A Diarchic Sex Manual: Programs, Skills, and Maneuvers of the Sacral Sexual Agenda

A Diarchic Sex Manual 

Programs, Skills, and Maneuvers of the Sacral Sexual Agenda

• Introduction

• The Sacral Sexual Agenda: Purpose, Problems, and Perspectives for Nuptial Dyads

• Sexual Communication and the Context of the Sacral Sexual Agenda

• Kinks, Fetishes, Sacral Sex, and Parallel Signification

• Sexual Evangelization and Hagiographical Templates

• The Program of Sexual Hagiographical Expansion: Balancing Three Celibate Hagiographical Templates 

• Hagiographical Template I: The Virgin Martyr and States of Life 

• Hagiographical Template II: Discernment and “Discerning Out”

• Hagiographical Template III: Chastity and “Chaste spouses”

• Practical Application: Parallel Significance and an Analysis of Sexual Ritual 

• Sexual Climactic and Orgasmic Parallel Signification

• Parallel Significance and Theodicy: Rituals of Sexual Pain and Sexual Pleasure

• Sexual Positions and Parallel Signification

• Sexual Foreplay and Parallel Signification

• Conclusion

Introduction

Just as I was preparing the outline for this manual, I happened upon an Aleteia article titled 9 Ways to pray with your body.  I immediately thought, “Oh!  Maybe they’ll have some good sex advice!”  When I opened the article I felt a little awkward.  Not only was there no sex advice, but there was also no “real” advice to speak of at all for a Catholic who is even less than moderately invested.   I’ll save you the suspense 1. Bow deeply 2. Prostrate (lie face down) 3. Beat the heart. 4. Kneel 5. Join hands together 6. Stretch out both arms in the form of a cross 7. Stretch out both arms toward the crucifix or heaven 8. Kiss the Bible or Book of the Gospels 9. Turn a walk into a pilgrimage.  This is all good advice.  Any of these are also so standard to an occasionally practicing Catholic that it’s hardly worth writing an article about.  

When I conceive of “praying with the body” I expand a bit more moving toward the idea of ritual, not simply particular ritual action.  Thus, the stations of the cross, (which includes many of these gestures) would have made for a better article, but again, that topic is commonly known.   As I read that article and pondered my reaction I wondered if anyone else considered sex might be a topic.  And I wondered how many people COULD consider sex to be the topic considering the relationship our Catholic faith has with sexuality.

The purpose of this manual is to develop an agenda of sexual sacralization that will offer skills and methods to foster conscious ritual investment in the sex life of the nuptial dyad.  The agenda will operate under two modes, one personal and one social.  The personal mode will be a campaign of sexual evangelization and the social model will consist of methods of hagiographical expansion.  The hope is to lead nuptial diarchies to a place where they can fully invest in their specific vocation as formative and significant structures of the Church.     

In the first section, we will set out to map a sexual landscape and find a way to a more fulfilling Christain sexual spirituality.  We will begin by discussing the loaded nature of language concerning sex.  The entire conversant realm, both secular and theological, seems to work against the notion of sacral sex.  We will then elaborated on the nature of sacral sexual significance and parallel significance especially as it relates to the sexual life of the nuptial dyad.  Lastly, we will focus on the problems of language and myth in the Church that seem to stymy sacral sexual ritual investment and set out our basic agenda of sexual evangelization and development of hagiographical templates. 

In the second section, we will analyze three hagiographical templates in order to suggest a better balance in the saints considered for canonization and begin to balance the pedagogy of hagiography amiably toward the sacral sexual agenda. The hagiographical templates we will review concern states of life, discernment, and chastity.  The specific narratives will be the virgin martyr, the “discerned out” template, and “the chaste spouses”.  For each narrative, we will give the skeletal template.  Then we will discuss the general message and meaning of the hagiographical template.  Next, we will offer several balancing templates for each of the three that better frame their message, re-frame the same message for married life, or counterbalance a celibate message with a complimentary message concerning married life and sacral sexual significance. 

In the last section, we will discuss theories and techniques for the practical applications of sexual significance.  We will attempt an in depth analysis of climactic and orgasmic significance followed by an analysis of Christain theodicy as signified in sacral sex. We will also develop an interpretive model for the significance of several sexual positions and offer commentary on the dynamic significant nature of foreplay.  

The Sacral Sexual Agenda: Purpose, Problems, and Perspectives for Nuptial Dyads  

After discussing the sacral sexual agenda in this section we will seek a clearer picture of hagiographical expansion in the next section and then move on to personal investment through practical applications of the sacral sex in the final section. 

Sexual Communication and the Context of the Sacral Sexual Agenda

The treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment, explored the problem of ritual that has lost its meaning and become superstition. There we defined intuitive ritual investment as the ability to intuitively invest in a ritual because the culture itself is so synchronistic with the ritual that its symbols are effective, even if subconsciously, and the actor or observer need take no conscious action for the ritual to impart meaning, emotion, piety, desire for action, etc.  

An intuitively invested participant in ritual is able to draw on the predominant myth, the symbols of which interface the dream world, for a natural experience of fulfillment and effect vis a vis the ritual.  This communication complex is as fundamental to humanity as spoken language.  Culture effects intuition regarding ritual because culture is where one garners one’s worldview and one’s myth, both of which are vital for effective ritual.

When one’s ritual does not align with the dominating myth and ethos of one’s parent culture, one must engage in conscious ritual investment.  Conscious ritual investment is a technique for religious ritual participation one can effect if one is submerged in a culture where one’s religious rituals are not supported at an intuitive level of investment.  Conscious ritual investment works on the teleological, cognitive, and somnium levels in order to help one be aware of the meaning of the ritual and then, not just understand, but experience the meaning.  

As we begin a treatise on sex, why have the opening gambit be a commentary on ritual?  The reason is that sexual activity is a major religious ritual of the nuptial dyad.  It is the means by which they become autocephalous nuptial diarchies.  But there is neither secular nor Catholic cultural scaffolding for understanding sexual action as sacred ritual action.  For the majority of Christian history, sacral sex as the ritual that signifies divine mysteries and literally generated the Church has suffered from a serious lack of affirmative attention. 

As we lay out our agenda for sacral sexual fulfillment we can begin by noting that sex is a communication system. This was discussed at length in the treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton.  That treatise also discussed how, whereas food communally binds and individually sustains, sex communally sustains and individually binds.  It is a one on one communication system.  Add to this the discussion of sacral sex in the treatise Birth Control vs Labor Rights? And one can begin to see how important it may be to begin to have frank discussions concerning, not just the “don’ts” of sex, not just the technical “dos” of sex, but the true significance of sex in the context of marriage as a spiritual practice rather than, say, pleasure or duty.  But these discussions are hard to have for many reasons, not the least of which is a hostile greater culture which wishes to define sex as a simple pleasure sport.  Wide spread tension around the conversation on matters of sexuality is the context of the authorship of this manual.  

It is extremely hurtful for those us who are married, that the Church itself exhibits such a defining hesitancy to positively comment on the full gambit of sex and sexuality.  Worse still, the general attitude of the clerical and magisterial class seems to be, if you engage in sexual activity, you are somehow clouded and beyond the ability to reasonably comment on it.  This pain is compounded by how important sex is for the nuptial dyad.  It is their chief sacramental sign.  

As we discussed in Two Paths for Expanding True Love, the nuptial dyad is a best friend model with its own personal communication system.  A profound part of this communication system is the dyad’s sexuality.

Ratification is the “promising ceremony” known as a wedding and all that it presupposes.  Consummation is the sacramental sign of the married couple, which is private in nature.  That shouldn’t come as a surprise.  For the consecrated person, being socially geared, a social ceremony would be appropriate.  For the married couple public profession is necessary because the couple itself is going to become a sacramental sign for the community of the Trinitarian God.  But this is the best friend model so after the volitional binding, which is the form of the sacrament, there is a binding in “deed”, which is the matter of the sacrament. This happens in private, because best friends are most intimate with each other, not in the public sphere.         

  

The private nature of this communication is not meant to be a “shame”, but it is often framed that way.  This makes it difficult for those invested in the model to easily publicly discuss the nature and meaning of these acts without some type of discomfort for themselves and/or their audience, even if this talk respects modesty while being informative.  Whether this is due to church instigated repression or the simple mechanics of natural spiritual sexual intimacy is hard to say.  But the fact remains when a religiously invested Christian gets up and starts talking about sexual acts, it usually skews toward condemnations, not affirmative description.  If it is affirmative it is almost always abstract, not based on examples of personal experience. 

  There is a shackle of speech concerning sacral sexuality.  Most sexual commentary is moral commentary and the analysis concerns the negative effect of sexual activity.  It is only very recently that the Church has developed its very basic sexual teleology in any way that aids nuptial diarchies to better utilize their ritual life toward a mature spirituality.  Why is it so hard for Christians to talk about sex in positive ways?  What those who discern marriage as a vocation are left within the current environment of Catholic sexual discourse is biological secular training and a reminder that “sex is a beautiful gift of God”.  But that usually carries the connotations of procreation, not sexual acts as a sacred ritual of religious expression.  Perhaps one reason for this deficit is that sex and sexual morality as “teaching” is not in the hands of those who practice sacral sex.  The clerical and consecrated class come near denying the existence of sacral sex, while the married laity is robbed of the authority and/or fortitude to discuss it.  A major part of the sacral sexual agenda is to remove this shackle.  This is not meant to devalue the voice of consecrated, clerics, or the magisterium.  We are only seeking to bolster the voice of the nuptial dyads and give a better opportunity for them to fully benefit from the graces of their vocation.

 The implementation of this agenda is complicated by the assumption that good sex is “easy”.  This assumption runs the gambit from secular to religious thought.  In the secular mind, the unstoppable force of eros will manifest and give the practitioner of intercourse an experience that will be effective, one way or another.  One need only yield to passion and good experience is sure to follow.  Conversely, according to underdeveloped Catholic thought, a couple’s sexual experience needs to be attuned to procreation and extremely tempered in its passion.  As long as this attunement takes place in the context of marriage, the rest will work itself out.  But neither of these beliefs are true.  Effective sexual experiences, especially spiritually, are difficult to master and attain.  They take practice and an array of supplementary communication. There is little commentary on how to manage that from the approach of sex as the sacred ritual of a nuptial diarchy.  There are no catechisms concerning sexual spiritual practice.  There are no magisterial documents on the sacral significance of particular sexual acts or how to maximize participation with the grace present in sacral sex.  The closest thing to this is Pope Saint John Paul II’s homilies collectively titled Theology of the Body.  These homilies barley succeed in stating the fact that “sex is sacred” and do little more to go beyond this.  

But Pope Saint John  Paul II was not married and has no objective experience of married life, sexual life, or nuptial communication about sexual life.  So to start our conversation, let’s start where the conversation starts, and usually stays, within the nuptial diarchy.  Nuptial life is in many ways a rhythm of praxis and methodological reflection.  This goes for all aspects of communal life from how to constructively argue, to how to maintain a clean and tidy house, to how best to mutually participate with the grace of your nuptial rites.  This cycle of praxis and methodological reflection is the mode by which the dyad co-operates with the grace of the sacrament.  If the Church could reach a cultural success of producing nuptial dyads that could experience intuitive ritual investment of sacral sexual rites, this victory may mitigate the need for a praxis reflection methodology toward these rites.  But as things are, conscious ritual investment is the order of the day, and praxis and reflection via supplementary communication is a constant necessity.  

Simply put, a couple must discuss their sexual life in order to improve it and in order to mutually cooperate with the grace that it offers.  These supplementary communications are conversations, probably outside of the ritual context, where the dyad discusses their spiritual lives and through their communication invests in the signification of their sexual lives.  That discussion is in language, which is a supplementary communication system.  Now, this discussion can happen during sexual activity and thus become part of the sacral sexual ritual life itself. But even if that is the case, the couple will want to discuss their ritual life outside the context of the ritual itself.  This discussion would involve both reflection and projection.  The couple will need to analyze their previous ritual action (being a ritual that runs via a praxis methodology it is usually rubricless and therefore in need of post-analysis).  This analysis is a check-in on effectiveness.  Sexual effectiveness can be measured by shared knowledge and understanding concerning continuing consent, pleasure, joy, fulfillment, skill, technique, intimacy, and for our purposes signification.  Projection looks to the future, to hopes, wishes, and desires regarding each of these.

Sex is a communication of love, of grace, and of miraculous procreation and communication imparts meaning.  All language is communication, but not all communication is language.  Yet we foolishly believe our human language is our best, most effective means of communication.  The life and teaching of the Church suggest otherwise.  Communication binds persons.   It is “com -union”ing, the ability to bring union.  LAnguage can definitely do this.  In John’s Gospel, scripture reveals the Son as the Logos, Word, in an analogy of language, or reason expressed by language.  But the truth is, language is just as apt to fail in communication as any other form of communication.  

In a perfect world (Eden or the Eschaton) all systems of communication would work together. Such systems would include (but are not limited to) verbal language (including sound and tone), body language, ritual symbolism, artistic expression, symbolic action, etc.  Even in our fallen world, when they work together this network of communication systems consists of parts that are mutually edifying.  They all work together to form religion, a grand communication between people and God.  They also work together to bind humanity in communion.  

But when they don’t work together, discord is sown. This discord could be these systems competing, or being used in appropriate ways.  Thus we come to the fundamental problem of the defining silence around affirmative sexual discourse in the church. A major facet of the orchestra of communion present in our religious life is left lame and bereft of the powerful effect it should have in the system.  Most condemnations of sexuality center around sex being overemphasized in its importance in one’s life.  In this criticism, sex takes the place of God, or ruling reason and volition in a disordered fashion.  But our argument is the opposite.  The nature of sexual communication is not theologically, spiritually, and even pious;y explored enough.  

Fortunately, more recent theology has begun to focus on how corrupt sexual activity is a miscommunication or a misuse of the communication of sex.  This move in the right direction allows for the considerations present in Pope Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  But the major question to be explored is if illicit sex is misuse or miscommunication, what does effective communication look like? Theology of the Body answers what it communicates, the sacramental significance of the Trinity (God is Love), but it does not approach “what that communication looks like” sexually.  Nor does Theology of the Body give the Church a popular language for openly discussing the actual activities sacral sex in healthy ways.  Instead, most of the support language around sex is developed in the secular media, because they are not ashamed or scandalized by discussing sex as sex.

It is no secret that the Church roundly condemns the major secular narrative of sex.  The modern narrative sees sex as a pleasure sport at best and a system of domination at worse.  The Church tries to promote an abstract philosophy to combat this, one that sells sex as an expression and experience of both union and procreation.  Abstractly this is appealing.  The union is especially appealing because the secular “romantic” portrayal of sex depends exclusively on this union (with, again, an underdeveloped sense of how this union works or what it signifies).  But romantics are not drawn to abstract philosophical principles. And as we noted there is a hesitancy to move beyond abstract principles.  

The corruption of sex as communication is intensified by how it engages with supplementary communications.  For example, media allows for an inexhaustible variety of sexual slang, some more trendy and some more lasting, that subconsciously shape the sexual narrative beyond the overt narrative portrayal one gets.  Christianity is at its most “prudish” when it chastises “foul language”.  But there is a spiritual benefit to this chastisement that perhaps is only intuitively understood by the Church itself.  Take two common cultural words for human genitals, “Cock” and “Pussy”.  These words represent the most basic “foul” language.  They also shape the narrative of sex in a concupiscent way.  All of the barnyard associations of the rooster are ones of arrogant dominance.  This is the modus of toxic masculinity.  All of the narratives of the feline are a soft attractive animal that cleverly pursues and devours, again, the worst stereotypes of vindictive femininity.  

It’s easy to say, “well, what's in a name?” but it turns out quite a lot is in a name.  Language carries meaning and is a supplementary communication system to sexuality itself.  Thus the constant use of these words and those like them work in synchronicity with the standard sexual narratives portrayed in culture to create an almost insurmountable milieu of sexuality that the abstract philosophical approach of Roman Catholicism finds hard to, for lack of a better term, penetrate.  Worse still, the abstract musing of academic and magisterial reflections on sexuality does not give people a language to work with.  I believe it is proper to chastise “foul language” when it comes to sexual discussion.  Because of the poor language, the systems of communication are not mutually supportive to their proper end.  But what practical usable alternative language is the Church offering?  At best they are offering information of the goodness of sex. But they are not offering particulars on how to use that information and no way for the average practitioner to talk about how to use it.  All of these need to work in concert for the systems of communication to mutually edify.     

These intricacies of sexuality and language are an indication of the problem to be addressed in this manual.  Most of the sexual terrain is poorly adapted to what is needed for sacral sex to effectively signify what it should.  Polite Christians should find it difficult to use the words “cock” or “pussy” but what is left? Penis and vagina?  These are medical terms that relate to biology and evoke mechanical (not miraculous) reproduction. Or bio-medical terms more likely to evoke bio-organs to be studied, which is worse.  The nuptial dyad is bereft of useful language that suites the purpose of sacral significance.  If they even conceive of the problem, perhaps they could construct their own in the context of the dyarchy.  But the ubiquity of counter narratives that are so strongly supported and thus effectively adhered to presents a powerful demonstration of how effective such a micro-colloquialism can be.  The danger of poorly shaped language is real.  It is why when a Christain tries to be sex affirmative by buying into “foul language” and profane narratives it doesn’t sit well.

The most mature discussion concerning spirituality and sexuality in Christendom takes place in the mystical tradition.  The credibility of the mystics in Catholicism is better than the nuptial dyads, but only barely.  A mystic, these often being consecrated, can be accepted and canonized, thus there is a well established hagiographical template for the mystic.  But in general, the mystic is suspect because they operate via direct personal experience and therefore seemingly outside the sacramental/ ritual/ and institutional aspects of the Church.  This solitary spirituality is suspect in the church, especially in that it is ineffable.  It is not as easily subject to scrutiny the way that systematic theology is.  Rather the mode of the mystic is analogy.  It expresses a personal experience.  But more correctly it is interpersonal experience, in that it is an experience of God, who is a person.  The mystics are not hesitant to use sexual analogy in their writings to elicit this interpersonal experience that is simultaneously a unity.  Even as celibates they are aware that sex is the most intimate action, interpersonal relationship, and interpersonal sharing, available.  

The mystics give the Church a narrow window into the goodness of sexuality in that they allow for a spirituality of sexuality.  This is different from the predominant theology of sexual morality because rather than hyperfocus on procreation, the mystical approach operates via the analogy of sexual action, not the result of sexual action.  Mysticism utilizes the powerful unitive experience of sexual action to analogously communicate the experiences of union they have with the divine in their ecstasies.  This is not a religious investment of sex as a spiritual experience, but at least it brings sexual experience into analogous relationship with spirituality. That is a start.  The aversion to actually admitting that sex can in and of itself be a spiritual experience is so strong that the mystic and Doctor of the Church Bernard of Clairvaux famously gave homily after homily interpreting the Song of Songs according to mystical analogous language.  It seemed impossible to admit that the spiritual joy of sex as an inter-human corporeal action could yield spiritual benefit.

This need to reinterpret hints at the lecherous nature of the celibate mystical experience.  It seems to need, or at least enjoy, sexuality to express the experience in language.  But at the same time the tradition, composed as it is mostly of celibates, seems to buy into the standard suspicion of corporeal sexual action as an aid to spiritual virtue.  Indeed, the tradition seems to imply that sex is the secondary experience that is meant to fade away to the true (incorporeal) reality of mystical experience.  According to this thought, one can enjoy all the true benefits of sexuality without actually having sex.  

How this relates to why the mystics are often suspect in the institutional church is of great interest to us in this manual.  The mystic seeks direct experience of God through personal spiritual discipline and practice.  The facet of mysticism that irks “institutional Catholicism” is that these direct experiences appear to happen absent the sacraments, a physical ritual system, and the institutional framework of Catholicism.  The ordinary way that a Catholic gets a “direct experience of Jesus” is through the Eucharist.  Mystics will not deny that, but they seem to have found a direct way absent physical participation in sacramental ritual.  

The question is, does this demean the sacraments?  If you can do that, do you (or we) need them?  The traditional mystic’s answer would most likely affirm the necessity of the sacraments.  But would their answer be the same for sex, since they see it as only analogously applicable?  Consider if no one experienced sex and everyone was celibate. The mystic would be robbed of the greatest context for describing their experiences.  It seems that sexual action as a unitive spiritual action is quite necessary.  All of these issues were discussed in the treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton.  But more importantly, our argument is that sex actually IS one of those sacramental rituals that the institutional church is loathed to jettison, though the celibate church seems loathed to admit that.  It should be considered blasphemous to think that no one should not use sexual action to access divine experience. Or at least it should be considered as odd to jettison sexual action as it would be to think such things concerning any other sacramental rite, such as the eucharist.

With secular language and narratives, one has sexuality that is lacking at best and often destructive.  With the mystics, one has an affirmation of “sexuality” absent sexual action.  With the clerical and consecrated class in the Church, one has at best a zygotic theory that abstractly comments of the goddess on sex.  What is needed is a well crafted language for mass use that conceptualizes the nature, purpose of sexuality then there must be a context for that language, that is, a narrative milieu for that language to live.  These two things, language and narrative, are the first steps of the sacral sexual agenda.  They contextualize the inner spiritual life needed for the practitioner of sacral sex and the cultural context that leads to conscious and ultimately intuitive ritual investment of those practitioners.  

One may say, “What? Are we all to agree on our own language and sculpt our own sex narratives for Catholicism? Write ‘Catholic sex stories’ and start calling genitals ‘bishop and cathedral’ instead of ‘cock and pussy?”  My answer to that is, “Perhaps so, yes”.  The purpose of such narratives would be to combat ideas and supplementary forms of communication that inhibit the effective significance of sacral sex.  Silence gives the counter narrative a singular voice on the issue, or worse, it implies consent.  Those narratives are extremely powerful and it may help to evaluate their effect on sexual life as it is practiced.  With that in mind we can begin to seek an understanding of the mechanisms of the corrupt culture we are combating, then, turn to the meaning and experience of sacral sex.  After this, we will be able to unpack each aspect of the sacral sexual agenda in turn.

Kinks, Fetishes, Sacral Sex, and Parallel Signification

We opened this manual discussing intuitive ritual investment and conscious ritual investment.  We coined these terms to represent ritual adaptation in transcultural situations.  But sex as a “ritual” is a little unique because the ritual (unlike even sacrifice) springs from prelapsarian reality.  Sex in Eden intuitively signified all the realities we have been discussing concerning the image and likeness of God.  The “cultural change” here is the traversing of humanity from a prelapsarian to a postlapsarian state rather than from one nation to another.  

It will now take a conscious ritual investment to reappropriate the significance of sacral sex.  The groundwork for that, as conscious ritual investment, is beginning to be laid by the Church in the formation of teaching such as Theology of the Body.  Such learning is only the first step.  From there one must be able to invest in the ritual and that process takes time and effort.  That effort will involve all the tools available to us, which we must use to the best of our ability, both sacred and secular.    

