Called to Singleness

Asking someone whether they are "called to singleness" or "called to celibacy" definitely makes my list of Top Ten Pet Peeves of Christian Culture (for a few hundred more of my pet peeves, check out the Stuff Christian Culture Likes blog).  Not long ago I got into a conversation with a girl after our small group meeting that went like this:

    Girl: "So, are you dating anyone?"
    Me: "Nope."
    Girl: "So, you're not looking to date?"
    Me: "Since when are those the only options??!"

Not long afterwords, the leaders of that same small group passed out a spiritual gifts survey, which each of us was supposed to pray about, complete, and share with them.  One of the gifts listed was Celibacy, defined as "the special ability that God gives to some members of the Body of Christ to remain single and enjoy it; to be unmarried and not suffer undue sexual temptations."  First of all, special ability?  Ha!  I've had the special ability to remain single my whole life without even trying!  As for enjoying it - well, it has its moments.  Second of all, what qualifies as undue sexual temptation?  Sure, if I looked at porn all day or thought of nothing but sex it might be a sign that I wasn't content in my singleness.  But what about noticing cute boys on the subway?  An affinity for Jane Austen novels?  Craving a good cuddle now and then?

To my utter horror, Celibacy ranked relatively high on my list of God-given gifts once I tallied the numbers.  I decided to look up the verses that were cited as evidence that singleness was, indeed, a so-called "spiritual gift".  The first was Matthew 19:9-12:

I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery." The disciples said to him, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry." Jesus replied, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.

In other words, if you can't be monogamous, don't get married.  If you're already a eunuch, make the most of it.  And if you have renounced marriage because God is your lover (aka the religious life), good for you - that's one less sin to worry about.  The second passage from Paul is more well known (1 Corinthians 7:5-9):

Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

Paul does undeniably name staying single as a "gift from God" here.  He also says that Satan likes to use our lack of self control to tempt us, and that "coming together" with your spouse (sex outside of marriage is not an option) can hold the devil off.  (Insert mental image of God crooning The Beatles' "Come together, right now, over me" with Paul fittingly on bass, John the Baptist with backup guitar, and Jesus on the drums.)  Marriage and sex, according to Paul, are a "concession" allowed to those who would otherwise disrupt the kingdom-building effort by being perpetually twitterpated and "burning with passion".

This still leaves some of us stuck between a rock and a hard place.  At this particular moment, I am not necessarily "burning with passion," per se.  I can't even remember the last time a guy asked me to dinner.  But if a good-looking gentleman called me tomorrow wondering if I'd be up for a boat ride on Lake Michigan followed by a picnic, dancing, and a walk under the stars, would I be obligated to turn him down because Celibacy ranked highly on my spiritual gifts survey?  Heck NO (says my gut)!  Thankfully some of my favorite Christian thinkers back up my gut (who is nevertheless a trusted theologian) by describing some different ways to think about singleness and calling.

Lauren Winner, in her fabulous book, Real Sex, which everyone must read, writes this on the subject:

Perhaps we ought not to fixate on the call to lifelong singleness. Some people, of course, are called to lifelong singleness, but more of us are called to singleness for a spell, if even a very long spell. Often, our task is to discern a call to singleness for right now, and that's not so difficult. If your are single right now, you are called, right now, to be single – called to live single life as robustly, and gospel-conformingly, as you possibly can. The problem comes when the assumption that these are lifelong callings creeps in – panicked single folks think they must discern, at some given age on some given date, whether or not they are called to singleness forever. Again, consider professional callings. We are often called to certain vocational or professional paths for periods of time – one is called to be a doctor or a teacher or a waitress, but to discern a call to go to dental school at age twenty-four is not to assume that one will be called to work as a dentist forever. Perhaps at thirty-five, one will be called to stay home with small children. Perhaps at forty, one will be called to open a stationery store. Perhaps at sixty-three, one will be called to retire. Indeed, even calls to marriage are often not lifelong – not because of divorce, but because of death. Jane may be called to be married to Peter right now, but if Peter dies, she will find herself called, for a season, to singleness – to widowhood. (139)

Aaaah.  What a refreshingly sane thought.  Of course callings and gifts come and go!  We are dynamic individuals, responding to constantly shifting circumstances, and God made us that way.  Things are rarely as black and white as some would have us believe.  (DELETE any mental images of God as Michael Jackson.)  Even Shane Claiborne - who wrote in The Irresistible Revolution that God was his lover and that "We can live without sex, but we can't live without love, and God is love" - later adopted Winner's language about "seasons of calling" when he found himself with a serious girlfriend.  The change in his relationship status didn't render his earlier words untrue, but it definitely added some shades of gray to his understanding of 1 Corinthians 7 and Matthew 19.

