"Delightful Secrets of Sex" (Vanity)

With all the incessant media drooling over the sexual options smorgasbord, with the Gay Summer of 2003 still flickering blue on our TV screens, and with even the Girl Scouts and the YWCA endorsing “safe-sex” training for young girls, people plugged into the mass culture have heard few discordant notes about the sexual revolution—and some have heard, perhaps, only one. Namely, that “the pope” is against it. To whom is sometimes added “the Christian right.” And, especially maddening to the Socially Responsible, “the pope” is even for some reason bizarrely, unaccountably opposed to what even most churches agree is the best thing since One-A-Day vitamins: contraception.

Secular journalists seem to assume that a comprehensive critique of the agenda and the paraphernalia of the sexual revolution is an idiosyncrasy of “the pope” alone. They are unaware that such opposition is only the latest expression of the continuous Judeo-Christian concern for sexual integrity going back to the New Testament and the church fathers, going back in fact to Genesis.

Who bothers to explain, even superficially, the rationale for the (until this century) universal Christian teaching against contraception? The implication is that there are no reasons for the historic Christian position: nothing worth examining, nothing even worth refuting. The believers who do accept the traditional teaching—mostly Catholics, and a minority of them at that—accept it on “blind faith,” and that’s that.

Yet the sexual revolution—the disjointing and dismembering of human sexuality into a heap of fragments to be rearranged into any shape at will—rests upon certain underlying assumptions about the nature and ends of sexuality. It relies upon contraceptive paraphernalia as its necessary technology. I am no professional philosopher, but I can see the urgency of examining the assumptions before taking any stance at all with regard to the technique.

Sexually, we resemble baboons. This is, and to a certain extent ought to be, true. But saying it seems like a dig, a put-down.

We know that human sexuality is something like other mammalian sexuality, and at the same time something more. For us, as for apes, mating fulfills an appetitive drive and satisfies an itch. Like other primates, we reproduce sexually. Again like other primates, we use sexual gestures to express affinity or “matedness” or belonging on some level: Our mating patterns order our herd, our group, our community.

But there is still something more than affinity, progeny, and itch. The sacramental view of sexuality was never based on studies of baboon communities or squints at barnyard sex. Christians believe that, first, since we were made in the image and likeness of God, our design is both revelatory and providential. Second, the “honor of the marriage bed” is rooted in the scriptural view of the marital union as showing forth, mysteriously, the love-union of Christ and the Church.

If human sexuality had no designer, then vain is an appeal to honor the design. Furthermore, if there is a design, and the design is already perfectly reflected in our instincts, drives, and appetites, then “honoring the design” should need no special appeal at all: We should expect it to happen automatically.

When Christ, during his ministry here on earth, was asked (in Matthew 19) about the propriety of certain sexual customs, his method was to refer his questioners back to Genesis. He used the argument from design: that the Creator had made the human race male and female, that he had designed them to hold fast together, becoming one flesh. So the design of male and female is a sign of different-sex alliance and fidelity (Gen. 2:18–24) as well as God’s way of making his human creatures fruitful (Gen. 1:28). This is the way it was to be in Eden (literally, “Delight”).

The question Jesus was asked had to do with divorce. His answer made clear that in the beginning (Genesis), in the time of delight (Eden), man and woman were one: There was no divorce. He notes that divorce came in later because of people’s hardness of heart—in other words, because they sinned. But rather than accommodating that hardness of heart, he challenges his listeners with a hard saying—“Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another, is guilty of adultery”—a hard saying that paradoxically upholds once again the norm of Eden, the full-orbed sexuality of delight.

What does this discussion of divorce have to do with contraception? The underlying question in both cases is whether we are justified in breaking this full-orbed sexuality apart.May we break apart, rearrange, a man and a woman? May we break apart fruitfulness and delight? Are we free, because we are able to do so, to split sex up into its various “animal” and “angel” components: fondness here, fertility there; here the itch, there the issue; affection and desire and covenant and conception considered separately and experienced separately—rearranging the pieces to suit whatever project we have in mind?

