If contraception is not good for women (and it isn't), then what is good for women? And what is good for men? It's simplistic to just say, "Don't use contraception," or even to say, "We'll accept as many children as God sends us" and then abandon all thought or reason regarding life circumstances, personal faculties, and limits. It's not enough to say, "Men and women should control themselves" and then leave it up to men and women to figure that out. But saying this last is key, only just how can this be realized when it hasn't been done for so many centuries, except by a few (only 1 in 10 couples or less even bother trying)? There is an answer!
Integration! However, if you look it up on Google you're likely to find something about racism, but our application here has nothing at all to do with that.
In this blogpost, I will share my understanding integration as expressed by Mary Rosera Joyce in her hopeful booklet How Can a Man and a Woman Be Friends? and in her new book, The Future of Adam and Eve: finding the lost art. At first blush, her ideas may sound like that trendy notion some years ago, popularized by some psychiatrist. Or on the surface, a reader may think she is suggesting some new age pantheism, which she is definitely not. Mary Joyce offers her own celibate marriage of fifty years to Robert as proof that it is more than just a notion. For them, it is joyful reality. From lived experience, Mary Joyce calls for a new and truly revolutional sexual revolution as a remedy to that ushered in by The Pill with all its subsequent ills resulting in an untold number of broken hearts, let alone a holocaust of innocents unrivaled by any other.
So, what is 'integration' as an answer to the human dilemma of what to do about sexual urges? First, integration is a power that humans have that animals do not have. So the first thing you must be absolutely convinced about is that man is not an animal. No way, because if he (or she) were an animal, he or she couldn't even think about integration. Integration uses the power of thinking: low brain (impulse or feeling) to mid-brain (reflecting on feelings) to high brain (decisions about feelings). No animal has this. Neither the power nor the brain.
Integration is a power that few humans realize they have because they've never even heard of the concept. It's something that must be practiced, and when it is, a whole new way of being, human being, opens up. So how does it work?
It starts with a feeling. For our purposes of discussion about how a man (or woman) can control his (or her) sexual desires, it starts with a desire for genitally expressed sex. The desire is not an act. It is only a desire, neither good nor bad; however, the desire deserves attention because it is a signal: a longing for something missing. Typically, a married man might think that it must be a desire he should be able to act upon with his wife, since he is lawfully and/or even sacramentally married and sex is 'allowed,' after all.
But is the desire love? Ah, that is what a man must ponder. The desire itself signals the need to ponder, and pondering will help him to decide upon one action among several possibilities. If it's in the middle of the night and his loving wife is sound asleep after a busy day with children or work, it's probably not about love for his wife. If he can barely pay the bills already and they have several children, it's probably not about love, either, though it still could be in some cases. If his wife has given him a signal of some kind to let him know that she's not too tired, and if other things by common sense and even great generosity for a higher value, despite tiredness or sacrifice or even limitations agree that another child could be warmly welcomed, then it's probably love, and the action is simple.
But what if one or more things on a list of things happens to suggest that it is not motivated by love, but merely a sexual feeling that the man has? What then?
The feeling is just a sign that a man (or woman) is alive as a sexual being. What he typically doesn't know, though, is that the signal may not be for him to reach out to his wife. It may be a signal that he needs to reach within his own interior self to some reality that is even greater, a reality that ordinarily should precede his ever reaching out for a woman. Every man (or woman) is made in the image of God, made male and female in God's own image. But that means that each man, each human being is made male and female within, not just by separate gender, but within his or her very self.
To the degree that a human being has a healthy balance between the male-ness and female-ness within, in the inner marriage between anima and animus, that person is ready for friendship built on authentic love in celibate friendship or in marital union, and this is key to integration. Integration means integrating the two opposites within. What seems to be a desire for union with a person of the opposite sex can really be a desire for the other side of a man's own self, the "feminine-like," not to be confused with androgynous feminine side, according to philosopher Joyce.
When a man is friends with his "feminine-like" side, paradoxically instead of making him more feminine, it makes him more manly because he has manly tenderness, manly ability to really hear another, combined with his natural masculine attributes for leadership, provision, and protection of wife and family.
Integration takes practice at first, but the rewards are so substantial that a man's love life grows very rich and rational instead of irrational and reckless, causing the need for contraception, objectifying either husband or wife, both being against reason and against love. Let's face it! While physical sexual union does only belong within the confines of married relationships, even then, it is a power and an art that demands human thought, not mere animal instinct!
No animal has the capacity to practice integration, or the inner marriage as Joyce calls it, but human beings can and must in order to fully appreciate human sexuality and the joy of being "fearfully and wonderfully made" in God's own image.
When a man or woman practices integration within him or her self, then that person is ready either to marry responsibly or to stay single and live a celibate life, celibate as far as other persons go, but conjugal within his or her own self in a kind of inner marriage that is entirely healthy, entirely whole-some, and entirely human. A well-integrated person within is the one best prepared for either marriage or celibate friendship. In fact, intimate celibate friendship is made possible only to the well-integrated person, but the good news is that it really is possible.
