Sex, sEx, seX, sex, SEX, SeX, SEx, sEX

This entry is about… SEX!

SEX, SEX, SEX!

It is about sexual intercourse, banging, doing the horizontal bop, shagging, and all the various euphemisms employed to describe the act of coitus.

Last week I enjoyed nice visit with a friend of mine after a after having seen him at confession. We are both Catholic. After we had individually made our confessions to the priest, we continued in each other’s company a few blocks away at a small local café on the courthouse square. Yes, I realize I used the word “local,” and did insofar as it is local in the sense it is not a multi-national corporate-conglomerate chain. It’s an original – there’s only one.

Afterward, as we together walked back the few blocks toward our respective vehicles, I shared with him how changes were occurring in my life, how my behavior is changing, and for the better. One of those “transformations,” as I referred to it, “is in my pants.” Of course, the transformation is not really in the pants, it’s in the head. The term accurately used to describe such a change is “metanoia.” Like many other things, it starts in the big head, and works its way down. More on that later – stay iTuned.

He commented about G.K. Chesterton’s remarks on sexuality, which he paraphrased saying, “the fundamental difference between ancient sexual pagans and modern sexual pagans is that the ancients celebrated sex specifically associating it with fertility, whereas modern sexual pagans specifically dissociate fertility from the act. It is a veritable culture of  death.”

Of course, the proper avenue of sexuality’s expression is exclusively within the boundaries of marriage.

For those whom have never heard of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, he was a visitor on Earth from 29 May 1874 until 14 June 1936, and during his time here, enjoyed some renown as a writer, first class intellect, Christian apologist, journalist, Catholic convert and all-around good guy whose writings are poignant and germane even today.

His 1935 book The Well and the Shallows (Sheed and Ward, London, publishers), is a collection of essays, one which follows in its entirety below, is from the site of The American Chesterton Society, 4117 Pebblebrook Circle
, Minneapolis, MN 55437; 952-831-3096; Fax: 952-831-0387; info@chesterton.org.

http://chesterton.org/gkc/Distributist/Sex%20and%20Property.htm

Sex and Property

From: The Well and the Shallows

In the dull, dusty, stale, stiff-jointed and lumbering language, to which most modern discussion is limited, it is necessary to say that there is at this moment the same fashionable fallacy about Sex and about Property. In the older and freer language, in which men could both speak and sing, it is truer to say that the same evil spirit has blasted the two great powers that make the poetry of life; the Love of Woman and the Love of the Land. It is important to observe, to start with, that the two things were closely connected so long as humanity was human, even when it was heathen. Nay, they were still closely connected, even when it was a decadent heathenism. But even the stink of decaying heathenism has not been so bad as the stink of decaying Christianity. The corruption of the best. . . .

For instance, there were throughout antiquity, both in its first stage and its last, modes of idolatry and imagery of which Christian men can hardly speak. “Let them not be so much as named among you.” [See Ephesians 5:3] Men wallowed in the mere sexuality of a mythology of sex; they organised prostitution like priesthood, for the service of their temples; they made pornography their only poetry; they paraded emblems that turned even architecture into a sort of cold and colossal exhibitionism. Many learned books have been written of all these phallic cults; and anybody can go to them for the details, for all I care. But what interests me is this:

In one way all this ancient sin was infinitely superior, immeasurably superior, to the modern sin. All those who write of it at least agree on one fact; that it was the cult of Fruitfulness. It was unfortunately too often interwoven, very closely, with the cult of the fruitfulness of the land. It was at least on the side of Nature. It was at least on the side of Life.

It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility. The new Paganism literally merits the reproach of Swinburne, when mourning for the old Paganism: “and rears not the bountiful token and spreads not the fatherly feast.” The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast – to themselves. They are worse than Swinburne’s Pagans. The priests of Priapus and Cotytto [fertility deities] go into the kingdom of heaven before them.

Now it is not unnatural that this unnatural separation, between sex and fruitfulness, which even the Pagans would have thought a perversion, has been accompanied with a similar separation and perversion about the nature of the love of the land. In both departments there is precisely the same fallacy; which it is quite possible to state precisely. The reason why our contemporary countrymen do not understand what we mean by Property is that they only think of it in the sense of Money; in the sense of salary; in the sense of something which is immediately consumed, enjoyed and expended; something which gives momentary pleasure and disappears. They do not understand that we mean by Property something that includes that pleasure incidentally; but begins and ends with something far more grand and worthy and creative. The man who makes an orchard where there has been a field, who owns the orchard and decides to whom it shall descend, does also enjoy the taste of apples; and let us hope, also, the taste of cider. But he is doing something very much grander, and ultimately more gratifying, than merely eating an apple. He is imposing his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him by the will of God; he is asserting that his soul is his own, and does not belong to the Orchard Survey Department, or the chief Trust in the Apple Trade. But he is also doing something which was implicit in all the most ancient religions of the earth; in those great panoramas of pageantry and ritual that followed the order of the seasons in China or Babylonia; he is worshipping the fruitfulness of the world.

Now the notion of narrowing property merely to <enjoying> money is exactly like the notion of narrowing love merely to <enjoying> sex. In both cases an incidental, isolated, servile and even secretive pleasure is substituted for participation in a great creative process; even in the everlasting Creation of the world.

The two sinister things can be seen side by side in the system of Bolshevist Russia; for Communism is the only complete and logical working model of Capitalism. The sins are there a system which are everywhere else a sort of repeated blunder. From the first, it is admitted, that the whole system was directed towards encouraging or driving the worker to spend his wages; to have nothing left on the next pay day; to enjoy everything and consume everything and efface everything; in short, to shudder at the thought of only one crime; the creative crime of thrift. It was a tame extravagance; a sort of disciplined dissipation; a meek and submissive prodigality. For the moment the slave left off drinking all his wages, the moment he began to hoard or hide any property, he would be saving up something which might ultimately purchase his liberty. He might begin to count for something in the State; that is, he might become less of a slave and more of a citizen. Morally considered, there has been nothing quite so unspeakably mean as this Bolshevist generosity. But it will be noted that exactly the same spirit and tone pervades the manner of dealing with the other matter. Sex also is to come to the slave merely as a pleasure; that it may never be a power. He is to know as little as possible, or at least to think as little as possible, of the pleasure as anything else except a pleasure; to think or know nothing of where it comes from or where it will go to, when once the soiled object has passed through his own hands. He is not to trouble about its origin in the purposes of God or its sequel in the posterity of man. In every department he is not a possessor, but only a consumer; even if it be of the first elements of life and fire in so far as they are consumable; he is to have no notion of the sort of Burning Bush that burns and is not consumed. For that bush only grows on the soil, on the real land where human beings can behold it; and the spot on which they stand is holy ground. Thus there is an exact parallel between the two modern moral, or immoral, ideas of social reform.

The world has forgotten simultaneously that the making of a Farm is something much larger than the making of a profit, or even a product, in the sense of liking the taste of beetroot sugar; and that the founding of a Family is something much larger than sex in the limited sense of current literature; which was anticipated in one bleak and blinding flash in a single line of George Meredith; “And eat our pot of honey on the grave.”