Breathless Waiting: from Abstaining to Chastity

To love absolutely one must learn to say no to love.

This is not a paradox since everyone can “love” more than one thing or person at once. To love one person is to give this beloved time and psychological energy making them unavailable to that other beloved. If I give myself to pizza totally, then the love of fitness will be squeezed out. On top of this, some loves are incompatible with other loves: you cannot love God and mammon.

Romance is not easy and partly this is because romance must learn to say “no.” Saying “no” is not something that a culture that wishes to sell things is good at teaching us, so romance has become more difficult than it should be.

More difficult, at least for me, is that my desire can be incompatible with the desires of the beloved. Just because I want to go to a movie does not mean Hope (my beloved!) wishes to go to a movie. It was disappointing (to me!) to discover that Hope did not think of Wagner’s Ring Cycle as a good date.

Marriage is a balancing of desires and often consists of “not yet” or “no, never.” That is the way of loving another free and independent person. If I have not learned restraint, and found a way to be myself when I cannot act on my desires, then life will disappoint me.

Everybody abstains from desire unless they are a devil or God. We are not God, but can act like devils. If I were to forget about any religious “rules” about sex, romance would teach me that learning restraint is necessary. Finding out that I can say “no” to myself and survive is an important lesson, since often circumstances will say “no” to me in any case.

Mere abstinence, a “no” to any desire (not just sex!), becomes chastity when we learn to change the “no” to a deeper “yes” to something else. We wanted pizza, but there is not pizza or we should not eat pizza. Can we learn to transform our desire for pizza to the carrot sticks we have and should have?

This is hard. I have (obviously) not done so well with pizza and carrot sticks (yet), but am learning about romance with a person. Nobody can or should get what they want, but everyone can and should get what they want if they allow the “want” to change.

A mistake is to lie about this and pretend that it already has happened. We wish, deeply desire, a relationship, but cannot have that relationship. We pretend that this is not so and hide our desire from our pastor, our God, and our community. We pretend a transformation we have not yet felt.

This is foolish. While somethings are not the business of everyone, we must never lie. If we struggle, then we cannot say we do not. Absolute romance will never come to the person who pretends to have let go of one love when he or she has not.

Romance needs truth.

This is Aristotle . . . a knowledge that happiness comes when happiness is secure from mere fate. This is Christianity: a knowledge that pain must come, but that pain (always painful!) can lead us to other joys.

We cease to abstain . . .we transform. This is not easy, or fast, or fun . . . few great things are, but it is the path of romance. Deepest love never says “no” really, but “yes” to something better. I will not do this, but I can do that.