Sick of Sex

When Fr Anthony Percy asks if we are sick of sex, he is not talking about sexual love, but of sex cut off from its proper context of love, friendship and devotion to God.

Without those three ingredients sex becomes enslavement and self-destructs, he says.

Author, theological scholar and Rector of the Seminary of the Good Shepherd, Fr Percy spoke to young people at St Joseph's Maronite Catholic Church in Croydon last week.

The audience were all members of the Marian Apostolic Movement and they were fascinated by Fr Percy's illuminating and thought-provoking talk on sex and the implications when it is severed from love, self sacrifice and real feeling.

"Casual sex is pleasure without conscience and so eventually implodes on itself," he says.

Using the recent sexual furore involving NRL footballer Matt Johns and his Sharks team mates as an example, Fr Percy says that although the press and media went to town with the story, they remained as confused as ever.

"On the one hand, they bombard us with advertisements with women clad in lingerie. Then when someone falls into a sexual trap, he is demonised. The same can be said of the NRL," Fr Percy said. "They demonise the players for sexual misdemeanours, yet implicity promote that kind of behaviour."

Fr Percy's talk on premarital sex and contraception, entitled "Sick of Sex" lifts the lid on the media's double standards, corrects exaggerations of the number of teens having sex and most important of all, shows us clearly what love means and why without it sex is so
demeaning, mindless and destructive.

The following is the full text of Fr Anthony Percy's speech.

Sick of Sex

Surely we are sick of sex. Not sick of sexual love, but sick and tired of brutal, savage, lustful, self-gratifying sex. I remember visiting a bathroom in a small country town whilst on a journey to Melbourne. After answering the call of nature, I turned around to wash my hands and was confronted with a condom vending machine. It read, "Savage Bliss."

Surely we are sick of this sort of nonsense? Philosophers and theologians have, over time, made distinctions about the word love. They recognize that love means three fundamental things. Love is eros. Love is philia. Love is agape.

Erotic love is desire. It need not be about sex at all, but it well may be about sex. Erotic love is essentially the salvific desire for the presence of the other. I desire to be with a good friend, a brother, a sister, a parent, a fellow priest, a parishioner, a fellow worker. The love of eros reaches beyond the self. It moves out in love to the other. Eros is a searching love. It knows and demonstrates that we need others in order to survive.

Remember Adam in the Garden of Eden? He spotted Eve and exclaimed, "At last bones of my bones and flesh of my flesh." (Genesis 2, 23) Here was someone who would fulfil him as a man. Eros tells us: "I cannot make it on my own. I am deeply in need of others."

But why listen to me when we can place ourselves at the feet of a real master of philosophy, Josef Pieper, who speaks eloquently about the real meaning of eros:

[W]e mean by eros the desire for full existence, for existential exaltation, for happiness and bliss: a desire that cannot be diverted or invalidated and that naturally dominates and permeates all our emotions and all our conscious decisions, above all our loving concern for the world and for other human beings. Once more then: "Man desires happiness naturally and by necessity." "To desire to be happy is not a matter of free choice." Happiness can virtually be defined as the epitome of all those things that "will is incapable of not willing." (Pieper, Faith, Hope , Love, p.234)

In other words, we are people of desire and our basic desire is for happiness. Eros then is not primarily about sex, but that is exactly what almost everyone today understands by the word eros. We have reduced eros to mean erotic love only. Our sexual selves do search. There can be no doubt about that. But I am much more than my sexual self " I am a relational self " and I am dominated in my personal being by a deep desire for relational happiness. Sex fits into this vision and not vice versa. Rollo May, an American existential psychologist, in his book Love and Will, sums up the dilemma we face. It is a dilemma we must face if we are to have any hope of having a proper sexual revolution:

We are in flight from eros - and we use sex as the vehicle for the flight. (May, Love and Will, p.73)