We began by observing the vacuity of experiential commentary present in the theological realm.  We then briefly discussed the experience of the mystic, who does have an experience, but that experience is not sexual. We can use the difference between the experience of the mystic and the experience of the nuptial dyad to begin our analysis of significant sacral sexuality.  What we have in mystical analogical sexual language a complex yet edifying dance between symbolism and significance.  The mystic uses the language of sexuality as a symbol of spiritual union and divine mysteries.  As a symbol, the language conveys an analogical meaning.  This stands in contrast to the nuptial dyad, who have performed rites that sacralized their bodies in very specific ways.  After the performance of the ratification ritual, they can use their bodies to perform sexual sacramental action and by that action signify divine mysteries.  The nuptial dyad signifies as opposed to symbolizes.  In sacramental language, this means that the symbolic communicator also presents the reality on top of symbolizing.  The sexual acts themselves make these divine realities sacramentally present in the experience of the two participants in the ritual.  Of course, it is up to the nuptial dyad to participate with the grace of this ritual experience.  That participation is where the following analysis may come in useful.  

In this section, we aim to set out an understanding of the“effective significance of sacral sex”  What does this phrase mean?  Effective means what one would expect, “it worked”.  We define sacral sex in  the The Technical Glossary of Transpositional Theology  as “sexual activity that takes place in a sacramental marriage and most effective channels the grace of the sacrament through the chief sacramental sign of the union. It is a recognition that the sexual act presents trinitarian life to the couple engaged in the act.”  The last sentence defines the “significance”.  In sacramental theology, a “sign” is opposed to a symbol. A symbol communicates a message.  A sign communicates a reality and makes the reality present.  The classic example is that the word “kiss” is a symbol, but the kiss itself, say from parent to child, is a sign of love.  It “means love” it “sends the message” of love, but most importantly it effectively “makes the love present”.  

To work our way into understanding what this means I will offer as an example the first time I ever read The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.  I opened the book and pondered this passage,

Clearly the dawn is the head of the horse which is fit for sacrifice, the sun its eye, the wind its breath, the mouth the Vaisvanara fire, the year the body of the sacrificial horse. Heaven is the back, the sky the belly, the earth the chest, the quarters the two sides, the intermediate quarters the ribs, the members the seasons, the joints the months and half-months, the feet days and nights, the bones the stars, the flesh the clouds. The half-digested food is the sand, the rivers the bowels, the liver and the lungs the mountains, the hairs the herbs and trees. As the sun rises, it is the forepart, as it sets, the hindpart of the horse. When the horse shakes itself, then it lightens; when it kicks, it thunders; when it makes water, it rains; voice is its voice.

Well, at the time  it was not so clear to me.  What is on display here is a culture that has so invested in the horse sacrifice, as well as sacrificial significance that its symbol and investment are intuitive.  Hinduism and ancient Christianity share the aspect of significant ritual.  We want our language to be symbolic and our ritual to signify.  The horse’s head does not “symbolize” the dawn.  It “is the dawn”.  This is why one of the objectives of the sacral sexual agenda is to sculpt a comfortable symbolic language that can ease both conscious and ultimately intuitive participation in the nuptial ritual.

  Regarding sexuality, the Kamasastra traditions in India offer a body of literature that develops sexual significance for a married couple.  Our point here is not to copy eastern ideas.  As was noted in the treatise The Three Tiered Integration of Self, the cosmologies of Eastern and Western religions are incompatible.  Rather here we would like to begin the development of a literary piety that served the same role as various Kamasastra sexual manuals, helping young discerners or newlyweds gain mastery of the sexual arts in a context that is sacred and holistic to their vocation.  This will be the major occupation of the next section of this manual. 

To do this we will need to comment on the sacramental experience of sexuality in a way that is “significant”, so that we can say a line such as “clearly the [fill in sex act or body part] is the …” and it will make sense.  This will be the major occupation of the last section of this manual.

“Significant communication” is rarely if ever written communication.  They are communications of act and especially ritual action.  Thus sex is a significant communication of Love.  Saint John the Evangelist defines God as Love, thus in as much as one experiences love in the communication of sex, one has an experience of the divine life.  This is especially true once one realizes that John’s definition is an expression of God as Trinity.  We developed this understanding in detail in the treatise Christian Ontology.  Sacral sex is significant of love and is consciously a significant communication of God as Trinity because the image and likeness of God are operable in a situation of creative singularity and multiplicity.  

All of these concepts of significant sex are the exact abstracts that the Church is just now becoming comfortable with admitting.  But we are far from developing and helping people intuitively cooperate with the nuptial sacred ritual. All the while there is a vast web if counter significant teleologies, informed by postlapsarian concupiscence and bolstered by narrative and language that are damaging the true telos of sex.  “Sacral sexual significance”  is replaced with a vast communication system of kinks and fetishes.  What the terms “kinks and fetishes” hint at is the same aspect of sex as “sacral sexual significance” but when that significance is directed inappropriately.  

When people think of kinks and fetishes, people think of things, maybe odd or specific things, that people personally enjoy during sex.  Modern psychology is replete with speculation on what these kinks and fetishes “mean”, how they demonstrate power dynamics, seek fulfillment, make up for lacks in a practitioner's life, effect peace or security, and more.  For this manual, we are going to define a fetish as a general symbol or significance that is sought to be demonstrated (by symbol) or experiences (by significance).  We are going to define kinks as particular actions (rites?) that are used to evoke the symbol or sign of the fetish.  So, for example, a fetish may be dominance, and a kink involved may be some use of leather during sexual play.   

The intense scrutiny of kinks and fetishes by the psychological arts makes modern people hesitant to personally discuss their own because they are so subject to analysis.  What becomes plain in most analysis modern kinks and fetishes yields observation of a society that is often obsessed with objectification, domination, and ultimately cruelty.  It also displays a culture where people painfully seek intimacy through acquiescence vulnerability. Disordered kinks and fetishes are the foundations for rituals of postlapsarian sex, which are spiritually harmful and that the Christain is trying to reform into sacral sex.  A quick survey of porn-hub will yield ample instruction into the postlapsarian ritual actions.  They symbolize and signify abuse, dominance, objectification, etc. and they make that reality present, to all the people involved, including set crew, corporate goons, and product consumers.  This ritual action is so powerful that it makes a contender out of the corporation under the auspices of the false god Economy.   

For our part, the Church is correct to condemn the structures that perform the rites.  But the psychological forces that give it power are the power of significant ritual and ritual is a means of communication with God.  It is only in its bereavement that these serious problems arise (because evil is a privation of good).  Sacral sex was in creation from the beginning.  Its power is innate and effective.  Rather than condemn psychological analysis of kinks and fetishes or simply using the analysis to condemn sexual activity, we should be overjoyed that the psychological community realizes that there is powerful significance is the nuptial ritual. 

Why contemplate profane and secular examples, which are filled with corruption? Because all these arts can be used to develop a Christo-centric sexual milieu that bolsters nuptial dyads in their sexual rituals and helps them signify and communicate well in their relationship. Thus, a modern tactic of the church, to bolster the effectiveness of the sacral rituals of the nuptial dyads, should be to explore such kinks and fetishes, analyzing the major needs being met.  Then converting the narratives of the sexual play in order to construct narratives that bolster Christian power dynamics, evoke and appropriate Christian narratives, signify life in Christ, and Trinitarian existence.  When we say “effective sacral sexual significance” we mean, kinks and fetishes that are finally working in a moral and spiritual framework compatible with Eden at least if not the Eschaton.  This is not scandalous.  It is the Christain fulfillment of a divine communication system placed in a “very good” creation from the beginning.  What is needed is a true investment by nuptial dyads, in their form of life that is confident, especially in the public sphere of the church.  The confidence in the sacred nature of the nuptial life is key, because to date that confidence has been greatly mitigated by the culture of Catholicism.  Even now, as I write this manual, there abides in me a great hesitancy to suggest that sex be treated in a virtuous manner as I intend to propose.  That hesitancy is based on a culture that instills an assumption that no spiritual good can come from sexual action.  

It now comes to developing this agenda in such a way that it can grow to fruition.  To begin that we must do the groundwork of conscious ritual investment.  We must decode the ritual significance of sex as it stands in society and “evangelize” sexuality so that it can take its rightful place in the life of the Church and the faithful.  In order to do this, we need to intensify our understanding of the sacramental nature of sexual action.  We may refference the  book, A User Guide to the Medieval Cosmology of Mantegna-Tarocchi.  That book, discussed the phenomenon of corporeal significance of celestial realities by illuminating a cosmology the presents both the possibility of the three tiered integration of the self and inversal unity of hierarchy.  We laid out how those significances are both social and individual.  We made a passing connection to eastern cosmologies that do the same.  This connection is strong and can be helpful for our purposes here.  The synchronicity between corporeal existence and celestial existence is most readily noted in the Kamasastra traditions of India.  The literature of these traditions develops the idea of "harmonious sensory experience".  This harmony develops out of a good relationship between "the self and the world".  

These are the techniques formed in the treatise The Three Tiered Integration of Self  which sought to compare and contrast eastern and western cosmologies in order to develop similar corporeal techniques.  The reader will remember that the final part of that treatise was how to integrate these techniques into one’s sacramental engagement in the Church.  Both the Kamasastra traditions and our own sacramental cosmology believe that by discovering and enhancing sensory capabilities we can affect and be affected by the world. The most famous example of Kamasastra literature is the Kama Sutra and the most famous legacy of these traditions is the tantric tradition.  Each of these is intimately connected to sex and sexuality in the western mind. Our task here is to seek development of these concepts in the sexual arena.

 To begin acceptance of sacral sexuality on a personal level we will need to coin and define the term “parallel signification”.  Parallel signification is fundamentally how nuptial dyads use their bodies as both corporeal temples and receptive sacral matter in their marriage and especially in their sexual lives.  It is a recognition of our sacramental cosmology, and the ability of Christ, through his church and the sacraments to change our corporeal existence into  corporeal temples and receptive sacral matter. By this it is a recognition Christian ontology whereby we as humans are individuals and one in Christ.  Thus as  corporeal temples and receptive sacral matter we can exhibit “parallel signification” together. 

There is the series of sacraments that conform human bodies into receptive sacral matter in various ways. Baptism conforms one to the Body of Christ and changes one’s reality to be able to act as a priest according to the baptismal priesthood.  That is, a baptized body can signify as alter Christus  according to the four modalities of Christian analogical interchange as was defined them in the treatise The Manifold Priesthood of the Catholic Church.  Parallel signification may be present in the ministry of the baptized priest if two such baptized are signifying together. But it may be that the baptismal priest ministers to the unbaptized, and therefore parallel signification may not be present. In that same treatise we discussed how ordination conforms the body as a ritual object in the Church’s sacramental rituals.  The ordained priest can stand in persona Christi and particularly signify Christ’s presence at these rituals.  Parallel signification is a way of understanding the liturgy if one understands that the presider stands in persona Christi signifying Christ and the community signifies alter Christus in their sacrificial mode.  But this is less “parallel” and more communal.  

It is the specific vocational call of the nuptial dyad to signify in parallel.  In The Manifold Priesthood of the Catholic Church we devoted an entire part called Spousal Relationship as a Structure of Baptismal Priesthood to examples of this signification in married life. Sacral sex is obviously parallel because it is two people who are ministering this sacral ritual together, and each of their bodies signifies particularly.  Our goal for this section of this manual is to fulfill the Kamasastra traditions by incarnating the truths and compatible practices it presents into our Christian sacramental cosmology. 

There are two general ways a nuptial dyad can practice parallel signification; interpersonal and cosmic.  Interpersonal parallel signification is obviously when the couple signifies personal realities, either personal psycho-spiritual attributes or a community of persons, for example utilizing their baptismal priesthood to signify as alter Christus through sacral sex.  As was noted in the treatise Birth Control vs Labor Rights? the fundamental parallel signification of sacral sex is the trinity, a communion of persons,

In the marriage in general the bodies become a sign of trinitarian existence in that the man and woman abide in a relationship of nuptial love which is indissoluble, just as the Father and Son aide in the loving relationship of the Spirit.  Each partnership is bound by a relationship that make three realities one reality.  In the sexual act especially, this union is clear.  In the sexual act the two become one biologically and spiritually in a complete sense.  Hence it is the chief sacramental sign.  

We shall see that in sacral sex interpersonal parallel signification can break down as “bifurcated”, where each person signifies their own point of view at the same time, or “mutual parallel signification” where their interpersonal signification forms a cohesive sign.  Even under the bifurcated variety Christian ontology is at play and all is simple and manifold at the same time.  But mutual signification is more perfect and proper to sacral sexual signification.  We will elaborate at length on details of these various modes of interpersonal parallel signification in the last section of this manual.

The oneness and multiplicity of both trinitarian abidance and sexual expression are each an atomic simple community of love.  From this signification, one can branch out using the four modalities of Christo analogical interchanges of the baptismal priesthood.  In the sexual relationship, Christain power dynamics is a major field of significance.  Also, the sacrificial nature of the modalities of Christo analogical interchange can be used to practice baptismal priesthood in the sexual context.  To use a banal but important example, if a partner is in need of greater intimacy during the rites, the couple can methodologically project and plan how they may exhibit first or second person alter Christus in order to meet that need while signifying mysteries of the incarnation.  Those modalities reveal sacrifice through corporeal signification.  Many similar dynamics can be inferred and developed.  For example, even in that signification, Christ as helper and helped by Christ is already signifying the love of Christ and the Church.  Indeed any Christian mystery that operates via binding relationships (the trinity, the incarnation, Christ, and the church) is perfect for use in sacral sexual rites which signify the intimate unity present.  

Cosmic parallel signification is when the bodies of the dyad signify impersonal realities of the cosmos, often signifying the union of opposites ever present according to Christian ontology.  This is akin to the horse in the above quoted passage of The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.  The horse’s head “is the dawn”, clearly.  The passage assumes the horse signifies the basic realities of the cosmos as it performs its role in the sacrifice. This type of signification seems uncomfortable for Christians.  The concept of baptismal priesthood and the call to alter Christus signification is rather intuitive as a personal signification.  And the ideas have been worked out theologically in various ways and form throughout our tradition.  These are interpersonal signifiers.  The priest of baptism signifies Christ in a particular way. The nuptial dyad signifies the Trinity as a community of persons, again, an interpersonal parallel signification.  But cosmic signification raises the specter of Yogic paganism and smacks of elicit Eastern syncretism.  Can it be Christian to “Cosmically signify” or is this exclusive to pantheistic paganism?

These concerns are valid.  When one is overly invested in the clerical vocation as ordained the priesthood, cosmic corporeal signification seems foreign.  But to understand how Catholicism invests in cosmic signification we must remember that there are three modes of corporeal signification.  The clerical signification is strictly in persona Christi in the formal sacramental structure of the church.  The subject relates to the cosmos (the sacramental matter of wheat, grapes, and oil) which serves an interpersonal function.  The significance of the Baptismal priesthood  is less rigidly defined, as we noted in The Manifold Priesthood of the Catholic Church.  But baptismal priesthood works on the model of alter Christus. It is invested at baptism and conforms one to the person of Christ.  So still we retain an interpersonal model of signification that is anthro-oriented rather than cosmically so.  Taking Christian priesthood as our metric, it seems that cosmic signification is an illicit signification.  But the sacrament of matrimony has some fascinating unique aspects that are theologically underplayed as a matter of course.  Matrimony is one of the three primordial sacraments.  Those primordial sacraments, which are visible signs of divine mysteries are creation itself, matrimony, and the incarnation.  Through the incarnation, being temporally situation last, Christ begets the Church and thereby the entire formal sacramental system of Christianity.  But that system only makes sense if one holds a sacramental cosmology, hence the first primordial sacrament, creation.  Then we have the human nuptial relationship, invested from the beginning in Genesis one to signify God and have dominion,

  

Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.

 

God created mankind in his image;

in the image of God he created them;

male and female* he created them.

 

God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.  Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.

This is the sacral investment of matrimony and giving the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the fundamental mode is parallel significance.  Nuptial signification predates the incarnation and therefore it predates “Christianity” as such.  Because of humanity's ability to participate in transcendence, the investiture is “cosmological”, so the signification goes beyond the bounds of other forms of signification.  It is even beyond what we might call “priesthood” because priesthood is a result of postlapsarian reality and the nuptial relationship precedes even that.   

 Therefore the nuptial dyad has licence to signify cosmically, as they have done from the beginning of humanity.  As it says in the Catechism,  "We do not believe in formulas, but in those realities they express, which faith allows us to touch."  The first parents obviously signify cosmic duality, such as gender.  They could signify realities of immanence and transcendence, (given they are the pinnacle of creation) concepts and abstractions, subject and environment because they regard each other etc. The nuptial diarchies effectively participate in their modality through Christ’s saving death which cleanses those who cling to him through baptism of the guilt of original sin and rectifies them to the Father.  This rectification includes a restoring of the ability to act in proper accord with the cosmos, which is to act sacramentally.  

It could even be said that the lustful objectification of a sexual partner is the demonic inversion of cosmic signification, where persons are willfully and sacramentally signifying objects.  Objectification is an extremely common sexual fetish.  When one lusts after a person as a piece of pleasurable flesh or fetishizes a person as a concept, this is the postlapsarian corruption of nuptial cosmic significance.  It is a classic concupiscent urge, to beg off treating a person as a person and instead treat them as an object used as a means to personal pleasure.  As a concupiscent urge, this is common enough in a variety of ways beyond sexuality.  As a disposition during sexual action, between two lovers it is a failure that needs to be worked out in the marital relationship.  It’s a barrier to intimacy and is definitely something to be processed during supplementary communication in order to build intimacy.  

This urge is the brokenness of humanity, where through the Fall humans were alienated.  What needs to be healed here is that alienation and it is healed by personal regard. THat personal regard, even in cosmic significance is an essential operative aspect.  Without it, this alienating urge becomes what we are calling a fetish when it is ritualized with intent.  We can take a moment to analyze one manifestation of such lustful objectification.  First, this lustful objectification will probably require a kink in order to manifest ritually.  So in pornographic ritual a common ritual object for an objectification fetish may be the so called “glory hole” where the genitals of one participant are exposed through a hole in the wall.  Symbolically, through a barrier much like the barrier of clothes introduced in the fall story, they become only the object pleasure and are thus objectified.  Significantly, through the sexual act, they experience becoming an object or experience the person as an object. It bears pointing out that there are a host of other fetishes that the glory hole can be ritually used for just as there are a host of other kinks that can be used to symbolize or signify objectification. 

This entire ritual system is a postlapsarian sexual nightmare.  In this situation the powerful lord their authority over others like the gentiles.   As C.S. Lewis notes in The Weight of Glory, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”  One can see in this quote a hint of the common Christian disdain for sexuality.  But, the sentiment suits our purpose.  To lustfully objectify a person desires to possess their body as an object, when what we are offered is to possess the cosmos with that person, as a person, through parallel signification.  As we shall see, even if one were not married, one could sexually fantasize in such a way licitly, because interpersonal and cosmic signification are true teleological ends of sexuality.  To up the game, one may fantasize further, imagining divine signification by means of this interpersonal expression.  In as much as God is swept up in the sexual expression, the fantasy is a religious fantasy.  This is the healthiest fantasy imaginable, even for an unmarried person.  Obviously the objectification of the “glory hole” in no way facilitates such interpersonal sharing. 

At this point, if the reader is overwhelmed by the multifaceted nature of nuptial and sacral sexual significance remember what we pointed out in the treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love married life is dynamic and consecrated life is static,

Neither of these comforts, submission to established order versus dynamic collaborative creation, is bad, just different and it makes sense to each path given the story.  The marriage story is set at the creation, everything is about to unfold, paths need to be forged.  The trinitarian God creates and the first parents also stand at a threshold, in the second story Adam has a collaborative part with God in the creation process itself, and they are charged with establishing humanity.  For the [consecrated] Eschaton narrative, it’s the end, everything has played out, the order is obvious and set, God’s plan is known and accepted and all one does is submit and live the plan in the kingdom as the true body of Christ.  But at this point we are neither here nor there, so we must pick the mode by which we live our lives, which paradise is best for us the frenzied work of creation and multiplication or the static peace of order and final fulfillment. 

  

It stands to reason that sacral sexual significance would be overwhelmingly creatively expressive.  Sex is fundamentally creative.  Because of this dynamism, the nuptial dyad will need to make use of constant supplemental communication regarding their experience of parallel signification during sacral sex so they may be of one accord in their sacramental vocation.  

Sexual Evangelization and Hagiographical Templates 

At this point, we can remind the reader of the agenda for sacral sexual fulfillment.  That agenda consists of two parts.  First through sculpting a new vocabulary that connotes sacral sex we are seeking to offer individuals the possibility of a sexual life that is a spiritual and religious expression life.  This we have briefly attempted by commenting on the intricacies of parallel signification.  From there we will fill out those intricacies with practical applications in the last section of this manual.  In the second part, we are seeking to sculpt new narratives that contain appropriate material for nuptial dyads so that they may intuitively invest in ritual sacral sex.  We will take a space now to comment briefly on how one may spiritually, religiously, and piously internalize the idea of parallel signification and discuss how our narratives often thwart that exercise.  After this we will take the next section to lay out an agenda repairing the narrative culture of our Church.

The majority of the implementation of this agenda, and the discourses surrounding it, should be shaped and guided by the nuptial dyarchies.  They are the organs of the Church that experience the realities of sacral sexuality.  The magisterium is right to fulfill its role as the garniture of orthodoxy.  Those invested in celibate life should not refrain from commenting.  But the major voice should be driven out of experience.  

As we noted, the current discourse on sex and sexuality is very abstract.  Theology, canon law, rubrics, these are the abstract analysis that can help one invest in conscious ritual investment in the sacrificial ritual of the mass.  But the narrative is the paschal mystery.  If that narrative effects one’s being down to the subconscious (somnium) level, one may be able to intuitively invest in the mass and dramatically benefit even without the theology (not to degrade conscious understanding, which can only help).  

So how do people licitly conceive of and imagine sacral sex (even before they are married), what are the Church’s narratives concerning the ritual of sacral sex and how they inspire confidence in those invested in marriage?  If these questions give one pause, that is because the answers are difficult to find in any positive way.  As it stands, marriage, which is the context of sacral sexual ritual, is the only sacrament that is sold as, “yes it’s a sacrament that conveys grace, but, it’s better if you don’t engage in it”.  This attitude is certainly a confidence killer among the nuptial dyads.  The treatise Ecclesiological Orientation  sought to dispel the presence of this attitude in when we noted “The most famous of these devaluations comes in Session Twenty Four Canon X of the Council of Trent,

If any one shall say, that the marriage state is to be preferred before a state of virginity, or of celibacy, and that it is not better and more blessed to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be joined in matrimony; let him be anathema.

…

You are only forbidden to say that married life is better AND that it is not better to remain celibate.  ~(A ⋅ ~B) Which means you can say anything else that is not this formula.  This is the freedom of technical anathemas. By this anathema you ARE able to say they are equivalent A=B.  A=B is a different formula and has not been condemned. You can say marriage is greater than or equal to A≥B or less than or equal to A ≤ B. You can make a logical dichotomy and add qualifiers such as (A>B ⋁ A<B) for example, marriage is better if one is called to that vocation OR celibacy is better if one is called to that vocation.  This is the most appealing as things stand. All of these possibilities and an almost infinite amount more are permissible according to the canon.  Most importantly, by this canon, one is not required to assert that “consecrated life is better than married life”.  It is just that one cannot absolutely and unequivocally state that marriage is better AND celibacy is not better (the conjunction is important). 

All this being said, most people when encountering this canon interpret the cannon to mean simply, “celibate life is unequivocally better than married life”, which is obviously also a licit interpretation. It’s just hard to defend.

“Celibate life is unequivocally better than married life” remains a very common belief in the church.  The assumption of this spirituality springs for a particular interpretation of Saint Paul, which conceives of marriage as a stop-gap for lust, and nothing more.  

