They have sexual relations before marriage. In her passion for him, she is willing at first to overlook his worst faults. Erlend sees Kristin's goodness, loves it, and believes he can be good for her. Kristin is eventually betrothed by her father to a man of her father's taste and character ,Simon Andresson, but she falls quickly and vehemently in love with a man who has a long and shameful history of relations with women, Erlend Niklausson. He has a special love for his daughter Kristin, a strong-minded, strong willed girl who, from her early days, aspires to her father's moral code. Lavrans is well known for his devotion and generosity to the Church and his charity and justice toward all who deal with him. He is a well-off husbandman with noble relations. In modern parlance, it would be said that Lavrans walks the talk, or puts his money where his mouth is. Kristin is the daughter of Lavrans Bjorgulfson (thus Lavransdatter). Kristin follows the life of a girl from her childhood to her death in 14th century Catholic Norway.
While it is simply impossible to convey its beauty or power in a condensed form, a summary is a necessary preface to a few observations about what Kristin teaches. Reading Kristin is about as close to learning from experience as you can get without the experience. You can only go so far in appealing to a future that your audience hasn't yet lived. However, before it's all over, at best, I have captured their intellects, but usually not their hearts.Īny wisdom I possess about the profound meaning of a sexual relationship comes predominantly from reflection on experience and from comparing my experience with the experiences of so many I know who have chosen a path outside the sex-only-in-marriage model.
I assure them that committed, married love is the best place for human happiness and authentic freedom to flourish. I count the casualties for them the sexually transmitted diseases, the abortions, post abortion syndrome, single parenting. I tell them sex lies when it doesn't say forever, and that it can only say forever in marriage. Ha! The only ones nodding along with me are already wearing JPII World Tour buttons. Go on, dear you're a young woman they'll listen to you, say the well-intentioned people who get me there. I say this as one who regularly finds herself at a microphone in front of hundreds of high-school or college-aged Christian women, trying to express the sacred meanings of human sexual intercourse. And every young woman to whom I have recommended Kristin in the past year has reacted to it as if they had discovered a new world. Any young woman under my influence will get a copy of Kristin to read the day she turns 16. It makes another signal contribution it demonstrates no, that's not strong enough it makes you feel the relationship between our sexual selves and the rest of our lives, powerfully, and that is exactly what's needed to challenge current prevailing attitudes, which can be summed as: As long as it's consensual, what I do sexually is nobody's business. Kristin gives you insight into virtue and makes you want to be more virtuous yourself. So I might be forgiven for my effusive enthusiasm on discovering what many have called the greatest Catholic novel ever written, Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. There are so few books today that matter, that talk about their subject, in light of the divine destiny of every human being.
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