One night in early 1989, when I was a 20-year-old New York University senior and a reluctant agnostic, the phone rang in my tiny dorm room.
It was Gary Selman, a forklift salesman who had a modicum of fame as one of local radio's "Two Nice Jewish Boys." The co-host of his show was Jonathan Cahn, pastor of the Messianic Jewish church Beth Israel; together, as Jewish converts to Christianity, they spread the Gospel with a hefty dose of self-conscious Noo Yawk attitude. (Cahn was then well on his way to becoming a self-styled modern-day Elijah. Today, his online bio proclaims, "Descended of the line of Aaron, he has been asked to sound the Jubilee trumpet and minister among the nations.")
I was expecting Selman's call. My mother was a member of his church and she had begged me to let Selman try to convert me. She assured me that he wouldn't put undue pressure on me; he just wanted to reason with me, she said. (And if you believe that, I've got a forklift to sell you.)
I resisted at first, but my mother kept up the begging. Eventually, she wore me down; I promised her I would take the call.
Once he got me on the line, Selman started out using humor. From there, he moved on to Gospel illustrations, and, finally, his trump card — salvation.
He informed me in no uncertain terms that all non-Christians were going to hell.
I didn't have much trouble believing I was going to hell. As a depressed and lonely college senior, I thought I was there already. In fact, I believed — although I probably didn't bother explaining this to Selman — that if there was a God, He intended me for hell. There was no other way, I thought, to explain the fact that He had resolutely refused to grant me faith after I had pleaded with him so many times, during countless nights when my depression stung me so hard that I wanted to kill myself.
Many times, I had tried to "get" faith at church with my mother, or on my own, through reading the Bible. At best, I could feel reasonably hopeful for a week. Then something would happen to remind me of how far I was from being the person I longed to be and living the kind of life I longed to live, and doubt would once again overtake me.
I was in no mood that night to endure Selman's proclaiming the doom of the unsaved. But getting him off the phone was another matter.
Racking my brain, I thought of one dead person I knew whom I had no doubt was in heaven, assuming there were such a place: my Grandma Jessie. She was, I believed, the purest soul I had ever met. I told Selman the idea that she could be eternally drowning in the lake of fire was unthinkable: "You can't tell me that my Grandma Jessie is in hell."
"Well," he said, "if she didn't accept Jesus, then she is."
That was it for me. I was ready to hang up. But before I could, Selman insisted I promise to ask God for something I wanted that I didn't believe was possible.
I told him I would, just to get him off the phone. Then I did ask God for what I wanted, and my prayer was granted the next day.
So I "believed" for a few days — until things stopped going my way and my faith, dependent as it was upon answered prayer, once again evaporated. It would be more than 10 years before I would receive faith that was based not upon fear of the afterlife or a desire for worldly favors, but simply upon the unmistakable light of truth.
Whatever good God may have brought out of Selman's failure to convert me — and who knows whether, had it worked, it would have stuck — his presumption of my grandmother's damnation effectively kept me a non-Christian for years to come.
As a Christian since 1999, and a Catholic since last year, I am required to stand by my religion's beliefs about the kind of faith that is necessary for salvation. At the same time, it is wrong for me to ever claim certainty about the state of another person's soul. Only God knows the hearts.
From time to time in my life, others have wrongly judged my soul. Sometimes it has been someone I loved, and it has hurt me deeply. With Holy Week upon us, if you are reading this and I have, at some point, tried to make myself the expert on your heart's purity, I would like to take this opportunity to say that I am truly sorry.
I've never been able to understand how people are able to think of Him as My Buddy Jesus, confiding in Him like they would a best friend. I have no problem telling Him my innermost thoughts, but when it comes to receiving the satisfaction that one receives from sharing with a real best friend, I'm like the little girl who's afraid of the dark. It's not enough to know that God is watching over me; I need "God with skin on."
Part of what was missing, I thought as I walked to the subway, was the feeling that Jesus could truly empathize with all my sufferings.
I knew He suffered more than anyone else ever has or will. Yet, it seemed to me, He never endured that special sting that comes when one experiences hurt without warning. Whatever insults were thrown his way, whatever injustices were perpetrated upon him, He at least could see them coming.
Or could He? On the ride home, I read Fulton J. Sheen's The World's First Love and was reminded that the Gospel says the young Jesus "increased in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52).
Sheen says the all-knowing Son of God could have expanded his wisdom by intentionally limiting himself: "In order that He might be really and truly a man, He consented, in His wonderful condescension, not to call into exercise those powers that He had as God."
So perhaps it was possible, I thought, that Jesus could allow Himself to be surprised by pain.
