Rededicating This Blog Yet Again!

An occasional topic of this blog has been Christian chastity. In this blog and in my personal commitments, I've been wobbly about chastity in the past, in terms of what it means, of how important it is (or isn't) to the Christian. Of late I've come to realize that chastity lies at the core of Christian belief and practice.

Sexual chastity, in particular. There are all sorts of promiscuity, and all sorts of its opposite, chastity. But the word chastity calls to mind, mainly, sexual restraint.

Ever since I've been a Christian at all, and it's been some 30 years since I was baptized, I've not been particularly chaste. Nor have I been particularly promiscuous. I've been somewhere in between, and I've rationalized it by imagining that questions of chastity and promiscuity are peripheral to being a good Christian in this day and age.

Wrong.

It's just that, today, in this modern world, traditional Christian beliefs about such things as the sanctity of married, one-man-one-woman, sexually exclusive fidelity have become so much more "radical" than they ever were before that I wanted to believe that some kind of a new dispensation had arrived from God. We could be good, holy, loving-of-others Christians while setting aside the old rules about sex.

I've reformed my views. Why? Because I finally came to see that I've harbored those old views all my life, while at the same time not admitting to others, or myself, that I did.

It's easy to juggle internal contradictions like that — until such time as you realize you've been doing so. I've always absolutely adored the idea of a man and a woman finding one another, pairing off for life under the auspices of holy wedlock, coming to each other as virgins on their wedding night, cherishing each other for the rest of time (and beyond). It's even better when their union produces abundant children whom they love, and who love them back. And so it goes, from generation to generation.

Except, today, it doesn't work that way. Not all the time.

Still, it happens often enough (well, maybe not the virgins-on-their-wedding-night part) that the ancient pattern is not lost to view. Yet the deviations from the pattern are so ubiquitous today that they seem "normal" and the pattern itself seems "outdated" and "quaint."

That's one reason why I say that belief in the sanctity of the pattern is "radical." Another reason has to do with the root meaning of "radical," which is, of course, "of or pertaining to the root." For I have finally put it together in my mind that the old ideas about sexual chastity and holiness lie at the root of Judeo-Christian beliefs.

If you go back to the Hebrew Bible — Christians call it the Old Testament — you find just about every story laced with allusions to sex and marriage. In Genesis alone: Adam and Eve; Abraham and Sarah; Jacob and Rachel (pictured at left), and so on. Even on the Ark "two of every sort [of animal]...male and female" are Noah's passengers.

In the New Testament we learn that Jesus was born of Mary after God's angel visited her and told her that she, though a virgin, would conceive by the Holy Spirit.

Why all the marital imagery?

Catholic theology holds that in the One God in Three Persons — in the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — the Persons are related in a way that human marriage and procreation reflect. From the love between the Father and His only-begotten Son proceeds the Holy Spirit. Though this divine love is not sexual, human sexual love and procreation mirror it.

If this is so, then our chastity is favored by the very weave of the fabric of reality. God wove reality in a way that makes wrong the sorts of promiscuity we claim the "right" to freely embrace today.

If we don't like the "weave of reality" metaphor, we can put it differently: Reality is so deeply colored by God's insistence on chastity that it might as well have been dyed that way ... and, shucks, I guess we're back to the metaphor of reality as a fabric that God has woven and given indelible color to.

Another try: God in effect "tattoos" reality with a mark of His holiness, but we are blind to it unless we use sex aright.

But why? It seems more logical that the prevailing wisdom today — that we are "free" to have sex of any type we want, with whatever consenting adults we choose — would be correct. Why would sexual license be responsible for so much of the world's pain?

Don't believe me? Just watch The Maury Povich Show when "Who's My Baby's Daddy?" is its theme, as it so frequently is.

Or, think about the approximately 46 million abortions that are performed worldwide every year. According to this page, 1.21 million induced abortions were performed in the United States in 2005, down from 1.31 million in 2000. From 1973 through 2005, more than 45 million legal abortions occurred in the U.S. Each abortion, wherever it occurs, is a tragedy. Even abortion doctors admit that their patients are anything but blithe as they enter and, after the procedure, leave the clinic.

That observation alone does not make abortions, though deemed legal and permissible by modern society, morally wrong. But it tells me that the general social situation of which the high incidence of abortion is but a symptom represents a veritable cultural sickness. Purposely killing the baby in your own womb is something that should happen rarely if ever. Yet it is anything but rare.

Again, why? Why is the current sexual permissiveness so hard on us? If sex is natural and normal in great variety and quantity, as we are told today, why does it so often put us in situations of regret?

My answer is that permissiveness goes against the grain of reality. No wonder it gives us so many splinters.

And that, to me, bespeaks the existence of God. Why would there be an anti-permissive grain to reality at all, unless that reality reflects at its deepest level something about the inner nature of the God who fashioned it?