The Narrow Way of NFP

Abstaining is hard. Really hard. It’s means choosing the truth over the flesh. It means forcing the tyranny of our sensuality to obey truth and reason. Practicing NFP is therefore part of a couples pursuit of virtue—the virtue of chastity. The context of NFP is spiritual and moral. It becomes an intrinsic part of our spiritual life as we die to sin and strive to live according to the demands of authentic love. It’s part of our cross, and we must not pretend that it isn’t also present in the bedroom.

Redemption is Risky

NFP is dangerous because it is the pursuit of virtue. NFP is dangerous because chastity is a threat to our fallen selves. It’s dangerous being fallen human beings in a fallen world dominated by sin and weakness. Bring a fallen man to live together with a fallen women, and you get one very perilous situation. Marriage is a moral tinder-box just waiting to burst into flames and ashes as soon as some sparks fly.

NFP just happens to act sometimes as the sharp knife of virtue scraping against the rough flint of our weaknesses and creating those sparks. The ensuing fire–if it gets out of control– could destroy your marriage, just as that fire could destroy your religious vocation, or your job, or your relationships with your family or best friend. That’s the danger that is inherent to being human beings on the road of redemption. There’s always the possibility of our sin ruining what is good around us. Should we then not pursue virtue?

The Demons Within

The reason that NFP can be so explosive is because—for men especially—it forces them to confront their demons. It’s not until one has to abstain—without relying on contraception to mask one’s weaknesses—that a person comes face to face with his or her chastity demons. It is unsettling to have to look in the mirror of truth and see how needy you are. But that’s the beginning of humility, which is the source of conversion.

Humility is to see and to know the truth about ourselves, to acknowledge our true poverty of spirit and need for God. Confronting one’s weakness does lead to a crisis of sorts. But it can go either way. It could ruin you if you let it, but it can also be the first step on the path to becoming the saint God created you to be.

Those who use contraception, however, are masking their vices. They aren’t just blocking their own fertility, they are creating a barrier to the grace of conversion by refusing to look in that mirror of truth.

If NFP is a loud, explosive confrontation with ones demons, then contraception is the passive aggressive sweeping those demons under the rug until they come out in some other form to wreak havoc. At least with NFP, after all the ‘yelling and screaming’ is over, health and healing can be begin. But there is no yelling and screaming with contraception. It’s all smiles until something implodes.

Wrestling with God

Struggle is not something alien to our faith or our spiritual life. Those who struggle with practicing NFP might look at the wrestling match between Jacob and the angel in the Old Testament.

The blessing Jacob recieved had to be won. He had to work for it and prove his mettle. Only at dawn, after struggling with the angel all night, did the angel give in and give Jacob the blessing from God. Stuggling with ourselves is good. It’s healthy. Is one’s marriage really safe by running away from all struggle?

The Hidden Costs of Contraception

Resorting to contraception seems like an easier road than NFP. In many ways it is. But it’s naive to think that it does not come with its own problems. That ability to indulge yourself comes with a price. Conceding to weakness and throwing in the towel to vice has consequences. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Almost every single one of those marriages included a contraceptive sexual relationship. If contraception is supposed to be a positive solution to the hardships of chastity, it’s not at all clear that it’s doing a good job.

So yes, confronting one’s demons and vices, the strain of abstinence, the stress of acquiring virtue, the struggle with the angels of the Lord, these things could ruin your marriage. I’m not denying it. They could ruin you.

But the spiritual life is a battle, and battles are always dangerous. And when it comes to virtue it’s better to fight than to be conquered.

And their culpability might vary from case to case. They don’t want to be dissenters, or troublemakers, they are just trying to survive as couples or as families.

But there is an assumption that always lies under the surface of these kinds of threads. Another sort of myth.

It’s the assumption that contraceptive sex is exactly the same as non-contraceptive sex. By that I mean that it is assumed that the ‘unitive’ dimension of sex is possible even when using contraception. And I believe that is a serious mistake.

When the Church says that the unitive and the procreative are inseparable, what is meant is that the act can only be unitive in so far as it’s a procreative kind of act (not to be confused with procreative in fact).

This isn’t pulled out of a Cardinals hat somewhere in the Vatican, this is reality the way God made it.

