We present a nice reflection by our young confrere Simon F., who belongs to the International Community of Theology, in Manila. He is currently doing his pastoral year at the St. Francis Xavier Parish in Novaliches.
Speaking of our religious and missionary life, the author underlines that chastity is totality because the reality called a chaste person involves the whole of you and the whole of me. Chastity is meaningless if it is isolated from the rest of the personality. … Indeed, chastity, more than a partial aspect of the person, like the sexual area, touches upon the wholeness of individual and is situated on the level of an all-embracing and personal attitude. The beauty of vocation is relationship and chastity qualify our lives towards others.
1. Introduction
Thomas Merton wrote: “He who attempts to act and do for others, or for the world, without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressivity, his ego-centered ambition, his delusions about ends and means.”[1] In light of this quote, it would seem that each consecrated person would desire self-renewal in the gift of chastity. It is important to re-evaluate ourselves, to ask not only about chastity but how things are going with my chastity.
2. Understanding of chastity
What it is: The vow of chastity is defined as one of the evangelical counsels (Obedience, Poverty, and Chastity) through which one vows to follow Christ in real life, whether in an ecclesial community or as a single person in the secular world. Like the other evangelical counsels, chastity is a principal means for furthering one’s chosen life of Charity. [2] This is a choice that goes for the love toward Jesus. Chastity is “To live in Christ Jesus”.[3] Like we choose to live the vow of poverty in order to “give” more, obedience in order to serve better; Chastity is a vow of love in order to love more. That is, one makes the vow of loving God in order to love more God and others.
Many testify that they started desiring to become religious through a God-related experience. Indeed, not everyone, though as faithful as they are, can understand why people choose to live a vowed chaste life “because they have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12). The foundation of vow of Chastity cannot be merely based on the charity for others, the convenience for apostolic life or other purposes; its solid foundation must be from one’s profound experience of God’s love through prayer, events, and peoples.
What it is not: Chastity means to avoid all voluntary genital and pregenital sexual behaviors, but it does not mean isolation, rejection of friendship, intimacy and human love related to one’s sexuality. Everyone should agree that a genuine virtue cannot just be the absence of the opposite of that sort of behavior. In other words, the virtue of chastity cannot lie simply in the absence of unchaste acts and must be positively acquired with freedom. Therefore, religious chastity is not a passive NO but a more profound YES.
Negative examples:
- A religious concerned with and proud of purity lived in fidelity but lived for herself or himself.
- An individual is so cold and harsh, arrogantly distant from people with a superiority complex, yet whose purity is without question.
- One receives the vow of chastity with egoism or heroism as a flight from the world and separation from people, as well as the passive, timid, and frightened elimination of all affective relationships between persons.
3. Contemporary confusions
- Chastity presupposes temptation: the idea that one can only acquire this virtue of chastity through exposure to its opposite is rampant in the contemporary world. As the ancient tradition indicates that we go through vice to obtain virtue, but it is not that we should be exposed to a sexual type of temptation to loving in order to another sort of loving. Our Lord’s loving was certainly chaste loving but not the result of having been exposed to a sexual type of loving. [4]
(Being mature ≠ having been exposed to a sexual relationship) Not every experience brings beneficial functions, but it has this opportunity to grow. At the same time, it also might block our vocation.
- Confusing virtue with knowledge: “knowing about” is not at all the same as a virtue. A virtue is not a state we enter. It is not knowledge we acquire, but the result of a set of repeated acts. Obviously, absence of knowledge may make it more difficult to acquire a virtue and even make it impossible. (Chastity)
4. Chastity: A form of loving
Chastity is “a form of loving,” “a way of loving.” But it is rather difficult to answer what kind of love is chastity. In what does the virtue of chastity lie? First of all, it is the kind of loving which inclines one person to love another person (Chastity is a personal and interpersonal loving). The absence of possessiveness and self-gratification of the loved person is at least part of the specification of chastity as a way of loving. [5]
- Possessiveness: The infant loves the mother, but the love is possessive; the infant rivals the father for the affection of the mother, becomes jealous and envious of the father.
- Self-gratifying: Even if what appears to be a romantic, idealized, detached sort of loving, the adolescent’s love is still a self-gratifying way of loving. Both boy and girl find their own identity by reflection back from the others. They act because they enjoy the “feeling” of being loved and appreciated.
When we grow into adulthood, we might still bear the infant that we were within us and we are still the adolescent that we were. Our love is childish when it is possessive, and it is self-gratifying when it is adolescent. We must proceed through them to a third dimension of loving: giving without seeking recompense.
