Let's begin our reflections on human sexuality by making a necessary distinction between sexuality and genitality. Most people use the first word to apply to both, and thus create a blanket and almost useless kind of language that serves only to perpetuate myths and non-communication.
By sexuality, we mean that essential and all-pervasive complementarity between persons, and in a certain sense, between all living things. Life is attracted to life. Beauty is attracted to both beauty and brokenness - which is a good description of all that lives.
Life is fragmented and finite and yet part of a larger and attractive whole. We long to be one with this wholeness. We seem to need to give ourselves to the other, or at least, we are fascinated or attracted by it. One need only observe people in an airport, or on the street, or reading gossip or romance magazines, or listen to much of human conversation to know that people are energized and excited by other people.
This is sexuality. It is our energy for life and for communication. Without it, we would settle for a cold and metallic kind of life; all would be trapped in each one's own inner world with no need to reach out, no desire to care. The power of bonding, linkage, and compassion would be gone from the earth. At its core, therefore, sexuality is a constant expression of the Spirit.
God seemingly had to take all sorts of risks in order that we would not miss the one thing necessary: we had to be called and even driven out of ourselves by an almost insatiable appetite so that we could never presume that we were self-sufficient. It is so important that we know that we are incomplete, needy, and essentially social that God had to create a life-force within us that would not be silenced - not until 10 minutes after we are dead, they told us as novices! All this tells me that something very important is happening here, and it makes me glad that I am sexual - both attracting (I hope!) and endlessly attracted.
The very word comes from the Latin verb secare, meaning to cut or to divide. It reveals that primitive sense that something is separated here, and very likely longing to be reunited. But it is a reunion based on differentiation and complementarity. That is the power and energy of sexuality. It is the power of the opposite and the energy of a certain kind of opposition. Sexual attraction is a full continuum with the ultimate polarities being called masculine and feminine.
All of my experience as teacher, as counselor, as man, as a visitor to innumerable cultures, as well as my knowledge of history, tells me that men and women are obviously different. I agree that culture has taught all of us; and I do not have the skill to debate the eternal question between the influences of genes and environment. But if we are the same emotionally, psychically, or spiritually, one would think it would have shown itself in at least one age or culture. To be sure, we have trained and exaggerated some of the differences (usually to the advantage of the male), but let's hope that we will not lose the powerful complementary energy that is present in male-female sexuality for the sake-of some doctrinaire philosophy of unisexuality.
It is our defined and affirmed identities as opposites that makes for full creativity in sexuality. I suspect that is why God chose such an enacted encounter of opposition to be the focus for the continuation of all human, animal, and plant life. Sexuality is revealing something at the very heart of reality. It cherishes tension and builds on tension; but sexual union is always opposition overcome.
Genitality is a specific expression of our sexual selves. It does not cherish tension, but instead seeks release from tension. And that puts genitality in an entirely different situation. It cannot be treated the same as sexuality, but at the same time will never be understood unless we have first been accepted as and have grown as sexual men and women.
Genitality is that strictly biological and anatomical complementarity associated with the sexual organs and with the primary sexual characteristics. By definition we are dealing with a "part," but a part that is so hormonally and psychologically triggered that it is the literal preoccupation of much of the human race.
The genital, or the preoccupation with results, has kept many people from the much deeper process of communication and caring that gives us such profound joy. They have pandered to their exclusively genital, visual, or physical fascinations and find that they are almost incapable of full human relationship and affection. Simply put, human beings cannot be oriented toward their own pleasure and immediate gratification and communicate bonding love to another person at the same time.
Many people do not know simply how to enjoy or play or give pleasure to another. I cannot imagine what these people are going to do in heaven. It is not that God will exclude them from the communion of saints; it is just that many will be bored and unprepared for the leisure and playfulness of eternal love.
True and observed sexual encounter has much to teach us about spirituality. It is a school of growth and conversion, and not just the proverbial garden of forbidden delights. Maybe that is why a lot of people avoid full sexuality and remain just genital. Genitality is the ritual. Sexual intimacy is the reality.
