Last year, I had the privilege of performing the wedding of two DBU students that I had taught in several of my classes. I found myself moved with deep gratitude for playing a part in their lives, as well as remembering again the deep commitment of my own marriage. The opportunity also gave me a chance to reflect more on the nature of marriage, and I believe there are connections to be drawn between this aspect of sacramental life and education.
This is what Jesus said of marriage: "[F]rom the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."(Mark 10:6-9). Jesus taught that marriage forms something new. Two people from different families become one flesh, and what God has brought into existence, no human court of justice has the right to unravel. When Jesus reminded his culture of this truth, he had in mind the model of Genesis. If humanity is the crown of creation, marriage is the jewel on that crown.
"Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone," Adam tells Eve. The nuptial meaning of the body is part of ourselves; we image God together male and female and are always the image of God in communion by helping one another, through mutual support and mutual definition. Our bodies literally point to the mutual dependence and community we were created for. Our contingent being is good; we have a sense of our finite dependency before the fall of humanity. "Ens et bonum convertuntur (being and the good are convertible)" as John Paul II observes (29).
These are important truths to remember in college-level education. The sexuality of ourselves and our students is part and parcel of who we are. Here, I am not necessarily trying to engage certain norms or stereotypes of gendered behavior, though I think there is some truth to these matters. Instead, I am trying to reflect on how we cannot treat intellectual and ethical formation in isolation from the nuptial aspects of ourselves.
In Genesis, humans are separated out from other animals; we may be bodies among other bodies, but we are far more. We are given our bodies to till and subdue creation, to be stewards of a world, wards of the king chosen to care for his prized estates. Our bodies are ethical, sacramental, aesthetic, social, and erotic. They present ourselves to the world and the world to us. Our bodies were created to aid in the fullness of shalom and the complete multi-faceted communication of being to being, but that bodily gift has been marred in our fallenness. We were created to express love, and our freedom was given to make true love of God and God's creatures possible. To be a body is to be a living soul, not a slave of our physical desires. We were, thus, originally free from the constraint of overpowering instinct.
That this is now too often the reverse is something we must keep in mind in the educational process, though it is hardly something we must address openly in most courses. Tom Wolfe's recent novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is only one sobering account of the culture of pornocracy on many campuses. Charlotte’s journey into an academic and residential culture of relativism and fornication should give us all pause, whether we teach in a state or private institution.
God promises us cleansing, for we are each Christ's bride (Eph 5:26-27). We are called to learn to lay aside shame and return to the right gift of our bodies in marriage. We are also called to relearn that our nuptial meaning is a pledge of respecting the bodies of others. This the meaning of pledging wedding vows before witnesses. In mutuality we learn "the reciprocity of the donation" (JP II). The gifts of ourselves, our gendered, nuptial bodies, are tied to a new purifying of our motives and in marriage a new vulnerability in our lovemaking.
The culture of "hooking up," of nearly anonymous sex leads to a loss of ourselves; we lose part of who we actually are. Lust desacralizes the body's sacramental sign. It also reduces the meaning of our erotic actions to a far less complex communication. Being human, it can still be quite complex, but once something less than reductive enters, it begins to be something else, with all the human brokenness our culture tries to hide from itself. We need to struggle with this dimension to education, even if it makes us quite uncomfortable. As professors, we need not be surprised when this part of existence enters our students' academic struggles.
Sex is not to be separated from love, family, and our responsibility to our community. Strong marriages and strong families make strong neighborhoods and town. Marriage is one of life's original blessings--prosperity, comfort, joy, long life, In the scriptures, marriage is a picture of giving and gratitude and mutual dependence, for "a marriage with conditions is no true marriage" (John Colwell). In this sense, the marriages of faculty, staff, and administration--not to mention those of students--ought to be signs of the true uses of our humanity. Christian marriage is a work of restoration, and this makes it profoundly counter-cultural. We are meant to model for all people what Christ intends for his Church as his Bride. This means we must learn to fully and truly accept each other, receiving each other for who we are in our brokenness and in our health. We were created for the experience of giving and receiving in the blessedness of trust and wholeness. When we truly live for the other person we help them along the way to a full possession of who they were meant to be.
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