Reviews of John J. McNeill's
Sex As God Intended
Review by Jack Gardner, Philadelphia EDGE
Review by William Lindsey, amazon.com
Review by Jeff Stone, Dignity USA Quarterly
Voice
Sex As God
Intended
by Jack Gardner
EDGE Contributor
Wednesday Nov 12, 2008
Religion and man’s relationship with God has been one of the driving
forces of the world throughout history. But it was the advent of
Christianity some 2000 years ago that gave birth to Western
Civilization as we know it today. As most things over time, the
teachings of Jesus Christ and those contained in the Bible have been
re-interpreted and re-evaluated so many times that it is difficult to
know what was originally intended. In his new book, former Jesuit John
J. McNeill tries to take a close look at God, sex and homosexuality
without the prejudices and fears that the men in the past two millennia
have intentionally brought to these subjects.
Sex As God Intended is a close examination of Christian religious
teachings that deal with sex and sexuality, and with conclusions
contrary to Catholic dogma. McNeill uses his intellect to delve into
what the scriptures really say, much to the displeasure of the Vatican.
He has, in his 80-plus years, pushed the boundaries of common belief
and thought, raising questions that very few were brave enough to even
contemplate.
McNeill has never accepted one of the Catholic Churches most woeful
contradictions: That he was made in God’s image as God intended but
that he was a homosexual and therefore evil and disordered. He has
devoted his life to reconciling the Catholic Church with its homosexual
members and his belief that there is a place in God’s heaven for us
regardless of who we love has kept him strong in the face of adversity
over the years.
In "Sex as God Intended," McNeill posits several heretical
interpretations of Scripture. With the first he argues that God
intended sex not only as a means of procreation but as a means of
enjoyment. He contends that the lovers depicted in the Song of Songs
were quite possibly two men. A third major point is that the sin of
Sodom was not homosexuality, but inhospitality. McNeill makes very
convincing arguments for each of his interpretations. His dialogue
about the Song of Songs makes me wish that I could read Hebrew so that
I could look at the oldest existing text and make my own opinion.
During the course of reading the book, I researched several different
translations of the Song of Songs and I do believe that McNeill makes
valid points about the lovers being male.
McNeil quotes fellow Biblical scholar Paul R. Johnson in pointing out
all of the anomalies that come from trying to interpret one of the
lovers in the Song of Songs as female: "If this person were female, she
would be , according to the original text the most liberated woman in
all the world. . . She was not interested in marriage . . .she made
many trips through the city streets at night searching for her beloved
. . . she was a mountain climber; drove a chariot; was a much feared
fighter; stalked wild animals; . . . had a large nose, strong neck and
very tiny breasts. This beautiful ten percent woman possessed a huge
body, wore a beard and was called prince."
Throughout the book, McNeill tries to lay out the place that
homosexuality has in God’s scheme of things. McNeill points out that
Jesus never condemned homosexuals and makes a case for the home of
Lazarus, Martha and Mary being the home of a lesbian couple and a gay
man. It is an interpretation that is impossible to confirm or refute
within the writings of the New Testament, but it is indeed a possible
answer for what seems to be an unusual living arrangement. McNeill also
reminds us that Jesus’ words on the sin of Sodom focus on the
resident’s unwillingness to offer hospitality to the angels more than
the sexual perversions that they may or may not have been committing.
The second half of the book contains essays by others in honor of
McNeill’s life and work as the first priest to come out for gay rights
within the Catholic Church. Looking at these essays, you see the image
of a determined, focused man doing what he feels is God’s chosen work
for him. The essayists talk about the controversy his first book, "The
Church and the Homosexual," caused when it was published in the early
1970’s, his expulsion from the priesthood nine years later when he
refused to follow the Vatican’s orders to cease ministering to gays and
lesbians, and his work as a therapist and counselor for gays and
lesbians struggling to reconcile their identities as humans and
homosexuals with their spiritual life.
