FIFTEEN CHEERS FOR ABSTINENCE

By LANCE MORROW

During the '50s, when there was no sex, the Jesuit retreat master would tell us, "Boys, sometimes you are going to find yourselves having what we call Impure Thoughts. And when that happens, boys, I want you to play basketball."

Thus in the concrete courtyard outside the cafeteria at St. Aloysius Gonzaga--before classes, between classes, in any weather, in the demon energy of our hormones--we played basketball. A boy would launch a set shot from the outside that rose steeply and dropped like a mortar shell. Swish! Another teenage pregnancy averted.

Basketball as birth control: the sublimating trajectory of ball to hoop cartooned the urgent, intimate quest of sperm to ovum--and, so to speak, contracepted it. Basketball converted raw adolescent pagan fuel to a useful chastity--that is, to play. For years when I saw teenagers on the court shooting baskets, I would say to myself, "I know what's on your minds, you dirty boys!"

What will keep today's young safe from the downward spiral--which is not only the familiar descent of children bearing children and disintegrated families and AIDS, but also the more general American sexual devolution, the swamp of the id? Basketball has lost its sublimating magic.

I offer 15 cheers for abstinence.

I do not suggest saying, "Ricky, instead of sex tonight, why don't you work on your stamp collection?" Heroic individual self-denial is not viable long-term adolescent policy. What might work, however, would be an entire context of abstinence, a culture of abstinence: what philosophy would call "enlightened abstinence, rightly understood."

The chief health official of the state of Virginia, Kay Coles James, attracted the usual supercilious ridicule by urging abstinence as a policy to reduce teenage pregnancy. It will not do, of course. Teenagers will no more abstain from sex than will the frisking neighborhood dogs, and it is fatuous, punitive, Neanderthal to expect them to; the best that adult authority can do is to distribute condoms to the beasts and hope they will pause long enough to slip one on before their urgencies of crotch propel them into the hedge. If they do not take the precaution, well, then, the fallback: a morning's visit to the abortionist. Melancholy, perhaps, but--um--c'est la vie. The condom-slinger's mentality takes a ruthlessly unennobled view of human nature. The young tend to fulfill expectations. Government-sponsored condom distribution announces that the society officially expects to get copulating dogs.

Long ago, Jesuit father and finger-wagging mother understood truths that return to us now with what Emerson called "an alienated majesty." The cultural Big Bang of the '60s destroyed the authority of common sense. The homeliest folklore comes back now as a ghost of lost knowledge or else shows up in the polyesters of what liberals dismiss as the "religious right."

Isn't adolescence madhouse enough--with sufficient confusion, shame and manic, grandiose-despairing energy of its own? The years from puberty to the first full-time job are a rough passage through which the child, if tough and lucky, evolves into a creditable, honorable, responsible grownup. You cannot light a candle in a high wind. What's needed for the development to occur is shelter, safety. A context of abstinence is the beginning of such shelter.

The mentality of abstinence demands a certain elementary moral metaphysics. Teach this: the more you indulge in anything, good or bad, but especially bad--in drugs, casual sex, violence, idiot music, stupidity, driving 90 m.p.h., bad manners, rage--the more you lose. The more you abstain, the more you gain. This is not cheap rhyming paradox but a good truth that in the past generation or two has been swept away by raw sewage. For an adolescent, abstinence means security and, therefore, the freedom that comes with self-possession. Abstinence becomes a medium of clarity, the window through which it is easier to recognize, among many things, one's work and one's mate.

America has become a society that makes too much of its living by marketing its own Impure Thoughts: a corrupt dynamic. Secular realists reply to the idea of abstinence with some snorting variant on what Hemingway's Jake Barnes told Brett Ashley at the end of The Sun Also Rises: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" (Jake's problem was not sexual indulgence, of course, but the reverse--grim chastity enforced by a war wound.) Get real.

But I remember that the Jesuits at Gonzaga High School maintained a chokingly blue-hazed "senior lounge" wherein we privileged men in our fourth year could light up cigarettes between classes. By graduation I was up to a pack of unfiltered Camels a day. The culture and its sustaining icons (Humphrey Bogart, for example) loved smoking. Today smoking cigarettes is disreputable, to me and practically everyone else. Change the myth, and the values follow.