Rediscovering Celibacy

To my delight I recently discovered a real attempt to engage the vocation of celibacy in Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must be Reinvented in Today's Church. I took a read through this last night and wanted to share a few thoughts.

First, bravo for evangelicalism getting something out on this topic. These are two fine authors with sharp minds, working on a pressing lack at the heart of evangelical theology.

But second, why "reinvent"? Jaroslav Pelikan makes an important point in The Vindication of Tradition that we never recover and we certainly don't reinvent tradition, we rediscover it. To their credit the authors do reach back into church history, but seem far too quick to move "beyond" these models. Rather than reinvent an evangelical theology of celibacy it might be worth looking at the folks that are already doing it more closely.

Briefly, let me explain why reinvention is a very bad idea. The tradition of celibacy would remind us that it is a vocation, a holy calling like marriage, that serves God and others. That same tradition would also remind us that, like marriage, there are specific disciplines that sustain and develop the life of celibacy. Henri Nouwen is very clear that celibacy should never be pursued as an isolated vow: there are reinforcing disciplines that support the celibate life. These are disciplines like silence, contemplative prayer and simplicity. The vocation of marriage has its disciplines which sustain it, why would not celibacy? We admit that marriage is so hard that we have marriage counselling before its administration - to deeply reflect on the disciplines that sustain the vocation. Our loss of the vocation of celibacy is indicative of even more profound losses in evangelicalism. More strongly, the surest sign of a flawed vision of family and community, is the denigration or dishonouring of the celibate life.

Finally, the radical embrace of what some of my students call "intentional living" also seems reflective of this a-historical evangelicalism. These students seem to want to embrace simplicity, contra North America's consumerism, living in rhythm with the land and seasons, focus their lives intentionally on the person of God and find creative spaces for prayer and service. Such institutions exist: they are called monasteries. The reason so much intentional-living in the evangelical community seems to precipitate conflict and betray emotional cataclysm is because these disciplines are damn hard to practice together and monks know that, and have been at it for a very long time. The rituals and disciplines that sustain monastic life are not so much ornamentation, they are critical features without which communal life rooted in the passionate pursuit of God collapses.

I will be giving a talk at the University of Western Ontario this fall tentatively titled thus far "How to do public life and (still) believe stuff." In that process I expect to reflect more extensively on celibacy and its supporting monastic disciplines, and relate this to the challenges of public life particularly. Thus, more thoughts will no doubt come on this.