in the act of sexual intercourse.

The simple fact is, our existence as sexual beings means that our whole personhood is in its raw physicality ordered towards the ‘other’. We are not sufficient unto ourselves. As our bodies require food for life, so our bodies require another person for love. But as our bodies’ physical hunger for food points to that deeper hunger, that deeper life that comes to us from the life of The Other, so our bodies’ hunger for love and union points us to a deeper Love and a Communion that is far beyond what sexual union can bring us.

Both these basic physical drives—food and sex—essentially serve in their well-ordered expression to pull the person out of the fortress of the autonomous independent self into a position of inter-subjectivity, relationship, need. But as food in the vice of gluttony becomes food at the service of the ego, at the service of the untethered will, so sex in the vice of lust becomes mere use of the other to satisfy the appetite.

Chastity—well-ordered sexuality either in its lawful use in marriage or in celibate continence outside of marriage—is the virtue whereby our sexuality is held in this deeper context and meaning, and prevented from its terrible tragic degradation into lust and use.

And the answer to this terrible fear that sexual continence will deliver us to loneliness and misery lies, not in abandoning God’s moral order about sex and marriage, but in a spiritual revolution whereby all of us—married or single—come  to know and believe that we are made ultimately not for the other, but for The Other, for God, and that the answer to loneliness, isolation, and the sadness of our human condition lies not in flesh and blood but in our entry into the Communion of the Holy Trinity, our divine destiny in which all the desires of our souls and bodies will be at last satisfied.

I do realize that there is so much more to be said on all of this—a blog post can only be so long, and say so much. But that is what I have to say on the matter, at least in this context.

Let's Talk About Sex

So why does the Church hate gay people? Why does the Church hate sex, generally? Women? The human body? Pleasure? Why is the Church so darned hateful, hateful, hateful? Why can’t it just get with the program like everyone else has?

Ah, gnarly questions, my new blog series! It had to come around to sex eventually, didn’t it? I want to talk in the blog post about the basic teaching of the Church regarding human sexuality—not this issue or that, but the fundamental teaching without which all the ‘rules and regs’ just seem arbitrary, bizarre, and frankly just plain mean.

Now I realize full well that at least some people read the blog who just ain’t buying what the Church is selling on this matter. I ask those people to at the very least try to understand what the Church is saying and why. At least know what it is you’re rejecting.

And of course most people reading this blog are Catholic and do accept what the Church teaches, maybe with struggles at times, but nonetheless. For all of you folks, I suggest that the basic teaching is simple enough, but there are heights and depths in it that need to be explored and that have implications far beyond the ‘rules and regs’ of what we can and cannot do in our sexual behavior.

So what is the fundamental thing at stake here, in this whole messy business of sex? The essential positive teaching, the teaching about what sex is that determines all of the negative teachings about what sex is not (and therefore what we should not do, sexually), is that sexual intercourse has an inherent meaning.

Furthermore, the meaning of sexual intercourse, the sexual act, is not something human beings have devised, which can thus be changed at will. It is not something private or individualistic—you decide what having sex means for you, and I will decide what it has for me. No, the sexual act has a meaning, and that meaning is created by God. And our whole sexuality is important—it is not some trivial afterthought of our humanity, but is a central and vital part of what it means to be human (finally, something on which the Catholic Church and the most dedicated progressive libertine can agree!).

And the meaning of the act of sexual intercourse is fundamentally a simple one. It is meant to be a physical, bodily expression of the love of God for his creation, the love of God for the human person, you and me, and specifically the love of Christ for redeemed humanity, the Church. Sex has a sacramental essence—it is meant to be a visible sign of the invisible reality of God and His passionate love for all He has made. It points beyond itself to something else

To be a faithful representation of God’s love made flesh in Jesus Christ, reflected and imaged in the actions of the body in our sexual being, means that we cannot just engage in sexual acts any old way. The way human beings have sex has to correspond to the way God loves the world, or it falsifies the reality it signifies.

And so God’s love is covenantal, faithful. God does not love us one day and turn away from us the next. God is not on again, off again. God does not use us. He is not a ‘friend with benefits’. God commits himself to loving his creation so much that when it is broken and wounded He becomes a man so as to be broken and wounded with it, and when it dies, He becomes a man so as to die with it. ‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health…’

So sex must occur within a committed relationship, and commitment does not just mean ‘until either one of us decides we’re not happy.’ That is… not what the word commitment means, right? Commitment means for life. Commitment means marriage. Sex outside of marriage is wrong because there is no commitment of the one to the other, and so it in no way, shape, or form corresponds to how God loves us.

