Chastity of a woman is a woman's morality, a holistic and wise approach to various aspects of life. And this applies not only to communication with men, but also to attitude towards bad habits, towards yourself, your words and promises, and so on. In the modern world, society has become so liberated that the concept of chastity has acquired a mocking attitude.
Many people equate chastity with virginity, however, these are completely different concepts. But before condemning men for taking away a woman’s chastity, it is worth understanding the meaning of the concepts of “virginity” and “chastity.”
Chastity is about sex life?
Chastity is about a healthy spiritual, mental and physical state, about a holistic personality who knows how to live with God, who knows how to love. Yes, in everyday consciousness this word is often associated only with issues of physical intimacy, but in reality it is a much broader church concept.
The Church recognizes that the state in which we were born and live is a state of sin, the deepest distortion inherited from the fallen Adam. We can get rid of it only through the desire to get closer to God - to the ideal that Christianity offers us. Thus, the Apostle Paul says: For let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus
(Phil
2
:5). He means that a person should be like Jesus Christ - contain a reflection of all His qualities. The Church defined such virtues with the word chastity.
At the same time, we need to remember that the union of all virtues is love. That is, chastity is ultimately the ability to love.
What is the basis of this skill?
The first is mental and physical purity.
The second is integrity. The Fall turned everything upside down in man: he ceased to understand God, and his spiritual component was scattered to pieces.
If before the knowledge of sin the spirit dominated in him, then after the knowledge of sin the flesh dominated. The feeling of anger before the Fall was a good feeling - a kind of immunity against sin, and after - it turned on one's neighbor.
The destruction of this hierarchy, natural for man, led to the fact that his feelings, will and mind were separated. The most piercing, most bitter words about this are in the letter of the Apostle Paul to the Romans: I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil that I do not want.
(Rome
7
:19).
Achieving integrity lies in the ability to subordinate the carnal to the spiritual. To be chaste in this sense means to put yourself back together again, to cultivate the will - to have the strength to fight sin.
Is virginity a disadvantage or an advantage?
The decisive point in this matter is the age of the female. Of course, if you are over twenty-five years old, the hymen becomes a problem and a source of complexes. Everything must happen in its own time. If there is a permanent partner, mutual love between a guy and a girl, then there is nothing scary in the act of love. On the contrary, it will become a source of joy and happiness for both partners.
Both parents must be involved in raising the girl. It is impossible to instill proper self-esteem, value yourself and maintain your honor in the face of constant family scandals. It is very rare that a chaste girl can come from a problematic family, where drunken scandals and assault are the norm.
How does a violation of this integrity manifest itself in everyday life?
Each of us, for example, is faced with the fact that we do not find time and energy for prayer, and most importantly, we do not spiritually participate in it. Human consciousness has become clip-like, that is, unable to perceive long texts. We are constantly distracted by calls, messages, notifications and cannot concentrate or complete at least one task.
Living in such a state, modern man is very weak in collecting his consciousness. How long can he keep his attention on the words of the prayer? If he can do it for a minute, that’s already a feat. Again, chastity is about focusing on what really matters. About gathering yourself around a core.
Is virginity a disadvantage or an advantage?
The decisive point in this matter is the age of the female. Of course, if you are over twenty-five years old, the hymen becomes a problem and a source of complexes. Everything must happen in its own time. If there is a permanent partner, mutual love between a guy and a girl, then there is nothing scary in the act of love. On the contrary, it will become a source of joy and happiness for both partners.
Both parents must be involved in raising the girl. It is impossible to instill proper self-esteem, value yourself and maintain your honor in the face of constant family scandals. It is very rare that a chaste girl can come from a problematic family, where drunken scandals and assault are the norm.
How exactly does this pain manifest itself?
The Church contrasts chastity with licentiousness and debauchery. “Dissolute”, “wandering” means that a person has lost his way, has turned off the path. These expressions through which we talk about bodily impurity, about the fact that a person has lost the path to God - he has neglected the available ways of dealing with sin. This cannot but affect the internal, mental state of a person.
Firstly, a dissolute person will never become an accomplished strong personality. Being destroyed by his own mistakes, not knowing how to use the will, reason and wisdom, not uniting these scattered pieces of Adam within himself and not even striving for this, being in a situation where the body does not obey the spirit, he cannot find what we call internal the rod.
Secondly, my small experience of observing the lives of many people I know - including from school - shows that most of those who began to lead a dissolute lifestyle early did not know happiness in marriage.
Due to the constant switching from one, as they say now, partner to another, a person’s integrity is destroyed, and he is no longer able to love with all his heart. He constantly compares his current relationships with previous ones and cannot give himself entirely to love alone, because part of his nature remains in past relationships.
We know the words of the Apostle Paul: he who copulates with a harlot becomes one body with her
(1 Cor
6:16
). That is, this connection, like a scar, remains with him forever. By doing this, leading a dissolute lifestyle, you fragment your knowledge of God, the world and your loved one into endless fragments.
