CALLED TO SINGLENESS… OR JUST WAITING BY THE PHONE?: So I found this Christianity Today article to be provocative, but somewhat naive.

You know, I’m thirty, and single, and not interested in marriage for boringly obvious gay-Catholic reasons, and yet I still feel tripped out by these attempts to recast singleness as just as normative as either marriage or a vowed religious vocation. They so often seem to rest on an ideal of self-knowledge which I think is probably chimerical, and generally fail to provide an alternative vocation–like the artistic one, think Emily Dickinson or Flannery O’Connor.

This article made me notice a third potential problem: the difficulties inherent in creating a Christian culture of long-term but temporary singleness. Can there really be a vocation to singleness faut de mieux?

On the one hand, ordinary single people in the world can take heart and inspiration from the example of celibate saints. And I take Hintz’s paragraph

This said, celibacy is not necessarily a terminal vocation. God could certainly call a single adult into a new way of being in the world. But that presumes that he or she was first in full possession of a previous identity. In other words, our attentiveness to marriage as a holy calling—a calling “not to be entered into lightly,” as the Anglican service book puts it—proclaims itself most strongly when it is assumed by two people who have first known themselves to be celibate.

as meaning that you need a self before you can give that self in marriage, which is entirely true.

But… if singleness is a temporary vocation, things get really, really quite strange. A married man shouldn’t date. A monk shouldn’t date. A consecrated virgin shouldn’t date.

Should someone with Hintz’s understanding of Christian celibacy date? Should he put up the Bat signal to friends who might help him meet ladies? Should part of her sacrifice to Christ be the acceptance of the fact that her plans and self-understanding may radically change when she meets the right guy? Can there be a vocation to which you’re only loyal if you don’t fall in love–rather than a vocation to which you’re loyal, regardless of emotions and possibilities, because you made a promise to your beloved?

And to put it another and more ground-level way: If the Christian choice is between no-sex-’til-thirty-four and economically-dicey early marriage… I think the fact of dating, and the anchorless yearning it acknowledges and responds to and sustains, means that most people will still pick Door #3, a.k.a. “Forever’s gonna start tonight.” (Hey, it’s better than “Tonight is forever”!) Or, sometimes, “She said, ‘I’ve got news of my own…. I’m two months late, and it’s not with the rent.'”