Thinking about it, I realized there is one line in the Gospels in which Jesus actually does seem to be caught unaware, in Luke 22:48: "Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?"
Jesus asks many questions in the Gospels, and usually it's clear that He knows the answer, as when he asks whose likeness is on Caesar's coin, or queries whether the disciples have caught any fish. He also asks questions to provoke thought, as when He asks the Pharisees, "What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?"
His question to Judas is different, more intimate, than most of his others. Not surprisingly, there exist many interpretations of it, including that He was pronouncing judgment upon His betrayer or was drawing attention to the fact that Judas had forfeited his position as disciple. I wouldn't doubt that Jesus did ask the question for those reasons or some similarly straightforward one.
Just the same, something seems off to me. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is so certain of His impending betrayal. He drops hints all over the place and eventually tells the disciples plainly that He will be betrayed and killed. On the Mount of Olives, when He sees Judas coming, He announces confidently that his betrayer is at hand (Matthew 26:46). Yet, when Judas leans forward to kiss Him, His last utterance to His rebellious disciple ends not with a thunderous exclamation, but a wounded question mark.
I wonder if Jesus purposefully prevented Himself from forseeing the manner in which Judas would approach Him on that hill. In doing so, He would have enabled Himself to fully experience the shock of his former friend's sheer brazenness. The pain of betrayal would have been that much more intense.
Pondering that as I arrived home, I still longed for God with skin on, But it did make Jesus seem like that much more of a best friend, to think that when He had eyes like mine, He too could be blindsided.
Dawn Eden blogged this week on the Gospel read in every Roman Catholic church on earth last Sunday: the story of the "Woman Taken in Adultery." Dawn lists the unchaste women mentioned in the Gospels and remarks that they were forgiven: "Well, we know Jesus forgave them at any rate. Whether anyone else did was another matter."
In sex-obsessed North America, whether you have had sex or not is a political issue. Canada's philosopher-prime minister Pierre Trudeau declared that "The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But it seems that everyone else has an opinion on what you have done there.
For Hollywood, virgins are hilarious. That a man can be a virgin at 40 is deemed a joke worthy of an entire gross-out comedy. That a virgin woman, "the virgin Connie Swayle," could--even in 1987--be kidnapped for a human sacrifice was the joke that powered the movie "Dragnet." And the hilarity extends to anyone in real life who has hassled a boy, girl, woman or man simply because they had never had genital sex and were willling to admit it.
But for many others, virginity is not funny. It is serious. In my Catholic Christian sub-culture, virginity is THE ideal for unmarried men and women both. Many Catholic men and women are haunted by their desires and infractions against the purity standard they or their advisors derive from Church teachings. Are they pure enough? What if they do this? What if that was done to them? It wasn't their fault, but it feels like their fault... Can their sexual sins ever be erased? Are they really washed white in the blood of the Lamb? Can they ever really be pure?
In other cultures, male virginity is not very important, but female virginity is the bank vault of family honour. Some girls are murdered by their fathers or brothers not because they have had sex, but because those fathers and brothers suspect that they have. Sometimes the reporter covering the murder mentions that a medical examination shows that the girl really was a virgin. And then I want to vomit because somebody obviously thought that made a difference to the case.
St. Augustine did not think that loss of a hymen necessitated loss of chastity. Responding to pagan taunts about the rape of virgin Christian women (who, unlike the pagan Lucretia, did not commit suicide), St. Augustine ruled that loss of chastity requires assent on the part of the person. Thus, a rape victim was still chaste. Imagine my surprise then, when a Christian mom I knew told me about a Christian girl we both knew, who had once been raped and was afraid to tell her boyfriend. "Do you think he will forgive her?" asked the mom.
I was a virgin on my wedding day. In a way, it was a pity, for my ex-husband would not have married me if I hadn't been one. It was a subject of obsessed delight. Unlike other women, he told me, I deserved to wear a white wedding dress. And having had a good Classical education, he dubbed me the "Parthenona", the title of the goddess Athena that honours her perpetual virginity. When I wrote that word just now, the Parthenon came to mind: cold, white, sterile, broken.
My ex-husband called me his "virgin bride" months after I had ceased to be one. And since ceasing to be a virgin had been, thanks to stupidity, misinformation and sin, a horrible experience, I did not relish the nickname. It was dehumanizing. I hated it. I hated him. I hated the old books that had taught me that ignorance was innocence. I hated the pro-chastity speakers who promised me that, if I were a good girl, married sex would be unending delight. I was envious, deeply envious, of my merrily promiscuous friends, who at any rate enjoyed sex and were not forever bound to men who hurt them.
