Scripture frequently uses these words to challenge us and we too rarely reflect upon them: Has anyone ever believed in a God as great as ours? Great, not just in terms of power, but, especially, in terms of goodness.

Julian of Norwich, whose theology of God has few equals, used to see God this way: “l see God, sitting at a table, smiling, completely relaxed, his face like a marvellous symphony.”

That vision, foreign and even perhaps scandalous to common conception and Christian preaching, is the one that, in the end, best fits the vision of God given us in Scripture.

The first image we get of God in the Old Testament, immediately after creation, is that of a God looking down on this earth and saying: “It is good; indeed, it is very good!” This is paralleled at the beginning of the New Testament, at the baptism of Jesus, when God is seen again as looking down from heaven, on his child, and saying: “This is my beloved child in whom I take delight!”

The essential attitude of Jesus can only be understood in this light. He knew God intimately and thus, in the deepest part of himself, could hear God say the deepest thing that God does say: “You are blessed. I am pleased with you. The earth is blessed. I am pleased with it.”

Because he heard this inside of himself, Jesus could look at the world, and everyone in it, and see it and them as blessed: “Blessed are you.”

Many implications flow from this, both in regards to how we view God and in how we see life.

First of all, regarding how we view God: Do we ever view God as relaxed, content, pleased with us and pleased, in fact, with the world? Do we ever believe that God takes delight in us and in the world?

Most of us, I suspect, are no longer much haunted by images of a punishing, legalistic, vindictive and arbitrary God, a God who records every sin and who exacts an ounce of suffering for an ounce of sin. Few of us still suffer from this particular fear.

Most of us, however, still suffer form an equally unhealthy and debilitating fear of God. Today this just takes a different form. For us, God is no longer the great watchdog in the sky, but is, nonetheless, far, far from pleased, relaxed and smiling. Our God, instead, is a workaholic, overly-intense, wired, displeased and semi-neurotic.

He no longer threatens us with hellfire, but he isn’t smiling, relaxed and pleased either. This is equally true in liberal and conservative circles—both of which mirror, precisely, the neurotic intensity and constant displeasure that come from believing in a hyper, workaholic and unhappy God.

We are still a long ways from really believing that God is smiling, relaxed and seeing us and the world as blessed. Consequently, consciously or unconsciously, we believe that God’s first mode of interpretation, when seeing us and the world, is that of depreciation rather than appreciation. Not unlike so many generations in the past, of whom we are so critical, we still see God as looking down on this world in judgment, in sadness and with disappointment, rather than with appreciative consciousness.

It is no accident then that, for the most part, that is also the way we look at ourselves and the world, namely, our first mode of interpretation is depreciation rather than appreciation: Before we see what is good, we see what is wrong; before we appreciate, we judge; before we are pleased, we are disappointed; before we bless; we curse; and before there is joy, there is anger. Before there is appreciative consciousness there is always criticism.

Moreover, and this is the point here, too often we do this in the name of God. We see ourselves as defending truth, values, orthodoxy or some cause and, under that divine mandate, unconsciously and consciously, we make our first task that of displeasure, criticism and judgment.

These have a place, but theirs is the second place, not the first. First, before depreciation, there must be appreciation, before my criticism there must first be appreciative consciousness. Why?

Because God works that way. Long before there is any judgment on this planet or on any of us, God is saying: “It is good. You are my beloved child in whom I am well-pleased!” God is smiling, relaxed and not neurotic. When we, liberal and conservative alike, are in a similar mode we will see the world in a similar fashion.

There is a story told about Saint Vincent de Paul which, while perhaps embellished by myth, needs nonetheless to be told and told and told again for its challenge is perennial. It runs something like this:

Vincent, whose life-effort, as we know, was directed to serving the poor, once gave his community the following instruction: “When the demands of service seem unfair to us, when we are exhausted and have to pull ourselves out of bed yet another time to do some act of service, we should do it gladly, without counting the cost and without self-pity, for if we persevere in serving the poor, persevere to the point of completely spending ourselves, perhaps someday the poor will find it in their hearts to forgive us. For it is more blessed to give than to receive … and it is also a lot easier!”

