The Loneliest Creature
When reflecting upon cohabitation and sexual relations before marriage, it may appear that critics over-accentuate the role of passion or sex. However, this highlight rests upon an interpretation of the sexual (bodily) being as a definition for the thinking and loving human person. We are not ghosts. What our flesh does, we do.
Sound reasoning has to be applied in an area where blind compulsion and misinformation have ruled the day. I do not intend to sound heartless or unreasonable. I well realize that the phenomenon of couples living together is reflective of the problems of our times. Modern men and women, like none before them, feel alienated and alone. Technology has given them more leisure and pleasure at the cost of separating them ever more and more from the real trials and joys found in a more natural harmony. The pace our own market-place society has often relegated the human person to a secondary status behind success and profit. Despite the way we crowd our cities, men and women are the loneliest creatures to walk this small planet. I suppose, surrounded by strangers, uncertain about the future, finding many insensitive to their needs, that many men and women choose to cling to one another in the hope of finding some refuge against the storm of indifference and rapid change. They seek on one hand to create something with a semblance to a stable home while grasping greedily into an uncertain tomorrow. Even though people are marrying later in life, the inner need for belonging cannot be forestalled. Overjoyed to be independent and leaving the nest offered by their parents, they swiftly discover that no empty house or apartment makes a home. Home is only home when there is somebody there with whom to share it, waiting for you and wanting you. Trying to escape the alienation and hardness of life, they postpone or rationalize the values which their consciences would admit for consideration. Christian betrothal and marriage would urge them to stand courageously together in facing realistically what comes to them.
Impulsive couples give the gift of their very selves to each other, even though it is not the right season for giving. In their attempt to find some consolation and healing in life; they might inadvertently cause more tension and hurt. If love is real it will wait. If it is not, then its prerogatives would best never be explored. Cohabitating couples are forced to do what might be impossible: they must adequately contemplate the sacrament and accept Christian formation for marriage while suffering the evil effects of serious sin.
There is a prominent Catholic theologian, Dr. William May, who despite having a wife and children is often criticized by progressives as being too rigid, even though many of these same critics are either ex-priests or religious, lay thinkers in bad marriages, or clergymen who think that they can challenge the lived experience of this layman who finds the road of fidelity to the Church teachings as the correct one. He is a man both of intellectual prowess and of sensitivity to the plight of others, including those who decide to live together. He writes: “I realize that at times there may be tender and affectionate acts of genital coition between persons who are unable to give each other spousal love. Fornication need not be brutal. Nonetheless the tenderness and affection present are not because those engaging in such actions are unmarried, but despite the fact. And there is present an element of tragedy, of poignant sadness, and this precisely because something of crucial human significance that ought to be present is missing: the ability to give spousal love, an ability that is made possible only by the covenant of marriage. But because of this the action in question is deprived of what ought to be integral to it, and this deprivation of the good that ought to be present makes it evil. Bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu” (Sex and the Sanctity of Human Life, p. 18). This same author who has often been unjustly snubbed by certain elements of the liberal theological community served on an international Papal commission regarding family and sexual issues.
God loves us all more than we can ever know. He wants us to be happy and whole. The struggle to keep love within its proper limits, as testified by the Scriptures and the Church, can only make us stronger in living out this love fully when it is consecrated in marriage. This is the way that God would have most of his people deal with the deep isolation they experience. I say “most” because a select few are called to find their most intimate companionship in a single-hearted love of God alone. For the rest, much more than secularized alternatives, the Church offers couples the companionship of each other and that third to get married, Jesus.
Those who recognize the deficiency in living-together relationships as opposed to marriage would do well to settle for nothing less than a formal bond recognized by the Church and by God.
Closing Remarks
In hindsight, I may have failed to fully appreciate the eroticism that permeates modern society and the pressure from peers to become sexually active outside the sacrament. However, such subjects are not easy ones for me to write about. We have made it very hard for our young men and women to be good. The irony today is that at a time when homosexuals want formal recognition of their relationships with civil unions; heterosexual couples are opting for informal living-together unions over traditional marriage. This past year (2007) more children were born out of wedlock than to married couples. Compounding the issue is the fact that many more children were probably aborted. Marriages between virgins have become more the exception than the rule. Those trying to do what God and the Church require are often forced into a ghetto classification, a smaller society within society, as with our home-schooling communities. They look at even fellow Catholics with a critical eye and embrace the tried-and-true traditions of the past. A small but growing counter-cultural prolife group of young people are, in some ways, more like their grandparents than their parents regarding sexual questions. There is hope in this remnant if they are not ultimately corrupted. I hope and pray that they will measure both courage and grace into their recipe of faith.
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