I shall walk in the path of freedom for I seek your precepts…Your commands have been my delight; these I have loved. I will worship your commands and love them…
(Psalm 119: 45, 47-48)
There comes a point, after the first flush of youth and vigour – at least so it seems to me, approaching 30 – when the things one learned as a young man start to take on a new meaning. Yes, one writes about the significance of x, and one publicly supports y, but with experience and grace, with the elegant tonic of age perhaps, one finally gets it – a lesson is truly learned.
It is like this, for me, when it comes to the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. One always wants to love the precept, to worship the command – but in the middle of things, in the intensity of youth, things are muddled. One believed then by faith mostly – by wanting to believe, by being struck by the beauty of something. This is beautiful too. Only later, however, does one start to grasp the truth as truth, to experience the goodness of what was hinted.
The meaning is no longer so elusive. One can come to know something that, before, one could only describe using borrowed phrases – learning vicariously from other men’s lives.
So, now having lived a little longer, here are my notes – what I have gleaned so far about love, sex, and Christianity:
I. There is immense beauty in particulars – in a finely turned calf, in light as it plays in the dark eyes of a loving friend – and there is no peace in denying as much.
II. If one has eyes to see such things, sensitivity to beauty is a profound gift.
III. Satisfying shapes and curves, loving acts, elevated modes of speech, and great works of art – these things can help the sensitive man to discern the pattern that lends any model its light and loveliness.
IV. For greater than any particular beauty, and more lasting, is beauty itself – the truth and goodness that sanctify particulars.
V. Beauty, indeed, is of the sort that Plato wrote about; it is deathless and inextricable from goodness and truth.
VI. The Catechism teaching on desire is derived from the speech of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium. It is profoundly moving; an enlightening passage. It makes sense of the teaching on chastity, because it is important to find out what happens to eros.
VII. In Christianity, one moves beyond philosophy, learning that beauty is a person – the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.
VIII. Real beauty is inexhaustible. Christ is inexhaustibly beautiful.
IX. A man who desires real beauty, who pursues the truth, who longs after goodness, will be satisfied.
X. The Christian’s yoke is sweet. The strictest Carthusian radiates joy because goodness sustains him.
XI. The most profound love a man can show another man is to want him to be a good Christian, to live a beautiful life.
XII. I also know that while the “spirit is willing, the flesh is weak” and for that reason I credit most of the things under the rubric “near occasions of sin” that I formerly rejected as prudish and timid.
No doubt there are other things to add, and many of these lessons are still only half formed in my mind and only just penetrating. However, progress has been made.
People often write about the Catholic teaching on human sexuality as though it were cold and dry, a cruel thing that constricts and twists.
That has never been my experience. It is the shining thing, the chryselephantine wonder, the light and hope in an otherwise dreary world of flesh and power.
The more one grows in the discipline of faith, indeed, the more profoundly one knows that Christianity is a civilising force, the “path of freedom”, and some commands – those that are holy and beautiful – can be a delight, something truly to worship and love.