The kind of unity that sex is supposed to be in the sacrament of marriage (and that the spouses long for) can not be had simply by putting your parts in the right place. That’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The logos of sex also plays a part. As Aristotle noted, there’s no real unity between friends without a ‘transcendent third’ that can mediate that unity. For unity can’t be manufactured, it must come “not from the flesh or the will of man, but of God.”

And God’s will for sex, expressed through the logos which he gave it, is that it is a procreative kind of act. And that spousal love, that unique love designed to image God like no other, is a procreative kind of love.

So when you contracept, your sexual activity is no more of a unity than mutual masturbation or homosexuality is unitive. You spurn the grammar which expresses the unity that you really long for.

Contraceptive sexual acts can no more express the unity of love than Judas’ kiss could express friendship after throwing thirty pieces of silver in front of the authorities. It’s just not objectively possible. Couples can understand this intuitively.

The sex is just not the same. It sucks.

So yes, by using contraception or sterilization, you can solve one problem on a practical level. But it would be a big mistake to imagine that you haven’t created other potentially serious problems and swept them under the rug to wreak havoc later.

There is no getting around the fact that love is the cross, and that this cross can’t be kept out of the bedroom.

Love can abstain. It’s worth it.

What happens is pretty predictable. Scripture ends up blessing whatever the hell we want it to, because in a culture of lust what we want often comes straight from Hell.

Lust And Legalism

The “Sola Scriptura” Christian’s approach to sexual matters is all about avoiding whatever is explicitly prohibited in the Bible; so stuff like homosexuality, fornication, and adultery. In other words, you’re mostly cool if you’re married. It’s not so much “do not defile the marriage bed” (St. Paul) but more like “whatever you do on the marriage bed can’t defile you”. Of course, many protestant Christians are still traditional in their sexual mores. But there’s a disturbing trend among “Mega Church” pastors to bless the sexual spirit of the times, and Sola Scriptura is their justification.

If “the Bible didn’t say I couldn’t” approach to sex was a Christian’s only defense for their soul’s purity, it would come tumbling down like the Wall of Jericho under lust’s trumpet blasts.

Christians complain that sex isn’t talked about in church, so to compensate they completely miss virtue’s mean and run straight for the opposite extreme of being all hip and cool about “hot” sex and sexual practices that more ancient Christians preferred to think of as sins against nature. That doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the Megachurch approach to sexual purity.

Neither do the books coming out by pastors like Mark Driscoll blessing every manner of unchaste filth that find its exemplar not in scripture but in Los Angeles–the porn capital of the world. Nor do “Christian Sex Toy” shops, or online “ministries” by Christian women who proudly refer to themselves as nymphos and seriously think that Jesus loves the shameful things they do and teach.

A Senseless Approach

These Christians don’t seem to see the contradictions in their legalism and private interpretations. If homosexuality is wrong, how is marital sodomy okay? Is it being married that makes the difference? And why not homosexual marriage then, if sodomy can be wholesome and Godly?

And if porn and lust and sexual fantasizing is wrong, how is it okay to sell Christians sex toys and bedroom mirrors so spouses can turn themselves into a porn show? You can’t watch it, but you can role-play it? You can’t lust for other men and women, but you can turn yourself and your spouse into an ‘other’ for your sexual excitement?

Fornication and adultery are wrong, but contraception and condoms are permissible even though all sex that has no intentional connection to procreation is identical in its narcissistic prison? There’s a reason why such things have been called “marital fornication”. But it’s fine because you’re married? Lust doesn’t recognize exclusive relationships like marriage–it’s not in its vocabulary.

There’s also the logical problem with such legalism. The Bible only directly addresses a very small fraction of the virtually infinite set of moral problems that a person might find themselves in during a lifetime. What Christians need is not a list of “don’ts”, but a theory of sex, a meaning of sex, the whys of sex. The Christian needs principles that he can apply to new situations and circumstances. Otherwise, the Christian is left helpless against the winds of licentiousness that blow in all directions these days, fanning the flames of evil desires into a destructive fire.

A Catholic Solution

Such a theory or meaning of sex can be derived from scripture, but many Evangelicals just don’t read it that deeply or holistically. For example Ephesians 5 on the allegorical nature of spousal love could go very far in setting boundaries and conditions for sex based on its essential connection to the kind of love that Christ has for his church. But that’s probably too Catholic.

