A married man on celibacy
Garvey, John
OUR CULTURE REGARDS VOWS AS AHACHROHISMS A married layman on celibacy JOHN GARVEY F OR YEARS celibate Catholic priests have spoken to Catholic married people about marriage. Some of what they...
...Vows are considered less than central to the business of being a human today because of the individualism which pervades Western culture: unless something can be shown to be of obvious and more or less immediate benefit to the individual, its value is questioned...
...In the Eastern churches it has been the typical practice to ordain married men, leaving celibacy to monks, from whom the bishops are chosen...
...MARY JO WEAVER O NE HEARS a good deal about singleness today because many people are either living alone or in "arrangements" that are not marriage...
...t~asks of service appeared to require celibacy...
...If, as Jewish and Christian tradition insists, creation is good, what is good or holy about renouncing the goodness of marriage and parenthood...
...Celibacy seen only as a "state in life" is as cold as ice, just as dead as a marriage which exists only as a pledge on paper...
...They may think they do, but in retrospect they find out how wrong they were...
...H ERE IT IS important to realize that one danger of celibacy is the myth of self-sufficiency...
...In pre-industrial society marriage and family were necessary to keep the society going and at that time there was not much room for single people to be' 'alone...
...To vow is to step into a larger life than the life you control and manipulate...
...At the level of the community, celibacy offers the same sort of witness to the married Christian...
...The obvious question here is, why do it at all...
...The Latin roots of the word voware also found in the words devoted and devotion...
...A vow is a symbol...
...The assumption was that something was wrong with such a person...
...How does celibacy serve the kingdom...
...where it is genuine, it is a gift to the church...
...I don't find this convincing...
...I am not concerned here with celibacy as asine qua non for the priesthood, but with the vow itself...
...Like fasting from food and drink, like voluntary poverty, it makes no worldly sense...
...The love that a man and woman have for one another and for their children is, if it is Christian, carried into the rest of their lives and into every other relationship...
...The singleness issue is not a major problem until one gets past the frontier of thirty...
...but the possibility of dispensation should not make a vow seem at the start to be optional, something to be backed away from when things don't come up to expectations...
...It is unfortunate, because only within the context of a refreshed sense of the ascetic can celibacy make sense...
...And dangerous...
...Half-devotion is a contradiction in terms...
...It is a negative thing, in that it means self-denial, and at times whatever good it may offer will be invisible to the person who endures the loneliness which is an inevitable part of celibacy, for anyone with enough heart to love...
...a lot of the time that could have been dedicated to God was dedicated to the spouse and one's many children...
...out what's wrong...
...In fact, by learning to love one other person deeply, one learns to love every other person that much more deeply...
...Not that there were not old maids ("poor things") who had never beenasked either by a man or by God to dedicate herself to him--the problem did not lie in the sad failures of a few old maids...
...The fact that the other person is loved stands as a barrier between them...
...The vow challenges this mentality by suggesting that self-fulfillment and personal freedom, good as they are, are not only not enough to make for a good life...
...The religions outside of Christianity which maintain celibate traditions tend either to deny or undervalue the goodness of the world...
...Vowing is, in a way, always done in the dark...
...Today, the nuclear family has no room for single people...
...hospitals, orphanages and other agencies of social concern were often managed and staffed by sisters...
...There is, for example, the argument that the celibate is more available, more able to give himself to those in need, because he is not tied down to wife and child...
...In marriage one was dedicated, too, but it was different...
...Consider this: celibacy seen as desirable would be neurotic, or selfish, or both...
...If anyone has a cure short of Origen's, it would be kind to let the rest of us know...
...There are people who remain unmarried and unloved because they have not been able, for whatever real sons, to attract anyone...
...Jesus says that celibacy is undertaken for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven by those whose hearts can bear it...
...Before thirty one can be considered in a state of creative indecision between one of the two states in life...
...Masculine" and "feminine" attributes (which are increasingly seen as stereotypical, when they are gendered that way) must come together in any m~ture individual, celibate or married...
...There was a need for dedicated singleness--the great centers of learning were monastic...
...Celibacy without asceticism and prayerfulness could become the most refined, subtle selfishness in the world...
...One of the advantages of that arrangement was that families had a place for singles...
...It is an act of faith and hope: faith that what the vow entails is possible, and hope that the resources to make it possible will be there...
...the Incarnation should teach us that much...
...The other is that it must be situated in an ascetic, contemplative context...
