Notebook

...There was also "conjugal dialogue," sexual love as "an act of worship," "The Law of the Gift," "the mutuality of self-giving, in a truly nuptial relationship expressed through their embodiness as Commonweal 6 December 3,1999 male and female...

...She rolled her eyes...

...she would protest, before announcing her estimate of the meager hourly wage I was getting as a reviewer...

...God knows, ir this age of abortion and incipient eugenics, we desperately need another "story" about the place of sex in a fully human life...

...Or for easy understanding...

...I learned this while reading George Weigel's back-breaking, thousand-page biography of John Paul II (Witness to Hope), where Weigel celebrates the revolutionary nature of Karol Wojtyla's thinking about "sexual function and the mutual exchange of pleasure...

...Weigel's stamina is humbling, and he labors heroically to turn the pope's firm opposition to contraception into a new humanistic and philosophical breakthrough in our understanding of the true meaning of sexuality...

...But the pope's highly abstract and mystical approach only trades in an older hopelessly rarefied and arguably more negative description of sex for another hopelessly rarefied and arguably more positive description...

...Paul Baumann Paul Baumann is executive editor of Commonweal...

...Amen to that...

...Weigel not only chronicles the pope's every hiccup and Carpathian hike, but he is determined to provide an exegesis for nearly every papal utterance...

...All this brought back to memory my first encounter with the pope's writings on sexual morality...

...Let me explain...

...By the time I finished the section, I was eager to return to the more mundane tales of how John Paul toppled communism, saved the post-Vatican II church, rebuffed "radical" feminism, stanched the exodus from the priesthood, and in his spare time reconciled Catholicism to capitalism...

...This blizzard of words was not going to let up...

...For my sins, I spent the better part of a month plowing through Witness to Hope...

...Periodically during my titanic struggle with Witness to Hope (which, by the way, has many fine things in it), my wife would pass through the room and cast a skeptical eye in my direction...

...But the arcane vocabulary—a mixture of Red Cross Blood Drive exhortation and organ transplantation pleas— can bring the occasional smile...

...I don't understand how you can read that stuff," she said, shaking her head...

...Honey," I began, "just let me explain...

...There was so much "mutual self-donation" I had a hard time keeping track of who was donating what...

...About a third of the way through the book, I started getting that sinking feeling I associate with the Donner party...

...I was not going to make it out alive...

...I read on...

...But what does she know...

...Commonweal 7 December 3,1999...

...Imagine my delight, then, when Weigel turned to the ever draught subject of sex...

...I suspect that most married people will still come away from the pope's theology of the body scratching their heads— I suppose we should be scratching each other's heads—about how the use of contraception turns one's spouse into a sinful object of sexual self-gratification...

...It was not a light penance...

...Honesty compels me to report that a moment of awkward silence followed...

...Surely here was a topic to lift the sagging eyelids of any weary reviewer...

...Marriage, after all, is a "school where we become fitted...to make a complete gift of self to the other...

...To coin a phrase, the pope's exacting Theology of the Body "does not make for easy reading...

...Weigel imagines that John Paul's work on sex is a "theological time bomb" set to go off to great and salutary effect some time in the next century...

...In fact, I seem to remember excitedly reading that bit aloud to my wife...

...I learned that the goal of sex within marriage is "perfect self-donation" and how "true attraction desires the other's good through the gift of myself...

...However, I vividly remember my astonishment and delight in coming across the book's detailed instruction on the moral imperative of simultaneous orgasm...

...You can only rearrange the old prohibitions in so many ways...

...In tackling John Paul's more opaque writings, Weigel usually enters the very wise caveat that however profound his ideas may be, Wojtyla's philosophical prose "does not make for easy reading...

...And I suspect we don't honor this remarkable pope by solemnly pretending otherwise...

...My wife then gave me what I can only describe as a pitying look...

...I suspect if s a dud...

...She's not even a Catholic...

...Darling," I said, my eyes alight in hopeful expectation, "would you say that our sex life 'is an icon of the interior life of God...

...As I recall, she rolled her eyes and mumbled something about "another impossible Catholic sexual teaching...

...Just let me explain...," I protested...

...Are you still reading that...

...Many years ago I was asked by a newspaper to review Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility, together with his then recently published Crossing the Threshold of Hope...

...I'm on to the sex part now," I said brightly...

...I read it...

...Even translating John Paul's ruminations into "more accessible categories and vocabulary," as Weigel urges, is unlikely to change the reception of this very unpersuasive teaching...

...A line, I confess, that I have on occasion used myself...

...I believe my words to the book editor were that it "does not make for easy reading...

...However idealistic the framework, the old taboo still serves as ballast...

...But when I came upon Weigel's pithy summary of John Paul's theology of sex, I felt compelled to call my wife back into the room...

...She smiled patronizingly, patted me on the shoulder in the spirit of "mutual self-giving," and headed out of the room...

...I could not, in good conscience, spare her this...