"Sex as God Intended It" will make you think. It will make you question
everything you’ve heard in the media or in church about homosexuals and
God. It will make you question the rightness or wrongness of gay
marriage. It will make you take a closer look at your faith and your
beliefs. It is a book that encourages spiritual and intellectual
growth, and a book that all Christians should read, even if your pastor
or minister or priest tells you it is evil. God created thought and
reflection, and what He created can never be evil.
Lethe Press, 2008. 268 pages, paperback, $20.00 ISBN: 1590210425.
Available from booksellers everywhere or online through Amazon.
Jack Gardner is a founding producer of and director for Anagram
Productions. He has performed in Operas, Musicals and dramatic works as
well as doing voice over and radio work. Jack lives in Miami with his
three dogs.
Here's the original. Click on the link to see the review in the
Philadelphia paper EDGE
http://www.edgephiladelphia.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=books&sc3=non-fiction&id=82877
The
Prophetic Gay Theology of John McNeill: Sex As God Intended,
March 29, 2009
5 STARS!
By William D Lindsey
Sex As God Intended gathers a lifetime of prophetic thought by
therapist-theologian John McNeill about the vocation of gay persons in
church and society. At a point at which a theological discourse by and
about the gay experience was almost non-existent in Christian churches,
John McNeill crafted such a discourse--in part, out of his own joyous,
painful experience as a gay believer, in part, out of his experience
working with other gay believers as a therapist. In doing so, he opened
a path for many of us who continue to think it important to try to hold
our gay experience together with our experience of faith.
One of John McNeill's most significant contributions to Christian
theology is his carefully worked-out insistence that gay and lesbian
human beings fit into God's plan for the world. McNeill not merely
asserts this: he demonstrates why it is the case, and he does so using
unimpeachably traditional building blocks of Christian theology to make
his case.
McNeill situates the lives of gay persons--he situates our existence in
the world, an existence willed by the Creator--within the longstanding
Christian tradition that through Christ, God has caught the entire
cosmos up into a grand drama of divine salvation, in which all that has
been created has a role to play in moving the created world to
liberation. Echoing the Pauline insistence that the whole universe
groans for salvation, and the declaration of patristic thinkers such as
Irenaeus that the Spirit moves within all creation to make it
(including human beings) fully alive, John McNeill asks what particular
gifts gay and lesbian persons bring to the human community, to assist
it in its movement to full life.
To ask this is also to ask precisely what it is that makes the human
community fully alive. To ask about the particular gifts that gay and
lesbian persons offer the human community is to ask about the
eschatological goal towards which we move, as a human community. What
is it to be liberated, to be saved? What does this mean, concretely?
From what exactly do we seek salvation?
John McNeill's thought is incisive on this point. In his view, the
Western mind (and the mind of the human community in general) has,
throughout history, been involved in a constant dialectic interplay
between the masculine and the feminine (p. 100). McNeill notes that
great religious founders including Jesus and Ignatius of Loyola were,
in cultures and historic periods heavily dominated by a masculine mind,
"extraordinarily open to the feminine" (ibid.). He attributes the
fruitfulness of such religious founders' vision to their ability to
draw on the creative energies of the feminine in cultures and periods
resistant to the feminine.
In McNeill's view, the human community is currently undergoing deep
crisis as it attempts to move beyond the crippling strictures of a
masculine mindset imbued with heterosexism and driven by feminophobia
(pp. 98, 114). McNeill sees inbuilt in modernity itself "an essentially
masculine crisis" (p. 105). The modern period joined the fate of the
human race--and of the world itself--to men's domination of women, to
the subjugation of the feminine to the masculine, to the denigration of
gay and lesbian human beings by heterosexual ones. In doing so, it has
brought the human community (and the world itself) to a perilous point,
at which we face the annihilation of everything by nuclear war and
unbridled ecological destruction (p. 105).
The salvation of the world depends, then, on the ability of the human
race to move beyond the intransigent, stubborn defense of masculine
domination of everything, in our current postmodern moment.
