Sacred Energy

The unmarried are anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord; the married are anxious about worldly things

The Greek word Paul uses here, translated "anxious," is the same root used elsewhere for worry that fragments attention, making this less a moral judgment on marriage than an observation about divided focus.

This verse is the hinge of Paul's argument in chapter 7, isolating the specific contrast between the unmarried person's single concern, pleasing the Lord, and the married person's necessarily doubled concern of pleasing the Lord and pleasing a spouse. Paul uses merimna, a term for anxious care that appears elsewhere in his letters and in the Gospels — the same root Jesus uses in the Sermon on the Mount when telling listeners not to be anxious about tomorrow. The parallel is likely deliberate: Paul describes marriage's demands not as sinful distraction but as a legitimate, unavoidable form of the same worldly care Jesus warned against, which the unmarried life simply generates less of. Read this way, the verse is less an attack on marriage than an honest accounting of where attention goes.

1 Corinthians

Written about in

• What celibate traditions say about energy

  Paul's argument is different again and entirely practical: the unmarried have one set of concerns rather than two. He is talking about divided attention, not about vitality.