As long as I am reading into things…. :)
Proverbs 16:30
He who winks his eye is plotting
trickery;
he who compresses his lips has
mischief ready.
This shows how we are able to lie with our bodies. It brought to mind for me teachings from the Theology of the Body almost immediately, especially when you are speaking of conjugal union between two people who are not married. For in that act, your body is saying to your partner, “everything I have is yours.” If you are not married, this is not true. And, whether you are married or not, if you are contracepting, you are still making a lie of this in that you are withholding your fertility from your partner. You are saying, in essence, “You can have all of me…except this.” So, in the very act in which we are to make ourselves vulnerable and open completely to the other person, we are holding back. We are not making a gift of ourselves, but rather a leasing of ourselves, with stipulations and conditions. Which would you rather have? The free and complete gift, or the conditional lease?
4 responses so far ↓
1 Kevin // Dec 30, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Say, for instance, that you’re completely open, and offer yourself completely and unreservedly, but your spouse is holding something back. Would you say thanks but no thanks, I’ll wait for the whole deal? Or would you accept that portion which they freely offer, praying that in so accepting you will encourage them to be more open in the future?
2 Jaibee // Dec 31, 2008 at 7:28 am
Obviously, I am not a perfect person — far from it — and I have many places where I need to work on if I am going to make that Purgatory cut-off. :) So, I would expect that my spouse would be a likewise flawed person and should give him my support and mercy as I would like it for the times when I am less than perfectly imaging God’s love. :)
But say I am unmarried and in a relationship. Should I go ahead and engage in a sexual relationship, trying to get whatever love and unity I can from that? No. I don’t think so. That speaks so much to my tendency to hurry things along, to jump into them and to take for myself the things that I want (or that I think I want), instead of trusting in God, or even trusting in my partner that he does truly love me for more that whatever physical pleasure we might be able to get. It’s kind of like defaulting. Much easier to sleep with someone and hope that that will bond you to him enough that he will come to love you [more], than to withhold from that and bank on the fact that he loves you enough to wait and give you all of himself.
Self-esteem issues? Oh, definitely. But look at how sick our culture is, especially in how we value women. Not surprising how often we make the wrong choices for the wrong reasons too soon. :)
3 Kevin // Dec 31, 2008 at 2:45 pm
4 Kevin // Jan 1, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I think that one of the key points you touched on is trust, or rather the lack thereof. I had a couple of reflections about that. The more I reflect on it, the more I’ve come to believe that lack of trust is THE symptom of original sin, and is the major contributing factor in the lack of harmony and disunity between the sexes in our society and in our world.
In the 5th chapter of Ephesians, Paul tells husbands to love their wives and wives to respect their husbands. I don’t know what women’s experience with that is, and obviously I can’t speak for all men, but speaking for myself from my own experience as a man, that’s like telling a fish to live in water. I feel like my heart is just bursting with love, waiting for me to find a wife to lavish all that love on. And the only thing she has to do is accept my love. She doesn’t have to earn it. She doesn’t have to be worthy of it. She doesn’t have to sleep with me in order for me to grudgingly love her. All she’d have to do is let me love her. And the thing I’m most hungry for is to be respected as a person in my own right. I’m happy to accept some good-natured teasing, because that’s done with affection; but being mocked hurts.
As an outside observer of women, it appears to me that there is a tendency for their self esteem issues to lead them to try to earn love. It’s as if they don’t, in fact, trust men to love them since they haven’t earned that love. So, then, many of them try to use sex as a commodity and trade it for love. Like you said, they are hoping that sex will bond him to her. It might succeed in bonding him to her, if the sexual relationship lasts long enough, but that sort of thing inevitably leads to an imbalance – both parties being hurt, but usually the woman is hurt worse. A woman could do worse than to find a man who’d love her without being sexual first. After all, what does love look like? Is it saying sweet words across the pillow? Is it having a physical reaction to the way you look without clothes? Or is it braving freezing temperatures to scrape the ice off your car in the winter, so that you won’t have to?
Of course, trust has to be a two-way street. We men probably have just as many issues with trusting women as women do with trusting us. I know that I’m scared to death of giving my trust only to have it betrayed.
The really sad thing in all of this is that distrust breeds more distrust. Our society is sick, and teaches its members to believe the worst about people – including oneself!! And so we learn to distrust the other. And when we see that distrust displayed toward us, we react with more distrust toward the one who distrusted us first.
We all need God’s help with this, because we’re all broken. Fortunately, He doesn’t withhold His grace: “Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more.” (Rom. 5:20) One of my faults, though, is that I always seem to want God to work according to MY time, not according to HIS time. :)
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