The picture is complicated by the fact that men and women have become hardened in their responses, in their feelings, in what seems natural to them, because of sin. We’re not in the Garden anymore. Our hearts are hard. So, for instance, rape seems natural, even urgent, to some poor sinners. To others, natural is the pleasure of seduction. For some men, mating with a man seems natural. Still others seek sexual gratification with children. Or animals. Or, lower still, with plastic sex toys and video images.

And many—especially in our day—think it a problem and a vexation that natural sex should so easily produce offspring. It seems to them normal that sex should be usually—almost invariably—infertile. The fruitfulness of the sexual embrace distresses them. I could almost say it affronts them. The connection between sexual fulfillment and fertility strikes them as a defect of design.

Fruitfulness is undeniably a component of real sex. Bible and biology, Genesis and genetics, every source of knowledge, natural and supernatural, is there to tell us so. It is not a defect: It is part of the design. The question, then, is what do we do about it? Do we learn to live with our created sexual design, learn about it “on our knees” as learning something holy? Or do we reject our sexual nature as it is, and invent something else?

Contraception means the rejection of real sex: It is an insistence that we can break sexuality into pieces, select the bits we like, and put the rest in the wastebasket.

It takes patience and humility to live with a husband or wife whose sexuality is whole, entire, and unbroken. It means one’s great bodily powers and heart-energies are at the service of somebody else—at the service of another sex, and another generation—and not of oneself. This laying out of sexuality at the service of another—seeing genital activity itself not as self-fulfillment but as self-donation—is at the heart of Christian sacramental reflection.

Now consider this: If the husband or the wife says, “I love you, dearie, but you’ve got one God-given, healthy, holistic power that gives me a pain: fertility. So bag it. Fix it. Suppress it. And then I’ll sleep with you”—that is not exactly the acceptance of a whole person by a whole person. It is altering the person (suppressing natural fertility) as a condition for marital union.

Thus, contraception does not just offend the procreative power; it offends the unitive power, too. It involves a maiming of bodily wholeness—cutting sex down to size—which ultimately means cutting your spouse down to size.

Both reason and revelation tell us that a great purpose of the sexual bonding of a man and a woman—and therefore of marriage—is the begetting and raising of children. But there are some who say that if a husband and wife are, on the whole, accepting of children, there’s no reason for this “holistic acceptance” to be expressed in every act of marital union. In other words, openness to life inheres in the relationship as a whole, and not necessarily in individual sexual acts.

Just a moment now. Suddenly we have a “relationship” that is somehow independent of its “acts.” Try this statement instead, which substitutes “fidelity” for “fertility”: “Marital fidelity inheres in the relationship and not necessarily in individual sexual acts.” (Oops! That comes a little too close to what the mass culture is already beginning to say: “Flexible Fidelity: the Next Big Thing.”) Let’s try one more: “Your Savings and Loan believes that business ethics inheres in the relationship and not necessarily in individual financial transactions.” Now we’re cooking!

A relationship is not separable from its “acts.” The acts are the ingredients of the relationship. If your recipe for brownies is 99 percent wholesome except for a tablespoon from the cat’s litter box, haven’t you subtly altered the character of brownies per se?

But don’t we have a dilemma here? On the one hand, the marriage relationship is ordered to self-donation: holy oneness with one’s spouse, and the procreation and education of children. But there are occasions—particularly in times of sickness, poverty, and hardship—when the arrival of more children would seriously compromise the family’s ability to care for the children they have already been given and make oneness far more difficult, if not (apparently) impossible.

In these cases—when the mother’s health is at serious risk, or the family’s finances are close to calamitous, or the caregiving needs of the existing children are already nearly overwhelming—wouldn’t contraception actually serve the ends of marriage by making it more likely that the children already born will also be decently cared for, given the parents’ limited resources of time, energy, and money?

