Love, sex, celibacy and faith

BY FR OSKAR WERMTER SJ

In a letter to The Southern Cross, published on May 22, an atheist raised, at least indirectly, a very challenging question: how do you become a fully grown person? How do you realise your potential and become fully human? St Paul wants us “to come to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph 4: 13). What is maturity? Or, in terms of the Gospel, “the full stature of Christ”?

“What do we live for? The answer is simple: Love. It is exemplified and realised once and for all in Jesus’ self-giving. “

The opposite would be “stunted growth”, like that of a spiritual dwarf, a crippled, disfigured human being, retarded in his personal development.

Having tried it and found it was not for him, the letter writer, Marco Compagnoni, is convinced that celibacy is “stunting” the growth of people. In other words, not being “sexually active” is deforming people and stopping them from fully developing their humanity.

That is, of course, a very common view these days. Every tabloid paper and most talk shows are selling sex as the most vital elixir of life.

No doubt, celibacy, like marriage, can go wrong. Pope Francis recently had something to say on this when addressing a group of women religious superiors who had come to meet him. He mentioned “chastity as a precious charism, which widens the freedom of the gift to God and to others, with the tenderness, the mercy, the closeness of Christ…in the Church. The consecrated woman…must be a mother. But, please, a ‘fecund’ chastity, a chastity that generates spiritual children and not a ‘spinster’,” he said, adding: “Be mothers, as the figure of Mother Mary and of the Mother Church. “

A mother has found fulfilment as a woman. She lives for her family. She is a person-for-others, and as such she realises her very self.

We realise ourselves, and our potential, by being for others, living for others. That is different from the current western ideal of “self-realisation”, which implies “doing one’s own thing”.

Jesus put it paradoxically: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mk 8:35). This was no more than the actual pattern of his life. In life and in death he was the perfect man-for-others. As such, he was simply the perfect man.

What do we live for? The answer is simple: Love. It is exemplified and realised once and for all in Jesus’ self-giving.

He did not live for one woman, for one beloved wife; he was celibate, but he lived to do the will of the Father and to live for his brothers and sisters, members of his bride, the Church.

“Love your enemies and  pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good… Be perfect therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:44-45,48). “God is love”, and perfect love makes us perfect humans.

Love, not a lived out sexuality, makes us fully human, is our full maturity and fulfilled humanity. Love for the tabloid readers is sex. Not quite. There is loveless, exploitative sex.

Love, whether or not it finds sexual expression, is life-giving.  There was a little baby-boy dumped on the streets of a big city. Police picked him up and took him to a hospital. The nurses fed the baby, bathed and clothed him dutifully. They came and went, on and off-duty. The baby remained very tiny and did not grow.

Then a children’s village took him in. One of the “housemothers” accepted the little one as her own. He responded to her love, and after a few months he was a heavy, healthy, happy little boy. Love gives life and growth.

Sexual intimacy should be an expression of the love of man and woman for each other; their mutual self-giving as husband and wife should be fruitful in giving life and love to children. But love is not confined to this intimate union, though marriage will be forever the most obvious symbol of love (which is why Scripture compares God and his people, Christ and the Church, with a loving couple).

A loving person is not centred on him- or herself, but on the beloved. A loving person is forever engaged in what Pope Francis has described as an “exodus”, in going out of himself or herself, is habitually a person in relationship, a person reaching out in love to the loved ones, forgetting self.

We need a lifetime to complete this exodus, this leaving ourselves behind and becoming “people for others”, in perfect love with their Father, in conformity with the Son and driven by the Holy Spirit.

It’s a pity that Mr Compagnoni left the seminary under the impression that he had escaped from a “stunted” life. Celibacy just was not meant for him. There are countless ways to God. If one door is closed that does not mean that the door to God is closed altogether.

There are the spinsters and bachelors among celibates who still need to be freed from Egypt and its “fleshpots”, undertake their “exodus” and reach the promised land of God’s love.

But most, I dare say, who have heard the Lord’s call to a life of consecrated chastity want to love the people to whom they are sent as much, or even more so if that is possible, as their parents loved them, or rather as the Lord loves them which is without limit.

Nothing can “stunt” or cripple us as long as we walk with Christ. His love is the fullness of life (Jn 10:10).

Fr Oskar Wermter SJ is based in Harare and assists the Inter-Regional Meeting of the Bishops of Southern Africa (Imbisa) in theological and pastoral matters.