...People who did not marry either stayed at home or went into some kind of religious community...
...To give your word before God that you will accept a vowed life, with anything it might involve, is an act of profound trust, which--if the vow is lived truly--draws you out of yourself, and draws from you responses and capabilities which you didn't know were there...
...The development of this understanding matters as much as anything else, if we are to see celibacy clearly...
...but this is where the darkness begins, because we really do not know everything that will be asked of us...
...By tl~is I do not mean that I haven't met genuinely generous celibates--I have...
...There must be a whole-heartedness about undertaking the vowed life in any state...
...But excluding these Christian facts is not the remedy...
...In a good marriage, a man and woman learn from one another's differences...
...and I invite the celibate reader to discount whatever seems unauthoritative or not quite to the point...
...The person who fasts from food will be hungry, and the person who fasts from sex, and the long intimate companionship of marriage, and fi'om parenthood, will experience intense loneliness...
...This is not at all what celibacy should be like...
...In a similar spirit, I would like to bffer this reflection on celibacy...
...It is a manifestation of the fact that there is a love which suffices absolutely, and it is offered to each single human being, as well as to the community...
...There is something profoundly unreasonable about a vow--unreasonable here megning beyond reason, not irrational...
...common understanding which could allow celibacy to be seen as the shocking and necessary thing it is...
...It isn't the dangers of asceticism that the Western world needs to fear fight now...
...The underlying assumption is the same: being single is not normal...
...But this contradicts the experience of love by making it a rationed thing, as if having spent 75 litres of love on one's wife and children, one had only 25 litres of God's allotment left for the Commonweal: 586rest of the race...
...The young celibate, or the young husband or wife, knows enough about the life being undertaken to be willing to stake everything on the vow...
...A sour celibacy is at least as scandalous and hurtful to the community as a bad marriage...
...It is a way of affmning that God alone is enough, is in fact everything, and it helps focus our attention on God...
...It was called monastic (or religious) life, was open to both men and women and thought to be assuredly superior to the other state in life, marriage...
...so in a puritanical age we are warned against licentiousness, and in a licentious age we are warned against puritanism...
...it is not demanded of all his followers, as some gnostics claimed...
...Unless a person is capable of loving one other person deeply--and this is as true of celibates as it is of married people--he is not capable of loving anyone, much less everyone...
...Like all symbols, it has the power to evoke more than a merely rational, calculated response...
...And while there are kinds of work in which celibacy is, in a practical sense, more convenient (for example, the constant work of Mother Teresa with Calcutta's dying, or the work of many others with the poor), even this kind of work has at times been done selflessly by married couples...
...It is not good to be alone...
...Some of what they have had to say is valuable, even at times helpful in a practical way...
...I am sure he did not mean that we are meant to put on a sort of show for the sake, of the world, but rather meant to point out the risk of true Christianity: finally, you have to put everything on the line...
...Marriage is easier to understand, certainly...
...For one thing, I have yet to meet a celibate whose celibacy had directly to do with his availability...
...Still another and more recent argument is that the celibate combines in himself both male and female elements, exhibiting a wholeness which others must seek in the opposite sex...
...A person who refrains from marriage because he or she is afraid of the intimacy involved in marriage, or can't be bothered with it, or who does not "want to be troubled by the burden of another person, or who does not want to be saddled with children, has made an ungenerous choice, a choice to be less than fully human...
...We will remain only human...
...It must exhibit the love it is based in, the paradoxical strength in weakness of which Paul boasts, or it will be worthless...
...It makes sense only if God'is real...
...The above article is reprinted from Doctrine and Life, an Irish theological journal...
...a life which sets them as goals is too small a life...
...Single people are often defined negatively, i.e., as unmarried...
...And this is where we must begin, because there is something essential in the fact that celibacy is a vowed state, not simply a condition like being single by choice or by accident...
...but celibacy helps to illuminate it, to throw it into relief...
...we are called to a deeper life, which discloses itself during the course of our life and is fulfilled at death...
...in this way he is devoted wholly to the Kingdom in a way that married people cannot be...
...This ancient discipline points up two things which the Western church may have forgotten...
...I am interested in how people perceive and react to singleness in the Christian church, i.e., in terms of religion and family...
...How are any of these things helpful...
...This has been especially true in the area of sex...
...Fasting, like celibacy, means refraining from something good...
...Just as priests have offered the argument that an impartial observer of marriage can sometimes be a more qualified commentator than someone intimately involv .ed, so perhaps a married layman might have something of value to say...
