“Woe to chastity that is not practised out of love, but woe to love that excludes chastity.” These are the words of Benoît Standaert, a Benedictine monk, and they can, I believe, be profitably read in our culture today where, to the detriment of everyone, the sexually active and vowed celibates alike, sexuality and chastity are generally seen as opposed to each other, as enemies.
That this opposition is unfortunate is not very well understood today, either in our culture or in our churches. In our current culture, chastity is mostly seen as a naïvety, a lack of critical sophistication, a quality you honour and protect only in children. Indeed, within the popular culture today chastity is often disdained and seen as a fear-based moral rigidity. Ironically, many of us in our churches who are trying to defend chastity are no healthier, in that we never link the chastity we defend to a spirituality that’s wholesome enough to able to celebrate sexuality as a beautiful gift from God that’s intended to be linked to exuberance, spirituality and delight.
