Asceticism and Chaste Celibate Love

By Vilma Seelaus OCD

The biblical understanding of God is captured in three words: God is love. Created as we are in the image and likeness of God, the core of our being is a "being-in-love" with God. (1) Because of our radical connection with God, we are conceived and born into the world as preconscious predispositions for love. As Rahner puts it, "man is the event of God's absolute self-communication."(2) Love therefore is the root and foundation of our being. Life's deepest challenge is to fully accept and give human expression to this foundational reality of love. The vow we call consecrated chastity, or chaste celibacy, has everything to do with love. By it we open ourselves to becoming fully loving persons.

Chaste love is love that is single-hearted. Single-hearted love does not of itself exclude a genital expression. Chaste loving is the universal call that includes both married persons and persons who remain single. In marriage, love is meant to have a genital expression. The religious vow is not only of chaste love, but also of chaste celibacy intended as a total response to God's unconditional love. The single-hearted love to which religious vow themselves is at the heart of the kind of loving to which we are all invited as human beings. As consecrated celibates we vow to live out in a chaste celibate way the love relationship with God, and with one another, to which all persons are invited.(3)

Fidelity in chaste celibate loving has its own unique call for asceticism; celibate love must include asceticism. Celibacy for God means that one has a desire to receive God's love and to become passionately in love with God, expressing it in the vow of chaste celibacy. Today we increasingly recognize what the mystics have known for centuries: that, in our universe and in the heart of every human person, there is an energy which as Christians we know to be God's creating love in all that exists. St. Teresa of Avila in her Sixth Dwelling Place describes a remarkable vision in which she sees all things in God. In this vision, "God is like an immense and beautiful dwelling or palace, and this palace is God himself." Teresa now sees all things as taking place in God and therefore in Love. All human love is either an expression or a distortion of this one love, namely, God's unconditional love embracing and encircling the human family. Teresa writes:

Could the sinner, perhaps, so as to engage in his evil deeds leave this palace? No, certainly not; rather, within the palace itself, that is, within God himself, the abominations, indecent actions, and evil deeds committed by us sinners take place. . . . The greatest evil of the world is that God, our Creator, suffers so many evil things from his creatures within his very self and that we sometimes resent a word said in our absence and perhaps with no evil intention.(4)

Our life unfolds in God! Postmodern Christian ecological theologians see this reality as the basis of God's radical immanence in the world and as the human challenge to respect and care for the ecological systems of our planet earth, symbolized as the body of God.(5) Chaste loving extends itself to loving care of the world in which we live, which, in one of his less-known poems, John of the Cross images as the palace created by God for "all the members of the just," who are "the body of the bride" of the eternal Word.(6) In viewing all of human love within the ambience of God's creating energy of love, we see how out of harmony is the so-called "sexual revolution," which seeks sexual pleasure apart from genuine love between persons. Yet even self-centered, narcissistic love contains within itself in a diffused, distorted way the energies of divine love. The human urgency for union with God, who alone can offer unconditional love, easily finds expression in diffused and distorted ways when God's love is unrecognized or rejected. Aware of this reality, Jesus had and has great compassion for all of us, who in ways small or great live love's distortions.

Asceticism enlarges the heart to receive a greater outpouring of God's love. It also allows the energies of divine love to flow more freely through us into the lives of others. This asceticism is a matter of self-denial and self-emptying.(7) What we deny ourselves and allow God to empty out are the things within us or around us that we tend to hold on to tenaciously. The purpose of asceticism is freedom for self-surrender, not self-punishment, not the giving up of things out of self-hate. Rather, genuine asceticism springs from a desire to be rooted in love. It is an expression of our willingness for our love to be freed of its distortions. The asceticism that leads to self-surrender can be sustained only in prayerful communion with God and is itself a form of prayer. Self-surrender softens the soil of our inner being so that stubborn willfulness may more easily be uprooted by God, leaving room for God to plant seeds of willingness.(8) These are seeds of the Christ-life. Josef Van Beeck, the Dutch theologian, in an early work of his titled Christ Proclaimed, points out that Jesus "was without the need for anxious self-possession, self-maintenance, and self-affirmation." Jesus was content to receive his being in a stance of total surrender to his Father.(9)