Speaking on a "Singles in Ministry" panel at a conference, Claiborne also suggested asking yourself this question: What will allow me to pursue Jesus with the least distractions?  This, if you ask me, is a very helpful flip-flop of questions like Do I suffer undue sexual temptations? or Is this burning passion allowing Satan to tempt me?  Instead, we should be asking how we can best glorify God in our current situation.  Singleness, like marriage, is not a sentence to be dreaded or endured.  It is a lens through which God shows us - in part - the character of the Divine.  In another delicious (albeit long) passage from her book, Lauren Winner writes:

Of course, premarital abstinence is different from fasting, because when you fast you know you will eat again. Premarital abstinence is different from keeping vigil, because during your vigil you can be confident that you will sleep again. Unmarried Christians have no guarantee that they will ever get married. They have no guarantee of licit sex. Thus to practice premarital chastity is at times to feel as if you are being forever forbidden the satisfaction of a normal appetite […] Of course, the desire for sex is normal and natural, but many spiritual disciplines center on refraining from something normal. One who keeps vigil is abstaining from sleep in order to abide with God; one who fasts is abstaining from food in order to see that one is truly hungry for God; one who spends time alone forgoes the company of others in order to deepen a conversation with God; one who practices simplicity avoids luxury in order to attend more clearly to God. And 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. With all aspects of ascetic living, one does not avoid or refrain from something for the sake of rejecting it, but for the sake of something else. In this case, one refrains from sex with someone other than one's spouse for the sake of union with Christ's Body. That union is the fruit of chastity. (128-129)

So, there you have it.  If "real sex" is union with Christ's Body, the chaste among us are one step ahead of the crowd.  And if one more person decides that I either need prayer for a nice husband or the calling card for the local convent, I've got an answer ready for them: I'm called to singleness...until I'm not.  I'm fasting from sex...for now.  I'm pursuing the path of the least distraction in an attempt to follow Christ.

I believe that God will always provide the tools to carry out his will. That means if I'm meant to be single, he'll satisfy my hunger for love, and if I'm not...he'd better introduce me to Mr. Right!  Mr. Right, if you are out there, I leave you with these words of a song by Alexi Murdoch:

So if I stumble, and If I fall
And if I slip now, and loose it all
And if I can't be, all that I could be
Will you? Will you wait for me?

 

Brain Pain

Perhaps the one thing worse than having a migraine is feeling like you are alone in your pain.  In the words of the ever-prophetic songwriter Don Chaffer, “the worst is my being alone.”  But alas!  I am not alone!  Today I learned that there is a special word for those who suffer from migraines, so there must be more than one of us.  And even better than this news is the word itself: migraineurs.  Makes us sound classy, like connoisseurs or chauffeurs or coiffeurs.  So without further ado, I shall dive into a survey of history’s most famous migraineurs, both real and imagined.

There are several artists who are believed to have suffered from migraines: Monet, Van Gogh, and Georges Seurat.  Apparently what we thought was “impressionism” is really an epidemic of headaches!  Pointillism is not just a creative style of painting where things are blurry close up and come into focus as you get further away; it is what Seurat was really seeing!  He was suffering from the well known migraine aura, or scintillating scotoma, which interrupts your vision in all kinds of fun ways.  And by fun I mean vomit-inducing, oh-crap-I’m-going-blind, get-me-to-a-dark-room-with-no-stimuli type stuff.  But if you are a stronger person, you might also take advantage of this visual anomaly to paint a timeless masterpiece.
 
Along the same lines, it turns out that authors Miguel Cervantes, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll were also members of la Société de Migraineurs.  Imagined windmills, nonsequitor streams of consciousness, and visions of rabbit holes and jabberwocks are not the products of insanity or drug-induced hallucinations, but migraines.  Or perhaps the distinction between those is not so clear.  What others see as Lewis’ jibberish, a fellow migraine sufferer might read as a poignant effort at describing her pain:

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

[…] And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

Emily Dickinson, too, is said to have tasted the scourge of the invincible headache.  A large number of her poems address the dark battles being staged within the confines of her own skull.  When I look back at these works after having experienced hundreds, if not thousands, of migraines myself, I cannot help but see them in a new light.  Check this one out:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My Mind was going numb—

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space—began to toll,

 

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here—

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then.

