Vigils Reading – Weekday
October 29
A VIRGIN LIFE
From the writing of Louis Bouyer3
Baptism is our union with Christ’s cross, our union with his death, so that we may also be united with him in his risen life of glory. Baptism therefore implies, and has always implied, in some way the abandonment, the renunciation of everything in human life as this is lived in a “natural”, that is, a fallen and sinful way. This fact was made clear to the first Christians by the very conditions in which God’s providence allowed them to live; they knew that if they wanted to be members of Christ by faith and baptism, they had to be prepared for martyrdom. They had to be ready at any moment to witness to the reality of their attachment to Christ. They had to be ready to give a witness which might imply the abandonment, not only of all the pleasures of human life, but of life itself.
And thus from the very beginning it was understood that someone could not be a Christian without in some way struggling with the world, without accepting a permanent and lifelong struggle with their own “flesh”, with their own sinful self. Christians understood, of course, that they were called to take part in Christ’s work of saving the world, but they knew that they could not take this part unless in some way they escaped from the world. Christ saved the world because he engaged in the struggle to death with the powers of evil… He was willing to abandon the life of this world for the sake of the salvation of humanity. A struggle with the evil in oneself and the world, and abandonment and escape from the world, is a necessary preliminary to taking part with Christ in his work of redeeming the world.
From the very beginning of Christianity, therefore, a virgin life, all life consecrated to Christ to the exclusion of all human attachment, even the most legitimate, has been proposed as the ideal realization of the will of God. It has always been considered better that Christians, in order to fight most effectively against the powers of this world, should abandon their hopes of realizing the fullness of life in this world, so as to be free and ready to meet Christ with his cross and to follow him through death to the world of eternal life.
This virgin life, this life of freedom from the claims and attachments of this world, was thought of first as the ideal preparation for the possibility of martyrdom – a possibility which faced every Christian in the first Christian generations. But when the persecutions of the first centuries ended, it came to be understood that this free and spontaneous offering of one’s own life to Christ in virginity, this consecration to him which implies the abandonment of the hope of realizing human love and love in this world – that this consecration was not only the ideal preparation for martyrdom, for full union with Christ and his cross, but that it was itself a spiritual martyrdom. For it is a spiritual witnessing by our whole lives to the love of God revealed and given to us in Christ, and to our desire to respond fully to that love.
3
Liturgy and Religious Life, St. Louis, 1959, pp. 20-22.