To love is to love someone -- other persons as well as God. Self-denial can be psychologically harmful and even sinful outside of the context of our relationship with other people and with God. There is, however, something in our being that clings to aloneness, to private and even narcissistic self-possession, distorting the inner solitude of our uniqueness. This distortion, the denial of relatedness, is sin. Sin would have us cling to our separateness as something absolute. This is an ontological illusion, but it nevertheless lures us to rest on its comforting bosom in the hope of avoiding the pain that comes with reaching out in love.

Relatedness can be painful, as we discover early. Although other persons reflect our uniqueness and help us discover our gifts and potential, they also mirror our inadequacies. As we struggle with the demands of friendship and human encounter, that relatedness undermines personal myths of omnipotence and reveals our finitude. The insecurity of finitude is hard to accept, and, just as others willy-nilly make demands of us, we place all kinds of expectations on ourselves to be all-knowing and all-capable, to be fully adequate to every situation. Amid these usually unconscious self-expectations, the gifts and talents of others threaten us, so we turn then off or become defensive. Insofar as we are out of touch with these inner movements, envy, jealousy, and competitiveness keep us outside of the unifying energies of God's love that flow between people. The opposite can also happen. Self-doubt can so overwhelm us that we give up trying.

The gentle vigilance of self-knowledge is an excellent form of asceticism. Self-knowledge keeps us in touch with the polluting elements that can be present in love's stream. Self-knowledge looks squarely at emotional and attitudinal dams that cause love's flow to stagnate.(10) It strengthens us to bear the pain of our failures as we struggle to learn new patterns of behavior more expressive of love. The asceticism of self-knowledge necessarily opens us to a deeper understanding of God in our life. God is compassionate, unconditional love; God accepts us just as we are. Imperfection is normative to our finitude. For us to be perfect is to accept the reality of our imperfection. God's only expectation seems to be that we surrender to God's Trinitarian love and that we ourselves become passionate lovers.

Fasting is a very traditional and helpful form of asceticism. As self-punishment it is harmful; nevertheless, fasting can be sincere worship. It can express genuine love toward God, who is father, mother, beloved, and friend, the source of all we have and are. The stomach's empty feeling reminds us that we are a hunger for God, who alone can fill our emptiness. Fasting can be an expression of praise and adoration of the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Jesus, alive in his Spirit worshiping in us, becomes more than a desire; he fills our emptiness with his own praise of his Father. Like the young Carmelite Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, we too are destined to be a "praise of His Glory."(11)

Fasting is a form of worship; it is also a form of the prayer of petition. Our finitude has many needs. We easily come to the limits of our human potential, especially in the realm of love and relatedness. Times exist when a relationship reaches an impasse or when persons dear to us seem stuck in self-destructive tendencies, or are struggling with seemingly impossible situations. Our fasting for them can be a hidden silent petition that God nourish the loved one to newness of life. Fasting can also be a prayer for the gift of detachment from the things we cling to in anxious self-possession and which keep us from self-surrender.

Asceticism therefore can take many forms. It is crucial to the critical moments when a committed celibate is being tempted along a path whose ending would inevitably be genital intimacy. Here one is faced with the asceticism of choice. One needs to set appropriate boundaries to love's expression while still fostering warmth and caring in the relationship. Fidelity to love is always a paschal experience. The asceticism of choice, in this instance the appropriate channeling of love's warmth, can be painful. But it is pain that is life-giving. Unlike the repression of feelings, which imprisons the self in the turmoil of unacknowledged emotions, the asceticism of choice is an encounter with greater inner freedom and is a call to growth in love. One's pain becomes redemptive not only for oneself and the loved person, but for others as well, because it springs from genuine love and is a true love response.

