The Inhumanity of the Megachurch Sex Marathon

Associated Press has a story on a pastor who challenged the married couples in his flock to a 7-day sex challenge (hat tip to the Ironic Catholic). While this phenomenon is not limited to megachurches, it has been a theme among some megachurches. Ralph Gardner Jr, writing for the New York Times, had an unforgettable quip. Commenting on a married couples who saw marathons as a way to improve their marriage, he writes: "That they thought a sex marathon would reinvigorate their marriages might say as much about the American penchant for exercise and goal-setting as it does about the state of romance."

To begin with, it is good that sex is affirmed as one of the goods of marriage. What's missing in these accounts, however, is the totality of the human experience. The most human way to affirm something is with awareness, consciousness. And if the affirmation is merely physical and quantitative, then it's not enough for the human person. For example, food is a good. Which way affirms the value of food more completely, more fully according the all the needs of human desire:

• to eat as much as possible and as often as possible OR
• to eat a good meal with friends?

Human beings need not merely sensory gratification and the satiation of instinct, but also need to understand the meaning, the value, the reason for their desire.

In the case of sex, intercourse is the form of the expression of love in which the husband and wife freely seek the happiness of the other, that is the whole happiness of the other, the destiny and total satisfaction of the other. And this happiness never remains alone but is oriented toward fecundity: including children, but also desiring a mutual fruitfulness in life.

If couples are seeking more satisfying sex, what they need is not necessarily more practice, but instead to begin to ask for more meaning, for a greater understanding of the significance of being instinctual creatures who enjoy each other sensorily and yet at the same time have an awareness of themselves and each other. Why is this given? Why are we made this way? If these questions are never asked, then frequent sex may lead to despair and a fear that desire is given in order to frustrate us.

Cultivating an awareness of the Presence, or living in the awareness of destiny

Today's Gospel started me thinking about the need to live in the awareness of a Presence and how Giussani's method, borne of his charism, which we share by our adherence to the method, teaches us to cultivate this awareness. The need to cultivate this awareness is illustrated by St. Peter's stepping out of the boat after the Lord beckons him, "Come" in response to Peter's entreaty, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water" (Matt. 14,28-29a). So, at the Lord's beckoning, Peter steps out of the boat and begins to walk toward Jesus. Once he is walking on the water, he becomes distracted when he notices the strong wind (v. 30). It is here that I wonder if I am overreaching to suggest that perhaps Peter began to look around, over to the shore, back at the boat, everywhere but at Jesus. This distraction induces fear because his awareness is given wholly over to the wind, the waves, his distance from the safety of the shore and the boat. If I am not overreaching, then I feel safe in asserting that Peter's being frightened is the result of his letting his awareness of the Presence be obscured by his circumstances.

Letting go of our awareness of Christ's presence, which is a fact that exists whether we acknowledge it or not, also has something to do with not living in the awareness of destiny, one of the two things necessary, according to Don Giussani (the other being mortification or self-control), to attain true freedom, the complete satisfaction of desire, finding that which corresponds to your heart.

To Choose for Destiny

Last week I promised to write something on freedom, and the idea just got larger and larger and sent me to more books and places. If I don't stop and gather up what I have, it's going to get away like a hot air balloon.

But as a first installment, I have a concrete example of freedom which we saw last night. This is more interesting than my studies on the subject, because it's life. We will have our CL vacation in about a week, and one friend has been very hesitant about going. She has been coming for some years, and we always stay in the same cheap primitive camp, an ideal set-up for kids and families with options of camping or dorm-style housing (think Boy Scouts or Bible camp). The idea of spending four days sleeping on camp bunks, eating low-grade cafeteria food and playing silly field games held little attraction for her.

We've been reading the chapter on Freedom in Giussani's Is It Possible to Live This Way? and yesterday we studied the section on the Conditions for Freedom. So I jump ahead of the premise, which is that freedom is completed by destiny, to look at the problem we have with making a choice which is really for us. The community helps us choose for destiny instead of by the immediate attraction or repulsion we experience. Our friend was very open about her dilemma, and this shows her simplicity of heart. Others don't even consider the invitation to the vacation. She fairly easily applied this reading to her situation, recognizing that she has always found this vacation to be the strongest expression of what she has met in CL, the living presence of Christ in a companionship. And so she decided to stay with us next week, as a choice for her destiny.

If you expect your satisfaction from something that can be dust tomorrow, you'll have dust. But who calls your attention to this? No one can, none of us has the strength to do it for himself, only together can we do it. This is the way that the Church, in the world, calls the world's attention to this.... Only in the community is one helped to understand this, to be conscious of when one chooses evil, to recognize when one chooses evil, to have the strength of dominion over the self to wrench oneself from evil--for mortification, penitence or metanoia, change of mentality--to adhere to what brings us to destiny and to await destiny every day; to wait, every day, for it to come.

Destiny

Fr. Giussani was always listening to how people used words and would correct them if they used words in a careless or forgetful way. He always said that simplicity is to call a spade a spade.

Here's an example from the book Is it Possible To Live this Way? A girl mentions that her boyfriend's tumor is a "destiny" that contradicts his desire to live. Fr. Giussani insists that destiny is more than the circumstances that confront us:

«To say "I am sick; I have to die, nevertheless I'd like to live, my destiny would be to live." To say "My destiny would be to live, but I have to die because I have tuberculosis; I have cancer and I have to die" isn't reasoning: it's a psychological giving in, a giving in to weakness. If your destiny tells you "I am made for life," this means that this is stronger and will prevail, prevail over the fact that you, in the circumstances that you are in, must die. It means that there is something else or another position; if there weren't another position, something else for which destiny triumphs, then all is destined to become nothing. Everything is destined to become nothing: dust inside a tomb, a mummy dried inside a prison for thirty thousand years.

If Christ called us to this path, it's so that we, in the midst of people, may have the ability to carry out this task: shout to everyone the true reason (the true reason is the destiny inherent in our nature) and therefore, to help people's hope, without which people become violent toward others, lazy in their work (they no longer want to work), and untruthful in front of true things.»

(Is It Possible To Live This Way? 112-113).

Destiny is the promise of eternal life. Now this destiny, to be sure, comes to meet us even in our circumstances - no circumstances may prevent it from arriving - but the difference is that a man may live fully every moment in the shadow of death and die in the hope of the resurrection and eternal life.