Men and women are not bars of Ivory soap. We are not a homogeneous material like gold. We are not action figures perserved in perfect, unblemished packaging. We are not, in fact, pure. We are people. We have histories. We are active and passive. We do things and things are done to us. Some of those things are sexual things. Some of them we choose, and some of them we do not choose. Apparently almost all men have masturbated. Does that mean that all men are impure? Tainted goods? Unmarriageable? And apparently most men and women in America have genital sex (willing, unwilling or semi-willing) before they marry. Was I, bleeding and hysterical, ontologically superior to them all? No. I reject that. My only boast is that I obeyed the law of God by choosing to not have sex before I was married. That's it. That is all I can look back upon without regret. I obeyed the law of God. The ointment on the fly.
So my point is this: chastity is neither what you haven't done nor what wasn't done to you. Chastity is what you are doing now. Chastity is your disposition of will to do what God has commanded: to treat sexuality as a precious gift of God and to love your neighbour--to whom this sexuality reaches out--as yourself. No-one has any right to judge a person who has made a public commitment to chastity for their past sexual experience. No one ever has the right to cast the first stone.
[Note for those who came in late: This is a guest post not by Dawn, but by Seraphic Single. Many thanks for her permission to reprint it from her blog.]
An Australian newspaper reports, in the familiar garbled manner of mainstream-media religion correspondents, that Pope Benedict made a speech referring to hell as a state "to be understood symbolically." Ronald Coleman, an Orthodox Jew, seeks clarification.
From thrillofthechaste.com Webmaster Saint Kansas comes this answer to Melissa Etheridge's theme song to "An Inconvenient Truth" (with some mildly salty language):
Watch for the rabbi's definition of freedom at the end — his description of ingesting faith sounds like an experience I had last Sunday. (And don't mind the kabbalah reference — this ain't Britney and Madonna's kabbalah.)
'Author, students share "thrill of the chaste" at U of I fair'
Elfin author signs books for giant college students after talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Photo by Jared Olar. (Caption is mine, not his!)
The following news story appears in the current issue of the Diocese of Peoria's Catholic Post. Reprinted with permission.
By JARED OLAR of The Catholic Post
CHAMPAIGN – In today’s culture, when a university hosts a sexual health and awareness fair, it might be taken for granted that free condoms would be distributed.
But students attending that fair probably wouldn’t expect to find someone distributing free Miraculous Medals.
Yet that’s something a group of Catholic students – assisted by Catholic author Dawn Eden of New York City — did at the fourth annual “Sex Out Loud” hosted Wednesday, March 14, by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Eden and the group came to the fair to run a booth that promoted a positive message of chastity and sexual abstinence, offering an alternative to the fair’s promotion of premarital and extramarital sex, contraception, abortion and homosexuality.
The booth was co-sponsored by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, the New Feminists, Network Catholic Fellowship and Newman Foundation Koinonia.
“Her message is countercultural and needs to be heard,” said Father Gregory Ketcham, chaplain of St. John’s Catholic Newman Center at the University of Illinois.
“It seemed to me from the comments and attentiveness that the students were open to her message,” said Father Ketcham. “It’s a message that will preserve their freedom, preserve their health, and preserve their happiness.”
Nearly 100 people came to hear Eden talk about her book, which she said “presents chastity as a positive lifestyle for single women,” drawing upon her own life’s experiences.
“The message that I wish I had put in my book was chastity as a positive lifestyle for everyone, not just for young women. But it was my first book and I wanted to write what I knew,” she said.
OF ALL the church’s teachings, Eden said, chastity is probably the most radical for today’s culture. The dominant culture tells us that our value is based on what we do — an approach that reduces others to objects or means to an end. But the church tells us that our value is based on who we are, she said.
Encouraging her audience to visit and support the chastity booth the next day, Eden said the booth would be a witness to the full gospel and to the goodness of the family.
She added, “People will be coming to that fair who are very lost, who are looking for love but are settling for sex.”
Not many years ago, Eden said, she was doing the same thing.
“I had pleasure, but something was missing, and for years I didn’t know what it was. What was missing was joy,” she said.
THOUGH born of Jewish heritage, Eden, 37, was at best an agnostic for most of her life until having a religious conversion when she was 31. She converted to Catholicism last year.
Eden compared her former beliefs and attitudes about religion to that of the character Carrie Bradshaw from the television show,“Sex and the City.”
“I belonged to the Church of Be-Nice-To-People, and I think even there my membership had lapsed,” she said.
But when she became a Christian, she came to understand how harmful her unchastity had been. With her body she had been professing complete love, but in her heart she didn’t mean it, said Eden. Without realizing it, she had been sabotaging her ability to give love, to experience real intimacy, and to have a happy marriage.
“Intellectually, most people can understand that if you try to ‘speed things up’ and squeeze all the intimacy out of a relationship at the start, it’ll blow up in your face,” she said.