It’s too bad, because only the Catholic church today (of all the Christian churches) refuses to back down in its defense of the virtue of chastity and sexual purity.

This third way is contraception, sterilization, or alternative sexual practices.The myth is that you can have the best of both worlds. You can have both the care-free sex life of the providentialist, while having the same control over child spacing that you get with NFP at the same time. Under this ‘middle ground’ view, the NFP way seems to be an unnecessarily rigorous and overly strict way of going about family planning. Surely, most Catholics are not called to such idealism and sacrifice?

The assumption is that Catholics might actually enjoy the best of both worlds if it weren’t for the unreasonable rules of the Church. But no middle ground exists. The problem is not Church rules, the problem is reality. When it comes to making love, there is such a thing as a law of the excluded middle. As the book of Tobit put the two poles, there is union according to lust and union according to truth. Truth and lust have no common ground. Contraception doesn’t represent some golden ratio of lust to truth. If it’s not on the side of truth, it’s on the side of lust.

This is what Humanae Vitae was getting at with the idea that man must not separate what God has brought together (unitive and procreative purpose of sex). It wasn’t saying “I declare this rule and you shall all abide by it–or else”. It was saying “this is just reality folks, ignore it at your own peril”.

If we approach sex the wrong way, it’s going to bite us. And there are conditions that come with treating it the right way. That’s why Catholics are called to abstinence sometimes. That’s just the cost of loving in truth.

It’s nice to think there is a third way. An easier way. It’s comforting to imagine that contraception will open a door to a middle ground. But, there is no middle ground.

You’re either using sex the way God designed it, or you’re doing something that’s going to end in shame and emptiness. You’re either on the path that God made or your stepping off a cliff.

There’s nothing in between.

It was a good article but I had some reservations about some things. Fr. Angelo is concerned that TOB popularizers are borrowing concepts from the pagan category of ‘sacred sex’.

As an example, he criticizes Gregory Popcak who wrote that when mutual climax occurs:

a husband, a wife, and God climax together.

And:

To experience sacred sex is to experience that cataclysmic eruption of love that was the cosmological orgasm we call the Big Bang.

Now Fr. Geiger thinks these are pagan ideas. I’m not so sure about that. I haven’t read Popcak myself (I would like to) so I can’t comment about his ideas, but those quotes don’t strike me as necessarily being pagan.  I can understand not liking the metaphors here, but is the content really pagan? Is really not possible to interpret these metaphors in a legitimate Catholic sense?

The first quote seems to be taking the idea of Bishop Sheen (and not just Bishop Sheen of course) that it takes three to get married. That is, the love of spouses is rooted in Christ. It takes that theme and applies it to the marital act. The word ‘climax’ is not meant to be applied literally to God of course. The idea seems to be that if the couple’s climax is a climax of love and not just merely a sexual climax, then it is united in some sense wit h the love of God, for the sacrament of marriage is not merely a sign of the love of Christ and the Church, but is an efficacious sign as well.

An argument might be made about the prudence of using sexual metaphors this way, but I don’t know that these ideas resemble paganism. The thing is, everything that God created is related to God and related to each other. People are going to find theological and sexual analogies if they look for them. And why wouldn’t they? Sex is either a good part of creation or it isn’t. If it is, then those called to marriage will want to see how that aspect of their life fits theologically with the other aspects of their life as a whole. They will want to see the religious and theological context of their sexual life.

Is that wrong?

“The transcendent Christian vision of the male-female relationship – and in this, the precise and demanding proposal of a chaste life according each one’s individual condition – finds its foundation and inspiration in the conviction that this relationship is the image of the spousal connection that binds Christ to the Church.

It is a lesson in “anagogical theology” (meaning that it allows itself to be illuminated from above) imparted to us by St. Paul in the letter to the Ephesians. In the reciprocal donation of the spouses, there lives a “great mystery” [...] which the Father planned before all the ages: “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:32). In the eyes of the Apostle, the husband’s love for his wife evokes Christ’s love for the Church: a love that saves, that purifies and sanctifies.

The later teaching of the Church would speak of marriage as a “sacrament”: a sacrament that, being an allusion and figure of a bond that makes the Redeemer and redeemed humanity “one flesh,” makes the spouses participate in a special way in that event, [...] within which the mutual acts of personal donation become the occasion and vehicle of continual grace.

