This is a very silly poem, a very foolish story. You shouldn't really listen to it too seriously, but it will allow you to get used to my voice and to the lecture and perhaps get us started.

Everyone who knows just a little about the life of birds, knows that between wild geese and domestic geese, however different they are, there is a kind of understanding. When the passage of the wild goose is heard in the air, the domestic geese down on the ground straight away hear it and to a certain extent understand what it means. They too raise themselves a little from the ground, beat their wings and cry and fly about in disorderly and unlovely confusion for a little while, close to the ground, and then it is over.

Once upon a time, there was a wild goose. In autumn, about the time of migrating, it noted some domestic geese. It fell in love with them, and it seemed a sin to fly away from them. It hoped to win them for its life, so that they would resolve to accompany it when the migration began. To this end, it took up with them in every possible way. It tried to attract them, to raise them a little higher, always a little higher in their flight that they might, if at all possible, take part in the migration, to release them from the miserable and mediocre life of waddling around on earth as respectable domestic geese. At first the domestic geese thought that it was quite amusing, and they developed an affection for the wild goose; but they soon got tired of it. They rebuffed it with rough words, chided it for being a fantastic fool, without experience or wisdom. But alas, the wild goose had become so familiar with the domestic geese that they had gradually acquired power over it, and their words impressed it. The end of the story is that the wild goose became a domestic goose.

In a certain sense the wild goose's plant was a good one, and yet it was a misunderstanding. For this is the law: that a domestic goose can never be a wild goose, whereas a wild goose can certainly become a domestic goose. If the wild goose's plan is to be approved in any way, then it must above all watch out for one thing-that it keep itself intact. As soon as it notices that the domestic geese are getting some power over it, then away! Away with the migrating flock! For the law is that the domestic goose can never become a wild goose, but on the other hand, a wild goose can certainly become a domestic goose. So watch out!

But in Christian life it is different. Certainly the true Christian, with the spirit over him, is as different from the ordinary man as the wild goose from the domestic ones. But Christianity teaches just what a man can become in life, so there is hope that the domestic goose can become a wild goose. Therefore, stay with these domestic geese, stay with them and be intent on one thing, to try and win them for the change. But for God's sake, take care for one thing. As soon as you notice that the domestic geese begin to get power over you, then away! Away with the flock-lest the story should end with your becoming a domestic goose, happy in misery.

Now, this business of chastity has to do with just the reality of life-the way life is given to us-as does every one of the nine new religious mode charts. They have to do with the given reality of the real. You almost have to say that nothing else is real but these charts, or rather, nothing else is real except what these charts point to. They point to the way life is. Another way to experience that reality is to finally say to yourself that the only reality there is is spirit. Only when you touch the deeps of being a man of spirit do you touch reality, and not before. What is really real in every situation is not a few exterior facts that you can weigh up in a test tube. What is really real in that situation is that you are always in that situation, related to that situation, taking attitudes toward the relationships that you have in that situation, and being able to forge a phenomenal yes to bleeding that whole situation of its deeps, or of rejecting that situation in many or all of its aspects. When you are dealing with this capacity of man of relating to the deeps of life-this is when you are touching what you can call the really real.

Poverty and obedience and chastity have to do with this reality. Poverty doesn't have anything to do with exterior lack of goods. It has to do with your relationship to all of life, and so with every other one of the categories on the charts. I like to tell the story of the character who had only one bean. Having one bean was not his poverty. It was his disengagement from having that one bean that was his poverty. If that man is not disengaged from that one bean, he is not a man of poverty. Whether he gives that one bean to somebody else or takes it and eats it himself has nothing to do with whether or not he is a man of poverty. A man of poverty is such a rare bird that if he has one bean, he probably ought to eat it to sustain himself in existence.

The spirit dimension is what you are always looking for in each one of the new religious mode charts: meditation, prayer, poverty, obedience; and contemplation, chastity, transparent knowing and doing, and transparent being. Now the spirit dimension here is the really, really real. But there seem to be other things in life as you try to relate what you are pointing to in the deeps of these charts to all of your experiences. I think of things like doing your solitary office. Everybody knows that doing your solitary office is not really real, that it is ridiculous to do your solitary office. Any kind of spiritual exercise is only half real; the real thing is that which spiritual exercises beckon forth. If the monk's bowl is a symbol of poverty or of corporateness in some way, everybody knows that that stupid bowl is not really, really real. That is not the thing at all. It's not real. Or maybe you want to talk about the tactical model. In working with thousands of those boxes, you are extremely clear that the tactical model is not the really, really real. Unless what is really real is underneath, illuminating what in the world all those little actions are which are the tactic boxes, you don't have anything real.

