Stages of Praying for a Spouse

Catholics who aspire to Serious Singledom do have their challenges. Men who wish to live their Serious Singledom as priests have structures and groups (like Serra) to support them, but they still have to deal with a chorus of "Oh, how sad that priests can't get married!" The response "But I don't want to get married" is sometimes greeted with a blank stare. Searching Singles and Married People sometimes have difficulty comprehending that some people just don't want to get married. In my hometown of Toronto, nuns and religious brothers almost never wear identifying garb, so they don't serve as public reminders that permanent celibacy is a viable and honourable option. I hope this changes with the Benedict XVI generation.

But my first sympathies are with Searching Singles. Serious Singles are free to get on with it, but Searching Singles are stuck with searching until they either give up or get married. They sometimes suffer quite a lot. However, Jesus did say, "Pick up your cross and follow Me." Protracted Singleness, for a Searching Single, is indeed a cross. So pick it up, my little Singles, and follow Him.

I think there are three stages to praying for a spouse, and I described them to the St Andrews Catholic Society. They are "fun", "passionate" and "accepting." In my experience, the Searching Single bounces around them.

In the fun stage of prayer, the Searching Single looks up the saints traditionally said to find an unmarried person a spouse, and these are St. Joseph and St. Anne, Our Lord's Grandmother. The prayer asking the help of Saint Anne is "St. Anne, St. Anne, send me a man." I don't know of a similarly simple intercessory prayer to St. Joseph. But I do remember asking both St. Joseph and St. Anne to help me out. (When we were engaged, B.A. and I visited St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal, where I took the opportunity--in the original oratory, thank you, not the behemoth--to thank him.)

In the passionate stage of prayer, the Single Person gets right down into his or her heart where it hurts and wrestles with God over the issue of his or her Singleness. "Send me a Spouse," yells the Searching Single.

Now, this is controversial to some, for this may be mistaken for disrespect. Anglican converts used to the Book of Common Prayer are used to a lot of bowing and scraping before the Lord our God, and that is okay. But Jacob (or Israel) wrestled with an Angel (or Our Lord God) and before that, his mother demanded of the Lord for the answer to why her twins were fighting in her womb. In the Psalms, the psalmist intersperses his praise with demands and complaints. In the Book of Job, Job refuses to admit he had done something wrong when he hadn't and demands an account from the Lord. And, to my great delight, a Certain Blind Man Who Sat By the Wayside Begging (Luke 18: 31-43) yells and screams until Our Lord asks to see him:

Et clamavit dicens: Jesu, Fili David, miserere me. Et qui praeibant, increpabant eum ut taceret. Ipse vero multo magis clamabat: Fili David miserere mei. (My translation: And he yelled, saying: Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. And those who went before, scolded him, that he should shut up. But he kept on yelling, even louder.)

So I think that if your heart directs you to inwardly yell and scream and demand that the Lord have mercy on you in your Searching Single suffering, you should go ahead and do it. This is a million zillion times better than deciding that there is no point in yelling because God doesn't care or that there is no God and this is an absurd, purposeless, random universe ruled by blind evolutionary forces. By demanding mercy, you are keeping the lines of communication open.

The final stage of prayer is acceptance. And that is when you say "not my will, but Your will be done". (And where Jacob lost the fight, where Job said he was dust and ashes, and where the Certain Blind Man shut up long enough for Our Lord to get a word in.) For many, of not most of us, this comes after a good wrestle, like Jacob's, or a big squally fuss, like the Certain Blind Man's. And, guess what, this is not always a lasting state. I think saints manage to say "not my will, but Yours be done" every single second, but I discovered that even after I was Seraphic about being Single, my prayers would zoom around between Stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3.

Stage 3 was the most comfortable one because it was followed by a feeling of trust and contentment. The only way I could say the Stage 3 prayer with sincerity was to remember that God loved me and had a plan for me and all creation that I didn't know about and that I should just calm down and let Him unfold His plan in His own time.

