Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Time For Change

TIME FOR CHANGE

On this historic day, with the inauguration of our new president, we're all aware of the theme he carried throughout the campaign: "Change." I'd like to suggest a specific change you and I can pursue this year that will revolutionize our lives for the good.

Martin Luther King, Jr had a dream that his four children would grow up in a world where they would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. What if we focused on developing a deeper personal experience of that classic Christian virtue known as "Chastity." Chastity is a virtue that helps to build us in spirit, so we can look past a person's skin and into her or his character, insight and depth. Chastity leads us to know the God who is the source of the lovely things in this creation.

Simply put, chastity is the opposite of lust. Chastity recognizes that, though sexuality is part of everyone's being, we are all also spiritual beings. Because we are all created by God we must treat our self and others with respect and dignity. If lust leads to using people for our pleasure, then true chastity, as an attitude of heart, leads to protecting people for the sake of their wholeness and wellbeing.

Lust is deceptive because it looks and feels like intimacy. It can be tempting to accept this substitute intimacy, because meaningful intimacy requires hard work. True intimacy requires that we listen, respect, forgive, encourage, support, affirm, accept, and give unselfishly for the good of the other. Intimacy also requires that we learn humility, patience and perseverance.

Healthy relationships shape us into healthy people! The virtue of chastity makes rich and satisfying relationships possible.

St. Paul warned us that in our fallen state, we are tempted to worship the created rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25). While ancient societies worshipped the stars and the moon, in our culture there is commonly the worship of washboard abdomens, tight derrieres, and shapely legs. Becoming captivated by fleshly realities is a form of idolatry. When we lack inner spiritual strength, our natural appreciation of beauty can descend into destructive obsession with external physical realities.

Thomas Aquinas in his Summa pointed out that "those who find no joy in spiritual pleasures turn to the pleasures of the body." Aquinas also noted that an aversion to sex is a vice, not a virtue. So we should never confuse chastity with a prudish attitude that holds sex to be distasteful or dirty. The Biblical book, Song of Songs, celebrates the near intoxication of physical passion. Sexual enjoyment and celebration is not the same as the misdirected fire of lust. Lust is an emotionally violent act that degrades and reduces another persons' value. Lust is a shortcut that leads to the destruction of intimacy and the destruction of self.

We will begin to experience the freedom of chastity as we cultivate an awareness and thirst for the loving, holy presence of God. Let's get to the core of the matter--we need a passionate and heart-enriching relationship of intimacy with God.

Freedom is found when we cultivate a taste for the long-term meaning God gives our lives, as opposed to the short-term excitements gained through pursuit of bodily pleasures. Most of us are aware that sin has a tendency to over-promise and under-deliver. Gary Thomas suggests we try the following experiment: "Compare the twenty-four hours after making a holy choice with the twenty-four hours after the last time you gave in to lust." There's no comparison! The peace and dignity we feel after re-directing our desire is part of the empowering experience of God giving us our life back.

Chastity offers a deep, quiet, peaceful stability to replace the empty, restless personality that is always looking for the next high.

Learning to change our lives away from lust and toward chastity requires that we begin to consider others--not that we just become a little more thoughtful, but we ask God to grow in us a respectful reverence for the people he has made. We must ask God to change our heart, releasing us from the desire to control and use others.

As we change from being a person driven by lust, to a person who lives the discipline of chastity, we'll make the joyful discovery that living a life that reverences others has fewer regrets, deeper friendships, and ultimately much more satisfaction.

Don't we really want a deep, quiet love with God and many strong, healthy relationiships with others? Will you join me in a renewed quest for the interior strength of chastity? In this quest, God will change and grow us in the direction of becoming the person we truly want to be. We will be men and women who are building healthy, mature, and respectful relationships with God, our self, and the people God has placed in our life.

"God is such a stickler about morality, not because he wants to control our behavior, but because he wants us to become the kind of people who can see him and thus experience infinite joy" (Peter Kreeft).

May God change our hearts so that lust gives way to chastity. In this process, we will celebrate beauty without worshiping it. We will be transformed away from domination into respecful self-givers as we begin to live a beautiful, immensely meaningful life.

Here's to a year of beautiful CHANGE!