No philosophy and no religion has ever succeeded in lifting sexual life so high; naturally, sexual life conducted according to the original plan of God. “[emphasis by me]

In the Trojan commercial they try to tone down the narcissistic and anti-social aspect of their ‘massager’ by inviting women to ‘share’ their experience with a partner. But it’s not that simple.

Pleasure and Perversion

It still doesn’t escape the curse of Narcissus. There’s nothing inherently social about pleasure. One person is just as good as two or more people. There’s nothing essentially relational about it. Pleasure can only be experienced by oneself, it can not be shared. Strictly speaking, it can’t be given to someone either, since you can’t share a subjective experience. The best you can do is cause someone to experience their own pleasure. But there’s a difference between giving and causing.

I know our culture doesn’t much believe in concepts like ‘perversion’ these days, especially in the sexual sphere. Nevertheless, isn’t the attempt to isolate pleasure as an object in itself part of the essence of perversion? Sexual or not, could the pursuit of pleasure purely for its own sake and cut off from the context in which it exists lead to anything good? I don’t think so. Not unless you think addiction is a good thing.

Aristotle was very wise when he observed that pleasure is a good, but not the good. Pleasure in itself, therefore, can not make us happy. Furthermore, Aristotle noted that pleasure was something that accompanied actions and in a way it completed them. In other words, the nature of pleasure is not to be an object of action, but accompanies actions which have other things as their object.  In a way it reinforces positive actions just like pain tends to warn us of negative or unhealthy actions. It always exists in a context. But when we seek pleasure in itself, we are ripping away the context that was meant to be reinforced by pleasure and focusing all our attention on the pleasure itself. But nature has her own way of punishing those that mess with her.

The Orgasmatron

Watching this commercial recalled a Woody Allen movie I had seen a long time ago called Sleepers. It’s a sci-fi comedy where Allen is stuck in the future in a totalitarian state where everyone is pacified by big screens, pleasure-inducing orbs and something called the orgasmatron.

The orgasmatron looked like a narrow tube with a door and was tall enough that one or two people could stand inside it. The person went inside and it created the experience of orgasm. As you can imagine, this device plays a comic role in the movie. But the questions such a technology raises are more serious.

The idea of an orgasmatron is useful though for one reason. It does make for a great thought experiment. Imagine if something like an orgasmatron really existed. It could stimulate every erogenous zone at the same time, maximizing the sexual pleasure that is physically possible by a human being. It would give the most perfect physical experience possible. So what then? I think this scenario helps highlight some pertinent questions. Questions like:

Are we liberated from the opposite sex completely? Why should we even bother with the opposite sex?

Is the orientation of the sexes to each other merely functional, so that if we can ‘liberate’ sexual pleasure and reproduction from that orientation, there is nothing left?

Is there nothing more that we desire from the opposite sex than sexual pleasure or the satisfaction of a purely physical desire?

Is sexual pleasure the end-all-be-all of sex? Is there nothing more to sex for us than the physical?

Is the possibility of sexual pleasure exhausted by the purely physiological experience of pleasure?

What Happened to Love?

I think the reduction of sex to physical pleasure that is presupposed by Trojan and many people in our society today is leaving out a lot. It’s leaving out things that have been demonstrated to be extremely important to human beings; things like meaning and love.

Sex requires a context that is more than animal satisfaction to be meaningful. And what about love?

No device, no technology, no machine will ever be able to replicate love. Only a human person can give the gift of love. We will make orgasmatrons and test-tube babies and artificial wombs, but robots will never love, computers will never make sacrifices, and motherboards will never make gifts of themselves. We can and will use technology to perversely produce orgasms and babies, but only a real human being can transform sex into making love and bring into being children that are not products but fruit.

We don’t often consider this form of influence on our beliefs. This is why Pascal’s observation was very wise. Our actions can help, or even change our beliefs. Human beings hate cognitive dissonance, we want and strive to be consistent in our actions and our beliefs. In fact, marketers understand this fact about human beings and exploit it. Every time you sign a petition you are taking an action and being primed to continue performing more actions consistent with that simple first one; actions like donating money to a cause.