This view robs sexuality and the sacrament of the marriage of any positive significance.  This is an awful defamation of marriage, which is a sacrament that conveys grace to its participants and is a literal life-giving facet in the mystical body of Christ.  It is an especially harmful attitude for women because their only alternative is the entrance into consecrated life.  Not that this is unworthy, it is a full and effective use of their baptismal priesthood.  But of the two vocational sacraments, which sacralize human bodies in particular vocational ways in the church, one is forbidden and the other is seen as some kind of spiritual failure.

Anecdotally, I knew a woman, who can only be described as a saint, born and raised in the Pre Vatican II church, who got married and believed for a very long time as an adult that entering the nuptial vocation meant she would not go to heaven.  The Litany of the Holy Dyads demonstrates that this is clearly not true, thus a major part of the sacral sexual agenda will aim to bolster narratives that help dispel this idea.  This woman is not unintelligent and she no longer believes these things, but what drove her to believe them as an intelligent adult Catholic?  This is what we need to explore in order to understand the nature of our task.

As we noted, this attitude springs from a long precedent of clerics and consecrated having a religiously authoritative voice in the Church and the married laity being subject to silence, even concerning their own role and methods in the Mystical Body. The life of the nuptial dyad has been constantly subjected to clerics and consecrated in every way.  Some of these ways are appropriate and some are not.  One may respond that it is not the place of the married to “teach” because they are laity and therefore not part of the magisterium.  Our response is, consecrated are also laity, they are in no way part of the magisterium unless they are ordained and speak on behalf of the bishop or are then made bishop (thereby canonically separating from their order).

Yet somehow, they have the authority to comment on their own mode of existence in the Church and are even trusted to comment on marriage and sexuality as well.  Yet for a married person to comment on consecrated or clerical life seems “out of line”.  Any married person commenting on the nature or role of consecrated or clerical life is immediately dismissable unless that person is a person of rare and extreme merit. One can simply reflect on how many brothers or sisters have casually written about sex and sexuality in the past few decades and then seek works about consecrated or clerical life of the same casual nature written by a married person.  A book entitled “Sexual morality by Fr. or Sr. or Br So and So” is common enough.  But, for a married person to talk about the beauty or grace of marriage would require advanced credentials and long standing credibility before they could be taken seriously in church discourse.  But a work entitled “Clerical competency by Mr. or Mrs. So and So MA” won’t likely be taken very seriously off hand under any circumstances.  

The result of this double standard is a culture where the married are often urged to take the aesthetic or culture of the consecrated or cleric, but rarely vice versa.  For example, Saint Fructuosus of Braga wrote two monastic rules, known for their severity.  One of these rules was sculpted in order to allow married members and their families.  It is admirable that monastic rules could be available for whole families to enter, yet it is imprudent to think that this is somehow objectively better.  As was noted in the treatise Ecclesiological Orientation the nuptial dyad, for the most part, has the authority to govern its own affairs and that authority is proper to them.  The reason nuptial dyads don’t is, again, that lack of confidence.  If a dyad chooses to surrender that authority, that is their decision, but it is certainly not an objectively better route simply because it models consecrated life.  The entire treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love is dedicated to demonstrating how consecrated life and married life operate in different but compatible ways.  In that compatibility, the differences should not be mitigated.

To demonstrate the work that needs to be done regarding language and narrative, we are going to take as an example the way that the term purity is utilized in Catholic discourse.  This term is shaped by celibate culture and by analyzing its use and function we should learn much about the need to implement both facets of the sacral sexual agenda under the auspices of the nuptial dyarchies.  The word and how it is used is curious because the concepts of purity, impurity and/or pollution are connected specifically with sexual acts, and never used for any other acts of charity or goodness when they are done in a disordered fashion.  The concept of impurity is never associated with acts of wrath or avarice or other sins.  And there are many well developed theologies explaining the benefit of charity peace and joy, that demonstrate the positive converse of these concupiscent dispositions.  But the term “purity” is usually not employed for these virtues.  

The church’s vocabulary and narratives revolving around sex often employ the concept of purity and it disproportionately leaves only negative impressions. The treatise Birth Control vs Labor Rights?, discussed the poor use of the term “purity” which seems to spring from a celibate focus,

Purity is taken from the Levitical code, where certain actions render one ritually impure and unable to participate in the calculated ritual laid out in the Hebrew Scriptures.  “Impurity” seems to indicate some sort of personal moral failing, but it is as probable that in the Levitical code “impurity” is part of the communication symbology of the system of ritual.  When this language is taken into the realm of Christian sexual morality, it does seem to take on an air of personal moral failing and “pollution”.  So, purity, which in Christian sexual morality is the beauty of sacral sex as explained above, is used as a grand shaming mechanism revolving around attitudes, actions, technology, and techniques that instill pollution and impurity.  What purity should indicate is the singularity of focus in the sacral life as a positive and an exploration of how those engaging in these activities can beautifully express oneness and diversity as well as procreation.  Not to mention how the sacramentally married couple, through sacral sex present the image and likeness of the trinitarian God in their mutual life.  As the Catechism states, “married love is caught up in divine love.”      

As the passage points out, the term “purity” is often used exclusively to discuss actions and dispositions that create spiritual “impurity”.  This frame makes sense if one is speaking from a state of life that rejects sexual action.  

In this treatise, we are suggesting a better focus on the redefinition of purity as “active sexual purity”.  This is a purity of intention that develops into fulfillment.  The intention is teleological.  By investing in it, one intends to use sex as a sacral sexual rite, to be done in the context of marriage, such that one can appropriately use their corporeal existence to sacramentally signify divine mysteries.  This uses the same word to the same end, but with an affirmative context. This is a stark difference from the current use is celibate centered and implies simple passivity.  As it stands, purity is a notion that informs one of what not to do, and the entire context revolves around the loss of purity instead of its development.

We discussed the term “purity” as used in the scriptures in the above quote.  What about in hagiography and the effect it has on a person’s interior spiritual regard for sexuality?  Let’s take our current term, “purity”, and see what hagiographical templates we can discover. To speak to that we may need to analyze a disturbing new trend in hagiography as attached to a particular type of hagiographical template, the phrase “martyr to purity”.  The standard hagiography for a martyr to purity runs thusly; a young girl is portrayed as the picture of piety.  She comes of age and catches the eye of a would be rapist.  The girl fights the rapist off to the death and because of her fortitude is considered a “martyr to purity.”  A classic example of this hagiography is exhibited in the story of Blessed Antonia Mesina.  Here is her hagiography as recorded on Catholic Saints info

Second of ten children born to a peasant family. She received only four years of school, quitting to take over housekeeping from her mother, Grazia, who was bed-ridden with a heart condition. Joined Catholic Action at age ten, becoming an active and lively member and recruiter. At age 16, while out gathering wood for home, she was beaten and murdered by a teenage would-be rapist, fighting him off to her last breath; considered a martyr to purity.

 

Again, we see here a consideration of the term purity in a passive sense. It is used in the negative, as some sort of absence of spiritual pollution that comes with sex, one can see how this narrative is disturbing to many modern minded people.  “Sexual purity” is portrayed as some kind of quality that can be taken by force, and guarding it should be valued above one’s own life.  The interior message of the narrative is clear, death is better than sexual impurity.  Yet, the non-volitional aspect of such passive purity also raises eyebrows.  Spiritualities invested in passive purity often try to equate virginity with bio-virginity and further equate bio-virginity with purity. But there is no biological indicator of virginity by any medical or spiritual metric.  Saint Augustine famously made this very argument in Book I Chapter 18 of City of God.  In this chapter, he is discussing suicide as an inappropriate response to prevent being raped (the context is the sacking of Rome in 410),

I suppose no one is so foolish as to believe that, by this destruction of the integrity of one organ, the virgin has lost anything even of her bodily sanctity. And thus, so long as the soul keeps this firmness of purpose which sanctifies even the body, the violence done by another's lust makes no impression on this bodily sanctity, which is preserved intact by one's own persistent continence. Suppose a virgin violates the oath she has sworn to God, and goes to meet her seducer with the intention of yielding to him, shall we say that as she goes she is possessed even of bodily sanctity, when already she has lost and destroyed that sanctity of soul which sanctifies the body? Far be it from us to so misapply words. Let us rather draw this conclusion, that while the sanctity of the soul remains even when the body is violated, the sanctity of the body is not lost; and that, in like manner, the sanctity of the body is lost when the sanctity of the soul is violated, though the body itself remains intact. And therefore a woman who has been violated by the sin of another, and without any consent of her own, has no cause to put herself to death; much less has she cause to commit suicide in order to avoid such violation, for in that case she commits certain homicide to prevent a crime which is uncertain as yet, and not her own.

Whatever “virginity” is, according to Saint Augustine, it is not a biological reality.  It seems to be akin to a moral state of affairs.  Its existence is dependent on action related to knowledge and will, much the same way culpability relates these in moral thought.  To lose one’s virginity one must be aware of how to engage in sexual acts and one must willfully engage.  Below we will further develop this cooperative concept of virginity.  But for now, it suffices to say active sexual purity is simply engaging in those acts morally, in the context of nuptial sacral rite or not engaging outside of that context.  

Given all of this, there can be no “martyr to purity” in the sense that it is so commonly believed.  The hagiography of Blessed Antonia Mesina seems off or at least lacking some key piece of information.  But here the hagiography stands and the narrative is used by virgins, especially consecrated, to bolster a passive sexual purity which revolves somehow around fear of impurity via loss of bio-virginity.  This, in turn, intensifies the idea that, if simple bio-action (even with knowledge, consent, and licit intent) can result in lost purity, then even marital sex is tainted.  Now we have every ingredient for an understanding of marriage that, since it involves sex, is somehow a “less than holy” life.  By the false premises, the logic is solid that marriage leads to impurity.  The framing of this narrative is unacceptable both in how it portrays sex and the implications that portrayal has concerning the vocation of the nuptial dyad.  

The treatise, Two Paths for Expanding True Love discussed how switch hitting analogical narratives among different states of life is a positive, even when it entails differing focus and interpretation of those narratives.  But this assumes a coherence of truth and that the interpretations are not only compatible with each other, but bolster each other in the greater context of the church.  The general way this hagiography of Blessed Antonia Mesina operates as a mythic narrative does not offer compatible edification and is offensive to pious ears.  Compare it, for example, to the more popular hagiography of Saint Maria Goretti, again from Catholic Saints Info     

In 1902 at age twelve, Maria was attacked by 19-year-old farm-hand Alessandro Serenelli. He tried to rape the girl who fought, yelled that it was a sin, and that he would go to hell. He tried to choke her into submission, then stabbed her fourteen times. She survived in hospital for two days, forgave her attacker, asked God‘s forgiveness of him, and died holding a crucifix and medal of Our Lady. Counted as a martyr.

 

While in prison for his crime, Allessandro had a vision of Maria. He saw a garden where a young girl, dressed in white, gathered lilies. She smiled, came near him, and encouraged him to accept an armful of the lilies. As he took them, each lily transformed into a still white flame. Maria then disappeared. This vision of Maria led to Alessandro’s conversion, and he later testified at her cause for beatification.

This narrative allows for spiritual purity related to sex that is more amiable to a positive view of sexuality.  Notice that the two narratives are not contradictory.  It’s just that the hagiography of Saint Maria Goretti takes pain to diffuse toxic views of sexuality that have entrenched themselves in Catholic culture.  But there are still many lingering questions as to the phrase “martyr for purity” even under this more amiable interpretation of the narrative.  First, why is the woman (curiously, there are as of yet no male martyrs to purity) responsible for the male’s spiritual state?  

Well, truly she is no more responsible than Cain.  In that context she shines, because most of us do not take that responsibility as seriously as we should.  She takes it as a primary to her life.  This leads to the second great criticism of the narrative as interpreted for Saint Maria Goretti.  Why is allowing him to be a murderer preferable to allowing him to be a rapist?  

Any answers to this question have no bearing on Saint Maria Goretti’s purity of intention and beautiful sacrifice of self.  However, the fact remains, though her intention was pure, there is no acceptable theological answer to this, only the cultural context of Christianity that disproportionately abhors lustful sexual action to wrathful physical violence.  To balance that, the sacral sexual agenda would seek to invest us with stories of saints that demonstrate true active purity and have sexual inner lives that contemplate sexual activity in a pure way.  As it stands, all sexual thoughts seem to be “impure thought”.  Has something like this ever been done before?  Well, yes.

We noticed that violence seemed to be more acceptable than sex.  How can this be in the Christian tradition?  To ponder the difference notice how Christianity quickly made peace with the soldier saint. There are a host of imperial Roman saints who’s proclaimed salvation spurred a complex tradition of “just war” especially jus in bello.  The danger of these narratives is that Christendom could become so comfortable with violent warfare that it is acceptable in almost every way instead of the rare exception.  War may be the context of virtue, but war is in no way virtuous itself.  As an example of how powerful narrative is in shaping culture, that fear has mostly come to fruition.  The lack of scrutiny concerning being a soldier and engaging in warfare as opposed to the inordinate scrutiny of the sex lives of even nuptial dyads is evidence of that comfort.  

Conversely, there seems to be a fear that if a saint is honored because of their sexual life, that is, the hagiography explicitly notes their sexual life as a means of sanctification, this will also lead to some sort of laxity concerning sexual morality. This may be true.  It obviously played out exactly such regarding war and soldiery and that is a problem.  However, that problem negates neither soldier saints nor sanctification via the complete nature of sexual life. And, there is one difference between warfare and sex.  Warfare is an absolute product of postlapsarian reality, and is “evil”, springing from a lack of proper order in society.  Sex is a prelapsarian signifier of divine life and is fundamentally good. 

Here is the bottom line; sex is significant.  Our agenda seeks two goals, to personally invest individual Catholics with this idea and sculpt a culture that allowed for honest discernment of marriage as a religious vocation that expresses sacred mysteries through sexual ritual.  Beginning with the personal agenda, there is one’s interior life to be considered.  So how can the concept of purity be used in a way that bolsters our agenda?  How can one personally think about sex in a pure way?  

The current thinking on sexuality in Catholic culture would have a person not think about sex previous to marriage.  Such thoughts are framed as “temptation”, “impure thoughts”, and are regarded as illicit.   For the unmarried, there seems to be no conceivable way to even licitly sexually desire or fantasize according to current Catholic thinking, much less develop a spiritually healthy sexual fantasy life or sexual desire, without some affront to “purity”.  One would be hard pressed to find a source for Catholic opinion that delineated the nature and properties of orthodox healthy sexual fantasy for unmarried people.  This is probably because most of our ethical lens for sexual fantasy comes from people who have vowed celibacy.  There is no licit situation for them to contemplate sexual fantasies.  They do not engage in licit sex, and they are not involved in a discernment process to do so.  Thus for them to assert, “all sexual fantasies are impure and concupiscent” is true for their state of life.  But this is a misguided understanding of both sexual desire and sexual fantasy if it is applied to the entire populace.  It is not impossible to morally sexually desire nor is it impossible to morally sexually fantasize.  Even before becoming a married person.  Not only that, but there are also spiritually edifying ways to sexually desire and sexually fantasize, even before becoming for a married person.

Our purpose is to foment a sacral sexual agenda that teaches nuptial dyads to participate in rites of sacral sexuality.  The agenda works on a model of conscious ritual investment in order to achieve a culture where intuitive ritual investment is possible.  In order to do that, consciously, people will need to think about sex … consciously, without fearing a loss of purity.  It seems that materials that would help the married and unmarried learn skills regarding sexual desire and fantasy would be a powerful and necessary tool of discernment for the nuptial vocation.  Once developed it would naturally extend long into married life itself, as one’s sexual fantasies and desires are shaped by maturity with one’s partner.  

Learning to attune one’s sexual desire is a complex skill, but not impossible.  One can do it by means of repetitive sexual fantasy.  Again, what we are suggesting here is premarital and nuptial fantasy that is sexual, spiritually attuned, and licit.   Without this skill, entering a nuptial life of sexual engagement is tantamount to entering mass with no preparation for sacral engagement.  The grace is still there, but the ability to cooperate is seriously and gravely mitigated. 

Licit sexual fantasy hinges on fantasizing about how one would sexually signify divine mysteries with the person they are fantasizing about in a marital context.  This is a spiritual exercise as well as a sexual fantasy.  It creates a domain of premarital sexual fantasy that is licit and edifying.  It attunes desire for sexuality and allows one to be led by their sexual desires and fantasies to God.  When one thinks about it, it seems almost inconceivable that no such domain exists or is commented on at the present in Catholic moral thought. 

This fantasy, through repetition, could increase properly ordered sexual desire, just as constant viewing of pornography inspires ever increasingly disordered desire.  This method of sexual fantasy in order to elicit well ordered sacral sexual desire is not “vulgar”.  It is a spiritual exercise that carries certain joys.  It should absolutely be practiced as a discernment exercise.  It should absolutely be carried into married life, where partners should share their meditations and mutually edify by means of them.  But, this type of meditation and discernment via sacral sexual fantasy is almost without theological precedence because of the environment of sexual suspicion bolstered by the Church’s culture.  

Therefore we must create a process we are going to call “sexual evangelization”.  Sexual evangelization is a three part process.  First, the most dangerous part, one must look at how the secular world manifests corrupt fantasies and desires. Second, one must deconstruct these fantasies, decode their symbology, distill their meaning, and look to their desires.  The rock bottom will either be a good desire corrupted or a manifestation of brokenness that can be healed. Sexuality and sexual desire were created good in Eden, so anything of sex that exists “ontologically” is good.  Again, according to Christan theodicy, it is the lack of the fulfillment of sexuality and sexual desire that causes all of our sexual problems.  Lastly, once we have the basic urges identified we can then seek to heal the broken ones and build the good ones into sacral fantasies.

Once this process is consciously exercised, one can seek to reshape their own fantasy life and thereby possibly reshape their sexual desire to be motivated by sacral signification.  The sacral sexual agenda has as a goal the evangelize sexuality to such an extent that over generations the practice of healthy sexual fantasy by premarital individuals will be intuitive joy and discernment as opposed to a conscious sexual evangelization. As we noted above, kinks and fetishes manifest the power dynamics, intimacy, and vulnerabilities that they seek to signify.  In the final section of this manual, we will offer ample translation from corrupt culture to parallel signification to aid the average practitioner of licit sexual fantasy to hone their skill.  But as it stands, there is little impetus to see nuptial life as religiously invested.  Marriage does not seem to be much of a “religious vocation”  This leads us to the next section of this manual and our second, social, aspect of the sacral sexual agenda, sculpting the narratives and myths of marriage to invest those called to it in their true vocation.   

The dearth of assistance concerning techniques of “pure” sexual fantasy for those in discernment is all the more reason to have sexually invested hagiography beyond the extremely rare “Saint mother had and raised many children, some of whom chose consecrated life.”  That last part concerning consecrated seems almost necessary for the hagiographical template in order to reaffirm that even in this narrative, celibacy is somehow the goal. One of our goals is a nuptial diarchy that is intuitively confident in the sacred nature of the sexual action because of well formed narratives in the church. Again the private nature of sexual communication between members of a nuptial dyad makes it difficult to ask the questions that need to be asked or to publically illustrate the concepts that need to be portrayed.  It seems scandalous (or maybe even pointless) to ask, how did Saints Louis and Zelie Martin use their sex life as a sanctifying aspect of their marriage?  The answer is obvious, they had many children, many of whom became nuns.  But my question revolves around their sex life as sacral sex.  Were they able to pull that off, and if so, how exactly did they do it?  As a married person, I would be very interested in the fulfilling sexual lives of married sexually active saints.  Of the entire Litany of the Holy Dyads at least some of these had to have mutually engaged in edifying sexual activity. And even though much of the cultural narrative (secular and sacred) works against sacral sex, I can’t imagine that it’s absolutely rare.

The agenda of sexual sacralization does not call for the censoring or abolition of the old hagiographical templates surrounding celibacy, virginity, or the inestimable value of consecrated.  It only seeks to balance these stories with strong hagiographical templates that involve not just the fact of children, but the basic techniques of sacral sexual rites as performed by the nuptial dyad.  Nuptial dyads need to start publicly discussing their experiences of sacred sex in calculated and documented ways so that we can develop a context for sacral sexual hagiographical templates.  This conversation is possible while maintaining a sense of modesty.  One can speak from experience in a way that does not voyerize that experience if one is speaking to teach, edify, and spiritually fulfil.  So for example one can speak about virtue in war from experience without glorifying violence by making a voyeuristic spectacle of it or seeming to “brag” on violence one had to do there to defend one’s life.  The same is true of how one or a dyad can convey spiritual aspects of their sexual life.  Concerns about modesty should not eliminate the voice of the nuptial dyads copncerning sacral sexualuty.  Without that voice, the institutions of nuptial dyads will continue to strive for sanctification, appropriate to their state in life, in the dark, via trial and error, and with no aid from the greater church.  This is a travesty.  

No good created of God goes so uncommented on by the Church in such proportion to its sanctifying power as the good of sex.  Western secular society has made public discourse on sex and sexuality more commonplace.  Publically talking about sex (even one’s personal experience of it) is not an objectively bad thing.  It is only “bad” when the discourse leads to unhelpful views of sex and sexuality.  The Church cannot let the simple secular narrative be the lone voice and therefore prevail.  The clerical and consecrated class have proved creatively deficient in engaging the powerful narratives of the secular world. This leaves the nuptial dyads, who must educate themselves on the abstract and then, awkward as it may be, speak from experience.

There needs to be a balancing of hagiographical templates such that those participating in the sacrament of marriage can look to narratives to appropriate and be able to experience intuitive ritual investment in their sexual lives.  This public discourse is not meant to be profane.  The purpose is to create a space for the supplementary communications of nuptial sexual communication. These supplementary communications, as we said, include affirmative vocabulary and hagiographical templates which create a mythic milieu to foster intuitive ritual buy in.  All this should exist in the public sphere such that this private sacramental sign can be shared in an appropriate way among the faithful toward mutual edification of nuptial dyads and of the greater church. 

In this section, we set out to map a sexual landscape and find a way to a more fulfilling Christain sexual spirituality.  We began by discussing and analyzing the loaded nature of language in concerning sex.  The entire conversant realm, both secular and theological, seems to work against the notion of sacral sex. We then elaborated on the nature of sacral sexual significance and parallel significance especially as it relates to the sexual life of the nuptial dyad.  Lastly we focused on the problems of language and myth in the Church that seem to stymy sacral sexual ritual investment and set out our basic agenda of sexual evangelization and development of hagiographical templates.  

In the next section, we will analyze three hagiographical templates in order to suggest a better balance in the saints considered for canonization and begin to balance the pedagogy of hagiography amiably toward the sacral sexual agenda. The hagiographical templates we will review concern states of life, discernment, and chastity.  The specific narratives will be the virgin martyr, the “discerned out” template, and “the chaste spouses”.  For each narrative, we will give the skeletal template.  Then we will discuss the general message and meaning of the hagiographical template.  Next, we will offer several balancing templates for each of the three that better frame their message, re-frame the same message for married life, or counterbalance a celibate message with a complimentary message concerning married life and sacral sexual significance. In the last section, we will discuss theories and techniques for the practical applications of sexual significance.

The Program of Sexual Hagiographical Expansion: Balancing Three Celibate Hagiographical Templates

In the last section, we set out to map a sexual landscape and find ways to a more fulfilling Christain sexual spirituality.  In this section, we will analyze three hagiographical templates in order to suggest a better balance in the saints considered for canonization and begin to balance the pedagogy of hagiography amiably toward the sacral sexual agenda. The hagiographical templates we will review concern states of life, discernment, and chastity.

