"As in James Joyce's description of Stephens' encounter with the young girl on the beach at Clontarf, this mystical power of sex also works on the imagination of writers. Rosemary Haughton argues that Dante's original encounter with Beatrice had a significant impact on Dante's development as a Christian poet. According to Haughton, Dante's first encounter with Beatrice was for him what many lovers describe as an 'Oh my God!' experience. It stirred the depths of his imagination and led him to appreciate the relationship between this 'good' in his life and the 'good' (God) of the eternal life toward which he was striving. His beloved colored everything in his life from then on. She even inspired him to speak of God the way he spoke of her. She was the 'savior' because 'she is also with attenuation, Beatrice, an "everyday" young woman of the most solid earthiness.'
"Those lovers who do not have the mystic's direct encounter with God or who lack the poetic imagination of a Dante or a Joyce still at times find that their 'Oh my God!' experiences of a lover move them not only to be aware of God's presence, but also to think of God as a lover. Research on the religious imagination supplies evidence of three ways in which a positive sexual encounter can lead to behavior which suggests that these experiences have influenced the religious imagination of the lovers, even if only at an unconscious level.
"First of all, the research indicates a positive correlation between a person's sexual satisfaction in marriage and his or her tendency to think of God as a 'lover.' Second, in those marriages where the husband considers the sexual relationship satisfactory, he is more inclined to engage in religious practices than a husband who does not have a sexually satisfying relationship with his spouse. Finally, statistics on the 'angry' Catholic woman indicate that the image of God as a 'lover' positively affects the Church attendance of this type of woman.
"A number of policy recommendations can be suggested for Catholic sexual teaching:
"1. The Church must encourage its members to become better lovers — more playful, more passionate, more skillful, more challenging. The better Catholics are as lovers, the more fully will they experience God and the more adequately will they reveal Him/Her.
"2. The Church must sustain lovers through periods of difficulty and conflict. For the Catholic, the hope of lovers that their love will last forever is not doomed to tragic disappointment. The lovers in the Song of Songs recognize that their love will be strong as death when they keep the flames of Yahweh Himself (passion) alive. They do not deny the destructive possibility of death — either literal or figurative — but they believe that Yahweh, who gave them this passion, will help them avoid destruction.
"3. The Church must help lovers to renew their loves. Marriage is not a smooth curve drawn on the chart of life. It is, rather, a series of cycles, of deaths and rebirths, of old endings and new beginnings, of falling in love again. Marriage is a sequence of surprise love affairs with the same person. The Catholic sensibility confirms the hope of all lovers that playful sex will endure when passion and commitment are joined in a relationship of intimacy. It recognizes that the strain toward intimacy that is present in every sexual encounter is a strain toward the formation of an organic community capable of repeated renewal. It is never too late to begin again.
"One strategy for a Church policy concerned to recapture the positive potential in our religious sensibility would be to use the theme of sexuality during Holy Week, demonstrating how we need to die to our abuse of sexuality in order to allow its sacramental potential to reveal that the Risen Lord is committed to us in the same ways as a lover is committed to a beloved. The religious imagination of anyone who is familiar with the experience of falling in love undoubtedly would be stirred by such a technique.
"The Catholic view of sex is comic. It refutes those suspicions that underlie in the Manichaean tendency to view sex as evil because of its demonic potential. It accepts the fact that individuals and societies have caused physical and psychological harm to themselves and others because of failure to live sex sacramentally. Still, the comic story tells us that sex does not have to be lived in this destructive manner. And even when a person fails to appreciate the sacramentality of sexuality, the comic power of the sexual drive (the flame of Yahweh Himself) continually challenges him or her to understand its ultimate meaning. The strain of the sexual drive toward unity may be ignored, dousing the comic flames of Yahweh, but the sparks smolder, ready to burst into flame and burn away the resistance to intimacy.
"The power of the sexual drive propels us to intimacy, to union with another, to the formation of a community rooted in love, which becomes a model of the committed, passionate love of God. Our religious sensibility helps us appreciate this power of the sexual drive to reveal how community should be lived if it is to be truly human, if it is to be 'in the image of God.' The cosmic union that is the goal of sacramental (revelatory) sex is a model from which we learn how to live all our human relationships — those among individuals, communities, religious groups, and nations. The intimate relationship of lovers, shored up by passion and commitment, sheds light on how to overcome the mundaneness that can eventually destroy any relationship or community.
"The concern and respect for each other, the need to work together to overcome inevitable obstacles from within and without, and the willingness of both to give and to receive that characterizes those relationships that reveal God as Lover should be the hallmark of relationships within an institution committed to carrying on the task of revealing God to the world."