Florida Catholic | ‘Thrill of the Chaste’

‘Thrill of the Chaste’

Author and writer Dawn Eden to tell why she’s happier now with her clothes on.

ARLEEN SPENCELEY | FLORIDA CATHOLIC CORRESPONDENT

Published: 02.08.08

Dinner & Talk

Chastity author and speaker Dawn Eden will be at St. Frances Cabrini Parish, 5030 Mariner Blvd., Spring Hill on Friday, Feb. 29 at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 for singles; $20 for couples, and may be purchased after the Feb. 17 and Feb. 24 Masses, at the door or by e-mail.

For more information go to: www.stfrances.org/wcn.

ST. PETERSBURG | Under bright lights in the middle of busy New York City’s bustle, Dawn Eden fit right in with musicians and groupies. A rock journalist, she spent her 20s rubbing elbows with rock stars, flirting with fame and sharing a bed with her boyfriend.

“I used to live what I call the ‘Sex and the City’ lifestyle,” said the now 39-year-old writer, who will speak to young adults Friday, Feb. 29, at St. Frances Cabrini Parish in Spring Hill.

Back then, she looked for love in sex and found herself empty, unfulfilled. But at 31, she said, she became convinced of God’s existence, believed Jesus was his son and started to see things differently.

“I realized my lifestyle was very different from the kind of life God wanted me to live,” said Eden, who was born into a reform Jewish household, but was received into the Catholic Church in 2006.

So she stopped sharing her bed. She pulled back from promiscuity to pursue chastity.

“Chastity is a way of life that involves living out all the graces you’ve been given,” Eden said. “It’s often confused with abstinence.”

But the two aren’t the same.

“Abstinence is simply a no; it’s a negative, a closing off,” she said. “Chastity is a yes. It’s a way of life where you wake up and instead of thinking, ‘What am I getting out of life today?’ you think, ‘How is today a gift?’”

After starting a life of chastity in her early 30s, she wrote a book called “Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On.” When she speaks at St. Frances Cabrini Parish this month, she’ll share more of her story and offer insight into her transformation from promiscuous to chaste.

“Living a promiscuous life can make you … think you’re valuable in terms of who you can attract. You don’t realize your own dignity as a human being,” Eden said.

Evidence of that, she said, is everywhere.

It’s on dating Web sites, she said, where users are “encouraged to boil themselves down to a set of attributes.”

“It keeps people in this cycle, and they feel like they know one another through (online) ads,” she said.

Even more, it’s in the media.

“Advertisers want people to be insecure, to have a sense of lack in their lives,” she said. “They want people to be superficial.”

That’s one of the reasons chastity seems so unpopular.

“Chastity doesn’t sell,” Eden said.

Living with a belief like that can cause a lot of trouble, she said.

“It can make you unable to appreciate what is really important,” she added. “It can make you obsessed with things that don’t matter.”

But, she said, chastity is different.

“Chastity says there is something so intimate that the only way we as human beings are meant to experience it is within marriage,” Eden said. “And that’s not something proponents of the sexual revolution would want us to hear.”

But with her book, on her blog and in her life, she plans to spread the word anyway. And because of it, she feels like a rebel with a cause.

“Rebellion has always been built around the idea that there’s something you aren’t being told that’s really the most important thing to know,” she said. In chastity, she says, she found it.

“The chaste life is far more fulfilling than the unchaste life,” she said. “I’m living from a sense of having something rather than a sense of lacking something.”

And so far, it’s been a liberating experience.

“You see just how much there is to appreciate in other people, in your environment and in everything you’ve been given,” she said. “You’re living as you were designed to live.”

Eden’s blog can be read at www.dawneden.com/blogger.html.

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