Lust

Before the collapse of Lehman Brothers which brought to our attention the robust sin of greed for universal condemnation (as if we had never participated in the staggering culture of greed ourselves) it would seem that sex had lived at the center of our moral consciousness one way or the other. And even now it remains so. At the heart of that consciousness is a "smoldering subterranean Manichaeism"* which assumes that anything pertaining to sex is somehow impure and beneath dignity. This is true of both puritanical approaches and libertarian ones. Those espousing the casting off of repressive Victorian morality to embrace "free love" proclaim with loud voices, "There is nothing wrong with ________." (Fill in the blank with sexual practice of choice.) It seems to me that the louder we shout this phrase, the more we are trying to convince ourselves.

Much of this is directed at libertarians but one quick word to the puritanical. And I quote St. John Chrystostom's Twelfth Homily on the Epistle to the Collosians. In speaking of sex in the union of man and woman as one flesh he said, "Why do you blush? Is it not pure? You are behaving like heretics!"

Lust is a perversion, a twisting of a good and indeed holy thing. Sexual desire was given to us by God. It was his idea, not Satan's as it appears some think. But it is a perversion of the good. Lust most commonly manifests itself in promiscuity, either with another person or persons or in our own, now internet pornography fed, fantasy life. But lust has a sister which is another twisting of the good of sexuality and her name is Frigidity. Lust is sexuality unbridled. Frigidity is sexuality killed.

Lust, of course, is not about love or true eros, to use the Greek word. In fact lust is most often driven not by love but by anxiety. When we feel alone, abandoned or anxious we look to be comforted. And the physical pleasure of sexual release is a powerful comfort that leaves us craving more. Dorothy Sayers says, "men and women turn to lust in sheer boredom and discontent."** What is boredom, ennui but anxiety?

Lust is about anxiety and this leads to another reason why it is not about love. Love is mutual submission (Ephesians 5:21) - a mutual giving. Anxiety-fueled lust is about getting - getting pleasure, getting my anxiety medicated. One of the newer trendy phrases in the lust culture is "friends with benefits", meaning a relationship with little or no commitment, just for sex. This is not about friend love (phile, the Greek word again) but about getting my needs met. Lust is about getting. Love is about giving.

And the cry to those who are bound up in lust-driven compulsions is that of "rebuke and restriction" (again Dorothy Sayers,) who says this is "worse than useless." And it is. Our need is first for God to fill our holes of anxiety and abandonment. We may feel we have been abandoned, left on our own by others. But God says he will never leave us or forsake us. (Hebrews 13:5)
Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. (Isaiah 49:15)

Being filled with love that comes from the God who made us, and made us as sexual beings, we are then free to give in love, to bless in love, even in physical love. And here we discover, with St. John Chrysostom, that what we thought a necessary evil, even if unconsciously, is truly pure. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.

* Josef Pieper in "The Four Cardinal Virtues"
** Dorothy Sayers in "The Other Six Deadly Sins"