Sex Is A Mystery

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on photograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited. But the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless and now here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. The two words most often used and abused in our modern world are the words freedom and sex. Freedom is often used to signify the absence of law and sex is often used to signify the absence of restraint. It is this subject that we are interested in today in the general discussion of matrimon. We will commence with three varied popular expressions about the subject of sex and then apply some thinking to these expressions. The first popular expression is sex is not anything to be ashamed of. Now that can be understood in a right and wrong sense. It is right if it means that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way that gives pleasure. But that expression can be wrong. If it means colonel license, the mess that sex instinct has got us in today, uncontrolled use of pornographic literature, if these things are nothing to be ashamed of, then the expression is wrong. Let us take a second one. We must be self-expressive. That is right if it means that we are to perfect our personality. It is wrong, however, if self-expression means to allow the sex instinct every satisfaction and at all times and under all circumstances, we must analyze the full significance of the term self-expression. A locomotive on a track, following the road that was laid out by an engineer is self-expressive if it stays on the tracks. Then it reaches its full perfection as a locomotive. If however, the locomotive says to itself, why should I obey the laws and the tracks that were laid down for me by an engineer some years ago, I am going to follow my own impulses. If it jumps the track, it was self-expressive in the wrong sense of the term and then it destroyed itself. Can you imagine a soldier in battle deserting the line and then running back to safety? Meeting a superior officer? Can you imagine that superior officer saying to him, I am so glad that you were self-expressive. After all, we have inherited a number of old Victorian ideas that a man should stay in the battlefield and fight for his cause and for his country. Would you have allowed your personality to manifest itself? You have deserted the lines, and you have come back here to safety. I commend you. We shall give you a medal for being self-expressive. Makes a lot of nonsense, does it not? Certainly we are to follow the idiom, be yourself. We have to remember what we are. We are human beings. We are not animals. And the third expression that is often used today is, well, God would never have given us this particular instinct unless he intended it to be used. Therefore we have a right to use it, certainly. But we have a right to use it according to our nature. What is the nature of man? Is it that of a rational animal? Or is it the nature of a rooster? Inasmuch as our nature is rational, that is to say we have to live according to purposes and goals. Well, then it follows that we are to use our instincts according to that order of reason and not according to mere instinct. We have a hunting instinct, but we are not to use it at all times and under all circumstances. One may not, for example, hunt down mothers-in-law. Justice, dirt, is matter in the wrong place. So lust is the sex instinct in the wrong place. There has been perhaps too much emphasis upon it, and it is well to recall what a great sociologist has written about a similar emphasis that was put upon it in earlier days. We are here quoting Dr. Petrum A. Serokin, who writes those families among us which frequently change husbands and wives, which fail in their duties to their children and adopt the moral code of the gutter, are pushing us along the road to chaos. Wreth in the third and second centuries before Christ brought sex into the open. We know he continues, because there were tinsies in those days, too. Men who prided themselves on their objectivity as they calmly recorded the distressing picture of whole families getting together to indulge in promiscuous behavior. A adultery, prostitution, were so common that those who indulged were regarded merely as impusting fellows. Now know how this sociologist concludes. But such a society was not able to summon the backbone to resist in the face of war or to endure the austerity program that might have salvaged that overblown economy. Soon the glory that was graced was over, and the mighty acropolis was only a hillside strewn with ruined marble. It would be well for any country which stresses the flesh too much to remember that lesson of history. Let us take now an entirely different point of view. There's a certain amount of sympathy to be extended to those who protest against the way purity and chastity have been stressed. Too often it is negative. Almost all talks on chastity begin with don't do this or don't do that. It was seen as if it were all almost a negative virtue rather than a positive one. No Christianity, business, look at things in a godlike way. And what do we learn by studying men? Well we see that every human being has two instincts. Basic, fundamental, strong. One is hunger. The other is sex. God implanted both of these. It is thanks to hunger that we preserve individual life. It is thanks to sex that we preserve social life. God had to associate great pleasures with these two instincts in order to assure the continuation of both personal life and the human race. Naturally there will come deviations, excesses within these instincts. Man may eat too much, his body will get fat. So too there can be excesses of the sex instinct. They can be deordinate. And just as one may produce bad health from abusing the hunger instinct, so too one can develop a carnalized mind. One would not generally put garbage into the stomach, but too often one will put garbage into the mind. Now looking at it positively, you are not to think therefore that it is earned to have it wrong. It is godlike. It is heaven sent. It is good. It is never wasted even when it is controlled because the energy that might go out physically is sublimated and may come out in another way mentally and spiritually as it most often does. Now let us try to treat this subject in a dignified and positive fashion. We begin by asking what is purity or what is justity. Purity is reverence paid to the mystery of sex. We do speak of the mystery of sex and it is the mystery. Why is it the mystery? Why is it called that? If we use the Greek word, we would use the word sacrament. Now you remember that in the supernatural order every sacrament has two elements. One material, one spiritual, one that can be seen or heard or touched and the other, which is divine. So to in the natural order, sex is a mystery because it has these two characteristics. First, sex is something that is known to everyone. One is either male or female and yet there's something hidden from everyone. The known element is, as we said, that everyone is either male or female. The invisible, mysterious element of sex is its creativeness, a sharing in some way of the creative power of God. Now it was God's love that made him a creator and so God has poured that love into man and woman to make them co-creators with him. And that co-creation with him is a free gift. Now we have certain movements in our body that are not subject to freedom, for