World of Love Sess9 - Sex in the Age of the Spirit

... it must be made clear that to hold that an external pattern of morality is inapplicable in some instances does not imply that we condone fornication and adultery: wayward sexuality is often appallingly destructive. Those who read this essay with care will realize that we are asking for an approach that starts from something deeper than a conventional moral judgment: rather it is from a concern for full responsibility in personal relationships. ... Christianity is not a book of rules, the application of which has to be worked out in a pattern. It springs from a living relationship and its fulfillment is in relationship. Its implications can, therefore be reached only through an understanding which is personal and intimate; without compassion there can be no understanding at all. The compassion of Jesus was his point of entry into each human situation. We must accept and begin from the truth about each human being in his own predicament, here and now in the modern world. -Towards a Quaker View of Sex¹

The revolution in values and behavior in sexuality is faster moving and deeper than in almost any other area of life. These changes illustrate most dramatically what going beyond natural law and other legalistic systems involves.

In place of the arbitrary straitjacket of natural law we will take the structure of agape as our guide. I am talking about the four-fold structure of wholeness spelled out in the first seven sessions of this study:

FREEDOM ------------RELATEDNESS
EXPANSION --------- INTEGRITY

There is a common meeting ground here for religious and secular theorists and practitioners. There will be, of course, differences of opinion, but they are of the kind which can be argued and put to the test without any appeal to scripture or divine revelation.

Defining Responsible Sexuality

The basic principles which undergird a new ethics of creativity and freedom are presented in session 14. The same ethical and moral principles apply in the area of sex as will in all the other areas of life.

A healthy, creative Christian sexual ethics is based upon agape. This means that we have to treat all other persons as of enormous value to God, as ends in themselves, and never merely as means to our satisfaction. We are required always to put first the development of the god-self of the other alongside our own.

When we consider matters of sex, three corollaries of this stance are especially important:

1. Honesty, openness, and truth-telling. Whenever a right-thinking person steps wrong in matters of sex you almost always find that he did something he was not willing to talk about to others. I am not speaking here of the reluctance of a gay man, for instance, to expose himself to possible persecution, or of other such revelations. I am speaking of two lovers committed to a long-term relationship when one is tempted to sexual adventuring of which the partner would not approve. Another example would be where one partner fails to admit to an infectious disease.

A dependable rule of thumb when one is uncertain is to ask, "Would I feel ashamed or guilty if the ones I love most knew about this?" If the answer is yes, then it is probably not a moral act for that person. And in most cases the act will also be injurious to one or more persons.

2. Keeping our commitments and covenants. This does not mean that the vows involved in marriage, for instance, should never be altered or reversed. But it means that we are to exhaust other alternatives before we break a relationship to which we have pledged ourselves. And we labor to make the decisions involved joint decisions if at all possible, and decisions which both partners feel will serve to the greatest degree the four-fold development of themselves and the children.

The same applies to other covenants and promises; they are kept until, in a process of open communication, they are with due deliberation altered or abandoned.

3. Protecting the defenseless. Those seeking to live by agape will put a special emphasis on protecting those unable to make adult decisions or defend themselves from exploitation, such as the mentally handicapped and children.

Middle Principles

These three principles operate as what have been called middle axioms. They are rules of thumb which help in decision-making, more specific than general terms like love or justice, but they are less specific and confining than laws and rules and mores which apply to a particular act or class of acts.

Natural is what nurtures, cherishes and builds up. The unnatural is that which is hurtful, which works to strengthen the demonic self-systems with their lusts, envies, jealousies, anxieties, hates, and violence.

This re-definition of natural and unnatural is a meeting ground for experiment by all peoples, whatever their faith.

For us as Christians it is that and something more. For us, health, love, and goodness are grounded not only in the cumulative experience of humanity as to what is helpful and hurtful. It is also grounded in the inner god-self and its wholistic vision of what we are intended to become as individuals and as members of the human family. See again session 7.

People who are consistently guided by agape are more careful not to hurt others, much more careful in what they do in the lives of the young, the weak, the mentally limited, those who are vulnerable. The judgments which fall on us due to careless words, of which Jesus speaks, is that we are actually injured. We suffer an inner contraction, further inner fragmentation, and a strengthening of one or more demonic self-system within us. Our victims are similarly injured.

In this sense, all sins are punished. Hurt and damage continue even after we have been forgiven and have accepted forgiveness.

The perils of sexual freedom under agape would seem to dictate a hands off policy in sexuality so that more damage will not be done. But if we are honest we have to recognize that our hands are all over sexuality everywhere all the time. Humanity is carrying on debilitating and destructive experiments every day, both in Iran's repressive society and our permissive one.

The taboo mentality of natural law and the conflicted practices of the present have produced multitudes of deeply injured people, crippled sexually, whipsawed by all the demonic emotions the race is subject to. If we fail to meet the challenge in the area of human sexuality, I doubt we can solve any of our other major social problems with any finality.

