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My own history with chastity is nothing to be proud of. I first had sex when I was 15, with a guy I met at summer camp. We dated for three months and had sex, but gradually our relationship dissolved—he went away to college, we wrote letters occasionally, but things fizzled out. A year later, I started college myself. And even though I was part of an observant Jewish community, I kept having sex. My freshman year, I dated a stunning man (he looked like an Armani model), and we had sex a few times. Then I began dating the man I now think of as "my college boyfriend," and we had sex too. None of this behavior was sanctioned by my Jewish community, so I kept it pretty quiet.

As I graduated from college and moved from New York to England for graduate school, I got pretty serious about Christianity. I was going to church regularly by then, praying to Jesus, thinking about him as I walked down the street, believing with a certainty that surprised me that he was who he said he was: God. I did some of the things you might expect from someone who believes that Jesus is God. I got baptized. I started spending inordinate numbers of hours hanging around with other Christians. I read the Gospels. I prayed the Psalms. I wore a small silver cross around my neck, proclaiming to passersby that I am part of this tribe whose allegiance is to Jesus.

But there were other things that you might expect a Christian to do, and I did not do them. I didn't forswear sex. I didn't tithe. I didn't especially enjoy going to church on Sunday mornings; in general, I had to grit my teeth, silence my alarm clock, and drag myself there.

I knew, dimly, that Christianity doesn't look kindly on premarital sex, but I couldn't have told you much about where Christian teachings about sex came from. It would not have been too difficult, of course, to get more clarity on this sex issue. But I didn't do that for one principal reason: I didn't really want to get more clarity on Christian sexual ethics, because I wanted, should the opportunity arise, the option of having sex.

Instead, I settled for an easy conclusion: what God really cared about was that people not have sex that might be harmful in some way, sex that was clearly meaningless, loveless, casual. I more or less managed to abide by that. I didn't have sex until that truly committed relationship came along, and then when it did—when I met a man I'll call Q.—I did. Once, during the Q. months, I broke my own pledge, to God and to Q., having sex one night with an ex-boyfriend and then lying to Q. about it. I began to have some twinges of misgiving.

The twinges continued (even after the "committed relationship" with Q. ended and another "committed relationship" began). Eventually I went to a priest. I was there to confess a long litany of sins, not just sexual sin. When I came to the confession of sexual sin, my confessor said, gently but firmly, "Well, Lauren, that's sin."

And in that sacramental moment, kneeling with another Christian whose sole task was to convey Christ's grace and absolution to me, something sunk in. I knew that this priest had just told me something true.

I wish I could say that at that moment I abandoned all that smacked of sexual sin and never looked back; but that's not true. But I did begin what has been a sometimes-halting movement, deeper into chastity.

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Sex in the Body of Christ | Chastity is a spiritual discipline for the whole church.

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May 2005, Vol. 49, No. 5