I am convinced that the answer is no. Even in these cases, contraception would not serve. There is something literally disordered about contraception: It entails actively rejecting and extirpating part of our created design. We are not allowed, and should not want, to bring disorder into our lives, especially our married lives.

In these cases, natural family planning (NFP) could very well be the answer to prayer. For the same reason, it should be clear why natural family planning is morally acceptable: It means knowing, respecting, and acting in harmony with our created design.

NFP involves knowing the bodily signs of fertility and infertility and then acting accordingly: choosing intercourse during fertile times if the conception of a child could be accepted, or abstaining at those times if there are grave reasons to avoid pregnancy. In both cases, the spouses are acting with, and not against, the natural powers and potentialities inscribed by divine wisdom in their own bodies.

That is why it is inaccurate to call NFP a “method of contraception.” Contraception is a key part of the larger modern project of splitting sexuality into its components and then exploiting those components separately. It calls for nothing by way of virtue. It requires only drugs, devices, or surgery. It is the ultimate technical fix.

NFP expresses a much more ancient and holistic view: that sexual powers require harmonious cooperation, patience, gentleness, self-control—in fact, all the fruits of the Holy Spirit. NFP presupposes husbands and wives who have placed their sexual lives humbly in each other’s hands; who can, by mutual consent, lovingly abstain for a little while, and lovingly come together again (1 Cor. 7:4–5); who know there is a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing (Eccl. 3:5).

St. Paul said something about human sexual love that was never said about any animal’s sex life: that for us—for human persons and particularly for baptized persons—sexual union is a mysterium tremendum. It is the prime image of the union of Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:32). To be sure, St. Paul does not say that this imaging is a property of sexual relations considered in isolation, but of marriage as a whole. Nevertheless, we’re not talking here about the love of parent and child, of brothers and sisters, of workmates or the monastery or the parish, but precisely the union exclusively proper to married persons. The sacred sign of this is sexual intercourse.

It seems to me that the goal of Christ’s work is the creation of a new human race, one that lives the way God originally wanted the human race to live. This is a call backward to Genesis, to original design, to what one might call Alpha Humanity. But it is also a call forward to something new, to life fulfilled in Christ: Omega Humanity.

If the sexual act signifies this, if eternal salvation has a nuptial meaning (the Spirit and the Bride say, “Come”), then its structure is not to be tampered with, any more than one would tamper with the matter of the Eucharist or the name of the Trinity. This means that wholeness is not just desirable, not just an ideal, but is obligatory for purposes of signifying what God wants to signify; in other words, for sacramental reasons. This is why honest virginity and honest married love both honor the sacramentality of sex: virginity, by keeping sex wholly reserved; and marriage, by keeping sex whole whenever it is expressed.

This doesn’t mean that a baby must be desired whenever intercourse is chosen (although it is a beautiful thing for husband and wife to come together knowing that conception is possible; they are then true wonder-workers in each other’s eyes!). But it means, at least, that the natural pattern of fertility and infertility is recognized as providential. We cooperate with it. We respect it. We don’t restructure it.

Those who never really fast, never really feast. The seasons of nature alternate cold and warm, dry and wet, the hard-shelled seed buried in darkness and the spring and sap of the new green shoot. In the same way, the church calendar is spangled with its purple and rose, its white, green, and gold, keeping its octaves, counting its days, fasting without bitterness and feasting without shame.

I speak here of sexual abstinence: the virginity of the unmarried, the continence of the celibate, and the periodic abstinence of NFP couples; and also of those many occasions when husband and wife are unable to come together because of illness, weariness, or separation. These are our fasts. Yet the meaning of abstinence is never found in itself, but in rhythms larger than ourselves, larger than our whole lifetimes. The meaning of the fast is found in the Feast.

Truly, if this life were all there is, there would be no reason not to squander our sexual energy ad libitum, de-coupled as to partner, disoriented as to sex and gender, Dionysian as to its final end: Remember that in Euripides’ play The Bacchae it ends in death.