From this springboard we plunge into the angry waves whipped by the hot issues surrounding sexuality.

Male and Female

Natural law is most discredited in our day because of the way it allowed women's lives and bodies to be owned and controlled. This was assumed to be the natural order willed by God, that women were property of their fathers until they were married, after which their husbands took over command.

Prohibitions against premarital sex and adultery have been directed mainly against women. Property could not be used without permission of the owner. This was true in most cultures, not just in Judaism and Christianity.

Women suffered especially because of misappropriation of the Adam and Eve story. Eve was assumed to be responsible for the fall of humanity. This was extended to mean that woman are weak, seductive, vessels of uncleanness. Women have to be sheltered and men have to be protected from them.

It was bizarre to draw these conclusions from the simple narratives of Genesis. This portrait of unclean, seductive woman was a central pillar of the whole edifice built by men to regulate sex according to their patriarchal prejudices.

This one example indicates perhaps more powerfully than any other how outmoded the concept of natural law is.

Under the implications of wholistic agape, men and women are equally loved by God and each gender is entitled to all the freedoms and opportunities accorded to the other.

Nothing else I could say on this could compare with the excellent recent writings by feminist theologians and biblical scholars.

Sex Between Partners

One of the great crimes of natural law has been to make all kinds of sex sinful except that between husband and wife within the marital relation.

Even here it has been wrong to feel good unless copulation included the possibility of conception. Most of the Church Fathers (sic) would have been happier if there were no good feelings connected with conceiving children. This is a bizarre judgment and wrong-headed reductionism.

Sex to orgasm is only a more strongly felt sensual pleasure. There is no “natural” reason for limiting it to any age or relationship. Babies should be allowed to play with their genitals and children to masturbate. These are healthy.

For Christians the new morality and ethics derives societal permissions and prohibitions from agape. Others can think in terms of what produces healthy people who are strong, loving, playful, free and peaceful.

The words sexual freedom have been misused by those who would exploit others sexually. True freedom is always freedom under the control of the agape. So wherever the words sexual freedom appear in this session we are talking of sex under agape. This is not an absence of controls but a different kind of control. This will make it clear that we are only free to engage in sexual activity when it does not harm another.

Indeed, agape goes much further. We can engage in sexual activity only when it can potentially help the other toward healthy wholeness. This rules out all kinds of exploitative, manipulative and violent sex. But, of course, the same principle of seeking the highest for the other and self is what must also govern all our decisions.

Sex and Love

One question which misrepresents sexual freedom is this: Doesn't it separate sex from love? This assumes that the word love has some one meaning. It does not. True sexual freedom, redefined and fitted into a new moral framework, will indeed begin to separate sexual activity from immature love and put it instead under the control of agape, just as every other aspect of life must be. Sexual activity has to be brought out from under the control of lust, need, striving for power over others or submission to them.

This is a matter of overall maturation, as discussed in sessions 4 through 7. As we move through Kohlberg's six stages, if such expansion of the boundaries of the personality is matched by a depth of compassion and empathy, freedom, and internal unification, then our sexuality also comes under that control and is liberated into joy, playfulness, caring and sensuous delight.

Is it safe for immature people to engage in love-making? Well, it's as safe as any other activity in this adventure of living. We immature people harm each other all the time, but we don't call a halt to other human interaction because of such dangers.

One poor argument against responsible free sexual activity is the contention that it will cheapen or depreciate sex through overuse, the boredom of familiarity.
People get tired of sex with a particular partner because the demonic self-systems are inherently restless; nothing they do is satisfying.

Mature people continue enjoying and elaborating sex with one partner to a growing enrichment of both the sensuous and the spiritual dimensions of the experience.

Sexual relations do settle down to some routine with time, as with all the activities of life. But a continually growing and enriching mutual relationship between two people can keep sex play and love-making also continually renewed. With immature, driven people all relationships are somewhat exploitative and get boring.

Nor is such freedom any danger to that madness we call romantic love. We have all seen two older people, who have had a wide variety of sexual experiences and partners, go crazy over each other. The future of romantic love, for such limited value as it has, is quite safe.

The Right to Intimacy

Long-term intimate relationships, with or without sex, are essential to our growth into godlikeness. If we miss such nurture in intimacy when we are young, the deficiency must be made up later.

Sex, particularly loving sex play, is a valuable gateway into the practice of intimacy. Once the decision is made that sex play is not confined to marriage by a natural law perspective, then it becomes possible for others in society to enjoy this opening outward to mutual enjoyment and intimacy of other kinds. Not only possible. The question must be reversed: Why should anyone be denied practice in the physical aspects of intimacy?

