The drive across Pennsylvania is longer than most people realize. This one took about six hours. I was traveling from Pittsburgh to a secluded part of the Pocono Mountains. The purpose of the trip was for a spiritual retreat.
On one of the summits in the Pocono Mountains is an ecumenical center called Kirkridge. In the early 1980’s, I made several retreats there. The ethos of Kirkridge is a blend of Celtic Christianity and social justice activism. Even 25 years ago, long before the term “locally sourced” food was part of our vocabulary, food at Kirkridge was prepared with a mindfulness of the environment and reflected the region. While I met several people on my visits to Kirkridge who proved to be particularly instrumental in my life, one of the more notable individuals was a Jesuit priest: John J. McNeil. Recently, I learned of John’s passing, which caused me to reflect more deeply about those times when I initially met him.
Among John’s many life experiences, he was a World War II veteran and Nazi POW, who later became an activist against the Vietnam War. John was also one of the very early gay rights activists, a psychotherapist, and a professor of ethics. When I met him, his blue Irish eyes danced in an elf-like way. As the speaker on this retreat, he posed an alternate approach to sexual ethics within a Christian context.
Traditional sexual ethics in the Christian Church generally views sexual expression, at best, as something that may be good but which should be kept for marriage. There are also strains within Christian ethics that view sexual pleasure quite negatively. In fact, there are perspectives within Christianity that have held that all pleasure in life should be avoided. When it comes to sexual intercourse, even sex within marriage was often considered sinful if the clear intention was not procreation. Procreation was the justification for having sexual intercourse.
Without going into a complicated overview of how these beliefs about human sexuality developed in Christianity, let me just cut to the chase: there’s really little Biblical or early church evidence to support the negative views of human sexuality and sexual pleasure that have been prevalent in the history of Christianity. Instead, there is strong evidence that supports a position of human sexuality as something profoundly good and to be enjoyed as a gift.
Starting from this latter position, McNeil suggested that perhaps we needed to re-think human sexual ethics. What if we started from the position of saying that human sexuality and the pleasure experienced in sexual encounters was in itself good. While there are clearly times when the gift of human sexuality is not used for good, as with rape or incest, perhaps an ethical position that understood sexual experience as good could be understood on an ethical continuum of good-better-best.
While it may seem trite to view human sexuality morally and ethically on a continuum of good-better-best, it’s a perspective that marks a profound change. Affirming that our sexuality is something good and positive about us, we are presented with the opportunity to grow into becoming fully embodied individuals who accept pleasure not only as part of our lives but as a gift. It is from this perspective that McNeill suggested that just as devote individuals give thanks before and after a meal, that it would be appropriate to pray in thanksgiving before and after a sexual experience. Better and best sex, from an ethical perspective, would be viewed in terms of the ways in which human sexuality draws people more deeply into faith-filled relationships that celebrate each other. For human sexuality to be viewed as good in itself would dramatically change how we discuss sex as well as our approach to education on human sexuality and support for the physical dimension of loving relationships. Sexuality would become another part of human experience, essentially no different from any other aspect of our experience.
Of course, McNeill’s proposal for a new ethic for human sexuality didn’t get much traction among moral theologians. But I think that Christian theology is often very slow to change because we are locked into antiquated philosophical paradigms that make little sense in a changing world. While we don’t ask scientists to learn flat-world paradigms for their fields, theologians begin their study with approaches from previous millennia that don’t represent our shared understanding of the Earth, cosmos, human life, or spiritual experience today. Locked into the past, Christian theology has become increasingly irrelevant to people in our era despite the new insights that have been offered by people like John McNeill.
I am thankful for people of courage like Fr. John McNeill. He embodied his convictions and lived them with courage. In doing so, he made the world a better place for very many people