It may seem that I am reducing religion to childishness -- to stories and images and rituals and communities. In fact, it is in the poetic, the metaphorical, the experiential dimension of the personality that religion finds both its origins and raw power. Because we are reflective creatures we must also reflect on our religious experiences and stories; it is in the (lifelong) interlude of reflection that propositional religion and religious authority become important, indeed indispensable. But then the religiously mature person returns to the imagery, having criticized it, analyzed it, questioned it, to commit the self once more in sophisticated and reflective maturity to the story.

The Catholic imagination sees God and Her grace lurking everywhere and hence enjoys a more gracious and benign repertory of religious symbols than do most other religions. On measures of religious imagery I have developed for national surveys (and call the GRACE scale), Catholics consistently have more "gracious" images of God: they are more likely than others to picture God as a Mother, a Lover, a Spouse and a Friend (as opposed to a Father, a Judge, a Master and a King). The story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the most "graceful" story of all -- the story of a God who in some fashion took on human form so that he could show us how to live and how to die, a God who went down into the valley of death with us and promised that death would not be the end.

How do they reconcile such gracious imagery with the often apparently stern and punitive postures of their religious leadership? It must be understood that religious heritages contain many different strains and components, not all of them always in complete harmony with one another. However, in any apparent conflict between images of a gracious God and severe propositional teaching of the leaders of a heritage, the latter will surely lose.

Consider the matter of sexuality, a subject on which Catholicism is thought to be particularly repressive. Under the grim and dominant influence of St. Augustine, the Catholic high tradition has always been suspicious of "too much" marital sex. It was all right for married people to make love for the purposes of having children, so long as they didn't enjoy it too much.

Whether this cold and harsh teaching was ever accepted by married lay people, whether in fact it was ever possible for anyone but a celibate theologian to believe it, remains open to question. But the problem did not bother most Catholics because they didn't know about St. Augustine and they learned about marital sex from their parish priests (some of whom had wives of their own), their mothers, their friends and neighbors and especially from the marriage liturgies which praised the union between man and woman as reflecting the union between Jesus and his people. The Sarum ritual from Catholic England provided a blessing for the marriage bed and for the bride that she might be vigorous and pleasing in bed -- a blessing that today we would doubtless want to extend to men. While the Anglican ritual of the Book of Common Prayer follows Sarum closely, it discreetly omits such references.

In any contest between St. Augustine and Sarum for the hearts and the bodies of the common people, Sarum was bound to win. But surely the Sarum tradition and what it stands for cannot have survived to the present, can it? Does not everyone know that Catholics are sexually repressed and that Catholic husbands and wives do not enjoy marital sex? Like a lot of other things "everyone" knows about Catholics, this happens not to be true. Or to put the matter more cautiously, while Catholics may be sexually repressed, they are on the average less likely to be sexually repressed than other Americans.

According to two different national surveys, Catholics have sex more often than other Americans, are more playful in their erotic amusements than others and apparently enjoy sex with their spouse more than do others.