Coitus Redemptor?

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen

It was the genius of the late Michael Vasey to realize the connection between the contemporary Church’s embrace of modern constructions of gender identity and a loss of eschatological imagination. The absence of an afterlife deprives the Christian mind of a space beyond heterosexuality and homosexuality. It leads to, or at least allows, the identification of discipleship with heterosexual relationships and family life in dominant ecclesial discourse (and homosexual relationships in the reverse resistant discourse) and with such identification comes the collapse of the religious life and the celibate vocation which challenges it. There is a great forgetting of the Church’s queer tradition when death is evaded. Death is essential to the queer project. (Elizabeth Stuart, “Queering Death”)

“Camping it up along with angels”

As I was reading some excellent, if dense, queer theology from the Queering Theology Series, the sexual theologian: essays on sex, God and politics edited by Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, this weekend, it dawned on me that these folks, who really are first and foremost concerned with dogma rather than sexuality, using queer theory to trouble the waters of an over-quick, idolatrous, and modern identification of heterosexual (and homosexual) love or sex at all as THE expression of the Most Blessed and Holy Trinity. And an over-quick, idolatrous, and modern identification of our modern two-gender and two-orientation bifurcation with G-d in schema of complementarity that reduce G-d down to us rather than pull all of our limitations into G-d far queerer than we might countenance. Such thinking is more akin to a fertility cult than theology and liturgy properly directed to the glorifying of G-d in Holy Eucharist in which our pale constructions and limited frames receive their proper and ordered place.

Elizabeth Stuart writes further in her essay, “Queering Death”:

It is in the Eucharist that the Church laughs because it is in the Eucharist that the Church encounters resurrection. Michael Vasey noted that “The biblical and traditional images of heaven are so preoccupied with style and public celebration as to be almost camp. While relentlessly political, they have more in common with a Gay Pride event than with the sobriety of English political life or the leisurewear informality of evangelical Christian life.”

In the Eucharist the Church camps it up along with the angels. The surfeit of heaven reaches earth and pushes aside space and time; death has no sway; all identities save that given by God are rendered non-ultimate. It is in the Eucharist that we learn what our ultimate destiny is. We learn that our gaze is oriented to the Lamb, to the altar/sepulcher surrounded by angels; this is the end and fulfillment of all desire. Here the space outside the Eucharist is exposed as a place of want and lack, a place of endless repetition, of yearning, of desire that can only be repeated, never fulfilled. In the Eucharist baptismal identity is renewed and fulfilled. In the Eucharist death is transcended and angles and mortals become on in activity, intention and desire. In the Eucharist we are as angels in heaven. In the Eucharist the primordial marriage between Christ and soul, the Lamb and the Church is celebrated, to be reflected and anticipated in love between persons of any gender.

A queer death is at the heart of the Christian gospel. The resurrection rolls in the end of death and the end of gender-based identities all in one. After the resurrection those incorporated into it by virtue of their baptism are simultaneously released from the bonds of death and the bonds of constructed identities. They have to die and they have to live out the scripts that are written on their bodies, but those scripts are overwritten by the baptismal identity given as sheer gift from God. So that when the baptized die they should die subversively as people who regard dying as not a passing over into the realm of death but into the great heavenly liturgy, and when they live they should live subversively as people who freed from the melancholia of gender, living in the laughter of the resurrection. It can be no mere coincidence that as the Church in the West, bound by its slavery to post-Enlightenment rationalistic world-views, lost sight of heaven, one consequence of which is the reduction of the Eucharist even in the Roman Catholic Church in Western Christianity to a family meal, it also brought into modern constructions of gender and sexual orientation, baptizing them. Having now deprived itself of an eschatological space from which to view the world, it runs the risk of being lost in melancholia, able only to endorse the status quo, unable to offer any hope, damning humanity to the endless repetitions of unfulfillable desires.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

It would seem, despite our tuning practice, Eucharist, we are asking “sex” to bear the burdens of the world, even take away the sins of the world. And it’s not just secular folks. Church folks too.

In a world seemingly in danger of forgetting we are flesh, in which we’re reduced to cogs in a machine or cyber junkies, secular folks emphasize body and sex to the nth degree, but seemingly so styled that all the remains is the wheel: Bodies honed and shaped to stylized perfection: anorectic women, hairless bulging men; über-romantic notions, forbidden daliances, messless scenes. But the end result is more loneliness and more frenzied seeking. We go down to our death, and there is no rising. Only endless repetition and unsated desire. Holy William Stringfellow’s excellent libelli, Instead of Death immediately comes to mind.

