THE PURPOSE OF SEXUALITY

'The fire of erotic impulse, intrinsic to human nature, can brighten and warm our lives as a source of gladness and fruitfulness. It can also erupt in conflagrations of deadly passion. In a Christian optic, eros is an impulse towards the divine, but it not itself divine. It has its part to play in ordering human existence towards its true goal, the knowledge and love of God. It must not be mistaken for the goal.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.160.

THE INTIMACY OF BEING TRULY SEEN

'To be seen in truth is an intimate experience. Sight can in fact be more intimate than touch. As any pastor knows, people often go out in search of sexual adventure because they do not feel seen, suffer from this fact and crave a substitute. The risk is that pleasure serves, then, to exacerbate sadness and make loneliness worse. Intimacy does not have to be sexual. Sex can stand in intimacy's way.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.158.

THE ESCHATALOGICAL LIMITS TO BINARIES

'There is an eschatological thrust in the desire to overcome binary oppositions. Christ came to make the two one (cf. Ephesians 2.14, Galatians 3.28). Trouble ensues when human beings try to accomplish overcoming unaided. Christianity entertains hope of transcending human dichotomies not through pendular alterations, but through a transfiguration in love that realizes our thirst for infinity through graced communion with Infinite Being.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.124.

BEING A CHRISTIAN

'The Christian condition is the art of striving to answer a call to perfection while plumbing the depth of our imperfection without despairing and without giving up on the ideal.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.120.

DON'T LOSE THE SUPERNATURAL THRUST OF CHRISTIANITY

'Once the supernatural thrust has gone from Christianity, what remains? Well-meaning sentiment and a set of commandments found to be crushing, the finality of change they were meant to serve having been summarily dismissed.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.114.

FREEDOM FOR, NOT FREEDOM FROM

'Ordinarily we think of freedom as scope to do what we feel like. We think in terms of freedom from, not of freedom unto. In Christian terms, freedom is about enabling commitment. The Biblical view of human nature, evidenced in Christ, regards the human being as essentially relational, oblative and covenantal. On this account, unhindered pursuit of momentary inclinations is not freedom. It it is enslavement to whim, which, empirically speaking, rarely produces last happiness. Sensational thrills can come of it, true, but they are not much of a foundation on which to construct a life.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.113.

WHY BEAUTY MATTER TO US

'The human will to embody beauty is, I suspect, underrated. But it lives in us as a consequence and expression of our iconic nature. He in whose image we are made is Beauty. Beauty is naturally the end towards which we strive.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.59.

OUR DIVINE CRAVINGS

'To be human is to exist with the sense of an absence to be filled. Only the light of our human's substance's longing for union with the divine do our lesser yearnings make sense.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.32.

CHASTITY DEFINED

'...chastity is not a denial of sex. It is an orientation of sexuality, of the whole vital instinct, towards a desired finality. It is a function of the wholeness sought and healing found.'

Erik Varden, Chastity: Reconciliation of the senses, p.17.

THE EXHAUSTION OF EMPATHY

'Always George's problem, seeing both sides of everything. Wore him out.'
John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies, p.341.