Laura Ferris

True Love Does Not Wait

— Posted June 2nd, 2009 at 11:56 pm // Permalink

“To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

On my fifteenth birthday, my parents gave me a purity ring. I had wanted one: not some mass-produced, heavy silver band with a popular abstinence slogan, but something understated and interesting – something pure. I received a thin gold band set with an oval-cut white opal. When bored during seventh-period algebra I would stare into the depths of the opal, so many layers now translucent, now obscure, color playing from gold to rose to blue. I let my thoughts dwell on the stone’s complexity. Is not purity a multi-faceted and mysterious thing? I thought. A quest for true meaning, a commitment to real connection, a clean conscience and a stainless memory?

I never took the ring off. I didn’t know how to care for opals; I never thought to ask. I thought the stone’s symbolism would protect me, and I never gave a thought to how I was going to protect it from the outside world. I didn’t notice the opal becoming dull and battered, its fire quenched by years of hard water, shampoo, and dish soap, its surface crazed by my sudden shifts from hot to cold places.

All of a sudden, it was ugly. In later years I would look down at my purity ring impassively, unmoved by the opaque oval, the color of Elmer’s Glue, and think, I need a new ring. This thought did not cause me ideological discomfort. After all, I reasoned, the act of wearing a ring is the metaphor for sexual purity here, not the ring itself. Any ring would do: it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The ring was just an object, a symbol, a talisman: true purity, of body, heart, and soul must be an internal quality.

In a recent article for Killing the Buddha, Jeff Sharlet examines exactly this sort of ecstatic and certainly weird spiritualization of sexual abstinence among the young and the sexless of the evangelical community. “Evangelicalism,” he writes, “has shaped our conception of sex as sacred… Sacred, that is, in a very particular sense: as a deeply democratic form of communion, transcendental communication for the common folk.” Sacramental sex, as Sharlet characterizes it, is basically a threesome with God, and this attitude contributes to the “evangelical essence of American eroticism, the thrilling and terrifying conviction that sex – even the thought of sex – really matters.”

To better understand the “high stakes” atmosphere of the evangelical abstinence movements, Sharlet spent time with the students of Battlecry Honor Academy in Garden Valley, Texas, where eight hundred “frontline soldiers” are trained each year to overcome temptation. Students are encouraged to memorize scripture to help them fight this battle, and Sharlet most frequently heard them cite the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command. “So it was with sex in the minds of the Academy’s believers,” Sharlet observes, “and yet because God commands it, they sacrifice their desire. Like Abraham, who kept his son and passed the test, anyway, they are sure they will be rewarded: they will deny their lust and have it too.”

Of course, as any reader of Kierkegaard knows, this interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac is inappropriate: Abraham certainly did not have assurance of reward. He made a choice, an excruciating choice, to sacrifice his beloved son, and had no idea that what God required was the choice itself, not his son’s life. Sexual purity that is little more than delayed gratification glorified does not make one a knight of faith. A dull stone on my right ring finger, clanking against the inside of tea cups as I wash the dishes, can be no true symbol of an epic quest for moral perfection that will lead me to my one true love because I do not care enough for it.

“Faith,” as Kierkegaard writes in Fear and Trembling, “is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that which unites all human life is passion, and faith is a passion.”* Sexual purity, however, is a denial, or perhaps deferral, of passion. True love, we are told, waits.

When I think about waiting, the first thing that comes to mind is the DMV.** When we go to the DMV to get our learner’s permits, we are told to bring a book: we may have to wait a long time. The DMV in our hometown invariably has an infelicitous combination of uncomfortable chairs and harsh fluorescent lighting that makes us look at least three times more unattractive than we actually are.*** The book that would be terribly interesting if we were curled up in our favorite armchair with a mug of tea is suddenly boring, the math homework we brought along is simply impossible, all our friends are inexplicably unable to answer our texts, and the monotone “nexts” that the stern-looking woman behind the counter bellows are at intervals just irregular enough to prevent us from spacing out.

Our early experiences with this modern understanding of waiting will prove true, to varying degrees and in different ways, in many contexts throughout our lives. Waiting is just something that is going to happen to us. There are whole rooms devoted to waiting; they always have an outdated and unkempt selection of magazines. When someone tells me to wait, I experience an unpleasant combination of frustration and resentment, detached and passive resignation, and occasionally dread of an existential flavor. This potent cocktail tends to release a fractious spirit of rebellion within me, and I occasionally act out. Waiting, like my purity ring, is ugly, and I do not much care for it.

When I bring this understanding of waiting to scripture, however, I find something very different. “But they who wait for the LORD,” says Isaiah 40:31, “shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” And Solomon, man after my own heart, wrote that “there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” (Ecc. 3:1-8): a time for everything, that is, except sitting on your ass and whining. No matter how pristine and proper that ass may be.

On my twentieth birthday, my parents gave me a Claddagh ring. I had wanted one: the traditional design, two hands holding one heart, crowned – friendship, affection and loyalty united, a Gaelic riff on that old-world value, fidelity. I received a gold ring with garnet, my birthstone, set as the center. And while I do occasionally stare into the garnet while bored during lecture, I do so more for the way the light refracts off the dark, clear red of the heart than becoming preoccupied with the depths of something essentially transparent. It does not symbolize some sort of internal quest for moral perfection; it is, rather, an external sign of my desire to actively make choices: to love. Instead of some simplistic either/or – pure or filthy, virgin or whore – I am increasingly coming to believe in the value of a simple yes or no. Love is not an object or an ideal that we attain; love is more than a feeling: love is the choices that we make; love is something we do.

True love does not wait. True love cultivates self-control and acts chastely outside of marriage and gives of itself freely and sacrificially within. There is a time to embrace and a time to refrain, and they are both true expressions of love. So if the practice of a more ardent and attentive chastity is complicated and mysterious, let us find our deerstalker caps, magnifying glasses, and fiddles once again: for the game is always afoot. If we are searching for meaning and connection, let us look each other in the eye when we speak instead of to our concrete and ideological fashion statements, no matter how tasteful they are. Let us seek the comfort, not so much of a clean conscience, but rather that of a clear one: the truth of our ways graven into the tablets of our hearts. And let us submit ourselves to the peace that comes with knowing that our memories are stained with Blood that is not our own, for the crown of love, after all, was always a crown of thorns.

*Søren Kierkegaard. “Problem I: Is There Such a Thing as a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?” Fear and Trembling.
**Actually, the first thing that comes to mind is something more like this, but you may not have as many Scandinavian friends as I do.
***This is why you do not look cute in your driver’s license picture.