Sex, Creation, and Family...part one

One impetus to this blog, and to a great deal of thinking for me in general, is that I am growing more emotional whenever I see children. Maybe not all children, but sweet, beautiful kids who in some way impress me with their intelligence or endear me with their speech or accent or smile. This fatherly impulse in me has existed for a rather long time, and I think helps to explain the tenderness and foolish selflessness with which I have pursued women who were more in need of fathers than boyfriends. As I mature and grow to love myself more this impulse is transforming into a desire to raise children and give them the selfless love which was inordinantly aimed in the past. Along with this growth is a desire to have a mutually loving, respectful, and adult relationship with a woman. And inevitably, because I simply cannot escape it, I ask theological questions...about these changes, these desires, and how they are all related.

One issue to which I have given a lot of thought (and about which I was recently reminded by Niebuhr I think) has to do with the relationship of sex, pleasure, and reproduction. The Catholic Church has followed Augustine and located the purpose of sex primarily within procreation. The accompanying ban on birth control is logically consistent with this emphasis on the strictly biological goal of sex. The contemporary worldview of supposed sexual liberation in Western culture has really taken the other extreme and all but abandoned the reproductive dimension of sex. I think both perspectives are incomplete yet contain important insights. The Catholic view rightly maintains the intimate connection between sex and family; while the modern view is correct that pleasure also is integral to sex.

And thus must I understand sex and family. The passion and pleasure: broken blemished bodies exploring each other in the utmost vulnerability of devotion, coming into one another gently with the sacred trembling of the unknown...such is the marriage bed, and such is the womb of new life. Its lack of appeal to our hedonistic culture is not foremost the perceived boredom and repetition of it, but rather the fear...of commitment, of responsibility, of being rejected, of things growing stagnant.

But out of such terror, such love as befalls us time and again, enter children. That this process can be beautifully explained should not mitigate its wonder and surprise; such an anesthetized view of science misunderstands it completely. Accordingly our sentiments are not to be derided when we refer to childbirth as miraculous. And this is not simply the biology, but more comprehensively the love which accompanies it and gives rise (yes, pun intended!) to the conception. The womb, more thoroughly speaking, is then not only the home made in the mother's body; but the tender, nourishing love of two fragile persons who have risked their future and happiness on each other, to the point of creating a space and bounty within their affections for an infinitely helpless stranger. That, in a world as sinful and lost as it is, is the miracle...and the hope.