"A Wise and Thoughtful Study of Sexual Ethics"

From 2001 to 2003 I had the good fortunate to study at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities so as to gain a Masters in Theology and the Arts.

While at UTS I experienced many outstanding professors of theology, including Mary Bednarowski, Jann Cather Weaver, Wilson Yates, and Eleazar Fernandez. One professor that I unfortunately didn’t have the privilege of experiencing while at UTS was Paul Capetz, Professor of Historical Theology and author of God: A Brief History.

Recently, a friend shared with me a review by Paul of Margaret Farley’s award-winning book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. As you’ll see from the following excerpts, Paul believes that “there is no better book on Christian sexual ethics” than Farley’s Just Love.

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Farley, a professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School since 1971, has written a wise and thoughtful study of sexual ethics that should be required reading for all clergy, seminaries, and lay persons who, for reasons of heart and mind, have concluded that certain traditional moral prescriptions handed down by churches through the centuries are neither appropriate to their lived experience of themselves as gendered and sexual beings nor adequate in light of historical, philosophical and psychological understanding of human sexuality and personhood.

By way of introducing her topic Farley adeptly guides the reader through the various theoretical discussions and empirical studies that have shaped our contemporary approach to thought about human sexuality. Of particular import are the moral challenges coming from feminism’s insistence upon the full equality of women with men as well as from gay and lesbian persons whose voices have been marginalized in classical and modern discourse about sexual ethics.

What is required, therefore, is a reconsideration of the scriptures and the post-biblical traditions that have set the discursive categories for how Christians have thought about what is moral and immoral in matters pertaining to sexual relations. This historical reexamination of the traditional sources of Christian ethics includes a critical assessment of the philosophical influences upon classical Christianity such as the influential “natural law” tradition so important in the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas among others.

Farley’s own normative proposal involves two terms: justice and love. While much of the New Testament and subsequent Christian tradition has elevated love as the supreme principle of ethics, Farley correctly argues that love is too easily sentimentalized and thus distorted if it does not presuppose justice as its more inclusive framework. Without justice, there can be no love worthy of the name. Justice requires that equals be treated equally, thereby undermining any rational for hierarchical relationships between men and women as was the case historically in biblical and Christian understandings of marriage. It also precludes violence within the marriage relation. Justice treats the other person an an end in her- or himself and includes respect for the other’s capacities of self-determination.

Love, which is the most appropriate context for the embodied expression of sexuality, requires justice as its sine qua non. While love, as the cherishing of another human being, goes beyond justice, love must never leave justice behind. From within this revised ethical framework wherein love informed by justice is the supreme moral norm for evaluating the appropriateness of sexual relations, traditional prohibitions against homosexuality can no longer be sustained. At the same time, however, consensual and committed relations between persons of the same gender are beholden to the same moral criterion of just love as are heterosexual relations.

Farley is a disciplined scholar who has mastered all the relevant historic sources of Christian ethics, Catholic and Protestant. Moreover, she is completely conversant with the voluminous contemporary literature on gender and sexuality from multiple secular disciplines. As befits an ethicist standing in the Roman Catholic tradition, Farley affirms the importance of attending to insights from non-theological disciplines such as those derived from the social sciences. For that reason, her work will not appeal to conservative Protestants who continue to maintain that the Bible, if not the sole source of Christian ethics, is nonetheless the absolute source of norms overriding considerations from any other source. Still, her reflections will appeal to liberal Protestants whose model of ethical reflection has more formal affinities with that of classical Catholic moral theology than with biblicism in either its cruder or more sophisticated varieties.

. . . [Farley’s] book validates the experiential and intellectual reasons persons have to be critical of the church’s inherited sexual morality at the same time that she clarifies why Christian faith itself provides a warrant for ethical revision on behalf of its distinctive vision of what human life may and should be when lived out of a love that is just.

There is no better book on Christian sexual ethics. Tolle, lege: take and read.

Paul E. Capetz

Making Love, Giving Life

Local theologian and writer David R. Weiss recently sent me a complimentary copy of his newly published book, To the Tune of a Welcoming God: Lyrical Reflections on Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Wideness of God’s Welcome.

Regular readers of The Wild Reed may recall that as executive coordinator of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities, I was asked to write an endorsement for David’s book back in April.