On the surface at least this is a curious comment. Why must the poor forgive us? What needs to be forgiven, especially if we are giving ourselves to them in service? 

Our minds may not see the entire logic of his statement, but, I suspect, many of us, at the level of feeling, have a pretty good sense of what is at issue here. At a simple level, all of us know that there is a certain humiliation in needing to receive, just as there is a certain pride in being able to  give. What is worse than being too busy? Having nothing at all to do. What is more painful than having to give away most everything we own? Having nothing of our own to give away. What is harder than being dragged out of bed to minister to someone in need? Being the person whose needs to drag someone else out of bed to minister to his or her needs. What is harder than being brought to our knees by the demands of those around us for our time and energy? Being on our knees begging someone else for his or her time and energy. At one level it is easy to see why it is easier to give than to receive. But there is more. 

There is divine power, literally, in being able to give. The one who gives gets to be God – or, at very least, to mediate God. That is not an overstatement. God is the source of all that is, the source of all gift. When we are in a position to give, we mediate that and feel that power, even if only unconsciously. There is a blessedness in that which, while ideally a great grace, can unfortunately easily be used to make the recipient feel inferior. It is important to understand this, otherwise there is the perennial danger that we will use our gifts of service in a way that further demeans the poor. It is not easy to learn to give gift in a way that does not shame the recipient.

But Vincent’s challenge goes further: He meant this too to be an antidote to self-pity. For anyone who is in a giving role – a parent, a priest, a minister, a teacher, a nurse, an advocate for Justice, or even a politician – there is the constant temptation to fall into self-pity: “Look what I am doing! Nobody is doing anything for me! I am so tired! Is there no end to this? Am I the only one who cares? This is asking more of me than is fair! I have my own problems!” It is easy, especially if one is tired and frustrated by lack of support, to lose heart, be begin to feel sorry for oneself, and to, eventually, feel oneself as victimized by those one is serving.

That is very common today. More and more, care-givers themselves are beginning to feel victimized by those to whom they are giving of themselves. Thus, psychologists have coined the term, “compassion burnout”. Moreover, many good people are beginning to resent the demands of the poor – the welfare system, the push by various groups for their rights, the pressure of immigrants, the drain that the sick put on the energy and money of a society, the cost of repairing the damage done by youthful vandals, and so on. Sadly, many of us are giving up and giving in, giving up on going the extra mile and giving in to the temptation to resign and take care of ourselves. 

Given all this, Vincent de Paul’s little adage must be told and retold: If we do not pull ourselves out of our exhaustion and resignation and continue to serve the poor, they will not find it in their hearts to forgive us. So too we need to remember always that it is more blessed to give than to resign and and take care of ourselves … and it also a lot easier!

Portraits of Vincent de Paul show him with a strong face, a warm face, a face that, everywhere, suggests a comfortable friendliness. He looks like a man you would want over for dinner. But if you had him over for dinner, you might want to make sure that your gift to him was indeed a real gift.

My dad has been dead for nearly 25 years and yet hardly a day goes by when I do not feel in some way, however inchoate, his influence. As I age and am, myself, forced, with each passing day, to look at life from the other side of youth, I am becoming ever more appreciative of what he shared with me.

Wisdom is not easily come by. His came to him conscriptively, through fire, through poverty, through years of having to make do with less than he would have liked. Sometimes, though not often, he would share with us incidents from his own growing up that would give us, his children, a glimpse into what shaped his soul. Let me share one of these with you: 

When my father first married, he and my mother were not able to afford a place of their own and lived, for several years, with his parents. During these years, my father worked on his dad’s farm, along with some of his other brothers. One of the winters he spent there was a particularly long and harsh one; harsh, not only in terms of cold and snow, but also in terms of the necessities of living. They were a large family, not-well-to-do, and the long winter took its toll. The family was reliant on a small herd of cattle for the milk, meat, and butter they needed for their daily subsistence. Moreover the future of the farm depended upon that herd of cattle making the winter.