Christians seem to place our bodily existence and worth and sanctification on sex as well. The vast majority of Christians still conceive of sex primarily in reproductive terms. Our sex is worthy if reproductive. Marriage is first and foremost about procreative potential. No matter suggestive slips in other directions. And this is definitely the case when we speak of the sex that dare not speak it’s name. Those suggestive slips are liable to undo our conceptions and contraceptions.

It’s as if the Incarnation never happened though we press it into our service on a regular basis through our moralizing about the proper fit of bodies, which seems these days to solely revolve around what we do with our genitalia, rather than how we touch one another lovingly, living our lives wholly as friends of one another and G-d. So much so, intercourse bears the burden of being the only touch worth mentioning or moralizing about.

But sex is not itself up to the task of saving the day, muchless the world. In all of our battles over sex, love dare not speak it’s name. After all, sex doesn’t make us human, love does, through a glass dimly though we dare speak. If ever we need a reminder of that kenotic notion, we only need look to the Virgin Birth. The Love of the Father and of the Son, the Holy Spirit, is the lord and giver of life, not our ova and semen.

“Not love according to nature, but according to the Holy Spirit”, to quote many an adelphopoesis ceremony, is our participation in the Divine Love Life. Note that this need not be a sex-negative treatment at all, but rather places our burning loins and procreations and lovemaking in context, gives our sexual relationships G-d’s meaning rather than our own pitiful substitutes that can only end in mechanistic reproductive schema or jostling for the next pleasure event while paying lipservice to the underlying point—making response to G-d who first loves us and commands us order our lives thusly in loving friendship and service. What we otherwise call ascesis.

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. Hosanna in excelsis.
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Hosanna in excelsis.

Though we cry out Holy, Holy, Holy, we seem more concerned with he who cums than with He Who Comes among us and abides in us first and foremost through partaking of the Body and Blood, giving and shaping our lives to G-d’s vision, holy touch and all.

Sex cannot save the world. Neither can procreation or lack thereof. Neither can pleasure or denial of pleasure. Neither can marriage or celibacy. I could go on. Only consecrating all of life to G-d in Christ by the Spirit brings the whole of Creation and our lives into proper focus as potential sacraments and icons.

The practice of celibacy in the early Church was largely a refutation of secular (Roman, and even Jewish) notions that offspring were our salvation and the salvation of society. That the continuance of family values, the pater familias, and the state was the most important notion and therefore salvific. Contra some modern notions, Roman life, especially for the noble classes, was not a sexually uninhibited life. Property and progeny lines must be preserved no matter one’s tastes or nature.

Celibacy disrupted this whole love-affair with the self in favor of lives reoriented to the One Who Saves, and it’s not without reason that Christians were labeled “atheists” for their meddling. Gods of fertility, the pater familias, the state, and even religion die hard. The ambivalence of many patristic writers toward sex must be understood in this context. Unfortunately, they were bound to their own contexts, and most found reason for sex in the very thing they wished to disrupt—a reproductive mentality, a mentality focused on production rather than receiving life as gift and responding in thanks. Today, we see an opposite side of this same coin in a contraceptive mentality. Neither trajectory will solve this seemingly implacable state-of-affairs until we begin with G-d again. The context of preparing for the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord which is even now upon us. Be on guard! Be watchful! Prepare the way of the Lord!

And I’m beginning to share their ambivalence. Not because I hate sex, which I quite enjoy thank you very much, but because it seems we’re in grave danger of exchanging the Ultimate for the penultimate. Sex for Eternal Life. It’s as if we woke up this morning with our minds set on coitus rather than on Jesus, or rather in waking up this morning with our minds set on sex—a common enough matter, we have forgotten the proper context and orientation for our eating, drinking, lovemaking, in all things giving thanks.

Gerard Loughlin writes of this matter in a way similiar to Caelius and myself (and for which I am most thankful to see someone so logically put forth what I tend to intuit in my thinking):

How then can we understand the advent of children in the body of Christ? The answer, briefly sketched, is that in the Church's imagination, people do not "have" children, as if they have made them themselves, but receive them, as gifts from God. The Church receives children, not in the hope of reproducing herself, so as to achieve some spurious immortality, but simply and only as the new life that burgeons from the life of Christ, who is yet to come, but is even now arriving, not least in the new-born child. As already hinted, this way of thinking of the matter understands children as born to the Church, and not merely to their parents. For the latter are not isolated couples, but part of the one body. This is why everyone has a responsibility for the children of the Church, symbolized in the practice of godparenting and of adoption. And it is also why not everyone in the Church has to look for the gift of children, why not every particular relationship or sexual act has to be open to the gift of children, in short, why there can be infertile straight couples and gay couples; why there can be celibates, consecrated virgins and single people. For in the imagination of the Church, children are first and foremost gifts that arrive through nuptial union of the Church with her beloved, Jesus Christ.

