Purity and Hospitality
Today I thought about “Purity Rings.” They’re popular among young people nowadays. They are worn as part of a vow to abstain from certain sexual activities such as pre-marital or extra-marital intercourse. In and of themselves, I suppose they can be meaningful to those who wear them, as a sign of holding and maintaining important boundaries in a culture that all too often has no clue what “boundaries” are.
But what bothers me is not so much that we pay so much attention to purity, but rather that we pay correspondingly little attention to hospitality. And I think this might be because hospitality sometimes subverts purity.
I’m reminded of the Irish legend about St. Brigit and two of her nuns who were travelling during Lent. (more…)