With a considerable stretch of winter still before them, they ran out of feed for that herd. Feed was to be had, but it was not close by. So each day, for a number of weeks until winter finally broke, a journey of some 15 – 20 miles had to be made, in the cold, by horse and sleigh, to get the feed for the next day. The lot fell to my father and one of his brothers, along with a neighbour (who was is in the same situation) to do that journey. And so, each morning, my father, his brother, and their neighbour, would set off while it was still dark and travel nearly 10 miles by horse and sled. Once there, they would hurriedly eat a cold lunch that they had packed, load the sled with straw, and begin the long cold journey home, arriving back when it was already getting dark. 

It was a marathon and it took its toll. The neighbour, a young man, caught pneumonia and, eventually, died from it. My father and his brother were luckier. They survived that ordeal – as did the cattle and, thanks to them, the family and the farm.

Telling us all this, years later, there was nothing in my father that suggested self-pity, heroism, or even that this was all that extraordinary. “We did what we had to!” was his simple statement. “That’s what it took, back then!”

Things like that shaped his soul, formed his mettle, and, conscriptively, taught him what you need to do when you are cornered by duty, done in by circumstance, and stand helplessly before certain dictates of life: You do what it takes! 

Robert Moore, the brilliant Jungian analyst, suggests that the defining mark of adulthood is precisely that characteristic: the adult, man or woman, does what it takes.

I bring this up not just because all of us will some times in our lives find ourselves caught in situations where everything inside of us, and everything and everyone around us, will be saying: “This is ridiculous! Nobody should have to do this!” and, yet, find that there is no way out, we need to do what it takes, but especially because we are not equipping our young adequately to handle frustration. 

Richard Rohr, speaking recently on the theme of reconstruction, stated: “Today, we are giving our children less than scraps.” There are, I suggest, different levels to his statement. On the surface, obviously, he is referring to certain moral values and traits of faith. At another level, though, he is also referring to a certain quality of character, including, among other things, the capacity to handle frustration. 

It is on this point that we, as a whole society, are failing our children. We are not equipping them to handle frustration, even as, with all good intention, we continue to raise their expectations of what life should give them. 

We have given our children the highest of expectations. That is good. We owe them a dream. Where we have failed them is in not giving them the tools to handle the frustration that comes when those dreams get crushed, when circumstance and duty corner them, and there is not other choice other than to do what it takes.

Shame on you! You should know better! 

How often have we heard those awful words? Or, seen them, unspoken, real, in another’s eyes? No words, but the clear message: You should be ashamed of yourself! That’s raw hurt: A whip on bare flesh! Your nakedness ridiculed. An humiliating stain for everyone to see. A smell, like that of Cain. After shame you are a different person than before. 

Yet all of us live with it. Shame is part of life. Most of the time we connect it to a particular quality about ourselves. We are ashamed of something. Something about us is not quite right: our ignorance, our selfishness, our sexual darkness, our laziness, our loneliness, our past, our poverty, our lack of sophistication, our hidden phobia, our height, our fatness, our complexion, our hair, our birthmark, our smells, our addiction. We are all ashamed of something. 

And, after shame, we are a different person, colder, more lacking in trust. Someone once said that we often judge someone to be cold when he or she is only hurt. That is very true and I suspect that, more often than not, the hurt that looks like coldness is shame. Most of the time, when we appear as cold we are only ashamed.

The importance of this should never be understated, not just for psychology but also for spirituality. If we are ever to become whole and spiritual, namely, if we are to take seriously the first words that came out of the mouth of Jesus: “Change your life and believe in the good news”, then the coldness and distrust brought upon us by shame must be overcome. Otherwise we will go through life paranoid and ever somewhat cold.