example, breathing, breathing, digestion, circulation, and so forth are to a great extent unconscious and involuntary. They go on independently of our will, but to create a poem, a statue, or a child is a free act. God gave the divine commission increase and multiply. Communicate new life. So we are sent into this world, therefore, to pass on a torch, the torch of life. And God has put that into our hands, to burn, confold, onto the purpose and destiny fixed by him. Pureity, therefore, is reverence paid to the mystery of sex and the mystery of sex is creativeness. Now a second point. All creativeness is surrounded with awe. And there is a creativeness given to man and woman. That is one of the reasons why, at all times there has been an association of religion with the unity of man and woman. Not only in Christianity, but among all pagan peoples. It was felt naturally that this great power of creativeness should be surrounded in some way by religious sanction. If then we understand the mystery of right, just as in supernatural sacraments, we mortal supply act and bread and water, words. So to hear man and woman supply the flesh and God supply the mystery. And this awesomeness that's around sex is the reason why young men act in a certain way toward young women and why young women act in a certain way toward young men. There's a sense of mystery, reverence, awe that makes each one of them shrieks from a two precocious surrender of the secret. That is one of the reasons why man is naturally chivalrous toward a woman. That's because he believes that she is physically weaker, but because of the awe that he feels in the presence of mystery. That too is why woman is tender, sensitive, even kidding, because she has a great mystery inside of her. Why cannot sex be used outside of marriage? What we call certain powers are to be used only in certain relationships, but as lawful in one relationship is not lawful in another. The man may kill another soldier in a just war, but not in his private capacity as a citizen. A policeman can arrest someone as a duly appointed guardian of the law, fortified with a warrants, but not outside of that relationship. And so too the creativeness of man and woman is lawful under a relationship sanctioned by God, but not apart from that mysterious relationship called marriage. And purity will never separate the two. Purity would no more think of isolating the capacity to share in God's creativeness. Then only good person would ever think of using a knife apart from its purpose to stab a neighbor. The things which God has joined together will not be separated. Purity then is not just physical intactness. In the woman it is a firm resolve never to use the power until God shall send her a husband. And in the man it is instead fast desire to wait upon God's will that he have a life, that he may use her for God's purposes. Purity then you see does not begin in the body, begins in the will and from there it flows outward, cleansing the imagination and the will and finally the body. Bodily purity is a repercussion or echo of the will. Life is impure only when the will is impure. You see then that purity is the sacristan of love. It is discarding. Just as we do not want to see an American flag under someone's feet because there is a mystery to that flag that symbolizes something else. So the pure are shocked at the impure because it is the prostitution of the sacred. It makes the reverent irreverent. The essence of all obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a chest. Given a hidden presence of God in every person, just as there is a hidden divine presence in the bread of the order, each person becomes a kind of a consecrated host. Not in the same sense as the bread of the order but because the purity is a consecrated affection. Notice here we are making it positive. Not negative. It is not something you must not do. It is something you must do, namely dedicate an affection. For example a mother will say to her young, never do anything of which your mother would be ashamed. So when it is dedicated to the love of the mother, young man goes with a young woman, he is dedicated to her ideals, marriage, dedication to a wife. In each and every instance it is always love that inspires charity and chastity and purity. You might give an example of this and the analogy of your musician and we want this to describe in some way the danger of isolating sex from love and from its purpose and from its creativeness. Suppose a director of an orchestra becomes very conscious of his hands, how he is going to hold the button between which fingers, whether his elbow is too high, whether his right hand should be lifted above his shoulder, suppose he concentrates just on his hand. Do you not think he is going to have an effect upon the music? Now suppose he concentrates on the music and the orchestra and the production of harmony, then everything fits into place. He is very unconscious of the hand and so too when sex becomes a part of love life and the purpose of life, then it is a dedication and it fits into the whole. So sex is not something that is isolated from life. Of course there is self-control, there is subordination of a part to a whole but all this again, I repeat, is on the count of serving a higher enthusiasm. When you dance, you do not concentrate on your feet and if you did, you would be walking on your neighbor's toes. But when you make your feet serve the spiritual and the mental and the social part of you, you have no problem. Thus purity properly understood is the taking of love and making every part of the sex instinct fit into it. That is why frequent holy communion is the best guardian of chastity because it places sex in the context of love. We have already said that chastity is the best of you, the sacristan of love. Now when we become in love with our Lord, when we have a sense of this tremendous ecstasy, and that is what it is, it comes from holy communion and from oneness with our Lord and Savior, then every part of us, our hunger instinct, our sex instinct, become a part of that love. It is love that awakens chastity. It is not the other way around every moment of our life. The time that we are children just reaching the age of reason on up until old age. It is the love of God that makes every other kind of love understandable. Even the love of husband and wife. He loves honesty never has to be told not to steal. He loves his neighbor never has to be told not to cut his throat. And so any of us who love God and human persons in the mystery of creativeness, we never have to be called not to do something, we're in love with a mystery. As Francis Thompson put it, with thou who knowest the hidden thing, thou hast instructed me to sing, teach love the way to be an overgindity. Do thou with eye-protecting hand, shelter the flame thy breathest hand, let my heart's reddened glow, be but a sun flesh snow. And if they say that snow is cold, oh, chastity must they be told. The hand that's chast with snow takes a redubble glow. That extreme cold like heat of sear, oh to the heart of love drawn near and feel how scorching rise is white cold purity. Sex is the reverence paid to the mystery of creativeness. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton-Chiin. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the US, call 818-3313-549. And please join us again next time, for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton-Chiin on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.