This endorsement reads as follows:

[To the Tune of a Welcoming God is] a heartfelt compilation of great beauty and honesty. To a church hungry for wisdom and grace, Weiss’s unwavering focus on God’s loving and welcoming embrace offers a veritable feast – one that both nourishes and delights.

Following is an excerpt from one of the essays in To the Tune of a Welcoming God. This essay is entitled, “The Body as Burning Bush: Coming Out and Other Holy Acts of Human Sexuality.” (I previously shared an excerpt from this essay in the April 29 Wild Reed post, Coming Out: An Act of Holiness.)

This particular essay is actually the transcript of a talk that David gave during Coming Out Week in October 2003. “My words are written with the GLBT community in mind,” he says. “But they will ring no less true for those who are straight.”

“The Body as Burning Bush” is, says David, “both a provocative and accurate” title for a talk that seeks to “explore two simple claims”:

First, that our bodies are able to host the presence of God – like the burning bush that Moses stood before. And second, that human sexuality is one realm of bodily experience where God’s presence can be felt – and that, therefore, there are “holy acts” of human sexuality, of which Coming Out is one such holy act.

In the excerpt below, I particularly appreciate and resonate with David’s perspective on procreation: “Sexuality is indeed intended to be procreative, to give life,” he says. “But our own prejudice – perhaps our desire to stem the flow of God’s creative energy into the world – has led us to understand this in a narrow, biological fashion. But truly, to find ourselves partnered in longing love with another person is to find that we have company in the work of caring for creation. . . . Christian sexual love should be procreative. Lived well, it always is. ”

Amen, brother!

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Making Love

Claiming the goodness of sexuality is not about hopping into bed as soon as possible with a clean conscience. It is first and foremost about Coming Out and Keeping Faith* – and learning to sense the gracious precious of God in these moments.

However, if sexuality is indeed good – if God can say, over a pair of entwined bodies, replete with the salty sweet sweat of a well-won climax, “That was very good” – then within the moment of faith well-kept, shaped by intimacy that is just and kind, patient and passionate, making love is a holy act.

Making love is not about the details of how your anatomy matches up and meshes with your partner’s. It is about how you and your partner’s anatomy together become mutually engaged in a crescendo of intimacy with each other’s soul. And it is another moment when bodies burn like bushes, without being consumed, but bearing forth the presence of God. . . a moment in which God’s presence is revealed as grace, as gift. In making love we participate in this presence, becoming wholly and graciously present to another. In this moment of finding ourselves held and touched by another’s love to the point of body-trembling ecstasy we come to know something in our bodies and in our souls of the truth of God’s astonishing love – and we have been fools to blind ourselves to this by shame.

If the purpose of God’s presence is to liberate and to lure us into liberating activity, then making love also participates in the purpose of God’s presence. We live most of our lives hemmed in by a sense of self that ends where our skin stops, but in lovemaking we find ourselves drawn into the hungry awareness that selves find their ecstatic completion in this other who is just beyond where I thought my mere self stopped. This is surely a wonder that must be seen.

But there is one more moment beyond this. Because finally we make love – like burning bushes – not simply to savor ourselves but to be drawn into God’s yearning to save the world.


Giving Life

Liberation, in Exodus, is not just personal or interpersonal; it is full blown society-shaking liberation. And I am ready to say that when lovemaking is allowed to burst into full flame with the presence of God it can have society-shaking consequences. In my body’s ecstasy I get one glimpse of what it means for this body to be fully alive. In my happy privilege to bring [my partner’s] body to ecstasy, I come to realize that I am able to participate deeply and wonderfully in the flourishing of another body. And in these twin perceptions, sustained by the presence of God, a power is released that is no longer specifically sexual but which bears in it the hope that all bodies might flourish.


[It’s a] hope that makes my personal ecstasy the measure of my highest ideals. How can I know this deep joy in my body and not make it my lived hope that other bodies cease to know hunger, poverty, war, fear?

