ABSTRACT
People do discover - as does Sarah Layton - a grace in encounters fraught with transitoriness and without much "promising": it may be just this that prompts them to want the fuller, longer exploration of the body's grace that faithfulness offers. A theology of the body's grace which can do justice to the experience, the pain and the variety, of concrete sexual discovery is not, the author believes, a marginal eccentricity in the doctrinal spectrum. Sexual desire involves a kind of perception but not merely a single perception of its object, for in the paradigm case of mutual desire there is a complex system of superimposed mutual perceptions - not only perceptions of the sexual object, but perceptions of oneself. The misfire or mismatch of sexual perception is, like any dialogue at cross-purposes, potentially farcical - no less so for being on the edge of pain.