The same experience occurs with our intellectual heritage. You read something like Thomas Aquinas and you say this can't be real. Then one day it happens to you that the spirit immediately breaks loose in the deeps of your own present life. That is to say, reality really slaughters you. And then, by the tricks of historical method, you are able to get inside of your heritage, even with so unusual a character as Thomas, and say, "My God! What reality that man is dealing with." But unless the immediate reality of the spirit is there, the New Testament has no reality, the Old Testament has no reality-nothing in all the past comes alive for you. When we look out into all that we may be struggling with, with new social vehicles and things like that, unless this spirit reality is in the midst of that, all the structures you might give to the world are all utterly futile.

Chastity is a reality in the very center, with these other four-contemplation, knowing, doing, and being. There is a certain mystery about this chart. Somehow, poverty, obedience, meditation, and prayer are more closely related to all these struggles of life and are not finally the center of reality. Nevertheless, they are part of our real struggle. It is as if you are given this whole thing as creation, and then human beings put their human creation on top of it. We build monks' bowls and build all kinds of social structures. We build tactics and recover heritages in order to elaborate and experience the deeps of reality. But the middle row of the chart points to creation as it is given. That is, solitariness is just the way life is. Corporateness is just the way life is. These three charts, poverty, chastity, and obedience, are pointing to the fact that life, in its very creation, is given to you as corporate. Then we mess around with it and put forms or structures or patterns on life.

I want to talk about the center dimension of corporateness, chastity, and the reason it is in the center. Somehow, poverty relates to the exterior world of things, because you are being disengaged from life. In a way, obedience relates in terms of getting yourself engaged in the multiplicity of life problems and tasks. Meditation has this kind of relationship, too, where you are building afresh upon your colleagues through all the ages. Prayer, also, is putting your body on the line, in terms of fundamental decisions.

When you move from one corner of the charts to another, as from poverty to obedience, you cross through a gap. You meet corporateness as it comes to you in the sheer white hot­ness of it. And that immediately transposes you to the center of being itself. When you move from prayer to obedience, you are pulled to the very center of action. Or when you move from meditation to prayer you are pulled into the center of what it means to be radically solitary. It is the fact that chastity is this kind of gap between poverty and obedience that makes it very difficult to describe.

We are going to use four categories in the lecture: contentless community, unreduced fanaticism, symbolic discipline, and bodily marriage.

For a description of contentless community you might put something like, "In but not of." Chastity is all prepositions and conjunctions. It has no content. It is a relatedness. And yet another way to say this is that it's all the content that there is. It's not like poverty, where there is something to talk about. In poverty, you can talk about intentional detachment from the world, and you can think of all the multiplicity of things you are having a struggle getting detached from! You can talk about the world of things you are tempted to sell your soul to in order to handle your hunk of anxiety and find a little security some place.

Or, you can talk about obedience. Again, you have concrete earthy things to talk about, because obedience begins with engaging yourself in particular covenants and actions in history. It begins with responding to history in a very particular way, where you grab hold of some particular arena and begin laying down your life with particular persons, for particular causes. Obedience is living out your faith that life is good in the midst of there always being sin and corruption and foolishness of one kind or another. You think of being in a school somewhere, as a teacher. Obedience means being obediently part of that school, reconstructing that school-beginning with that school on your hands, having to deal with principals who are dumb oxes, and teachers who are sentimental Miss Millers and bitter hags. That is your situation. Your covenant is with that concrete, very particular, grizzly group of people who are going to educate that neighborhood. To be obedient you have to begin to grasp how it is that that group is your commander and how it is that God has given you this group, and that God did not goof!

Now obedience has to do with that kind of concretion. In any group, in any part of life that you show up in to engage your wild goosehood, you are going to find yourself over against a great deal of sin, corruption, injustice, hostility, hatred, defensiveness, stupidity-and the list is endless. That is the situation to which you are going to be obedient.

