Charles Davis and sex
October 17th 2008 02:10
Back in the 60s, when I was still a young man, the Catholic priest, Charles Davis, left the Catholic Church and his priesthood in a blaze of publicity. (He'd chosen the publicity, by the
way, in order to clarify his position and to confront the Church's position on contraception, amongst many other things.) He married Florence Henderson in due course, and they had a family. While cataloguing my boss's books at work, I came across A Question of Conscience, the book that made Davis famous around the world. It occurred to me to check up on the Net what had happened to Davis, who died a few years ago.
An interview with his daughter, Claire, appeared in the Guardian back in 2006, and she has some interesting things to say about sex - in relation to her parents, who were both around 40 when they married.
Here's a quote from the interview:
Images of sex in the media encourage us to think that a successful sexual relationship hinges on physical beauty and technical prowess. But if we think of sex as an adult language, a form of conversation between equals, a different vision of success emerges based on reciprocity, mutuality and equality. We might say that we live in a sexual age in the sense that these values govern our aspirations not only in the bedroom, but in the way we structure society. It is the claim sex makes to adulthood that really frightens the Catholic church, with its emphasis on child-like obedience. My parents, by leaving the church, were asserting their own adulthood. What they then faced were the parts of themselves that hadn't yet grown up. They were like musicians breaking from the orchestra to improvise. The sounds they produced didn't always make good listening, but over time they learnt to play together. Christianity is ultimately about being human, and if this way of life doesn't bear fruit in human terms, there is something wrong with how it's getting expressed.
So what kind of fruit can it bear? If I look at my parents' lives, it probably wasn't great sex. They began too late in life, with too many obstacles to overcome. For them it was fidelity to each other over 32 years of marriage, and fidelity to the path they had embarked on together. This involved a radical openness to the world, which enabled them to keep growing and changing right until their deaths. On my parents' tombstone the epitaph, taken from one of my father's poems, reads: 'Love not knowledge is the answer, feeling not logic is the process.' This insight is probably the greatest fruit of their marriage, a commitment to a particular way of life, accepting the suffering as well as the joy it brings, without knowing where it's going to take you.
Charles Davis: a photo taken around the time he left the Catholic Church
An interview with his daughter, Claire, appeared in the Guardian back in 2006, and she has some interesting things to say about sex - in relation to her parents, who were both around 40 when they married.
Here's a quote from the interview:
Images of sex in the media encourage us to think that a successful sexual relationship hinges on physical beauty and technical prowess. But if we think of sex as an adult language, a form of conversation between equals, a different vision of success emerges based on reciprocity, mutuality and equality. We might say that we live in a sexual age in the sense that these values govern our aspirations not only in the bedroom, but in the way we structure society. It is the claim sex makes to adulthood that really frightens the Catholic church, with its emphasis on child-like obedience. My parents, by leaving the church, were asserting their own adulthood. What they then faced were the parts of themselves that hadn't yet grown up. They were like musicians breaking from the orchestra to improvise. The sounds they produced didn't always make good listening, but over time they learnt to play together. Christianity is ultimately about being human, and if this way of life doesn't bear fruit in human terms, there is something wrong with how it's getting expressed.
So what kind of fruit can it bear? If I look at my parents' lives, it probably wasn't great sex. They began too late in life, with too many obstacles to overcome. For them it was fidelity to each other over 32 years of marriage, and fidelity to the path they had embarked on together. This involved a radical openness to the world, which enabled them to keep growing and changing right until their deaths. On my parents' tombstone the epitaph, taken from one of my father's poems, reads: 'Love not knowledge is the answer, feeling not logic is the process.' This insight is probably the greatest fruit of their marriage, a commitment to a particular way of life, accepting the suffering as well as the joy it brings, without knowing where it's going to take you.
| 27 |
| Vote |
Shared on
Subscribe to this blog
