Status Updates From Chastity: Reconciliation of...

Bp. Varden’s writing is much more poetic than I expected it to be, which is equally frustrating and refreshing for me.

"To be seen in truth is an intimate experience. Sight can in fact be more intimate than touch. As any pastor knows, people often go out in search of sexual adventure because they do not feel seen, suffer from this fact and crave a substitute. The risk is that pleasure serves, then, to exacerbate sadness and make loneliness worse. Intimacy does not have to be sexual. Sex can stand in intimacy’s way."

"The fact that [Jesus] looked at her peacefully transformed her."

"The wound which a chaste eye inflicts does not humiliate or hurt. It is sweet, like the infant’s gaze. It cuts us to the quick but feels like a blessing, reminding us of what sight can be like. To see in this manner is to re-enter paradise, says Bruno. It is part of the process of exchanging the garment of skin for the robe of glory."

"Once our eyes have been opened to faith as something real, a reorientation of existence is called for.
Faith in the Son of God made man requires of me an embodied response, made concrete in a life of conversion, not just in the rehearsal of abstract sublimities."