The love of philia is the love of friendship, although Pieper thinks this is too narrow a translation, and "seems " to stress chiefly fellow feeling, the solidarity among human beings." (Pieper, p.156) Importantly - and we cannot go into here - friendship is based on the love of self. That is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, "friendship is the image and self-love is the original; we love our friends as we love ourselves." (Cf. Pieper, p.236)

The bible calls a friend an elixir for life:
A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter:
he that has found one has found a treasure.
There is nothing so precious as a faithful friend,
and no scales can measure his excellence.
A faithful friend is an elixir of life ... (Ecclesiasticus 6, 14-16)

Philia is critical to human life, as is eros. A faithful friend is an elixir for life. Now that is worth thinking about. Philia is not quite like an aspirin tablet or some other modern medication, designed for quick relief. Rather, philia is an elixir, a tonic, a spiritual and/or psychological massage. A friend soothes the soul, comforts the psyche, provides strength and relief to the inner man, invigorates the spirit. We simply must have friends to live a long, fully human life.

Then there is agape. This is the love of Christ, who lays down his life for his sheep. This is a distinctive Christian word. Used rarely in the ancient world, if ever, it is the word that is preferred by the biblical authors of the New Testament. Agape is a total, self-giving and self-sacrificing love. It comes from a Giver - with a capital G - and it is received as pure gift to the recipient - you and me. Pope Benedict in Deus Caritas Est "God is Love " says that in God eros and agape coalesce. That is, God desires man and this desire is expressed as agape when God becomes man and dies for us. In God, eros and agape are one.

Now, here is the question, "Does sex fit into this vision of love or does it not"? Either sex is about eros, philia and agape or it's not. Either sex is to be seen in a context that gives it meaning or it goes its own merry way and finds its own feet. If it is the later, then it selfdestructs.

How do we know this? We know it from the events of the last few weeks involving NRL footballers. Their sexual shenanigans have been exposed for all to see. The press have had a wonderful time. They have been obsessed by it. In fact, the press suffer from OCD when it comes to things sexual.

It's amazing how journalists, editors and owners of papers are so confused about all of this. On the one hand, they bombard us with advertisements with women clad in lingerie. Then when someone falls into the sexual trap, he is demonised. The same can be said of the NRL. They demonise the players for sexual misdemeanours, yet implicitly promote that kind of behaviour. The players run out of the dressing sheds and are greeting by the cheer girls who are next to naked. Then they wonder why three players end up in a toilet cubicle with one woman, while another footy player takes photographs of the incident with his mobile phone.

Contrast this demonising of the players with the attitude Christ would show them in the sacrament of penance. They would find forgiveness and healing for their sins, with the invocation to "go away and sin no more." (Cf. John 8, 3-11) That makes infinite more sense then the way the press and the NRL deals with these matters.

Sex cut off from its proper context does indeed self-destruct. Just contemplate the comments of Matthew Johns' wife. She said, "I would have hated for my daughter to have been the subject of that group sex act." Indeed, nothing could be closer to the truth. Sex, divorced from eros, philia and agape, becomes enslavement. Simple as that.

Last Saturday (May 16, 2009) the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article documenting teenagers' sexual patterns. The article, by Debra Jopson and Elicia Murray, begins:

Any Saturday night, teenagers are doing it in the dark places - parks, garages, backyards, beaches, schools, the backs of cars. Partying, drinking, drugs and sex, even in trees, according to 17-year-old Tania (names have been changed), who lost her virginity at 13. She knows of a girl, 15, and her 14-year-old male lover who had sex in a tree in a park because lying on the grass made them itchy. "My advice to everyone is they should not walk through a park on a Saturday night or a teenager might fall on their head," says Tania.

They continue with some observations about group sex:

Group sex may still be fringe, but a fair proportion of sexually active teenagers and young adults interviewed last week have been involved in threesomes, or know of friends who have. Oral sex is no longer the exotic addition to the normal repertoire of their parents' generation. For the young who do sex, oral is the norm. For them, it's the equivalent of their parents snogging during courtship. They get pornography, advice and pick-ups over the internet and alcopops, which appeal to younger women drinkers, evaporate inhibitions. "I've had threesomes and foursomes," says Lisa, 19. "It's usually at a party and everyone's had a bit to drink. It started with girls kissing girls because that's a hot thing. After that you're just kissing everyone and it goes on from there."

