Last year I floundered around for several months trying to understand why the Church doesn't more often take up the task of speaking directly to single lay people. There are very few references in the Catechism to widows and virgins, and even fewer references in the popes' encyclicals to single life in the Church. --Why is there so much help available for spouses and religious and so little for us loners? I've been told in no uncertain terms: because single life is not a vocation. --Okay, but then what are we to do with ourselves? I've been told: you discern, either towards the vocation of marriage or towards the vocation of religious life, and you devote your free time to helping others. --And if I can neither join a monastery nor find someone to marry? Then the reality of your station in life is a kind of limbo: either you missed your calling, or you have not discovered your vocation. That was the word he used, too: "limbo." As a way, I suppose, of recognizing that singles do suffer.
So I asked: why doesn't the Church then provide an option for single lay people? A fully consecrated secular life replete with public vows? To this I could find no answer. Only: some people find a consecrated life available as tertiaries of a religious order, some people make private vows, under discernment with a spiritual director, a year or so at a time...
But these were general remarks, stuff I gathered from reading around and from conference talks at a singles' retreat I attended last fall. Actually, Fr was kinder and more helpful. There is a long and rich tradition of secular saints in the church who remained unmarried, keep reading, look at the literature on virginity, celibacy, and chastity, see what you come up with, he said. My question then became: what is the difference between making a private vow of chastity and living chastely as we are all called to do? Perhaps there is no difference, I thought, and there are attitudes in the Church that suggest a private vow of chastity is a spiritual redundancy--perhaps because the vow can always be lifted should one decide to marry or go religious instead. But this question was the biggest obstacle of all, Lord, for if a private vow is close to meaningless, then why would anyone do it?
As always, faith before revelation: I had to commit in my heart to the vow before I began understand it. There is in fact a radical difference between obedience to the general call to chastity and the greater act of vowing to give--above and beyond a child's loving obedience--that which I cannot give until I have grown to desire (through grace received through loving obedience) Mary's fiat as my fiat: "let it be done to me according to your Word." A vow of chastity is not a verbal acquiescence, not a symbolic utterance, but a living communion, a word that receives the living presence of the Word as it is bound to him: you are my beloved. I was made for you. I give you my body that you might pierce it through and through with your spirit. That you might join my most vulnerable and mortal wounds to yours. That you might consume the veils between us utterly in your fire and make my will your own.
True chastity, then, transforms the letter of the law into the spirit of the spouse and the beloved. It is the marriage between heaven and earth in anticipation of heaven; it is the marriage between body and spirit in anticipation of perfection. Humanity is so prone to living out the beautiful marriage between body and spirit as though it is a great divorce, however, that chastity often becomes mere abstinence. But chastity is not stoic withdrawal. And it is not repression. It is the opposite! True chastity is the full reception of your tree of life, your rod, your staff, your sword, your cross, and your scepter--not as symbols of what you are, but as aspects of your reality. Only then can chastity become an expression of fully integrated human sexuality. Which is why it is a gift and not my own doing. All I can do is say: come, Lord--marry me if it is your will--I'm awaiting the arrival of your heaven within me with love. Only then have I opened myself to receiving you. Only then have I invited your gift to me: your sacrificed and resurrected body within mine.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.
Amen.
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"Virginity is plenitude of agape: it shows forth the reality which matrimony contains in only a veiled way. It is the full revelation of the 'mystery' still half hidden in sacramental marriage....
Like the love of the Spouse in the Canticle, the agape of the Christian celibate is 'a blazing fire, a flame of Yahweh' (Canticle 8:6). This fire of love make of virginal life a holocaust in which the 'flesh' is burnt up and with it any sign, any reality of the present world. Virginity is love impatient of the mediation of any symbols. In that respect, too, it is analogous to the sacrifice of the cross: the death on the cross was a sacrifice without rites because, in its utter despoliation, all the symbolical realities of the world came to an end; there remained only the naked corpse on the bare wood, in a total holocaust of everything belonging to this world. Virginity, too, is a feast without rites, a marriage banquet celebrated without any external rejoicings because, as on the cross, this marriage is consummated and consumed in a holocaust of self-denying love that raises it above the world.