Thirdly, an unchaste person, not being a whole person himself, and does not perceive his spouse as a whole person, loves not the whole person, but only his bodily component, partly spiritual, there is no question of the spiritual. He only knows how to own and use, even if he arranges it very beautifully and romantically.
Fourthly, such a person is naturally incapable of love as service, because he is aimed exclusively at receiving, possessing and appropriating for himself. This is finite love: as soon as what a person is used to receiving dries up - his spouse has grown old, fallen ill, his previously unnoticed shortcomings have been revealed - his love also dries up, and he looks for a replacement.
That is why it is assumed that a Christian family can be created with only one person. A Christian keeps himself physically pure until marriage for the benefit of his future spouse. The Church believes that everything a man needs to know in a woman is in his wife. And everything a woman needs to know in a man is in her husband.
By violating his chastity, a person destroys the integrity of his soul, which should be gifted and dedicated to his spouse. It is natural for a Christian not to engage in premarital relations - for him it is a loss. The loss of the possibility of the love that he wants to reach.
And love as service can only be grown in marriage, when a person, throughout his entire life together with his beloved, grows to the full disclosure of the personality of his spouse. Moreover, he loves both when he fully receives reciprocal love, and when he stops receiving it - this is not an obstacle to love.
As a priest, I constantly see how an unchaste person, having become a Christian and deciding to change his life, often suffers bitter failures in trying to build a family according to the church model - he is hampered by his past life experience. It is much easier for a person who is chaste before marriage to become happy in family life, because all that part of his soul that was created by God for union with a spouse is given to a single person.
How my daughter found her boyfriend's dad
But if you started your sex life at too young an age, the chances of your first boyfriend becoming your husband are very low. Chances are that your husband won't be your first, or even your second or third boyfriend. But every time you go to bed with a new partner, you give away 50% of the happiness that was left over from your previous partners. Therefore, find out what your husband will receive in the end, what the dowry is. And then women suffer: why is there no happiness in life? Why can't I live normally with my husband? In the distant past, this secret was also known. It explained the law on the right of the king, ruler, and feudal lords to have their first wedding night with the wives of their subordinates, courtiers and other subordinate men. The more virgins a man had, the more success and prosperity he achieved in life and business. And their girls with the first type of dress were surprised to find that they would marry these guys, but they did not choose them. It turns out that the men simply did not plan to connect their fate with them.
But why is chastity dependent on the formal registration of marriage?
Love in the highest sense becomes possible when a person takes full responsibility for his spouse. The brightest experiences—infatuation, falling in love, captivity—grow into true love only when a person says: “Everything that’s yours is now mine—your youth and beauty, old age and illness, all your relatives and all the burdens of your character, all the difficulties of your fate and all possible difficulties in the future - all this will now be mine as well as yours.”
Only after this can a person accept the gift of love from God - real, deep. The key to this Christian love is responsibility. This is why the Church does not solemnize unregistered marriages: registration in the registry office is now evidence of the assumption of this responsibility.
Until a person takes responsibility for his beloved as well as for himself, as long as there is some kind of deceit, he is not ready to accept the gift of Christian marital love, to become a whole person.
If there is a girl growing up in the family.
Then both parents should make every effort to teach her chaste behavior and instill healthy self-esteem. Nowadays, due to the difficult economic situation in the country and the loss of the value of family status, children are growing up like “weeds.” They are left to their own devices, walking on the streets without adult supervision and gleaning information from the Internet about the darkest sides of adult life. How can a girl grow up chaste in such an environment?
The main value became money and financial well-being. Young girls look at the behavior of their peers, begin to smoke and drink, and date boys not for the sake of feelings, but for the sake of false prestige. They are ready to do literally anything for the sake of a new iPhone. And we, adults, make their world this way. How can they grow up in such an environment? And then on TV people are surprised by the next program “Let Them Talk” about a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who gave birth to twins.
But there is divorce and remarriage - how does the Church relate to this?
Despite the fact that for a Christian there can be only one marriage, today the Church in some cases makes concessions to human weakness by allowing a second wedding. However, if you look at the order about second marriages - the rite of re-wedding - then this is not a bright and joyful rite, it is a rite of repentance. Sometimes it’s even somehow awkward for the priest to serve: on the one hand, a white dress, candles, guests, and on the other, a prayer of repentance, grief.
This also applies to a widowed person who wants to start a family again: the Church blesses such a marriage, but with condescension - after all, the departed spouse is waiting for you there! Blessing the remarriage of a widowed Christian, the Church previously excommunicated him from Communion for a year. Yes, you are separated for a while, but if a person has matured and understood what true love is, then for him the time of waiting for eternity will be bitter, but not endless.
Perhaps, all the rules that, according to the Church, every Christian should follow, apply in all severity only to the families of clergy: a priest cannot divorce, and if he is widowed, he cannot remarry.
And this is not because any special rules apply to clergy, it’s just that the Church applies its expectations from marriage completely to their family. This is why the recent initiative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to allow priests to remarry is so rejected by us.