Sex play becomes an important preparation for mature intimacy. Moreover, it plays an important new and creative role as it helps defuse the unrealistic expectations with which people often enter relationships.

The intimacy which is most upbuilding takes place in long-term relationships that are at the same time physical, psychological and spiritual. We see the negative evidence all around us of people who lack this depth intimacy. We see the disorientation, loneliness and violence of people who have not experienced and learned such intimacy in a community of dependable caring.

Without the experience and learning of intimacy, the other three aspects of our four-fold wholeness also cannot be made to flourish. Without intimacy and compassion, freedom becomes license. Expansion of the self becomes the miscellaneous collection of facts or the focus of our expanded content on demonic ends. And inner coherence deteriorates, as energies are turned increasingly to the strengthening of the fragmenting demonic self-systems rather than the unifying god-self. Intimacy breeds the only real compassion the human race knows, and without compassion we are all lost.

If this is true, then church and society are evading one of the deepest problems in our society. Church and society still push the nuclear family of husband, wife and children as the only social grouping which can teach true intimacy. But, if this is the case, then the majority of people in modern society are now left out. They are expected to do without the creative stimulation of sex play which can help draw people out of egocentrism into further advance into godliness. What are single people, gays and lesbians, the physically deformed or otherwise unattractive to do? Evidently, they are to do without.

This is not to say that all forms of intimacy involve sex play or sexual fulfillment. It rather suggests that sex can be an opening to intimacy for many. And for all the rest, you have to turn the question around and ask why anyone should be denied sexual fulfillment.

Touch is vital to health and important to all kinds of intimacy. Yet people shy from hugs because of fear of sex or being thought to be seeking sex. Should not life be, from one end to the other, a rich, full, joyous and sensuous experience? Yes, and this is evidently God's plan that it should, since S/He gave us these wonderful sensuous bodies to enjoy.

The need of all for sensuous/sexual experience is a problem the larger society can't tackle comprehensively because it is too deeply divided. The churches are unwilling to experiment creatively because they are structured to avoid controversy rather than deal with it. This passes the task to small experimental groups to try to show the way.
I've already suggested that we must redefine sexual arousal and climax as simply more intense caresses, occupying the strongest points on the continuum of sensual pleasures. They are not in themselves intrinsically good or evil, but only in relation to the motives and ends involved in their experience.

Society seems to be preoccupied with the damage done by sexual lust and obsession. But these have to do with the way the demonic self-systems love, obsessively and immaturely, and do not have to do really with results of sexual freedom.

Lust is more basic than sex. Lust is at root always lust for power of being. This ontological lust has a way of attaching itself to sex in the form of sadism, masochism, obsessions of various kinds and dashing in and out of relationships.

Problems in sex are most often problems in power relationships. But abuse in sex is not curbed and certainly cannot be eliminated by a sexually repressive climate. In fact, there is considerable evidence that a freer climate of sexuality, if combined with healthy education and experience, will begin the process of eliminating such damaging perversions and obsessions. Surely, if all children enjoyed carefully regulated and appropriate sexual fulfillment from an early age, accompanied by genuine affection, caring and nurturing attention, there would be an enormous reduction in the internal rage and self-hate which fuel the violence related to sex and all other relations in our sick society.

One corollary: greater sexual freedom requires even more effort to protect children and others who are vulnerable from sexual abuse.

Homosexuality

Defining natural as we have above, setting it free from cultural prejudices, we will now find no obstacle to viewing gay and lesbian people as just as normal as heterosexuals.

Once one is liberated from the need to control sex for the sake of bearing children, perpetuating the family line, managing the lives and bodies of women, or just because it feels good, prohibitions against same sex loving and marriage are seen to be irrational.

There is no need to examine the seven scriptural passages which seem to condemn same sex loving. Excellent scholars have shown convincingly how such prohibitions are culture related prejudices similar to those directed against woman.

The argument that same sex loving produces neurotic or socially maladjusted people is not supported by evidence. The twenty or so gay and lesbian friends I've had are, I would say, better adjusted and more saintly than most of the other people I know. Most are Quaker Christians. We would be hard pressed to establish that homosexuals are less well adjusted emotionally than heterosexuals. Of course, being called deviant, in itself, places an abnormally powerful stress on people on top of the other considerable stresses of life.

Gay and lesbian people have some unique and wonderful gifts to share with the rest of us, and a special role to play in God's strategy.

This ethical stance applies whether homosexual orientation is genetic or learned or some of both.

In a time of severe overpopulation in the world, it would make sense not to discourage
such relationships.

Abortion

Abortion is left to last because it is, in many ways, the most painfully divisive issue we face. It gives me the most personal agony and uncertainty.