And change will not be easy. Shame is powerful. Its bite is deep, the scars permanent. 

However, while the scars of shame are permanent, they are not necessarily fatal. We are powerfully resilient, capable of living warm and trusting lives, beyond shame. But the power to live beyond, does not lie in some easy fix or cure. As a wise axiom has it: Not everything can be cured or fixed, though it should be named properly. This is critical in the case of shame. It must be properly named.

There is a growing literature today, much of it in popular psychology circles, which tries precisely to do this, to name shame properly. Unfortunately, to my mind, it often does not name it very well. It talks about cultures of shame and religions of shame and, all too quickly, lays much of the blame for shame at the feet of those who insist on duty and on those who are less liberal sexually. We are shamed by too much insistence on duty and we are shamed by our own bodies and our sexual needs in a culture and religion which are too rigid and puritanical. Duty and sexual restraint, in this view, are the culprits. Too much insistence here and you produce a culture of shame. 

Whatever the truth of that, it misses the deeper point. Where we are most deeply shamed, and hurt, is not, first of all, because we are made to feel badly on account of some unfulfilled duty or because religion and culture have not given us permission to feel good about sex and our own bodies. No. Long before that, we are shamed at a deeper level. We are shamed in our enthusiasm. We are made to feel guilty, naive, and humiliated about our very pulse for life and about our very trust of each other. Long before we are ever told that sex is bad, or that our body isn’t quite right, or that we have failed in our duty somewhere, we are told that we are bad because we are so trusting and enthusiastic. Trust and enthusiasm are our nakedness, bare flesh. 

Remember as a child, the number of times you literally burst with life, how you ran up to somebody, someone you trusted, a parent, a teacher, a friend; completely trusting, full of life, you tried, with a nakedness you can never bring yourself to risk again, to share something you were excited about: a leaf you had found, a drawing you had made, your report card, a story you wanted to tell, a fall you had just taken, something that seemed so important to you, and you were met by a bored, irritated, chastising presence. Remember too how, sometime in your early years, however it happened, how you were made to feel ashamed for spontaneously feeling and believing certain things. Recall how the warmth and trust drained out of you. 

Then think, now, how, so many times, people perceive you as being cold when, as you know, you are only hurt.

There is a story told about St. Lawrence, perhaps only a legend, which merits retelling. 

Lawrence, so the story goes, was the deacon in small community during the third century, a time when Christians were being persecuted and martyred. One day, word came from the local civic authority that the government was going to confiscate church properties and that it was coming round to collect anything that Lawrence’s small community had which was of value. An edict was given to Lawrence stating that, on a certain day designated, he was to have all the “treasures of the church” readied so that the soldiers could come and pick them up. 

When the day arrived, the local authorities, complete with their military support, arrived at the door of Lawrence’s house. Lawrence, however, had read their decree in a way quite other than they had anticipated. He had assembled there, by his house, all the poor, the lame, the sick, the blind, the weak, the aged, the children, and the outcasts. The commandant announced: “We are here to pick up the treasures of the church! We command you: Hand them over!” 

Lawrence, on his part, calmly pointed to the group he had assembled and said: “Here they are! Take them! These are the treasures of the church!”

The commandant was neither amused nor understanding: “We are not here to play games. We have come to pick up the treasures of the church! Hand them over under the pain of death!” 

Lawrence again pointed to the group he had gathered and said: “You asked for the treasures of the church. These are our true treasures. Lying on the ground here is an old gunnysack filled with vessels and candlesticks. Some of these are made of silver, gold, and bronze. These you can gladly have. They are not of much value to us. But they are not what you asked for. The decree you sent to me said that you wanted to collect our treasures so I assembled them, these people, here for you.” 

We need, regularly, to recount this story, not just because our age is in danger decertifying, right out of existence, those who are not strong and healthy, but also because, under the influence of our culture, we are in danger of creating an ecclesiology that mirrors the blind bias of our age. 

