Ah, chastity. The one thing we don’t have. It’s not just bodily purity, although chastity begins in our flesh. But I mean purity of heart, or single-heartedness. Our hearts are as divided and distracted as are our minds, largely by a virtually infinite menu of internet novelties, the most recent of which is the “novel corona virus.” A noble man or woman does not chase sirens. A great-hearted person serenely keeps focus on the simple tasks proper to his first principle and final end.
Who is “most chaste,” however, but Mary and Joseph? She is immaculate from conception, an extraordinary grace needed for her task of bearing God’s son. Joseph was not immaculately conceived, but he became most chaste through espousal to the Mother of God. “Where your treasure is, there also will be your heart,” Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:21. St. Joseph set his heart on the purest of treasures, his wife and his son. A good father sets his heart on what God sets before him, rather than chasing after every distraction. God sets a wife and children before a man, and everything else—career, money, sex, food and drink, his house and his car—is only a means of providing for his family.
How can we become strong in purity like Joseph and Mary? First by calling upon them for help, and second by calmly focusing on the simple work God has set before us. Get up, brush your teeth, do your prayers, go to work, and do all for love of the people God has set before you. Such is simple happiness in this life, in preparation for perfect happiness in the life of the world to come.