Sex Au Naturel (13 page)
Authors: Patrick Coffin
Biological fecundity is the physical echo of God’s superabundant spiritual fecundity within the Godhead. His life is an eternal relation of three perfect self-donations, which are best understood not by what each keeps, but by what each
gives
: fatherhood, sonship, and the means to become holy. “God does as God is,” as Forrest Gump might have reversed it.
In the Book of Genesis, sexual intercourse follows immediately upon creation.
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The man (
ish
) and the woman (
ishshah
) become one flesh (“Adam knew Eve” Gen. 4:1). With the birth of Cain, they are constituted as three. From one comes two; these two become one; and then the unity of the couple produces the “third” person of the child. Hence, the new husband-wife-child community is a dim, but real, reflection of God as Trinity, the transcendent “first family.”
As we saw in Chapter Four, the Bible’s first command is to “be fruitful and multiply” (note: not “be barren and divide”). This mandate comes in the very next verse after man is created (Gen. 1:28). Made in God’s image, man is called to respect his innate orientation toward new life—most particularly in the domain in which he’s most profoundly the image of God in the co-creation of new life.
Why? Because all that touches upon life is sacred, because life has its source in God; an instinctive respect surrounds it.
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When husband and wife become one flesh, a holy act takes place, which God may bless with the creation of a “someone” who will live forever in the kingdom of God. Endless permutations of future progeny are unleashed by a sexual act so blessed. We take hold of a whole series of events yet to be when we enter into that natural holy of holies that is sacramental genital union. We get a sideways glimpse at this mystery in Frank Capra’s movie classic,
It’s a Wonderful Life,
in which everyman hero George Bailey gets to see his world had he not existed.
When couples treat this mystery as a danger they cannot enter without “protection,” then they unwittingly don a kind of invisible spiritual condom against the fecundity of the Holy Spirit.
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This is not hyperbole. It’s a consequence of the sin of contraception, which, objectively, always involves grave matter. To willingly refuse the gift of children while engaging in the act God designed for that purpose is bound up in some way with refusing the gift of divine filiation from above. Fearing conception, yet unwilling to bridle their sexual urge for a short time, their union is no longer
life
-making.
It’s a mutual grasping at an orgasm, the main liturgical action of worship of the false god mentioned in Chapter One.
All analogies limp, but hopefully this one is not a paraplegic: Imagine a hiker covered in smelly grime from hiking in the heat of the day. He has grown used to, and now defends his filthiness and ignores the pleading of his family to clean himself up. Suppose he’s told about a sparkling waterfall that is fed by a beautiful lake in the high forest above.
The mud and the grime stand for personal sin; the day’s heat, original sin; his defense of filthiness, pride; his pleading family, the Church. The lake is the Father; the waterfall is the Son “descending” to share his divine nature; and the invisible tug of gravity that draws the torrent down from the lake is the Holy Spirit, who brings us into relationship with the Father and the Son. And contraception? It would be unfurling a huge umbrella before stepping into the falling water—refusing to be cleansed yet grabbing at the sensation of refreshment, and treating the (objective) cleansing quality of the water as mere mist to luxuriate in.
Seen against the dynamism of life within the Trinity, as long as a marriage is characterized by birth control, it is tainted with a death wish—not wishing the death of an existent child, of course, but the metaphysical wish of imagining the prospect of a child and then taking positive steps to kill off his or her coming to be. The “me first” mentality is lethal to the family. If children are the fruit of marriage, then killing off the fruit at its source harms in a certain way the trunk and the root (i.e., the marital friendship and the vow that makes it a sacrament). No wonder so many “protected” marriages die anyway, and from a direction they never saw coming.
Again, notice the very word contraception. Its
raison d’être
is to be in opposition, always against something or someone. It targets the imagined-as-being-conceived child whose debut they have considered as possible, and then sabotaged.
We took the long way, but we have arrived at the first implicit indictment of contraception: it contradicts God’s Trinitarian model of self-donation by turning the direction of love as envisioned by
Humanae Vitae
back upon the self, instead of toward the lover/beloved.
The second link between the Trinity and the message of
Humanae Vitae
expresses the same thing more vividly. It’s the radical example of the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, considered especially as the Bridegroom in His sacred passion.
The words of the Nicene Creed summarize what He did “for us men and for our salvation;” they also provide concrete ideals for husbands to meditate upon. The Creed skips past the details of Our Lord’s life, and announces that
“He was born of the Virgin Mary,” and then “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.”
Saint Paul must have been on fire with the terrible beauty of this self-emptying (
kenosis
) when he described a kind of primitive inkling of the Trinity:
[He], though he was
in the form of God
, did not count
equality with God
a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he
humbled himself
and
became obedient
unto death, even death on a cross. (Phil 2:6–8)
Kimberly Hahn has a lovely description of this act of nuptial union and communion:
Love leads to life; life leads to sacrifice. Jesus does in the flesh what He has always done in his divinity: He loves with complete self-donation. Of course the difficulty with loving with complete self-donation is that it requires the ultimate sacrifice of life in death. When Jesus took on human flesh in the Incarnation, His self-offering involved His life, death, and resurrection as the supreme gift of His love for us. It is this self-offering that He took into the Holy of Holies in heaven when He ascended to the Father (see Heb. 9:11–14).