In the last section, we will discuss theories and techniques for the practical applications of sexual significance.  We will attempt an in depth analysis of climactic and orgasmic significance followed by an analysis of Christain theodicy as signified in sacral sex. We will also develop an interpretive model for the significance of several sexual positions and offer commentary of the dynamic significant nature of foreplay.  

 

Hagiographical Template I: The Virgin Martyr and States of Life

As we noted in Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment calculated ritual communicates through object and action symbolically or more likely significantly.  These actions and objects gain their meaning from a narrative milieu, myth, that is also symbolically, existentially, and teleologically invested.  These characteristics are why ritual and myth sync so well with the dream world because that world operates via symbology rather than causality.

Now we are considering sacral sex in a ritual context and it is plain that the investment must be conscious because at present the symbols and significations are in no way bolstered by either the macro (secular) or micro (sacred) cultures.  Sexual evangelization is an aspect of the sacral sexual agenda that operates on a personal level as a spirituality.  Now we turn to the cultural mythic vacuum that renders participation with the grace of sacral sex both necessarily conscious and extremely difficult.  The agenda here is socio-cultural and longitudinal.  It is unlike “the sexual revolution” of the mid-twentieth century” because revolutions begin as disorganized, organic movements and that revolution particularly seemed to be unaware of its purposes and ends.  The sacral sexual agenda is calculated and consciously teleological.   In its social manifestation, it is an attempt to shape a mythic milieu over the generations in order to facilitate participation in sacral sex intuitively as well as generate official canonization for successive saints (preferably holy dyads) who are honored as masters of ritual sacral sex.

The methodology will be a program of sexual hagiographical expansion.  This program seeks to illuminate clandestine holiness in the world by relaying their sanctifying narratives.  From there people can recognize themselves and/or invest in these narratives. This program of sexual hagiographical expansion operates by taking the hagiographical templates that celebrate celibacy and virginity, analyzing them for their fundamental virtue and meaning, and then seek a balancing virtue or meaning in order to sculpt a template involving sacral sex, in which nuptial dyads can invest.  Once these templates are conceived and created it is up to the nuptial dyads to live this template through a conscious narrative appropriation and publicly attest to this, such that the theoretical template can become a significant narrative to be appropriated.  If culture accepts the template and saints are canonized in great enough numbers with adequate devotion, nuptial dyads may one day have the benefit of intuitive narrative appropriation.  In the previous section, we broached this program using the hagiographical template of the “martyr for purity”.  In this section we will analyze three hagiographical templates; a state of life narrative exemplified currently by “The Virgin Martyr” hagiographical template, A discernment narrative based on a hagiographical template we will call “Discerned Out”, and a lastly chastity narrative based on the hagiographical template we will call, “Chaste Spouses”.  We will begin with the foundational and widespread hagiographical template of the Virgin Martyr.

The virgin martyr template is one of the most ancient on Christian hagiography.  It demonstrates the early attempt to grapple with the virtue of celibacy as a counterbalance to Roman imperial sexual laxity.  Many of the current symbols and analogies for the celibate life (especially of females) in the Church spring from this hagiographical template.

The template roughly runs according to this pattern; a beautiful young (bio-)virginal female takes a private vow of celibacy, often symbolically affirming Christ as their spouse.  Then a pagan man or men, noticing her irresistible beauty.  They seek to engage in sexual intercourse with her either licitly, by a marriage proposal, or illicitly by blackmailing her via her profession of an illegal religion.  The saint invariably refuses and is subsequently denounced as a Christian.  This results in her arrest and she is turned over either to, the denouncer, a brothel, or roman soldiers so that they may have sex with her.  Again, invariably they are unable to perform this action, keeping her (bio-)virginity intact.  This impotency is either by miraculous intervention or often it is because, somehow after all this, they respect her so much they refrain.  Subsequently, the saint is martyred, often dying only after several, ever increasingly brutal failed attempts to kill her by various means.

This hagiographical template emerges from what was obviously a common historical scenario during the early persecutions of the church.  Interestingly at the same time as these great martyrs were witnessing to the faith, an equal number of nuptial dyads were witnessing in the same manner and evoking intercessory devotion.  The entire first part of the Litany of the Holy Dyads are martyrs from this same time period.  But as the persecutions abated, the hagiographical template of the martyred holy dyad fell off the radar due to a lack of need to inspire nuptial dyads to die a martyr’s death.  Meanwhile, the Virgin Martyr template continued in popular devotion.  The reason is that, though with the Edict of Milan there was no reason to inspire virgins to die a martyr’s death, in a society that placed a woman’s value in her ability to produce children, there was a need to inspire young women to accept the developing vocation of consecrated life.  Thus the templates in each case were templates meant to inspire fortitude.  But in the case of the virgin martyr, the fortitude translated to vocational inspiration and fortitude in the face of what was culturally the “more valuable” option, marriage.

The reason for the popularity of this template is not because virgin martyrs are “better saints”.  It’s because it helps the Church in an area that it was and is lacking, female adherents to consecrated life, by reminding the audience that virginal is equivalent to spiritually pure and is therefore worth dying for. It inspires young women to contemplate that life.  It gives them a narrative of fortitude and begins to develop the concept of Christo-spousal virginity that continues strongly to this day.  The macro secular culture still prefers married (or sexual) life to celibate life.  Thus, this hagiographical template is still extremely relevant.  The need for a template to recruitment into nuptial life seemed not necessary.  Thus, the template of the holy dyad faded into obscurity, no longer canonically regenerating, and no longer inspiring devotion.  But we could reflect on the development of the auxiliary purpose of promoting Christo-spousal virginity and remember the mistaken assumption of “ease of effective sexual action”. It turns out there is a great unmet need to catechize and inspire Christendom concerning sacral sex.  

The promotion of understanding sacrificial death under both states of life is laudable.  The promotion under the auspice of the virgin goes on to promote the Christo-spousal analogy. The consecrated virgin’s death is a statement on sacrifice, giving up the possibility things one never had, giving up sex, giving up a spouse, and then, when these things are offered, giving up her life out of love for Christ.  It is “consecration”; setting aside.  

The dyadnal sacrificial death is a death of life significantly fulfilled rather than set aside.  It is active, not passive.  The dyad lives a sacramentally significant life with their spouse, including sacrally significant sex, and then they die together gives up all the beauty they have attained for Christ in faith and hope.  

Much as the virgin martyr attained an auxiliary purpose (promotion of Christo-spousal analogy) that foundational story leads to an entire family of consecrated life hagiographical templates, so the original nuptial dyad could as well.  But what is missing is the sacral sexual significance.  Can we now begin to develop the foundational dyadnal martyrology into new modes and templates?  What would these look like?  Well, the foundational template needs to replace the Christo-spousal analogy with graphic analysis of sacral sex in order to allow for narrative appropriation.  The message is the simple basic beauty and goodness and manner of sacral sex, just as the virgin martyr template is the simple beauty of Christo-spousal analogy.   

If that seems sacrilegious, offensive, or voyeuristically off kilter it may help to explore the grotesque nature of early martyrology.  “In its truth”, the beauty, goodness, and sacral nature of sex cannot be sacrilegious and should not offensive.  Thus the only perceived problem here must be the suggestion of graphic narrative concerning sex for spiritual edification.  Sex is supposed to be done privately, not on display for all to see.  But no one is seeing anyone having sex, just as no one is seeing anyone martyred.  We are talking about a narrative that it is being told in the same way martyrology has been for two thousand years.  The aspects and symbols are there for pedagogical reasons.  

How one dies, especially for God, seems like an extremely intimate situation that should not be exploited for the voyeur. And certainly, as a Christain, to seek it out in order to witness it seems suspicious.  Yet to read the early martyrology leads one to suspect that the graphic violence is a hook to interest the reader into investing into the spiritual life of the saint.  This most intimate moment seems to be absolutely exploited to that rhetorical end.  OR the graphic description has a point to tell.  Possibly it generally relays the fortitude of the saints, or cruelty for the gentiles.  If these are good ends to display what seems like inappropriate cruelty and violence during the intimate situation of martyrdom, then why not the same rhetorical or pedagogical end for sacral sex?  The answer comes, because it may inspire people to lustful contemplation of sex.  This is true.  But that is not more of a danger than the grotesque martyrology leading to sublimation for cruelty or violent urges.  The danger of this for violence does not seem to outway the rhetorical implementation.  The morals here are much like the cultural puritanical holdovers of our culture where a PG-13 can display repeated brutally and graphically murdered, yet a movie that shows a moderate sex scene between two people in love, even married, warrants an R rating.      

As we noted earlier, why wouldn’t it be helpful to know and understand exactly how Saints Louis and Zelie Martin used their sex life in order to share grace and experience sanctification, down to positions, actions, and how they used them significantly?  Why would relaying that as catechesis and inspiration for fellow nuptial dyads be immoral?  Could that information be abused or misused in inappropriate ways?  Yes, but no less than grotesque martyrology could be used to fulfill unhealthy voyeurism of other kinds.  For nuptial dyads to be able to confidently share narratives of this kind from their lives would make great material for future dyads to better invest in the sacral rituals.  How much more empowering would it be if some holy dyads were canonized with this material as part of their hagiography?

Along with the narrative, one helpful supplementary maneuver may be to shape current vocabulary in a certain way to further bolster this narrative.  In this case, we are seeking to develop the idea of virginity to its natural Augustinian end.  How would the language, narrative, and culture change if Catholic culture was able to fully implement its spiritual understanding of virginity?  Again, Augustine seemed to think that virginity, or at least the “purity” of it, was in no way related to biology.  Rather it seems to be related to knowledge, intent, and will, much like how sinful culpability is related to action.  One strategy of the sacral sexual agenda may be to develop and grow this germinating concept of virginity and implement it to the honor of the nuptial dyad.  

How does one lose their virginity?  According to the common understanding, it happens according to what we call a bio-genital concept of virginity or bio-virginity for short.  In this conception, virginity is “lost” somewhere between genital bio penetration of the female by the male and male orgasm.  But this is not Augustine’s definition.  Nor is it everyone’s’ even today.  For example, Shug in The Color Purple had other ideas about virginity and it’s a loss,

I don’t like it [sex] at all. What is it like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I ain’t there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep.

She start to laugh. Do his business, she say. Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make

it sound like he going to the toilet on you.

That what it feel like, I say.

She stop laughing.

You never enjoy it at all? she ast, puzzle. Not even with your children daddy?

Never, I say.

Why Miss Celie, she say, you still a virgin.      

For Shug, loss of virginity relates directly to the experience of fulfilling physical and psycho-spiritual pleasure when engaging in sexual practice with another.  This cooperative concept of virginity is closer to the mark.  It very much suits a healthy secular understanding of sexuality.  

For Christianity, sexual pleasure in a nuptial context may meet the minimal threshold.  But it may be that we need to understand virginity as gradated, in similar ways as we understand culpability, according to investment in will and knowledge. We may understand that there are multifaceted levels of investment that “decrease” one's virginity, or better, grow their effective use of sexuality.  The first way to appreciate this would be to fully invest in the Augustinian model.  It may be assumed that in order to reach the pleasure the Shrug is talking about, one is willingly giving one’s self to another.  Thus one is losing one’s virginity by will. Just as one cannot accidentally sin, one cannot accidentally lose one’s virginity.  This is Augustine’s point regarding virginal purity in City of God.  It is why he advised against suicide in lieu if being raped.

But developing further, one may use a religious frame and apply sexual purity as active purity to the concept of virginity.  Active purity is positive and is focused on one’s sacral investment in sexuality.  This complements both current Christianity’s notion of passive purity (freedom from “sexual blemish”) and Augustine’s notion of virginity as linked to will. In an active context purity as reality exists in order to mutually gift sacral sex with another.  Here is where Shrug’s definition of losing one’s virginity leads to sexual behavior that misses the mark.  If one is simply seeking pleasure with another or others, this is sexuality that could be driven by lust, objectification, cruelty or any other number of spiritually unhealthy motivations.

Now we come to a possible second qualifier for loss of virginity developed out of a cooperative concept of virginity.  When adhering to the sacral sexual agenda, the cooperative concept of virginity also hinges on knowledge.  Christianity is not a gnostic religion, knowledge is helpful but not at all sufficient for salvation.  So for a nuptial dyad to have sex and enjoy the pleasure of mutual willful engagement is good grace-filled sex according to sacramental life. If they are in a culture where one can intuitively invest in sacral sex, they wouldn’t even need to have conscious knowledge of all the facts and skills of sacral sex in order to channel it to cooperate with the grace involved.  They would simply act, exhibit, signify, and cooperate.  But now we are at a point in our culture where our environment robs us of the intuitive investment of our sacral sexual rituals.  At this point, according to the sacral sexual agenda, one would need conscious knowledge of sacramental theology, symbols, and signs, sacramental cosmology, methods and meanings of sacral sex, how procreation relates to the ritual, etc. in order to give of one’s self, not just in pleasurable ways, but in sacrally significant ways to their partner and thereby fully cooperate with the grace of the sacred ritual.  Only if this can be archived has one fully lost, or rather given their virginity. In this context, it is not appropriate to say “lose”, it is only appropriate to say give, and that giving is necessarily mutual.  It could also be appropriate at this level to say “freed from” virginity.  In this linguistic connotation, purity and virginity are potentialities waiting to activate in the form of sacral sexual rites.  

This leveled understanding of virginity helps one understand the progressive graces of married life and allows one a window into the deeper beauty of consecrated life, even those of the consecrated virgin.  Thus Pope Francis noted that bio-virginity is not a requirement to enter into the vows of a consecrated virgin. He stated in his summary bulletin Instruction “Ecclesiae Sponsae Imago” on the “Ordo virginum”,

[It] should be kept in mind that the call to give witness to the Church’s virginal, spousal and fruitful love for Christ is not reducible to the symbol of physical integrity. Thus to have kept her body in perfect continence or to have practised the virtue of chastity in an exemplary way, while of great importance with regard to the discernment, are not essential prerequisites in the absence of which admittance to consecration is not possible.

    

Thus, rape certainly does not disqualify.  Even the engagement of “less culpable” sexual activity, sexual activity that does not strive for the fullness of sex, does not rob one of “virginity”, though in our framework it can rob one of purity because purity is the intention and practice of chastity, sexual activity according to one’s station in life.  Obviously this purity can easily be regained by repentance (whereas bio-virginity could never be “regained”).

Under the auspices of the cooperative conception of virginity, we can look back on the original hagiographical narratives of the virgin martyrs and ask were they “virgins”?  The answer is absolutely “yes”.  These young women in no way did the things that we are describing. They chose a life of consecration, thus their virginity was set aside and the dormancy involved in that sacrifice was made sanctifying.  Indeed, by our definitions, many people probably die some manner of “virgin”, even if they have several children.  Then there is the question of whether these young women were “classical” virgins.  

Were they bio-virgins?  The hagiographical template invariably demands that they were.  Generally, the hagiography points out that even though the young woman was, for example, turned over to a house of prostitution, no one was able to “violate” them.  Often this type of language is supplemented with tales of overwhelming respect of the pagans for the protagonist's protection of their virginity (though not enough respect for her life to keep them from murdering the saint).  Or the hagiography relates some miraculous paralysis of the perpetrators.   For example,  the very simple hagiography of Saint Denysa of Troas runs thusly; 

[She was] a Christian girl ordered to sacrifice to pagan idols during the persecutions of Decius. She refused and was given over to a house of prostitution to be raped into submission. She fought against her "customers" until exhausted at which point her guardian angel appeared and frightened the men away from her. The next morning she fled the house to the site where a mob had dragged Saint Andrew and Saint Paul of Troas, and began proclaiming her faith. The proconsul had her dragged away and executed. Martyr.          

No one doubts this girl's courage.  Her story perfectly fits the hagiographical template of the virgin martyr.  The “angel” in this narrative is clearly meant to be interpreted as a celestial being, but could just as easily be a person who finally saw through the cruelty and protected her.

What is curious is the hagiographies where no one came to protect them; where it simply states, “they were unable to violate her” with no detail.  According to both the cooperative concept of virginity and Saint Augustine, if the oppressors had raped the saint, she still would neither have been “violated” nor lost her virginity.  The idea of virgin martyrs who are raped before their death seems counter intuitive.  But only if one is invested in a strictly bio-genital conception of virginity.  The death of a virgin martyr who is raped could go far to illustrate just how much these saints clung to and appropriated the passion of Christ, giving up their most cherished position, their very body.  It only seems off base if one has the poorly crafted concept of purity and virginity we have been discussing. One so crafted honestly believed that what they were “guarding” is a biological state of affairs, which they then went on to “protect” by having their entire bio-reality destroyed.  Clearly this makes no sense.  But the bio-genital concept of virginity reigns supreme in the general culture and purity is equivalent to virginity in Christian culture, thus we make excuses for such contradictory ridiculousness.

To illustrate how ridiculous this can get, we come to what I like to call, “the curious edit of Saint Marciana”.  One morning as I was reading the daily saints one of the feasts was Saint Marciana.  I remember clearly that I was skimming through this painfully standard virgin martyr template when a striking phrase caught my eye. The phrase was “sex toy”.  I came to a full stop re-read the sentence and then reread the entire passage.  Sure enough, the hagiography said that this pious saint vandalized a statue of the goddess Diana.  She was then arrested, “handed over to the gladiators to be a sex toy”, then subsequently gored by a bull in the amphitheater of Caesarea.  It fascinated me that this story of an early female martyr was so graphic in its portrayal of her rape, and yet she was considered a “virgin martyr”.  From this, I came to all the conclusions we have heretofore discussed.  Much to my dismay, a year later as I again came across the story of Saint Marciana the app from which I read the daily saints had been edited.   I need the reader to understand that this app is filled with typos and odd inaccuracies that I come across year after year, but this one thing seemed to have raised enough anxiety to merit a change.  The phrase “sex toy” was removed and a whole new passage was added where the gladiators were paralyzed for three hours as she prayed for their salvation.  

I didn’t look into the historical development of the story, but the hagiographical development in this one app speaks volumes.  The pious cannot handle the objectifying phrase “sex toy” applied to a virginal saint.  But gladiators doubtless engaged in such cruel rape and as we discussed, they would not be “violating her purity or virginity” if they raped her.  Being someone’s sex toy by force in no way mitigates virginity under a cooperative concept of virginity.  But the bio-genital concept of virginity coupled with an equivocation of virginity and purity keeps a powerful hold on Christian culture and saintly hagiography.  

That influence and Christiandom’s inability to talk about healthy spiritually significant sex in public ways neutralize the possibility of hagiographical templates involving sacral sexual narratives of holy dyads. The coupling of bio-genital model of virginity with a concept of passive sexual purity also makes virginity the rare thing.  But, by our calculations many if not most people die virgins, because becoming a non-virgin is a difficult thing.  It takes mutual will, knowledge, practice, and cooperation with grace.  Under the cooperative concept of virginity “non-virgins” are extremely special people.  They are the people who had the vision, discipline, and effective love to make sacral sex signify divine mysteries.  If the sacral sexual agenda played out well, in one regard “virgin” would be an honorary title, yet in a profound way, “non-virgin” would be even more impressive, because it connotes a particular type of sacramental success, they are more than just a “non” they are sexual co-signifiers. 

Hagiographical Template II: Discernment and “Discerning Out”

 

The second hagiographical template concerns discernment.  We are going to call it “discerned out”.  This template covers pretty much what you would expect, someone decided they did not want to be married and devoted themselves to consecrated life instead.  Again, given the force of dominant culture arrayed against investment in consecrated life, this is an extremely valuable and necessary template.  It would seem on the face of it that there is no need to develop a balance to this template given that most of our “love stories” concern courtship, relaying the whos, whys, and hows of attaining a lover.  But we may discover that there is still much to develop in these narratives once we have distilled the meaning and effect of the “discerned out” hagiographical template.

There are two basic models for discerning out of married life that we need to outline.  The first template runs thusly; a young Christian (usually woman, but in this template not always) is arranged in marriage by their parents.  But the young person “feels the call to religious life”.  This narrative then relates what must be done by the young person.  They must resist their parents, who have legitimate authority over them, and follow a higher authority, God.  Ultimately they win this battle by one strategy or another.  

The second hagiographical template is rarer and a little more disturbing.  In this template, the prospective saint actually gets married, but in the course of being married realizes (or finally effectively asserts) that this is not the vocation they were called to and with the permission of their spouse, they leave the marriage and enter into consecrated life. 

There are countless examples of the first story and they offer young people a framework for fortitude to follow their legitimate call.  But the imbalance of hagiography and culture of suspicion concerning the religious nature of marriage often colors the hagiography in dangerous ways.  For example, notice the portrayal of Blessed Columba of Rieti.

  

At her birth, angels gathered around Columba's house to sing. During her Baptism, a dove suddenly flew down to the font. She was raised in a poor but pious family; her parents gave away nearly everything thing they had to people even poorer than themselves. As a small girl Columba learned to spin and sew; she and her mother repaired the clothes of the local Dominicans. 

 

Columba quickly developed a strong devotion to Saint Catherine of Siena and to the Blessed Virgin Mary. While still in her teens she prayed about her vocation in life, and received a vision of Christ on a throne surrounded by saints. She took this as instruction to dedicate herself to God, and so she cut herself off from the world, made a private vow of chastity, and spent her time in prayer. Unbeknownst to Columba, her parents had arranged a marriage for her, but she cut off her hair and sent it to her would-be suitor, an accepted way at that time of telling him that she was devoting her life to God, not marriage.

Saint Columba had an extraordinary life and doubtless discerned her vocation well.  But the way this hagiography portrays that discernment is just odd enough to warrant investigation.  First, there is a beautiful portrayal of a domestic church well run.  There is evidence of baptismal priesthood well exhibited, an environment of learning which fostered devotion, and a family of values that bolsters their children.  Then the story relates a vision Saint Columba had of Christ surrounded by his saints and her interpretation leads her to reject marriage as a vocation.  Why?  She had a devotion to and relationship with Catherine of Siena, who was a consecrated, but she also, obviously had a direct and formative experience of well functioning autocephalous nuptial diarchy.  As we pointed out in Two Paths for Expanding True Love, both are forms of communal living within the body of Christ.  So why is the vision of Christ surrounded by saints immediately interpreted as, “this means i should enter consecrated life”?  The answer is in the last line quoted.  After relating the manner that Saint Columba rejects her suitor the narrator states, “an accepted way at that time of telling him that she was devoting her life to God, not marriage.” The logical implications are painful for a dyarch who loves their vocation.  A married person cannot be dedicated to God, not through their marriage, maybe not even despite their marriage.  This then links back to the vision, where all the saints in the vision are assumed to be consecrated.

This is not meant to disparage Saint Columba’s call to celibacy.  It is meant to draw attention to how the hagiography not only extols consecrated life but subtly sets the reader in opposition to married life as a religious reality. The message relayed in the discerned out hagiographical template is of supremative value.  Social structures and obligations are secondary to calls by God to vocation and/or state of life.  Without this message, we could never have many of the beautiful stories of the Litany of the Slaves.  How could Christendom have had Popes who were former slaves without such a message?  But the secondary messages of the frame of the template concerning the value of sexuality and marriage are damaging to those who feel they have a call to married life, and that is unacceptable.  Again, the problem is not the saint’s personal call, it’s the narrative frame.  

