Sexuality is a wholistic way of describing human persons who are male or female, skin, bones, fat, muscle, spiritual selves. Our laughing, talking, thinking, choosing, feeling, touching are all part of our total sexuality. Our sexuality includes our capacity for human intercourse, not just sexual intercourse.
The teen years are the time in life to learn how to be intimate without sexual intercourse. Friendships help us practice. We try trusting and confiding in people outside our families. We get a sense of who we are from their reactions. We try telling how we feel. We get hurt and withdraw. In friendships we discover some of our friends have feelings like ours, some don’t. We get attached to friends, share their problems, and react to their moods.
Spirituality expresses the human spirit, our drive and desire for meaning, love, and purpose. Spirituality is our moving in the Holy Spirit, our reflecting, praying, opening to relationships with others and with God.
Friendship helps our spirituality and sexuality to grow together, so we can become whole persons.
We humans experience feelings of sexual attraction in our bodies (physiologically) and in our conscious, spiritual selves (psychologically). Our sexual feelings do not program us to act by instinct like animals. We act sexually by choice, by thinking, acting out of what we value.
St. Augustine, who associated sexuality with the animal/body side of human nature, influenced Christian moral thinking about sexuality very negatively in the AD 400s. People today share his view when they talk about falling in love. They lose their heads. They think they have no choice but to follow their natural feelings. Augustine taught passion is unruly, grasping, difficult to control as a result of original sin.
People today workout and make over their bodies but experience little of the capacity of their spirits for faithfulness and intimacy. In this way of thinking, the act of intercourse — physical intimacy — is able to do the work that in reality only sharing all the types of intimacy can do: creating closeness by talking, sharing, and listening.
Love is more than an emotion and more than a name for romantic, sexual attraction. Love is also a one-word summary of all that Christian and Jewish teaching asks of us.
From the beginning Jesus challenges Christians to live in mutual love, despite differences between Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, men and women. Serving one another in mutual love and treating one another as equals aren’t easy.
Jesus challenges his followers to build a community that reverses the usual pecking order in Roman families, in which the father was head and then in rank, the wife, children, male slaves, female slaves. The members of Jesus’ community call no one father. “Only one is your father, the One in heaven.” The community has only one teacher — the messiah.
Early Christians formed communities of equals and challenged one another to love as Jesus loved them, not as a household in which some submitted to the authority of others. Instead they called one another brothers and sisters, terms of equal rank. In serving one another they lived out Jesus’ challenge to mutual love.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul describes the Christian community as being one in Christ. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3.28).
Most Christians live out Jesus’ challenge to love in the sacrament of marriage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church understands marriage as a sacrament of service. A husband and wife love each other mutually. Each partner seeks his or her well-being in the other. The health of their children rests on the well-being of their relationship, so ultimately does the well-being of society.
The very WORD made flesh willed to SHARE IN HUMAN FELLOWSHIP. He was present at the wedding of Cana… and SANCTIFIED those HUMAN TIES, especially FAMILY TIES, from which social RELATIONSHIPS arise.
Gaudium et Spes #32