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| Chastity "Chastity is intimate communion with Christ in selfless love. In this love the feelings are not deadened but clarified from within." (Brunner S. J.) CHASTITY: BETHROTHAL TO CHRIST: Christian chastity is intended as a means of restoring to human relationships the purity and unselfishness that are theirs by right. It is not be accounted for by a wholesale condemnation of sex. As a judgment on marriage it is not to be thought of. The fact that celibacy spares a man a load of troubles and worries is also wholly irrelevant. On the contrary, love, true to its nature, impels a man to take other people's trouble and worries upon himself? No, to tot up the advantages of celibacy is a selfish and heathen act, not at all conducive to making chastity stand out in its true colours. TRUE NATURE OF CHASTITY: The real ground for Christian chastity is something totally different. It aims at the same thing as marriage ultimately and intrinsically does: self-surrender in the service of other people: but without the sexual bond and its attendant dangers. Just as poverty concentrates on that essential quality of earthly goods that does man good, and avoids exposure to the entanglements of poverty, so chastity seeks to realise the intrinsic part of marriage, THE PERSONAL SPIRITUAL VALUES, in renunciation of sex with all its allurements and inherent egoism. CHASTITY: LOVE FOR CHRIST AND THE TRINITY: Acknowledgment of the Man-Christ, in whose genuinely human behaviour and feeling the perfection of Divine Love is revealed for all to see, CAN INFLAME human hearts to most noble love and devotion to the God Man. His sublime form can take such complete possession of a man's thoughts and feelings, that there is no room left in him for that intimate attachment to another person which constitutes marriage. CHASTITY IS THUS ESSENTIALLY A SPECIAL VOCATION TO THIS ALL INCLUSIVE LOVE FOR GOD INCARNATE. In this vocation it resembles the ideal form of marriage where each of the two people is strongly and utterly convinced that the other is the only right one and there can be no other, to whom one shall and must belong forever? Reverence for Christ's divinity and human perfection warrants a declaration of total war on self-love. CHASTITY AND FRATERNAL CHARITY: Chastity brings with it a great obligation to love other people. It promotes the serious effort to love other people UNSELFISHLY with no concern for any possible pleasure or advantage to be gained from their society, and no attention paid to any purely instinctive attraction or replusion that may be felt, nor any care whether this affection will contribute to the fulfilment of one's own emotional life? All the opportunities for egoism should be resisted with increasing firmness, BY KEEPING ONE'S GAZE CONSTANTLY FASTENED ON CHRIST OUR LORD. What has to happen is practically a miracle - beyond unredeemed human powers; to be unselfish without being cold in feeling, to love dearly and yet not seek one's self and one's pleasure in this love. Love for the high stature of Christ who stands before the human soul as Man and God, makes such love possible by mightily raising a man above himself. He whose heart is brimming with such love can venture to approach others with warm love WITHOUT RUNNING THE RISK OF ENTANGLEMENT? It is not the warmth of personal attraction that should disappear; on the contrary - but it must burn with a CLEAR flame. |