Note: This post is imported from the Nicene Guys Website. For those reading this on Facebook, it is probably worth going to the actual source, because Facebook does a bad job of retaining formatting. Sorry.
Also, before I begin, a word about my notation in this reflection. I did not take any notes, and thus have to rely on memory alone about what was said. Thus, I cannot use any direct quotes, only paraphrases; I thus will use italics and single quotations (‘ ’) to denote anything which I am taking as a paraphrased quote, and regular double quotations marks (“ ”) to mean things which are quoted directly, e.g. from other sources. Without further ado:
On Friday night, my fiancé and I took a little road trip east to Texas A&M University to hear Christopher West. The theme of the night’s talk was “The Longing,” and it was indeed a good talk; Mr West is certainly one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard, and the Theology of the Body is a message which is desperately needed in our culture—in the schools and universities, in the churches, and in the homes.
As we were leaving from the auditorium after the talk, we were caught by a couple of folks from the university’s Catholic Student Association who were hoping to record the reactions of audience members for posterity and/or promotional opportunities. The lady, a Miss Hilary -------, asked us two questions, the first of which I answered and the second of which I allowed my fiancé to answer. The questions were, if memory serves, first, what did we think of the talk, and second, what is it for which we long. As I was still thinking through the points of the talk, I gave a somewhat disorganized and inarticulate answer.
My answer consisted of something along the lines of, ‘I enjoyed the talk, and I like how he tied it together with and expanded upon the talk he gave last time he was here [last March]. For example, last time he placed most of his emphasis on his approached to sexuality—starvation, fast food, and banquet. He also spent considerable time discussing the primary protagonists of the latter two of these approaches: Hugh Heffner as opposed to John Paul the Great. I noticed that he returned to both of these themes tonight, but that, true to the talk’s title, the primary focus was more towards the longings related to sex. Thus, he both tied back to and built upon his talk from last time.’ In actuality, my answer was a bit more disorganized than this, but this is the essence of what I said.
Having had a few hours time to consider what was said in the talk, I have a fairly strong urge to revisit both questions, beginning actually with the second and the returning to the first. For what do I long? Two replies come to my mind; the first is the reply of the Samaritan woman in the Gospels, “Domini, da mihi hanc aquam”: “Lord, give to me this water.” The reply is of course to Christ’s statement that all who drink will thirst again; however, “he who shall drink of the water which I give him shall never thirst again. But the water that I shall give him shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting.” It is for this water that I long. Or, in the words of St Augustine, which is the second reply which comes to my mind, “Lord, our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”
These answers are implicit within Mr West’s presentation. He begins with something autobiographical, something to which a survivor of the public schools and indeed a great many private ones—universities, high schools, and increasingly even middle schools—can relate to some extent or other. He begins with the experience he had as a freshman in college, having been told that the secret to happiness was to be found in hedonism, that is, in frequent sex and heavy drinking. For him, this came crashing down one night when, after witnesses his roommate pass out in a pool of his own vomit, he then witnessed—and felt powerless to stop—a date rape. He asks us here, “Are we having fun yet?” In the immortal words of the Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?”
Looking deep don, we can see only one answer, and it’s the negative and not the affirmative. There exists a longing for something, which the modern psychologists, in the tradition of Freud, would say is a desire to have sex. But, as Mr West points out, ‘even Mick Jagger “can’t get no satisfaction,” and it’s surely not because he’s not having enough sex.’
Yet, sex itself, while not the answer to the longing, as the icon which points to the Answer. “What is the difference between the great sinners and the great saints? They are both made of the same basic materials” he asks; and indeed, both the sinners and the saints are mere men, nothing more and nothing less, in their origins. Moreover, they both have the same longing. The difference is not one of humanity of types of humanity or even of deepest longings, but of where the saints and the sinners turn to satisfy those longings. ‘The sinners turn horizontally, and the saints vertically, to satisfy their longings.’ That is to say, the sinners turn only towards each other to satisfy their deepest longings, and so sex becomes their idol, alcohol their medicine. And people, will people become mere objects which can be used to satisfy these longings, these urges.
Professor C.S. Lewis’ put this in slightly different terms. In his Mere Christianity, he wrote “What Satan has put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside of God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible journey of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
The saints, on the other hand, know in their hearts the answer to this longing. The know deep down in their souls what Mr Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity in answer the question as to why the approach of the sinners doesn’t work. What he said is this: “The reason why it can never succeed in this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not operate properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other….God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
The saints turn vertically to fulfill their deepest longings, because they know that this is the only way in which that longing can be fulfilled. But turning vertically, they are then able to turn horizontally and see, not objects which can fulfill their urges and desires, but rather icons, images of the Divine Love. The see people as fellow-subjects, and so can love them rather than merely using them.