For example: Many of us are getting ever more discouraged as, each year, the church is losing more and more of the young, the successful, the talented, and those others that our age and culture precisely considers as “golden”. Who’s left in the churches? The old, the weak, the psychologically unstable, and those with less choices and less place in the culture. As a rather cynical friend of mine puts it: “Here and there, among the very old, the very young, and those who don’t have much going in their lives, the church can still spin its magic! But it doesn’t have much attraction for those who actually have a life!” 

In Western culture, put as a simple statement of fact, he is, more than I would like to admit, correct. As a gross over-generalization, with many exceptions of course, that is what is happening. Sociologists of religion verify that. Statistics which tell us who is attending church and who is taking its doctrines and teachings seriously show, precisely, that where the church is weakest is in drawing people who are talented – artistically, athletically, scientifically, intellectually, and otherwise. We don’t draw so easily what is gold, silver, or bronze (in the eyes of the world). The church, as my cynical friend puts it, must spin its magic elsewhere. 

But we must be careful to interpret this properly. We can, and often times do, look at this and conclude that there is something terribly wrong with the church. Contemporary critics accuse us of peddling a “god of the gaps”, that is, of having a church that can draw people only when they feel certain inadequacies, gaps, in their lives. Religion, they claim, offers little to the healthy, talented, and the strong. Hence, as another cynic once put it, the church is left in the absurd position of trying to teach happy people to be unhappy so that it has some power over them!’

But there is another view, that of Lawrence: In the very old and the very young and in those who are marginalized through illness, poverty, or other kinds of unattractiveness, in those who are not seen as gold or silver in our culture, the church, more than ever, is full of treasure. 

Several years ago, at a workshop in Los Angeles, John Shea shared a story that speaks of the effect of a deep blessing:

It’s the story of a woman whom he met while teaching in Ireland. During a summer school there, he had asked each person in his class to recount an incident of blessing from his or her own life and one woman, very timidly, shared the following:

The incident took place when she was twelve years old, on a Sunday morning. She came from a large family and, each Sunday morning to ready them for church, her mother would line up all of her children and then, one by one, wash each child’s face and comb each one’s hair. Each would wait patiently in line for his or her turn and then go out to play while the mother finished with the rest. One Sunday she, the woman telling the story, was second in line and anxious to get her turn over with because it would mean nearly a half hour of play time while the others were being washed and combed. Then, just before her turn, her mother noticed that the youngest sister, at the end of the line, was missing a shoelace and asked her to go into the bedroom and get one. But, not wanting to lose her place in the line and given that her mother did not ask her a second time, she did not go. Her mother said nothing as she combed her hair. When she was finished she went out to play. However after playing for about ten minutes she felt guilty and went back into the house to get the shoelace for her baby sister. When she entered the house, the mother had just removed her own shoelace and was bent down, putting it into her baby sister’s shoe. Feeling doubly guilty, she went into her parents’ bedroom and got a shoelace and, as her mother was combing her baby sister’s hair, she bent down and put the shoelace into her mother’s shoe. While she was doing this, her mother said nothing but gently stroked her hair.

When she finished telling that story, somebody in the class asked her what it meant and she, rather embarrassedly, said: “I don’t know … but it has just stayed with me all these years!”

A day later, Shea, who during this two week course had the habit of sitting under a particular tree every day during the afternoon break and smoking a cigar, had settled himself under that tree, but had forgot to bring a cigar. Out of nowhere, the woman appeared: “Where is your cigar, today?” she asked shyly.  “I forgot to bring one!” He answered. Immediately she produced a cigar, gave it to him, and without a word disappeared. The next day after his conference, Shea found her sitting by herself at the back of the room. He went to her and confronted her with these words: “THE CIGAR IS THE SHOELACE, ISN’T IT?”  “Yes”, she answered, “Ever since that day that my mother stroked my hair, through all these years … and long after she has died … I have had this secret covenant with her, I go through life supplying what is missing!” 

