Sex and the Incarnation: A Reply to Michael P.

I received this from an MOJ reader:

“I was struck by Michael Perry's recent comment that referring to "homosexual intimacy" as "sodomy" amounts to dismissiveness.  This strikes me as getting things backwards.  I take it that one of the critiques of those who reject the Church's sexual teaching is that it is too abstract, not aware enough of the messy realities of human relationships and human loving.  But in their discussions of homosexual sex, it is precisely these people who retreat from the concrete, from the body, and offer only lofty abstractions that prescind from the real world.

In this season where we reflect upon the Incarnation, we do well to remember that we live not only in a realm of ideas but in the realm of the flesh.  Our bodies have a structure, and that structure reflects purposes that are not invented by one's will or imagination--I cannot turn my stomach in to a pancreas nor my eyes into a nose any more than I can turn my anus into a sex organ just by willing it to be so. 

The Church's understanding of human sexuality is one that attends to the physical facts of human bodies.  It attends to structure and purpose and seeks to learn from how we are built how we ought to behave so that we might flourish.  Therefore, it does not throw all of human sexual conduct under the rubric "intimacy" and thereby regard it as good.  Not all intimacies are equivalent, and having the intention to do good does not absolve one of having to reflect on the morality of the particular acts through which one fulfills that intention.  Thus, it is at least possible that some forms of homosexual intimacy, even when pursued out of the best of motives, might still be wrong.

I encourage Michael Perry and the theologians he finds compelling to reflect upon the fact that the “intimacy” they endorse entails using body parts in ways that they are quite obviously not intended to be used.  In this season of advent, I ask Professor Perry:  whose theology is more respectful of the human body his or the Church's?  Whose theology is more respectful of the Incarnation?  To make a plea for “intimacy” in an abstract form simply is not sufficient.  The Church does not teach that homosexuals may not be friends with one another.  It does not suggest that there are no forms of intimacy that may be engaged in by homosexuals even with those whom they love and would love intimately. 

It teaches, rather, that the act of physical sexual union is ordered by nature and nature's God toward procreation, an act which throughout human history has required male and female to come together.  It teaches that male and female are called to express and experience that most intimate physical union within the relationship of marriage, and that to engage in sexual relations outside of that relationship is to violate one's body.  This is a teaching that is hard, particularly in contemporary culture, to accept.  But it is a teaching most assuredly rooted in a theology concrete and Incarnational. 

To ignore the physical realities of certain forms of human intimacy, homosexual or heterosexual, is more dismissive of the persons involved than to discuss them accurately for what they are.  Those who argue that some people's bodies are called to express the gift of their sexuality through acts that are intrinsically cut off from procreation and complementarity, acts that have historically been called "sodomy" should defend these practices concretely, calling them by name: anal sex, mutual masturbation, and oral sex.  After all, this is not an argument for abstract intimacy but for certain kinds of intimate contact. The argument will require more than suggesting that those who think otherwise are dismissive of homosexuals; it will require more than noting (as if it were disputed) that homosexuals are loved by God, are capable of love, and are called to love.  These facts are not in dispute, and they are not dispositive.  Pace the theologians cited by Prof. Perry, the Church does not dispute that homosexual persons are called to flourish in a way that has integrity; rather, it imagines that its understanding of chastity is the most faithful to our created and received nature, whatever our sexual orientation might be.  It therefore believes that the acts themselves, not just the relationships within which they take place, matter. 

The idea that homosexual sexual activity is required, that a chaste homosexual person cannot be "integrated" without committing the physical acts that remain unnamed by those who defend them, is precisely what Michael Perry is called to defend.  The Church's teaching does not forbid integration, it does not deny that people can be constitutively homosexual, and it does not ask them to deny who they are.  Rather, it invites them to reflect on the possibility that a human life deprived of genital sexual activity can be integrative, can lead to flourishing, and can be holy.  The burden, then, is on those who dismiss this possibility, to explain why the acts they seek to justify but not name are required and are paths to holiness.”