But in chastity we don't have anything to talk about. It is as if you come up out of poverty, up into the sky, and then there is a kind of gap and you are in chastity. Then you come down out of the sky, and you are in obedience. And chastity just sort of hangs up there like a flip in the air. It is not obedience, and it is not poverty. It is nothing. It is sheer invisibility. It has never been seen before except in the intensification of poverty and obedience. Whenever you see chastity, it is either poverty or obedience or both. But you never see chastity. Chastity is like a gap, across which you smell the aroma. When you cross over from poverty to obedience, you get a whiff of chastity. It isn't a very big whiff, just a faint odor in the air. You begin to smell the odor when you talk about the relationship between poverty and obedience. There isn't any obedience without poverty. I get a whiff of aroma when I think about that!

You are never genuinely engaged in life until you are radically disengaged. It is impossible to be engaged, unless you are first radically disengaged. Being involved in life is not what obedience means. Obedience is when you have detached yourself utterly from life and then decide where you are called upon to get involved-where you are commanded to get involved. When being involved is the last thing under God's heaven that you want to do-that is when obedience takes place. And if obedience is not utterly unnecessary, then it is not obedience. If obedience is needed by you, then what you have on your hands is lack of disengagement.

Whenever you flip from thinking of the relationship between being radically disengaged and radically engaged, you sort of get a whiff of an aroma in between. But it is a clean and sweet smell. Some have actually seen it, and say it is a city, blazing white with streets of gold. But I've never seen it-I can only take their word.

You come up out of poverty leaving an evil and passing generation. There are great passages in the Bible where it says, ". . . this is an evil and passing generation." It sounds really contemporary! Then you go over to the right side, where obedience means beginning the impossible task of creating a new globe. When you are standing somewhere in between leaving an evil and passing generation and starting the new task of creating a new globe, you are standing in chastity. It is like an "abiding rest in the everlasting arms," or being "in the bosom of Abraham." Or maybe it is Moses and Joshua standing at the river Jordan. They spent forty years getting Egypt worked out of their souls out there in the wilderness. Forty years of poverty, getting the wine presses of Egypt dried up out of their bones. And now they are poverty­stricken men standing before the task of obedience-moving in to conquer the promised land. At that moment, as Moses looks over into the promised land and dies, and as Joshua looks over into the promised land and leads, you get a whiff, I think, of chastity.

Poverty has been called a lady, "Lady Poverty." I've often wondered why exactly that was true until that came up in our lecture. Obedience is called manly obedience. To put it another way, poverty has to do with "giving up all to God." Obedience has something to do with "bringing the terror of God to all." In chastity there is neither male or female. They are all angels in heaven, utterly submissive and utterly conquering at the same time. Yet, this isn't some mystical escape. Chastity manifests itself in real life. Chastity manifests itself in women, and chastity manifests itself in men, and when it does, they have an angelic aroma. somehow.

In talking about poverty you are talking about hearing a voice that comes to you cutting across all your creativity and says, "Forget about getting your creativity into history, forget the creativity you already have got into history! " That is what poverty always says to you. Listen over here to obedience. It says, "Get your creativity into history, right here, right now! Assume responsibility for creating history; history is waiting for you, wants you, wants you here, wants you now!" Then chastity holds the paradox, and says to you, "Your home is not in history, and yet, in history is the only place you have a home." One last illustration: chastity is like being a moon man in Olathe, Kansas. You are not from that place-very clearly not from that place. And yet that is the only home you have-Olathe.

Chastity is a real presence, however. I'm not talking about something that is not there. It is the most real presence you could ever bump into. It is creational corporateness itself. It is corporateness pushed to the very limits of what it means to be corporate. It is spiritual fellowship manifesting itself. Now it's poverty, now it's obedience. It's always free, and it's always a new revolutionary response. It is a creative community experience out of which fresh revolutions are always emerging. It is an ongoing reality that has never been absent in the very process of history itself. It's the only thing worth living in-a chaste community, or a community of chastity. There will never be a chaste world, but building one is the only task worth dying for-bringing this corporateness into the life of the world.

The next category is unreduced fanaticism. My subtitle for this is, "To will one thing." First I want to read to you just a little snatch of scripture that has been helpful for a long time.

"Now as they were on their way, and they entered a village, a woman named Martha received them into her house. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But, Martha was distracted with much serving, so she went to him and said," Lord, do you not care that my sister left me to serve alone? Tell her to come help me!" But the Lord answered, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things. One thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good, which shall not be taken away from her."

