Embracing reality

Posted by admin on Nov 21, 2007 in Issues & Ideas | 0 comments

Being a sexual being is great, as is sex itself. Sex is an intense pleasure, unifies souls, deepens emotions, and is the culmination of erotic love in a relationship. This is where it breaks down: the sexual impulse is only good when acted upon in the proper and appropriate way. That’s not easy anymore. The trouble begins with the fact that in modern society, acting with desires out of their proper context is just so much easier and so much more prevalent than ever before. We don’t do this just with sex. An improper attitude of pleasure destroys how we view everything that is integral to being human: relationships, work, money and all real-life experiences.

There is an important distinction to be made between sex as a sacrament – a vehicle of God’s blessing into your life – and sex as, well, anything else. C.S. Lewis nailed it in Mere Christianity. When people say “sex is ok,” or “be comfortable with sex,” they tend not to be arguing for sex as a sacrament, which is all right; they are arguing for the state of sexual desire as it exists in our culture, which has truly gone awry.

On the other hand, the polar opposite to this is the Gnostic heresy, which cuts deep in certain Evangelical circles. Glorifying only the spiritual, this finds shame in our bodies: the physical being, our sex and our nakedness. Society at large caricatures this attitude, presenting a false dichotomy: us or them, “free” love or ridiculous guilt and shame. Given a choice between over-ascetic and bohemian lives, all people with life in their souls and bodies would choose the latter, but the happy truth is that both are wrong. There exists a massive divide between being happy with our physical nature and polluting our standards for conduct and understanding of pleasure on either end of the spectrum.

A Christian man whom I greatly respect and admire said he’d rather his wife masturbated before their marriage than not. “The Line” is supposed to be where you would be uncomfortable if your future husband or wife had gone there, and today nobody’s partner-in-life is seriously going to mind about past masturbation. Maybe this is one way of becoming comfortable with your own physical nature. But still, is it bad in itself? Is it dangerous? Is it worthy of guilt? No.

The colossal danger is the attitude of autoeroticism (self-pleasure), not the act of masturbation. This focus may be present in masturbation, sex or virtually any pleasure. In any event, it’s the attitude that’s poisonous: it requires nothing of you, placing you at the centre of your own universe in which all pleasure is your gift to yourself. It’s the heroic message of our culture: the ultimate in self-reliance, sex without real interest in the other, irrespective of whether the other is in fact real, only in how they reflect one’s own self. “Love-scenes” in movies are rife with this; the mere existence of “one-night stands” confirms this in modern society.

Dorothy Sayers pulled no punches on the topic, vilifying the narcissistic pseudo-relationships that such an attitude forms. C.S. Lewis characterized this in That Hideous Strength. The utterly debased people of the moon, when they “marry,” take on machine-likenesses of their mate upon which to practice their sexual fantasies rather than the real person; they produce their children by “inorganic” means. The coldness permeates: a focus on the self is unhealthy enough; a complete focus on the satiation of one’s own immediate impulses and desires (no matter how bizarre) comes at the expense of real pleasure and is truly soul-destroying.

In the real world, the “take a pill” attitude towards pleasure may even pollute one of the greatest and most meaningful challenges you’ll ever face: finding your mate. Masturbation may be called a waste of your God-given energy, with which you ought to be using to go out and find your love, but the true problem would come down to the attitude of autoeroticism. The good news is that masturbation may be disconnected from this attitude. Don’t let guilt get you down on this: it is not the act but this attitude that sets itself against self-giving relationships and turns real love into a shabby mockery of love. It is this attitude that takes itself seriously and has no time for the frivolities of love. It is this attitude which would substitute a false picture of the other and call that the object of love. It is this attitude which is the ultimate unreality and the ultimate death of love.

In the end, erotic love between people does not come down to liking our own reflection in the other and entering into a mutual self-absorption; it comes as a clinging to the reality of the person and ultimately enters into colossal act of selflessness. G.K. Chesterton said it best: “There is no realism like the insatiable realism of love,” and, “lovers desire not only love, they desire marriage… if their love for each other is the noblest and freest love conceivable, it can only find its heroic expression in both becoming slaves.”

Of course, adopting a healthy attitude of relationship and going out and finding your love can be both intimidating and difficult. In my personal experience, courting a woman requires a conscious, vigilant, yet joyous battle against my full and impressive array of idiocy; this may be quixotic anyway, but seriousness, self-absorption, and an embracing of unreality would all kill such quest from the very outset. What we all have to do is something much more painful and revealing: examine our souls and purge the poisons of autoeroticism, so that we may truly learn to love real people once more.