Once again from triple X church, through reading the context will become clear, and the subject matter though addressed to those whose names have been eliminated is clearly a universal situation:
Here I think, it might be time to introduce you to something that I tried to write as a massive post sometime ago, and as usual in this place, failed. Your lust is not evil or wrong. In fact I would conclude it’s not a rapacious hunger, or a lust at all, but a very intuitive desire. We’ve talked before about our source of pornography problem before- a stark craving for intimacy and connection. So, when your lust strikes, do whatever seems most human and obedient, and I stress on your own, not to suppress fight or remove the lust- but to follow it’s leading submitted and obedient to God. When it arises, call it what it gloriously is- the wonderful desire to be strong, the be recognised, to leave a mark in time and space- to connect with God, people and the universe, and seek ways to obey this craving in your being, because while sex is part of it, and that is where this longing and craving is manifesting itself and sometimes in blessed circumstance, sexual satisfaction is exactly the right connection with God people and the universe we need, the source and nature of these longings and madnesses is not sexual, but intimate, human, holistic, pure, godly, and your better nature attempting whole heartedly, that it is not good for man to be alone, but it is good for man to be in company and in harmony.
Part of those companies and harmonies, is to sew and reap, and rear children from a sexual place- glorious before God. Almost we can no more greatly be joined to God people and the universe but by spreading our seed. But it is not the only place, and while the sexual fruit is perhaps the strongest and most immediate, the plethora of additional places so out weighs the sexual numerically that they are on even terms. Sometimes the sex the lust, the desire, gratifies itself in sex and porn and masturbation because it’s easier access and immediate. You don’t have to spend time harvesting real intimacy if you do it that way, you don’t have to spend time and work with another person, you don’t have to go for a walk stop for the roses or listen to the birds. You don’t have to stop and pray, or ponder the wonders of His majesty, and bring out greatly embarrassing longing and weak helplessness to achieve it before out God. But immediately following that, we know, we can painfully feel it, it was the deep preternatural desire of connection with God people and the universe, and not primarily sexually that we were craving, lacking and still missing and it hurts like a monster- and brings us shame, in the paradox that it’s not our fault we’re alone in so many ways, but we haven’t done anything to improve it when the proof and compass that sends us out to plug into the vast conduit lurches inside of us and we lust.
So what I think you should do, is just stop and listen to your body. Don’t do anything simply for it’s process, connect with everything you do, from eating to talking, and let it absorb you and vice versa. Stop fighting your longings and begin to see them as what they are, survival mechanisms leading us to God- and yes the snivelling pesky persistence of lusts held in ignorance are revolting and infuriating, but as the great divorce shows us, a lust that is killed is reborn as a strong, sturdy and steady desire which is our aid and ever present will, from a lizard to stead. So stop, don’t try and find the answer, don’t try and change, be human, and where you are relax and be one with your surroundings and your loved ones. And accept your flaws as the things that lead you into God and which he blesses and addresses particularly to himself. Make life not about measuring up, but of making love, and the love will bear fruit of all kinds, as long as the love making is its own reward.
Have you ever thought of fighting your desires in a different way? It’s easy to bludgeon ourselves with our failures and how we feel sexually repugnant. But at the end of the day, all I have ever seen from that is bad news. We feel good about ourselves only when we are the least human, only when we’re able to deflect or opress the very things that make us feel weak. Yet, fighting who we are and our desires, fighting ourselves is not productive, in fact it is a symptom of despair, concession, and the very fruit of sin, tearing us to pieces from the inside out. A wolf in a trap chews off it’s arm only because it has no one else to rescue it. When a farmer’s fence fails and a few cows get out on the road, because the grass in the field is gone, he spends all his time losing the cows that got away, and waists the rest of the time trying to keep the cows in field that doesn’t feed them- all the while still fixing the same fence that keeps falling down. Which eventually loses him the cows, and that field, and eventually leaves him with a patch of land which has maybe a few weak and unfed cows, mad with hunger, and a fixed fence which has no purpose- and the field is a wasteland that cannot support food for those few cattle even, and then they die- and to explain the metaphor- at the end of the field metaphor we have an empty muddy desolate place only weeds can grow with no desires needing to be fed.
What we all need is to be wolves who know they have the aptitude to get out of their trap, and that if not someone is not only coming but has come to rescue us.