The last line is the one that interests me first. "The good that shall not be taken away from her." There is probably nothing wrong with the thousand and one finite causes that life is filled with, and Martha was just doing some of those. Thank God for some of the Marthas who are on telephone duty, who are watching the children, who are in the kitchen, who are driving police cars around the city, doing what has to be done. Furthermore, it is very late, dinner is to be served soon, and obviously our time­line is not going to make it-they are hungry people, and they are going to be waiting. There are ambiguous decisions: "Do I lower the quality of the food? Do I take time to bake this special cake that I was going to bake? What will they say about my cooking? And this child just came in with blood on his head! And that diaper hasn't been changed for at least two hours!" So she runs across the room to her sister who is sitting there at Jesus' feet. What interests me was that she doesn't go up to whisper in little sister's ear, but she attacks Jesus and says, "Don't you care? Why don't you tell her to help me?" And he says, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things. One thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good, which shall not be taken away from her."

"A concern that shall not be taken away from her," a concern that you could live in for a thousand lifetimes and it would not wear out. Food comes and goes, children grow up and move away, but this one thing that Mary has chosen cannot be taken away from her. The glorious wholeheartedness to be able to will one thing with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul and with all your strength-for a whole lifetime. That is what Mary has chosen, and it shall not be taken away from her.

All the many, many concerns of life are filled with anxieties because we want them to be finished, or we want them to be out of our hair, or we want them to give us the proper credits. So you wake up in the middle of just multiplicities of anxieties. And the more genuinely and seriously concerned people are, the more anxieties and multiplicities they wake up in the midst of. Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night with seventeen just impossible things suddenly coming to mind. Maybe in the middle of one of those afternoons, those seventeen impossible things bear in on you from outer space, all in one hour. And you are so shaken, you can't even make a list. You have to forget sixteen of them even to hold onto your sanity, and you have to make a decision as to which sixteen you are going to forget! And that causes increased anxiety! Which one of the sixteen are you going to forget, so you can give yourself to the seventeenth one and, if all goes well, bring it off?

"Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things. One thing is needed." You sort of want to scream out, "Oh, for the glorious tranquillity of willing one thing, with all my heart, all my mind, all my soul." Soren Kierkegaard was so clear that no finite thing, nothing in this world, and nothing about yourself can ever, ever fill that need. Every concern for self and every concern for the world ends up in contradiction and duplicity, in a paralyzing situation, where you are literally torn in two. Think of all the supplementary tactics we have been making. Any one of them is enough to make you upset. And you have nine thousand of them, and they are to be done all at once! That is enough to drive a grown man crazy, unless in the midst of that complexity you know how to will one thing, with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul and with all your strength.

Now this one thing is not some particular thing along side of other particular things. That is just an attempt at idolatry. It is the Good. It is that which is all things and no thing at the same time. It is not the most comprehensive model; it is that which blasts your most comprehensive model and demands more comprehensiveness. It is not the most futuric model; it is that which blasts your most futuric model and demands of you more futuricity. It is that which liberates you from all imperatives, and puts new and fresh and wondrous sheer intentionality back on your back.

It is as if there is a subjective side to willing one thing, and an objective side too. On the objective is just the Good, out there, something that is not you. And then there is constancy of will. This fanatic we are talking about constantly wills one thing, but he can will one thing only when it is the Good that he is willing. All of us probably experience it in different kinds of ways, but the quality of the cause that you are willing determines the quality of the soul that you have on your hands. When you are willing the Kingdom of God, then you are the Kingdom of God. You participate now; the Kingdom of God has come!

Another way to say this is that we are always over against the "active stupidity" of always doing things that don't have any profound depth to them. And on the other side, you are always over against what needs to be called "lucid laziness." When you finally come to see how stupid most of what you are doing is, that lucidity drives you to collapse. And there you are, just lying in, and wallowing in, a phenomenal vision about which you dare not lift a finger.

Now, chastity stands in between active stupidity and lucid laziness, and is just sheer action and sheer vision at the same time. You see to the very center of being and you act, at once. Chastity always takes place in the midst of some particulars, but it can never be made synonymous with particulars.

