IT IS NOT THAT SEX IS A
BAD THING, BUT A HIGH THING
If one says nowadays that
sex is sacred, one runs the risk of being ridiculed. But that is only because
the job of demystification has been done so well. If someone managed to kidnap a princess, dressed her in rags and knocked
her about the head so her speech was slurred, and told his fellow thugs that
this woman was a princess, they would likely not believe him.
Our society is in a
similar situation with regard to sexual love. We find it difficult to see how
anything that can be found in low places can also be found in the highest.
Given the common and easily available state to which sex has fallen, it is not
to be wondered at that the medical and psychological estimate would prevail:
sex is not sacred at all. It is a
natural thing, one more biological process among many. So let us eat and drink
and sleep and have sex and be healthy.
Christianity won’t go
along with that. Neither did the pagan world for that matter. The Greeks
believed love was god and sex a goddess. The Romans believed that only virgins
should tend the vestal fire. In our better moments we don’t go along with the
casual view of sex either. We can see, though not so clearly as before, that
sex is something set apart and not for the public realm, that what goes on behind
closed doors is not meant to go on the movie screen… The fact that we tend to
blush and stammer or assume an awkward air of matter –of- factness when talking about sex does not mean we are
holdovers from Puritanism, but simply that we realize the subject matter we are
tackling is not a purely biological phenomenon . No one as far as I know ever blushed when
telling children how grape fruit should be eaten.
Unless you understand that
Christianity considers sexual love to be a sacred thing, you can never fully understand why it insists
that sex be set about with exclusions and restrictions. All sacred things are.
It is not that it thinks of sex as a bad thing, but a high thing. Like other
high things, it deserves to be bounded by objective rules and not wafted about
by gusts of changing emotion. The Christian position on this issue is quite
clear…The correctness of our sexual conduct must not turn on the intensity of the moment’s
feelings but rather on objective criteria
: Whether we have made a vow and to whom.
How else can it be? We are not allowed to plead our case on the basis
of.”It’s all right if you’re in love.” Much less on the defense, “It can’t be
wrong when it feels so right.” Poached trout, as John White points out in Eros Defiled, tastes quite as delicious
as the purchased kind, but it is still poached trout.
-William Kirk Kilpatrick,
Psychological Seduction.
(Photo from stylecube.co.uk)
No comments:
Post a Comment