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| APRIL 2005: |
The Revolution in Singles Ministry - part 1
Renewing the Church and Transforming the World - Part 1
By Dave Sloan
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Perhaps the most dramatic shift ever to take place in Western society has been the very recent shift from family life to single life.
- In 1950, singles comprised 20% of the households in America. But soon perhaps this year, singles will comprise a majority of all households.
- Between 1970 and 2000 the number of Americans between 25 and 34 who were unmarried tripled. (All statistics from www.census.gov).
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The future of our society and of our Church depends upon reaching this exploding demographic for two simple reasons:
- Singles are the only source of families - all marriages, and all consecrated vocations as well, can only come from single people. The current crisis in both married and consecrated vocations cannot be remedied without providing formation to single people who are the sole source of all of those vocations.
- The interests of our society are racing at a breakneck pace away from the values and issues of family life and toward the values and issues of single life. In recognizing how to reach and respond to singles, we are recognizing how to reach our entire society.
From the beginning of history until very recently the norm was to live from family to family--to live most of one's life in a nuclear family and practically all of one's life in an extended family. Scripture calls for a man to "leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife" (Gen 2:24), without mention of any protracted period of singleness. Life, throughout our history, has always been family life. There have certainly been exceptions, but they were understood to be exceptions.
Until very recently, the ascendant value in our culture had always been the notion of the "common good," a natural extension of the concepts of family and extended family. In the turbulence of social change in the last half century, most of us failed to notice that this notion of common good has largely been replaced by the notion of individual rights, or personal freedom.
Perhaps the person who pointed this out most prophetically, and in the clearest terms, was Justice Blackmun, in the majority opinion he authored for Roe V. Wade. Justice Blackmun observed that the ideal of privacy has become the one upon which we as a society make our most crucial, life and death decisions. Justice Blackmun was wrong in the conclusions he derived from this, but profoundly and powerfully accurate in his assessment of what we as a society have come to treasure most highly: absolute autonomy - radical privacy.
Roe V. Wade was authored in 1973. Between 1970 and 2000:
- The percentage of Americans living alone increased 2.5 times.
- The percentage of people living alone compared to couples living with children increased over 5.5 times.
This astounding shift toward aloneness and isolation is rapid and ongoing and gives no sign of abating.
The ascendant value of radical privacy is given expression in our culture in so many ways today that we hardly even notice it. We have reality TV programs premised not upon shared experience but upon systematically excluding others until the winner achieves the modern ideal, the coveted status of isolation as the sole survivor. We have conservative thinkers espousing rugged individualism, self-reliance, and personal responsibility for one's self as the supreme values. At the same time we have liberal thinkers rejecting any notion of absolute truth in favor of the individual's right to choose his own truth, even his own reality.
It is certainly true that everyone in society is affected by the trend away from the concept of family and common good and toward the concept of personal rights and freedoms. But no group in our society exhibits the traits and suffers the consequences of modernity's radical privacy so much as do single adults.
One of Pope John Paul IIs favorite quotes is that, "man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself" (Gaudium et spes, n. 24). Giving is God's nature. Giving is the essence of love, and giving is exactly what singles typically have not learned how to do. Even more, giving is precisely what single life in our culture has taught us all not to do.
Giving is most naturally learned within the context of family. In family life we learn to put others before ourselves, and in the joy of this giving we discover who we are as God's children. In our modern culture, and particularly in living the modern single life, we learn to put ourselves and our own desires first, and second and third and fourth and so on, as we isolate ourselves more and more fully from those around us.
Who can doubt that this isolation reaches its fullest expression in the modern sexual lifestyle, especially as lived by singles? An effective, descriptive term for the preferred and certainly most common sexual lifestyle of the modern single is "serial monogamy." Serial monogamy is systematic reinforcement of abandonment, of abandoning and being abandoned by the person to whom we are bound the closest. Serial monogamies, more popularly and politely termed "committed relationships," almost always involve some form of subtle, implicit deception as to what is actually being committed.
What is in fact being committed is almost never stated out loud. If it were, it would perhaps sound something like this. "I promise not to have sex with anyone other than you until I'm through or almost through having sex with you." This is too crass, too depressing, to be admitted out loud. And it is certainly not consistent with the longings of our hearts. And so there is almost always a pretence of a promise or commitment to something vaguely more meaningful - but it is only a pretence. That is why serial monogamy, with its serial abandonment, is experienced by its participants as serial betrayal.
Serial monogamy, abandonment, and betrayal are the instructors in the school of isolation. This school decimates our capacity to give and to receive love, teaching us that we have nothing of value to give, and that all we can expect to receive in return for our nothing is a lie. We need look no further to discover why today we have few successful marriages and few consecrated vocations. This school of serial monogamies is the anti-marriage prep course, and the anti-seminary.
The good news is that everyone knows that serial monogamy is empty - and no one really wants it. Almost everyone is open and ready to be offered a better way, a way that speaks to the truth of who we really are and fulfills the desires which are found in the depths of our hearts.
For more information visit: TheologyoftheBody.net, ReaLove.net, GodofDesire.com, ChristopherWest.com, yam.org.
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