Meanwhile, there are activities that correspond with the stages. In the fun stage, I would sign on with Catholic Singles dating services and flirt by Instant Message. I even gave into massive peer pressure and gave answers to the very long and boring questionnaire set before me by Whatsit (the expensive secular one whose name I honestly forget--not LavaLife, hmm....) as my buddy typed them in. In the passionate stage, I would gripe at my Spiritual Director. In the accepting stage, I would write a nice blog post about the Single Life.

But I am absolutely sure that it was Stage 3 that made me a better and, if I may say so, more marriageable person.

Today can be a good day.

Happy Valentine's Day to all my little Singles, especially Notburga, Berenike, Volker, Cecilia, Bolyongok, Theobromophile, Gruntette, IA_, Dominic Mary, Dayle, KimP, Hip2BSquare, DowntownDude, Calvinist Cath, Janet in Toronto, Wodkatonik, Shiraz, Frank Monozlai, Jasmina, Mary, Alephine, Elspeth, MargoB, Thwarted Throne, Alisha Ruiss, Lemons, Markyate Priory, Aussie Girl in Australia, Leonine, Healthily Sanguine, sciencegirl, The Sojouner, Claire Christina, Anna, Jessica, Francesca, Lizzie, Jen D, Clio, Maggie, Mark M, Aelianus, Papa Bear, Some Guy on the Street, Amy, B, Mulieris Fortis, Father PF, Father B, any other commentators and all the lovely lurkers.

Valentine's greetings also to my married readers!

Special valentine's greetings to B.A.

Meanwhile, I am pleased to report that at least 3 of 4 overseas Operation Valentinus packages reached their targets in time.

Survival Tip: Every time you see a canoodling couple today, take a breath and silently say, "Bless their little hearts." It might be fun to count them, too. Count up each couple whose little hearts you bless, and then report to me!

The Celibacy Revolution

I'm back from St Andrews, having made sure its Catholic Society knows that there is something called a vocation to the Single Life and what it looks like and how you know you might have one and how you go about investigating its possibilities. I also talked about Searching Single stuff and Married Stuff and how priesthood is something Serious Single men might want to look into. At the end my throat was sore and, boy, did I need that beer afterwards!

The part of Serious Single life that I find so fascinating is that lifelong celibacy, such as began in the Mediterranean area only around Jesus's day, was a revolution against the ancient pattern of marriage-reproduction-death. Since the average lifespan even as late as the second-century A.D. Roman Empire was only twenty-five years, getting married young and having babies was essential to the survival of earthly society. But Christians, in their enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God, looked at earthly society and said "Who cares?"

This will blow your minds, but from St. Paul to St. Augustine, the Early Church Fathers had a bit of a problem convincing Christians not to throw marriage completely out the window. Some Christians, in their enthusiasm about being eunuchs for the Kingdom, preached that marriage was actually BAD. So St. Paul and St. Augustine, to name only two, had to put the breaks on and insist that marriage was GOOD and, yes, although lifelong celibacy was better, marriage was still great. St. Augustine's winning argument--get this--was that marriage was good because it produced more virgins.

I'm telling you, once upon a time being Seriously Single was where it was at.

Now the ancient Greeks and Romans were very impressed by celibacy. Never mind orgies and pederasty and all that. Philosophers and other educated Greeks and Romans valued temperence very much. And they thought that the most manly man was the man who could do without very much sex. Sex robbed men of their strength, brains, whatever. (An idea that still manages persists today with athletes. Do you remember in the film Rocky, the trainer's belief that "Women weaken legs?" You can thank the Romans.) So they were very impressed by men who had no sex at all. Pliny the Elder wrote with admiration of groups of prophetic celibate Jewish men, like the Essenes, in Palestine who lived without women or slaves. And later the total sexual abstinence of a growing number of Christians impressed Greeks and Romans so much that it helped in their conversion to Christ.

Thus, Jesus was not the first Jewish man in his time to have no wife. We hear all kinds of dumb theories of how weird it was for a Jewish man not to be married and therefore Jesus MUST have been married. This is nonsense. Historian Peter Brown writes that Jesus's celibacy was an unremarkable part of His calling as a first century Jewish prophet. Of course, one difference was that the Essenes didn't want women or slaves around because their celibacy was about being "single-hearted" and they thought women and slaves were "double-hearted." But when Jesus said, "Follow me", He was talking to women, too.