But if this life points mysteriously to a life to come, we must honor the “secret meaning” of our sexuality as a Sign of sacred fertile union. To deliberately splinter the parts of the Sign—to break away from the sacredness, to split off the fertility, or to disrupt the spouses’ one-flesh unity—would be like hacking up a painted highway marker into a heap of unrelated syllables. But to restore the Sign of whole sexual love—man and woman, lifelong and exclusive, faithful and fruitful—means to read the Sign rightly and to reach the destination to which it points: the Marriage of the Lamb, the feast that has no end.

Juli Loesch Wiley is a worshiper of one God, the wife of one husband, and the homeschooling Mater et Magistra of two fine sons in Johnson City, Tennessee. She can be reached at jlw509@earthlink.net. A version of this article appeared in Re:generation in 1995.

If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue of Touchstone magazine. An introductory subscription (ten copies for one year) is only $24.95.

Luke 23.27
A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him.

28 But Jesus turned to them and said,
Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.

29 For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, wombs that never bore, and breasts which never nursed!’

30 Then they will begin ‘to say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!”’

I've read more than once that NFP couples rarely divorce, but I've never been able to find an actual source for that, or any statistics. Do you have any you could share with us?

I'm not the one you addressed this to, but I have a theory. I don't think the divorce rate is lower due to using NFP vs. another form of contraception. I think the divorce rate is lower due to the reasons that people practice NFP in the first place: Respect for God, Respect for Life, Respect for our God-given bodies.

I know many, many Protestant couples who use NFP. They are not willing to end an innocent life through abortifacient birth control methods (the pill, the IUD, the mini-pill, Depo-Provera, etc.). Nor do they wish to fill their bodies with artificial hormones; the effects of which are not fully known.

More often than not, a profound respect for Life is attached to a profound trust in God, and NFP (or no "method of avoidance" whatsoever) is an outgrowth of that faith.

The anti-chemical birth control crowd is growing as more people are made aware of its mechanisms. Protestants are jumping off of the birth control ship in rapid numbers. They are rapidly finding out that they were lied to. Expect to see more and more Protestant couples (those not in PCUSA, ECUSA, etc. !) having larger families than in years past.

The tide is turning!

But this is not the case with most people. If I grant that for some people, pregnancy can be life threatening, and contraceptives are allowed because they are "self-defense," this still leaves open the vast majority of people who are not in life-or-death circumstances.

I completely disagree. There is never a justification for potentially aborting a child through chemical birth control.

If pregnancy would literally cause death, then a couple should be using sympto-thermal NFP and/or a barrier method. Better yet, sterilization. While I don't agree with sterilization, it's a far better thing than chemical abortion. No one dies with sterilization.

I see no evidence to suggest contraception in of itself is a sin at all

I don't necessarily believe contraception is a sin. However, no birth control method (besides NFP and barrier methods)completely prevents contraception. They do, however,prevent implantation. "Breakthrough ovulation" occurs anywhere from 2 - 25% of the time. The IUD prevents implantation as its primary method. The pill uses it as a secondary method. The mini pill allows breakthrough ovulation more often.

Do you know that the medical definition of "conception" was changed in the 70's to mean the point at which an embryo implants in the uterine lining (about a week after conception), rather than the point at which the egg is fertilized? That is why the Pill is called a "contraceptive", when in actuality, it doesn't always prevent conception, but it does prevent birth. (Although of course it fails at even that sometimes.) So it's more accurate to call it birth control than contraception.

All in all, I do not strongly feel it's a sin to prevent conception (although it is a rejection of blessings), I DO believe it's a sin to kill the conceived child by preventing its implantation.

I am sure God agrees.

I think it helps to think of contraception this way:

Like every human act, contraception involves two elements: a means(or method)and an end (or goal.) The goal is the avoidance of pregnancy; the means is a fundamental revision of the sexual act.

The goal is not always morally wrong. Sometimes it is allowable, or even morally obligatory, for married people to postpone the next pregnancy, or even to avoid pregnancy entirely. Grave injury or illness could be the reasons; or it could be that a new baby would make it impossible to care for other family members already depending on our care (imagine you have a couple of ailing elders in the grandparent generation, a disabled husband, etc.)