The challenge, she said is to enable them to understand it personally, not just in an abstract way.
IN HER lecture, Eden emphasized that the virtue of chastity is much more than simply abstaining from sex outside of marriage.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says chastity is for both the unmarried and the married. Chastity is needed even within a marriage, for it involves treating our spouses with dignity and includes openness to life and to children, Eden said.
Eden also debunked the stereotype in popular culture that paints men and women Religious as dour and unhappy because of their vows of celibacy.
“You have a blessing here at the Newman Center for having so many vocations,” Eden said, “because you can see that chaste people are some of the happiest people on earth.”
She compared our culture’s prevalent messages about sex to a man deliberately cutting the last page out of a novel before anyone can read it.
“Our popular culture claims to be telling us the whole truth about sex, but . . . they haven’t given you the last page. The last page is marriage,” she said.
* * *
ATTENTION, CHURCHES AND YOUNG-ADULT GROUPS: Would you like me to deliver your group a message like the one I gave at the University of Illinois? You can reach me via the Contact page of thrillofthechaste.com.
The Independent reports Swedish study finds that where men and women have "gender equality" in the workforce, both sexes have a lower life expectancy. Not surprising, a feminist quoted says the answer is to get more men out of the workplace.
Unchaste people turn up at least two or three times in the Gospels: the woman "caught in the very act" of adultery, the Samaritan woman, and, arguably, Mary Magdalene (though there is some dispute as to whether she was the same woman who was called "a sinner"). What they have in common is more than that they are all women: They are all forgiven.
Well, we know that Jesus forgave them, at any rate. Whether anyone else did is another matter.
One would imagine that, after being forgiven by Jesus, the women ceased to care what the rest of the world thought. I wish I could say that for myself.
Once a radio host said to me, "You're one of those people I hate."
He wasn't opposed to chastity — just the opposite. Married for about 20 years, he said he had never had sex with anyone other than his wife.
He hated me, he said, because I'd had sex with different men and then decided to be chaste. In his eyes, I was simply trying to win brownie points for chastity after having indulged in the fun that he and other married people had missed.
It's not an unusual attitude; Jesus described it in the parable of the workers in the vineyard, and also the parable of the prodigal son (with the other son who resents the welcome his brother receives).
I think that such a resentful attitude, when directed at one who has been unchaste, not only denies the possibility that the person has repented (as I have), it also assumes that unchastity is a desirable state. The radio host must have thought that I "had fun," otherwise he wouldn't have begrudged me my experiences.
I had fun in those days, but I never had joy. I had the fun of someone who eats chocolate compulsively even though it aggravates her heartburn. Yes, it tastes delightful, but it will never give me peace or assuage the pain inside. Sex is no substitute for love, and sex with a loving partner is no substitute for sex with a loving spouse.
Being jealous of people for their sexual escapades is like being jealous of a beautiful model whose anorexia is eating her alive. Some people do resent such women, but the proper response is pity.
When the unchaste women of the Gospel encountered Jesus, each one of them encountered true love, true intimacy, for the first time.
My own experience of love and intimacy used to be based on needs. I needed my parents, needed my friends, needed my boyfriend.
Then I experienced faith and began to discover a love that was based not on taking, but on giving — and not on giving for the sake of receiving, but for its own sake. I began — and I say "began," because I have a terribly long way to go — to learn to give love as Jesus gives it, not through words or deeds, but through presence.
The fruits of presence include attention, devotion, appreciation, and determination to bear a love that won't change even as circumstances do. Yet, unlike actions or words of love, presence refuses to be quantified. Just as there is no less Jesus in a sliver of a Communion wafer than there is in the whole thing, so, where love is a presence, its strength transcends outward signs.
I don't know if it's my lot to meet my future husband, though I hope it is. What I do believe is that, if it's meant to be, then, regardless of all our past affairs, when we begin to love one another, it will be a true first-time experience. Because, for the first time in my life, I will be truly present with the one I love, and he with me — and us with God.
Buy The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On at Amazon.com.
One of the highlights of my Dallas trip was sharing my conversion story with the students of Dr. Elaine Heath's "Intro to the Theory and Practice of Evangelism" class at Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology on Thursday morning.
As she drove me to her class, Dr. Heath told me about her interest in contemplative prayer. She had long had an interest in it and studied masters of Catholic contemplative tradition while getting her doctorate from Duquesne. That evening, she said, she and some of her students were beginning a new chapter in SMU religious life, hosting the first common meal of their "neomonastic order" devoted to contemplative prayer.
It is called the Contemplative Order of St. Julian of Norwich.