Thus, I will say that sexuality is indeed intended to be procreative, to give life; but our own prejudice – perhaps our desire to stem the flow of God’s creative energy into the world – has led us to understand this in a narrow, biological fashion. But truly, to find ourselves partnered in longing love with another person is to find that we have company in the work of caring for creation. Whether you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or straight – whether you are celibate or sexually active, single or in a relationship – one truth that we hear in the biblical creation account is that human beings were created to tend the Garden, to guide creation’s bounty and to tend its scarcity in ways that promote the flourishing of all. That’s why we’re here. The joy that we know sexually in our bodies is there, at least in part, to lure us into the holy act of caring for all that is embodied, for all the ecological diversity that reflects God’s rampant desire for incarnation.

We don’t need a partner to do this. But if in our partnerships we fail to look outward and tend to the corner of creation around us – whether that is children or other humans, animals or ecosystems, or simply our household resources – if our love for another person does not spill out into these areas, we have missed something of the presence of God. God is always engaged in the care of life, especially among the vulnerable. And no one need shrink from the expectation that Christian sexual love should be procreative. Lived well, it always is. And here, too, the bush burns brightly.

– Excerpted from “The Body as Burning Bush: Coming Out and Other Holy Acts of Human Sexuality” in To the Tune of a Welcoming God: Lyrical Reflections on Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Wideness of God’s Welcome by David R. Weiss (Langdon Street Press, 2008).

* “Keeping faith,” says David, is about “relating to others in a way that honors the divine presence at your coming out. It is about sexual ethics, and it has less to do with rules than with relationships.” Keeping faith thus also includes “recognizing the potential for misuse of our sexual selves - but more importantly about recognizing the potential for moments of incarnation through our sexual selves.” This potential for incarnation, David reminds us, “has been all but lost to us in our faith tradition.”


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
Relationship: The Crucial Factor in Sexual Morality
The Non-Negotiables of Human Sex
Joan Timmerman on the “Wisdom of the Body”
Sons of the Church: The Witnessing of Gay Catholic Men – A Discussion Guide
The Many Forms of Courage
What is it That Ails You?
Compassion, Christian Community, and Homosexuality
Song of Songs: The Bible’s Gay Love Poem
Jesus and the Centurion
The Archangel Michael as Gay Icon
What is a “Lifestyle”?
Be Not Afraid: You Can Be Happy and Gay
Beyond Courage
The Real Gay Agenda
Love is Love
And Love is Lord of All
Charis
Cherish
Dew[y]-Kissed
In the Footsteps of Spring

Relationship: The Crucial Factor in Sexual Morality

Last week saw the publication of the August issue of The Progressive Catholic Voice online journal, of which I’m honored to serve as editor.

As I mentioned in a previous Wild Reed post, this particular issue contains an insightful article on sexual morality by Cletus Wessels, OP.

Cletus originally gave me this article when I visited him at St. Albert the Great Church in South Minneapolis in February of this year. It was written several years ago when Cletus was conducting a series of workshops on understanding human sexuality. He told me to use it as I saw fit. And so I’m doing just that.

I think it’s an excellent piece that Cletus has written, and one that clearly and courageously reflects that type of rationality and compassion totally lacking in Vatican documents that attempt to address issues of sexuality. I think it is worthy of the greatest audience possible, and so am publishing it not only in The Progressive Catholic Voice, but on The Wild Reed as well. Enjoy!

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Relationship
The Crucial Factor in Sexual Morality
By Cletus Wessels, OP
The Progressive Catholic Voice
August 2008

I wish to describe the meaning of human sexuality in a way that frees us from some of the straightjackets of traditional ethical thinking. In my years as a student in the 1950s and early in my time as a professor, we tended to understand human sexuality in terms of its actions. The category of sins were described in terms of different actions: sexual intercourse without marriage, sodomy, masturbation, rape, adultery, etc. I wish to change the focus from acts to relationships. For me, the quality of relationships is the crucial factor.

The fullness of human sexuality is a gender-based relationship of the whole person founded on varying levels of intimacy and commitment manifested externally and physically in appropriate ways with regard to both personal and social values. Each of these dimensions can be described briefly.

A gender-based relationship of the whole person: Human sexuality does not flow primarily from the sexual organs or the bodily actions of the people involved. Gender identity can be seen in terms of a person’s genetic and genital makeup, but more importantly a person’s gender identity is found in a psychic and social self-perception as male or female. The whole person is necessarily bound up with gender and gender-based relationships.

