Laid For Your Faith

My ward recently, as all good singles wards must, held a chastity lesson. This was no ordinary chastity lesson, either--it was a special two-hour, everybody-all-together, question-and-answer chastity extravaganza.

(I told my dad this and he laughed out loud. "I hope they make a big deal out of it," he said, "as that's the closest you're going to get." I'd like to think that was a plural you.)

The lesson, in contrast to many of my more awkward chastity lectures at BYU (I remember, as a freshman, leaning over to my friends sitting next to me and wondering what on earth "Levi loving" was, and why my bishop was so against it), was intelligent, articulate, and refreshingly specific, though, frankly, I could have used a little less repetition of the word "probe" in close proximity to the word "genitals." But, you know, maybe that's just me.

As we were setting up the chairs for the lesson, the first counselor in the bishopric told us to pass out hymnbooks for our opening hymn. "Will we sing a special chastity song?" my friend joked.

The counselor considered for a moment: "If you can write a chastity hymn before the meeting starts, we'll sing it."

My mind instantly started racing with possibilities, but, unfortunately, the chairs were set up and the meeting began before I could figure out how to force lines like "As I have loved you, love one another, but try to avoid probing one another's genitals," and "God is love, but we mean agape and not eros, so, please, keep your hands off each other" into the tunes they were meant for.

Had I been given another ten minutes, though, we could have begun our chastity lesson appropriately:

Onward single Mormons,
Chaste and true and pure.
Bear the cross of virtue;
Abstinence endure.
Sex oral and otherwise,
Petting heavy and light
All these things we do without
In our celibate plight.

Chorus:
Onward single Mormons,
Chaste and true and pure.
Bear the cross of virtue;
Abstinence endure.

It's probably just as well, though, as I already had my hands full during the meeting trying to explain the proceedings to the Indonesian investigator I've been translating/explicating for; justifying an entire church meeting dedicated to the details of celibacy was so hard--"Um, you know we don't usually talk about "passionate kissing" in church, right?"--that I can't imagine what I would have done with an entire hymn dedicated to those same details.

Oh, and our real opening hymn? "How Firm a Foundation." I'm a terrible person, I know, but I snickered.