This past week for some reason I found myself telling some friends: ‘I have never interested myself in the RH Bill but reading on it now I am surprised to find myself rather sympathetic with the stand of the Church regarding the issue.’
Second and third thought found me saying to myself I shouldn’t have been surprised. One who takes interest in theology is bound to incline to sympathy with the conservative or the traditionalist. But I might as well admit it right away: I think the trouble with traditionalists regarding the matter is that we may be too loving.
Explain? Sure.
When I was a boy in my early teens in the 50s there was this book that the olds were reading, and did not bother to keep out of our reach, the young ones: Love Without Fear
by Eustace Chesser.
Even without the googling, I still distinctly remember the book as a veritable sex manual, perhaps not on the scale of Kama Sutra but still a legit, honest-to-goodness sex manual. How did I know? I was 13 or 14 and could read already. I mean — you know. The sub-title of Dr. Eustace Chesser’s book was How to Achieve Sex happiness in Marriage
and he was hyped as the foremost authority on Sex Technique. Enough provocation for a reader who knows Cebuano Visayan to poke pun and mischief at his name, Eustace, and his profession, psychiatry.
But though the book was recalled (I presume only in the initial year) and the author arrested for indecency, the book was a modest bestselling success. It was right there with Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and Tropic of Cancer
. Its virtue over those two literary classics was it was ‘a book at once sensible and scientific,’ the Kirkus Review said, the aim of which was uncomplicated: to make couples get the most out of their love life. (The phrase ‘love life’ was not current yet in those days; perhaps ‘coupling’ here is preferable.)
The title of the book is what the book, later on — much, much later — amounted to me. It was much lighter and easier to carry in one’s head. But it was really what it, the title of the book, was saying that dawned on me only in my middle years.
Love without fear means fear is the enemy. So much it would seem that love itself cannot love if there is fear in the heart.
The Church forbids the rubber because the rubber gets in the way of free, liberated and liberating sex a.k.a love without fear. That’s how I choose to read the Church’s position.
You might as well cement the volcano, gag the river, catch the wind. Baby, the rain must fall. If he were still around I’d challenge the great poet of Chile, Pablo Neruda, to write an ode to the condom.
The Church, apparently sees sex as a force of nature, perhaps of supernature. We celebrate weddings and birthday parties and baptisms. I suspect primal tribes did us one better: they celebrated pregnancies.
Unfortunately this, to be fair to the other side, is to be unrealistic. We live in severe times, a time when we have to, we are forced to, settle for, live with, second or even third best.
In further times with, God forbid, the godawful. In Soylent Green
, an apocalyptic sci-fi movie in the 90s, civilization, to escape death, adopted a new industry: canned human flesh for food.
That’s how I read the pro-RH Bill lovers. They love with precaution and in fear because the times call for it — what is at stake is survival.
Which, alas, may not be survival of the foetus — which outrages if not horrifies the too-loving.
