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Honest about his own sexual experiences, faithful to heterosexual normativity, and devout in his Catholic faith, Fr. Kevin Clark’s reflections on sexuality are as relevant today as they were when the book was first published forty years ago.
Quality writing never goes out of style.
In fact, Clark’s eminently-readable work of 182 pages will help sex-saturated and sex-weary young people in 2026 understand that sex is a crucial aspect of being human no matter one’s state in life—whether one has chosen being married, staying single, or becoming a member of a religious order.
The initial pages of Clark’s work establish some essential facts about human life and are therefore applicable to religious and non-religious persons. “From the womb I carried with me the instinct to establish relationships with others,” he writes; “Being driven from the womb was itself the impetus to want to regain a sense of connectedness with others” (15). This universal fact of our humanity explains why “Sexuality is a much more pervasive reality in human life than most people I have spoken with seem to believe” (19) because, being open to children aside for the moment, sex is a means to obtain connectedness with others.
Since many (if not most) contemporary people erroneously think sex is the be-all and end-all of life, Clark concludes that
“Much of the disappointment in the lives of celibate and married people, as well as in the lives of all others, comes from failure to recognize the personal need for intimacy and from relying exclusively on the gratification of our biological sexual urges and our emotional or bio-psychological sexual drives to bring happiness into our lives.” (20)
The following paragraph is perhaps the most trenchant in the entire book and one which will help anybody who thinks that his or her sexual fantasies must be pursued:
“In workshops I have given with Jan and Jerry, we sometimes asked the participants to examine their most enticing or most frequently reoccurring pleasant sexual fantasy. We invite them to follow that fantasy through to its realistic imagined consequences. If you acted out your sexual fantasy, what would it be like for you an hour later, or a day later, or a year later? The realization people often come to is that their fantasies may be pleasant at the point at which they are most enticing, but they are disappointing often in their consequences.” (121-2)
Almost a prophecy, the following paragraph suggests that Clark knew how society would become corrupted by the distortion of sexuality (think, for example, of the LGBTQ distortion of heterosexual normativity and the transgender refusal to recognize that there are only two genders):
“A society which insists on the right of each individual to engage in sexual behavior and to give sexual activity his or her own meaning exclusive of a cultural meaning has placed explosives around the foundations on which it stands.” (80)
A key notion in Clark’s work is that “intimacy” should not be confused with genital sexual activity. While married persons have the right to engage in such acts, since celibate men and women (priests, other religious, or widows and widowers who choose not to marry again) cannot engage in genital sexual acts, intimacy can still be achieved because it meets a deeper personal and spiritual longing within human beings than the physical pleasure of marital sex:
“I am a man committed to a celibate life. That life is fulfilling for me, largely, I suspect, because in Ron and Jerry and Jan and Paul I have relationships which meet my need to have a mentor, a friend, a spouse and a son [….] It is not my urges and drives or needs which brought about the intimate relationships I have with these four people; nor is it their appearance or personalities; nor, for that matter, is it the circumstances which brought us into each others’ lives. Intimacy could grow because of the way we behaved toward each other. The behaviors I chose allowed a personal intimacy to grow instead of merely relationships which would be gratifying to my genital urges and romantic drives or would simply find me filling a role which related to the role which another filled.” (101-2; italics in original)
One of Clark’s best summary statements (which pepper the volume so that the reader can study what he argues) contains several essential conclusions of how being celibate is consistent with understanding and appreciating one’s sexuality:
“Our biological urges reveal themselves in our bodies. Our bio-psychological drives revealed themselves in our emotions. Our personal/spiritual need for intimacy reveals itself most clearly when it is being abundantly met or when it is not being met at all.” (127; italics in original)
As a new widower who lost the love of his life nearly nine months ago, Clark’s work is one of the most consequential books of my life. I trust that readers will enjoy not only Clark’s mellifluous prose, but also his positive approach to human sexuality.