In our noise-filled demanding lives, we too need to fortify ourselves in the reality of God’s holiness. Ordered lives and communities depend upon it. But it’s increasingly difficult to achieve. Church and culture conspire to make us noisy extroverts. As a young believer at an Evangelical camp I was once told that if I wanted worship different from the clapping and stamping of the Big Top, I would find it at a smaller venue ”” where counsellors would be on hand to minister; the inference being that quietness was something to be cured.
A similar distortion applies to chastity. Ever since Freud, the chaste are presumed to be socially and emotionally disturbed rather than exercising a foundational social virtue. Rampant individualism dictates that we all exercise our “right” to genitally expressed sexuality. Yet there is an essential link between sexuality and society, between chastity and spirituality.
Traditional Christian teaching that sexual virtue is a social good has withered away under the onslaught of the vigorous Jewish theology that marriage is a duty, and sex therefore as essential as eating: a functional view that easily adapts itself to the secular market, making sexual “consumers” of us all. Sex sells everything. Because of Freud, it seems to explain everything too. Even senior clergy believe sex “forms persons” as one put it recently. But misused sex also deforms persons. It was only on becoming a Christian that I discovered the space and strength, sanctioned and enabled by my new faith, to recover from the ravages of a promiscuous youth.