Unfortunately, at this point of peril, the churches, including the
Roman Catholic church, have chosen to make the defense of masculine
domination of everything so central to their definition of what it
means to be a believer in the world today, that many churches view the
attempt to correct the exclusively masculine worldview we have
inherited as apocalyptic: to question the right of males to dominate is
to court the destruction of the world (p. 110). Churches are impeding a
necessary movement forward by the human community, by clinging to
outmoded, unjust patriarchal ideas and structures, at a point in which
those ideas and structures are revealed as increasingly toxic wherever
they prevail.
What do gays and lesbians, who are increasingly the human fallout of
the churches' adamantine resistance to the feminine, have to offer in
this dialectical struggle for the future of the world? In McNeill's
view, gays and lesbians have a providential opportunity to "model the
ideal goal of humanity's present evolution," by demonstrating what it
might mean to live with a balance of masculine and feminine principles
inside oneself and in the culture at large (p. 115). Gays and lesbians
can offer, simply by living their lives with unapologetic integrity, an
example of "balanced synthesis" that a culture heavily dominated by
fear of the feminine and unjust power of the masculine sorely needs, if
it is to remain a viable culture.
John McNeill follows his sketch of the dialectic evolutionary process
through which humanity is now moving--or, rather, has to move, if it
hopes to overcome forces with the perilous ability to destroy the
entire world--with a reminder of the special gifts that gay and lesbian
persons bring to church and society. This Jungian-oriented analysis of
the contributions of gays and lesbians to humanity is one that runs
through everything McNeill has written. It sustains his thought, and is
one of his most valuable contributions to Christian theology.
Following Jung, McNeill notes that gays and lesbians bring these gifts
to the human community and the churches:
1. Deep bonds of love, which bear an often unacknowledged fruit in many
social institutions that transcend the gay community itself;
2. A sensitivity to beauty;
3. Supreme gifts of compassionate service evident in the contributions
of gay and lesbian teachers, ministers, medical workers and healers,
workers in the fields of human service that serve the blind, those with
mental and physical challenges, and so on, and many other
service-oriented fields;
4. An interest in and commitment to preserving the best of traditions,
aspects of tradition that remain viable and are often overlooked by
mainstream culture;
5. And the gift of spiritual leadership.
One cannot read John McNeill's work and not conclude that the church's
decision at this moment of its history to reject--even to seek to
destroy--such gifts is tragically short-sighted. One cannot read John
McNeill's work and struggle, as an unapologetic gay person, to live in
some connection to the church without feeling the tremendous weight of
the tragedy that the churches are choosing to write today for
themselves, the human community, and the earth itself by repudiating
and undermining the gifts of gay and lesbian persons to the churches
and the human community.
John McNeill's prophetic theology opens up for me and for others a way
that would never have been opened to us, had he not written books such
as Sex As God Intended. For what he has accomplished, and for who he
is, John McNeill deserves high honor and gratitude--and not only from
the gay community. From the entire church.
William D. Lindsey
Dignity
USA Quarterly Voice
Review by Jeff Stone
To many of us in Dignity, John
McNeill is a familiar and beloved figure. Yet because he is so
well-known to us, it is possible to lose sight of the vast scope of the
achievements and gifts of this prophet in our own land. In 1970,
John published the first theological articles defending homosexuality
from a Catholic perspective, which became the basis for Dignity’s
original Statement of Position and Purpose. In 1972, he
co-founded Dignity/New York. In 1976, he published the
groundbreaking book The Church and the Homosexual, which brought his
subject into the international spotlight for the first time. Over
the next two decades, John followed with Taking a Chance on God;
Freedom, Glorious Freedom; and his autobiography, Both Feet Firmly
Planted in Midair. As a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist, John
counseled hundreds of LGBT Catholics and others. As a workshop
and retreat leader, he reached thousands more around the world.
In addition to many other honors, he received DignityUSA’s Lifetime
Achievement Award in 1997.
