When I became Catholic as a college freshman at a large public university, by far the most difficult virtue to get under wraps was—without much surprise—the virtue of chastity. I began discernment to the religious life a year later, and for the next ten years I wrestled to “be good”: to not hook up with girls who I was attracted to, to not commit self-abuse, to not view pornography. The culture was strong, my formation as a new Catholic was shaky, and I failed on all accounts, sometimes day by day. Though I always made use of the Sacrament of Confession with a contrite spirit and a firm commitment not to sin again, I would find myself back in the confessional week after week.
Grace was working, albeit at a pace that seemed indiscernible to me at the time. At one point when I threw myself at the feet of a monk, lamenting the struggle through tears, he calmly told me something I never forgot: “Never curse your sexuality, because it is a gift given to you by God.” I surely was tempted to do so in the moment.
Now, of course, he was right (though I couldn’t see it then); we are meant to be proper stewards of this supreme and powerful gift that God has endowed men (and women) with. But men have a particular cross to bear as well in this regard, whether it be same-sex attraction or simply a struggle to keep one’s member under wraps in continence. On those days or weeks when I tried hard to do so, I would lay awake at night unable to sleep, feeling like a life force was swelling inside of me begging to escape, threatening to make me insane if it didn’t. Of course, this is by God’s design to ensure the propagation of the human race. If sex was undesirable or a chore for men in their prime, we would have petered out as a race within generations.
But the devil always distorts that which is good for his own nefarious purposes. It is hard to love a cross, and yet that is exactly what Christ our Lord did. He loved His cross. A rightly ordered sexuality yearning to express itself in its intended state (which is marriage) is a good thing. Christ did not curse His cross, because it was from the Cross that life—eternal life—gestated.
After ten years of religious discernment, my true vocation became clear when I met my now-wife. Though I loved the rhythm of monastic life and the time for solitude, it was apparent that it was a kind of “shirt that never fit quite right.” Marriage and family, on the other hand, was tailor made for me by a God who knew me better than I knew myself. The woman I married was God’s provision for me; and even more sobering, I was God’s provision for her. To accomplish His will in the world, we were entering into a union together, assenting to a vocation, and being endowed with the supreme privilege and responsibility of bringing children into the world.
Those ten-plus years of struggle in the crucible when I was single, of falling and getting up and falling again and getting up again, were not for naught. I loved this woman, and wanted to honor her, imperfect and fallen as I was. She was now flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. We were married at an altar in a church, but the marriage bed in our room became itself a kind of altar in which the consummation of a sacrament occurred, a bed that precluded any others besides the two of us.
In my twenties I thought that chastity was an impossibility—not difficult, but impossible—the way Christ said it was impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. But with God all things are possible. By God’s grace, the pornography viewing ceased, as did any kind of self-abuse. It has been fifteen years now; something I never thought was humanly possible. To sin myself in our marriage was to sin against her, for my life and body were no longer my own. St. Paul says, for good reason, that there ought not be even a hint of sexual immorality among believers, for unchastity is a fecal fleck of unholy leaven that ruins a ten-pound ball of dough.
But for men like myself who have pornography in their rearview, there is still a need to be healed in the faculty of memory. Pornographic images and videography have a scary way of burning their way into one’s consciousness that can surface years later. For a married man, this means that in the sometime doldrums of sexual intimacy, it is a temptation to conjure up such images during the sexual act. One might pat themselves on the back for not looking at pornography or not committing self-abuse and keeping custody of the eyes, but the more pernicious issue of being present in the marital act is as much a part of chastity as not engaging in the aforementioned sins.
When I was running a house of hospitality for men in recovery in the inner city, my confrere who I lived with confided to me, “Rob, my greatest fear is that my heart will grow cold.” The heart is something men don’t talk a lot about (we are much more comfortable talking about the mind), but you cannot talk about chastity, nor can one love properly, without the heart.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me,” David prays earnestly in repentance after his fall into unchastity with Bathsheba (Ps. 51:10). For as our Lord says, “from the heart come forth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies” (Mt. 15:19). Not the mind—the heart, the seat of all that is human and fraught with frailty.
We can think, as men do in our compartmentalizing way, that if we check off all the boxes—no porn, no masturbation, no fornication or adultery, keeping custody of the eyes—that somehow our hearts are pure. This is the bare minimum, the cinderblock foundation of a large house that needs to hold a lot of weight. It is important, but no one lives in a foundation alone. Our Lord sets a high bar, a seemingly impossible bar: “But I say to you that whoever looks on a woman, to lust after her, has committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Mt. 5:28). Not in a man’s mind—in his heart.
A heart that cannot or will not love is not chaste, for love is chastity’s raison d’etre, and chastity is the rightful house for love to make a home. When two people exchange vows, they do not offer their minds to each other, but their hearts. And in doing so, those hearts intertwine, being formed into one through the grace of the sacrament, something no man—not even the pope—can put asunder.
A woman may be said to guard her heart. Why? Because it is being entrusted to one man and one man alone during that ceremony—a man that could conceivably hurt her, fail her, betray her. There is great freedom in this exclusivity—the freedom to love one woman, and to love her fully at the exclusion of all others. That is why it is both a sacrament and a vocation.
As men we must pray for clean hearts, uncompromising hearts, guarded against the fatal tainting of sexual immortality, lest Satan get a foothold in our hearts and in our marriages. Let there not be even a hint of it in your bedroom, lest you invite unwanted guests into the marriage chamber unwittingly. Most of all, in order to love chastely, we must not let our hearts grow cold.
Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash
