Rite and Reason: Marriage, we are told, was created by God, but where is the real evidence for this? asks Paul Murray
I remember the day well. We were teenagers and the Christian Brother said he had to talk about a difficult subject. So we twitched in our seats, blushed and were otherwise discomfited as we waied for the inevitable lecture on the sacredness of the human body and how it should never be defiled.
He thumped the desk, we jumped and only returned to earth again when we heard the word Faith. That was what he was going to talk about. Where, we wondered, was the difficulty? Faith was boring, a lecture touching on our developing sexuality could at least promise some frisson.
Immature, of course, and it is only perhaps in later years that Faith begins to fascinate, at co-incidentally the time when, for many, the mystery of sex has been put into an overall life context. All of which might suggest that sex is necessarily the predominant issue for the young, spiritual matters for the old. This, of course, is nonsense. Chronological age measures little - it is the date on your birth certificate.
There are young people of inspiring Faith, older people with enviable sex lives, and there are people of all ages with both, or none, of the above. One thing certain is that while the churches may have been successful in the spiritual domain, their record in the bedroom has been miserable.
Diarmuid Ó Murchú, in his Reclaiming Spirituality, tells us that many of the major religions seek to diminish the significance of sexuality, some even suggesting that sexual drives are the "animal within".
John O'Donohue in Anam Cara says that religion has often presented the body as a source of ambiguity, evil, lust and seduction. The body, he says, has been much sinned against "even in a religion based on the Incarnation".
Mary Condren, in The Serpent and the Goddess, outlines how in the early Church the control of sexuality became a science and the "male clerics, by proving their immunity to women's power, were uniquely qualified to become the new scientists".
The religious rulers were caught between the soul and the body, and the last, which got in the way of a true humanity, was merely regarded as an encasing for the first.
We've moved far from the Augustine view that he who is "intemperate" in marriage is "but the adulterer of his own wife", but there has been scant evidence of rigorous thinking by church people on sexuality. Is marriage still regarded as the only arena for a full sexual life? Marriage, we are told, was created by God, but where is the real evidence for this?
Many people now seek breadth in their sexual relationships, rather than depth. Have any theologians addressed the fact that most young Westerners have a number of partners before they eventually wed. Are such people to be denied access to a religious life, as was once threatened against married couples who used contraceptives? Is there no future for same-sex couples in mainstream churches?
And, most important, have the churches, and the rest of society, considered the sexual lives of older people? The widow in her 60s, loses not just a breadwinner and domestic companion, but also a sexual partner. What privacy is given to residents of nursing homes who may want a sexual relationship with a visitor?
Indeed, have children been trained to respect the sexual-privacy rights of their parents? It could be said that we have allowed ageing to be associated with non-feeling, with the idea that those who have lived many years have feasted long enough, that at 65, and even younger, they are spent.
If they have been excluded from the BreastCheck programme, the provisions of the Employment Equality Act, banned from Dúchas heritage site jobs and the Back to Education scheme, it's a short jump to the suggestion that people in their autumn years have no sexual feeling, that they live contentedly on the memory of the "first fine, careless rapture".
Ó Murchú says that a spirituality that chooses to ignore or bypass sexuality is "grossly incomplete". By extension we can say that a spirituality (or a civil society) that disregards the sexuality of older people is equally incomplete, that it is immoral to deny legitimate sexual expression.
This is not a call for a sexual rampage, but to champion a revisiting of how we deal with a basic human desire. We have to get away from Marian images which held women back by contributing to male power and male immaturity (as outlined by Garry Willis in Structures of Deceit, Papal Sin) and from a society where an Archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, advised his priests on the appropriate soap for genital washing (John Cooney's biography).
Such repression, of course, has not just been in the Catholic arena. Martina Evans in her fine novel, no drinking no dancing no doctors, depicts a world where Protestant people had more knowledge of the Bible than their true feelings and desires.
However, Catholicism has set the agenda and in Austin Clarke's The Planter's Daughter we perhaps get a true picture of the sexual-religious (and political) undercurrents that have disturbed so much of Irish society with men that "drank deep and were silent" when they glimpsed her between the trees.
- Paul Murray is head of publishing and information with Age Action Ireland. He is also a member of the Dublin Unitarian congregation.