"It is the Lonely Revolution"

A profound commentary written by Anthony Esolen on the film called Desire of the Everlasting Hills can be found over at Crisis Magazine:

There was another moment that made me gasp. The woman—like her brothers in the film, winsome, intelligent, and attractive, and yet also possessed of a quick feminine sense of the good in persons—was attending with her partner a feminist celebration of empowerment, out in the fields in Georgia. As they were walking along, they came upon two women on the grass, “loving on each other,” as she puts it, searching for polite words. When the women turned their heads, she saw with a shock that they wereidentical twins. Her conscience woke up for the moment, and she said to her partner, “Did you see that? Don’t you think that’s wrong?” The partner, also shaken by the sight, gave a predictable but revealing reply. “We can’t judge them,” she said, “because then other people would judge us.”

And we should remember that the inclination to this sin may make people feel particularly abandoned, in our time especially, when “sexual identity” is taken as fixed, and when the ordinary ties that used to bind people to one another, to a place and a history and a way of life, are so few and so frail. The second man in the film, once he found that his attraction to other men was not going to go away, did not conclude that there was no God, but rather that God did not love him. So whenever he passed the basilica near his home, he would turn to it with an obscene gesture, flinging it in the face of the loving God he did not know.

But in a more important sense the form of the sexual sin is not important. “All have sinned,” says Saint Paul, “and fallen short of the glory of God.” Jesus came to save sinners, and it is those who know they are sick who seek the physician, not those who believe they are healthy. All of us have breathed in the smoke of sin. No one’s flesh is clean of the char. The revolution in mores and in family life that struck the west with terrific force within my lifetime has hurt everyone. That revolution ought never to be called merely sexual. It is the Lonely Revolution.

Think of it. The conjugal act is the foundation of culture itself. It binds together the man and the woman, as man and woman, as representing all men and all women, because what they do makes the past present and ushers in the future; it is like a consummation of all of human history, and the seedbed of a world to come. This is not mystical thinking but plain fact. When I was thirteen years old and suddenly realized that I had changed, my first thought was not, “Now I can find out what is supposed to be so much fun,” because I hadn’t drunk in the poison. It was simply, with a quiet astonishment, “Now I can be a father,” meaning, I could enter into a new and permanent world of relationship.

What the Lonely Revolution did, under the cover of words like “love” and “freedom,” was to detach the sexual from the permanent things. It was to riddle the permanent with transience. A one-night stand is a kind of compressed marriage and divorce. To “love the one you’re with,” as the jauntily vicious song put it, meant to forget the one you weren’t with. It is to become not a giver of self but a consumer of selves, even if the selves are willing also to consume and be consumed. It is to use and to be used, even to be used up. So too every “relationship” which mimics marriage, but hangs an exit sign over the door. This is not philosophy. It too is a plain fact.

There's more and it's a crime to say simply that it's worthy of your time.  It's much more than that.

Read the rest.  And see the film.  

Just do it.