an excerpt from a book

Back at Vandy some guys and I joke about marriage. Or rather, the flipside of marriage. Celibacy. Rather than play the who's going to get married game first, we play the "most likely to be celibate game." An excerpt from City of Joy by Lapierre (more on that on a later post) reminded me of that. The excerpt really surprised me, in that it puts celibacy in such a beautiful light. Enjoy.

"When I was a child," Stephan Kovalski recalled, "I used to like to go for walks int he country and it amused me to chop the heads off flowers with a stick. Later, when I went to school, I used to pick a flower and put it on my table. Then I told myself that flowers were beautiful right there where they grew, and so I stopped cutting them and admired them in their natural setting. It was the same with women. One day I told the Lord that I didn't want to pick any one single woman because I wanted to let them all bloom right there where they were.

"Saint John of the Cross once wrote, 'Heaven is mine. Jesus is mine. Mary is mine. Everything is mine.' As soon as you want to hold on to any one particular thing, everything else escapes you, whereas by detachment you can enjoy everything without actually possessing anything in particular. That's the key to voluntary celibacy, without which chastity would make no sense. It's a choice of love. Marriage, on the other hand, means giving yourself, body and soul, to one single human being. As far as the body and carnal love were concerned, that would not have been difficult, but it was impossible for me to give my soul to any one single person. I had already decided to give it to God and there was no one in this world with whom I could share that gift - not even my mother whom I adored.