SINGLE HYPOCRISY

'I nursed my resentment at having "no one" for whom I considered it to be their official role to support me, at the same time positioning myself as someone who would always consider it my role to help a friend and likely force them to accept it. I realised I was indulging a sense of my own exceptionalism, creating a sharp boundary around what I would allow others to do for me, even as I told myself I could and should cross that boundary in the other direction when needed.'

Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue, p.108.

THE DOMINANCE OF ROMANTIC LOVE

'I wonder if we all lose by centring romantic love in our lives. And it does still feel like romantic love is centred. Even as the internet has helped us find our own warm pocket of community within the endless variations of romantic and sexual idenitity; even though state and church control of who cannot be romantcially and sexually involved, and who can have their relationships recognised, has loosened. Nothing has displaced romantic love from its holy status. If we were to pay attention, what do we fail to notice, share and celebrate because of this? Is it possible that life without romantic love isn't that bad? Is it possible we can take as much pleasure in other loves, find new ways of incorporating romantic feeling into our lives, assign importance to crossing over thresholds that romantic love has abandoned?'

Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life, p.10.

SINGLENESS & SOVEREIGNTY

'I want to suggest that our cultural attachment to ideas of "choice" can make it harder for us to see how God is working in the unchosen circumstances of our lives. When Christians argue that the only good celibacy is "voluntary" celibacy rather than mandated celibacy, they gloss over the degree to which all our choices are constrained by the interaction of circumstances and conviction.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.48.

HOW CELIBACY CONFRONTS YOU WITH REALITY

'Celibacy can leave us with a lot of time to sit alone with our thoughts and God, should we be so daring. It can provide a perspective that invites me to contemplate meaning and eternity and what is really true and lasting. It can also be a doorway into a godly hopelessness, because there is no locus of hope in this life. Celibacy has removed all the temporal hopes. No date. No special someone. No engagement or marriage or first child or grandkids. "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" (James 4:14).'

Greg Johnson, Still Time to Care, p.239.

A SINGLE TEACHER'S LEGACY

'She had more children than any of her friends, and been loved and respected, fawned over and feared. She'd taught thousands of young people to read and think, and they had gone on to change the world and would continue to long after she was dust.' 

Stewart O'Nan, Wish You Were Here, p.315. 

WHY PEOPLE SEEK TO ESCAPE SINGLENESS

'To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn't necessarily our faults as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible: once the freewheeling days of school and university are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly  hard to find; social life starts to resolve oppressively around couples; there's no one left to call and hang out with. It hardly surprising, then, if when we find someone half decent, we might cling.' 

Alain de Botton, The Course of Love, p.39.

SINGLENESS & SEXUALITY

'To be sexual - to be male or female - means to be incomplete as an isolated individual. For as isolated individuals we are unable to reflect the fullness of humanity and thus the fullness of the divine image. We see the other who is sexually different from us, and as this occurs we are reminded of our own incompleteness. 

The fullness of humanness, therefore, is reflected only in community. As a result, our existence as sexual beings gives rise to the desire to enter into community, and thereby to actualize our design as human individuals. Sexuality, then, is an expression of our nature as social beings. We are not isolated entities existing to ourselves; nor are we the source of our fulfillment. On the contrary, we derive fulfillment beyond ourselves. This need to find fulfillment beyond ourselves is the dynamic that leads to the desire to develop relationships with others and ultimately with God. 

This dynamic is present in a person's life regardless of marital status. Married persons have entered into this intimate bond as a result of their sexuality. But the drive toward bonding as an expression of human sexuality is operative in the single life as well, albeit in a less formal way. Just as bonding is a dynamic of the single life, so also this drive to bond with others n community is an expression of our fundamental sexuality, a sexuality that goes deeper than body parts, potential roles in reproduction, and genital acts.'  

Stanley J Grenz, Sexual Ethics: An Evangelical Perspective,  p.193. 

THE IMPLICIT PROSPERITY GOSPEL

'If, in the explicit prosperity gospel, it is unthinkable that God would withold from His faithful followers cash, cars, and mansions, in the implicit prosperity gospel of many, shaped by a culture that must elevate sex beyond its station in God's created order, we cannot imagine that God would ask of some celibacy.'

Mark Sayers, Disappearning Church, p.82.  

CHASTITY DEFINED

'Chastity is not the same as virginity or celibacy. Within Christianity, it is something both married and single people are called to. The person who is raped is not guilty of being unchaste. On the other hand, the consumer of pornography is. Chastity, most simply, is fidelity.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.161. 

