The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On
W Publishing Group, 2006
I can’t always see the joy that is set before me.
But I know one thing.
Where my old way of life is concerned, there is no joy behind me. (35)
Dawn Eden gives us both a retrospective into her past, and what she has discovered in terms of hope for the future. In the present she is coming to understand a good number of lessons, learning to live in the virtue of chastity, and encouraging others to do the same.
In Eden’s story there are several conversions. She tells us that at the age of 31, “after being an agnostic Jew for my entire adult life, I had what Christians would call a born again experience”. (4) But her book is not the stuff of much of what passes for contemporary devotional literature on the topic of “purity”. The book is rather down to earth; she is up front about her experiences and her struggles. She writes as well of those daily conversions of habits, attitudes and actions to which Christians are called. While she writes from and to an explicitly female point of view, I would suggest that many men could benefit from this book as well. She gives us some insights into women’s sexuality which could come in handy, guys.
What is chastity? She quotes Mark Lowry: chastity is “that virtue by which we are in control of our sexual appetite rather than it being in control of us.” (14) With this short definition in mind, she proceeds in the second chapter to hold before us both our contemporary culture and the ancient virtue, arguing that being “chaste is a bold challenge to modern culture, because it proves that people are not automatons but human beings with free will, able to control who and what they are.” (17) Mixed in with this is the apparent degradation of “singlehood” (21 ff) in our society: to be single is often seen in negative terms, lacking a relationship with a man. (22) And we’ve all seen enough Cosmo mags at the checkout counter to see that not a few advertisers are trying to tell women that there must be “all sex, all the time”.
Much of popular culture, particularly magazines directed at single women, hold up “having sex like a man” as a goal toward which all intelligent women should strive. Women who refuse to hold to that ideal are derided as provincial, hopelessly backward prudes. (33)
There are a number of sensitive men who will take exception to that phrase “having sex like a man”, and I suppose I should object as well in case my loving wife reads this. However, I will only quote the psalms “I said in my haste, all men are liars”. I might suggest that Eden accomplished some of what comes all too naturally to men when she writes: “I was learning to detach, to feel as though I could separate the physical actions of sex from its emotional consequences…” (50)
We can learn this detachment early in life, and the experience of parental separation and divorce certainly played a part in forming Eden. She recounts episodes in her childhood (56 ff) which certainly had an effect. Yet, as Eden’s story shows, we can be more than the sum of our history, and at the end of the day, we can only throw back so much on Mom and Dad.
There is a certain amount of hope infused in this book. She takes a look at the broader “meaning of sex” (63-71). Coupled with this is her own discovery of how casual sex affects the other person: “I started to wonder what effect my own actions when I was unchaste had on the men with whom I’d had sex.” (76) Her conversion to Christianity led her to begin to see the other, and began her move away from a merely self-centered existence. It is ironic that the sexual act, designed to be the communion of two persons, can be the ultimate lonely experience. One of the first things that appears after her confrontation with her own life, is the beginning of concern for the other. All of this takes time in the Christian life: “what’s changed is not so much what I am, but what I am becoming.” (80)
Eden tells us of her subsequent journey in working out the implications of her new faith. Christ calls us to convert the whole of our lives, from our emotions to our wardrobes. In all of this, she sees a new hope that she will eventually find Mr. Right, or rather that God has found Mr. Right, and will introduce them at the opportune time. I was tempted to say something about this naïve confidence in God, but then I remembered how my wife and I got together, so I’ll have to agree with her. God is not indifferent to such things, and as Christ calls us into specific vocations, he also calls us into the vocation of marriage. (101 ff)
She gets down to the nitty gritty, telling her readers everything from tips on how to meet a future husband to dealing with sexual fantasies and masturbation. Dawn has given us a good book: one which is honest, insightful, and hopeful. She is as open about her Christian faith as she is about her past, and doesn’t try to put too much blue eyeshadow on either. She strikes me as a realist, but a realist who knows as well that the ultimate reality is God’s ability to make beauty out of ashes. Like the “yes” which Mary spoke to the angel, Eden’s “yes” to God is not the end of something, but the beginning. (80-81)
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