Before we get too depressed about it all, it is worthwhile noting, as the Herald article does, that not everyone is doing it. A survey in 2002 found that a quarter of year 10 students and half of year 12 students were no longer virgins. Half of those leaving school had not had sex. The La Trobe University survey of 2009 - unpublished to date - shows only a slight shift to permissiveness.

It may come as a surprise to some of us that secular researchers understand that the contraceptive pill is one of the main causes for the dramatic rise in sexual promiscuity. Anne Mitchell, associate professor at La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre for Sex, Health and Society, explains the effect of easy access to the pill:

That is when the gap between puberty and marriage started to grow. In the past you got married to start a sex life. The pill was huge. It made the difference between the shame of having a baby out of wedlock (and not) - The gap between puberty and marriage means there is a lot of territory where you cannot expect everyone to be celibate.

The pattern, then, is this: First, procreation is severed from sex because of the many methods of contraception. This makes sex more available, since you can have sex without babies. But then what happens? Love is severed from sex. Sex moves into the world of pleasure, more pleasure and more and more pleasure. Of course there is nothing wrong with pleasure per se, but pleasure accompanies certain human acts and is not meant to replace them or overwhelm them. Remember one of Gandhi's seven modern sins? - pleasure without conscience was one of them. That is exactly what casual sex is: pleasure without conscience and so it eventually implodes upon itself.

We can go back to the implosion of the NRL players. We can go back to Jopson's and Murray's article. They quote from Joan Sauer's Sex Lives of Australian Teenagers which tells of many tales of supposed joy, then regret, fuelled, it seems, by bucket loads of alcohol. "Well, I was really, really drunk and I had a boyfriend but I went to a party and was with three guys," says a West Australian, who lost her virginity at 15. "It felt really good at the time but afterwards I felt cheated and used."

Christ speaks right into this mess:

You have heard that it was said, `You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5, 27-30)

There can be no doubt about it. The five senses are wonderful and powerful gifts from the Creator. However, as with all good things, they come at a price. The price we pay for the proper expression of our senses is the exercise of Christian discipline or asceticism.

Remember, we are body and soul (and spirit). The soul loves the body. How could it be otherwise? The soul is the vital principle of our human life. It loves personal being. However, the same cannot be said of the body. The body - or more correctly the "flesh" - is at war with the soul. There is profound tension because the body has fallen of its perch because of original sin. For this reason the soul has to discipline the body, bring it back continually to its proper functioning and mode of operation. Mind you, the soul has fallen of its perch, too, and penance and self-denial is one of the human acts that aid healing of the soul, too. Grace, in the end, is the only reality that really carries through the project of healing the entire person. We forget this at our peril. Grace at baptism, grace as we confess our sins, grace as we receive the sacred species. This really is the only way to find true healing.

This is what Christ is saying. "The eyes, the sense of touch are marvellous gifts, but beware of them. They will turn on you if you don't put them in their place. They will turn on you if you don't mortify (literally put to death) or restrain certain aspects of their life. The eyes will wander and begin to go "window shopping." Touch, unrestrained and undisciplined, will go in search of more and more pleasure until it takes you to hell. On the other hand, unite yourself to me, and watch the transformation."

When we do put the body in its proper place, we begin to sense the truth of the love of eros, philia and agape. Only when we do that will we be ready for sex. Only then we will build a society based on trust again. Only then we will have true sexual revolution.

Yes, we are sick of sex " the type of sex that has nothing to do with eros, philia and agape. But if we let our true selves emerge once more, we will feel the fire within, urging us to pursue a love that is erotic, friendly and self-sacrificing. Sex can be all of this, because that is how God saw it in the beginning.

(taken from xt3.com :)