Byzantine Catholic Family Matters

The Church and Our Sexuality II

Joyful Affirmation of the Dignity of the Person and a Window to God

In a monologue from his radio show Prairie Home Companion humorist Garrison Keillor "reads" a letter from an old high school buddy who, now at forty feeling unappreciated by his wife and children, recounts waiting for a woman colleague with whom he was about to drive several hours to attend a meeting. He waited "with adultery on my mind . . . waiting to join a woman who appreciates me. But in five years or six or eight will I go to a higher bidder? What happens when I'm older and my grade falls? Who do I choose when I'm old and can't run fast and nobody chooses me? I thought . . . so that's what adultery's like: it's just horse-trading."

Whether it's a forty year old man feeling unappreciated by his wife, a twenty-five year old woman not ready for commitment in her fourth of a series of monogamous sexual relationships, or a seventeen year old telling his girlfriend "If you love me . . ." It's all the same: just horse-trading.

This is precisely what the Church teaches us our sexuality is not about. In his treatise Love and Responsibility, John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) wrote that when we truly love another person we attempt with all our heart to show our beloved that he/she "has a value higher than that of an object for consumption or use."

It is easy to see how prostitution, the sexual abuse of children, and pornography are premised on seeing persons as objects to be used to satisfy one's urges. A person caught up in an extra-marital affair or a premarital sexual relationship, however, is much apt to rationalize his/her behavior and not see the horse-trading going on.

A person is not an object to be used by the other to satisfy one's sexual cravings. (Sex is also not merely a tool we use to perpetuate our species.) As such sex becomes impersonal. Wrote Orthodox moral theologian Paul Evdokimov (The Sacrament of Love, SVS Press): "When the sexual attraction is impersonal . . . It is not the unique [person], but the anatomy and the moment and the 'brief eternity of pleasure' that are sought and desired." Orthodox theologian John Chryssavgis takes this to the next logical step when he says that the object in such a sexual relationship becomes a victim. This is what leads to a person having felt "used" by another.

More than being a "brief eternity of pleasure," John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) wrote that the Creator designed a "great variety of pleasures connected with differences of sex, or by the sexual enjoyment which sexual relations can bring . . . in a manner worthy of human persons."

The Church teaches that our sexuality is a great gift of God; a gift to be offered husband to wife, wife to husband involving the total person - a "miracle of feeling, touching, seeing another's personality - and this is as wonderful and unique as the mystic's knowledge of God" (Alexander Elchaninov, The Diary of a Russian Priest).

It is in this light that we need to see the Church's teachings on sexuality and how we can develop as more whole and holy men and women. And in a culture where sexual images and language are so prominent that sexuality is trivialized, it can be so difficult to discover the true joy of our sexuality.