The Real Meaning of Sex

The entire piece is very good, and I recommend reading it all at this link, from Touchstone Magazine. I'll just post an excerpt:

... There were about four or five men and two women, and they all looked to be in their twenties. As pro-lifers marched by, they chanted various things, like “Women’s liberation, we won’t go back.” Then they sang the following song, to the tune of “Jesus Loves the Little Children”:

Jesus should have been aborted
Mary wanted a career
Abortion is a woman’s right
So we won’t give up the fight
Until you Christian ** go away.

... Then a young man who had already passed by came back to say something. Maybe he’d just thought of it, or maybe he said it to his friends and they told him to go back. He walked up to the group, looking nervous, and said: “You guys don’t even know the real meaning of sex.”

He turned quickly and walked away.

It took the group a moment to register what he’d said, and then they began to laugh. A young man said, “Yeah, well, at least we’re having more of it than you are.” One of the women said, “What does that even mean?!?”

I wondered the same thing. What did he mean? What is the meaning of sex?

...

I don’t know that I can give a short answer to the question of what the “real meaning of sex” is. I speak from a generation that made a lot of mistakes, and when I see how badly we’ve equipped our children to make sense of their own lives and relationships, it looks pretty sad. I guess the clue I would draw is that nature shows us that sex is not just for reproduction but also for that deep human connection we hunger for. It’s designed to be part of healing the essential human condition of loneliness.

This is why Christians have always had an interest in how to handle sexuality. This deep human experience of alienation and loneliness, our difficulty in connecting with each other in love, is an aspect of the shattering of our relationship with God. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that all religions recognize that there is something wrong in the universe, either with our relationship to God and each other, or in our perception of that relationship. We feel out of sync. Every religion tries to address that experienced disconnect by helping humans recover unity through prayer, meditation, serving the poor, or other means.

Christians believe that God took the initiative to repair the damage by coming to earth in human form. This means that he blessed and affirmed the human body, the body he made at the beginning of creation. He showed that it is possible for a human body to contain the presence of God.

In Christ we, too, can become “partakers of the divine nature,” as St. Peter says; we take on the presence of God like a coal takes on the illumination and warmth of fire. We live “in Christ” as St. Paul says, filled with the healing presence of God. Being bearers of God’s light means that we’re able to love each other and repair the tragic brokenness among the human race.

It is a sign, in fact a sacrament, of that union when two people unite with each other for a lifetime. We can’t love each other very well. We do so in spite of flaws and failures, continuing to offer active love no matter what. Offering this love changes the person who gives it, molding him or her into the image of God.

Receiving this love, even this imperfect love, changes the person who receives it, day by day restoring him to the likeness of God. From all we can see in nature, humans are designed to mate for a lifetime, so that even when you’re old and gray and nobody else in the world would find you sexy, you can still look over at a person who loves you just as much as he did when you were young.