Blessing begets blessing. When we are treated gently, gentleness grows in us. We all make an unconscious secret covenant with those who have blessed us, who have stroked our hair gently.

Listening to Shea’s story, I was reminded of the words of Li-Young Lee, the fine Chinese American poet, who recounts a similar incident with his own father. In a poem entitled, The Gift, he recounts how, when he was a boy of seven, his father recited a story to him to help calm the pain as he, the father, removed a metal splinter from his son’s hand. He cannot remember any longer the story his father told that day, but he can remember his father’s tenderness, his gentle voice, and how it soothed the fear and the pain of a seven-year-old who was frightened of dying from a splinter: “Had you entered that afternoon, you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame.” 

Now, no longer a boy, he, the poet, is taking a splinter out of his wife’s hand and what his father put in his hand that afternoon, all those years ago, is now inside of him: “Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for my Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.”

When we bless others, stroking them gently with understanding and forgiveness, we make secret covenants, giving them something to keep.

Each age has it own way of defining the word prophet. Today the common notion, particularly within church circles, seems to be that a prophet is someone who challenges the institutional status quo, someone who shakes things up. As such, he or she is almost automatically conceived of as an agitator, as someone who makes others uncomfortable.

There is some truth to this notion, but it is, taken without qualification, simplistic. As a contemporary axiom puts it: Every prophet disturbs, but not everyone who disturbs is a prophet. Prophecy takes many forms, some of which far more subtle, and sometimes more needed, than is the common notion of the prophet as an agitator.

I want here to suggest a prophetic ministry that is desperately needed in both the world and the church today, namely, we need persons, prophets, who have wide enough loyalties, deep enough hearts, and extensive enough sympathies to help hold together a community that is dangerously fragmented. In both the world and in the church today the sincere are divided from the sincere, the good from the good, the committed from the committed. Everywhere we see anger, hatred, bitterness, people blaming others, people frustrated and stepping away from communities they used to take part in, and people with highly selective loyalties, sympathies, and indignations. Daily, the world and the church are further polarizing.

What we are losing in all of this is community. The radical edge of both the right and the left are fragmenting the middle in such a way that, simply put, the world and the church are falling apart. Because of this there is a growing hysteria in both the right and the left and this is helping to justify a lot of things in the name of prophecy which are antithetical to it. Elementary charity, respect for others, and simple good manners are frequently by-passed in the name of higher causes. Ever narrower agendas and ever more selective ideologies get paraded as the answer to everything and anyone, be he or she ever so narrow and intolerant, can get status as a prophet, as long as that person can display sufficient anger and indignation about something. At the end of the day, the net result of this is that more and more people get alienated from each other and our communities and families are falling apart.

Prophecy is about genuine moral indignation and this takes many forms. Today we need to be morally indignant precisely about all of this angry, cancerous indignation which is so destructive of community. The task of prophecy today is to absorb division. To be a prophet today, in the church or in the world, is to let your person and your loyalties be wide enough so that they can be that place wherein all the different sides can meet, where the various indignations can spend themselves, like the storms they are, and where liberal and conservative, feminist and bishop, pro-life and pro-choice, victim and perpetrator, legalist and nihilist, puritan and liberated, socially concerned and privately obsessed can be at one table sat down. The task of the prophet today is keep incarnate the wide, all-embracing heart of God, a heart that has many rooms.

This will be a very lonely and painful vocation. In it, one will feel the earthly helplessness of the word of God, that powerlessness that comes from refusing to violate the widest and deepest contours of things. To be this kind of prophet is to sweat blood in the garden and to be powerless, defenceless, and silent before those who sit in the judgement seats of both the left and the right.

It will be a vocation within which one will, frequently, be hated by both sides, judged to be too liberal by some and too conservative by others. To be this kind of prophet is to be called wishy-washy, backward, puritanical, unbalanced, lacking in commitment to justice, sloppy in orthodoxy, judgemental, sold out, morally bankrupt.