Battle of the Deep

Pascal’s atheist admits that his atheism is not rational, it has other roots. Like the Psalmist said: “Sin speaks to the sinner in the depths of his heart.”  St. Paul also gives witness to this greatest of all dissonance — sin. What I know is wrong is what I do, Paul lamented, and the good that I want to do I can’t. This is the tension between the spirit and the flesh. The law of sin at work in our members. This creates a great tension in our souls. In the depths of our heart there is a great battle to identify our whole being with either sin or with God. That is why atheism is not a victory of reason, but a victory of sin. The atheist (the ‘new atheist’ in particular) is an atheist because he has solved the dissonance in favor of sin. His passions have won, God can not exist because he is good and the author of all goodness, and the atheist must rationalize his evil.

So Pascal prescribes a course of actions designed to combat those non-rational elements of unbelief.

But it can work the other way around. Our behaviors can inadvertently lead us to erroneous beliefs.

Trojan Horse?

I think this was the case with contraception. Contraception was widely adopted because it seemed like a convenient way for married couples to have sex while avoiding pregnancy. No one really gave it a second thought. But there were all kinds of hidden implications lurking within that contraceptive behavior. Actions have their own internal logic, even when we aren’t completely aware of them. It’s logical that if sex can be separated from fertility; if our idea of sex can be divorced from fertility then it must follow that homosexual behavior and other forms of sexuality that have no intrinsic relation to fertility must also be OK.

If our idea of sex can change so as not to encompass fertility, then what objection could there be to homosexuality or same sex marriage?

The great push for the normalization of homosexuality and same sex marriage is unthinkable if the contraception revolution didn’t happen first. I believe this is a case of behavior changing beliefs. At first, no one was interested in normalizing homosexuality or same sex marriage; people (mostly married couples) just wanted a convenient way to have sex without getting pregnant. So they took the bait. And several decades later, that population can see nothing wrong with homosexuality or same sex marriage, and why should they? Once you accept the implicit premises of contraception by letting it change your behavior, the other beliefs will surely come after.

As we act, so we believe.

A man and woman are wrapped in each other’s arms in front of gently billowing curtains and moonlight as they tenderly and lovingly kiss and caress each other–beautiful music playing in the background–for what seems like hours of intimate bliss.

Today, we might laugh at such a romanticized picture of lovemaking and object that the reality is much different. We might note that in real life sex is less graceful, more sweaty, and seemingly related more to the animal than the angelic.

Of course, humans share with animals the same mechanics of sex. In that respect it’s true that those love scenes are not very true to life. But this is taking these scenes too literally. They express an intuition about sex that is not only true, but is in danger of being lost.

Sex Really Can be “Making Love”

Those romanticized love scenes are not supposed to be realistic depictions of sex, but metaphors of making love. They turn the lovers inside out so that we don’t get misled by the external details–which obscure the inner truth–but show us the reality of what is being expressed by the lovers.

The qualitative difference between making love and plain old sex isn’t visible to the voyeuristic eye of a camera focused on the externals of sex. Depicting only the outer shell of sex is the domain of pornography. Porn is a lie precisely because it is too literal. Its emphasis on the flesh (the external) makes it impossible to see the work of the spirit (the interior). It presents nothing but the animal and the lustful. The onlooker can’t see how the soul turns sex into a language for speaking the poetry of love to its mate.

Is it Love; Or Is it Nasty?

Interestingly, the tendency in movies these days is to show sex more literally and realistically. Does this trend correspond to a loss of the experience of sex as making love? Does it reflect a lack of meaning in the experience of sex? If sex is not making love, then there’s no difference between the outer and inner reality. The outer reality is the inner reality. If that’s the case, then we can just as well describe sex the same way the materialist philosopher Hobbes described human life: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Indeed, isn’t one of the less flattering contemporary manners of speaking of sex: “doing the nasty“? If we can’t link sex to love, then yeah, sex is just an animal activity; one that is solitary (sex can be solitary no matter how many people are involved), nasty, brutish and short. And that’s what sex looks like when it is portrayed ultra-realistically (The Sopranos is a good example of this kind of sex scene).

