My apologies for the repost. I’m working today on a large article for the inaugural issue of the new bioethics journal ProLife ProPatria. I’ll be back tomorrow. For those who are newcomers, this article is the third in a series. The other two are linked in the text. I would suggest starting with “Of Bridal Veils and Little Girls”, followed by “Purity and Play” nd ending with this one. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.
Little girls are unburdened. There is a lightness about little girls in those golden years before adolescence that is unmistakeable. Its unblemished beauty is like a rose bud, with all of the promise of the splendor about to unfold.
A florist once shared that rose buds exposed to a sudden and extreme chill will not open. They wither in their unrevealed potential.
So it is when youth is corrupted, when our daughters and sons are lured into sex before they have established their own ego boundaries, when sex forges bonds that youth cannot sustain, when the inevitable is heartache-and often times worse. Their blossoming is interrupted by confusion, anger, guilt and shame. The inability to sustain the powerful bonds created by sex leads to feelings of inadequacy and isolation, self-reproach and depression.
The very people holding themselves out as the solution have been the problem all along. Planned Parenthood is aggressive in its efforts to cut our sons and daughters off from trusting in us, playing to their youthful cravings for autonomy. They and their fellow travelers in the Culture of Death have for too long pumped them full of estrogens, stuffed their pockets full of condoms, and lured them to abort their babies when the inevitable contraceptive failure occurred. In the process they have filled them with a false sense of security and left them utterly unprepared for the emotional and spiritual fallout. The girls are not the only ones to suffer.
Contrary to popular belief, boys are not aloof. It’s an act. Boys are as devastated in a breakup as girls. The macho act is just that: whistling past the graveyard. But is the damage irreparable?
Blessedly no for most of it.
It starts by focussing on the true meaning of purity. I’ve treated this in other posts, notably Purity and Play and in, Of Bridal Veils and Little Girls.
Purity of heart, mind, body and soul is the very essence of a child’s spiritual rhythms. It isn’t that sex is dirty, it’s that the beauty of sex is caught up in an entirely different set of rhythms; those of radical self-donation to one’s spouse. It is the inability to deliver on the promises made in physical union that becomes dysrhythmic, and psychologically destabilizing. Sex is a great good that many parents themselves have not always seen or honored as such.
So, first we must reconcile with our past and with God. Then we must be ceaseless witnesses to the great good of sex, appealing to the bonds of love and intimacy created during sex as one of the exclusive goods of marriage. Those who have been sexually active will intuitively grasp that portion of the message.
Young people know how pathetic older adults look when they try to be cool, using the slang of teens. They get what dysrhythmic means when presented objectively in the reversal of roles. They also get it, and are relieved when they are brought to understand that they are simply not ready to deliver on the depth of the promises made in sex. These powerful emotional realities, properly explained, demystify for teens what have been to that point a nebulous angst.
Properly restored to their rhythms they become unburdened again, the unfolding of their potential restored in its function and beauty.
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Photo via mylittlegirlsboutique.com
Coming Home 
When I was in sixth grade, I remember one morning being on safety patrol, and watching two second grade or so girls walking around the playground with innocent smiles talking to their teacher. I thought, how sad, they look so sweet and innocent. In a few years, they’ll grow up to be like the girls in my class.
By today’s standards, what bothered me about the girls in my class was nothing — even sex education was a couple of years away. But I had a sense something was being lost. Eventually some of the sweetness is recovered — I wasn’t really ready for what any of the girls were becoming either.