Y'know, Dallas in many ways was down the rabbit hole for me. When I walked into SMU's Catholic ministry headquarters, I was greeted by copies of Commonweal and the Houston Catholic Worker. A workbook-sized commentary on the year's readings was available, but no stack of Magnificats or anything similarly devotional.
Then I meet Professor Heath, an elder of the United Methodist Church, and she's talking to me about Teresa of Avila while acknowledging Julian of Norwich as not only a great contemplative, but a saint.
Seems you just can't keep a good saint — or a good tradition — down. Now, if those students could only have the opportunity to learn such devotions from a Catholic as well ...
My friend Fallen Sparrow sends this notice of the Church of Notre Dame's Lenten concert. I'll be there:
As Lent continues on toward Holy Week and Easter, my choir will be performing its annual Lenten concert of Renaissance sacred music at the Church of Notre Dame, 405 W. 114th St. (at Morningside Drive, near the Columbia Campus and St. Luke's Hospital - #1 to 116th St.) on the evening of Saturday, March 31st at 8 p.m.
This year we are featuring a stunning setting of "Media vita" by Lassus, as well as motets by Palestrina, Festa, LaRue, and three of Gesualdo's Tenebrase Responsories.
I would be honored and delighted to see each of you there. For those who have attended in the past, it your support has always brought me joy and I hope that you have found the music a rewarding experience.
The admission is $10, and $5 for students and seniors.
I'm back from Dallas and am exhausted, having done six talks in two and a half days. Met lots of great people and had a wonderful time. I hope to write an anecdote or two about it after getting some rest. In the meantime, Radical Catholic Mom, who lives in Alaska, has an account of my talk last night at Dallas's Theology on Tap, sent to her by a friend who was there.
Many thanks to everyone who has been praying for me. I felt prayed for in Dallas and I really needed it. Actually, I always need it.
Jill Filipovic at Feministe and Jessica Valenti at Feministing, as well as NOW and many others, are pulling out their profanities about the recent episode of "America's Next Top Model," hosted by Tyra Banks, that featured a "crime scene" fashion shoot. The models were rated according to how sexy they looked when made up as bruised and bloody corpses. I've only seen one of the photos from the shoot, the one on Feministe, but it is enough to make me agree with those who are outraged.
"This evening I heard Dawn Eden speak at the Fellowship Bible Church, which of course is in Dallas where I am, not in the Zeta Reticuli star system where I am not. Eden is on a book tour for The Thrill of the Chaste, but you might otherwise know her by her weblog, The Dawn Patrol.
"A few of the synonyms given for chaste are pure, austere, celibate – words of rather discreet charm. Slightly better are modest and decent, but the only real frisson one can get from these is in imagining them as reactions to an amorous advance (although the t-shirt Eden was wearing had the encouraging slogan 'Modest is hottest')."
I think I know which attendee was Udolpho; there were actually a few Dawn Patrol readers there in addition to the church's crowd, which made me very happy. I'm hoping more show up tomorrow night, when I speak at Dallas's Theology on Tap.
And I'm off! Below, once again, are details of my Dallas gigs — not counting talks for students at SMU and the university's Perkins School of Theology. Unless I can get to a hotel computer, I'll be away from e-mail until Friday and away from blogging until late that night.
If you're reading this in the Dallas area, I really hope you can get to one of my talks; it's always a delight to meet Dawn Patrol readers.
Tonight!
Talk and signing: "Sexless in the City: Why the Happiest Singles Are Saving Themselves for Marriage." Fellowship Dallas, 7 p.m.
Thursday, March 22 Talk and signing: Dallas Christian Leadership Luncheon at Southern Methodist University's Umphrey Lee Ballroom, 12:15 p.m. (214) 349-1109 or (214) 232-7248.
Talk and signing: Catholic Campus Ministries/Catholic Young Adult Ministries, Theology on Tap at Tipperary Inn, 5815 Live Oak (corner of Skillman and Live Oak), 7 p.m.
Buy The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On at Amazon.com. Learn more about the book on its official Web site.
One thing I find fascinating about God is that not only does He love each of us as though there were only one of us, as St. Augustine wrote, but He also loves each of us regardless of how special He is to us.
God is a jealous God, to be sure, but He never seems to mind how many gods we worshiped in years past — so long as we clear out all the idols and make room for Him. Indeed, He seemed to take pleasure in the knowledge that evenwhen we were pagans, with our pantheon of gods for every occasion and every lust, we still had a formless statue set aside and dedicated "To an Unknown God." He knew what we didn't: The statue symbolized the vacuum in our hearts that only He could fill — and it was His joy to fill it.