If there is a girl growing up in the family.
Then both parents should make every effort to teach her chaste behavior and instill healthy self-esteem. Nowadays, due to the difficult economic situation in the country and the loss of the value of family status, children are growing up like “weeds.” They are left to their own devices, walking on the streets without adult supervision and gleaning information from the Internet about the darkest sides of adult life. How can a girl grow up chaste in such an environment?
The main value became money and financial well-being. Young girls look at the behavior of their peers, begin to smoke and drink, and date boys not for the sake of feelings, but for the sake of false prestige. They are ready to do literally anything for the sake of a new iPhone. And we, adults, make their world this way. How can they grow up in such an environment? And then on TV people are surprised by the next program “Let Them Talk” about a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who gave birth to twins.
Which girl is considered a virgin?
The spiritual world of every person can be beautiful, or it can be ugly. Greed, jealousy, greed, betrayal - these qualities create a personal hell in the soul of every person during his life. Without speaking religiously, even from the point of view of ordinary kitchen psychology, each of us recognizes that these character traits are destructive. This is the preservation of innocence and integrity before entering into a marriage relationship, both on the part of the girl and on the part of the boy. Chastity is understood here as the age of maturity, as the age of nurturing spiritual inner strength, which in its pure form can be passed on to children.
But why make chastity dependent on the official registration of marriage?
Do you know the impression of a meadow covered with dew on an early summer morning? The gentle, blissful sun rises. A drop of the purest water on every blade of grass, and in every drop the sun's rays flicker and sparkle. Extraordinary beauty! Such is the inner beauty of the pure feminine soul, which elevates and ennobles those who come into contact with it. In Christianity, the word chastity refers to the purity of a person, which is inherent in both his physical (bodily) nature and his spiritual, mental qualities. This leads to the absence of malignant tendencies. A chaste person is characterized by purity of thoughts and actions, which are dictated by his inner world, independent of external negative influences. One aspect of chastity is abstinence from intimate relations outside of marriage, but it cannot be reduced to such a narrow understanding. The concept of chastity is very similar to the concept of nobility. Together they can be considered an honor category.
QUESTIONS FOR THE VICAR
If we consider the etymology of the word “chastity”, then it means “innocence”. Apparently, this form arose in the Old Church Slavonic language as a tracing of the Greek sōphrosynē - “prudence”. In Church Slavonic and Old Slavonic languages it is written like this: chastity σωφροσύνη, chastity σώφρων. The upbringing of a man begins, surprisingly, with the upbringing of a girl. The amazingly beautiful virtue of chastity is inherent in female nature. Nekrasov spoke about the inner beauty of a woman, about her spiritual nature: “There are women in Russian villages (...) She will pass by, like the sun is shining, she will look and give a ruble.” The Apostle Peter, who was a simple, illiterate fisherman, found amazing and very poetic words on this topic: “And let not your adornment be the outer braid of your hair or the finery of your clothes, but the inner beauty of your heart in a quiet and peaceful spirit, which is precious.” before God." (1P 3;3,4). This is an amazingly deep definition of beauty that is worthy of a girl, a woman, a wife, and a mother. This impeccable beauty is precious not only before people, but even before the Lord God Himself!
What is celibacy
Once upon a time, celibacy meant preserving the honor of not only the girl, but also her entire family; a faithful wife was considered a man's honor. The traditions of the Russian people said that before marriage a girl must remain virgin, and after marriage remain faithful to her husband. After marriage, she became a married woman. The tradition has been preserved because people have a conscience, an integral part of which is shame. Nowadays it is not customary to be ashamed. If a man suddenly says that he is ashamed of his wife, then most likely the answer will be an accusation, and no one cares that she may behave badly. There is a propaganda of total acceptance, in European commercials criminals, gays, scientists, drug dealers are equated with people, with tearful music saying that we are all human, we are all the same, we all need understanding, we can all be lonely and experience difficulties. Most people believe in such “quality” films. Today, the tradition of purity is being systematically destroyed; weddings, even if they take place, mean little to the newlyweds, and at the first difficulties they often leave. The so-called “happiness” is promoted, and in pursuit of it, people get divorced, even if they have children, presenting it as “Happiness of children - happy parents.” However, most children suffer greatly when their parents divorce, but that is another story.
The term "chastity"
There is such an accumulation of experience that after the first sexual contact, even if it was consensual, girls feel ugly. They wash themselves in the shower and cannot wash off the visible dirt. Because in general, women do not need sex, they need feelings, emotions, and we agree to sex for the sake of love. And when this happens, the girl often realizes that it was not worth it, she feels hooked, she feels used. That's why it's so important to choose your partner wisely, avoid parties with alcohol, and delay first contact as long as possible. Feminine energy is approaching the earth. Her consciousness seeks to attract the attention of the little ones, to whom she can give love and support. She experiences the world with her feelings and her heart, and she does not try to save the whole world, but she is able to warm those who are truly dear to her.