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This sacrifice was not done as a judge for a plaintiff, or a warrior for a king, but as a bridegroom for his bride. According to the apostle Paul, the marital embrace is the pre-eminent earthly symbol to describe the indescribable union between Christ and His Church (Eph. 5:31–33). Paul builds upon the bridal imagery foreshadowed in the Old Testament where God’s love for Israel is likened to a husband’s love for his bride (see Is. 61:10–11; Hos. 2:16–20; Song of Solomon, etc.). It also appears later in Saint John’s apocalyptic vision: “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.… Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues, and spoke to me, saying, ‘Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb’” (Rev. 21:2, 9).
Christopher West, accenting Pope John Paul’s theology of the body, ties together the marital themes of both Testaments:
Just as God organically inscribed the marital union of Adam and Eve in the mystery of creation, he organically inscribes the “marital” union of the new Adam and the new Eve (Christ and the Church) in the mystery of redemption. Spousal union, in fact, becomes the foundation upon which God constructs the entire mystery of our salvation in Christ.
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As the bridal, so the maternal. Christ constitutes the Church as Bride by Christ so she could become our Mother. This Mother then gives supernatural birth to new children by the “womb” of her baptismal font, so women share in this bridal maternity by being called to motherhood, whether spiritual or biological. Saint Paul does not hesitate to say that “woman will be saved through bearing children” (1 Tim. 2:15).
The “unbreakable connection” between the procreative and unitive meanings of the marital act taught by
Humanae Vitae
is the logical outgrowth of Jesus’ teaching of the indissolubility of marriage in Matthew 19:5–6, which harkened back to the way it was “in the beginning.” For the invisible love of husband for wife, and wife for husband, is so charged with promise that the two
do
become one in a breathtakingly literal way—in the form of a diaper-clad nap enthusiast! From this angle, every child is a kind of Incarnation in miniature.
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Taking a provocative step further, Saint Augustine referred to the cross as the marriage bed of Christ. “Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his nuptials into the field of the world,” wrote the saint of Hippo. “He came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And where he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up in place of his bride, and he joined himself to the woman forever.”
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Augustine’s comparison is worth lingering on. On a symbolic level, does it not intimate something of the outlook we ought to have toward the life-bedecked consequences of each act of intercourse? More, if the cross stands for Christ’s mystical marriage bed, and consummation refers to His saving death, what kind of grotesque sacrilege would contraception signify? It would be Jesus ensuring in secret that His death on the cross was faked, that it did not really save us, i.e., the Bridegroom defrauding His Bride in a convincing, and satanic, lie.
Of course, any reference to the intention of the Bridegroom will also have a Eucharistic meaning. And here, too, birth control is tacitly rejected. Tw o key prophecies about Jesus—the suffering servant (Is. 53) and the gentle lamb ( Jer. 11:19)—are both realized in the Eucharist, the fulfillment of the ancient Jewish tradition of sacrificing an unblemished lamb for the Passover Seder meal (Ex. 12).
In the Eucharist, the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. When we consume the Lamb of God “who takes away the sins of the world” (Jn. 1:29), we enter into the closest possible encounter with Him this side of heaven. Jesus’ high priestly prayer for unity in John 14 comes literally true as He abides in us that we might abide in Him. The ecstatic sexual union of marriage is a foretaste, however gauzy and pale, of the eternal love-union God “has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9).
It is easy to forget that Our Lord could have saved us at the Last Supper by speaking a word or snapping a finger. Yet He willed that the Supper of Holy Thursday should be joined with the Sacrifice of Good Friday, and plunged Himself into a horrific experience of abandonment and torture, unto a messy death no crime writer ever dreamed of. Why? To demonstrate “to the end” (CCC, no. 1337) His total communion with us, even amidst unimaginable suffering and its terminus in death. Atheists and other scoffers can no longer say, “God doesn’t understand.”
Peter Kreeft explains the relationship between repast and redemption against this Trinitarian background:
It is a banquet because it is a sacrifice, just as any earthly food can be eaten only because it is first killed and “offered” to eat. Whether animal or vegetable, its natural life is ended, given up to nourish the life of the one who eats it. “My life for yours”– this is the law of nature and of grace. It is even the life of glory. Self-donation, the ecstatic coming out of the self and giving of the self in love, is the essence of our eternal life in heaven, because that is our sharing in the very life of the Trinity.
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In the Eucharist, we receive the Body of God into our bodies. The Eucharistic Bridegroom impregnates us, as it were, with His divine life so that we can become other Christs for the world. “You are what you eat.”
But what if a man in the communion line inserted a latex sheath into his mouth (like the ones used by the dentist when filling a tooth) before going up to receive Holy Communion so that the Host wouldn’t be truly received? This is analogous of the condom writ Eucharistic. Or what if a woman swallowed something beforehand that would cause vomiting and ensure that the Host would be purged before truly entering her body? This parallels the Pill. Don’t these anti-Eucharistic actions bring to mind the word
blasphemy
?