Gloria in excelsis deo,
et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis
Laudamus te.
Benedicimus te.
Adoramus te.
Glorificamus te.
Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.
Domine Deus, Rex caelestis, Deus Pater omnipotens.
Domine fili unigenite, Jesu Christe.
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius patris.
Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Qui tollis peccata mundi suscipe deprecationem nostram.
Qui sedes ad dexteram patris miserere nobis.
Quoniam tu solus sanctus.
Tu solus Dominus.
Tu solus Altissimus, Jesu Christe.
Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.

Building on Fergus Kerr’s work, After Aquinas, in which Kerr review of Holy Thomas Aquinas’s work, in his essay, "Sex after Natural Law", Gerard Loughlin writes,

Thus, far from thinking that Thomas had a “divine command ethic”, or even a “virtue ethics”, we should think of him as advocating an “ethics of divine beatitude”. It is then not so surprising that Thomas says so little about the natural law, an that what he does say is so vague, for its basic teaching must be that the good life is one ordered toward the good from which all life flows and to which it returns, toward the good of the beatific vision, which of its nature we now glimpse only darkly.

On this understanding, sex after nature—sex that follows the natural law—is sex that orders us toward the infinite joy of our consummation with and in God, in the fellowship of Christ and the saints. There is thus a real difference between the Church’s sex and that of the secular world [here meaning either Darwinistic reproduction or utilitarian pleasure]. It is most clearly visible, as in the celebration of the Eucharist, and in those eucharistic practices of dispossessive union when, after Christ the bridegroom, we give ourselves over to another, in the ascesis of Christian partnership and marriage.

Some may not like that, discipline, exercise. Ascesis isn’t very popular these days (unless we look at the increase in gym memberships!) sometimes with good reason, but often times as an unwillingness to build up the body and Body at all. We want all things served our way, so that food becomes mere “good times, great tastes”, sex becomes mere release rather than Holy Communion. But by ascesis as I’ve said before, I don’t mean body-hatred or self-hatred or miserable practices for the sheer joy of being miserable. I’m not into S/M. I mean life ordered toward the thanks and praise of G-d. Caelius says it better than I:

*Christopher of Bending the Rule often refers to the family of his conjugal union as a "community of ascesis." In the sense I suspect he means it, he sees his family structure in terms of creatures training for the competition alluded to in 1 Corinthians 9 or obliquely in 1 Timothy 4. Thus, a community of ascesis is in constant training for the present struggle against the principalities and powers in hope for the amazing blessedness of the world to come.

Now, this takes different forms, depending on our temperament, nature, and calling. What does this mean with regard to sex for me? It means remembering in Whom I live, and move, and have my being. That because sex is not the Ultimate end of our relationship, placing sex within proper context is vital if it is to orient us toward glorifying G-d rather than take us out of G-d (the very deep concern with the passions that the Elders had).

The context of sex is prayer and thanksgiving to G-d. But that doesn’t just go for sex, that goes for all of life. And well enough, we all fall out of our proper state, our natural state, that was our original sin from the Eastern Christian point-of-view (we failed to give thanks and in so doing fell and fall). But our metanoia, our repentance begins and ends in thanks for the One who continues to bless us gift anyway through boundless forgiveness:

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison

We pray before making love. Perhaps, that sounds strange to a world obsessed with getting the next piece of ass or to Christians who either can’t understand (homo)sexual partaking as a way into participation in the Divine Love Life or the need to first orient ourselves properly. Here is one such prayer:

Blessed are you, O Lord, God of the universe,
who saw our loneliness and took pity upon us,
who fashioned for us a helpmate after our own kind,
that we might have joy together in the work of life:

We give you thanks through Jesus Christ, our Lord,
to whom we are joined in Holy Baptism,
before whom we have made our vows,
and in whom we shall complete them;

Blessed are you, Holy Spirit, may you rest upon us,
that cleaving friend unto friend in Christ,
we might become one flesh in fruitful service
being a sign of your peaceable Kingdom. Amen.