Jesus required faith to perform His miracles, but He did not require love. Perhaps He knew that, for us humans, faith comes more easily than love. Even Peter, who had such great faith that he was the first to declare Jesus' messiahship, ended up denying Him three times. The apostle later had the opportunity to atone by answering Jesus three times that he loved Him. Yet, even then, his expression of love did not measure as high as it could have. Jesus had asked, "Do you love me more than these" (emphasis added), and Peter answered only that he loved Him, not adding that he loved Him more than he did others. But Jesus accepted Peter's answer, just as He accepted Peter's phileo love when He had initially asked for agape love.
If and when I meet the man I will marry, I will want to believe that I am special to him — that the passion he feels for me goes beyond what he experienced with other women he dated. Yet, I know even if he insists he loves me more than them, his previous experiences, however unmourned, will remain imprinted in the recesses of his memory — like a tattoo acquired while drunk, now marking one for life.
Thinking about that would make me feel less special, I suppose — if my definition of "special" meant making the first and only imprint on a pristine heart and body.
I want to be special as Jesus is special; not because I am loved, but because I love.
What that means in a relationship is not seeking to be special to a man, but, rather, opening my heart and letting him become special to me.
If he is the right man, I am certain that I will become special to him as well. But just as God first loved us before we loved Him, I am becoming more and more convinced that in a love relationship, the man and the woman each have to be the first to open their heart.
University of Illinois senior Katharine Johnson has a beautiful and very kind account of my stay with her in Champaign, including some fab pics. I had a blessed time too; been meaning to write about it myself, but have been caught up with my job and preparing for my talks in Dallas this week.
Ich will dir mein Herze schenken, senke dich, mein Heil, hinein. Ich will mich in dir versenken; ist dir gleich die Welt zu klein, ei, so sollst du mir allein mehr als Welt und Himmel sein.
I will give my heart to you; lose yourself in it, my Salvation. I will lose myself in you; though earth be all too small for you, ah, for me you alone shall be more than earth and heaven.
What a beautiful surprise to return from Mass today and discover that an Irish priest used my book to illustrate the parable of the prodigal son in his homily today. I hope he comes to the Legion of Mary youth conference in Dublin this June, where I will be speaking.
Got a nice surprise today: I learned that my Beliefnet interview is one of the Web site's most e-mailed articles. As a result, it's currently featured on the site's cafeteria-like home page alongside menu items by or about the likes of the Dalai Lama, Andrew Sullivan, and atheist Sam Harris.
[Note from Dawn: Yesterday, I saw that a woman identifying herself as "Sarah" had left a comment on an old post in which I quoted a woman who claimed to have been mistreated at Planned Parenthood. Sarah wrote that she had just undergone emergency surgery after Planned Parenthood had failed to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy. I e-mailed her and asked if she would like to share her story with Dawn Patrol readers. (I let her know my feelings about Planned Parenthood upfront, in case she had any reservations about her story's appearing on a pro-life blog.) She sent me the following, which appears here unedited. She did not mention which Planned Parenthood clinic she visited; if she lets me know, I will add it to her story. She will be reading this entry, so you can leave messages or prayers for her in the comments.]
My first trip to Planned Parenthood was on March 3rd. I went in there and filled out my paperwork for the abortion. As I sat there the waiting room filled up with women. It amazed me how many people would go in there and kill a life without an extremely good reason other than selfishness. They herded us back there like cows. Literally they called a bunch of names and told us to pay at the window. Then we were sent to urinate into a cup and sit in another waiting room.
One by one we were sent into a little room with a woman who "counsels" us. There is NO counseling done here. They tell you that you will be given certain medications and give us an instruction list of what not to do afterwards. They then give you an ultrasound to see how far along you are. Fortunately I was not far along enough to have an abortion at that time so they sent me on my way.
March 13th I went back this time to attempt to have a medical abortion instead of a surgical one. Once again they did the urine pregnancy test and an ultrasound and announced that I wasn't pregnant. After taking 4 home pregnancy tests and one at Planned Parenthood along with all the usual symptoms of pregnancy that I had with my daughter, I was appalled that they wouldn't look into this any further to see what was going on with me. I had seen the ultrasound screen and knew that my uterus looked pregnant even though there were no signs of a baby or a fetal sac.
Instead, they sent me to the front crying because I didn't know what step to take afterwards. The same woman that did my ultrasound who is a supposed "nurse" yelled at me "Why is you crying? You ain't pregnant." This is just an example of the excellent bedside manner of all the employees of Planned Parenthood.
Fortunately I called my OB/GYN and they told me to get up to the office asap. They conducted their own ultrasound and sent me to the hospital for an emergency D&C and a laparoscopy because of a failed tubal pregnancy. Had I not I could very well be dead right now.
