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Thoughts on chastity, sex, and self-mastery.

I stumbled recently upon a tweet or a post in which its writer opined on self-mastery.

I don’t remember who it was or exactly what he or she said (I read a lot of things.). I do remember disagreeing. I suspect, then, that the tweet or post in some way decried the quest for self-mastery as bad. Which wouldn’t surprise me. The culture that surrounds us isn’t conducive to it. The culture that surrounds us ultimately says “be governed by your drives” (for sex, for instance).

We are taught to let our drives decide what we’ll do (want sex, get sex) instead of acknowledging our drives as there, and as God-given, but using other guides, like love and critical thought, to decide why and when to act on them.

Regarding drives, chastity says “govern them.” Chastity says use self-mastery to do it. Self-mastery requires discipline, but to get better at discipline isn’t the point. The point is to get better at love.
Self-mastery is self-dominion. It’s possession of self. It’s being the boss of your drives. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is “ordered to the gift of self.”Love, for single people and priests and nuns and married or celibate people, regardless of sexual orientation or experience or lack thereof, is a gift of self. When we love, we give ourselves in different ways to different people.

This is why, when love is the goal, self-mastery is important.

We can’t give away what we don’t own.

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3 Lessons and 2 Tips from Brandon Vogt.

Brandon-Vogt3 Lessons and 2 Tips is a new series of interviews in which some of my favorite people (and probably some of yours) share three lessons they’ve learned by being married, plus two tips for single people. This edition features Brandon Vogt, Catholic blogger and author of The Church and New Media, who has been married since May 17, 2008. He and his his wife have three children.

AS: How did you meet your wife?

BV: My wife and I grew up in the same town and we met in high school. We were juniors together when we started dating, (and) we were in band together. We both played clarinet, (and) depending on who tells the story, either I was ahead of her or she was ahead of me and we would challenge each other, back and forth. What started as competitive relationship eventually blossomed into a loving relationship.

AS: What’s the first lesson you’ve learned by being married?

BV: The necessity of dying to self. I’ve found that the more I die to my own desires to serve the desires of my wife and my children, paradoxically, their desires become my own. Once I die to myself and my own desires, those desires are resurrected in new forms in the rest of my family. I have had to learn to that to be a great husband means to be a selfless husband.

AS: And the second lesson?

BV: To remain calm. Especially when you have young kids, lots of days things get out of control. Kids are screaming. They’re misbehaving. It seems like your breaking point. It’s easy for husbands and wives to take it out on each other, but we know that’s totally counterproductive. It ultimately damages your relationship. The best way to serve your family is as a united husband and wife. I have to remind myself that this, too, shall pass. All frustrations will ultimately pass.

AS: And the third lesson?

BV: To ground yourself in the Lord. We’ve found that in our marriage, the strongest periods are the times when we are both seeking the Lord, individually and together. There are weeks and months when we’ve just grown leaps and bounds in our relationships with the Lord; we pray together, discuss our spiritual lives, read the Bible together. Other times, there’s a lull. When our spiritual lives are firing together on all cylinders, it’s quite evident. When there’s a lull, when spiritual matters are ignored and we become ambivalent, that evidences itself through little flare ups, bickering, little problems here and there. When we are spiritually attuned together, our relationship flourishes. When we’re not, our unity breaks down.

AS: What’s one tip for readers who are single?

BV: One thing I heard a lot as a single is that when you’re single, you should be preparing yourself for marriage. It’s good advice, but I’d add (a caveat): Catholic sexual teaching has held for centuries (that) everyone is called to get married, but not everyone is called to marry a human being. Some people are called to marry God, either through the priesthood, or through the religious life, or through a consecrated community. Develop your relationship with God now because the way you relate to the Lord will influence your marriage, whether that’s a human marriage or a divine marriage.

AS: And a second tip for singles?

BV: Find a community. Whenever you’re single, it’s a rare point in your life where you can easily move in and out of a community. When you’re married, you’re in a community that you’re going to be in for the rest of your life, (whether that’s a) religious community, or (a community with your) spouse and kids. To prepare yourself for perpetual community, develop the skills to live in community with others. Find ways to enter into other types of small community now, whether that be small groups at your parish, local sports teams, groups of friends at work. Commit yourself to at least some form of community and learn how to live a communal life.
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Connect with Brandon Vogt: Click here to read his blog, here to like him on Facebook, and here to follow him on Twitter.

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Step forward (thoughts on Protestants and Catholics).

I missed the quiet years for a minute today when I stumbled upon an abrasive tweet about the pope, written by an evangelical Christian.

The quiet years are the six I spent not texting, the two or three sans social media, the life before my smartphone (which I only have owned since December).

I missed the not knowing what people are saying, the freedom from unsolicited opinions that I implicitly solicit every time I press “follow.” This is because what people say sometimes reminds me of any and all of the times the misinformed mistreated me for being Catholic.
Of being in fourth grade and being told by a pastor’s wife that my church is of the devil.
Of being in fifth grade and being told by my teacher that it is harder for me to get to heaven, because I’m Catholic.
Of being in sixth grade and watching a Protestant pastor tell the student body at my Christian school that the Catholic Church is a cult.
Of being in seventh grade and having to tell my history teacher I don’t worship Mary.
Of being in tenth grade and handing my Church’s creed to my principal and demanding that he show me where it says I worship saints. Of suggesting, when he couldn’t find it, that he replace the history curriculum with one that doesn’t misinform his students. (And he did.)
Oh, the adrenaline. How I would shake.
It’s true, even now, even if the message arrives via tweet, that I don’t really want to be bothered. That eight years (5th grade through 12th) is a lot of years to debate. That I am nine years out of high school and still kind of tired. But hear this:

