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By: Matthew Nichols
Can a kiss be a prayer? Can the intimacy of a husband and wife be an activity that is religious? Like going to Mass? Or praying a rosary?
The answer is yes. But this yes needs a quick clarification. It's not yes in the sense that the husband and wife need to be thinking of two things at once: expressing and enjoying their mutual love and at the same time focusing on praying, simultaneously trying to think 100% about God and 100% about each other! Someone once asked me whether I thought sex is or could be a religious act, an act where God is actively present. When I answered, “Yes, certainly,” they looked at me anxiously. “But surely a man and woman should be focusing completely on each other in sexual intimacy without any distraction?” they asked. I agreed again, “Yes, certainly.” For the Church, there is no contradiction: a Christian woman completely focused on expressing her pure love for her spouse is, at the same time, and precisely in that loving focus on her husband, a woman who is praying deeply, who is living within and inviting God's active presence and drawing her husband into that presence.
Understanding how this can be true is mainly about understanding how the Church thinks of God's presence with us. God is “everywhere,” but at the same time He can be more or less present. Pope Benedict has invited us “to experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world.” These are thought-provoking and exciting words: by experiencing love – by participating in real love – we can “cause” the light of God, who is Love, to enter more into the world. Does this – can this – have anything to do with our sexual bodies, and with sexual intimacy with all its mutual desire, passion, fascination and delight? Absolutely.
In his Theology of the Body, John Paul II spoke of the sexual body as “sacramental.” What does this mean? Well, in a basic and general sense (we're not talking about the Seven Sacraments here, though some of this applies to them), a sacrament is something which IN ITSELF “makes” God present. The IN ITSELF bit is important. In this thing being precisely what it is, God (by his eternal choice) is present. And there's a “dynamic” element to this as well (remember Pope Benedict and “causing” God's light to be more present?). The more the thing is what it is, the more God is simultaneously present, and the less it is what it is, the less He is present. Also, the more God is present, the more it is what it is (it doesn't lose its character because God is there – on the contrary, it becomes more itself!), and the less God is present, the less it is what it is.
For John Paul II, the sexual body is sacramental, and so is the loving intimacy which sexuality makes possible: it “makes” God present. And the more sexual intimacy is really itself – loving, beautiful, close, depthless – the more God is present. “The body...and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine,” says John Paul II. “It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God.” This “hidden mystery” is ultimately God himself and our sexual bodies are created to “transfer” (not a very poetic word, but accurate!) his presence into this visible, physical, tangible, sensual world. The mutual touch of Christian spouses (i.e. a man and a woman married “in Christ”) in loving sexual intimacy is, in a real and Catholic sense, a making-present of God himself: they make God present to each other as they make themselves completely present to each other. Their co-experience of love “causes” God’s light to be present – in other words, their sexual intimacy (precisely as sexual intimacy) is prayer. The Church has a very “incarnational” – the divine “made present in flesh” - reading of reality.
So, in the “life according to the Spirit” to which God calls us, a kiss is prayer and I can pray by kissing. … And did you know that “adoration,” which the Church sees as the foundation of all prayer, originally comes from Latin words which mean “to kiss”? More on that next time.
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