One way, however, to begin talking about it is to talk about inventing humanness. Whenever the chaste act is acted, it is a new creation of humanness. It brings corporateness afresh into being. It brings life afresh into being. It means putting on humanness as an example of what it means to be radically human. The movie, The Fixer, pushed me in this particular dimension, especially the line where he said, "I am the kind of person for whom it is perilous to be alive." What struck me about that line was that he was literally being killed for nothing else than being human. He had no other fault than just being human in a situation where humanness wasn't popular. And I thought after that movie, "What else is there that is worth getting killed for besides being human?" That is the one thing that is worth getting killed for.

Being human is, of course, being in relationship to God. Teresa of Avila paints a picture of Jesus on the cross that is a picture I have never been able to forget since I saw it. She pictures him there in great grief of soul. She goes on to explain what he is in grief about. He is not in grief over the nails that are driven into his hands. He is not in grief over the painful death he has to die today. It is as if he is saying to himself, "This is the necessary day's work. These nails and this death today are what I have to do and I'm pulling it off rather well." But he is not in grief over that, he is in grief over the inhumanity that hung him up there. Those people out there, before the cross, are violating humanness, they are offending God, they are rejecting their own possibilities of being the only thing worth being. And so he prays a prayer, "Father, care for them for they know not what they are doing." They do not know that they are rejecting the only hope, the only humanness, the only possibility to live. That was his grief. And as Rouault said under one of his paintings, Jesus will be in grief until the end of time. And there is just one grief-that men do not love God with all of their hearts, all of their minds, all of their souls, and all of their strength; and, therefore, that they do not love one another either. This is the one grief: that men are not chaste. It is as if Jesus is saying on that cross, "I will be crucified a thousand times a day forever, if only I see men healed of this great horror." This is chastity as unreduced fanaticism.

The third category is symbolic discipline. Augustine talks about two cities. One he said was a celestial city and the other was the earthly city. The celestial city is a real presence in history, but what you mostly find is the earthly city. The earthly city is in history, too. It is that construct of going­on-ness that lives out of the midst of history itself-out of concern for health, wife, children and status. The celestial city lives out of the one love of God, the God who made all things, heaven and earth. The celestial city, however, while in the midst of history, is on a pilgrimage through history-a history that has rejected God. But it has a very real life in history, here and now. Every here and now life and city have cultural, economic and political structures. The celestial city also has economic, political and cultural life. Cultural life is made up of images and symbols and styles, so the celestial city has its images and its symbols and its styles. It has a very real practice, a very real discipline in the midst of history.

My subtitle for symbolic discipline, if you like, is "Living in celestial culture." Key questions here are: Do you have heaven in your images? Do you have heaven in your symbols? Do you have Heaven in your styles? Do your patterns of life hold for you your images of the real? Do your symbols hold for you your having been laid hold of by God? Do they hold for you the presence of the final reality?

Symbolic discipline is laying hold of your having been laid hold of by God and hanging on. It is as if God gives his being to you. That is, he breaks your life open to the fullness of life, and then you have to decide to hold on to God, and therefore to your own fullness of life. Your images, your symbols, your styles are your hooks for grasping the shirt collar of God, so to speak, and holding on. This is a fierce discipline because God is difficult to hold on to, and your hook keeps slipping out of his shirt collar, or his shirt collar tears off or something. It is a constant discipline of recreating and re-appropriating and reforging the symbols that hold Being Itself for you.

What images, symbols, and styles are is also part of the question of understanding what symbolic discipline points to. If images are understood as those pictures that hold reality in focus, and styles are understood as how you put yourself into history or the kind of patterns you put on, then the problem is always how your images are filled with being and how your style is filled with being. Somehow, symbols seem to me to be nothing else than images that have been blown apart at the seams and styles that have been blown apart at the seams, so that those images and styles hold the white­hot experience of life.

It is as if you always experience symbols as nothing. But the reason they are something is that they are symbols. I remember the book, The Sybil. There was this goat and the goat was nothing, but it became a symbol. It was as if suddenly the goat became a symbol of the divine, and electricity flew through the goat and you saw the divine with that goat. Then you looked back and it was just a goat! All symbols are like that.