For example, without fail, a saint in this template is on their way to being married, “BUT they feel the call to religious life”.  Well, the term “but” could be an indicator that they felt their calling as a consecrated and since that is their calling, it is what is religiously required of them.  But this is not really how it is meant.  As we noted in Two Paths for Expanding True Love “this seems to be the way that most Catholics today make the division of the church.  When they refer to “religious life”  they are talking about priests, brothers, sisters, monks, and nuns and specifically not married or single life people.”  In church parlance “religious life” is consecrated and clerical life.  Married life is decidedly not “religious life”.   Without a balance, this hagiography stands alone.  Though it does not explicitly state that sexuality is evil or wholly corrupt, in unison with the milieu we are reviewing it certainly bolsters the idea.  With few exceptions, the discerner discerns away from marriage to the celibate state in the hagiography as it stands.  This near exclusive repetition frames a discernment away from marriage as equivalent to a discernment toward religion and therefore toward God.  It is always framed in opposition to parents, who are married and created the discerner by means of sex, so the progression of the narrative is from sex to celibacy.  These failings are easily correctable.  There simply needs to be a balance.

A well balanced hagiographical milieu would present as many stores of people discerning away from consecrated life and toward married life.  These do exist, but they are extremely rare.  Even these rare examples often intensify the problems of discerning toward married life.  Take the example of the strange case of Saint Ethelbert of East Anglia.  Saint Ethelbert’s hagiography is devoted almost completely to his discernment process.  He does discern away from consecrated life toward married life.  Our problem is that his discernment is apparently wrong and given the rarity of his trajectory, the hagiography reinforces all the negative implications of sexuality and marriage we have been discussing.  Here is the presentation of his story,

A pious youth, he would have preferred religious life, but was in line for the throne. King of East Anglia for 44 years. He would have preferred to remain celibate, but agreed to seek the hand of Althryda (Alfrida) daughter of Offa, King of the Mercians in order to continue a stable line to the crown. There were a number of supernatural indications that it was a bad choice, but Ethelbert went anyway. Due to court intrigues, Ethelbert was murdered by a man named Grimbert at the instigation of his father-in-law, Offa of Mercia. Often listed as a martyr.

As a nuptial dyarch I have to ask, what is the point of the way this narrative is framed?  Martyrs who are not “objective martyrs” usually have some brief explanation in their hagiography, for example, “martyr to purity”.  But this account does not tell us why he is “often listed as a martyr”.  Was his father in law annoyed that he was pious and it was rubbing off on the man’s daughter?  That would actually be nuptial affirmative, demonstrating how dyarchy spiritually mutually edify.  Or was it just court intrigue, in which case the story does not tell us anything other than that he made an extremely poor choice regarding his vocation, which is a personal call.  It tells us he had a conflict in duties, did his best to choose and God seemed to punish him with death.  

The reader might respond, “it doesn't say that God punished him with death!”  But the text does say that during his discernment “there were a number of supernatural indications that it was a bad choice” and directly after that we are told of his death leading to a subconscious connection of foreshadowing.  This leads to my most paranoid interpretation of this story.  Is the reader supposed to derive from this hagiography that simply having the call to the celibate life is sanctifying, even if one does not follow it, whereas marriage is so irreligious that it leads to death?  Are his preference for celibacy and his sanctifying acceptance of his death (martyr) as a result of his poor choice what leads to his sanctity?  Given the frame of Saint Ethelbert going against the call to “religious life”,  are the sanctifying baptismal calls to be “priest, prophet, and king” nullified for those in marriage even if they are a literal king? Only the author of this train wreck of a hagiography can answer these questions.  But any reader who is invested in living the faith can observe that some major clarifications are needed.  Dear reader, this is one of our extremely rare examples of a person who discerned away from consecrated life and toward married life.  What is a person with the call to marriage supposed to make of this?  Recall that this singular story is offset by an entire reposit of hagiographies where successors to the throne abdicate in order to follow “religious” (read, consecrated) life. 

  Often nuptial hagiographies end with the second template of discerned out, the members of the diarchy leave the marriage and transition to consecrated life.  Sometimes after one spouse dies they embrace consecrated life.  Then there is the extremely rare instance of what is truly needed, a template of a full embrace of the call to a nuptial vocation against a trajectory toward consecrated life.  One example is Blessed Anacleto González Flores.  In his hagiography it states,

He entered seminary, was an excellent student, but realized that he did not have a call to the priesthood and dropped out. Lawyer in the archdiocese of Guadalajara, Mexico. Married to María Concepción Guerrero, they had two children. He attended Mass daily, visited prisoners, and taught catechism.          

           

 

Here we have the basics for the template we need, a template where someone discerns into marriage based on an honest call, as opposed to duty to parents, which is usually the motive for the spousal saint who upon widowhood transitions to consecrated life.  One will notice the employment of language in this hagiography.  The narrative does not describe Blessed Anacleto González Flores’ discernment as “feeling the call to religious life”.  Rather it is extremely subtly crafted in opposition to that.  The hagiography does not assert that he has a “call to married life”, just that he does not have a call to the priesthood.  The priesthood is seen as a “religious calling”  , married life is seen as a default, which is neutral at best, or even regarded as damaging if the narrative frame of Saint Ethelbert is to be believed. Again, this view of marriage as dangerous is based on the negative views of passive sexual purity we have discussed.

With appropriate balance, we can truly see how each person is called by God to their vocation and state in life.  Blessed Anacleto González Flores discerned a call to religious life. His call was not to consecrated life, nor to clerical life, it was to married life as religious life. As it stands, marriage is portrayed as, “for those not strong enough for the sacrifices consecrated life”.  And this may be true.  But that does not mean they don’t love God as much, or that they are not as holy or effective at practicing the art of religion.  The marital discerner is not strong enough because they are not called to that form of life.  In fact, they, “discern out” of consecrated life if they are doing the spiritually correct thing. On the flip side, those who are called to consecrated are called to it because they are not strong enough for the creative signification of married life.  These dynamics were discussed in the treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love.  These vocations and lifestyles are complementary and each serves its adherents in various ways.  Not everyone is suited to either and if one is called by God to one or the other, logically that path is the best path for them.

More templates following the model of  Blessed Anacleto González Flores would be a great help in this regard.  But one may respond, “aren't there plenty of stories on how to find a spouse?”   Again, we did note in Two Paths for Expanding True Love that most of our cultural love stories are courtship stories, stories on how to find a spouse rather than stories on how to be married.  This is a serious lack that the sacral sexual agenda is in part meant to address.  But now we can take a look at the advice given concerning that discernment and notice the serious lack of cultural support the discerner of sacramental marriage has.  

In most western love (courtship) stories, what is being discerned is in no way sacramental marriage, it is marriage, or more often in these latter days “relationships”, defined by modern culture as emotive and erotically discerned and binding by intellectual consent.  Here is the template for a modern secular story of partnership discernment:  Boy meets girl.  There presents some form of emotive or desire based attraction.  The couple must surmount some sort of external obstacle, then they assent to their union and “live happily ever after”.

Again, the secular template has mirrors of the consecrated hagiography.  There are many secular romantic comedies that bolster the message of the first “discerned out” hagiographic template and assert that “romantic love trumps socio-cultural conventions”.  These socio-cultural conditions are the external obstacles that provide the narrative tension of the story.  They could be overbearing parents, rid social structures that prohibit their love, economic forces, or preexisting romantic prospects that carry obligations, yet are not conforming to the defined romantic notion of love.  

This last example leads to how the secular world presents the second “discerned out” hagiographical template.  In this case, one does not leave marriage with permission in order to pursue a different spiritual state of life.  Rather, it is a story of divorce of a loveless (or maybe just lacking) marriage in order to pursue new romantic possibilities.  These awful stories completely undermine the indissoluble nature of sacramental marriage, the undermine any mature sense of commitment, and they completely disregard any notion of sacral sexuality.    

Given the emotive nature of the process, there are actually little to no skills imparted here period.  The nuptial discerner is left with no practical way to understand and seek their goal or invest in their discernment.  One who seeks a sacramental marriage, involving sacral sex, can forget aid from the larger culture.  The further tragedy is that the Church in all her wisdom has left this discernment process, including the shaping narratives in the hands of secular cultural forces.  

The sacral sexual agenda demands a better catechesis for discernment.  In this case, we need a simple nuptial discernment counterbalance of both varieties of the hagiographical template.  Blessed Anacleto González Flores is a good start, but there needs to be more, more varieties of discernment, and more skills for discerning.  There also need to be hagiographies that follow the second template, good and holy people that leave consecrated life because they realized their call to sacramental marriage and their call to sacral sex.  “But isn’t that blasphemous?!”  Why?  If they were called to that, then its no more of a mistake than marrying, realizing your mistake, and getting proper permission to live a sanctified life according to God’s plan for you as a consecrated person.  Such a balance would drive home the original message of a personal call by God that defies all social conventions.

It bears repeating that such hagiography should offer skills and material for living a sanctifying life.  In the case of the holy dyads (balancing the consecrated virgins), the nuptial discerner potentially offers great skills for the discernment of nuptial life and sacral sex.  These stories can be effectively used to demonstrate the methods and sanctity of licit and edifying sexual fantasy.  This fantasy is a major discernment tool for discerning nuptial life as a path, and then for discerning which person one wished to share that life with.  Again, this is not lustful and self gratifying sexual fantasy, this is a contemplation in the hope of sacral sexual signification.  It is a form of prayer, it is beautiful and it is necessary for well executed nuptial discernment. The married Christain may or may not seek revelations through ecstatic visions.  But by their vocation, they are seeking revelation through sacral signification in their own corporeal reality.  In the previous template, we imagined a host of hagiographic examples and lessons of sacral sexual significance by various holy dyads.  For this template we imagine the same, but instead of holy dyads, the lesson is discernment and we are getting a host of methods of discernment through fantastic engagement just as we discussed in Two Paths for Expanding True Love. But the fantastic engagement is via sacral sexual fantasy, a skill unheard of in both secular and sacred culture, but a skill that would be beneficial beyond comparison.  

Hagiographical Template III: Chastity and “Chaste spouses”

The last hagiography we will go over regards the virtue of chastity.  We will call the template “the chaste spouses”.  This template differs from the other two in that, unfortunately, it is beyond needing a balance.  It is actually in need of linguistic correction and intense development.  As we noted above, hagiography is a teaching tool of the Church which has no “officialdom”.  This means that unauthoritative members of the Church can sculpt them, and there is no official standard to compare them to because they are windows into someone's life, not a series of interconnected principles.

Now we come to a hagiographical template with an unfortunate linguistic turn, the misapplication of the term chastity.  These types of technical semantics seem to have almost no relevance; until that is, they do.  Then the effect is severely damaging.  Here is the problem, there is a difference between chastity and celibacy.  Celibacy is abstaining from sexual activity, for whatever reason.  It implies a life choice with a permanent trajectory, but it need not be.  One may take temporary vows of celibacy.  Celibacy is a negative investment, it is abstinence from action.  Chastity has the potential to lean more affirmatively.  It is not simply “refraining from sexual activity”, though, it often involves that.  The treatise Birth Control vs Labor Rights? developed the three reasons for chastity; pragmatic reasons, moral reasons, and sacral reasons. There we defined it most generally “Chastity is performance of sexual activity appropriate to one’s age and station in life.  Thus it varies between children, consecrated, cleric, and married.”  As the reader can see, most of the vocations and states in life require a certain level of celibacy. Thus in many contexts, it is easy and often useful to simply equate chastity and celibacy, but they are not the same thing.  Chastity is a virtue, celibacy is a state of life which may be a participation in chastity, or it may be motivated by or the result of unhealthy dispositions.

In Birth Control vs Labor Rights? we defined chastity in order to illuminate the context of a failing sexual education program in Catholic schools. These programs are predominantly modeled on similar secular programs and thus mostly cover pragmatic reasons for chastity.  The Catholic school system may delve into moral reasons for chastity, but very rarely do they delve into the sacral reasons.  Only recently with a wider study of Pope Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body has the curriculum even approached this idea.  The sacral sexual agenda seeks to offset this imbalance in favor of a sacral investment in chastity.  That investment is positive and affirmative and teleologically focused, not negative and simply passive.  This leads us to the hagiographical template for the “Chaste spouses”.

The template runs like this; two people enter into an arranged marriage.  One or the other is “pious” in their approach to God, possibly feeling the “call to religious life” (meaning consecrated life of course).  Out of some sort of respect for each other, doubtless informed by the notion of passive purity equated with bio-virginity they decide to live together as man and wife, but in a state of celibacy.

    As we shall see, the historical fact of celibacy in marriage is in no way a problem for us here.  But there are a series of implicative train wrecks that, once again, cast extreme suspicion upon married life and especially married life as sexually expressive life.  The first problem is that the hagiography mislabels their agenda, they live celibately not chastely.  In fact, because of that misapplication and the author’s assumption that they are synonymous, we have no way of knowing if this situation is chaste.  The natural ends of married life usually involve mutual sharing through sexuality.  We will review situations where that may not need to be the case, but in all of them, both partners have come to this through spiritual discernment coupled with their supplementary communication.  In many of the stories that use this template, we don’t know if that was well pulled off.  Therefore, since married life is meant to signify through sacral sexuality, celibacy in this context may not be a cooperation with the virtue of chastity.  It matters because again the narrative subliminally bolsters the idea that purity equals bio-virginity.  Even if these couples have consummated their marriage (some do, some do not) the implication of the hagiography is that it is an intrinsically virtuous thing for them to reject nuptial sexual engagement, to reject the sacral ritual of their vocation.  As we said in section one, marriage is the only sacrament where the attitude is “yes it’s a sacrament, but it’s better if you don’t”.  Now the feeling is, “at least if we don’t do the sacred things that this sacrament calls one to, we can be pure and holy.”   

This leads to a further and greater problem with this template as it is employed.  There is a semantic maneuver that has profoundly disturbing spiritual implications.  Again, chastity is a virtue, celibacy is a state of life and as such, celibacy is a possible example of that virtue.  But by the way this template employed, celibacy is portrayed as having the intrinsic status of virtue and that is not the case.  Celibacy can certainly be virtuous.  But in marriage, chastity is most often normatively achieved through sexual action.  The summation of chastity in marriage is when the couple has become a pair of sexual co-signifiers and achieved the status of non-virgins, they have successfully cooperated with the grace of the sacrament and ritually signified divine mysteries through their sexual lives.  By the subtle maneuvers of this template, diarchies are robbed of any sense of achieving this virtue as a virtue.  This dishonesty is a great tragedy for the Church.

It behooves us to offer a drastic reform of this template.  We are not seeking to scrub the idea of virtuous celibate nuptial dyads.  We are seeking an assumption of the goodness of sacral sex or an adequate explanation as to why celibacy was chosen by a nuptial dyad.  That explanation cannot simply be “the virtue of chastity”. It cannot simply be the assumption that sex is objectively impure.  There may be many good and virtuous reasons to abstain from certain sexual activities in a marriage. 

An example might be that the couple realizes that they are not skilled enough at sacral sexual practice to achieve the status of non-virgins, and they decide together to put their time and effort to better use.  Better use could be any number of things, prayer, charity, efforts at social justice, all the exercise called for by the baptismal priesthood.  It should not be assumed that just because at some point the nuptial dyad chose celibacy because of a feeling of sacral deficiency, that they were not gifted children.  God is benevolent and charitable.  He gifts us far more than we deserve, and children are not simply a reward for those who achieved the status of non-virgin.  Among many things they are a sign of God’s bounty, extended to the nuptial dyad.  Perhaps the nuptial dyad chose celibacy (temporary or permanent) in order to better focus on raising and shaping their domestic church.  Many of the martyrs in the Litany of the Holy Dyads were not just spouses, but whole families who die together.  Diocletian seemed to have a knack for capturing entire domestic churches and eradicating them.  

It takes constant practice and great effort to strive for the status of non-virgin.  As a parent, I can assure the reader that children in the house tend to inhibit sexual life and practice.  It takes great effort to run a domestic church.  The time and creativity it takes, the constant adaptation, learning, teaching, collaboration, and cooperation that the dyarchs must do is a staggering weight.  It is conceivable that a nuptial dyad, taking both of these things extremely seriously, chooses together to cut their losses on one, and since parents can’t cut losses on children, the goal of non-virgin may be at least temporarily tabled.  I don’t personally think that abstinence would be required, but perhaps a nuptial dyad discerned that in their life.  In this case, we can assume the celibacy is temporary, and they intend to “get back to original goals when they have time.  One could imagine situations where that decision would need to be permanent. For example, they discern that a constant insurmountable concupiscent problem was causing them troubles in their marriage.  Those problems could be relational, spiritual etc.  This does not mean they discerned poorly in getting married.  It means they are working together on their salvation, and this is a powerful signification in their public as well as private lives as living sacraments.

A second example of the reform of the celibate nuptial dyad is less of a choice of celibacy and more of an adaptation of sexuality that comes with health and aging.  As a nuptial dyad ages, sexuality changes, and hopefully matures.  As biology takes its toll (on the male body especially) or health concerns strike either partner, the dyad may not be able to perform the full gambit of sacral ritual it once did.  It may be that a couple transitions in a healthy way to sexual communication that is not “traditional sexual activity” (coitus).  The question becomes, how does a couple continue to sexually communicate given the circumstances.  This is not “choosing celibacy”.  This is developing sexual communication far beyond how most Catholic sexual morality discusses it. It doesn’t simply involve genital reception and penetration.  It is not necessarily concerned with the male climax, exactly how and where it happens like much of Catholic sexual morality seems to be.  It may involve more significant craft and more ritual objects than the nuptial dyad had conceived of using when they were first wed.  In the following section, we will seek to lay out strategies for sacral sexual engagement and we will find many ways that sacral sexual communication can work.  But it may be that the couple discerns that genital reception and penetration is no longer their means of sexual communication.  Is this celibacy?  I wouldn’t necessarily define it so, but some may.

In either of these or any other celibate spouse hagiographical templates that may be concived, there are some requirements that need to be met in order to avoid being offensive to pious ears.  The first is that the decision must be theocentric and not modeled off of temporal and culturally bound (even “Catholic” culturally bound) ideas of sexuality.  God created sexuality good and it remains fundamentally so.  Second, the decision must be made through mutual consent. It cannot be one partner’s decision because of their own issue.  Sacrifice is a possible motivation, i.e. that one partner needs celibacy and the other sacrifices sexuality for the other.  But that model is not preferred, because sacral sex is the default expression of chastity in a sacramental marriage.  That leads to the third reason, the decision must be for vocationally appropriate reasons.  Since sacral sexual significance is chastity for the nuptial vocation, the reasons for celibacy must be seriously considered because they go against natural and preferred aspects of chastity.  The last qualifier is that the hagiography must make these former qualifiers clear.  If the detail of “celibate spouses” is dropped in a hagiography, then, for the sacral sexual agenda to succeed, the message of the detail must be evident.  Take for example the odd case of Saint Urbicius of Clermont his hagiography runs thusly,

Second bishop of the diocese of Clermont; his wife entered a convent and he went to his diocese. However, his wife was unsatisfied with her new life, left the convent, returned to Urbicius and said she did not wish to give up married life.  Seeing her, Urbicius realized how much he had missed her, and let her move in with him; they told people she was his sister who was there to keep house for him. The bishop’s conscience soon got the best of him, and he left both wife and diocese to live in penance in a monastery.

What was the sting of conscience? Was it impure sexual activity? Was it the lie to the people? Did he objectify his wife?  Was their discernment to celibacy poorly made?  Did he “dismiss her for political gain” and regret it?  There are a host of ways this hagiography could be interpreted.  It’s hard to see from this story any sanctity of celibacy in the situation, but when coupled with the standard template one may mistakenly assume that the problem was that he had sex with his wife.  That, in isolation, is a dangerous interpretation.  It seems, rather, there was a poor or misguided discernment on the part of the dyad.

The simple deduction is that there was no mutual consent and Saint Urbicius of Clermont simply laid down the law.  He told his beloved that he wanted to be a bishop and for that to happen, she needed to be out of the picture.  This makes her action in the story understandable.  It is interesting in this story that when she returns he takes her back because “he misses her”.  There is true affection between them.  Maybe the poor discernment was on both of their parts and they mutually decided to reconnect.  Then the real problem comes into play.  Saint Urbicius of Clermont does not have the strength of his vocation.  He cannot accept that marriage is his call, possibly because “sex is impure”, but more likely his political aspiration gets in the way.  This is a story of sanctifying penitence, not sanctifying chastity through passive purity.  The climax of the story is his realization that he has wronged everyone involved.  He then retires as a vow breaker of every variety to repentance.  Again, a spirituality of passivity is promoted, willfully sacrificing both wife and bishopric in repentance.  But was that the most just and noble course of action?  A diocese can readily garner a new bishop, but we have no idea what happened to the wife, to whom he was sacramentally and indissolubly bound. 

This tale is tragic, but it is not a tale of spousal chastity.  It is not a tale of a holy dyad.  We know this because the wife is neither canonized nor even named in the story.  This is the story of a single man’s sinful crippling failing and his pathetic misguided repentance.  This makes this story actually a story of God’s great mercy that he accepts a repentance so ill executed.  But all of this has to be deduced.  If one is invested in celibacy as the purest form of spirituality, much if not all of the lesson can be easily lost.

With the failings of Saint Urbicius of Clermont and God’s mercy made clear we can now turn to the last reform of the chaste spouse template, the hagiographical template of sexual struggle.  This template would display the struggle of participation with the virtue of chastity, fully realized to its natural end in the sacrament of marriage. That is to say, it is a template for holy dyads who strived for and struggled with their virginal status.  This means, they have sex, but they have a hard time achieving the status of non-virgins.  

There are many ways this hagiographical template can play out.  Being a moral and sacramental exercise the template could fall on either end of the spectrum of grace and free will.  Diarchies could work into conscious signification through discipline.  Diarchies could achieve conscious signification by sudden and even unexpected grace.  With sudden or disciplined anticipated achievement the diarchs could realize the significance as “there the whole time”, because grace is a gift, not a merit. And on and on …

The practical use of the hagiographical template, much like early martyrdom templates, is to give encouragement.  Everyone assumes that sex magically works on its own to express love, to bind two people together, to “be amazing”, but like any virtue, this is often not the case.  Communication is hard.  Building intimacy is often hard.  A hagiographical template where a holy dyad must work through these struggles on the way to achieving the crown of mutual non-virginity would be an amazing and edifying testament.  It could help people successfully discern their call to consecrated life, realizing they are not suited to such spirituality.  It could also serve as a warning for common traps and hangups of sexuality that mitigate the success of sacral signification.  This may come off as classic culturally Catholic sex bashing, but it must be rememberd that the goal here is good sex, so any negativity aimed at sexuality in this template assumes a positive sexual end.

In the three hagiographical templates, we covered we often noted narrative possibilities.  We would say, the narrative could show how holy dyads do X or strive sexually for Y.  But these stories cannot simply be fabricated.  Hagiography must be rooted in history and the personal sanctity of those who came before us.  We pointed out a two fold strategy that the sacral sexual agenda is meant to take.  One goal is personal, through sexual evangelization, and one is social through reform of hagiographical templates.  But these cannot happen until nuptial dyads start not only living their vocation to the fullest but publicly discussing that life, that sexual significance.  Thus we must proceed to the final section of this manual, a halting and feeble attempt to begin the conversation of practical techniques and strategies for sacral sexual significance and the achievement of non-virginity.     

