Thoughts from Lauren Winner

I finished reading Lauren Winner's Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity last night. This is much more heavy theology than her previous books, bringing a very weighty perspective to a topic that typically gets a quick and light treatment. Here are some quotes pertinent to our discussion...

...on marriage:

[in years gone by] "there was a togetherness born not merely of affection but of mutual work. It didn't really matter if you liked your husband on a given Tuesday. You were stuck working with him all day anyhow. Your togetherness, your relationship didn't rely on the caprice of your feelings. You were bound together, primarily, by a common undertaking--making your productive household run." (This reminds me of Leslie Leyland Fields' autobiography Surviving the Island of Grace.)

"No matter how clearly we see ourselves and our fiances, marriage will prove difficult. We will both change. We will argue, and feel broken, and wonder why we ever married in the first place--and it is God who will sustain us in those spells."

...on singles living chastely:

"...the unmarried Christian who practices chastity refrains from sex in order to remember that God desires your person, your body, more than any man or woman ever will."

[quoting John A.T. Robinson on the importance of the body] "It is from the body of sin and death that we are delivered; it is through the body of Christ on the Cross that we are saved; it is into His body the Church that we are incorporated; it is by His body in the Eucharist that the community is sustained; it is in our body that its new life is to be manifested; it is to a resurrection of this body to the likeness of His glorious body that we are destined."

"In baptism, you have become Christ's Body, and it is Christ's Body that must give you permission to join His Body to another body."

...and on both chastity and fidelity:

"This is how sin works: it whispers to us about the goodness of something not good."