We’re getting chastity all wrong, and that makes it harder

I can’t help but think that we’re thinking about chastity all wrong. Precisely backwards, in fact, and this mix-up is behind the reason so many of us struggle to be chaste. We’re picturing a constant battle against sin, the relentless process of leaving something we desire behind. In this scenario, chastity can be conceived as mortification against our bodies. Chastity, by this way of thinking, is entirely negative.

I don’t mean to say that chastity isn’t a fight against bodily desires and that it won’t require of us spiritual discipline and penance. Developing virtue certainly involves fleeing from sin. If I desire to be chaste, I must maintain custody of the eyes. I must practice modesty. I must withdraw from feeding into my disordered desires. This is all true enough, and it’s very much true that there are things a chaste person does not do, but I say that we get chastity wrong if we think of it only as a lack. Virtues aren’t negative. If all we’re doing is avoiding, then we’re not really developing chastity.

In the long run, this is a losing battle. Society and media are saturated with unchaste images. We are surrounded on a daily basis, against our will, by temptations. Temptation is embedded in commercials and social media feeds. It’s cheering and dancing on the sidelines of a football game, working out at the gym, and walking directly through our field of vision in the food court at the mall. It requires tremendous self-control to be chaste. Over time, the endurance required is exhausting, which is why it’s impossible thrive if we are living chastity in terms of negativity, what we’re against, what we’re not.

Virtue isn’t absence. It is fullness. Virtue is always a positive good. Living virtuously means being filled with happiness and joy. It means being free. If this is the case, then chastity is far more than we would have supposed, and far happier.

Chastity is a virtue for everyone, in every stage of life. Sometimes, people think that if they can just get married, they won’t have to be chaste anymore or the temptations will shift and cease. This isn’t true, though, because chastity isn’t the same as celibacy. Even married couples practice chastity, and those external temptations never cease.

In my experience, getting married isn’t a magical fix for chastity. If someone struggles with it before marriage, the struggle will continue after marriage. Others, older in age, perhaps widowed and with fewer physical temptations, might think chastity is a virtue only for the young, but it is for them, too. It’s for all of us. The reason is simple – all the virtues are good for everyone. The more virtuous we are, the more self-fulfilled we will be.

I learned this way of thinking about chastity from Bishop Erik Varden in his book titled Chastity. Bishop Varden is a Trappist monk (who just finished preaching to Pope Leo XIV his annual Lenten retreat) with profound insight into this virtue, which he refers to as freedom from the passions so as to “attune oneself to celestial life.” Chastity is wholeness and healing. “It is not a denial of sex,” he writes, but is a reorientation of our desires towards their perfect and holy fulfillment.

Knowing this, we can see that the opposite of chastity is a corruption of the self, the enslavement of our senses and desires towards a lower purpose. Someone who is unchaste is only partially experiencing life, lacking vision to behold the true beauty by which we are surrounded. Bishop Varden insists, “to do something beautiful for its own sake, for the intrinsic delight of it, without thought of gain: this, I’d say, is a way of beginning to live chastely.” We yearn for ecstasy beyond the sensual, he writes, and our senses are meant to gather up, redeem, and transcend. The way I see it, unchastity is the objectification and belittling of beauty. On the other hand, chastity sees more deeply, beholding the image of God stamped on his creation.

This is what I mean when I say we get chastity all wrong. It isn’t for some, it’s for all. It isn’t an abandonment of the senses and desire, it’s their fulfillment. Chastity is a departure from sin, but it is also an arrival to our selves.

So how can we become chaste? We should definitely keep fighting against lust and disordered desire, but at the same time (and this is often the missing piece), we can practice purifying our desires. Bishop Varden recommends a reorientation of our nature as opposed to putting it to death. We are called towards wholeness, “enacted through integral reconciliation, towards fullness of life.”

Bishop Varden teaches that chastity is not normal. It is exceptional. We have to work hard to obtain it. Never fear, though, this is what grace is for, but this is why it’s so important we correctly identify chastity for what it truly is - the fullest embrace of life.