Is Holiness Actually Possible in Dating?

Is holiness actually possible in dating?

That's the question I keep asking God over and over again.

It's not a question I though I'd have to ask Him - at least, not in a personally relevant way. ("What's that, Kate?" I hear you ask, "You mean, it IS a personally relevant question for you now?!")

But you're becoming a nun, right?

For pretty much exactly five years, a huge part of my identity has been grounded in the fact that I was the girl discerning religious life. I hadn't (since those angsty early high school days) dated anyone - partly because I wasn't interested, partly because I was SO interested in becoming a nun.

It's not like I didn't desire romance or marriage or family. I deeply thirsted for them, and frequently (tearfully) brought those desires to prayer to beg Jesus for the courage to make any sacrifice He might ask of me.

But I also really, really wanted to be a Saint. I craved holiness - becoming the most perfect, whole, loving, generous, heroic, radical, world-transforming, biography-worthy version of myself. I craved a life fully in union with God and His will.

Heck, I still do. More than anything in the world, I want to point to God as the summit of everything my heart has ever desired. My ten-day stay at Jamberoo Abbey in April solidified that within me.

Jamberoo was also a major turning point in my spiritual life. Jesus met me on top of that mountain and asked me to go back down with Him, to become fully incarnate in the messy realities of human life. He told me to stop trying to make the world peripheral and allow it to become translucent  - to be a contemplative right here in the middle of the world - to live deeply entrenched in His love and so point others to Him.

Inasmuch as my discernment of religious life had been a genuine response to the tug of grace on my heart - the slow, steady process of falling in love with Jesus more and more every day, until I couldn't desire anything but Him - there was also an extent to which I really wanted to run away from the world. I didn't want mess or incarnation. I wanted clear-cut, black-and-white, twelve-step-program Holiness. And in all honesty, I'd begun to think that wasn't possible outside of the convent.

I saw what the world looked like - a sex-saturated culture, a greed-driven consumer economy, a follow-your-dreams-even-if-you're-trampling-on-others mentality. And I saw what Jesus' vision for a life of Love looked like: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the pure of heart..." And like many young Catholics, my instinct was to run away, to hide myself in vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and curl up in the tabernacle until the good Lord saw fit to take me to heaven.

My instinct is still to run away. Four months of daily prayer about 'becoming incarnate' and 'making the world translucent, not peripheral' doesn't overwrite the instinct to run away.

But Jesus has been relentless in calling me to persevere with "ordinary life" reminding me that on the surface it may be similar to everyone around me, but 'faith, piercing the superficialities, discloses that God is accomplishing very great things.'  (J.P. de Caussade)

Srsly, Kate, are you going to tell us about the dating thing yet?

No, I'm going to keep talking about spirituality, because this is my blog and I can do whatever the heck I like here. So there. Ha.

Jk, I'll tell you. After a few more paragraphs of spirituality.

Not too long after getting home from the Abbey, the Lord began to prompt a more thorough consideration of the idea of partnership. Having ascertained that I wasn't (yet) entering a convent, I began to realise how thirsty I was for community. I really (really, really, really) didn't want to date anyone, but I simultaneously craved companionship on the journey.

Over the course of several weeks, Jesus began to address my fears, past wounds, and inhibitions surrounding the concept of relationships. It was messy. I was frustrated. I wanted to run away and become a nun.

But He chipped away steadily and broke down a few barriers I'd staunchly been reinforcing in the name of independence and infallibility.

And just when my heart started to soften..... *enter Boy*

Finally, we're getting to the good stuff. So how'd you meet?

Gross. No. I'm not telling you details. This is a spirituality blog, not a gossip column.

(suffice to say we'd already known each other for a while in an academic, service, and religious context, recently discovered our strikingly similar tastes in humour, books, and poetry, and were suddenly spending several hours a night messaging. Then I went to Europe for a month, avoided the question for far longer than I should have, and finally ended up having a DTR with the Boy five hours into what was meant to be a brief catch-up to swap notes on Würzburg. FINE. HAPPY? Can we get back to Jesus now?)