When early Christians decided to follow Jesus by going out and preaching as celibate people, they weren't just giving up marriage, they were giving up a rooted existence--and this was revolutionary, too. But what I find particularly amazing is that for the very first time, women didn't have to marry, have sex and have babies. The median age for Roman brides was 14. And even the Vestal Virgins were expected to marry when they retired from their positions at age 30. But for the first time, women could say "No, I want to stay Single, thanks." And they could add, "Like Our Lord Jesus."

By remaining celibate, women and uneducated men could belong to a spiritual elite. Celibate women and men were prized as heroes and, as we still see them, as signs of the Kingdom of God where there will be no marriage. And women, generally ground down, alas, took on something akin to male privilege by remaining celibate. And, indeed, since they didn't have children or the wear-and-tear of married life, they probably lived longer too. (Even today, Single women live longer than anyone.)

In the beginning, I imagine, Serious Singles were just Single without any blessings about it. But then they did take vows, and Consecrated Virgins and Widows lived as sacred presences in their family homes and later out in the desert as Desert Mothers. Even later they joined up and lived together as proto-nuns and then as really, truly organized nuns.

Later still, Single women tried experiments in living Single in the world, instead of living Single enclosed. The Beguines were one movement of such women, and they made bishops nervous. And then the Counter-Reformation Era Mary Ward wanted to start an order of roving nuns, a kind of female Society of Jesus, and got seriously stomped on by Rome before she was exonerated. Despite, Mary Ward's exoneration, the Loretto Sisters were made to act more like conventual nuns. Now that they have reclaimed their original "charism", their numbers have dropped like a stone. But never mind that for now. The point is that Serious Single female life has always been important to the life of the Church, as has, of course, Serious Single male life. But then, ever since St. Augustine's day, those Serious Single men have usually been brothers and celibate priests.

Today we tend to think that marriage is the better part and there is not as much need to remind Christians, at any rate, that marriage is good. Unlike the Early Christians, our problem is that we forget that celibacy is good, too. Indeed, it is better for those who can hack it, for it is truly a sign of the Kingdom of God.

Update: My report on my St Andrews trip is here!

A Modestly Modest Proposal

Somebody asked me a chastity question yesterday, and I gulped like a goldfish. I can talk about the Single Life all day long, and I can talk about Strategic Dating for hours. But ask me to talk about Chastity, and I will look at you with eyes darting backwards and forwards like those of a cockatoo who's just made a 48 hour journey from Australia in a cardboard tube.

One reason why I would never give a Chastity Lecture is because of the fatal opening line of "When I was a teenager". Is there an introduction more dire than "When I was a teenager"? But anyway, when I was a teenager, passionate kissing (like in the movies) was still thought to be a relatively harmless and completely desirable recreational activity. Now that I am old and cranky and, it must be said, married, I don't quite believe that anymore.

So if I were the Queen of the World, I would make it a rule that nobody could kiss lingeringly on the lips unless they were almost-engaged. That is so retro I am dying of embarrassment here. When a young married guy said almost the exact same thing at a Theology of the Body lecture two years ago, I rolled my eyes and thought, "Oh, pul-eeze, married guy!" But as a matter of fact, when B.A. first kissed me, I knew we were almost-engaged.

This is not to say that I think you are Bad People because you made out like bandits yesterday. All over this little world, young Single People of Every Religion were making out like bandits yesterday. And yesterday was Tuesday, so imagine Saturday afternoon. Therefore, nobody write in, "Seraphic, do you think I am bad because...?" I don't think you are bad because of anything. God created you good. Jesus died for you. You're good. And don't ask me about "purity" because I don't really believe in the concept of "purity" applied to human sexuality because human bodies cannot be compared to Ivory Soap, as I explain very forcefully in My Book. What counts is treating everyone, including yourself, like beautiful Temples of the Holy Spirit.

But what I have concluded, after 39 years, and also now being married, which I admit makes these things seem a lot simpler than they do when you're Single, that one way to keep out of trouble of all kinds, especially emotional, is not to kiss people passionately unless marriage is definitely in the air and a diamond ring is immanent.

