Sex and procreation are holy
The 2nd reading at Catholic Masses yesterday included this passage from I Corinthians 3:16-17:
Brothers and sisters: Do you not know that you are the temple of God,
and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person;
for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.
Important insights:
These four lines offer important insights for this confused age:
- We are more than just bodies, we have a soul. In other words, our lives are not merely material, but also spiritual.
- God dwells in our body, and as a result, it is holy.
- Our body comes from God and belongs to God, a stark contrast to the godless secular religion of our age that believes we are the god of our body and can mold and subvert its form and function.
Peter Kreeft explains why sex and procreation are holy:
Catholic philosopher, Peter Kreeft, unpacks the significance of all of this in his book, “Food for the Soul, Cycle A”:
“That’s why sex and procreation are holy. They are not dirty. The old Victorianism or puritanism saw sex as something dirty and to be avoided as much as possible. The new Victorianism or puritanism today still sees sex as something dirty but to be enjoyed as much as possible — as long as it doesn’t produce that terrible accident, another person like us. Our secular culture is really much closer to Victorianism or puritanism than it thinks. It is not as sexy as God is, for God sees sex as something holy and beautiful, as a sacramental incarnation of love and life, which is the nature of God. In separating sex from procreation, by contraception, we changed the whole meaning of sex from something profoundly holy to something neither profound nor holy. Contraception separates sex from life exactly as cloning and test tube babies separate life from sex. One demands love without life and the other demands life without love.”
Gender confusion
Kreeft addresses the gender confusion which is so in fashion today:
“After God created everything else, he created us, as the Bible says, “in his own image,” and the next words are “male and female.” Sex is God’s invention. And after he created that thing, he pronounced this judgment on it: “Very good.” That’s our God-designed nature. When our culture still had wisdom, the cultural cliché said you can’t fool Mother Nature; and Christ’s Church, which still has wisdom, says you can’t fool Father God. That’s not the road to happiness.”
Which is why abortion is so awful. It subverts the work of the Holy Spirit within us, and the Spirit’s work is all about life.
If you want to suck the joy out of your life, abort your baby.
But what if you’re in a crisis situation? Let you daughter or son be adopted, and spread the joy. You will experience a special kind of joy by loving so sacrificially; your child will experience the joy of the gift of life; the adoptive parents will experience the joy of loving a baby for whom they have so desperately prayed. [Our website offers extensive resources for women in crisis pregnancies.]
Unprecedented comfort
Modern man enjoys a level of comfort unprecedented in human history, and yet seldom have we been more miserable. Our misery has spiked since abortion became so available. As Kreeft points out, Christians love life, but modern secularists do not:
“They see children as “accidents” and pregnancy as a disease that they prevent by contraception or cure by abortion. They say, “I don’t want to bring children into this terrible world.” They say that now, today, when life is longer, richer, healthier, more comfortable, less violent, less cruel, more sensitive, more under our control, and more painless and peaceful than ever before in human history! Until fairly recently, most of our ancestors could expect to experience in a single year more pain than most of us experience in a lifetime. Yet they saw life and this body and this world as good, as a blessing, and as a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved and conquered. That’s why I call the mentality that finds it “irresponsible to bring children into this terrible world” hypocrisy, and a kind of insanity. Pope St. John Paul II called it something even worse than that. He called it “the culture of death.
The culture of death does not love life
The culture of death does not love life. It does not love bodies; it does not love embodiment in this world. It is far too spiritual. It does not love objective reality, only subjective satisfaction. All it wants is psychological pleasure, control, comfort, freedom, and autonomy: personal satisfaction of spirit, a kind of retreat from nature, from the objective world, from what-is, from truth. It is addicted to sex because sex is for it like an oasis in the desert. For it, sex is not about life; it is a retreat from life. It demands protection against life and against the God of life, against the great gift that used to be loved as a blessing and is now feared as a curse. It talks a lot about social ethics and social responsibility, but it does not want to do the single most important thing we can do for society and for the human race, and also the creative thing — namely, to have children.
The culture of death lacks lasting joy
Our culture has solved many of life’s problems by its wonderful science and technology, and it has attained unprecedented power and comfort and freedom from pain. Yet is no longer loves life, no longer feels gratitude for life. Its suicide rate is far higher than it is in poor, primitive cultures. It lacks lasting joy. It is in the wilderness without a temple and without the manna from heaven, without the two temples that we know: our bodies in sexual intercourse and Christ’s Body in the Mass. They are the two holiest places in the universe and the two places where God literally performs a miracle millions of times every day around the world. Whenever we procreate mortal bodies, God creates new immortal souls, and whenever our priests echo his words of consecration, he transubstantiates our bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood.”
Don’t be a joyless pagan or puritan; be a joyful Christian!”
Christ gave us a warning when he said whatever we do to the least of his children, we do to him.
As Kreeft concludes, “And deep down, you know in your heart that he’s right.”
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