The Power and Holiness of Sex
June 15, 2017
The Wedding March, Theodore Robinson; 1892
FROM More than Many Sparrows: A Practical Guide to Christian Living by Fr. Leo J. Trese (Fides Publishers Association, 1958):
In planning the human race God did a most gracious thing. He chose to make mankind partners with Him in His work of creation; partners in the very highest of His works of physical creation: in the fashioning of human life. God did not have to create us male and female. He could have provided for the perpetuation of the human race in many other ways. He could have made us a sexless race of beings, Himself creating each body individually as He does now create each soul individually.
In His infinite goodness, however, God did choose to share with us His own creative power. Man, woman and God; these three would be partners. By an act of profound love which would express the complete giving of themselves to one another, man and woman would initiate the new human body into which God would infuse the new spiritual soul. This would be parenthood, in which the paternal strength and providence of God and the maternal tenderness and patience of God would be reflected by diffraction in human mother and father.
The dignity of parenthood is enhanced by a further privilege accorded by God. Father and mother are not only to be partners of God in the creation of a new human life, they also are to be His partners in the nurturing of the child’s spiritual soul. Parents not only will be the procreators of children, they also will be the makers and molders of saints. Under the warmth of their love for each other and the child, this new soul will unfold and flower with the sanctity willed for it by God. Through the love of His parents for him, the child will learn what it means to be loved by God; through his own love for his parents the child will learn what it means to love the God Who gave them to him. Through the prayers and the example of the parents, God will channel His graces to the child. Not merely to people the earth with humans, but to people heaven with saints; this is the ultimate meaning of parenthood.
The sexual drive underlies all this and is a part of the total gift of marital love and (when God so wills) parenthood. Original sin destroyed the perfect control which reason was to have exerted over it, as over other human drives. But no amount of misuse and abuse can destroy the beauty and holiness of God’s gift of sex.
