chastity Archives - Held By His Pierced Hands

How to Stay Chaste: 10 Tips for Couples

It’s all well and good for a single gal to tell y’all to be good, but when you’re really in love things can get hard. After last week’s post on chastity, some of you might be wondering how on earth people do it. From what I’ve gathered, it generally involves more than just a strong will; it involves prayer and guidelines and communication and mercy. So for those of you who are in a relationship and struggling–or who aren’t in a relationship but are still struggling or who aren’t either but expect one day to be–here are some tips on pursuing chastity when love and chemistry seem to be conspiring against your better judgment.

Be committed. Know who you are and whose you are. Know why chastity matters. Then make a commitment–to God, to yourself, and to each other–that you will strive for chastity. If you’re halfhearted, your resolve won’t last long. And if you’re not on the same page, it’ll be very, very difficult. But if you’re both serious about being holy and keeping your relationship pure, you have a real shot.
Pray for each other. The purpose of dating is to discern marriage; the purpose of marriage is to get each other to heaven. If you’re not praying avidly for your partner’s sanctification, what are you doing? Pray for your own chastity, of course, but pray for your partner’s even more. It’s easier, I think, to be willing to compromise your own salvation in the heat of the moment than to endanger the soul of someone you love and for whom you pray daily. Making little sacrifices and offering them for your partner’s chastity will keep this at the forefront of your mind–and probably bring that desire to mind when other desires threaten to push it aside.
Farm tools optional.

Pray with each other. If you’re praying together for purity, you begin to see each other in a more sanctified light. Try beginning each date with Mass or a rosary before the Blessed Sacrament. It sets the tone for the evening and strengthens you against temptation. If it’s possible, end each date in the chapel. If you’re planning to stop in to see Jesus before you say goodnight (or if you’re dropping her off after having done so), it’s harder to transgress those boundaries.
Fast. I’ve said it before: I don’t know how people can be chaste if they don’t fast. Not only does it strengthen your prayer, it gives you mastery over your body. The more you’re able to deny your body what it needs, the more you’re able to deny it what it wants. If you’re really struggling with chastity, I’d recommend picking one day a week¹ to skip a meal or two. Fast (to the point of being hungry), learn some self-control, and ask the Lord to strengthen your love of purity.
Rodin’s The Kiss. Too far.

Set boundaries. “We’re not going to have sex” is a great start, but there’s more to chastity than just avoiding intercourse before marriage. Sit down early in the relationship and discuss what you think is appropriate in different stages in your relationship. It strikes me as fairly obvious that touching things you don’t have (pause to make sure everyone’s grasping my euphemism) is reserved for marriage. But maybe you’re like me and you think “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do with your grandma looking on” is a good rule of thumb. Or maybe you don’t want to kiss before you’re engaged. Maybe you want to talk about how many feet should be on the floor when you’re cuddling. Try not to be too legalistic, but do be aware that there’s more to chastity than sex. If you’re not comfortable having this conversation with your partner, you might want to reconsider either this relationship or your readiness to be in a relationship. It might be awkward but it’s important enough to endure.
Be intentional about being alone. There’s a reason the Church talks so much about the “near occasion of sin.” Even if you’ve got the self control of a saint, sleeping in the same bed is a bad idea before you’re married.² In less extreme situations, standards are going to differ dramatically. The more you’ve fallen in the area of sexual sin in the past, the more careful you’ll have to be. I know some people who have to be sure never to be alone with their significant others. They spend time in parks and coffee shops and movie theaters but never just the two of them in someone’s apartment; they know themselves. You might be able to handle some alone time but need to have the possibility of a roommate walking in at any moment to keep things PG–know yourself and do what you have to.
Be accountable to someone. If you’ve got a roommate, give her permission to ask how your date went–and promise to tell her, down to the last detail. Ask your buddy to call you Saturday morning and ask if you were good the night before. Heck, give me your number and I’ll text you at midnight to make sure everything’s still holy.³ We can’t do it alone and a real community could be just what you need.
Dress chastely. I’m looking mostly at you ladies here. Your bodies are lovely and there’s nothing dirty or wrong about them. But they were made to be given only to the body–and the eyes–of your husband. Even if you’re not willing to dress chastely for the myriad men in your life who are trying desperately to see you as a person and not an object, do it for the one man you love. If you’re dressed like you’re wearing clothes, not underwear⁴, then he’ll have less trouble not thinking about removing said clothes.
Be chaste alone. The solution to temptation is not to indulge that temptation in another venue. Using pornography and masturbating don’t release sexual tension, they distort it and cause it to grow. Pornography is also as addictive as crack and has serious consequences on more than just your love life. Here are some tips on leaving pornography behind. Do it now.
Repent. You’re going to fall. Don’t give up! Get up, get to confession, and redouble your effort. Reconsider your relationship and the rules you’ve set for yourself. Talk to a trusted friend. Cry and pout and punch a wall but do NOT give up. It’s a hard road, but remember that you follow a God who fell three times under the cross. He knew you would fall. He forgives you. He wants you to try again.

