Originally posted December 5, 2007.
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Marital Intimacy or Touching the Face of God
One thing I’ve discovered in rearing my two offspring is that modern society has made sex into a topic not to be discussed with one’s parents.
Never talk about sex with your folks! Society tells young people these days. They’ll think you’re ‘doing it’ and you’ll get lectures and pamphlets and books and all kinds of things and you’ll wish you’d kept your mouth shut! They’ll take you to Planned Parenthood and put you on the Pill and buy you Trojans! Just keep quiet around the Folks. Sex is for watching on TV and the internet and doing in secret. Talk about it with your friends, but never, ever talk about it with your Folks.
Now, that’s just plain sad.
I made a firm decision, when my first child was born, that there would be no topic I would not discuss with my children. I determined that I would be open to any subject, at any reasonable time, and would not jump to conclusions about anything they told me. I made up my mind that I would steel myself and not turn away from any subject, no matter what it was, no matter how private or taboo or normally uncomfortable that subject were to be. Never have I been more glad about such a decision.
We’ve talked about all sorts of things, my offspring and I. We’ve covered ground I never would have dreamed of setting foot upon with my parents. I felt humbled one day recently when Elder Assistant Offspring told me that her friends were envious that she was able to tell her mother anything. She said that! And she does, she does.
Now, Elder Offspring’s friends are starting to get married, and are beginning to talk amongst themselves about that most wonderful of all topics, married sex. Poor baby of mine! Of course she understands of the mechanics and such, and that’s not what her questions are about. She doesn’t want to hear about what she’s missing from them until she hears about it first from me!
So for the last several weeks, I’ve been pondering over marital intimacy. And I began missing it too, which has surprised me tremendously. I guess I just thought I’d get divorced and the normal rhythm of a married human female’s life would leave me forever too and I’d be ok. He and I had many problems, insurmountable problems, but sex was not one of them.
I believe that making the rest of this as non-specific as I can make it will spare embarrassment. I don’t want to embarrass anyone at all. The whole point of this discussion is to share with my girls something of the sacredness of married intimacy. I heard a speaker say once that the reason married sex happens behind closed doors isn’t because it is shameful, but because it is sacred. Sex within a sacramental marriage will allow you to touch the Face of God. Think that’s not so? You haven’t yet touched the Face of God.
Letter to My Children
Dear, beloved Child,
Today, you stand ready to begin a new life. Today is your wedding day. You’ve asked me about marital intimacy, to talk with you about it, to prepare you for what is to come. You already know about how human bodies operate, so no need to go there. And your questions aren’t really about the mechanics of sex, as you told me.
You will soon begin a new way of viewing yourself and your husband. You cannot now know this new vision, until the Sacrament of Matrimony has been celebrated. Never mind previous indiscretions and failures, temptations and the like. The Sacrament will change you even if you cannot feel it. All things will begin anew.
I suppose the first thing about marital intimacy that I remember is that it always told me every day when that day was over. It told me when the argument had ended, when the discussion was finished, when to stop talking, when to be quiet. I’m the original jabber wocky, as you well know, my dear! When we came together, sometimes it cut off my air supply. I had to stop talking!
That crush of his body each time would begin the changing of the rhythm of my own breathing to match his, and thus began the coming together.
Marital intimacy taught me many things, really. Patience. Many new ways to laugh at myself. It fulfilled its other mission and gave me five children, two of whom were born alive. Never, if I pondered it for the rest of my life, will I ever fully understand God’s love for us, that He allowed us sex as His way for us to participate with Him in the creation of new life. Sex, wonderful sex, beautiful sex, glorious sex, new life, and nine months later a baby! Conception didn’t occur every time, of course. But it did five times, and two new beings came alive into this earth, you and your sister.
Intimacy taught me to submit to him, submission being utterly outside my nature. After the troubles of my years I swore I would never submit to any man, ever, ever, ever.
But chaste marital intimacy, practiced correctly, means that your husband loves you like Christ loved the Church and would be willing to lay down his life for it, as Christ did. That love and tenderness in time comes to win over some very headstrong women. There is almost no way to escape it!
And what woman would not want to submit to such Love? In that context, to submit to him in intimacy means to give yourself over to–well, yes, I remember. You will soon long to submit to him, as he will long for it too.
To submit during marital intimacy in a sacramental marriage means to give yourself over to the true owner of your body, your husband. Correctly, the true owner of your body wants your body to feel as good as it possibly can, as you will want his body (of which you are the true owner) to feel as good as it possibly can.
By my submission, I gave him my body to do with as he correctly should. I was not there as a slave, or a toy, or a lust object, but the other half of himself. Would he mistreat himself?
Marital intimacy also taught me something else, something so far outside my nature once again, I can no longer even see it from here now: to obey him.
How well I remember how I would feel when, in ecstatic obedience, I would submit to him taking my head in his hands, and moving my lips where he wanted them to be, like a slow dance of computer mouse, doing what he told me to, how he told me to. Obeying his maneuvers, his will was mine.
Obeying also meant that he obeyed the machinations of my body, in its rhythm and progress, day by day. Receiving him in obedience when he knew I needed it and not refusing without good reason, hearing him when there was no good reason not to obey, will over time build a secure wall around you two, where you can be together alone, and reach that sacred ground where as one, you will meet God.
The rest, my dear child, is for you and your husband to learn about together. That is the way God intended it.
May God bless you and your husband with many, many years of intimacy so sacred, and so beautiful, that you both learn the shape of God’s whole Face through the touch of your hands.
Love, your own Mother
Who hopes you’ll always find something to tell her about
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