Because love is the creating energy that sustains the universe, and its energies flow through all of humankind, it is necessarily the very heart of the church. Therefore any decision that one makes out of love and with the intent of fostering love has apostolic value. It shares in the life-giving, redemptive mission of Christ. This reality is worth pondering. It broadens one's understanding of the apostolate and of the meaning of mission for consecrated celibates. We participate in God's creating action through the choices we make, and in doing so we inevitably affect the lives of others. Decisions drawn from the deep well of love enter into love's stream flowing from the womb of God, the source of life, the one life that flows through all of humankind. Even the smallest of our decisions is like the proverbial pebble thrown into the water whose ripples expand in ever widening circles.

Here I am reminded of an experience in my own life that becomes increasingly meaningful. My monastery in Rhode Island is located on Narragansett Bay. Occasionally I take an early morning walk along the beach to enjoy the sunrise reflecting itself across the waters. One such morning the bay was unusually calm. As I walked along I heard a sudden strong swish of incoming surf. This usually announces the changing of the tides, but the waters of the last high tide had not yet fully ebbed out. I turned and scanned the bay. In the far distance a tiny craft was speeding across the waters, splitting its quiet surface, and leaving behind rolling waves of water. As the craft disappeared between the islands, the waters returned to their previous unruffled state. The swish at my feet settled to a calm.

I have experienced this phenomenon many times, and it never ceases to amaze me that the movements of such a small craft, hardly visible in the distance, can affect such a large expanse of water even to a distant shore. This symbolizes for me the awesome reality that the choices we make, no matter how small, are not insignificant. Humanity is bonded in a common stream of consciousness and love; the movements of one person, toward life or toward diminishment, necessarily affect the whole. Asceticism in its many forms is a prayerful desire that not only our activity but also our entire being may be apostolic, that is, life-giving for others. It fosters human solidarity as an enduring reality, by creating a freer channeling of divine life through the collective body of humankind.(12)

Notes

1. See Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), p. 105

2. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), p. 126.

3. This paper was first written in the 1970's. Since then, much of great value has been written regarding the vows. In this recent minor revision, no attempt was made to connect with the fine work of recent authors.

4. Interior Castle, VI.10.2-3. Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Vol. 2, trans. Otilio Rodriguez OCD and Kieran Kavanaugh OCD (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1980), p. 419.

5. See Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril by Sallie McFague (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), pp. 138ff. See also the writings of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme.

6. Romances, nos. 3-6, "On Creation," in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Otilio Rodriguez OCD and Kieran Kavanaugh OCD (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991), pp. 62ff. [See especially no. 4, pp. 63-64. Ed.]

7. See Vilma Seelaus OCD, Self-Emptying: Philippians 2 and the Carmelite Tradition (Washington D.C.: ICS [Audio] Publications, 2004).

8. See Gerald May MD, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982).

9. Frans Jozef Van Beeck SJ, Christ Proclaimed (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 421.

10. For a further development of the value of self-knowledge, see Vilma Seelaus OCD, "Effective Ministry through Contemplative Self-Knowledge," Review for Religious 41 (May-June 1982): 390-399.

11. See Elizabeth of the Trinity, The Complete Works (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1984).

12. The asceticism of chaste celibate love has yet a deeper dimension, which is the asceticism of prayer, especially contemplative prayer. To remain faithful to love and to prayer during the painful times of dark night and the seeming void of love would be a topic in itself. See Hein Blommestijn, Jos Huls, and Kees Waaijman, The Footprints of Love: John of the Cross as Guide in the Wilderness, trans. John Vriend (Leuven [Bondgenontenlaan, 153; B-3000 Leuven; Belgium]: Peeters, 2000).

(Tomado de Review for Religious 64.2)