Every relationship is different which is why these are more broad guidelines than hard-and-fast rules. What seems to be universal is the fact that people don’t stumble into chastity–they work for it. It’s not just about rules, it’s about building your relationship with Christ first and foremost; purity is just a means to that end. And if we’re not just talking about abstinence but about glory and virtue and true love and a real, eternal happily-ever-after, nothing should stand in our way.

It’s hard. It’s worth it. Be strong when you can and when you’re weak, let Christ be strong for you.

Friday would be ideal: all Catholics are required to perform some act of penance every Friday (per the Code of Canon Law). The U.S. Bishops recommend abstaining from meat. [↩]
For a number of reasons. It might not be sex, but it’s certainly intimacy. [↩]
Limited offer and bear in mind that a lot of the time I don’t have service, so…maybe make a new friend at church. [↩]
You know what I mean–sheer shirts, short shorts, leggings that you’re pretending are pants…. [↩]

You Will Get Pregnant and Die: 4 Better Reasons to Wait

It’s not hard to make an argument for chastity. After all, STDs are terrifying and unplanned pregnancies aren’t ideal. And there are the statistics that show increased depression in sexually active teens and increased rates of divorce among those who had multiple sexual partners. But if you’ve ever been in love, you know that scare tactics won’t work. “It won’t happen to us,” you think, and rightly so. You ought to be so deeply in love that you think nothing can go wrong. That’s a good thing—at the beginning. But it means that our explanation of the importance of chastity has to be more than cherry-picked statistics intended to terrify teens into super-gluing their pants on.

I spoke with a young friend recently who is really struggling with chastity. She and her boyfriend are in love and in a committed relationship. They’re both strong Catholics who know that it’s wrong to sleep together outside of marriage, but she wanted a little more of the why. Now bear in mind that these arguments aren’t directed at the unchurched but at those who are really striving to do God’s will. If you’re not coming at them from that perspective, they might not be terribly compelling. But for those of us who are seeking chastity not just to avoid dying of a terrible venereal disease and going to hell but in order to glorify God, I think they might help.¹

1. Sex renews the covenant of marriage. Sex isn’t just fun—although I’m told it is that. Sex is the sign of the covenant of marriage. Every covenant² is renewed by a repeated action, an action that reminds each party of their commitment, an action by which they recommit themselves. In God’s covenant with Adam, it was the Sabbath.³ In the covenant with Moses, it was the Passover meal. In the covenant with Jesus, it’s the Eucharist⁴ and in the covenant of marriage, it’s consummation.

Like this couple: married 60 plus years, 9 children, 25 grandchildren and 40 plus great-grandchildren. Now THAT's love! — Like this couple: married 60 plus years, 9 children, 25 grandchildren and 40 plus great-grandchildren. Now THAT’s love!

Renewing your vows is a beautiful gesture, but it’s just that: a gesture. Even when a couple celebrating 60 years together repeats their vows with tears of joy in their eyes, it’s just a symbol; it doesn’t do anything. The way you renew the covenant of marriage is by saying with your bodies what you said with your vows: I give myself completely to you forever.

Sex makes a marriage; sex outside of marriage isn’t just sin, it’s sacrilege. It’s renewing a covenant that doesn’t exist, like receiving the Eucharist if you’re not baptized or wandering in to a Seder meal, grabbing some lamb, and walking on through to flip through the paper in the other room. It’s more than just rude—it’s wrong.

If this incredible act of love was created for marriage (not just restricted to marriage), to create and renew and strengthen marriage, it just doesn’t make sense in any other context.

2. Sex is a sign of God’s love. Sex didn’t have to be awesome. God could very easily have designed human beings without family. Even with marriage and procreation, sex didn’t have to be an ecstatic, all-encompassing gift of self. He designed sex as a shadowy image of his love for us. It’s a foretaste of heaven. And the marriage that it consummates is a sign of God’s covenant with each human soul. The purpose of sex is to show you how deeply God loves you: a love that is indissoluble, for better or for worse. When you give yourself completely to your spouse, you experience a sliver of the complete self-emptying of God for you and (God willing) you begin to give yourself to him in return.

Look how excited they are to have said forever!

But when we engage in sex outside of marriage, we give ourselves completely to one who has no obligation to us, one who could–theoretically–use us and move on. Our relationship is necessarily tinged with uncertainty and even shame. We are giving ourselves but there’s no guarantee of tomorrow. Even if you’re absolutely certain that you’re going to get married, “Baby, I’ma love you forever” in the heat of the moment is very different from standing up before God, your momma, and everyone and saying “until death do us part.” You may mean forever but you haven’t vowed it and your heart knows that.