A featured speaker at every Dignity
national convention except one (when he was briefly silenced by the
Vatican), John will be with us in San Francisco to introduce his new
book, Sex as God Intended: A Reflection on Human Sexuality as
Play. In it, John offers fresh, joyous, and challenging insights
into a subject of intense interest to each of us, while expanding on
the major theological and psychological themes he has developed over a
lifetime. In addition, twelve of John’s distinguished fellow
theologians, writers, and activists – including Sr. Jeannine Gramick,
Daniel Helminiak, Mary Hunt, and Mark Jordan – present their own
insightful and provocative reflections on his work and life in a
festschrift of essays.
John poses a central question at the beginning
of Sex as God Intended: “Christian revelation, as it came from
Jesus, was one of the most sex-positive and body-positive religions in
the history of the world. How, then, in just a few centuries did
it become such a body- and sex-negative religion and remain so to this
day?” Turning to both Scripture and personal experience, John
seeks out the revelations of God’s intention for human sex as play,
from the Old Testament’s frankly erotic “Song of Songs” to four
profound affirmations of the body in the New Testament. In John’s
view, God’s plan for sex as a source of joy, pleasure, and love fully
embraces same-gender partners. He finds biblical support for this
conviction in the stories of Jonathan and David, and Ruth and Naomi, as
well as accounts of Jesus’s beloved disciple, the gay centurion and his
beloved boy, and Jesus’s membership in a highly unconventional family
of choice.
John’s vision of playful same-gender
sexuality includes the complete spectrum of the LGBT community’s
experience. He writes: “Intimacy, both physical and spiritual, is
precisely the goal of playful sex. But . . . in order to have the
freedom to play and to overcome self-consciousness, we must have the
felt security of being loved. The primary purpose of a
relationship of love is to enable the partners to affirm each other
continuously through shared activities in an atmosphere of security and
trust. Love gives us that freedom.” At the same time, John
contends that everyone – not just those in committed relationships –
has a right to playful and responsible expression of their sexuality
and their search for intimacy. “I agree with Norman Pittenger,”
he writes, “that there are only three kinds of sexual activity between
consenting adults: good, better, and best sex.”
Arguing forcefully for the right to same-sex
marriage, John declares that there is nothing in either Scripture or
human experience to support the denial of official recognition of
committed same-sex relationships by church and state. He explores
the “providential role of gay marriage,” including the potential for
same-sex marriage to correct the power imbalances and rigid gender
stereotypes of traditional heterosexual marriage. Additionally,
he celebrates the special gifts of creativity, compassionate service,
and spiritual leadership offered by the LGBT community.
Moreover, John maintains that one of the
main roots of homophobia is feminaphobia, or a fear of and contempt for
all things feminine. The only cure for this form of homophobia,
he states, is the liberation of women to a full and equal status with
men. Furthermore, John argues, “It is my belief that Christianity
in its present form is dying, along with all the major forms of
patriarchy representing the domination and suppression of the feminine
by the masculine. The only way it can be resurrected is to
recover and affirm the feminine, which will allow the Church once again
to proclaim the body- and sex-positive message revealed by God.”
The voices of the festschrift writers, as well as foreword author Ken
Page, speak eloquently not only of John’s deep influence on them
personally, but on LGBT Catholics, the broader Catholic and Christian
communities, and the entire LGBT spiritual movement. As Mary Hunt
writes, “His impact goes well beyond his roots to persons of diverse
faith perspectives who seek to hold together their sexuality with their
faith. If a Roman Catholic priest can do it and be open and proud
about it, why not a devout Muslim, a Southern Presbyterian, or an
Orthodox Jew? As our collective movement matures, his example
becomes more obvious.”
Sex as God Intended is the crowning work of one of our true sages,
vital and inspired in his ninth decade. A fount of new and
stimulating ideas as well as a compact overview of John McNeill’s
cumulative wisdom, it is essential reading for all of us who call
ourselves lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender and Christian.