We continue this week and throughout the month of February, with excerpts from Passion and Purity. Today we feature chapter one.
There was not much of a view from the window. The central feature was the garbage cans behind the dining hall. The closed windows shut out neither the tremendous crash and clatter of early morning collections nor the noisome effluvium of the day’s cooking. Nevertheless I was tickled pink to have that little room. It was a single one, what I had been wanting and finally got when I was a senior in college. It had a bed, a bureau, a bookcase, and in the corner by the window, a desk with a straight chair and a lamp. A place for solitude and silence, a “closet” of the sort Jesus said we should go into to pray.
I did my studying and some of my praying at the desk. . .
It isn’t hard at all to put myself back in the chair at that desk. When I sit at a different desk now and read letters from puzzled young people, I become that girl again who gazed out at the snow. . .
I needed that tiny, cozy room that year, perhaps more than ever before. Some issues that would set the sail of my life were to be dealt with. During the preceding summer I had finished praying about whether or not I was to be a missionary. I was. . .
But there was another matter of business not by any means finished. That was the one for which God knew I would need a “closet.” It was about being alone—for the rest of my life. I was saying “Me, Lord? Single?” It seemed to come up between me and my Greek textbooks when I sat at the desk, between me and my Bible when I tried to hear God speaking. It was an obstruction to my prayers and the subject of recurrent dreams.
I talked often about this to God. I don’t remember mentioning it to anybody else for many months. The two who shared the suite of which my room was one-third were not the wildly popular sort of whom I would have been envious. They were quiet, sensible girls a few years older than I. . .
After college Jean married. Barbara is still single. I have no memory of any discussions with them on love and marriage (though we must have had some), but I am perfectly sure that for all three of us singleness meant one thing: virginity. If you were single, you had not been in bed with any man. If you were to be permanently single, you were never going to be in bed with any man.
That was a hundred years ago, of course. But even a hundred years ago anybody who quite seriously believed that and acted on it would be seen as an oddity by many people. Perhaps we were in the minority. I can’t be sure about that. Certainly the majority professed to believe that sexual activity was best limited to husbands and wives, whether or not their private lives demonstrated this conviction. Now, however, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, times have changed, they tell us. For thousands of years society depended on some semblance of order in the matter of sex. . . A woman knew that she possessed a priceless treasure, her virginity. She guarded it jealously for the man who would pay a price for it–commitment to marriage with her and with her alone. Even in societies where polygamy was allowed, rules governed responsibilities to spouses, rules on which the whole-stability of the society depended.
Somehow we’ve gotten the idea that we can forget all the regulations and get away with it. Times have changed, we say. We’re “liberated” at last from our inhibitions. We have Sex and the Single Girl now. We have freedom. We can, in fact, “have it all and not get hooked.” . . . Everybody’s equal. Everybody’s free. Nobody is hung up anymore or needs to deny himself anything.
The reason my roommates and I believed that singleness was synonymous with virginity was not that we were college students a hundred years ago when everybody believed that. It was not that we didn’t know any better. . . The reason is that we were Christians. We prized the sanctity of sex.
I sat at that desk by the window and thought long and hard about marriage. I knew the kind of man I wanted. He would have to be a man who prized virginity—his own as well as mine—as much as I did.
What do women want today? What do men want? I mean, deep down. What do they really want? If “times” have changed, have human longings changed, too? How about principles? Have Christian principles changed?
I say no to the last three questions, an emphatic no. I am convinced that the human heart hungers for constancy. In forfeiting the sanctity of sex by casual, nondiscriminatory”making out” and “sleeping around,” we forfeit something we cannot well do without. There is dullness, monotony, sheer boredom in all of life when virginity and purity are no longer protected and prized. By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.
**Excerpt originally published in Passion and Purity, pp 15-19