Dating for Catholics in a Culture of Lust: SINGLE BLESSEDNESS IV OF V

The Young and the Restless

 If you are a teenager or not yet thirty, chances are you need simply to grow up.  Who can help you grow in a solid way that will be a blessing to you and help you be a blessing to others?  Christ.  Pope Benedict XVI, in his first homily addresses young people:

“Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again the Pope said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.

All too often young people “go with the flow” and submit to peer pressure and find themselves in very unhealthy relationships, perhaps because they are told or may feel that they are not acceptable, not lovable, unless they find a boyfriend or girlfriend to tell them that they are beautiful or good.  What happens is that they seek to find fulfillment, happiness, and wholeness from someone who in no way has any capacity to provide it - another broken, needy, and underdeveloped teen-ager like themselves.  Sadly these relationships often end up in pre-marital sex, and if not fornication, at least the spirit of impurity soils their capacity to see God.  Thus,  they turn away from the living water who is Jesus Christ and turn toward empty cisterns that cannot quench the thirst for deeper love.

Remember in our last talk we discussed how everyone needs healthy masculine and feminine affirmation before one becomes an affirmed person, or adult.  If a person goes into relationships when they are young in any way unaffirmed, unloved, needy, and seeking from the one person what they should have got from their father and mother, there is going to be a mess.  Grow up first.  Be friends with many young men and women.  Gift yourself to others.

Don’t get me wrong.  I have nothing against teen love.  It is just when teenagers don’t permit themselves to grow first and then try to enter into a mature relationship which is the context of discerning marriage.  The problem we face today is that we live in an age of radical materialism, egoism, and lust, which greatly inhibits the maturity of young people.  In times past a young man or woman in their late teens were certainly ready to start a family because they had the capacity to begin to give more than they received.  Now it seems like people grow up in the same level in their thirties and forties.

What is necessary for young people?  Be present to Christ!  Give yourself to him.  He understands you.  He loves you.  He knows you.  He will guide you to a happy life, a life lived in intimate friendship with himself and service of others.

DATING AND FINDING A SPOUSE

There are a great many singles out there who desire marriage.  This is normal.  This is good.  Most people have this vocation, and we would fail to approach the topic of singles if we didn’t talk about dating, but what is dating?  Is it for pleasure?  Some would say it is for pain.  

Christian dating is about trying to find the right person you want to spend the rest of your life with.  If it is not about looking for a husband or wife but rather for making yourself feel good about yourself or pleasure-seeking, it is not Christian, not of Christ at all.  If dating is about looking for the right mate for life, then dating is about dumping.  It is like looking for the right fruit in the grocery.  You have to pick out the right one.  If it isn’t, put it back!  You shouldn’t be able to say, nope, sorry, you are not the right one for me.

A big problem for dating is that there is much pressure to move it into an exclusive relationships, before the couple has a chance to get to know each other.  Since marriage, especially one that is happy and solidly founded, is based on friendship, this should be the key ingredient to help a person get to know the other.  Love, as Blessed Pope John Paul II said in his book Love and Responsibility, ought to be viewed in different aspects, a metaphysical aspect, a psychological or experiential aspect, and an ethical one.  Metaphysically, love has different dimensions that respond with the different parts of the being of the person, which have been called by different people the three kinds of love: agape (self-sacrificing love), filios (friendship), and eros (attraction or desire).  These are all important but the communion of persons in marriage rises and falls within the scope of friendship.   Then the Pope spoke about the experience of love, that it is a sensual, sentimental and relational experience.  Again this experience is most healthy when it unfolds along the lines of friendship.  Finally he spoke of the fact that if it is love, it can never be separated from the ethical dimension, it won’t lead a person to do what is evil in an ethical sense, even if at times this may do violence to a persons sensual or sentimental attractions, or if this may deeply fulfill a persons need for deeper love.    That is to say, the friendship is also ethically good, not just emotionally good or personally fulfilling.  Christian formation means that all these expressions of love that is the heart of marriage unfolds for singles in friendship that naturally progresses in a healthy way according to the law of God, while not denying any of the richness of sensual, sentimental, and interpersonal attraction, and allows the eros, filios, agape kinds of love to bloom.

CULTURE OF LUST

The HUGE problem nowadays is that we live in a culture of lust and all too often this is the predominant ingredient in dating, its discerning factor, with no ethical dimension of love.  The most frequent pattern we see around us is that men give love to get sex and often women give sex to get love.  Because sexual intercourse is an act that is meant for marriage, certain chemicals in our bodies that are released in order to bond a person for life are released and a sexually active person finds themselves bonded to another without having a sufficient understanding of who they are, what they are really about, and if they can be a best friend to them for life.  Also because fornication is a grave sin, the spiritual blindness that accompanies the chemical blindness of a person’s hormones terribly impede her sense of judgment.  A woman thus finds herself with a “guy” instead of a man, whom she could not be happy with.  Then separation happens and the ripping apart of the hormones and chemicals rip a hole wide open in her heart, which she would have wanted to give wholly and undivided to the man she would marry for life.  She then finds herself emotionally wounded and incapable of searching and discerning marriage in a healthy way.  Thus begins a downward spiral of unhappy relationships.

For these reasons, it seems the best place singles can grow in friendship with others is when the first concern is not actually an exclusive relationships, but simply friendships.  The first example of this we see is where a group of families live in a community and they grow over time together.  However, since this is often broken down, an alternative is Catholic communities, where people are permitted to interact with each other and grow in friendship in a disinterested way.

When a couple realizes together that they want to start looking at an exclusive relationship together, then an alternative to dating that is more in keeping with the idea that an exclusive relationship is headed for marriage, but not necessarily must end there is courtship.  Courtship may sound like an antiquated term, but it is most sound in allowing two persons to grow in knowledge of one another, deepening their attraction and longing for the other, while protecting them from not polluting it with premature sexual encounters.

OLDER SINGLES

There is a whole category of Catholic singles that, for whatever reason, have aged beyond what they may think is the normal time for getting married.  These people may feel they have missed their opportunity for love.  To these I would like to say, DO NOT GIVE UP HOPE!  In a few months in our parish we are marrying two people who are eighty.  A few months ago we married two sixty year olds.  Why?  Because they can.  Because they want to, because they are free to.  

Sometimes older singles may be in battle attack mode with their shields up and swords blazing because they have been hurt many times in the past, but Jesus, out of the great love he has for them, desire to peel away the armor, the masks, to heal the hurts and give hope for the newness of life.

It is important to always return to the basics of the single lay vocation and simply ask the good Lord, “What is it you want of me today?”   It is so important to continually center ones activity and vocation on Christ.  Only in this way will one be free of the fears and hurts that are accompany the single life.