I believe abortion should be permitted, but not necessarily for all the reasons its advocates give. Christians cannot consistently argue that a woman's body belongs to herself to do with as she pleases. We are all stewards and nurturers of our bodies, as we are gardeners of this world's environment; our lives are intertwined in interdependence. Our bodies are also, as Paul said, temples of the Holy Spirit. In addition, pregnancy introduces into the equation something which both belongs to the body and also has its own rights.

The right to life people also use specious arguments. They base their claim on natural law theory. They arbitrarily redefine the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." This commandment is not about abortion directly, nor suicide.

Most Protestants, Jews and Catholics who hold the so-called pro-life viewpoint are inconsistent. They are quite willing to kill in war and to practice capital punishment. The only fully consistent antiabortion advocates are the pacifists who hold all life sacred.

These three statements sum up my own opinions on abortion practice:

1. The personhood of a fetus does not begin until after birth. The conferring of a name is the symbol of the birth of the soul. This is consistent with the definitions of soul, self, and god-self in the first seven sessions.

Laws which rule that life begins with conception cloud the issue. The question rather is when personhood begins. Fetuses have human genetic structure but are not yet persons. The burden of proof is on those who say otherwise and the State should not intervene and mandate a particular decision.

2. Abortion normally should take place to protect the mother's life or health or to prevent the birth of a fetus which is unwanted or whose quality of life will be miserable. If at all possible, the abortion should take place in the first trimester.

3. There is no good evidence that God wants quantity instead of quality.

The world has too many people by far, too many to feed, too large a burden on the ecosystems, and too many for quality of life to be established for us all even if there were no further increase.

The birth of a child in the United States or another of the advanced countries is a special ecological disaster. That child will, during life, consume six to ten times more than a child in the poorer countries. Much of this is consumption of nonrenewable resources. This is a senseless squandering of the quality of life of future generations.

The antiabortion people like to say sarcastically at this point: "Well, if there are too many people, I suppose next you'll be wanting to get rid of some of the useless old folks, maybe set a limit on how many years a person is allowed to live."

They are arguing that abortion produces a callousness toward all life which spills over into other areas. This is possible but not necessary. And they know well that there is a profound difference between the fetus, which as yet is not human except biologically, and older persons who have accrued valuable spirit and the freedom to decide whether they want to live or die.

Agape is not narrowly pragmatic; it does not base moral decisions only on results. Consequentialism does not an ethics make. Overpopulation is not an adequate argument for the rightness of abortion. But since there are other substantial reasons for the rightness of the practice, then overpopulation becomes an additional reason for permitting abortion. Unwanted children or those whom people cannot support and give quality lives have a right not to be born.

Pro-lifers urge that adoptive homes can be found for unwanted children. However, I haven't seen them advocating much concerning the million abandoned children wandering the streets of Brazilian cities (to mention only one country), who live by and for crime, drugs, and sex, and whose lives are miserable and short.

Most pro-lifers argue directly or indirectly from some natural law position. As with the arguments against birth control, the Catholic natural law assumption is based on a doctrine of providence which constricts human freedom down close to zero. This view holds that God directly controls or wills the conception of every child as well as its time of death. This implies that God wills the birth of every child once conceived. This is a wrong-headed doctrine of providence as we see in session 19.

While I have stated my opinions with customary force, I confess that on this issue especially I am not so certain I am right. This is why I would say that where possible abortions should be confined to the first trimester.

Conclusion

Towards a Quaker View of Sex adds:

A moral code, even when accepted for the best of reasons, necessarily tends to be negative rather than positive, to be concerned with "Thou shalt not" rather than with what an individual should give to his fellows. We are much concerned about the whole content of human relationship. ... Loving does not merely mean doing good works, it goes further than feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. It means warmth and intimacy, open-heartedness and overwhelming generosity of hand and spirit. It means a desire to know and a and a courageous willingness to be known. Loving implies commitment to the other person, involvement in that person's life, whatever it may cost in suffering, whether that suffering comes through being repudiated or through identification and sharing.

The life of society desperately needs this warmth of giving and receiving. Everywhere we see sociability without commitment or intimacy, and especially in our towns, intense isolation and loneliness. We see human energy that should be creative and loving deflected into activities that are coldly power-seeking; we see love inhibited, frustrated or denied, turning into its opposite -- into ruthlessness and aggression^{. 2}

One thing we can be sure of: the sexual revolution will continue and expand, with occasional predictable periods of backlash. It will continue to be both liberating and hurtful. Those who seek to live in the age of the Spirit will remember that God's objective is that we become the wholeness of the divine nature, summed up in the word agape.

Questions for Thought

Review session 8 on natural law. What taboos in sex are giving way? Which seem to be justified? Which seem to be injurious? Why? Feel free to read ahead to session 14 on ethical decision-making under agape.

Contact the author: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Friends Home Service Committee, Friends House, Euston Road, London, N.W.1, Preface to the Second Edition, 1964
2. ibid., page 12

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