You think of Saint Francis, or you think of the hermit, Saint Anthony. I'm reading the life story of Saint Anthony. He has become just a powerful symbol for me. This man had moved out into the desert after having seen the wicked, sinful generation of which he was a part. He moved out into the caves, but people came out to see him, so he moved out further. Finally he moved way out into the desert into the tombs, where he symbolized being dead and struggling with Satan. I say to myself, "That is what is needed to really see to the bottom of detachment." Then I look back at Anthony and he is just a dirty old hermit in the fourth century. Just one dirty old hermit. But no, he is a symbol. He is Saint Anthony. All symbols are like that. You look at them one way and they're utterly ridiculous, but when they have grasped hold of the shirt collar of God for you, when the wonder and weirdness of life itself blows through them, then-no-they're not just nothing. They are the only thing that is really important.

Discipline in symbols is what it means to live the life of chastity; and chastity, it seems to me, is a long­range discipline. You just keep holding onto the symbols that have held on for you. There are days when you get up and go to worship in which the very symbols that yesterday blew the winds of the spirit so powerfully that they knocked you down, today just come across as cold turkey. Now, there are valleys in the spirit life and there are peaks in the spirit life. Chastity is hanging on through valleys and peaks. There are times when the spirit breaks loose, so that everything is turned to fire. Then there are times when you go to Church for weeks and nothing happens, even when you are preaching.

Chastity is the discipline of symbols. Symbols occasion, but do not force, the presence of God. In our arrangement of the charts, chastity is on the top, and contemplation is at the bottom, and what you mean by contemplation is just the immediate union with God. Contemplation is a happening in the solitary life of man. When it happens, you know it happened-that is, awe has broken through. It may be in a subtle fashion, or it may be in a rather dramatic bowling­over fashion. But when awe has broken through, then awe has broken through. When contemplation is present, then contemplation is present.

Now chastity, as it were, occasions contemplation. It is only in the midst of a community of disciplined people that contemplation is finally ever occasioned. It is only when you live in the midst of constantly calling upon Being to come forth, or in the midst of symbols which constantly beckon us into a relationship with the radicalness of all of life' that those radical experiences happen to you.

Another way to put it is that contemplation is just a radical interiorization of the corporate life that chastity is pointing to. Contemplation occurs on those mornings when suddenly all the symbols that you have been disciplined in holding onto ignite and burn. Then contemplation works back the other way. It creates the symbols. It is out of the deeps of the solitary life, the deeps of the immediate experience with God, that one creates the symbols that hold on.

The relationship between solitariness and corporateness is being pointed to here. Solitariness is always creating corporateness-which corporateness is always occasioning solitariness. There is never any solitariness unless it is being occasioned by some corporateness. And corporateness is constantly being built, being given historical form, by the actions of solitaries. Whenever two or three great solitaries are gathered together, there is chastity and nowhere else. Bonhoeffer talked about there being a corporate person. When you think of two solitaries interacting, there is a third reality present that has a life of its own. The two solitaries participate in it, they create it even, but there is a third thing that ministers to each of them and goes on ministering to others until the end of time.

To say that again, this weird quality of corporateness is something in addition to all of the solitaries that make it up, and it ministers to them and goes on ministering to solitaries perhaps until the end of time. At any rate, this communal air of symbols and images and styles of chastity is bringing discipline into that. It always seems as if it is hovering over you. This leads me to say this about chastity: only a group is chaste. Individuals participate in chastity with all their being, but chastity is always a group thing, never a private thing. Only the People of God are chaste, and wherever there is chastity there is the People of God.

The fourth category is bodily marriage. It needs to be said that chastity has nothing whatsoever to do with sex, only with symbols. But sex has always been put to symbolic use. I mean that sex is functioning as symbol in the reality of humanness whether one wishes it to or not.

In every human culture, in every time and place, the symbolic uses and power of sex are there. And it is symbolic power. Symbolic power is its real power, its real dread, its real fascination, its real majesty. It is also its real demonic potential. Almost all of the modern books and research studies on sex ignore the symbolic dimension of it. They treat it as a mechanical technique, or as something meters can measure emotional levels about, or some kind of pleasure machinery. But in no age has sex ever been that. Sex has been primarily understood as a religious phenomenon, whether it be in fertility rites, whether it be in celibacy practices, or whether it be in so common a thing as a marriage. Sex is a religious concern and always has been a religious concern in the societies of man.

Turning sex into spirit is a crucial concern of the man who is concerned about chastity because sex, broadly conceived, is the whole vital drive of man. Symbolically, sex means productivity of the whole body. Symbolically, sex means the drive of the whole body. Symbolically, sex means the physical meeting of a human being with history itself.

