BEGGING your pardon for that rather naughty title of this piece,
what I would like to bring out is that if we truly have the Christian spirit,
that spirit should animate not only our spiritual soul but also our body all
the way to our sexuality as represented by our genitalia where the crudest and
strongest forms of our animality are found.
That’s because our Christianity should not only be a spiritual
affair. It has to impact the whole man, body and soul. Let’s remember that man
is always a unity of body and soul. He is not just pure body nor pure spiritual
soul. And as our Catechism teaches us, the body, properly animated by the
spiritual soul, shares in the dignity of the “image of God.” (cfr. CCC 364)
We can say that once our sexuality is animated by the Christian
spirit, we truly can consider ourselves as authentic and consistent Christian.
That’s because our sexuality can be regarded as the last frontier where the
Christian spirit has to conquer. And it’s not an easy frontier to conquer at
all. It requires tremendous effort and a special kind of grace from God.
Christianizing our human sexuality is not simply a matter of
living chastity in the level of continence alone, where we can manage to be
protected and to avoid falling into sin. It involves nothing less than making
it a powerful means to show our love for God and for everybody else. Its
instincts and passions should be trained in the ways of loving and glorifying
God and of loving and serving everybody else.
We need to see to it that our body, and specifically our
sexuality, is properly animated by the spirit of Christ, which is a spirit of
love, a spirit of self-giving, willing to make sacrifices even up to death for
love of God and of everybody else. This spirit of Christ should be felt in the
body. And let’s convince ourselves that it is in this way that our body and our
sexuality acquire their best condition.
We indeed need to sanctify sex which means that we understand its
purpose and use according to God’s will and law about it. It should be trained
to behave according to God’s will and law about it. Ideally, every time we feel
the urgings of sex, we should always get the sensation of loving God and
others. It’s in this way that we can discipline it and put it on its right
place and path.
But, of course, given our wounded nature, where it is very
vulnerable to just follow the blind and erratic ways of our hormones and other
earthly factors, we really need God’s grace, first of all, and our all-out
effort to attain its ideal condition.
Given how difficult this task can be, we have to understand that
we may have to resort to some extraordinary means to keep our sexuality in its
proper condition. In this regard, a saint once said: “To defend his purity, St.
Francis of Assisi rolled in the snow, St. Benedict threw himself into a thorn
bush, St. Bernard plunged into an icy pond…” (Escriva, The Way 143) We should
not be averse to resort to these means when necessary.
We have to understand then that we can only put our sexuality in
its proper place and on its proper path when it is lived in the context of a
working piety, a living and loving relation with God that is supported by
prayers, sacrifices, recourse to the sacraments, ongoing formation, spiritual
accompaniment, etc.
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