Seeking Sexuality
that Fits Our Spirituality
:: Michael Higgins
Few topics succeed as well as human sexuality in provoking debate, confusion, rancour, mutual denunciation, and gobs of fear in the Roman Catholic Church.
Although Catholic health professionals, academics, clerical and lay leaders, moral theologians and ethicists continue to work – sometimes in open ways and other times avoiding the censuring glare of authority – exploring the complex terrain that is contemporary psychosexual studies through the lens of Catholic thought and tradition, the opportunities for the ordinary layperson to participate in an informed manner in these issues are very circumscribed.
All the more reason, then, to applaud the recent initiative of Asklepion Toronto to hold a symposium on sexuality at the University of St. Michael's College entitled "Fresh Air for the Beast and Beauty Too." Asklepion, a centre in Toronto founded in 1997 in association with the Centre for Psychotherapy and Emotional Bodywork Therapies, is dedicated to the task of healing sexual trauma, sexual addiction and relapse prevention.
There is no denying that many in our culture suffer from sexual behaviour that diminishes their sense of the essential holiness of the body and their awareness of the great gift that is sexuality. The trivialization of sexual meaning, the coarsening of sexual dialogue, the sundering of intimacy, and the vulgarization of sexual expression all contribute to the making of a society that prides itself on its openness at the same time as it betrays its own crude dualism. Television's The Sex Show and Sex Files are informative and clinical, but befreft of any substantive ethical and spiritual component. Ed the Sock, by contrast, is blatantly scatalogical.
As I sat through the symposium's opening address by U.S. psychiatrist John Perito, I was reminded of a conversation I had with an Episcopalian cleric in Honolulu following a retreat focused on the writings and spirituality of Thomas Merton. At dinner, she remarked on the then imminent dissolution of her son's marriage. A young, ambitious and highly successful lawyer in San Francisco married to an equally impressive woman, the cleric's son seemed destined to blossom in so many ways. However, within a very short time, the bloom faded when the son's addiction to cybersex destroyed the relationship.
My distraught friend's dilemma – how to help her son build his life again in positive ways by facing his addiction – highlighted for me the myriad problems that face us in the area of sexual relationships.
Before Perito's presentation – a digest of the central themes of his new book, Contemporary Catholic Sexuality: What Is Taught And What Is Practiced – the sponsoring body provided an entertaining spoof of two German psychiatrists trying to make sense of human sexuality. It was the right touch. We are often far too grave when we talk about the joy of sex, or too flippant. In either case, we handle the subject badly. The spoof set the right tone for a night of reflection and sound inquiry.
Perito, a psychiatrist in private practice for more than three decades, is accessible, earnest, and deeply religious. At one point in his life he found himself at a crossroads. Study medicine or study for the priesthood. Many Catholic figures during Perito's youth, television personality and writer Bishop Fulton Sheen most prominent of them all, fulminated against psychiatry as irreconcileable with orthodox Christianity. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed. In fact, it was a priest-psychiatrist who counselled Perito that there is good and bad psychiatry just as there is good and bad religion. Perito found that by being a psychiatrist he could be both a physician and a non-ordained priest. Both vocations in one, as it were.
Certainly, there were many role models for Perito fo Catholic psychiatrists, ordained and lay, who struggled to incorporate the ideas of the new human sciences with religious tradition. Perhaps the most important for him, precisely because he was his peer and collaborator, was the Jesuit psychiatrist James Gill, founder of the Christian Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality in Maryland.
As Perito continuously affirmed in his opening talk, "we need a spirituality that fits our sexuality and we need a sexuality that fits our spirituality." He cautioned his attentive audience that "a gift of love that is feared and unwelcome is no gift of love at all." To my ear, this gentle healer spoke from the heart as much as from the mind.
Perito would have no truck with dualism. Nor should we.
:: Michael Higgins is president of St. Jerome's University in Waterloo.
