Learning from your friends is one of the joys of life.
Good friends present alternative ways of doing things that challenge our own ideas. Our Wii- centered household must accept friends that have succumbed to the expensive and brutal delights of the Playstation, though we beg owners of the X-Box not to tell us so our friendship can remain intact.
Having more than Facebook friends is vital, because people who really know you, teach you by being themselves. A person can only be himself in three dimensions, since that is the way he truly lives!
When Fred Sanders refuses to glory in a Rossetti painting, I must admit that he knows much more about art than I and remember not to confuse my taste with true Beauty. When Melissa Schubert teaches me about Milton and Spenser, it is a reminder that my learning is never done. Paul Spears gives me wise guidance and teaches me what it is to be a leader by his good example.
Of course Hope, the fairest flower in all of Christendom, is the wise woman in my life.
A multitude friends brings a diversity of joys.
Of late, in observation and thought, both Hope and I have learned from our single friends. One thing we have learned is that being single is a high calling, but the culture, even the Christian culture, does not beautify singleness.
Of course, I could never tell a single man or woman the nature of this high calling from the inside. I am afraid of the presumption of even writing of it!
View this not as instruction to my single friends, but as a celebration of the staggering beauty I have seen and see in them. Some of the most holy men and women I have known chose to never marry. They were misunderstood, pitied when they should have been blessed, and treated as dysfunctional when they were some of the sanest folk around.
I worry that being single is now presented, even in the Church, as hellish, impossible, or a second class citizenship. The married reduce single life to a lack when in reality, my friends have taught me, it is a gain. There is a calling that some men and women have that I do not.
Of course, they quickly point out to me that just as marriage can be hellish, impossible, and demeaning when not entered into with total and radical charity, so too celibacy. To be single is love, but in a different manner.
Men and women are not, after all, born married. However, when “singleness” becomes “not married” then it can be a mere privation.
It is hellish when not chaste, since then it is no longer singleness, but a sad parody of marriage. The single man or woman is free to love God in ways that I cannot know, but the single person who is unchaste gains none of the advantages of marriage, but loses the gift of the mysterious charity of the single.
The Bible calls marriage a mystery and so it is, but perhaps only because all charity is a Divine mystery.
Nobody loves anybody, God or man, simply. Both the married man and the single man find different ways, if they are in Love, to defy their selfish genes and live for a beloved. The married have a spouse, but the single have (I am told) their own charity and their own relationships.
Both the married and unmarried are called to chastity in different ways and equally to charity, but directed differently.
Christian singleness is not impossible as my good friends demonstrate daily. It is after all the lifestyle of the Son of God in this world and of the apostle Paul! My single friends are, on the whole, as happy and fulfilled, (though in different ways) as any human can be this side of paradise. None are foolish enough to believe marriage would solve their problems any more than my wiser married friends are silly enough to envy the single.
I am blessed with single friends who show me a glory and a power in great gifts dedicated to something different than marriage and family. Mostly it is a warm opportunity to charity directed in new and mysterious ways that I cannot understand, but that they celebrate. It is the celebration of their life that I can share and enjoy.
My single friends are happy (often!). There is nothing happier for any man than to see and enjoy (vicariously!) a happiness whose total experience is closed to him. It shows a universe of joys that go far beyond his capacity!
It makes life grander to know that joy is so prevalent, that no one person can even experience all the human kinds. I assume when we meet the angels, we will discover joys even more enviable with which we have even less in common.
Those I have known well who have lived whole lives in the beauty of singleness were like and unlike me.
Their own road was the human road and so most of it was shared and they could guide me on my pilgrimage. However, they also walked a high way that was not mine and it gave them vistas I will never have. Fortunately, they can share what they saw, just as I could share what marriage was teaching me. We both saw more completely as result. A world without both the single and married would be a world where humans would be blinded to certain joys.
I know it is possible to be joyful in singleness, because I have seen it done to the very finish.
The chaste single person and the chaste married person create a diversity of experience that enriches their friends. Both struggle with loneliness, but in different ways. Both experience birth, growth, and death, but from different perspectives. Both are blessed, if faithful, to show a watching cosmos how the righteous never die alone.
I have seen married men die surrounded by earthly families. I have seen unmarried men die surrounded by earthly families of a different sort. Holiness was the same, but differently expressed in these men. One man glowed from the glorious martyrdom of marriage and the other from the victories gained in the martyrdom of celibacy.
The man or woman called to stay as God made them serves the culture in ways that the married, with the cares of that estate, cannot do. My single friends are not unmarried anymore than I am “un-single.”
They are magnificently themselves.
All Christians are the bride of Christ, but my single friends are better living icons of the state that all of us share. Just as married life is an image of Christ and His church, so the man or woman dedicated to Christ alone is symbolic of the virgin who conceives and has a Son who is Christ in us.
My single friends do not have an easy life and they are stereotyped as often as the married. People think they have more “spare time” as if a call to intimacy with Christ is less time consuming than a call to intimacy with a human beloved. They are assumed to be either wildly miserable, because everyone should be married or gloriously free and happy, because marriage is a trap that destroys liberty.
Single people are, of course, simply gloriously who they are and who God has called them to be. Just as there is no typical marriage, there is no typical single person. Today I celebrate what those still with me are teaching me and the holy examples of those who have gone ahead of me to Paradise.
Hope and I desire to encourage those that today might be discouraged because the culture may be making you feel less than you are, because of your calling to singleness. Thank you for your holy example and know that some we have known have lived the life you lead well and found it, though hard, worthwhile.