I would not trade it.
My parents invited me to transfer to public school, but I said no.
I liked my school. The experience.
Much of it made me who I am. It pushed and stretched me. I learned to let go, to forgive, and to coexist. Yes, I was at first the fifth grader whose ex-Catholic teacher told our class how bad it is to be Catholic. But I was also the fifth grader who sat on the couch with my Catholic mom and my Jewish dad and listened to Scott Hahn tapes. I was the fifth grader who sat in the pew and watched a priest baptize my dad, who watched her dad make his first communion.
When I read that tweet today, I shook. Just when I thought we could get along… “Another step back.” But I only missed the quiet years for a minute. I only missed them for a minute because I realized:
One person’s step back doesn’t haven’t to be mine. 
That a person is misinformed or misunderstands doesn’t change the truth about my Church. The misinformed can mistreat me, and it doesn’t change the truth about me. Nobody but Christ can discern my faith as real or fake. I can choose dialogue over debate, love over hate, and to unplug for awhile if what surrounds me is abrasive.
I can invite anybody open to it, to let go, to forgive, to coexist. 
To – like Pope Francis and his evangelical associates – sip drinks and pray and read the Bible together.
To disagree and love and like each other anyway.
To step forward, into something better and closer to whole.
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Thoughts on Lumen Fidei: “Faith is no refuge for the fainthearted.”

pope-francisFriday, the Vatican published Lumen Fidei, a papal encyclical initiated by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and brought to fruition by Pope Francis.
A papal encyclical is a letter written by a pope that regards Church teaching, is authoritative but not infallible, and is appropriately followed by #BOOM when referenced on Twitter, ’cause popes are brilliant and what they write routinely blows my mind.
Lumen Fidei – the light of faith – is written to bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated persons, and the lay faithful. This is code for “everyone who is truly Catholic.” But in reading Lumen Fidei in full this morning, I have come to this conclusion:
Every Christian, Catholic or not, ought to read it.
Lumen Fidei clarifies faith for us while we live in a culture that muddies it. Pope Francis defines faith and dissects it, connects it to our senses and to hope and truth and love, and puts the rumor to rest that Catholics believe we are saved by works (Spoiler alert: we don’t!).
Here are some of my favorite excerpts:
  • “…faith, hope and charity are the driving force of the Christian life as it advances toward full communion with God.”
  • “Faith is linked to hearing. … Faith is our response to a word which engages us personally, to a ‘Thou’ who calls us by name.”
  • “…faith, as remembrance of the future, memoria futuri, is thus closely bound up with hope.”
  • “Before an idol, there is no risk that we will be called to abandon our security, for idols ‘have mouths, but they cannot speak’ (Ps. 115:5).”
  • “Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes; it is a participation in his way of seeing.”
  • “Paul rejects the attitude of those who would consider themselves justified before God on the basis of their own works. Such people, even when they obey the commandments and do good works, are centered on themselves; they fail to realize that goodness comes from God. those who live this way, who want to be the source of their own righteousness, find that the latter is soon depleted and that they are unable even to keep the law. They become closed in on themselves and isolated from the Lord and from others; their lives becomes futile and their works barren, like a tree far from water. … As Saint Paul puts it, ‘By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God’ (Eph. 2:8).”
  • “Unless you believe, you will not understand.”
  • “Today more than ever, we need to be reminded of this bond between faith and truth, given the crisis of truth in our age. In contemporary culture, … truth is what works and what makes life easier and more comfortable. … In the end, what we are left with is relativism, in which the question of universal truth – and ultimately this means the question of God – is no longer relevant.”
  • “Love cannot be reduced to an ephemeral emotion. True, it engages our affectivity, but in order to open it to the beloved and thus to blaze a trail leading away from self-centeredness and towards another person. …”
 
  • “Love and truth are inseparable. Without love, truth becomes cold, impersonal and oppressive for people’s day-to-day lives.”
  • “Joined to hearing, seeing then becomes a form of following Christ, and faith appears as a process of gazing, in which our eyes grow accustomed to peering into the depths.”
  • “Faith is not intransigent, but grows in respectful coexistence with others.”
  • “Those who have opened their hearts to God’s love, heard his voice and received his light, cannot keep this gift to themselves. Since faith is hearing and seeing, it is also handed on as word and light.”
  • We “cannot truthfully recite the words of the creed without being changed.”
  • “Faith is no refuge for the fainthearted, but something which enhances our lives. it makes us aware of a magnificent calling, the vocation of love.”
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Click here to read Lumen Fidei in full.
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Hey Tampa! Let’s meet up.

A week ago today, I sat on a red bar stool in front of a podium in the youth center at Christ the King Catholic Church in Tampa. But that night, there weren’t any youth.

Instead, young adults showed up who are part of the parish’s young adult ministry and I got to do two of my favorite things:
Meet new people and talk sex.
The topic for the talk I gave was “Why Saving Sex For Marriage Doesn’t Doom It,” ambiguous on purpose because saving sex dooms neither sex nor marriage. The goal of the talk is in part to tell my story, that of a 27-year-old virgin whose career in journalism was the catalyst for her closer look at the Church’s perception of sex versus the world’s. It is also in part to rebut what the world says about saving sex (that it results in doom), and to prepare the people I meet to do the same.
I write about this today for two reasons:
One: I am grateful to CTK Young Adults for the opportunity to chat and for the discussion that followed (which was so good we took it to the parking lot after we got kicked out).
Two: I want to do it again this summer and fall, and this time for the young adults, parents, or staff at your church (Catholic or not). Priority one, as a resident of the Tampa Bay Area of Florida, is to travel throughout it. (But if your church is elsewhere, let’s talk travel or video chat.) For information, send me a note at arleenwrites at gmail dot com. Looking forward to meeting up.
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Click here to view my current schedule.