    

In the first section, we set out to map a sexual landscape and find a way to a more fulfilling Christain sexual spirituality.  We began by discussing and analyzing the loaded nature of language in concerning sex.  The entire conversant realm, both secular and theological, seems to work against the notion of sacral sex. We then elaborated on the nature of sacral sexual significance and  parallel significance especially as it relates to the sexual life of the nuptial dyad.  Lastly, we focused on the problems of language and myth in the Church that seem to stymy sacral sexual ritual investment and set out our basic agenda of sexual evangelization and development of hagiographical templates.

In this section, we analyzed three hagiographical templates in order to suggest a better balance in the saints considered for canonization and begin to balance the pedagogy of hagiography amiably toward the sacral sexual agenda. The hagiographical templates we reviewed concerned states of life, discernment, and chastity.  The specific narratives were the virgin martyr, the “discerned out” template, and “the chaste spouses”.  For each narrative, we gave the skeletal template.  We then discussed the general message and meaning of the hagiographical template.  Next, we offered several balancing templates for each of the three that better frame their message, re-frame the same message for married life, or counterbalance a celibate message with a complimentary message concerning married life and sacral sexual significance. 

In the last section, we will discuss theories and techniques for the practical applications of sexual significance.  We will attempt an in depth analysis of climactic and orgasmic significance followed by an analysis of Christain theodicy as signified in sacral sex. We will also develop an interpretive model for the significance of several sexual positions and offer commentary on the dynamic significant nature of foreplay.

Practical Application: Parallel Significance and an Analysis of Sexual Ritual

In the first section, we set out to map a sexual landscape and find a way to a more fulfilling Christain sexual spirituality.  We began by discussing the loaded nature of language in concerning sex.  In the next section, we analyzed three hagiographical templates in order to suggest a better balance in the saints considered for canonization and begin to balance the pedagogy of hagiography amiably toward the sacral sexual agenda. The hagiographical templates we reviewed concerned states of life, discernment, and chastity.  In this last section, we will discuss theories and techniques for the practical applications of sexual significance.

Up to this point we have been discussing sacral sexual significance fairly abstractly and with few details and examples.  We have certainly noted that as things stand culturally, this ritual is in need of conscious ritual investment.  The practices of lucid waking outlined in Somnium Spirituality may be helpful, especially as these techniques facilitate conscious corporeal signification.  This spirituality allows investment in a reality where symbology as signification, is the modus of flux, as opposed to our world where causality is.  Toggling between the experience of lucid dreaming and lucid waking could help allow a dyad to invest in an ontology which facilitates awareness that their being, as one being, signifies divine mysteries.  The interested reader would be bolstered by studying these techniques.  

But the study should not stop there, it is our aim now to generally detail some aspects of sacral sexual significance in this public format in order to facilitate conversation and continue the growth of germinating in the nascent sexual spiritual ponderings of Pope Saint John Paul II in his Theology of the Body.  This will be the most general aspects of sexuality in order to help the reader apply these techniques to their particular life in mutuality with their partner.

The sexual culture of the modern world will make this section embarrassing to write because whenever one talks about sex, one is necessarily revealing their own psycho-spiritual relationship to sexuality for analysis by the populace.  The sexual culture of Catholicism will make this section embarrassing to write because it is so nichely crafted to invest sexuality with shame and guilt. The latter will also probably make this section hard to read for an average Catholic without being offended because I will be blunt, and Catholicism is only blunt about the dangers involved in sexual action.  Rarely if ever is Catholicism blunt about the inherent spiritual goodness of carnal sexuality. Thus many may see its contents as blasphemous, sacrilegious, or aimed as intentionally giving offense.  None of these things are true, but we, all of us, even me,  are certainly raised to believe so.  

Creating this treatise involved a process of a reflection on modesty.  Immodest activity reveals what is properly private, usually due to concerns for intimacy.  The reader will notice that it is written in such a way that no personal examples are given.  Even if the author and spouse agreed that they are comfortable with sharing personal examples, purposefully seeking to conjure images of intimate sacral sex in the mind of someone outside the dyad seems immodest.  By way of example, it seems to be a popular trope at present for a young male “chastity speaker” to begin a talk by pointing out that he has lots and lots of sex with his “smoking hot wife”.  The phrase “smoking hot wife” seems almost necessary in this trope.  This is a rhetorical move to get the audience of, usually young, people to trust the speaker’s amiability to sexuality before he launches into a carefully constructed talk founded on a passive investment in purity and harping on the preservation of bio-virginity.  The result is a talk that is replete with negative sexual content and an opening salvo I consider immodest because it uses shock to evoke faux scandal and the proceeds to dance on the edge of inviting inappropriate mental images.  

Discussing one’s personal experience of their sex life “as their personal experience” is best done with one’s co-dyarch.  Secondly possibly with close friends or family, assuming the co-dyarch is comfortable with that. When we say the sacral sexual agenda pushes for public discourse on sex by the nuptial dyarchies, we mean that the speak “from their experience” not “of their experience” and that is the difference between modest and immodest discourse. This treatise will talk about is sex, its situations, its use, and its signification.  These examples may be the result of direct experience or they may be deduced and inferred from it.  But not where will it breach modesty.  There will be no examples that will begin, “when my spouse and I do XYX” and there will be examples of things we have never done because they simply aren’t “our bag” (to quote Austine Powers).  With that said, we can now begin to analyze    

Sexual Climactic and Orgasmic Parallel Signification

We will weed out the faint of heart by beginning with an analysis of sexual climax and as fair warning, if terms like “cumshot” are too offensive, the reader may retreat to the more abstract portions of the text and remain until they are so attuned as to contemplate an incarnational spirituality.

Sexual orgasm, especially male orgasm, is an obsession of both secular culture and Catholic sexual commentary.  It’s so much so that when we say, “sexual climax” there is no vagary in what this “climax” could be.  Everyone knows it's an orgasm and it is often particularly the male orgasm.  What we want to explore in this part is our former hypothetical from section one part 2 when we discussed The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.  If I began a Upanishadic style explanation of significant sexual ritual, but from a Catholic point of view with the phrase, “clearly the orgasm is the …” what is the end of the thought?  

Let’s follow our methodology by beginning with a secular analysis, decoding it, and reapplying a sacral context.  In popular pornography, which is the only cultural phenomenon that widely signifies orgasm, the orgasm has several meanings.  The male orgasm, though it is not exclusive, occupies a central location in this genre.  If a pornographic video has a male in it, it would be the exception that if the male would climax visually (by withdrawing and climaxing) for the audience.  In the film Boogie Nights during his first Scene, Eddie Adams AKA "Dirk Diggler", climaxes inside of his co-star.  The producer is miffed, but Dirk Diggler assures the director that he can go again and offer the required shot.  

 In pornographic expression an example of an, “I need to feel powerful” kink may be what is referred to in pornography as “the money shot”.  How the male orgasm is used, whether it is used as a humiliation tactic directed at the objectified partner or as something uncontrollably elicited by the agent acting upon the male genital speaks to power dynamic kinks and fetishes.

The obsession with male orgasm can be traced to Church teaching concerning sexual morality and how much it hinges on the male orgasm, where it happens, and the potential procreative power it holds.  Pope Saint John Paul II obviously does not call it a “money shot”, rather he calls it a “donation of self”.  If the reader is scandalized, how dare one compare concepts of Theology of the Body with tactics of pornography, rest assured we are not.  We are all talking about orgasms as they are portrayed in culture.  But the secular signification is concupiscent and begets rituals of humiliation and dominance.  Our significance is sacral. It queues into the narrative of Eden and begets nuptial sacramental rituals.  

There are multiple possibilities for significance of the withdrawn male orgasm.  It is most offensive to Catholic moral thought because such an orgasm that is closed to the possibility of life.  But the context of pornography puts us so far beyond Catholic moral thought that we must stay with strict significant analysis.  Let’s assume a male and female cast.  The standard cumshot will have the male withdraw and climax onto the female’s body or face.  It is doubtful that this is meant to portray an intimate expression of loving union, which signifies a loving relationships.  These scenes are bereft of any sense of the total mutual gift of self one sees in the Theology of the Body.  The pornographic industry is predominantly targeted at males, therefore the narratives and significations are demonically directed at their insecurities.  So most often the cumshot [especially the facial] is a sense of the dominance of male over female.  However, there are examples where the female draws out the orgasm and the male is “uncontrolled” giving the possible significations of the release of uncontrolled passions or female dominance.  The female orgasm, when the caste is a male and a female, is more often than not “uncontrolled”.  The female orgasm seems to signify the male’s [or female depending on the cast] ability to bring a woman, even against her will, to a place of sexual ecstasy.  

After this brief analysis of pornographically significant orgasm, we still have not come to the reason that the producer was annoyed at Dirk Diggler in the movie Boogie Nights.  That annoyance comes with another signifier related by the technical term “money shot”.  In the pornography industry, the “money shot” is the video capturing of the male orgasm.  This term can be a bridge for us in terms of symbolic language and significant action.  The visible male climax is the “money shot”, because in line with the concupiscent patriarchal origins of the pornographic industry, this shot and all it signifies, is what makes money for the industry.  It is what originally brought damaged men into the theaters to watch these videos and garner a sense of power through the awkward yet effective movie theater rituals of the ’60s ’70s and ‘80s.  This manual is not a history of pornographic ritual.  But this term of art, “money shot”, lets us see the dynamic between symbol and sign.  Spoken language is a supplementary communication to significant ritual communication.  The term “money shot”, as language, is symbolic of a certain video scene.  But the term hints as a significant reality, the entire pornographic ritual, which includes the sex, the filming, the marketing, concupiscent male empowerment, and the collection of money.  The leaders of the industry worship the god Economy.  They have discovered yet another ritual that garners them the power of their false god and they have aptly named one of it’s potent moments. The symbolic language has a synchronicity with the significant ritual.  They each empower the other.  With that knowledge, we can see the benefit of sculpting our own symbolic language, and in advance of a crafting of conscious ritual investment for sacral sex.

In the first section of this manual, we posited questions from an exacerbated theoretical interlocutor, “what? Are we all to agree on our own language and sculpt our own sex narrative for Catholicism? Write ‘Catholic sex stories’ and start calling genitals ‘bishop and cathedral’ instead of ‘cock and pussy?”  By now the reader has probably come to understand that our answer is a definitive yes, rather than a maybe.

Yes, bishop and cathedral are not at all a sacrilegious symbolic linguistic turn for cock and pussy.  It seems like juvenile blasphemy, but imagine that these terms were as second hand as terms like cock and pussy with their dominating symbology.  If the terms didn’t elicit giggles but rather were just linguistic terms of sexual symbology, then they would act in an auxiliary manner to ritual sexual signification.  What does a bishop do with a cathedral?  At the height of his effectiveness, a bishop enters a cathedral and offers prayer for, with, and on behalf of the community.  If this language was normative then an understanding of sex as prayer would be unambiguous.  The male climax is incense in the cathedral, prayers that rise through the cavernous vault and reach the heavens.  Now, back to our phrase. “Clearly the [male] orgasm is the incense”.  “Clearly the [male] orgasm is the prayer”.  It signifies a prayer for unity and life.  It is a visible sign of an invisible reality.

At the same time, the nuptial dyad’s corporeal existence in the act signifies the greater church as it as a oneness in which that prayer happens.  It is not incidental that the significant prayer itself creates members of a domestic church.  OR the nuptial dyad’s corporeal existence in the act could signify an even greater ontological transcendence.  In this case, the male body is the church, and the female body is significant of the unity of both the cosmic temple and terrestrial temples.  The female orgasm is the joyful reception of prayer by the greater cosmic order, signifying the role of humanity as the divine gates (the image and likeness of God) in creation, yet their abidance as part of that creation.

Here we are building upon an existing spiritual intuition that is a pan-human symbology.  The treatise On Promotion of a Theocentric Ecological Consciousness, surmised the symbolic interpretation of the female body as the land, the earth or the cosmos, 

we must revisit a theme we discussed in previous treaties such as Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment or Cosmic Evangelization that the female body and the land (the Earth) are intimately tied together in Judeo-Christian imagery, in pan-human myth, and therefore, probably in the collective unconscious.  Not so subtle examples from scriptures are the reference to women who are “fruitful” just as land is fruitful, the reference to sperm as seed, just as seed is put into the land to create and grow fruit. These connections are not accidental, nor is the awareness that the cycles of fertility and barrenness of the land through seasons 

The remaining symbology and significance to be developed is the masculine role.  The lack of a masculine role is most likely due to the andro-centric nature of patriarchy, the male is naturally considered the “point of view”.  But in these latter days, it is helpful to unpacked each role in order to develop the parallel signification into a coherent symbolic and then significant system.

The treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton made note of how this relationship between prayer, life, body, cosmos, and orgasm played out in the book of Ruth,

It is on the threshing floor that Ruth makes her advance toward Boaz in order to secure union by marriage, sex and livelihood.  This scene shows the complete interconnectedness of these themes.  It is set on the threshing floor at the harvest celebration where Ruth sneaks in and lays at Boaz’s feet.  Through double entendre it is clear that sexual activity took place (the word for feet in hebrew is also slang for the male sexual organ).  As Ruth leaves there is a culminating scene which combines all in one, 4:14-15

So she lay at his feet until morning, but rose before anyone could recognize another, for Boaz had said, “Let it not be known that this woman came to the threshing floor.”  Then he said to her, “Take off the apron you are wearing; hold it firmly.” When she did so, he poured out six measures of barley into her lap and helped her lift the bundle; then he himself left for the town. 

It would not be lost on an ancient reader that pouring seed into a woman’s lap is a sexual a connotation as they come.  The seed here is literally barely, yet at the same time he has apparently just poured his procreative seed in her lap as well.  The ancients used the two terms interchangeably because eating and sex are seen as connectors for giving and maintaining life. If one applies an anagogical interpretation to this text one can see how Ruth moves from a land of death to a land of life .  

Under this same model of cosmic significance, the orgasm as a climax could also signify the completion of any spiritual process, the culmination of faith and hope.  The male climax is the completion of spirituality or discipline that is effective of the world.  Again, the female body is the world or the Church and the male performance signifies the practice of virtue and the male climax is an experience of the result of that practice leaving one’s self and effecting the world, planting itself, and growing into something new.  It is a powerful signification of the union of the inner self with the exterior world through the auxiliary self (the Body).  The ontological reality of sacral sex, one and many persons, reminds the participants that all this takes place in the inclusive reality of the church, another situation of one and many.  Thus, this same significance can be reanalyzed from the woman’s perspective as she is experiencing a parallel signification.  The feminine performance revolves around virtue as a gift in all its facets, from the spirit, through the environment.  Her performance is the joyful struggle of seeking or cooperating with grace and virtue.  Her climax is the elation of virtue attained and made effective through cooperation.

With parallel signification, the sacral ritual will benefit from supplementary communication.  As we noted above, there are conversations, probably outside of the ritual context, where the dyad discusses their spiritual lives and through their communication invests in the signification of their sexual lives. It may be that their significations are deeply individually personal and their parallel signification bifurcates.  So one partner may signify appropriately concerning the virtue of trust, while the other is working on fortitude in a spiritual discipline.  As a whole, this is a signification of cooperative struggles humanity has.  This individual nature of bifurcation is less desirable than a mutual parallel signification.  But with appropriate supplementary communication, this can be a helpful technique, especially as a new dyad strives toward mutual parallel signification.  The supplemental communication concerning the bifurcation can lead to a greater mutuality.  

 If they are working on the virtues together in synchronicity, for example as a compatibility of cospectral mutual pedagogy, they are exhibiting mutual parallel signification.  In this case their sexual life is signifying the working relationship of their marriage. Again, all of these facts are being processed together by the couple in supplementary communication.  

At the height of integration, one could imagine a couple engaging in mutual parallel signification, conceiving a child, and connecting the name of the child to the issue signified by the sacral signifier.  This is a beautiful synchronicity because, as we noted above, sex is creative.  With that in mind, we can begin a series of meditation on climax that involves cosmic parallel signification and their relationship to the creation of a domestic church.

Sex is creative, one major cosmic parallel signification is the male climax itself signifying the beginning.  Both Genesis 1 and John 1 give the image of the word of God being spoken by the Father into the void.  To look at the tip of a penis, one can almost see a pair of lips upon the static formless backdrop of the head, personhood out of the “onmi”.  The vagina is the void and the sperm is the Word spoken into the void over the water (vaginal fluid) the begets creation. All of this is symbolic until the ritual is employed by a nuptial dyad, then it becomes significant.  By this particular significance, we can derive a more general significance of masculine transcendence and feminine immanence and it portrayed a beautiful and peaceful creative sexual experience.

 As experimental as our conversation may have seemed, our focus on the male orgasm especially, is fairly par for the course subject matter for Catholic sexual discourse, especially moral discourse.  Catholic moral thought on sexuality seems male orgasm obsessed.  This obsession mostly regards where it happens and how effective it was intended and allowed to be.  But our conversation revolved around sacramental signification, and the reader noticed immediately our field or orgasmic engagement was dramatically expanded.

The problem with the exclusive role of the male climax is that sex is seen as neutral, at best, at all points outside of that context.  The male climax is important in that it is the easiest symbol for generation, one of the purposes of sex.  But the female body as a whole, her reproductive system, and her cyclical position is also perfectly attuned to symbolize and signify generation.  This gender differential is a balance between act and context, between linear and cyclical, between a host of life-giving paradoxes that reality presents and that sacral sex signifies.

But, once one realizes the unitive function is complementary and therefore equally as important as the procreative consideration of sexuality should broaden exponentially.  Nearly half of the content of the treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton was an attempt to help sexual partners appreciate the unitive function of sexuality.  It discussed several strategies.  First was ontological corporeal unity, where supplementary communication allows the couple to “understand” who they present Christian ontology, simple and manifold at the same time, through sex biologically.  Then there was the emotive experience of sexuality.  And that treatise, developed the techniques for shifting one’s locus of being such that the practitioners of sacral sex could, through the implementation of cognitive emptiness, exist “as selves” in the same place at the same time.  This technique was developed further in the treatise The Three Tiered Intetgration of Self.  Now we can expand this to another important unitive technique, parallel significance.  There is an entire gambit of sexuality beyond the male climax and the singular purpose of procreation to be considered.  At this point, the possibilities for the development of sexual parallel significance beyond the orgasmic become almost infinite.  So, for now, we can leave behind climax and orgasm, allowing other sexual masters to take up their creative arts on that topic.      

We portrayed the climactic creation as a cosmic signifier of complementary peace and creativity between the genders and therefore the unity of the cosmos.  Of course, the world did not stay peaceful, so we have another possible cosmic parallel significance that involves the Father speaking The word into creation, the incarnation.  The Word processing from the transcendent (male or penis) to the imminent, the female as world or vagina as void of chaos and the creation of a human.  As a nuptial diarchy makes children under this signification, they are keenly aware of their call as leaders and generators of a domestic church, where they must instruct their child in the arts of signifying alter Christus. That awareness will lead us to another creative significance that the nuptial dyad can invest in, which presents the pain of the Church in the cosmological paradox.

Parallel Significance and Theodicy: Rituals of Sexual Pain and Sexual Pleasure

Pain is a fetish which works out via many disturbing kinks in our culture and through history.  The parallel significance of these kinks generally break down sadomasochisticly, one person signifying cruelty, and one person signifying disordered attachment to suffering.  This fetish seems irredeemable.  But still, some are drawn to the experience of pain in their sexual life.  If it is irredeemable then it is to be fought and repressed.  But Christianity teaches us that it is always better to redeem if possible.  Here is some dangerous territory, but again, we are seeking to sacralize not condemn.  Rather than review all the ways sexual pain is an abomination, disordered, and spiritually damaging, we are going to explore the possibility of sexual pain and theodicy through cosmic parallel signification.  First, let’s analyze the fetish of domination.

The struggle for dominance is in many ways synonymous with the struggle for survival.  Self mastery is a spiritual goal of discipline and fortitude and is a healthy engagement in dominance.  But Christ warns often of abuse and neglect of the vulnerable, and one way this has taken place continually through history is sexual dominance.  Rape, pedophilia, sexual slavery, etc are all examples of significant sexual dominance.  In modern culture, there are the tamer “safer” ritualistic kinks of sexual dominance that are developing.  In each case, it is forbidden in Christianity to lord our authority over others like the gentiles.  Rituals sculpted to display a dominating and enslaved or abused relationship is antithetical to Christian sacral sex.  To distill the fetish down to its basic urge, it is a desire to use power or authority.  This is a good desire, but the power or authority must be used in an appropriate way, in this case, according to Christain power dynamics.  

Christian power dynamics will allow us to sexually evangelize and rebuild upon the urge of this fetish into many varieties of beautiful sacral sexual significance.  Christian power dynamics allow for a hierarchy where some have power and authority over others.  But, that hierarchy operates under the principles laid out in the treatise Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent, the greatest serve the least.  The virtuous antidote to abusive dominance is vulnerable intimacy.  In practice, many of the ritual gestures may look the same or similar.  The difference is the Christain power dynamic manifest between the dyad, and how they use their sex to signify tender vulnerability as opposed to abusive domination, and unitive mutual service as opposed to alienating selfish gratification.  Again, this goes back to the cycle of supplementary communication manifest as praxis and methodological reflection. In as much as the couple is aware of what they are signifying and can trust that significance in their partner, the rituals can signify trust in God through issues of theodicy, suffering and redemption, captivity and liberation and a host of other narratives which persistently reoccur in the sacred scriptures and can be ritually experienced as part of the divine mysteries through ritual sacral sex.  

Is this blasphemous?  If the nuptial dyad, in the context of their marriage, is faithful to the Christain mysteries, pure in their intention, trusting, consensual, and communicative in their expression, and seeking experience of, and cooperation with, grace, through the rites of their sacramental marriage; how can it be?  After this labyrinthian set of qualifications, the only way such action can be denied is to deny the possibility of the circumstances.  And here we are back at square one, the starting point of the sacral sexual agenda, the belief that it cannot be the case that sexual action can sanctify.  The first objection would no doubt be that because of concupiscence “they could never have purity of intention”.  This objection rests on a mountain of speculative and hagiographical evidence that the celibate life is preferable because sexual activity is “impure”.  It seems that above we have made short work of the speculative material using no other source the famously sexually suspicious Doctor of Grace Saint Augustine himself.  If we can trust the possibility of purity, then we can look to Christian theodicy and begin a process for investment in cosmic signification. 

Christian theodicy seeks several ways to account for suffering. The most common throughout scripture is eloquently surmised by Saint Paul, “all things work to good for those who, love the Lord.”  As we have formerly noted, this theodicy is manifest as early as Genesis 3, where the punishments end in life, bread, and children.  And we are discussing the methods of creating children here.  Eve was told, “I will intensify your toil in childbearing”.  We noted the relationship between the punishments of Genesis chapter 3 and the Christain Theodicy in the former treatise The Dysfunctional Human Family and the Nontraditional Holy Family,

In each case the punishment is attached to the purpose of the creature being punished.  For Adam, his job was to care for the garden, and for Eve her job was to provide help and companionship, herself and by making other humans.  The pain of the punishments is inescapable given that these are their jobs, tilling the soil and making children.  However, important also is the fact that each of the punishments ends in a tremendous life giving good, children and bread.  The Bible presents a few answers to the purpose of suffering and this is definitely one of them, through suffering comes goodness and life.  This theme runs from Genesis Chapter 3 through the crucifixion to the glorious end of The Book of Revelations, a book written in part to address the suffering of the churches of Asia Minor.  Humans have an experience of pain and suffering,  but the Christian religion seeks to find meaning and ultimately a good from that suffering.