And God’s love for us gives life, brings life. God is the creator. His love is fruitful. This time of year the whole of creation here in the Northern Hemisphere is exploding with new life. God’s fecundity, expressed through the natural cycles of the earth, is obvious. But His love in the human person is equally fruitful. Where God is present in a person’s life, that person’s life increases, there is growth, there is newness, there is fruit. Always and at all times.

So sex that is either inherently sterile (i.e. sex between two people of the same gender) or sex that has been deliberately made sterile (by an act of contraception) simply does not communicate the nature of God’s love. The two people involved may genuinely care for one another, but nothing can come from this love—no life, no newness, no fruitfulness.

People counter that the Church has no problem with an older married couple engaging in sexual intercourse, nor with couples having sex during the times of the month when the woman is not fertile. This is because they have done nothing themselves to sterilize themselves, and the act itself is still ordered towards generativity even though the natural process of aging or the natural rhythms of the woman’s body have made it non-procreative.

The bottom line is that God’s love is faithful and committed, an unbreakable bond, and God’s love is creative and fruitful, life-giving. Sex, to be a faithful sacramental sign of God’s love, must be within marriage and open to the generation of life. And I will say more next Wednesday about all the people who, therefore, cannot have sex (at least not in their current situation) and why the Church does not actually hate these people and is not condemning them to a horrible empty life. Next week!

Let's Talk About Judgment

Well, I’m not following any particular plan with this Wednesday series on the ‘Gnarly Questions’, the genuinely difficult matters of Catholic theology or faith practice that puzzle or confound many. Like so much else of this blog, it’s mainly a matter of what I’m thinking about when I wake up in the morning, or something I read this week or whatever.

That being said, let’s talk this time about a word that is one of the most red flag words around, a word guaranteed to get people’s hackles up and knives out, one way or the other. Let’s talk about judgment.

‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.’ (Matt 7: 1, Lk 6:37). These are the Lord’s own words, and we ignore them at our peril. To be a Christian is to be non-judgmental—let’s get that straight. ‘For with the judgment you make, you will be judged’ (Matt 7:2) – the consequences are grave if we do not come to grips with this call and live it out faithfully.

What does it mean, anyhow? The problem is that many people today abuse that one saying of the Lord by taking it out of its proper context, which is the whole of Scripture. And from that, they interpret ‘do not judge’ as meaning that we cannot advance any sort of moral norm, make any kind of claim as to the good and evil of specific human acts. The whole thing collapses into a sort of fuzzy relativism in which nobody can ever say to anyone else ‘You ought not do that.’

Well, that is silly. The moral law has been given to us as a gift to make our lives beautiful, not as a curse to burden and afflict us. Certain actions are morally wrong simply because, and only because, they harm us, harm particularly the one who does them. A specific action is morally good because it helps the one doing it become more the person he or she is created to become.

It is incoherent to say that, say, ‘murdering another human being is wrong’, and then, beholding Stanley bathed in the blood of Jim, not be able to say ‘Stanley has done a wrong thing.’ That is not being non-judgmental; that is being an idiot. Nor is it being non-judgmental to refuse on principle to go to Stanley and say ‘Yo, Stan, you have done a wrong thing there, killing Jim!’ That is not being non-judgmental; that is being a coward.

So what is non-judgment? It is the blank refusal to say that another person is in a state of sin. People do wrong things all the time, objectively manifestly wrong things. But whether they have actually sinned or not depends on a host of factors that are utterly unknown to us.

For an action to be a mortal sin, it has to be grave matter (something serious, Ten Commandment stuff). The person also has to have full knowledge that what they are doing is wrong. They have to be doing it freely and without compulsion, with deliberate intent (cf Catechism 1857). These latter two conditions are known only to God, since they pertain to the interiority of the person.

It is not a judgmental thing to say to a person, “You know, I really don’t think you should be doing that. Did you know that was against the moral law? It is, you know!” That is a work of mercy, actually, provided it is done with prudence and charity. It is a judgmental thing to say to someone, “You are a sinner – you’re going to go to Hell if you don’t cut that out right now.”

Mind you, most of us, in our judgmentalism, don’t actually say those things out loud. The late Fred Phelps and his so-called ‘church’ (of ‘God Hates Fags’ notoriety) really are extreme outliers. But for many Christians it is more a matter of the up-turned nose, the pursed lips, the raised eyebrow, the dirty look, the cold demeanour, the sneer. And these things, because they cannot be directly countered or corrected, because they are matters of non-verbal and unspoken judgments, can be much more damaging in the end.