It is in that sense that virginity is a spiritual marriage. It is a marriage: in the phrase 'spiritual marriage', the adjective does not obliterate the noun. Virginity is love, total communion with the divine agape which is the essence of the life of Christ and the life in Christ." (108)
--Lucien Legrand, The Biblical Doctrine of Virginity
1 comment:
Thank you for directing me to your “struggling-with-faith” blog. Powerful and provocative. My (inadequate, no doubt) understanding is that your decision (and trepidation) to take a vow of chastity is a decision of a marriage vow with God. It makes me tremble for you! I mean, that’s as huge of a commitment as you can take in this life. I also suspect that, like any number of marriages, it doesn’t always work out the way we’d hoped. Basically, marriage is incredibly hard, and it might be hardest if your bridegroom is Christ. But I don’t say this to dissuade you from this incredible step. On the contrary. I say: that is really the only true purpose of human life. That is the perfection of humanity (unfortunately, collectively we seem to be forgetting this real meaning of our existence). I only tremble for you because I do believe, as you pray for, that the true consummation of this marriage is the cross – terrible and abandoned suffering, the kind of suffering that makes one cry out “Why hast thou forsaken me?” And that’s an awful path to travel. But I also recognize that in the end, it is not even a choice, but a path, an inner directive which cannot be avoided past a certain point.
To pick up a little of our previous conversation – and not that it is unrelated to what you are grappling with here: I am not at all convinced of the goodness or perfection of creation or God’s plan for it. I can’t tell you how many times I complain to God about his very poor design of the whole edifice. Creationists make me laugh because I so often see the un-intelligence in design! But that’s not to say that creation is not good and perfect and a most perfect plan insofar as it is a ruse for capturing our freely given love. In that respect, and in that only (to me) is it perfect, marvelous, and beautiful. All of what IS is REALLY there to open our hearts to God who lives in secret everywhere. I forgive God the imperfection of space-time – and human psychology, which makes people murder each other, for example – because he is infinitely lonely. He is so lonely that he was willing to abandon himself to creation, to the free will of men (people), and to forget himself. I think that’s why it is also so hard for us to remember God – God doesn’t even remember himself! In that respect, he needs us desperately. There’s a beautiful hadith (a post-Koranic revelation in Islam) which sums up what for me is the meaning of this whole divine mess, and which says, through God’s voice, presumably:
I WAS A HIDDEN TREASURE, AND I WISHED TO BE KNOWN; HENCE I CREATED THE WORLD
As for miracles: I guess I never understood why people needed them, or to believe in them. The fact that there is something instead of nothing is a miracle in and of itself. When I was a little girl, I was already pretty angry at God for all the injustices I saw around me, and at one point it occurred to me that maybe he doesn’t exist. So, in order to prove myself wrong, I prayed every night for three months for a miracle – really, any sign, albeit miraculous, that would let me know he is there and listening. Well, you can imagine what happened – nothing, of course. I waited and I waited. Secretly I was hoping for a vision. I wanted an experience like the one St. Bernadette had. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed. In my disgust at my own gullibility I told God off – told him I wasn’t going to attend to him if he wasn’t going to return the favor. Yes, it was a silly childish tantrum, but it also set me up for years of needless foundering and getting sidetracked with details of a basic misunderstanding. How instructive it would have been for me to have someone step in at that moment and say, “look, the point is not for you, YOU to have these amazing experiences or be amazed at God’s power. He is waiting for you. He is waiting for your love since the beginning of time. So quit having this selfish tantrum about not having beatific visions and go love him, love his crucified body.” It would have saved me years of wasted time trying to find my way back.
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