That love of the Trinity, that divine family, is the model for human sexuality, for the love of husband and wife that gives rise to each human family. Just as God‟s love is complete and selfless, so the spousal love of husband and wife is called to be complete and selfless, to be a total self-giving: physical, emotional, and spiritual. In living out that vocation to love, through good times and through bad, a husband and wife achieve meaning and fulfillment, discover their own identities as children of God, and manifest God‟s glory. The pleasure of sexual intimacy is part of that manifestation, part of God‟s plan, as is the begetting of children. Here is how the Catechism sums up this vision of sexuality: “Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death” (#2361). That is God‟s vision, in a nutshell, for human sexuality. You can see how beautiful it is: much more positive and dynamic than what most of us have ever heard before. Far from something dirty and shameful, God designed human sexuality to be a vehicle of his grace. Another quotation from the Catechism emphasizes this truth: “The acts in marriage by which the intimate and chaste union of the spouses takes place are noble and honorable; the truly human performance of these acts fosters the self-giving they signify and enriches the spouses in joy and gratitude. Sexuality is a source of joy and pleasure” (#2362).
It’s Not Easy to Love Because of original sin, however, which weakened our ability to govern our natural tendencies, living out God‟s plan for sexuality is no simple task. We can easily let our God-given sexual drive get out of control; in fact, of all our natural urges, the sexual urge is one of the most difficult to harness; precisely because it touches the very core of our vocation as human persons, it especially was affected by original sin. Advertisers, TV and music producers, Web masters, and moviemakers have caught on to this, and use provocative images and music to manipulate us into buying their products. This in turn has the side effect of giving our society an unhealthy obsession with sex.