This October, my boyfriend and I will celebrate our 1 year anniversary of dating. Needless to say, I'm excited to celebrate the day with a bunch of cheesy romantic gifts and a fancy dinner!
However, as the day comes closer, I find myself reflecting on all the things I've learned these last twelve months, especially about how to live a holy and chaste relationship.
This October, my boyfriend and I will celebrate our 1 year anniversary of dating. Needless to say, I'm excited to celebrate the day with a bunch of cheesy romantic gifts and a fancy dinner!
However, as the day comes closer, I find myself reflecting on all the things I've learned these last twelve months, especially about how to live a holy and chaste relationship.
Did you know that the Catholic Church actually cares about homosexuals? I even feel confident saying that we love them a lot. I sincerely hope that no one has ever made you think otherwise because they were sorely misled and misinformed . . . and probably unhappy too because of this faulty way of thinking.
So, yes, it’s hard to be gay and Catholic — it’s hard to be anything and Catholic — because I don’t always get to do what I want. Show me a religion where you always get to do what you want and I’ll show you a pretty shabby, lazy religion. Something not worth living or dying for, or even getting up in the morning for. That might be the kind of world John Lennon wanted . . .
But we live in a world that doesn't really get that.
A world where people sing songs about how they're perfectly good at being 'bad' and radio edits of songs switch 'love' in for the 'f' word like there's no difference. Society has taken something sacred, designed by God to unite couples in the Sacrament of Marriage and cooperate in bringing new life into the world ‘Ìâ‰âÂÌâ‰Ûù and categorized it as just another extracurricular activity.
God is one creative Creator. He gave us the cosmos, the sun, the moon, and the stars. He gave us the mountains and the seas, volcanoes and icebergs, tropical rainforests and sand-covered beaches. He gave us the humpback whale, the platypus, the giraffe and the dragonfly. God also gave us humanity. God created us male and female … beautifully distinct and wonderfully made in His divine image. God created marriage and God created sex.
Did you catch that last line?
Have you ever wondered why God made you male or female? Think about it . . . God could have made us 'unisex' like that billboard I saw in the airport, but he made us two genders. Why?
Well if we want to understand why we were created, we have to look back to the one who created us – God. In the Book of Genesis we learn that . . .
It means waiting for the person God intended you to be with, and especially saving sex for marriage. The world says, 'Go ahead . . . do whatever you want, whenever you want, as long as it makes you feel good.' God made sex, and He made it to be an expression of free and fruitful love in the context of marriage. Don’t forget though, that it’s never too late to recommit to purity if you’ve already fallen. None of us are perfect; it’s very hard to stay pure.
I decided to ask one of these teens at the pool what she thought of the book, and she turned bright red when I interrupted her. She even admitted to being embarrassed because I interrupted her at “a really naughty part.” When we talked about it, she said that she knew the sex scenes were “a little much” but didn’t see anything wrong with it. “After all,” she said, “It’s not like I’m sitting here at the pool making out with my boyfriend while I read.”
Modesty is annoying. That's right, I said it.
And not just little brother level of annoying. It's like stand-still traffic, spilled hot coffee, only AM radio, and little brother in the back seat level of annoying.
I really, truly, feel this way. Dressing modestly is not easy. You have to search longer when you're at the mall. You can't always embrace the new fashions without a little (or a lot) of modification.
When a man sees a woman whom he thinks is sexy, he's looking at her with one thing in mind: sex. This might be great if every man walking around had a beautiful vision of sex as “a glorious thing created by God to be an act of selfless love, a gift of oneself created for marriage to be an icon and foretaste of the joys of the marriage of Christ and the Church in Heaven!”
My first reaction to this video was shock. I couldn't believe that someone could speak like that in such a public forum. If a speaker in a similar forum talked about how Jesus died for all of our sins he or she would have been rushed off the stage. But I quickly got over that. St. Peter wrote, 'Don't be surprised that a trial is occurring among you, as if something strange were happening to you.' (1 Peter 4:12) Christians should expect to be persecuted.
One night in high school, my ex-boyfriend's best friend called me up. He told me that he and his girlfriend, and my ex-boyfriend, were all hanging out, and that I should come over. From the tone in his voice and slight innuendo in his words, I knew what this meant.
My ex-boyfriend and I had played the 'friends with benefits' game before. Thus I wasn't surprised and actually felt a bit flattered that this popular, talented, good-looking guy would beckon me to him, even if we weren't still dating.
I excitedly rushed over to the best friend's house, greeted everyone, and proceeded to 'hang out' exclusively with my ex-boyfriend. I didn't see anything wrong with making-out with my ex-boyfriend, because after all, I wasn't having sex.
Man lives more in the external world, because made from the earth and closest to it; it is his mission to rule over it and subject it. Woman lives more in the internal world, because she was created from an inner, human life.
Man is more interested in the outer world; woman in the inner world. Man talks about things; woman more about persons. Man fashions products of the earth; woman fashions life, having come from life, both Divine and human. Man, more related to the earth, makes sacrifices for things that are in the future and are abstract; woman, more related to the human, is more inclined to make sacrifices for persons and for that which is immediate.