...There is not much in the Judaism from which Christianity sprang to make room for it...
...It is obviously not an easy witness to bear, as Jesus himself said, and it is certainly not for everyone...
...This, anyway, is our hope, the risk we take, and our evidence, such as it is, is tobe found in the lives of people who went before us and lived well...
...Yet in our tradition, which says fh'mly that the world is good, that sex and procreation are good, that pleasure well-taken is loved by God, there is this bunch of men and women who do not marry, who are pledged to a life of abstinence from sex...
...Celibacy is in the same way a witness to the wholeheartedness the Gospel demands...
...Lewis once remarked that there is always a tendency to warn an age against the danger into which it is least likely to fall...
...But this also falls short of experience...
...This is important, because vows, in or out of I JOHN GARVEY contributes a regular column to Commonweal...
...The radical nature of celibacy demands the renunciation of something wholly good--a fact which presents us with a paradox...
...In marriage the natural and the supernatural meet wonderfully...
...The devoted person is the person of the vow...
...Just as marriage and parenthood have their dark moments (there is no distance so lonely as the distance which can occur between two people who love one another, and a child's serious illness involves parents in an agolly with which others may sympathize, but which can be shared only by someone who has gone through the same agony) so celibacy has a depth of loneliness which must be acknowledged, not to get it out of the way--that can't be done--but to bring it to healing, by allowing the community to share as much of the burden as can be shared, and by asking the community to be available during the darkest moments...
...We are close enough to a Christian culture, in which celibacy was generally accepted, to be blinded to its strangeness, and at the same time 'we are distant from any A NOTHER ARGUMENT is that the celibate, in committing his love to no particular person, is free to love everyone...
...Perhaps Catholicism in the past did overemphasize the cross, suffering, and self-denial...
...The celibate can reveal to someone this lonely a love which can be healing, and can restore a meaning and dignity which the world denies...
...During a fast we are reminded continuously (and sometimes uncomfortably) of what our lives are really about...
...after thirty one finds oneself much less safe from pressing inquiry and rude assumption...
...Celibacy is a kind of fast...
...If there is an alternative to risking everything, why take the risk...
...The context for understanding the present perceptions of singleness includes at least five areas: the nuclear family, sexual openness, social convention, the churches and the marketplace...
...But they were not more generous than the generous doctors I have known, or the generous married couples whose homes have been havens for many people, whose lives are open to those in need at every moment...
...I should make it clear at the outset that I regard celibacy as an important thing...
...T HERE IS nothing obviously good or healthy about celibacy...
...At the same Commonweal: 588...
...it is similarly not just a remedy for concupiscence...
...The celibates I know who live it well are, not at all coincidentally, the ones who are capable of forming deep friendships, and who never give the sense of having erected protective emotional barriers...
...and in this it is like marriage...
...Any part of the self which holds back poisons the vow, and makes living it that much more difficult...
...I believe it was Cardinal Suhard who said that as Christians we should live in such a way that, if God did not exist, our lives would make no sense...
...I point this out because of the chilling barrenness too often encountered in rectories and convents, and in individual celibates whose inability to deal with the simplest heartfelt emotion is pitiful...
...perhaps this bad name is the inevitable reaction to the misrepresentation of asceticism to which many of us were exposed, which made it seem a simple hatred of the flesh...
...marriage, are increasingly regarded as less than central...
...There is nothing at all abstract about love...
...Like fasting and voluntary poverty, celibacy is a witness to a life which is more profoundly real than the life offered by the world...
...Couples whose marriages are at all happy know that sexual intercourse is a good deal more than a reproductive necessity, and in a happy marriage it is never primarily that...
...I have observed priests, monks and nuns from childhood on, and know many quite well...
...But if a vow, whether of marriage or of celibacy, calls us out of ourselves to a larger life--a participation in God's own life--what, specifically, does the vow of celibacy tell about that life...
...Like voluntary poverty, it may have to be a lifelong thing to bear the fruit it is meant to bear...
...That alone should be looked at, because we live in an in-between time...
...And John reminds us that if we cannot love the one we see before us, we cannot love God, who cannot be seen...
...The desires for companionship, lovemaking and children are universal and require no explanation...
...A culture which is increasingly geared towards selffulfillment and present satisfaction is not likely to be very sensitive in the way it looks at any vow...
...Like fasting, it involves a focus that there are priorities which demand radical responses...
...It is willingness that matters, of come...