Planned Parenthood is a disgrace. They call themselves a womens center but they are just a butcher of babies and they could care less about a woman's health. My friend went there about a month and a half ago for an abortion. What they failed to tell her was that they do not administer any kind of pain medication during the abortion. They expand your cervix with metal rods and then perform a D&C. This is a procedure the hospital and actual doctor feels is necessary to put people under sedation for. I actually asked Planned Parenthood a few times about the lack of pain medication and their response was "well they do fine without it". How in the world could a woman "do fine" with being scraped out with surgical cutting equipment without any pain medication? My only answer for the lack of compassion is that they are making more money from not using any type of sedation.
That's "Ill." as in Illinois, though I might well be ill if I don't get some sleep. Will write over the weekend about the wonderful time I had with the students of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Newman Center; in the meantime, here are some links for you:
Goodbye 'til Thursday; unless I manage to get onto a borrowed computer, I'm away from blogging and e-mail while on tour at the University of Illinois. For details on those dates and my appearances next week at and around Southern Methodist University, visit the Appearances section of thrillofthechaste.com.
If you live near Champaign, Ill., or Dallas, I hope you can make it to one of my talks. I'm told there will be plenty of copies of The Thrill of the Chaste available at each appearance, or you can bring your own copy if you have one already and I'll be happy to sign it.
In 1995, my status as a regular contributor to New York Press got me a stint as an on-air consultant to the FX channel's "Sound FX" program, doing my rock-historian thing and having fun playing dress-up in my thrift-store wardrobe. Here (following about 45 seconds of a Soul Coughing video), in a clip that aired live 12 years ago this week, I discuss a CD that I had assembled in 1992 for Sony Music Special Products, Jimmy's Back Pages, collecting rare mid-Sixties session work by the future Led Zeppelin guitarist:
Yes, that is Jeff Probst, later of "Survivor" fame. He was very sharp and a great guy; I loved working with him.
I'm posting this clip because it hints at the extent to which I was the lost soul I describe in The Thrill of the Chaste. If you compare my carriage — the way I sit on the bed, my makeup, and my general manner — to the way I am now*, there's a difference that goes beyond mere maturity. I can see how insecure I was, and how badly I wanted to fill a hole that couldn't be filled. (It's the feeling I recently described in my articles about my rock-journalist days for The Sunday Times of London and Canada's National Post). I'm still self-conscious before a camera, to be sure, but I'd like to think it's, to borrow a lyric from my former faves the Buzzcocks, a different kind of tension.
If I had stayed on that road, I would not want to see what I would be like now. Contemplating it makes me uncomfortable and, at the same time, very thankful.
You may notice that I was about 15 pounds heavier; I talk in The Thrill about my lifelong struggle to keep my weight down. Looking at myself then reminds me how self-conscious I was about my weight — and makes me realize I judged my looks far too harshly.
There are some things I do appreciate about who I was in those days. I worked extremely hard to educate myself about an era of music that had passed before I was born, and I believe that many of my rock-history pieces, like my profile of Harry Nilsson, still stand up today. I also give myself credit for having the guts to go on TV. It means I had the willingness to risk failure, which is essential for success in life.
In the interview, I'm clearly out of my depth with regard to Page's music; I readily admit that I don't even like what is for me his "later" work. I simply was obsessed with British pop from the mid-Sixties, and saw a Page sessions CD as a means of getting some good, rare tracks from that era onto one CD.
Watching the clip, my gee-whiz comments about Page's performing prowess make me flinch. You'll have to trust me when I say I did manage to say some articulate things about him in my liner notes for the short-lived collection. Trouser Press editor Ira Robbins summed up the disc well in Entertainment Weekly:
Before he became a guitar-rock god in the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page spent the early '60s as a session musician. A fascinating resume of a master's beginnings, this collection of obscure British rock singles is peppered with Page's characteristic riffing. Some of the guitar playing, however, is too generic or incidental to be of consequence.
*For comparison, see this clip from this past January 3, when I debated sex author Virginia Vitzthum in the basement of the Lolita Bar on the Lower East Side:
As I'm going to be away from e-mail and blogging for most of the time I'm on my speaking trip to Illinois (back on Thursday), I'd like to leave this as a gift for a friend who reads my blog, as he is curious about the Catholic faith. It's the beginning of a talk by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen on the meaning of the Mass, from "A Family Retreat with Fulton J. Sheen."
I'd like my friend to see it because I think it will illuminate the Mass for him, as it did for me. Archbishop Sheen's description of what — or, really, who — the bread and wine, pre-consecration, represent is a revelation for me. They didn't teach that in RCIA. And I went to a good RCIA.