This is a postlapsarian punishment related to suffering as we progress through the cosmological paradox.  Sexual pleasure and sexual pain seem to somehow be deeply connected to theodicy.  In Genesis 18, when the three visitors come to visit Abraham, they bring an annunciation of life that will visit their family.

One of them* said, “I will return to you about this time next year, and Sarah will then have a son.” Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent, just behind him.  Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years, and Sarah had stopped having her menstrual periods.

So Sarah laughed to herself and said, “Now that I am worn out and my husband is old, am I still to have sexual pleasure?”

The word she uses for pleasure is the word Edan, the same name as the pleasure Garden built by God.  Thus sexual pleasure for her seems to be children, which is at the same time painful.  The reader will remember that she is chastised for her laughter and when the shield is born, he is named Issac, which means laughter.  Sarah says, “Sarah then said, “God has given me cause to laugh, and all who hear of it will laugh with me.”  Again, pointing to the sexual interconnectedness of pain, suffering, faith, hope, pleasure, and joy.  

   This theodicy is fulfilled in the passion of Christ.  Jesus’ suffering and sacrificial death is a pivotal moment in history regarding the macro-teleology of this theodicy.  From this story John the Evangelist gives us a narrative by which the nuptial dyad can practice narrative appropriation and engage in cosmic significance of theodicy, by sacral sexual parallel signification.  In this signification, the man is “The World” as defined by John’s gospel, the woman is Christ. She bears the torment of the world, which climaxes in piercing and birth described in the treatise Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence

In John’s Gospel, dying at the hands of patriarchal brutality, stripped naked, [Jesus’] biological sex revealed, he is pierced by a spear (an unmistakable phallic symbol) excreting water and blood out his side, the vaginal secretions of an, in this case raped, female virgin.  Then in the biblically classic way Jesus takes that suffering violation and gives birth out of the opening in his side, after the nature of Adam, to the Church.     

      

“Clearly” the penis is the spear, the vagina is the side of both Adam and Christ. Here is a signification that can simultaneously involve the divine mysteries of theodicy and creation of the church.  The act itself is generative of the church.  One may take issue with the male being the inflicter, does it ever “work the other way?” Not for this particular narrative, because “Clearly the penis is the spear” and “clearly vaginal secretion is the blood and water.”  But there may be other narrative possibilities as we move one to significant foreplay below.

The male partner in this signification is conflicting in this appropriation and significance, because he signifies as sinful world and in this act may take pleasure from that through sublimation.  But this is also a divine mystery, why does God allow suffering and how are we to respond?  It was this suffering that gave humanity salvation.  What are we to make of this felix culpa?  “Should'' the male enjoy it?  Should he feel remorse as he engages in it or after he engages in it?  It must be remembered that in this scene, a gentile soldier confesses the glory of God.  The female partner is conflicting because she willfully accepts the pain.  But the Logos willfully became incarnate, knowing the consequences.  Should she enjoy it?  Should she not? What if he enjoyed it because she didn't?

Here is a possible assessment.  Pain fetishes and kinks exist because of the fall.  The incarnation is a reality because of the fall.  Salvation as both objectively achieved and at the same time as the ongoing mission of the Church are realities meant to work in the framework of the pain and suffering of postlapsarian reality.  This particular signification, because it is so specifically tied to sin and salvation, and others like it are medicinal.  They are for people who need healing regarding their relationship to cruelty, pain, and suffering.  A couple can either repress their issues and have them crop up in other unhealthy ways.  Or they can use the divine mysteries that serve these exact issues to receive grace.  As always, supplementary communication is of vital importance, but I would personally add that mutual signification would be necessary for such a parallel signification.  This openness between the dyad is the best way to keep the rite grace filled and open to mutual cooperation with that grace.  Otherwise, it could an isolated partner could easily fall into all the poor sexual dispositions that we are seeking to avoid rehashing in this manual.  

The model of participation for this grace involves a scapegoating of cosmology through the sexual signification.  To willfully act cruelly is a sin.  But original sin is not personal, it is macrocosmic, it is the sin and guilt of humanity.  To be possessed of concupiscent cruelty is an effect of original sin, and the guilt of this was washed away with baptism. Thus, when one of the baptized experiences its effect, for example, concupiscent cruelty, there is no guilt or shame.  Even still, the kerygma of salvation in a fallen world is hard to internalize, especially as one is still experiencing the effect of original sin.  

Enter a sacral sexual significance of theodicy and salvation.  One may have a concupiscent relationship with cruelty and/or suffering.  The sublimation via narrative appropriation of our sacral rite allows the participant to “Scapegoat the cosmos”.  The urges are “human” in so far as humanity is fallen, but it is a felix culpa and God has a plan for salvation that actually involves use of the suffering and even the cruelty.  The grace is a grace of faith and hope granted by God through sacral sex.  The dyad signifies the cosmic paradox and the mode of salvation and by that experience is allowed the peace of the gospel.  God has saved us despite, even through, a fallen world, the participants are now free to do their best and trust the macro-flow of salvation history.   

If this seems like wishful thinking, remember that the Church hyper focuses on the openness to life.  The cosmic significance takes this into account and the danger of simply using sex as a torture tactic is why openness to life is so important, especially as a dyad attempts to play this significance.  Otherwise, the couple will not be invested in the appropriate theodicy and teleology.  If one or both is closed to the possibility of life, the significance is a lie and the theory and teleology is nihilistic teleology.  The sexual act presents a world that is simple cruelty and submission, with no direction toward fulfilling life.    

Again, we are assuming a spiritually mature nuptial dyad, an assumption rarely permitted in the current Catholic culture.  We are assuming a couple who discerned their fetishes and kinks during the exclusive relationship phase of their nuptial discernment (as defined in the former treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love).  We assume they continually discuss these mysteries as part of their sexual lives and their spirituality.  We assume they processed that pain gives arousal for one or both of them and that they processed together what this “means”.  We assume the pondered the questions, “Is our sexual life objectifying and seeking to signify a cosmos of nihilistic worldly domination and submission?  Or is it open to life and care for it, which signifies Christian theodicy and power dynamics in a postlapsarian world?’  The arousal is a given, the signification is determined by the context of mutuality and sacramental enactment.  

“This has gone too far! Sacral sexual pain fetishes!?! This is against the teaching of the Church! It’s sacrilegious, offensive, and even if it wasn’t it’s impossible to pull off!”  Well, we can admit that this is “advanced” signification, but I don’t think using one’s sacramental vocation as it was designed to signify divine mysteries is blasphemous or sacrilegious. Could the idea be abused, misused, or ineffectively misapplied and cause damage? Yes. That is true of almost any spiritual technique.  This sacral sexual sublimation strategy is far better than creating an analogy (non-sacramental) of “spiritual warfare” that leads to the crusades and tens of thousands of violent deaths.  Yet here we are.  Crusades are apologized for, and sex is a topic of hushed tones.  Is it against the teaching of the Church?  Well, as was pointed out in the treatise Ecclesiological Orientation canon law has shockingly little to say about how nuptial diarchies can or can’t run their community.  This includes ritual signification in their sacral sexual life.  So as far as I know, there is no “teaching of the church” regarding such things.

Sexual Positions and Parallel Signification

Any sex manual worth its salt in the Kamashstra tradition will have a section on sexual position.  Thus here we come to that section of our work.  Our purpose is to seek an engagement with sexuality that considered sex as sex, in it’s most natural, and typical manifestation, “traditional sexual activity” or as we now might say, “bishop in the cathedral”.  Our aim is to sacralize the act of coitus by pointing our possible corporeal significations in the same way Yogic exercise might. Anyone who has gone to a yoga class has certainly come into contact with poses with names such as “The Tree Pose”, “The Mountain Pose” etc.  When traditional Catholics decry participation in yogic exercise because it “offers worship to strange gods” they are off base.  But the positions are derived from a cosmology that sees visible realities as presenting invisible ones and the names of some poses connect back to this.  Here we are seeking to use the symbolic names to illicit significant engagement in sacral sexual rites.    

Our focus will be an understanding of the biblical terminology of sex as “to know someone”  and relationships of knowledge.  As Pope Saint John Paul II says in Theology of the Body, 

Becoming "one flesh," the man and the woman experience in a particular way the meaning of their body. In this way, together they become almost the one subject of that act and that experience, while remaining, in this unity, two really different subjects. In a way, this authorizes the statement that "the husband knows his wife" or that both "know" each other. Then they reveal themselves to each other, with that specific depth of their own human self.

We will proceed to expand that knowledge to knowledge of cosmic and interpersonal parallel signification.  There are three fundamental positions we are going to cover, the couple facing one another, the man facing the woman who faces away, and the couple mutually facing away.  We will assign a name to each of these fundamental positions in order to apply the foundational relationship.  From there, variations can be drawn out by further names and significations.  It is to be noted early that natural position will bolster traditional gender roles and significance.  If this is a frustration to the reader concerning the particular relationship of their dyad, expanded use of those roles will be discovered in the final part to follow when we consider foreplay.  But to begin, even before positioning, we must consider “sex as sex” or “traditional sexual activity”.

The relationship between sex and violence or domination is well documented psychologically and often commented on culturally.  In the act of coitus, there is a penetration, and there is a devouring.  These primal images are not lost on the modern mind and linguistically related over and over again to how we perceive of sex itself, the perusal of sex, and the dynamics of sexual relationships.  The sacral sexual agenda follows theology of the Body is understanding sex as a unitive act as opposed to an act of domination.  The treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton developed an image of mutual sharing that was meant to counteract violent and dominating understandings of sexuality.  

Bio-union constitutes one flesh, just as our understanding as Christians is that the two are one flesh in marriage, and this statement is explicitly connected to the sexual act.  One may also reflect on the penetration or internal acceptance of the sexual act.  In it the two physical objects become one, one dwells inside the other, one surrounds the other.  Now add to that the reality of the uncircumcised male, where his internal being enters and is exposed inside the internal being of his wife, the two insides connecting (as his foreskin recedes upon insertion), and you have a beautiful sign of absolute self sharing inner to inner.  

We can now add to that seemingly static focus, a focus on the mutuality of action.  Sacral sex in postlapsarian reality is the rite of the unfolding of the cosmological paradox.  It does not only need to be interpreted as a static reality that participates in eternity.  It can also present that unfolding.  In this struggle and striving, the couple works in unison to collaborate on rhythm, pulse, speed, rest, and presence in all these facts as a “dynamic unfolding of life”.

There are two aspects of this struggle, the struggle for awareness (cognitive, perceptual, and informational)  and the struggle of action (morality, justice, etc.). That mutual striving is a key aspect of the union of the couple as they mutually signify the cosmological paradox.  So as we analyze we will see signification in how each position presents awareness and action.  The awareness will be signified by who “sees” what and the action is signified by who is the major “operator” of rhythm and motion in the position.  How the nuptial dyad expresses rhythm and depth can be violent, driven, tender, erratic, or invested with any number of various meanings and significations.  How they use these significations in their rhythm and depth is under the desecration of the dyad.  As always it involves their supplemental communication.  But as much as the rhythm of their sex life needs to, it should consciously reflect the rhythm of their purposes, meanings, and lives most generally as a dyad participating in God’s creation.

The first position we will cover is simply the couple facing each other.  The most common name for the most classic sexual position of modern Christianity is “The missionary position”.  For once we have a name that is culturally accepted and suites our purpose.  The fable goes that the missionaries of the age of exploration taught the indigenous converts that “Doggystyle” sex primitive and heathen, and instructed them to have sex face to face.  Hence the name “missionary”.  As nice as this story is, it is hard to say where this name comes from and it seems to originate in Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.  If the name “missionary position” had originated with the missionaries, perhaps it would have been an attempt to reclaim sexual signification from the dormancy it has experienced since the privileged rise of celibate life.

Typical of the sacral sexual agenda, we may briefly start with the popular secular significance of facing positions.  If you watch enough sex scene laden R-rated movies, you notice that facing positions are more often the position of lovers “as lovers”.  Not that brutality or comedy cannot take on the face to face position, but it is much rarer that interpersonal lovers are portrayed in an oppositional position. If they are, usually they signify lovers in the throes of mutually uncontrolled passion and not conscious regard of interpersonal union, which is fine...  The face to face is the interpersonal signifier. Since both partners see the other mutually.  Thus, it signifies mutual awareness.  If missionaries were using it, the hope is they were using it after the missionary model of Saint Patrick, to explain our most difficult dogma, God’s trinitarian existence as divine self awareness or mutual love (God is love).  We are going to call this first fundamental position “The Godhead”. 

“Clearly” the two faces united in mutual regard are at their most foundational a signifier of trinitarian existence.  It was noted in the treatise Christian Ontology that conceiving of God as trinitarian is the only way one can have one God who is also a personal God, that is, a self aware God.  Thus two faces signify communal personhood, and the sexual engagement is the love that binds them together as one.  This is the trinitarian model.

For the couple engaged in “The Godhead” their fundamental perception can be this awareness consciously or through shifting their locus of being to the genitalia via cognitive emptiness.  Either way, their entire corporate being signifies mutual trinitarian existence.  From the foundation, ontological revelation inherent in the dogma unfolds all of the interpersonal mysteries of Christianity.  The two natures of Christ, the union of Christ and the Church, each of the four modalities of Christo-analogical interchange, all of these are easily signified by the couple because they all present the same ontology.  

From this complexity, one can see how a new couple may start with bifurcated signification and through supplementary communication work towards a healthy pattern of mutual parallel signification.  They may enjoy many significations or tailor a few to what they see as the focus of their marriage, and ministry in life.  Working in tandem with their baptismal ministry and its participation in the Mass, one can see who a holistic sacramental integration can occur that is specific and made beautiful by each nuptial dyad.

“The Godhead” may also be used to focus signification on radical transcendence in the context of a God who is immanent and transcendent.  If we are observing the traditional missionary position then the male is on top and takes the role of the active transcendent as generator and the female takes the role of the passive imminent as creator “Through whom all things are made”.  Traditionally the transcendent looks down upon the immanent in cosmic signification, so here we have a chance for a gender reversal, and by that a reversal of the active significance.  As coitus goes, face to face can be reversed.  So we can introduce “the cowgirl” for significant analysis.

There are patriarchal cultures that shun women on top positions such as what in America is called “the cowgirl”.  But as we proceed we can observe how “woman on top” positions signify both Christian power dynamics and inversal unity.  We might call the reversal “The Mutual Godhead''.  Because, regarding the Father and the Son they both present the fullness of divinity, thus neither is “on top”.  There is no greater or lessor and there is no service.  So to flip positions is a great signifier of their absolute unity in the Spirit.

As the “Mutual Godhead” unfolds in signification the roles tend to break down as greater and lesser.   In this case, the woman is the active element, thus we can seek a cosmic signification working from the imminent to the transcendent.  From the anthro-centric position, transcendence is static and all dynamism takes place in the terrestrial realm. So if we are at prayer about the turmoil of our lives and seeking grace, it seems that we are trying to rouse a sleeping God.  This signification reminds us that God is engaged and aware and the gift of life is coming.  But we have our part to play. 

If what is portrayed is Christ and the Church or a dyad is utilizing their baptismal priesthood and through sacral sex, they are signifying Christ the helper and the Helped via some moral signification, The Godhead and The Mutual Godhead are versatile at signifying the complexities of Christain power dynamics and can offer an extremely effective array of signification for the couple.  

Obviously, from there, there are a host of other positions that are variations on the Godhead and the mutual Godhead.  These include standing, sitting, wheelbarrow, and anything else the couple’s imagination can bring them to.  How the couple chooses to use these and what they signify is a mode of religious communication in their marriage.  But since their union is a sacramental one, how they choose to position during any given act of coitus is also a great conveyer of grace in its signification and turns out to be a great cooperation in the sanctity of their marriage.

The second fundamental position is the oppositional.  In its variants, the woman is facing away from the man and the man can see the woman.  We just finished discussing missionary and cowgirl.  In the oppositional, these are secularly known as Doggystyle and reverse cowgirl.  The oppositional positions are positions that signify longing and trust on the part of the one who does not see, and mystery and knower on the part of the other, who does.  And here we have come to our sacral name for the fundamental position, “All Things Seen and Unseen”.  During coitus, biology generally defines these roles as male knower and the mystery.  From his position, he can observe and know the female in the sexual act as he enters her.  The female would traditionally be the signifier of longing and trust because she does not see her lover and must trust him.  Given the situation of male genitalia, conceiving an oppositional “All Things Seen and Unseen” without use of ritual objects becomes, not impossible, but … complex.

As an interpersonal parallel significance, these positions fundamentally signify our trust in the all knowing God, when we ourselves are not all knowing.  Again, the male would be the perceiver, and the female would be the truster.  Through the ritual, we experience how faith as trust brings creative development (procreation).   But then there is the added complexity of action.  Oppositional positions create an interesting set of variations on action and awareness that can lead to a complex array of significations. 

Who is consciously aware depends on who “sees” according to the position, and who is also active/passive aspect depends on the variation of the opposition.  They may or may not be the same person, which is nice for an odd blend of mutual/bifurcated parallel signification.  

For Doggystyle, the male is active aware and the female is “unaware” because she does not see.  She is passive because, even though a back thrust is perfectly acceptable, culturally the male may tend to forward thrust more.  Thus we can rename Doggystyle, “The Cloud of Unknowing”.  This position is great for signifying an apophatic experience of God.  The female is the human, through cognitive emptiness they have achieved “unawareness” and via stillness they have allowed God to come into their being.  The male signifies divine dynamism, active, aware, and engaged.  He knows us, but we do not know him, and experience is on his terms.  He positions himself in our very being and creates in there new life and new legacy.  One can see now how parallel signification and mystical ecstasy are the same experience, but by different means.  One is via solitary prayer, one is via interpersonal ritual.  One is achieved through passive psycho-spiritual discipline.  One is achieved through active sacramental signification. 

Reverse cowgirl adds a different element of signification because even though the male retains awareness, the female is the active agent.  This is a signification of trusting faith and hope in action as opposed to apophatic contemplation.  Here the dyad can signify all the strivings that humans make to relate to God, who knows us but is a mystery to us.  The summative signification of reverse cowgirl is the emptying of the Logos in the incarnation.  Hence we can rename this position, “The Incarnational Procession”.  The treatise The Spiritual Sacrifice of the Incarnation pointed out the extremity of emptiness that the logos must have gone through in the incarnation to become truly human.  And again in Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence, we pointed out the feminine qualities of the Son as portrayed in the creation narrative of the creed.  These together give reverse cowgirl a powerful signification of the incarnation, facing away in trust and “doing the work” of creating a salvific body, the incarnated body (which is active while the father is passive) and the body of the Church (a literal domestic church in this case).    

From there the dyad can unfold into a myriad of other interpersonal mysteries using the same dynamics of oppositional positions. For example, the dyad could signify the Church’s trust in the magisterium or the faithful’s trust in each other, given Christian theodicy.  They could take the positions as a psycho-dynamic signifier of the union of grace and free will, one being consciously active and one being minimally cooperated with and utilize both the Cloud of Unknowing and the Incarnational Procession to signify different facets of these.  Again, the dynamic nature of sexual signification is limited only by how the dyad seeks to signify and synchronize with their life.  

In his poem Dark Night of the Soul Saint John of the Cross seemed to be seeking symbolic language for these exact mysteries, using the soul seeking God in the darkness to illuminate his mystical and apophatic theology.   He beautifully expresses the union of the lovers in his poem,

Oh, night that guided me,

Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,

Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,

Lover transformed in the Beloved!

 

But the poem evokes an image of darkness from the perspective of the soul and an illumination in mystery.  It does not take God’s point of view, which is omniscient.  It could just as easily be an absolute mystery on both sides.  This agnostic position is one we as finite creatures find ourselves in.  It is only by faith and hope that we trust beyond agnosticism.    It’s worth mentioning that another easy way to get either “All Things Seen and Unseen” or “Faith Hope and Love” is simply to collaborate on who opens and who closes their eyes.  But in my opinion, the positional signification is alluring because it is more holistically attune to the sacramental signification of sacral sex.  With that, we have one more fundamental position, which is a bit harder to pull off, the double oppositional.  We will call this position “Faith, Hope, and Love”.  This position is one where neither partner is facing the other.  Like the other two this position can take a few varieties, but, again, male biology makes it hard to get too experimental without the implementation of ritual objects.  One possibility is “the scissor” where the couple faces each other similar to missionary, but spun head to feet.

  

A young male observing the graphic might see this position as “impossible” or at least painful.  An older male may have more opportunity to practice such a position because erect is not necessarily stiff, but carries an element of flaccidity that allows for more experimentation.  

As we shall see, given the life experience of the mature co-signifier, the use of such position makes sense, given what signifies.  The easiest configuration for this position, available even to the rigid male, is a facing spoon where the bodies of the dyad create a 90° (or greater?) angle.  In this way, they can’t see one another and each has co-equal opportunity to be active or passive.

This position has a supermassive reliance on locus of being shifting.  Each partner lacks the “state of awareness” signified by seeing the other.  Each partner is slightly limited in their ability to effect rhythm or connect in auxiliary sexual manners with their hands.  Thus we might call the L-Spoon, “Impotence and Potence”.  Because will and awareness are limited, but the position signifies a union and potency (procreation) that are beyond the human striving. This position is an excellent signifier of human abidance in the cosmological paradox.  It presents our ontological unity in our human nature, yet our alienation is self regard.  The pleasure, joy, and fulfillment come from cognitive emptiness and experience of the oneness.  In this position the more one is aware of a sense of self, the more one must struggle to achieve the joy of the sexual experience.  This position perfectly represents the Christan Mystery of dying to self and union with the divine mysteries.

Conceiving of an “oppositional” to “Impotence and Potence” could not regard who faces who.  Nor could it “flip” who is on top, because for this position, no one is.  So we will end this part with one last classic sexual position, the Sixty-Nine. We might call this position “Human Balance” because it presents the agnostic aspects of Faith, Hope, and Love in a way that allows for precision control of effect.  If one imagines how the locus of being, shifts by the action, then it splits between the tongue and genital, one position of control, and one position the subject is being drawn to.  In coitus, there is one point where two exist.  They are each summoned to their genitals by practice of cognitive emptiness and locus of being shifting.  In the “Human Balance”, there are two points of being, each with an aspect of active and passive being a summoner and a summoned.  Both partners have a better element of control, but the overarching significance of the faces reminds one of the mystery of the other.  Also, the more one seeks to control the other, the more one loses the pleasure of giving of one’s self, because it takes a measure of cognitive emptiness to locate at either end of one’s corporeal being, yet at the same time, it takes a measure of cognitive action to effectively summon the other to their genitals. 

   

Here you see again the mystery of union in alienation of the cosmological paradox.  The give and take of consciousness and cognitive emptiness, the mutual art of summoning, and being summoned, all of these signify perfect mutual striving.  This position is perfect for bifurcate parallel signification.  This is done through supplementary communication concerning the virtues and concepts where the couple is engaged in cross-spectral mutual pedagogy.  By this act, they signify the work they do together as a dyad.  It is a beautiful image that all at once signifies alienation and longing, yet union and joy. It is an alternate signification of the cosmological paradox. 

This position works on a completely human level, whereas  “Impotence and Potence” invests in the apophatic with a release of control as opposed to a disciplined balance.  “Impotence and Potence”, could imply grace because it highlights our inability, thus it signifies divinely.  But “Human Balance” is not ultimately generative.  It signifies our own abilities and mutual balances, which can be pleasurable.  But when our being is not fully given in union (signified by coitus) “Human Balance” will not ultimately be generative in and of itself.  This leads to our last part of this section, significant foreplay.

