by Daniel C. Maguire

At a meeting of scholars from the world’s various religions, a Chinese scholar reported that in China now they are starting to put free condoms in hotel drawers. Mustering as straight a face as I could I said: “We don’t do that in the United States. Instead, we put Bibles in the motel drawers on the assumption that if a couple come to have sex and find the Bible, they will read that instead.” With an equally strained straight face, the Chinese scholar asked: “Have you any data on this experiment?” I replied: “Yes, a very high rate of unplanned pregnancies.”

This story is a tale of two cultures. In this nation there is no possibility of putting free condoms alongside the mouthwash and shampoo provided in motels and hotels. It would offend our theocratic and Puritan sensibilities. In many ways, the United States is a functioning theocracy. The First Amendment hides this fact from view.

Let us sing praises to the First Amendment. Its purpose was not to banish religion from life; its purpose was to ensure that public policy will not be made by alleged divine inspiration but by reasoned discourse. In areas of sexuality and reproduction, the First Amendment has failed. Alleged divine inspiration is national policy on embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning. Even when national policy and constitutional law permit women to choose abortion, the theocratic culture rebels and manages by harassment, political pressure, and terror to make abortion unavailable in more than 80 percent of the nation.

The inability to face our sexuality, in Western culture, is to a great extent religiously grounded, with historical Christianity bearing enormous blame. Augustine saw sexual passion as the conduit of original sin, so heinous and infectious that the passion of parents that led to conception befouls the souls of newborns. Ambrose said the worldly marry but the children of the Kingdom of Heaven refrain from all fleshly lust. The Penitentials-early medieval books listing sins and their appropriate penances -prescribed that during times of prayer and on religious feasts, there must be no sexual activity. Thomas Aquinas conceded that marriage was a sacrament, but he said it was the least and last of the sacraments because it had the least spirituality. Sexual pleasure, even in marriage, was long thought to be sinful. And the rule was, the more pleasure, the more sin. William of Auxerre in the thirteenth century said that a holy man who has sex with his wife and finds it hateful and disgusting commits no sin. He added, with regret, “this, however, seldom happens.”

The twelfth century Petrus Cantor opined that sex with a beautiful woman was a greater sin since it caused greater delight. His contemporary Alain de Lille disagreed, saying sex with a beautiful woman was less sinful “because he was compelled by the sight of her beauty,” and “where the compulsion is greater, the sin is slighter.” Taken to its logical extreme, this would justify the rape of overwhelmingly beautiful women. Catholicism decided that only celibate hands can administer the sacraments. (In her textbook of Christian sexual pathology, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church, Uta Ranke Heinnemann chronicles the attitudes that suffused Christian history). The message is clear: sexuality is incompatible with spirituality. Sex is dirty, spirituality sublime. That is the legacy of much of Western culture.

Not even gentle masturbation could escape this indicting negativity: it has taken a cruel beating. The first psychiatry textbook published in the United States said that masturbation “produces seminal weakness, impotence, dysury, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary consumption, dyspepsia, dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, hypochondriasis, loss of memory, manalgia, fatuity and death.” Other experts thought this listing incomplete and added that it caused senility, stupidity, melancholy, homosexuality, suicide, hysteria, mania, religious delusions, auditory hallucination, conceit, defective offspring, and eventually racial decay. The masturbator, it was said is incapable “of any generous impulse or act of loyalty; he is dead to the call of his family, his country, or of humanity.”

How many masturbators reading this would like to plead guilty to those charges?

Errors about sexuality do not remain on the written page. They invade human life and sicken it, leading to destructive behavior and to what has been called ecclesiogenic psychoneurosis. In 1953 Kinsey and his colleagues in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female reported that Christianity has had a negative impact on women’s sexual pleasure; the more devout they were, the fewer orgasms they had. A more recent study contradicts that, saying that “in general, having a religious affiliation was associated with higher rates of orgasm for women.”1 Clearly ethnic cultural variables make it difficult to pinpoint religious influences on orgasmic rates. An Irish Catholic is not the same as an Italian or a Kenyan Catholic.

