Created for Intimacy: Sexual Healing in Christ - Hardcover

by Joshua Elzner (Author)

We all ask questions about love, intimacy, and the sexual sphere which are foundational for the happiness and wholeness of our lives. And in responding to these questions, it is of utmost importance that the Church offers not fearful "oughts" and "ought nots" but a vision of beauty and affirmation, a journey of integration in true love and the freedom born of it. This book seeks to aid in some small measure in this task, presenting an understanding of sexuality bathed in the light of the Trinity and the whole teaching of the Church. And in addition to the many words of explanation and contemplation, this book also present an evangelization through image: presenting images that can truly help educate in how to see and live our bodiliness and our relation to the bodies of others.

The images and words of this book are intended to help facilitate the path of healing and integration into authentic purity for persons who have been affected by either the extreme of our pornified culture or the extreme of a sexual repression, and also simply to help evangelize the heart of any who desire to see and reverence the beauty of God manifest in the human body. Many persons in our world, in fact, are affected by both of these extremes simultaneously, to differing degrees and in different ways. Considering the statistics of early and almost universal exposure to pornographic material, it is no longer possible to seek purity merely in "not seeing." Rather, the wound is inflicted precisely through a seeing that is improper, a seeing that is forced upon us or seduces us-not only in pornographic images themselves, but in the very climate of our culture as a whole-and in doing so subtly twists our own capacity to see and to receive the "word" that the human body speaks in all of its beauty and sacredness, without fear or repressive projection, but rather with deep receptivity, childlike wonder, and awe.

The text of this book includes that of "Loving in the Light of Eternity" (without the poetry) and a few other additional reflections related to anatomy and art, and also contains many images added to accompany the text. It also includes some sections on anatomical structure and meaning and on the beauty of the human body. These latter sections contain a great deal of art as well as explicit photographs, which are to be viewed with discretion and reverence, and yet without fear, as they are given precisely in order to educate in authentic seeing.