So you and 1, who have talked so long about turning mind into spirit, need to grasp as we move forthrightly into corporateness that it is deeply and radically related to turning body-our body, and the body of the group of people that are chastity-into spirit. It is body turned into spirit that is chastity. Sex is clean or demonic, depending on whether or not this has happened, depending on the symbolic meanings that have been poured through the symbolic power that is always just there in human existence

I think of Playboy magazine as an example of this very powerful symbolic power poured through sex. Playboy magazine is probably the solitary office for thousands of people. Any chaste interpretation of sex has been carefully culled out of there. Articles on "Why there cannot be a God" make that clear. So if you intend to use Playboy magazine for your solitary office, you had better start naming the demonic forces right away, or you'll be in trouble. I suppose you could even use Hitler's memoirs as your solitary office, if you were clear about the demonic forces you were working over against. But it takes an agile spirit to do that, you understand. You have to be sure you have all the names of the demons before you use Playboy magazine for your solitary office. Sex is the gift of God, and rejecting the gift is rebelling. The gift of sex is to symbolize, as it indeed does already symbolize, your relationship to God, your relationship to Being Itself that created you that way.

Then you can begin to talk about the category "bodily marriage to God." Celibacy has always been an extremely powerful symbol to get hold of it. We ought to learn again to be thankful for what the Church did in pioneering the symbol of celibacy as a symbol that gets hold of the concept of "being bodily married to God." After having accepted sex, and all its intimate glories and horrors, celibacy has to do with renouncing it as your symbol. This is your symbol of unswerving covenant with God. It is a way of saying that your body is totally on the line, that your body will be given to nothing else than the work of the People of God.

The Apostle Paul had some very exciting things to say along this line. "That is really the easier way. Would that everybody were able to take that way," he said, "because then you wouldn't have so many worries on your hands. But if you wish to take another way, you do not sin." At any rate, celibacy was not understood in the Church's understanding as some Greek ascetic virtue in which bodily existence was despised. No, it was a good thing, treated symbolically in this particular way to dramatize a radical relationship. Also, the distinction of celibacy from the homosexual stance ought to be mentioned. At bottom I believe homosexuality is lack of courage to relate intimately to the "other­than­you." Celibacy is not avoiding the intimate relationship with the "other­than­you." It is an intimate relationship with the whole of creation and with the Creator of that creation, or else it is something sick that we maybe need to get rid of in the Church.

The same kind of radicalness that celibacy points to must be articulated for the man and the woman who are married in the context of the Church. Therefore, their bodily union is just as much a symbol of marriage to God as denial of bodily union would be a symbol of marriage to God. You are not married to yourself when you are married; you are married to God through this earthly union. You are not married to this particular woman and her needs and wishes; you are married to God. It is as if she or he is the altar, the exterior sign of the divine fire that consumes the whole relationship. Without that other person there, it is not possible for that radical symbol to be there. It is a radical symbol of the undivided love of God being held in the undivided covenant with that one person.

To participate in a symbolic relationship with one woman as a symbol of your one loyalty to one God does, however, require some spirit agility. In the midst of having married that woman, there is always the encroachment of the notion that you really married her. And the very idea that you didn't marry her at all, but married God, is sort of offensive, one or two mornings a week. And because that offense crops up, it takes a certain kind of agileness of spirit really to be clear that you married God, and that you didn't marry that woman-that she was just the way in and through which you married God

It is like the agile stuff that Abraham had on his hands when he went up the hill with Isaac. Isaac was his son. It was through Isaac that his life was going to bless the whole world. But he took Isaac up to the top of the mountain and laid Isaac on the altar and killed him, except that God didn't let that happen. He gave Isaac back to him. He said, "I believe that I'd better let you bless the world after all, through Isaac." So there he conducted the phenomenally agile stunt of radically giving up the marriage-or in this case, the son-and then having the marriage given back to him in a radically new context.

What you have to understand is that you have died when you have married God. You are dead. You have given up all. All has been given up for the sake of that one loyalty, and nothing else is ever to come even a million miles close to it. The marriage to God is life beyond complete death-beyond complete death to everything. And so, if you use celibacy as your symbol, or if you use one woman, it is God that you have married. The use of a concrete historical bodily symbol is an agile stunt on the other side of having died even to the stunt, so to speak, that you have performed.