From today's University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Daily Illini, reprinted by permission of the author:
Sexuality, by its very nature, is a vulnerable thing. It involves letting someone share the deepest parts of one's body, heart and soul. It has pride of place as an expression of romantic love. In its natural form, there is no better practice of intimacy.
March 14 will be the annual Sex Out Loud fair put on by the Feminist Majority. The general point of this fair, falsely dubbed a "sexual health fair," is that as long as the physical consequences of sex can be controlled, nothing else matters. If it (physically) feels good, do it. But sex isn't solely a physical matter and by treating it as such, grave harm is done to women particularly.
"Control," "safe," "protection," these are the words that the "sexual health" groups use for sex. These attitudes are usually solely directed at controlling the physical aspects of sex.
The problem is that our sexuality cuts across all dimensions of our personhood. We are physical, emotional and spiritual beings. Sexuality embraces all of these dimensions. By shrinking sexuality to a merely physical act and then bringing the full weight of science to control the physical consequences, we've adopted a sexual mentality based on impenetrability.
With the mainstreaming of contraception in the early part of the 20th century and the invention of the pill in the 60s, sexuality began to be divorced from the natural consequences of sex. With the "consequence" of conception out of the way, people were "free" to be with anyone they wanted.
Women were supposed to be empowered to finally love as equals and have sex with as much disregard as men supposedly did. Women were now free to be with anyone, yet get close to no one. The result is that the sexual revolution has delivered grave harm to women. A "revolution" that began in hedonism has bred a generation of cynics.
Instead of vulnerability, people approach sex trying to protect themselves. Instead of an experience of a person at their deepest levels, it's an experience of mere gratification. "Protected sex" is sex that satiates but does not satisfy. The human wreckage from this idea is vast and is felt most by women.
Since men are brought up in the "bottle it up" school of emotional development, they are better equipped to handle the isolation that is a result of this sexual pathology. Women, on the other hand, are unable to escape the inevitable loneliness, depression and isolation that results from this disconnected sex.
One only needs to look at adultery to see the emotional consequences that can result from sex. Even in a "free sex" world, something about cheating on a partner still registers as one of the greatest betrayals.
After having experienced the empty promises of sexual freedom for two generations, people are rediscovering chastity and the promises it holds. Chastity isn't a new concept, it is what we already know in our hearts but refuse to acknowledge with our lips. We want to be fully and deeply accepted by another person on all levels of our being and that is only possible be reserving oneself for that "special someone."
In books such as "The Thrill of the Chaste" by Dawn Eden, women retell their conversion from "sexually liberated" to "chaste" and show through their own experience that "protected sex" does not lead to the fulfillment we really desire. In embracing the true meaning of our sexual desires, we are free to approach others in a way where we can truly be connected and not objectified. It requires vulnerability not impenetrability.
The voices of chastity are increasing as more and more people see the broken marriages, broken homes and broken hearts that are a result of "liberated sexuality." Only in vulnerability and chastity can we truly find sexual fulfillment and the intimacy our hearts desire.
Author Dawn Eden will be giving a talk at 7:30 p.m., March 13th in Newman Hall's Lewis Lounge. She will also be at the chastity booth during Sex Out Loud on March 14.
Still one of my top five favorite recordings — Badfinger's "Baby Blue":
For you fellow music nerds out there: Tom Evans and Pete Ham (may they rest in peace) are singing live to their original 16-track recording. Because the lip-synch backing comes from the 16-track, it is slower than the 45 and therefore a bit dirgey by comparison; the song was sped up during mastering, as all good 45s were.
"Eden, who converted to Catholicism last year, said her editor was reluctant at first to use the title 'The Thrill of the Chaste' because 'he probably thought, quite rightly, that most people in this day and age don’t know what chastity is. Chastity is not "no sex." According to the catechism, everyone is supposed to observe chastity according to their state in life, so there’s single chastity and there’s married chastity. Chastity is really a way to look at all your relationships so that they no longer become mere exchanges of commodities. It’s a plan for your whole life, for your happiness, and for eventually going to heaven. I look at chastity as a way to practice what it’s like to be in heaven.'
— From the Long Island Catholic's review of my Theology on Tap talk in Wantagh, L.I. (Click the link to see me in groovy-librarian mode — giving my eyes a break from contact lenses.)
"Popular blogger and columnist Dawn Eden has written a refreshing call to chastity. ... [O]ne of Eden's most important decisions in this book is to draw upon Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, stressing the unfashionable notion that the body has a spiritual purpose. Eden underscores that chastity is a lifelong discipline — not just a tough thing that single Christians have to deal with, but also a call to embodied holiness in controlling one's sexual appetite that every Christian must submit to."
and was reminded that the Gospel says the young Jesus "increased in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52). 