...but this was never common or encouraged in Judaism...
...I grew up in a tradition where there was an institution of dedicated singleness...
...It is easy to say, for example, that I am ready to drop everything for the sake of the Kingdom, that once my hand is on the plow I will not turn back...
...It has been pointed out that celibacy is under attack from the culture at large, and the discussion of a married clergy has in some cases been confused with a call to abolish celibacy altogether...
...There may be perfectly good reasons for which an individual would look for a dispensation from a vow...
...I 9 THE PAIH OF NEGATIVE DEFINITIONS Single blessedness...
...The paradoxical nature of celibacy should not be explained away or made to look like a practical and beneficial thing...
...Any healthy young man or woman who takes a vow of celibacy, believing that he or she knows everything that the vow will involve, will be proved wrong...
...Today the pious may still storm heaven but most people turn to psychologists to find MARY JO WEAVER is an "assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University...
...But celibacy...
...In the old days, the wrongness was assaulted by novenas or by an arrangement made by the girl's father...
...It is unfortunate that asceticism has come to have such a bad name in recent years...
...When their advice rings false, it is frequently discounted by married people on the gro~mds that the speaker, not having experienced marriage, couldn't really be expected to be authoritative...
...The problem (or puzzlement) !ay in the idea that one would choose to be single, want to lead a lonely, undedlcated, peculiar life...
...The person who lives in radical simplicity, giving away what he does not need, has in a similar way put his life on the line...
...and it is a wholeheartedness which will simply have to be willed at times, especially in those dark times when there is no apparent reason to go on...
...Western culture in recent years has tended to regard the idea of the vow as an anachronism based upon unreasonable expectations...
...Celibacy has no worldly justification (and this is why practical, sensible arguments in its favor sell it short, just as the argument that fasting is good for the figure misses the point of fasting), but it makes sense in the context of the reality of God's kingdom...
...This is especially true for women, whose ability to reproduce is bound up with their age...
...it is rather a surrender to the cultural 26 October 1979:587surroundings that will only allow the sort of religion that fits in, the religion which reinforces the picture the world wants to have of itself...
...Single people who wish to remain single can only hope that people will catch on and tire of: finding dinner partners for them, wondering/asking/assuming things about their sexual orientation, picturing their lives as the media do (as "swinging"), dropping broad hints about how they might make their lives more "meaningful," and feeling sorry for them because they do not have the proper nesting instincts...
...As Christians we are called to something larger and stranger than the life the world offers us...
...This singleness must be present in every Christian life, not just the life of the celibate...
...An argument from practicality, it seems to me, sells celibacy short...
...In looking at a married person someone in this situation is able to say, "He couldn't possibly understand my loneliness--he lives in such security, the security of being loved...
...We all know what they are not --they are not' 'two in one flesh" but single/alone...
...A couple who marry usually do not, at the time of their marriage, know one another very well...
...There is one final, pastoral aspect of celibacy which I would like to mention...
...The monastic Essene community included celibates...
...That's the strange one...
...but never to see that willingness tested can lead us into selfdeception, which is a lesson fasting can teach us...
...In fact, nothing seems to remedy concupiscence...
...Within marriage there is the possibility of a knowing and a being known which is so archetypical of the soul's relationship to God that it is a recurrent theme in mystical literature (and of course, just as in the life of prayer, the knowing and being known involved in marriage can be humiliating and uncomfortable...
...26 October 1979:585The answer, I think, is that without the vow we are much less likely to be led into the fullness of our humanity, which is a divine fullness...
...This love is what celibacy reveals, or should reveal...
...Many of them are members of religious orders, who come from communities human enough to provide their members with the mutual support and companionship which all of us must receive from our families and friends...
...I don't mean to suggest that those who seek a dispensation from vows--those of the professed celibate religious or those of marriage--are to be condemned for doing so...
...Some people choose to be single and others find themselves that way by accident or tragedy...
...There was little room in theory or in practice for an undedicated life--people were either to bind themselves to God or to a family--singleness without the curbs of public vows and community was considered unseemly and footloose...
...One is that celibacy, like the monastic life, is a radical choice...
...Paul compares the love of one spouse for another to the love of Christ for the church...
...1. Nuclear family...
...There was a utilitarian and religious reason for singleness...
...but it should be clear that what they are being dispensed from is ideally a binding and (to use an unfashionable word) absolute thing...
...Most explanations of celibacy try, one way or another, to resolve this paradox...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 19