My parent's generation (but not my parents) ushered in the Sexual Revolution and screwed us all up. Maybe your generation will save us. I hope so.

Busy, busy, busy!

What a day! Deadlines, social stuff, a talk to plan, housework--you name it. Today was not a bloggy day.

Tomorrow is my talk to the U. of St. Andrews Catholic Society, and I'm looking forward to it very much. Of course, talking about stuff I normally only write about is very scary. Eeek! And I will be talking about Marriage as well as Single Life... Er, only been married for nine months, so what do I know, eh?

Anyway, it will be fun and if I blank right out, I will simply move into my one of my usual lectures, e.g. "How to Find Your Writing Voice." Here's the Catholic Register version of the latter.

Valentine's Day is not Failure Day

A pal of mine called Valentine's Day "Failure Day", and I was shocked. I've been so consciously peppy about the Single Life for so long, I've forgotten that other women are perfectly comfortable complaining about Valentine's Day and equating not getting anything on that day to a personal failure of Titantic proportions.

Once again, I encourage all women out there to make or buy Valentines for such Single female friends and relations who will not blow up like TNT in response to your kindness. Single men can fight off their V-Day loneliness by also doing a similar good deed, only in their case I recommend sending these valentines to Mom or Mum, Auntie and Sis, who cannot possibly read anything scary into them.

My five-year-old nephew Pirate, soon to become as famous as Christopher Robin (I hope), once electrified a room of his female relations by suddenly saying to his mother, "Mommy, you're my little sweetheart."

All his female relations cried "Awwww!" in one voice and looked all tender and misty and in danger of melting like butter in a puddle on the rug.

So I think that only good can come of brothers and sons and nephews firing off or bringing valentines and chockies such kinswomen as they are strictly forbidden by God and man to marry.

If you do something nice for someone on Valentine's Day, that day cannot possibly be a failure. Meanwhile, the day is a fantastic excuse for Single Women to have a party and tell (risque) jokes and watch Orlando Bloom in Pirates of the Caribbean or Colin Firth's wet shirt in Pride and Prejudice.* It is an opportunity to dress as Marilyn Monroe or Jane Russell and sing a chorus of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." It is a Women's Solidary Day of epic proportions, which is no doubt why the [Woman's Private Part] Monologues are staged that day on Roman Catholic college campuses across the USA and at secular colleges elsewhere.

Personally, I always had better things to do on February 14 than listen to horrible stories about rape by soldiers and 'empowering' stories about statuatory rape by seductive lesbians, all in the company of the kind of man who can be talked into going to such a show. Apparently the audience participates by chanting an Anglo-Saxon word no lady or gentleman ever utters, no matter how stressed out she or he is. If the F-word is merely a bomb, this word is a weapon of mass destruction plus cancer thrown in.

No, there are better things that Single people can do for fun on Valentine's Day. They just need a little ingenuity and planning. So please, dear Single readers, my angels, reveal in the comm box what you're going to do on Sunday. By so doing you may give helpful ideas to your fellow Singles. I am going to an afternoon cocktail party being hosted by a clever, romance-less Single man. No doubt he will be rolling in chocolates by supper.

*Update: Fraternal correction by Berenike leads me to note that if for you sharing risque jokes and admiring matinee idols, even in all-female company, are occasions for sin, and not the female bonding devices they are for me, then obviously you shouldn't do those things. Frankly, I think reading romance novels with erotic scenes--a very common (and solitary) female habit--much, much worse. But, anyway, gnothe seauton.

Auntie Seraphic & the Long Letter

Poppets, I have been writing a very long answer in response to an email. In short the email read:

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

I am a young woman. I want to get married one day. Retaining my femininity is very important to me. Should I join the Marines for four years?

Signed,
Gruntette

And, in short, I replied,

Dear Gruntette,

No.

Grace and peace,
Auntie Seraphic

I forgot to ask Gruntette for permission to reproduce our correspondence, so this is all the detail you're getting.

Here's Mulieris Dignitatem.

I totally respect Gruntette's urge to serve her country, by the way. If there are any American (British, Canadian, et al.) servicewomen (or even servicemen) who would like to add their two cents in the comm box, be my guest.