Where were we? Oh, yup, softening heart.

I knew, through very clear and repeated signals from the Holy Spirit in prayer, that God was calling me to be in this relationship, even if it was only going to be short-lived. For the record, I did not (and DO not) have any expectation that dating will necessarily lead to marriage and happily-ever-after. Too many young Catholics date in an intensely vocational way that doesn't actually give the relationship (or the other person) space to breathe and become three-dimensional. That's not at all what I want.

(although, having four of your close friends get married in the course of six weeks - and beginning to date someone in the midst of those weddings - can be.... less than helpful... for remembering that you don't want to get married any time soon...)

But even knowing that God was calling me to date a particular person (a particularly delightful person, might I add) didn't appease the fears in my heart that dating was fundamentally incompatible with holiness.

I'm not just talking chastity here. Sure, saving sex for marriage is a thing. But it's not the only thing that determines whether you're pursuing a pathway completely paved by God's Love.

I was scared that I'd fall out of love with Jesus.

I was scared that I'd forget how to choose simplicity and poverty in my material life.

I was scared that I'd become 'that girl' who only cares about her boyfriend, and never thinks about other people's needs.

I was scared of not being generous in serving the world.

I was scared of proclaiming by the way I lived that I was finding my happiness in something less than the eternal and unquenchable love of God.

I was scared that dating was fundamentally selfish - an exercise in boosting my ego, or something.

The whole enterprise seemed fraught with opportunities to stop striving for holiness.

But the mistake I didn't think to avoid was the trap I actually fell into: not trusting God.

See, at the end of the day, holiness isn't something we achieve by striving for it (much as my competitive nature would love something to WIN at).

Holiness is the wholeness that comes from letting God be the only answer I need.

Holiness is learning to receive His love.

Holiness is gratitude, hope, and adoration of the extravagant God who desperately desires for me to meet His loving gaze.

Holiness is trusting that His ways are higher than mine, and I can't rationalise the path to sanctity with my own schemes of self-justification.

Holiness is accepting a Mercy that I can't even offer to myself.

Is holiness possible in dating?

"With human beings this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."
Matthew 19:26

Holiness is possible whenever we let God be the answer. Right now, the Lord is using this dating relationship to answer a lot of my fundamental misunderstandings about who God is. He's using it to break down my fear of genuine vulnerability and desire for emotional immunity. He's using it to teach me the mysteries of human life. He's using it to show me the depths of my insecurities, and arrogance, and concupiscence, and self-centredness - and reveal the potential for a life of grace, love, and humility that lies on the other side of Spirit-led growth.

And most of this is so much more passive than active. It's not me learning how to heroically date like a capital-S Saint. It's me learning to be attentive and receptive to the breath of God hovering over my life.

So..... Tips? Tricks? Will you tell us more about the Boy?

Um, no to the last one. I dunno. PM me or something.

But for the first two, I've found a few things that make holiness in dating seem a bit more feasible at this stage of the game:


1.) Not ditching my personal prayer life

How I could possibly process a new relationship without quality daily Jesus time is unfathomable to me. My head would literally short-circuit. Like, I'm talkin' nuclear explosions.

But I also realise now how easy it would be for personal prayer time to get thrown out the window. My schedule was full before I added a Boy. Now it's chaos. Late nights lead to sleep-ins which lead to running for the bus which lead to 'oh-whoops-have-I-even-prayed-today?'

God's been pretty clear with me: a daily hour of prayer is non-negotiable. Not because I can 'win the holiness game' by spiritual gymnastics. But because I desperately need Living Water. Every day, I'll pray morning prayer of the divine office, use the readings of the day for Lectio Divina / journalling, try to get to daily Mass, and build in at least one 2-3 hour prayer session every week. Sometimes that barely feels like enough to sustain the pace of life and my hyper-need for processing!

Jesus is still the first and central love of my life. That's never going to change. And so I want to commit to spending time basking in that love so that it can inform everything else I do, especially dating someone and communicating God's love to them.


