A post about sex, and religion

One of my friends emailed me this article today.

I've always liked the Jesuits.

So, I, myself personally, am not Catholic. Or Lutheran. Or particularly religious, for that matter, although I identify myself as Orthodox Christian. But I tend to find my spirituality much more important than organized worship, and in my own faith have learned from a lot of different traditions. And yet I went to a very religious, conservative Lutheran college, and a very religious, more liberal Jesuit medical school. Maybe it was just that the Jesuits seemed so much more realistic than the crazy fringe Lutherans we went to undergrad with (okay, they weren't all crazy, but some of them were reasonably extreme. I once witnessed an LCMS Lutheran and an ELCA Lutheran get into a fistfight over who performed the baptism sacrament most according to God's plan or something like that. I thought this was especially ridiculous, because from the Orthodox Christian perspective, you're both doing it wrong!), but I really got comfortable in that environment. We had a ministry office in the commons of the medical school, replete with priests and nuns and other ministering types, and I tell you, that was the nicest place to be on a bad day. I sang in the Gospel Choir every year on Martin Luther King Day (it was really the only time we performed, but man, you should hear this crazy white girl belt out "We shall overcome"). We celebrated Ramadan, and the Jewish holidays, and Orthodox Easter. They were such a welcoming, accepting, inclusive bunch, and that really surprised me.

We also had 12 full time chaplains on staff at the hospital, and a bevy of part timers, and they all had pagers and specialties and assigned areas of the hospital. There was a chaplain in-house, on duty, 24 hours a day. They responded to traumas, codes, and plain old requests. The medical students had to do shifts with the chaplains. I cannot tell you the impact this had on patient care, and frankly, the whole mood and mode of the hospital was influenced by the Jesuit ideals. The way we practiced was more holistic, more inclusive of families, more centered on the patient as a person.

It definitely tied our hands sometimes - i.e., one of the most heartbreaking cases I had as a med student was this woman who had a baby with anencephaly - a baby in whom the brain had not, and would not, develop. This kid's head literally stopped at its ears. These babies, obviously, cannot survive long, if at all, when disconnected from their mothers. We were a Catholic hospital, so we couldn't offer her a genetic termination. She was Catholic, so she wouldn't have done it anyway (or so she said...who knows, if we'd been able to provide it, if that would've changed things). It was absolutely heart-wrenching, to watch her go through the pregnancy, feeling her baby move, having strangers come up to her and ask when she was due, if it was a boy or a girl, did she have a name...knowing her child would be born with no chance at life. It struck me as months and months of torture, and I couldn't fathom the idea that God wouldn't understand her decision to terminate.

But that whole respect for life thing was, in general, a really positive influence on my education. I did a rotation in Child Advocacy my 4th year. I talked to my patients, their families. I did a sub-internship in the NICU, and watched the way those little lives were cared for as they walked that line between life and death, how they were respected as full human beings with resplendent potential. How they were held up in those final hours. One night, I stayed several hours after my shift was over because one of the 24 week twins I'd delivered a few days earlier (when I was doing an OB rotation) was dying. Her sister had passed the night before, and her parents were so distraught they couldn't bear to be up there once they'd made the decision to let her go. We took her off the ventilator, swaddled her tiny body in handknit cloth, and the nurses and I took turns holding her until her little heart finally stopped.

I know a lot about end of life care, and am comfortable with the inevitability of death, at least professionally. I can deliver bad news like no one's business. I think I've mentioned on here before how, at the Emerald Palace, I felt like the angel of death on my ICU month, because the team always waited until I was on call to withdraw support from our patients, because I was "so good with the families," and I was "just so much better at it." Likewise, when I was on the labor deck, I always, always took the genetic terminations. Because my cohorts would check in at the beginning of the shift, and then leave them alone until something happened. You know, "so they could have their privacy" (read: "we don't know how to deal with them, so we won't"). I, on the other hand, went in, introduced myself, asked how they were feeling, learned everybody's names in the room, asked if the baby had a name and referred to it as such if it did, and checked in every two hours like I did with my other laboring moms. Plus, delivering a significantly pre-term, dead, and often deformed fetus takes some skill - not so much technical skill, but skill at knowing how and when to do things. They're fragile, their skin is delicate, you can damage them easily. It's important to know how to collect and present the fetus so it looks like a real baby, so they can touch and hold and understand their child. It's important to understand the pain of malpresentation, even for someone so small, and how much it hurts to force an immature uterus to contract. It's important to respect the life ending and the ones being left behind. It was such a horrible, traumatic experience for most of these women anyway, that a cold, impersonal stranger rushing in awkwardly at the last minute to deliver their child was just unacceptable to me.

Interestingly, it was my Jesuit medical school at which I also did my sex therapy training. We only treated married couples in the clinic, and we would talk about God if the patients wanted to, but beyond that there was little to brand the therapy as "Catholic" or "faith-based". But there was something there that went unsaid, this undercurrent of respect and celebration of life, union, and effort that imbued the way we taught, and interacted with, our couples. So many of them came in with taboos, misconceptions, and shame that had been imparted under a guise of "religion"; we were open, accepting, unfazed. We touted sex as a good thing and an important piece of a good Christian marriage. We taught masturbation (yes, yes we did) as a means of exploring, accepting, and learning about one's God-given body. We "preached" love, tolerance, compromise, and connection. It was a nice view.

The article above reminded me of all this. I particularly like how she holds casual sex up not as "sinful" and in a punitive light, not as a "violation of sex", but rather, a disappointment, a failure to expect enough of themselves and their partners, that they are "not asking enough" of sex. That good sex is an expression of incarnation, a celebration of our physical nature, given to us by God. Who can argue with that?

Just an interesting read, and a nice foray into musing philosophical.

(PS - Comment with reckless abandon, but, I don't want to hear about the evils of abortion or how abstinence is the only way. Go blog about that on your own space.)