Monet and Seurat might have been a stretch, but Emily is certainly not.  Also on the list of real world migraineurs are Caesar, Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, both commanding generals in the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Freud, Nietzsche… and Elvis.  Interpret those as you will.  Of those alive today, some stars who have admitted to migraines are Whoopi Goldberg, Lisa Kudrow, the woman who plays Bree on Desperate Housewives, the guy who played Farmer Hoggett in Babe, former NBA player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Terrell Davis of the Denver Broncos, who had to sit out the second quarter of Super Bowl XXXII due to a migraine.

Migraineurs can also be found in the pages of literature, though some – like my insurance company – might argue the diagnosis.  Nevertheless, I find it comforting to hear my pain named, described, and shared by a character.  We become kindred spirits.  As a migraine sufferer, my first kindred spirit was Mrs. Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.  A whole chapter is devoted to her thoughts and sensations as she lies on her bed in a dark room and waits for the “furry beast” in her brain to retreat.  She is awake, occasionally hearing noises in the house and interpreting them, but her eyes are closed and you hear the dialogue in her mind between hopeful peace and raging fire.  If McEwan’s details are not a product of his own experience, he definitely did his research.

Another kindred spirit from literature is the infamous Harry Potter.  Though his pain is never explicitly referred to as a migraine, Harry’s lightning-shaped forehead scar often burns, giving him a hell of a headache.  A few headache doctors picked up on this and actually published a study about it.  Here is some of the evidence Drs. Sheftell and Steiner cite that Harry’s pain is migraine-induced:

• Harry did not have headaches prior to the age of 11, a common age of onset for primary headache disorders, especially Migraine.
• The onset in Harry’s case seems to be some time prior to puberty since the first evidence of headaches in the series was apparent when he was 14.
• Although Harry’s headaches haven’t been frequent, they have periodically left him temporarily dysfunctional, thus significantly impacting his life and activities.
• All of Harry’s attacks strike without warning.
• Harry’s primary (and perhaps only) trigger is proximity to “He Who Must Not Be Named” (Lord Voldemort).

Unfortunately for Harry, his primary trigger is also the man he is called to destroy, so he can’t exactly steer clear of him.  I can relate, since my triggers of coffee, red wine, stress and hormones are equally unavoidable!  Even when Harry is taught the art of Occlumency, which is supposed to prevent Voldemort from invading his brain, he wrestles with whether or not to succumb to the episodes.  On the one hand, his scar aches makes him miserable…

“It was pain beyond anything Harry had ever experienced...his head was surely splitting along his scar; ...he wanted it to end...to black out...to die...” (Goblet of Fire)

“His scar seared and burned...the pain of it was making his eyes stream...” (Order of the Phoenix)

“His forehead hurt terribly...it was aching fit to burst. He opened his eyes...he felt as though a whitehot poker were being applied to his forehead...He clutched his head in his hands; the pain was blinding him...he rolled right over and vomited over the edge of the mattress.” [And soon after] “The pain in his forehead was subsiding slightly...He retched again...feeling the pain recede very slowly from his scar.” (Order of the Phoenix)

…and on the other hand, his migraine aura consists of visions that help him track what his enemy is up to.  Friedrich Nietzsche and author Joan Didion share this dichotomous view of their migraines; both wrote about how their headaches released deeply buried art and wisdom by interrupting their normal, distracted trains of thought:

“In the midst of the torments brought on by an uninterrupted three-day headache accompanied by the laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence.” (Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, 1888)

“I'm a writer, and I've found […] I often have my best story ideas while in bed in pain.  My migraine seems to occupy, or preoccupy, a part of my mind that is usually taken up with self-criticism, self-censorship, stress, etc., allowing this other authoritative voice to speak.  In effect, the migraine behaves as a circuit-breaker:  when all that pressure gets too heavy, it interrupts the action so that authoritative part of me can function again, uninhibited.” (Didion in “In Bed,” 1979)

So far this blog post is my greatest effort to channel my pain for good.  But who knows – maybe the migraine curse will yet turn out to be a blessing.  In the meantime, I will echo the closing words of Dr. Sheftell and Dr. Steiner’s paper: “We applaud the efforts of the paediatric subcommittees of both the International Headache Society and the American Headache Society to raise awareness of these issues, and appeal for assistance to the world of Magic.”