But even if the goal (avoiding pregnancy at this time) is perfectly legitimate, you still have to look at the means or method, to see if it is also legitimate.

The word "perversion" means literally "turning away," and a sexually perverted act is one that has been turned away from procreation. That is what contraception has in common with ejaculating up somebody's anus or down their throat, or any other such act: it is "turned away from" fertility. It deliberately sabotages the potential fertility which is part of the act.

NFP, by way of contrast, does not involve choosing a perverted act. It simply involves waiting until the female fertile time has passed. "Waiting" is not a perverse act. There is a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.

If you believe that the picture I have drawn would be inaccurate for most women, then you are historically ignorant.

I believe that God means for the vast majority of people to marry, almost everyone, in fact. In that scenario, smaller, more delicately built women will be physically destroyed by your prescribed path of unlimited childbirth. And, many of the remaining children will grow up in poverty. If that is the will of your god, I'm just grateful that I don't know him.

By the way, I read Pope John Paul II's book "Love and Responsibility", which I believe makes the strongest possible case that can be made for the Catholic position on love, marriage, and behavior in marriage, including contraception, and the logic collapses at the point of contraception. Right up to that point, he's absolutely spot on, but his argument fails at contraception, and reading it, I knew the reason for the Catholic position-- it has been developed by celibate men, men with a limited understanding of women and marriage. I was surprised that he got so much right, but understood then and there exactly why no other major denomination concurs with the Catholics on this issue. If you haven't, you should read that book.

Finally, it occurs to me that God has no problem unambiguously spelling out exactly what sort of behavior he prohibits-- I don't notice "Thou shalt not use contraception" among the ten commandments, and I don't see anywhere indicated that "contraception is an abomination". On this one, the Catholics are doing one heck of a stretch from two sources-- Onan, and the exhortation to "be fruitful and multiply". That's just about as big a stretch as liberals do with the U.S. Constitution.

I have studied NFP in detail, even practiced it for a while (although with a different purpose-- I was trying to get pregnant-- but the methods are the same), and I consider the difference between NFP and so-called artificial contraceptive methods to be splitting hairs-- very Pharisitical.

My previous post #148 was written to another poster, but some of the points might interest you.

I would also note that my God is VERY powerful-- if He wants a particular act of sex between a man and a woman to produce a baby, it will. His will CANNOT be overcome by any contraceptive method, including sterilization.

As I said before, He gave us brains and intends for us to use them. We are meant to discover the miracle of all of His creation, including our own bodies. Once we do so, we have obtained greater power to cultivate them, but we have simultaneously assumed a greater ethical burden to use our knowledge wisely, and in accordance with His will. And, as always, the best way for us to know His will is to pray unceasingly, and ask Him. We will get the real answer for our own lives, one specifically tailored to us, rather than a cookie-cutter answer created by man to apply to everyone equally.

I also pray for the best for you and your family. It sounds to me that on this issue, the doctrinaire answer IS God's will for you and yours, but I am equally certain that it isn't His will for everyone. And, this debate on such an intimate marital question, regarding such a biblically undefined activity, reminds me of Jesus' response to Peter concerning John at the end of the gospel according to John: "If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?" Indeed, what is it to any of us what another married couple does in this area?

If I grant that for some people, pregnancy can be life threatening, and contraceptives are allowed because they are "self-defense," this still leaves open the vast majority of people who are not in life-or-death circumstances.

I completely disagree. There is never a justification for potentially aborting a child through chemical birth control.

I said "if." I was taking the special pleading off the table in order to focus on the normal situation, people who use contraception without some perceived special medical necessity for it.

It was a rhetorical gesture to focus on the main issue.

If you believe that the picture I have drawn would be inaccurate for most women, then you are historically ignorant.

I stand by what I said. You believe children to be a burden. I don't.