Founded on varying levels of intimacy and commitment: These two qualities are the foundation stones of the fullness of human sexuality. By intimacy, we mean mutual self-disclosure, the sharing of life found in friendship, cooperation, and healthy competition. Such mutual self-disclosure is found in three dimensions of human life. There is a mature intimacy with the self in which a person has obtained a true sense of identity without which there can be no self-disclosure. There is an intimacy with the Earth and with all creation that brings balance to selfhood and a deeper sense of relationality. Finally, true selfhood requires intimacy with God in which a person experiences the intimate presence of God and the true meaning of love. Intimacy with self, with the Earth, and with God are the source of mutual self-disclosure.

By commitment, I mean mutual responsibility. In all relationships mutual responsibility is fundamental, but in our society a difficult reality. People fear commitment. We have a mobile society with an uncertain future; we are a culture of individuals who fear the loss of freedom; we are vulnerable people despite all of our façade of strength, and all of these work against commitment.

The following are the positive foundations of mutual responsibility:

1) Investment – a mature relationship requires time and energy.
2) Wholeness which involves the whole person without immature projections.
3) Choice – there must be freedom and not compulsion, not infatuation but real love.
4) A public and personal awareness of this mutual responsibility – friends and family know the commitment.

It almost goes without saying that there are varying levels of intimacy and commitment. The intimacy and commitment of two high school kids is different from an engaged couple. The college student with a chance acquaintance does not have the quality of two mature friends. The new friend with whom a handshake is appropriate differs from a long-time family friend with whom a hug and a kiss is appropriate. The quality of the relationship is the most important factor. Sexual intercourse is not virtuous or licentious because of the action itself but by the quality of the relationship. Sexual intercourse of an engaged couple with a deep sense of intimacy and commitment may be more virtuous and a fuller expression of human sexuality than sexual intercourse of a married couple with little or no intimacy and commitment. A gay or lesbian couple with many years of intimacy and commitment and a married straight couple with a similar background can equally share their lives in a physical and genital embrace of love. Both relationships can be an expression of the fullness of human sexuality.

Morality within sexual relationships depends upon the fullness of human sexuality. Thus, homosexuality must be judged by the quality of the relationship and not by the character of the act involved. There are different physical expressions of love and intimacy and commitment, and diversity is the rule of the Earth. The Earth, which emerges from the loving presence of God within, has so much diversity that it goes beyond our comprehension. Likewise within the human family, which emerges from the presence of the God within, has the same diversity in race and color, in cultures and religions, and in the diversity of sexual relationships. There is diversity with human sexuality where we find people more inclined to a single life and some to a married life, some people are gay/lesbian and some are straight. Gay/lesbian people have been ostracized because they are different, but now the Earth shows us that difference is richness. Gay/lesbian people have always contributed to our social and religious communities, and now they are being called to bring their richness out in the open for all humankind.

Cletus Wessels is a Dominican priest who served for eighteen years as a professor of theology at Aquinas Institute, a graduate school of theology. Later he taught at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was pastor of the Parish of St. Albert the Great in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 1988 to 1997. Currently, Cletus is engaged in a free-lance ministry of lectures and workshops, preaching parish retreats and missions, and teaching adult faith formation in parishes. He is the author of two books: The Holy Web: Church and the New Universe Story (2000) and Jesus in the New Universe Story (2003).


Opening image: “Telling Him” by Steve Walker.

For more of Cletus Wessels on The Wild Reed, see The Holarchical Church: Not a Pyramid but a Web of Relationships.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Non-Negotiables of Human Sex
The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
Be Not Afraid: You Can Be Happy and Gay
Joan Timmerman on the “Wisdom of the Body”
Dan Hanway’s “Fresh Look at a Sensitive Topic”
What Is It That Ails You?
Beyond Courage

First We Take Minneapolis

It would appear that some so-called traditional Catholics are crying foul of the latest example of what’s been described as the “gay gotcha agenda.”