Integration is not repression. Repression tries to tell the self that the feeling doesn't exist, maybe because the feeling is bad or dangerous and so, unwanted. The feeling is ignored irrationally, and because man is a rational being, this refusal to reflect on the feeling is never healthy.
According to Joyce, integration is not sublimation, either, because sublimation admits the feeling but then chooses a distraction so as to keep from acting on the original feeling. Sublimation is a little better than repression, but it still is not entirely integral to being human.
Integration, rather, takes a feeling just as it is and notices it without judgment. In the process of integration, a person accepts the feeling, stays with the feeling long enough to reflect on its meaning and a reasonable course of action, and then makes a decision rationally and with good results, of which genital expression is only one possibility and always with a married spouse, never with self or someone other than spouse. Ample statistics abound to demonstrate that sexual intercourse without marriage is risky sex that leads to great poverty on many levels.
The sexual urge always calls for integration, but rarely if ever, for acting upon it through immediate intercourse with even one's spouse without first considering the other's well-being.That marriage is a license for unrestricted access to sexual intercourse is a notion that contraception intended to assist and improve. Tragically, it has not!
Joyce holds that integration calls for seeking out the inner qualities that a person longs for from the opposite of its emphatic side. For a man, the sexual urge signals a longing for the feminine within. For a woman, the sexual urge signals a longing for the masculine within.
For a woman, she may feel sexual desire as a longing for strength, leadership, protection, guidance to balance out her softer, more emotional nature. For a man, he may feel sexual desire when he really seeks nurturing, kindness, acceptance, warmth, or wisdom to balance out his tough, analytical nature. The integrated person will be one who is in touch with the opposite, less apparent side of his or her nature. Integration needs to begin well before the age of marriage, and Joyce has written educational materials for high school students with integration in mind. After all, integration is a work in progress that first demands that the foundation be laid as early as possible, especially the understanding that persons are whole sexual persons, not only genitally but through and through.
The integrated person is ready and capable of sharing with other persons rationally and with authentic and fruitful love, whether that be through friendship with the fruitfulness of ideas shared and synthesized creatively to provide fresh ideas for the common good or with the fruitfulness of friendship that also includes children with one's spouse.Whether married or single, such persons will enrich the lives of others.
In such persons, contraception (or any other form of "illicit" sex) is not necessary! And integration is a great help to making good use, then, of something as beautiful and practical and respectful of being a human person as natural family planning, wherein both husband and wife take personal responsibility for right use of the gift of a whole-person, fully human approach to sexual love and fertility.
Integration! However, if you look it up on Google you're likely to find something about racism, but our application here has nothing at all to do with that.
In this blogpost, I will share my understanding integration as expressed by Mary Rosera Joyce in her hopeful booklet How Can a Man and a Woman Be Friends? and in her new book, The Future of Adam and Eve: finding the lost art. At first blush, her ideas may sound like that trendy notion some years ago, popularized by some psychiatrist. Or on the surface, a reader may think she is suggesting some new age pantheism, which she is definitely not. Mary Joyce offers her own celibate marriage of fifty years to Robert as proof that it is more than just a notion. For them, it is joyful reality. From lived experience, Mary Joyce calls for a new and truly revolutional sexual revolution as a remedy to that ushered in by The Pill with all its subsequent ills resulting in an untold number of broken hearts, let alone a holocaust of innocents unrivaled by any other.
So, what is 'integration' as an answer to the human dilemma of what to do about sexual urges? First, integration is a power that humans have that animals do not have. So the first thing you must be absolutely convinced about is that man is not an animal. No way, because if he (or she) were an animal, he or she couldn't even think about integration. Integration uses the power of thinking: low brain (impulse or feeling) to mid-brain (reflecting on feelings) to high brain (decisions about feelings). No animal has this. Neither the power nor the brain.
Integration is a power that few humans realize they have because they've never even heard of the concept. It's something that must be practiced, and when it is, a whole new way of being, human being, opens up. So how does it work?
It starts with a feeling. For our purposes of discussion about how a man (or woman) can control his (or her) sexual desires, it starts with a desire for genitally expressed sex. The desire is not an act. It is only a desire, neither good nor bad; however, the desire deserves attention because it is a signal: a longing for something missing. Typically, a married man might think that it must be a desire he should be able to act upon with his wife, since he is lawfully and/or even sacramentally married and sex is 'allowed,' after all.
But is the desire love? Ah, that is what a man must ponder. The desire itself signals the need to ponder, and pondering will help him to decide upon one action among several possibilities. If it's in the middle of the night and his loving wife is sound asleep after a busy day with children or work, it's probably not about love for his wife. If he can barely pay the bills already and they have several children, it's probably not about love, either, though it still could be in some cases. If his wife has given him a signal of some kind to let him know that she's not too tired, and if other things by common sense and even great generosity for a higher value, despite tiredness or sacrifice or even limitations agree that another child could be warmly welcomed, then it's probably love, and the action is simple.