We would be naive, however, if we denied that there is an almost mystical aura that surrounds the shapes and images of the human body. One need only observe the fertility rites, the phallic stones, the painted nudes since time immemorial. I am sure that we are dealing with images and archetypes so deeply rooted in the human psyche that we can never truly dismiss or deny them. Even religions and cultures, with all their warnings and taboos, only disguise and sometimes sublimate the power of these sexual images.
Perhaps our biggest shortcoming in the area of Christian sexual mores is that we have failed to realize that all love is dangerous. Love is very threatening to our existing world-view and our present ego boundaries. Yet love is better than any of the other alternatives. It is a risk that we must take to be human, and according to John "anyone who fails to love can never know God" (1 John 4:8).
The risk, fear, and discipline involved in loving rightly, I believe, cause people to use religion to avoid the tremendous amount of darkness and suffering that goes into the mature development of any human relationship. It is easier to simply quote the appropriate chapter and verse, or the cultural teaching, than to deal with the self and the potential beloved at my doorstep.
Jesus on Sexual Morality
In all honesty, the Scripture scholar is surprised to find how little direct teaching Jesus gives us on sexual morality. It is obviously not his main concern: that is reserved for the proclamation of the kingdom of God and the call to forgiveness and reconciliation. This does not mean that sexual morality is unimportant, but that Jesus seems to feel that sexual practice will take care of itself if these primary teachings are deeply received. They too are concerned with the creative overcoming of opposition.
I believe that there are two basic texts in the Gospels that teach us Jesus' positive understanding of "purity."
"The lamp of the body is the eye. It follows that if your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light. But if your eye is diseased, your whole body will be all darkness. If then, the light inside you is darkness, what darkness that will be" (Matthew 6:22-23).
Here Jesus tells us that it is all a matter of seeing. It is possible to have "light" inside of us that is not really light, answers that are not really wisdom. And Jesus comes not so much to fill our minds with the right answers as to open our minds so that we can see for ourselves.
The Christian virtue of purity is the ability to see as God sees. It is the longsuffering path toward seeing the truth, toward the vision of the whole. Impurity, therefore, is the partial vision. Impurity is to be satisfied with lies. It is to define ourselves as merely material and to limit ourselves to merely external observation.
Jesus here gives us responsibility for who we are and what we are becoming. We can educate our eyes to see what is really there, what is fully there. That will be a lamp, a light to illumine the "whole body."
The second basic text in Jesus' sexual teaching follows from the first:
"You have learnt how it was said: You must not commit adultery. But I say this to you: if a man looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye should cause you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; for it will do you less harm to lose one part of you than to have your whole body thrown into hell. And if your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; for it will do you less harm to lose one part of you than to have your whole body go to hell" (Matthew 5:27-30).
Again, we see Jesus' emphasis on the eye and the way that we see one another. The real import of this passage from his inaugural sermon is not that he is trying to teach us the immorality of sexual thoughts and desires; he is telling us that we should not try to separate what cannot be separated. We are a history. We are one, we are whole, we are body, mind, spirit. We are a truth. We are a story. We must put the chapters together and read ourselves as a whole.
Purity is always wholistic. Impurity is invariably fragmented. Goodness holds opposites together in the same place. Evil always divides - and, in that, is conquered. Purity always integrates, putting eye, and heart, and body together. Impurity separates and pretends that I am just body, or I am just this moment, or I am just need. And sometimes, with equal ignorance, it pretends that I am just spirit.
Jesus says that if any part of yourself is keeping you from being your full self, then you must cast off the false self at all costs. All must be confessed and integrated.
"Every thought is our prisoner, captured to be brought into obedience to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). This does not mean that we change the thoughts, or deny the thoughts, or disguise the thoughts, or repress the thoughts. It means that we situate them in the context of everything else. We refuse to believe their lies. We refuse to idolize them or trust their overstated promises.