According to one individual, the inclusion of the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus in a series of concerts to be staged in association with the “Vatican Splendors” exhibit at the Minnesota History Museum is an example of this particular agenda, one which, in all seriousness, he defines as follows:

. . . quietly place a gay group on the program, be it Dignity, a gay choir, or something. . . then when the thing goes forward, lo and behold, the gays and their supporters are right there making noise. Now the [Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis] is in a pickle, pull support and be decried as homophobic, say nothing and appear to give tacit support. It’s the gay gotcha. And the Chancery, in their usual statements of plausible deniability, well, they just don’t know how this happened, [and are left] clucking like court eunuchs.

It needs to be noted that the “Splendors of the Vatican” exhibit is not being brought to town by the local archdiocese. Nor is it being held on church property. That, of course, hasn’t stopped some more Inquisitional-minded Catholics from calling for the chancery to withdraw archdiocesan endorsement of the exhibit while ever the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus is somehow connected to it.

A spokesperson for the chancery, however, citing the Vatican document, “The Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” reminded the Taliban-like Catholics among us that, as Catholics, we are not to discriminate against homosexual persons.

Oh, really? Is this plea for non-discrimination against gay people coming from the same chancery whose leadership bent over backwards (no pun intended) to support and push for an amendment to the Minnesota Constitution that would not only have banned same-gender marriage but domestic partnerships and civil unions? Yes, it is, which makes the chancery’s plea for non-discrimination against gay people all the more disingenuous. (Thankfully this proposed amendment was defeated in 2006).

But back to this supposed “gay gotcha agenda.” I thought it was only leftists and liberals who were supposed to conspiracy nuts. Obviously, those on the right can be just as crazy. I mean, think about it: can you really see a group of Broadway queens conspiring to bring down the Roman Catholic Church?

Yet some Catholics really do fear that “political maneuvering” will take place once the gay boys of the chorus hit the stage; that these same gay boys will (tunefully, of course) push an “agenda” – much to the embarrassment of those “court eunuchs” at the chancery.

Oh, one can only wish! Here’s hoping some brave soul involved with the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus does indeed opt to pursue and push an “agenda.” I’m all for “agenda” pushing – especially if by “agenda” we’re talking about relating people’s lived experience, and sharing such experience so as to counter ignorance, insensitivity, and oppression.

In this spirit of truth telling and liberation, here are a few song suggestions for when the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus perform as part of the “Splendors of the Vatican” program:

The George Gershwin classic, “The Man I Love”

“We Kiss in the Shadows” from The King and I

“I’m Getting Married in the Morning” from My Fair Lady

Image: Peter and Steve of Gay Abandon, West Yorkshire’s lesbian, gay, and bisexual choir. (Photo by Mark Weeks.)

Pow-Wow

This past weekend saw the 9th Annual “Welcome Home” Traditional Pow-Wow of the Mendota-Mdewakanton Dakota Community.



I first became aware of the Mendota-Mdewakanton Dakota Community in 1997 when I joined with them (and with Earth First! activists and concerned neighborhood groups) to oppose the rerouting of Highway 55 through lands of special sacred significance to them. My photographic documentation of this struggle can be viewed in Gallery 7 of my Faces of Resistance online exhibit.

Recently, a feature-length documentary film about our efforts to stop the rerouting of Highway 55 premiered in Minneapolis.

At one point during the Pow-Wow on Saturday, August 9, a special tribute was paid to Carol Kratz (pictured at right) who, along with her husband Al, were the last property owners on the 5300 block of Riverview Road in South Minneapolis to relinquish their home for the sake of the reroute. Before being finally forced out by a court order in November 1998, Carol and Al and their small white house were the focal point of Camp Two Pines, the first of two encampments established to oppose the reroute.

“It’s wonderful,” said Carol in August 1998, when the encampment and the cause it championed first began getting media attention, “We’re finally getting the attention we’ve been looking for all these years.”

Carol’s husband, Al, died soon after the couple were forced out of their home. Carol passed away July 16 of this year.





Writes Marijo Moore: “American Indian dance is a form of praise and worship. It is a way to experience the interconnectedness of life through motion. Dancing is an art that was here before the conception of art ever existed. It is a necessity for Indian people - a necessary spiritual action requiring dedication and a devout sense of reverence.”



Above: My friends Lynn and James - Saturday, August 9, 2008.


Images: Michael J. Bayly.

See also the previous Wild Reed post:
Stop the Re-Route Documentary Premieres in Minneapolis