As is said sometimes, homosexuality influences the rate of births, or is unacceptable to our sense of morality, etc. If the Church in the first centuries was after such problems, Christianity would not exist today. Our thinking of this problems should be determined by the question, if a homosexual as such becomes a worse person, a stranger for (what we consider to be) the truth, therefore, even before that, by the question of the meaning of sexual attraction in general.
According to a common sense, sex ‘completes’ mutual contact. This mistake includes also a truth, because, when I love someone, I love him as a whole, spirit and body. In the completeness of love, to the degree that love is real, what is the part of bodily love? Whatever that part is, we should have it also with our parents, friends and children, regardless of age, gender or any other factor. Then, if a nice body attracts, and if this attraction was meant to complete our relationship, old men could live only an inferior love, just because they are not desired. And what could we say for ugly persons, even young, or ill, deformed…?
What for evil souls is an occasion to be immersed to the impersonal, between lovers means a contact towards greater maturity – little joy mixed with disappointment, which recedes naturally in the joy of the real fulfillment of their contact, to the degree that they understand who granted them even the moment they played an immature game. As a loving relationship grows genuine and real, sexual attraction impedes.
The ‘progressive’ teaching of so called psychotherapists, counseling couples how to have sex until the old age, etc. is indeed appalling, it shortens man, not understanding that, from an aspect, each of us lives constantly in this body of humiliation, his own and his friends’, almost as if he was living in the blood of a great wound. It is, therefore, a matter of life and death, not of compliance with some ideal purity of an ideology. To the degree that I know the other, there is revealed the Measure in which all of what is his, spiritual or corporeal, take for me their proper unity and meaning.
Page 12
Panteleimon
Where is the citation to Chrysostom (“where is death, there is marriage”) from?
E-Blog
It is from his work “About Virginity” (ch. 14). Here is the context:
Ὅπου γὰρ θάνατος͵ ἐκεῖ γάμος· τούτου δὲ οὐκ ὄντος οὐδὲ αὐτὸς ἕπεται. Ἀλλ΄ οὐχ ἡ παρθενία ταύτην ἔχει τὴν ἀκολουθίαν ἀλλ΄ ἀεὶ χρήσιμον͵ ἀεὶ καλὸν καὶ μακάριον καὶ πρὸ τοῦ θανάτου καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον καὶ πρὸ τοῦ γάμου καὶ μετὰ τὸν γάμον.
Isa Almisry
“With virginity belonging to the highest point of love, the Church blesses temporarily the marriage, and rather tolerates marriage than wishes it. ”
This reminds me of a comment I heard from a monk at St. Tikhon’s, who asserted that, apart from the texts of the marriage ceremony, the Church does not celebrate the married state, to which I could only reply, “Of course, that is why we sing the hymns of Pascha describing the Risen Lord as a ‘monk coming out of His monastic cell.” [note for the non-Orthodox: the hymns actually describe Christ as “a Bride-Groom coming out of His Bridal Chamber,” and the services of Great and Holy Week are called the “Bride-Groom Services.” ]
“Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness…so God created man in His Own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply..” The Fathers have always used this text as the springboard for Trinitarian theology (“Us” “We” but “His Own” “He”) and Christian anthropology “image and likeness of God”). A loss of this perspective, led for instance among the Latins for Abelard to declare that marriage is the only sacrament that does not give grace, an oxymoron.
The Fathers, for instance, the Alexandrian, refer to the yoke that unites the Persons of the Holy, Constubstantial and Undivided and Life-Giving Tritinty in the same terminology of the yoke that binds the married couple. This reality even compelled St. Augustine to admit “it is harder for a man to be parted from his wife than to be parted from his soul.”
Christ was celibate to espouse the Church, the Bride who calls “Come” (Rev. 22.17). “It is not good that the man [Adam] should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him.” (Gen. 2. 18) Just as God created Eve out of the side of Adam, the Bride flowed out of the Holy Mysteries out of the side of the Second Adam, True God (John 19.34-36). Hell was wounded by Him Whose side was pierced. God created the physical world. Hell was created by a spirit: the Devil can create nothing, as evil, the privation of good, has no existence, just as darkness only results from the absence of light.
The monastic state is not just the absence of marriage, as it presupposes the existence of the married state. All the Christians who have a formal monastic state also count marriage as a sacrament. None of the Christians (Lutherans, Evangelicals, Pentacostals, etc.) who do not consider marriage a Holy Mystery/Sacrament have monasticism.