What does this tell us about God’s love for us? In this context, our experience of self-giving always has reservations–“for now,” we say, or “but not my fertility.” Our consummate experience of love is absolutely conditional. It has no flavor of eternity or surrender or promised sacrifice. And so we begin to feel that God’s love must also be conditional. He loves us as long as we’re young or beautiful or innocent or loveable. This damages our ability to love each other and our ability to receive God’s love.

Certainly even married sex is never perfect. There are conditions to the love of fallen man, fears and insecurities. But the vows you made are strengthened by God and the ideal is possible because of his grace. It is that ideal that speaks–in the thrill of married love–of the unending love of the great Lover of souls. Don’t cheat yourself of that.

3. You owe it to your children. I knew an agnostic teenage girl once who told me that she wasn’t going to have sex until she was married.⁵ “I owe it to my children,” she said, “to give them a father.”

This girl knew in her gut that sex isn’t just about pleasure or even just about love. It’s about family. It’s about a love so strong that it brings new life. And that new life deserves the stability of married parents.

Be warned: sometimes 1 + 1 = 4. Just ask my sister.

But it’s not just that you might get pregnant. After all, you might not. And even if you did, you might end up happily married for many years. This isn’t a consequentialist view of morality⁶ but one that looks at the inherent purpose of an act, not merely its consequences. Sex is about family. Sex outside of the context of family (even a family of two) is disordered. Remember that sex is one image of the Trinity–two Persons whose love for one another is so strong it becomes a third Person. If it’s outside of marriage and openness to family, it’s closed in on you two and not about a love that spills forth to the world. This act of complete self-gift becomes an act of selfishness. That will begin to take its toll on your love.

4. Chastity prepares you for a healthy, happy marriage. I don’t mean to come out all roses and butterflies about how pleasant and happy marriage is. I know too many married people to think that a healthy marriage is all smiles all the time. Marriage is hard. And so is chastity–before marriage and after marriage. When I’m asking you to be chaste, I understand that it seems a Herculean task, especially when you’re in love. It takes a lot of work, months and even years of self-control and self-sacrifice, of patience and communication, of fortitude and purity and respect, obedience, and selflessness. If you’re going to make it to the altar unsullied, you’ll have to work and work and work at these virtues.

Because "happily ever after" is just the beginning. — Because “happily ever after” is just the beginning.

Fortunately, these are exactly the virtues that you need for a strong marriage. That patience and selflessness and self-control is exactly what’s going to hold your marriage together during the tough times. And after a few years of absolute celibacy while dating the love of your life, celibacy on a business trip or with a good friend who suddenly seems like more won’t be quite so tough. Marriage isn’t a magic wand that makes it possible for you to be chaste but if you’ve trained yourself in self-control, fidelity in marriage will be a lot easier.

I often hear people argue that premarital sex is actually a good idea as it’s practice for marriage. You know what’s really practice for marriage? Doing what’s right even when it’s hard. Sacrificing and communicating and learning how to be strong for each other. Chastity is the best practice for marriage. Love your partner enough to wait.

Now, obviously God is merciful and people and relationships can be healed. You’re not SOL because you messed up, even if you messed up repeatedly and unrepentantly. Where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.⁷ But if you’re at a crossroads and you’re wondering if it’s worth fighting this overwhelming desire, it is. I promise you won’t regret it.

Note: there’s only so much nuancing that can be done in a blog post. It’s already too long. I love you and I’m not judging you! [↩]
Remember that religion class vocab word? Irrevocable exchange of persons. [↩]
So take a real Sabbath this Sunday! It’s God’s gift of love to you. [↩]
Which, of course, is also the Passover meal. [↩]
Well, she said “in a permanent relationship” because she didn’t believe in marriage, but it comes to the same thing. [↩]
The idea that the morality of an act depends entirely on its consequences. [↩]
Rom 5:20 [↩]

Why I Won’t Read Fifty Shades of Grey

If you haven’t yet heard of the Fifty Shades trilogy, you probably don’t spend much time on the internet. The series is so popular that when I put the number 5 into Google, it autofilled “50 shades of grey.” For those of you so fortunate as to have avoided the books so far, let me summarize the first for you in the words of noted news source Wikipedia:

Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic novel by British author E. L. James. Set largely in Seattle, it is the first installment in a trilogy that traces the deepening relationship between a college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a young business magnate, Christian Grey. It is notable for its explicitly erotic scenes featuring elements of sexual practices involving bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism (BDSM).