And with that, will come an unspeakable loneliness, namely, the loneliness of true conscience, of moral isolation, of being divided from and judged by sincere persons. But that pain is the price of genuine prophecy, the price of absorbing division within a community.

Prophets, we are told, die somewhere between the altar and the sanctuary. Some of them die because they are agitators and speak out against the system. Others die because they get caught, as buffers, in the violence that follows upon that – and faith and community go on because of the blood of all of those martyrs.

Already 30 years ago, before the sexual revolution, Albert Camus had written: “Chastity alone is connected with personal progress. There is a time when moving beyond it is a victory—when it is released from its moral imperatives. But this quickly turns to defeat afterwards.” (Quoted by P. Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 233.)

Moving beyond chastity initially feels like a victory but eventually it becomes a defeat. Our post-sexual revolution generation might wan t to think about that. What is meant by those words?

Whatever they mean, they are not understood by our generation. It considers the move beyond chastity as anything but a defeat. For it, this is a progress, a sophistication, a liberation from a past ignorance, an eating of the forbidden fruit which is more of an entry into Eden than an expulsion from it.

Today, in Western culture, and in more than a few church communities as well, chastity is seen as naivete, timidity, frigidity, lack of nerve, being uptight, a certain innocence to be pitied.

One salient example of this can be seen in the debate surrounding AIDS, teenage pregnancies and venereal diseases. In this discussion the argument for chastity is generally seen as naive, impractical, narrow, religious (as if chastity was a religious concept), old-fashioned and even dangerous. Conversely, those who argue on the basis of condoms claim all the high ground—intellectual, moral and practical.

The same holds true today essentially in the entire discussion about sexuality and life. Chastity is given little place and even less respect. At best, it is seen as an unimportant and impractical ideal, at worst it is an object of ridicule. We are the poorer for this.

In some sense, and I submit this is not an overstatement, chastity is the key to everything. Joy, community, love and even full enjoyment in sex depend upon chastity. When a society is chaste, community will happen; when a family is chaste, it will find joy in its everyday life; when lovers are chaste, they will experience the full ecstasy of sex; when a church is chaste, it will experience the Holy Spirit.

The reverse is also true. Chaos, joylessness, erotic numbness and hardness of heart are generally a fault in chastity. To say this, however, implies a certain understanding of chastity. What is chastity?

Too often we identify chastity with a certain sexual purity or with simple celibacy. This, however, is too narrow. To be chaste does not mean that one does not have sex. Nor does it imply that one is in any way a prude. My parents were two of the most chaste persons I have ever met, yet they obviously enjoyed sex—as a large family and a warm, vivacious bond between them gave more than enough evidence of.

Chastity is, first and foremost, not even primarily a sexual concept—though, given the power and urgency of sex, faults in chastity often are within the area of sexuality. Chastity has to do with all experiencing. It is about the appropriateness of any experience. Chastity is reverence. Sin, in the end, is irreverence.

To be chaste is to experience people, things, places, sexuality, entertainment, phases of life, and all the opportunities that life offers in a way that does not violate, them nor ourselves. Chastity means to experience things reverently, in such a way that the experience of them leaves both them and ourselves more, not less, integrated.

I am chaste when I relate to others in a way that does not transgress their moral, psychological, emotional, sexual and aesthetic contours. I am chaste when I do not let irreverence or impatience ruin what is gift, when I let life, others, sex, be fully what they are. Conversely, I lack chastity when I cross boundaries prematurely or irreverently, when I violate anything so as to somehow reduce the gift that it is.

Chastity is respect and reverence. Its fruits are integration, gratitude and joy. Lack of chastity is irreverence and violence. Its fruits are disintegration, bitterness and cynicism (infallible signs of the lack of chastity).

Our generation, since it suffers so much from violence, disrespect, emotional chaos, lack of community, sexual irresponsibility, despondency, cynicism and lack of delight, might want to be slower in denigrating chastity. It might too, should it ever summon the courage, sort out what, in the area of chastity, is victory and what is defeat.