Celibacy, loss or gain? Paulina Monjarraz

• Facts to love

“God has loved us first”, this is a phrase we surely have heard or read in St. John’s Gospel: “God has loved us first”, if we really understood the meaning of this reality, our heart would explode, and everything would make sense, even our sadness and anguish – maybe without stopping feeling them – this feelings would make sense and would not lead us to desperation.

The absolutely free and original love of God is the reason why all human beings have this deep need to be loved and love. Everybody needs to love because we are made by and for Love. Almost all great misfortunes of our world have their origin in the lack or absence of love. For some people, it could be pretentious or even naïve to think that love is the great solution to our world, but it is not so, because it is not an easy or light solution, it is really “the solution” that carries the whole salvation doctrine of Jesus Christ. Within this redemption and salvation context is that we have to understand “why” and “what for” people “renounce” to conjugal love, either to consecrate to God or to live the apostolic celibacy.

You may wonder if it is correct to talk in terms of “renounce” because of the negative burden of the word. Certainly renouncing means giving up something, yes, but that does not mean loss without gain. It would be false to say we don’t leave something, especially something so precious and blessed by God as conjugal love, however, that “renounce” means giving up less for more.

• Loss or gain?

Why loss or gain? Is it that married men are less saint than celibate men? No, we are not talking here about personal sanctity, because personal sanctity is the relationship with the grace God has given us, so we are not more or less saint due to the state or the calling that God has sent us, but because our relationship with it. Nevertheless, talking about celibacy or consecration means going beyond our natural disposition towards an honest love between a man and a woman. It is said that celibacy demands to move to a supernatural dimension because it goes beyond purely human strength and disposition. That is why celibacy is a gift from God, a gift that God adds up to our nature so that we can kindly bear this renounce. So that it becomes a gain instead of a loss.

So people that decide to answer this calling from God is not a person who does not love, or who does not have the same desires and need to love and be loved than those who get married. No, on the contrary, this person who has been called by God expands his capacity to love and be loved, because he will devote his body and his spirit energy to show Christ’s love to every person, as his top priority.

• Celibacy and sexuality

However, a woman or a man who lives celibacy could sincerely wonder: why my body, why my sexuality? if I am not going to be a mother or a father? First of all we would have to redimension our corporeity. It is important to understand that the human being is a unity of body and soul, where the body is not an obstacle for the spirit or an opportunity to sin. It is necessary to affirm the real and positive sense of our corporeity, so we can state: “I am my body” although not only my body. Maybe what is wrong in this question is that we reduce body to sexuality and sexuality to corporeity. The fact that we do not exercise our sexuality to engender does not mean that we lose our masculinity or our femininity. A person does not have a sex, but he/she is a sexed person, which means that we are men or women in all our integral being, not only in some parts of our body. Therefore our service to the others to show them Christ’s love is done with all our masculinity or femininity.

When the first commandment says: “You shall love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind”; He is telling us that the love towards Him is not a love that represses us, or that fills us with prohibitions, and least of all that nullifies our masculinity or femininity. Quite the opposite, He makes them full in his original sense from Genesis “Be fertile”, since that “renounce” does not nullify love, but extends it to everybody so that they can receive Christ’s love for this “renounce” that always allows to give more… A close and kind example of motherhood development within consecrated life can be seen wonderfully incarnated in Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who devoted her whole heart of woman in loving all those children that their own parents could not or did not want to love.