I believe that God means for the vast majority of people to marry, almost everyone, in fact. In that scenario, smaller, more delicately built women will be physically destroyed by your prescribed path of unlimited childbirth.

First of all, I never said that all women have to have "unlimited childbirth." The rest of what you have written is rubbish as well.

It is astonishing how pervasive the contraceptive mentality is, how far Christians have fallen in accepting this evil. I know your heart is not open, but at least you can know you were told.

The brains that God gave us does not include the right to re-engineer our sexual design. Nothing in Scripture gives us the warrant to fundamentally change our sexuality: to add or subtract parts or powers from the healthy body; to try to change males into females -- or the other way around --- or to outsource or redesign or disable our power of fertility.

There are things you can properly do to animals that you cannot properly do to humans. This is because they are not rational animals, and ---although they were created good ---- they were not created in the image and likeness of God. That is why for instance, you can breed or castrate or spay or neuter an animal: because its sex does not have any spiritual significance.

Contraception is veterinary medicine.

This is because, unlike animals, uman beings' bodies have, not only utility, but significance. In particular our sexuality has very great significance: because we are being capable of thought and of love, and we express this with our bodies; because we are capable of being procreators, co-creators with the Creator in bringing new human beings into the world; and because sexual intercourse itself is a constitutive element of a Sacrament (the Sacrament of Matrimony): the bodily sign of our giving of ourselves as a gift to God and to our spouse.

It is not right to take something so significant and deliberately damage it by weakening or destroying one of its powers. It is a sacrilege to do such a thing to an "image and likeness of God."

"It is He who made us, and we are His." We can use our "brains," as you say, to heal what is injured, cure the diseased, to strengthen what is weak or restore the natural to its proper function.

But nothing gives us the right to deliberately subvert or destroy part of our healthy sexuality, which includes fertility. That is not medicine. That is anti-medicine. We should not deliberately damage or weaken any healthy bodily power God gave us: it's the same as saying,

"Forget it, God; You made a mistake in the way you made the healthy human body. What you deigned us to have as a wonder, we regard as an inconvenience; what you gave as a blessing, we see as a curse; what you granted as a sharing in your creative power, we see as a damned nuisance. Fertility is your error, Lord. We don't want to learn to live with it harmoniously. For the time being --- or maybe from now on in--- we'd just rather be rid of it."

You are both Catholic, are you not? If you haven't, please read "Love and Responsibility". It is truly a wonderful book, and right on so much of what it covers, but I very much believe that any happily married person who reads it will see in it exactly what I saw.

I'm going to leave the discussion here. Neither of you dealt with my stated objections to traditional Catholic doctrine on this issue. I can truly understand, and have no objection to your passionate conviction that the Catholic position on this issue is right and proper to your lives and your families, but until you deal with my specific objections to the argument that it is right and proper to all people and all families, I have nothing more to say.

And, Dave, your contention that I see children as a burden is uncharitable. I have two much-beloved daughters, and your comment is simply ugly.

Neither of you dealt with my stated objections to traditional Catholic doctrine on this issue. I can truly understand, and have no objection to your passionate conviction that the Catholic position on this issue is right and proper to your lives and your families, but until you deal with my specific objections to the argument that it is right and proper to all people and all families, I have nothing more to say.

"Catholic" specifically does not mean good for some people in some circumstances. It means "universal." You may think it OK for things to be true for some people, and false for others; but I believe in objective truths.

And, Dave, your contention that I see children as a burden is uncharitable. I have two much-beloved daughters, and your comment is simply ugly.

How is it uncharitable to simply reiterate what you have already said? That childbearing is a sentence of death, drudgery and poverty for the vast majority of women, who were only freed when technology allowed them to divorce conception from intercourse.

Maybe you need to look up "burden" as well as "catholic."

I leave you with your own words, your own testimony to the burdensomeness of children:

The terrible poverty of families too large, the maternal deaths, the women with broken down bodies and no teeth, looking like old women at 30, the children lost and overlooked amid too many children with parents too tired from the struggle of it all, the widowers struggling on alone with so many children.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.