In the United States, where religious sexual neurosis took deep root in the dominant culture, the results show up in what I have called “the surprised virgin syndrome,” referring to a controlling dishonesty and inability to admit, much less cherish, our capacity for sexual joy. Counselors are familiar with young women, pregnant before they are ready for pregnancy-and pregnancy is a 25-year condition and commitment-who claim they do not know “how it happened,” as though the onset of sexual ardor were not noticeable. More honest cultures face their sexuality and prepare for it with sexual education and contraceptive availability. Statistics tell the tale. “Each year, one million American teenage girls become pregnant, a per-thousand rate twice that of Canada, England, and Sweden, and ten times that of the Netherlands.”2 The research indicates that there are much higher rates of sexual activity in these other countries, but far fewer pregnancies. Contraceptive availability is key, along with honesty about when a relationship is about to go sexual. Recent studies indicates some improvement in this regard in the United States.

Studies in the United States show that three quarters of teens say that their first intercourse was unplanned and a majority of them say they wish they had been older when they had their first intercourse. The broad discomfort with sex discourages communication between teens and parents. This is tragic, since studies show that healthy candor about sex between parents and children helps to postpone the time and the circumstances of first intercourse.

One might think that the puritanical horror of sex has been dissipated in a culture where sex is used ubiquitously in the marketplace to promote sales, and frenzied pornography abounds. However, as Grace Janzen observes, this obsession reflects the historical Christian obsession and is really “the same preoccupation, turned inside out.”3 The addiction to pornography is fueled by discomfort with sex.

Enter Spirituality

Spirituality is more popular than religion, though in reality the two are one. Indeed, morality, spirituality, and religion are concentric circles. Each can be defined as a response to the sacred. “Sacred” is the highest encomium in the human lexicon. It is the superlative of precious. It is where valuation dips into mystery. Some of our value experiences are literally ineffable; we can’t explain them. Jean Paul Sartre, late in his life, met some former students in a park in Paris. They had their three-month-old baby with them. Sartre took the baby in his arms and wrote later that he realized, with a kind of mystical poignancy, that if you took all of his life’s work–and he was the best known philosopher of the twentieth century–and yet if you balanced his work against the smiling pre-ciousness he held in his arms, he said all his works would seem almost weightless by comparison. The words “sacred,” “sanctity of life,” attempt to describe such moments. “Why is this flesh so precious?” I would ask myself as I cradled my ten-year-old son Danny in my arms. His dwarfed body was wasted as was his mind by Hunter’s syndrome, and he was near death, but I handled him with all the reverence with which I used to handle the sacraments when I was a priest.

Neither Sartre’s nor my experience admits of explanation. And that brings us a step further in knowing what spirituality is. Spirituality is born in the affections, in the deepest part of the affections that the medievals called mystical. It is our appropriate response to values that transcend our paltry powers of analysis. (There can be false spirituality. There are misplaced sacreds that don’t merit our reverence. We can worship our selves egotistically. We can worship our nations in the pandemic religion known as nationalism. We can also idolize our gender or our race or our sexual orientation.) True spirituality reacts appropriately and enthusiastically to the value of human life and to the rest of terrestrial life with which we are kith and kin.

The Marks of a Healthy Spirituality

Let me boldly dare to suggest the three signals and signs of a healthy spirituality:

1) a release from the isolation of egotism;

2) a passion for justice ; and

3) an undefeatable conviction that hope and joy can be at home in this universe.

Egotism crushes any sense of interdependency and mutuality; it misses the fact that life, all life, is a shared glory, a miracle of energy that merits an explosion of awe, reverence, appreciation, wonder, and a sense of giftednesss. Spirituality that does not pulse with a hunger for justice for all is specious and a fraud. Hope is a recognition that, with all its bloody blows, the possibilities of life outweigh its debits. As for joy, the old rabbis had it right when they said: “We will have to give account on the judgment day of every good thing which we refused to enjoy when we might have done so.” A true spirituality is convinced that, against all the odds, ecstasy not misery is our destiny. Spirituality is baptism by immersion in the stunningness and promise of life.

More… http://www.crosscurrents.org/Maguire0304.htm