WHERE A LACK OF RESPECT FOR FRIENDSHIP LEADS

'Loss of respect for nonsexual relationships itself fuels a desire for sexual relationships...' 

Jana Marguerite Bennett, Singleness and the Church: A New Theology of the Single Life, p.38.

SINGLENESS & SEXUALITY

'...celibacy is not a renunciation of sexuality but a pressurized form of it, a reduction of eroticism to that eros between God and his people that is the enabling archetype of all eroticism.' 

Robert W Jenson, 'Male and Female He Created Them' in Braaten & Seitz (Ed.), I am the Lord Your God,  p.186. 

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

'...the church has created a culture that simultaneously pressures singles to get married and makes it very difficult for them to do so.' 

Gina Dalfonzo, One by One:Welcoming the Singles in Your Church, p.85. 

THE PATTERNS OF LOVE

'Arnold, after yawning twice, got up and went into the house. Stretched out on the bed in his room, with the Venetian blinds closed, he began to compare the life of the Talbots with his own well-ordered but childless and animalless life in town. Everywhere they go, he thought, they leave tracks behind them, like people walking in the snow. Paths crisscrossing, lines that are perpetually meeting: the mother's loving pursuit of the youngest, the man's love for his daughter, the dog's love for the man, the two boys;' preoccupation with each other. Wheels and diagrams, Arnold said to himself. The patterns of love.' 

William Maxwell, 'The Patterns of Love' in Over by the River  and Other Stories, p.81. 

FRIENDSHIP & SINGLENESS

'True friendship is a treasure, often most deeply discovered by single persons, cherished, burnished, garnished, but then offered to others.' 

Ephraim Radner, A Time to Keep, p.185. 

LIVING ALONE

'I need someone to fold the sheet; someone to take the other end of the sheet and walk towards me and fold once, then step back, fold and walk toward me again. We all need someone to fold the sheet. Someone to hitch on the coat at the neck. Someone to put on the kettle. Someone to dry up while I wash.' 

Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, p.86. 

SEX IS NOT SEXUALITY

'...only one aspect of sexuality is expressed in sexual intercourse. We also express it in warmth and touch, in closeness and care for the other persons who are dear to us. If in our lives there is no sexual union with another, perhaps because we have accepted celibacy, or gone through bereavement, illness or divorce, we are no less fully human and fully sexual. Deeply satisfying human intimacy, whether in marriage or outside, is in the end not dependent on copulation but on a faithful sharing of our hearts and lives with those whom we love, and a longing for their well-being and peace.' 

Elaine Storkey, The Search for Intimacy, p.207. 

THE THREAT OF CHASTITY

'Those who are chaste by conviction are in fact a threat to all who market sex as something which we must bow before. For they are often living testimonies to the fact that human intimacy is not dependent on sexual intercourse for its meaning and power. They also know the truth that we are much more in control of the way we relate to others than our culture is prepared to acknowledge. And in this they have the witness of history.' 

Elaine Storkey, The Search for Intimacy, p.206. 

SINGLENESS

'A celibate is not a bachelor. It is a person with a unique connection with the Church and therefore with a special call to faithfulness, obedience and love.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Love, Henri, p.81.

MALE & FEMALE INTIMACY

'In my thirty years of attending churches I have heard two narratives in Christian communities: 1) the marital/ romantic story, and 2) the danger story. Both stories of course, involve an introduction, a plot, and a climax towards the same thing: sex. Freud no doubt, would heartily endorse these two stories. But are we to settle for only Freudian sexual formation in our faith communities? As Protestants, we have to ask ourselves, why do we reduce deep, male-female intimacy in our communities to the great Freudian "sex charade?" If the church is going to present an alternative, eschatological community of brothers and sisters bonded together as one in Christ, formation and friendship must suggest that Christian sexuality has multiple paths for men and women.' 

Dan Brennan, Sacred Union, Sacred Passions, p.56. 

WHAT GOD HAS JOINED TOGETHER

'God, who is love, calls us all - singles, husbands. wives, widows, widowers, divorced - into a spirituality of love and friendship in marriage, beyond marriage and outside of marriage. While God honors and blesses the marriage bed, God does not confine delight, goodness, passion, attraction, beauty, sensuality, spontaneity, or creativity to the boundaries of married love. Jesus himself embodied these realities as a single man.' 

Dan Brennan, Scared Unions, Sacred Passions, p.44.