• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

For many hours we sat around a huge table in an Off-Broadway theater talking about the Gospels, about Jesus, and about sin, grace, despair, and hope. “Why did Judas betray Jesus?” “Why did the apostles run away after the crucifixion?” “Was Jesus in love with Mary Magdalene?” These spirited conversations were different from those I have with Catholics, who often feel (me included) that Catholics have all the answers already.

And here was a group of people inhabiting a world foreign to my own: the theater. When we began, they didn’t know me at all, so I wondered how they would react to a Jesuit priest. But since they knew I was celibate, they knew I wasn’t there for any other reason than to help them. Probably as a result, some felt comfortable sharing some intimate details of their lives with me—someone they barely knew—opening up during times of sorrow and celebrating during times of joy.

Their trust was a gift that helped me, in a sense, fall in love with all of them. Whenever I entered the dressing room, I was usually surrounded by smiling faces and plenty of hugs.

As in other situations, I realized I was there not just to give love but to receive it. When the show closed, I recognized that I was also called not to hold on to their love. While I hoped that some of us would remain friends afterward (and we have), I knew I couldn’t “possess” anyone’s love. It had to be freely given and freely received.

That’s another lesson of chastity: love cannot be owned.

My friend Chris, a Jesuit brother who works in New York City, said it’s similar for school teachers. “It’s just like when a school year ends,” he said at the time. “You have to love freely and be loved freely, but you have to remember that you can’t hold on to it.” As Jesus said after the Resurrection, “Do not hold on to me.”

This may be one of the greatest gifts that the chaste person can offer: showing not only that there are many ways to love, but that loving a personfeely, without clinging to him or her, is a gift to both the lover and the beloved. Often we are tempted to think that loving someone—a spouse, a boyfriend or girlfriend, or even just a friend— means clinging to them, which is a subtle form of ownership. But love means embracing the poverty of not owning the other.

So chastity might be able to teach the world about a free way to love and a loving way to be free.

IS IT POSSIBLE?

But is religious chastity really possible, with any degree of healthiness, integrity, or honesty?

With God’s help it is. So let me talk briefly about my own experience with chastity, which I hope might offer you some insights into your own life of loving and being loved.

A few months into my novitiate, David told me that at some point as a Jesuit I would fall in love and that others would fall in love with me. I was horrified!

His response was memorable. “If you don’t fall in love from time to time,” he said, “there’s something wrong with you.” He went on to explain: “It’s both human and natural. The question is: what do you do when you fall in love?”

Priests, and men and women in religious orders, have to accept the possibility that they will fall in love. If you hope to be a loving man or woman, you will run the “risk” of falling in love. Jesus, as a fully human person, also opened himself up to that possibility—when he offered his heart to others and opened himself to receiving their love.

Despite what you might read in popular novels, Jesus was not secretly married. It is pretty clear from the New Testament that Jesus of Nazareth remained unmarried throughout his life. (As I wrote earlier, the Gospel writers speak freely about Jesus’ brothers and sisters. Not mentioning a wife—if he had one—would be strange.) But Jesus, in his humanity, was as prone as anyone to falling in love and having others fall in love with him. His response was to love others both chastely and deeply.

What happens when a member of a religious order falls in love? He must choose. Either he finds that he cannot live his vows and must leave