2.) Praying for the grace that I/we need to overcome specific temptations

"Poverty, chastity, and obedience" still apply to dating life as much as religious life. None of them are easy. The middle one's a lot harder that I realised it was going to be.

I'm realising that the choices we make in a moment are always the products of broader decisions. I know I need to decide every day that I value simplicity of lifestyle, purity of speech and act, and humility in pursuing God's will over my own. If I don't commit to these and pray for them proactively, they don't just happen organically.

Holiness is possible when I let God be the answer. I firmly believe that when I look to Him and surrender to His will, true happiness follows, along with the virtues necessary to pursue a life according to the Church's teachings.


3.) Casting a vision of the ideal

I wrote a list. No, not a "man of my dreams and all his perfect qualities" list. A "what I value in a relationship" list. It's peppered with things like 'rational conflict resolution' and 'sharing about the ways we notice God moving in our lives' and 'brainstorming the bigger picture together'.

Is this necessary for holiness? Possibly not. But I think it's a helpful metric in continuing to analyse whether the 'here-and-now' of this relationship is lining up with the bigger picture of what I feel called to. We don't have to have it all together - but I hope we're always on the right trajectory.


4.) Seeing and serving Christ in the other

Oh my gosh, the loveliest thing about dating someone is that you get to think about ways to make them happy. Their messages that you screenshot to remind you of things they like. The little notes you make in the margins of your journal with ideas for their birthday. The feeling of bringing them a hot chocolate while they're studying and affirming them on working hard. Squeeeeeee!

I recognise that I have a slight tendency towards excess when it comes to acts of service. It's probably a little bit fuelled by a need-to-be-needed and love-of-being-loved. But the exciting thing about being a Christian is knowing that when I serve someone else - the poor, my friends, the Boy - I can actually recognise the person of Christ in them, and make it an act of love for God as well.

I want to keep noticing ways to be attentive to Christ's needs in all people, and continue prioritising "the least of these" in the ways I serve. But charity also does begin at home, and dating can, if you let it, become a school for understanding what it means to value someone else's needs above your own.

It's also cool to acknowledge that by journeying alongside the Boy in this season (however short or long the season is), I am uniquely positioned to be a vessel of God's love to him. I get to discern the action of the Holy Spirit in his life. I get to minister to his wounds and insecurities with a tenderness that comes from God, not me. I get to empower him in his calling to be a missionary disciple. And that's pretty darned cool.


5.) Letting Jesus love me through the other

I've never been very good at accepting God's love for me. Especially this year, I've had some major struggles in prayer when life has been good because I've felt so guilty for being happy. There is injustice in the world. People don't thrive. People don't have the privileges that I do. And so every time God attempts to show me His love, I complain.

Jesus has been pretty clear with me that one of the core functions of this relationship in my spiritual life is that it is teaching me to receive God's love as a free gift. He wants me to know how to accept blessings and be filled with gratitude rather than guilt.

And in the context of this relationship, there's no running away from goodness. Sometimes, I will have to be happy (Dude. All I want is to suffer. Why does sunshine exist? Smh). But it all becomes a chance to praise God, from whom all blessings flow, and in whom all love finds its source.

~~~

Kaaaate, why do you write such long-winded blog posts?

Ugh, I know, right? I have to write them, you see. It's the only way I can deal with my many tangled thoughts. Why you bother reading them is beyond me, though.

But since you've read to the end, here's a final thought:

I'm a work in progress. So is the Boy. We're both on a journey towards heaven - towards Home in the arms of the God who loved us into life. Right now we're walking together. We might not always be. That's cool too. Right now is sufficient unto itself.

I'll be honest - I haven't gotten over a single one of those fears or misconceptions about what Holiness really looks like. I'm still caught in the belief that a 'normal life' cannot make a Saint. But faith, piercing the superficialities, discloses that God is accomplishing very great things.

Let it be done unto me according to His word.

AMDG