The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20160320

Ladder of Divine AccentThe fifteenth step on John’s Ladder deals with LUST and CHASTITY. St. John defines Chastity as

… a supernatural denial of what one is by nature, so that a mortal and corruptible body is competing in a truly marvelous way with incorporeal spirits. A chaste man is someone who has driven out bodily love by means of divine love, who has used heavenly fire to quench the first of the flesh.

 Chastity, as we saw earlier, should not be thought of in purely sexual terms – or merely as a virtue opposed to sexual depravity. It has a deeper meaning. We pray in the Mystery of Marriage that the newlyweds live in “chastity.” So, a more accurate definition of Chastity must be “whole-mindedness.” It is ultimately harmony between body and soul, between the flesh and the spirit – a state of mind in which the two do not war with each other, but work together as one. John writes that chastity is a name         common to all virtues saying: “The chaste man is not someone with a body undefiled but rather a person whose members are in complete subjection to the soul.

Chastity must not be understood in terms of celibacy, but in terms of control over one’s sexual impulses. Within marriage, sex is blessed. It is not only for procreation – it is also an expression of love.

So perhaps the most important idea on this rung of John’s Ladder is that in a chaste person there is a       harmony between their spiritual and physical lives. This means that a person enjoys those things that will bring their closer to God and to a real understanding of themselves and rejects those things that can distract them from becoming more like Jesus.

If we are in touch with God’s Spirit within us, then leading a balanced life become possible for we only do those things that lead us to union with God.

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