Prepare your chariot and go down, lest the rain stop you..

I feel compelled to say that I find the various texts to which Berenike linked in her last post extremely irritating. The attitude they exemplify is profoundly destructive. Virginity and Chastity are most precious things. Chastity may be retrieved but that part of it which is founded in the acquired virtue of temperance cannot be cheaply redeemed. When Virginity is lost it is truly lost. Virginity and Chastity are distinct in that sense even when Virginity is considered under the aspect of a virtue. Every sin we commit takes the place of a meritorious act we might have performed and which we will never now perform. The guilt may be erased but the merit and the innocence that is lost cannot be restored. Other merits and virtues may be acquired but they will never strictly fill the place of those that were lost. Innocence in the psychological sense cannot be regained. Virginity is a morning that lost will never return. Scab-picking is not actually a cardinal virtue. Surely it is liberating to accept that such things are truly lost when they are lost. We do neither innocence nor virginity nor ourselves any favours by attempting to reinvent innocence in order to avoid admitting when it is lost. Innocence is not cold it cannot be preserved through a lack of passion. It is a fire, a burning passion, a refusal to surrender. Only because the innocent one knows that once innocence is lost it is forever lost has he or she any hope at all of preserving it. On this earth it is possible for someone else to ruin your life, to take so precious a thing from you forever and yet that is no excuse for you to surrender it or curse God that you have lost it. If God had never restored Job to temporal happiness that would not have licensed Job to curse Him for his pains. Temporal happiness can be taken from you through no fault of your own. Once you are in a state of grace only you can let go of eternal happiness, but others can help you. The only tragedy in life is not to be a saint. If I die tomorrow I will not be a saint. Please God He will receive me after purgation into His kingdom, but still I could have been a saint. If I die tomorrow my life will be a ruined thing, please God it will not be completely destroyed. I am responsible for its ruin but other people have helped me. I have helped others ruin their lives. Let not either of us comfort ourselves that we can pick up the pieces. Please God we shall pick up the pieces, but even if it is completed the edifice will never soar into the heavens and pierce the clouds as it might have done. In this sense even the saints have ruined lives. Only Mary ever Virgin, the Immaculate Conception, springs perfect and untainted from the hand of God. Give her her due. Accept what you have done and what you have lost. Pick yourself up and walk on. A light still shines in man, let him walk on lest the darkness engulf him forever.