We have to pray for, and choose, really choose, to have a compassionate heart and a friendly disposition towards all men and women—the ones who always get it right and do everything they’re supposed to do (whoever those happy few may be), and the ones who struggle and fall down and are lost in any number of immoral paths and bad choices.

We don’t know how God sees them, although we do know He loves them enough to die for them. Perhaps we could love them enough to stifle our criticisms and carping and unkindness?

There is much more to say about this—so often we jump to conclusions about situations, make assumptions about what a person is doing and what is in their hearts, and our assumptions are quite often not charitable and are astonishingly often wildly inaccurate.

Judgment belongs to God. We are indeed to know what is right and what is wrong—why on earth would God want us to be ignorant of such vital matters? But to assess whether another person is in the grace of God or is cut off from Him—this is simply not our business and we indulge in such matters to our own immortal peril, as the Lord Himself took pains to tell us.

Do not judge, lest you be judged.

Let's Talk About Euthanasia

Well, judging from the 'Most Popular Posts' thingy on the right margin of the blog, my new series on 'Gnarly Questions' has immediately proven to be a hit, at least by the standards of this small blog. So let's carry on with it, and talk about one of the gnarliest of the gnarly questions of our day, euthanasia.

So what I have to say today builds on last week's blog post on the morality of suicide. If suicide itself is not understood to be a grave moral wrong, of course none of the Church's specific teaching on euthanasia makes any sense. If it is morally right to kill ourselves in other circumstances, there is no possible reason why it would be morally wrong to ask a doctor to give us a lethal injection.

I cannot possibly give the full and very nuanced Church teaching on this matter in one blog post. The Church's Declaration on Euthanasia from 1980 is still the authoritative teaching on the matter.

Essentially, we must take no direct action to end a person's life due to their being in a condition of terminal illness or chronic suffering. If the person asks us to do so and we comply, we are formally cooperating in the sin of suicide; if they have not asked us to do it and we do it nonetheless, we have committed the sin of murder.

There are nuances in this teaching that are important and have direct application to the real on-the-ground situations any one of us can come across in our lives. The Church does not hold to the ethic of vitalism, that is, the idea that life is to be preserved and prolonged for as long as possible, no matter what the cost to the person.

This makes no sense in the context of our larger vision of human life, in which this world and state of being is not our final goal. We must not take any step that would directly kill ourselves or another, but we are under no obligation to fight death to the last possible moment.

And so it is not euthanasia, not remotely, to decide to suspend medical treatments in certain circumstances. The Church currently uses the language of benefit vs. burden as a useful metric in making these decisions. If a treatment being proposed will yield little benefit for a person but is highly burdensome, then it is a perfectly moral decision for the person, or whoever they have delegated to make such decisions for them if they are incapacitated, to refuse that treatment. I am loathe to start going into specific examples, as this is an area where each situation has to be evaluated on its own merits and there are very few blanket statements that can be made.

It is also not euthanasia in any way, shape, or form, to give a person adequate pain medication to reduce their suffering. This is the case even when the dose of pain medication being given will indeed shorten the person's life by, say, compromising their respiratory system. The intent is what counts in these things--what is intended is to manage the person's pain, not to end their life. The proof of that intent would be that if there was some other way to manage the pain without the life-shortening effect, that method would be taken.

It is not euthanasia to remove artificial respiration when it has become clear that the person is not going to recover from, say, a massive aneurysm or other catastrophic event that has prevented them from even breathing on their own. That is allowing someone to die when that is what in fact they are doing; it is not deliberately causing their death by a positive action.

It is not euthanasia, even, in certain and very specific terminal conditions, to cease giving a person food and water. There is a point in the dying process when the body itself becomes unable to metabolize food and even, at the very end, hydration. At that point to force nutrition into a person is not actually 'feeding' them (since their body cannot absorb the nutrients), and in fact increases their suffering. On the other hand, to withdraw food and water in other circumstances is most definitely euthanasia, since the person has not yet entered that terminal phase of their illness, and their body does indeed want and can absorb food and water.

I go into all these things because it is confusing, otherwise. And in that confusion, the actual euthanasia--actually giving the person a lethal injection intended to kill them--can look like some of these other things. But it is radically different, and we must keep it clear. Choosing to let death happen when a person is actually dying is an entirely different thing than killing the person directly. One is a moral and humane thing to do; the other is a grave evil to be rejected.

Any questions? Fire away in the comments or on my Facebook page, and I will do my best to answer them.

Let's Talk About Suicide

Ooh, boy. Well, when I began this new column ‘Gnarly Questions’ last week, I wasn’t quite sure what I would be writing about this week. So why am I writing about suicide this week?

