Redeeming Our Sexuality

by Sarah-Leah Pimentel · April 25, 2016

During the Easter season we rejoice in Christ’s glorified body. In his Resurrection, we are also glorified. The body of Jesus is no longer rooted in time and space, but instead carries a trace of the life that exists beyond the physical reality, a reality that will also be ours when we are united to God in eternity.

How often do we stop to consider that we carry divinity within us?

Every time we receive Christ in the Eucharist, we become living tabernacles of love, carrying Jesus into our homes and into our relationships. Our bodies are sacred chalices. Do we really grasp the enormity of that?

We treat the Eucharistic chalice on the altar with utmost respect, knowing that it is the vessel that holds the wine transformed into the blood of Jesus. So then, if our bodies are also sacred vessels for the God who lives within us, do we accord them the same reverence and respect as our bodies?

The current focus on healthy lifestyles has given us a deeper awareness of how to care for our bodies by eating healthy food, getting sufficient sleep and regular exercise. It is our Christian duty to take good care of our bodies, because they are gifts from God. A healthy lifestyle is our way of thanking God for the life he has given us, but it is also a sacred reverence of the divinity that lies within us.

But how often do we consider that our sexual lives can also enrich or stunt the sacred tabernacles of our bodies?

Our culture has reduced sexuality to little more than a bodily function of self-gratification. In a short span of little more than 60 years, sexual intercourse has been removed from its place of privilege within marriage to temporary liaisons between people.

As Fr Ron Rolheiser pointed out in The Southern Cross earlier this year, our culture has become so focused on sexuality as an end in itself that many young people have opted out of committed relationships and chosen instead to “hook up” for as long as the one partner can make the other feel good. Once the excitement and pleasure are gone, each one moves on to the next sexual partner.

The problem with this culture of “temporariness”, as Pope Francis describes it, is that we lose the ability to form connections with others. It negatively impacts our ability to give and receive love. Love itself becomes nothing more than a superficial feeling and is unable to evolve into agape love — a love that pours itself out for the other and is ready to sacrifice all things out of a genuine desire to serve the other.

Agape is a reflection of God who, out of love for us, allowed his own Son to suffer death on a cross. When we respond with that same love, we share in God’s vision of a perfect love.

But when our ability to love becomes stunted by fear, rejection or an obsessive focus on sexual pleasure, we miss the deeper love God has planned for us.

Furthermore, we become unable to love in return. Without love, we become empty vessels, and even passing sexual pleasures eventually lose their appeal.

If we are to share in Jesus’ resurrected and glorified body, our bodies need to be places where love matures. We do this through a life of chastity.

For those who are unmarried, chastity becomes a patient waiting and prayerfulness in preparation for lasting and life-giving love — either in a future marriage or life as a consecrated or single person. By refraining from transitory sexual encounters, the unmarried person is called to delve into the heart of God’s deep love and share this love with others.

For those called to marriage, chastity takes the form of faithfulness to the marriage covenant.

In his new apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), Pope Francis says that marriage “involves mutual self-giving, includes and integrates the sexual and affective dimensions, in accordance with God’s plan” which includes an “openness to new life”. By bearing children, the spouses become co-creators with God of bringing new life to the world.

Pope Francis goes even further, saying that “the sacrament of marriage is not a social convention” but a “gift for the sanctification and salvation of the spouses” because their union represents the “same relationship between Christ and the Church”.

The presence of God walks through the world in the living tabernacles of his sons and daughters who choose the fullness of life and love in God.

We are called to be tabernacles of hope by redeeming the body of our culture that has become enslaved to transitory sexual liaisons but still aches for fulfilling and lasting love.

In this season of new life, we are also called to reflect on our own sexual lives and hear God’s call to deepen our marital love for our spouses.