Tuesday, November 02, 2004
SINGING THE MELODY AGAIN
The Vatican has issued a new sex guide for Catholics according to a Telegraph article sent in by a reader:
A Vatican-sanctioned sex guide is encouraging churchgoers to make love more often in an effort to offset "impotence and frigidity" and address papal concerns over declining birth-rates among Italian Roman Catholics.
The controversial book, It's A Sin Not To Do It, written by two theologians, promises the reader answers to "everything you wanted to know about sex but the Church (almost) never dared to tell you".
In their attempt to galvanise the faithful, Roberto Beretta and Elisabetta Broli, who write regularly for the Italian Bishops' magazine, Avvenire, have written one of the raciest works ever to deal with the Church and sex.
Bullet points on the jacket cover underline the central message: "Sex? God invented it. Original sin? Sex has nothing to do with it. Without sex there is no real marriage." ...
Beretta told The Telegraph: "The Church is not against sex. Something needed to be done about the cliches and stereotypes. The Church is not only about forbidding the use of contraception and warning against the sins of the flesh.
"In view of the trivialisation of sex and the rise of impotence and frigidity in consequence, as well as the increasing number of only children, it is better for the Church to promote sex in the right circumstances, instead of just focusing on prohibitions and perversions."
Well, maybe, but I somehow don't get the impression this is going in a wholesome direction, either.
The porn was still appearing on my computer screen when I took it in for repairs yesterday. I wasted a lot of time trying to make it go away. The last time it came up, I finally really looked at it instead of quickly X-ing it out, and what it revealed was a mind bender.
The screen consisted of a series of small pictures lined up in rows like a checkerboard...Doorways to click. The word across the top of each picture described what could be found behind the portal. Selections ran the gamut of hard core porn including shemales and children.
The pictures were intended to be enticing I suppose, and I'm sure a credit card was required. They were hardly tempting, though, and I wondered what sort of mind would find a woman with male anatomy interesting.
What I saw when I really stopped to look was incredibly boring ugliness. The ugliness of a Mona Lisa slashed with a knife. The ugliness of an orchid trodden under hobnail boots. The ugliness of a kitten set on fire.
The ugliness of a soul cut off from the source of beauty, truth, and innocence?
The pictures were boring in their effort to shock. There is nearly nothing left in the pornographer's bag of tricks. When you have seen one naked body posed to titillate, you have seen them all.
As I think about those pictures, revulsion gives way to fear for the vulnerability of innocence. But then the mental picture shifts to the setting of the Song of Solomon from Scripture. The contrast is overwhelming:
Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, ah, you are beautiful!
Your eyes are doves behind your veil.
Your hair is like a flock of goats streaming down the mountain of Gilead....
Your lips are like a scarlet strand; your mouth is lovely.
Your breasts are like twin fawns, the young of a gazelle that browse among the lilies... (Songs 4:1-5)
It's almost embarrassing, isn't it? We are so conditioned to "Man, did you see the ____ on that one?"
In our rush to perversion our culture has lost the meaning of sex, and has precious little knowledge of the meaning of love. The Song of Songs raises up before us the evidence of goodness that has departed.
Perhaps our in-your-face naked clothing styles are a reaction to the coarseness. The boys talk about girls in a vulgar fashion. The girls listen and learn. They try to please the boys by being vulgar, becoming coarse and hardened themselves in the process, which in turn causes the boys to talk about them in a vulgar way...And round the spiral it goes seeking ever-lower ground.
I had a vague sense of this years ago when preparing to teach my young daughter what mothers are supposed to teach. I knew the language of the mechanics. I could easily find diagrams to explain it, but there was something missing. That absence sent me searching, and instinctively I knew that what I was seeking would be found only in faith because only God could supply it. The culture sure didn't have a clue.
That brought me to a class for parents at church--an opportunity to learn what would be taught to the parochial school children in their sex ed classes. I attended expecting to be given the secret that I lacked. What I got was what I already had along with the realization that "they" didn't know any more than I did what was missing, and "they" didn't care.
I asked, "How do you protect the natural innocence of the children which is their first defense against sexual exploitation?" and got blank stares in response. They didn't have a clue and had never thought of the question. Even more, they resented that I had asked. The teachers who would teach my child about sex in a few short years didn't care about children's innocence. They didn't want to talk about it. All they wanted to do was to get this session with the parents over with because it was embarrassing. Today in the headlines we see the result of their failure.
I took my child out of the sex ed classes and taught her at home the incomplete knowledge that was all I had to give, adding to it the prohibitions of the Church which I could not be sure she would have gotten in the classroom, then I watched as her classmates slipped into promiscuous behavior.
Once I saw the evidence of the missing piece of our understanding of the sexual act, once thirty years ago on a September day in Yellowstone National Park.
September is mating season for the elk, and they put on a show that draws nature photographers from all over the U.S. Elk bugling is a sound like no other, loud, demanding, echoing through the forest. There is nothing doe-like about a bugling elk, or the clash of antlers as rivals duel for the attention of a doe. Once seen, the sights and sounds of the mating of the elk are hard to forget.
Several of us, camera in hand, were following one particular bull at a safe distance, hoping for that priceless shot. There were trees all around us, and we were silent so as not to disturb the animal. A large bull who had defeated his rival in head to head combat was bugling in the clearing. A doe appeared from out of the trees and walked slowly toward the bull. Both animals were silent. The bull didn't move. We held our breath. The sun shone through the trees, turning the clearing to dappled gold. The doe came close and stretched out her neck toward the bull. Their noses touched, or nearly so. Then they turned their tails toward us and walked slowly out of sight into the trees together side by side.
It was a magical moment, when the world seemed to have paused in its turning. I had seen something profound, but didn't know quite what it was. I couldn't plumb the depths of that moment and still can't. Neither can I forget it. It's burned into my mind like a firebrand.
After that moment, I lost interest in photographing the mating of the elk. Whatever was there to discover I had already witnessed, but I had failed to grasp its significance. Everything else would be anti-climactic.
If I ever discover the secret of that moment, I will know what was missing from my daughter's sex ed class, from my own understanding of the sexual act, and from the pornographic pictures on my computer screen that fails to turn them into the Song of Songs.