The Making of Love

But if sex is animal in its mechanics, it should never be animal in execution. For sex doesn’t become love automatically, that’s why we call it making love. We must make it love and we must make it anew at every moment from beginning to end. What wells up from below us must be made to serve what in us is higher. Only the spirit can take the wild and impulsive force of sex and transform it into a strong and clear ink with which to write beautiful verse. But if we only experience sex as an embarrassing capitulation to the merely animal, then something is wrong. It shouldn’t be that way.

When sex is spiritually harnessed however, the mechanics of it cease to be a spiritual liability and become instead a means for its expression. Only then does the outer and inner, the external and internal, and the physical and spiritual, become a harmony of love. But this music can only be heard with an inner ear, it can’t be seen.

That embrace in the moonlight with the billowing curtains is not a lie, it is a real possibility and an invitation to participate in the making of love, not just doing something nasty.

Lost in Cosmo

After years of playing the New York dating game — a game which follows what Eden calls the Cosmo rule: sex must drive the relationship — she decided to begin an experiment with chastity.  The Thrill of the Chaste documents what she has learned from that ongoing adventure.  What exactly is the thrill of the chaste?  For Eden it is a life that is more real, vibrant, intense and meaningful than anything the life of casual indulgence has to offer.

Eden exposes the vicious cycle of the sex-driven dating scene, that endlessly recurring circle of loneliness — quick fix — aftermath — loneliness.  Eden explains how she came to realize that she would never find the love and marriage that she was looking for without heading in a new direction.  The lack of vision of the dating game becomes apparent when some of Eden’s acquaintances sincerely wonder how she could meet a prospective husband outside of this scene, as if there were no other kinds of men to be found in the world except those found in singles’ bars.

The general effect of much of the book is the unveiling of the profound differences that exist between the life of chastity and that of indulgence. The goal might be the same, but the means employed reveal two completely antithetical visions of human love and happiness.

Dawn’s Wager

Eden’s perspective presupposes that most woman are out for something more than just meaningless flings, that they are expecting someday to win a husband from playing this game.  Eden’s story is intent on demonstrating why the odds are against it.

In fact, in a passage reminiscent of “Pascal’s Wager,” Eden explains that both the experience of pre-marital sex and the experience of chastity are centered on a kind of faith.  “One of them,” Eden explains, “relies on faith that a man who has not shown faith in you…will come around through the persuasive force of your physical affection.” “The other experience,” she says “relies on faith that God, as you pursue a closer walk with Him, will lead you to a loving husband.  Chastity opens up your world, enabling you to achieve your creative and spiritual potential without the pressure of having to play the dating game.”

Eden concludes that “when faced with a choice between two attitudes — both of which require looking beyond present reality — I choose the one that has a solid foundation.”

This is another Augustinian parallel because Eden declines to separate chastity from grace.  She doesn’t try to create a sort of secular version of chastity that could be presented in complete independence from faith.  She isn’t afraid to communicate her discovery that not only is chastity a solid foundation, but it is a foundation that rests on God.

Eden’s observations about her experience of both pre-marital sex and chastity are very astute and insightful.  And like Augustine before her, her self-reflection is unflinching (even merciless) and penetrating.  She doesn’t shy away from revealing her mistakes and weaknesses — in fact some readers may find her confessions uncomfortably thorough.

Purity Lost and Regained

But she does a great job of analyzing those experiences.  One of the great insights is Eden’s realization of the role her parents’ divorce had on her behaviour.  She connects the dots between her promiscuity, the fear of rejection, and her shattered security which was the fruit of her father moving away and seeing her mother playing the dating game.  It’s a sad and tragic story, but one that effectively demonstrates the harm caused by divorce.

Another gem is where she recounts how she slowly eroded her purity so that by the time she lost her virginity physically, she had in fact already lost it morally and spiritually long before.  She observes how, in apparently harmless activities like kissing, she was already learning to separate herself emotionally and spiritually from the physical aspect.  One could say she was learning a contraceptive mentality long before she lost her virginity.

This book is not for the squeamish, but it is a welcome counter-attack on the absurd sexual philosophy taught by our culture.  Eden calls the bluff on the sexual revolution’s promise of fulfillment, and proposes a more authentic revolution.  For those still stuck in the dating game, but unhappy, The Thrill of the Chaste will be a great help.  And for those of us already committed to chastity, she offers insights that are still fresh and original, confirming that where sin abounds, grace abounds even more: Oh, happy fault!