But we do listen to them, their roots, their sources, their many-colored motivations. We enjoy their life-energy, their power for good, and we recognize their deceptions and power for death. In that creative dialogue and tension, human passion is born and warm affection is kindled. Such is the true and profound sexualness that God is creating in us. Without such tension, we have only momentary orgasm and passing flirtations. When the seemingly bodily action recognizes that it is also mind, spirit, past, and future, when it respects its physical self, without letting the body become a tyrant or dictator, then our sexual behavior is life-giving and obedient to the Maker. An action is evil or immoral when it is falsely centered and isolated from the rest of our lives. When an action is not integrated, then it is literally disintegrating of the person that God is creating. When we isolate parts of ourselves from one another, when we make use of our bodies for reasons other than the communication of truth, we are lessened and corrupted.
Without going into it at great length here, since it would make for an entire treatise on law and morality, we might just say that the traditional Christian ethic on sexual morality is in great part an accurate reflection of what is usually good and usually evil. It did not hang around this long merely through the efforts of moralistic clerics, but very likely because it represents the recurring experience of cultures and centuries as to what has created life and what has created death.
At the same time, the "law" is severely limited in its ability to lead us to all truth. That, as we know, is the work of the Spirit (John 16:13). Many have followed the law and never known love. Many have kept the law perfectly - and all for what? This most subtle link between Spirit and law is the crux of much of Jesus' teaching and the issue that brings Paul to such exhortation in both Romans and Galatians.
We have the wisdom and the experience in the Judeo-Christian tradition to fashion a positive morality, a morality that cuts a clean path between the rationalized libertinism of the modern age and the prudish guilts of the past. There is a way for the law to serve the Spirit. But there is absolutely no way that any guidelines will be workable apart from the Spirit of God working within us.
Moral sexuality might well be described as an "emotional sincerity" that shows itself in truthful relationships. It is a combination of sensitivity, responsibility, communication, constancy, and honesty in the ways that we share our lives and bodies with one another. We can tell truths with our bodies, and we can tell lies with them. Sexual relationships apart from personal responsibility for one another's larger lives is rightly called using another person.
The marriage promises must be held sacred if human words and intentions are to have any value. The indissolubility of this bond and promise must always remain the ideal and all-pervasive goal: "They are no longer two, but one body. What God has united, man must not divide" (Mark 10:9). Looks, and thoughts, and desires must be subjected to this larger picture of truth. Otherwise they enslave us and make caring relationships impossible, trapping us in the vice of lust.
"Nothing the world has to offer: the sensual body, the lustful eye, the life of empty show, could ever come from the Father, but only from the world; and the world with all that it craves for is coming to an end, but anyone who does the will of God remains forever" (1 John 2:16-17).
As always the Word of God retains its truly idol-crashing character. First, it tells us that we are created in the image of God as male and female, and that this blessing allows us to be fruitful and to fill the earth (Genesis 1:27-28). Our sexual humanity is affirmed and identifies us with the very creativity of God.
But our sexuality remains gift only if we recognize its inherent tendency to domination and enslavement. Lust has a huge ego which demands total control and longs to take a central position that is reserved for the Lord himself. The "world" (John's word) and the "flesh" (Paul's word) are not bad in themselves, but only insofar as they blind and take over.
The biblical teaching on sexual morality is contingent on the larger reality which Jesus calls the kingdom of God. Unless one's life is given to the purposes and the seeking of this new and full reality, sexual morality becomes no more than a fear-ridden conglomeration of social taboos - with God to back them up.
The virtue of sexual purity is one effect of a mature life in the Spirit. Impurity cannot be forced or legislated out of our minds and hearts, it simply becomes superfluous and unnecessary as we become more whole. It falls away like an unsightly cocoon, as we gradually learn what matters, what lasts, and what is real. Impurity finally shows itself for the illusion that it is.
My desire and fond intention in these reflections has been to initiate a healthy and holy dialogue within your own spirit and perhaps between would-be lovers. In such an interchange, I hope that you will catch sight of that one Holy Spirit, who is enlivening us all and assuring us that it is from our flesh that we shall look on God (Job 19:26).
Richard Rohr, OFM, was pastor of New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati and a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.
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