Two Sexual Roads Less Traveled

One Catholic writer I try to keep up with is Donald Cozzens, lately of John Carroll University. He is out with a new book, Freeing Celibacy, that is simply stunning in its eloquence and integrity. The thesis of the book is an old one: the right kind of decision to live out one's life without sexual experience, for the greater good of the gospel, is the outward expression of an inward, spiritual gift from God. Fr. Cozzen’s exposition of the thesis, though, is anything but something from a distant past.

Cozzens stays clear of the intellectualization about celibacy as the sexual ideal that has dominated Roman Catholic pastoral theology in the past, and instead focuses on the present experience of a very small number of very real, humble, and quietly inspired men and women for whom only "a mysterious pull of grace" toward singleness can fit their personal spiritual journeys. Movingly, Cozzens allows these beautiful people to tell us on their own terms why they cannot be the people they sense God wants them to be without relinquishing their yearning for sexual intimacy, and why the commitment to celibacy involves, seemingly paradoxically, a lifetime of struggle as well as graced ministry, performance, and achievement.

The idea of celibacy as a charism is especially relevant to a whole lot of really bad things still going on in the Catholic Church. Trying to be celibate when you are not called or enabled by God for the task is one way to end up as the quirky, cranky, manipulative, abusive, or downright dangerous kind of human being that all too many priests have ended up being. ( I am well aware that there are other ways to wind up like this.)

But trying to be a marriage partner, as Protestants are pressured to be, is not much of an alternative when you are neither called nor equipped for that task. The particular brand of Protestantism that I still represent, United Methodism, itself has a long way to go on this issue. Officially, the denomination supports what sounds like a credible, dual sexual standard of fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness. In actuality, though, the latter serves not as a cajoling of the unmarried to hold off on sex, but as a cover for an irrational opposition to homosexual relationships, and for a hypocritical attitude toward celibacy itself.

Both celibacy and the marriage relationship are divinely bestowed opportunities for expressing our sexual nature to God's glory. But, and contrary to a thousand years of misguided Christian teaching, celibacy is not the ideal for everyone. And neither is offspring-begetting marriage, contrary to even more years of de-forming Genesis 1:22 into yet another spirit-killing law. Some married couples cannot produce offspring, others choose not to, and neither the inability nor the choice invalidates the sacredness of their sexual activity together.

God invites couples to "be fruitful and multiply." God invites individuals to make a life-long commitment to chastity. And God's prevenient grace equips some, but not all couples, and some, but not all individuals to accept and live out these invitations. Neither invitation is a demand, even when it is experienced as a calling from God Godself. (The biblical word is even stronger: summons.) God's great gift of freedom is never overridden by God's enthusiasm for getting some of his people onto a different track.

As I finished my reading of Fr. Cozzen's book, I found myself following a different line of thought from his own: the winsome descriptions that some celibate priests and nuns share about their commitment to chastity are strikingly similar to those of more than just a few men and women who understand their being gay and lesbian also to be a living out of God's grace, gifts, and will. They, too, have found their deepest humanity and service to God through struggle, prayer, commitment, and through grace-filled, life-giving friendships with both men and women. For gays and lesbians, there is also the transforming quality of an intimate, same-sex relationship bound by a commitment to permanence and fidelity. Self-assured critics who proclaim such a relationship an "abomination unto the Lord" know neither gays, lesbians, nor the Lord very well.

Like celibacy, gay and lesbian sexuality isn't for everyone, in spite of the fanatical fulminating going on these days about the dangers the latter pose to keeping the world safe for straightness. The evidence suggests that it, like the road to celibacy, will always be a less traveled road. But it is hardly a road that leads to perdition. That road is the more traveled road of people unwilling to look deeply enough into their own sexuality to want to make its expression, in whatever form, a fit offering to God.