May 5, 2014
Can it be that the time has come, in our general American culture and in our Catholic culture as well, to celebrate virginity?
For almost four decades, virginity has been in the decline. “Chastity is its own punishment,” went a button in the ’60s, that decade when we listened to a list of once-scorned sexual acts now sung to us in the musical “Hair.” Certainly, for Catholics, virginity has been in overt decline. The numbers of women and men drawn to teaching orders as sisters and brothers has almost reached the point of no return. For priests, the whole idea of virginity has been smeared by three-decades of revelations of sexual abuse against minors – confirming for the general public their surmise that no one really keeps celibacy – and now we have the gruesome evidence right before us.
Nevertheless, general society does not know what to do with its new vision of sexuality – a vision that basically extols every kind of sexual act so long as it is not criminal or diseased. Other trends in society carry this vision aloft: the ability to separate sexuality from fertility, and the consequent ability to prolong life-long commitments until one’s 30s (with divorce as a back-up in case even this commitment wanes).
So we have a society where virtually meaningless sexual activity is at least tolerated, if not expected. Our public images in many forms of media presume that two “hot” bodies will soon be in bed. Public health perspectives all look at sex as something to be furthered, with the less-desirable consequences trimmed, if possible. Abortion has never been the primary issue: irresponsible sexual activity has. Likewise, contraception has been far more than a conundrum for moral theologians: it’s been the proclamation of sex with seemingly minimal consequences.
While Catholics may have the least credibility to talk about sexuality, stereotyped as we are (rightly or wrongly) as obsessed about sex, we still have the important role of bearing witness to a vision of sexuality that flows from a profound human responsibility – expressing ultimate commitment to another, and to life, by the way we relate to each other in the most intimate way.
Running against this vision, of course, is the sex-as-gratification-syndrome, once primarily pinned to males, but now pinned to both genders (and the in-betweens) – remember Spike Lee’s “She’s Got to Have it”? While one might argue that one cannot dismiss sex only as gratification, once it is taken out of the context of committed relationship, sex begins to have very wobbly meanings.
Perhaps today’s situations mirror, in some way, that which the Ancient Christians saw in the pagans. These early Christians honored virginity all the more that it spoke against a wanton sexuality running through their pagan environs. Virginity, if it in some way might speak against the pleasures of sex, speaks far more about the meaning of sex.
Virginity speaks about the inner realities of human persons, communicated in the most intimate and personal ways through sexual contact – how frail, and precious, and nurtured these inner realities must be. As most males know that having “sex on one’s mind” colors almost all of life, so most people know, at some discernible level, that randomly coupling with others alters not only our inner states, but our vision of the world. If much of modern life is absorbed with the issue of identity (“to whom do I belong”), the way moderns do sex certainly mucks that question up.
So perhaps there’s a shift toward virginity once again – certainly the growing interest in vocations that even we somewhat non-traditional Paulists see gives evidence of that. Perhaps, as we were discussing in the common room at St. Paul’s College a few weeks ago, younger people see all this sexual activity (and pressure) as instability – one more instability in a frenetic world without much of a meta-narrative to hold it together.
And, more than an oasis in a desert of sexual meaning, perhaps virginity is saying something that must be said before God and before humanity: some values transcend generation, transcend family, transcend human kinship. Virginity, especially when lived authentically, allows us to touch the passion we feel in the lives of Jesus and Paul: a passion for God that calls for total response. Surely that response can be made in many states of life, but virginity, when lived well, certainly raises the bar, and points to the divine-among-us with unusual clarity.