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I've yet to write my vow, Lord, I know. It is not reluctance to give myself to you, but a desire to express the right things in a simple way and some confusion about what must be said.
"Come Holy Spirit, Father of the poor, illuminate my heart and my mind."
"Lord, open my lips and my mouth will proclaim your praise."
...
Almighty and eternal God,
I, _____,
in the hands of Fr______,
(and in the presence of my brothers and sisters?)
wishing of my full and deliberate will to consecrate my body to you
with the grace of Christ
and the help of the Blessed Virgin Mother,
promise (vow?) to you, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
my chastity for one year on this Feast of the Annunciation
(according to ... ?)
Receive me, O Lord, according to your word that I might live sanctified within your wounded side, for your purposes and within your love: my body joined to your sacrificed and resurrected body, my wounds closed within your wounds, my heart consumed by your heart, and my thirst razed within your thirst. Grant me the grace to be faithful to you. Let my hope not be in vain.
Lord my God.
...
from a letter to Fr, December 17, 2008
In my rudimentary research I found a number of advice books on the subject of chastity, and many more on celibacy—nearly all of those directed towards the priesthood—but most of the popular advice written on chaste single life is by Protestant authors (I wonder why?), so I’ll keep looking around. Still, I think I’m not looking for advice now, but for something more theological in dimension, something that informs my intention, this desire leading me towards this vow, so that I might have a deeper understanding of what I’m about to do. I went to the Vatican website and turned up little before landing on what seems like the obvious place to start: JP II’s Theology of the Body. Of course. The paragraphs I encountered first were from “Continence for the Kingdom of Heaven,” the virgin as self-willed eunuch, which seems more immediately relevant to my questions than what I discuss below. But I want to parse out one or two points from “The Meaning of Original Solitude” because it speaks to me of what I’ve written about elsewhere in this letter.
“The Meaning of Original Solitude” points to the divide that opens up within original solitude between the formation of human self-consciousness and the formation of human self-determination the moment the first man’s awareness can grasp otherness. Before Eve is introduced as helpmate, and before, therefore, Adam’s awareness of male-female complementarity can arise, he is allowed to make two discoveries: he is alone in his humanity among all the living creatures of the earth, and he is alone in his humanity before God.
Adam arrives at a knowledge of himself—of his being, his qualities, and his human identity—precisely as he arrives at a knowledge of his solitary state of existence. As he compares his body to other bodies, and sees himself as a body among other bodies, he finds no likeness of himself on earth, a radical difference signified by his own corporeality. Within the frame of original solitude, this is what the body means: it points beyond itself to the consciousness at work in perceiving what the body senses, to the intellect observing its own unique movement as it thinks about thought and joins it to act, and to an “I” who forms a conception of himself against whatever is plainly “not-I.” The body thus points to the human person as body-spirit, which is a realization in anticipation of personal unity, and of the giving of oneself to another person, and which reminds me a whole bunch of what the Catechism says of chastity:
"Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being." (2337)
The moral virtue of chastity, then, is the “successful integration of sexuality” within the human person as body-spirit—where corporeal experience is ordered towards personal body-spirit unity. “Successful integration of sexuality,” I’d suggest, is intricately tied to the formation of a healthy personal unity, or of a self-consciousness that respects the reality of human existence as body-spirit. Chastity is also essentially tied to the healthy formation of a person’s self-determination, or freedom of will, in which “the powers of life and love placed in him” are always used towards maintaining personal integrity. Which seems to suggest, I think, that at the core of personal unity and personal integrity, and at the core of human self-consciousness and human self-determination, human sexuality, the gift of the power of life, if not successfully integrated into the unity of the person through chastity, threatens to splinter the unity of the human person irreparably.
This is not the same as the effects of radical difference on Adam, whose primary solitude defines him and threatens to alienate him from the world around him. This solitude creates personal unity, as the first man also learns of his dominion over the earth and its creatures, which begins with his act of naming, and which gives him a sense of his position in the world and of his relationship to the things within it. He becomes aware that his interior life impels him towards self-realization as he encounters external reality, and in ways that the animals do not experience and are not impelled. And, finally, he discovers his personhood as a thinking self attempting to come to terms what he is. “In fact, in relatively few sentences, the ancient text sketches man as a person with the subjectivity characterizing the person” (TB 6:1).
