My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone…” Song of Songs 2:10-11
Dear Friends in Christ,
I’m writing a series on stewardship, chastity and humility, virtues that underlie monastic vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience, virtues that oppose the often abusive attraction of money, sex, and power. I wrote in my piece on stewardship last week that stewardship of our bodies and relationships is what we call chastity. That’s a more proactive vision of chastity than we might normally think of. Is chastity (and even celibacy) actually more than just the absence of sex? (spoiler alert: yes! much more!).
Of course, there is a component of restraint or at least redirection often involved in chastity (read more on restraint here). For some reason, western culture is terrified of restraint when it comes to sexuality. We have developed this unwritten rule that is powerfully reinforced in our culture that says that we have a right to the sex we want when we want it. But anyone who lives in the real world can tell you that even if this were a right, it is not a reality, neither in promiscuity nor in marriage. No one always gets the sex he or she wants when he or she wants it. How did we come to such passionate convictions that this fantasy must be pursued? And what price have we paid in the pursuit of it? Let me reflect on these and other questions in the next couple of weeks.
Human cultures around the world and in history vary somewhat in the norms they have on sexual behavior. But all cultures have norms or rules for this part of human life. We can easily think of the damage done when there are no boundaries to our sexual behavior. But in the last 150 years or so, we’ve taken on worldviews that challenge that assumption. Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ located the drive for sex as part of the survival of the fittest—the advancement of the species, and the central force in all living things. Notice that this is perhaps a more theological claim than a scientific one, and we became ardent believers.
Freud also tried to move us away from Christian ideas of desire for God as a central part of our humanity. Freud called religion an ‘illusion.’ Freud claimed sex as the central motivator in human life, the progenitor of all our desires and actions. Restraint of our sexuality became ‘repression’ in Freud’s canon, and repression, of course, is the primal sin of Freudian religion. Marx took Darwin’s worldview and drew out of it the primacy of perpetual struggle and competition, with religious restraint as a tool of oppression, and casting off the shackles of such restraint as the path to human freedom.
All this gave freer reign to our wild and powerful drives, and they quickly subdued us.
All this gave freer reign to our wild and powerful drives, and they quickly subdued us. We spoke of the reckless consumption of others as a right for ourselves, claimed that consent gave us absolution, and in time claimed that our desires and drives are not part of us, but rather who we are, the center of ourselves and the object of our worship. But alas, every sexual revolution is followed shortly by revelations of abuse scandals and ‘me too’ movements. What we thought was the path to freedom has enslaved us (sometimes in the literal enslavement of human trafficking).
The Christian view of sex is different. While some voices in Christian history have obsessed about the challenges of sexual sin, Christianity does not hold a negative vision of sex, but rather a beautiful and positive vision of sex. Our culture seems to think of sex as a right to consume others for our own fleeting pleasure—or at best a limited and temporary contract for mutual taking for our pleasure. The Christian view of sex, on the other hand, is that sex is a precious and powerful gift from God, a gift, not for our mutual taking of each other, but for our mutual self-giving to each other.
Sex is a gift for the unifying of husband and wife, and for the bearing and welcoming of children into a context where they (and we) can flourish. This is a context of self-giving hospitality, of commitment and covenant to endure hardships for the sake of the other, rather than staying only so long as it pleases one’s self. Marriage lives out the kind of covenant that God makes with us—starting with sacrificial self-giving for the other’s benefit, committed and faithful in sickness or in health, committed through the suffering and loss inherent to human love and human relationships. The mutual self-giving of marriage is a sign of God’s sacrificial self-giving for us in Jesus that we might thrive.
Do you see the how the Christian view completely re-orients the direction of our sexuality? From taking to giving, from scarcity to abundance, from a restless sense of our need to a patient desire to give—in the right time, in the right amount, in the right way to bless the other. And in so doing, to live in resonance with the one who loves us with that kind of self-giving love, and to flourish as that love abounds and multiplies.
Sex, then, takes its place as a physical consummation of a more holistic marital union. Sex is not the only consummation of marital union, nor is sex a constant part of marital life. Sex is part of a wider physical intimacy, and of a wider personal intimacy that embodies the marital relationship.
Our culture, however, takes this beautiful gift and strips it of all of its depth and breadth, all of its vulnerability and positive relational power, and its generativity connected to family and heritage, and reduces it to a mere transient physical pleasure to be consumed. Such a view feeds on the dopamine hits and drives connected to sex, but like other addictive forces, this view only robs sex of the fullness of its purposes, yielding only emptiness and more painful hunger. God wants so much more for us! God wants true joy for us—true human thriving.
Of course, even if we could shut out all the cultural forces that prey on our instincts, these drives are within us too. They are often unbidden, and powerful and durable and persistent. When we are in relationships of personal depth, physical affection is more closely aligned with its purposes. So why should we restrain ourselves in such cases? And how do we manage such powerful forces? The situation is not so easy for us, is it?
I’ll address this next week, but I’ll leave you with a hint: chastity is not merely about restraint or abstinence. Chastity and even celibacy (temporary or otherwise) are not merely the lack of something, but they are something substantial in themselves. Chastity is positive actions and attitudes that we take and develop to form and shape our hearts, minds and choices toward what is good, what is better, and what is closer and closer to God’s beautiful dream for us, flowering in human flourishing. This is the promise and power of the virtue of chastity. More on this next week…
God bless you with a hunger for the richness and fullness of his vision for you in all your human relationships.
Yours in Christ,
-Tom