To tell of this from one's own life, at least from mine, is so painful I do not believe that I am able to do it. But maybe a little broad poetry would help remind us all of the deep and central and crucial struggle that is here for the whole of civilization, and the whole of the Church, at this point.

When I got married, I got married unadvisedly, irreverently, indiscreetly, and without proper fear of the consequences. And if you were honest, so did many of you. My situation was even more complex because of the fact that I really secretly knew that, and went ahead with it anyway, with my fist in the air, so to speak. Now, that decision has consequences for your life. I mean, if in the midst of getting married, you made a decision that didn't really get you married to God, but got you married in some other way, that symbol is all through you. Though that decision made seventeen years ago is forgiven, and is forgiven forever, it is still that decision; and the way it was made is my particular past.

I remember when I finally woke up to the full extent of the demonic nature of the way I understood and lived my marriage. It's impossible to talk about the jolt that was to the depths of my being. This doesn't have anything to do with my wife. It is almost as if she were an innocent bystander. I just used her to rebel against God. And I bodily crystallized that rebellion for fifteen years, so to speak. Now, when fifteen years of demonic worship suddenly appear to view, I mean that is an experience that you'll hardly ever forget. All the damaging consequences of that stand around, and are clearly seen to be the damaging consequences that they are. So do you know what I did when that happened ? I decided to get a divorce. The next day I was going to get a divorce. I also considered becoming a hermit and going out into the furthest field alone for the rest of my life and never seeing anybody ever again. So I got a divorce, and after six months of divorce, I remarried the same girl. I want to tell you, that was a clever stunt. I've never told anybody before about this divorce; I've kept it a secret between me and God. But while I was on this absurd and tricky journey, I learned some things. The most devastating discovery I made on this journey was that I was still capable after fifteen years of experience of remarrying someone else for exactly the same spiritually stupid reasons as I did in the first place. I mean, that was a devastating discovery, namely, to think that I had to have some sweet spirit woman-this is the way it came to me-to hold my hand while we walked together to the abyss. And I had to ask in a way that is still painful even to think about, "Why was I not man enough to walk to the abyss alone? Why did I have to have some sweet spirit woman hold my hand?" I mean, romanticism dies hard, and it's dying hard all over the place throughout our whole nation. And the pain of such deaths would take a thousand books to tell.

I also learned this, that in the very center of any marriage which takes marriage to God seriously, there is an eternal divorce going on. It never goes away. And this eternal divorce lives right alongside of that covenant unto death with this one person. If you are not graceful enough to dance with a stone altar, you are not graceful enough to dance with some sweet sensitive spirit woman either. Several years ago, one of my colleagues pointed out the biggest fattest black woman he had ever seen, and his comment was that if you cannot build a marriage with that woman right there, then you cannot build a marriage with any woman in the world. And all the disciples standing around said, "That is impossible." But with God, all things are possible, including chastity.

The family is only the smallest sphere in which this marriage to God operates. It is only the beginning. But it is a critical beginning and without that beginning there is no going on. That is, unless one is married to God in his family, then he is not married to God at all. But if one is married to God in his family, he is also married to God in relationships that go beyond the family.

It is as if the family is a mini­religious order. But the family cannot even be that, apart from a global fellowship of colleagues to whom you are married as well, a global fellowship that transcends the family, and gives it the context in which it is something. It is a concrete sign of poverty. It is a way of communicating to yourself that you are poor. The concrete sign of obedience is your unto death on the line. The concrete sign of chastity is your bodily marriage into some religious community, into some religious fellowship that literally encircles the globe.

I am married not only to my wife-and I am married to her in a very special way of course-but I am also married to many other colleagues, in a bodily way. This whole community is a part of that reality in and through which I am bodily married to God. And without being married to that community, I am not married, nor could be married to God. The covenant with God is always concretized in my relationship with particular lives who are participating in being that covenanted community. And without this particular global society of the People of God, with real people in it, with real problems and real struggles, celibacy and marriage are both meaningless symbols.

The celestial city is a real presence in history. It is populated by real people who really are the presence in history of this contentless community, and wherever that appears, there, and there alone, is chastity. We have to see that all men are called to the celestial city, all men are called to chastity, for finally that is just humanness at its raw roots. But those who hear and respond to the call are then called to be unreduced fanatics in calling all the others.