So let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: these books are not wholesome. They are “explicitly erotic,” featuring all kinds of…sketchy practices. And not just implied filth–graphically-described filth, stuff so bad I can barely google the novels without feeling the need to scrub my brain. From a Christian perspective, I just don’t know how you can excuse that.

Now, I generally won’t take a stand against a book I haven’t read myself. I wholeheartedly support Harry Potter as an innocent fantasy series because I’ve read every word. I wasn’t even willing to condemn The Da Vinci Code until I read it–now I’m glad to warn people against it.¹ So when a reader asked me to write about the book, warning Christian women away from it, I said no.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t tell people not to read a book that I haven’t read, and I can’t read that.”

But last week, I mentioned this exchange to one of my kids. “You can’t hide from the truth,” he said.

“I’m not afraid that these books will expose some truth that threatens my nice little Catholic world,” I said. “I’m afraid of what they’ll do to me. I knew The Da Vinci Code wouldn’t destroy my faith, so I wasn’t worried about reading it. I’m not as confident that these books won’t affect me.”

“Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t going to destroy your faith,” he said, giving me a kind vote of confidence.

“Alex, it’s not that I think I’m going to read these books and suddenly abandon my life of chastity for some wild S&M fantasy. I just refuse to put myself in a situation where I’m walking up the aisle to receive communion and a graphic image of bondage sex presents itself to my imagination. I’m not hiding from anything, I’m protecting myself.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t enough just not to read the books. I may not know everything about these books (thank God!), but I know enough to take a stand. Since I haven’t read them, I guess I can’t exactly tell you what to do. But I can say that I wouldn’t read them for ten thousand dollars and that I really, really hope no Christian women do.

In case you’re on the edge, here’s why I won’t read these books:

They’re pornographic. People who like them call them mommy porn. These aren’t even the books’ detractors–these are their fans! Men who watch porn think they’re porn. The only people who seem to insist that the books aren’t porn are people who want to believe that reading these books isn’t unchaste.²
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As these books prove, something can be pornographic without having images, and it makes total sense that women would be more drawn to words than images. While many women claim that the books have revitalized their sex lives, marriage is about so much more than sex. It’s about love and honor and chastity and seeking holiness together. So I don’t care what Fifty Shades has done for your sex life, it is not great for your marriage. This isn’t just harmless fun–pornography damages marriages as well as souls. Someone’s getting hurt.
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Good, because most women really need to lower their standards for men.

They’re not just erotica, they’re bondage erotica. If I can’t even handle good old Mr. Darcy, why on earth would I want to read about a wealthy, experienced, powerful man getting a young virgin to sign a contract consenting to God knows what? Because yeah, love is all about escape–ha–clauses and signing on the dotted line. I know from reading articles about the book that there are safe words, whips, straps, and a “red room of pain.” I don’t even need to read the graphic lines to have a serious problem with the image of sex and “love” that the books present.

And yet apparently Christian Grey is such an attractive character that women are falling head over heels for the sick man. This kind of fiction skews our idea of love to be about pain and domination. I don’t care what happens with the love story–I refuse to make that kind of man my standard, as so many women seem to have done
It’s terrible writing. From what I’ve heard, it’s not even very well-written. I mean, it evolved from Twilight fanfic. That’s right–an author so devoid of ideas she sponged off of Twilight. The books, evidently, are so full of misused words, trite language, and broken record clichés (“my inner goddess) that even the most undiscerning readers can’t help but cringe. Honestly, I wouldn’t be interested even if they weren’t porn.

So I’m not going to touch those things with a ten foot pole. And I feel a lot more comfortable, after all the research I’ve been doing,³ in saying that they have no place on a Christian bookshelf. Even if they’re not smut, they’re too close for Christian comfort.

I’m not condemning you if you’ve read them. Maybe my imagination is just more vivid than most, and that’s the problem. Likely I’m much more of a prude than most. But I’ve got to ask: would you blush if your pastor (or mother or Sunday School teacher or friend from church) saw you reading them? Would you snatch them from your child if she flipped to a page at random? Do you honestly feel that these books are good for your soul?

Maybe I’m missing the mark, but when St. Paul says “flee immorality,”⁴ I take him seriously. So when I see those books, I’m happy to turn and run. And I’m hoping you’ll join me.

If you’re strong in your faith, read it if you must. It’s not filth, it’s just lies. I understand that it’s fiction, but the Church is my Mother, and when someone writes a book all about how your mother is a liar and a murderer, sticking it in the fiction section doesn’t make it more palatable. [↩]
There are advocates of the book who reject the term “mommy porn” because they find the term condescending. “I’m a big girl and I read big girl porn, goshdarnit!” [↩]
God help me, I had to close some of those websites really fast. [↩]
1 Cor 6:18 [↩]