Father Benson surprised me last week.
For the last little while, I’ve been reading Instructions on the Religious Life. The three books that make up the series are based on notes taken during retreats that the founder of our Society, Father Richard Meux Benson, gave to the early members of the community. At the time, the community was barely four years old and consisted of just a half-dozen or so men. During these long retreats, Father Benson laid the foundations of the Society. The addresses cover a broad range of topics, and, as such, these books can be read thematically rather than sequentially. As I’ve been reading these, I have skipped here and there to see what Father Benson said on Silence, and then The Religious Life, and then Sacrifice. At one point, I decided to read the book sequentially, not so much because you need to read what went before to understand what comes next, but so that I wouldn’t miss anything. That’s when I was surprised.
Reading Instructions on the Religious Life sequentially, I couldn’t avoid reading what Father Benson said about celibacy, or to use the word current at the time, chastity. As you can imagine, Father Benson says a great deal about chastity, but it wasn’t what I assumed he, a man born in 1824, would say. I assumed that there would be a great deal about the need to suppress bodily desires and carnal thoughts, and he does that to a certain extent, but that’s actually not what he’s primarily interested in. He speaks very little about sex, and there is no discussion about sexuality.
What he is interested in is our union with God. It’s a theme that comes up over, and over again. In fact, you could say everything that Father Benson writes, in whatever context, is about our union with God. He says as much in the very first lines of another book, The Religious Vocation, which is his teaching on the Society’s original Rule of Life. There he says that “we must seek to realise increasingly the purposes for which our Society is called together – to live for God” (p. 37). It is this living for God that is at the heart of Father Benson’s understanding of celibacy.
In the Instructions on the Religious Life (first series), he told the assembled Brethren that “Religious Chastity is not a mere abstinence from carnal pleasure, but a dedication of all our sensible nature to the glory of God. It is not an isolated life, but a life of union with Jesus. The soul is espoused to Jesus, and it gathers us into a special unity of being with Him. We promise not to be united to any other in order that we may be united to Him, and in proportion as the vow is realised it will become a source of joy” (p. 27).
Just as he returns to this theme of union with God, so he returns to this idea of joy. He says: “However necessary bodily disciple may be, it is useless unless we are living in the contemplation of Jesus. The life, the love, the joy of Jesus must be a reality taking possession of our souls. This union with Jesus is no abstract union of fancy. It is the union by which our nature is to be perfected, and for which it is formed. The taking of our flesh by the Son of God was not an accidental or remedial measure only, but part, we believe, of His original plan to unite us to Himself. He gives us our nature for the purpose of eventually gathering us into Himself” (p. 28).
It is as he contemplates this life of joy that can be ours through our union with Jesus, that his language becomes almost erotic.
Oh, wondrous joy, when the eye gazes on the face of Jesus, and the ear hears the unequalled sweetness of that voice, and the body wakes to all the glories of Heaven! Thrilling touch, delight beyond all words, when we fall upon the neck of one much loved, and realise the joy of that fond embrace; but what will it be for the body in the day of the Resurrection to feel itself His, to be enclosed in His embrace, and be locked in that Heart of love? This will be the joy of the Resurrection if we persevere. It shall be ours if we are true to Him that calleth us. Our bodies are to be regarded as a special possession of Jesus, and to be perfected for the reception of that particular glory which is designed for them in the day of the Resurrection. (p. 31)
His language is reminiscent of another. John Donne, the seventeenth-century dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and one of the great English metaphysical poets wrote, in his fourteenth Holy Sonnet:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Reading Father Benson through the lens of the twenty-first century, which is perhaps dangerous but, nonetheless, the only way we can, I would dare say that for him the vow of celibacy isn’t so much a repression or suppression of our sexual nature, but a channeling of it to the person of Jesus. He writes:
We must give up all our affections to the Lord Jesus. Our affections must be personally centred in Him. We rest on Him with an entire love. We must give our whole souls to Him, and not divide them between Him and the world. The love of those nearest and dearest to us should be as nothing in comparison to that love. The soul has received a certain consciousness of His glory, and must give herself up to Him. Many complain that their bodies are troubled with foul emotions, but do not give up their souls entirely to Jesus. They strive to beat down these troubles by force, but do not give themselves up to a continual tranquil love of Jesus. . . . Give thine [thoughts] to Him and to His glory. Be content to leave thine own interests, caring for those of thy Lord. If the soul is thus true to Jesus, the desires of the flesh will have no power to prevail. (p. 31)
Father Benson surprised me. This is not what I expected. Father Benson’s almost erotic language brings him to life and helps to make sense of a vow that is so contrary and countercultural to the world in which we live out our vocation tolive in union with Jesus.
Our vow of celibacy isn’t about denying anything, least of all who we are. Rather it’s meant to help us discoverwhosewe are, and to whom we belong, not just in our hearts, but with our bodies as well, for as Father Benson reminds us: “The vow of Chastity involves the gift of our bodies to Christ to be His alone” (p. 30).
