Is Marriage Primarily About Sex?
Posted by: tony on 08/13/2007 08:13 PM
Updated by: tony on 08/13/2007 08:13 PM
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Expires: 09/13/2007 12:00 AM
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David at Sed Contra discusses CourageMan's Courage conference in Chicago. This has engendered some combox discussion with which David seems to disagree:
Courage Man has been finding his voice lately and has posted a bit of a response to a question in one of the Comboxes he visits from time to time. The question was, boiled down, why the claim that temptation toward homosexual activity is greater than [it is for] heterosexual persons?
Courage Man, rightly I think, noted that is is futile to make comparisons about the different weights our respective crosses. But he did venture an opinion on the question with which I mostly agree except for this part:
Marriage and children are vocations and are always a possibility for the straight person; chastity is both carrot and stick, in other words. For the homosexual person, it can be easily seen (and almost all do see it at times) as all stick and without real vocational value.
I disagree with CM in that I don't believe that married life is always a vocation for anybody, necessarily. As I have noted before, there are a lot of people in the Masses I pray and among my network of acquaintances who do not live with any degree of same sex attraction who yet remain unmarried - and all with varying degrees of discomfort with the fact.
Not one to speak for CM, but it doesn't appear that he said a married vocation is right for everyone, but he did say that the option is available for everyone who feels attraction for the opposite sex (well, assuming they can find someone they wish to marry who would have them). Those who remain single do so for many and varied reason, one of which might be that they simply haven't found the right person who will marry them, yet.
Marriage is a vocation, but I believe it a significantly more singular than even Christians in this culture tend to appreciate. This is one reason I believe there rates of annulments, separations and divorces as high as they are even among Christians today: too few people really stop to ask the question of whether God is calling them to a married life generally and then to a married life with this particular person, perhaps their future spouse.
This is so true. Popular culture has glamorized the sappy romantic notion of being "in love". That sappy Neil Clark Warren from eHarmony.com talking about finding your "soul mate" and living happily ever after. He parades person after person, each one more gushy than the last about finding "the love of their life". The concentration is on the feelings of love, not the reality of love.
Love is not a feeling. Love is a choice. This means before you get married you need to take a long hard look at your future spouse, and decide if they are the one that God is calling you to bind yourself to "for as long as you both shall live".
And the second odd thing is this persistent notion that the deepest purpose of marriage is primarily sexual. Sad to say, but someone who is having a problem living a chaste life had best not look to marriage as the remedy for his or her lust because they are only likely to bring that with them into the marriage where it will wrack further havoc.
Marriage is primarily sexual. The marital act mimics the trinity and is as close as we can get to heaven short of dying. When a man and a woman join in the creation of new life, it is a human expression of the "Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son".
However, if you want to get married to simply "get your rocks off", you'll be sorely disappointed.
Every Christian, those living with same sex attraction or not, those married or not, is called to live chastely in some regard. The exact form that call will take will vary over different circumstances and vocations, but it is essentially the same call to successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2337.)
All of us are called to live chastely. However, for those of us who are not attracted to the opposite sex, marriage is not an option. Thusly, chastity translates to celibacy in those cases.
As someone who has been discerning a vocation to the permanent Diaconate, the idea of celibacy has been on my mind in the case of my wife predeceasing me. But for me, celibacy will be a choice as opposed to those who really have no choice.
My heart and prayers go out to them.
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