But what if one or more things on a list of things happens to suggest that it is not motivated by love, but merely a sexual feeling that the man has? What then?
The feeling is just a sign that a man (or woman) is alive as a sexual being. What he typically doesn't know, though, is that the signal may not be for him to reach out to his wife. It may be a signal that he needs to reach within his own interior self to some reality that is even greater, a reality that ordinarily should precede his ever reaching out for a woman. Every man (or woman) is made in the image of God, made male and female in God's own image. But that means that each man, each human being is made male and female within, not just by separate gender, but within his or her very self.
To the degree that a human being has a healthy balance between the male-ness and female-ness within, in the inner marriage between anima and animus, that person is ready for friendship built on authentic love in celibate friendship or in marital union, and this is key to integration. Integration means integrating the two opposites within. What seems to be a desire for union with a person of the opposite sex can really be a desire for the other side of a man's own self, the "feminine-like," not to be confused with androgynous feminine side, according to philosopher Joyce.
When a man is friends with his "feminine-like" side, paradoxically instead of making him more feminine, it makes him more manly because he has manly tenderness, manly ability to really hear another, combined with his natural masculine attributes for leadership, provision, and protection of wife and family.
Integration takes practice at first, but the rewards are so substantial that a man's love life grows very rich and rational instead of irrational and reckless, causing the need for contraception, objectifying either husband or wife, both being against reason and against love. Let's face it! While physical sexual union does only belong within the confines of married relationships, even then, it is a power and an art that demands human thought, not mere animal instinct!
No animal has the capacity to practice integration, or the inner marriage as Joyce calls it, but human beings can and must in order to fully appreciate human sexuality and the joy of being "fearfully and wonderfully made" in God's own image.
When a man or woman practices integration within him or her self, then that person is ready either to marry responsibly or to stay single and live a celibate life, celibate as far as other persons go, but conjugal within his or her own self in a kind of inner marriage that is entirely healthy, entirely whole-some, and entirely human. A well-integrated person within is the one best prepared for either marriage or celibate friendship. In fact, intimate celibate friendship is made possible only to the well-integrated person, but the good news is that it really is possible.
Integration is not repression. Repression tries to tell the self that the feeling doesn't exist, maybe because the feeling is bad or dangerous and so, unwanted. The feeling is ignored irrationally, and because man is a rational being, this refusal to reflect on the feeling is never healthy.
According to Joyce, integration is not sublimation, either, because sublimation admits the feeling but then chooses a distraction so as to keep from acting on the original feeling. Sublimation is a little better than repression, but it still is not entirely integral to being human.
Integration, rather, takes a feeling just as it is and notices it without judgment. In the process of integration, a person accepts the feeling, stays with the feeling long enough to reflect on its meaning and a reasonable course of action, and then makes a decision rationally and with good results, of which genital expression is only one possibility and always with a married spouse, never with self or someone other than spouse. Ample statistics abound to demonstrate that sexual intercourse without marriage is risky sex that leads to great poverty on many levels.
The sexual urge always calls for integration, but rarely if ever, for acting upon it through immediate intercourse with even one's spouse without first considering the other's well-being.That marriage is a license for unrestricted access to sexual intercourse is a notion that contraception intended to assist and improve. Tragically, it has not!
Joyce holds that integration calls for seeking out the inner qualities that a person longs for from the opposite of its emphatic side. For a man, the sexual urge signals a longing for the feminine within. For a woman, the sexual urge signals a longing for the masculine within.
For a woman, she may feel sexual desire as a longing for strength, leadership, protection, guidance to balance out her softer, more emotional nature. For a man, he may feel sexual desire when he really seeks nurturing, kindness, acceptance, warmth, or wisdom to balance out his tough, analytical nature. The integrated person will be one who is in touch with the opposite, less apparent side of his or her nature. Integration needs to begin well before the age of marriage, and Joyce has written educational materials for high school students with integration in mind. After all, integration is a work in progress that first demands that the foundation be laid as early as possible, especially the understanding that persons are whole sexual persons, not only genitally but through and through.
The integrated person is ready and capable of sharing with other persons rationally and with authentic and fruitful love, whether that be through friendship with the fruitfulness of ideas shared and synthesized creatively to provide fresh ideas for the common good or with the fruitfulness of friendship that also includes children with one's spouse.Whether married or single, such persons will enrich the lives of others.
In such persons, contraception (or any other form of "illicit" sex) is not necessary! And integration is a great help to making good use, then, of something as beautiful and practical and respectful of being a human person as natural family planning, wherein both husband and wife take personal responsibility for right use of the gift of a whole-person, fully human approach to sexual love and fertility.
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