I've renamed this blog yet again!
It is now "In Search of Charity." Before, I called it "In Search of Chastity." It turns out that chastity, for me, is elusive.
So is charity, for that matter.
A subjective experience will illustrate. Before describing it, I need to mention that I have a sexual kink. I've always had it. It's — how shall I put it — that, if I dared, I could get many jollies from voyeuristically watching (for instance) what carousing college-age women who've tanked up on beer on a Saturday night are apt to resort to, after the bars close, to restore themselves to comfort behind a parked car in a parking garage.
Get it? Enough said ...
Not daring to do it up close and personal, I seek out porn on the Internet that relates to the bodily function in question. (There's a huge amount of it.)
Now, that's not the only turn-on in my life, but it's the kinkiest. It's so kinky that it makes, for example, being gay "normal" by comparison.
And it's not "chaste": not the urge itself, not the way I satisfy that urge.
But for many years now I have made it my business to try to become more perfect, chastity-wise and with respect to all the other Christian virtues. I was "in search of chastity."
Just recently, after an episode of breaking down and satisfying (online) my kinkiest lechery, I was driving along one afternoon in my car and musing that I was not by any means the unhappy wretch I "ought" to have been for wallowing in such unholy, forbidden stuff.
And it hit me that doing that kind of thing makes me, in a way, more of a Christian. It leads me to charity.
In Christian theology, charity or love means an unlimited loving-kindness toward all others. My reasoning went this way:
I'm not gay — and I don't care about the bodily function I mentioned when it's done by men — but I do have a sexual predilection that, were it to be more common that it is, and were I really to come "out of the closet" about it, would very likely make me just as much of a pariah as being homosexual used to make people, until very recently.
In fact, I'm not at all sure that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered today is all that much more accepted than it used to be, underneath today's veneer of political correctness ... but, never mind. The point is that being "different" sexually myself makes me feel more charitable toward those who are also different, but in a different way.
That is, it makes me feel more charitable when I'm not focusing on how chaste I think I (and everybody else) ought to be.
When I'm not into chastity but into charity, as I am at this present moment, there floods over me a feeling of unity with all those other "sinners" that the world is full of — i.e., everybody. For everyone has a "kink" or two in their makeup. It may not be a sexual kink. It may be a sexual predilection that is not usually thought of as "kinky," or it may be something that has nothing to do with sex — if indeed there is anything that has nothing whatever to do with sex. But everyone has something to hide, something they may struggle with and a lot of the time fight a losing battle with.
Then I wondered, after reasoning that far, whether Christianity hasn't put way too many eggs in the basket of chastity, and way too few in the basket of charity.
Didn't Jesus dine with tax collectors, beggars, the diseased, and various persons of questionable social standing who, by the reckoning of the religious leaders of the time and place, were of low station for the very reason that they were unclean sinners, and the Lord God was punishing them?
Didn't Jesus forgive the prostitute who, according to the religious laws of the day, was being stoned to death?
Those are some of the thoughts I had as I was tooling along in my automobile. They're by no means original thoughts with me. Lots of people have tried to use such notions as a basis for a radically pro-charity theological standpoint. Well and good — but what I really think is that Jesus would have turned up his nose at the theology and urged the unity that charity fosters as a thing in itself.
