celibacy and friendship
Apologies for the light posting lately. I’ve been out of town and haven’t given much time to collecting interesting content for this tumblelog.
I’m breaking the silence now to recommend a book which I’ve nearly finished reading. It’s called Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must be Reinvented in Today’s Church by Christine A. Colón and Bonnie E. Field. Aside from an excess of pop-culture references in the first several chapters (which is really more of an annoyance than something to seriously criticize), this book is fabulous at every level. I wish I’d written it. The authors’ aim is to hold up celibacy, and not simply a temporary period of singleness that one “endures” while looking for a spouse, as a real, viable, life-enhancing possibility for Christians who live in the cultural mainstream and haven’t necessarily entered into anything like an “intentional Christian community.”
The section on friendship, which I just read, is one of the parts I found most stimulating. The authors draw on Ronald Rolheiser’s book Forgotten Among the Lilies, and I thought I’d post a couple of the quotes from Rolheiser they include:
[Celibate friendships] can be an important way to keep alive, visible and in the flesh, that part of the incarnation which tells us that when one is speaking of love, the human heart is the central organ.
…
[I]n our culture’s view, a view we have generally interiorized and made our own, to love means to make love, to be a lover. Platonic heterosexual friendship is seen as too incomplete, too empty, or as simple unrealistic… When to love someone means to make love to that someone, then it becomes hard to trust that simple friendship might be more life-giving than having sex.
I may post more thoughts on this book over the next several days, but for now I’ll simply say, get a copy and read it. It’s one of the best treatments of contemporary Christian celibacy that I’ve come across (and I’ve read a few).