We have and continue to rip sex out of context in the doing of our moralizing focusing every so voyeuristically on how two men make love. Notice, that the focus is on gay men most generally in our discussions, from psychology to sociology, from theology to ethics. This should give us pause. Something more is at work. I suspect, as many feminist and queer thinkers have before me, that for whatever reason male couples threaten a pater familias mentality still very much with us today, indeed reified and even deified by some in the Church.

The Holy and Blessed Trinity, ironically the queerest thing of all, becomes little more than another family values crusade. It must be quite a feat to fit Father, + Son, and Holy Spirit into the nuclear family when quite frankly, as others have recognized before me, it looks rather homoerotic. Lesbian couples do as well in their lack of a need for a man—no pater to rule them, only the Pater who incorporates them but is beyond all of our gender constructs and categories. We don’t worship pater familias, we pray Pater Noster who is greater than our little salvation schemes and really offers us the only way out—Jesus Christ in the Spirit who takes us up into the Divine Love Life in Holy Eucharist and from which we respond in our everyday comings and goings, ordering our lives accordingly. This is the point of rules such as Abba Benedict’s, to foster our reorientation:

Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum.
Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

The very vicious and passionate responses all around in the current sex debates suggest we’re all in thrall to an idol. St. Paul’s tale in Romans about exchanging the natural for the unnatural, about our being in thrall to the passions stands out. We’ve gotten carried away by ourselves. We’ve exchanged the Natural for the unnatural. G-d for climax. G-d for being right. G-d for loving others as we would wish to be loved if they were us. And our passions are all out of whack for having so done.

Even when discussing the holy friendships of same sex couples (even by good liberals and even Affirming Catholics), the proper place to keep our attention, we invariably slip into the matter of testing the sheets for body fluids. Are they having sex or not seems to be the only thing that really matters. And if so, what are they exactly doing? Perhaps anal sex is out, but oral sex is okay? The list can get endless as we probe the details for prohibitions, exemptions, relaxations.

Really, what doesn’t matter to us is fruitfulness, but how and where and when who does whom. Now some might and do argue that same sex relationships aren’t fruitful, but the arguments are selectively bolstered from an “objective” reading of Scriptures through Tradition and Reason that blinds us to even considering the possibility that our reading is prejudicial, that the Living G-d to Whom these things point is working with us now, at this moment, not doing a new thing, but rather making all things new. Do we have eyes to see? Or are we blinded by our own original sin--our own lack of praise?

After all, gay folk are often enough accused of living out our original sin, our false selves if we couple, but I’m going to reflect that back on our detractors. If the zealous, passionate, often vicious responses of our detractors and the real physical, emotional, spiritual violence of church and state are the fruits of true self and the greater flourishing in our loving even in the midst of such societal and ecclesial opprobrium are the fruits of false self, I have to ask, “Which spirit are we discerning?” The Spirit of Christ or the spirit of this world?

Apparently for many the Spirit of Christ is not the flourishing that clearly occurs in so many cases from human touch (of which intercourse in its variety is a special case), the falling away of self-hatred, the resolution of promiscuity, the bonds of covenanted commitment, the setting up of a household and nexus for working out salvation and the extension of that household to the loving of others, the upbuilding of the wider community, both societal and ecclesial, such couples lend. No. It’s all about the cum test.

And we should rightly feel very icky, indeed unclean, for having let our minds so quickly drift into the bed practices of our sisters and brothers while they’re serving us coffee at coffee hour or praying alongside us at Holy Eucharist or sharing with us daily bread. The fact that so many Christians don’t feel unclean because of their prurience shows up that we’ve only yet begun to put on the Mind of Christ.

That is the catholic in me. If same sex loving is true, it has always been true, and the Church has been wrong to have been abusers of women and men so oriented. If same sex loving is true, as I wrote in my lengthy excursus on Chalcedon on Wednesday, May 18, 2005: Chalcedon 101, we will be able to observe good. And in fact, we have seeds in our tradition both modern and ancient that show the sanctity of same sex love in celibate and non-celibate chastity.

But somehow, it’s okay to keep our blinders on in the face of such evidence even when they greet us face to face. It is okay not even to consider that we might be wrong and mouth all manner of slander and bile in the name of god, stirring up hatreds and passions and then refusing to take responsibility for the aftermath. Such may be churchly, but such is not Christian. Such fruits and spirits as these shall pass away:

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Ioanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, et omnibus Sanctis, quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper Virginem, beatum Michaelem Archangelum, beatum Ioannem Baptistam, sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum, et omnes Sanctos, orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum. Amen.