What we need to be are wise farmers with our sexuality. If the farm is our body, then we must take care of it very very well. A farmer does many things with his crops if they are to take care of their heard- which we’ll call our skills and our desires- sexual included, and sex is both a desire and a skill. The farmer sets some fields aside for grain. They set others aside for rest. They set others aside for grazing, they set others aside for hay, and when they harvest they set the grain sheaves aside for straw and bedding for their desires. The whole farm exists to support the desires- feed them and care for them. Grain, foliage, bedding, and rest to later on produce the same needs at a later date. These steps and practices are not just merciful, in that our desires are nourished and encouraged by them, they’re practical as well so that we don’t become exhausted, and lose control of ourselves.
So if you’re desires are getting out of control, in the idea that we are yielding people, bearing fruit before God, then likely reality is, you’re not failing to be disciplined with them, you’re failing to nurture them, provide for them, feed them with quality and abundance- and I don’t mean that you should indulge them, or indulge them at every turn, because like I said, their are fields set aside for rest- and fields that yield grain and bedding for when it is cold.
So here is a suggestion. The next time you are gripped by desire, don’t panic, and don’t try and fight it, or avoid it, or indulge it. You don’t break a horse by actually breaking it by beating it down, you break a tumultuous and magnificent animal by playing to it’s nature and riding it out. When you break a horse, you’re not taking anythying away from it, and you’re not adding anything to it. You’re persisting with it, bonding with it, harnessing that horse, becoming in command of it, being patient with it, because when the horse realizes that you’re there to stay, and that you mean it no harm, and have trained and directed it, it will support you carry you listen to you, protect you even- even feed you with its own life if it gets that bad- it becomes your intimate ally not a threat or an enemy. And you don’t do this by forbidding it to move, you do this by learning from its movements, anticipating it’s movements, allowing it to move off in one direction, and easily and gently, but not weakly or timidly guiding it not in a new one, but even extending its motion into your control. And for this to happen, the horse must be accustomed to you, your smell, your presence, your voice, your touch, your weight on its back, and you must be ready to be thrown from it, so you learn to respect and understand the magical quality of what is going on with this animal. You’re learning to act as one with it, and it’s learning to make you part of its being, and vice versa.
I can think of no greater analogy of what sex is, learning to embrace attach, love and master not only desire, but oneself, for bursts of brilliance, rather than burning or snuffing out. The problem is, that what we do, cannot be done without a lack of loathing, or a lack of confidence. What these things lead to is shooting the horse in frustration and anxiety. It’s made worse by the fact that the horse is simply a metaphor for a deep meaningful powerful and critical part of ourselves. A part that we cannot do without, and a part that like Eustice in Narnia, we cannot cut deep enough to truly take control of the situation, we are timid with ourselves, merciful not out of compassion but weakness and sympathy we posses for ourselves- not a declaration of worthiness, but our inability to acknowledge our flaws insecurities, failures, etc- to cut so deep is to admit that these things are there- to not cut so deep is to say, I am only human, what a weakness, instead of I am human, what total strength, And in being fully human or learning to be so, becoming to be so, God and I can cut together.
I do not have to come in anger toward my desires, I can learn from them, so like with harnessing a wild horse, I can learn to give that creature peace without driving it away or setting it free- I can learn how to wield it, and truly unleash it in magnificent focussed waves of resilient and terrible mastery, I can channel that power into raging roaring directed deluge that truly runs a worthy and primal course through a blasting fissure instead of seeping and dissipating over the landscape.
If I refuse to listen to that horse, I will not breach it and I together, it will lash out and kill me, or I will condemn its spirit. Grasping the mastery is a sweaty labourious task of love. It is good stewardship and making love to creation, good ministry it is, which involves, with God, doing the same with our own bodies. If I ignored a tooth ache, I would be an idiot, esp. if I neglected it so much I couldn’t eat.
If I ignored a hernia, or rather saw it and just pushed it back in, I would be foolish. If I felt my appendix pain, and let it burst under the incessant chanting, ‘I have no appendix, I have no appendix’ I would be an idiot who cannot see the wisdom which my own body possesses before my conscious mind. So when our sexuality, and our intimacy begin to ache, why don’t we listen to them? Why do we shut them out and chant over and over, ‘I shouldn’t be horny, I shouldn’t be horny. I will make the horny go away, I wont give in, I wont acknowledge the gripping pain, the gnawing anxiety, the loneliness, the lack of connection, the desire to be filled and to fill, and bless and be blessed, and sew into and be sewn into all creation’. If you walked around holding your head, all day and just telling people who asked, ‘Yeah it’s just my aneurysm, it will go away.’ How do you think they’ll look at you, and how without treatment do you think an aneurysm is going away- only with the death of you.
