As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you (Isaiah 62:5). The Church reads this passage twice — every year at the Christmas Vigil Mass and early in Ordinary Time of Year C. It is rife with a hope and beauty that borders on the eschatological: in the time of the Lord’s Coming there will be rejoicing as when “a young man marries a virgin.” So, virginity is not just a “nice thing.” It is an expression of the joy that reflects the fulfillment of God’s Promise, which is the fulfillment of Love.

Which makes me wonder: What does it mean to a young person today? Let’s be honest. Don Williams was onto something when he sang back in 1980, “I don’t believe virginity/Is as common as it used to be.” Forty-five years later, has much changed?

Fornication (a.k.a. “premarital sex”) seems no big deal in many circles (until Dobbs threatened the abortion license). It’s never talked about in homilies. “Hookup culture” is alive in some quarters. In others, interest in the other sex has petered out. So, would a young person sitting at Mass on the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (C) be moved in any way by Isaiah’s vision? Or would that person consign it, keeping with the canons of postmodernity, to the “personal” truths of the “time-and-culture-conditioned” patriarchy in which it was written? And what can the Church say in response?

I’ll say something. I’ll take another line from that Don Williams song: “I believe in love.”

Why did a young man marry a virgin? Because it was a social expectation? Because, to steal John Adams’s line from “1776,” those expectations suppressed his “sexual combustibility”? No doubt some people thought (and think) that way. But one hopes that others think a little deeper.

In his powerful book The Christian Meaning of Human Sexuality (here), Jesuit Paul Quay writes about sexual intercourse as a symbol — a symbol of complete, total self-giving in love. The Church doesn’t teach what it does about sex because sex is bad; it teaches what it does because it is so good, so noble, that it should not be stained.

As an act of total self-giving, sex is intended to be a unique expression and symbol between two people. When it is the “first” such giving, it acquires a unique and special significance. It’s said a person’s first love always stays with him. How much truer of their first sexual encounter? And if that’s not the case, then what went wrong?

If sexual intercourse is a sign of total and mutual self-giving, how can one “give” one’s self to multiple people, especially casually? Can one give one’s self “totally” one time, in a one-night stand? Can we not admit that such “giving” is a lie? It is a deformation of the symbol, a mockery of what this act inherently means. Ah, you might say, “you are overlaying intercourse with levels of meaning and intensity that you might think are there, but I don’t. Who’s to say your feelings should prevail?”

Well, sexual intercourse seems to be one of two things. It’s either primarily about you or it’s primarily about me. If it’s primarily about you, it seems to require some sense of — to steal Karol Wojtyła’s words — love and responsibility: to say that “I am here for you and will be always”; to reckon with the fact that what I am doing says, “I could/might become a parent with you (maybe even if I don’t want to) but that’s okay, because I love you totally.”

Or it can be primarily about me, because pleasure always remains a very personal thing. It can be “coordinated,” even “synchronized,” but can it really be “shared?” Does “my pleasure” become less pleasurable because yours isn’t more pleasurable? Anybody familiar with the variation in male/female climax/orgasm knows the answer to that question. Which means that if sex is primarily about pleasure, it is primarily about me, and that resets the whole focus. Juice Newton was not far off the mark when she sang, “It’s hard to be a lover when you say you’re only in it for fun.”

And let’s admit the injustice in the double standard: the responsibility is borne more intensely and longer by the woman (which is why abortionists argue for abortion-on-demand to “even the tables” by eliminating the baby responsibility).

No, virginity is a powerful symbol, a symbol of a total self-giving of two people, one to the other in a way to which nobody else in the world is entitled. It is a powerful symbol that says this love is and can only properly be expressed this way with you. It is an act that says what may come of this act — a child that makes us “two in one flesh” — is the supreme gift and expression of the unique love we share here and now.

Casual sex can never say any of that.

One can marshal lots of social science data showing that premarital sex, far from being a “test drive” for marriage, actually contributes to future marital breakdown. As a theologian, I’ll use such data as corroboration for my arguments but it’s not really what matters or what I’m interested in pressing. What I want to stress is what the Lord is saying through Isaiah: that there is a joy — or at least should be — when a young man (and woman) marries a virgin because these people are (or at least should be) pearls of great price to each other.

In a world where virginity is “not as common as it used to be,” all is not lost. True, history cannot be erased, but the anti-values and diminished significance that historical baggage imports can be overcome. While history cannot be erased, one can subsequently recognize, value, and reembrace the values and meaning virginity embodies — by seizing the joy that animates “the young man [and woman who] marries a virgin.” Such is the joy of the nuptial banquet of the Kingdom.