Zoomtard

We were talking about St. Patrick’s Day parades not letting gay pride floats in. Conversation roamed around until my friend, the father of three young boys, lamented on how quickly his kids were sexualised. He wasn’t oh-woe-is-me-where-is-my-Daily-Mail conservative on it. He just was saddened that sexuality was a currency that his boys, still in primary school, had to be familiar with.

At Inhabitatio Dei I then read:

If Christ is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness.

For Halden, claiming that sexuality has any defining role in what it means to be human, then we are saying that Jesus is less than fully human.

There are moments when I see how tortured theological thinking must appear to the rest of the world.

Halden, who is a very thoughtful and literate writer makes a point that serves as the counter point to the gay pride movement’s claims to march in New York’s March 17th parade. On one level, I want to say, “Let everyone join the parade”. But then again, what has St. Patrick’s Day got to do with sexual orientation? Halden builds a theological argument that answers the sexualisation of our society that turns who we are intimate with into a political position and a demand for “our rights”.

Ben Myers, in the equally brilliant theo-blog Faith and Theology remixes Halden’s post. He draws on the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality to say,

one of the central themes of modernity is the idea that we must constantly speak about our sexuality. By analysing our own sexuality, we believe we will finally discover the deep secret truth of our humanness… we are obsessed not with sex itself (as a physical act), but with “the truth of sex” – with the idea that sex is a revelation of truth.

For Myers, the antidote to this mess is in friendship. He writes,

Might friendship itself – so lacking in anxiety, so free and undemanding – provide a much-needed critique of our culture’s profound sexual anxiety, an anxiety which is simply part and parcel of the dubious (and ultimately theological) doctrine that the truth of our humanness is disclosed in the truth of sex?”

Maybe it is just that my wife is writing up her philosophy on friendship at the moment that I agree with this position. Or that CS Lewis formed my mind and he obviously thought friendship was vital. Or that in friendships I have here in Maynooth and further afield I can’t help but think I have tasted paradise before my time.

Acknowledging that in Halden Doerge and Ben Myers I am going up against two of the most imaginative young thinkers the church has, I still want to say that on the issue of sexuality they have both misplaced their position. The Christian approach to sexuality must be shaped, of course, by the witness of Jesus. But can I suggest that we are mis-reading him by mis-reading sexuality. As Christians we recognise we have to imagine about sexuality outside the bounds society offers because the binary position of hetero and homo don’t do justice to human experience. If we are going to inquire as to how (if) sexuality informs what it means to be human we must first recognise that human sexuality is not defined by having sex.

I was a sexual person while I was still a virgin.

To claim that Jesus is not a sexual being would be to say that he was less than human. But to say that sexual beings are beings who have sex is to get it all wrong. My friends who are priests are not deficient human beings because they are celibate.

Friendship is more complicated than Ben Myers suggests. Its value does not come from it “lacking anxiety” but from it being able to arise outside the bounds of blood and tribe and the other constructed categories (like sexuality) that humans are busy making and maintaining. As such, friendship is the great stage for performing virtue because its constitution can transcend the societal markers that usually lock us away from each other.

The Gospels describe Jesus in quite risky terms physically. He is intimate with his friends in a way that if I describe it as sexual, it will all too easily be misunderstood by modern society. But as he lays in the bosoms of his disciples eating meals together, it is a profoundly sexual act without being erotic. It asserts and reasserts his existence as a human being with gender and a body and the pleasure and potency that comes from that.

But he also shows us what it is to be friends. He turns to his apostles and declares them his friends. What is the love of friendship? He says, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”.

In the paper that started this little storm in a blogosphere Archbishop Rowan Williams writes:

What is baffling and sometimes outrageous to the modern reader is just this assumption that, in certain circumstances, sex can’t matter that much. And I want to suggest that the most important contribution the New Testament can make to our present understanding of sexuality may be precisely in this unwelcome and rather chilling message.

It is indeed true to say that as modern readers, the New Testament relativises the role that sex plays in our life and in what we understand as our “humanness”. Yet the response to this is not that sex is unimportant, or that procreation is irrelevant or that families are distractions. To claim such things cuts against some of the greatest and deepest pleasures we know. It is true that society at large gets sex and parenting and family all mixed up. But we would expect that the things that cause us the most difficulty to understand are also the most important. And it is not as if the church has led the way in clear thinking on this issue.

The path out of the sexuality battles of our twilighting civilization is to be found in Jesus. It is not his virginity that is to be normative for us. It is his life built around self giving love lived in community of friends, including spouses, children and our enemies turned brothers. As true as it is simplified, there are as many sexualities as there are humans. To say that doesn’t mean that all the ways and contexts for having sex are equally life-affirming and generating (in all meanings of the word).

If as Foucault says, sexual obsession in the modern western world is grounded in the hope that we might have some revelation of who we truly are, the response we make ought not be a pendulum swing to the opposite position that says sexuality “tell[s] us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness”. In Christ we have a third way that transcends the obsession of the wider world and the reactionary position that it inspires. Sexuality does inform who we truly are but it is not even the chief mode of relationship we have (which is friendship) and it does not inform us in simply having sex but shapes all amongst us, straight, gay, bi, celibate and even our poor unfortunate unintentional virgins!

Your Correspondent, Sleeps with the fishes