There is another way to pose the question, “for what do you long?” This is posed in a story which Mr West told about a young couple. ‘The young couple was driving together along a scenic and secluded country road on a Friday night. The air was crisp and cool and the stars were out that night. The pulled off the road into a wheat field, spread out a blanket, and began to gaze at the stars. The soon turned from the stars to each other, and then engaged in—shall we say some serious lip-locking action. Unbeknownst to them, the field was owned by the local Catholic parish, and the priest of the parish say them from the window of his rectory. He decided to go for a short “prayer walk,” and grabbing his rosary left the rectory and gently, quietly approached the couple. When he got very near, he called out to them, and they quickly began to grab their clothing, which had somehow been discarded. The priest did not scold them or reprimand them. Instead, he only asked, kindly, gently, “Tell me. What does what you are doing down there [pointing to the blanket] have to do with what’s up there [pointing to the stars]?” ’ Why, indeed, is a starry night so romantic? What is it about seeing the majesty of the heavens which “turns us on?”
The answer is that both sex and the heavens serve as icons for us. That is, both things point beyond themselves to something both deeper than the heavens and greater than sex. Sex is meant as a symbol—a “foreshadowing” in Mr West’s words—of the mystical union of God and His Bride (the Church). But the Church is none other than us, so that sex is a symbol for and a foreshadowing of the union with God which we can expect in heaven. The stars themselves occupy that spaces which many a poet of mystic has called “the heavens,” are in turn an icon which points from “the heaves” to Heaven, the place where God resides and where the saints reside in union with Him. It is no wonder that the stars have captured many a man’s or woman’s heart or a poet’s pen as a “romantic” scene.
Mr West had one more thing to say about sex as a masterpiece. Through sin, the masterpiece is crumpled, as it the canvas upon which it has been painted was pulled down and wadded into a single twisted and wrinkled ball. It is here that he could tie into the three gospels concerning sex. The first, which he calls the “starvation” gospel, is the prudish Christianity of rules and repression, which springs less from an authentic Catholic understanding of the body and sex than from the various heresies against which the Church has fought: Gnosticism, Arianism, Manichaeism, and even Calvinism. Such is an oversimplification of the Gospel message about sexual morality, and goes against Christ’s command to Peter and the whole Church: “Feed my sheep.” Rather, the prudish interpretation of Christianity says only this: ‘You have these desires inside of you, and they’re bad. Repress them, and follow this list of rules, and then you will be healthy.’ The prudes see the crumple work and view it as trash, and thus throw it into the bin with the other trash; such was the state of the Church—Catholic and otherwise—entering the twentieth century; this was especially true of those areas under Victorian influence, and remains the case in many Christian homes today.
The second gospel of sexuality, which Mr West calls the “Fast food” gospel, was begun primarily by Mr Hugh Heffner. ‘Hugh Heffner say the masterpiece and drew it out from the waste bin. But he did nothing further to it, leaving it in its crumpled, ruined state. His magazine—Playboy—celebrated the twisted thing as if it were the real thing. “Look at this beautiful art! Why don’t you all just look at this?” He pulled sexuality out of the waste bin into which the Victorians had thrown it, but he did not restore it; it still looked like garbage, but now garbage was to be extolled as art.’ Indeed, this is what Mr Heffner has done, though I would make a distinction here. Mr West says that Mr Heffner pulled sexuality out of the garbage bin, but it would be much closer to the truth to say that Mr Hefner has demanded that we all be pulled into the garbage bin instead. He has attempted to reunite humanity with that from which we’ve been estranged, but he does so not by pulling sexuality out of the garbage can—which would elevate sexuality if only a little—but by pulling men (and women) into the bin, causing humanity to be lowered and debased along with sexuality.
The third gospel, which is the truly and authentically Catholic gospel of sexuality was brought about at about the same time as Mr Hugh Heffner’s “fast food,” instant gratification gospel. And this is the gospel which views sex as the appetizer to the banquet which is union with God; it is union with another person, and as such is an icon of union with God, for what are we but images of God? This gospel was Pope John Paul’s the Great “Theology of the Body,” the banquet gospel which has reached into the trash bin as well. But rather than reaching in by climbing in, this gospel reaches in, retrieves the masterpiece, and begins to un-crumple it so that it may truly resemble a masterpiece again. In a word, it attempts to do what any gospel should—assist in redemption. Pope John Paul the Great helped to redeem sexuality with his Theology of the Body, just as Christ came to redeem man. At the heart of this redemption is the changing of a verb, from “to use”—as per the fallen state of sexuality in which men and women use each other for the satisfactions of their desires—into “to love,” which is the relationship which ought to exist between men and women, for it is the only relationship which can find a place at the heavenly banquet.
What does what we do down here have to do with what exists up there? In a word, everything. If the heavens are a work of art, then we are God’s masterpiece as images of Himself. At the center of that masterpiece is sex as an image of the union found within Him. This is the secret of the saints so often overlooked by the greatest sinners, that to find the satisfaction of our greatest desires, we turn not only outward but upward, to the heavens which are God’s throne. For only the Infinite can fulfill our deepest longing.