Sexual Foreplay and Parallel Signification

“Human Balance” takes us beyond coitus and begins a contemplation on significant foreplay.  It is a dual manifestation of oral sex, which is a very common act of foreplay.  The relationship between foreplay and coitus in a nuptial dyad is the relationship between liturgy and para liturgy or popular piety in the Church.  Liturgy is culturally fluid and adaptable to an extent. But there are certain things that need to happen for there to be a valid liturgy.  The same is true of coitus.  Paraliturgy and popular piety are extremely dynamic.  It is culturally bound, it is expressive of the micro community, and it adheres to how they specifically offer devotion and sacrifice.  Paralitergy operates in synchronicity with the Mass in how it sacrifices and offers symbols and signs of devotion.  The opportunity for dynamism and personalization of para liturgy and popular piety cannot be underestimated.  The same is true of foreplay.  The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy: Principles and Guidelines offers guidance to the relationship to popular piety which we can translate to foreplay according to its role in sexuality,

Liturgy and pious exercises must co-exist in accordance with the hierarchy of values and the nature specific to both of these cultic expressions.

Careful attention to these principles should lead to a real effort to harmonize, in so far as possible, pious exercises with the rhythm and demands of the Liturgy, thereby avoiding any "mixture or admixture of these two forms of piety". This in turn ensures that no hybrid, or confused forms emerge from mixing Liturgy and pious exercises, not that the latter, contrary to the mind of the Church, are eliminated, often leaving an unfilled void to the great detriment of the faithful.

  

There are two general concerns addressed in this passage.  One that liturgy is understood as the superior practice and two that popular piety is order according to liturgy and not the other way around.  When sexually translating this, one sees the renewal of concern for the teleology of sacral sex, union, and openness to life.  Without proper bearing, the second purpose can suffer.  There could be an urge to replace coitus with foreplay, just as it may seem tempting to replace liturgy with personally evocative popular piety.  

However, if this relationship can be maintained, the variances of popular piety and how they engage a culture are near infinite.  The same is true of foreplay and coitus.  The same manner that we laid out various interpretive context for sexual positions can now be applied to any acts of foreplay.  What seemed like an infinite array of possibilities in the previous part in coitus (which we barely scratched the surface of), is now becoming exponentially greater in how the dyad can extremely personally relate.  We can barely begin to categorize the various forms that such signification can take place.  But we will attempt a quick and general review of some things to consider.

First, most generally, foreplay is considered an auxiliary physical touch in advance of coitus.  The dyad must learn to inculturate this touch into their system of parallel signification.  They must make meaning from this touch.  This most likely involves supplementary communication regarding how the couple experiences arousal, and then application of the sacral sexual agenda to this end.  What is such arousal taken to mean?  How is it often portrayed?  Especially if these things evoke shame, this is no stopping place.  The next task is to sacralize these mutual arousals according to the system of signification most apt to their relationship. 

Foreplay is a means of mutual cooperation with the grace of their marriage.  Arousal is invested by God to be good.  It is the couple’s job to pray, seek grace, reframe and reinvest in arousal in such a way that it signifies well and bolsters their religious exercise.  An example of this is the theme of theodicy and pain in the previous part.  The method of translation is admittedly controversial.  But what is a couple to do if they are aroused by such things?  Feel shame?  Shove the feelings down and go “vanilla”?  These are the uncreative possibilities of someone invested in a sense of passive sexual purity.  Those invested in a sense of active sexual purity must be more daring, and that takes greater skill.  But the rewards are an experiential sense of the Paschal Mystery that cannot be paralleled.    

Then we discussed “Human Balance” as a sexual position, though it is not a position of coitus, but one a technique foreplay. The interplay of the summoner and the summoned that we see in mutual in the “Human Balance” position can be used individually to signify and nuptial realities in the foreplay of oral sex.  The one performing is aware and the one receiving is summoned through emptiness.  There are defined aspects of control and submission that play out in secular signification of oral sex.  The dominator could perform or receive depending on how the corruption of concupiscent control is narrated.  In each case, the operation is sex as nonprocreative pleasure. In one view, the receiver objectifies a human body to give pleasure by forcing their genitals into position.  In this case, the one receiving is the dominator.  In another narrative, a controlled actor infects another with destabilizing pleasure by manipulating their genitals and thus asserts dominance.  In this case, the performer is the dominant agent.

For sacral oral sex, the signification of the couple will queue into these power dynamics but operate as “gift” rather than domination.  This sacral sexual strategy employs beatitude and mutual spiritual edification at work.  The relevant actions offer the other the chance to actively or passively offer the experience of oneness through locus of being shifting.  But since the performer shifts to the mouth as opposed to the genitals,  there is a certain “human” control as opposed to a static emptiness, given that the rigidity of the bishop and the void of the cathedral lend themselves to stasis (though they have active muscles that can operate significantly).  Coitus involves divine signification because it is procreative.  But oral sex signifies secular relationships in that they are not divinely procreative, but only corporeally cooperative to elicit unity through pleasure.  In oral signification the performer is the actor, they use their mouth, which signifies words, knowledge, cognitive potency, a partial integration by ingestion (at least in the tactile and taste aspects). They effect the receiver by inducing the shift in their locus of being to their genitalia.  The receiver is passive.  As the dyad engages in oral foreplay there is ample room to signify how Christian power dynamics call for mutual service, both serving and allowing another to serve one.  

There is a pleasurable unity that culminates in coitus but is enjoyable and effective in and of itself.  Sacralized oral sex is by definition “foreplay” in that all sacralized sex will aim at a teleological end of creativity in order to keep the signification cosmologically and interpersonally appropriate.  The sacral sexual agenda works perfectly in cooperation with the constant traditional focus of sex being open to life.  A person speaking from a dyadnial point of view may be more forgiving if that end isn't met because of “premature termination” but the goal was there.  A person speaking from a dyadnial point of view will also be aware that sometimes actions of “foreplay” are enough, and male “climax” as a goal may be longitudinal (meaning, “not tonight”...).

From there the dyad can extend beyond touch through many various experimentations that explore intimacy through mutual pleasure.  One lesson learned in scripture of abidance in this postlapsarian world is that we must adapt beyond Edan.  So, for example, clothes and omnivorous diets are not things of paradise, but they are certainly facts of this world.  Such adaptations include the need for sacrifice, the need for sacred spaces, and the need for a ritual objects.  Each of these plays into the sexual signification we have been discussing.  The question the dyad must face is, how do we need and use these postlapsarian crutches in order to make our sex life work as a conveyer of grace.

At the very least a nuptial dyad would want to prepare their sacred space.  As was noted in the treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment, “Profane points to when one is distracted in one way or another from the deep meaning or purpose of one’s life.  A sacred situation is a situation set aside from these distractions to allow for deep investment.” We further noted in Somnium Spirituality,

The [sacred] space is setup to contrast the hustle and bustle of everyday life.  It is designed as a place to encounter quiet and peace. . . The space itself is meant to channel an entire system where the invisible realities of grace become visible by physical signs.

     

The sacred space of the nuptial dyad’s sacral sexual life is usually the bedroom.  Our question is, in what way has the dyad established and consciously shaped this space to convey the significant meanings of the sexual rite?  So for example, one may not want “invisible realities” visibly present, but we believe they are present regardless.  Perhaps such symbols will keep the pair mutually focused.  There are infinite other ways the sacred space of the bedroom can be utilized.  

The pornographic environmental kinks that seek to inhibit the sacral nature of sex and signify deeper fetishes can definitely utilize environment.  So for example, public sexual expressions signify sexual abandonment that mitigates the sacred context and nature of the ritual.  Or a “sex dungeon” may be specifically designed and outfitted to signify fetishes of objectification and domination as mentioned above.  To contrast, the dyad should notice how their room is set up to facilitate sacral sex.  Is the room comfortable?  Is it reflective of how their relationship mutually edifies?  Does the layout, lighting, comfort level etc. facilitate engagement in divine mysteries?  How a room could do this is determined by the dyad.

Another aspect of foreplay is the use of ritual objects.  Ritual objects and motions should be used to enhance personal awareness. There is a wide array of uses for ritual objects that can be spiritually edifying.  In the secular narratives regarding sexual ritual objects, a sex toy is an object one uses to an effect.  So, “I am going to take Object A and use it in XYZ sexual manner” is actually a moral and spiritually neutral statement.  What is symbolized by object A and what is signified by XYZ between the persons? This is what is going to develop the moral and spiritual value.  The use of ritual objects that augment or enhance a mutual practice of the three tiered integration in order to facilitate shifting the locus of being in symbolically appropriate ways can be edifying for a nuptial dyad.  But it is hard to envision the edifying ends of an object that culturally symbolizes cruelty and is used to signify sadomasochistic ends.

The phrase sex toy seems trivializes the significant ritual aspect of sex.  Toy connotes frivolous pleasure and brings the mind back to the standard teleology of sex as pleasure sport.  But again we can note the paradoxical double standard between finding the practice of virtue in the evil state of warfare and eschewing mention of sacral sex which is fundamentally good.  In his spirituality, Louis de Montfort made popular the analogy of the rosary as a weapon in his extended analogy of spiritual warfare.  If this is permissible, to liken the rosary to an instrument of cruel violence, is it permissible to develop a spirituality that likens it to a sex toy?

Even the suggestion puts me ill at ease.  Blasphemy!  Yet … it’s not blasphemy to liken the rosary to an instrument devised exclusively for and used in a context of complete depravity, warfare, as opposed to sex, which is not completely depraved.  Could we balance this consecrated post with a dyadinal post of one holding a rosary saying, “Going for a walk, got my sex toy!”  Culture seems well attuned to violent analogies but is still hesitant to embrace sacred realities.  Yet each could be a context that teaches similarly, one about spiritual warfare, one about sacral sex.      

 Along with “industry based sex toys” it is also conceivable that the nuptial dyad would employ a variety of ritual objects in their rites.  These could run the gambit of pious objects such as statues, to rosaries, to holy water, to scapulars, etc.  If the reader sees that as “weird, disordered, sacrilegious” etc. then they are not yet as accustomed as they need to be to seeing sex as a religious and holy endeavor.  The investment in a passive sexual purity sees sex as at odds with piety.  Thus to conceive of how implements of common pious prayer could be utilized in a dyad’s sex life seems to only exhibit disorder.  But sex and piety are not at odds with each other.  The whole goal of the sacral sexual agenda is to illuminate the harmony.  Thus to use simple traditional sacramentals while engaging in sacral sex should be as natural for a dayd as using sacramentals in any other prayerful context. It may be a bold assertion, but a dyad or partner that is keenly invested in traditional sacramentals, yet cannot see them as useful in a sexual context at all is an indicator that something is disordered.  For a nuptial dyad there should be a harmony between the Church as they experience it, the domestic church, and their dyadnal relationship including sacral sex.     

Our religion also sacralizes the profane.  Thus ritual objects could also include all the standard tropes of secular sexuality, blindfolds (an object useful for some of the gender role reversals mentioned above),  whips and wax (significant theodicy), various “penetrating devices” (shifting aids for locus of being), etc.  This is creative paraliturgy that acculturates cultural/popular sexuality and sacralizes it.  So, for example, just as the may crowning sacralized a whole host of pagan spring rituals, as we discussed in Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment, so the nuptial dyad can seek a framework for sacral implementation of secular materials.   

Then there are the common ritual objects of clothes.  It is evident from the Genesis account that clothes are an important facet of postlapsarian human existence.  They were originally a shame, that God turned to a good in Gen 3.  For the rest of Genesis, how one appeared, versus how one was, was often signified by the clothing they wore.  The priest, in the liturgy, has an impressive array of ritual clothing.  The nuptial dyad has the same opportunity to invest.  True, coitus generally takes place naked, but the secular world is in no way bereft of role play and explicitly sexual clothing.  These are both translatable to a sacral setting in the same manner as we have been illustrating.  Thus the clothes and uniforms that assign “roles” meant to fetishize people as objects or concepts can also be flipped to demonstrate sacral significance by the creative couple. 

One last potent ritual object with deep roots in scripture that deserves special comment is ritual oil.  According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church,

It is fitting to consider the sign of anointing and what it signifies and imprints: a spiritual seal.  Anointing, in Biblical and other ancient symbolism, is rich in meaning: oil is a sign of abundance and joy;  it cleanses (anointing before and after a bath) and limbers (the anointing of athletes and wrestlers); oil is a sign of healing, since it is soothing to bruises and wounds; and it makes radiant with beauty, health, and strength.

There are several situations where oil, which is privileged as confluential sacral matter, can be used to significant effect in both foreplay and coitus.  Since anointing is a priestly gesture, to open with an anointing massage can easily be significant of engagement in sacral rites, it brings the dyad to an awareness of the sacred in their actions when biblical and ritual symbols are employed.  In the previous section, we developed the “chaste spouse” hagiographical template to include sexual adaptation in again.  Ritual sexual oils can be very effectively used as a dyad ages and adapt their sexual lives accordingly.  The symbols of healing, limbering are especially potent in this context.  Sex is union and life, as a couple ages, the use of oil can reunify through sexuality and signify new life in new abilities to commune sexually.      

  

If the reader finds these reflections unpalatable, remember, that is okay.  No one is required to perform popular piety of another culture, especially if they can’t make sense of it.  But that doesn’t mean that such popular piety is illicit or disordered.  Though it is just to ask at what point does experimentation and adaptability shift from adaptation in the cosmological paradox, to manifest disorder?  It all depends on how well the foreplay, as “popular piety”, syncs with the naturally invested significance of coitus, as liturgy.  And of course, all of these significations should synchronize with Christan cosmology, dogma, doctrine, and liturgy.  But since, as we noted, no one talks about how to effectively engage in sacral sexual parallel signification, there is no commentary.  It is not the correct place for celibate members of the magisterium to “pre-speculate” on these things.  It is the place for the nuptial diarchies to experiment, discuss and reveal (in an appropriate way) sacral rites.  Much like popular piety, this springs “from below”.  The magisterium's job is to react at best, with an eye on its role, or lack thereof, as canonically defined.  A celibate who may be shocked by the rather tame topics covered in this manual is far out of their depth in commenting as sacral sexual culture stands now.  The program of the sacral sexual agenda is to create a space where we can all learn together inappropriate ways.  The sense of hesitancy regarding sexuality is born out of a mistrust that the married laity could successfully pull of such synchronization.  Well, probably not immediately, but as the participants of dynamic unfolding, it is the married laity’s job to learn through experience.  To do otherwise is to “bury one’s talent”.  To prohibit the diarchies from such experimentation is an affront to their participation in their sacrament, an affront to their due authority as a nuptial diarchy, and it runs contrary to the gospel which tells us to work and trade our talents to further development (Mt 25).  

As we begin to conclude this section it is our final task to solidify and extend the sexual life of the dyad beyond the act itself in a maneuver that seeks a holistic experience.  For this we will employ two strategies, pageantry and seasonal affinity.

What we are calling sexual pageantry is the skill of combining and attuning the significance of foreplay and positions to form a macro-narrative that is significant for the couple.  It is important to point out that when we say “foreplay” that is not a temporal indicator to the act of coitus.  Thus, one may signify by dynamic foreplay interspersed with coitus invested with positional parallel significance up to a male climactic act of parallel significance in coitus.  After that climax, the dyad may continue with “foreplay” and even further coitus depending on the stamina of the male.  Life is dynamically not singularly creative.  Thus sacral sex is open to a wide variety of pageantry. The modes, positions, techniques etc. all together “tell a story” and convey complex meaning.

An example if simple sexual pageantry may help.  A couple may start out with “The Godhead” move to “The Mutual Godhead” and with “Incarnational Procession”.   This sexual pageant explores the narrative of the self relational God extending a hearing gesture to creation.  Again, a couple may start with “Impotence and Potence” and work their way into “The Cloud of Unknowing” a sacral sexual pageant that signifies a rhythm or culmination of human prayer life. 

Does this need to be planned out in prior supplementary communication?  Not necessarily.  Often couples have a “manner” in which they have grown comfortable having sex.  A first step, given the state of affairs concerning sacral sex now, would be to analyze that manner as it is.  Does the couple have a progression or undulation of foreplay to positions and/or position to position?  If so, what does each part signify and what story do they tell together?  Once this is determined, the dyad can assess whether or not there is a need to alter.  It could be that the significations are unhealthy for where the couple is in their relationship.  It could be that the progression is generally healthy, but the couple needs something else at this moment.

 Taking these skills into account, the ritual of sacral sex forms a pageant, where the flow of symbols and signs creates a sacral prayer in progressive form.  The signs can work from cosmological into interpersonal, vice versa, or in a toggling fashion. The meaning should relate to the couple, express their prayer as mutuality, spirituality, ministry, relationship, struggles, etc.  because of this the dyad’s sex life should adapt thought their life together, with some standard significations thrown in for grounding.  It should reflect each of their personalities and the personality of the dyad as a singular reality.  Here are three examples of the infinite variations of sacral sexual pageantry with a brief explanation of their signification:  

The Pageant of the Eternal and Everliving God Seeks the most foundational signification of the nuptial dyad, to signify trinitarian love.  Thus one sees how the first two positions speak to the relationship of God’s love in the economic Trinity and the last position displays the act of love in the immanent Trinity.  

The Pageant of Nuptial Maturity signifies the dynamics of grace at play as a diarchy matures in its relationship.  First, as the couple is going through the traumatic years of being newlyweds, they are at odds with each other and relying solely on the graces gifted by God.  Most likely they are not cooperating well with these graces and they (especially the ones relating to “dying to self”) are perceived of as pain for the dyad.  But as they mature they learn the skills of cross-spectral mutual pedagogy, they learn to balance each other's weaknesses by employing each other’s strengths, they learn to work as a team.  There is pleasure to this, but it still runs the danger of a pelagian ignorance of grace.  Thus the final position is one where the couple comes together to signify the mutual Godhead as a sign of cooperation with God in their lives.     

The Pageant of Sincerity of Conscience is a prayer for virtue. It begins with foreplay meant to signify prayer, where “clearly” the female is the human and the male is the divine.  Next the divine response with grace and the gift of effective mutual awareness, lastly the human must take that and act through knowledge and will, seemingly independent, but never out of consideration of the divine.

With the skill of sacral sexual pageantry in hand, the couple can begin to invest this individual pageantry with sexual seasonal affinity in order to integrate sex life with a greater environment.  This creates a sacral sexual nexus that allows the nuptial dyad’s chief sign to be reflective of the rest of their life and offer graces to cooperate with in the facets.  The matrix for this nexus is sacred time.  Sex itself should constitute a sacred time for the dyad.  Synchronizing that time with other aspects of sacred time can create a harmonious significance of temporal worship for the dyad.

The couple will need to synchronize sexually with certain cycles in life and will find these adaptations beneficial.  First of all, there is the need to create sexual seasonal affinity between the feminine cycle of menstruation and sexual expression of the dyad.  How this presents will have an influence on the sex life of the couple and can be used to significant effect.  The positions and foreplay adapts to the cyclical location of the female and that in turn helps accent the relational interplay linear masculinity.  

Then there is the sexual season affinity that can be synchronized with cosmic seasonal life.  With climate controlled housing it may seem irrelevant, but sex in the summer should presumably (or at least historically) be different than winter sexuality.  The seasons themselves have significant meaning for life and death, dying and rising.  Thus the dyad’s sex life can queue into these realities by means of how they signify by position and foreplay.  

That then brings the couple to the liturgical year and how the dyad’s sex life can operate as mutually within this context to add significance to foreplay and position.  This is a powerful sexual seasonal affinity that can create an expansion of sexual life into liturgical life.  “Incarnational Procession” at Christmas, “Cloud of Unknowing” on Good Friday; so many possibilities for investment in the life of the Church through sacral sexual parallel significance are available for the dyad to consider.

Admittedly, this part, concerning forelay, has been far less detailed than the previous part, concerning position, because of the fundamentally dynamic nature of foreplay.  It is the most experimental and therefore the most personal to the couple aspect of sacral sexuality.  Too much detail would imply one right way to do it, and that is simply not the case, either for popular piety or for foreplay.  The hope is that by the end here, the reader has gained the creative skills to apply significance if their nuptial dyad and seek personal investment.  The ultimate goal is that people can begin to simply talk, without shame, about these things in their own lives and sacral sexual creativity can become cultural to the Church.            

       

In this section, we discussed theories and techniques for the practical applications of sexual significance.  We did an in depth analysis of climactic and orgasmic significance followed by an analysis of Christain theodicy as signified in sacral sex. When then developed an interpretive model for the significance of sexual positions and ended with a commentary of the dynamic significant nature of foreplay.  

Conclusion

In the first section, we set out to map a sexual landscape and find a way to a more fulfilling Christain sexual spirituality.  We began by discussing and analyzing the loaded nature of language in concerning sex.  The entire conversant realm, both secular and theological, seems to work against the notion of sacral sex. We then elaborated on the nature of sacral sexual significance and parallel significance especially as it relates to the sexual life of the nuptial dyad.  Lastly, we focused on the problems of language and myth in the Church that seem to stymy sacral sexual ritual investment and set out our basic agenda of sexual evangelization and development of hagiographical templates.

In the second section, we analyzed three hagiographical templates in order to suggest a better balance in the saints considered for canonization and begin to balance the pedagogy of hagiography amiably toward the sacral sexual agenda. The hagiographical templates we reviewed concerned states of life, discernment, and chastity.  The specific narratives were the virgin martyr, the “discerned out” template, and “the chaste spouses”.  For each narrative, we gave the skeletal template.  We then discussed the general message and meaning of the hagiographical template.  Next, we offered several balancing templates for each of the three that better frame their message, re-frame the same message for married life, or counterbalance a celibate message with a complimentary message concerning married life and sacral sexual significance. 

In the last section, we discussed theories and techniques for the practical applications of sexual significance.  We then did an in depth analysis of climactic and orgasmic significance followed by an analysis of Christain theodicy as signified in sacral sex. When then developed an interpretive model for the significance of sexual positions and ended with a commentary of the dynamic significant nature of foreplay.  

My writing process usually starts with quirky ideas and a Docs titled according to the content, where I write the ideas down.  Then I make an outline, draft etc.  But it may be some time before I start that an outline.  In the meantime, I add thematically related ideas as they come and split Docs if the ideas become too divergent.  This Manual started as a Doc of disparate ideas titles “Some Sex Stuff” that I could not bear to split, even though some of the ideas got extremely divergent.  The Church’s teaching on sex and sexuality is a beautiful reflection of Divine truth and revelation.  The problem is that this teaching is myopically manifest and contains a useful profundity that is for the most part latent.  There is a great need for a major overhaul of the Church’s relationship with sexual discourse.  

What can this manual do?  It is not a magisterial document and carries little to no authority.  The hope is that if this manual has been traumatizing for the reader, that trauma was of a cathartic sort.  The authorship was done with prayer and discernment with the hope that the thoughts contained are good and true and not simply scandalous for the sake of scandal.  If someone of influence were to read this manual and offer an extremely public criticism of some faults and that criticism sparked a conversation about the sacred role of sexuality in the church, even if this material were to be condemned, it would be worth it to break the silence and allow the nuptial diarchies to take a seat at the table of fruitful church discourse.  The greater hope is that there are truths to be discovered here that some nuptial dyads are able to utilize in a way that facilitates cooperation with the grace of their marriage.  If just that happened, it was well worth the time invested.