5. The Vow and Virtue of Chastity
We can, by one act, impose a vow of chastity on ourselves, but we cannot acquire the virtue of chastity that way. We have vow of chastity, but we do not automatically become the persons with the virtue of chastity. As we mentioned, chastity is a special way of loving, and the acquisition of the virtue of chastity must lie in repeated acts of that kind of loving. Chastity is a gift that expands and increases our freedom to God and others, but it also requires our efforts. There is vow of chastity, first of all in temporary vows and then in final vows; nevertheless, the virtue of chastity must be a renewed choosing over and over again.[6]
“How often have you renewed the choice of the chaste state?” Once a year, every retreat, etc. The formal renewal or the formal revival is an act of binding or dedicating oneself. But the renewed choosing, which is the action of a person doing something, should be carried out daily, hourly, and possibly even constantly.
6. Chastity: a way of being human
We need to be aware that talking about chastity as virtue, in isolation, can be misleading, because chastity is not a virtue acquired by the will in isolation. Instead of talking about an abstraction called chastity, let us talk about a reality called a chaste person.
- Totality: Chastity is totality because the reality called a chaste person involves the whole of you and the whole of me, and chastity is meaningless if it is isolated from the rest of the personality. Many might still think it was possible to remain themselves in all aspects and add chastity or to carry out acts of the virtue of chastity while leaving other appetites to take care of themselves. Indeed, chastity, more than a partial aspect of the person, like the sexual area, touches upon the wholeness of individual and is situated on the level of an all-embracing and personal attitude.[7]
Chastity cannot be maintained in a personality where any one of the passions is out of order, where anger rules, selfishness, hatred, food, drink, recreation, or any other form of self-indulgence rules the personality. Our constant checking on ourselves, at the same time vigilant in our frailty and aware of it, allows us to be open to all people with a truly free heart.
- Maturity: Since chastity requires great skill in handling oneself and one’s interpersonal relations, a chaste person is very mature. As a person is always in the process of maturity, “wounds and healings” are inevitable in becoming chaste. The immature personality may have the negative side of chastity (not to do) but has not acquired the positive side (need to do).
- Honesty: a chaste person is a very honest person. This total honesty is not just something to be contrasted with deliberate self-deception. Instead, it is from self-knowledge in contrast with the defenses that most of us use from time to time to hide our real selves from ourselves. An honest (chaste) person is being completely frank with his sexuality, straight, clean; no denying, no excusing, no rationalizing and spiritualizing.
7. Chastity qualifies missionary life
Throughout history, the Lord has raised men and women who have been called to the fullness of his love and able to love him with such intensity (even without marriage). Consecrated chastity is somehow outside of the natural pattern of evaluation of human love because it acquires a markedly transcendent and eschatological dimension. The religious were able to experience intimate communion with God and were granted the grace of spreading His gratuitous love to others and discovering in others God’s love for them.[8]
Chastity qualifies our lives toward others and shows faith to non-Christians in the manner of Jesus: neither possessive nor seeking self-gratification. Obviously, integrated consecrated persons are attractive, not necessarily in the sense of beauty but with the compelling attractiveness that comes from the contemplative center of the soul and the activities they carry out; they seem to be “more interested with others” by giving attention and space. They often project a spiritual impression that signals it is safe to approach and reveal. That’s why people willingly and trustfully open up their interior issues and “wounds” to them. The risk here is that when a consecrated person has not been integrated enough, s/he might become manipulative in the openness of vulnerable people.
8. Let the Lord wash our feet!
…During supper, fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God, he rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and dry them with the towel around his waist. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Master, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered and said to him, “What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well.” Jesus said to him, “Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over; so you are clean, but not all.” For he knew who would betray him; for this reason, he said, “Not all of you are clean.” (John 13: 2-11)
Let Him first serve you: “In your experiences of surrendering yourself to the Lord, you really need to allow Jesus to serve you, and the other challenge is to let Him love you.”
Along the vocational journey, we eventually appreciate that our calling is always a gift from the Lord through the Church, and the Lord calls and accepts who we are. The beauty of vocation is relationship. Whoever struggles with chastity is always living by himself, is not humble and just concentrates on himself. When we encounter a crisis in the area of sexuality, only humility can liberate us. Trust and openness are keys to our salvation, because the Lord comes in when we allow others to come in, such as Spiritual direction, Confession, etc.
[1] Patrick Hart (Ed.), Thomas Merton, Monk, (New York: image Books: Doubleday & Co., 1976), 15.
[2] Elizabeth McDonough “Evangelical Council of Chastity”, in Review for Religious Vol. 57 (1998), 202-207.
[3] Benedict J. Groeschel, The Courage to be chaste, (Paulist Press, New York, 1985), 12.
[4] Benedict J. Groeschel, The Courage to be chaste, 12.
[5] Eamonn Feichin O'Doherty, Consecration and Vows: Psychological Aspects, (GILL AND MACMILLAN LTD, London, 1971), 35-37.
[6] E. F. O'Doherty, Consecration and Vows, 39-40.
[7] Marcello de Carvalho Azevedo, S.J, Vocation for mission: the challenge of religious life today, translated by John W. Diercksmeier, (Paulist Press, New Jersey, 1988), 50.
[8] Marcello Azevedo, Vocation for mission, 60.