Personally I think our times of deepest arousal is when God, even if only in our bodily material is closest to us. We we then indulge because it is easier than doing the terrifying thing, calling out, or asking deep within, ‘Is that you Lord?’ And we feel shame in the end because really, we didn’t ask, and we avoided God, yes because it was terrifying to be wounded by our own being so deeply and honestly, but also because we love God. And it’s not different from the shame you feel when you lie, betray live falsely, murder, steal, etc. But unlike those sins, we ignore the fact that it is good and right on occasion to meet these palpitations in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone. I don’t think it is the universally consistent and acceptable way, but I don’t deny that on occasion that is actually the connection and release God has blessed and condoned- but more often than not, the release he convicts us of is to embrace him, embrace others, embrace creation, to live a life of sewing and reaping and the great lack and absence, the sometimes total lack of nourishments to those deep necessary and often unmet godly longings in us, and that cannot be met in sexually, but come to us through sexual desire because truly, when the reality presses it cannot just be a tight chest. When we are being told, bear fruit, connect severely and totally, take on the human role of affecting the universe, it must grip us with a complete and visceral madness- but if God is God, then his madness is in his hands, and it will be good and wonderful. We just simply don’t submit it to him, but we should.
Think what it might be like if we took our sexual desire, and took a page from the animals. To hunt and screw with unbroken unstuttering unyielding will. To direct that towards the service of God with one goal and one purpose, within the scope of what it is to be submitted to the will of God, and what it means to be a human being, just as the Lion pride is submitted to what it is to be lions, and what is best for them for the time under God- that Lions would persist. There are of course obvious things that don’t connection in the nature of a lion to a person- but the lion takes it’s nature, from God, and does all that is in its power to unwaveringly execute that purpose- and it does so with the raw direction of its intended desires. God is asking the same of us, that we should become not passionless, nor careless but that we would be the full human animal he made to be him on earth, with the raw directed intention of our desire for him, surging and seething within all our cells. I think sex in us, is the boldest flag of that intention, and it is screaming at us constantly- we react sinfully when we seek to silence the scream only by any orgasmic, ejaculating means, or that this is the only intention and purpose the grip of such desires possess, instead of learning from it, listening to it and teaching it to sing. And what can you assume the result is if we never let it hum or open its mouth, or only let it sing the same thing? It will never reach its potential and it will never have anything to speak or affect. It will become mutilated by growing inside, and around all the restrictions that impede or refuse such a juggernaut as the human spirit growth, and then we have an abomination and behemoth on our hands that has been made into the image of sin, which is never in the first place possessed or reflected. Yet even this can be undone, by listening to its throes of agony, and administering healing.
I have already mentioned one Lewis source, I find that it is appropriate to end then with an Irish quote and a situation from his Great Divorce. A man is walking through heaven in the Great divorce, he has a pesky little lizard, a salamander or similar creature on his shoulder, which he is aware of but refuses to acknowledge, and is incapable of dealing with. An angel asks him if he may kill the lizard. The man reacts in a paradoxical way, as to say, ‘no I am afraid’ but also in such a frightful half assed way ‘Silly angel, I don’t know what you’re talking about, a lizard, there is no lizard.’ and poof lizard becomes pink elephant. But eventually without guarantee or thought of return, the man concedes and the angel kills the lizard. It hurts the man in a real and crippling way, but then he heals, and his former lizard appears as a mighty and wilful stallion, which propels him towards higher horizons, it is no longer a nagging incessant irritant but a persistent unyielding power to the man’ benefit, which he controls and directs and gives him purpose and certainty rather than misgiving and shyness. There is reconciliation within himself with himself, and it is mighty and earth changing to behold and to wield- all is good and what is human in God has triumphed. But to do this we must embrace the fact that ‘We are human there for nothing that is human is foreign to us’, which means first among such things are God and our bodies. To ignore one or hurt one is to ignore and hurt the other.And to discipline with out nourishment, is to corral God a well as our body, to starve him of ourselves, and starve us of him and to make both of us mad with the hunger of love which we never feed.
