Wendell Berry has written on why you cannot fully privatize sexuality, that it inescapably involves a covenant between the individual and the community. Excerpt:
If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.
I thought about that this week when I heard from an old Christian friend I'll call Bobby. Bobby is in late middle age, and in crisis. His wife left him earlier this year after having had an affair. It shattered him. He granted her the divorce. Now he's living a pretty wild life, and called to tell me about it this week. It made me so sad I hardly knew what to say to him. He was once one of the most devout and upstanding Christian men I knew, but now? After listening to him recount his exploits, I finally said, "Bobby, how do you square that with your Christian faith?"
He told me he had no problem with it, and that he and the woman he was seeing now have offered it all to the Saviour, and are waiting on Him to lead. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Bobby was the kind of Christian before who would have seen this kind of self-deception so clearly. But not now. As far as he's concerned, he's happy with his sexually liberated lifestyle, and he's sure God has no problem with it. I asked him about his teenager, how he explained his behavior to her. His answer made it clear that the poor kid's in serious trouble, morally and perhaps emotionally -- and that he doesn't see this.
I had to get off the phone because I was trying to cook dinner for the kids and get them bathed, so I told him I loved him, and that was that. But I tell you, it was such a shock to try to take this all in. Lord have mercy. I can't get off my mind Bobby's teenage daughter, and how the messy breakup of her parents' marriage and now the path both her parents have chosen to take is shaping and will continue to shape her path through life.
See, this is what Wendell Berry is talking about. The breaking of the bonds of marriage between Bobby and his wife have turned Bobby into a man I hardly recognize. I'm not blaming her, exactly; he is responsible for his own choices. But the consequences of his choice, and his ex-wife's choice, cannot escape their children. And you know, when I go back to Louisiana, to my hometown, and talk with my friends there, I usually hear about someone of my generation or even younger who has left his or her spouse and taken up with another lover. These are people with kids. It's so ... normal now. Bobby told me on the phone, "Rod, people do things in this world and go through things that you and I can't imagine" -- this, as part of an exchange about violating moral and theological norms. His point was: What's normal, anyway?
It's ruinous, is what it is, and grievous. I don't understand why we do the things we do to each other and to our children. A friend in his twenties tells me that I'm out of touch with the way of the world now, on sexual matters. He's a devout and conservative Christian, engaged to be married, and quite public about his faith. And yet, he tells me, he and his fiancee get propositioned as a couple by their acquaintances. I don't understand people these days. But there is a connection between the choices we adults make to wreck our own moral lives, and ruin our marriages and communal lives, and stories like this shocker. Excerpt after the jump:
NORMANDY, Mo. (AP) -- Students at a suburban St. Louis high school headed to the gymnasium for HIV testing this week after an infected person told health officials as many as 50 teenagers might have been exposed to the virus that causes AIDS.Officials refused to give details on who the person was or how the students at Normandy High School might have been exposed, but the district is consulting with national AIDS organizations as it tries to minimize the fallout and prevent the infection -- and misinformation -- from spreading.
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As it is an English word, you are technically correct. In fact, the word is philologically deviant, a linguistic hermaphrodite and an intrinsically disordered locution that ought to be proscribed as vilely antisemantic.
Yes, that's the objection that A.E. Housman has to the word "homosexual" in Stoppard's play The Invention of Love ;-)
Of course, the same could be said of the word "television". (I suppose we could have said "telorama" instead.)
antisemantic
Now that's a good one! I'm going to have to remember that!
David J. White Of course, the same could be said of the word "television". (I suppose we could have said "telorama" instead.)
Excellent point. I had intended to add a sentence in my post that I object to "automobile" on the same grounds. But I saw no need to arm the loyal opposition with arguments beyond their ken.
Actually, the modern Greek word for automobile is αυτοκίνητο (autokineto) and for television, τηλεόραση (teleorase). I don't know what the Ancient Greek words are. The Great Scott is strangely silent on technological terms.
Let us, as Meg urges, give credit where it is due. The Catholics (along with a number of other institutional churches, but I'm most familiar with the Catholics) have certainly tried of late to do what can be done to prepare people for the responsibilities of marriage ahead of time, as well as conduct rescue operations later when a marriage runs into trouble (and all of them do sooner or later). If you're going to take the position that you can't get out of it later, you can in good conscience do no less, and the Catholics have been working diligently in those fields. I imagine they could use all the help they can get, given the messages the culture is sending out.
It was different when we got married in 1966. Our "marriage preparation" consisted of a meeting with the pastor at Newman Hall, who only wanted to see baptismal certificates and who scheduled us two weeks later, when he had a day free. (We were in a hurry. I was not pregnant, but we had other problems.)
We found out later that this priest was himself secretly married already. He left the Catholic Church not long after we were married. Of course I knew nothing of this at the time, and at 21 I could not possibly have cared less.
In spite of rather than because of this rather hasty and inauspicious beginning, we've done rather well I think. 42 years and counting.
I told our four adult kids two years ago that we're having a big party for our 50th wedding anniversary, and that we're neither giving this party nor paying for it. My friends said, "Do they really need ten years' notice?"
The answer to that would be, Yes.
"John M.: Just so you know, this veteran crunchy poster was very, very struck by the clarity of your observations and has benefited from it greatly. Thank you!
Bless,
Doug"
thanks Doug. Blessing to you as well.
Arsenokoitai are men who lie with men, irrespective of love or lucre.
Interesting assertion, but 'paederastes' would have fit that bill nicely, indeed have been substantially better. Surely Paul didn't want to license man-boy sex. 'Arsenokoitai' is obscure and arcane in Koine. It only makes sense as a usage if there is a further element or connotation to it that strikes Paul as salient.
Paul is a prude, no doubt. I prefer the OT. The Tanakh is far more positive on erotic delights. It does push the envelope, as in the case of Lot's lusty daughters and Onan and his anachronistic foray into coitus interruptus.
Paul is definitely annoyed with all the impious youngsters and the messes they get themselves into. The Tanakh writers see sex with, um, a bit less of a task-directed view.
But then there is the Song of Songs, and the woman with breasts like roes and thighs like jewels, not to mention the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense. My kind of religion.
The Garden, as in that book (and in Genesis), is- fortunately or unfortunately- a famous allegorical device in ancient Middle Eastern literature for portraying the inward universe successfully accessed by prayer. :-)
Of course, taken to its logical conclusions, that makes the Hebrew Bible to a guidebook for individual human spiritual journey via subtle allegorical narratives and advices rather than a manual for setting up and running worldly societies in the material world. But that can't possibly be true, can it?
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