I don’t know what any given heterosexual or homosexual couple does in bed, and I don’t want to know unless they volunteer concerns to me as a friend seeking advice. I do wish to affirm their displays of kindness toward each other and others, their gentle-firm care of children if G-d has so blessed them and the wider community with such gifts, their regular attendance at Eucharist, their proclamation of Good News to all the world in their daily tasks.

But I don’t want to think about their bed practices. Such is second order business best attended to by the couple and a representative of the Church, read confessor, than by the Body as a whole in our rather fertile imaginations. Note what I am not saying. I am not saying that such matters are private. I am saying that such matters are personal. Personal within the larger context of public covenanted commitment. A trained confessor is the best place to start when matters of sex in such a commitment are in danger of becoming something other than a participation in the love of Christ for his Church and upbuilding of one another and the community as a whole.

Sex is wonderful. Sex feels good. Our pleasure points us toward the Greater. Sex is a penultimate way of communing and communicating bodily our trust and faithfulness and commitment within a larger category of loving touch. I won’t deny that.

But if my relationship hinged on sex, we’d have drifted apart a long time ago. As with all faithful couples, sex ebbs and flows. Some weeks we’re too busy serving our greater communities and too tired for sex, but we snuggle, we kiss, we greet one another lovingly, we pray.

Something more binds us, and that is the context within which our lovemaking occurs, and something more is at stake in our debates than Tab A and Slot B. What is at stake is queer folks’ holiness and wholeness, for the two are the same thing in a properly Jewish and Christian understanding. Temperament and nature G-d flourishes through personal callings, each reverent and chaste.

Many things in my holy friendship are wonderful and connect us in Christ. Praying together before a meal eaten, walking on the beach, drinking a glass of sherry together while listening to Bach, disclosing and asking forgiveness for sins, even sins most crushing. All of these are communion with one another in our Lord. And frankly, some of them are finer moments than the grunts of satisfaction, the moans of bliss that arise in sex, which participate in rather than bear the full weight of our union in Christ. Some matters are even more lasting. All are but shadows of the Heavenly Feast.

The bottom line is this. Were my partner to be injured tomorrow so that we could never have sex again, in my mind, that would be no reason to leave him. I might have to get over myself, I might even mourn the loss of such sharing, but something more binds us, vows of commitment, friendship—love, these are the things that point to and participate in the Everlasting.

Some might say, well, then you should have no problem giving up sex and following the hardline? I echo the same response back to them. After all, in the patristic world, the married couples that were lauded were those that gave up sex. If we wish to deal in that world, we’d better be prepared for its full consequences on our own actions before asking them of others.

Only in a world where we have forgotten the patristic ambivalence toward sex, a world in which marriage was finally sacramentalized by allowing that the multitudinous sins of sex were covered by love, a world that radically retooled the marriage rite and continues to do so in favor of response to love over “getting some” or producing babies as definitive goal, a world in which heterosexuals can imbibe freely due to birthcontrol methods be they NAF or other artificial means, can we find such a voyeuristic turning to homosexual couples and focus on their sex because “we’ve finally arrived, the monastics were wrong, ours is about love”. Well, so is ours. And so is the celibate who challenges us all to chastity—having our minds set on the things of G-d. And we’d all be better off if we helped one another along the way in the things of G-d, rather than continue raising dividing walls and tearing one another down.

Sex will pass away one way or another. We all die. But the Good News is, in dying, we shall rise; our rising will be bodily, but our body shall be glorified. Our want to connect through sex will pass over to the more glorious, our cutting off shall be no more (sexuality as we know it shall finally be fulfilled and completed and consumated), and we shall find ourselves interpenetrated in the dance of the kenotic, perichoretic G-d who finally and ultimately does us.

If we’ve hitched our being cut off no more (our sexuality) on orgasm, if we’ve hitched our trust in the Incarnation on climax, if we’ve hitched our hope of Resurrection on erections, we’re in need of reorientation therapy—and fast. We’ve forgotten the Depth to Whom sexuality points in favor of focusing on filthy rags. The liturgy is our best bet for reassessment. May we orient ourselves again to participation in our Great Thanksgiving, Christ Jesus, from whom we all receive and respond to ourselves and one another as gift.

Sisters and brothers, in dying, we shall rise to find our thirst to cleave friend unto friend consummated in G-d through Christ by the Spirit who binds us all in all until we shall be one. May our lives now simul iustus et peccator all, be we celibate or single, cenobitic or eremitic, married or partnered, give a full acccounting of the hope that is in us, Jesus Christ, our Way, our Truth, and our Life.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.
Sicut erat in principio,
et nunc, et semper,
et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.