It might seem that human self-consciousness is developed principally through an engagement with the external world—that such experience is sufficient towards the development of self-identity, and that the mind tends toward differentiation primarily as an act toward self-formation. That is, had God planted Adam in the garden and left him to his own devices, Adam would have developed a subjective or personal identity nonetheless. But here I want to emphasize that in the second account of creation, the development of human identity is helped significantly by Adam’s contact with the Lord God—in an intimate interpersonal relationship. Adam is Fathered toward an exploration of his surroundings and encouraged toward language: “So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19). All of creation is brought to Adam, so that solitary as he is, he needn’t venture into his world and encounter it alone. Moreover, Adam is not told of his solitude, but led through an experience (the naming of animals) that will allow him to understand what God already knows, and in this way is given the confidence of discovering for himself that, though he cannot grasp all of reality, he can attain to a knowledge of certain truths within reality: “but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him” (2:20). Finally, the Lord God delights in sharing with Adam the world He has formed: in presenting him with the good gift of His material creation, in bringing His creatures before him, in allowing Adam to see His interest in “what he would call them,” and in granting authority to humanity’s baby utterances (“whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name”).
There is so much tenderness, so much joyful giving and receiving in this scene, it is unmistakably about human consciousness being taught, within relationship and reciprocity, what a person is, and what it means to love another person, especially within this original “I-Thou” association, where humanity doesn’t yet know it will separate from God. In fact, this scene, I think, is linked to the other great gift humanity receives—self-determination, or freedom of will—which is the signifying mark of the Tree of Knowledge. The command against eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge marks the boundaries of relationship: to accept the gift of existence and friendship with God is to refuse death, which is the opposite of God. Without this boundary, relationship, reciprocity, isn’t even possible, for there is nothing to give back to God unless He provides the means. And of course, without freedom of will, relationship also isn’t possible, for the giving of obedience must be freely given.
It is this I sense: the Lord God’s great reciprocity in revelation and in Christ is about teaching us true personhood, and true Love. While there is no return to original solitude (and no desire to return!), I think the only path to relationship, friendship, daughterhood, and partner to the Absolute (Who can minister to my spirit, heal my splintered person, and teach me what it means to love others) is through the chaste formation of self-consciousness and self-determination, towards my own integrity. So for now, at least, I feel called to that little time allotted to Adam in his original solitude in which the Lord God Fathered his first son, and in which I might discover who I am as His daughter.
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1 comment:
Your meditations here stimulate me to think about things in my own vein – which is to say that I’m not sure how much my thoughts are a response to you as much as a sharing of what comes up for me as I read your struggle.
The unfolding of God within us is both a beatific and a terrifying possibility. I wouldn’t dismiss the God of ladybugs and puffy clouds; he can be that, certainly. Just so long as you’re not attached to this exclusive quality of his. Then he does become simply a consolation, and I’ve always thought that is a perilous attitude, because it’s going to get dismantled rudely, sooner or later. I have personally rarely experienced God in this consoling way, and as I get older, I am beginning to recognize that it may be a blessing. To me God was always much more terrifying, a source of nameless dread. I’m much more in the camp of people who intuit, as Moses did, that no one can see the face of God and live. It’s not that I experienced him as wrathful, though. Not at all. My “dread experiences” had much more to do with annihilation terrors – of being flooded with too much truth, too much of the Real.
Your reflections on Adam’s solitude in the garden are lovely. As with just about any OT story, however, I find it imperfect and lacking in terms of reflecting human experience faithfully. I have always found two things about the story puzzling: it’s clear God sets Adam and Eve up with that damn tree. I mean, he knows, he knows they are going to eat the fruit. In fact, they have to eat the fruit; he means for them to eat the fruit. Without eating the fruit they cannot be self-determining, and self-will (the desire to have something for themselves) is part of the self-determination package. So I find it ridiculous and baffling that God gets pissed off. First of all he is omniscient, so he knew better. But that’s beside the point. The point is that the story would have been so much more poignant, true and tragic if God was, as you had noticed, *hurt* by and yet reconciled to their disobedience. Reconciled because he knows that without that disobedience, they would remain asleep in his bosom – sweet and cozy, but not reciprocal. And I’ve never seen anyone be really intrigued by the fact of God’s *absence* during which Adam and Eve commit their original sin. It’s startling, really. He goes away. Where does he go? It suggests that God absenting himself from the human soul is what sets the stage for the disobedience.
Anyway, that’s not apropos Adam’s solitude, that’s my peeve with the way the story unfolds. I would have liked to see more about the absence, God’s necessary pain, etc.
Oh, I too could say so much more, but I must tear myself away. The baby is calling me.
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