Well, on a small personal note, we received word this week that an old friend of MH for many years took her own life this week. So the subject is much on all of our minds here, obviously with a terrible sorrow for all who loved this person, myself included. So I apologize in advance if I bring a level of emotion to this blog post that I normally try to keep in check.

Actually, no, I don’t apologize for that. Too often we handle the topic of suicide with kid gloves and in consequence are not able to say hard things that need to be said about it, out of a misguided sense of compassion for its victims and its survivors. And I for one am sick of having to tip-toe around the subject in that way.

All the more so because suicide is one of the big topics of our day as well, in Canada at least, and I certainly would have gotten around to it as part of this series.

So let us begin by saying what so often is left unsaid in our discussion of the subject. Namely, suicide is a gravely evil act. It is one of the most evil things a person can do, not only because it involves the taking of a life, but because by the very act of committing suicide a person leaves themselves no chance to repent; it is literally the last choice the person makes, and it is a gravely evil one.

This does not mean that all people who commit suicide go to hell. Of course not, and anyone who thinks the Church says that is wildly deficient in their catechesis. The objective grave evil of the act does not necessarily translate into subjective guilt borne by the person, which depends on their freedom and knowledge. With suicide in particular, people more often than not kill themselves when the balance of their mind is disturbed and they are simply not thinking clearly. We draw a curtain over the whole question of subjective guilt and the state of the person’s soul, leaving that to God who alone can judge the living and the dead, and we pray for His mercy upon all.

But we need to do that, because (let me repeat myself) suicide is a horribly evil thing to do. Our lives are not our own—this is the key thing. Our lives belong to God, and it is for God and God alone to determine the manner and time of our deaths. I realize that for non-believers that is meaningless tripe; I am addressing this blog post to believers.

We have no right to commit suicide. We have no right to dispose of our lives when we see fit. It is an act of arrogating to ourselves the most sacred thing that belongs to God alone, and it is a wicked, wicked thing to do, even if psychic pain and a host of psychological factors mitigate or wholly remove the guilt of the one who does it.

I say this with some force for two reasons. First, it is not said often enough, generally because we are all aware of the terrible suffering and grief those left behind suffer from and do not wish to make it any worse. But by never coming out and saying flatly that suicide is a terribly wrong choice, we run the risk of implying that it is really not so wrong, really quite an understandable decision in this or that circumstance. And in that, we risk being complicit in the deaths of the suicidal.

But most importantly, physician-assisted suicide is coming to Canada whether we like it or not, and it is time for Catholics and all people to form their consciences properly. Suicide is evil—get it straight. It is an evil thing to do, so don’t do it. Do not end your life by committing one of the most evil actions a person can perform. Don’t go to God like that, please.

And the Canadian government, the Prime Minister and his cabinet members, in proposing and enacting this legislation (and let’s be realistic, they are going to push it through no matter what anyone says about it), are doing a wicked, wicked thing. May God have mercy on their souls.

Suicide will become the order of the day in Canadian hospitals. For people who are vulnerable—who are in some physical pain, who are afraid, who are worried about burdening their families, who are depressed in the face of a terminal prognosis—a kindly doctor will show up at their bedside and offer to end it all right now with one injection. It will all be couched in the language of comfort and mercy.

It will be a preying on the weakest and the most vulnerable members of the human community, at their hour of greatest desolation, to tempt them to do something that is monstrously evil that they will have no opportunity to repent of. Rather than accompanying a dying person through the dying process, surrounding them with the love and care of the community, doing everything possible to alleviate their pain, communicating to them with every small act of kindness and service we give them that their life is precious, that they are the most important person in the world right now, that we love them and will not abandon them no matter how hard it gets at the end… instead, we will just show up at their bedside, essentially tell them that the parts of their lives that were worth living are over now, and wouldn’t they rather just kill themselves. This is a moral evil that rises to the level of the demonic, to be perfectly frank, and I will not back down from that strong language.

Look, I know and you know it’s going to be legal in Canada. It’s going to happen and we can’t stop it, seemingly. But we can at least fight it, when it arrives at our own bedsides and the bedsides of the ones we love. We can tell the merchants of death to get the hell away from us and let us die like children of God, uniting our sufferings with Christ and bearing the gift and burden of life until its natural God-given end.

I am writing this blog post with one purpose and one purpose only: to dissuade even one person from choosing suicide in the face of illness, pain, and terminal illness. If I have succeeded in doing that, not only this blog post but my entire five years of blogging will have been worthwhile.

I will write more next week about specific issues around euthanasia proper—for now let us establish that suicide itself is a grave evil and must be resisted at all times. Our lives belong to God; we must not kill ourselves.