Masturbation: My Original Sin
Masturbation
My “Original” Sin
Last month, I told my wife Linda that my seminary class had scheduled a couple of zoom calls, one to celebrate our 60th reunion, another to discuss sex and celibacy. She said she thought it was touching that it’s taken us 80 years to decide to talk to each other about sex. Linda’s a non-Catholic, so it’s extremely hard to explain the seminary’s celibate culture to her. She always thinks I’m kidding.
Our class discussion mainly focused on how little we knew about sex in the seminary other than it was vaguely sinful. One classmate said that he always thought masturbation meant getting a hard-on, so he regularly added it to his other venial sins in confession, until his confessor at St. Pat’s told him that, if he continued to confess it, he’d have to leave the seminary.
Remember our week-long silent retreats? Remember how “impurity” was the great white whale of the Mission Band orators? How they always culminated the retreat with a rollicking homily conflating impurity with eternal hellfire? Not that they ever explained what impurity was, just that it had something to do with sex which would lead us to Hell.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. More knowledge can be even worse. Here’s what happened to me:
I’m about 11 years old, and one night in bed I discover that if I lie on my stomach, place my palms against my upper thighs, and move back and forth on the sheets, I begin to feel this mysterious glow in my penis, more tingling and delicious than anything I’ve ever felt before. It has something to do with touch and friction, and I assume I’m the only one who knows about it, that God has blessed me with a secret gift. I start looking forward to bedtime, so that I can rub up and down while I listen to the Red Blanchard Show on KCBS.
This goes on for several glorious months. Then everything goes to hell.
My folks and I go to confession every Saturday night at St. Sebastian’s. It’s our regular routine. I have my usual roster of “sins” that I rattle off, little venial sins that I know will get me easy absolution– “I got angry at my mother 5 times. I used bad words 7 times. I was uncharitable to others 9 times.” Inevitably, after I confess my sins, Father Leonard will assign me three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys, pronounce the absolution in Latin, and then lean in and ask me if I can serve the 8:30 Mass the next day. I’ll say yes, and that’ll be it for another week.
That’s the way it’s supposed to go, but tonight, for some reason, things are different. After I confess my sins, there’s an awkward silence. I can see the shadowy outline of Father’s face near the screen, but he’s not saying the words of absolution. Instead he’s just sitting there. Then he clears his throat. He seems nervous.
“Uh, Greg, when you’re in bed at night, do you, uh . . . ever, touch your penis . . . or uh, rub it back and forth?”
I’m shocked. How does he know about that?
“Um . . . yes, Father.”
He lets out a long sigh. “And do you take pleasure from doing that?”
“Um, yeah. It feels really good.”
He sighs again. “Well Greg,” - and now his voice becomes deeper, more solemn - “you’re going to have to stop doing that. It’s a mortal sin called “masturbation,” and if you keep it up, you could go to hell.
My heart drops. I don’t know what’s worse - the fact that I’ve been committing a mortal sin, or that it has such an awful-sounding name. Dazed, I walk out of the confessional, kneel down, say my penance, and resolve never to touch myself again.
It works. I don’t touch myself again for the next ten years.
That was my original sin; it was also my first big mistake; it was the first time I allowed an innocent act of mine to be labeled evil by someone else. It changed my life. It transformed my God from an intimate friend to a stern stranger. It made me uncertain about my acceptability in the world. It made me doubt my own judgment: If something that felt that good . . . was declared that bad . . . by someone I trusted that much . . . well, I must have had it all wrong from the get-go.
I was radically changed that day. My capacity for innocent pleasure was strategically squelched, priming me for the programmed celibacy of a Spartan Catholic warrior. Father Leonard passed on to me the same guilt and sexual repression he had received as a child.
Maybe I’m being simplistic, but isn’t this the same thing that happened to Adam and Eve in the garden? They started out ecstatically entwined with each other, united in blissful oneness, no sense of guilt or shame. Then Eve’s confessor, a jaded serpent, suggested they eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, thereby becoming “like God.” They did, and that’s when they first saw each other as other, and felt the subject-object distance arise between them. That’s when they first felt shame and grabbed for the nearest fig leaf.
The Hebrew word for sin is chata’ah, an archery term which means “miss the mark.” Basically, it’s a mistake. We make mistakes all the time. Very rarely are they serious enough to be life-threatening (i.e., mortal). The first really big mistake in history was when Eve listened to her Serpent confessor and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil instead of from the Tree of Life. That’s when she and Adam started to see each other as separate, no longer merged with God. That’s when they really “missed the mark” and lost their innocence. That’s when the Fig Leaf Club was founded. And we are all charter members.